BRERETON, Sir William, 1st bt. (1604-61), of Handforth Hall, Cheadle, Cheshire.

Background and early career

Brereton belonged to a collateral branch of one of Cheshire’s most ‘ancient and knightly’ families, the Breretons of Brereton – indeed, his ancestors may well have arrived in England with the Conquerer.80Ath. Ox. iii. 252; F. Dwarris, ‘Observations upon the hist. of one of the old Cheshire fams.’, Archaeologia, xxxiii. 55, 56, 58, 61; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 31. His own particular line had been founded by his great-grandfather, who had acquired by marriage an estate at Handforth – a village eight miles south-east of Manchester – and had built Handforth Hall as the family’s principal residence.81Earwaker, E. Cheshire, i. 260; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 31. His father having died when he was five, Brereton became the ward of his maternal grandfather Richard Holland† of Denton in the parish of Manchester (also grandfather of Richard Holland*), who was a man of trenchantly Protestant convictions and a patron of godly ministers.82WARD9/162, f. 76; WARD9/348, f. 78; Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 1; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 33; , ‘Richard Holland’, HP Commons, 1558-1603; Richardson, Puritanism, 121, 125.

Brereton inherited an estate that consisted of about 3,000 acres and worth approximately £1,000 a year, putting him among the upper tier of gentlemen landowners in the county.83Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 31; J. Morrill, ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s wars of religion’, JBS, xxiv. 312. In 1623-4, he (or more likely his Holland relations) contracted a marriage with Susanna Booth, a daughter of Brereton’s near neighbour Sir George Booth of Dunham Massey (the grandfather of George Boothe*), who would emerge as a leading figure in the Cheshire parliamentarian interest.84Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 33-4. Brereton was likewise on familiar terms with, and (by his own reckoning) a kinsman of, another Cheshire man who would distinguish himself in the parliamentarian cause, the future regicide John Bradshawe*.85SP28/37, pt. 1, f. 44v; Cheshire RO, ZCR 63/2/730, p. 29. However, Brereton’s circle of friends and family before the civil war did not lack for future royalists either.86Newton, House of Lyme, 145; Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 25.

In the Cheshire election to the 1626 Parliament, Brereton contested the junior place with a son-in-law of the man who had been unanimously elected for the senior place, Sir Richard Grosvenor. The rival candidates were persuaded to settle the issue by drawing lots, with Brereton emerging the loser and duly standing aside.87‘Cheshire’, HP Commons, 1604-1629 In 1627, he was created a baronet through the good offices of the royal favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, on the understanding that he would maintain 30 soldiers in Ireland for three years in lieu of the customary creation fee of £1,095.88CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 85; Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 3. In the elections to the 1628 Parliament, Brereton was returned for Cheshire, taking the junior place behind Grosvenor. He made no recorded contribution to debate in this Parliament and was named to only one committee.89‘Sir William Brereton’, HP Commons, 1604-29. However, the fact that he either kept a parliamentary diary – or, more likely, that he annotated a copy of the anonymous manuscript account of the 1628-9 Parliament, the so-called ‘Proceedings and Debates’ – suggests that he had a lively interest in the key political issues of the day. Moreover, his gloss on debates in the House further implies that he sympathised with the ‘patriotic’ opposition to the crown’s policies in the late 1620s. On one occasion, he echoed the words of Sir Edward Coke† (repeated in Proceedings and Debates) in describing a speech of the royal spokesman Sir Francis Ashley† in defence of prerogative power as being ‘of desperate and damnable consequences’.90Bodl. ms Hearne’s diaries 177, ff. 77-106; Remarks and Collns. of Thomas Hearne ed. H. E. Salter (Oxf. Hist. Soc. lxxii), 273-4; CD 1628, iii. 6; ‘Francis Ashley’, HP Commons, 1604-29.

Brereton’s godly piety and his evident desire to augment his estate converged from the late 1620s in his efforts to purchase property in New England and Ireland on which to settle Protestant tenants. He was well known to John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, and may himself even have contemplated (if apparently nothing more) emigrating.91Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 6-8; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 62. Some of his formidable energy as a ‘pioneer in estate management’ was dissipated in a series of lengthy law-suits with opponents of the commercial duck decoy that he and Sir George Booth constructed in Saltney marshes near Chester, and also with Chester corporation over his insistence that former monastic properties he owned in the city were exempt from municipal jurisdiction.92Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 2, 18-23; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 34; ‘Sir William Brereton’, Oxford DNB. His fondness for litigation may partly explain his chronic indebtedness from the late 1620s, which he compounded by taking out several large loans in 1639 and 1640. Among his creditors was the future royalist grandee Orlando Bridgeman*.93LC4/201, f. 298; LC4/202, ff. 147v, 205v; LC4/203, f. 148; Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 2.

Although Brereton was the most active member of the Cheshire magistracy during the period 1627-41, and an assiduous deputy lieutenant, he found time during the mid-1630s to make what he called ‘summer progresses’ to the United Provinces, the Spanish Netherlands, France, Scotland and Ireland.94Cheshire RO, QJB 1/5-6; Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 10; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 34, 35; Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 312-13; ‘Sir William Brereton’, Oxford DNB. His accounts of these travels, though largely devoid of overtly political or religious comment, reveal that his puritan sympathies could accommodate an admiration both for the separatist Hugh Peters (‘a right zealous and worthy man’) and the Presbyterian Scots, whom he praised as ‘very sound and orthodox [i.e. Calvinist] and zealously religious’.95Brereton, Travels ed. Hawkins, 6, 10, 106-10; Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 313-14. His friendly visits to the non-Laudian bishops Thomas Morton and James Ussher (‘a most holy and heavenly man’) suggest that he was not at this stage an opponent of episcopacy.96Brereton, Travels ed. Hawkins, 143; Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 15-16; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 34. Back in Cheshire, he was a patron of godly ministers during the 1630s, most notably the future Presbyterian divine Richard Heyricke, warden of the collegiate church of Manchester.97IND1/70001, p. 53; Richardson, Puritanism, 128.

Brereton’s refusal to pay ship money in 1636 has generally been seen in the context of his long-running dispute with Chester corporation over his former monastic properties in the city rather than as a principled stand against the tax itself.98Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 23-4; P. Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire during the sixteen-thirties’, NH xvii. 47-8; Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 313. However, Cheshire’s ship money sheriff for 1637-8 claimed that Brereton was encouraging some of his tenants to resist paying the tax.99Lake, ‘Collection of ship money’, 62, 66. Yet if, as seems very likely, Brereton disapproved of many royal policies during the personal rule, he made no public show of opposition and continued to serve diligently as a magistrate and deputy lieutenant.100Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 312-13.

The death of Brereton’s first wife in 1637 and his re-marriage, apparently by December 1639, to the puritan iconoclast Cecily Mytton may have weakened his friendship with his former father-in-law Sir George Booth, who, with Grosvenor and Sir Richard Wilbraham, headed the so-called ‘patriots’ – a political grouping among the Cheshire elite that combined an ‘evangelical Calvinist religious outlook ... with a distrust of courtiers and royal favourites and a readiness to look to Parliament to remedy the county’s problems’. A potentially rival grouping was centred upon the county’s leading gentry who had acquired Irish peerages during the 1620s and 1630s. Known as the ‘barons’, this embryonic faction ‘tended to be strongly anti-puritan ... relatively indulgent towards Catholicism and Laudianism, ready to identify with the interests of king and court and willing to take an authoritarian line when it came enforcing the crown’s demands’.101R. Cust, P. Lake, Gentry Culture, and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of the Civil War (Manchester, 2020), 173.

The calling of a new Parliament, late in 1639, brought the latent tension between these two Cheshire groupings into the open. At some point that winter, Brereton formed an electoral partnership with one of the barons’ closest confederates, Sir Thomas Aston*. Although Aston and Brereton had each acquired a reputation in Cheshire as opponents of ship money, their electoral partnership in 1640 was very much a marriage of convenience. Aston was a minor courtier with a marked hostility towards what he called the ‘puritan faction’, while Brereton may well have been recruited by the barons precisely because his popularity with ‘the religious [i.e. the puritans]’ in Cheshire was likely to draw supporters away from the ‘patriots’.102Supra, ‘Cheshire’; ‘Sir Thomas Aston’; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 565. Brereton’s alliance with Aston and the barons was not entirely in keeping with the fine sentiments he had expressed to a kinsman when he had first thrown his hat in the ring.

I could much wish, though I cannot hope it, that every man might have come so free to the election as they might be under no manner of engagement, but might be at liberty to give their voices as they see cause, so might there be a fair and free election, suitable to the nature of a Parliament; wherein ... I cannot doubt but that you are sufficiently ... sensible of the necessity of making a careful choice, seeing that we trust our estates, liberties, posterities and religion with them that are elected.103UCNW, Mostyn ms 9082, no. 21.

Brereton’s estrangement from the patriots may have been caused, or compounded, by their decision to select candidates from within their own immediate circle – probably either Booth’s younger son John or his grandson George Boothe*, and Wilbraham’s eldest son Thomas – to the exclusion of Brereton, who was clearly eager to return to the House.104Infra, ‘George Boothe’; ‘Sir William Brereton’; VCH Cheshire, ii. 107; Morrill, Cheshire, 33; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 178. With their support apparently declining by late March 1640, the patriots appear to have withdrawn from the contest before election day on 6 April 1640, which saw Brereton and Aston duly returned as knights of the shire, in that order.105C219/42/1/50; VCH Cheshire, ii. 108. Brereton was named to only one committee in the Short Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.106CJ ii. 12b.

Brereton stood for Cheshire again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640. Two other candidates emerged – Aston and Peter Venables* – and the ensuing contest may have been a three-way struggle, or it is possible that Brereton and Venables stood together as the preferred candidates of the patriots. Having forfeited the support of the barons by the autumn – probably because of his increasingly close identification with what Aston had termed the national ‘puritan faction’ – Brereton had apparently patched up his differences with the Booth-Wilbraham group. Aston had retained the barons’ favour, but his court connections and his friendship with prominent Catholics had damaged his interest among the freeholders. On election day, 19 October, there was reportedly ‘much feuding and faction’ between the three candidates – ‘but at last’, presumably after a ‘shout’, Venables and Brereton were returned. Booth, Wilbraham and their friends evidently approved of the result and had probably backed one or both of the successful candidates, for their names figured prominently among the parties to the election indenture.107Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Harl. 2125, f. 133; C219/43/1/77.

Brereton and the godly interest, 1640-1

Brereton was named to 26 committees before the outbreak of civil war, which was a relatively modest haul for a man who believed that the fate of the nation depended as much upon the success of the Short and Long Parliaments ‘as upon any that ever was in our age’.108UCNW, Mostyn ms 9082, no. 21. A high proportion of his early committee appointments related in one way or other to the Commons’ efforts to abolish or remedy the perceived abuses of the personal rule, such as ship money, the prerogative courts and the crown’s failure to hold regular Parliaments.109CJ ii. 35b, 44b, 45b, 50a, 52b, 53b, 54b, 56a, 60a, 75a, 253b. An active member of the Commons’ standing committee for religion, he was named to its sub-committees of 23 November and 18 December 1640 to receive complaints from ministers ‘oppressed’ by the Laudian church authorities and to remove their ‘scandalous’ colleagues.110CJ ii. 54b; Procs. in Kent 1640 ed. Larking, 80, 82, 87, 89, 98. He was never very vocal on the floor of the House, and his only recorded contribution to the House’s debates during these early months came on 25 November, when he presented a petition on behalf of a puritan minister who had fallen foul of Archbishop William Laud and the court of high commission. Brereton denounced ‘the exorbitant power’ of the court and its persecution of ‘godly and innocent ministers’.111Procs. LP i. 291, 295, 296.

Brereton’s hostility towards Laudian prelacy seems to have matured by early 1641 into rejection of episcopacy itself, for on 19 February he presented a petition that the Cheshire puritans had organised over the winter of 1640-1, calling for the complete abolition of the office of bishops, the church courts and ‘the English refined mass book of Common Prayer, with all their popish significant ceremonies therein contained’. In place of episcopacy, the petition advocated the establishment of what seems to have been a form of Congregationalism: ‘then might our ministers have liberty to preach God’s word and administer the sacraments according to the mind of Christ and our congregations’ power to execute ecclesiastical censures within themselves’.112CJ ii. 89a, 123a; Procs. LP ii. 492-3; P. Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain ed. T. Cogswell, R. Cust, P. Lake (Cambridge, 2002), 261-2. At least one contemporary believed that the petition’s organisers had consciously rejected Presbyterianism in favour of ‘a popular government [in the church]’ – which, if true, meant that Brereton and his puritan circle in Cheshire stood at cross purposes not only to the Scottish Covenanters, but also to the programme of reforming rather than abolishing episcopacy being pushed by John Pym and his allies in both Houses – a group known as the ‘junto’.113Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics’, 170-1; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 179-84. But the man that Brereton’s petition particularly upset was his Cheshire rival Sir Thomas Aston, who organised a counter-petition from Cheshire – presented to the Lords on 27 February – in defence of episcopacy and denouncing puritan schemes for further reformation.114Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Aston’.

Brereton and his Cheshire confederates have been held responsible for the next salvo in this battle of petitions – a long diatribe against ‘lordly prelates’ and the ‘diabolical’ institution of episcopacy that was printed in March 1641 and which its author claimed had been signed by what was an improbably large number of the county’s gentry and freeholders.115The Humble Petition of Sundry of the Nobles, Knights, Gentry, Ministers, Freeholders, and Divers Thousands of the Inhabitants of the County Palatine of Chester (1641); Procs. LP iv. 14-18; Maltby, Prayer Book, 148; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 265. In fact, the evidence suggests that this new petition was primarily the work of the London-based anti-episcopal polemicist Henry Walker – although Brereton and his local allies were probably behind its circulation in Cheshire.116LJ iv. 204b-205a; Add. 36914, f. 222; Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics’, 173-4, 176. The March petition’s murky provenance did not stop Aston seizing on it in an attempt to discredit Brereton’s February petition. However, in his eagerness to serve the king in defence of the established church, he over-reached himself. Lacking the patience to garner support for his actions from the county, he simply presented another petition to the Lords – which was read on 2 April – ‘in the behalf of the county palatine of Chester’, requesting the House to begin proceedings against the ‘seditious persons’ that he claimed were responsible for publishing the March petition.117Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Aston’. This, in turn, was the cue for Brereton and his allies to hit back at Aston when, on 19 April, they presented yet another petition in which they alleged that many of the signatures to the 27 February petition belonged to dead men, papists or had been fraudulently obtained.118CJ ii. 123a; Procs. LP iv. 6-7, 321-2; An Humble Remonstrance to...the Lords (1641), sigs. A2-A2v (E.178.4). A few days later (23 Apr.), this petition was referred to the committee set up to consider the issue of root-and-branch reform, with the addition of Brereton and several other godly MPs; and when the matter was debated in this committee on 11 May, the Members present showed a strong inclination ‘to preserve the complainants from punishment’.119CJ ii. 126b; Add. 33936, f. 232; Procs. LP iv. 321-2; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 264-5, 266.

The last word in this controversy, at least as far as Brereton and his allies were concerned, was the so-called ‘Attestation’ that Peter Venables presented to the House on 22 May 1641 on behalf of the Booth-Wilbraham group, denouncing Brereton’s ‘printed libel’ but taking even greater umbrage at Aston’s proceedings: ‘we ... do utterly mislike that any one man should take so much power upon himself, without public trust and appointment, to use the name of the county’.120CJ ii. 154a; Procs. LP iv. 525; Add. 36913, ff. 63v-64; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 266-8. Although the struggle between the Cheshire godly and their pro-epsicopalian opponents was clearly rooted in religious divisions, it quickly developed into a wider contest over the nature of political representation and authority at both local and national level. Revealingly, Brereton and his friends had villified the ‘lordly prelates’ not only as spiritual cankers but also for ‘asserting of his Majesty’s absolute power both over the laws, good, lives and liberties of the subject ... tending to the introduction of a lawless tyranny and arbitrary form of government both in church and state’.121Procs. LP iv. 17; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 287-9.

Parliamentary career, 1641-2

Brereton seems to have played relatively little part in the House’s proceedings during the spring and summer of 1641. He was named to a committee set up on 6 May for the security of religion and the safety of the king’s person in the wake of revelations concerning the army plot; and on 20 July, he was part of a conference reporting team concerning a request from the French ambassador to the king for permission to recruit soldiers disbanded from the royal army.122CJ ii. 136b, 217b. It was on Brereton’s motion that the committee for star chamber was revived on 4 August in order to hear the cases of the Chester puritans who had been punished for fêting the puritan ‘martyr’ William Prynne* in 1637.123Proc. LP vi. 192, 195, 200.

As a man with a lively interest in the westward expansion of English civility and godly religion, the outbreak of the Irish rebellion in October 1641 probably struck Brereton with particular force. Ten days after his nomination to a standing committee of both Houses for Irish affairs (2 Nov.), the Commons voted to send him down to Chester with £2,000 to help raise troops for service in Ireland.124CJ ii. 302a, 313b; D’Ewes (C), 277. During the next six months, he was intimately involved in the House’s efforts to dispatch soldiers and supplies, via Chester, to fight the rebels and to succour Ireland’s beleaguered Protestants, and he became, in the process, the main link between Parliament, the forces gathering in Cheshire for embarkation and the county and civic authorities.125CJ ii. 340b, 351b, 369a, 381b, 386a, 390a, 391b, 408b, 418b, 420a, 434a, 446a, 465a, 472a, 490b, 525b, 575b, 588b; D’Ewes (C), 276-7, 328, 399, 400; PJ i. 29, 30, 77, 94, 147, 192, 301, 318-19, 392, 430; ii. 14, 364; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 323-5. He endorsed the junto’s policy of encouraging the Scots to send an army to Ulster, and he backed Pym’s claims that the king or his courtiers had granted passes to Ireland to several leading rebels.126D’Ewes (C), 328; PJ i. 318-19. In the months preceding his investment of £1,200 as an Irish Adventurer in the spring of 1642, he repeatedly informed the House of his readiness to contribute to the war effort in Ireland directly from his own purse.127CSP Ire. Adv. 210-11, 299-300; Cheshire RO, ZCR 63/2/730, p. 32; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 177; PJ i. 147, 392.

The origin of Brereton’s apparent expertise or interest in military matters, and of the proficiency he would later demonstrate as a parliamentarian general, is something of a mystery. There is nothing in his travel diaries to suggest that he possessed, or had indulged, a passion for soldiering. On the other hand, at least one contemporary claimed that at some point in the early-to-mid-1620s he had ‘exercised himself in martial feats beyond the seas’.128Ath. Ox. iii. 253; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 50-2. If this claim is true, then perhaps the most obvious place for Brereton to have won his spurs would have been in the expeditionary force lead by Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, that had fought alongside the Dutch against the Spanish in Low Countries in the 1620s.129V.F. Snow, Essex the Rebel (Lincoln, NE, 1970), 118-24, 159-60. This might help to explain Brereton’s apparent closeness to Essex’s military circle during the early years of the civil war.

The focus of Brereton’s political energies shifted during the spring and summer of 1642 from the fate of Irish Protestantism to the increasingly precarious situation in Cheshire and the northern counties generally. In March, he was employed by the House in several capacities in its efforts to replace the man he had served under for over a decade as a deputy lieutenant of Cheshire – James Stanley†, Lord Strange (soon to become the 7th earl of Derby) – with the godly peer William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele.130CJ ii. 486a, 497a; LJ iv. 670a. In debate, he appears to have sided with Alexander Rigby I and other puritan Members in denouncing Lord Strange as being ‘popishly-affected’.131Infra, ‘Alexander Rigby I’; PJ i. 341. On Brereton’s motion on 24 May, a petition was presented to the Commons from the nascent parliamentarian interest in Cheshire, calling for ‘the perfecting of the reformation of our church already begun’ and for measures to safeguard the county from attack by Irish and Lancashire Catholics.132PJ ii. 365; Two Petitions from the Countie Palatine of Cheser [sic] (1641, E.148.12); Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 326-7.

Brereton served as a messenger to the Lords and featured on a committee and a conference-management team as part of Parliament’s response to royalist military preparations in Yorkshire in May and June 1642.133CJ ii. 591a, 609b, 615a; LJ v. 90. He doubtless added to the store of concern at Westminster by informing the House on 7 June that the Cheshire Catholics were involved in raising horse to serve the king.134PJ iii. 38. Two days later (9 June), the Commons sent Brereton and the Chester MP Sir Thomas Smithe down to Cheshire to oversee the execution of the Militia Ordinance in the county, where the Lord Strange was preparing to raise troops upon the commission of array.135CJ ii. 615b, 642b; PJ iii. 76. Shortly before leaving on this mission, Brereton pledged to furnish four horses and £100 on the propositions for the maintenance of the parliamentary army being raised under the earl of Essex.136PJ iii. 468.

Fighting for Parliament, 1642-4

Practically the first thing that Brereton did on arriving home – as he informed John Hampden* and Arthur Goodwin* in a letter from Sir George Booth’s house in mid-June – was to make the short journey to Manchester, in Lancashire, to persuade Rigby and his colleagues of the need to ‘speedily and vigorously go on with the execution of the ordinance for the militia’ if that ‘brave town’ were not to be plundered by papists and other ‘malignant spirits’.137LJ v. 174b. Three days after this letter was read in the Lords, Brereton was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Lancashire.138CJ ii. 649a; LJ v. 178b. But though he repeatedly assured the House of the ‘ready affections’ of Cheshire to execute the Militia Ordinance, his letters to Oliver Cromwell*, the Speaker and to the Lancashire MP Raphe Assheton I during July and August reveal that the region’s royalists, under the command of Lord Strange, were more or less in control of much of the county.139CJ ii. 653b; PJ iii. 171, 199; HMC Portland, i. 44-5, 46-7, 51-3. On 8 August, Brereton and Alderman William Edwardes* attempted to execute the Militia Ordinance in Chester, but met with a hostile crowd of citizens, and Brereton was lucky to escape unhurt.140Harl. 2125, ff. 65v, 133v; R. H. Morris, ‘The siege of Chester’ ed. P. H. Lawson, Jnl. Chester and N. Wales. Arch. and Historic Soc. n.s. xxv. 215. He had returned to Westminster by 20 September, when the earl of Essex commissioned him as a colonel of foot and captain of horse – although Brereton had been drawing pay as a captain (from the Committee of Safety*) by 3 August.141SP28/261, f. 5; JRL, TW/262; CJ ii. 774b; Eastwood, ‘Brereton acct. bk.’, 91.

Undeterred by his failure to save Cheshire from the clutches of the royalists, Brereton spent the final months of 1642 preparing to return to the region in force. On 24 November, he was appointed with the Lichfield MP Michael Noble to attend the earl of Essex and request that he grant commissions for raising companies to defend Staffordshire.142CJ ii. 862b. On 3 December, the Commons ordered that Brereton be supplied with muskets and given leave to raise horse for service in Cheshire.143CJ ii. 862b, 875a. Busy with his military preparations, he was included on only seven committees during the final four months of 1642 – although these included the Committee for Examinations and the Committee for Advance of Money*. Similarly, he was appointed a messenger to the Lords and served as a conference reporter just once during this period.144CJ ii. 774b, 825b, 826b, 833a, 866a, 876b, 882b, 907a; LJ v. 518a. He rarely spoke in debate, and when he did it was usually to urge that more resources be directed towards the war effort in the north midlands and north-west.145Harl. 164, f. 177v; Add. 18777, ff. 4, 38v, 69v, 72.

But Brereton’s most revealing assignment during the early months of the war came on 26 October 1642, when he was ordered to return the House’s thanks to the godly divine Thomas Case for the sermon he preached ‘this present day of public humiliation’. Brereton would perform the same office again on 9 April 1644 and 26 May 1647; and in 1645, he carried up to the Lords an ordinance appointing Case rector of Stockport, Cheshire.146CJ ii. 824a; iii. 455a; iv. 250a; v. 184a; LJ vii. 547b. Case was a friend of Heyricke and the Booths and was also chaplain to London’s radical lord mayor (and one of Brereton’s correspondents during the early months of the war), Isaac Penington*. In the mid-1640s, Case would align with the Scots and the parliamentary Presbyterians in wishing to bring the war to a swift, negotiated conclusion and in opposition to the New Model army and the sects. But during the early years of the war, he favoured a military solution to the conflict and backed the war party’s policy of an Anglo-Scottish alliance.147HMC Portland, i. 53; Harl. 164, f. 290v; ‘Thomas Case’, Oxford DNB.

Brereton shared Case’s desire to see the war prosecuted with all possible vigour, and by July 1643, at the latest, he was encouraging Pym to secure Scottish military intervention.148Two Intercepted Letters from Sr. William Brereton (1643), 4. For most of that year, however, Brereton was too busy soldiering to attend Parliament and lend his voice to this controversial policy. His campaigns in Cheshire and the surrounding counties during 1643 and early 1644, in which he defeated Aston and then combined with Sir Thomas Fairfax* in what was ‘the first unequivocal parliamentarian victory of the war’, at Nantwich, in January 1644, have been dealt with elsewhere. Suffice to say that after a not particularly competent opening campaign to clear most of southern and eastern Cheshire, he was soon waging ‘an aggressive and relentless war throughout the north midlands’.149HMC Portland, i. 94, 95-6, 141-3, 151-2, 153, 156-7, 162-3; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 36-42; iii. 15-16; M. Wanklyn, F. Jones, A Military Hist. of the Eng. Civil War (Harlow, 2005), 78, 133-5; ‘Sir William Brereton’, Oxford DNB. Sir Edward Hyde* (the future earl of Clarendon) acknowledged that though Brereton and

the other gentlemen of that party (albeit their education and course of life had been very different from their present engagements and for the most part were very unpromising to matters of courage [i.e. they had little previous military experience] and therefore were too much contemned enemies) executed their commands with notable sobriety and indefatigable industry ... insomuch as the best soldiers who encountered with them had no cause to despise them.150Clarendon, Hist. ii. 471-2.

His sobriety and industry aside, Brereton’s success as a general owed much to the support of friends and allies in London. In March 1643, the earl of Essex commissioned him (at the Commons’ request) as commander-in-chief of Parliament’s forces in Cheshire and, in November, as governor of Eccleshall Castle in west Staffordshire. During the course of that year, the House issued a series of orders and ordinances that boosted Brereton’s authority at the expense of local rivals and gave him wide powers to commandeer resources. Success in the field was vital in sustaining this outpouring of parliamentary largesse; but also important were the services at Westminster of several very able and energetic men-of-business – most notably, the Lancashire MPs William Ashhurst and Alexander Rigby I and (from 1644) the Staffordshire ‘recruiter’ John Swynfen and Brereton’s Cheshire friend John Bradshawe.151Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; ‘John Bradshawe’; infra, ‘Alexander Rigby I’; ‘John Swynfen’; CJ iii. 19a, 129a, 313a, 331a, 342a, ; LJ v. 538b-541b, 676a; SP28/256; JRL, TW/263; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 9-10, 537.

A few weeks after the victory at Nantwich in January 1644, Brereton returned to Westminster, bringing with him, as trophies, 12 of the royalist officers who had been captured after the battle.152Add. 31116, p. 230. Upon his entering the Commons on 13 February, the House commanded the Speaker to inform him that it took ‘special notice of the great and faithful services performed by him and do set a great value and esteem upon them and do return him great thanks in acknowledgement’.153CJ iii. 398b. Two days later (15 Feb.), Brereton was named first to a committee for strengthening Cheshire, Lancashire, Shropshire and Staffordshire against royalist incursion.154CJ iii. 400a. On 28 February, he took the Covenant.155CJ iii. 410b. Basking in the glow of parliamentary approval, he and his allies were able to secure further votes, orders and ordinances for augmenting his military authority and money-raising powers in Cheshire and for channelling yet more of Parliament’s resources into his army. Armed with such powers, Brereton and his military subordinates effectively acted as Cheshire’s county committee during the mid-1640s – much to the resentment of many of its leading parliamentarian gentry.156Supra, ‘William Ashhurst’; CJ iii. 410b, 411a, 418a, 418b, 427b, 428a, 429b, 440a, 450b, 454b, 482a, 484a-b, 496a, 505b; LJ vi. 486b-488b; Harl. 166, f. 13; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 42-4; The Parliaments Dreames Interpreted (1648) 7; Morrill, Cheshire, 81-2, 86-7, 89, 162-3, 168-9, 219.

Although Brereton proved adept at lobbying Parliament’s new supreme executive, the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK), the evidence suggests that in the spring of 1644 he was on better terms with the committee’s detractors – a faction headed by the earl of Essex – than with its war-party creators and backers.157Harl. 166, f. 18v; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 21, 26, 253; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 41, 47. In this respect, he seems to have out of kilter with his leading spokesmen and men-of-business at Westminster – Ashhurst, Bradshawe, Penington, Rigby and Swynfen – every one of whom was closely associated with the war party in the Commons, which had long ago lost all patience with Essex’s dilatory generalship. That Brereton was still loyal to Essex, or at least not aligned with his enemies in the House, can be inferred from his voting with the yeas in a division on 2 March over whether to release the former peace party grandee Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire, who had been imprisoned by the Commons the previous year for holding secret communication with the king.158CJ iii. 414a. The tellers in favour of Evelyn’s release were the peace-party grandee William Pierrepont and the prominent Essexian MP Sir William Lewis; the opposing tellers were the war-party men William Strode I and Edmund Prideaux I. Brereton underlined his Essexian sympathies even more firmly on 11 March, when he was a teller with Essex’s right-hand-man Sir Philip Stapilton in opposition to an attempt by the committee ‘for reforming the lord general’s army’ – which according to the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes was composed entirely of ‘violent spirits’ (Ashhurst was a member of this committee) – to intrude two colonels into the earl’s army against his will. The tellers in favour on this occasion were the war-party grandees Sir Henry Vane II and Sir Arthur Hesilrige – two of Essex’s most vocal critics.159CJ iii. 424b; Harl. 166, f. 18. Brereton and Stapilton were teamed again on 3 May to inform Essex that his commissary-general, Colonel Hans Behr, had spoken dismissively of some Scottish officers, ‘and to take some course that may prevent any mischief’.160CJ iii. 478a. Clearly, Brereton and Stapilton were assigned this delicate task because they were thought to enjoy the lord general’s trust and confidence.

Towards the Independents, 1644-5

Brereton’s movement away from Essex, or at least towards the Independents (which is clear by early 1645), may have owed something to the quarrel that broke out during the 1644 campaigning season between Brereton’s allies in the parliamentary west midlands association – notably, his brother-in-law Sir Richard Skeffington* and Swynfen – and Colonel Edward Leigh* and his confederates. This feud seems to have begun as a squabble over military resources between Brereton and some of the Staffordshire officers and committee members.161Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 18. However, by the summer of 1644 it had become caught up in the wider issues of how and to what end the war should be fought. Leigh and several other Staffordshire officers headed a faction on the county committee that was keen to advance the power of the region’s parliamentarian commander Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, an ally of Essex and other peace-party leaders, in the same way that Brereton’s own authority had been in late 1643.162Infra, ‘Edward Leigh’; ‘John Swynfen’; supra, ‘Staffordshire’; Harl. 165, ff. 246-7; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 16; ‘Basil Fielding, 2nd earl of Denbigh’, Oxford DNB. Brereton, on the other hand, was apparently growing exasperated with the lack of aggression being shown by some of Parliament’s other field commanders.163Harl. 166, f. 100. Moreover, by August a dispute was brewing between him and Denbigh over custody of Eccleshall Castle, which lay in Denbigh’s quarters but which Parliament had effectively handed over to Brereton in 1643-4 and which he treated as his personal residence in Staffordshire.164CJ iii. 415b, 505b; LJ vi. 449a; Harl. 166, ff. 107, 111; Staffs. Co. Cttee. pp. lxxvi-lxxvii; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 57-8. In December 1644, Brereton would act upon the CBK’s orders in seizing Stafford from Denbigh’s supporters.165Staffs. Co. Cttee. pp. lxxviii-lxxx.

Denbigh’s most formidable political opponent in the north midlands association was not Brereton however, but the latter’s Staffordshire ally John Swynfen.166Infra, ‘John Swynfen’. Brereton himself was too preoccupied fighting the royalists during 1644 to cause the earl too many problems – at least, at Westminster. Indeed, in June, Brereton joined forces with Denbigh in Worcestershire, from where he then made a dramatic ride to Westminster to inform the House that unless Sir William Waller’s* army remained in the region the king would gain ‘a greater and more formidable army than ever before’.167Harl. 166, f. 74; Harl. 483, f. 55v. The high point of another successful campaigning season was the victory that Brereton and his ‘sub-general’ Sir Thomas Myddelton* achieved at Montgomery in mid-September. ‘That God who is most glorified by working by the weakest and unworthiest instruments’, wrote Brereton to the Commons on 18 September, ‘hath this day given a most glorious victory and as much manifested His power therein as in any day I have been engaged since the beginning of these wars’.168LJ vi. 713b-714a. Writing to the CBK the next day (19 Sept.), Myddelton praised Brereton and his Cheshire soldiers, ‘who did most bravely behave themselves that day and did beat the best foot in England, as they the very enemies confess, being all Prince Rupert’s foot and the chosen foot out of all their garrisons’.169LJ vi. 714b.

By the spring of 1645 at the latest, Brereton was in regular contact with those he termed the most ‘faithful’ and ‘powerful’ members of the CBK, and in particular with Sir Henry Vane II and Oliver St John – both leading Independents. On 12 March, Bradshawe assured him that his proceedings were ‘looked upon with much contentment’ by the committee – as it had already informed Brereton himself on numerous occasions since October – and that Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton (another leading Independent) ‘and some others are most willing to assist you with men, money or both. They take full notice of your winter war to your high honour and their great satisfaction. You have such here as daily mind your condition whom help may be expected from’. The following month, Bradshawe wrote to Brereton from London in terms which suggest that both men approved of the process of new-modelling Parliament’s armies.170Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 18, 51, 65, 66, 67-8, 68, 76, 79, 82, 97, 98, 126, 186, 226, 229, 397-8; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 24, 69, 114, 189, 193-4, 257, 328. Support for Brereton from the Independents and the Independent-dominated CBK may well account for a series of parliamentary orders during the spring of 1645 for supplying his army and continuing him in command for several months after the introduction of the Self-Denying Ordinance.171CJ iv. 73a, 83b, 109a, 110a, 110b, 122a, 139b. Brereton’s letter books for 1645-6 – which contain some 2,000 letters and are ‘one of the most important sources for understanding the military, administrative and political dynamics of civil-war parliamentarianism’ – reveal that his friends and contacts in the Commons during these years were almost all prominent Independents, and included Godfrey Bossevile, Miles Corbett, William Ellys, John Gurdon, John Lisle, John Moore, Edmund Prideaux I, William Purefoy I, Oliver St John, Sir Henry Vane II and Sir Peter Wentworth.172Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 12-13, 51, 65, 66, 67-8, 68, 76, 79, 82, 97, 98, 126, 186, 211, 226, 292, 320, 397-8; ii. 11, 116, 119, 129, 176, 215-20, 247, 271, 281, 302, 322-3, 308, 349, 358, 380, 397, 433, 462, 469, 505, 520, 528, 529; iii. 18, 78-80, 132, 164, 167, 233; ‘Sir William Brereton’, Oxford DNB.

Brereton’s gravitation towards the Independents was noted with disapproval by some of his colleagues in Cheshire. Early in 1645, Colonel George Boothe* (the grandson of Sir George, and Brereton’s nephew) and some of his fellow officers went down to London to register a complaint against Brereton, apparently for financial irregularities in the supply of his forces.173Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 13-14, 54, 55-6. However, political differences evidently played a major part in this quarrel, with Boothe informing the earl of Essex that Brereton ‘had turned off many brave and able commanders only that he might put in Independents, [and] that Sir Wm. Brereton himself was grown a strong Independent’.174Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 56. Brereton’s sometimes fraught dealings with the Scots during the spring of 1645, as he and the CBK tried desperately to persuade them (unsuccessfully) to move their army south to protect the midlands and the Eastern Association until the New Model could take to the field, probably did little to improve his opinion of ‘our brethren’ and their English Presbyterian allies, headed, of course, by Essex.175Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 11-12, 111-12, 128, 336-7, 397-8, 421, 502, 532-3.

But given Brereton’s martial zeal, the puzzle is not why he came to align with the Independent grandees, but why he continued to work with the Essexians long after it had become clear to his closest friends at Westminster that the lord general favoured a soft peace over absolute victory against the king. The answer may lie more in the realm of Brereton’s personal than his public life. In April 1645, he would refer to the ‘duty’ he owed to Essex in a way that suggests he recognised past favours and a debt of gratitude to the earl (possibly stretching back to the 1620s) even as he moved away from him politically.176Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 218. This estrangement between the two men was perhaps reflected in Essex’s refusal to allow Brereton’s wife to remain in residence at Cassiobury, Hertfordshire – sequestered property that had been granted to the earl in September 1645. Brereton and his agent, Henry Cockson, had lobbied the Committee for Sequestrations* in the spring of 1644 that Brereton be admitted a tenant at Cassiobury, to which the committee had assented in regard of his great services and losses in the parliamentarian cause. In December 1645, Brereton used his former contacts among the Essexians, notably Stapilton, to solicit the earl that Lady Brereton be allowed to remain at Cassiobury – but without success, for Essex demanded that she quit the place by next Michaelmas. Just four days after Essex’s death, on 18 September 1646, the Committee for Sequestrations (presumably at Brereton’s request) recommended that he be continued as tenant at Cassiobury. However, on 26 October, the House of Lords (now dominated by Presbyterians) requested the committee to install Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke in Brereton’s place.177SP20/1, pp. 233, 294; Add. 40630, ff. 134, 139, 224, 229-30, 232, 234, 238; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 291-4, 375; CJ iv. 702b; LJ viii. 545b.

Faction and compromise, 1645-6

Brereton was obliged to surrender his command under the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance, and by early July 1645 he had resumed his seat at Westminster and his attendance of the Star Chamber Committee of Irish affairs*, to which he had been named a year earlier.178CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 405, 408, 409, 465, 468, 473; CSP Ire. 1647-60, The understandable interest he took in his former army’s siege of the royalist stronghold of Chester prompted him to arrange a presentation to the House on 21 July from a group of Cheshire gentlemen that resulted in his appointment to write letters requesting that the Scottish army lend its assistance.179CJ iv. 213b; Harl. 166, f. 243v. On 5 August, he was named second to a committee to consider measures for bringing the siege to a successful conclusion.180CJ iv. 230b. His only tellership of 1645, on 12 August, saw him paired with the Independent MP Edmund Prideaux I on a minor division concerning the composition fine of a London delinquent. The opposing tellers were Sir John Bampfylde (suspected by some Independents of being a closet royalist) and the Presbyterian grandee Sir William Lewis.181Supra, ‘Sir John Bampfylde’; CJ iv. 238b.

Brereton’s movement into the Independents’ camp at Westminster may have been accompanied by a subtle shift in his religious loyalties towards Independent ministers. Nevertheless, his inclusion on a committee set up on 25 July 1645 to advise with the Westminster Assembly on the establishment of Presbyterian classes in London points to his continuing commitment to a tithe-maintained, national Presbyterian church.182CJ iv. 218a. By March 1648, he had been appointed an elder in the fifth Surrey classis.183Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 435. What he would not have endorsed was a ‘Scottified’ Presbyterian settlement in which clerics, rather than Parliament, had the final say on questions of church government.184Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 321. His patronage and support extended during the 1640s across a broad range of godly clergymen, from ‘orthodox’ Presbyterian ministers to Congregationalists – most notably, Samuel Eaton. Revealingly, however, he condoned the unordained ministry of one of his captains, Jerome Sankey*, and in 1646 he replaced the ‘strict’ Presbyterian minister serving as preacher to his army with a man who would later become a Baptist.185Mercurius Aulicus no. 25 (18-24 June 1643), 328 (E.59.8); Mins. of the Cttee. for Plundered Ministers rel. to Lancs. and Cheshire ed. Shaw (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xxviii), 146-7, 165, 220-1; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 378, 379; iii. 38, 81-2, 95, 142, 272-3, 327; CSPIre. Adv. 300; A. Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains (Woodbridge, 1990), 123, 124, 144-5; Morrill, Cheshire, 168; ‘Brereton’, 318-19; ‘Samuel Eaton’, ‘Nathaniel Lancaster’Oxford DNB; Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics’, 248, 398, 400, 402, 405, 406. Yet though the ‘mental freedom’ of religious Independency may have grown increasingly attractive to Brereton from the mid-1640s, he never lost his appreciation for the ‘orderliness’ of Presbyterianism.186Dore, ‘Early life of Brereton’, 17.

Brereton seems to have approached the task of settling the political affairs of Cheshire and Staffordshire in the mid-1640s in this same practical, non-partisan spirit. In the four recruiter elections where his influence can be detected – Stafford (Oct. 1645), Newcastle-under-Lyme (Nov. 1645), Staffordshire (Aug. 1646) and Chester (Dec. 1646) – he backed candidates whose election would help consolidate his authority in the region or strengthen their role as his men-of-business in London – namely, his nephew-by-marriage John Bowyer*, John Bradshawe, William Edwardes, Sir Richard Skeffington, John Swynfen and possibly John Ratcliffe. Although all of these men, except Ratcliffe, had actively supported Brereton’s war in the north west, they represented a variety of political positions and religious viewpoints. Only one of them – Swynfen – can be identified as a firm ally of the Independents at the time of his election, and, like Bowyer, Edwardes and Ratcliffe, he would be among those MPs excluded at Pride’s Purge. Of Brereton’s inner circle during the 1640s, only Bradshawe was a thorough-paced Independent – and Brereton failed to secure him a parliamentary seat. If Brereton was indeed operating in the recruiter elections as a local agent of the parliamentary Independents, as several authorities have claimed, he did not do a very good job of it.187Supra, ‘Chester’; ‘Newcastle-under-Lyme’; ‘Stafford’; ‘Staffordshire’; ‘John Bowyer’; ‘John Bradshawe’; infra, ‘William Edwardes’; ‘Sir Richard Skeffington’; ‘John Ratcliffe’; ‘John Swynfen’; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 18-19, 66, 556-61; iii. 18-19; Morrill, Cheshire, 175-9. He showed similar restraint in his unwillingness to make a concerted effort to contest George Boothe’s election for Cheshire in November 1646, even though he cannot have found his nephew’s political and religious views very palatable.188Supra, ‘Cheshire’; ‘George Boothe’; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 14-15.

On 25 September 1645, a group of Cheshire gentlemen presented a petition to the House from ‘divers well-affected of that county’ and reportedly endorsed by ‘many thousands’ of civilians and soldiers, desiring that Brereton resume command of their forces and the siege of Chester.189CJ iv. 284b; True Informer no. 25 (2 Aug. 1645), 113-14 (E.294.22); Weekly Account no. 37 (10-17 Sept.), sig. A3v (E.301.17); no. 38 (17-23 Sept.), sig. A2 (E.302.21). The House immediately re-appointed Brereton as commander-in-chief for four months and subsequently turned a deaf ear to complaints by Sir George Boothe and his allies that calls for Brereton’s return were the work of a ‘factious’ minority and cast ‘odium and scandal’ upon their own military achievements.190CJ iv. 284b, 295a, 302b, 367a; HMC Portland, i. 279; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 48. On 1 December, the House voted to settle lands worth £1,500 a year on Brereton, although nothing ever came of this resolution; and on 20 January 1646, it extended his commission as commander-in-chief for 40 days – long enough for Brereton to bring the siege of Chester to a successful conclusion.191CJ iv. 361a, 412a, 429b. Confident now of his abilities as a general, Parliament put him in command of the flying force that tracked and, on 21 March, defeated the last royalist field army in the midlands.192CJ iv. 466b; LJ viii. 202b, 231a; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 44-8. Having returned to Westminster by late June, he received the thanks of the House from the Speaker for his ‘good and faithful services in his late employments in the reducing of Chester and other places’.193CJ iv. 585b. His tellership on 30 June, with Robert Goodwin, against communicating the preamble of the Newcastle peace propositions, and amendments to them, to the Scots commissioners suggests that he did not share the Presbyterians’ eagerness to turn this latest attempt to reach a settlement with the king into a more ‘British’ endeavour. The tellers in favour were the Presbyterian grandees Denzil Holles and Sir William Waller.194CJ iv. 593b. During Brereton’s absence from the House in July and August to oversee the final stages of the siege of Lichfield, the Commons passed an order confirming his tenancy at Cassiobury (or part thereof).195CJ iv. 612a, 634b; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 48-57.

With the war in the north west and midlands won, Brereton returned to Parliament and the on-going battle between the Presbyterians and Independents. On 4 September 1646, he was a teller with the Independent MP Sir William Armyne against issuing a writ for holding a recruiter election at Callington, Cornwall – a borough likely to return crypto-royalists or Presbyterians. Again the tellers in favour were leading Presbyterians.196CJ iv. 662b. He was thrust to the very middle of the factional fray on 10 October, when a report by John Lisle from one of the Commons’ committees of accounts concerning Brereton’s arrears of army pay sparked a furious and highly partisan debate (this debate did not occur in August, nor did it refer directly to Brereton’s governorship of Eccleshall Castle, as several authorities have stated).197Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 320-1; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 58; iii. 17; ‘Sir William Brereton’, Oxford DNB. Those MPs who were determined, now the war was over, to pay off the soldiery as cheaply and quickly as possible – a group headed by the Presbyterians – seized upon what they regarded as Brereton’s inflated salary claim for £9,209 as commander-in-chief (equivalent to the rank of major-general) as a stick with which to beat the military establishment and its Independent patrons. To this end, they secured a series of resolutions – that all previous orders for allowing major-generals a salary of £10 a day ‘be vacated and made null and that this vote relate as well to the time past as to the time to come’; that a committee be set up to examine whether major-generals were value for money; and that Brereton’s claim be reduced first to £7,152 and then to £5,000 – the implication being that he had defrauded the public purse. They then proposed (although here they were narrowly defeated by the Independents) to have a ballot box introduced ‘for voices to be given secretly when any question should be put for giving of money of offices’ – a measure that would have undermined the political patronage system built up by the Independent grandees, who had much of the state’s revenues and many of its offices in their gift.198CJ iv. 689b-690a; Add. 31116, p. 570; Harington’s Diary, 42; Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 169 (6-13 Oct. 1646), 271-2 (E.357.5); Moderate Intelligencer no. 84 (8-15 Oct. 1646), 688-9 (E.357.13); Perfect Diurnall no. 167 (5-10 Oct. 1646), 1342 (E.513.17); Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 17-18.

Despite the Presbyterians’ reduction in his arrears of pay, Brereton was able to lay out over £9,500 in 1647-8 on the purchase of the palace of Croydon – the former summer residence of the archbishops of Canterbury – and adjoining property in Surrey. He would later make much of the fact that he had been ‘one of the first purchasers that did adventure to buy any bishops’ lands’, especially given that the times had been ‘hazardous and dangerous by reason ... of the interruption of the Parliament by the apprentices of London and others [in July 1647]’. With his house in Chester destroyed by early 1646, his house at Weston in Staffordshire (acquired by his second marriage) ‘defaced’ and Handforth Hall ‘quite stripped and left naked’, the palace of Croydon became his main residence in the late 1640s.199C3/435/21; Cheshire RO, ZCR 63/2/13, 14; A Two-Inch Board for M. Prynne to Peep Thorow (1647), 16-17; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 527-8; VCH Surr. iv. 219, 220. His Westminster residence from 1647 until at least the mid-1650s was at first in Dean’s Yard and then in Old Palace Yard, both in St Margaret’s parish.200WCA, SMW/E/47/1582-3, 1592-1603.

Parliamentary career, 1647-8

Brereton seems to have been absent from the House for much of the winter of 1646-7, but having returned to Westminster by mid-February he re-joined the deepening conflict between the Independents and Presbyterians over control of the military establishment. On 25 and 26 February and 3 and 13 March, he was a teller in a series of divisions concerning the kingdom’s garrisons, which the Independents were anxious to retain wherever possible (being mostly commanded by men favourable to themselves and the New Model army) and the Presbyterians keen to reduce and to put those that remained under the command of their own supporters. His fellow tellers on three of these four divisions – John Lisle, Sir John Danvers and Sir Peter Wentworth – were firm Independents, while the opposing tellers were in every instance leading Presbyterians.201CJ v. 98a, 99a, 104a, 111a. He and Danvers were tellers again on 1 April – this time in favour of allowing a delegation of Sir Thomas Fairfax’s officers into the House to defend themselves against Presbyterian accusations of sedition.202CJ v. 132a. Two weeks later (15 April), he partnered yet another Independent MP, Sir Henry Mildmay, as a majority teller in favour of suspending the recently elected George Devereux from the House pending investigation of charges that he had collaborated with the royalists during the civil war. The losing tellers were the Presbyterian MPs Holles and Sir Edward Hungerford.203CJ v. 144a.

Given Brereton’s evident hostility to the Presbyterians’ plans for dismantling the army in the spring of 1647, it is almost certain that he favoured the Independents’ rival programme for settlement, which included severe restrictions upon the king’s prerogative and toleration for tender puritan consciences. He may therefore have had mixed feelings about his appointment on 26 May to thank Thomas Case for his sermon to the House that day in which the minister had urged Parliament to enforce the Covenant and suppress religious heterodoxy (which he seems to have defined as anything outside of the national Presbyterian church).204CJ v. 184a; T. Case, Spiritual Whordome (1647, E.389.8). Perhaps anxious to avoid further such employments, Brereton obtained leave of absence on 28 May and received only one more appointment – to a committee for assuring reformadoes of the House’s provisions for their pay (7 June) – before the Presbyterian counter-revolution of late July.205CJ v. 192a, 201b. According to one contemporary source, he was among those Members who fled to the army after the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster of 26 July, but his name does not appear on the more authoritative and reliable of such lists.206LJ ix. 385b; HMC Egmont, ii. 440. He had resumed his seat by mid-August – a week or so after the army had marched into London in orderly triumph – but was named to only three committees before taking further leave of absence on 1 September.207CJ v. 274a, 279b, 287a. Declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October, he was subject to a £20 fine – although this sum was returned to him on 20 October upon the recommendation of the committee for absent Members.208CJ v. 330a, 337a. He had returned to the House by 4 January 1648, when he was included on a large committee to prepare ordinances for the redress of grievances and the removal of burdens on the people’s liberties.209CJ v. 417a.

Brereton’s involvement in the House’s proceedings in 1648 – which was apparently confined to the period January to August – seems to have been less obviously partisan in nature than it had been in 1647. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that he remained closely aligned with the Independents. He was paired with leading Independents in each of his three tellerships during 1648 – most importantly, on 5 May, when he partnered Sir Peter Wentworth in opposition to an amendment that would have weakened the force of a motion to put the seven northern counties into a posture of defence.210CJ v. 420a, 532a, 551b. Although he did not take up arms again during the second civil war, several of his committee appointments in the spring and summer of 1648 are consistent with a concern to defend London against another Presbyterian-royalist coup and generally to bolster Parliament’s war-machine.211CJ v. 538a, 556a, 565a, 574a, 597b, 602a, 625b, 664b, 671b. When Chester corporation was implicated in a royalist plot that summer, he attempted to bring the city under closer military control by having his friend Colonel Robert Duckenfeild* and three other non-citizens added to its militia commission, but without success.212CJ v. 616b, 623a; Cheshire RO, ZML/2/320.

Brereton was granted leave of absence on 11 October 1648, and though there is no evidence that he attended the House between then and February 1649, he seems to have remained in or near London for most of that time.213CJ vi. 49b. In late December, he had an unfortunate encounter with James Compton*, 3rd earl of Northampton, who held Brereton responsible for the ‘barbarous usage’ of his father’s corpse after the battle of Hopton Heath, Staffordshire, in 1643. Meeting Brereton by accident on the highway, the earl ‘fell foul on him ... and bad[e] him draw [his sword] again and again, which he [Brereton] refusing, the earl gave him two or three cudgelladoes and went his way’.214Bodl. Clarendon 34, f. 20; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 20. If this account is true, it does not suggest that Brereton was so badly beaten that he was incapable of attending his place as one of the king’s judges. Nevertheless, he absented himself entirely from the trial commission and the trial itself – even though several contemporaries would testify in 1660 that they had often seen him deep in consultation with Hugh Peters, Bradshawe (the presiding judge at the trial) and Cromwell in December and January.215State Trials, v. 1126, 1127, 1139, 1201; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 20-1. Brereton was apparently well enough late in December to organise a pass for transporting horses for his friend, the secluded MP Sir Raphe Assheton I.216Chetham’s Lib. A.3.90, f. 26v. Yet Brereton’s apparent reservations about appearing publicly in the army’s and the Rump’s proceedings over the winter of 1648-9 is perhaps not so surprising given that he had never been identified with the more radical Independents like Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner, nor exhibited their hostility towards the king.

Career in the Rump, 1649-53

It was not until 5 February 1649 that Brereton took the dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote that the king’s answer to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement.217CJ vi. 132a. But having taken his seat in the Rump, he gradually established himself as one its most politically-engaged members. Indeed, his involvement in the Rump in 1649-53 and in 1659 represents the most sustained periods of political activity in his entire public career (unfortunately, these are also periods when diary and press coverage of parliamentary proceedings are very thin and for which we have none of Brereton’s correspondence). Between February 1649 and April 1653, he was named to approximately 36 committees. More remarkable, however, was his haul of 27 tellerships, which was a higher tally than that all but a handful of his fellow Rumpers. His partners on these divisions were 19 in number, and of these he was paired with only Sir William Masham and William Purefoy I on more than two occasions.218CJ vi. 141a, 159b, 172b, 195a, 453b, 524a, 536a, 561b, 563a, 566a, 585a, 589a, 604a, 618a; vii. 27b, 42b, 78b, 79a, 87a, 88b, 136b, 148b, 163a, 182b, 188b, 218a, 218b.

Brereton has been identified among those in the Rump who exercised a ‘moderating influence’ on its policies, or helped to push them in a more conservative direction, and some of his tellerships certainly bear out this assessment.219Worden, Rump Parl. 65. Thus, he was a teller in favour of respiting the execution of the parliamentarian turncoat Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland (8 Mar. 1649); for strengthening the provisions of a bill to suppress the Ranters (9 Aug. 1650); for respiting the execution of the Presbyterian minister Christopher Love (15 July 1651); and for releasing the disgraced parliamentarian peer Edward Lord Howard of Escrick* from prison (7 Aug.).220CJ vi. 159b, 453b, 604a, 618a, . On the other hand, several of his tellerships early in 1652 on amendments to a bill for pardon and oblivion suggest that he opposed the efforts of the army and its allies to relax the terms of this legislation in order to promote reconciliation and settlement – an issue on which he clashed with Cromwell himself.221CJ vii. 78b, 79a.

The Rump regularly enlisted Brereton’s services when it came to the government and affairs of Cheshire, settling a preaching ministry (both in Cheshire and nationally), suppressing ‘obscene and licentious’ religious practices, and regulating the machinery for fining delinquents and for the sale of forfeited, crown and church property.222CJ vi. 133b, 137b, 141b, 148b, 159a, 196a, 201a, 237a, 382b, 416a, 423b, 528a, 576b, 589a; vii. 49b, 138b, 263b; Mins. of the Cttee. for Plundered Ministers rel. to Lancs. and Cheshire ed. Shaw (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xxviii), 220, 221, 222. He either chaired, reported from, or was named first to committees for establishing a gaol in Cheshire (15 Feb. 1649); for reduced officers (30 May); settling an estate on Bradshawe (19 June); considering a petition from the magistrates and grand juries of the county palatine of Chester (11 Dec. 1651); and the ‘committee for Cheshire’ (16 July, 22 Sept. 1652).223CJ vi. 141b, 220a, 237a; vii. 49b, 155a, 184a. His popularity with his fellow Rumpers was such that he was elected to the council of state in February 1651, attending 93 of its 249 sessions and receiving appointment to nine conciliar committees. He also chaired council committees for ordnance and for paying off and disbanding the nation’s militia units after the defeat of the king’s forces at Worcester in September.224CJ vi. 533a; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. xxxv, 67, 96, 218, 219, 260, 322, 329, 453, 455, 494; 1651-2, p. 39. On 15 August, he reported from the council concerning the appointment of Jonathan Ridge* as an alderman of Chester.225CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 316, 325; CJ vii. 1a. He was re-elected to the council in November 1652 and this time attended 40 of its 121 sessions.226CJ vii. 221a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. xxxiii. However, he had been named to only two conciliar committees by the time the army dissolved the Rump in April 1653.227CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 181, 276.

Protectorate and Restoration, 1653-61

Brereton reportedly joined Vane II and other Rumpers in trying to work themselves back into favour with the army in the weeks following the dissolution of the Rump, but to no discernible effect.228Bodl. Clarendon 45, f. 381. Although Brereton probably had little liking for the protectorate, he continued to play an active role in politics – at least, in Cheshire – and in the summer of 1654, he was part of an informal ‘caucus of gentlemen’ (which also included Peter Brooke* and Thomas Marbury*) that convened to select the men who would stand for the county in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament that July.229Cheshire RO, DDX/384/1, p. 173; Morrill, Cheshire, 287. Who their nominees were is not known, but the successful – indeed, apparently the only – candidates were Bradshawe, George (now Sir George) Boothe, John Crewe II and Henry Brooke.230Perfect List of the Members Returned (1654, 669 f.19.8).

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Brereton himself stood as a candidate for one of the shire places – initially, in opposition to John Bradshawe and the candidates put forward by the gentry caucus. According to Major-general Tobias Bridge*, Brereton’s interest among the Cheshire gentlemen was ‘very little’ – which may well be true – but he then added, ‘only some of the rigid [Presbyterian] clergy cry him up’, which seems barely credible for a man like Brereton who was associated with the likes of Samuel Eaton and Bradshawe.231TSP v. 313. It has been argued that Brereton’s popularity in the county had suffered because of lingering resentment at the way he had thrown his military weight around during the civil war – compounded perhaps by his long absences in the south since the late 1640s. However, there is no evidence for the contention that he was object of local ill-feeling because he had used the civil war to wrest the office of steward of Macclesfield from the earls of Derby and their clients (installing Bradshawe as his deputy).232Earwaker, E. Cheshire, ii. 6, 467; P.J. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire election of 1656’, BJRL xlix. 407-9, 413-14, 416.

On election day, 20 August 1656, some of John Bradshawe’s party suggested to Brereton that he join his supporters, who were (according to Bradshawe’s brother) ‘inconsiderable few’, with the judge’s, who were ‘a great number of substantial men’. Jealous of his honour, however, Brereton would not countenance this suggestion. After one of the candidates – probably Sir George Boothe – was declared elected, many of the voters, possibly a majority, began to shout for Bradshawe, while some also declared in favour of Brereton, and both sets of supporters demanded a poll. The sheriff, a confederate of the gentry caucus, refused all such demands, however, and simply declared Boothe, Thomas Marbury, Richard Legh and Peter Brooke elected. Brereton and his supporters apparently considered petitioning Parliament against the sheriff ‘and others, his complices’, particularly for their refusal of a poll, claiming that Brereton had enjoyed the support of the ‘greater number of freeholders’ and would have been elected on a fair vote. In the event, Brereton seems to have confined himself to making a presentment to the Cheshire grand jury to this effect, which, as the jury was effectively nominated by the sheriff, sank without trace.233Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Bodl. Lib. Top. Cheshire e.3, ff. 20v-21; Cheshire RO, ZCR 63/2/702, pp. 39, 40, 42; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 416-18; Morrill, Cheshire, 292. Perhaps chastened by his experience in this election, Brereton did not stand as a candidate in the elections to the third protectoral Parliament in 1659.

Brereton returned to Westminster following the restoration of the Rump in May 1659, and between 11 May and 24 August, when he took leave of absence, he was named to 13 committees and served as teller in three divisions.234CJ vii. 666a, 683b, 727a. Several of these appointments were to committees for ordering the Rump’s armed forces and managing its precarious finances.235CJ vii. 656b, 664a, 676a, 684b, 726a, 739b. In an important division on 14 June, in response to a petition from the west country for the abolition of tithes, Brereton and Carew Ralegh were tellers in favour of having the question of ‘how a more equal and comfortable maintenance may be settled for the ministry and satisfaction of the people than by tithes’, referred to a committee of the whole House rather than a smaller, ad hoc committee that the radicals might more easily dominate or which would be better suited to producing swift results.236CJ vii. 683b; R. Hutton, The Restoration (Oxford, 1985), 47, 49. It was probably in much the same spirit of keeping the radicals at bay that he was a teller on 21 July in favour of including the Yorkshire Presbyterian knight Sir Robert Barwick on the county’s militia commission.237CJ vii. 727a.

Brereton reportedly tried to shield Cheshire’s Presbyterian ministers from the worst of the Rump’s anger after their failure to declare against Boothe’s rebellion in the north-west in August 1659.238Life of Adam Martindale ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. iv), 140. It was probably to help stabilise the situation in Cheshire that he took a 30 day leave of absence on 24 August.239CJ vii. 767a. He had not returned to Westminster by 30 September, when the House was called and was therefore fined £20.240CJ vii. 789b. But it is unlikely that he had paid up before the army dissolved the Rump again in mid-October. When the Rump was restored for a second time, late in December, Brereton again heeded the call and resumed his seat; and in the final months of the Long Parliament he was named to 11 committees. He continued to attend the House even after the return of the secluded Members on 21 February 1660 – a move that effectively spelled the end of the commonwealth.241CJ vii. 800a, 806a, 806b, 818a, 822b, 833b, 843b, 847b, 848a, 848b, 856b. Far from gradually losing interest in politics after the civil war, as some authorities have claimed, he continued to play an active role at Westminster until the last few weeks of the Long Parliament.242Morrill, ‘Brereton’, 319-20.

Brereton seems to have withdrawn from public life at the Restoration, and he was forced to relinquish the church lands he had acquired in the late 1640s (he evidently retained some property in Croydon, but probably on lease from the new archbishop of Canterbury). He died on 7 April 1661 at Croydon and was buried in the parish church there on 19 April.243Cheadle par. reg.; Croydon par. reg. According to local tradition in Cheadle, his coffin was swept away at a river crossing while being carried up to Cheshire for burial. His date of death, but nothing more, was recorded in Cheadle parish register. It is possible, if unlikely, that he was disinterred at some point after April 1661, perhaps when the times were more settled, for re-burial with his ancestors in Cheshire.244Earwaker, E. Cheshire, i. 259; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 67. In his will, he charged his estate with bequests totalling at least £2,000. He bequeathed a number of his ‘divinity books’ to the soon-to-be-ejected Presbyterian ministers John Brereton (almost certainly Sir William’s kinsman) and Thomas Case, his old friend, whom he appointed one of his executors.245PROB11/305, ff. 12v-13; Calamy Revised, 71, 104. Brereton was the last of his line to sit in Parliament.