LUDLOWE, Edmund II (c.1617-92), of Maiden Bradley, Wilts.

Alongside those of Edward Hyde* and Bulstrode Whitelocke*, the memoirs of Ludlowe have occupied a pre-eminent, canonical place among narratives of politics in the 1640s and 1650s. Hyde obviously viewed events of the latter decade from afar, but together Whitelocke and Ludlowe, respectively representing conservative and radical standpoints, appeared to offer unparalleled first-hand accounts of the commonwealth and protectorate regimes in which they played distinctive, different and (if they are to be believed) key roles. But although it has long been recognised that all these narratives were, in varying degrees, constructed retrospectively, and thus through the potentially distorting lenses of hindsight, self-justification and Restoration agendas, it was only towards the end of the twentieth century that other problems were identified. In particular, the authorial authenticity of the Ludlowe Memoirs, first published in 1698, and of that text as re-edited in 1894 by C. H. Firth with insertions of several subsequently-unearthed sections of suppressed material, has been significantly undermined. The discovery of part of the original manuscript, commencing with the early months of 1660, but containing comment on earlier events, has pointed not only to a lost autobiography which was about four times longer than the Memoirs but also to an author driven by unshakeable, energising religious conviction rather than shaped by cool classical republicanism. This has profound implications both for the accuracy of information supplied in the text (except, perhaps, straightforward biographical detail and the outline of military campaigning in which he was directly involved) and for the interpretation of Ludlowe’s motivation and behaviour.48Ludlow, Voyce, Introduction; B. Worden, Roundhead Reputations (2001), chapters 1-4; Worden, ‘Whig History and Puritan Politics’, HR lxxv. 209-37. Thus, wherever possible, the life which follows references ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ (whether the published section or the remainder of the unpublished manuscript) as closer to Ludlowe’s intent; it treats with caution the evidence of the Memoirs.49Bodl. MS Eng. hist. c. 487.

Family background

Ludlowe came from a family prominent in Wiltshire since their arrival in the county in the mid-fifteenth century; his forebears had served as MPs, sheriffs and justices of the peace. Their considerable wealth had been dented by the litigiousness of Ludlowe’s grandfather, Sir Edmund Ludlow†, and by settlements on his five sons, but it had not been permanently eroded. The MP’s father, Sir Henry Ludlowe*, the eldest son of a second marriage, had been generously provided for and came to exceed in prosperity and social status his elder half-brother, Henry Ludlow† of Tadley and Hill Deverill, circumstances which exacerbated tensions between them. The two Henrys shared with their father a quarrelsome temper, if not the violent streak that brought the latter particular notoriety, and were still squabbling over their landed inheritance when Henry died in October 1639, bequeathing the contest, and a tendency to sibling rivalry, to his eldest son and heir, another Edmund Ludlow.50‘William Ludlow’, HP Commons 1604-1629.

By the late 1630s Sir Henry was becoming prominent among Wiltshire gentry who resisted fiscal and other demands from central government.51CSP Dom. 1637, p. 137; SP16/357, f. 29; SP16/388, f. 195; SP16/407, ff. 129-30; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 915. However, having been elected to the Long Parliament as a knight of the shire, it was probably not until early 1642 that he emerged as a notably radical member.52s.v. ‘Sir Henry Ludlowe’. At this juncture his son Edmund Ludlowe II – a graduate of Oxford like his father, and thus of some academic pretension – was a student of several years’ standing at the Inner Temple.53Al. Ox.; I. Temple database. The mobilisation of forces for war that summer prompted an uncharacteristic display of unity by most of the Ludlow family (Edmund of Tadley being among the exceptions) as they promptly rallied to Parliament. Already as tensions mounted our Ludlowe had narrowly escaped two duels as political quarrels among students degenerated.54Bodl. MS Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1234-5. The Memoirs record him organising troops from the inns, acting with Richard Fiennes, a son of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and Charles Fleetwood*. These were absorbed into the lifeguard of the parliamentary commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, led by Sir Philip Stapilton* – a move perhaps facilitated or motivated in part by the fact that Ludlowe’s cousin Henry Ludlowe of Drury Lane (second son of Edmund of Tadley) had served the earl until his death that spring.55Ludlow, Mems. i. 38-9; PROB11/189/251 (Henry Ludlowe). Meanwhile, Ludlowe’s next brother Robert, who had obtained a captain’s commission, was captured by royalists at the end of July while on a secret operation in the north and imprisoned in York Castle. That he died in captivity (before June 1643) doubtless contributed to Sir Henry’s and Edmund’s uncompromising attitudes. 56CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 362; Truths from Leicester and Nottingham August 1 (1642) (669.f.6.57); The Answer of his Excellency the Earle of Newcastle, to a late declaration of the Lord Fairfaxe (1643), 20-1; Ludlow, Mems. i. 29, 35, 65.

War service

Ludlowe was present among the lifeguard at the battle of Edgehill.57Ludlow, Mems. i. 42 Probably in February or March 1643, while his father gained notoriety for his zeal at Westminster, he returned to Wiltshire to raise troops there, apparently at the invitation of Sir Edward Hungerford*, parliamentarian commander in the county. In April he was commissioned as a captain of horse and foot in Hungerford’s regiment.58CJ vi. 508b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 49, 51, 452; Pyms Juncto (1643, 669.f.8.6). Entrusted in May with the governorship of Wardour Castle, seized from the royalist earl of Arundel and about 17 miles west of Salisbury, he clung on there for ten months (during which his father died in London) while around him the initially promising parliamentarian war effort in the region imploded due to incompetence and personal animosity, and suffered several serious defeats. The Memoirs recount several sorties (during one of which his cornet and cousin William Ludlowe* survived a potentially fatal injury) and fruitless attempts by friends and kinsmen to persuade him to yield the castle.59Ludlow, Mems. i. 54, 59-63; 66-78. Summoned to surrender in March 1644 by royalist commander Sir Francis Doddington, he at first responded with measured but pointed defiance. Politely acknowledging Doddington’s respect to his family, and (at this stage at least) pleading innocence of ‘any offence committed against my liege sovereign’, he protested that he although he would ‘never seek by ... deserting my Saviour, which is the way, the truth and the life, to attain the haven of peace and happiness’, he would ‘not be so presumptuous upon the mercies of the Almighty to draw down his justice upon my head’ for risking the blood of the many men with him by ‘an obstinate resolution to withstand all opposers without hopes of relief’. Having done his duty, he would entertain terms, but reminded his adversary that there would be ‘a strict account required ... at the day of judgement’ if these or the result of surrender were costly in lives.60Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 627. Both the obstinate attachment to the will of God as he perceived it and the conviction that the spilling of blood must be expiated remained with him for the rest of his life, but after an intense bombardment he capitulated on 18 March. While the royalist newspaper Mercurius Aulicus, which printed his letter, portrayed him as a ‘stiff’ opponent forced to desist from ‘preaching’ and accept a humiliating defeat, he was celebrated by his own side as one of the few parliamentarian commanders to emerge with any credit at this juncture.61Mercurius Aulicus no. 12 (17-23 Mar. 1644), 889-90 (E.40.32); J. Vicars, Gods Arke Overtopping the Worlds Waves (1645), 228 (E.312.3).

Now Doddington’s prisoner, Ludlowe, according to his later recollection, received better treatment than many in his garrison and parted from Arundel on good terms. He was taken first to the house of Richard Aubrey, father of the antiquary John Aubrey, at Broad Chalk. There he withstood the efforts of Dr John Earle, rector of nearby Bishopston, and Charles Gataker, son of Westminster Assembly member Thomas Gataker, to ‘convert’ him – whether to the royalist cause and/or to episcopalianism is unclear. He then spent about three weeks in Oxford Castle before being released in a prisoner exchange and returning rapidly to service.62Ludlow, Mems. i. 81, 84-9.

Commissioned on 10 May as a captain and major in the army of Sir William Waller* and the regiment of Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, who was perhaps interested in him as the son of his radical colleague Sir Henry as well as for his record, Ludlowe stayed only briefly with the commander in Oxfordshire.63CJ vi. 508b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 89-90, 459. Whether because of a direction from Waller to raise horse in Wiltshire, as the Memoirs recount, or on the encouragement of other local activists like Colonel Alexander Popham*, or of Colonel Edward Massie*, who still controlled some towns, but almost certainly following his own inclination, he returned to his native county.64Ludlow, Mems. i. 91. On 6 July Mercurius Aulicus noted that he had been set up as ‘mock sheriff’ to rival the king’s sheriff, Sir John Penruddock, acting with Popham and others in a remodelled county committee at Devizes.65Mercurius Aulicus no. 27 (30 June-6 July 1644), 1070 (E.2.30); Ludlow, Mems. i. 459-61. Operating either on their own initiative or on orders from Massie, Ludlowe and Popham had some success in driving royalists out of Marlborough, but their forces were limited. Overwhelmed by the superior forces of Ralph Hopton*, now 1st Baron Hopton, Popham was captured and Ludlowe fled to Southampton.66CSP Dom. 1644, p. 336; Weekly Account no. 46 (10-17 July 1644), A2v-A3 (E.2.15); Ludlow, Mems. i. 92, 462.

But Ludlowe’s absence from Wiltshire was temporary: in what was to become a pattern, he soon returned. Armed with a colonelcy of horse apparently issued by Waller but funded by local activists (30 July), and parliamentary sanction as a commissioner for county administration and assessments (15 July), he made some headway in collecting money in Salisbury.67LJ vi. 637; Ludlow, Mems. i. 459, 462. He had troops based there when on 7 September he presented himself to Waller in Hampshire and attempted to resign his colonelcy in favour of one totally controlled by the Wiltshire committee. Waller rejected his request and several times in the next few weeks unsuccessfully petitioned the Committee of Both Kingdoms for orders requiring Ludlowe to fulfill his prior obligations and help the wider war effort.68CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 478-9, 484, 488, 489; CJ iii. 622b. The Committee’s decision to prioritize local needs was vindicated when, as was reported in the Commons on 24 September, Ludlowe carried ‘two brave actions’ resulting in the seizure of about 180 horse.69CSP Dom. 1644, p. 488, 501; Ludlow, Mems. i. 105; Add. 31116, p. 323. Having then been ordered to join Waller (18 Oct.), Ludlowe and his Wiltshire troops were part of the main parliamentarian army at the battle of Newbury on 27 October, and subsequently participated in the siege of Basing House.70CJ iii. 668b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 106, 464. While Waller, Massie and the county committee contended for their services, they were ordered in November to go with Waller to the relief of Taunton, with permission to return to Wiltshire once service in the west was accomplished. Ludlowe was perhaps excessively prompt, rather than disobedient, as the Memoirs claim, in leaving for Salisbury in mid-December, although the Commons indeed clamped down (26 Dec.) on departure without licence.71CSP Dom. 1644, p. 528; 1644-5, pp. 47, 100-1, 112-14, 164; CJ iii. 688a, 705a; iv. 2b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 107-12, 464. However, the Committee of Both Kingdoms, recognising the local danger or at least a fait accompli, then sanctioned his sojourn in Salisbury.72CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 225, 227. But after an assault in early January 1645 – fired up, Mercurius Aulicus alleged, by unacceptable violence committed by his officers on Penruddock’s son – he escaped capture by the skin of his teeth.73CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 192, 194, 201, 204; Mercurius Britanicus no. 65 (6-13 Jan. 1645), 324 (E.24.16); Perfect Diurnall no. 76 (6-13 Jan. 1645), 602 (E.258.12); Mercurius Aulicus (5-12 Jan. 1645), 1330 (E.27.7); Ludlow, Mems. i. 465; G. Wharton, Englands Iliad in a Nut-Shell (Oxford, 1645), n.p. (E.1182.3).

The immediate upshot was apparently that Ludlowe was reined in. First ordered by the Committee to attend Waller’s orders (26 Jan.), he was subsequently with Essex’s lifeguard to Hampshire and Surrey (March-Apr.).74CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 278, 341, 345-7, 354-5, 362, 406-12. Reading between the lines, it seems that his relative competence was valued and his troops were indispensable, but that he was regarded as a loose cannon.75cf. Ludlow, Mems. i. 114, 116; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 399. When membership of the New Model army was first under discussion, the committee of Wiltshire ‘pretended that they could not ... spare’ him, but they later told the Committee of Both Kingdoms they readily consented to Ludlowe’s deployment in Kent.76CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 406-12; Ludlowe, Mems. i. 116. On 12 May Sir Arthur Hesilrige recommended him warmly to John Rushworth*, secretary to Commander-in-chief Sir Thomas Fairfax*, seeking Rushworth’s ‘good offices’ to let Fairfax ‘know what a good patriot his father was, and what honour this colonel hath gained by holding out the siege at Wardour’.77Ludlowe, Mems. i. p. xx. Yet, although the Memoirs indicate that Ludlowe was prepared to abandon his ungrateful neighbours and pursue the public interest elsewhere, a commission in a national army was probably not his preference.78Ludlowe, Mems. i. 116. Conceivably, independent authority, even if in a small sphere, allowed greater scope for his uncompromising zeal.

As the clubmen movement gained ground in Wiltshire, Ludlowe’s vigorous presence there was again welcome. Having passed through the county on his way from victory at Naseby, Fairfax wrote to the House of Lords on 3 July proposing that they despatch a regiment of horse there

who, with the assistance of Colonel Ludlowe, the sheriff of Wilts, and the garrisons in these parts, may be able at least to keep them from drawing into any great bodies, to the disturbance of the country.79LJ vii. 484b.

As headway was made against the royalists, there was rejoicing in some quarters that ‘Colonel Ludlow is now (thanks be to God) sole high sheriff ... his competitor being now taken prisoner’; Ludlowe’s ‘approach hither is now most earnestly desired’.80J. Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana (1646), 125 (E.348.1). Once the disorder was suppressed and the threat diminished Ludlowe could be spared for a period in the autumn to join Colonel Massie in the west, but the moment for joining the New Model had passed.81Ludlowe, Mems. i. 130, 474-8. His replacement as sheriff at the end of October by the newly-elected MP for Downton, Alexander Thistlethwayte*, probably represented a reassertion of Presbyterian influence in his absence. However, by December 1645 Ludlowe had returned to Wiltshire to promote the candidature at recruiter elections in Hindon of his uncle Edmund Ludlowe I*, a fellow parliamentary commissioner for the county, usually referred to as Edmund Ludlowe senior. It is likely that ongoing struggles between radical and conservative elements among the parliamentarian gentry played a significant part in Ludlowe senior’s failure to gain a clear vote.82Ludlow, Mems. i. 132.

Long Parliament 1646-1648

Such tensions probably accompanied the return of Ludlowe himself for a shire seat in elections on 12 May, notwithstanding the claim in the Memoirs that there was ‘no opposition’ to his taking the seat once held by his father. According to this account, Pembroke, thinking ‘that the county was inclined to choose’ Ludlowe, asked the latter to help secure the return of his son James Herbert*, appealing to Ludlowe’s sympathies by undertaking that James would ‘vote honestly for the commonwealth’.83Ludlow, Mems. i. 133. But it seems just as likely that it was Ludlowe who needed Pembroke’s support to make certain of his place.84V. Rowe, ‘The influence of the earls of Salisbury’, EHR lxxxiii. 242-56; S. Kelsey, ‘Foundation of the council of state’, Parliament at Work ed. C Kyle and J. Peacey, 135. That he secured it may be explained by the genesis of an association between the two which became more visible later.

On the other hand, there is little reason to doubt the Memoirs’ claim that Ludlowe chose to take his seat in the Commons in company with Robert Blake*, newly elected for Bridgwater, in the conviction that ‘he having been faithful and active in the public service abroad ... we should be as unanimous in the carrying it on within those doors’.85Ludlow, Mems. i. 134. Blake, described later by the earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde*) as ‘of an anti-monarchical spirit’, would have been known to Ludlowe as governor of Taunton and a man of both military flair and thoroughgoing commitment to the parliamentary cause.86s.v. ‘Blake, Robert’. The arrival of the pair in the chamber must have predated their inclusion on the committee to consider a militia bill (13 June), and may have predated Ludlowe’s nomination (with several other Wiltshire MPs) as a commissioner for exclusion from the sacrament (3 June).87CJ iv. 563a, 576a. Ludlowe took the Covenant on 24 June, but only, as he later asserted, having first announced precisely what this action meant.

I have always understood that a covenant must be reciprocal between those who make it and those who expect any benefit thereby ... This clause was interpreted publicly in the House ... by Mr Henry Marten* and myself and others, at the time of the taking of [it].88Ludlow, Voyce, 141.

This early association with Marten, who had only recently been restored to the House after suspension for inflammatory behaviour, is a further pointer to Ludlowe’s having entered the Commons with a radical agenda – albeit one that was framed less within the classical republicanism of the Memoirs and of Marten and much more within a Christian apocalypticism. It is unfortunate that his habitual reference to himself as one of the ‘commonwealthsmen’ – evocative as that has come to be of advanced social conscience – is so vague as to associated personnel and policies that it elucidates little (although it was also sufficiently identifiable as to be adopted as a descriptor by others).89Worden, Rump Parliament, 50n. The closest Ludlowe came to a definition perhaps lies in the contrast he drew when in exile between the corrupt and self-interested Cavalier Parliament and ‘the work the Lord had upon the wheel in that our day’. This he interpreted as ‘the establishing of such a righteous frame of government under which men may enjoy their civil liberty, and not be imposed upon by any person or party’ – a sentiment with which Marten would have heartily concurred – together with goals less important to Marten, that

the word of the Lord may be freely published, and the saints and churches live in the exercise of its ordinances without interruption; the whole duty of man, contained in the law and the prophets, being to love God above all, and our neighbours as ourselves .90Ludlow, Voyce, 308.

There was to be liberty of conscience (although evidently not Marten’s licence): Christians should not ‘lord it over one another’ for it was ‘against reason’ that they should try to ‘constrain’ or ‘restrain’ God’s free gift of faith. To this end He sought ‘officers that are peace, and exactours [?executors] that are righteousness’, who would provide a constructive environment. In response, ‘all conscientious persons, whose doctrine tends not to licentiousness, would find themselves reciprocally obliged to the strengthening of the said government’. Any tendency of those in power to impose their beliefs on others would be curbed by a combination of the majority who would disagree with them, ‘no one conscientious principle being owned by one of 40 throughout the nation’.91Ludlow, Voyce, 308-9.

Yet even in the process of adumbrating his commonwealth, Ludlowe conceded its inherent weakness. His citizens might be informed by prudence, duty and conscience to accept the powers-that-be and pray to be able to ‘lead quiet and peaceable lives, in all godliness and honesty’, and those not in government might recognise the necessity of toleration. However, any party ‘whilst uppermost’ had a tendency, ‘the God of this world blinding their eyes’, to ignore it.92Ludlow, Voyce, 309. Suffering and failure, in effect, seemed inescapable. This might have been a perspective born of defeat and exile, but it is credible that from the outset Ludlowe’s vision was lacking in practicable, realisable detail. His strength lay instead in his uncompromising determination, his dedication to what he saw as the good of his county, and his military experience.

His record in the Commons, especially early in his career, appears to exemplify this. While he was evidently a vital presence on the radical fringe, until Pride’s Purge he was not a particularly conspicuous player in the chamber, still less a notable framer of legislation. He was nominated to only a score of committees during this period and chaired none, although he was five times a teller (once each with the Presbyterian Nathaniel Stephens and the usually uncompromising parliamentarians Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, Sir Michael Livesay*, Robert Goodwin* and Nicholas Love*).93CJ v. 179a, 403b, 544b; vi. 86b, 93b. From 2 July 1646 he was also a reasonably regular attender of the committee of the west.94Add. 22084, ff. 11, 13v, 14, 17, 21, 26, 29v, 30, 44. It seems clear that, for the time being, Wiltshire matters remained a priority.

In an initial clutch of nominations between 3 July and 4 August 1646, Ludlowe was placed on three committees relating to delinquents, as well as three others considering the petition and papers of Colonel John Lilburne (whose affairs had long been a concern of Marten’s), enquiring into agitation against Parliament in the City of London and discussing provision for the churches at Westminster.95CJ iv. 601b, 603a, 613a, 615b, 625b, 632a; S. Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue (2000), 15. But, as his committee of the west signatures show, he was already busy with the implementation of what was later cast as a ‘commonwealth party’ plan to take advantage of recruitment for Ireland to push for the disbandment of Colonel Massie’s brigade, with the object of alleviating ‘intolerable pressure’ on the people of Wiltshire.96Add. 22084, f.11; Ludlow, Mems. i. 141. Perhaps partly in preparation for this, he apparently spent several weeks in the county in the late summer, attending the assizes at Salisbury on 14 August.97Waylen, ‘Diary of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper’, 25. He may have returned to Westminster by 25 September when, as part of what seems to have been a general mopping up of army arrears in the region, his own accounts were referred to the Committee of Accounts.98Add. 22084, f. 11; Waylen, ‘Falstone Day-Book’, 378; CJ iv. 676a. Among a group of MPs (including Blake and Popham) added (3 Oct.) to those delegated to supervise the formal dissolution of Massie’s brigade, he was also placed on the committee to prepare an indemnity ordinance for army officers (15 Oct.).99CJ iv. 681a, 694b. But he promptly left again for Wiltshire in pursuit of the former business. On 22 October he and Francis Allein*, an Irish adventurer who had been active in disbandment measures, wrote to the Speaker from Devizes that they were ‘now by the blessing of God waded through the depth and difficulties’ of their task of reduction. Despite having used ‘all possible endeavours’, they had failed to engage officers and soldiers for Ireland owing to ‘a general dislike’ of the conditions offered – perhaps, in Ludlowe’s case at least, because he shared those reservations – but they had conducted an orderly pay-off and, in accordance with their probable sympathy for the troops, reported their ‘civility’ and ‘quiet behaviour’.100Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 566. The Memoirs gave a different picture: while some were glad to return home, others mutinied.101Ludlow, Mems. i. 142. Ludlowe had similarly mixed success in his other local business of taking accounts. Robert Nicholas*, MP for Devizes, reported sympathetically to the Committee of Accounts that the colonel had acted diligently in this, but had found it difficult to find assistants to help him.102CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 491.

Ludlowe was back in Westminster by 17 November, when he signed orders of the committee of the west for payment of arrears to Colonel Thomas Eyre*, governor of Devizes, and of expenses to William Coles, the clerk to Wiltshire sessions (who also received Ludlowe’s rents).103Add. 22084, ff. 13v, 14; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 697. Not until 7 December, however, did he have any committee appointments. There were four that month – relating to disorder in the capital (7 Dec.), the establishment of the Committee for Compounding* (10 Dec.), action against the publication of the London ministers’ declaration for divine right Presbyterianism (12 Dec.) and dealing with outstanding grievances from Massie’s soldiers (28 Dec.).104CJ v. 4a, 8b, 11a, 28b. Yet he was then absent from the Journal for the next three months, and indeed was only occasionally in evidence until late 1647. Periodic appearances at the committee of the west indicate that two concerns remained the collection of Wiltshire assessments and the payment of military arrears, both of which may have taken him to the county, but it looks as though he was attending the Commons only selectively, even while in London.105Add. 22084, ff. 21, 29v.

It is probable that this pattern stemmed from suspicion of the army on the one hand and of assertive Presbyterians on the other, although the confused account of the period in the Memoirs precludes certainty. S. R. Gardiner plausibly ascribed to March 1647 Ludlowe’s alleged conversation with Oliver Cromwell* during which the former detected in the latter’s complaints of Parliament’s treatment of faithful generals ‘the beginning of a design for the destruction of civil authority’.106Ludlow, Mems. i. 144-5, 147. This, as well as genuine compassion, would explain his assiduity in paying off troops. Ludlowe’s sole nomination of the spring was to the large committee which pondered the various petitions from the army at Saffron Walden as it resisted disbandment (27 Mar.).107CJ v. 127b. In early May he signed more committee of the west orders for arrears, including to the horse commanded by his cousin William Ludlowe, while later in the month he was appointed to two committees – those settling land on Fairfax (11 May) and considering a petition from the Weavers’ Company (27 May) and he was a teller in favour of the majority who agreed a large fine in return for Shropshire MP Francis Newport discharging his delinquency (20 May).108Add. 22084, ff. 26, 30; CJ v. 167a, 179a, 187a.

By this time Ludlowe had evidently come to fear Presbyterian intrigues with the Scots and the king more than he did the army. He reappeared briefly in the Journal just after the accusations had been presented against the Eleven Members, as an addition with Marten to the committee disciplining MPs which was chaired by John Bulkeley (8 July).109CJ v. 238a. At some point, probably shortly before this and in response to the agitation that resulted in Heads of Proposals, the Memoirs recount his visit to army headquarters at Maidenhead, where Commissary-general Henry Ireton* assured him ‘of their steadfast adherence to the public interest’ and that their current wielding of power was ‘to quiet the restless spirits of the cavaliers, till they could put themselves into a condition of serving the people effectually’. Although he disapproved of their methods, by this account Ludlowe had no option but to take on trust their protestations of ultimate good faith.110Ludlow, Mems. i. 152-3. When ‘a rabble of vain and idle women’ tried to force on Parliament a settlement with the king in the Presbyterian coup of 26 July, he consulted with Hesilrige and, in the light of the ‘deflowering’ of privilege, the following day fled to the army.111Ludlow, Voyce, 142-3; Mems. i. 161-2.

Yet when the tables were turned on the Presbyterians, it seems plain that Ludlowe regarded the army with misgivings. He did not appear again in the Journal until 3 September, four weeks afterwards, when he collected another isolated committee nomination, sitting with Marten, Hesilrige and others to prepare the ordinance making Colonel Robert Hammond* governor of the Isle of Wight.112CJ v. 291a. It is not clear whether his appointment on 4 October as a commissioner to settle the affairs of Guernsey, Alderney and Sark was primarily a testament to general confidence in his military and administrative abilities or an attempt to place a potential troublemaker at a safe distance.113CJ v. 325b. Whatever the truth, five days later he was noted as absent ‘excused in service’.114CJ v. 330a. When he reappeared in mid-November it was to oppose forcefully the army’s pretensions. Redolent as it is of his 1644 letter to Doddington, the account in the Memoirs, even if coloured by hindsight, rings true. Placed on committees to investigate agitation in the army (16 Nov.), to manage the militia in Tower Hamlets (19 Nov.) and to review representations from the army (7 Dec.), Ludlowe hindered what he saw as Lieutenant-general Cromwell’s aim ‘to advance his own passion and power into the room of right and reason’, taking

the first opportunity to tell him, that the army having taken power into their hands, as in effect they had done, every drop of blood shed in that extraordinary way would be required of them, unless the rectitude of their intentions and actions did justify them.115CJ v. 360a, 363b, 376b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 173.

It is likely that it was soon after this that Ludlowe and Cornelius Holland* went to headquarters at Windsor to seek the discharge from custody of officers imprisoned by for their Leveller activities.116c.f. Ludlow, Mems. i. 183. After an all-day prayer meeting on 22 December, which would have been very much to the taste of the Ludlowe revealed in the Voyce, the army composed its internal differences. Perhaps partly at his instigation, it recommended the appointment as vice-admiral of the fleet of Leveller-sympathiser Colonel Thomas Rainborowe*, who had once served under him.117J. Smith, The Innocent Cleared, or the Vindication of Captaine John Smith, (1648), 10 (E.472.25) Two days later Ludlowe was a teller with Hesilrige for the majority in the Commons who ratified this in an order to Rainsborowe to repair immediately to his charge.118CJ v. 403b.

It is no surprise to find Ludlowe included on the committee to address grievances listed in the aftermath of the Vote of No Addresses (4 Jan. 1648).119CJ v. 417a. The sentiments of the Voyce, so opposed to any who sought accommodation with the king ‘to promote their own carnal ends rather [than] the public interest’, indicate he would have made every effort to register his opinion at this critical point.120Ludlow, Voyce, 130. ‘Long before’ Charles’s trial he had

earnestly desired and prayed the Lord would open a way and fit instrument for it (not seeing any other way to appease the wrath of God towards the nation for the blood that had been shed during the wars, nor to settle the peace of the nation for the future, but by bringing of the King to justice).121Ludlow, Voyce, 143.

However, that was his only appearance in the Journal until 20 April.122CJ v. 538a. While a visit to Wiltshire cannot be ruled out, he was almost certainly in London for at least part of this part of this period: Wiltshire radical John Long addressed a grateful letter to him in Holborn on 13 March.123CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 28. Clearly identified with the ‘commonwealthsmen’, he was apparently seen to stand aloof from routine Commons business. With the Independent leaders almost immediately in visible retreat from the January vote, it is plausible that Ludlowe again distrusted them and the army grandees, and that the conferences between the latter and the commonwealthsmen described in the Memoirs took place around this time. The story that exchanges between him and Cromwell degenerated into a cushion fight may or may not be invention; the animosity appears to transcend hindsight.124Ludlow, Mems. i. 184-7, 190-1.

Significantly, Ludlowe’s reappearance in the Journal came amid pro-royalist riots. On 20 April he was among those named to prepare an ordinance punishing those who defaulted on musters in Kent.125CJ v. 538a. Four days later he was a teller for the minority who opposed a proposal to narrow the window in which MPs could ask for official leave of absence, presumably because he wished to retain freedom to come and go.126CJ v. 544b. As full-scale royalist insurgency developed he doubtless welcomed, or even sought, the order issued on 30 May to him, James Herbert and Salisbury activist John Dove*, to go and deal with disorder in Wiltshire.127CJ v. 579a. It removed him from Westminster and from debates surrounding renewed overtures to the king, to his opponents’ probable satisfaction, but it was also the kind of task he relished. A series of orders from the Derby House Committee in June and July indicate that the seriousness of the situation and Ludlowe’s leading role in addressing it.128CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 124, 126, 132, 134, 169. Reports in the hostile Mercurius Pragmaticus alleged he went about it in characteristic fashion by employing obscure assistants to raise men and money, ‘one Read a serving-man and such other paltry contemptible fellows (all of them sectaries)’ and wondered that he ‘made himself thus odious, by setting up base fellows, to trample down the gentry’.129Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 19 (1-8 Aug. 1648), X2v (E.457.22). The newspaper further claimed that when the Commons debated county militia commissions at the beginning of August, Ludlowe proposed Read and others ‘of no estates in the county’. Furthermore, ‘Reid ... had often declared himself against kingly power, saying, he thought this kingdom might be governed better without a king’. Yet ‘the faction pleading strongly, that he and the rest were godly men, it was carried for them, as the peculiar people of God, contra gentes.’ The journalist blamed ‘Nol Cromwell’ and by ‘the faction’ probably had in mind the Independents, but Ludlowe himself, Dove (who reported amendments to the Wiltshire militia bill) and the commonwealthsmen may have been nearer the mark.130Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 20 (8-15 Aug. 1648) (E.458.25); CJ v. 663b, 667a, 667b. While Ludlowe made no recorded contribution to the bill, he was probably present in the Commons: on 1 August he was included on a small committee fixing compensation to Leveller Colonel John Lilburne.131CJ v. 657a.

Ludlowe then vanished from the Journal, to reappear briefly on 22 and 23 September, when he was named to amend an ordinance granting a monopoly on the quarrying of Bath stone and (with William Wheler*) to instruct Wiltshire assessment commissioners to expedite their task.132CJ vi. 27b, 30b. Behind the scenes his ‘utmost endeavours’ were directed towards thwarting negotiations for the Newport treaty and effecting a judicial solution.133Ludlow, Voyce, 143. While his language may have been elaborated in retrospect, his outrage at the possibility that Parliament might stumble at the last hurdle was surely contemporaneous. ‘Though Charles Steward was not the Anti-Christ spoken of by the apostle, yet was he one of the kings that gave his power to the beast.’ What greater demonstration could there be of his ‘pretention ... to an absolute, arbitrary and tyrannical power’ than that

Parliament, whose sessions the Lord by his wonderful providence had continued till they should think fit to dissolve themselves, and whose battles the Lord had fought and owned (to a very miracle) to the delivering of his and their enemy into their hands, to be still suing unto a man of so much guilt and blood, as if he were the life and very being of the nation, and all its prosperity and welfare were wrapped up in him?134Ludlow, Voyce, 144-5.

He doubted that

people would ever be so mad as to appear on the behalf of a parliament again, when they see that the best issue they can expect, after such vast expense of blood and treasure, is but to load themselves with more fetters, and to render their posterity more slaves [than] before.135Ludlow, Voyce, 145.

Even if, by the terms of the treaty, the king granted temporary control of the militia to Parliament, confirmed the sale of episcopal lands and accepted that some royalists would not be indemnified from prosecution, the very fact that such a grant had been made would undermine the essential principle that Parliament had acted with moral and legal right in all that it had done. Under this conviction, some time that autumn Ludlowe went to Fairfax’s quarters at Colchester to inform him ‘of a design ... drawing on to betray the cause in which so much of the people’s blood had been shed’. The general’s response was, he recalled, moderately encouraging: the two agreed that ‘it was necessary for the army to interpose’, although they ‘differed about the time’. Subsequent messages from Commissary-general Henry Ireton* revealing that, having dissented from his commander-in-chief, he had accepted the argument for the army’s imminently and forcibly bringing the king to trial, pleased Ludlowe even more.136Ludlow, Mems. i. 203-4; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 116, 132.

Doubtless buoyed up by these developments, Ludlowe re-emerged in the Commons to be added on 1 November to a committee dealing with compensation for a sufferer under the personal rule, Dr John Bastwick, but not again until 24 November, when he was a teller for the minority who opposed a short extension to the deadline for treaty negotiations.137CJ vi. 67a, 86b. It has also been suggested that, with the earls of Pembroke and Denbigh, he was one of a delegation of five Independents who around this date took time for talks with Patrick Crelly, abbot of Newry, sent by Randall MacDonnell, 2nd earl of Antrim, to seek an alliance with Parliament to thwart French and royalist designs in Ireland.138J.H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (1993), 220-1. On 4 December Ludlowe was a teller with Nicholas Love* for the minority (93 as against 144) who wished to put to the question whether the king’s answer to Parliament’s propositions was satisfactory.139CJ vi. 93b. Failure to accomplish this confirmed his conclusion that there was ‘no other way to effect’ calling Charles to account ‘in so regular a way as by excluding those members of the Parliament who, being by some temptation or other drawn off to the king, obstructed the same’.140Ludlow, Voyce, 143. Even if Ludlowe was not directly responsible for the physical coercion involved in the purge which took place on 6 December, he had a say in its nature and timing.141Ludlow, Mems. i. 209-10; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 140-2; W. Prynne, The Substance of a Speech (1649), 117.

Regicide and Rump, Dec. 1648-Dec. 1650

For a couple of weeks thereafter, while the army made its own last-ditch attempt to reach agreement with the king, Ludlowe seems to have hung back as before.142Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 145. Once this initiative too had gone aground, however, with Parliament freed of Laodicean backsliders and a day of judgement in clear prospect, he at last achieved a profile within the Commons commensurate with his reputation outside it.143J. Jubbes, Several Proposals for Peace and Freedom by an Agreement of the People (1648), 9 (E.477.18). Within four months of the purge he received as many committee nominations as in his previous two and a half years in Parliament and joined all the key decision-making bodies of the commonwealth, financial, political and religious. On 20 December he took the dissent to the vote of the 5th for continuing negotiations with the king, although his sole appointment that month was to the committee considering a petition from the corporation of the City of London, itself just purged (23 Dec.).144PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 473-4; CJ vi. 103b. On 6 January, the day that he helped draft the ordinance for and was named as a commissioner to the court that would try the king, he was also added to the committees for Indemnity and Plundered Ministers, and at Haberdashers’ Hall and Derby House.145CJ vi. 109a, 112a, 112b, 113b; A List of the Names of the Judges of the High Court of Justice (1649). Within the next five weeks he collected an unprecedented (for him) selection of further appointments, including committees for the sale of church lands and for the reconstitution of commissions of the peace.146CJ vi. 116a, 120b, 124a, 127b, 132a, 134a.

This did not represent an immediate or complete victory for Ludlowe and his radical friends. Initially the Lords remained in place, although they were ‘rather the counsel of the king than of the people’.147Ludlow, Voyce, 144. On 9 January, when peers resumed sitting after a week’s interval, he and Marten failed to prevent a vote to admit their messengers and thus to block consultation between the two Houses on the way forward.148CJ vi. 115a. However, both men were to be closely involved in arrangements for the forthcoming trial. On 15 January, while Marten was placed on the ‘civilian’ committee advising on the charge, Ludlowe was appointed to a ‘military-dominated committee’ which organised security and other practical matters.149Journal of the High Court of Justice in Howell, State Trials, iv. 1061; S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism (1998), 124.

There is no reason to doubt, given his language of blood, that Ludlowe had for some time envisaged that a trial would result in the king’s death, not least because of the latter’s failure to acknowledge any fault. Bearing out the colonel’s later claim that he ‘was so well satisfied in the justice and necessity of this undertaking’, one contemporary commentator spoke of

Ludlow that rogue and dog, vaunting among his friends ... that the king was nothing at all daunted at the charge, but looked with as impudent a face as if he had not been guilty of all the blood that hath been shed.150Ludlow, Mems. i. 143, 215n.

In the Voyce Ludlowe was relatively clear on the point that for a traitor, a tyrant, a murderer and ‘an enemy to the commonwealth’, the penalty was death, and that there was no exemption for kings.151Ludlow, Voyce, 131-4. The obligation to execute justice on those whom the Lord ‘had appointed to utter destruction’ was no respecter of persons, although it was essential that the executors were acting in publicly and openly, and not privately and covertly.152Ludlow, Voyce, 135-7. It is not certain, however, that before the regicide Ludlowe fully shared Marten’s conviction that the monarchical system should be overthrown altogether, rather than merely temporarily removed as a logical consequence of the king’s sin. Years later, when from republican Switzerland he wrote his justification informed by his own sufferings and the martyrdoms of his associates at the hands of Charles’s heir – circumstances which evidently intensified his opposition to the Stuarts and might have been expected also to liberate him to express anti-monarchical sentiment – he was somewhat opaque on this issue. He regretted that Parliament had adopted and maintained the fiction that it operated under the king; this had confused its objectives and prolonged the war.153Ludlow, Voyce, 140. He went so far as to say that ‘the king’s title was ill-founded’ and that nature ‘is often more liberal in bestowing magisterical endowments on many thousands than on the royal progeny’; he conceded obliquely that Charles’s power might have been ‘unjust’ and he was sure that ‘he had imprinted on him the image of the devil’.154Ludlow, Voyce, 138-9. But, as in a speech of February 1659, he did not rule out kingship in every circumstance.155Burton’s Diary, iii. 145. He conceived of the possibility of one ‘with the image of God upon him, such a magistrate as we are bound to obey for conscience sake’; a higher power, howsoever grounded, to whom ‘if we receive protection from it, we are bound to pay subjection to, either actively or passively’.156Ludlow, Voyce, 139. Although he registered the warnings of the prophet Samuel as to what kings would do in Israel, he appeared to leave some room for an elective monarchy, ‘chosen by the free vote of the people’ and without the sanction of divine right or inheritance, along parallel lines to those others envisaged when they spoke of primitive episcopacy. At its heart would be a reciprocal covenant for the welfare of the people and government according to law.157Ludlow, Voyce, 138, 140-1. If he had not, even in the enforced leisure of exile, pursued his argument further than that, then the balance of probability is that, in 1649 and later, his thinking on political systems was as fuzzy as his definition of commonwealthsmen.

He was, it is true, among the five MPs deputed to devise the form of and the instructions for the new council of state (7 Feb. 1649), but his Memoirs acknowledge ‘unfitness for so great a work’ (demonstrably, if disingenuously on his part), and this was the only occasion on which he was noticeably a draughtsman.158CJ vi. 133a; Ludlow, Mems. i. 223.. Elected a member of the resulting council on 17 February, he took the oath on the 19th.159CJ vi. 141a, 146b. In the year that followed he was present on about a hundred occasions – an average attendance; this was punctuated by only one absence above a fortnight, between early June and late July.160CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. xlviii-lxxv. His speciality seems to have been security, although he was involved in money and other matters; Cornelius Holland was his most frequent companion on sub-committees.161CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 49, 67, 70, 127, 159, 166, 167, 275, 280, 417, 422, 507. Among other councillors, there are signs that Ludlowe had links with peers, including Pembroke, whom he accompanied into the Commons when the earl took his seat as a knight for Berkshire that April.162Kelsey, ‘Foundation of the Council of State’, 134-5. Around this time, if not earlier, Ludlowe married the step-daughter of Pembroke’s right-hand man, Michael Oldisworth*, Member for Salisbury. His wife Elizabeth may have been, as her brother Edmund Thomas* was by October 1647, under Oldisworth’s guardianship.163LJ ix. 471a. It proved a successful, if childless, marriage and the relationship between the Ludlowes and ‘father’ and ‘mother’ Oldisworth became close and important. In the meantime the council referred Ludlowe and Bulstrode Whitelocke to confer with Oldisworth over a Berkshire petition (31 May 1649), while Oldisworth and Ludlowe went hunting with Whitelocke in August.164CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 167; Whitelocke, Diary, 245-6.

Ludlowe’s profile in the Journal over this period more or less mirrored his attendance at the council, although his summer absence from the Commons was apparently longer. For all his greater activity in the Rump, he played a relatively modest part in reforming legislation and was only once appointed to a (large) committee set up to justify Parliament’s actions to the nation (24 Oct. 1649).165CJ vi. 312b. The one committee from which he reported, and which was a recurrent concern, was disciplinary in intent. Doubtless because of his role in the purge, he was named on 5 March to pursue Members who had not yet registered their dissent or disapproval of the 5 December 1648 vote for the treaty which had provoked it.166CJ vi. 157a, As this became the committee for absentee members, he updated MPs on individuals who had satisfied their interrogators that they should be admitted to sit (27 Apr.; 7, 22 May; 2 June 1649).167CJ vi. 197a, 202b, 214a, 223a. He was a supporter of the redistribution of seats and regulation of elections (joint chair, 11 Oct.) and was also appointed to committees examining parliamentary pensions and petitions (19 Sept.), taking from Members subscriptions to the Engagement to the commonwealth (12 Oct.), discussing an act providing for deputy sheriffs to transmit parliamentary and conciliar orders to the localities (28 Nov.) and adjudicating in Members’ disputes (17 May 1650).168CJ vi. 298a, 305b, 307b, 327a, 413b; Worden, Rump Parliament, 152, 156–7.

On 7 March 1649 Ludlowe was added to the committee then entrusted with preparation of the act abolishing the House of Lords as well as that already underway for the abolition of the monarchy. 169CJ vi. 158a. He may have approached the former with a degree of moderation: it is not clear that at this point he had an animus against the peerage per se; nor should he be seen as ‘the champion of the new social order and “a sliding social scale”’.170Worden, Rump Parliament, 152. On 8 March he was a teller against Hesilrige and Cromwell and for the small majority who voted to give further consideration to the petitions of various aristocratic creditors of George Goring† (the earl of Norwich).171CJ vi. 159b. His memory of kind treatment at Wardour translated in 1653 into support for the Catholic earl of Arundel’s petition for mitigation of sequestration.172Bodl. Tanner 53, f. 192; Ludlow, Mems. i. 456. On the other hand, he can have had little compunction about selling crown lands (3 Apr. 1649; 7 Feb., 15 Apr. 1650), proceeding against delinquents (12 March 1649; 20 Nov. 1650) and was an unsurprising recruit to the Committee for Compounding (2 Nov. 1649).173CJ vi. 162a,178b, 318a, 358b, 398b, 499b. His experience of money-raising and submitting accounts was also variously deployed (29 Apr., 28 May, 7 Nov. 1649; 18 Apr. 1650), while his earlier adminstrative/military role in the Channel Islands was replicated in addition to the committee for Anglesey (30 May).174CJ vi. 196a, 213a, 218b, 220a, 320a, 400a. He also remained in touch with his native area, sitting on the committee of the west, forwarding local petitions and conveying thanks to the mayor of Salisbury.175CJ vi. 200a, 204a, 219b, 325b.

In the midst of this, there were occasional signs of positive commitment to radical causes. Ludlowe was named with Sir James Harington*, Hesilrige, Marten and others to prepare an act for the abatement of food prices (5 Apr. 1649).176CJ vi. 179b. He was a teller with Marten in an unsuccessful attempt to secure maintenance from the state for imprisoned Levellers (12 May 1649) and sat on Marten’s committee to consider Lilburne’s petition for compensation (27 June 1650).177CJ vi. 208a, 433a. He was appointed to committees for advancing the gospel in Wales (12 Jan. ), for suppressing blasphemy and unlawful assemblies (24 June) and (eventually) for regulating the universities (19 Sept.), and, in one of the more incongruous demonstrations of the alliance between the reputedly amoral Marten and the pious Ludlowe, the pair were tellers for the majority who rejected a clause in the proposed act against incest, adultery and fornication (26 Apr.).178CJ vi. 352a,404b, 430a, 469b. In an assembly that arguably failed to live up to its reforming intent, this was still a rather modest record, and it seems clear that Ludlowe’s religious toleration had limits.

On 22 February 1650, partly as it would seem as a pledge of faith to the new regime, Ludlowe bought the manors of East Knoyle and Upton and the borough of Hindon, former lands of the bishop of Winchester. The purchase, costing over £4,500 and funded by his wife’s portion and the sale of some of his inheritance, also brought him the rectory of East Knoyle and a controlling interest in the constituency for which his uncle still had an unresolved claim to sit.179Bodl. Rawl. B.239, p. 44; Ludlow, Mems. i. 235. Earlier that month he had been re-elected to the council of state.180CJ vi. 363a. Placed the same day (12 Feb.) on a committee to devise a way of adding further councillors, he was a teller (14 Feb.) for the minority who favoured using the ballot box, probably in order to limit the influence of the army grandees.181CJ vi. 363b, 365b. His companion was Robert Reynolds*, the other, longstanding Member for Hindon, who shared his distrust of Cromwell if not his radical edge; Hesilrige and the maverick Wiltshire MP Sir John Danvers* (for whom he probably also had some antipathy) were ranged against them. Six days later Ludlowe joined his old ally Marten to block the election of Sir Henry Vane I*.182CJ vi. 369a.

In his second year on the council, truncated by departure for Ireland that December, Ludlowe was more assiduous in attendance than previously, missing few meetings except in March.183CSP Dom. 1650, pp. xv–xxxix. In reflection of the fears of insurrection and Scottish invasion, his service was dominated by military and security concerns; nominations for the Wiltshire militia could not be considered in his absence, and it can have surprised few that he emerged as its colonel, with his cousin William Ludlowe as major.184CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 10, 56, 104, 126, 145, 156, 169, 222, 327, 346, 353, 379, 399, 404-5, 506. In the Journal he was slightly less visible than in the previous 12 months, while his activity was closely related to that on the council. He reported from that body recommendations for raising troops in Somerset (10 May) and Devon and Cornwall (22 May); having worked on it in council, he was on a small committee that completed work on the Militia Act in the Commons (7 May, 11 July).185CJ vi. 411a, 415a, 439b; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 145, 148. Among other committee appointments was one to work on the act prohibiting commerce and traffic between England and Scotland (23 July).186CJ vi. 437b, 438a, 444b, 455b, 463b.

Ludlowe resisted the financial settlement offered in May by the Commons to Lieutenant-general Cromwell in recognition of his service in Ireland, regarding it as the desire of ‘sycophants’, although he promised not to oppose it. Instead, he claimed to have spoken up for the claims of others, especially Major-general Philip Skippon*, ‘who did me ever after the honour to call me his real friend’.187Ludlow, Mems. i. 241. Soon after, however, having been among those who in vain ‘laboured to persuade’ Fairfax of ‘the reasonableness and justice’ of invading Scotland, Ludlowe considered himself to have been duped by Cromwell (‘who acted his part so to the life, that I really thought him in earnest’) into encouraging the latter to take command instead.188Ludlow, Mems. i. 243–4. According to the Memoirs, Cromwell then, in a lengthy and roundabout conversation, attempted to sound Ludlowe out as to replacing him in Ireland, before duly proposing him formally in the council. Ludlowe’s pleas of insufficient experience, personal debt and family obligations were not accepted – he said – and on 27 June he was nominated in council to be commissioner for Ireland and assistant lord deputy (and thus third in command under the absent Cromwell, rather than second).189CSP Dom. 1650, p. 219. The appointment, which also named him lieutenant-general of horse, was approved by the Commons on 2 July.190CJ vi. 435a; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 228. While Ludlowe’s claim that this was at least partly a ploy to remove him as a potential obstruction to Cromwell’s will may have overstated both his own importance (his deprecatory remarks notwithstanding) and the latter’s strategy, others also detected a move to balance Cromwell’s absence in Scotland with Ludlowe’s in Ireland.191Ludlow, Mems. i. 249. If this was the case, it was not immediately successful: Cromwell left for the north with Ludlowe still in London.

In the next five and a half months Ludlowe’s appearances in the Journal were dominated by the fall-out from his prospective service. On 19 July his account for past service was referred to the Committee of Accounts, while on 23 October, following conciliar prompting, it was resolved that £1,000 should be advanced to him for use in Ireland; the former was still being debated in the second week of December.192CJ vi. 444b, 486a, 486b, 508a–509a, 511a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 376, 397, 398, 420, 464. Detailed instructions from the council of state for Ludlowe and the three other commissioners for Ireland – Miles Corbett*, John Jones* and John Weaver* – were presented to the Commons on 4 October, but despite other preparations, Ludlowe tarried for the debating of ‘such private petitions as depended in [his] hands, which the House promised to hear’.193CJ vi. 479a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 597, 599, 601, 606; Mercurius Politicus no. 29 (19-26 Dec. 1650), 483 (E.620.12); Ludlow, Mems. i. 257. He left Westminster only after 19 December, when with Luke Robinson* he was a teller for the minority who opposed Parliament’s conciliatory answer to a petition from the City of London.194CJ vi. 512a.

Commissioner in Ireland 1651-1653

Ludlowe and the other parliamentary commissioners to Ireland made their first report to the Speaker from Waterford on 25 January 1651.195Ludlow, Mems. i. 258-9, 486. The scope of their responsibilities was wide, though it could be characterised under four inter-related headings: the advancement of protestantism; the improvement of the public revenue; the management of army provision, quartering and disbandment; and the exercise of authority delegated by Parliament.196Eg. 1048, f. 192; CJ vi. 479a. It was work for which on paper they were enthusiastic and reasonably well prepared, just as Ludlowe’s additional military role was ostensibly an extension of his previous activity in Wiltshire.197Fisher, Veni, Vidi, Vici. According to Ludlowe’s later assessment, the commissioners discharged their function well.198Ludlow, Voyce, 248, 300. But reality on the ground was complex and novel, and although there seems to have been a remarkable degree of cohesion among them, other powers in Ireland and opponents in Parliament held them in significant suspicion.

At first the lord deputy, Henry Ireton, and the commissioners achieved a united front. On 24 March 1651 they wrote from Kilkenny presenting for Parliament’s approval conditions which might be offered to the native Irish to encourage them to settle a peace and discourage an anticipated ‘general insurrection’.199Ludlow, Mems. i. 486-8. A few weeks later the impression was still one of amity.200Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence no. 16 (23-30 Apr. 1651), 131-3 (E.628.8); Ludlow, Mems. i. 488. But although Ludlowe retained a generally very favourable view of Ireton, he recognised correctly that the deputy, and through him the army at home, distrusted him.201Ludlow, Voyce, 272; Mems. i. 278, 285, 293, 294; Clarendon, Hist. v. 270-1. Ludlowe received a positive press for some of his successes in the field that summer, but while lines of communication were sometimes attenuated, the ruthless behaviour of his troops caused disquiet which was transmitted back to England.202The Tanner Letters ed. C McNeill (1943), 336-8; Mems. i. 489-90; Weekly Intelligencer no. 27 (24 June-1 July 1651), 212 (E.633.1); A letter concerning the rendition of the city of Limerick (1651, E.647.9).

Ludlowe was in Dublin with the other commissioners when on 2 December ‘the sad news’ arrived of Ireton’s death.203Add. 63788B, f. 94; Ludlow, Mems. i. 496. The same day Ludlowe’s colleagues wrote to Cromwell expressing a conviction that Ludlowe would automatically replace Ireton for the time being and then willingly relinquish his command.204Ludlow, Mems. i. 497. Once again Ludlowe demurred at the opportunity of office; once again he overcame his reluctance and got on with the job.205Ludlow, Mems. i. 294-5, 497-501. By the end of 1651 rebellion was in retreat, but deficiencies in plans for neutralizing resistance and expediting plantations had potential to cause trouble, while insecurity was fostered by the arguments in England between the army and Parliament over the the subordination of the new deputy (whoever he might be) to Cromwell, as lord lieutenant of Ireland.206Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 120-8; T.C. Barnard, The Kingdom of Ireland (2004), 17-18, 26-9; CJ vii. 77b, 79a, 79b, 168a. Writing to the Speaker on 9 and 13 February the commissioners gave a broadly up-beat assessment of the situation – although the troops still needed provisions and equipment – but sought clarification of their brief.207Bodl. Tanner 53, ff. 112, 121; Ludlow, Mems. i. 501-3. On 20 February Ludlowe replied to an overture towards a treaty from the royalist commander in Ireland Ulick Burke, 1st marquess of Clanricarde, that ‘the settlement of this nation doth of right to belong to the Parliament of the commonwealth of England, to whom we leave the same’, although he suggested that, ‘if the Lord would have that mercy in store’ for the rebels ‘as to incline their hearts to a submission’, then ‘timely application’ might yet secure ‘moderate terms’. But he warned that ‘the Lord hath hitherto enabled’ those who served Parliament, ‘to proceed against those whose hearts have been hardened upon vain and groundless expectations, to withstand offers of such favour as have been made unto them’.208Mercurius Politicus no. 96 (1-8 Apr. 1652), 1514-15 (E.659.11); A Letter, or paper, signed by Garald Fitz-gerald (1652); Ludlow, Mems. i. 504-8; Bodl. Tanner 55, f. 155.

Ludlowe and his fellow commissioners stuck to their hard line during the spring in correspondence to Parliament, the council of state and the rebels, emphasizing that previous leniency had been counter-productive and underlining the atrocities alleged to have been committed against Protestants.209Bodl. Tanner 53, f. 20, 22, 27; 55, f. 174; Ludlow, Mems. i. 508-20; Mercurius Politicus no. 96; CJ vii. 105b, 115b. Despite a welcome shipping of supplies, however, there was a shortage of uniforms and ammunition, compounded by a shortfall of pay and difficulties in obtaining food.210Bodl. Tanner 53, f. 24; Ludlow, Mems. i. 517-19. ‘Lacking particular directions from Parliament’, the commissioners explained to the Speaker on 13 May, when ‘God ... put [an] opportunity into [their] hands’ to conclude reasonable terms with rebels under the earl of Westmeath in Galway, they took it.211Bodl. Tanner 53, ff. 27, 31; Ludlow, Mems. i. 519-21. These were read in the Commons on 18 May.212CJ vii. 133a, 133b. The next day Hesilrige and Marten marshalled just sufficient votes to abolish the office of lord lieutenant of Ireland once Cromwell’s current tenure ended, but his son-in-law Charles Fleetwood was eventually confirmed as pre-eminent commissioner in Ireland; despite some military success that summer Ludlowe and his colleagues had to be content with a new commission as his subordinates (13 Aug.).213CJ vii. 134a, 143a, 164b; Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 18; Ludlow, Mems. i. 321, 344-53, 365, 523-5, 529-30; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 365; Bodl. Tanner 53, f. 67; Perfect Diurnall, 139 (2-9 Aug. 1652), 2069 (E.796.14). Wide-ranging instructions issued on 24 August covered justice, settlement, religion, education, finance and the economy, officeholding, propaganda and the English army of occupation.214CJ vii. 167a-168b.

The Memoirs protested that the news of Fleetwood’s arrival at Waterford ‘was very welcome to me, having found my care and fatigues recompensed only with envy and hatred’, but while the jealousy from existing colleagues was probably all too real, Ludlowe was probably not so sanguine.215Ludlow, Mems. i. 330. On the surface the four commissioners appeared to work together constructively, perhaps partly because Fleetwood proved more congenial than anticipated.216Ludlow, Mems. i. 530-1; TSP i. 631. After an autumn in which sickness again debilitated the occupying army, the commissioners joined to grant Clanricarde a pass to go to England (6 Dec.).217CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 653; Clarendon, Hist. v. 272; Mercurius Politicus no. 135 (30 Dec. 1652-6 Jan. 1653, E.684.24). A policy of sympathetic hearing of petitions from some delinquents facing sequestration or transportation was continued.218CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 475, 584; TSP i. 631.

Protectorate dissident

Yet the divisions which surfaced late in 1653 were evidently deep-seated. The inauguration of the protectorate, which automatically nullified the commissioners’ mandate, confirmed Ludlowe’s worst fears about Cromwell’s ambition, despite a message promising friendship and favour.219Ludlow, Mems. i. 369. According to the Memoirs, a vote on the proclamation of the Instrument of Government, taken by the commissioners and chief officers, was passed only by the casting vote of the auditor-general. Regarding it as a ‘usurpation’ – contravening, as witnesses reported him as saying, successive acts passed in the first few months of the Rump – Ludlowe still refused to sign the proclamation and promptly rode out of town, explaining later that he ‘durst not’ continue in his ‘civil capacity’, but was reluctant to lay down his military authority because it was derived from Parliament.220Ludlow, Mems. i. 373-7. Since both derived from the same source, the distinction is not apparent; hostile commentators assumed that the answer to this ‘riddle’ was simply profit.221TSP ii. 149, 163. Meanwhile, Ludlowe’s stance – he was heard to say that that he would ‘rather cut off his hand’ than append his name – allegedly encouraged other commissioners to withdraw their signatures and thwart proceedings for as long as possible.222TSP ii. 163-4.

Such defiance could not go uninvestigated. Ludlowe had recently been granted a confiscated estate at Monkstown, some six miles south-east of Dublin. He was there at the beginning of March when Henry Cromwell*, landed at nearby Dun Laoghaire and accepted Ludlowe’s hospitality. Young Cromwell and his host aired frankly but politely the mutual distrust of the protector and lieutenant-general.223Ludlow, Mems. i. 380-3, 543-4. Once Henry Cromwell was in Dublin any gloves were off. Reporting to John Thurloe* on 8 March, Cromwell complained of the ‘peevishness and frowardness’ of the parliamentary commissioners, ‘especially Ludlowe and Jones, who are very highly dissatisfied’.224TSP ii. 149. One of Cromwell’s travelling companions singled Ludlowe out as an agitator who ‘hath behaved himself most childishly, not refraining [from] very poisonous and bitter expressions in public meetings’, thereby gaining so much prestige among the anabaptists that, after previous refusals, they had finally admitted him to their meetings.225TSP ii. 163.

It is difficult to determine whether the association of Ludlowe with sectaries who denied both an overarching national church and paedo-baptism was an accurate representation of his theological and ecclesiological views at this point. It was an association soon made by other contemporaries of various persuasions and as such, an indicator of the degree to which he had, or was perceived to have, departed from the political mainstream. It is not, however, conclusive proof that he was a Baptist in 1654, although he professed such views later in exile.226Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1184-5, 1286-7. That he had already developed a sympathy for those who advocated ‘gathered’ churches and that he thought compulsion engendered lip-service attendance is highly plausible; that he advocated a measure of toleration is certain. But Ludlowe had given sympathy to Levellers without becoming a Leveller. Dr Samuel Winter, who accompanied the parliamentary commissioners to Dublin as chaplain, and whose ministry there was highly praised by them in 1652, by 1653 led a civilian-dominated Independent congregation at loggerheads with the Baptist congregation Ludlowe was supposed to have joined, yet the latter was still promoting the former’s ministry in Ireland in 1659.227Ludlow, Mems. i. 511-12; ii. 447-8; Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 99-100. He was later a patron and friend of other ministers who were not Baptists and who promoted ecumenism; he had personal esteem for some Catholics.228Bodl. Tanner 53, f. 192; Ludlow, Mems. i. 456.

Meanwhile, according to Thurloe’s informant, all the commissioners ‘expect not to continue long, and therefore do little but prepare for their dissolution’, although since this preparation consisted in preferring ‘their friends to places of benefit and continuance’, it only served to ‘make the work more difficult’ for their successors.229TSP ii. 164. Having picked up on Henry Cromwell’s recommendation that Ludlowe be dismissed, royalist intelligence in May 1654 was that he was ‘truly cashiered’.230CCSP ii. 359. It was thus in distinctly unpromising circumstances that Ludlowe was a candidate for a county seat in elections for the first protectorate Parliament that summer. In an account suppressed in the first edition of his Memoirs he protested that he was unaware of others’ campaigning on his behalf and that, based in Ireland, he could not have sat; this argument was also circulating at the time.231Mems. i. 388-91; H. Chambers et al. An apology for the ministers of the county of Wilts. (1654), esp. 5-8 (E.808.9). However, given his evident conviction that his days there were numbered and his propensity to thwart Oliver Cromwell’s ambition where he could, this stance is – and clearly was – somewhat unconvincing. Whatever the truth of this, perhaps because of hostile campaigning by certain Wiltshire Presbyterian ministers, he failed to gain a seat.232The Copy of a Letter sent out of Wiltshire (1654); Ludlow, Mems. i. 545.

By late 1654 Ludlowe’s defiance had become intolerable.233Ludlow, Mems. i. 406-7. But ejecting him from Ireland proved a complicated and protracted process. Requested (before 17 Jan. 1655) to resign his commission as lieutenant-general of horse, he refused ‘to deliver it up without a legal conviction’.234TSP iii. 113. Faced with the option of resigning both his military commissions or giving his parole to attend the protector at Whitehall by 10 March, Ludlowe assented to the latter on 30 January, announcing an intention then ‘to live in Somersetshire with a sister-in-law, to avoid jealousies and temptations’.235Add. 4156, ff. 129, 138; TSP iii. 142; Ludlow, Mems. i. 412. However, by 25 April his parole for attendance in London had been extended to 10 September.236CSP Dom. 1655, p. 139; TSP iii. 407. The arrival of Henry Cromwell in Dublin in July as acting commander of forces in Ireland failed to offer an immediate resolution.237Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 20; TSP iii. 743-4; Ludlow, Mems. i. 422; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 300. Ludlowe signed a second engagement on 29 August, similar to the first, but Major-general Cromwell was still nervous about the implications of his ‘over-earnestness to come for England’. Once there, he would be ‘very troublesome’ and then the government would be forced to hand out exemplary punishment, ‘which would but make him considerable’. He had refused to place himself under an obligation not to challenge the protectorate ‘because ... God may give an opportunity for him to appear for the liberty of the people’.238TSP iii. 743-4. In the meantime, on 9 October Cromwell informed his father that several officers in Ireland, ‘most of them’ formerly of Ludlowe’s regiment and ‘too much of his spirit and principle’, had ‘been liberal in seditious reviling expressions against the government and your highness’.239TSP iv. 74.

Finally, encouraged by letters from his stepfather Oldisworth and messages from Corbett, and not deflected by indications from Parliament that a further delay might be wise, Ludlowe ‘went hence without taking his leave’.240Mems. i. 423-7; Publick Intelligencer no. 5 (29 Oct.-5 Nov. 1655, E.489.11). Before 16 October he had landed at Beaumaris in Anglesey and been detained at the castle. The arrest was applauded by a surprised government and mourned by some royalists, who were coming to see Ludlowe, ‘an irreconcilable enemy to the protector’s person’, as a potentially more useful ally than many on their own side.241TSP iv. 88, 100; CCSP iii. 411; Nicholas Pprs. iii. 177-8. As Henry Cromwell had predicted, to those who valued ‘the commonwealth’s best friends’, the detention simply contributed to the catalogue of the protector’s extra-judicial acts.242I.S. The Picture of a New Courtier drawn in a Conference (1656), 4 (E.875.6).

Released in early December 1655, Ludlowe made his way to London. Once there he had the first of a series of summonses to examination by the council of state which were to punctuate the next three years.243CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 56; Ludlow, Mems. i. 431-6. Intelligencers followed with interest the fencing between Ludlowe and the regime as the former refused to give absolute undertakings of non-resistance and the latter deliberated as to whether or not to keep him in custody; rumours had him confined, only then to be contradicted.244CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 109, 196; 1656-7, pp. 50, 59, 582; TSP v. 317. It is surprising that he continued to be named to commissions of oyer and terminer: perhaps this was a ploy to involve him in proceedings against royalists; perhaps it was a sign that he had friends in high places.245C181/6, ff. 9, 50, 85v, 115, 138, 167, 211, 235, 274, 308, 377. Ludlowe himself recorded meetings in London with the disgraced Major-general Thomas Harrison I* and Hugh Peter, one of Cromwell’s chaplains, at the latter of which he supposedly spoke his mind on the protector.246Ludlow, Mems. ii. 6, 8-9. As he had intimated he would, he also spent time settling his affairs: in March 1656 he finally discharged his obligations as his father’s executor to his uncle Humphrey Ludlowe of Allington.247E44/190. From time to time he courted obscurity, as when in July 1656 he accompanied the Oldisworths to Essex, while that August a campaign by some to get him elected to the forthcoming Parliament – yet again ‘against his will’ – prompted the council to arrest him again.248Ludlow, Mems. ii. 10-13, 17; CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 67; Clarke Pprs. iii. 69. By October he was reported to be not in prison but on supervised bail.249CCSP iii. 190.

There are signs that in 1658 Ludlowe, who was still being courted by royalist agents, was also on slightly better terms with the regime, even if only as a negotiating stratagem, while the restraint of ‘disaffected persons’ seemed to at least one of his family members to be easing.250CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 369. In February Sealed Knot leader Alan Broderick informed Hyde, plausibly, that Ludlowe had remarked that Cromwell had tried one Parliament after another ‘to find one fit to plague the people, as Balaam walked from mountain to mountain seeking the most convenient place to curse Israel’, but fellow spies continued to be baffled as to Ludlowe’s intentions.251CCSP iv. 16; TSP vii. 98. Writing to Thurloe in June (when other evidence reveals Ludlowe to have been staying at Dorchester House in Westminster), a sceptical Henry Cromwell professed himself glad to hear of the ‘compliance’ of Ludlowe and other well-known trouble-makers. None the less he hoped ‘they do not intend to tickle you, as men do trouts’; it seemed to him that they sought rather ‘to shuffle again, [than] better your hand’. He doubted ‘your affairs will gain much reputation by their being in your counsel’.252TSP vii. 154-5; CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 56-7. It looks likely, indeed, that Ludlowe and friends were positioning themselves ready for change. Ludlowe’s assertion that, when Fleetwood enquired as to why he had come to London again on 31 August, he had done so in ignorance of the protector’s indisposition, rings hollow.253Ludlow, Mems. ii. 43-4. A few pages later the Memoirs suggest that ‘the commonwealthsmen’ were only waiting for the army to be ‘delivered from their servitude to the general’ for the soldiers to ‘open their eyes and join with them as the only means left to preserve themselves and the people’.254Ludlow, Mems. ii. 46. That deliverance seemed to have arrived with the death of Oliver on 3 September.

Third protectorate Parliament

Ludlowe was still, or again, at Dorchester House in late October, evidently consulting friends over future strategy.255CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 678. Thurloe reported in December that there had recently been a meeting of ‘several commonwealthsmen’ including Scot, Weaver, Henry Neville* and Ludlowe at which ‘resolutions were taken how the business should be managed in Parliament’. The first element of their programme was to move ‘that all votes should be passed by a balloting box, judging that there will be many Nicodemites in the House, who would be of their party, if they durst’. Secondly, they intended to challenge the Humble Petition and Advice, the bedrock of the protectorate, and assert that the Other House and the council should be chosen by the Commons. Thirdly, they would argue that ‘the House ought to be satisfied of the succession’ (that is, presumably, that it should have power of veto), ‘thinking by these steps to bring in the commonwealth’.256TSP vii. 550. By 4 January 1659 Thurloe had still not heard whether Vane and Ludlowe had secured seats, ‘but there is no doubt to be made but they will come in’ for ‘the commonwealthsmen stickle all they can to come into the House’.257TSP vii. 588.

In these altered political circumstances ownership of the borough of Hindon virtually guaranteed Ludlowe a seat in the forthcoming Parliament.258Bodl. Rawl. B.239, p. 44. At the election he collected at least 32 votes, possibly slightly more than his more conservative partner, Edward Tooker*, former guardian of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper.259C219/48. Thomas Clarges* echoed Thurloe’s worst fears when he told Henry Cromwell on 1 February that while there were names he dared not ‘particularize’, ‘when you know Sir Arthur [Hesilrige], Lord Lambert, Mr Scot, Lieutenant-general Ludlow, and Captain Baines, are of the Parliament, I shall not need to enumerate the rest’.260TSP vii. 605.

Thurloe’s analysis of the agenda of Ludlowe and his associates proved reasonably accurate. It is all the more notable, therefore, that Ludlowe was included on the commission issued by Richard Cromwell* on 26 January to administer to other MPs the oath which would entail a formal acknowledgement of the protectorate’s power to call a Parliament – unless this was an attempt either to bind him to the regime or to provoke a confrontation which would result in his exclusion from the chamber and political neutralisation.261CJ vii. 593a. If there was an ulterior motive, it was ultimately ineffectual. Ludlowe recalled that at first he skulked around Westminster Hall, ‘declining going into the assembly’, until encouraged to do so by Wiltshire MP Sir Walter St John* (a protectorate loyalist with covert royalist links), who promised to create an impression of having administered the oath to him. It is another surprise that the combative Ludlowe would have entertained this form of subterfuge – unless he was waiting for the right moment and sufficient associates of the same mind – although more comprehensible that, a rendezvous with St John having failed, he slipped in, made for the Speaker’s chamber and the gallery, and for a week ‘sat with as much privacy as I could’.262Ludlow, Mems. ii. 51-2. The confrontation came on 5 February, when Griffith Bodurda* (a more thoroughgoing protectorate loyalist) twice drew attention to the unsworn Ludlowe. Hesilrige, among others, hastened to deflect the discussion, while William Eyre II repaid a debt by reminding the Commons that he had been permitted to sit in the Long Parliament without taking the oath once Ludlowe had spoken for him. It is testament to the collective power of the disparate elements hostile to the protectorate that the debate was ‘waived’ and Ludlowe sat tight.263Burton’s Diary, iii. 68 seq.; Ludlowe, Mems. ii. 52-4; Clarke Pprs. iii. 179.

The fact that Ludlowe had only two committee nominations in this Parliament, and those only towards the end of the session, is no indicator of his contribution to proceedings. If not a prolific contributor to its discussions, then he was at least, as diarist Thomas Burton* noted, a regular speaker. As anticipated, he took numerous opportunities to further undermine the Humble Petition and Advice. While avowing that he had no personal animosity to Protector Richard, he shared with Members of rather different political outlook a disinclination to ‘settle that upon him which is not for the interest of the nation, [which] will be injurious to the nation and to him’. Unlike some, he considered that the time was passed ‘when the interest of the nation was suitable to government by kings’ (8 Feb.).264Burton’s Diary, iii. 145. He was among the substantial minority who rejected ‘recognition’ of the protectorate. The ‘undoubted’ right of succession was no such thing, since none of the three conceivable justifications pertained. Richard was not ruler by divine right, since that ‘cannot be’, scripture declaring otherwise; ‘he has not conquered you’; nor, given the vote ‘by a small number of men’, could he appeal to ‘common consent’. Only the last, which he acknowledged stuck in the throats of many, was an admissible and acceptable foundation for government: ‘though a commonwealth be odious amongst you, yet it is not your wisdom to depart from it’ (14 Feb.).265Burton’s Diary, iii. 282-3.

Ludlowe also spoke against transacting with the Other House. The chamber already in existence served the interest of the protectorate; its members had ‘been guilty of all the breaches upon the liberties of the people’ (7 Mar.).266Burton’s Diary, iv. 67. The traditional chamber which Presbyterians and others sought to restore in a system of ‘king, lords and commons’ was, he implied, worse, although to settle the question of which, if either, should be adopted he wished to explore their relative merits and their legal standing in debate (8, 14, 28 Feb.; 8 Apr.).267Burton’s Diary, iii. 145, 283, 548; iv. 375. The English Parliament was founded on statute, not upon a particular government or upon prudential considerations, thus for Ludlowe, as for others, the admission of Irish and Scottish Members had no sanction (18 Feb.; 17, 18, 21, 22 Mar.).268Burton’s Diary, iii. 345; iv. 172-3, 191-2, 215, 230. It was ‘a representative of the people’ (18 Feb.) and should have more regard for the rights of voters (6 Apr.); MPs owed a duty to attend grand committees, plenary sessions when particular important matters were debated (12 Apr.); while the franchise, he seemed to argue through his support for the inhabitants of Dartmouth in a disputed election, should be relatively wide (23 Mar.).269Burton’s Diary, iii. 345; iv. 192, 236, 358, 410.

It was therefore appropriate that one of Ludlowe’s two committee nominations was to work on the bill for giving equal representation to the gentlemen and freeholders of the county palatine of Durham (31 Mar.).270CJ vii. 622b. Acting with Alured, he was predictably active (if unsuccessful) in promoting the claims of Major-general Lilburne and ‘commonwealth party’ stalwart Robinson in a disputed election at Malton (7 Mar.).271Burton’s Diary, iv. 42. But like others, he was selective in targeting those to be excluded from the House. While he supported Alured in his successful attempt to have Member for Breconshire Edmund Jones* expelled from the House on the grounds of his delinquency, he was less convinced of the case for excluding permanently the Malmesbury Member Robert Danvers alias Villiers*: although the latter’s attempt to blame youthful royalism on his mother and family was distasteful, the fact remained that he was then under age; there should be a committee to examine problematic cases of this nature (12 Feb.).272Burton’s Diary, iii. 237, 247, 249.

Ludlowe also exhibited a preference for investigative committees over individual Members’ motions when confronted with a petition from persons convicted of participation in the Wiltshire insurrection of 1655 and transported as indentured servants to Barbados (25 Mar.).273Burton’s Diary, iv. 272. Perhaps it was an instance where his sensitivity to the representations of the people and his suspicion of the protectorate regime clashed with the desire to quash royalist rebellion. Placed on the committee preparing the impeachment of Major-general William Boteler* for his oppressive behaviour in administering Northamptonshire, Ludlowe was prepared to be ruthless in view of Boteler’s lack of ‘reluctancy’: ‘if not fit for civil, he is not fit for military employment’ (12 Apr.).274CJ vii. 637a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 410. He was also ready to defend magistracy against contemptuous petitioning (16 Apr.).275Burton’s Diary, iv. 445.

By late March royalist spy Alan Broderick had registered a realignment: disappointed of their hopes to block non-English MPs and transaction with the Other House, Neville, Scot, Ludlowe, Vane, Hesilrige and others had begun to seek new friends.276CCSP iv. 166. According to the Memoirs, overtures came from ‘the Wallingford House party’, army officers in the habit of gathering at the residence in the Strand, to Ludlowe and others, although the initiative may have been the other way.277Ludlow, Mems. ii. 63. The army’s concerns had surfaced in the Commons through Ludlowe and his associates as early as 12 March, when both Vane and Ludlowe had highlighted the distress caused to all by a policy of withholding pay and relying on free quarter.278Burton’s Diary, iv. 140. Ludlowe’s last recorded contribution to the Parliament on 18 April, four days before its dissolution, was to move that Members should not enrage their friends and encourage their enemies as many officers sought to secure their arrears through the purchase of former royal forests.279Burton’s Diary, iv. 457. But by 14 April one of Hyde’s correspondents had already concluded that ‘Ludlow, Lambert and Harrison are deep in the army design, and no friends of ours, unless by accident’.280Burton’s Diary, iv. 436; CCSP iv. 176.

The return of the Rump

There is no doubt that Ludlowe was at the heart of negotiations between the army or ‘officers’ and ‘the commonwealth party’, between ‘the republic men’ or simply between MPs in general designed to manage the Rump Parliament which was due to reassemble. He produced grist for the mill by supplying army chaplain and Oxford academic Dr John Owen* with a list of about 160 Members whom he thought were still living.281Ludlow, Mems. ii. 74. He participated in meetings both at Wallingford House and at Vane’s residence at Charing Cross, which included fasting, prayer and complex discussions. Observers concluded that those ejected from the army, including Ludlowe, sought readmission to their commands, while the other ‘commonwealthsmen’ sought civilian office; the Memoirs speak of army demands for security through an act of indemnity and financial provision for Richard Cromwell, of agreement to seek reform of abuses in the law and clergy, and of differences as to the ideal form of government. According to the Memoirs, Vane, Hesilrige, Ludlowe and Richard Salwey*, speaking ‘as private men’, ‘encouraged [army officers] to hope’ that if ‘we four joined in proposing anything in the House for the public good, we might probably bring it to effect’ – a clear indication of a party nucleus in operation.282Ludlow, Mems. ii. 63-7, 74-7; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 122; CCSP iv. 192; Wariston’s Diary, 108.

As the parliamentary session opened, Ludlowe attained a prominence greater even than that he had enjoyed in his unusually busy period during and after the king’s trial. On 5 or 6 May Ludlowe was reportedly with Vane, Hesilrige and other associates when they went to the house of William Lenthall* in Chancery Lane to urge him to resume his place as Speaker.283A. Annesley, Englands Confusion (1659), 9. He was named with them and Fleetwood (as commander-in-chief of the army) to the seven-strong committee of safety set up on 7 May to sit at Wallingford House with executive power over the army and the judiciary.284CJ vii. 646a. As in 1649 his preparatory work on identifying who was eligible to sit in the House translated into membership of the appropriate Commons committee (7, 9 May).285CJ vii. 645a, 646b. With Marten and the 5th earl of Pembroke he was also appointed (10 May) to review the imprisonment of those committed for conscience sake – a longstanding grievance arising from the protectorate – while now automatically restored, with the passing of that regime, to his rank of lieutenant-general, he reported from the committee of safety on commissioners to nominate army officers (11, 12 May).286CJ vii. 648a, 649a; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 344. He was duly chosen as one of the commissioners (13 May) and elected to the new council of state (14 May).287CJ vii. 650b, 651a, 654a; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 349.

Over the next two months Ludlowe had unprecedented opportunities to shape policy in the Commons in areas important to him. Nominated to the committee preparing an act of indemnity (14 May), he later claimed to have argued ‘earnestly’ against allowing Lord Chief Justice Oliver St John* to escape punishment for selling offices under the protectorate, thereby alienating further a man from whom he ‘he had never expected any sincere friendship ... because he knew me to be zealous for the regulation of the practice of the law’.288CJ vii. 655a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 97-8. He was evidently satisfied with the resulting act (passed on 12 July) defending it, with Hesilrige, as well-constructed legislation to be used only against those who had enriched themselves at public expense and opposed the return of Parliament.289Ludlow, Mems. ii. 100-1. Meanwhile, he was appointed to committees preparing a declaration justifying the return of the Rump (20 May), identifying commissioners for the navy and admiralty (18 May) and for the treasury (25 May), settling the Westminster militia (24 May) and funding a pension for Richard Cromwell and state mourning for Oliver Cromwell (25 May, 4 July, both of which he doubtless desired to moderate).290CJ vii. 656b, 661a, 664a, 665a, 665b, 704b. With Valentine Wauton he was a teller for the majority who ensured that not all admiralty commissioners would be MPs (26 May).291CJ vii. 666a. He reported from the council of state a recommendation regarding the continuation of offices in Scotland until such time as new commissions should be issued by the authority of the English Parliament, revealing the same perspective on the former’s subordination to the latter as he had displayed earlier in the year (19 May).292CJ vii. 659a. He later reported from the council on nominations for the judiciary (15 June) and sat on Marten’s committee to draft the oath to be administered to judges and other officers (20 June).293CJ vii. 686a, 686b, 689a. He also obtained one of his occasional nominations to religious committees, that to tighten up the law on those who disturbed public worship (1 July).294CJ vii. 700b.

For all the prior negotiation and behind-the-scenes dealing, however, there was plenty of frustration and disagreement, even between allies. Ludlowe remembered that he successfully proposed a motion against the sale of Hampton Court on the ground that it provided a convenient summer sanctuary for those employed in public affairs (6 July). While this had drawn criticism from his ‘good friend’ Vane as ‘contrary to the interest of the commonwealth’, for Ludlowe it was also one of the compromises necessary to an accommodation with the army which would deter it from seizing sovereign power by force.295Ludlow, Mems. ii. 101-2. As debates over the fundamental question of how the government should be settled continued, the ‘commonwealthsmen’ differed over how far they might trust the army on the one hand and overtures from royalists on the other, and what the inalienable principles might be. Recalling at least five different sets of proposals, Ludlowe claimed he ‘could willingly have approved of’ either a popular assembly together with a select council (exercising a veto to exclude return to rule by one person and to ensure adherence to the constitution and liberty of conscience) or a popularly-elected bi-cameral system (one chamber of about 300 with power to debate and propose laws; another chamber of about 1,000 with power to take resolutions) retiring in triennial rotation.296Ludlow, Mems. ii. 99. Writing to Hyde on 17 June, Broderick recognised that both Hesilrige and Ludlowe were now determined to fight oppressive government (including insofar as it bore on ‘cavaliers’), but thought the latter inclined further towards a parity of interests.297CCSP iv. 239. That Ludlowe, or people close to him, continued to engage periodically with royalist concerns is indicated elsewhere in Hyde’s correspondence, while the re-surfacing of his longstanding suspicions of Ashley Cooper – suppressed in the first edition of the Memoirs – led him into the surprising company of men like John Grobham Howe*.298CCSP iv. 220, 270; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 85-7.

Nevertheless, Ludlowe seemed to some to have moved closer to the army. Nominated colonel of a regiment on 28 May, he later claimed that, as usual, he had hesitated, being on this occasion loathe to forfeit any independence in the Commons. He had accepted only after persuasion from Vane, Salwey and Hesilrige, and with the intention of taking no pay but, instead, of influencing decision-making.299CJ vii. 668b; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 361; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 82. The desire to retain autonomy rings true, but the fact that Ludlowe had been party to the reconstitution of army command from the outset and continued to have a voice in parliamentary discussion suggests more complex manoeuvring than meets the eye. He was confirmed as a prospective army commissioner (31 May) and appointed to the committee framing the bill making Fleetwood commander-in-chief (4 June).300CJ vii. 670a, 672b. The Memoirs claim that he approved the order that the new army commissions should be issued by the Speaker rather than by Fleetwood in order to establish that military was subordinated to civil authority – ‘as it should be in a free nation’ – and indeed, once Fleetwood had appeared in the chamber to accept his command, Ludlowe promptly followed (9 June).301Ludlow, Mems. ii. 88, 91; CJ vii. 677a, 677b. But the Memoirs also claim that, perceiving how much the officers disliked the parliamentary interference and how critical it was to ‘the very being of our cause to maintain a good correspondence between Parliament and the army’, he, Vane and Salwey tried to persuade the House not to insist on circumscribing army independence. They were unsuccessful: a majority, including Hesilrige and Neville, carried the vote otherwise and began to suspect Ludlowe ‘on account of this moderation’, as if he had gone over to the other side.302Ludlow, Mems. ii. 88-9.

Ireland and the search for settlement, 1659-1660

By this time there was a further complication. On 3 June Broderick told Hyde that both Lambert and Ludlowe were being mooted as potential governors of Ireland, Henry Cromwell’s tenure of office having been terminated with the protectorate.303CCSP iv. 221. As Parliament favoured administration by a commission alone rather than under a single person, Ludlowe (with Marten) was again pitted against Hesilrige (with another radical friend, Algernon Sydney*) in a temporarily unsuccessful attempt to have Miles Corbett (who had been a thorn in Cromwell’s side in Dublin) re-appointed (7 June).304CJ vii. 674b. Skirmishing doubtless continued on the committee devising the commissioners’ powers, to which all four tellers (and other established associates like Scot, Robert Wallop*, Weaver, Eyre and Dove, as well as antagonist St John) were appointed on 9 June.305CJ vii. 678b. It is thus difficult to assess whether Ludlowe’s emergence by the end of the month as commander-designate of the forces in Ireland was the work primarily of enemies or of those usually friendly, just as it is to weigh his ostensibly negative reaction. Reports such as that on 11 June that officers of the army for Ireland had petitioned to have him as their general probably flattered his ambition.306Clarke Pprs. iv. 19. The orders which passed the council of state nominating him first as commander-in-chief (unanimously, 27 June) and then also as lieutenant-general of horse (29 June) almost certainly unsettled him.307CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 389, 393. It seems plausible that, as he said, he suspected a plot to sideline him, feared what might happen in England behind his back and desired to return to fight his corner as soon as Ireland was secure. But, although there seems no reason to doubt his claim that he talked it through with Vane, the habitual self-deprecation and the perspective of hindsight obscure the motivation for his eventual acceptance of office.308Ludlow, Mems. ii. 94.

The terms surrounding Ludlowe’s appointment, which was formally resolved by the Commons on 4 July, appear shaped by a series of compromises which made some concessions. His hope to have Vane replace him as colonel of his regiment in England was thwarted, but the substitution of Alured was seemingly palatable.309CJ vii. 703b; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 95-6. As with Fleetwood in England, he was presented with a ready-made list of officers, ratified by Parliament (13 July), but in practice the committee of safety allowed him to recommend junior officers.310CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 2-3, 12, 29, 31; CJ vii. 716a. The Commons rejected (7 July) the intention of the council of state that Ludlowe be a appointed a commissioner for government, thereby depriving him of additional authority and potentially pitting him against the civil powers; subordination to the parliamentary commissioners was indeed subsequently spelled out.311CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 7; Stowe 142, ff. 64-5; CJ vii. 707a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 103. On the one hand, the military commission issued to him by Parliament on 9 July (and expanded on 18 July) enjoined both military and civil officers to obey him in all matters relating directly to his brief; on the other hand, although accepted by the committee of safety, his nomination for attorney-general was not successful.312Stowe 185, f. 135; CJ vii. 710b, 722b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 34. The Commons resolution (9 July) that he should have leave to come home to deal with his own affairs once Ireland was settled may have met his request, but this task had already proved beyond easy solution.313CJ vii. 710b; CSP Ire. 1649-60, p. 690. One royalist commentator opined that ‘if the tradition be true that no venomous beast can live there, his reign will not be long in that climate’; observers of all shades, including perhaps Ludlowe himself, must have wondered if the result, sooner or later, would be political disaster or oblivion.314Nicholas Pprs. iv. 168-9.

Ludlowe’s final committee nomination – in fact the last of his parliamentary career – was to consider a petition from the Adventurers for Ireland (6 July) seeking a removal of the vacuum left in the disposition of lands there by the nullification of existing powers.315CJ vii. 706a. The Memoirs, clearly anxious to depict his moderation and good intentions, record that he made his farewells to army officers requesting that they should not violate the authority of Parliament, and to his friends among MPs – Hesilrige, Vane, Neville, Scot, Salwey and others – begging them not to ‘put any unnecessary hardships upon the army’.316Ludlow, Mems. ii. 103. Having received his final orders and a particular instruction to convey thanks to petitioners from Limerick on 18 July, he left promptly, but not without an attempt to address unfinished business and perhaps ensure a better co-operation in Ireland.317CJ vii. 722a, 722b. On the 19th he and commissioner John Jones wrote to Speaker Lenthall from St Albans. With due deference to Parliament’s favours and wisdom, they submitted that it was a matter ‘of immediate concernment’ that the act in hand for land settlement should pass, ‘and that it will be very much for your service that it be sent over with all possible speed’.318Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 93; Tanner Letters ed. McNeill, 396-7.

Events intervened to distract both parties, however. According to the Memoirs, Ludlowe and Jones informed the council of state of the plot of Sir George Boothe* as they passed through Shropshire on the way to Holyhead.319Ludlow, Mems. ii. 104. On 30 July, before their safe arrival in Dublin was known for certain in London, Whitelocke, the president of the council, wrote to the commissioners and Ludlowe requiring 1,000 foot and 500 horse to be sent immediately from Ireland to help quell more widespread insurrection, a demand repeated on 4 and 9 August to Ludlowe alone.320CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 54, 72-3, 90-1; Nicholas Pprs. iv. 179. The Memoirs depict ready compliance, despite concerns over the potentially adverse effect on control in Ireland. A party sent to England under Colonel Jerome Sankey* indeed landed before 20 August, just in time to assist Lambert to victory over Boothe’s forces in Cheshire.321Ludlow, Mems. ii. 107, 110-13. Ludlowe may even have profited from the fact that the spotlight was turned elsewhere to assert a precedency over the commissioners – according to the Memoirs freely offered and, as ever, reluctantly accepted – and to commence a purge of elements in the Irish army whom he considered disloyal to the commonwealth interest.322Ludlow, Mems. ii. 105, 116-17. In the longer term the latter was to backfire: ‘preferring men of parboiled and harebrained principles, and laying aside persons of known integrity and faithfulness’, as Thomas Scot I’s* son put it, created dangerous resentment.323CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 712. In the short term the demonstrable contribution of the Irish contingent to the suppression of the rebels in England allowed Ludlowe to adopt a moral high ground in explaining to Speaker Lenthall that ‘whilst you were contesting for your being’, he had ‘looked upon it as a presumption to interrupt your counsels’ and had instead thought it his ‘duty rather to employ my talent in the sphere wherein you had placed me’, leaving the commissioners to communicate with Parliament.324Ludlow, Mems. ii. 447-8; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 167.

Despite retrospective protestations to the contrary, however, it is likely that Ludlowe had all along suspected that the English army would seize the opportunity of quashing rebellion to effect a coup, utilising amongst others his Irish reinforcements.325Ludlow, Mems. ii. 110. In late August, for example, he was in communication with Thomas Scot I*.326CCSP iv. 348-9. He is unlikely to have been ignorant of what might be afoot, either in the army or in Parliament, where in early September Vane and Hesilrige clashed over the latter’s desire to exclude the army from political settlement. When Sankey brought back to Ireland copies of the army petition signed at Derby on 16 September by Lambert and others, castigating Parliament for an inadequate response to insurrection and for seeking an independent political settlement, on his own telling Ludlowe summoned the Irish officers and convinced them to a unanimous rejection. He sent their resolution that day to Hesilrige, by implication as ammunition for his cause.327Ludlow, Mems. ii. 119-20. But Ludlowe wrote long after the event to vindicate his conduct, glossing over, among much else, the temporary differences which he and Vane had had with Hesilrige which render this questionable: in the meantime, as will be seen, others had remembered it differently.

Uncertainty surrounds the precise timing and motivation of Ludlowe’s subsequent trip to England. While his return had always been envisaged, it seems implausible that it should be primarily prompted, as the Memoirs suggest, by completion of the reorganisation of the Irish army; although the parliamentary commissioners’ authority ran only to the end of September, Ludlowe’s was predicated on the life of the Parliament and there was probably plenty of work still to do.328Ludlow, Mems. ii. 121. Rather, his departure from Dublin seems to proceed from a desire to influence events in England. According to Jones, he said that ‘if those now in power would resolve to establish honest, righteous things’, then he ‘would join with them’, he would retire.329CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 694. If, as Ludlowe claimed, he had Fleetwood’s sanction for choosing Jones as his deputy during his absence, then he had been in communication with the English army and had chosen to privilege Fleetwood’s agreement over Parliament’s; if not, then he probably made the choice without due sanction.330Ludlow, Mems. ii. 121-5. According to a resolution on 14 October by the parliamentary commissioners, who had continued in office in default of contrary orders, Ludlowe was summoned to consult by Parliament, but there is no trace of such a communication.331CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 691. There were rumours in Chester by 15 October that he was about to land with a party of horse, but on the 17th he had probably only just left Dublin.332CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 497. On that day the parliamentary commissioners entrusted him with a letter to Speaker Lenthall bemoaning shortcomings in the administration of justice in Ireland and other memoranda for the Committee for Irish Affairs, while Sankey (apparently still on cordial terms with his superior) gave him a request for authorisation of land settlement to be presented to Parliament.333Stowe 185, ff. 136-8, 141; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 691.

Ludlowe had arrived at Beaumaris in Anglesey when, probably at the end of the third week in October, he learned not only that he was among the seven army commissioners appointed by Parliament (12 Oct.) to manage the army after the annulment of Fleetwood’s commission and the dismissal of Lambert, but also that the council of officers had then ‘interrupted’ Parliament and taken control of government (15 Oct.).334CJ vii. 796a. Whether or not he found the latter news ‘astonishing’, as he claimed, it left him without a mandate in Ireland.335Ludlow, Mems. ii. 127. Solicited for support both by the reinstated Fleetwood in London and by fellow army commissioner George Monck in Scotland, he stayed put for some days while commentators speculated as to his whereabouts and intentions.336Clarke Pprs. iv. 64, 93, 94; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 127-8, 143, 449; Mordaunt Letter Bk. 69; CCSP iv. 425, 434-5. Perhaps it was the receipt of further tidings confirming the coup and announcing that he had been placed with Vane and Salwey on the army’s committee of safety (26 Oct.) that decided him not to return to Ireland and attempt to secure a base there but to proceed to London.337Ludlow, Mems. ii. 130-1. Perhaps, as he later told opponents, it was an assurance from Wallingford House ‘that there was only a stop put to the sitting of Parliament for the present’ which represented ‘a door of hope for to encourage me to hold on my journey’.338Ludlow, Mems. ii. 449.

Over the next two months the Ludlowe of the Memoirs was a reluctant participant in politics yet, in meetings at Wallingford House, (apparently) on the committee of safety and elsewhere, on the persuasion of his friends, he was a dedicated peacemaker between the army and those who sought to reinstate an independent Parliament.339Ludlow, Mems. ii. 132-84. This was clearly some way off the truth. His account is inconsistent while uncertainty as to where he stood persisted among observers.340CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 262, 264; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 156. He recounted a meeting with Lenthall in which he assured the former Speaker of his desire for a speedy return of Parliament – ‘the only leaves of the tree of life, which (under God) must be for the healing of the nations’, according to a later justification.341Ludlow, Mems. ii. 146; A Sober Vindication of Lieut.-Gen. Ludlow (1660), 8. He claimed that he had expressed dissatisfaction at Irish officers changing tack to take the army’s part, but it later appeared that the reverse was the case.342Ludlow, Mems. ii. 147. In practice, Ludlowe appears to have done little to uphold the parliamentary interest. Despite celebrating Hesilrige’s elevated status as a commonwealth martyr, and Ludlowe’s profession that he had defended his conduct and promoted a reconciliation with Vane, the Memoirs still exhibit a frustration with the manner of Hesilrige’s support for Parliament.343Ludlow, Mems. ii. 133, 143-5, 156. In another section omitted in the first edition, the behaviour of Ashley Cooper, Hesilrige’s associate at this point in covert meetings of the dissolved council of state in defiance of the army council, was dismissed as treacherous.344Ludlow, Mems. ii. 155. Instead, Ludlowe associated with Vane, Salwey and Whitelocke, who did not join these unofficial meetings, and admitted to having swallowed Vane’s defence of Lambert.345Wariston’s Diary, 150-1; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 154, 164, 180; Clarke Pprs. iv. 133-4. John Jones, reporting to Ludlowe from Ireland on 30 November after some hard words had evidently passed between them over what exactly stood ‘with the honour of Parliament or public safety’, assumed that the latter at least agreed that avoiding a breach with the army was critical.346CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 693.

As Monck made his way south and demands augmented for the restoration of the Parliament, however, Ludlowe appeared to reassert his enthusiasm for it. When on 10 December Fleetwood and the council of officers declared that they would call a new Parliament on their terms in or before February, Scottish member of the committee of safety Archibald Johnston* of Wariston, who generally found Ludlowe too radical, noted that the latter ‘spoke highly and threateningly against it and for the old Parliament’.347Wariston’s Diary, 156; cf. Ludlow, Mems. ii. 168, 169. Perhaps he had gained confidence: on the 12th it was reported to Jones in Ireland that Ludlowe’s ‘dissatisfactions abate’ as he sat daily on the council.348CCSP iv. 481. There appears to have been some rallying to old principles: on the 13th Wariston recorded that ‘Ludlow and [Nathaniel] Rich[*] and the sectarian party’ opposed an army proposal to include him on a new committee of safety, ‘because I was a man bound up in the matter of liberty of conscience’.349Wariston’s Diary, 157. Possibly Ludlowe had really concluded, as he later indicated, that ‘the Lord did darken counsel from the army’.350Ludlow, Mems. ii. 450.

If Wariston’s account is correct, then Ludlowe should have welcomed wholeheartedly the army’s surrender of the initiative to the Speaker and the re-assembly of the Rump on 26 December. With it his mandate in Ireland was theoretically restored. But it is unclear what exactly inspired his precipitate return there, without, as he put it, staying to witness ‘the completing of this mercy’. It could have been as late as the 24th and via Fleetwood that, as he said, Ludlowe learned of a coup in Dublin on 13 December.351Ludlow, Mems. ii. 184, 450; Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 23.The declaration issued there the next day by army officers and other office-holders in support of Parliament – which he later (31 Dec.) assured them convinced him of his ‘duty to repair to you, for the strengthening of your hands in so good a work’ – was apparently not re-published in London until the 29th.352Ludlow, Mems. ii. 450; An Account of the Affairs in Ireland (1659, 669.f.22 .40). On the other hand, it is conceivable that Ludlowe had been informed earlier and that the return of Parliament compounded a disquiet about the coup’s implications. It had involved the imprisonment of his closest associates, commissioners Corbett and John Jones, and although the Dublin declaration referred to the previous expression of loyalty to Parliament he had himself conveyed and was signed (reluctantly) by his brother-in-law, subordinate officer and confidant Nicholas Kempston, it must have been immediately evident to him that his position was precarious.353An Acct. of the Affairs in Ireland; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 152; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 692, 710. The suspicion arises, therefore, that he wished as a matter of urgency to patch up quarrels in Ireland before facing potentially awkward investigation by longstanding adversaries in Parliament, and even that he had been specifically told that charges were afoot against him.

In fact, Ludlowe was already too late to avert this eventuality. On the 26th a council of officers in Dublin resolved that he had ‘given just occasion of suspicion that he is no friend to the Parliament’ and that, ‘should he transport himself into Ireland’, it would not be ‘consistent with the safety of Parliament’s interest here to admit’ him to his command as lieutenant-general.354Ludlow, Mems. ii. 471; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 696. Detailed articles impeaching Ludlowe and commissioners Jones, Corbett and Matthew Thomlinson* of high treason for abetting the army against Parliament were agreed at a similar council two days later.355Ludlow, Mems. ii. 464-70. Having received en route an interim update from Kempston, Ludlowe learned the worst when his boat, The Oxford, arrived off Dublin on the 31st. In a letter penned that day to his accusers, quoted earlier, he attempted to justify his actions since October and express solidarity with their goals, but it was to no avail.356Ludlow, Mems. ii. 449-50; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 696-7. He lingered four days at anchor in the bay, during which he conferred with Corbett (on his way to Holyhead), angled for local support, sent a defensive missive to Parliament (2 Jan.) and received at least one firm repulse from Sir Hardress Waller* and others in Dublin.357Ludlow, Mems. ii. 185-93, 449-51; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 301, 311-12, 317; CJ vii. 808b; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 704-5. Finally The Oxford, whose captain, Abraham Allgate, had himself fled from the city, transported Ludlowe to Duncannon, where he disembarked on 5 January 1660, took control of the castle and appealed to forces in the south east to join him in support of Parliament.358CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 302-3, 311-13, 316-18; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 705-9.

The same day the Commons ordered the other Hindon Member, Robert Reynolds, now solicitor-general, to summon Ludlowe and commissioners Jones, Corbett and Matthew Thomlinson to attend Parliament forthwith to give an account of their management of Irish affairs.359CJ vii. 803b. In addition to Reynolds, who himself had interests in Ireland and whose brother had been an associate of those behind the coup, Ludlowe later identified St John and Ashley Cooper as the prime movers in this.360Ludlow, Mems. ii. 205. At this stage, however, Ludlowe probably had significant support in the chamber, and charges being prepared against him there, while arising from a deep distrust by some, may have been no more serious than an accusation of having advanced sectaries.361CCSP iv. 12. Perhaps Hesilrige was reassured by the receipt of a message from Ludlowe of 8 January in which he clarified his perspective on the previous autumn’s coup and recognised the perilously narrow path to be negotiated between the army, the Presbyterians and the royalists.

The Parliament was lately imposed upon by a professing people. The danger now is that they will be overpowered by a prophane or an imposing spirit; the former, in that it is a scandal to religion, hath been more dishonourable to God; the latter, being that which inclineth to bring in the king upon us, is more dangerous to us as men.362CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 709.

Following the reading on 12 January of Ludlowe’s letter from Dublin Bay, he was included on a proposed council of state for Ireland (13 Jan.).363CJ vii. 808b, 811a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 308-10. On the 14th the council of state wrote even-handedly to Monck of Ludlowe’s fears of threats to the Parliament interest and of the Dublin officers’ unwillingness to work with him.364CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 310.

The respite was temporary. On the 10th the officers (not, this time, including Kempston) sent Ludlowe a letter asserting that they and not he (as in his invocation to others to rally to his side) represented the authority of Parliament in Ireland.365Ludlow, Mems. ii. 197.

We will not say, that you have set up for yourself, though your staying, if not acting amongst those who had set themselves up at London; your never declaring for the Parliament, when most of the army here had declared against them; your posting from the Parliament, when you yourself write, they were to sit within a day or two; and your now casting yourself into the only place in this nation, which hath not, together with us, declared for the Parliament; might ... give us juster rise to believe you had set up for yourself, than our actings or letters have given you cause so untruly to report of us.366Ludlow, Mems. ii. 451-2.

This, and much else in the same vein, Ludlowe later described as ‘endeavouring ... to defame me with all possible malice’, yet ‘the inference’ its writers invited ‘all sober men to make’ was compelling.367Ludlow, Mems. ii. 197, 454. The following day, professing their own ‘ready submission’, they sent a copy to the Speaker, asking again that, ‘for preventing growing evils, and that [his] ... proceedings be not further dangerous to the Parliament’s interest’, he might be ‘speedily recalled, and required to answer the charge already sent against him’.368Clarke Pprs. iv. 241-2. ‘By an express from Ireland’, another copy seems to have been in Monck’s hands when on 16 January, in reply to a letter from Lenthall, he commended Waller and his associates as ‘fit persons’ for the management of the kingdom. In contrast

As for Lt. General Ludlowe I shall say little, but refer you to the consideration of his own actings with the army and committee, or sub-committee for the government, when he was last in London during your interruption, as also to the enclosed paper of articles.369Ludlow, Mems. ii. 471-2.

With Monck in the ascendant and his commonwealth friends beginning to ‘lose ground’, the way opened in the Commons for the reading on 19 January of the articles of impeachment against Ludlowe and the commissioners. These had clearly been modified since December in the light of subsequent developments; Sir Charles Coote*, a notable supporter and beneficiary of the protectorate and a leader of the revolt, played an important role, becoming for Ludlowe the chief villain in Irish affairs.370Ludlow, Voyce, 87. Focussing first on the commissioners, especially Jones as Ludlowe’s deputy, the charges alleged an endeavour for ‘the destruction of Parliament’ through correspondence with Fleetwood and Lambert, and through discouragement of Monck. Moving on to Ludlowe, the articles accused him of dismissing from the army in Ireland officers friendly to Parliament, proceeding to London instead of retrieving the reins in Dublin when informed in Wales of the army coup, adhering to the army rather than the council of state once in London, and finally returning to Ireland

by express advice and orders of ... General Fleetwood head of that rebellious party and faction in England, to the end that this nation may be engaged here against the Parliament, and if occasion shall be in England.

Once established at Duncannon, although ‘well knowing’ the officers’ declaration for Parliament and cognisant of charges laid against him, Ludlowe ‘in opposition to the Parliament’s interest here hath menaced such the Parliament’s servants even to blood’.371Ludlow, Mems. ii. 210-11, 464; CJ vii. 815b; CCSP iv. 538. Faced with this, the Commons accepted that there was a case to answer and issued a summons. A requirement that Ludlowe surrender forthwith the now besieged Duncannon garrison was appended.372CJ vii. 815b.

It was probably the express arrival of this second summons that prompted Ludlowe on the 24th to respond at great length to the letter of the 10th from Dublin committee (on his indignant account, received only the previous day and encountered first in print). He defended his refusal to heed their advice to return to England, ‘you not being that counsel the Parliament commanded me to consult with in things of that nature’. Taking advantage of the fact that many of them were protectorate loyalists whose own allegiance to the Rump might be questioned, he asserted that it was they, who by their ‘present pretendings express utter enmity and aversion to all whom this Parliament thought fit to trust either in civil or military employment’. Using his legally derived authority, he had sent to various places in Ireland ‘to press them to declare for the Parliament, not in a show only but in reality’. If anyone, it had been Monck who had flirted with both cavaliers and the army, though Ludlowe had been ready enough to support him once he had declared for ‘the restitution of Parliament’. Ludlowe had not adhered to the army ‘otherwise than in a military capacity’; (to all appearances stretching the truth to breaking point) he had ‘refused to join with their committee ... of safety ... though earnestly pressed thereunto’ and he ‘bore a constant witness’ to the restitution of parliamentary authority. He refused to take responsibility for what Jones might (or might not) have done amiss in Ireland. He conceded that he had expressed the fear that if the Long Parliament returned ‘they should be very high if they came in without conditions’, but this was not be interpreted as outright opposition to the Rump. On the contrary, during the ‘interruption’ he had, in order to prevent ‘the effusion of blood’, worked to restore the Rump with those in the army ‘not pre-engaged in that unhappy undertaking’. Having discharged his trust, he was ‘making all speed’ to render his account. In the meantime, he warned his adversaries not to ‘be found beating and smiting your fellow servants’, as they had done in restraining ‘such persons which your own consciences tell you are more hearty to’ the service of Parliament ‘and more ready to obey their commands than yourselves’.373Bodl. Rawl. A.492, ff. 39-42; cf. Ludlow, Mems. ii. 455-63, with date 21 Jan., and pp. 198-200.

On 30 January Ludlowe and Corbett took their seats in the Commons.374Mercurius Politicus no. 605 (26 Jan.-2 Feb. 1660), 1068 (E.773.51). Although Ludlowe claimed that he had agreed with friends to do so as ‘privately’ as possible, he also claimed that it was he who moved on 1 February for a hearing for the affairs of Ireland, motivated by a desire to ‘clear’ himself and to secure a revocation of the order to surrender Duncannon.375Ludlow, Mems. ii. 212-13. An order was issued that day that he render his account on 8 February, but then postponed a further week.376CJ vii. 829a, 837a. In the meantime, sitting by his friend, Ludlowe encouraged Marten to propose the settling of army commissioners for Ireland as a step towards the removal of his rivals there; thanks to Marten (and probably Hesilrige, who was a teller with him on the general issue) this was accepted (11 Feb.).377Ludlow, Mems. ii. 224; CJ vii. 841a, 841b. By the time the week of grace was up, Members were deep in the discussions brokered by Monck with their secluded colleagues, while in Ireland the anti-Ludlowe alliance had collapsed, with Waller and Coote in the field against each other. The sword hanging over the heads of Ludlowe and the commissioners seems to have vanished, there being no further recorded mention of the matter that session, but none the less, Ludlowe’s parliamentary attendance was soon at an end. His attempt to oust Speaker Lenthall, who refused to sign writs for new elections which might bolster the Rump, garnered minimal support. Outraged at the re-admittance on the 21st of the purged Members, who he considered had been ‘excluded ... by a lawful authority’, he refused to sit any longer. Seemingly he did not, however, advertise this fact to all, passing sometimes through Westminster Hall to obscure his tracks.378Ludlow, Mems. ii. 234-6; Ludlow, Voyce, 94, 100.

In some respects it is a surprise, even in confused and rapidly changing circumstances, that he survived so long: the case against him looked plausible; his enemies were many and, in England at least, gaining in influence. One explanation for this seems to be that Ludlowe grasped before leaving Ireland the advisability of repairing his relations with Hesilrige, whose role in the return of the Rump placed him above reproach on the chief issue for which Ludlowe had been indicted; this he soon achieved, if not without difficulty.379Ludlow, Mems. ii. 202-4; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 709-10. Another possibility is that, facing the alarming prospect of a revivified Long Parliament, the ‘commonwealthsmen’ briefly pulled together more effectively than they had the previous year; Ludlowe’s correspondence from associates in the provinces was also encouraging on this point.380CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 717-18. A third factor was that they all, or Hesilrige, or Ludlowe – his account is contradictory – were temporarily deceived by fair words and promises from Monck, whom Ludlowe visited at his lodging on 3 and 13 February. The general’s ‘betraying’ of ‘the public cause’ in facilitating the admission of the secluded members was the first stage in his subsequent ‘unmasking’.381Ludlowe, Mems. ii. 215-16, 221, 224-7, 232; Ludlow, Voyce, 85-9, 317. Finally, presence in London gave Ludlowe the opportunity to promote his own version of events and to counter comment that he had ‘sought to betray the Rump with a kiss’.382CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 517; Arsy versy, or, the second martyrdom of the Rump (1660, 669.f.24.31).

Shortly after 24 January ‘a faithful friend to Parliament and commonwealth’ prepared a counter-attack, exposing the Dublin rebels’ ‘anti-parliamentary proceedings’. ‘To throw off their noble general under the Parliament’ was ‘unwarrantable, unjustifiable and vituperative’. Proceeding ‘to wipe off that dirt which they would cast upon the face of this honourable patriot’, the author contrasted Ludlowe’s previous and current fidelity to Parliament with the less convincing record of his accusers. He had chosen the way of a mediator and arbitrator between Parliament and the army; it was ‘well known’ in London that he had not sat on the committee of safety, while he had performed ‘great and faithful service’ in meetings at Wallingford House. On the other hand, projecting their disaffection on to him, Waller and the others had endangered all. They had imprisoned commissioners, and ministers condemned falsely as anabaptists; they had tricked faithful officers and deluded the soldiery into acting against a supposed sectarian plot, when the latter were among Parliament’s ‘best friends’; they had propagated misleading lies and suppressed the truth. ‘All this was done’ it was asserted, ‘by the instigation and incitement of such of the clergy as are implacable enemies to the sectarians’. ‘The true reason’ they opposed Ludlowe was because of his excessive favour to this group, ‘though like a prudent father, he manifests an equal affection to all honest men of different apprehensions’.383A Sober Vindication of Lieut. Gen. Ludlow (1660). The author’s patent aim was to vindicate the sectaries, but at least some elements of his analysis were plausible and a few perhaps incontrovertible. Acceptance or rejection of his arguments doubtless depended on the perspective of the reader.

Probably in February 1660 Ludlowe presented to the rectory of East Knoyle one of the ministers who had been ‘driven out of Ireland by those who had usurped the power’. That Enoch Grey was prepared to serve within the national church and obtained (according to Ludlowe) the requisite ‘testimonial of three neighbouring ministers’, appears to support the contention of the author of the Vindication that he was not a sectary, as does his subsequent career. Although the commissioners of the great seal were solicited for another candidate, Ludlowe’s choice was upheld.384Ludlow, Voyce, 90; A Sober Vindication, sig. A2, pp. 15-16; Calamy Revised, 232.

Convention Parliament and Restoration

As far as Ludlowe was concerned, the return of the Long Parliament ushered in a period of chaos. The new council of state, which included Ashley Cooper, St John and other long-term opponents, ‘had vast powers given them for the committing of persons’; having pledged themselves to a course which ‘they knew had no other tendency but the overthrowing of the privilege of Parliament, and the betraying of the liberty of the people, and the bringing in of tyranny’, they persuaded Parliament to agree to the seizure of MPs who would not sit, ‘an order very probably aimed at me’, as the one they had cause to distrust.385Ludlow, Voyce, 87, 94. Apart from occasional appearances in Westminster Hall, Ludlowe therefore sometimes flitted between friends’ houses and sometimes kept to his lodgings behind closed doors.386Ludlow, Voyce, 100. The commonwealth party was again in disarray, although there was evidently much congregating in private to discuss public affairs, Wallop, Neville, Love and Harrington being among those present. While Hesilrige and Scot attempted, somewhat half-heartedly as he implied, to salvage something from the wreckage by persevering with parliamentary attendance and by continuing to court Monck, Ludlowe claimed he and others were not persuaded, seeing ‘what a nose of wax the sword made of the Parliament’s privileges (pleading for them or against them as they served the promoting of their own interest)’. Ludlowe

became more and more convinced of the hand of the Lord in this confusion of languages amongst us, seeing that those whose interest it was to untie had still such principles of division reigning in them, most of those from whom we could probably expect any succour being such as [at least one MP declared] were never to be employed more.387Ludlow, Voyce, 89, 99.

All had periods of despair, but Ludlowe claimed that he, for one, while ready to support a press to print pamphlets, did not seriously entertain the plots for insurrection suggested by Slingisby Bethell*, William Say*, Scot, Sankey and Overton.388Ludlow, Voyce, 90-6, 101.

The dissolution of the Parliament and the writs for new elections offered one final opportunity to hold back a reactionary tide. A few days before 27 March, Ludlowe returned to Wiltshire with his wife to honour an engagement to support Edward Bayntun* in the election that day for knights of the shire. Although he had expressly endorsed Bayntun, despite the fact that the latter’s youthful radical credentials had been eroded, Ludlowe’s primary object may have been to block the return of Ashley Cooper.389CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 719-20. A secondary motive may have been to test his own standing among assembled gentry. Thwarted when Bayntun withdrew, Ludlowe lingered near Salisbury as unobtrusively as he could, staying partly with his cousin William Ludlowe at Clarendon.390Ludlow, Voyce, 102, 104; ‘Wiltshire’, ‘Edward Bayntun’, HP Commons 1660-1690. By 30 March a rumour was circulating that Ludlowe had been chosen to sit for the city, but although he visited his agent, William Coles, a resident of the cathedral close, he otherwise kept clear on account of a troop of horse stationed there ‘that was moulded by Moncke and [Ashley] Cooper to their interest’.391CCSP iv. 628; Ludlow, Voyce, 108, 111. Sustained by assistance from his sister Kemptson, Nicholas Love, William Ludlowe, the Oldisworths and perhaps also the Herbert family, he was able to wage a discreet campaign for a seat at Hindon, appearing openly only for ‘about an hour’. Although he failed to gain some previously-promised support and discouragingly had to bargain disadvantageously with his tenants for his rents, he was elected by a majority vote alongside George Grubham Howe† (son of the candidate who had opposed Edmund Ludlowe I in 1646), who was unopposed.392Ludlow, Voyce, 106-7, 110; ‘Edmund Ludlow’, HP Commons 1660-1690.

This was a fragile victory. Royalist candidate Sir Thomas Thynne, brother of Sir James Thynne*, had mustered a section of the vote and, bolstered by rumours that Ludlowe would soon be arrested, secured a double return.393Ludlow, Mems. ii. 477; ‘Sir Thomas Thynne’, HP Commons 1660-1690. Ludlowe lay low, congratulating himself at his decision not to join in Lambert’s designs for a coup, but still implicated and vulnerable when it failed.394Ludlow, Voyce, 111-13. A warrant for his apprehension was issued by the council of state on 23 April and sent into the west, but in the meantime by roundabout ways he reached London, where he stayed ‘private until [he] could understand what the issue of things would be’.395CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 574; Ludlow, Voyce, 118. Eight days after the opening of Parliament, his election was upheld (3 May) and he was ordered to present himself in the chamber in a week’s time; Ludlowe, who remembered a ten day deadline, pronounced the order ‘unusual’, although it hardly seems surprising.396CJ viii. 9b; Ludlow, Voyce, 119. Now armed with parliamentary privilege, he none the less remained wary. He proceeded ‘to play my game as well as I could for my own security’, choosing to sit in the gallery and the Speaker’s chamber, maintaining a distance from potential enemies and taking advice.397Ludlow, Voyce, 119-24. Warned by friends, he may have withdrawn from the Commons by the time his return for Hindon was annulled (18 May), his immunity from arrest was forfeited and proceedings against the regicides were set in train.398CJ viii. 33b-36b; Ludlow, Voyce, 150-2.

Defeat and exile

At this point Ludlowe had not altogether given up hope, although he raged at those who, having hitherto always accepted Parliament’s case against the king, now disowned the regicide.399Ludlow, Voyce, 146-7. For some weeks he hid in London awaiting a positive outcome of moves in the Commons to omit him from exclusions to the Act of Indemnity, and was thus a witness to the Restoration. A report heard by Whitelocke on 2 June that he had fled to France was mistaken.400Whitelocke, Diary, 596. Persuaded to render himself to the serjeant-at-arms, he did so on 20 June in anticipation of a pardon. He later wrote that he ‘expected little’ from Charles Stuart, thoroughly distrusted Moncke ‘that monster of mankind, the devil’s great instrument in this change’, and was perhaps right to believe the assertion of ‘my friends at court’ that ‘my worst enemies were those of Ireland’, above all the ‘two fawning parasites’, Charles Coote and Theophilus Jones.401Ludlow, Voyce, 161, 165, 166, 168, 200. Clearly he realised he was suspected of sedition. However, he perceived (rightly or wrongly) that many people had spoken a good word for him or offered other help on the basis of past favours or family ties. Apart from Oldisworth and his wife’s uncle, Colonel Thomas Stradling, these included the Speaker, (Sir) Harbottle Grimston*, James Herbert, the earl of Denbigh, Irish figures such as James Butler, marquess and then 1st duke of Ormond, his son Lord Ossory, Roger Boyle*, Lord Broghill, and his sister Lady Ranelegh, several Roman Catholics and more sectaries. Several unknown women and men recognised him in hiding but did not give him up to the authorities.402Ludlow, Voyce, 10, 156-89. In these circumstances, cautious optimism might have seem justified for a while, but it was extinguished some time shortly before the act of indemnity passed the Commons on 28 August.403Ludlow, Voyce, 189-90; CJ viii. 139b.

Powerful patrons and a network of contacts then underpinned his journey into exile, and helped sustain him for the rest of his life; these in turn indicate a breadth of connections in his previous political career, not otherwise apparent. His passage to France may have been facilitated by Algernon Sydney’s uncle, the former parliamentarian leader Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland. While in Dieppe, he lodged with a Madame de Caux, whose family had links to the 4th earl of Pembroke.404CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 252; Ludlow, Voyce, 190-2; ‘Algernon Percy, 10th earl of Northumberland’, ‘Isaac de Caux’, Oxford DNB. He then moved to Geneva, where his host was Charles Perrot, member of an international Huguenot clan, ‘who ... had been engaged for the Parliament and had married an English woman’.405B. Gagnebin, ‘Les Relations entre Genève et l’Angleterre’, Atlantis, xviii. 178; Archives d’État de Genève [hereafter AEG], Mis A 60p/3364, Jur. Civ. F521, 526; Ludlow, Voyce, 8, 192, 196, 304; Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 951, 1001; C. Vuilleumier, Les Elites Politiques Genevoises 1580-1652 (Geneva, 2009), 481-2, 712; A. de Montet, Dictionnaire Biographique des Genevois et des Vaudois (Lausanne, 1878), ii. 275-6. When by early 1662 even Geneva became too insecure for regicides, their path to a new refuge was arranged by Johann Heinrich Hummel (Humelius), chief minister of the Reformed church of the Swiss canton of Bern, who had lived in England and had numerous friends there. Emanuel Steiger, treasurer of the Bernese subject territory of the Pays de Vaud, obtained a patent (16 Apr. 1662) for John Lisle*, William Cawley* and Ludlowe to reside there.406Archives d'Etat de Genève, Mis A 60p/3381, 3383; Ludlow, Voyce, 196-270, 279, 303-4, 327; Mems. ii. 481–2; Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 944, 965, 1187, 1426; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 310, 412, 495, 551; CCSP v. 202, 227; V. Larminie ‘Johann Heinrich Hummel, the Peningtons and the London godly community’, History of Reformed Pietism ii, no. 2, 1-26; Larminie, ‘The Herbert Connection, the French Church and Westminster Politics’, in Huguenot Networks 1560-1780 ed. Larminie (New York, Abingdon, 2017), 41-59; Briefe Englischer Flüchtlinge in der Schweiz ed. A. Stern (Göttingen, 1874), 23-4. After a brief stay in its chief city, Lausanne, the regicides moved eastwards to Vevey.407Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, p. 963; E. Recordon, Ētudes sur le passé de Vevey (1944), 119. Their numbers swelled by William Say*, Cornelius Holland* and Nicholas Love, they took up residence with a councillor, Sampson Dubois.408Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 964-5; J.L.G. Dubois, Notice Généalogique et Historique sur la Famille Dubois de Vevey (Geneva, 1883). Here Ludlowe was joined by his wife, received visitors including John Dury, Algernon Sydney and James Whitelocke*, maintained a wide circle of friends in Geneva and Switzerland, was supplied with news from across Europe, and weathered numerous kidnap and assassination plots.409Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 979-84, 998, 1002, 1020, 1037, 1108-10, 1176, 1180, 1333; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 482-96, 502-5, 507-8; Briefe Englischer Flüchtlinge, 6, 24-5.

The extent to which the daily experience of exile – as opposed to the circumstances in England which prompted and prolonged it – coloured the political and religious outlook of the ‘Voyce’ is difficult to determine. Ludlowe was impressed by certain things he encountered in Switzerland, including the legend of William Tell, an agent of deliverance from tyrannical lords, and frequently referred to the warm welcome the regicides received from a people with ‘an innate hatred against tyranny and popery’.410Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 944, 966, 980, 983-4 and passim. Yet what he experienced in ancien régime Switzerland was not a democracy of landed peasants, or even the plebian ‘company of clodpated clowns’ derided by one of the early readers of the Memoirs.411W. Baron, Regicides, no Saints nor Martyrs (1700), 52. Rather, it was ‘a kind of aristocratic absolutism, with oligarchic tendencies’ – arguably not far from the England of 1649 to 1660.412F. Walter, Histoire de la Suisse, ii (Neuchâtel, 2010), 11-12. The Pays de Vaud, was ruled directly, without either a parliament or a Scottish-style general assembly of clergy, by officials who had some parallels with the parliamentary commissioners and commanders in Ireland; such devolved power as there was rested with self-perpetuating city councils.413De l'Ours à la Cocarde: Ancien Régime et Révolution en Pays de Vaud ed. F. Flouck et al. (Lausanne, 1998). While conscious of his debt to the ‘magnifiques et tout puissant seigneurs’ of Bern, Ludlowe did not habitually abandon his inconveniently radical past. One on occasion he got into a serious dispute when he dismissed the trappings of social rank as idolatrous.414Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1425-6.

The Erastian church, where Calvinist theology and austere Zwinglian practice was enforced by lay magistrates, and which might have provided a model for some mid-seventeenth century English politicians, proved at one and the same time too lax and insufficiently tolerant for Ludlowe and his friends.415H. Vuilleumier, Histoire de l'Eglise Réformée du Pays de Vaud sous le régime Bernois (Lausanne, 1927-33); V. Larminie, 'La vie religieuse en Pays de Vaud et le contexte européen', De l'Ours à la Cocarde, 261-80 ; Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 951 and passim. When asked to stand godfather, Ludlowe felt obliged to dissemble his chief reason for refusing. He pleaded the impermanency of his residence, concealing his objections ‘against the thing itself’ because it was ‘usual amongst most here, to attribute all the enormities that are charged on the Anabaptists of Munster, against those who are against the baptizing, or rather sprinkling of children’.416Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1286-8. Duties of politeness to their hosts did not, however, prevent Ludlowe and other regicides refusing to take communion in the local church, where they could not be sure of ‘a work of grace in their lives’; instead they were part of a church of believers gathered by mutual consent (where and how he did not specify).417Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1184-5, 1426; Briefe Englischer Flüchtlinge, 20-3; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 496-500. Yet on this and other occasions he insisted that ‘we differed not to our knowledge in any of the doctrinal part of religion’, and blamed political enemies for stirring up trouble.418Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1183-6, 1287. The exiles maintained very cordial relations with many pastors, were assiduous attenders at sermons, and were seen to be ‘of the same belief as us in all the fundamentals of the faith’.419Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 966, 1020 and passim; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 499.

While exile doubtless accustomed Ludlowe to the normality of living without a monarchy, it may be that on balance it confirmed existing perspectives rather than encouraged innovative thinking. If so, the verdict of the ‘Voyce’ on the 1640s and 1650s may have been relatively little distorted by time, even if its detail is hazy and its chronology confused. The inspiration and language is notably the same as in letters from that earlier period. Penning ‘a conclusion’ to his memoirs in November 1674, Ludlowe conceded weaknesses of style and argument, ‘frailties’ of memory and imperfections of source material, but reasserted his aim to vindicate truth and the cause of God. If his wife or friends thought it might be useful to the public, then they might publish it, but if anyone detected mistakes or could improve on his style, then he was happy to contemplate an editor.420Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, interpolation betw. pp. 1354-5.

At an early point in the exile Ludlowe had signalled a willingness to pursue the propaganda fight internationally when he arranged for the publication in French on a local press of the hagiographic account of scaffold speeches made by fellow regicides.421Les Iuges Iugez se iustifiants ([Yverdon], 1663); G. Mahlberg, ‘Les Juges Jugez, se Justifians…and Edmund Ludlow’s protestant network’, HJ lvii. 369-96. Refuge did not represent retirement and obscurity, any more than it guaranteed safety. The ‘Voyce’ records numerous overtures to Ludlowe and his companions from England, holding out the prospect of a pardon if they returned home.422E.g. Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, p. 1348. For many years Ludlowe resisted all blandishments, despite the financial hardships attendant on the seizure of his assets; denied his inheritance from his uncle Edmund Ludlowe I he was reliant on the generosity of his mother-in-law.423Ludlow, Mems. ii. 510-11; Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, pp. 1057, 1176. In the mid-1670s he could ‘admire’ the beneficent providence which utilised the ‘envy and power’ of his enemies and which, ‘by depriving me of my country and estate, and by throwing me off the public theatre, [made] me for the future a spectator of the bloody tragedy that is there acting.’ But this state might not be permanent: those plucked from danger had a duty ‘to have Jerusalem on their mind’ and rebuild it when opportunity presented.424Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, p. 1423. Faced with the deaths of ‘most of my principal patrons’ and the fact that ‘many of our chief magistrates are but too much concerned in the French interest’, Ludlowe became unsettled.425Bodl. Eng. hist. c. 487, p. 1424. This consciousness and a readiness to believe that the cause of religion and politics in England had finally taken a turn for the better explain his brief return home in 1689. But it simply served to confirm his original reservations. Discovered hiding in London, the man to whom plots had continued to be attributed was still too controversial a figure to withstand the outrage expressed in Parliament and the press.426Ludlow, Mems. ii. 510-11; Ludlow, Voyce, 279; Tanner Letters ed. McNeill, 401, 405, 406; Bodl. Carte 46, ff. 65-6; CCSP v. 487, 498; CSP Dom. 1676-7, pp. 286, 287, 577. He rapidly returned to his adopted home.427Ludlow, Mems. ii. 509-10. He died in Vevey in November 1692; his widow placed a monument in St Martin’s church.428MI St Martin, Vevey.

Assessment

As indicated at the outset, traditionally Ludlowe’s chief importance was as a commentator on his age. Compromised as they are by whig editing – although they also have considerable interest in this regard – the Memoirs remain a useful, if not chronologically accurate, narrative of events in which Ludlowe participated and a pointer to the tensions within the parliamentarian camp. The ‘Voyce’, in contrast, offers insights into the religious motivation and the reasoning of its most uncompromising members. It also presents vivid portraits of some of them, especially the choleric Hesilrige, the patriot Vane, the faithful Marten, the comfort-loving Holland, and the timorous Lisle – as well as of their many opponents. It stands as testimony to the fact that austere religious radicalism could live with generous religious toleration.

While his forte may have been as a relatively ruthless military administrator on a local stage, Ludlowe was of some stature as an MP. Little given to speeches, except perhaps early in 1659, rarely employed as a messenger, and usually only sparingly on committees, he was none the less an important force in the House at a moments of particularly radical change in 1649 and again in 1659. He evidently had a presence in the chamber. His reputation in and beyond it as a divisive and subversive sectarian was to a degree deserved, but it sometimes hid a pronounced and apparently genuine commitment to collective parliamentary rule in the public interest.