HOTHAM, Sir John, 1st bt. (1589-1645), of Scorborough and Fyling Hall, Yorks.

Background and early career

Sir John Hotham and his eldest son John Hotham* were the most notorious of the 20 or so MPs who deserted the parliamentarian camp during the first half of 1643. Their support for Parliament in 1642, as much as their attempted defection to the king a year later, was closely connected with their efforts to preserve and extend their estates and ascendency in the East Riding. Edward Hyde*, who saw a link between lineage, wealth and allegiance, was convinced that if Hotham had been ‘prepared dextrously beforehand and in confidence’, he would have surrendered Hull to Charles in 1642, ‘for he was master of a noble fortune in land and [was] rich in money, of a very ancient family and well allied’.45Clarendon, Hist. ii. 48-9. But the Hothams’ treachery, although motivated largely by fear and self-interest, also reflected the growing sense of alarm among the more pacific and conservative parliamentarians at the escalation and impact of the war. By early 1643, it was common currency among those of the peace party – the group at Westminster which favoured a swift, negotiated settlement with the king – that continued civil war would lead inevitably to an overturning of the established order.

A Norman family that had taken its name from a village about eight miles west of Beverley where it had settled after the Conquest, the Hothams had established their main residence at Scorborough, some four miles north of the town, by the mid-thirteenth century.46Stirling, The Hothams, 1-2, 20; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Hotham’. Hotham’s father, who had been returned for constituencies in the North and East Ridings in the 1580s, had been the first member of the family to sit in Parliament since the 1470s.47HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Hotham’; HP Commons 1422-1504, ‘Ralph Hotham’. The hostility to popery that would mark Hotham’s own parliamentary career was not sustained by any great zeal on his part for godly reformation either in church or society generally. In about 1617, for example, he and other East Riding gentlemen organised an annual horse race, raising £300 for a piece of plate for the winner. Besides Hotham, this racing syndicate included his future son-in-law Sir Philip Stapilton*, another future parliamentarian Sir William Boynton*, as well as several prominent Catholics, notably Henry 1st Viscount Dunbar and Sir Michael Warton (father of the future royalist Michael Warton*).48C8/89/160.

In 1619, during what was perhaps an interlude between his second and third wives, Hotham secured a passport to travel to the continent, where he spent two years as a volunteer in Count Mansfeld’s army and was reportedly among the Protestant forces routed at the battle of White Mountain in November 1620.49APC 1618-19, p.454; Strafforde Letters, ii. 288; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 750. Having inherited an estate worth approximately £1,500 a year, he augmented it considerably through a series of advantageous marriages – and these unions (five in all) and their issue would place him at the centre of a wide network of leading families in east Yorkshire that included the Stricklands of Boynton, the Anlabys of Etton and the Wartons of Beverley.50Hotham Pprs. 3-4; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Hotham’; R. Carroll, ‘Parliamentary Representation of Yorks. 1625-60’ (Vanderbilt PhD thesis, 1964), 264-5. By the early 1640s he reckoned his estate was worth some £3,000 a year, making him one of the wealthiest gentlemen in northern England.51Hotham Pprs. 3, 133, 137.

Hotham owed his return for Beverley in 1625, and to every successive Parliament during Charles I’s reign, to his considerable influence as a magistrate for the town and the East Riding and as one of the region’s greatest landowners. His election at Appleby, Westmorland, in 1625, however – which he waived in preference to a seat at Beverley – was on the interest of Francis Clifford†, 4th earl of Cumberland, whose residence at Londesborough lay close to Scorborough. The earl’s electoral patronage was probably secured through his erstwhile son-in-law Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford), for whom Hotham had canvassed for one of the Yorkshire county seats.52Strafforde Letters, i. 28; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Hotham’; Carroll, ‘Parliamentary Representation of Yorks.’, 210. At Westminster, as in Yorkshire, Hotham was a firm supporter of Wentworth in his power struggle with Sir John Savile†, who looked to the royal favourite, the duke of Buckingham, for preferment. Another of the duke’s Yorkshire clients, Viscount Dunbar, described Hotham and two more of Wentworth’s allies in the East Riding, Boynton and the future regicide Sir William Constable*, as ‘in all things...opposite to your Grace’. Hotham figured prominently in the attack upon Buckingham in the 1626 Parliament, and he and other enemies of the duke and Savile (including Boynton and Constable) were purged from the Yorkshire commissions of peace that summer and autumn.53Infra, ‘Sir Matthew Boynton’; ‘Sir William Constable’; SP16/37/28, f. 42v; Add. 15858, f. 31; HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Sir John Hotham’. Hotham and Constable spearheaded opposition to the Forced Loan in the East Riding and were imprisoned by the privy council for several months late in 1627.54Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P16/213; APC, 1627, pp. 382, 418; 1627-8, pp. 17, 75, 217; J. T. Cliffe, The Yorks. Gentry, 291, 293; R. Cust, Forced Loan, 227, 289.

Wentworth’s elevation as lord president of the council of the north late in 1628 brought its inevitable rewards for his supporters; indeed, one of his first acts in his new office was to secure Hotham’s restoration to the East Riding bench and his appointment as governor of Hull.55C231/4, f. 262; Stirling, The Hothams, 30; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 294. Early in 1629, Hotham, Boynton and Constable were appointed deputy lieutenants for the East Riding – replacing Dunbar and his friends – Hotham having recommended his two colleagues to Wentworth as ‘the ablest and best affected to do his Majesty service in respect of their undoubted affection to religion, which ... in these parts is not easy to find in gentlemen of prime rank ...’.56Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P12/50; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 238, 295; HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Sir William Alford’. Early in 1632, Hotham, Boynton, Constable and Stapilton accompanied Beverley’s godly town lecturer Richard Rhodes to an audience with Archbishop Richard Neile at which Rhodes petitioned against allegations that he had held Puritan conventicles in his house.57Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P17/274; R. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560-1642, 26, 37, 271. Cholmley would claim in the mid-1640s that the ‘preciser clergy...neither loved Sir John nor he them...whom, though he made use out of politic ends, he did as much disrelish their humours and ways as any man living’.58Clarendon SP, ii. 184. The only godly minister that Hotham is known to have favoured, besides Rhodes, was the incumbent of Marske, in north Yorkshire, John Jackson, who was also a preacher at Gray’s Inn and would sit in the Westminster Assembly of Divines.59PJ i. 425, 429, 456; Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts, 256; J. Peile, Biographical Reg. of Christ’s Coll. 1505-1905, i. 292-3.

Hotham and the end of the personal rule

Hotham was one of Wentworth’s ‘most energetic subordinates’ during the first half of the Personal Rule.60HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Hotham’. He was ‘very forward’ in the collection of knighthood fines and, as sheriff of Yorkshire in 1634-5, was an enthusiastic levier of Ship Money, earning the personal thanks of the king and the resentment of Thomas Stockdale*, among others, for his ‘rigorous’ proceedings.61Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P12/209, 15/64, 261, 16/105; CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 479, 481, 504, 507, 537; CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 198, 297; Strafforde Letters, i. 495; Fairfax Corresp. ii. 226-7; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 304-5; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Hotham’. As Hotham assured Wentworth, ‘I have not only given it [Ship Money] all the help I could in the public way, but have used the best interest I have with my private friends’.62Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P16/105. In May 1635, Wentworth put Hotham in charge of the council of the north, having appointed him deputy to Vice-President Sir Edward Osborne* during the latter’s brief furlough that year.63Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P15/64; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Hotham’.

With the onset of the first bishops’ war, however, cracks began to appear in Hotham’s support for Wentworth’s administration in the north. When Osborne ordered the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants to put the trained bands in a state of readiness in July 1638, Hotham dragged his feet ‘alleging ‘tis now harvest time’.64Strafforde Letters, ii. 193. And by December of that year, Osborne was seeking Wentworth’s authority to promote Hotham’s gentry rivals in order to ‘balance the power he [Hotham] now assumes throughout all the East Riding in regulating arms [and] proportioning and levying the necessary charges incident thereunto, wherein though he pretend the case of the country, yet I pray God another spirit walk not in that shape’.65Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P18/157. In January 1639, following a royal command to mobilise the Yorkshire trained bands for possible deployment against the Scots, Hotham joined Osborne and the rest of the county’s deputy lieutenants in a petition to the king, expressing their readiness to march to any rendezvous, but reminding Charles that the trained bands had never before been deployed outside the county.66CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 305. Reports that Hotham was now refusing to pay Ship Money drew a mild rebuke from Wentworth, although the lord president was inclined to see his refractoriness as the result of ‘private animosity’, particularly towards Osborne, rather than political disaffection.67Strafforde Letters, ii. 307-9, 288, 310; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 313. Upon learning of a proposal to replace Hotham as governor of Hull by Captain William Legge†, who was establishing an arsenal there for the royal ordnance, Wentworth wrote to both secretaries of state (Sir John Coke† and Sir Francis Windebanke*) early in 1639, urging against such a course. Wentworth conceded that Hotham showed ‘more will and party [partisanship] than I could wish’, but insisted that he was

very honest, faithful and hearty, which way soever he inclines, and to be won and framed as you please with good usage. I conceive my credit with him to be such, and to understand him so well, as to make him as forward and passionate to satisfy the king as any other ... I know his faithfulness to be such as I durst answer for him with my life ... And believe me, he is as considerable a person in that way as any other gentleman in the north of England; and therefore it were ... not well utterly to cast him off and discourage him, as by taking the government of that town you shall infallibly do.68Strafforde Letters, ii. 288, 310-11.

Although Legge was never formally appointed governor of Hull in Hotham’s place, he was clearly in charge of military operations there by the spring. In March 1639, Hotham signed petitions from the Yorkshire deputy lieutenants to the king and to Sergeant Major General Sir Jacob Astley, requesting that plans for a general muster be shelved on grounds of cost.69SP16/414/92, ff. 217, 219; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 313-14. Yet the crown does not appear to have questioned Hotham’s loyalty at this stage, for his was one of only six Yorkshire militia regiments to be included in the royal army that faced the Covenanters that summer.70E351/292; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 314. If, like Sir William Savile*, Hotham used his own money to help mobilise his troops for battle, the de facto English capitulation at Berwick in June may well have increased his frustration with royal policies.71Infra, ‘Sir William Savile’.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Hotham and his kinsman Michael Warton were returned for Beverley without opposition (Hotham also secured the return of his friend and cousin Sir Hugh Cholmeley and of his son, John Hotham, for Scarborough on the North Riding coast).72Supra, ‘Beverley’; ‘Scarborough’. Four days before his election, on 23 March, Hotham had joined Cholmeley and other Yorkshire deputy lieutenants and militia officers in a letter to the privy council in which they had refused to send reinforcements to Berwick until the necessary money had been provided and due consideration had been given to ‘the last year’s past and great charge of this county’.73SP16/448/66i, f. 133; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 573. Wentworth regarded this letter as an act of ‘insolence’ and vowed to give those responsible ‘something to remember it by hereafter’.74Strafforde Letters, ii. 408-9. Nevertheless, Hotham’s was again one of six Yorkshire militia regiments that the king ordered to be mobilised against the Scots early in April.75Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland ms vol. 1608-1700, N33 Car. I: the king to Sir Edward Osborne, 4 Apr. 1640. Hotham was named to the committee of privileges on 16 April, and four days later (20 Apr.) he was a committeeman for drawing up a representation to the king concerning the crown’s perceived violation of parliamentary privileges in dissolving the 1628-9 Parliament.76CJ ii. 4a, 6b. On 22 April, he invoked the Petition of Right in questioning whether the king’s command constituted a sufficient warrant for the imprisonment of the puritan cleric and ‘martyr’ Peter Smart, and he was named that same day to a committee for considering Smart’s petition to the House.77CJ ii. 8b; Aston’s Diary, 26.

No doubt conscious of his proceedings as sheriff of Yorkshire in the mid-1630s, Hotham played down the importance of Ship Money in a debate on 24 April 1640 concerning the nation’s grievances. ‘We suffer much in Ship Money’, he admitted, but claimed that monopolies represented a far greater oppression.78Aston’s Diary, 55. After this debate he was appointed a committeeman to prepare for a conference with the Lords concerning Ship Money, innovations in religion and other grievances.79CJ ii. 12a. On 27 April, having agreed with John Pym that the Lords’ resolution to put the voting of supply before the redress of grievances was an encroachment upon the Commons’ preserve of initiating finance bills, he was named to a committee for preparing an address to the Lords for vindicating the House’s privileges.80CJ ii. 13b-14a; Aston’s Diary, 69. Two days later (29 Apr.), in the debate on a bill for the reform of parliamentary elections, he defended the right of peers to send letters of recommendation in support of their electoral clients, insisting that there was ‘never less cause to complain of lords’ letters; why should we restrain the liberty of free elections?’81Aston’s Diary, 86. When the House then turned to ecclesiastical grievances, he took issue with Sir John Culpeper, who questioned whether Laudian innovations could be deemed criminal. Hotham argued that the House should ‘not fear to call that a crime for which there is no law nor command’.82Aston’s Diary, 94.

In the Commons’ debate initiated on 2 May 1640 by the king’s request for the speedy voting of supply, along with a tentative royal offer to relinquish Ship Money as part of any compromise over grievances, Hotham sided with those Members who continued to insist upon redress before supply.83Aston’s Diary, 126; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 116-18. However, he adopted an even more inflexible stance, claiming that ‘Ship Money was not enough for his own country [i.e. county]... that military charges lay heavier on the commons [people]’.. .therefore he should unwillingly give money [i.e. vote supply] till Ship Money, military charges and matters of religion were redressed’.84Procs. Short Parl. 192. When this debate resumed two days later (4 May), he again pressed for the redress of military charges and other grievances before supply, although he wished that the ‘question of Scotland’ be left out of the reckoning.85Aston’s Diary, 131. Moreover, when Sir William Savile claimed that Yorkshire would agree to a compromise over supply if Ship Money were removed, Hotham replied that he ‘knew not what authority Sir William had for that, for where he lived, the country complained more of those military charges, and unless they might have relief [from them]...and some other grievances, they would not willingly give’.86Aston’s Diary, 142. His assessment of the situation was supported by another Yorkshire Commons-man, Henry Belasyse.87Aston’s Diary, 142-3.

By insisting on the removal of military charges as well as Ship Money, Hotham and Belasyse were partly to blame for the Commons’ rejection of the king’s compromise proposal, that, in return for an immediate vote of 12 subsidies, he would surrender Ship Money and prolong the session to hear other grievances. Hotham, like Belasyse, was probably motivated by a desire to serve his constituents. But this does not preclude the possibility that both men were also acting in concert with Pym and his allies in their efforts to prevent the king obtaining parliamentary backing, moral or financial, for his campaign against the Covenanters. Charles certainly suspected the worst of the two Yorkshire MPs, for on 8 May (three days after Parliament had been dissolved) they were summoned before the privy council to answer for their speeches of 4 May.88PC Reg. Apr.-June 1640, x. 476; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 154-5. With the king in attendance, the council questioned both men, but received ‘very undutiful and uncivil answers’.89PC Reg. x. 476. ‘Neither of these two gentlemen’, it was reported, ‘could, or would, remember what they spoke that day [4 May], alleging that what they spoke was for the country and in Parliament, which they did not expect to be called to give an account of’.90CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 154-5. However, after Francis Nevile* had ‘repeated and averred to the board’ what Hotham and Belasyse had said, they were committed to the Fleet, where they remained for ten days.91CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 130, 154-5, 166; PC Reg. Apr.-June 1640, x. 476. It was apparently in May that Wentworth (recently created the earl of Strafford) had Hotham ‘put out of all commissions for refusing Ship Money’ and for his speeches in Parliament.92Cholmley Mems. ed. Binns, 100.

Undeterred by his brief imprisonment, Hotham took a leading role that summer in presenting the county’s grievances to the king. Late in July, with the war against the Covenanters causing severe hardship in Yorkshire, Hotham, Cholmley, Belasyse and the future parliamentarian peer Philip, 4th Baron Wharton organised a petition to Charles from the county’s ‘disaffected’ gentry, denouncing enforced billeting as contrary to the Petition of Right. When it was presented at the council board, Strafford exclaimed that ‘for them at such a time as this is, thus to complain when an invasion is threatened by the Scots, it seemed to be a mutinous petition’.93Cholmley Mems. ed. Binns, 100; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1214-15; D. Scott, ‘‘Hannibal at our gates’: loyalists and fifth-columnists during the bishops’ wars – the case of Yorkshire’, HR, lxx. 274-6. On 24 August, Hotham signed the county’s second petition to the king, in which the petitioners insisted that the trained bands could not be mobilised for service against the Scots without two weeks pay in advance.94Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1231; Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 283. And, on 12 September, he signed the county’s third such petition, in which, after complaining about Ship Money, illegal billeting and various other ills, the petitioners reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers, late in August, that Charles should summon a Parliament. When this third Yorkshire petition was shown to Strafford, he refused to present it to the king, delivering instead a revised address of his own which made no mention of Parliament.95Cumb. RO (Kendal), Strickland Ms vol. 1608-1700, N38 Car. I; Cholmley Mems. ed. Binns, 102; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1264-5; viii. 601-3; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 321; Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 287-8. Angered by Strafford’s proceedings, Hotham, Cholmeley, Belasyse and several more of the ‘principal and most active gentlemen’ drew up another petition, in protest, which they intended to present to the king themselves. However, one of their number informed the court, and Hotham, Cholmeley, Belasyse and Lord Wharton were reprimanded by Charles in person. The king accused Hotham and Cholmeley of having been the chief instigators of the Yorkshire petitions and threatened that if they meddled in such matters again he would have them hanged.96Cholmley Mems. ed. Binns, 102; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 321-2. Charles had strong grounds for suspecting that at least some of the leading Yorkshire petitioners had covertly assisted the dissident English peers in inviting in the Scots over the summer. Part of the dissident peers’ plan had involved weakening the king’s army in the north, a process which the ‘disaffected’ Yorkshire gentry, by retarding the mobilisation of the county’s trained bands, had certainly contributed towards. Whether Hotham had collaborated with the dissident peers – beyond supporting the August-September petitioning campaign for a new Parliament – is impossible to say. He certainly had no great liking for their Scottish allies.97Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 319-20; Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 269-93.

Parliamentary career 1640-1

Hotham and Warton were returned for Beverley again in the elections to the Long Parliament, fending off a challenge from one of Hotham’s local gentry rivals Sir Thomas Metham, who had probably been recommended to the corporation by Strafford.98Supra, ‘Beverley’; Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 290, 292-3, 295. Hotham’s hard usage by Strafford and the crown since April seems to have strengthened the reformist convictions he had revealed in the Short Parliament, and he soon emerged as one of the most active men in the House. Between November 1640 and the September 1641 parliamentary recess, he was named to approximately 70 committees – at least three of which he chaired – and as a reporter or manager of 21 conferences with the Lords.99CJ ii. 34a, 65b, 66a, 74a, 120b, 123b, 125b, 153a, 175b, 178a, 205a, 220a, 220b, 228a, 229b, 232a, 240b, 252b, 257a, 261a, 262a, 264a, 275b, 277b. He was also employed as a messenger to the Lords on five occasions during this period.100CJ ii. 185b, 186a, 189a, 195b, 245a; LJ iv. 284b, 289b, 297a, 350a.

Ranked the tenth most active Member by early 1642 in terms of participation in debate, Hotham appears to have maintained that high profile in the House throughout his relatively brief career in the Long Parliament.101PJ i. p. xxii. He was a leading figure among the more active and reform-minded northern MPs – a group known as the ‘northern gentlemen’.102D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’, the parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ xlii. 349. According to Hyde, the most influential members of this northern interest were Hotham, Cholmeley and Stapilton (Hotham’s son-in-law), who between them possessed ‘a numerous train which attended their motions’. Hyde further maintained that the three men ‘observed and pursued the dictates’ of Pym, John Hampden and other members of the ‘governing party’ at Westminster – known as ‘the junto’ – particularly when it came to the prosecution of Strafford.103Clarendon, Hist. i. 250, 263, 315, 421. However, Hotham’s squeamishness about infringing ‘public liberties’, and his lack of sympathy with most aspects of ‘further reformation’ in religion, would not have made him a natural ally of Pym and his confederates. On 20 February 1641, for example, Hotham and Cholmeley opposed a motion of Pym which threatened to put the demands of financial necessity before ‘the fundamental liberty of the subject’.104Procs. LP ii. 502. Hyde believed it was little more than hatred of Strafford, and fear of punishment for his proceedings as a Ship-Money sheriff, that pushed Hotham towards the junto.105Clarendon, Hist. i. 524. Cholmeley took a rather more generous view of Hotham’s political motives

he was a man that loved liberty, which was an occasion to make him join at first with the Puritan party, to whom after he became nearer linked merely for his own interest and security, for in more than concerned the civil liberty he did not approve of their ways.106Clarendon SP ii. 185.

The Yorkshire royalist Sir Henry Slingesby* described Hotham as ‘but one half the Parliament’s, for he was mainly for the defence of the liberty of the subject and privilege of Parliament, but was not at all for their new opinions in church government’.107The Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby ed. D. Parsons, 91.

Many of Hotham’s committee appointments and interventions in debate during the early months of the Long Parliament indicate his support for reforming the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule of Charles I and punishing their authors – above all, Strafford.108CJ ii. 39b, 44b, 47b, 50b, 52a, 60b, 82a, 84b, 92a, 101a; Northcote Note Bk. 58, 60, 101. Hotham’s ready compliance with the earl in promoting some of the government’s most controversial financial schemes does not seem to have hampered him in this regard, for he had no qualms about demanding the withdrawal from the House of monopolists and ‘projectors’ or those who had publicly defended them – notably, Sir John Jacob, Robert Hyde and William Watkins.109Procs. LP i. 224, 226, 439; D’Ewes (N), 537. Nor did he flinch when it came to abolishing the council of the north, whose authority he had been zealous to uphold only a few years earlier.110Clarendon, Hist. i. 315.

But Hotham’s main preoccupation and the bulk of his workload at Westminster in 1640-1 related not to the matters of reform but to those of supply and the relief of the English and Scottish armies and of their reluctant and hard-pressed hosts in northern England. In one of the first debates in the House on the kingdom’s parlous finances, on 13 November 1640, he joined Cholmeley and other Members in desiring ‘rather the old way of subsidy than the new way of benevolence [i.e. forced loans]’.111Procs. LP i. 131, 133, 138. On 19 and 21 November, he was named to committees for preparing a subsidy bill and to address the financial needs of the king’s army and the northern counties.112CJ ii. 31b, 34a. And it was on 21 November that he made the first of what would be numerous motions and similar interventions in debate aimed at hastening the supply of money to the army or reducing the cost of its upkeep.113Procs. LP i. 228, 307, 336, 638; ii. 35, 471, 501, 636, 663, 694, 744; iii. 547; iv. 532, 538, 550, 554, 583, 592, 691, 693, 721; v. 277, 634, 682-3; vi. 39, 94, 124, 242, 245, 313, 456, 533, 593; Northcote Note Bk. 54, 55, 74; D’Ewes (N), 451. Reporting from the committee for the king’s army on 24 November, he related the soldiers’ ‘great want and danger of spoiling the country’ and recommended that the City be urged to advance £25,000 immediately as a stop-gap and that all popish officers – and especially one of the Covenanters’ leading Scottish opponents, the earl of Crawford – be discharged and replaced by Protestants.114CJ ii. 35a; Procs. LP i. 268, 275, 276-7, 279-80; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 177. The next day (25 Nov.), he moved that those officers who were not Parliament-men be ordered back to their regiments to keep their men in order.115Procs. LP i. 293. In further reports from the committee for the king’s army on 28 and 30 November, he outlined proposals for administering payments to both armies (with the English receiving three pounds for every two given to the Scots), discharging all papists from the king’s army and for drawing up a new muster roll ‘and to pay hereafter by that roll’ – all of which the House approved.116Procs. LP i. 356, 360, 376, 377, 381; CJ ii. 40. Such were the disorders in the army though lack of pay, he claimed on 3 December, that the soldiers had burned down houses and cut off a minister’s hand.117Northcote Note Bk. 30. On 23 December, he delivered another lengthy report from the committee for the king’s army in which he informed the House that it was facing a £75,000 funding shortfall, ‘and therefore wished we might grant 4 [additional] subsidies’, which was voted accordingly. He also proposed that the oaths of supremacy and allegiance be tendered to those officers and soldiers suspected of being Catholics.118Procs. LP ii. 34; Northcote Note Bk. 82, 104-5.

A desire to speed up Parliament’s response to the problems associated with the king’s army may well have been one of his motives in assuming the chair of a committee set up on 8 January 1641 to review the House’s business in order to expedite matters of greatest importance. On the basis of his report on 11 January, the House selected a number of committees whose work it would prioritise, including those dealing with Strafford’s trial, Ship Money, Laudian innovations and the ‘the king’s army and the north parts’.119CJ ii. 65b, 66b, 162b; Procs. LP ii. 172-3; iv. 624, 678, 680, 682. In his reports to the House as chairman of a committee established that same day (11 Jan.) for the supply and regulation of the king’s army, he emphasised the ‘great distress’ of the king’s army, and its consequent ill-discipline, and that the ‘present charges did far exceed the subsidies given’. But although he and his committee were willing to accept an offer from the customs farmers to advance £60,000 for present supply, this was rejected on the grounds that ‘the customers were guilty of great crimes’.120CJ ii. 66a, 67b, 70b, 82a; Procs. LP ii. 191, 230, 409, 650, 653; iii. 310, 311, 317-18, 320; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 6, 84. On 6 February, he seconded Pym’s motion that two subsidies be added to the four already voted for the relief of the king’s army, but this proposal, too, was rejected by the House.121Procs. LP ii. 381. Early in March he joined those Commons-men offering to bring in or provide security for money to help pay the armies, although his own pledge of £500 was by no means the most generous.122Procs. LP ii. 628, 629, 654, 655. Having helped secure an order on 6 March for paying the Scottish army £25,000, he attempted a few hours later to divert £10,000 of that sum to the king’s army, but, once again, the House would have none of it.123Procs. LP ii. 650, 653; D’Ewes (N), 451-2. On 19 and 20 March and again on 1 and 2 April, he delivered detailed reports to the effect that the armies in the north were still owed in excess of £300,000 and that more money needed to be found, although he was confident that ‘the Scots would be gone if but £100,000 [were laid] down’, with the remainder of what they were owed to follow in due course. His committee’s solution for relieving the kingdom of this crushing financial burden was to push for the disbandment of both armies by mid-April – an entirely impractical proposal given the impossibility of raising the necessary money in such short order.124CJ ii. 115a; Procs. LP ii. 809, 828; iii. 310, 311, 317-18, 320-1. Even more worrying than this financial deficit was news from the north that some of the king’s officers were contemplating a renewal of hostilities against the Scots. This alarming prospect and the first intimations of the army plot – a court-sponsored design to use military force to overawe Parliament – prompted Hotham and his committee to propose, and secure, a Commons’ order forbidding the English army or any militia units from marching without the consent of both Houses.125CJ ii. 116a; Procs. LP iii. 321, 362, 364, 410; A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, 20; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 292-3.

Before the autumn 1641 parliamentary recess, Hotham was named to only three committees that dealt specifically with religious reform, and he made no recorded contribution to the great root and branch debate in the House on 8-9 February 1641.126CJ ii. 84b, 119a, 165b. As with Sir Hugh Cholmeley and Sir Philip Stapilton, his hostility to ‘innovations and superstitious ceremonies’ and to Laudian prelacy, although deep, was not rooted in enthusiasm for the cause of godly reformation.127CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 462. In debates on 14 and 16 December 1640 on the new Canons, he identified Archbishop Laud as ‘the principal active spirit in this business’ and moved, successfully, that a committee be established – to which he was subsequently nominated – to investigate the authors of the Canons and determine whether the archbishop was guilty of high treason.128CJ ii. 52a; Northcote Note Bk. 72; Laud: Procs. LP i. 624. According to Cholmeley, Hotham was the first Commons-man in the Long Parliament to move that Laud be charged with high treason.129Clarendon SP, ii. 186. Like Pym and many other Commons-men, Hotham was convinced that Laudian clerics were part of a ‘Jesuitical faction’ bent on subverting the Protestant religion and the liberties of the subject.130Hotham Pprs. 187-8; Procs. LP ii. 807. His fear of a popish plot against the commonwealth was such that he and Sir John Clotworthy proposed a bill ‘for the gelding of priests and Jesuits’ – a suggestion that provoked ‘much laughter’ in the House.131Procs. LP vi. 7. In January 1641 he worked closely with the junto to frustrate the king’s attempt to pardon the convicted priest John Goodman. Hotham, in common with the great majority of Parliament-men, did not approve of royal clemency towards popish priests.

But it was not only the religious dimension of Charles’s leniency that may have concerned him, for the king’s use of his prerogative to reprieve Goodman was ‘taken by all to have been done of purpose for a preparative to save the life of the [lord] lieutenant [Strafford]’.132CJ ii. 72a, 73a, 74a; Baillie, Lttrs and Journals i. 295; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 162, 165-6, 167. In a debate on 13 February concerning the disarming of Catholics in England and Ireland, Hotham delivered a paper to the House in which it was alleged that ‘there were dangerous instruments in the queen’s court ... English Catholics’ who plotted with ‘the superiors of the Romish priests and Jesuits here and...foreign states abroad’.133Procs. LP ii. 441; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 261-2. When this issue re-surfaced in the House on 15 March, he sought to expedite the removal of four leading Catholics in the queen’s circle, but to leave the question of whether, by law, all papists should be removed from the royal courts to another time, prompting Hampden to ‘crave leave ... to differ from him, for...we sit here to see the laws observed, not broken’.134Two Diaries of Long Parl. 20; Procs. LP ii. 754. A week or so later (23 Mar.), Hotham took the lead in urging the House to press the Lords on the issues of disbanding the king’s Catholic-dominated army in Ireland, disarming English Catholics and removing papists at court.135Procs. LP iii. 85, 88. On 12 May, he opposed the reading of petitions from Cambridge University and the cathedral church of Canterbury ‘in favour of deans and chapters and for their continuance’.136Procs. LP iv. 334, 339; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 270-3. Later that month (27 May), he joined Sir Simonds D’Ewes in condemning William Pleydell’s violent denunciation of a bill to abolish episcopacy.137Infra, ‘William Pleydell’; Procs. LP iv. 607. On 1 July, he was added to a committee for examining the witnesses in the prosecution of Laud.138CJ ii. 194b. But Hotham’s zeal against popery and prelacy did not extend to sanctioning Puritan iconoclasm – at least when directed against the funerary monuments of the nobility and gentry – or the antics of ‘the Brownists and sectary’.139Procs. LP ii. 440; vi. 105.

Hotham was among the most energetic and remorseless of Strafford’s enemies at Westminster. On 14 November 1640, a few days after the earl’s dramatic committal to the custody of Black Rod, Hotham moved in the Commons ‘that we might go to our great business’ – i.e. the prosecution of his former patron. Five days later, on 19 November, he moved, successfully, for the appointment of a committee ‘to search the records of attainder in the [court of] king’s bench...for the furtherance of the charge against the earl of Strafford’.140Procs. LP i. 150, 190. And on 25 November, he moved – again, successfully – that the charges against the earl, which Pym had read the day before in the House, be sent up to the Lords.141Northcote Note Bk. 6. In mid-December, he joined Sir Hugh Cholmeley in accusing Sir William Pennyman* of illegally levying money in Yorkshire that autumn in order to keep militia forces loyal to Strafford in the field.142Infra, ‘Sir William Pennyman’; Northcote Note Bk. 63-4. Hotham and Cholmeley were among those added to the committee for managing Strafford’s prosecution, early in February 1641, in order to investigate allegations of brutality against another Yorkshire militia colonel and loyal Straffordian, Sir Thomas Danbie*.143CJ ii. 79b. Summoned on 7 April 1641 as a prosecution witness on the 27th article at Strafford’s trial – that Strafford had levied an illegal tax upon Yorkshire in the autumn of 1640 – Hotham corroborated testimony that the earl had tried to suppress the county’s petition of 11 September 1640. But on the question of the illegal levies, he followed Cholmeley in pleading ignorance: ‘warrants were sent out by the vice-present [Sir Edward Osborne], but how far my lord [Strafford] was interested in it, he can say nothing at all’.144Rushworth, Hist. Collns. viii. 603, 604; Procs. LP iii. 431, 441, 447. But whereas Hotham, in contrast to Cholmeley, supported the proposal to proceed against the earl by way of attainder, this did not preclude his appointment to a committee on 16 April 1641 to press the Lords for greater expedition in the trial proceedings – which, whatever their outcome, would almost certainly result in the earl’s life being spared.145Procs. LP iii. 553, 573; CJ ii. 122a. However, on 22 April, Hotham was one of five Members, including John Pym and Denzil Holles, ordered to prepare heads for a conference with the Lords to justify the bill of attainder.146CJ ii. 126a.

In the immediate aftermath of a foiled plot to spring Strafford from the Tower and spirit him away by ship, Hotham, Cholmeley and Stapilton were named to a committee on 3 May 1641 for drafting a letter to the king’s army in the north – a potential powerbase for Strafford should he escape the Tower – informing the soldiers of the House’s efforts for their maintenance.147CJ ii. 131b; Procs. LP iv. 179. That same day (3 May), he took the Protestation (and later that month the mayor and corporation of Beverley also took this oath ‘according to order and direction from Sir John Hotham’).148CJ ii. 133a; E. Riding Archives, BC/II/7/4, f. 73. Hotham may well have chaired the 3 May committee, for the next day (4 May) he reported its draft of a letter to the commanding officers in the north, assuring them that their men would be paid in full, notwithstanding the efforts of ‘some ill affected person [the army plotters]... to make a misunderstanding in the army of the intentions of the Parliament towards them’.149CJ ii. 134a; Procs. LP iv. 195, 200. The next day (5 May), Hotham delivered a letter to the House in which details of a further attempt to suborn the king’s army in the north were revealed.150Procs. LP iv. 215, 218. In response to these revelations, the House resolved on 7 May to send Hotham and Cholmeley to Yorkshire ‘for satisfying the army and to discover the plot’.151CJ ii. 138a, 138b. However, the ‘committee of seven’ (the House’s newly-appointed executive committee, of which Stapilton was a member) decided that neither man could be spared, whereupon [Sir] Henry Cholmeley* – Sir Hugh’s brother – Sir Arthur Ingram junior and John Mallory* were sent in their place.152Procs. LP iv. 247, 251, 253, 256, 276. But although he had worked with the junto to secure Strafford’s execution (which took place on 12 May), Hotham apparently had misgivings about adding to the powers that the parliamentary leadership had assumed in accomplishing the earl’s destruction and countering the army plots. Thus on 13 May, he seconded a motion by D’Ewes that letters concerning the safety of the kingdom be read before the entire House rather than be referred to Pym and the other members of the committee of seven, ‘commonly called the secret committee’.153Procs. LP iv. 359-60.

But Strafford’s trial and execution were side issues in the context of Hotham’s endeavours at Westminster during the spring and summer of 1641. His two main preoccupations remained those of supply and the state of military finances – to which a third had been added by mid-May: the protracted business of disbanding the armies in the northern counties, where, he claimed, the ‘insolency of the soldiers’ was making life intolerable for the inhabitants.154Procs. LP v. 372. The disbandment process and the huge financial, logistical and political problems it entailed, accounted for a high proportion of his appointments as a committeeman, messenger to the Lords and as a conference manager or reporter between May and September.155CJ ii. 143a, 152a, 153a, 172b, 175a, 175b, 178a, 179a, 180b, 188b, 189a, 189b, 196a, 197b, 205a, 206a, 206b, 215a, 220b, 228a, 229a, 229b, 232a, 239b, 240a, 252b, 258a, 264a, 277b; Procs. LP iv. 533, 538. He also made regular reports to the House as chairman of the committee for the supply of the king’s army and, it seems, of committees established on 11 May and 10, 14 and 25 June for ‘advancing monies’, managing the disbandment process and for reassuring the army regarding payment of its arrears and Parliament’s continued goodwill towards it despite the army plots.156CJ ii. 150a, 173b, 175a, 176b, 177b-178a, 178b-179a, 189a, 220a, 222b, 226a, 226b, 227b, 231b, 237a, 251b, 263b-264a, 270a; Procs. LP iv. 455, 459, 467, 468-9; v. 110, 112, 114, 116, 132, 144, 169, 174, 176, 204, 207, 208-9, 213, 222, 223-8, 364, 371-2; vi. 52, 54, 68, 71, 81, 94, 106, 108, 124, 128, 172, 218, 360-1, 404, 488, 492, 538, 539. His only tellership in the Long Parliament was in a minor, and apparently non-partisan, division concerning the pay of seven army officers (5 Aug.).157CJ ii. 237b. On 17 June, he presented a particularly detailed report of the sums required to pay off and disband the English and Scottish armies, which amounted to an eye-watering £507,800 – a figure that would inevitably rise the longer disbandment was delayed.158CJ ii. 177b-178a; Procs. LP v. 204, 207, 208-9, 213; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 335; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 323. At a conference with the Lords that same day (17 June), of which he was one of the managers and reporters, he went over the figures again, although, according to D’Ewes, neither he nor Sir John Culpeper ‘could make them understand the business’.159CJ ii. 178a; Procs. LP v. 205. The next day (18 May), he reported from the committee for advancing money a proposal that Isaac Penington* and Sir Henry Vane I* had suggested for a graduated poll tax, and he was named second to the committee then established for preparing the required legislation.160CJ ii. 178b-179a, 180a; Procs. LP v. 222, 223-8; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 336; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 323. His allegation on 23 June that the bishops in the Lords were deliberately frustrating the disbandment process was perhaps made in concert with the junto, which was eager for ammunition in its battle to destroy the pro-episcopacy majority in the Upper House.161Procs. LP v. 296, 297. He was certainly aligning himself with the junto on 24 June, when he moved that Pym’s report of the Ten Propositions be communicated to the Lords at a conference.162CJ ii. 185b; Procs. LP v. 316. And it is clear from several of his appointments and motions in the House that summer that he shared the junto’s concern to secure the kingdom, and the arsenal at Hull in particular, in the event that the king, on his proposed journey to Scotland, attempted to suborn elements of the English army.163CJ ii. 189b, 240b, 243a, 245a, 259b, 261a, 275b; Procs. LP vi. 270; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 360.

During the Commons’ debates in July and August 1641 on the punishment of the army plotters, Hotham repeatedly urged leniency – he evidently saw their offence as the product of ‘the violent heat of youth, which drives men on to many extravagancies’ – pleading particularly for Henry Percy* ‘in respect of the great deserts of the earl of Northumberland [Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland] to the public’. Northumberland was not only Percy’s brother, but also a recently-acquired and high-ranking ally of the junto.164Procs. LP vi. 57, 376, 385, 387; D’Ewes (C), 259; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 311. Hotham also assisted the junto in securing the appointment in August of a parliamentary commission – which included Stapilton and Hampden – to attend the king in Edinburgh.165CJ ii. 262a, 264b. Ostensibly, this commission was to liaise between king and Parliament, but its real purpose was to monitor Charles’s activities in Scotland and to strengthen the parliamentary leadership’s links with the Covenanters.166Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 321. Despite his prominence in the House during the opening session, Hotham was not appointed to the Recess Committee* on 9 September, and nor did he figure on a royalist list that autumn of the king’s leading parliamentary opponents.167HMC Salisbury, xxiv. 277.

Parliamentary career 1641-2

The disbandment of the armies in northern England – which was not completed until mid-September 1641 at the earliest – was doubtless a source of great relief for Hotham and would greatly reduce the burden of his responsibilities at Westminster.168Hotham Pprs. 48-9. Nevertheless, between the re-assembling of Parliament after the autumn 1641 recess and his departure from London in March 1642 to take up his position as parliamentary governor of Hull, he was named to approximately 35 committees and as a reporter or manager of 7 conferences and served as a messenger to the Lords on nine occasions.169CJ ii. 297b, 308b, 312a, 316a, 321a, 325b, 327b, 348a, 363b, 368a, 369b, 377a, 379a, 388a; LJ iv. 439a, 451a, 453a, 498a, 503a, 504b, 511a, 513b; PJ i. 66. The House continued to enlist his services on matters relating to supply and military finance, and he chaired a committee set up on 29 October to review and expedite the collection of the poll tax – reporting from this body on 9 December that Parliament remained in debt to the Scots, the City and to the northern counties for billet money to the tune of over £500,000.170CJ ii. 294b, 297b, 298a, 326a, 327b, 336a, 357b; D’Ewes (C), 206, 237, 256, 334. Parliament’s response to the outbreak of the Irish rebellion also accounted for a number of his assignments as a committeeman and to report conferences with the Lords during late 1641 and early 1642. Thus he was named to, and reported from, the bicameral committee on Irish affairs that the Houses established early in November to organise the Protestant war effort in Ireland. And he was part of the three-man delegation that the Commons sent to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the earl of Leicester, in mid-December to request military commissions for Sir John Clotworthy and other prominent Irish Protestants.171CJ ii. 302a, 311b, 312a, 347b, 348a, 362a, 369a; D’Ewes (C), 121-2, 127, 137.

His relations with the junto and the godly interest in the House were not without tension that autumn. On 29 October, for example, he clashed with Sir Walter Erle, Oliver Cromwell and other godly Members in arguing that it would be illegal for Parliament to force a halt to the investiture of five new bishops after the king had issued a royal warrant authorising their election.172D’Ewes (C), 52-3. And he was reluctant to embrace some of the more radical measures that Pym and his confederates thought necessary to crush the Irish rebels. On 4 November, Hotham seconded Henry Marten in urging that a bill to impress soldiers for service in Ireland be rejected on the grounds that it was contrary to the liberty of the subject.173D’Ewes (C), 83. In a debate the next day (5 Nov.) on whether to accept Scottish military assistance to suppress the rebellion – a course favoured by the junto – Hotham thought that ‘it would be a dishonour to our nation to desire help from the Scots’. Later in the same debate, however, he rejected Sir John Culpeper’s motion that if Scottish troops were sent to Ireland, Parliament should not pay them; and by 13 November he had apparently accepted the proposal of the Committee for Irish Affairs to deploy 6,000 Covenanter soldiers against the rebels.174D’Ewes (C), 91, 93, 137. Moreover, he seems to have endorsed the junto’s highly controversial attempt during the first half of November to include a clause in additional instructions for Parliament’s commissioners in Scotland that unless the king removed his evil counsellors the two Houses would ‘take such a course for the securing of Ireland as might likewise secure ourselves’.175CJ ii. 308b; D’Ewes (C), 99, 101, 104, 105; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 423-4; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 426-7. He was part of the supporting cast that helped Pym and other leading Commons-men prepare the Grand Remonstrance during the second half of November.176CJ ii. 316a; D’Ewes (C), 144, 167. And Hotham and his son and fellow MP John Hotham were prominent in denouncing the future royalist Geoffrey Palmer for demanding a right to enter a formal protest against a proposal to have the Remonstrance printed.177D’Ewes (C), 192, 198.

Hotham’s appointments during November and December 1641 suggest that he backed other provocative aspects of the junto’s campaign against the perceived forces of popery, including initiatives for disarming and arresting Catholics in England and for extending Parliament’s control over the kingdom’s military resources.178CJ ii. 316b, 319b, 321a, 327b, 363b, 364b; D’Ewes (C), 345, 368. It is a measure of the seriousness with which he took the popish threat that on 3 December he was named to a committee that effectively threatened the anti-junto majority in the Lords with a de facto parliamentary coup unless it passed the bills sent up to them ‘for the preservation of the kingdom’.179CJ ii. 330b; D’Ewes(C), 228; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 438; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 459-60. He was also among those Members who welcomed a petition from the City on 11 December, requesting that the votes of the bishops and Catholic peers be removed and that the kingdom be put in a posture of defence against the ‘many treasons and conspiracies ... [of] the papist and malignant party here’ and in Ireland.180D’Ewes (C), 271-2. Late in December he assisted the junto in gathering evidence for possible impeachment proceedings against the king’s leading adviser the earl of Bristol.181CJ ii. 358a; D’Ewes (C), 352-3, 357; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 479.

Hotham was closely involved in Parliament’s efforts to secure itself and the kingdom against the king and his supporters during the early months of 1642. He and Stapilton were named to a four-man Commons delegation on 3 January to inform the king that the six Parliament-men whom Charles proposed to impeach for high treason would ‘be ready to answer any legal charge laid against them’.182CJ ii. 367a. In the hours preceding the king’s attempted arrest of the accused Members on 4 January, Hotham was appointed one of the managers of a conference with the Lords and was sent as a messenger to them, for addressing the threat posed by Charles’s warlike preparations at Whitehall and the Tower.183CJ ii. 368a. Responding to Charles’s perceived violation of its proceedings, the Commons set up a ten-man committee the next day (5 Jan.), to which Hotham was named, for vindicating the privileges of Parliament and providing for the safety of both kingdoms.184CJ ii. 368b. Having received intelligence that the king had sent William Cavendish, 1st earl of Newcastle, and William Legge to secure Hull using Metham’s militia regiment, Parliament, on Stapilton’s motion, ordered Hotham – ‘who hath command of that town already by patent from the king’ – to draw several companies of the East Riding trained bands into Hull ‘for the safeguard of that place and magazine there’. The two Houses gave further order that Hotham was not to deliver up the town or magazine ‘without the king’s authority, signified unto him [Hotham] by the Lords and Commons’.185Nottingham Univ. Lib. Cavendish corresp., Pw 1/673; Life of Newcastle ed. C. Firth, 8-9; CJ ii. 371a, 371b, 372a; LJ iv. 505b, 585; PJ i. 37, 41, 46-7; Hotham Pprs. 121, 124; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 457; I. E. Ryder, ‘The seizure of Hull and its magazine, January 1642’, YAJ, lxi. 139-48. Hotham was too important a figure for the Commons to dispense with his services immediately, however, and it was his son, John Hotham, who implemented these orders.186Supra, ‘John Hotham’; Hotham Pprs. 50-1. Hotham senior would later claim that he took on office of parliamentary governor of Hull ‘at the earnest desire of Mr Pym’.187Hotham Pprs. 121. But Hyde believed that Pym and his confederates were well aware that Hotham, despite having

concurred with them in all their violent ways ... was not possessed with their principles in any degree, but was very well affected ... to the government both in church and state ... and therefore they sent his son ... in whom they confided, to assist him in that service [at Hull], or rather to be a spy upon his father.188Clarendon, Hist. i. 523-4.

But it is clear from a number of Hotham senior’s appointments and contributions to debate during the early months of 1642 that he remained convinced of a deep-laid popish plot against the English state and of the need for Parliament to assume control of the kingdom’s armed forces, including the navy, and of the war effort in Ireland in order to defeat it.189CJ ii. 369b, 372a, 378b, 379a, 385a, 391b, 393a, 400a, 412b, 433a; iv. 458b; PJ i. 55, 66, 70, 148, 181, 183, 199, 223, 281-2. It was doubtless with this necessity in mind that he joined Pym, Holles and Stapilton on 13 January in supporting a proposal to hand over Carrickfergus and other strongholds in Ireland to the Scots and for trusting to their ‘fidelity’ to return them once the Irish rebels had been defeated.190CJ ii. 375b; Add. 64807, f. 25. After the first reading, on 26 January, of a bill for granting the king tonnage and poundage for life, Hotham combined with Pym and Holles again in opposing a second reading, ‘for so long as these counsels [at court] be followed, these moneys may be employed against us’.191PJ i. 183; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 474. The next day (27 Jan.), he joined Pym and other Commons-men in denouncing the king’s bedchamber man, James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond, for trying to secure an adjournment of the Lords for six months and thereby effectively put a stop to all parliamentary business. ‘To adjourn the House at this time’, Hotham insisted, ‘’tis no less than to lose Ireland and to hazard this kingdom’.192Add. 64807, f. 37; PJ i. 199.

Understandably, he was keen to promote measures for strengthening his and Parliament’s control of Hull. On 15 January, he moved that Parliament request the king’s assent to its orders concerning Hull. And on 20 January he agitated successfully for orders from both Houses that the mayor of Hull – who had refused entrance to Hotham’s militia regiment – the earl of Newcastle and Legge be summoned to Westminster. He also talked down a motion for sending Peregrine Pelham* to overcome municipal resistance to Parliament’s orders, arguing that ‘he [Pelham] might think himself obliged by his oath [as a freeman] not to admit any soldiers into the town’.193CJ ii. 383b, 387b, 388a, 407b, 468a; LJ iv. 527b; PJ i. 78, 81, 90, 95, 114-15, 116, 124, 126, 127, 248, 514; ii. 3, 4. Perhaps with an eye to extending his authority more broadly in eastern Yorkshire, he delivered a petition to the House from the well-affected of Cleveland on 5 February, requesting arms to defend themselves against the region’s Catholics – which ‘occasioned much and long debate touching the putting of Yorkshire and the rest of the kingdom into a posture of defence’.194PJ i. 281-2.

Governor of Hull 1642-3

Hotham left Westminster in mid-March 1642 to take up his command at Hull. On 21 March, Hotham junior informed the House that because of the ‘many distractions of the kingdom’ his father had been necessitated to draw more forces into Hull.195PJ ii. 8, 67-8. The Commons accepted this fait accompli and agreed to provide pay for Hotham’s additional troops.196CJ ii. 497a. The next day (22 Mar.), however, the two Houses passed an order that Hotham was to bring no further troops into the town without the prior approval of Parliament.197CJ ii. 493a. In having the magazine moved from Hull to London in April – which Hotham had pressed for on the grounds that it would deny the king arms and therefore lessen the likelihood of civil war – the House was careful to ensure that he acted in accordance with its orders.198CJ ii. 508a, 528b; HMC Buccleuch, i. 295; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 49. With the king clearly intent by mid-April on confronting Hotham at Hull and preventing the magazine’s removal, Hotham junior secured a vote of both Houses that Parliament would cover his father against any ‘inconvenience’ that might arise by reason of his employment at Hull.199CJ ii. 531a, 532; LJ iv. 722b-723a; v. 4a; PJ ii. 181-2; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 503-4.

Forewarned of the king’s arrival before Hull, Hotham consulted the aldermen, including Pelham, before shutting the gates on Charles (23 Apr. 1642). Kneeling on the walls as he addressed the king, Hotham protested his loyalty but said he could not admit Charles without breach of the trust reposed in him by Parliament and incurring ‘to me and my posterity the odious name of a villain and faith-breaker’. Asked by Charles whether he had a specific order for his actions, Hotham had to confess he had none.200LJ v. 16b, 27a, 28b-29a; PJ ii. 245, 246; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 47-9; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 567; B. N. Reckitt, Charles the First and Hull 1639-45, 26-30. But as Parliament later emphasized, ‘although Sir John Hotham had not an order that did express every circumstance of that case, yet he might have produced an order of both Houses which did comprehend this case’.201Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 578. The next day (24 Apr.), Charles wrote to the Lords, charging Hotham with high treason and demanding his exemplary punishment. But both Houses resolved on 26 April that Hotham had acted entirely in accordance with their commands and that declaring him a traitor constituted a high breach of parliamentary privilege and was against the liberty of the subject.202CJ ii. 542, 547; LJ v. 16b-17a, 27a. Hotham (or parliamentarian propagandists writing in his name) later justified his actions by appealing to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and the necessity of saving the king from his evil counsellors and the kingdom from civil war.203Five Matters of Note (16-23 May 1642), sigs. A3v-A4 (E.148.27); Sir Iohn Hothams Resolution Presented to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty at Beverley (1642), sigs. A2-A4 (E.155.18); Reckitt, Charles the First and Hull, 42-3. At the time, however, he may have been swayed more by the belief that there was a plan to murder him if the king gained admission to the town. Indeed, according to Sir Hugh Cholmeley it was this which weighed most heavily with him, having assured his friends before he left London that he would not deny the king entrance into Hull.204CJ ii. 551a; LJ v. 27b, 29a; Clarendon SP, ii. 182; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 48; HMC Montagu, 152; HMC Egmont Diary, i. 234.

The Commons kept in close contact with Hotham after April 1642, mainly through Hampden and Pym as members of the Committee of Safety*, and every effort was made to meet his frequent requests for more men and money. In response to his plea in mid-May for a committee to help him discharge his duties as governor, the House appointed ten or so Yorkshire and Lincolnshire MPs to assist him, although most of this group’s work devolved on just three Commons-men: Hotham junior, Pelham and John Alured. Selected and trusted by Pym and his allies, these MPs were appointed as much to keep Hotham in line as to provide him with assistance.205Supra, ‘John Alured’; infra, ‘Peregrine Pelham’; CJ ii. 542b, 545b, 555a, 560a, 561b, 577b, 584b-585a, 590b, 592, 595a, 604b, 605a, 622a, 623b, 635a, 638b, 721b, 743b, 797b, 840b, 856a, 863a, 885a, 888b, 889b, 938a, 949b, 972b, 974b; iii. 10a, 29b; LJ v. 71b; PJ ii. 336, 341, 379, 382; iii. 115, 118, 196, 228, 229, 232, 272; Hotham Pprs. 52-9, 61-2, 66-7, 71, 72-3; Mercurius Aulicus no. 24 (11-17 June 1643), 320 (E.56.11). In August, the two Houses resolved that Hotham be paid £5 a day for his salary as governor.206CJ ii. 729a; LJ v. 319b.

After holding secret talks with the royalist grandee George Lord Digby*, who had been taken prisoner and brought to Hull in June 1642, Hotham may have given serious thought to surrendering the town to the king. If Hyde can be credited, Digby played on Hotham’s loyalty, his ambition and his fear of civil war to persuade him to change sides and to carry Hull with him. Hotham allegedly told Digby that when he took on the government of the town ‘he did it with no purpose of disserving his majesty and did believe the intentions of the Parliament at that time to have been much better than he had now reason to apprehend’. He also inveighed against his son and other members of the Hull committee, who, he alleged, kept him under constant surveillance and were the real power in the town. At his trial in 1644, Hotham would claim that Digby had never revealed his true identity and had been intent only on deceiving his captors and regaining his freedom. But this testimony is hard to reconcile with the king’s command to Digby early in July 1642 to offer Hotham a royal pardon if he agreed to deliver up Hull, ‘which I must and will have, though with the hazard of my life and crown’. Whatever actually passed between Hotham and Digby, the outcome of their talks was that Hotham released Digby, who then persuaded the king to lay siege to Hull. Yet if Hotham had indeed plotted with Digby to betray Hull, he either had second thoughts or the parliamentarian interest in the town was too strong for him, for the king’s forces were successfully rebuffed and the siege abandoned.207Belvoir Castle, Original letters 1641-52, QZ.22, f. 12b; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 251-67; Hotham Pprs. 127-8; HMC Portland, i. 41; PJ iii. 173; Reckitt, Charles the First and Hull, 47-61.

Despite his strong desire for an accommodation with the king, Hotham was a fierce critic of the Yorkshire treaty of pacification that was signed under the auspices of the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and other leading members of the West Riding gentry on 29 September 1642. Hotham sent a copy of this treaty to Westminster with a letter attacking it as a strategic blunder and a violation of parliamentary authority. This outburst was prompted in part by the Hothams’ rivalry with the Fairfaxes and their circle in the West Riding, whom they appear to have regarded as rabble-rousers and, in the person of Thomas Stockdale, upstarts. Having taken all the risks in their defiance of the king at Hull, Sir John and Hotham junior – who was now a captain in the parliamentarian army – evidently saw Lord Fairfax’s appointment as commander-in-chief of Parliament’s forces in Yorkshire as a slight upon their honour and military reputations, not to mention a challenge to their pretensions to command in the East and North Riding.208Supra, ‘John Hotham’; CJ ii. 797b; Reasons Why Sir Iohn Hotham, Trusted by the Parliament, Cannot in Honour Agree to the Treaty of Pacification (1642, E.240.30); Certaine Letters sent from Sir Iohn Hotham (1643), 7, 9; Hotham Pprs. 60-1, 74, 75, 122, 126; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275.

Yet despite the fact that he had denounced the Yorkshire treaty of pacification, Hotham wrote to the Speaker and to the earls of Northumberland and Holland early in October 1642, pleading that they use their best endeavours to induce Parliament to an accommodation with the king.209Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275. The main impediment to peace in Hotham’s eyes was still the presence of evil counsellors at court. Once these were removed, he was convinced that Charles would clearly see the ‘glorious mixture and temperament of a just prerogative and a people’s liberties’, as well as ‘the wicked practices of those prelates who for promotions had almost sold our religion’.210Hotham Pprs. 187-9. These letters reportedly ‘begot an ill opinion of Sir John amongst some powerful Members’.211Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275. Hotham also fell out that autumn with Peregrine Pelham, who, he alleged, was stirring up the inhabitants of Hull against his authority.212Infra, ‘Peregrine Pelham’; Harl. 164, ff. 155v, 161v, 166v; Add. 18777, f. 69v; Hotham Pprs. 62-5.

By late 1642, Hotham was engaged, through his son, in secret negotiations with the earl of Newcastle, the commander of the king’s forces in the north. Captain Hotham wrote to Newcastle on 27 December, assuring him that Hotham senior’s refusal to surrender Hull to the king ‘was only to discharge the public trust imposed upon him and not any disaffection to his [the king’s] service’.213Supra, ‘John Hotham’; Hotham Pprs. 74-5. This ‘treaty’ with Newcastle, besides helping to keep Hull and the Hotham estates free from royalist aggression, was an expression of the Hothams’ growing disenchantment with the parliamentary cause, which was exacerbated by Captain Hotham’s rivalry with Lord Fairfax over ‘superiority of commands’ in Yorkshire.214Supra, ‘John Hotham’; Merc. Aulicus, 3 (15-21 Jan. 1643), 28 (E.245.36). They were also worried that the longer the war continued, the greater the risk that ‘the necessitous people would rise up against the nobility and gentry.215Hotham Pprs. 75. But though anxious for peace and ambitious for preferment, whether from Parliament or the king, the Hothams were, according to Cholmeley, ‘cautious of being engaged too far, having an eye at the inclination of the Scots, who, if they appeared for the Parliament ... would balance the business on that side’.216Clarendon SP, ii. 182. On 4 January 1643, with Parliament busy debating the terms of peace proposals to the king, Hotham senior wrote to the Speaker – possibly at the urging of the peace party grandees at Westminster – advising Parliament ‘if we could but get our counsels to be presented unto him [the king] upon even terms, he would discover his unhappy counsellors [and] peace and unity would be our endeavours’.217Add. 18777, f. 121v. When the letter was read in the House on 10 January it was greeted with surprise and dismay and was ordered to be kept from public view.218CJ ii. 920b; Mercurius Aulicus no. 2 (8-14 Jan. 1643), 21 (E.86.22).

Parliament’s inability to meet Hotham’s constant demands for supply during the winter of 1642-3 put further strain on his relations with the parliamentary leadership. In mid-February, Pym received ‘another angry letter’ from Hotham, warning that unless the House sent down money quickly ‘they must not blame him if he took that course which God had put into his mind for the cause’.219Harl. 164, f. 303; Mercurius Aulicus no. 8 (19-25 Feb. 1643), 102 (E.246.41). Pym wrote a conciliatory letter in reply, assuring him that the House and Committee of Safety would do all they could to send him a ‘good sum of money’ and acknowledging his ‘great service’. Nevertheless, Hotham continued to badger Parliament for money.220CJ ii. 1000b; iii. 83b; Hotham Pprs. 81-2, 83-6; Add. 31116, pp. 54, 99; Harl. 164, f. 352v; Certaine Letters, 2. And on 17 March, he wrote to Lord Fairfax, warning that ‘unless he [Fairfax] would send him some succours, he [Hotham] and Sir Hugh Cholmeley must be forced to take new counsels’.221Harl. 164, f. 337. Cholmeley’s defection to the royalists just a few days later aroused further ‘jealousies’ against Hotham at Westminster, even though, on learning of Cholmeley’s intentions, he had tried to persuade him to remain loyal to Parliament.222Mercurius Aulicus no. 6 (5-11 Feb. 1643), 74 (E.246.26); Certaine Letters, 1; Hotham Pprs. 93; Cholmley Mems. ed. Binns, 143. Hotham’s attempts to take Scarborough from Cholmeley earned him the thanks of the House for his ‘good and faithful service’; and early in April he wrote to Pym’s friend Sir Thomas Barrington* expressing his abhorrence at the idea of ‘betraying a trust put upon me by so great a body as the House of Parliament’.223CJ iii. 28a, 30a; Add. 31116, p. 79; Certaine Letters, 5.

Such professions of loyalty to Parliament must be set against the Hothams’ apparent hostility to Pym’s strategy for winning the war – that is, negotiating a military alliance with the Scots – and, more damningly, their willingness to treat with the queen after her landing at Bridlington in March.224Clarendon SP, ii. 182-3; Hotham Pprs. 144; Certaine Letters, 7, 9. Moreover, there are signs that they were looking to the outcome of the Oxford peace treaty that spring to provide them with honourable grounds for quitting Parliament.225Hotham Pprs. 87, 88; Clarendon SP, ii. 185. But the king’s final terms to Parliament were a great disappointment to Hotham, or so he informed the earl of Newcastle. Had Charles ‘offered reason to the Parliament’, claimed Hotham, ‘I should, with my life and fortunes, more willingly have served him than ever I did any action in my life’.226Hotham Pprs. 97. Early in May, Captain Hotham wrote to Newcastle, explaining that ‘the reason of his [Hotham’s] standing a little aloof is that he so infinitely wishes the peace of the kingdom, which he thinks the king’s last answer tends not to, that I know it hath staggered him much’.227Hotham Pprs. 99.

What finally caused Hotham to desert Parliament was the imprisonment of Captain Hotham by Cromwell and Colonel John Hutchinson* at Nottingham in June 1643. Hotham senior wrote to Parliament in ‘menacing style’, demanding his son’s release and justice against Cromwell.228Supra, ‘John Hotham’; Hotham Pprs. 103; Clarendon SP, ii. 183. Captain Hotham managed to slip his guard, however, and Hotham wrote to him at Lincoln, congratulating him on his escape from the ‘great Anabaptist’ – i.e. Cromwell – and implying that he was preparing to defect to the king.229Hotham Pprs. 103; Reckitt, Charles the First and Hull, 104-5. The Commons, having already been alerted to Hotham’s intrigues by his kinsman, the puritan minister John Saltmarsh, sent instructions to Sir Matthew Boynton to secure the town, which he accomplished, with help from the mayor and some of the citizens, on 29 June. Both the Hothams were apprehended – Captain Hotham in Hull, Sir John after fleeing to Beverley – and were conveyed in short order to London.230CJ iii. 151a, 152a; Add. 19398, f. 146; A True Relation of the Discoverie of a...Plot for the Delivering up...of Hull (1643), 4-5 (E.59.2); Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 275-6; Reckitt, Charles the First and Hull, 75, 78-82.

Imprisonment, trial and execution 1643-5

On 6 September 1643, the Commons resolved that Hotham be kept a close prisoner in the Tower, and the next day (7 Sept.) he was brought to the bar of the House and examined concerning his dealings with Lord Digby, after which he was disabled from sitting as an MP.231CJ iii. 230b, 232a. The Hothams were held close prisoners in London for almost a year and a half before they were brought to trial. There were several reasons for this delay: the difficulty in assembling witnesses (many of whom were officers in the northern army); the lack of incontrovertible evidence against the two men; and their refusal to answer questions except before the Commons.232Mercurius Britanicus no. 3 (5-12 Sept. 1643), 22 (E.67.8); Add. 31116, pp. 143, 146, 190, 284; CJ iii. 213a, 218a. But the main reason, according to Hyde, was that the Hothams had ‘so many friends in both Houses of Parliament, and some of that interest in the army, that they were preserved from further prosecution’.233Clarendon, Hist. iii. 527.

Support for the Hothams among the more peace-minded Parliamentarians may indeed have been a factor in postponing their trial. Yet equally important was the apprehension on the part of many MPs that if the two men were tried by court martial, as their crimes and military rank dictated, they would escape punishment. Jurisdiction in the Hothams’ case was claimed by Parliament’s commander-in-chief Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, who was not only a patron and close friend of Sir John Hotham’s son-in-law, Sir Philip Stapilton, but also shared, by late 1643, the Hothams’ desire for a negotiated settlement. The Commons suspected, and with good reason, that if ever the Hothams were tried by court martial, the lord general and his friends would arrange for their acquittal.234[William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele], Vindiciae Veritatis (1654) 46-7 (E.811.2); Add. 31116, pp. 165, 185. Consequently, the Hothams' enemies in the Commons, who were apparently in the majority, were obliged to delay proceedings against them until they could be sure of obtaining a conviction.235CJ iii. 320b; Add. 31116, p. 190.

Two developments took place during the second half of 1644 which encouraged the Hothams' enemies to bring them to trial. Firstly, the discovery of some of the Hothams’ correspondence with Newcastle, seized in the earl’s coach after the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor in July.236CJ iii. 562a. The Commons now had firm evidence of the Hothams’ treacherous proceedings. Secondly, a considerable weakening in Essex’s influence and popularity as commander-in-chief after a summer of humiliating parliamentarian defeats in the south, culminating in the surrender of his army in Cornwall. By the autumn of 1644, the lord general’s opponents at Westminster felt strong enough to proceed against the Hothams on the basis of an ordinance passed in August for establishing a court martial.237Clarendon, Hist. iii. 528. Late in November a court martial was convened to try the Hothams – beginning with Sir John – under the presidency of Sir William Waller*, who was committed to new modelling Parliament’s armies. Hotham senior was charged in court with traitorously betraying his trust by, among other things, corresponding with Digby, Newcastle and the queen, failing to supply Fairfax with arms, slanderous words against Parliament and plotting to betray Hull to the royalists. In his defence, on 2-4 December, Hotham claimed that he had done nothing contrary to his commission – the extreme latitude of which he emphasized – and that the royalists and Fairfax’s supporters, chiefly Alured and Stockdale, had maliciously conspired against him.238Hotham Pprs. 26-7, 120-40; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 744-5. The treaty with Newcastle, he argued, was an act of military necessity given how starved the Hull garrison was of pay and supplies by early 1643.

And for the words that I used in those treaties, you know no man fisheth with a bare hook. I must some way make my offers probable ... either with passionate relations of my discontent or ... solemn promises or narrations of my preparations, which, you see, were false, else my treaty would have seemed groundless.239Hotham Pprs. 139.

The court was not convinced, however, and, on 7 December, sentenced him to death.240Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 745. Captain Hotham’s trial, which began on 9 December, would end with the same verdict.241Supra, ‘John Hotham’.

In the event, the Hothams’ court martials settled little, for their fate by this stage was contingent upon the struggle for supremacy at Westminster between Essex’s supporters – soon to be dubbed Presbyterians – and those who favoured new modelling: the Independents. Hotham senior, it was reported, had ‘many powerful friends, as Sir Philip Stapilton and others of the Presbyterian party’, and they worked hard during December to win him a reprieve. But their efforts were consistently opposed by ‘divers of the Independents, his mortal enemies, he having uttered some speeches against Cromwell and the Independents in general, which much exasperated the whole party’.242Clarendon SP, ii. 184. Stapilton and another leading Essexian Sir William Lewis were majority tellers on 24 December in favour of granting Hotham senior a week’s stay of execution (the defeated tellers were William Strode I and Cromwell).243CJ iii. 734b. And on 28 December, Hotham petitioned the Lords that either his own life or that of his son might be spared ‘that this whole family ... may not be cut off root and branch’.244LJ vii. 100b, 112b, 113a, 114b, 116b-117a. The Essexians in the Lords were sympathetic to Hotham senior and, citing his ‘former merits and good service’, endeavoured to pressure the Commons into sparing his life.245CJ iv. 4a, 4b; LJ vii. 117a. On 30 December, however, the Commons voted by 94 votes to 46 to uphold the sentence against him.246CJ iv. 4b. The majority tellers were Cromwell and another prominent supporter of new modelling, Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire; their opponents were Stapilton and Sir John Coke. Hotham’s friends managed to secure an order from the Lords on 31 December – the day before sentence upon Hotham was scheduled to be carried out – for another stay of execution. But the next day (1 Jan. 1645), with the authority of the court martial due to expire on 2 January, the Commons insisted ‘that the execution of Sir John Hotham should be no longer put off than till tomorrow’.247CJ iv. 7a, 7b; LJ vii. 118a, 118b; Add. 31116, pp. 363, 365; Hotham Pprs. 28, 200; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 528. Hotham junior, who was even more unpopular than his father, went to the block on 1 January.248Supra, ‘John Hotham’. On 2 January, ‘a motion was made again in the House for the saving of Sir John Hotham, his son being executed, and it endured some debate ... many moving for it, but they could not prevail’.249Add. 31116, p. 366. Accordingly, Hotham was brought to Tower Hill, and, after a short speech in which he denied betraying Parliament’s trust, he was beheaded. He was buried that same day (2 Jan.) at All Hallows by the Tower.250Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 749-50; Hotham Pprs. 28-9, 200; Maskell, Allhallows Barking, 81.

To his contemporaries, Hotham appeared as a man mastered by pride and ambition, and yet at the same time shrewd and with at least the capacity for sound judgment. Sir Henry Slingesby thought him ‘covetous and ambitious’, but acknowledged that he was ‘not easily led to believe as another does or hold an opinion for the author’s sake ... for what he held was clearly his own judgement’.251Slingsby Diary ed. Parsons, 91. Hyde described him as ‘a rough and rude man, of great covetousness, of great pride and great ambition, without any bowels of good nature or the least sense or touch of generosity’, yet conceded that he ‘judged well, he was a man of craft’.252Clarendon, Hist. ii. 261-3. Probably the most accurate assessment of Hotham’s character is that of Sir Hugh Cholmeley

Sir John was a man of good understanding and ingenuity, yet of a rash and hasty nature and so much wedded to his own honour, as his passion often over-balanced his judgement, and yet he was able to give good counsel and advice, where his own interest was not concerned.253Clarendon SP, ii. 185.

In May 1645, the Commons concurred with the Lords in lifting the sequestration on the Hothams’ property on the grounds that ‘there was no attainder laid upon them to corrupt the blood of their heirs upon a judgment of martial law, as [there would have been] if they had been condemned by the common law’.254CJ iv. 71b, 140a; LJ vii. 369b; Add. 31116, p. 418. The bulk of Hotham’s estate, which included goods and merchandise in the East India Company and elsewhere ‘employed in the way of trade or interest’, passed to his grandson Sir John Hotham†, 2nd bt., who represented Beverley six times between 1660 and 1689.255C6/191/20; HP Commons, 1660-1690, ‘Sir John Hotham, 2nd bt.’.