MUSGRAVE, Sir Philip (1607-78), of Hartley, Westmld., and Edenhall, Cumb.

The Musgraves of Hartley and Edenhall were one of Westmorland’s oldest gentry families and had represented their county, as well as Cumberland, on numerous occasions since the fourteenth century.47HP Commons 1386-1421, ‘Sir Thomas Musgrave’; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Richard Musgrave’; ‘Sir William Musgrave’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Christopher Musgrave’; ‘Sir Simon Musgrave’. Musgrave’s father, Sir Richard Musgrave†, sat for Westmorland in 1604 at the age of just 22, but otherwise appears to have left little mark on county affairs before his death on the grand tour in 1615. His burial in Naples cathedral suggests that he died a Catholic.48Burton, Musgrave, 2; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Richard Musgrave’. Philip was eight years old at the time of Sir Richard’s demise, and his wardship was purchased by his mother and her father, Philip Wharton, 3rd Baron Wharton, whose successor and namesake was the future parliamentarian grandee. Lord Wharton was Musgrave’s guardian, as he had been to Sir Richard before him, and it was through his good management that the family’s estate survived the two wardships, although not without financial losses estimated at £3,000.49WARD9/94, ff. 479v, 638; WARD9/162, f. 204; WARD9/413, f. 495v; Burton, Musgrave, 1, 2-3; Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 229-32. Musgrave was said to have inherited ‘a very entangled and disordered estate’.50Burton, Musgrave, 4.

Musgrave would spend three years in Lord Wharton’s household and was then sent to Goldsborough, the Yorkshire residence of the distinguished lawyer Sir Richard Hutton, where he apparently attended a local grammar school. He was admitted to Peterhouse in 1622, but his education at Cambridge was cut short by ill health, ‘the air not agreeing with him’. According to his biographer, he had ‘a melancholy disposition and weak body’ and preferred to spend his time improving his estate than in indulging ‘those pleasures which young gentlemen commonly accustom themselves to’.51Burton, Musgrave, 3-4, 5.

Musgrave seems to have remained entirely conformable to the crown during the personal rule of Charles I, and by the spring of 1639 he had been commissioned as a deputy lieutenant and colonel of militia foot by his ‘noble and dearest kinsman’ Henry Lord Clifford† and the earl of Arundel respectively.52SP29/24/117, f. 248; Cumb. RO (Kendal), WDCAT/MUS/A2113; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 312; Burton, Musgrave, 5, 6. He seems to have taken his military duties seriously and was employed by Clifford to help secure Carlisle and other border strongholds during the first bishops’ war.53CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 312; 1639, p. 10; Strafforde Letters, ii. 317; Burton, Musgrave, 6. The following year, Musgrave and Sir Henry Bellingham* battled it out with the region’s wealthiest gentleman, Sir John Lowther†, for the honour of representing Westmorland in the Short Parliament.54Burton, Musgrave, 6-7; Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 154-5, 287. The nature of their rivalry, whether political or personal, is not clear. The issue was decided on 12 March with the return of Musgrave and Bellingham; Musgrave taking the senior place. He was elected on his own interest, it seems, as one of the county’s most prominent governors and landowners.55Supra, ‘Westmorland’. Five days later (17 Mar.), he signed the indenture returning Sir George Dalston and Sir Patricius Curwen as knights of the shire for Cumberland.56C219/42/1/83. Musgrave received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Lowther seems to have tried his hand with the Westmorland electorate again, but with as little success as before. On 22 October 1640, Musgrave and Bellingham were returned for the county, apparently without any formal protest on the part of Lowther.57Supra, ‘Westmorland’.

Although Musgrave made a bright start in the Long Parliament – reportedly presenting a petition of grievances from Westmorland on 7 November – he faded thereafter and was named to just seven committees all told.58Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21; CJ ii. 61b, 114a, 152a, 172b, 196a, 383b, 423b. To judge by the few mentions he receives in the Journals and parliamentary diaries, his most pressing concern at Westminster was to relieve the northern counties, where the English and Scottish armies had been quartered since the second bishops’ war and causing great hardship. On 3 March 1641, he joined a group of MPs, many of them northerners, in pledging money (£500 in his own case) as security on a loan intended to be raised in the City for paying off the Scots.59Procs. LP ii. 620. This proposal to use City money to pay the Scots has been seen as an attempt by a proto-royalist element in the Commons to lessen the pressure on Charles from the ‘factious party’ by securing the withdrawal of the Scottish army.60R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), 334. But to what extent, if any, Musgrave was complicit in this design (if such it was) is not known. He was not among the northern Members who voted against the earl of Strafford’s (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) bill of attainder on 21 April, and he apparently had no qualms about taking the Protestation in May.61CJ ii. 137b. In debate on 12 May, he and Sir George Dalston conceded that the tax exemptions enjoyed by Cumberland and Westmorland ‘by reason of their vicinity to Scotland’ should be abolished and that they should be taxed at the proportion of other counties.62Procs. LP iv. 342. Between 20 May and 2 July, Musgrave was named to several committees concerning the disbandment of the armies in the north and the payment of the billet money due to their reluctant hosts, and then on 17 July he was granted leave of absence upon Dalston’s motion.63CJ ii. 152a, 172b, 196a, 214b; Procs. LP v. 687. His appointment, probably in absentia, as a commissioner for disarming recusants in Westmorland suggests that he was considered sound in religion.64LJ iv. 385a.

Musgrave had returned to Westminster by 17 January 1642, when he was added to a committee (set up in the wake of Charles’s attempted arrest of the Five Members) for putting the kingdom into a posture of defence.65CJ ii. 383b. His willingness to join Sir Patricius Curwen on 10 February in moving for the appointment of the 5th earl of Cumberland (the former Henry Clifford†, Lord Clifford) as parliamentary lord lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland may merely reflect his gratitude to the earl for favours rendered.66PJ i. 342. But Cumberland’s political sympathies, which would soon take him into the king’s camp, may also have struck a chord with Musgrave. Cumberland certainly failed to inspire the confidence of proto-parliamentarian MPs, and he was replaced by Lord Grey of Warke (Sir William Grey†). When the Commons subsequently recommended Curwen to Lord Grey as one of his deputies, it made no mention of Musgrave for the like honour.67CJ ii. 483b. On 13 April, Musgrave was granted leave of absence on the motion of Sir Philip Stapilton and thereafter abandoned his seat entirely.68PJ i. 167.

Musgrave reportedly attended the king at York during the summer, and his correspondence confirms that by September he was working with the earls of Derby and Cumberland in an effort to form a royalist alliance between the gentry of the five northern counties.69Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DMUS/5/5/1/1-2, 4; DMUS/5/5/4/1-2, 4, 16-17; News from the North (1642), 2-3 (E.128.43); [J. Musgrave], Yet Another Word to the Wise (1646), 1 (E.355.25); Burton, Musgrave, 7; Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 289. Musgrave’s conception of the Church of England as warranted in law and conscience seems to have played an important role in determining his allegiance.70Burton, Musgrave, 34. As he informed Sir Henry Bellingham late in 1642, he was convinced of the church’s ‘conformity in discipline … and purity in doctrine’. Referring to Parliament’s perceived laxity against radical puritans, he professed it ‘beyond both my reading and reason that the countenancing seditious and schismatical, if not heretical opinions, is the way to [keep] the church from superstition’. In trying to overcome Bellingham’s scruples about going outside the strict letter of the law to raise forces for the king, he asked rhetorically whether the parliamentarians, in laying ‘violent hands [upon what] God himself sayeth touch not, and upon a mere pretended necessity, hath not made many a greater and dangerous breach in those … banks the law hath placed about the king and people?’71Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DMUS/5/5/4/4. Musgrave’s household chaplain was the episcopalian minister Arthur Savage, who would be ejected from his Westmorland living by the parliamentarians in the mid-1640s.72Burton, Musgrave, 34; Walker Revised, 368.

Musgrave’s absence from the Commons during the summer of 1642 aroused its suspicion, and on 2 September he was suspended from sitting.73CJ ii. 750a. However, he was not disabled by the House until 15 March 1643, after it had received positive information that he had executed the commission of array in Westmorland.74CJ iii. 1b. The Commons gave further order on 28 September that Musgrave’s estate be sequestered for his ‘long and willful neglecting and deserting the service of the commonwealth in not attending ... the House’.75CJ iii. 256a. His name subsequently featured in successive parliamentary peace proposals among those ‘malignants’ deemed incapable of bearing public office in the event of a settlement.76CJ iii. 650a, 650b, 657b; v. 286a; LJ vii. 55b; ix. 406a; x. 549b.

Soon after his appointment as commander of the king’s army in the north in the summer of 1642, the earl of Newcastle commissioned Musgrave as commander-in-chief of Cumberland and Westmorland.77Newman, Royalist Officers, 269; Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 288-9. It was Musgrave’s ambition to turn the region’s trained bands into a marching army that could serve the king wherever required, but he was constantly thwarted by his old rival Sir John Lowther and other militia colonels, who resented his authority over them and were determined to preserve their regiments for local defence. Lowther, for his part, may also have been motivated by lack of enthusiasm for the king’s cause.78Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DMUS/5/5/1/1-2, 4, 10-11, 17, 19, 20-1, 30; DMUS/5/5/2/10, 13, 19; DMUS/5/5/4/6, 9-10, 14-15, 22, 24; DHUD/18/2/6; Mercurius Britannicus no. 42 (1-8 July 1644), 328-9 (E.54.6); Burton, Musgrave, 8; Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 289-94; ‘The royalist north’, 171-3. Surveying the plight of the Yorkshire royalists in October 1642, Musgrave informed the earl of Cumberland that ‘were it in my power, with the hazard of my life and all that I have, I would put it to the adventure to give you assistance, but without my country’s [i.e. region’s] consent ʼtis little I am able to do’.79Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DMUS/5/5/1/4. His importance to the king’s cause in Cumberland and Westmorland was such that he could not be spared to attend the Oxford Parliament early in 1644.80Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DMUS/5/5/4/14, 24.

Musgrave was forced to take refuge in Carlisle when the region was invaded in the autumn of 1644 by the Scots, whose forces allegedly plundered his estate to the tune of £3,000. When Carlisle fell to Parliament the following summer, he led a troop of Cumbrian horse to join the king in south Wales.81Burton, Musgrave, 8, 9. Although wounded and captured at the battle of Rowton Heath in September 1645 and suffering imprisonment at York and Pontefract thereafter, he remained staunch in the royal cause, refusing to compound for his estate and attending the captive Charles at Newcastle in 1646.82LJ vii. 608b, 609b; Burton, Musgrave, 10; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 116, 323. He conferred with both the king and the Scots commissioners in 1647-8 about raising the north-west in support of the Scottish Engagers, and in April 1648 he seized Carlisle under instructions from James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton.83Bodl. Clarendon 31, f. 221; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 323-4, 325-6; Burton, Musgrave, 11, 12. Despite his dislike of the Covenant and misgivings about serving under the Scots, he performed stoutly as royalist commander-in-chief of Cumberland and Westmorland during the second civil war, surrendering Appleby Castle in October only when all hope of relief had failed.84NAS, GD 406/1/2330, 2336, 2345, 2346, 2348; Bodl. Clarendon 31, ff. 221-223v; Clarke Pprs. ii. 2-3; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 348-9; ‘Sir Philip Musgrave’s relation’ ed. C.H. Firth, Misc. of the Scottish Hist. Soc. (Scottish Hist. Soc. xliv), 302-11; Burton, Musgrave, 12, 14-15.

Musgrave left England for the continent after the regicide, and in March 1649 the Rump ordered his banishment and the confiscation of his estate.85Clarendon, Hist. iv. 380; Burton, Musgrave, 15; CJ vi. 165b. He accompanied Charles II to Scotland as an advisor in 1650, but his episcopalian sympathies proved distasteful to the Covenanters, and he served out the Anglo-Scottish war of 1650-1 as royalist governor of the Isle of Man.86HMC Portland, i. 590; Burton, Musgrave, 16-28; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 69. In 1652, his forfeited estate was purchased for £7,893 by his heir, Richard Musgrave, and agents (including Thomas Wharton*) acting on the family’s behalf, with the help of a loan of £3,300 from Musgrave’s cousin Sir Thomas Wharton†.87C54/3728/13; CCC 2308; Phillips, ‘The royalist north’, 187-8. When Musgrave was imprisoned in 1653 as a suspected royalist plotter, his other Wharton cousin, Philip, 4th Baron Wharton, interceded on his behalf with Oliver Cromwell*, and he was quickly released.88Bodl. Carte 103, f. 193; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 157, 165, 276; Burton, Musgrave, 30-1.

Musgrave returned to Westmorland in the mid-1650s, only to be harassed and imprisoned by the authorities for suspected involvement in the 1655 northern rising and other royalist plots.89Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 202-3; CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 215, 220; 1659-60, p. 35; TSP iv. 561; Burton, Musgrave, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 87, 108. His voluntary payment of £10 in decimation tax in 1656 seems to have availed him little.90TSP iv. 562. Having no doubt welcomed the Restoration, he attended the king on his triumphal entry into London in June 1660, and over the next six months he was showered with local offices and perquisites, including the tollage of Cumberland and Westmorland and the governorship of Carlisle.91HMC Le Fleming, 26; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 313, 431; Burton, Musgrave, 38, 39, 41. The mortgages and loans upon his estate were repaid in 1662 with the help of money from the crown.92Burton, Musgrave, 41. Returned for Westmorland to the Cavalier Parliament, he was listed by Lord Wharton as a possible supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement, but this was mere wishful thinking, for Musgrave was ‘esteemed to be instrumental in the House of Commons in crossing the designs of those who did desire the procuring a toleration of different opinions in matters of religion’.93G.T.F. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 353; HMC Le Fleming, 31, 69; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 480; Burton, Musgrave, 46; HP Commons 1660-1690. He was unrelenting in his efforts to persecute and purge from public life the dissenters and other ‘fanatics’ in Cumberland and Westmorland, while at Westminster, he was a staunch defender of the church and was regularly identified as a court dependent.94HP Commons 1660-1690; ‘Sir Philip Musgrave’, Oxford DNB; M. Mullett, Patronage, Power and Politics in Appleby in the Era of Lady Anne Clifford, 1649-89 (Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. tract ser. xxv), 31, ch. 8.

Musgrave died on 7 February 1678 and was buried at Edenhall on 11 February.95Edenhall par. reg.; Burton, Musgrave, 50, 56. He had drawn up his will in March 1675, but it is not clear that it was ever entered in probate. In this document, he asked to be buried ‘according to the form of the Church of England, of which I have always professed myself a member and I bless God I so die’.96C6/239/24. His third son, Christopher†, sat for Carlisle, Westmorland and several other constituencies between 1661 and 1704.97HP Commons 1660-1690.