BAYNTUN, Sir Edward (1593-1657), of Bromham, and later of Spye Park, Wilts.

Established in the county since at least the thirteenth century and subsequently enriched through court service under Henry VIII and by fortunate marriages, the Bayntuns were pre-eminent among the leading families of north Wiltshire and as such had a long history of public service.34Vis. Wilts. 5; VCH Wilts. ix. 95; HP Commons 1509-1558; HP Commons 1559-1603; ‘Baynton Family’, Oxford DNB. As an only son, Bayntun began his parliamentary career early, sitting for Devizes in 1614 as a replacement for his father, who was suffering from ill-health.35HP Commons 1604-1629. Despite his youth – he was a few months short of his majority – he was simultaneously elected a councillor of the borough, a position he retained until the year before his death.36HP Commons 1604-1629; Wilts. RO, G20/1/17. His contribution to this Parliament, and to the four others of which he was a Member in the 1620s, was negligible, and his local administrative activity appears to have been intermittent and idiosyncratic, but his wealth and his family’s reputation ensured that his potential influence in the north-east of the county could not be ignored.37HP Commons 1604-1629. Knighted at 20, he succeeded to his father’s substantial estates at 23 and joined the commission of the peace three years later.38Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 153; PROB 11/128, f. 116; C231/4, f. 82v. However, his standing was consistently undermined by his abrasive and unco-operative temperament, which regularly erupted into acrimony, litigation and violence.

An entanglement with the exchequer court over forest rights while he was still a minor, and an arrest warrant in January 1620 prompted by information that he was about to leave Dover for the continent to fight one Duns, set the scene for confrontations to come.39HP Commons 1604-1629; E. Suss. RO, RYE/47/93/16; E. Kent Archives Centre, NR/CPw/221. In 1623 he was accused in chancery of dishonest dealing in the supply of rabbits for the London meat market.40Keeler, Long Parliament, 101; C3/335/73. In February 1626 he brought an action in the same court against his uncle Sir John Danvers*, his cousin Charles Danvers of Baynton, and the latter’s three young sons (including Henry Danvers I*), alleging that before his mother’s death in June 1621 they had enticed Dame Lucy, ‘being then feeble, sickly and weak’, to move from Bremhill to Sir John’s house in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Once there they had induced her to abandon a previous intention to leave the bulk of her estate to her son and her daughter Elizabeth, wife of John Dutton*, and convey it instead to themselves.41C2/ChasI/B126/60. Sir John Danvers was later to prove acquisitive over the personal effects of his brother Henry Danvers, earl of Danby, and Lady Bayntun, who died in St Martin’s parish and was buried according to her expressed wish in Westminster Abbey, did indeed privilege her Danvers relatives in her will, but there is much in Sir Edward’s case to question.42‘Sir John Danvers’, Oxford DNB; PROB11/139/77; Reg. of St Martin in the Fields ii 1619-1636 (Harl. Soc. lxvi), 166. As Henry Danvers observed when the case dragged on through the winter of 1628-9, in 1621 he and his brothers had all been minors and too young to be culpable conspirators, and their father (by this time deceased) had received a legitimate lease in Bremhill as his cousin’s steward.43C2/Chas I/B53/50. It is entirely plausible that Lady Bayntun found the cultured household of her brother and his then wife Magdalen (formerly Herbert) more congenial than her son’s at Bromham. In 1629 a bill of charges alleged not only that Bayntun had fathered children on two of his wife’s waiting gentlewomen, promising marriage to one, Katherine Gerard, when her sickly mistress died (as her horoscope predicted she soon would), but also that he had committed adultery with other women of varied social status, and even boasted of his conquests, which were common knowledge in Wiltshire and in London.44SP16/151, ff. 40-1. A pardon issued on 2 January 1630 for adulteries with Katherine ‘or any other person’ must have appeared to confirm the accusations.45CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 116; Coventry Docquets, 269. The bill of charges had recounted a quarrel between the Bayntuns in the early 1620s in which Dame Elizabeth supposedly took Sir Edward to task for seeking to purchase the office of earl marshal because ‘you love such places of command, for then you may command anywhere’.46SP16/151, f. 41. An authoritarian streak which disregarded others was evident in both his private and public life.

Bromham was situated in the heart of the cloth-making area of north west Wiltshire, hit hard by the trade depression of the early seventeenth century. As the owner of substantial sheep flocks and the landlord of weavers with vulnerable livelihoods, Bayntun fought hard for his own interests. While he was ruthless in pursuing tenants who fell behind with rent, he was also prominent in resistance to Anthony Wither, the royal commissioner sent to investigate conditions in the area following the widespread social unrest of 1628-31.47C2/ChasI/D14/37; C2/ChasI/D62/80; VCH Wilts. vii. 180; D.G.C. Allen, ‘The Rising in the West 1628-1631’, EcHR 2nd ser. v. 76-85; Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry. Time and again he obstructed the commission’s work, but while some other deputy lieutenants and local gentlemen did the same, Bayntun seems to have been notably insolent, responding to a summons from the sheriff to action against local unrest in November 1631 by saying that ‘he did not much fancy that service’.48SP16/203, f. 163. Repeated complaints by Withers secured an indictment of Bayntun and others before star chamber, but proceedings were halted when on 23 July 1637 Bayntun again secured a royal pardon.49CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 312, 326; 1633-4, pp. 136-7; 1636-7, p. 429; Bodl. Bankes 43, f. 70. The price was being pricked as sheriff that September.50Coventry Docquets, 368. Charged with collecting Ship Money at the height of its unpopularity, he went about it with characteristic insensitivity, provoking lasting hostility for meagre return: arrears for which he was responsible were still being chased in the spring of 1640 and in the meantime he had alienated fellow gentry including leading Wiltshire gentleman Sir Francis Seymour*.51CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 232-3; 1639, pp. 238, 253-4, 284, 528, 536; 1639-40, pp. 437, 537; D’Ewes (N), 141-2. He seems to have been an erratic member of the commission of the peace, sometimes stirring himself constructively, as when he agreed to bringing in a London physician to deal with the plague outbreak at Calne in 1637, but at other times acting preremptorily, as when he apparently threw two respectable Somerset men into prison in July 1640 for supposed desertion from forces pressed for service in the north.52HMC Var. I. 104, 106; Wilts. RO, A1/160/1.

Where most of the pre-eminent gentry of Wiltshire, including Seymour, Sir John Danvers, Sir Thomas Thynne† and Bayntun’s neighbour Sir Edward Hungerford*, refused the loan for the bishops’ wars in 1639, Bayntun, like Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire*, merely sent his excuses.53Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 912, 914-15. In April 1640 he was returned to Parliament with Hungerford for Chippenham on his own interest, but he made no recorded contribution to proceedings; his son Edward*, who sat for Devizes, was on this occasion similarly unobtrusive. On 1 August, his wife Elizabeth having finally died in 1635, he remarried at St Peter, Paul’s Wharf, London; his bride, Mary Bowells, was probably a kinswoman of a future courtier of Charles II, Nicholas Bowell of Cokethorpe, Oxfordshire, and of Bentley, Hampshire, but the wedding was apparently sufficiently secretive to afford room for subsequent doubt that it had taken place.54Reg. of St Bene’t and St Peter, Paul’s Wharf, London, iii. 283; Vis. Oxon. 1669 and 1675 (Harl. Soc. n.s. xii), 14-15; C9/403/262. Nearly three months later Bayntun’s elder daughter Anne, not quite 18, married at Bromham Hugh Rogers*, ward of Somerset notable Thomas Smyth I* and heir to lands in that county.55Wilts. RO, 518/3.

In the autumn elections it was almost certainly Bayntun’s support that secured for Rogers a seat at Calne, another clothing town in the area. Bayntun and Hungerford were returned again for Chippenham, young Edward for Devizes, and Bayntun’s brother-in-law John Dutton for Gloucestershire. This time Sir Edward’s place was disputed by Sir Francis Popham*, and not confirmed until at least the middle of February 1641.56CJ ii. 68a, 79b; Procs. LP ii. 198, 378, 380. In the meantime Bayntun had acted as a teller supporting the referral of Irish affairs to the whole House (6 Nov. 1640), and joined (with Hungerford) the committee to prepare a grant of £100,000 (4 Dec.) and (in distinguished company) that for the Virginia colony (6 Jan. 1641).57CJ ii. 21b, 45a, 64a. But meetings of the Ship Money committee had uncovered complaints of his activities as sheriff – that he had confiscated goods of excessive value for non-payment of assessments and that he had ‘employed one Edmund Brundson, a most infamous man, to be his bailiff to distrain men’.58Procs. LP ii. 6-7. Uncomfortably for Bayntun, the committee’s chairman was Hungerford, whose kinsman Edmund Hungerford had been among those who suffered distraint, and with whose family there had been potential tension since Bayntun’s grandfather’s time.59CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 232; PROB11/82/478. However, it seems that punitive action was postponed in the context of sorting out the election, and then quietly dropped.

Bayntun was a visible presence in the Commons in May 1641: he took the Protestation immediately after the Speaker on the 3rd, made a cryptic contribution on the 12th to debate on a suspicious letter addressed to the recusant Lady Shelley, and on the 28th expressed distrust of the Merchant Adventurers in the debate on accepting their money for the armies.60CJ ii. 132b; Procs. LP iv. 339, 625. Thereafter he was apparently silent, but he may have stayed in London. On 11 August he fought a duel at Paddington with Richard Rogers*, Member for Dorset and son-in-law of Sir Thomas Cheke*, in which he sustained what was briefly thought to be a mortal wound. Recovery from a serious injury may have taken some time, but it is conceivable that his low profile over the next year, during which he was absent both from the Journal and diaries of the Commons, owed something to the fact that this Rogers’s mother-in-law, Lady Essex Cheke, was a cousin of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.61HMC 8th Rep. ii. 9b, 58a; Nicholas Pprs. i. 5-6.

On 9 April 1642 Bayntun subscribed £600 towards the suppression of rebellion in Ireland.62Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 565. He was sufficiently identified with opposition to the crown in Wiltshire to be omitted from the commission of the peace on 10 June 1642. However, unlike Sir Edward Hungerford, who was sent with Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire to execute the Militia Ordinance, he was named only once (and then inaccurately) among reports of the Wiltshire and Somerset gentlemen who in August confronted royalist forces around Chewton Mendip and Wells.63C231/5, p. 529; Joyfull Newes from Wells (1642, E.111.4).

Nonetheless, by late 1642 Bayntun had emerged as a colonel of dragoons and the commander of parliamentary forces in Wiltshire, based at Devizes.64BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database; Add. 18980, f. 6. In his denunciation on 8 December of parliamentary ordinances raising money and arms, the king singled out Sir Edward’s warrant in Wiltshire as an example of how ‘unlimited arbitrary power’ would be used against the property of his subjects, while a proclamation issued in Oxford on 28 December expressly forbade men of Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire to obey Bayntun’s summons.65Clarendon, Hist. iii. 424; Stuart Royal Proclamations, ii. 837-40. On 6 January 1643 Bayntun sought through Evelyn parliamentary authorisation to raise money from episcopal lands and from recusants, and on the 10th an order gave him power to raise troops, but his command in Wiltshire had already unravelled.66Add. 18777, f. 118; A. and O.

The same day Hungerford and others wrote from Cirencester to report that Bayntun had suddenly disbanded soldiers at Devizes and Malmesbury, and then sent his lieutenant Edward Eyre (probably the brother of William Eyre II*, well known to both parties) to arrest Hungerford when he went to Malmesbury to muster troops for the defence of the Gloucestershire town. Notwithstanding the imminent danger to Cirencester from Prince Rupert, a party had been sent out from there to rescue Hungerford, and had then taken Bayntun and Eyre into custody. When the letter was read in the Commons on 14 January, deputy lieutenant Sir Neville Poole* and others took the opportunity, as Sir Simonds D’Ewes* noted, to expatiate on how Bayntun ‘had miscarried himself in several particulars’.67CJ ii. 928a; Harl. 164, f. 276. Some local intelligence was quick to detect ‘treacherous dealing’ and accuse Bayntun of a pact to make his peace with the king in return for neutralising Hungerford, although another report more cautiously put it down to a sudden fit of incivility (clearly not unprecedented) and the royalist Mercurius Aulicus cast the episode within the frame of a private feud.68Speciall Passages no. 23 (10-17 Jan. 1643), 191-2 (E.85.9); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 3 (10-17 Jan. 1643, E.85.15); Mercurius Aulicus no. 2 (11 Jan. 1643), 17 (E.86.22). Whatever the truth, there was potential to undermine fatally the parliamentarian cause in the region. The Commons referred the matter to the Committee of Safety and ordered that Bayntun and Eyre be brought, still under arrest, to London.69CJ ii. 928a; Add. 18777, f. 126. Meanwhile, in a letter addressed on 15 January to Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, the lord lieutenant, Bayntun defended his conduct, depicting himself as being in control of Malmesbury with 500 men of his regiment until tricked by two Scottish lieutenant colonels, Furbush and Carr, who had been bribed by Hungerford to plunder the garrison and carry him off a prisoner; his prior seizure of Hungerford had been justified by the latter’s correspondence with the local royalist leader Lord (formerly Sir Francis) Seymour and challenge to his military authority.70A letter to the Earle of Pembroke from Sir Edward Bainton (1642, E.85.37). Given the apparent support for Hungerford from the local élite and Hungerford’s much more distinguished recent record in the House, it is not surprising that Parliament preferred his version of events and awarded him on 31 January control of Wiltshire forces in Bayntun’s place.71CJ ii. 950a.

Through the spring and early summer, as Hungerford revealed himself no more effective a local commander than his predecessor, Bayntun seems to have spent time in London, proclaiming his resentment at his deprivation and its negative consequences to any who would listen. The length of his restraint is unknown, but he was free before 27 May, when he was detained again within the Palace of Westminster as he left to fight with one Colonel Fettiplace, evidently a partisan of Hungerford’s. Bayntun thereupon promised not to entertain challenges in future without informing the House, but MPs were sufficiently alarmed by this and other ‘differences … whereby the public likewise suffers’ to refer them to a committee which included a sizeable proportion of Members for Wiltshire consituencies.72CJ iii. 107a. Two months later Bayntun, his son and Hungerford were all enjoined by the Speaker not to disturb the peace of Parliament or the kingdom with their private affairs.73CJ iii. 185a. In the meantime Bayntun took the covenant promptly on 6 June and appears to have enjoyed a measure of rehabilitation – he was appointed as early as 29 May to deal with Shropshire business with Sir Neville Poole, and on 13 July to the committee to consider the safety of the city of London and Parliament – but his conduct continued to arouse suspicion.74CJ iii. 108b, 118b, 165a.

Shortly after 9 August, when Bayntun was among those delegated to give a speedy answer to a petition, he and his son-in-law Hugh Rogers decamped to the Isle of Wight. On 26 August Bayntun wrote from Newport to Sir Edward Hyde* seeking his help, and that of the king’s lord lieutenant of Wiltshire, William Seymour, 1st marquess of Hertford, in procuring a royal pardon for himself and Rogers.75CCSP i. 244. It is not clear whether this approach was known to any in the parliamentary camp when Bayntun was apprehended on the strength of a warrant from the Committee of Safety* and his luggage, consisting of three trunks of plate and a range of weapons, seized.76CJ iii. 199b. According to the testimony of several witnesses taken on 26 August, he dismissed the Committee as having ‘no more power over him than a company of boys’ and claimed that William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Say and Sele, and John Pym* were on course to destroy the kingdom.77Harl. 165, f. 167v. These ‘words of dangerous consequence’ convinced Thomas Carne, governor of Carisbrooke Castle, that he should be shipped back to London as soon as practicable.78Bodl. Tanner lxii. 303. In a frank letter to Pembroke Carne seemed stunned by Bayntun’s effrontery: ‘truly, I believe, no man hath a fouler mouth or worse tongue’. When challenged to verify his accusations against Say and Pym ‘he answered that he had spoken daily as much in Westminster and in other places (and I believe it) and that they durst not question him. He hath not his fellow living’.79Bodl. Tanner lxii. 313.

Summoned to the Commons on 9 September to answer charges against him which centred on Carne’s communications and apparently said nothing of treasonable correspondence, Bayntun initially asserted disingenuously words to the effect that ‘he had learned, since he had [sat] there, that he ought not to speak anything here that reflected to the prejudice of another Member’ (presumably meaning Pym). Under pressure he then admitted to having said that Pym ‘had betrayed his country, which he did by being a means of detaining him [Bayntun] in prison who only was able to maintain and preserve that county, till the said county was quite lost, notwithstanding many orders made for his bringing up’. He added, for good measure, the further accusation (outrageous in the circumstances) that Pym, disappointed of expected preferment, had been negotiating with the lord treasurer, Francis Cottington, 1st Baron Cottington, for a pardon from the king. Pym’s denial led the Commons to resolve that the charge was ‘scandalous and false’, and despite significant voices to the contrary Bayntun was sent to the Tower for ten days, until removed to his lodging on ‘his promise to be a true prisoner to the House’.80CJ iii. 235b-236a, 247b. There he apparently remained under close watch for more than eight months, respited when there was a roll-call of absentees on 5 February 1644, and discharged from restraint and readmitted to the Commons only on 4 June, on condition that he did not go into the country without leave. A select committee including Nathaniel Stephens*, Denzil Holles* and Sir Henry Mildmay*, all non-Wiltshire men who nonetheless had contacts in the county, was to attempt ‘to compose the differences, if they can, between’ Bayntun and Hungerford.81CJ iii. 517b. Bayntun gave his word on 10 June not to abscond.82CJ iii. 523b.

On 26 June 1644 Bayntun took the Covenant in the House.83CJ iii. 543a. Two months later the goods seized on the Isle of Wight were restored to him and he was freed from all restraint.84CJ iii. 606a. However, his contribution to parliamentary proceedings continued to be minimal. On 3 December he was the last-named in a committee to meet with the Lords to discuss slander of the Elector Palatine and deputy lieutenants for Northumberland; on 28 April 1645 he was a teller in favour of the unsuccessful motion that Squire Bence* be placed on the committee for the fleet; and rather more significantly, on 2 September he was the most notable Wiltshire member of a committee to redress grievances from Wiltshire, Dorset and Devon.85CJ iii. 713a; iv. 125a, 262a. Periodically evidence surfaces to suggest he was still not trusted. In April the Committee of Both Kingdoms ordered that he and others be examined about the breaking open of the Scots commissioners’ letters.86CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 383.

But by the autumn of 1645 Bayntun had indisputably suffered considerably for his allegiance to Parliament in an area of particularly intense fighting, his major residences at Bromham and Bremhill having been burnt to the ground on separate occasions by royalist troops, and 644 of his sheep at Bishops Cannings having been allegedly carried off to feed the Oxford garrison.87CSP Dom. 1654, p. 43; VCH Wilts. vii. 179, 195. Modest acknowledgement came his way. When on 27 October Edward Bayntun the younger brought to the attention of the House the indictment for treason of his father and Robert Nicholas* for their action on behalf of Parliament, its facilitators were sent for as delinquents, and in June 1646, Sir Edward was one of several Wiltshire MPs to benefit from an order that soldiers would no longer be billetted at his house.88CJ iv. 323a, 593a. However, his petition that March for a compensatory share of delinquent Robert Henley’s interest in the manor of Bishops Cannings was rejected by a decisive 71 to 27 majority.89CJ iv. 477a, 480b.

Bayntun’s attendance and activity in the House continued to be limited. Nominations (on both occasions with his perhaps still estranged uncle, Sir John Danvers) to committees to consider sheriffs’ fees (26 Mar. 1646) and compensation to Lord Say, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* and others financially affected by the abolition of the court of wards (24 Nov 1646) were ostensibly undemanding.90CJ iv. 593a, 727a. Leave to go into the country, granted on 11 July 1646 and 26 March 1647, may have marked extended absence.91CJ iv. 615a; v. 125b. Some indication of his sympathies is supplied by his (rare) appearance as a signatory to an order from the Committee of the West on 23 March 1647 preventing the taking of free quarter and putting a limit of 16 April on the future payment of troops; also present on that occasion were Bayntun junior (a regular attender here as in the House), Danvers, Evelyn, Denzil Holles* and John Dove*, but somewhat unusually at this period, neither Sir Edward Hungerford nor his half-brother Henry*.92Add. 22084, f. 21. That Bayntun senior had an anti-army stance at this juncture appears to be confirmed by his acting on 19 June as a teller (with Sir Henry Mildmay*) of those voting for the discharge of soldiers when agreed by parliamentary committees.93CJ v. 217a. On 19 July he again had leave to go into the country: the fact that on 9 October he was still absent, with other Wiltshire members like Sir Neville Poole, Sir Edward Hungerford and Alexander Thistlethwayte*, suggests that he had joined the general exit of disillusioned traditionalists from Westminster, but his previous meagre record excludes certainty on this.94CJ v. 249b, 330b.

Bayntun had been a member of the Wiltshire county committee from the outset and continued to be named as a commissioner of assessment and of the militia even when under a political cloud at Westminster, but the level of his commitment is once again difficult to gauge.95A. and O. Unlike his humbler neighbours the Eyres and their kin he was not visible at quarter sessions through the 1640s, although presumably, like others omitted in June 1642, he had been reinstated.96Wilts RO, A1/160/1; J. Waylen, ‘Notes from the diary of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury’, Wilts. Arch. and Hist. Mag. xxviii. 23-5. He did sign the occasional certificate in favour of local petitioners, but it is conceivable that he was preoccupied with the building of his new house at Spye Park.97CCAM 673; VCH Wilts. vii. 179.

Bayntun was back at Westminster by 13 November 1647, the start of a short burst of uncharacteristic activity. That day he joined Evelyn of Wiltshire, now an Independent grandee, as a teller in support of the imposition of sentence of death and forfeiture of estates on those who had concealed the king’s person following his escape from Hampton Court.98CJ v. 358a, 358b. With Danvers and Henry Hungerford he was nominated on 14 December to a committee to determine the punishment of Sir Henry Compton for his part in the soap monopoly and other misdemeanours, and with Danvers he was added on 6 January 1648 to the revived committee for hospitals.99CJ v. 383a, 421a. On 20 December he again partnered Evelyn as a teller against the proposal that the negative oath renouncing any contact with the king be immediately administered to James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, while on 27 January 1648 he ranged against Evelyn in trying unsuccessfully to oppose the sending to the Lords of impeachment articles against Francis Willoughby, Lord Willoughby of Parham.100CJ v. 393b, 445a. Over the next ten months the record is silent again except for a fortnight’s leave granted on 27 June and the presentation on 29 August of a report relating to what was to be a long-running dispute with the surveyors of former ecclesiastical lands over the extent of Bayntun’s holdings in Bishops Cannings; this did not require his presence, and absence may have been more convenient.101CJ v. 614b, 691b.

Given his previous record, the date and nature of Bayntun’s next appearances in the Commons journal are startling. On 7 December 1648, the second day of the purged Parliament from which his formerly active son was excluded, Sir Edward himself was a teller in favour of proceeding with the proposals of the army.102CJ vi. 95a. In the next few weeks he was three times nominated to committees in areas in which he had hitherto displayed no interest: for considering a petition from the wife of the Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* (19 Dec.); for plundered ministers (6 Jan. 1649); and for reforming the courts of justice (6 Jan.).103CJ vi. 100b, 112b. He was also named as a commissioner for the king’s trial, although he did not sit.104Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1380; Muddiman, Trial. He was patently not a natural radical, but various tentative explanations may be advanced for his move to identify with, or at least to act more closely with, those who were. It is possible that he shared the desire of William Heveningham, his fellow teller on 7 December, ‘to keep power in parliamentary and out of military hands, and so out of reach of “the lower kind of people”’.105Worden, Rump Parliament, 45. It is likely – perhaps owing to indifference – that he was broad-minded on religion: while James Crump, admitted as vicar at Bremhill in 1646, and Robert Richards at Bromham were Presbyterians, William Hughes, curate of Bromham since 1639, was a congregationalist by 1658.106Calamy Revised, 153, 282, 557. It is also conceivable that Bayntun’s temperament was one which preferred activity where he had few rivals and might be noticed, to operating in circumstances demanding self-denial, co-operation and compromise, and thus that a slimmer House of Commons was more congenial.

If so, his higher profile did not last long. After apparently sealing his conversion on 1 February 1649 by taking the dissent to the vote of 5 December, it was not until 5 April that he received his next committee appointment.107PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 625; [W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 23 (E.1013.22). On that date he was nominated with Edmund Ludlowe II* to the committee charged with reducing food prices, where his experience as a magistrate during the Wiltshire trade depression might well have been helpful, and on 29 May he was added to the Committee of Navy and Customs and the committee for excise.108CJ vi. 179b, 219b. Thereafter he made only three further appearances in the Journal: on 19 November 1650, when he was a teller supporting suspension of collections for the assessment for the British army in Ireland; on 13 January 1653, when on a poorly-attended day he was a teller on an army petition; and on 19 April, when in the last few days of the Parliament he presented a petition which was promptly referred for consideration the following term, and thus effectively shelved.109CJ vi. 499a; vii. 246b, 280a. He did not sit again.

Bayntun was present at the April quarter sessions at Devizes in 1650, 1651 and 1652, but his name was erased soon after, and he was expressly omitted from the bench in July 1654; two years later he was even dropped from the Devizes corporation.110Wilts. RO, A1/160/1; Stowe 577, f. 57v; C193/13/3, f. 68v; C193/13/4, f. 108; C231/6, p. 294; VCH Wilts. x. 271. He was placed for the first time on commissions of oyer and terminer for Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset in 1654 and 1655, but with new men in power locally he may have chosen to concentrate on his estates.111C181/6, p. 8. Early in 1652 he was pursuing allegedly unpaid tithes of corn from the rectory of Steeple Ashton.112E134/1651–1652/Hil.12. His claims in the manor of Bishops Cannings were still being investigated in April 1654, when the council of state received a report that the land was leasehold, not freehold, and referred the matter to the law courts.113CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 44, 115. At this period Bayntun was also consolidating his hold on property at Avebury, some of which had been acquired in the 1630s, but some of which was in disputable ownership following the sequestration of the Stawell family.114VCH Wilts. ix. 57; xii. 91, 93, 101. He had made a temporary home there while his new house was being built, showing the same hospitality to John Evelyn the diarist, who visited in July 1654, as he had to the student friends of his son-in-law Rogers before the wars. The latter had celebrated his table in a collection of poems marking Rogers’ wedding in 1640; the former recorded with some distaste Bayntun’s practice of making his guests’ servants drunk.115Evelyn Diary ed. de Beer, iii. 112. In 1654 Bayntun also made an agreement with the city of Salisbury to endow a silver gilt cup for a horse race on the nearby downs.116Wilts. RO, G23/150/161.

In his will, drawn up on 30 October 1657 when he was already unwell, Bayntun made a profession of faith which, if it did not match that of his father and of his old rival Sir Edward Hungerford in the extent of its charity and piety, was nonetheless couched in orthodox puritan terms. Provision was made for his younger sons Henry†, Nicholas† and Robert (the latter two from his second marriage), while his only surviving daughter Mary was left to the care of her eldest brother.117PROB 11/272/36. Bayntun died on 8 December, and was buried at Bromham on 18 December.118MIs Wilts. 1822, 231; Wilts. RO, 518/3; 1154/2. Family divisions soon opened up, as Edward appears to have challenged his widowed stepmother’s jointure rights, and even disputed the fact of her marriage, while Dame Mary, as executor, was pursued by her late husband’s creditors.119Reg. of St Bene’t and St Peter, Paul’s Wharf, London, iii. 283; C9/403/262; C10/465/187. Nonetheless, three of Bayntun’s sons sat in Parliament, and the family remained at the apex of north Wiltshire society.