BELASYSE, Henry (1604-47), of Oulston and Coxwold, Yorks.

Belasyse belonged to one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Yorkshire. The Belasyses had been gentry landowners in the North Riding and in County Durham since at least the time of Richard II, although they did not achieve any real prominence in local affairs until the Elizabethan period.26HMC Var. ii. 14, 17, 86. They had acquired the bulk of their estate in the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and by James I's reign their lands were worth almost £4,000 a year, making them perhaps the fourth wealthiest commoner family in Yorkshire after the Ingrams of Temple Newsam, the Saviles of Thornhill and the Wentworths of Wentworth Woodhouse.27C3/364/41; VCH N. Riding, ii. 9, 15, 19, 20, 86, 254, 322, 470. Their principal residence was at Newburgh Priory, near Thirsk, which they had acquired shortly after the Dissolution.28VCH N. Riding, ii. 9. Like a number of other leading gentry families in the North Riding, the Belasyses had strong Catholic connections. Belasyse’s father, Sir Thomas Belasyse† (created Baron Fauconberg of Yarm in 1627 and Viscount Fauconberg of Henknowle in January 1643), had married into a notoriously Catholic family and was to die a Catholic himself in 1653.29H. Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the N. Riding of Yorks. 1558-1790, 183, 274; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Henry Cholmley’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Thomas Belasyse’. Belasyse’s younger brother, John, also became a Catholic.30Infra, ‘John Belasyse’. Belasyse himself remained conformable to the Church of England, although he was noted for associating with Catholic gentry and was suspected in some quarters of being ‘popishly-affected’.31Aveling, Northern Catholics, 273; Merc. Britanicus, 22 (5-12 Feb. 1644), 174 (E.32.18).

The Belasyses were the principal landowners in the Thirsk area and had regularly represented the borough since the 1580s. Belasyse’s father sat for Thirsk in four Parliaments between 1597 and 1624, relinquishing his seat to Henry in the first Caroline Parliament in 1625. Belasyse’s only contribution to this Parliament’s proceedings was the tabling of a bill ‘to preserve the liberties of the Commons’ House of Parliament’, which suggests that he shared the view of the leading ‘country’ spokesman, Sir Robert Phelips, that ‘the privileges of this House have been so broken...that no time can come into comparison with this’.32Procs. 1625, 257; Debates in the House of Commons in 1625 ed. S.R. Gardiner, (Camden Soc. n.s. vi), 31; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Henry Belasyse’. Returned for Thirsk at the next election, however, Belasyse left no trace in the records of the 1626 Parliament. With his father’s elevation to the peerage in May 1627, Belasyse became a legitimate candidate for knight of the shire, and late in 1627 he teamed up with Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford) to take on Sir John Savile† at the next county election. The partnership between Belasyse and Wentworth was formally arranged by Belasyse’s close friend and cousin, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax* (the future parliamentarian general) in January 1628. Belasyse’s Catholic connections caused some disquiet in the Wentworth camp; but, as Sir Gervase Clifton* informed Wentworth, ‘I tell Sir Ferdinando (and he himself is sensible of it) you must join with a man gracious with the papists, which only Henry [Belasyse] is’.33Wentworth Pprs. ed. J.P. Cooper (Camden Soc. ser. 4, xii), 278, 287. In the event, Belasyse and Wentworth defeated Savile on a poll, Belasyse, as the son of a peer, claiming the senior seat.34CD 1628, ii. 514. As in previous Parliaments, Belasyse was largely inactive at Westminster. He was named to only two committees, and his only significant contribution to debate was on 2 March 1629 (the day on which Sir John Eliot tabled his three inflammatory resolutions), when he moved ‘that the Speaker, if he would not put it [whether to pass the three resolutions] to the question, should come out of the chair and the House should choose another’.35CJ i. 895a, 928a; CD 1629, 240, 255; HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Henry Belasyse’. The session ended notoriously with the Speaker being forcibly held in his chair while the House passed the three resolutions and then voted to adjourn. This was the only occasion on which Belasyse openly supported Eliot and his associates, which probably explains why the crown took no action against him after the dissolution.

The electoral pact between Belasyse and Wentworth in 1628 was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. On the contrary, Belasyse and his father became leading opponents of Wentworth following the latter’s appointment as lord president of the council of the north, late in 1628. The origins of this quarrel are not clear, although it seems to have owed more to pique and injured pride than a principled opposition to ‘Thorough’. Indeed, relations between the two camps had begun to deteriorate before Wentworth’s desertion of the ‘country’ interest, as a result of a dispute between Lord Fauconberg and Wentworth’s closest friend, Christopher Wandesford†, over the marriage of Wandesford’s ward (and Wentworth’s cousin), (Sir) Thomas Danbie*.36Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Danbie’; Cliffe, Yorks. 297. And the feud may have intensified in July 1630 with Wentworth’s appointment as bailiff of Richmond, an office that Lord Fauconberg had apparently sought for Henry.37R. Reid, Council in the North, 414. The Belasyses’ animosity towards Wentworth and his supporters almost led to violence at one point (in either September 1630 or 1631). While out riding with a party of about 20 of his ‘friends and adherents’ (including Sir Hugh Cholmeley*, a nephew of Lord Fauconberg), Belasyse came face to face with Wandesford and accused him of having fomented ill-feeling between Lord Fauconberg and Wentworth. He then challenged Wandesford to a duel, but before the two men could come to blows ‘the company’ managed to separate them, and the incident passed off without bloodshed. Belasyse’s temper had evidently cooled the following day, when he informed Wandesford’s brother-in-law, Major Norton*, that he had not intended to offer Wandesford any violence, simply to ask him whether he would affirm that he had done his father and him no ill offices, particularly with regard to Danbie’s marriage.38Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P16c/255.

The quarrel between the Belasyses and Wentworth came to a head in the early months of 1631, following an unsuccessful attempt by Fauconberg to engineer Wentworth’s downfall as lord president.39APC 1630-1, pp. 249-51; Cliffe, Yorks. 298. On 6 April 1631, Belasyse was brought before the privy council for ‘insolent and contemptuous carriage’ towards Wentworth. The charge against him was that he had entered a room where the lord president was holding a meeting

without showing any particular reverence to the said lord president, as in civility and duty he ought to have done. And that afterwards, his lordship going out of the said room ... he, the said Mr Belasyse, putting himself in a conspicuous part of the room, as his lordship passed along ... stood with his hat on his head, looking full upon his lordship, without stirring his said hat, or using any other reverence or civility to the lord president.40APC 1630-1, p. 292.

Belasyse’s excuse was unconvincing. To the charge that he had wilfully ignored Wentworth, he claimed that that he had been talking with the 1st Baron Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax I†) at the time and had failed to register the lord president’s presence. Not surprisingly, the council was not satisfied with this explanation and ordered him to sign a formal apology to Wentworth.41APC 1630-1, p. 293. Belasyse refused to submit to this judgment, however, and the council promptly had him committed to the Gatehouse prison. Early in May he petitioned the council, expressing his willingness to obey its commands, but upon appearing before the board he made it clear that his submission was only in relation to the office of the lord president, not the person.42APC 1630-1, p. 345. The council refused to countenance any such distinction, and it condemned Belasyse’s behaviour as ‘unmannerly, insolent and saucy’. Perhaps realising that he had gone too far, Belasyse asked to be called before the board again, and this time he promised to make a full submission before Wentworth and the council of the north, which the board, ‘respecting his youth and want of experience, was pleased to accept of’ and ordered his release.43APC 1630-1, p. 346. Relations between the two camps had not improved by March 1633, when, at Wentworth’s request, warrants were issued for Belasyse’s arrest, after he and his father had defied a proclamation ordering country gentleman to keep to their estates over Christmas.44PC2/42, p. 526. Wentworth’s departure for Ireland in 1633 as lord deputy, and the appointment of Belasyse’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Osborne*, as vice-president of the council of the north, took much of the heat out of the quarrel, and by the mid-1630s the Belasyses were conforming closely to privy council’s ideal of the zealous and dutiful magistrate.45N. Yorks. RO, ZAG 282, Bell of Thirsk mss, Lord Fauconberg’s ‘book for the business of the country’, 1636 (mic. 1704). Indeed, Belasyse was one of the most active magistrates on the North Riding bench during the 1630s.46N. Yorks. RO, ZAG 282, ‘A rate made...for the king’s provision’ by Henry Belasyse and William Frankland*, 1636 (mic. 1704); N. Riding QS Recs. ed. J.C. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iii), 313, 364; (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iv), 12, 172.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Belasyse was returned for Yorkshire – taking the senior place – along with Wentworth’s nephew, the West Riding knight Sir William Savile. Belasyse owed his election to the strength of his family’s interest in the North Riding and also, perhaps, among the county’s Catholic and church-papist gentry. True to his conduct in previous Parliaments, Belasyse was largely inactive in the House, receiving only one appointment – to the committee of privileges, on 16 April 1640.47CJ ii. 4a. He made only two recorded contributions to debate: the first in the ‘committee of grievances’ on 29 April, when he ‘represented Ship Money for a grievance from the county [i.e. Yorkshire]’.48Aston’s Diary, 157. Five days later (4 May), during a debate in the House on supply, he supported Sir John Hotham in disputing Sir William Savile’s assertion that ‘if Ship Money were taken away, they [Yorkshiremen] would give [i.e. support the voting of subsidies]’. Speaking after Hotham, who had insisted that military charges were a greater grievance in the East Riding than Ship Money, Belasyse argued that ‘he was for the same shire Sir William Savile was and knew not [what] mind they might be of about him, but where he lived he was sure they should not be welcome home unless they brought home relief in some other things as well as Ship Money [i.e. military charges]’.49Aston’s Diary, 142-3; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 154.

With the king trying to field an army to quell his rebellious subjects in Scotland, any denunciation of military charges was bound to give great offence to the crown. Moreover, 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. Belasyse, like Hotham, 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 John 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.50PC 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’.51PC Reg. Apr.-June 1640, 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’.52CSP 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.53CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 130, 154-5, 166; PC Reg. Apr.-June 1640, x. 476.

Undeterred by his imprisonment in May 1640, Belasyse took a leading role that summer in presenting Yorkshire’s grievances to the king. Late in July, at the height of the second bishops’ war, Belasyse, Hotham, Sir Hugh Cholmeley and the future parliamentarian peer Philip Lord Wharton organised a petition to Charles from the county’s gentry, complaining about the local impact of billeting and other military charges. When this petition was presented at the council board, Wentworth (by now the earl of 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’.54Cholmley Mems. ed. J. Binns (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. cliii), 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, Belasyse signed the county’s second petition to the king, pleading poverty in the face of royal demands that the trained bands be mobilised against the invading Scots.55Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1231; Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 283. And, in mid-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.56Cumb. 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, Belasyse, Hotham, Cholmeley and several more of the ‘principal and most active gentlemen’ drew up another petition, in protest, which they intended to present to Charles themselves. However, one of their number informed the court, and Belasyse, Lord Wharton, Hotham and Cholmeley were summoned before the king and told ‘never to meddle more in petitioning him in that kind’.57Cholmley Mems. ed. Binns, 102; Cliffe, Yorks. 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 encouraging the Scots to invade. Part of the peers’ plan had involved weakening the king’s army in the north, a process which Yorkshire’s ‘disaffected’ gentry, by retarding the mobilization of the county’s trained bands, had certainly contributed towards. Whether Belasyse had collaborated with the dissident peers – beyond supporting the August-September petitioning campaign for a new Parliament – is impossible to say. There is certainly no evidence that he favoured the Covenanters’ demands for root and branch religious reform and godly uniformity between the two kingdoms.58Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 319-20; Scott, ‘Hannibal at our gates’, 269-93.

With the summoning of the Long Parliament late in September 1640, Belasyse stood for Yorkshire again, this time with his friend and kinsman Sir Ferdinando Fairfax (now 2nd Baron Fairfax). Their opponent for one of the county seats was Belasyse’s former parliamentary colleague Sir William Savile. The fact that all three candidates had been involved in the Yorkshire petitioning campaign – and that both Belasyse and Savile would side with the king in the civil war – suggests that the contest was primarily a factional struggle for the honour of representing the county, rather than an overtly political contest between the supporters and opponents of Charles I’s personal rule. In the event, it was Fairfax and Belasyse who prevailed on polling day – Savile’s betrayal of Belasyse and Hotham after the Short Parliament having apparently compromised him in the eyes of all but Strafford’s staunchest adherents.59Supra, ‘Yorkshire’. Belasyse’s friendship with Fairfax would exert a strong influence on his career in the Long Parliament and probably throughout the 1640s. Edward Hyde* (the future earl of Clarendon) described Fairfax and Belasyse as ‘nearly allied together and of great kindness ‘till their several opinions and affections had divided them in this quarrel, the former adhering to Parliament, the latter with great courage and sobriety, to the king’.60Clarendon, Hist. ii. 461-2.

Belasyse was more prominent at Westminster between November 1640 and the summer of 1642 than he had been in any previous Parliament, although for a Member representing the kingdom’s largest county, his record in the House is perhaps less impressive than it might have been. He was named to approximately 55 committees and to six conference management or reporting teams, was employed as a messenger to the Lords on five occasions and was a teller in three divisions.61CJ ii. 72b, 109a, 112b, 155b, 196a, 218a, 227a, 228a, 264a, 271a, 276b, 282b, 407a, 539a, 568a; LJ iv. 143b, 191b, 198a, 320b. He is not known to have chaired a committee, or been closely involved in drafting legislation. Moreover, some of what appear to have been his appointments in the Commons may in fact have been those of his younger brother John Belasyse (Member for Thirsk), for the clerk of the House was not always careful to distinguish between the two men, sometimes referring to both, it seems, as ‘Mr Belasyse’. Henry was by far the more active of the two MPs, however, and it is likely that most such references in the Journals or diaries relate to him rather than to John. Indeed, Belasyse can be accounted a senior figure among the ‘northern gentlemen’ – a contemporary term for the more active and reform-minded northern MPs – although not as influential in this group as Lord Fairfax, Hotham, Cholmeley and Sir Philip Stapilton.62Clarendon, Hist. i. 309, 315; D. Scott, ‘The ‘northern gentlemen’, the parliamentary Independents, and Anglo-Scottish relations in the Long Parliament’, HJ xlii. 349. He worked particularly closely with Hotham, with whom he shared a concern to defend the ‘liberties of the subject’ as adumbrated in the Petition of Right. Unlike Hotham, Cholmeley and Stapilton, however, he did not regularly collaborate with Pym, John Hampden or any other member of the so-called ‘junto’ (the reformist leadership at Westminster) – probably because he lacked their willingness to countenance initiatives for further reformation in religion. He was named to only a handful of committees relating to religious issues, and every one of these bodies, such as that set up on 9 November 1640 for disarming recusants, concerned the perceived papist threat rather than church reform.63CJ ii. 24b.

Given his strongly Catholic background, Belasyse was probably more alarmed by the spread of radical Protestant ideas than by any talk of popish plotting. It may well have been fear of sectarianism that prompted him to present the pamphlet The Saints’ Beliefe to the House on 18 May 1641.64Procs. LP iv. 435, 441, 442. This was a new version of the creed, which enjoined belief in the doctrine that ‘every church hath power from God to elect and ordain their own officers, receive in believers and excommunicate any one of them that lives in transgression, without the help or assistance of any’.65J. Turner, The Saints’ Beliefe (1641). Written by John Turner, self-styled ‘prisoner of our Lord, Jesus Christ (committed by the bishops), near 14 years’, this was effectively a blueprint for congregational Independency and was denounced as scandalous by the Commons, although the parliamentary diarist (and zealous Calvinist) Sir Simonds D’Ewes professed to find ‘nothing amiss in it’.66CJ ii. 148b; Procs. LP iv. 435. Belasyse’s appointment on 9 February 1642 to return thanks to a group of godly Cleveland gentry who had petitioned the Commons desiring a ‘happy reformation’ in religion and the firmer enforcement of the laws against papists, owed more to his standing in the North Riding than to his religious sympathies.67CJ ii. 422a; PJ i. 329. Early in March 1642, it was Belasyse who moved (successfully) that two of the bishops whom Parliament had committed to prison late in 1641 – the bishop of Durham (Thomas Morton) and the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (Robert Wright), a moderate Calvinist and Laudian respectively – should be admitted to the House to plead for clemency.68PJ i. 499. Belasyse’s criticism of the episcopate was apparently confined to censuring past bishops of Durham for opposing the enfranchisement of County Durham.69Procs. LP v. 685. And in terms of his devotional preferences, he may well have leaned towards the Laudians. On 23 April, he served as a majority teller with John Hotham junior in favour of appointing the Ripon divine, Matthew Levet, a member of the Westminster Assembly.70CJ ii. 539a. Levet was said to have been ‘a forward man for the late innovations [i.e. the Laudian church reforms]’.71PJ ii. 209. Belasyse and Hotham won the division from the godly knight Sir Walter Erle and the Erastian radical Henry Marten.72CJ ii. 539a. However, the following month, the Commons rejected Levet in favour of the York puritan minister Henry Aiscough.73CJ ii. 579a.

Reforming the ‘abuses’ of royal power during the Personal Rule appears to have occupied some of the Belasyse’s time in the early months of the Long Parliament. One of his first acts in the House was to present a petition from the Yorkshire gentry and freeholders (on 6 November 1640), condemning Ship Money as ‘a great and crying grievance’.74Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21. Four days later (10 November), he was named to what became known as ‘the committee of twenty-four’ – a standing committee for drawing together and presenting all evidence of the ‘deplored state of the kingdom’.75CJ ii. 25a. During the next two months, he was named to committees for investigating monopolists, receiving petitions against several of the prerogative courts and for examining the crown’s perceived breaches of parliamentary privilege in the 1628-9 and Short Parliaments, and particularly the proceedings against himself and Hotham in May 1640 and against Denzil Holles, Hampden, Pym and other MPs in 1629.76CJ ii. 31a, 34b, 53b. On 30 December, he was named second to a committee on a bill introduced by William Strode I and Oliver Cromwell for holding annual Parliaments – legislation that would reach the statute books as the Triennial Act.77CJ ii. 60a.

Yet despite his nomination to such committees, Belasyse showed little interest in dealing harshly with those whom Parliament regarded as the architects of royal mis-rule. On the only known occasion that he participated in a debate concerning the punishment of a minister of state, Lord Keeper Finch (Sir John Finch†), he advocated leniency.78Northcote Note Bk. 86. And although he was a long-time opponent of Strafford, only four of his appointments related to Parliament’s proceedings against the earl, and he was not among the Yorkshire gentlemen called as witnesses for the prosecution at his trial.79CJ ii. 39b, 79b, 98a, 109a. Like his brother John Belasyse and Sir John Hotham, he was also reluctant to take a hard line even against the army plotters, serving as a teller on 8 September 1641 in favour of a motion that William Ashbournham* and Hugh Pollarde* should receive their pay as army officers.80CJ ii. 282b; Procs. LP vi. 685. Apart from his appointments relating to Strafford, Belasyse was named to only two committees that were of punitive intent – that set up on 29 October for listing those whom the Commons had voted delinquents, ‘whereby there estates may be liable for their offences’, and that to discuss a bill for confiscating the estates of the late archbishop of York, John Neile (22 February 1642).81CJ ii. 298b, 448b.

But although Belasyse showed little appetite for punishing the king’s servants and supporters, he appears to have subscribed to the view that most of the kingdom’s ills could be traced to Charles’s evil counsellors. Thus on 28 June 1641 he was named to a committee to confer with the Lords about the Ten Propositions, which included, as their central plank, proposals for replacing the commonwealth’s perceived enemies at court with men trusted by Parliament.82CJ ii. 190b. Similarly, on 28 October he was named to a committee to prepare heads for a petition to be presented to the king ‘to prevent the mischiefs that may happen to the commonwealth by the choice and employment of evil counsellors’.83CJ ii. 297b.

Belasyse’s overriding concern at Westminster, however, was the relief of Yorkshire and the northern counties, where the quartering of the English and Scottish armies since the summer of 1640 had caused severe hardship. Inevitably, therefore, he was keen to promote measures for the supply and disbandment of the king’s army and for paying off the Scots. This may well account for his addition to the committee for the king’s army on 18 January 1641 and his motion a week later (25 Jan.) – interrupting a debate on petitions to the Commons for abolishing episcopacy – that the House inform the Lords of its vote concerning the ‘relieving of the Scots in a friendly manner’ [i.e. the Brotherly Assistance].84CJ ii. 69b; Procs. LP ii. 272-3. On 8 February, he claimed that ‘if some course were not speedily taken for payment of the king’s army, the northern parts, and especially Yorkshire, would be plundered by the soldiers thereof … and so we might bring the desolations of Germany upon ourselves’. He then moved that ‘some speedy order might be taken therein, or else that we would send down himself and the other Yorkshiremen of the House to defend their own [property], though with the loss of their lives’.85Procs. LP ii. 389. He was probably the ‘Mr Belasyse’ who pledged security for £500 early in March for raising money in the City to pay the armies in the north.86Procs. LP ii. 628. And on 24 March, he was a messenger to the Lords to request a conference on procuring a City loan ‘for the speedy supply of the urgent necessities of both armies’.87CJ ii. 112a; LJ iv. 198b.

It may well have been Henry rather than John who was the ‘Mr Belasyse’ that the Commons sent into the north in April 1641 to investigate the state of the king’s army.88CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 532; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Johnson, ii. 82. Belasyse received no appointments in the House that month and was certainly more closely involved in the House’s dealings with the army than was John. Whichever man it was, they may have helped to trigger the first army plot, for when this design was investigated in June, one of the conspirators testified that rumours had circulated among the officers ‘that Parliament intended to disband the army without money and that Mr. Belasyse was sent down to that purpose’.89Procs. LP v. 43. Assuming that it was Henry who had undertaken this mission, he had returned to Westminster by 27 April, when he again drew the House’s attention to the plight of the northern counties, making a ‘short relation of the miseries and depredations in Yorkshire occasioned by the lying of the king’s army there’.90Procs. LP iv. 111. He requested that the county be exempted from payment of the two subsidies that the House had recently voted. When details of the first army plot emerged on 3 May, Belasyse, Hotham, Sir Hugh Cholmeley and Sir Philip Stapilton were named to a thirteen-man committee for drawing up a letter to the army’s commanders ‘to certify them what great care this House has taken for their maintenance and what distraction has been amongst us for want of monies’ and promising payment of arrears and a further month’s pay on disbandment.91CJ ii. 131b; Procs. LP iv. 179. That same day (3 May), Belasyse took the Protestation.92CJ ii. 133a.

Belasyse’s concern for the welfare of the northern counties would draw him into financial policy-making more generally. He was named to a committee on 11 May 1641 to consider where best to borrow money, and he was a minority teller with Nathaniel Fiennes I on 24 May against taking a vote on whether the customers and others involved in the collection of tonnage and poundage should be declared delinquents.93CJ ii. 143a, 155b; Procs. LP iv. 549, 553. According to D’Ewes, ‘the northern men inclined to hasten a composition with the customers that so we might disband the armies which lay in those parts and almost ruined them’.94Procs. LP iv. 562. A week or so later (2 June), he relayed information to the House from the officers of the Mint concerning the most cost-effective method of turning plate into hard currency.95Procs. LP iv. 691, 693-4.

Working alongside Hotham and several other northern gentlemen, Belasyse was among that relatively small group of leading Commons-men which handled the business of disbanding the armies and related issues – tasks that accounted for a high proportion of his appointments as a committeeman and as a conference manager or reporter between mid-May and late August 1641.96CJ ii. 152a, 172b, 179a, 227a, 228a, 264a, 271a, 276b. His most important such appointment was to a bicameral commission established in June for paying the Brotherly Assistance – the money Parliament had voted to maintain the Scottish army while it remained in England.97CJ ii. 182b. Keen also to secure financial reparations for the armies’ reluctant civilian hosts in Yorkshire, he was named first to a committee set up on 2 July on a bill for securing the county’s billet money and was a messenger to carry the drafted legislation up to the Lords.98CJ ii. 196a, 215a, 218a. After a busy summer, he was granted leave on 8 September.99CJ ii. 284a.

The reimbursement of Yorkshire’s losses at the hands of the soldiery remained one of Belasyse’s highest priorities after the autumn 1641 recess.100CJ ii. 298a; D’Ewes (C), 44, 114, 256, 341; Fairfax Corresp. ii. 216, 297, 349, 378; PJ i. 417. Indeed, so determined was he that the county’s poll tax levies be used exclusively to pay off the billet money owing to its inhabitants, he even opposed a motion in mid-January 1642 that Sir John Hotham receive some of this revenue for the defence of Hull.101PJ i. 42, 48. He was still pursuing the county’s financial claims on 30 April 1642, when he and Lord Fairfax secured an order for payment of its billet money.102PJ i. 252. He was much less assertive in the factional struggles at Westminster during November and December 1641 between the junto and the nascent king’s party – a conflict exacerbated by the outbreak of the Irish rebellion late in October – although he seems to have been broadly aligned with Pym and those advocating further restrictions upon the royal prerogative. On 2 November – the day after news of the rebellion reached Westminster – he was named to a committee for arranging a City loan to help suppress the rebels and to a bicameral standing committee on Irish affairs.103CJ ii. 302a. And on 30 November, he was included on the twelve-man delegation chosen to present the Grand Remonstrance to the king.104CJ ii. 327a. By the following day (1 December), apparently the only Members of this body left at Westminster were Belasyse, Lord Fairfax, D’Ewes and Sir Richard Wynn, and it was these four men, therefore, who presented the Remonstrance to the king.105D’Ewes (C), 219-20.

Although Belasyse continued to attend the House until at mid-May 1642, the frequency with which he was named to committees declined after November 1641. He received only one such appointment in December and only two in January 1642.106CJ ii. 357b, 368b, 400a. Nevertheless, he continued to associate with some of the king’s leading opponents in the early months of 1642. During the House’s brief residence in the Guildhall following the attempted arrest of the Five Members, he was named to a high-powered committee (or sub-committee, since the Commons had adjourned to the Guildhall as a committee of the whole House) on 5 January to vindicate the privileges of Parliament, liaise with the Common Council and make provision for the safety of the kingdom.107CJ ii. 368b. Belasyse was the only member of this committee who was not to enter the civil war on the side of Parliament. Moreover, he and Fairfax were keen to remind the House in February and March of the threat that Yorkshire’s Catholics posed to the region’s security.108Infra, ‘Sir Ferdinando Fairfax’; PJ i. 240, 299, 329. On 15 February, he was named with Fairfax, Hotham, Cholmeley, Stapilton and Sir William Savile, to a committee to confer with Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, the lord lieutenant of Yorkshire, about command of the county’s militia.109CJ ii. 433a. More significantly, on 1 March, he was named second to a committee of both Houses for presenting the king with Parliament’s answer touching the disposal of the kingdom’s militia, Charles having refused to give his assent to the Militia Ordinance.110CJ ii. 462a. Judging by this appointment, Belasyse was regarded as a supporter of Parliament’s efforts to wrest control of the kingdom’s military forces from the king. This can also be inferred from the House’s resolution on 17 March that Belasyse be recommended to Essex as a deputy lieutenant for Yorkshire (Essex commissioning him as such on 5 July).111CJ ii. 483b; N. Yorks. RO, ZDV, Fauconberg of Newburgh Priory mss, Personal and official pprs. (mic. 1252). Belasyse was one of only a handful of deputy lieutenants appointed under the Militia Ordinance who would side with the king at the outbreak of civil war. His last committee appointment was on 11 April, when he was named third, after Stapilton and Fairfax, to a committee to prepare a letter to the sheriff of Yorkshire concerning the county’s trained bands.112CJ ii. 522a.

Belasyse remained at Westminster several months after most of the leaders of Yorkshire’s royalist party had joined the king at York. On 3 May, he was confirmed as one of the commissioners for payment of the Brotherly Assistance.113CJ ii. 555b. On 12 May, he was probably the ‘Mr Belasyse’ who was appointed a messenger to the Lords to request a conference concerning the king’s demand for justice against Sir John Hotham for refusing him entrance at Hull.114CJ ii. 568a. According to D’Ewes, the House employed Henry Belasyse as its messenger.115PJ ii. 307-8. But in the Lords Journals the messenger is named as John Belasyse.116CJ ii. 586a; LJ v. 60a; PJ ii. 307-8. John Belasyse was more sympathetic to the king’s cause than Henry at this stage and had probably already left Westminster, in which case the clerk of the Lords either mistook John for Henry, or simply made a clerical error. The ‘Mr Belasyse’ appointed to manage this conference, along with Pym, Sir Henry Vane I and John Glynne, was, again, probably Henry Belasyse.117CJ ii. 568a. By this stage, however, cracks were beginning to appear in his own allegiance to Parliament. On 16 May, Belasyse, Sir Robert Pye and several other Members moved that the House might consider ‘some way of accommodation’ with the king following an altercation between some of his supporters and the parliamentary committee at York (which included Fairfax and Sir Hugh Cholmeley). The Commons, however, opted for a more confrontational response, publishing a vindication of the York committee’s proceedings.118PJ ii. 323.

Belasyse’s motion on 16 May 1642 would be his last contribution to the proceedings of the Long Parliament. Four days later, on 20 May, he and his brother-in-law Sir Henry Slingesby* left London for Yorkshire.119Slingsby Diary ed. D. Parsons, 75. By 16 June – two days before he was named to the Yorkshire commission of array – when he was declared absent without leave by the Commons, he was probably at York in attendance on the king.120CJ ii. 626; Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. The timing of his departure from Westminster suggests that he was swayed by royal declarations that sought to re-brand Charles as a constitutional monarch – propaganda that deliberately echoed the language of the Petition of Right. By the summer of 1642, Belasyse apparently gave more credence to royal claims that the junto aimed at a fundamental alteration in church and state, than to Pym’s talk of a popish plot at court. His own religious conservatism would have drawn him towards the king’s party; and it was later alleged that although he had formerly been ‘a great pretender to the good of his country’, his ‘tutor and chaplain’ William Bearman – who had been presented to one of the family livings in the 1620s – ‘did so altar [sic] him and alter him, that his judgement never since had a sound bottom either for state or church to stand upon’.121Mercurius Britanicus no. 22 (5-12 Feb. 1644), 174 (E.32.18); HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Henry Belasyse’. Belasyse’s decision to side with Charles was doubtless made easier by the fact that his father and brother had already done so. But although he received a royal commission in mid-July as a colonel in Yorkshire trained bands and was involved in raising troops in the county that summer, there is no evidence that he ever saw active service.122Harl. 6851, f. 197; E. Peacock, ‘On some civil war docs. rel. to Yorks.’, YAJ i. 95. On 6 September, the Commons disabled him from sitting for neglecting the service of the House and for signing an ‘insolent’ petition to Parliament from the Yorkshire royalists, protesting at Sir John Hotham’s proceedings as governor of Hull.123CJ ii. 754b; LJ v. 273b-274a; Fairfax Corresp. iii. 18.

Belasyse’s alarm at the Hothams’ belligerency may help to explain his presence on 29 September 1642 among the signatories to the Yorkshire ‘treaty of pacification’ – an abortive attempt by the Fairfaxes and other West Riding gentry to keep the county neutral. Belasyse headed the royalist signatories to the treaty – who included Sir Edward Osborne, Sir William Savile, Sir John Ramsden* and Francis Nevile* – as Lord Fairfax did for the parliamentarians. The main thrust of the treaty was that all armed forces in Yorkshire should be disbanded and that the gentry act ‘as one man to defend one another, according to the law, against all others, leaving all offences to be punished by the law of the land and not by force and violence’.124Woolrych, ‘Yorkshire’s treaty of neutralty’, 701-2. The treaty was immediately condemned by Parliament, however, and was soon rendered a dead letter in Yorkshire, where the tide of war was flowing too strongly to resist.125CJ ii. 794a. Battle was fully joined in the county with the arrival of Newcastle and his army in December. Belasyse apparently took no part in the negotiations that brought the earl’s forces southwards. However, once Newcastle’s army had entered Yorkshire, Belasyse joined Nevile, Osborne, Ramsden and other Yorkshire gentlemen in helping to raise money for its maintenance.126Bodl. Tanner 62, ff. 655-6. He also signed the so-called Yorkshire Engagement in February 1643, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the maintenance of the earl’s army.127CCAM 908.

Belasyse attended the Oxford Parliament in 1644, signing its letter to the earl of Essex on 27 January, urging him to compose a peace.128Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. After the parliamentarian victory at Marston Moor in July, he surrendered himself to Lord Fairfax in Yorkshire. However, in September 1644 it was reported that he and ‘divers gentlemen of Yorkshire who came in to Lord Fairfax and submitted themselves to Parliament ... are now upon intelligence of the late business in the west [the defeat of the parliamentarian army at Lostwithiel], again perfidiously revolted and fled to Scarborough [which Sir Hugh Cholmeley held for the king]’.129Mercurius Civicus no. 70 (19-26 Sept. 1644), 662 (E.10.11). But his commitment to the king’s cause, or at least to holding out to the bitter end, was apparently waning, for early in 1645 it was reported that he had ‘come in again to the Parliament and is at York’; in November, he tried to obtain permission to come to London to compound, but without success.130Perfect Passages no. 17 (12-19 Feb. 1645), 133 (E.270.5); SP23/201, pp. 583, 621. His nomination at the Uxbridge peace treaty early in 1645, and again in December, to a bi-partisan commission proposed by the king for managing the militia doubtless owed much to his friendship with the Fairfaxes, but it also suggests that he was regarded on both sides as a moderate, peace-minded figure at Charles’s court.131LJ viii. 72b.

Yet Belasyse, in the end, proved prove something of a cavalier diehard, for he was residing in royalist-held Newark – of which John Belasyse was governor – when it surrendered in May 1646. Possibly with his brother’s approval, Belasyse had entered into private negotiations with two of the parliamentary commissioners for negotiating the surrender, Thomas Hatcher* and Sir Edward Ayscoghe*, who later testified that ‘upon promise and engagement with Henry Belasyse that he would do his best endeavours with his brother that the town might be surrendered upon fair composition, we did on our parts undertake to do our best endeavours with the Houses, that Henry Belasyse should find as much favour in his and his father’s composition, as any other person then within the garrison’.132SP23/68, p. 31.

Belasyse petitioned to compound on the Newark articles in June 1646, although his petition was not allowed until March 1647. Because he predeceased Lord Fauconberg, he never enjoyed his full inheritance, but only such properties as his father had settled upon him at his marriage, or in reversion.133SP19/95, f. 168; SP23/201, pp. 583-4, 615, 624, 655; CCC 967; CJ v. 119b. His fine was fined at a third of his estate – that is, £3,429.134CCC 967. However, before composition proceedings had been completed, Belasyse died, on 4 May 1647, and was buried at Coxwold church on 20 May.135SP19/95, f. 328; Coxwold Par. Regs. ed. Lloyd, 104. He died intestate. Belasyse’s eldest son, Thomas, who succeeded as 2nd Viscount Fauconberg in 1653, married one of Oliver Cromwell’s daughters and was summoned to the Cromwellian Other House in 1657. However, none of Belasyse’s descendants sat in the Commons again until the mid-eighteenth century.