WYVILL (WYVELL), Christopher (1614-81), of Constable Burton, Fingall, Yorks.

The Wyvills had settled at Little Burton, near Masham, during the early Tudor period, but had established their principal residence at nearby Constable Burton – some five miles south of Richmond, in north Yorkshire – by the 1570s.20N. Yorks. RO, ZFW, Wyvill of Constable Burton mss, Wyvill fam. pprs. to 1700 (mic. 1761); Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 431-3; VCH N. Riding, i. 234, 326-7. Members of the family had represented Ripon in the Parliament of 1553 and Richmond in 1585 and 1597.21HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Marmaduke Wyvill’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Marmaduke Wyvell’. Like a number of other leading families in the North Riding, the Wyvills had strong Catholic connections. Wyvill’s mother and four of his sisters were Catholics, and one of his younger brothers had been educated at the Catholic seminary at Douai.22C. Wyvill, The Pretensions of the Triple Crown (1672), sig. A3; H. Aveling, Northern Catholics; the Catholic Recusants of the N. Riding of Yorks. 1558-1790, 320. But although exposed to strong Catholic influences during his boyhood, Wyvill received his grammar-schooling at Epping under the tutelage of a ‘Mr Wroth’, a man much given to ‘pithy sermons’, and became a firm Protestant.23Wyvill, Certaine Serious Thoughts, 10-11. Indeed, after the Restoration, Wyvill would write a pamphlet relating those ‘antidotes’ he had found most useful against ‘all those little sophisms which laid hold of me when I was a child (or thought as a child), new vamped for the seduction of the growing generation’.24Wyvill, Pretensions of the Triple Crown, sig. A4. His wife, whom he married in 1636, was accounted by the puritan chaplain of the godly Yorkshire gentleman George Marwood* a ‘most noble and virtuous saint’.25G. Ewbancke, The Pilgrims Port (1660), 8.

Wyvill’s father, Sir Marmaduke Wyvill, was very probably a church-papist and, like most Catholic sympathisers, was a steadfast supporter of the king throughout the 1640s.26HMC Portland, i. 1; Cliffe, Yorks. 243. In October 1640, he was one of a group of Yorkshire deputy lieutenants that persisted in efforts to levy money for the county’s trained bands – and thus provide the king with a military option against the invading Covenanters – when most of their fellow gentry were content to see Parliament conclude a peace with the Scots.27N. Yorks. RO, ZFW, Wyvill of Constable Burton mss, Wyvill fam. pprs. to 1700; HMC 5th Rep. 331; D. Scott, ‘‘Hannibal at our gates’: loyalists and fifth-columnists during the bishops’ wars – the case of Yorkshire’, HR lxx. 288. The majority of these deputy lieutenants had close links with the county’s most powerful figure, the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), and Sir Marmaduke was no exception.28Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P10a/273-8.

Christopher Wyvill may well have shared his father’s distaste of the Covenanters and their English allies and abettors, for he signed none of the petitions from the ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry to the king over the summer of 1640, in which they complained about the cost of military charges and pleaded poverty in the face of royal efforts to mobilise the trained bands against the Scots. However, he was among the signatories to the county election indenture on 5 October 1640, returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament.29C219/43/3/89.

Appointed a commissioner of array in the summer of 1642, Sir Marmaduke was active in raising money and men for the king in Yorkshire.30Northants. RO, FH133 unfol.; SP23/201, p. 429. Wyvill, by contrast, remained neutral, torn between his loyalty to the Stuarts and the fear that the king’s cause was being used by the Church of Rome to supplant the Protestant religion. In a poem which purports to have been written in February 1643, but was not published until 1647, when it appeared in a collection of Wyvill’s verse (dedicated to the wife of his friend, the royalist Sir Philip Warwick*, who had married into a local family), he explained his reasons for not taking up arms

ʼTis not base trembling, cowardice and fear

That makes me in this fighting age, forbear

To draw my sword; but seem an useless thing

Perhaps, whilst others by adventuring

Gain glorious titles; for my country’s good

My steps would fearless march in seas of blood,

And welcome certain ruin; yet I find

A war within myself, and stay behind.

Eternal blessings fasten on the crown,

To Charles his head, God grant him all his own;

And may as long-lived curses fall upon

Their heads who honour not his princely son,

So from my heart I wish; and yet suspect

Many unsound will sound that dialect.

The form-obtruders may deform and make

Onerous (whilst the Church of Rome doth take

Advantage, and supplant religion),

I’ll not thrust in my hand to help them on.

Whose heart can less than bleed, whose head can be

Less than a spring of tears, when his eyes see

Distempered Zion in this woefull plight,

Her sun withdrawn, enveloped with night?31Wyvill, Certaine Serious Thoughts, 16-17.

In a subsequent poem, apparently written in 1645 or 1646, he attacked what he saw as the self-interest and duplicity of the parliamentarian factions.32Wyvill, Certaine Serious Thoughts, 35-6.

It was with some measure of truth that Wyvill claimed, after the war, that he had ‘always been faithful to the Parliament and commonwealth of England and no delinquent’.33SP19/131, f. 123A. However, the fact that he received only one local appointment under the Long Parliament and its successors – to the North Riding commission for the Northern Association in June 1645 – indicates that he was regarded as politically unreliable. No doubt his neutralism during the civil war, and his father’s adherence to the king, aroused suspicion among the county’s parliamentarians. But what could not be questioned was Wyvill’s attachment to Protestantism. He was even said to have frequented the sermons of the Presbyterian divine Edward Bowles (a friend of the Fairfaxes), who preached at York during the 1640s and 1650s.34E. Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial ed. S. Palmer, iii. 456. He was also familiar with the writings of another leading York Presbyterian, Christopher Cartwright.35Wyvill, Pretensions of the Triple Crown, 112. Consistent with his claim that he was ‘no delinquent’, Wyvill was not required to compound for his share of his father’s estate when Sir Marmaduke was accepted for composition in October 1646.36SP23/201, p. 431.

Despite his affinity with the Richmond area, Wyvill probably owed his return for the borough to the third protectoral Parliament, in 1659, to his brother-in-law, James Darcy†, who belonged to the most influential local family by the late 1650s, the Darcys of Sedbury Park.37Supra, ‘Richmond’; R. Carroll, ‘Yorks. parliamentary boroughs in the seventeenth century’, NH, iii. 85-6. Wyvill received no committee appointments in this Parliament and apparently made no substantial contribution to debate. Like some of the more conservative Members, he was willing, on occasion, to make common cause with the republican opponents of the protectorate in an effort to delay or derail the government’s parliamentary programme. Thus on 18 February, he joined Thomas 3rd Lord Fairfax, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Henry Neville in support of the question that the House should proceed to determine the power of Richard Cromwell’s negative voice, before deciding whether to recognise the Cromwellian Other House.38Burton’s Diary, iii. 345. But on 21 March, following a division on whether the Scottish MPs should be allowed to sit in the House, he appears to have joined the crypto-royalist Ralph Delaval and other opponents of the army in declaring ‘against the question’.39Burton’s Diary, iv. 219. This has been taken to mean that he was against having Scottish MPs at Westminster and was thus at one with the republicans, who regarded them as Cromwellian placemen.40Bolton, ‘Yorks.’, 178. A more likely interpretation, however, is that Wyvill, rather than having voted in the negative to this question, had been opposed to having it put in the first place.

Wyvill evidently welcomed the Restoration, joining Lord Fairfax and the Yorkshire Presbyterian gentry in their declaration to General George Monck* of 10 February 1660, calling for the return of the Members secluded at Pride’s Purge or a free Parliament – either of which would almost certainly have led to the restoration of monarchy.41SP18/219/49, f. 75; A Letter and Declaration of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of York (1660, 669 f.23.48); A. H. Woolrych, ‘Yorks. and the Restoration’, YAJ xlix. 501-7. In March, Lord Fairfax appointed Wyvill a colonel in the Yorkshire militia; and that same month he was added to the North Riding bench.42Notts. RO, DD/SR/216/1; A Perfect List [of JPs] (1660). Wyvill and James Darcy were returned for Richmond in the elections to the 1660 Convention and were both listed by Philip Lord Wharton as managers of the Presbyterian interest in the House.43G.T.F. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 323-4, 345. In a debate on the bill for maintaining the Protestant religion, in July, Wyvill moved to lay aside a controversial paragraph for the re-establishment of episcopacy.44Bodl. Dep. F.9 (Bowman diary), f. 85; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Sir Christopher Wyvill’; Bolton, ‘Yorks.’, 245.

Wyvill retired from national politics after the dissolution of the Convention, although he was an active member of the North Riding magistracy.45N. Riding QS Recs. ed. J.C. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. vi), 58, 223; His most high-profile engagement with public affairs after 1660 was as the author of two publications attacking the papacy. His aim in these works was to expose the ‘conceits of Rome’s infallibility, perspicuity, succession, supremacy, perpetuity and the like’ and to reveal to the reader the purity of Protestant practice, ‘which by God’s blessing removed out of my way all those stumbling blocks that I found cast in it and whereby I was reduced into the right paths, even when my feet had almost slipped’.46Wyvill, Pretensions of the Triple Crown, 2.

At the beginning of the Exclusion crisis in 1679, Wyvill published a pamphlet to persuade Catholics to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance. He argued that the royal supremacy was consistent with the ‘priestly function’ and that papal supremacy, by enjoining ‘blind submission’, served to undermine civil order.47Wyvill, A Discourse Prepared for the Ears of some Romanists (1679), 5. During the elections to the first Exclusion Parliament in 1679, Wyvill was asked to canvass in Wensleydale on behalf of the whig candidates for knights of the shire, Charles Lord Clifford† and Henry Lord Fairfax†, which suggests that Wyvill himself was a whig by this point.48Bodl. Fairfax 33, f. 51.

Wyvill died early in 1681 and was buried at Masham on 8 February.49Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 435. No will is recorded. His grandson represented Richmond as a tory in the 1695 Parliament.50HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Sir Marmaduke Wyvill’.