SCAWEN, Robert (1602-70), of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, Antony, Cornw. and Horton, Bucks.

Background and early career

Scawen’s family had acquired Molenick by marriage in the reign of Edward I.39Boase, Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, ii. 628. Like many younger sons, he studied to enter the legal profession, although where he acquired his expertise in the law is not known. There is no evidence that he attended university or was a student at the inns of court. Nevertheless, by 1624 his talent as a legal clerk was sufficient to persuade Francis Russell†, 1st Baron Russell of Thornhaugh (who succeeded as 4th earl of Bedford in 1627) to employ him as one of his solicitors in the Westminster courts.40Alnwick, Y.III.2(4)7, ff. 2, 4-6. It is likely that the man who recommended Scawen to Lord Russell was John Pym*.41J. Adamson, ‘Of armies and architecture: the employments of Robert Scawen’, in Soldiers, Writers, and Statesmen of the English Revolution ed. I. Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden (Camb. 1998), 39. Pym was an uncle of Scawen’s mother and was Russell’s man-of-business. By 1626, Scawen’s entire time was spent on Russell’s litigation, and so by mutual agreement he entered the peer’s household as his retained solicitor.42Alnwick, Y.III.2(4)7, ff. 2, 4-6.

Scawen was to spend the next nine years or so in Bedford’s employ. The earl’s London residence, Bedford House in the Strand, was his main base of operations, and his brief quickly expanded to include the earl’s fen-drainage schemes and his plans to redevelop Covent Garden. In the course of his duties he regularly encountered Pym and Bedford’s retained counsellor-at-law Oliver St John*. It was probably at Bedford’s suggestion that Scawen first contemplated marriage to Catherine Alsopp. Both of her parents had been servants to the earl and had been bought up in his household.43Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 39. It was to be a complicated courtship. At first, Bedford promised Scawen an annuity of £40 a year if the marriage went ahead. But when Scawen seemed close to concluding a marriage contract, Bedford began to ‘take causeless exceptions’ against him and declined to settle the annuity, forcing Scawen to abandon his suit. At this, Bedford relented, settling the £40 annuity on Scawen (a pension he was still receiving when he made his will in January 1668) and promising to allow him the farm of rents arising out of various Russell estates in East Anglia (a promise never made good).44PROB11/332, f. 320v; Alnwick, Y.III.2(4)7. Thereafter, relations between the two men steadily deteriorated. When Scawen prepared a general account of the money he had received on the earl’s behalf, Bedford procrastinated, apparently refusing to give Scawen his acquittance. Early in 1634, Scawen’s patience snapped. In a letter to the earl of 11 March, he complained that Bedford’s refusal to pass his accounts had injured his credit and reputation; he would have no further dealings with the earl unless his accounts were allowed and a fixed salary was settled on him. Bedford responded by breaking down Scawen’s study door, removing his writings and evidences and by threatening to ruin him.45Alnwick, Y.III.2(4)7, ff. 23-4. In the spring of 1636, Bedford and Pym met with Scawen at Bedford House in a bid to settle their differences; and after the meeting, Pym privately assured Scawen of Bedford’s wish to retain his services, but the breach was now irremediable.46Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 39-40. Scawen had left Bedford’s employ by the autumn of 1636, when he drafted a petition initiating litigation in chancery against his former master.47Alnwick, Y.III.2(4)7, ff. 29-52.

An experienced and accomplished man-of-business, Scawen did not long want for employment. In July 1638, he was appointed receiver of crown lands in Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Wiltshire in succession to Pym, who almost certainly relinquished this office (which came with a salary of £100 a year) voluntarily to his great-nephew.48Coventry Docquets, 206; Rymer, Foedera, ix. pt. 2, p. 206; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 40. In 1639, Scawen entered the household of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, as his lordship’s secretary and (from 1645) paymaster of the works at Syon and Northumberland House.49Alnwick, U.I.6: general household accts.; W. Suss. RO, PHA 5830; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 63. As lord admiral and general of the king’s forces south of the Trent, Northumberland was closely involved in the preparations for the king’s military campaigns against the Scottish Covenanters. In moving from Bedford’s household to Northumberland’s, Scawen had crossed a major divide in Caroline politics. While he toiled as part of Northumberland’s and the privy council’s military secretariat during the second bishops’ war, his former employer and friends at Bedford House collaborated with the king’s Scottish opponents to bring down the personal rule of Charles I.50Alnwick, Y.III.2/8: Scawen to Hugh Potter*, 14 Apr. 1640; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 137; 1640-1, pp. 241, 557.

Parliamentary career, 1640-3

Scawen was apparently the only candidate in the by-election held at Berwick-upon-Tweed on 21 December 1640 following the resignation of the town’s junior burgess, Sir Edward Osborne.51Supra, ‘Berwick-upon-Tweed’. Clearly a carpetbagger, he owed his place to Northumberland and to the earl’s retained counsel Sir Thomas Widdrington*, who was the town’s recorder and senior burgess. Scawen’s parliamentary career seems to have got off to a faltering start. In his first four months at Westminster he received only four appointments and was conspicuously absent from any of the committees dealing with the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule.52CJ ii. 61b, 87b, 88a, 96b. Despite this low parliamentary profile, he was thrust into the limelight on 21 April 1640, when he voted against the attainder of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†).53Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. He was thus one of the few Straffordians who would side with Parliament in the civil war. After Strafford’s execution, he seems to have become a little more willing to put the experience he had gained in military administration at the House’s disposal. The majority of his committee appointments during 1641 related to raising, supplying, or disbanding troops.54CJ ii. 88a, 96b, 140b, 219b, 240a, 277a, 305b. On 17 February, he had been added to the committee for the king’s army in the north, and when this committee was ordered on 22 July to determine the sum required to disband both armies – English and Scottish – Scawen was ‘especially required’ to attend its deliberations.55CJ ii. 88a, 220a. On 19 August, he was added to a Commons delegation to oversee the disbandment of the armies, though it is not clear whether he made the journey into the northern counties.56CJ ii. 264b, 270a. It is a measure of his growing status in Parliament by the end of the first session that he was named to the 9 September Recess Committee*.57CJ ii. 288b.

From Parliament’s resumption in October 1641 to the outbreak of civil war the following August, Scawen was named to only seven committees – the majority of which concerned the raising and provisioning of troops for Ireland.58CJ ii. 305b, 391b, 451b, 474a, 496b, 552a, 553b. Granted leave of absence on 2 July 1642, he had returned to the House by 7 September, when he took the oath to ‘live and die’ with Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex – Parliament’s commander-in-chief.59CJ ii. 600b, 755b. The earl of Northumberland’s adherence to Parliament at the outset of the war probably had some bearing on Scawen’s own alignment and there are signs that Scawen was not entirely immune to the anti-popish scare-mongering of John Pym and his allies at Westminster.60CJ ii. 346a; D’Ewes (C), 300, 302. Nevertheless, it is significant that his elder brother, William Scawen*, became a royalist.61Infra, ‘William Scawen’. Moreover, Scawen’s track-record at Westminster during 1642-3 suggests that he was very slow to commit himself to the vigorous prosecution of the war. Apart from contributing the modest sum of £30 to the war-effort on 19 September, he figured very little in the House’s proceedings during the early months of the war, receiving only four committee appointments between September 1642 and the beginning of March 1643.62CJ ii. 762b, 882a, 883a, 923b. He was present in the chamber on 31 December, when MPs were asked individually how much they would subscribe to the maintenance of the army, and his response of ‘nil’ may have reflected hesitancy to commit himself fully in the parliamentarian cause as much as impecuniousness.63Add. 18777, f. 110.

With the resumption of preparations for the war in the spring of 1643, Scawen received a series of appointments that suggest a steadily rising position within the Commons.64CJ iii. 5b, 12a, 30b, 42a, 78a, 107a. On 5 April, he was named first to a committee charged with the major task of preparing rules for the better payment of the army; and the following month he was added to what seems to have been a standing committee for Irish affairs headed by Northumberland’s friend Sir Henry Vane I.65CJ iii. 30b, 78a. Yet just as Scawen appeared to be taking a more active role at Westminster, his career received a major check – for six months between the end of May and the second week of November 1643 he received no committee appointments and made very little contribution to the House’s proceedings. This sudden hiatus in his parliamentary activity was almost certainly linked to the contemporaneous political maneuverings of Northumberland. The earl had been vaguely implicated in the plot of Edmund Waller* in June 1643 and had withdrawn from Westminster to his estate at Petworth after the rejection by the Commons on 7 August of the Lords’ attempt to secure lenient terms for a settlement. Only after news reached Westminster that the king had concluded the cessation with the Catholic Irish, did Northumberland return to his place in the Lords, on 17 October.66Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 44.

Scawen’s pattern of attendance during the summer and autumn of 1643 is closely congruent with Northumberland’s. He took the vow and covenant on the discovery of Waller’s plot (6 June), and he was present in the House on 7 August – the day on which it rejected the Lords’ peace proposals – to complain that the coaches of Northumberland and his allies in the Lords had been ‘assaulted’ by anti-peace protesters outside the Palace of Westminster.67CJ iii. 118a; Add. 18777, f. 12. On 31 August, he was granted leave of absence for ‘ten or 12 days’, but he had evidently not returned to Westminster by 23 September, when he was summoned by the Commons to declare whether he would serve as a receiver for the newly-established Committee for Revenue* – another body chaired by Vane I.68CJ iii. 222b, 253a. On 5 and 21 October, he was ordered to attend the committee to receive its instructions and to deliver up any money he held as a crown receiver.69CJ iii. 264b, 283b; Add. 31116, p. 199. But it is not clear that he had complied with these orders by 1 November, when he received a further command to attend the House the following morning in order to take the Solemn League and Covenant.70CJ iii. 297b. That he was formally summoned to take the Covenant suggests that he was suspected (probably rightly) of being reluctant to do so. Certainly the other three Members summoned with him all required further time to overcome their scruples about taking the oath. But whatever Scawen’s reservations, he took the Covenant on 2 November.71CJ iii. 297b, 299a.

Reforming the armies, 1643-5

Following Scawen’s return to Westminster in November 1643 he quickly assumed a major role in the administration of Parliament’s war machine.72CJ iii. 309a, 310b, 360a, 368a. One appointment was of particular importance in this context – his selection as chairman of a committee set on 24 January 1644 to consider the condition, musters and pay of Parliament’s armies.73CJ iii. 375b. From this point until Pride’s Purge, Scawen’s work would be pivotal to the organisation and effectiveness of the parliamentary war-effort. In February, when the Commons resolved to recruit Essex’s army, it turned to Scawen and John Glynne to prepare an ordinance detailing the structure and pay of the lord general’s command.74CJ iii. 384a. This ordinance effected a major reduction in Essex’s army, and it is noteworthy that Scawen should have assumed a central role in relation to this legislation at precisely the time when Northumberland was seconding efforts to reduce Essex’s influence in the conduct of the war by establishing the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK).75Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’. Scawen made his first report on the ordinance for recruiting Essex’s army on 19 February, and on 7 March he was named first to a four-man committee to draw up an establishment (rates of pay) for the army.76CJ iii. 402b, 419b. On 12 March, he was also appointed to draft an ordinance providing an establishment for Essex’s horse.77CJ iii. 426a. After Scawen had reported the final draft of the ordinance for Essex’s army on 20 March, the House passed it with the addition of a clause subjecting the lord general’s army to the orders and directions of the CBK.78CJ iii. 432b; LJ vi. 514. In a major report on 25 March, he highlighted numerous financial irregularities and abuses in the payment and accounting of Essex’s forces, whereupon he was named first to a committee to prepare an establishment of pay for all Parliament’s forces.79CJ iii. 437a; Add. 18779, f. 81; Add. 31116, p. 253. Over the next two months it was Scawen’s reports that shaped deliberations on the new establishment – the first attempt to standardise rates of pay within the various parliamentary field armies since the beginning of the war.80CJ iii. 473a, 475a, 481b, 488b, 502b, 503b, 509b; Harl. 166, f. 64v; Add. 18779, f. 100; Add. 31116, pp. 268, 270, 277-8. By the summer of 1644, Scawen seems to have been regarded as the House’s leading expert on recruitment and military finance. When a new committee was established on 28 June to raise an army of 7,000 foot and 3,000 horse under Sir William Waller*, the care of this business was specially referred to Scawen.81CJ iii. 544b. This committee rapidly acquired the status of a standing committee – its main brief being the improvement of Parliament’s supply machinery.82CJ iii. 563b, 565b, 567b.

The range of business on which the House enlisted Scawen’s services widened during the second half of 1644 to include the ordnance office, chivvying the City and the excise commissioners to provide money for Waller’s and Essex’s armies, assessments for the forces in Ireland, grants to officers’ widows, and defraying the cost of London’s fortifications.83CJ iii. 580b, 583a, 587a, 597b, 601a, 602b, 606a, 609a, 645b, 676a. On 11 October, he was assigned the chair of another committee – for financing the City brigade.84CJ iii. 654b, 659a, 660a. In the wake of Essex’s defeat at Lostwithiel in September and the major reorganisation of Parliament’s field armies that it provoked, Scawen’s 28 June committee came into its own. Measures to increase central control over Parliament’s armies were referred to the committee on 31 October.85CJ iii. 682b. And then on 7 December, two days before the Self-Denying Ordinance was first mooted in the Commons, Scawen’s committee was ordered to prepare rules for taking musters of all Parliament’s armies – a necessary preliminary to the amalgamation of the forces that had been planned by the CBK since late September.86Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 717b. William Pierrepont reported the draft of this ‘new model’ from the CBK on 9 January 1645, and over the following weeks, Scawen’s committee commenced work on putting the army into the field.87CJ iv. 31b, 39a. On 17 February, he was named in first place to a committee to ‘consider of recruiting the army according to the new model and of all things requisite and necessary thereunto; and what else shall conduce to the setting forth and enabling the army to march and do service’.88CJ iv. 51a. Chaired by Scawen, this committee – known as the committee for (or of) the army – and a smaller body set up on 14 March (to which he was also named) for ‘making contracts for the provisions of all the arms, ammunition and other stores and necessaries ... for this summer’s service’, shouldered much of the burden in recruiting and equipping Parliament’s new army.89Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ iv. 52b, 56a, 59a, 70a, 71a, 73a, 73b, 76b, 77b, 78a, 85a, 86a, 88b, 89b, 91b.

It was after the Lords accepted the officer-list of the New Model’s general, Sir Thomas Fairfax*, that Scawen’s committee for the army made its most controversial input to the process of army reform. Despite the appointment of Fairfax as general, Essex retained the title of commander-in-chief, a position that left him in nominal command of all garrison forces. On 24 March 1645, Scawen reported a draft ordinance for giving Fairfax greater powers, whereupon the ordinance was recommitted with instructions that consideration be given to Fairfax’s power over garrisons and that the clause relating to the preservation of the king’s person be removed.90CJ iv. 87b-88a; Harl. 166, f. 194. The key features of the revised ordinance, as reported back from the committee by Scawen, were that it extended Fairfax’s power to all garrisons (thereby removing the last husk of Essex’s authority as lord general) and defined his commission as commander-in-chief as ‘to slay, kill and put to execution of death, by all ways and means’ all enemies of the Parliament.91CJ iv. 88a; LJ vii. 298b. In the Lords, Northumberland joined Viscount Saye and Sele and other anti-Essex peers to secure the passage of this legislation on 1 April.92LJ vii. 298b-299a; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 47. Scawen’s role in the creation of the New Model army appears to have been more than simply that of an efficient functionary, therefore. He was closely identified with the political group within the two Houses that was seeking to oust Essex and other dilatory generals and vest command in officers committed to the vigorous prosecution of the war. The Presbyterian grandee Denzil Holles* had a point when he described Scawen as a ‘proselyte’ of the Independents, though ‘one who, formerly, had not very well liked of their ways’.93Holles Mems. (1699), 137.

Sustaining the New Model army, 1645-7

With the creation of the New Model came a bicameral standing committee to oversee the collection of the assessments and to ensure that the army was regularly paid. The Committee for the Army* (CA) established on 31 March 1645 was a highly partisan body, composed, almost to a man, of supporters of the Self-Denying Ordinance and of new-modelling.94Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; LJ vii. 294a; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 47-8, 50-1. Like its predecessors, which it superseded, the Army Committee came under Scawen’s chairmanship. It was to become Parliament’s principal military committee, and its business was to form the centre of Scawen’s parliamentary activity until the winter of 1648. From March 1645, hardly a week passed without there being some order or directive from the Commons to ‘the committee where Mr Scawen has the chair’. In practice, the committee’s brief quickly extended well beyond the financial responsibilities laid down in the ordinance of 31 March to include most aspects of the army’s logistics and its relations with Parliament.95Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ iv. 99b, 101b, 104b, 121b, 129b, 130b, 138a, 159a, 161b, 163b, 164b, 187a, 231b; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 51. The committee’s increasing workload is suggested by a Commons’ order in June giving its members power ‘to adjourn when they please and to what place they will and to sit when they will, at such times as the House sits not’.96CJ iv. 161b. But Scawen’s activities in the Commons were by no means confined to the CA. During 1645 he received numerous appointments to ad hoc committees, the vast majority of which concerned some aspect of other of the war-effort.97CJ iv. 117a, 132a, 146a, 178b, 203a, 220a, 230a, 250a, 264b, 267b, 286a. 295a, 300a, 351a, 399a. On two occasions he was named first to committees – for payment of public debts due to soldiers and wagoners and on an ordinance for regulating the ordnance office – and may well have chaired both.98CJ iv. 132a, 178b.

By the late summer of 1645, he had become the principal parliamentary spokesman for the New Model Army. It was he who kept the problem of the army’s recruitment and supply before the attention of the Commons; it was to him that John Rushworth* (secretary to the army’s council of war) wrote directly when the army’s pressing needs required the scrutiny of Parliament; and it was Scawen who, late in December, delivered the general report to the Commons on the financing of the army.99CJ iv. 267b, 275a, 342b, 369a, 386a, 387b, 388a; Add. 18780, ff. 91, 137v, 165v; Add. 31116, pp. 500-1. In so far as the New Model’s success in the field was the consequence of effective logistical and financial support, Scawen played a major part in its victories. The extent of his contribution was publicly recognised by the Commons in January 1646, when the House instructed the Committee of the West* ‘to consider of some considerable recompense to be bestowed upon Mr Scawen ... that may remain to posterity as a mark of the favour and acknowledgement of this House to him for the great pains and the faithful and extraordinary service he hath performed in the affairs of the army and service to the Parliament and kingdom’.100CJ iv. 414b. In the event, the two Houses opted to bring in an ordinance in May for bestowing £2,000 on Scawen out of composition fines.101SP46/108, f. 46; Bodl. Nalson XIV, f. 222v; CJ iv. 535b, 539a, 661a; LJ viii. 317b; CCAM 261; CCC 799.

The work of the Army Committee assumed a more overtly partisan character during 1646. Scawen was at the forefront of parliamentary moves, initiated at the request of the London militia committee (which was dominated by pro-army members until mid-1646) to prevent the king’s anticipated arrival in the capital sparking a Presbyterian-royalist uprising. At a meeting of the CA at Guildhall on 1 April, which Scawen reported to the Commons two days later (3 Apr.), measures were taken to ensure that if the king did come to London he would be immediately secured in St James’s House and ‘to prevent any tumult that may arise by his coming’.102Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ iv. 498b-499a; LJ viii. 255b-256a. On 4 May, Scawen drafted and reported an ordinance for keeping papists and royalists out of the capital, which the Commons then recommitted to the CA.103CJ iv. 531b, 532a, 534b. Two days later (6 May), on learning that the king had surrendered to the Scots, the Commons resolved that the CA should be empowered with an extensive brief to investigate information concerning any ‘treaties or intelligences whatsoever, either with the king, or with any other person’ that might be prejudicial to Parliament.104CJ iv. 537; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 55-6. Employing these investigative powers, Scawen and Thomas Pury I – and doubtless other members of the CA as well – began gathering evidence of the secret negotiations between the king and Scottish politicians and officers that had preceded his flight to their army.105Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; HMC Portland, i. 362-3.

The majority of Scawen’s appointments to ad hoc committees during 1646 again related to military finance, or security in the capital.106CJ iv. 399a, 462a, 472b, 490b, 521a, 525a, 529a, 531b, 560b, 596a, 613a, 616a, 629b, 641b, 650b, 658b, 687b, 696b, 703a, 709b, 719b, 738a; v. 14b, 27a, 28a. However, he also found time to chair a committee set up on 28 April 1646 to resolve the long-running dispute over the project to drain the Great Level – although his chairmanship was contested by the fenlanders because of his links with the late earl of Bedford, a leading projector.107CJ iv. 525a; The Anti-Projector, or the History of the Fen Project (n.d.), 4; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 143, 165, 166. Several of his appointments may also have thrust him further into the intensifying party conflict at Westminster. On 1 June, for example, he was named to a committee consisting almost exclusively of leading Independents which was set up to demand the Scots hand over the accounts of their plunder-prone army – a task specially referred to Scawen’s care.108CJ iv. 560b. He was made a committeeman on 10 July on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers – legislation that was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.109CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 162. The next day (11 July), he was included on a committee to investigate the promoters of the City’s May Remonstrance to the Houses in favour of a swift settlement with the king and the establishment of a iure divino Presbyterian church.110CJ iv. 616a. Despite Scawen’s prominent position within the Independent interest in the Commons, he acted as a teller on only one occasion during his career in the Long Parliament. Appropriately for one with such close links with the peers, the occasion of this division was a motion sent from the Lords to have James Stanley, 7th earl of Derby removed from the list of royalists exempted from pardon in the Newcastle peace propositions. On 10 February 1646, Scawen and Sir Anthony Irby were majority tellers against a procedural motion that, if passed, would have prevented the Lords’ motion from being considered.111CJ iv. 436a.

Scawen’s career during 1646 was inevitably affected by the ending of the civil war and the increasing influence at Westminster of the Presbyterian interest headed by the earl of Essex, Holles and Sir Philip Stapilton. Late in December 1645, with the end of the war in sight, the Commons had passed legislation – reported, and probably drafted, by Scawen – for continuing the CA for a further nine months (to September 1646).112Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ iv. 387b. The Lords passed this ordinance, but with amendments, and on 9 January 1646 the pro-army trio of Scawen, Pury and Sir Thomas Widdrington were managers of a conference to state the Commons’ objections to the Lords’ changes.113CJ iv. 400b. When it became evident, in March, that the authority to collect assessments for the New Model would need to be extended for a further six months, Scawen was duly deputed to draft the legislation.114CJ iv. 484a. However, with the surrender of Oxford and most of the remaining royalist garrisons during the summer, the CA became increasingly marginalised. By the autumn it was clear that any proposal to continue the committee – or indeed, the army itself – would meet with strong opposition in the Lords. By mid-September, the January continuation ordinance had expired and the committee had gone into abeyance; and to make matters worse for the army, the assessment ordinance expired on 1 October. Scawen was at the centre of the Commons’ efforts to press the Lords on both issues, drafting and reporting new ordinances to revive the CA and continue the assessment. But all the Lords would agree to, late in October, was to continue the CA until 1 January 1647.115Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ iv. 673a, 687a, 692a, 713b, 736b-737a; Add. 31116, pp. 570, 582. As a stop-gap measure, in response to a letter to Scawen from Fairfax, the Commons ordered on 16 January that the CA was to sit from day to day ‘and execute all such powers as formerly they have done to all intents and purposes, for bringing in the arrears upon the [assessment] ordinances’. That same day (16 January), Scawen and Robert Reynolds were appointed managers of a conference for pressing the peers to pass the CA and assessment legislation that the Commons had sent to them ‘long since’.116CJ v. 53b, 55a. But the Lords formally rejected this legislation on 4 March, prompting Northumberland and other pro-army peers to enter their dissent.117LJ ix. 56b-57a; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 57.

Scawen and the army grandees, 1647-8

Scawen and the Army Committee could not help but become embroiled in the controversy that spring surrounding the Presbyterians’ plans to send an army – a downsized and re-structured New Model – to Ireland. On 16 March 1647, the Commons appointed Scawen and Reynolds to draft legislation introducing a new assessment to pay for this Irish expeditionary force.118CJ v. 114a. In the midst of these preparations, with rumours circulating that the soldiers were refusing to disband or serve in Ireland until their grievances had been met, Scawen delivered a major report from the CA on 26 March concerning the state of the army’s finances. According to the committee’s calculations, the army was owed over £300,000, and collections were in arrears by roughly the same amount.119CJ v. 126b; Add. 31116, p. 611. Although it is impossible to gauge how Scawen glossed the figures, the presentation of these statistics – on the eve of Holles’s Declaration of Dislike (27 Mar.) – was a powerful endorsement of the legitimacy of the army’s financial claims. On 9 April, when the House considered the rates of pay for the forces to be kept up in England and Ireland, it ordered the CA to join with Parliament’s Presbyterian-dominated executive, the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs*, to draw up an establishment – a task it referred specially to Scawen and John Swynfen.120CJ v. 138a.

It is a measure of the extent to which Scawen’s committee had become identified with the army interest that over the next two months it was virtually ignored by the Presbyterian grandees. Almost all army business was managed directly from Derby House.121Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’. Similarly, although Scawen had been named regularly to ad hoc committees in the first three months of 1647, between 6 April and the army’s seizure of the king early in June he was named to just one.122CJ v. 43a, 51b, 62b, 74a, 84b, 106a, 127b, 132b, 134a, 181a. Only in June 1647, with the army’s approach to London and seizure of the king, did the fortunes of Scawen and his committee revive. Parliament now had no alternative but to open negotiations with the army, and on 7 June Scawen was named to the six-man commission that the two Houses sent to smooth relations with the soldiery.123CJ v. 201b. The commissioners presented Parliament’s terms to the army at its rendezvous on Thriplow Heath on 10 June, and the following day Scawen and Povey returned to Westminster with the army’s answer – and a copy of the Solemn Engagement in which the soldiers refused to disband until their grievances had been met.124CJ v. 206b. There was little doubt where Scawen’s sympathies lay. Holles later recalled that Scawen had used his report on the state of the army to cow the Independents’ opponents and extract further concessions to the New Model.

Mr Scawen ... reported back to the House in such a ghastly, fearful manner (only to terrify us and make us more supple), he saying [that] the army was so strong, so unanimous, so resolved, as the Presbyterians’ hearts fell an inch lower, and the Independents made themselves merry with it.125D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 108.

The following day (12 June), Parliament effectively abandoned the terms it had been offering the army hitherto, and Scawen and Povey were sent back to headquarters ‘to know the particulars which the army desires, and will insist on, for their satisfaction’.126CJ v. 208b. Scawen remained at army headquarters until early July, when ‘some special service of the House’ prompted his recall to Westminster.127LJ ix. 247b, 308b, 312a; CJ v. 229b; Clarke Pprs. i. 148, 149.

Following a report by Scawen from the Army Committee on 6 July 1647, the Commons took steps to put the New Model’s pay upon a more secure, more permanent footing and to address the state of the military establishment more generally. Over the next two weeks, Scawen reported the CA’s proposals for streamlining the kingdom’s garrisons, beginning with Northumberland’s property of Cockermouth Castle, which the Commons agreed should be returned to the earl’s safe-keeping. On 22 July, the CA itself – which had lacked any statutory foundation since its ordinance had expired on 15 September 1646 – was at last reconfirmed by the Lords for a further ten months (retrospectively from 1 January 1647).128Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ v. 234a, 235b, 243a, 251a, 252a, 254a; LJ ix. 340a, 344. The revival of the CA was one of a series of tactical victories by the Independents that provoked the Presbyterian ‘riots’ of 26 July 1647. Although Scawen did not sign the Engagement of those Members who fled London for the safety of the army, he was present at Fairfax’s headquarters by 1 August.129CJ v. 264a. However, it seems he returned to London shortly thereafter, for Holles later accused him and Francis Allein*, one of the treasurers-at-war, of frustrating a parliamentary initiative of 3 August to dispatch £49,000 to the army and thereby (the Presbyterians hoped) avert a military occupation of London. Holles claimed that the non-payment of this money was ‘as great a blow to Parliament and City as could be given, for it serv’d to keep the soldiers together and unite them for marching up [to London]’.130Holles Mems. 161. Scawen was present in the chamber on 6 August – the first day of regular sittings after the army’s march into London – when he was named to a powerful bicameral committee, dominated by the Independents, to investigate the instigators of the 26 July riots.131CJ v. 269a; LJ ix. 415b.

With the army’s allies now in the ascendant at Westminster, Scawen was able to turn to the urgent question of the army’s structure and pay in the aftermath of civil war. From 9 September 1647, he made a series of reports from the CA on the size of the forces to be kept up, disbanded or sent to Ireland; the sums for particular garrisons; and the supply of money for arrears and current pay.132CJ v. 298b, 306a, 325b, 340b, 371a, 390a, 414b. On 9 October, the Commons ordered the CA, or such as it should designate, to resume the role of the former commissioners to the army, with a wide-ranging brief to confer with Fairfax and the council of war.133CJ v. 329b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 928, 1309. By virtue of his chairmanship of the CA and close working relationship with Fairfax, Scawen had become one of the most influential figures in the Commons by the winter of 1647. Few committees on army pay, disbandment of supernumerary forces, or reducing free quarter were deemed complete without Scawen’s inclusion.134CJ v. 373b, 376b, 377b, 396a, 400a, 414b, 434a. When the Commons appointed a four-man delegation on 23 December to acquaint Fairfax with the Houses’ proceedings on the army’s behalf, Scawen was the first man named.135CJ v. 400a.

Although Scawen received only a handful of committee appointments during the first half of 1648, he remained a key figure in the parliamentary war machine, drafting and reporting, inter alia, a new establishment for Fairfax’s army and a new assessment ordinance and putting in many hours as chairman of the Army Committee.136Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; CJ v. 414b, 434a, 454b, 459b, 460a, 466b, 472a, 477a, 484b, 535a, 543b, 546a, 567b, 581b, 587a; Berwick RO, B1/10: Berwick Guild Bk. f. 95; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 61. He used his influence as chairman of the CA to help foil an attempt by Presbyterian MPs in June to investigate allegations that the army was planning to kidnap and murder the king.137[C. Walker*], Hist. of Independency (1648), 104-6 (E.463.19). From July until September, he and other leading members of the CA were away from Westminster, having been dispatched to Essex on 1 July to assist with raising money for the pay of Fairfax’s army at the siege of Colchester.138CJ v. 619b, 620b; LJ x. 355a; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 146. Scawen was back in the House by 1 September, when he was named first to a committee for debriefing the Essex county committeemen who had endured royalist captivity in Colchester.139CJ v. 696b. During the autumn of 1648, he again emerged as the main link-man between the army and Parliament. He made numerous reports to the House of the army’s ‘great necessities’ and was instrumental in drawing up measures to improve the soldiers’ pay and conditions.140CJ vi. 26a, 46a,b, 76a, 83a, 83b, 87a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 26 (19-26 Sept. 1648), sig. L12 (E.464.45); no. 28 (3-10 Oct. 1648), sig. Pp4 (E.466.11); no. 29 (10-17 Oct. 1648), sig. Rr4 (E.467.38); no. 30 (17-24 Oct. 1648), sigs. Tt2v, Tt3, Uu2, Uu2v (E.468.37); no. 31 (24-31 Oct. 1648), sig. Xx2v (E.469.10); no. 35 (21-28 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbb3 (E.473.35). On 21 October, he was named first to a Commons delegation for informing Fairfax of the House’s votes for assigning the soldiers garrison quarters (thus ending free quarter) and providing them with regular pay. That same day, he and his colleagues on the CA were given the thanks of the House for their work in expediting the collection of the assessment.141CJ vi. 58a. According to the royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus, Scawen was the army’s ‘prime spokesman’ in the Commons that autumn – his duties as an MP subsumed by his work as ‘a solicitor for the council of war, and to that end he ambles all the year betwixt the headquarters and Westminster’.142Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 30, sigs. Uu2, Uu2v. Although consistently depicted by as a lackey of the army and its radical allies in the Commons, Scawen was probably acting primarily on behalf of the earl of Northumberland and other Independent grandees in their efforts to quieten political discontent in the ranks by addressing the soldiers’ material needs.

Later career, 1649-70

Scawen was neither arrested nor excluded at Pride’s Purge; and though there is no firm evidence that he sat in the House after 25 November, he continued to chair meetings of the Army Committee.143CJ vi. 87a; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 61-3. Scawen’s break with the committee late in December 1648 – he attended his last meeting on 26 December – coincided closely with Northumberland’s withdrawal from parliamentary politics after the grandees’ failure to prevent the king’s trial.144SP28/57, f. 306; Adamson, ‘Employments of Robert Scawen’, 62-3. Scawen was apparently collaborating with Widdrington on Berwick corporation business at Westminster during early January 1649.145Berwick RO, B9/1, Berwick Guild Letter Bk., f. 16v. But it was reported in June that he had ‘not been in the House since the death of the late king’ and had taken up residence at Northumberland’s house at Syon in Middlesex.146Berwick RO, B9/1, f. 29v.

Like the earl, Scawen boycotted public life during the commonwealth and does not appear to have stood for re-election to Parliament until the restoration of the old pre-1653 franchise under Richard Cromwell*. In the elections to the third protectoral Parliament in 1659, Scawen was returned for Grampound in his native Cornwall. There is no evidence that he enjoyed any proprietorial interest in or near the borough, and it is likely that he owed his return to the town’s recorder and principal electoral patron Hugh Boscawen*.147Supra, ‘Grampound’. Scawen was named to just five committees in this Parliament, but one of these was the committee for inspection of public revenues – a powerful body charged with finding ways of reducing state expenditure, particularly in relation to the armed forces.148CJ vii. 594b, 605a, 627a, 627b, 639a. It was on Scawen’s motion that Parliament initiated the general review of public finances that led to the committee’s establishment on 17 February, and it was probably he who chaired its meetings.149Burton’s Diary, iii. 61, 62. He made at least half a dozen reports from this committee during the life of the Parliament, and on 7 April he received the thanks of the House for his great pains in rendering a faithful account of the protectorate’s finances.150CJ vii. 605b, 610a, 627b-631a, 631b, 633b-634a, 640b-641a, 642b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 347-8; iv. 1, 362, 387, 447, 466-7. He also chaired the House’s ‘grand committee for trade’, which met for the first time on 11 February.151Burton’s Diary, iii. 233; iv. 20. In debate, he revealed a concern to maintain the conventions of the House – insisting that delinquents kneel at the bar and that reports from committees should be read by the chairman, not by one of the clerks.152Burton’s Diary, iii. 38, 51, 195. In the debate on 5 April on whether the Commons should seek the concurrence of the Other House to a bill for declaring a day of fasting and humiliation, he emerged as a supporter of the Cromwellian upper chamber, urging that its approval be sought for this legislation.153Burton’s Diary, iv. 349. The next day (6 Apr.), he moved that the House appoint a committee to examine ‘the old form of addresses’ between the two Houses and was then named to a committee for considering how the Commons should transact business with the Other House.154CJ vii. 627a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 356. On 8 April, he acted as a minority teller against this committee’s proposal that messages from the Other House should only be received by the Commons if they were brought by a messenger who was himself a peer – an egalitarian departure from the pre-1649 practice, which held that it was below the dignity of a peer to act as a messenger to the Commons.155CJ vii. 632b. As the parliamentary diarist Thomas Burton noted, this rebuff to the traditionalists ‘was the first question that ever the republicans got [i.e. won]’.156Burton’s Diary, iv. 378. The next day (9 April), Scawen returned to the role he had made his own in the Long Parliament – reporting the state of the army’s pay.157CJ vii. 633b-634a. However, his efforts to find money for the soldiers’ arrears proved insufficient to deter the army from bringing down the protectorate later that month – a development that Scawen probably regretted.

Despite his appointment on 20 June 1659 as a commissioner for managing the revenue of the commonwealth, there is no evidence that Scawen took any part in the affairs of the restored Rump.158CJ vii. 690a. Indeed, it was apparently not until 21 February 1660 – the very day that the Members secluded in Pride’s Purge were re-admitted to the Commons – that Scawen resumed his seat in the Long Parliament.159CJ vii. 847a. From 21 February until the Long Parliament was finally dissolved in mid-March, he once again immersed himself in the tasks of managing public finances and the supply of the armed forces.160CJ vii. 848a, 848b, 850b, 851a, 856a, 857a, 858a, 860a, 862a, 876b, 877b. On 1 March, for example, he was named first to a new committee for inspection of state revenues.161CJ vii. 857a. He evidently had no difficulty negotiating the transition to monarchy, securing appointment to several offices of financial trust during the early 1660s.162CTB i. 75, 685, 718; 1667-8, pp. 14, 56, 69, 585; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 536; 1664-5, p. 399; 1670, p. 154. His election to the Cavalier Parliament early in 1662 was occasioned by the death of Hugh Potter* – the steward of Northumberland’s northern estates and MP for the Cumberland borough of Cockermouth (Scawen was named as one of the overseers in Potter’s will).163PROB11/308, f. 6. In the resulting by-election at Cockermouth, Scawen was returned, like Potter before him, on the Percy interest. Once again, he received a series of committee appointments relating to fiscal and accounting matters, and in 1664 he was listed as a court dependent.164HP Commons 1660-90.

Scawen died in the spring of 1670 and was buried at Horton on 15 March.165Gyll, Hist. of Wraysbury, 262. His will suggests that he ended his life a prosperous man.166PROB11/332, ff. 320-22. He left two major estates – at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, which he had bought in 1658 and was evidently his principal seat; and the manor and rectory of Antony, in Cornwall, that he had purchased from the 5th earl of Bedford in 1641.167C54/3995/6; Woburn Abbey, Beds. Acct. bk. of 5th earl of Bedford, 1641-2 (entries 10 Aug., 7 Sept. 1641). He charged his estate with annuities of £200 and bequests totalling £2,000, as well as marriage portions of £600 to each of his two unmarried daughters. His widow was given a life interest in Horton and all of its contents.168PROB11/332, ff. 320-22. Of his seven surviving sons, two sat for Grampound and other constituencies as whigs after the Glorious Revolution.169HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Thomas Scawen’; ‘Sir William Scawen’.