DUTTON, John (1594-1657), of Sherborne, Glos.

Nicknamed ‘Crump’ on account of a spinal deformity, John Dutton was the heir to one of the richest estates in Gloucestershire (and possibly within the kingdom), and he had occupied a prominent place in the affairs of the county since his father’s death in 1618.28Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 163. The family’s prosperity was based on sheep-grazing and the wool trade. In 1608, ten per cent of the shepherds in the North Cotswold parishes were resident in the manor of Sherborne, the family’s seat: the largest concentration of shepherds anywhere in Gloucestershire. Before the dissolution of the monasteries, Sherborne had been part of the estates of Winchcombe Abbey, to which, each year, its flocks were sent for shearing. The first Dutton to own Sherborne, which was purchased from the crown in 1551, was a surveyor of crown lands in Gloucestershire.29Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 6. The manor in which John Dutton grew up was home to the families of 13 yeomen, nine husbandmen, and two shepherds, all listed as the ‘servants to ... William Dutton, Esquire’.30J. Smyth, The Names and Surnames of all the Able and Sufficient Men...within the County of Gloucestershire...in 1608 ed. Sir J. Maclean (Gloucester, 1902), sub ‘Sherborne’; R.H. Hilton, ‘Winchcombe Abbey and the manor of Sherborne’, in Gloucestershire Studies ed. H.P.R. Finberg (Leicester, 1967). No secluded country family, the Duttons were well connected in the metropolis: William Dutton had made a lucrative match with the daughter of a former lord mayor of London.

John Dutton became a justice of the peace in his twenties, and was appointed a deputy-lieutenant in 1624 at the age of 30. That year, he took his seat as knight of the shire, the first of his line to serve in Parliament.31SP16/54/28. Even before then, however, in 1622, he had offended the privy council in some unspecified way.32APC 1621-3, p. 134. He made no impression on either the 1624 or 1625 Parliaments, and in 1627 refused to serve as a commissioner for the Forced Loan. Along with almost half those named on the Gloucestershire commission, he refused either to collect money from others or to subscribe it himself; and was therefore summoned before the privy council.33APC 1627, pp. 125, 374, 449. For this refusal (and the additional offence of having failed to report to the council that a letter had been circulating in the county urging the gentry not to subscribe), Dutton was committed to be imprisoned. On 18 July 1627, John Holles, 1st earl of Clare reported that Oxford had been chosen as the place of Dutton’s confinement, a far healthier place than the Gatehouse prison in London where a number of his fellow refusers from Gloucestershire had been gaoled, and a sign of some leniency on the part of the council.34Lttrs. of John Holles, 1587-1637 ii. ed. P.R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc. xxxv), 356. By 30 September 1627, however, Dutton had clearly not yet gone to his ‘place of confinement’, and the attorney-general was empowered by the council to interrogate Dutton and a series of other loan-refusers, who had similarly failed to deliver themselves to their gaolers, about their non-compliance. There is a strong possibility that, despite the council’s orders, Dutton was never actually imprisoned; but, in any case, the council discharged him from its grasp in January 1628. 35APC 1627-8, pp. 58-9, 217.

Despite his resistance to the Forced Loan, Dutton’s wealth and standing within Gloucestershire made him a man with whom the council still hoped to work, and he maintained his county offices. Dutton, in turn, enjoyed links with a number of influential figures at court. The position of his brother, Ralph Dutton, as a gentleman of the privy chamber afforded one well-placed contact, but he also maintained links with the Endymion Porter*, closely associated with the pro-Spanish group at court which included Richard Weston (later 1st earl of Portland) and Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†), master of the Court of Wards. Dutton asked Porter to intervene in a dispute he had with his own vicar at Sherborne.36CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 586. In 1635, he was able to purchase, for £2,000, the wardship of the young Thomas Pope, 2nd earl of Downe [I], who, despite his Irish titles, was seated at Wroxton, near Banbury, in the neighbouring county of Oxfordshire.37CP; Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 105. On becoming Dutton’s ward, the earl of Downe came to live as part of the Dutton household at Sherborne, and Dutton selected as his tutor Henry Beesley, who was evidently no Laudian, and who published sermons in 1657.38Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 106, 111; H. Beesley, Psychomachia, or the Soules Conflict (1657). Three years later, Dutton married his ward, still aged 15, to his daughter, Lucy, then aged 14, thus ensuring the social preferment of the family and the elevation of his daughter to the rank of countess. According to his young son-in-law, Dutton exploited unscrupulously his position as guardian, acting with Downe’s stepfather, Sir Thomas Penyston*, to force him into a marriage against his will, and plundering his estates. In February 1641, Downe complained to the House of Lords that his step-father had coerced him ‘by threats, menaces, blows, hard usage and terrifying’ to marry Dutton’s daughter, ‘though there was no liking between them’.39PA, Main Pprs. 4 Feb. 1641.

Dutton exercised an influence on the conduct of the county elections to the Short Parliament of April 1640. Early in March, soon after the issuing of the writs for the election, the Gloucestershire magistracy met during the quarter sessions to ‘pitch upon’ who should represent the county in the forthcoming Parliament. Dutton, acting in conjunction with Sir Maurice Berkeley, took the lead in establishing an agreement, evidently in the hope of avoiding a public contest; and their choice fell on Sir Robert Tracy* and Sir Robert Cooke* of Highnam, near Gloucester, thus ensuring representation for the Cotswolds and the in-shire, or Vale of Gloucester. Tracy (who would become a royalist in 1642) seems to have owed his nomination by the magistracy to Dutton’s advocacy; and it was Dutton who organised Tracy’s party in Gloucester on the county day.40Cf. Glos. RO, D2510/10: Sir Robert Cooke to John Smith of Nibley, [February 1642?]. The arrangement between the two parties seems to have been that each candidate should instruct his supporters to vote for the other, thus preserving an appearance of public unity among the gentry. In the weeks prior to the election, the agreement broke down, providing John Allibond, a Laudian prebendary of Gloucester, with an opportunity to recount with relish the ensuing quarrel between the candidates and their promoters. At the heart of the dispute was the unexpected appearance of Nathaniel Stephens* as a candidate. Dutton accused Cooke of duplicity, and declared ‘he would never more trust any man that wore his hair shorter than his ears’, a reference to Cooke’s puritan leanings. Promoting the interest of the Cotswold ‘shepherds’, Dutton considered Stephens to be the dupe of the ‘weavers’ of the Vale. Allibond’s motive in recounting the saga of the election in detail was that he had heard that ‘cunning, underhand canvass’ was widespread, and he feared for the effects on church and king.41SP16/448, f. 79.

Dutton evidently felt a strong sense of personal betrayal at the Short Parliament poll, and directed his anger towards Cooke and Stephens, but it would be straining the evidence to regard him as hostile to parliamentary reform. In the contest for the two places as knights of the shire in October 1640, the county élite seems to have divided between a moderate party, represented by Dutton, and a more extreme interest, represented by Dutton’s bête noire of the previous spring, Nathaniel Stephens; Dutton was duly returned as the senior of the knights. On 21 November, Sir Baynham Throckmorton† reported proceedings in the House to Thomas Smyth I, of Ashton Court, Somerset. Throckmorton had been promoted as a possible candidate in the March election, and now linked Dutton’s name with men who were the objects of fierce criticism in the House, including Endymion Porter. Throckmorton hoped ‘to give a lift to little Crump Dutton about the business of coat and conduct money, wherein he hath played notable pranks’.42Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 163. The tone is hardly complimentary, Dutton as a deputy lieutenant had levied the unpopular coat and conduct money, and yet it seems unlikely that the tax-striking Dutton of the 1620s could have been a great enthusiast for the levy. Throckmorton’s comment may be related to Dutton’s pledge, made on the day he wrote to Smith, of £2,000 for the king’s army.43D’Ewes (N), 52.

At Westminster, Dutton seems to have attended the House regularly and was named to 15 committees during the first year of the Long Parliament. The majority of these dealt with the redress of grievances and the reform of the commonwealth, and ranged from such matters as a bill against the oppressions of clerks of the market, to those ‘concerning the conversion of pasture into tillage’ (25 Feb. 1641) and one against the unjust exaction of fees and gratuities by sheriffs (6 July 1641).44CJ ii. 75a, 92b, 200a. Two of the committees concerned the reform of the religious innovations of the 1630s; he was named to the large committee to consider legislation to abolish ‘superstition and idolatry’ (13 Feb. 1641), and, shortly afterwards, to another to consider the royal pardons issued to the two clerics whose views had been condemned in the Parliaments of the 1620s: Richard Montagu, the author of New Gagg (1624), and Roger Manwaring, whose sermons justifying the Forced Loan of 1626-7 had been censured by the two Houses in 1628.45CJ ii. 84b, 91a. On 13 May 1641 Dutton took the Protestation imposed on Members after the first army plot.46CJ ii. 145a.

During the early stages of the Parliament, it was evident that Dutton was acting with, and probably broadly in sympathy with, the cause of ‘further reformation’ in the church and commonwealth. When, in March 1641, the prominent lawyer and future parliamentarian, Serjeant John Wylde*, named two referees to consider a dispute between himself and the future royalist, Sir Henry Herbert* (who was also to name to referees of his own), it is revealing that Wylde named Dutton (along with another future parliamentarian, Humphrey Salwey*) as the two MPs to whom he entrusted the mediation of the dispute.47D’Ewes (N), 462. The appointment suggests that Dutton was trusted by, and well known to, Wylde – a figure who was to emerge as a powerful and effective administrator during the civil war as chairman of the Committee for Sequestrations. How long the two had been known to each other is unclear; both men had long experience of earlier Parliaments, and lived in neighbouring counties. Yet, if Wylde was characteristic of the Parliament-men with whom Dutton was associating during 1641, he was to part company with them during the following year, as the lines between parliamentarian and royalist parties became ever more clearly defined.

Whatever Dutton’s interest in the cause of reform and his reservations about the legality of the king’s fiscal measures during the 1620s, it was apparent by the autumn of 1642 that he was increasingly ill at ease with the conduct of affairs at Westminster, and his appearances in the Commons became ever more infrequent. After July 1641, he received no further nominations to committees, and he made no recorded appearance in the Commons until February 1642, when the Commons acceded to a petition that Dutton’s parliamentary privilege should be waived in order that a counter-action might be brought against him in the court of wards.48CJ ii. 429b; PJ iii. 371. At the time Parliament was engaged, in June 1642, in considering the Nineteen Propositions, its ultimatum to the king, Dutton sought leave to retire to the country ‘for the recovery of his health’.49CJ ii. 636b. In July 1642, when he was presumably in Gloucestershire, he was named by the king to his county's commission of array, but this was not his final break with Parliament. By 14 September, he was back in the House, when he took the oath to live and die with Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex in the furtherance of the parliamentary cause, and he offered to provide at least ten horses for the use of the parliamentarian committee of Gloucester.50CJ ii. 765b, 772b.

According to the royalist gossip, Anthony Wood, Dutton left Westminster because he was intimidated by the crowd action in London.51Wood, Fasti, ii. 42. Perhaps influenced by the strength of the royalist party in Gloucestershire, and the military superiority which the king’s forces enjoyed in the county until Essex’s relief of the parliamentarian garrison of Gloucester in September 1643, Dutton threw in his lot with the royalists, possibly reluctantly. His brother, Sir Ralph Dutton of Standish, was like him a commissioner of array and raised a regiment for the king in 1642.52Cal. Sherborne Muniments, 4, 243-4; Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 158.

Once having left Westminster, he was unstinting in his financial support for the royalist war-effort: it is claimed that he offered to lend the king £50,000 in 1642.53Memorials of the Duttons (1901), p. xxiv. He later served as an excise commissioner for the king in the midlands counties, and Charles stayed at his manor of Coberley on two occasions.54Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 259; Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 115.

Dutton was expelled from the House of Commons on 1 January 1644, even before he obeyed the summons from the king to attend the royalist Parliament at Oxford convened later in that month.55CJ iii. 355b. In the ‘anti-Parliament’, he signed the eirenic letter to Essex, calling on him to work his influence with the Westminster Parliament for peace.56Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. He received a pardon from the king for his involvement in the Westminster Parliament.57Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 213. By the summer of 1644 he had fallen into the hands of parliamentarian forces and in July he was one of three expelled MPs – those who had been ‘of the anti-Parliament at Oxford’ – ordered to be imprisoned.58Whitelocke, Mems, i. 280. As during the 1620s, his imprisonment on this occasion does not seem to have lasted long. After the first civil war, one of the charges of corruption laid against Major-general Edward Massie*, political Presbyterian and former governor of Gloucester, was that he had agreed to the ‘selling of Mr Dutton, the knight of Gloucestershire’, almost as soon as he had been taken, in return for cash which he had then pocketed for himself.59‘Some remarkable passages out of the county of Hereford and South Wales concerning Sir Robert Harley and other members’ [c.1647-8], Clarke Pprs. ii. 159. Nevertheless, Dutton, had to pay heavily for his backing the losing side in the conflict. He first came to the attention of the Committee for Advance of Money in July 1644, and was assessed at £3,000.60CCAM 424. He was in Oxford when the king’s headquarters fell to Parliament, and was said to have had a major role in negotiations on the Oxford articles of surrender.61Wood, Fasti, ii. 42. His composition fine was first set at £3,434, at one-tenth, which he had paid in full by 8 March 1648. He paid a further £1,782 at the same rate in 1650.62CCC 1273.

Dutton was evidently no doctrinaire royalist. After the full discharge of his estate from composition, in 1650, he was free to avail himself of the opportunity to buy not only the crown’s fee farm rents on his own manors, but on others, by means of agents including the Cotswold lawyer and man-of-business, Gabriel Becke*.63SP26/1, pp. 44, 270; SP26/2, pp. 44, 143. He kept a house in London, and became a friend of Oliver Cromwell’s* at some point well before 1655. Dutton’s nephew and heir presumptive, William Dutton, was Cromwell’s ward. The young Dutton’s tutor at Eton was Andrew Marvell†, who in July 1653 wrote to the then Lord General Cromwell on the young man’s character and progress.64Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 98. The intended disposition of John Dutton’s fortune on his nephew was sufficiently attractive for a marriage to be mooted between the lord protector’s youngest daughter, Frances, and William, and the friendship between Dutton and Cromwell was probably a consequence rather than a precondition of this arrangement.65TSP vi. 610-2. In any event, it secured Dutton against reprisals. The lord protector intervened with Major-general John Disbrowe’s* commissioners to ensure no penalties were enforced against him, as a former royalist, in the aftermath of Penruddock’s rising. ‘The gentleman’, Cromwell wrote effusively, ‘hath given so many real testimonies of his affection to the government and so to my person in particular, so constantly for many years past, that no man that I know of in England hath done more’.66TSP vi. 610-2; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 80-1. Dutton’s name was duly kept off the list of those to be ‘decimated’.67Glos. RO, Smyth of Nibley vol. iii, f. 71. Cromwell further attested to his regard for Dutton by ordering the chief ranger of Wychwood Forest ‘to serve unto John Dutton ... so many bucks of this season and so many does of the next season as he shall require’, and allowing him liberty to hunt, or course with greyhounds, in the forest whenever he chose.68Cal. Sherborne Muniments, 159; Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 187. The intended marriage between William Dutton and Frances Cromwell was acknowledged in John Dutton’s will, drawn up on 14 January 1656.69PROB11/265/700. In the event, it was never contracted, and in November 1657 Frances married Lord Rich (Robert Rich*), instead.

Dutton died a year to the day after making his will, probably in London. His funeral was at Sherborne four weeks later, on 18 February 1657.70Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 124. As there was no son to inherit, it was perhaps inevitable that the various parties with a claim on the estate should go to law to try to acquire control of the estate. Dutton’s son-in-law, George Colt, found himself locked in acrimonious litigation with his nephew, William Dutton, in the course of which Colt was accused of having forged various deeds and a spurious version of Dutton’s will, which settled the estate on himself, his wife and children.71TSP vi. 611; Morgan, Mems. Dutton Fam. 127. The suit was eventually determined in William Dutton’s favour. On his death, the Sherborne estate again passed sideways to another nephew of John Dutton, Sir Ralph’s second son, Sir Ralph Dutton†, who sat as knight of the shire for Gloucestershire for much of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. His son, in turn, was returned for the county in 1727 as a whig.72HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Ralph Dutton’.