HOWARD, Edward, Lord Howard of Escrick (c.1602-75), of Escrick, Yorks., and Tollesbury Hall, Essex.

Howard was a scion of one of England’s greatest noble houses. In 1622, he inherited his mother’s estate in and around Escrick, in Yorkshire, by reversion, and he consolidated his good fortune the following year by marrying a niece of the royal favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, who declared that he would ‘not only be an uncle but a father unto them’.56C142/435/119; Chamberlain Letters ed. McClure, ii. 513; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Edward Howard II’. Howard probably owed his return for Calne in 1624 and 1625 to a family interest derived from his mother, while his election at Hertford in 1628 has been ascribed to the patronage of William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury, who had married his sister.57HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Calne’; ‘Hertford’; ‘Sir Edward Howard II’; J.K. Gruenfelder, Influence in Early Stuart Elections (Columbus, Ohio, 1981), 180. He made little impact in the Commons before his elevation to the Lords early in 1628 as Baron Howard of Escrick – reportedly through the influence of Buckingham. If Sir Edward Hyde* can be credited, Howard was ‘absolutely governed’ by Buckingham, and it was only as a result of the duke’s death in 1628 and that of his (Howard’s) wife in 1634 that he ‘withdrew himself from following the court and shortly after from wishing it well and ... delivered himself up body and soul to be disposed of by that party which appeared most averse and obnoxious to the court and government’.58Clarendon, Hist. i. 392.

Although royalist commentators, such as Hyde, were naturally prone to regard defectors to the ‘popular party’ in the worst possible light, Howard’s willingness to tie his fortunes to what was in fact a small and (before 1640) relatively powerless group among the nobility at least argues courage on his part. While he may not have gone as far as William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, and Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, in opposing the first bishops’ war, his response to the king’s summons to the nobility to attend him with horse and armour in the spring of 1639 was less than fulsome.59CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 439. Similarly, in the Short Parliament he was part of the minority in the Lords that voted against the granting of supply before the redress of grievances.60CSP Dom. 1640, p. 66. More revealingly still, he put his name to one of the most controversial (and potentially incriminating) documents of the 1640s – the petition of the Twelve Peers to Charles in August 1640, demanding that he summon Parliament.61CSP Dom. 1640, p. 640; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 149-50. Indeed, it was Howard and Lord Mandeville (Sir Henry Montagu†, the future earl of Manchester) who presented the petition to the king.62CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 15; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 325. Howard’s role in helping to bring down the personal rule of Charles I prompted the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) to urge that he be tried for sedition.63Adamson, Noble Revolt, 100.

Why Howard chose to run such a dangerous course in 1640 is not immediately obvious. There is little evidence, for example, that he was man of strong godly convictions, which may help explain why he was not as consistently or enthusiastically pro-Scots as several other of the dissident peers, notably Mandeville.64Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 189-90. His household chaplain by the mid-1640s, the ‘very orthodoxal [sic]’ John Tindall, seems to have conformed at the Restoration.65Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 124-5, 127; CCC 1246; ‘Matthew Tindal’, Oxford DNB; Clergy of the C. of E. Database 1540-1835 ‘Bere Ferrers with Bere Alson (ID: 16002)’. In the end, all we are left with is Hyde’s claim that Howard (like other prominent members of his family) shared the peers’ personal animus against Archbishop William Laud and Strafford.66Clarendon, Hist. i. 203, 244; J.B. Crummett, ‘The Lay Peers in Parliament 1640-44’ (Manchester Univ. PhD thesis, 1972), 68. Whatever his political motivation, he was evidently trusted by the parliamentary leadership, for in August 1641 he was appointed by the Lords to the parliamentary delegation to attend the king in Edinburgh.67CJ ii. 262b, 264a, 265b-266a; LJ iv. 370b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 371, 393. Publicly, this committee was to liaise between king and Parliament, but its real purpose was to monitor Charles’s proceedings in Scotland and to strengthen the leadership’s links with the Scottish Covenanters.68Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 321; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 371, 400, 426. The committee’s correspondence with the parliamentary leadership in London represents the only large cache of Howard’s papers to have survived.69Beinecke Lib. Osborn shelves, OSB mss 61, Howard of Escrick pprs.

Howard was appointed lord lieutenant of Worcestershire under the Militia Ordinance of March 1642, although it is doubtful whether he ever acted upon this charge.70LJ iv. 490a, 521b, 578b; CJ ii. 426a; Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 440, 467. The only county where he enjoyed any influence or standing was Yorkshire, and he was therefore a natural choice to head the delegation that the two Houses sent to attend Charles at York in May.71LJ v. 37a. The commissioners’ task was ostensibly one of trying to smooth relations between Westminster and the king, but their actual role was to gather military support for Parliament.72Cholmley Mems. ed. J. Binns (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. cliii), 103. The king suspected as much and advised them not to make any party for themselves or to obstruct his plans, on pain of imprisonment.73LJ v. 61; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 317.

With the outbreak of civil war, Howard remained at Westminster, where he devoted himself, apparently enthusiastically, to the work of the Lords and its committees.74Crummett, ‘Lay Peers in Parliament’, 404, 433, 434. Politically, he seems to have steered a rather idiosyncratic course during the first two years of the conflict. He was seen by contemporaries, and has been identified since, as one of the peace-party peers in the Lords and on the Committee of Safety* – of which he was an active member.75Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; Harl. 483, f. 40v; Hexter, King Pym, 58; L. Glow, ‘The cttee. of safety’, EHR lxxx. 299, 313; Crummett, ‘Lay Peers in Parliament’, 299, 367, 382. However, his presence on an unofficial parliamentary delegation to the Scots commissioners in the spring of 1643 – presumably to sound them out about a military alliance against the king – suggests that he enjoyed the confidence of his colleagues on this mission, the prominent war-party men Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, Sir William Armyne and Sir Henry Vane II.76Mercurius Aulicus no. 20 (14-20 May 1643), 252 (E.104.21). That he maintained friendly relations with the earl of Dorset (Sir Edward Sackville†) – a leading figure in the royalist peace camp – was not necessarily incompatible with trying to wring concessions from the king by force, or at least the threat of force.77Bodl. Nalson III, f. 92; HMC Portland, i. 136. Yet in February 1644 and again in May, Howard was one of several peers whom the anti-Scots, the peace interest in the Lords sought (unsuccessfully) to have added to the Committee of Both Kingdoms*.78Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’.

Howard’s apparent vacillation over whether to bring in the Scots or pursue a more conciliatory line towards the king was perhaps linked to concern over his Yorkshire estate, which was under royalist occupation from the autumn of 1642. Having been reduced to ‘very great straits’ by early 1644 he was keen to supplement his income and petitioned the Houses for the rents and profits of delinquents’ estates worth £1,500 a year.79Add. 18777, f. 50v; LJ vi. 382b-383a. He followed up this audacious request (which was granted) with another petition in October, requesting £5,000 from the profits of a parliamentarian privateer ‘towards the reparation of his great losses’.80CJ iii. 407b, 425b, 432a, 659b-660a; LJ vi. 476b, 480a; vii. 29b. Even at Oxford, Howard’s name was becoming something of a by-word for venality.81Mercurius Aulicus no. 10 (3-9 Mar. 1644), 865 (E.39.3); no. 12 (17-23 Mar. 1644), 888 (E.40.32). His power-base at Westminster, and main source of his ill-gotten gains, was the Committee for Advance of Money* (CAM), which served as a major clearing-house for much of the revenue raised by penal taxation upon delinquents.82CCAM 41, 202, 297, 465, 1491-5; J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-49’ (Cambridge PhD thesis, 1986), 26; ‘The diary of Sir Thomas Dawes’ ed. V. D. Redstone, Surr. Arch. Colls. xxxvii. 19. He began to attend at Haberdashers’ Hall on a regular basis only from mid-1644, but within a year he was the senior figure among the small clique of Parliament-men that ran the committee and dipped into its funds for personal use.83Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’; SP19/1, pp. 21, 22; SP19/2, pp. 40, 244; SP19/3, pp. 50, 351; SP19/4, pp. 5, 454; SP19/5, pp. 3, 439; SP19/6, pp. 1, 353; CCAM 297, 602. Among the many suitors for his favour at Haberdashers’ Hall was Oliver Cromwell*.84SP19/106, ff. 36, 38; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 431. It was probably Howard’s collaborator on the CAM, Henry Darley, who arranged the marriage between Howard’s daughter and Charles Howard* of Naworth Castle in Cumberland, the future Cromwellian major-general.85Supra, ‘Charles Howard’.

Chaired by Howard from the autumn of 1645, the CAM became an important instrument in the Independents’ stranglehold on political and financial patronage.86Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’. Howard’s alignment with this faction is clear by late March 1645, when he was named to the first Committee for the Army – the membership of which reads like a roll-call of the leading Independents in both Houses.87Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’. He consistently sided with the Independent interest in the Lords and was among those peers who fled to the protection of the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster in July 1647.88LJ vii. 297b; viii. 332a; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 563; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 750, 750; Adamson, ‘Peerage in Politics’, 290, 293. A few weeks later, he was named to the so-called ‘close committee of examinations’ – a bicameral body that the Independents used to investigate and coerce the principal actors in the July-August counter-revolution.89[C. Walker*], The Hist. of Independency (1648), 53 (E.463.19). In the summer of 1648, he was added to Parliament’s main executive body, the Derby House Committee*, which he attended on a regular basis until 1 December.90CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 90, 337. As a reward for his loyalty to the Derby House ‘junto’, the Committee for Revenue* (another Independent-dominated body) recommended him to both Houses for the keepership of Hyde Park.91LJ x. 392a. Unfortunately for Howard, the two Houses deemed Lord Admiral Warwick more deserving of this perquisite.92CJ v. 648b; LJ x. 524b.

Howard continued to attend the Lords assiduously after Pride’s Purge and may well have been involved in attempts to put pressure on the king to submit to a settlement before his case came to trial.93LJ x. 625a, 632b, 642b, 644b-649b. Not even the regicide kept Howard away from the House – that honour went to the Commons, which dissolved the Lords on 6 February 1649.94SP19/6, p. 160; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 583. No doubt anxious to preserve the empire he had carved out for himself at Haberdashers’ Hall, Howard overcame his distaste for ‘the present way of settlement’ and sought election to the Rump.95HMC Portland, i. 602. On 26 April 1649, he was returned for Carlisle on the interest of his son-in-law Charles Howard, who was an influential figure in the city’s affairs.96Supra, ‘Carlisle’. Howard was admitted to the House on 5 May, taking the Engagement (abjuring monarchy and the House of Lords) the same day and was back at the helm of the CAM by 11 May.97SP19/6, p. 323; CJ vi. 201b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 227. In December, the CAM granted him the lease of Wallingford House, near Whitehall, at a rent of £40 a year, which was less than a third of the property’s actual yearly value. The Committee for Compounding* confirmed this grant in June 1650, despite the fact that the sitting tenant, John Manners*, 8th earl of Rutland, was willing to pay £130 a year.98CCAM 530; CCC 179, 185, 187, 218-19, 229, 237, 239, 245, 254, 256, 278, 281. In addition to his sharp practice as a member of the CAM, Howard was alleged to have traded extensively, and illicitly, in the debentures market, though he seems to have acquired little forfeited property for himself.99CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 310-11.

Not surprisingly for so venal a figure, he was not especially popular among his fellow Rumpers – as they made clear in the elections on 20 February 1650 for the last five places on the second council of state.100CJ vi. 369a. Of the seven Members on the slate, Howard came last; but after votes for discounting two of the other candidates, he was duly appointed. He attended 134 of the council’s 295 sessions and was named to six conciliar committees.101CSP Dom. 1650, pp. xl-xli, 17, 18, 67, 81, 229. In the House itself, he was named to nineteen committees, including that of 27 November 1649 for the general subscription of the Engagement.102CJ vi. 204b, 206b, 231a, 237a, 245b, 250b, 274a, 326b, 334a, 352a, 359a, 388b, 393b, 398a, 398b, 400a, 432b, 437a, 516b. He was also a teller in four divisions, of which the most significant was on 8 May 1650, when he partnered Sir Henry Vane II against bringing in a bill for the reform of working practices at Haberdashers’ Hall.103CJ vi. 334a, 360b, 410b, 547a.

Despite the widespread opinion – then and now – that Howard’s only real commitment in the Rump was to himself, he did exert himself on his constituents’ behalf at least occasionally. As a member of the Committee for Revenue, for example, he was able to obtain an order for remitting payment of Carlisle’s fee farm rent while the city had been under royalist occupation in 1648.104Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/123-4. Nevertheless, there were those in the corporation who felt that he neglected the city’s business, and by the autumn of 1649 they had been joined by the new mayor Thomas Craister*, who opined that Howard was unfit to serve as a Parliament-man.105Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/2/125a. What prompted this criticism is not clear, although Howard’s reputation for self-aggrandisement and peculation cannot have helped. It is therefore ironic that it was not until after Howard’s reign at Haberdashers’ Hall had ended – the Rump vesting the CAM’s power in a commission in April 1650 – that he came under concerted attack at Westminster, and for reasons that had less to do with public-spiritedness than private animosity. Howard’s lease of Wallingford House had been bitterly disputed by the earl of Rutland and his wife. Rutland had appealed against the lease to the commissioners for compounding, citing several parliamentary orders against committeemen granting sequestered estates to themselves, ‘especially at an under rent’, but had been rebuffed.106CCC 218-19, 237, 239, 254, 281. Consequently, in the summer of 1650 he tried a more public approach, presenting his case to the Rump in a petition, which was read on 30 July 1650.107CJ vi. 448a. At the same time, the countess used her ‘great servant’ Thomas Gell* to convey information to the godly Rumper Major-general Thomas Harrison I, accusing Howard of having taken ‘divers bribes for the excusing delinquents from sequestration and easing them in their compositions; and that in particular he had received a diamond hatband valued at eight hundred pounds from one Mr Compton of Sussex’.108Ludlow, Mems. i. 258; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 482. Harrison being a man of ‘severe principles and zealous for justice, especially against such as betrayed the public trust reposed in them’, presented this information to the Rump, which on the same day that Rutland’s petition was read set up a committee to examine Gell’s accusations.109Ludlow, Mems. i. 258; CJ vi. 448b.

The committee to investigate Howard, which was apparently chaired by Henry Neville, took almost a year to make its final report.110CJ vi. 469a, 470b, 570b, 590b-591a. The delay was due largely, it seems, to the efforts of Howard’s lawyers and friends to put ‘a good appearance upon a bad cause’.111Ludlow, Mems. i. 259; SP19/102, ff. 166-170v. Their task was rendered especially difficult by the fact that Compton and several other men who had bought favours from Howard were only too willing to corroborate the charges against him.112CJ vi. 591b. But perhaps the greatest threat to Howard’s political survival was the growing pressure on Rumpers from the army and its radical allies for wholesale reform, beginning with the House itself. For as a protégé of Buckingham, with a reputation for lining his own pockets from the public purse, Howard made an ideal scapegoat. Having digested a report of the committee’s findings, the House, on 25 June 1651, adjudged Howard guilty of bribery and ordered that he be disabled from sitting, fined £10,000 and confined to the Tower.113CJ vi. 591b. In the event, the Rump was content to make little more than a public show of punishing Howard, for on 7 August, despite opposition from William Say, Thomas Scot I and 20 or so other MPs, the House ordered his release from the Tower on grounds of ill-health; on 5 April 1653, it voted that his £10,000 fine be discharged.114CJ vi. 605b-606a, 618, 622b; vii. 143b, 154a, 274b. It was a few weeks after this that the army discharged the Rump. The end of Howard’s career in the CAM and his subsequent fall from political grace seem to have strained his finances, for he was obliged to borrow £6,500 by statute staple between December 1652 and March 1654.115LC4/203, ff. 215, 277v.

Howard lived the rest of his life away from the political spotlight. Claims that he secured command of Colonel Nathaniel Rich’s* regiment of horse in 1655, or that he sat for Yorkshire in the 1660 Convention, are completely groundless.116‘Edward Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Escrick’, Oxford DNB. He died in the spring of 1675 and was buried on 5 May in the Savoy Chapel just off the Strand.117CP. In his will, he asked to be buried ‘as conveniently [as] can be without pomp, in a private and decent manner’. He made bequests totalling £1,100, including £100 to his son-in-law – by this point 1st earl of Carlisle – whom he made his executor.118PROB11/347, f. 259. Howard’s second son William† – an even greater political adventurer than his father – sat for Winchelsea in the 1660 Convention.119HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Hon. William Howard’.