NORTH, Sir Dudley (1602-77), of Kirtling, Cambs. and Tostock, Suff.

On commencing his biography of his great-great grandfather, Edward†, 1st Baron North, Sir Dudley North confessed that he was worried that his research would expose the family’s humble origins. For that reason, he was at pains to stress that Lord North’s ancestors, who had lived in the Nottinghamshire village of Walkeringham, ‘had preserved a small fortune in that county and place for many generations, without any considerable increase or diminution, living always in the quality of private gentlemen’.43Dudley, 4th Ld. North, Some Notes Concerning the Life of Edward Lord North [1682], 4. In reality, the Norths of Kirtling were upstarts only in comparison with families of real antiquity. The peerage dated back to 1554 and they had owned the estate at Kirtling since the 1530s. Since then they had unquestionably been one of the leading families of Cambridgeshire and (apart from Sir Dudley’s father, who had succeeded to the peerage aged only 18) the heir to the title in each generation had at some stage sat as MP for the county.

Early life, 1602-40

Details of North’s education are only patchily recorded, although what is known suggests that it was especially rounded. He went up to Cambridge already a knight of the Bath, having received that honour as part of the ceremonies surrounding Prince Charles’s creation as prince of Wales. He claimed of his time at St John’s College that he was ‘one of those who have taken from the Cantabrigian Helicon least water’.44North, Life of Edward Lord North, preface. His time there may well have been brief, but it was while at St John’s that he befriended Sir Simonds D’Ewes*.45‘D’Ewes diary’, 375. North then proceeded to Gray’s Inn and it was probably of that period that he would later recall that

I came to have a taste of the court, but my father soon called me from thence, knowing by dear experience the air of that place to be such, as few elder brothers can long breath there without falling into a consumption.46North, Observations, sig. A3v.

A military career was thought more suitable and in the early 1620s he served in the Palatinate as an officer in the expeditionary force led by Henry de Vere, 18th earl of Oxford, and Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.47CSP Ire. Add. 1625-60, pp. 47-8; Dudley, 4th Ld. North, Light In the Way to Paradise (1682), sig. A2v. He probably returned to England before 12 May 1622 to take up a place at the Inner Temple and, as he was admitted to that inn along with Philip Parker*, it is quite possible that Parker had been with him on that campaign.48I. Temple database. Before the year was out, however, he was off on his travels again, being granted a licence to travel abroad for three years. It was for this reason that he was in Madrid in 1623 when the prince of Wales visited the Spanish court to woo the Infanta Maria and in Paris soon after when the initial steps were taken in the negotiations for a marriage between Charles and Henrietta Maria.49APC 1621-3, pp. 376-7; North, Observations, sig. A4; North, Light In the Way to Paradise, 30-1. He subscribed at the Academy in Geneva and while visiting Rome, which he did in contravention of the terms of his licence, he resisted an attempt by one English resident to convert him to Catholicism.50Le Livre du Recteur, i. 169; North, Light In the Way to Paradise, 17. In October 1624 he enrolled as a student at Padua.51H. F. Brown, Inglese e Scozzesi all’Università di Padova (Venice, 1922/1923), 145. But that summer he had already been appointed as a captain in the regiment raised by the earl of Oxford and he spent the next three years on campaign in the Low Countries and possibly in Ireland.52Bodl. North a.2, f. 272; CSP Ire. Add. 1625-60, pp. 47-8 The experience seems to have left him bitterly resentful of the military failures presided over by the 1st duke of Buckingham.53Randall, Gentle Flame, 143. His election to Parliament as MP for Horsham in 1628, possibly with the support of Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel, could be seen as the final stage in this long preparation for public life.54HP Commons 1604-1629.

Sir Dudley’s marriage in 1632 to a daughter of the late Sir Charles Montagu† linked him into the powerful Montagu connection headed by his new wife’s uncle, the 1st earl of Manchester (Sir Henry Montagu†). Even though Anne Montagu brought with her a substantial dowry, she later complained that Lord North insisted that she and her husband should continue living with him at Kirtling.55North, Lives, iii. 311. It was only with Sir Dudley’s purchase in 1638 of a house at Tostock in Suffolk, over 15 miles from Kirtling, that he was able to assert some independence from his father.56Randall, Gentle Flame, 52-3.

By 1640 it was over 40 years since a North had sat as MP for Cambridgeshire and high time for them to reassert the electoral interest which seemed theirs by right. They were undoubtedly assisted by the tradition that one of the Cambridgeshire MPs should come from the east of the county and the other from the west. Neither of the two other major landowners in the east of the county – Sir William Russell†, a newcomer to the area, and Sir Edward Peyton†, who had severe financial problems – provided much of a threat at this time. Although the election seems to have been contested, Sir Dudley’s nomination was probably never in doubt and he was duly elected on 26 March 1640 with his cousin, Sir John Cutts*.57C219/42, pt. 1, no. 53. Apart from his appointment to the committee of privileges, North left no trace on the records of the Short Parliament. That autumn his re-election for his Cambridgeshire seat proceeded smoothly, with all the attention focussing on whether Cutts would challenge Thomas Chicheley* for the junior place.

Memory contradicted by evidence

North was one of the few MPs in the Long Parliament who would later write a detailed memoir of what he had witnessed. At some point during the 1660s he set out his version of events, which was published in 1670 as A Narrative of some Passages in or relating to the Long Parliament. Although he mentioned a number of details which would have enabled the very well-informed to guess his identity, North published it anonymously and thus made it difficult for the anyone reading it to compare this later version with his actions at the time. North was well aware that he painted an unflattering picture of his fellow MPs; he anticipated this criticism by claiming of the record of this Parliament that

I know nothing publicly done that was either good or justifiable, saving only an outward profession of personal reformation, which, unless it carried with it a real intention, would have been mentioned with as little advantage, as had the outward pretended public reformation, which deserved rather blame than praise. The intention of many of us was also very good, being desirous of peace and of a good agreement between prince and people: but how could this appear without doors, till the army had kicked us out of the House?58Dudley, 4th Ld. North, A Narrative of some Passages in or relating to the Long Parliament (1670), sig. [A5v]-[A6].

According to North, he was a loyal and devoted subject of the king throughout.59North, Narrative, sig. [A6v]-[A7]. His declared view was that rebellion by subject could never be justified, no matter how great the public interest.60North, Narrative, 7-8. There can now be little doubt that, in making these claims, North was being disingenuous. His real record during the 1640s was far more pro-parliamentarian than he later pretended. Whether this distortion was the product of prudence or of self-delusion, or of a conviction that subsequent events shed a different light on what he had done 20 years before, remains open to speculation. But there is no doubt that, although he did not support everything the Long Parliament had done, he had supported some things it had done.

North saw the root causes of the dispute between king and Parliament as being Ship Money and the ritualism of the king’s religious policies, although he recognised that the difficulty in reaching a settlement with the Scots was the immediate problem facing the new Parliament when it assembled in November 1640.61North, Narrative, 8-12. It was for the latter reason that one of North’s first actions on taking his seat was to offer £1,000 to the king.62Procs. LP i. 228, 231, 235. North seems to have accepted the deal done with the Scots, even if its terms were to prove hugely expensive, although he correctly saw the passage of the resulting Triennial Act as a crucial step in the developing crisis.63North, Narrative, 9-12. His later comments about the proceedings against the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) and the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, expressed disquiet about the manner in which that process had been manipulated, but said nothing about whether their characters and conduct had been traduced. Reading between the lines, it is clear that he had no liking for either and had been happy at the time to acquiesce in the questionable methods used to bring them down. His criticisms about the exploitation of intimidation by the London mob to secure the passage of the attainder against Strafford might carry greater weight if he had himself voted against it.64North, Narrative, 12-15.

North was not a passive spectator watching others take key decisions. From the opening months of the Long Parliament he was a respected Member of the House, figuring regularly in the Journal. During 1641 he was named to a total of 17 committees, some of which, such as that to amend the 1605 Act against recusants (8 May) or that on the bill concerning trained bands (24 July), were of some importance.65CJ ii. 61b, 95a, 101a, 103b, 114a, 126b, 139a, 143b, 149a, 152a, On 11 May 1641, at the height of the army plot scare, he was a member of the large committee which prepared the heads for the conference with the Lords concerning the continuing presence in England of Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de’ Medici, and the riots in London. His involvement in the conference with the Lords nine days later to discuss the disbandment of the army seems to confirm that he was taking seriously the news that some of the hard-liners around the king had planned a military coup. He was also sent to the Lords two months later to request another conference on the same subject.66CJ ii. 143b, 152b, 220b; LJ iv. 324b; Procs. LP vi. 55. These efforts could be seen as a laudable attempt to reduce tensions, although equally it could be argued that, in practice, these attempts heightened suspicions. Needless to say, North later disassociated himself from those he claimed had heightened suspicions for cynical purposes.

Similarly, reading North’s denunciation of the covert encouragement some in the Commons gave to the wave of attacks on the homes of Catholic recusants, it might appear that he had played no part in the persecution of Catholics: this was not so. In August 1641 he was named as one of the commissioners to disarm all Catholics within Cambridgeshire.67LJ iv. 385a. He took this duty seriously. The following January he and Robert Reynolds* got the Commons to order that action should be taken against one of his Catholic neighbours, Lady Gage, who, they claimed, was building up a stockpile of arms at her house at Hengrave in Suffolk.68PJ i. 62, 68. There was a difference between lawless harassment and authorised precautions against suspected treason, but arguably, the latter was just as much a cynical attempt to spread fear and suspicion as was the former, which North condemned.

Supporting Parliament, 1642-4

If North had doubts about Parliament’s role in the descent into civil war, these were not apparent at the time. He may be correct when he claimed that his appointment on 9 February 1642 as one of the four messengers to deliver to the king the Commons’ justification of John Pym’s* recent remarks about him was a punishment for his abrupt departure from the Chamber in protest at that decision.69North, Narrative, 19-21; CJ ii. 423b; PJ i. 332. However, over the following months he was also named to a wide range of committees intended to bolster the Commons’ position against the king, including those on the bill against innovations in religion (17 Feb.), for the maintenance of the ministry (25 Mar.), and to investigate who had refused the Protestation (16 Apr.).70CJ ii. 438a, 476a, 496b, 519b, 530b. Moreover, once both sides throughout the country began arming themselves, North without question played a key part in preparing Cambridgeshire for war. Although it had been his father who had been named as the new lord lieutenant of the county in the Militia Ordinance, it was Sir Dudley on whom his lordship then relied to carry out the duties of that office. Thus, it seems likely that it was Sir Dudley who moved the motion on 14 May by which Robert Peyton was appointed as one of the Cambridgeshire deputy lieutenants, and the following month Sir Dudley himself joined Peyton as another of the deputies on his father’s nomination.71CJ ii. 572a; PJ ii. 320; Bodl. North c.44, no. 25.1

This sparked off a flurry of activity on his part. On 10 June he promised to give Parliament £10. Two days later he was collecting the coat and conduct money due from the former pro-royalist sheriff of Cambridgeshire, which he was later instructed to pass on to Oliver Cromwell*.72CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 354; CJ ii. 674a. On 30 June he drew the Commons’ attention to a local dispute concerning assessment collection in Cambridgeshire about which some of his constituents had written to him.73PJ iii. 153, 469; CJ ii. 644b. On 6 July he obtained permission to stockpile 20 muskets at Kirtling. In late August, when the Commons needed to send someone into Cambridgeshire to spur on their preparations there, North was the obvious person for the task.74CJ ii. 654b, 743b.

He was back at Westminster by 6 September, when he carried up to the Lords the resolution giving powers to his father and to any of the Cambridgeshire deputy lieutenants to call out the local militia to suppress civil disorder within the county whenever they thought it necessary.75LJ v. 341a, 341b-342a; CJ ii. 754a. After North had informed the House on 27 October that he had received information that his wife’s uncle, the MP for Huntingdonshire, Sir Sidney Montagu*, had failed to respond to a request for assistance from the Cambridgeshire standing committee, proceedings began which would end in Montagu’s expulsion from the Commons. Since the standing committee had also requested the presence of North in the county, he and Cutts were ordered to travel to Cambridgeshire to direct preparations.76CJ ii. 824b; Add. 18777, f. 44v. On reaching Cambridgeshire North quickly summoned a meeting at Bottisham to collect money to support Parliament.77The Cambs. Cttee. for Scandalous Minsters ed. G. Hart (Cambs. Rec. Soc. xxiv), 80, 83. According to North’s subsequent version of events, he was beset at Kirtling with a constant stream of messengers expecting action from him in response to their latest improbable scare stories about the royalist army which was supposedly advancing towards them.78North, Narrative, 36-8.

North implies that, having realised that the royalist forces were not about to attack Cambridgeshire, he returned to Westminster to do what he could to limit the extremist course Parliament was increasingly adopting.79North, Narrative, 38. However, there is every indication that at the time North was still an enthusiastic supporter of the war. That December he secured the Commons’ approval for the offer from Cambridgeshire to supply 1,000 dragoons.80CJ ii. 892b; Add. 18777, f. 96v; Harl. 163, f. 267v; LJ v. 505b-506a. A letter he wrote to the Cambridgeshire standing committee informing them of Parliament’s plans to levy a regular assessment in the Eastern Association (which became the ordinance of 20 January 1643) seems to have inspired the suggestion from the committee in February 1643 that there should also be a tax on recusants and malignants.81Harl. 163, f. 299v; CJ ii. 968b. Subsequently he was named to all local revenue-raising committees, including that for the sequestration of delinquents.82A. and O. Interestingly, his Narrative implied that the various forms of tax levied by Parliament, including the assessments, had been regrettable without condemning them outright.83North, Narrative, 39-41. That North was dispatched with Miles Corbett* and Sir Anthony Irby* on 31 July to ensure that reinforcements were sent at once to Lincolnshire suggests continuing enthusiasm rather than caution.84CJ iii. 188b; Harl. 165, f. 132; Add. 22619, f. 93. Although he was prevented by ill health from accompanying the delegation which the Commons sent in late October 1643 to consult with the earl of Essex about the garrison at Newport Pagnell, he was among those sent on a similar mission two weeks later.85CJ iii. 295a, 296a, 311b. The impression given by most of the Journal references to him is that he was preoccupied with sitting on committees set up to smooth over the numerous problems created by the war.86CJ iii. 12a, 174b, 355b, 372b, 385a, 398b, 434a, 457a, 465b; Harl. 166, f. 1v. His decision in 1644 to move his family permanently to London may have been motivated mainly by a desire to escape from his father’s shadow, although it may also be relevant that by then there was less need for his regular presence in Cambridgeshire as an encouragement to local officials.87North, Lives, iii. 312. However, while the war lasted, he remained the main channel of communication linking Parliament with its leading supporters in and around Cambridge.88CJ iii. 662a, 664b, iv. 41b, 99b, 120a, 138a, 193a, 202a, 327b; Harl. 166, f. 197v.

Supporting peace, 1642-5?

We have little more than North’s word for it that he consistently supported the various attempts to secure a negotiated settlement with the king.89North, Narrative, 42-7. If he later thought that Parliament’s decision to order a great seal, along with the impeachment of the queen, made such a settlement less likely, that had not prevented him from being included on one of the committees which had paved the way to the appropriation of the great seal.90North, Narrative, 47; CJ iii. 92b. It seems to have been the peace issue, rather than the lord general’s conduct as a commander, which coloured North’s attitude towards Essex. He blamed the earl for the precipitate rejection of the peace overture of Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, in August 1642 and thought that Essex, eager for glory, had no interest in supporting peace unless it was brought about by his own initiative. However, he was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt because he was sure that it was the ‘private cabalists’ who had done most to wreck any chance for a settlement.91North, Narrative, 42-5. There was much that Parliament did to which he implied he consented only with the greatest reluctance. He took the oath imposed in the aftermath of Edmund Waller’s* plot on 6 June 1643, despite his later view that it was designed to encourage the continuation of conflict with the king; similarly, he took the Covenant on 19 October 1643, even though its professions of loyalty to the king were worthless, being written ‘in so perplexed and complicated a way, as it signified little’.92CJ iii. 118a, 281b; North, Narrative, 54-5. At some point over the next two decades he adopted the cynical view that all the oaths imposed by the Long Parliament on its MPs were no more than a way of binding them to the parliamentarian cause by increasing the risk of confiscation of their estates in the event of the king winning the war.93North, Narrative, 55-6. That he had opposed the alliance with the Scots would only be implied, although his account of it as the result of Parliament’s military weakness and as the source of unwise concessions to the Scots was hardly flattering.94North, Narrative, 48-50.

In the fluid circumstances of 1643 and 1644 doubts, fears and second thoughts were understandable. If much of what he later wrote about this period seems too anxious to play down his own responsibility, there is some evidence that he opposed those who wanted a victory for Parliament at all costs, and, despite his misgivings, he does seem to have backed Essex. On 4 May 1644 he spoke in debate against those opponents of the earl who sought to make mischief regarding the precise definition of Essex’s authority over the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†).95Harl. 166, f. 55v. Moreover, it was presumably as a known supporter of Essex that North headed the list of MPs included by the Lords in their abortive bill reappointing the Committee of Both Kingdoms introduced two days later.96LJ vi. 542b. That said, his claim that Essex’s opponents had set out to undermine his position because they knew the earl would never acquiesce in ‘an utter overthrow of the regal authority’ betrays a heavy dose of hindsight.97North, Narrative, 62.

Contemporary evidence does confirm North’s wish for peace, for there is every reason to believe that he gave his support to the attempt made at Uxbridge in early 1645 to reach such a settlement – his father was one of the peers representing the Lords at these talks and Sir Dudley himself was sent to the Lords the day before the negotiations began to inform them that the Commons wished to consult with them about the instructions to be given to their commissioners.98CJ iv. 33b; LJ vii. 160a. That, faced with the failure of these negotiations, North then redoubled his efforts to secure a military victory, in particular playing an energetic role in the raising of loans for Parliament, was not hypocrisy but realism.99CJ iv. 120a, 164a, 203a, 299a.

Religious equivocations

What probably did most to set North apart from the extremists in Parliament was his attitude towards religion. This was a topic in which for much of the Long Parliament he showed little more than a passing interest. Looking back, he regarded the Westminster Assembly as a failure which had assisted in the abolition of episcopacy, but which, as a result of obstruction by the Independents, had failed to protect the principle of uniformity.100North, Narrative, 50-2. It is possible that he had had reason to fear the worst from the outset of the Assembly. John Gauden would later allege that North and Sir Thomas Chicheley had tried to nominate him as one of the Cambridgeshire representatives in the Assembly but that they had been overruled because Gauden was perceived as wanting to retain the bishops.101[J. Gauden], Anti Baal-Berith (1661), 89 (E.1083.5). In another of his works written in later life, his collection of essays on religious themes, Light in the Way to Paradise (1682), North condemned Presbyterian forms of church government as a system ‘which seemeth adjusted to the latitude of a democracy, and not to the altitude of a monarchy’. The reasons he gave were the usual ones, that in a democracy

the statesmen may easily disperse themselves, and have an influence upon those assemblies by private conference with the leaders; whereas in a monarchy the sovereign dealeth better with single persons, as the bishops, in whom the common people have not had so particular an interest, as they may have in these mixt bodies.102North, Light In the Way to Paradise, 25.

As with most of his comments in this work, these were the conventional thoughts of a loyal member of the Restoration Church of England.

His attitudes in the 1640s may have been more flexible. Thus, his view that the powers of the Committee for Plundered Ministers* amounted to a usurpation of the judicial powers of the House of Lords did not prevent him being added to that committee in November 1644.103North, Narrative, 52-3; CJ iii. 699b. North equated its work with the purge of Cambridge University which the earl of Manchester had conducted earlier that year, yet he was also included on all the committees which completed this drastic reform.104North, Narrative, 53-4; CJ iv. 174a, 229b, 312a, 350a. It is true that this was partly a courtesy to him as a local MP (and Manchester was one of his wife’s cousins), but that does not explain why it was he who (with Francis Rous*) was asked in June 1645 to draft the letter by which, as part of this same campaign, the Cambridgeshire standing committee was told to refer cases of seditious preaching to the Committee for Examinations*.105CJ iv. 174b. Previously, on 10 April, when the Commons, as a committee of the whole House, had been debating the proposals from the Westminster Assembly on restricting access to holy communion, North had moved that they complete their discussion of that before moving on.106Harl. 166, f. 199v. Whether that meant that he favoured or opposed those restrictions is unclear. His later arguments in favour of a church governed by bishops seem especially at odds with his involvement in the disposal of the episcopal estates, for he was named to two committees in September 1645 and November 1646 which prepared the legislation implementing this sale as a corollary to the abolition of episcopacy.107CJ iv. 275b, 712a.

Political ambiguities and uncertainties, 1645-9

North’s later account of events between 1645 and 1649 is little more than a tale of how the army, corrupted by success, came to challenge Parliament for supreme power and won.108North, Narrative, 62-87. This was the way in which most of his contemporaries tried to understand these events. Throughout North’s account of those years there are only passing hints that he may himself have been involved. In fact, although he was never more than a secondary player, there is no doubt that he was a regular presence at Westminster throughout most of that period.

His description of the passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance and of the creation of the New Model army is perfectly judged, making it clear that this fixed the fate of the Long Parliament, while explaining why it seemed so sensible at the time. Any indication of his own views at the time was carefully avoided.109North, Narrative, 62-7. North was fully aware of the paradox that it was this reform which seemed to bring about Parliament’s comprehensive military victory over the royalist forces, while, at the same time, making a political settlement all the more remote. To those like North, who, more than anything else, longed for some sort of resolution, the king’s attempts thereafter to play the Independents, the Presbyterians and the Scots off against each other was especially confusing. As a member of the committee charged with that task, North may well have helped draft the reply to the king’s letter of 23 March 1646 by which Parliament refused to concede his request to be allowed to return Westminster without giving assurances of his good faith.110CJ iv. 491a. He could not have foreseen how this would help drive the king into the arms of the Scots, although in his memoirs he took care to avoid dwelling on the king’s precise motives.111North, Narrative, 69-70. To have conceded that the king might have been to blame for the failure to reach a settlement would have undermined the whole message of the Narrative.

The negotiations for the king’s return would be used by North to illustrate how the army became less dependent on Parliament than Parliament was on the army.112North, Narrative, 69-71. However, on 8 June 1646 he was probably as shocked as most of his colleagues by the revelation that the Scots had made promises of military support to the king, and the following day he was among the MPs appointed to prepare the statement registering their disapproval.113CJ iv. 570b. The subsequent realisation that Scottish custody of the king might provide the basis for another attempted settlement was one that North may well have shared; later that year (26 Dec.) he sat on the committee which considered how the Newcastle Propositions could once again be offered to Charles.114CJ v. 30a. North’s comment that the Scots’ decision to hand over the king had marked them out for ‘eternal infamy’ should not necessarily be taken to mean that, whatever he thought of the Scots’ motives, he had opposed the deal with them.115North, Narrative, 71. Writing much later he was all too aware that the king’s return had been a prelude to his seizure by George Joyce and other soldiers of the New Model army four months later.

North could probably claim justifiably that by the summer of 1647 he was among those MPs who were deeply concerned about the threat from the army. In April and May 1647 he was named to a number of committees which, by seeking to raise a loan of £200,000 and by passing the indemnity bill, were intended to allow the disbandment of the army to proceed.116CJ v. 133a, 166a, 168b. Moreover, at the time, he probably did think that the impeachment of Eleven Members was ‘mutinous’.117North, Narrative, 71-2. As he was granted leave to go into the country on 16 July, he may well have been absent from London throughout the crisis of late July and early August 1647.118CJ v. 245b. Indeed, it is not until 6 November that there is any evidence that he was back at Westminster, raising the possibility that he had deliberately stayed away.119CJ v. 352b.

It may have been not long after North returned to London that the king escaped to the Isle of Wight and one of North’s first tasks may have been to sit on the committee to prepare instructions for Robert Hammond* to ensure the king’s safety at Carisbrooke. It is therefore of some interest that North would come to believe that the army had connived in the king’s escape and that Parliament had been manipulated into accepting Hammond’s appointment as royal gaoler.120CJ v. 359a; North, Narrative, 74-5. It is likely that North was, at this stage, still reluctant to rule out the possibility of a deal with the king. His father certainly held out some hope, for he opposed the Vote of No Addresses when it came before the Lords in January 1648 and his absence from the House proved to be crucial to its passage. Perhaps frustrated by this impasse, Sir Dudley’s main concern in early 1648 appears to have been his efforts to secure Parliament’s approval for his proposal that the revenue of the rectory of Kirtling, which had formerly been paid to the bishop of Rochester, should instead be used to augment the vicar’s salary. Given that episcopacy had already been abolished, this was an uncontroversial measure and passed with little difficulty.121CJ v. 446b, 455a; LJ x. 11b; Bodl. North b.1, ff. 214-215; North b.12, ff. 309-312, 316.

North’s attitudes seem to have hardened as it became clear that 1648 would see full-scale uprisings against Parliament. When the Lords, aware that the London mob might again seek to coerce Parliament, revived their attempts to get the Commons to endorse the declaration of 10 August 1647, which had been issued by those Independent MPs who had taken refuge with the army, it was North who on 9 March 1648 moved the motion for the Commons’ agreement. He then carried that agreement up to the Lords.122‘Boys diary’, 163; CJ v. 489a-b, 492a; LJ x. 107a. North seems an odd choice for this particular role, given that he had probably supported those Presbyterians who had remained at Westminster. But other evidence indicates that he was now prepared to support the army against potential rebels. As this latest crisis came to a head that summer, he reverted briefly to his old role as a major activist in Cambridgeshire. His father’s recent appointment to the Derby House Committee was probably a contributory factor. In the early days of July 1648 it was possible that the rebels at Colchester and at Kingston might cause trouble throughout East Anglia. North was one of four East Anglian MPs then sent to confer with the excise commissioners about raising money for the defence of the Isle of Ely and the orders agreed by the Commons for that purpose were among measures he then carried up to the Lords for their concurrence. These precautions proved to be unnecessary only once the 1st earl of Holland (Henry Rich†) had been defeated at St Neots on 10 July.123CJ v. 620a, 621b; LJ x. 357a-b; North, Narrative, 80-2. Over the following weeks North was named to a number of the Commons’ committees which conducted investigations into why these rebellions had been allowed to happen.124CJ v. 631b, 640b, 647b, 676a. It was again to North that the Commons turned in September 1648 when they next needed letters written to their officials in Cambridgeshire to speed up the gathering of the latest assessments.125CJ vi. 30a.

The opening of new negotiations with the king in September 1648 reawakened North’s hopes of a settlement. He welcomed the resulting Newport treaty, congratulating one of the negotiators, Sir John Potts*, in a letter of 30 October for having, with his fellow commissioners, ‘wrought wonders’ in completing their task. North was less optimistic about whether the Commons or, as he hinted to Potts, the army would accept the proposed deal.126Mems. of the Great Civil War, ed. Cary, ii. 48-9. By late November he was directly involved in the desperate efforts to raise money to assuage the army, being named as one of the commissioners in the bill to promote the sale of the bishops’ lands (21 Nov.) and being added to the Committee for the Army to help them consider the new assessment bill (22 Nov.).127CJ vi. 81b, 83b; A. and O. North’s hopes that a settlement with the king was still possible sealed his fate. Removed in the purge on 6 December, he refused to repudiate the vote of 5 December and so remained excluded from the Rump until 1660. He was clearly relieved that he was required to play no part in ‘the formalities of that most hideous (and not to be parallell’d) murder of our royal sovereign’.128A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 29 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5); North, Narrative, 84-6. His father was present in the Lords on 2 January 1649 when their lordships voted unanimously to reject the bill establishing the high court of justice.129LJ x. 641b-642a.

After 1649

Sir Dudley now withdrew, in his own words, ‘wholly from public affairs’.130North, Narrative, 86. He and his family moved back to Kirtling to live with Lord North, although the following year he set up a permanent household of his own at Tostock.131North, Lives, iii. 312. He claimed to have spent his time there writing, producing his biography of the 1st Baron North and composing some of the pieces later included in his posthumous collection of religious essays: some of his prayers pondering the need to be obedient to God date from January 1656.132North, Life of Edward Lord North, preface; North, Light In the Way to Paradise, esp. 99-101. In fact, his supposed retirement may never have been complete, at least at local level. As early as May 1649 he was named by Parliament to the commission to oversee the Great Level drainage scheme.133A. and O. He had a direct personal interest in this, as some of the Norths’ estates lay within the fens and a decade earlier he had invested in the separate scheme to drain the Lindsey Level in Lincolnshire.134CSP Dom. 1637, p. 184; 1637-8, p. 151. For the same reason he was also included on the two sewers commissions appointed in 1654.135C181/6, pp. 26, 37. Sir Dudley continued to be named as a justice of the peace for Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely throughout the 1650s and it was only after 1652 that he was removed from the Suffolk commission.136C193/13/3, ff. 6v, 23, 60; C193/13/4, f. 92. Moreover, there seems to have been no question of excluding him from the local commissions of oyer and terminer or from the Isle of Ely commission for gaol delivery, while he was once again included on the Cambridgeshire assessment commission from June 1657.137C181/6, pp. 16-378; A. and O. As long as his dislike of the government remained muted, there was always a case for including him, as the chances of him performing any of the duties must have seemed minimal. The readmission of the secluded MPs in February 1660 allowed him to resume his interrupted parliamentary career: he was added to the committee for religion on 2 March and four days later acted as teller for those trying to block the confirmation of a former Cromwellian, John Trevor*, as custos brevium of the court of common pleas.138CJ vii. 858a, 863b.

North’s rewriting of his conduct in the 1640s was probably a direct response to the Restoration, rather than a slow process of forgetfulness and repentance during his retirement. Indeed, his views in 1660 may not have been that far removed from those he had held during the civil war, but he may have realised that others had moved on. It was at his father’s behest that he put his name forward for one of the Cambridgeshire seats in March 1660, and, after it became clear that he and Sir Thomas Willys* would not support an unconditional Restoration, they were heavily defeated by two candidates, Thomas Wendy† and Isaac Thornton†, who had no such reservations.139North, Lives, iii. 312; CCSP iv. 657; Pepys’s Diary, i. 112. The Cambridge freemen proved to be more sympathetic, allowing North and Willys to sit as their MPs and so avoid complete humiliation. Given this, the assumption of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, that North was a Presbyterian who could be influenced via Nathaniel Bacon* may well have been accurate.140G.F. Trevallyn Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 333. Several features of his known conduct in the Convention, in particular the speech in which he argued for clemency towards those regicides who had surrendered themselves, suggest that he was now out of step with those who were determined to undo everything the Long Parliament had done.141HP Commons 1660-1690.

There were few signs here of the damning interpretation of that Parliament’s achievements which he would soon set out at length. North’s decision in August 1660 to obtain a general pardon from Charles II for his past actions was probably motivated by prudence rather than any deep sense that what he had done had been wrong.142Bodl. North c.85, nos. 15, 27; PSO5/8, unfol. He declined to stand for Parliament again in 1661 and, even after his father’s death in 1666 had elevated him to the Lords as 4th Baron North, he played little part in national or local politics. Only his publications, his Observations and Advices Oeconomical in 1669 and his Narrative in 1670, attracted public attention. He was not the only person of his generation who spent the 1660s trying to reinterpret the events of the 1640s in order to make sense of his own life.

He died on 24 June 1677, having been ‘a miserable martyr to the stone’ in his old age, and was buried with his ancestors in the church at Kirtling three days later.143MIs Cambs. 91-3; HP Lords 1660-1715. The eldest of his six surviving sons, Charles, succeeded him as 5th Baron North, while, of the others, Sir Francis† rose to become lord keeper and 1st Baron Guilford, Dudley established himself as one of the leading English merchants in Constantinople and an important financial adviser to the English government, and John became master of Trinity College, Cambridge. The youngest, Roger†, immortalised them all and himself in the series of lengthy pen-portraits which he wrote as an act of family piety comparable to his father’s biography of 1st Baron North. George III’s prime minister, Frederick†, Lord North, later 2nd earl of Guilford, was this MP’s great-great-grandson.