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Conflict and Concensus:

The Central Regimes and Cheshire, c.1630 – c.1660.1

by Peter Gaunt

In spring 1632 the Bishop of Chester received a letter about the state of religion within the county and the county town:

Right trustie and welbeloved and reverend father in God, we greet you wel. Our princely zeale to care for the peace and good government of the church causeth us now to admonish you of that which your own vigilance in your function should put continually in your minde. For wee heare of some seeds of differences sowing in your Diocess by debates about the Saboth, and that one Mr Lea vicar of Budworth prebend and lecturer at Chester hath put himself uppon that subject in opposition to some others. Wee require you therefore for prevension of further strife to command him that in his lectures hee raise no occasion of controversies which may disturb the union and peace of the church and that hee do nothing to unsettle or question the received doctrine by curious straines and speculations or by anything which may perplex or troble the minds of the people. Do you what belongeth to a good Bishop to make your clergie capable [i.e. understand] that disputes ingender strife and that true religion must be planted and preserved by unitie and good life.2

A second letter, written nearly a quarter of a century later, in winter 1655-56, gives a more detailed account of active intervention in pursuit of morality and good order:

Our meeting at Chester hath been this week to enquire into the particulars specified in the order...and have received a very good account from the persons imployed, and have made this further progress. We have put down a considerable number of alehouses…We have likewise taken course that all such as are to be continued bring in their licenses and honest faithfull sureties to be bound with them for keeping of good order and discipline…We have further taken care to remove bad constables and put in honest, faithfull and judicious men. We have likewise put down divers brewers and taken care for the rest, which are to be continued, to give in very sufficient surety that they shall not sell any ale or beer to any person or persons unlicensed, except for their own particular use. We have also taken for all malsters within the city to do the same. We have sent a great number of persons to the gaol for being married contrary to the act of parliament, and the persons which have so married them. We have likewise sent many suspicious, idle and loose persons to the said place…Those things gives matter of rejoicing to the good and is a terror to the bad.3

The first letter was written by a son of a king and a prince of the realm, sometime Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall and Prince of Wales and since 1625 the reigning monarch, as part of his very active and interventionist campaign to ensure provincial conformity to his favoured religion, which he passionately supported and advanced. The second letter was written by the son of a Manchester merchant, a man from humble origins and obscure background, who was clearly educated and literate but who would not have been considered a ‘gentleman’ in seventeenth-century parlance, as part of his very active and interventionist campaign to ensure conformity in his province to a religious and moral outlook which he passionately supported and advanced.

King Charles I and Major General Charles Worsley, the respective authors of these two letters, were hugely different men, advancing hugely different causes and acting in hugely different political contexts. However, they shared more than a Christian name, for both had a profound belief in God and a strong desire to advance their view of godliness and the Lord’s will. But they also both possessed the power and authority at least to attempt to impose central policies on a somewhat reluctant Cheshire and to enforce the initiatives of the central, London-based regime on a not conspicuously populous or prosperous county nearly two hundred miles from London which, with its Marcher and Palatinate background, had a pedigree of semi-autonomy and of keeping its distance from the centre, but which could not entirely avoid the clutches of central government or the imperatives of national events and policies.

This paper seeks to analyse the ways in which different central regimes of the early and mid seventeenth century sought to impose their will, policies and initiatives upon the county of Cheshire. It will explore the means by which and the degree to which they attempted to do this, as well as the response of Cheshire to such initiatives and the level of success or failure central regimes encountered at the local level. The period chosen is the thirty years from around 1630 to around 1660, that is three decades, a span easily encompassed by an adult lifetime or by the active career of a politician or administrator. Indeed, there were a few figures – though, admittedly, not many – who were prominent and active in Cheshire in the early 1630s and who, having survived civil war, plague, political instability and the assorted slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, were still playing a leading role in the county down to 1660 or beyond. These thirty years are particularly interesting as they encompass three very different types of central regime, thus enabling the historian to compare and contrast the very varied methods, policies, goals, county responses and outcomes found over this period.

In 1630 Charles I had just abandoned attempts to rule with and through parliament and had embarked on a period of non-parliamentary government, the Personal Rule. During the 1630s he called no parliament in England and Wales and instead governed through his own royal and prerogative powers, using existing and alternative bodies – the Privy Council, the Church of England, the judicial system and the established mechanisms of local government – to enforce his new financial and religious policies and, more generally, to launch a period of efficient, orderly and reinvigorated administration both at the centre and in the provinces. In the early 1640s Charles’s government was overwhelmed by a political crisis which in 1642 triggered full-scale civil war in England and Wales. In some parts of the country war persisted for much of the decade, but Cheshire’s direct involvement was briefer, spanning less than four years, from summer 1642, when armed men began to be raised in the county, until February 1646, when the royalists holding out in Chester finally surrendered and parliament assumed control of the whole county. So the second type of government is found in Cheshire in the period 1642-46, when the traditional, peace-time forms of central and local government largely collapsed and instead king and parliament sought to impose new, military-backed and military-orientated administrations on the territories under their control, designed to enforce new policies in new ways in support of the war effort. Because most of the county was in parliament’s hands from spring 1643 onwards and because the surviving sources are predominately parliamentarian, our analysis of central-county relations during this phase will of necessity be largely from a parliamentary perspective. The third phase, which began in Cheshire in 1646-47 with the parliamentary triumph and resumption of peace, and which lasted until the Stuart Restoration of 1660, saw attempts by a succession of parliamentary and (from 1649) republican regimes to reconstruct and oversee local administration. In some ways, this period was marked by healing and settling, with the phasing out or fading away of war-time novelties and innovations and a return to more established and traditional forms. In some fields, however, the war-time innovations were retained and became more embedded during the 1650s, and at the same time the central regimes also made fitful attempts to institute further reforms in pursuit of a more godly society. In Cheshire, as in most counties of England and Wales, the period 1630-60 saw a succession of very different central regimes attempting to impose their policies at county level and was characterised by a complex mixture of conflict and consensus, continuity and change.

 

Throughout the early modern period the bedrock of county government and the principal body through which central regimes sought to run and oversee the localities was the Commission of the Peace. From time to time the executive, operating through the Lord Chancellor – or, during the republic, through the Commissioners of the Great Seal – issued new Commissions, automatically superseding the old, which appointed and empowered a body of men to serve as Justices of the Peace. This was a county-based system, and by the early Stuart period each county in England and Wales had its own Commission, and thus its own body of JPs or magistrates who met from time to time as a bench to dispense justice and oversee administration within the county. There were four formal meetings a year, known as quarter sessions, generally held in January, April, July and October. Although Cheshire was not a particularly large county, the Cheshire bench was one of several English benches which had become peripatetic and held the four quarter sessions in different towns; in Cheshire’s case, the JPs generally assembled during the year in Chester, Knutsford, Nantwich and either Northwich or Middlewich, though each was a full county meeting and handled business ranging across the whole of Cheshire. By the early seventeenth century, in Cheshire as in many other counties, there were also purely local meetings to conduct local business, but these were separate from, and additional to, the formal quarter sessions. From time to time groups of just two or three local JPs would gather in their own hundred to hold smaller, less formal meetings, which became known as petty sessions, to handle minor or routine business which did not need to come before the full quarter session. In many counties, including Cheshire, the frequency of these hundred-based petty sessions increased in the early Stuart period, from perhaps just one per quarter to nearer one a month, and a growing quantity of business was conducted at these petty sessions rather than at the more formal quarter sessions.

At both petty and quarter sessions, the JPs handled a huge variety of business, some of it judicial – dealing with petty crime and criminals, minor misdemeanours, personal disputes, breaches of the peace and so forth – but much of it administrative – regulating alehouses and the brewing and selling of ale, overseeing poor relief and provision for illegitimate children, administering apprenticeships and the repair and upkeep of roads and bridges, dealing with vagrants and hearing pleas from the destitute. By the early seventeenth century the magistracy had become the workhorse of local administration and the workload of the JPs was enormous. There were by this stage over three hundred statutes which governed, shaped or touched upon the actions of the JPs and their enforcement of justice and administration, a body of legislation and a range of duties which tended to grow with each parliament. From time to time the crown, the Privy Council or royal judges might intervene to guide or direct the JPs on specific issues and the JPs themselves sometimes sought guidance from the central regime or its agents on particularly complex questions. However, in Cheshire as in most English counties, for most of the time the bench worked on its own initiative, operating within the established legislative framework, but without repeated intervention from above or recourse to the centre.

The overall range of business was in many ways broadly similar pre- and post-civil war, and if we compare the issues coming before the Cheshire bench in the 1630s and in the period 1647-60, they often appear almost indistinguishable. Thus the bench received a letter on behalf of an old soldier, who had fought for several years in the late wars and now, because of wounds received in military service, including the loss of an eye, as well as advanced age, could no longer work or support himself; again, Thomas Oulton of Nantwich petitioned the bench to claim that, as a soldier in the late wars, he had been repeatedly wounded, shot through the left leg and rendered lame and on another occasion losing so much blood that his colleagues had left him for dead, so that he was now unable to work and faced destitution. Thus Christian Southern, spinster, petitioned that she had been made pregnant by Richard Hunt, who had promised to marry her, but since giving birth Hunt was denying all responsibility for her child and had instead married another woman whom he had made pregnant; again, Elizabeth Strettell petitioned that she had been made pregnant by Richard Jackson, who had promised support but begged her not to name him openly for fear that his father would hear about it and disown him, only for Jackson to deny involvement and refuse financial support once the child had been born. Thus the sheriff wrote to the bench pointing out that funds allocated to repair Frodsham bridge had proved inadequate to cover costs and in addition some of the constables and townships had failed to pay their quotas; again, a group of locals petitioned about the repair of Cranage bridge, which carried an important road through the county but which had been badly damaged by recent floods, with part of the structure collapsed and a new, deeper channel, scoured by the flood water, threatening to undermine the foundations and sweep away the entire bridge. Thus some inhabitants of Bunbury complained that, although their village was poor and off the main road, it contained seven alehouses, several of which were disorderly, harboured the wrong sort and led astray servants and children; again, some inhabitants of Bollington petitioned against a particular alehouse keeper who ran a house of ill-repute, open all day on Sundays, even at service time, and who encouraged drunks and drunkenness. Each of these paired examples has, in fact, been presented in chronological order, with the first example drawn from the pre-war years (1630-42), the second from the post-war years (1647-59), but in each case the work of the two periods is indistinguishable, apparently unchanged over these three decades.4

However, there had been changes in the workload of the JPs, and the business coming before them in the late 1640s and the 1650s bears witness both to the legacy of the civil war itself and to the severe visitation of the plague which affected not just Chester but also other parts of the county immediately after the war. For example, the bench received a string of petitions from those who had been wounded in the war – always stressing, of course, that they had fought gallantly for parliament and had suffered bravely in the parliamentary cause – seeking one-off financial compensation for their grievous wounds or a continuous pension or maintenance to support them if they had been rendered incapable of work. The number of petitions on this subject coming before the bench between 1646 and 1660 was far larger than the trickle of claims received during the 1630s from old soldiers, the gnarled veterans of Elizabeth I’s wars against Spain or in Ireland or the more recent conscripts in Charles I’s brief and inglorious escapades against France and Spain in the late 1620s. Similarly, the post-war bench received a steady flow of claims from the widows and orphans of parliamentary soldiers, as well as from those who claimed to have lost property during the civil war, ranging from claims of plundering and dispossession at the hands of the royalists to requests for compensation for the war-time quartering of parliament’s forces, from those whose houses or workplaces had allegedly been wrecked during the fighting to those whose estates lay in the suburbs of garrisoned towns and whose property, they claimed, had been deliberately demolished by the defenders to create a clear field of view and line of fire around the defended urban core. And on top of all this business resulting from wartime death, injury, loss and destruction of property, there were claims arising from the post-war plague. For example, some nurses who had cared for plague victims in Middlewich sought payment and then complained again when they were allegedly paid in clipped coin, landowners sought compensation when their property outside Middlewich was taken over to erect small cabins in which plague victims could lie sick and die, and doctors in both Middlewich and Warrington sought payment for their work in ministering to the sick in 1646-47.5 Following a dip in business in the mid 1640s, in the immediate wake of the war and war-time disruption, the workload quickly recovered and increased, not least because of the multiplicity of claims spawned by civil war and plague. The number of petitions coming before a typical Cheshire quarter session of the 1650s was often roughly double the number before a typical session held during the 1630s and the session file for the summer 1653 meeting contains well over 300 documents.

Both pre- and post-war, there is little sign of extensive or repeated central intervention in the work of the Cheshire JPs. They had to get on top of and enforce no new legislation during the 1630s, for no parliaments met during that decade. Post-war, there was a trickle of new legislation from some of the parliaments of the period, with new laws clamping down upon adultery and blasphemy and making marriage a civil rather than a religious ceremony, for example, but such innovations were unusual and much of the post-war legislation was routine. Indeed, those parliamentarians who were looking for radical reform and the creation of a new and better world post-war complained long and loud that parliaments did not meet these aspirations and had conspicuously failed to push through a body of reformist legislation to change things at the centre and in the localities. In any case, during the seventeenth century new initiatives and legislative innovations would only be effective if they met with co-operation and support at the local level. The central regime had no salaried bureaucracy in the provinces and relied instead on the backing of the unpaid JPs. Accordingly, if local government did not give active support and lacked the will to enforce new measures, their effectiveness and impact were often blunted. Thus the new Adultery Act of 1650, making adultery a capital offence, was viewed as so severe that it was not supported at the county level and was virtually unenforceable. In Cheshire, as in many other counties, the bench took note of the Act to the extent that the JPs may have been more inclined to imprison adulterers rather than merely ordering a fine or a flogging, but the precise and very harsh terms of the new legislation were simply ignored. This raises some interesting and largely unanswerable questions. Did parliament in London know that in Cheshire, as in most parts of England and Wales, its new legislation was not being fully and properly enforced? And, if it did, was there anything it could really do about it?

Very occasionally, the head of state might directly intervene in business coming before the Cheshire bench. Within the State Papers there survive occasional reports on the administration of Cheshire bearing comments or annotations in the king’s hand, showing that Charles I had run his eye and his pen over them.6 Similarly, on at least one occasion Lord Protector Cromwell personally supported the petition of an old and wounded soldier when it came before the Cheshire magistrates, for in October 1655 he endorsed the claim of Lawrence Glossopp of Bucklow hundred and directed the Cheshire bench to allow him ‘a competent Pencon for his maintenance’.7 But such direct involvement of the head of state himself in particular items of business was very rare. It was more often the executive arm, the royal Privy Council or the various Councils of State of the parliamentary and republican regimes, which corresponded with the JPs and oversaw their work. However, the Council (royal and republican) lacked the time, will, focus or means of enforcement to provide much of a drive or impetus to the work of county benches. Brian Quintrell’s portrait of Charles’s Privy Council during the Personal Rule8 – a body which was overworked, seldom looked very far ahead, responded to immediate circumstances and events, and was at best capable of dealing with one major issue at any one time – holds equally true of the various Councils of the later 1640s and the 1650s, including the powerful Protectorate Councils of Oliver and Richard Cromwell. They were simply too busy and bombarded with too many issues and requests to give close, consistent and sustained attention to any particular item or area. Without its own bureaucracy or paid officials in the localities, all the royal and parliamentary Councils of the seventeenth century tended to take a rather inactive and non-interventionist approach to local affairs and the working of the county benches, relying on the magistracy to provide cheap, stable but often rather uninspired and somewhat devolved county government. Major initiatives produced, promoted and pursued by the central executive arm were rare and often not very successful.

 

The most notable executive initiative of this period, and one of the few sometimes claimed as a success, is the Book of Orders of 1631. From time to time, the Tudor and Stuart Privy Council issued Books of Orders, which generally took the form of compendia of existing laws to be enforced by the county magistracy. In providing guidance to the JPs and prompting them to act in accordance with the statutory framework, the Books were designed to give new impetus to the magistrates’ work, to encourage them to act correctly and efficiently and to ensure that they responded properly to any particular issues or problems which had arisen. The Book of Orders initiated late in 1630 and issued during the opening weeks of 1631 was one of those designed in part to guide the JPs’ response to a particular problem, namely the need to cope with the poor harvest of 1630 and the fear of high and uncontrolled food prices, though its authors, the Earl of Manchester and a clique of fellow Privy Councillors, took the opportunity to range much more widely. As well as prompting magistrates to enforce existing laws and procedures to control food supplies and prices and to alleviate poverty, unemployment and dearth, the 1631 Book of Orders also called upon smaller groups of magistrates to meet locally and frequently between quarter sessions, so encouraging the emerging petty session system to become a more regular, perhaps monthly, event in each hundred. But unusually, the 1631 Book of Orders went further, for in order to prevent the Council’s initiative sinking without trace, like so many others before it, and to ensure continuing compliance and enforcement, it not only called upon royal judges to oversee the JPs’ implementation of the Book but also required each bench to submit regular, quarterly reports to the Privy Council, showing how it was implementing the laws.9

The new Book of Orders was received in Cheshire during the opening months of 1631 and seems to have been considered at the summer quarter and petty sessions. In line with the government’s directives, the Cheshire JPs tried to get to grips with poverty and food prices within the county:

We thinke fitt both for our owne discharge and yours to acquaint you how farr wee have proceeded accordinge to his Majestyes late directions.

Thus the Eddisbury JPs were well aware of the royal initiative and of the need to liase with the Privy Council (‘the lords of the Counsell’), keeping the Councillors informed of their plans and progress and seeking further guidance from them where appropriate. In fact, the Cheshire JPs agonised over their main initiative, to build at least one and perhaps two new houses of correction within the county to set the poor to work. At first, they planned to replace the single existing and by then rather dilapidated house of correction in Northwich with new houses at Chester and Knutsford, but eventually, after changing their minds several times, the bench decided to keep and repair the Northwich house, supplementing it in the late 1630s with a second house at Middlewich. As for attempting to control the supply and price of food, the Cheshire JPs did appoint provost-marshals to oversee stocks, and in 1631 they also clamped down on the brewing and selling of ale, partly to curb drunkenness and the potential for disorder but also on the assumption, common throughout the early modern period, that ale production absorbed large quantities of grain and therefore significantly reduced the amount of grain available for bread and other foods. However, it is important to note that as early as June 1631 the Eddisbury JPs were already reporting that ‘the prices of corne of all sorts is very much abated since our last certificate’. As the immediate and pressing problem quickly eased with a much better harvest in 1631, so the Cheshire bench seems to have relaxed, returned to its old ways and quietly shelved the Book of Orders.

Just as the response of the Cheshire JPs to the new Book of Orders was marked by an initial burst of enthusiasm which quickly trailed away and dissipated, so the oversight and involvement of the Privy Council soon waned. With the improved harvest of 1631, the first of a string of generally good harvests during the 1630s, and a corresponding fall in food prices, the impetus was lost. A few, though not many, county benches continued to submit regular quarterly reports to the Council until the mid 1630s, but their reports became much briefer, standardised and stylised and in December 1632 the Council decided that it no longer wished to see the reports themselves, asking its clerk to prepare an abstract or summary. Like many northern counties, Cheshire returned very few reports to the Council and the JPs quickly realised that they were no longer really needed. The Council’s initiative was poorly thought through and not followed through, for with the easing of the immediate problem the Councillors soon turned their attention to more pressing issues, such as the enforcement of the king’s religious and fiscal policies. In Cheshire and elsewhere the 1631 Book of Orders may have nudged the JPs into holding more and more regular petty sessions, though that trend was already well-established in Cheshire, but overall there was no will at the centre or in the localities for sustained and substantial change.

So far this paper has reviewed the work and operation of the Cheshire bench in the decade or more pre- and post-civil war, highlighting continuity, modest change and the fairly limited impact of the central regime and its initiatives, but it has avoided the black hole of the war years of 1642-46 themselves. During the war the traditional system of local government and administration overseen by quarter and petty sessions largely collapsed. The quarter sessions continued until January 1643, when a rather unusual meeting was convened in war-time Chester, but then no further quarter sessions were held until autumn 1645, when a quarter session met in Knutsford, followed by a further, shorter break until more regular quarter sessions resumed from spring 1646, though more disruption followed in the later 1640s. Thus for most of the war, quarter sessions were in abeyance in Cheshire and it is most unlikely that traditional petty sessions would have been held at this time and in these circumstances. Instead, new war-time administrations sprung up to run the counties of England and Wales. When it became clear that the war would not be resolved in a single, decisive battle in autumn 1642 and that, far from being over by Christmas, it would drag on through 1643 and quite possibly beyond, both king and parliament set about remodelling the local administrations in the territories under their control, establishing by royal order or parliamentary ordinance new administrative systems which could run the counties and ensure that key resources – men, money, food, horses and so on – would be efficiently siphoned off to supply and support a long-term war effort.

In most parts of England and Wales king and parliament established early in the war bodies of men to form new county committees to run local affairs. Typically a county committee began life as a largely civilian body, drawn from the traditional county elite and incorporating many of the existing JPs. As the war continued, the composition of some county committees changed, as new men were added, some of them military figures and some of them drawn from the lesser gentry – that is, still members of the landed elite, but often from the lower, more modest reaches of that broad class, mere gentlemen rather than knights or baronets, the sort of people who would not have run the county or been elevated to the bench in normal, peacetime conditions. Just as the composition of the war-time county committee often changed, so its powers were extended in the course of a long and complex civil war, and in many areas the original county committee spawned a number of long-term or standing sub-committees or found itself working alongside separate bodies of commissioners, established and empowered by king or parliament to undertake specific war-time roles.

Most of Cheshire was under the control of parliament for most of the civil war and it is therefore the parliamentary local administration which dominated this county. By spring 1643 parliamentary troops under Sir William Brereton had gained control of five of the seven hundreds of Cheshire, all but the western fringes of the county. Around Brereton, there emerged a group of parliamentary administrators, effectively a county committee, comprising a number of deputy lieutenants and other civilian and military figures. Although this committee does not seem to have been established by a single parliamentary ordinance, it was certainly empowered and given an expanding workload by various parliamentary ordinances of 1643-45, though its members also used their own initiative and in some cases drew on their standing as pre-war JPs or as active military commanders in order to run Cheshire for parliament during the civil war. They met frequently during the war years, generally in Nantwich, which became the main parliamentary HQ, though occasionally elsewhere. The committee, which was referred to in contemporary documents under a bewildering variety of titles – ‘the Deputy Lieutenants’, ‘the Deputy Lieutenants and Committee’, ‘the Deputy Lieutenants and Gentlemen’, ‘the Committee’, ‘the Council of War’ and so forth – to some extent inherited and continued the traditional activities of the pre-war bench. Thus it may initially have aspired to maintain the system of poor relief, oversee bridges and highways, regulate alehouses and so forth, though in time of war these issues were hardly a priority and they were soon largely ignored. Similarly, the war-time county committee took over something of the judicial role of the bench, though it now had a very quick and effective way of dealing with alleged vagrants, drunks, adulterers and petty criminals, swiftly scooping them off the streets and conscripting them into the parliamentary army. However, the main role of the Cheshire county committeemen was geared more directly towards supporting the parliamentary war effort, tapping the resources of the county to ensure a steady supply of men, money and materials. They acted within a framework established by war-time parliamentary ordinances passed by the Long Parliament in London, using extraordinary financial and coercive powers, granted to them by the centre and enforced with military backing on the ground, which went far beyond those exercised by the peace-time bench. Indeed, so great were the powers and so onerous the duties of the war-time administration that in Cheshire, as in most counties, it was deemed impossible or undesirable for the single county committee to exercise them all. The principal county committee found itself working alongside other committees, some of them with overlapping membership, some with completely different members, undertaking specific roles. For example, parliament appointed a Cheshire committee to impose and collect the principal war-time tax, the weekly or monthly assessments, one or more local committees were set up to sequestrate – that is, to penalise by seizing the estates of – known royalists, Catholics or neutrals, and a completely separate committee was established by parliament to oversee and audit the financial accounts of the various commissioners and officers who collected the range of war-time exactions.

In Cheshire as elsewhere, the principal parliamentary county committee faded away once the civil war had been won and peace returned, and, after further disruption during 1647, from 1648 the regular and unbroken round of quarter sessions resumed; around the same time, parliament also re-established the main assize court for Cheshire and North Wales, the Court of Great Sessions. However, the revived Cheshire bench no longer acted virtually in isolation, with supreme and largely unchallenged oversight of administrative affairs. During the 1630s and the early Stuart period as a whole, the king or his Privy Council had from time to time appointed special commissions to enquire into specific issues, but in Cheshire as in most counties these had generally comprised JPs alone – in effect, sub-committees of the full Commission of the Peace – and had been very short-lived, usually carrying out a few weeks’ work, reporting back to the full bench and then lapsing. But during the war years, parliament had gained a taste for establishing standing committees and for employing a range of semi-permanent committees and commissioners to undertake specific roles. Many such county-based committees were retained long after the war had ended and, although they often contained a core of JPs, they also included other civilian administrators and military figures, giving them a presence, profile and role quite separate from the regular bench. Thus while the bench and its routine of quarter and petty sessions returned soon after the war had ended and much of its work during the late 1640s and 1650s closely resembled the traditional activities of a pre-war bench, it was no longer supreme but instead found itself sharing power with other bodies. Although the main Cheshire county committee was run down and subsumed into other bodies when peace returned and the hundredal sequestration committees were combined into a single county body which itself became increasingly moribund and was finally abolished in the 1650s, right through to the Restoration the post-war Cheshire bench had to share power with a handful of other centrally-appointed and empowered committees, including an assessment committee, a militia committee and, from 1654, a county-based committee set up to review incumbent ministers and schoolmasters and to eject those found to be unworthy. Moreover, in the late 1640s and 1650s the revived Court of Great Sessions, its two new judges, who were appointed by parliament, and the Cheshire Grand Jury all proved far more interventionist than the pre-war court, more prone to prod the bench into action over issues such as clamping down on alehouses, preventing the use of the old and now banned Prayer Book and reminding the JPs of the need for petty sessions. In the 1650s the Cheshire bench had to work alongside various other bodies and officials, many of them holding completely separate powers, and found itself just one of several county-based authorities.

This analysis of the position, role and power of the principal bodies which oversaw the administration of Cheshire between 1630 and 1660 has thus far occasionally touched on their membership, but we need to assess more directly the matter of composition and personnel. Throughout this period, JPs and other county officials were almost all directly appointed (and dismissed) by the central regimes, so this issue goes to the heart of relations between the centre and the locality and the treatment of the latter by the former.

During the 1620s central government had acted to reduce the size of most county benches, and – excluding purely honorific appointments of non-Cheshire figures who were never expected to play an active role within the county – there were generally around 30 JPs on the Cheshire bench in the decade or so before the outbreak of war. They were drawn almost exclusively from the greater or ‘county’ gentry of Cheshire, the remarkably stable group of around 60-70 large landed families who dominated the social, economic, political and administrative life of the county for most of the early modern period. There were not sufficient places on the bench for all these families to be represented at any one time and by accident or design there was some rotation in the pre-war generations, though as these leading families tended to marry amongst themselves, even families which did not hold a seat on the bench themselves often had in-laws or cousins serving as JPs. Unlike some counties, early Stuart Cheshire was not dominated by a great aristocrat, a senior peer who resided on, and presided over, enormous rolling estates and who held sway over the whole county. Instead, there was a clutch of somewhat more modest Cheshire peers, most of them of quite recent creation, who did have seats on the bench during the pre-war period – Lord Brereton, Viscount Cholmondeley, Viscount Kilmorry and Earl Rivers. However, they were outnumbered by a larger group of non-peers, many of them baronets or knights. The 1630s bench included Sir Thomas Aston, Sir George Booth, Sir William Brereton, Sir Henry Bunbury, Sir Edward Fytton and Sir Richard Wilbraham, as well as non-titled representatives of many of the other great Cheshire families – Cotton, Crewe, Mainwaring, Stanley and so forth. By no means all these men attended every quarter session – indeed, during the 1630s the average attendance at quarter sessions fell below ten – and some proved decidedly inactive until stirred into life by the growing disputes and divisions of the early 1640s. But throughout the 1630s the central executive continued to fill the Cheshire bench with the traditional county elite, the very durable and stable charmed circle who had been empowered to run the county for generations past.

This semi-oligarchic rule was broken up or undermined by the civil war. As we have seen, the routine of quarter and petty sessions and traditional local government collapsed very early in the war. In their stead, parliament appointed or empowered a new county committee to run war-time Cheshire. There was a natural turnover of members in the course of 1643-46, so that although at any one time the membership was generally in the very low teens, in total around two dozen men served on this body at some stage during the war. There was a degree of continuity with the pre-war bench, for while some existing JPs – Aston, Cholmondeley, Fytton, Rivers and others – either became active royalists or were antipathetic to the parliamentary cause and so naturally played no part in the parliamentary administration of Cheshire, several of the pre-war JPs – Sir George Booth and Thomas Stanley, for example – served on the parliamentary county committee, and several other appointees were drawn from the traditional ruling elite – a second Booth, a Brooke, a Mainwaring, a Wilbraham and so forth. However, the county committee also included quite a number of more minor figures, almost all of them local landowners and members of the Cheshire gentry, but often lesser men, mere gentlemen, whose status and estates would not normally have won them seats on the traditional bench. Such figures included Thomas Aldersey, Thomas Croxton, Robert Duckenfield, Richard Egerton, Edward Hyde, John Legh, William Raven, George Spurstowe, Thomas Walthall and Richard Wright.

Personal and social divisions, which had opened up amongst the Cheshire gentry in the pre-war years, were exacerbated by the pressures of running the county in time of war and the committee became divided. The pro-parliamentary gentry as a whole, and members of the county committee in particular, differed over such questions as the degree to which traditional procedures should be retained even in time of war or could and should be over-ridden in pursuit of victory, how far it was right and proper to employ non-Cheshire troops within the county, mainly in the long operation against Chester, and to pay them out of Cheshire’s coffers and how far it was right and proper to employ Cheshire troops, material and money beyond the county borders in waging the war in neighbouring counties. Those generally following a more cautious, conservative line, who wished to retain as much as possible of the traditional, civilian procedures and who took a county-based outlook, clustered around the powerful Booth family and probably commanded a clear majority on the full county committee throughout the war years. However, they often found themselves out-manoeuvred and out-gunned by a determined minority who held different views and who, with the backing or acquiescence of the centre, progressively starved the full county committee of real power in order to achieve their preferred ends.

In some parliamentary counties, the full county committee dominated the administration and power and control were shared out between the active members of the committee. However, in many counties one or two figures emerged early in the war as effective county bosses, taking control of affairs, dominating, overshadowing or by-passing the full committee. Sometimes the county boss was a member of the traditional elite – a Barrington in Essex, a Barnardiston in Suffolk – while others were drawn from the lesser gentry, from outside and below the usual charmed circle – Sir Anthony Welden in Kent, William Purefoy for a time in Warwickshire, Herbert Morley and Anthony Stapley jointly in Sussex. Cheshire conforms to the second pattern, for from spring 1643, when he led a brief military campaign which secured most of the county and was appointed by parliament as its commander-in-chief in Cheshire, through to February 1646, when the county town and last remaining royalist base in Cheshire surrendered to him, the county was dominated by Sir William Brereton, a dynamic war-time leader, political, administrative and military supremo and all-powerful county boss. He displayed a radicalism, a willingness to intervene and ignore traditional procedures and a broad regional outlook, happy to pay for Cheshire troops to campaign outside the county and for non-Cheshire troops to serve at the siege of Chester, very different from the moderate majority on the county committee, who became increasingly unhappy with Brereton’s monopoly of power and his use of that authority and who on several occasions tried – generally unsuccessfully – to rein him in. Brereton did not seek to purge or remodel the county committee and so, although from time to time individuals dropped out or were added, there was no single, radical restructuring and the overall balance of the Cheshire county committee did not greatly change over the period 1643-46. Instead Brereton simply decided to by-pass it on most major issues or when it suited him. Under a parliamentary ordinance of spring 1644 he gained the right to issue orders bearing his signature and the counter signatures of any two members of the committee, and thenceforth he was able to sideline the whole committee, with its moderate majority, and to run affairs in coordination with a small number of his cronies, men who often owed their promotion to him or who held military office under him – figures such as Robert Duckenfield and John Legh. Moreover, when Brereton was away from Cheshire for significant periods, attending parliament during spring 1644 and temporarily removed from his command from June to October 1645 under the Self Denying Ordinance, he ensured that military control rested with loyal officers and that specially-appointed groups dominated by his supporters – men like John Bromhall, Henry Brooke, Thomas Croxton, Robert Duckenfield, John Legh and Robert Venables – rather than the moderate-dominated county committee, controlled key aspects of the county administration, especially the raising and spending of money, the life blood of the war. In addition, he used his growing powers to ensure that his allies and those in sympathy with his approach dominated many of the other war-time committees in Cheshire, including the assessment committee, the hundred-based sequestration committees and local committees established by Brereton in several garrison towns, and he ensured that important county offices, such as the solicitor for sequestrations and the county treasurer, were held by men loyal to him. Brereton used to the full the military, political and administrative power which had been granted to him from the centre, by parliament, but at the same time the energy, ability and application he displayed in Cheshire and his generally successful record in retaining parliamentary control over a vulnerable region enhanced his standing in the eyes of parliament and enabled him to monopolise power in the North-West.

Moderate and traditional figures had generally been eclipsed during the civil war, pushed out of, or excluded from, military command and denied real administrative clout. However, many moderates had hung on, retaining their rather impotent seats on the county committee and more influential places on some war-time committees, especially the important Cheshire sub-committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom, which had power to check and audit the accounts of other financial bodies and officials. Accordingly, in 1646, when fighting ceased and Brereton’s control over the county suddenly ended – he moved south to become an active London-based MP and politician, with a new seat at the former archbishop’s palace at Croydon in Surrey – the moderate and more traditional Cheshire parliamentarians seemed poised to regain power. In 1646-47 quarter sessions resumed and, although there was no way back for former active royalists or opponents of parliament, the restored bench was initially dominated by representatives of some of the old county families – Booth, Mainwaring, Stanley, Wilbraham and so forth. But it proved a false dawn for such figures, for although Cheshire largely escaped the renewed fighting of 1648 which again divided many parts of England and Wales, the late 1640s saw the Cheshire bench shaken up several times. Army mutinies during 1647, when quarter sessions were again disrupted and several JPs were captured and held hostage by mutinying troops, the trial and execution of the king in January 1649 and the abolition of monarchy and House of Lords and resulting establishment of a republic during 1649 all had an impact on the composition of the Cheshire bench. Some JPs effectively resigned, unwilling to serve the central regime under these circumstances, while others were removed by parliament in order to ensure that county administrations in the provinces would reflect and enforce the new ethos at the centre.

By 1648 there were – again, excluding honorific, non-Cheshire figures – 26 Cheshire JPs, of whom only a handful, such as a Mainwaring and a Crewe, were drawn from traditional families who had served on the pre-war bench. They were far outnumbered now by younger men drawn from more modest landowning families, such as Ralph Aderne, Thomas Croxton and John Wettenhall, and by a group of men, soldiers and civilians, who had risen to prominence during the 1640s largely through serving Brereton – Robert Duckenfield, Gilbert Gerard, John Legh, William Steele, William Tuchett and Robert Venables. A new Commission of the Peace issued in February 1649, immediately after the trial and execution of the king, enlarged the bench to 34 and made some changes, but at the end of the year it was superseded by another Commission which, honorific appointments aside, reduced the Cheshire bench to just 19 and led to a far more extensive remodelling. Several of the old guard had been removed, as had several figures who had risen through military service to Brereton, whose influence in and on Cheshire had effectively ended; others were probably removed, ruled out or ruled themselves out because of their opposition to the regicide. The slimmed down bench was dominated by figures like Jonathan Bruen, Henry Bradshaw, Thomas Brereton, Thomas Croxton, Gilbert Gerard, Thomas Mainwaring and Thomas Marbury, in the main either new men, from families who had not sat on the pre-war bench, or young and recently-inherited members of more established families. By the early 1650s, the Cheshire bench had no active members who were knights, baronets or peers and, while very few had risen from humble origins below the gentry class, most were middling or lesser gentry, from outside the 60-70 great county families, the sort of men who would not normally have been created JPs and served on the bench. The lottery of mortality, the consequences of the twists and turns of events during the 1640s and the conscious political decisions of the central regime to remodel county government had together produced a dramatic change in the nature of the Cheshire bench. Although there were further, more modest changes of personnel in the course of the 1650s, the overall balance and complexion of the Cheshire bench was little changed down to the Restoration.

The less exalted social profile of the bench, combined with the fact that it now had to work alongside other, largely separate and effectively independent county-based committees and officials – ‘the increased density in the fabric of administrative life’, as John Morrill has put it – and the more fussy and interventionist approach taken by the Court of Great Sessions, may have had a deeper impact upon the ways in which the JPs operated during the 1650s. Professor Morrill has suggested that the JPs were less self-assured in the post-war period, less confident in their own standing and less likely to be closely related to each other. Accordingly, the JPs tended to deal with more business in the larger and more formal quarter sessions, where corporate decisions could be taken, and, reversing the earlier trend, less business was handled at the smaller and informal petty sessions, which were probably held less frequently during the 1650s, reverting to just three or four meetings per year per hundred instead of the monthly pattern of the pre-war decades. But Professor Morrill also suggests that at the same time the Cheshire JPs may have become more efficient – and at times more humane – in dealing with problems such as maintaining bridges and highways, supporting the deserving poor, controlling the numbers of alehouses and overseeing the price and supply of grain. In part, this followed on from the centralisation of decision-making at the quarter sessions rather than at petty session level, thus permitting and encouraging a greater degree of planning, coordination and control by the bench, and with it a greater strategic awareness and county approach. But in part this may also have resulted from the willingness of the JPs to liaise with local communities, many of whom had gained in self-awareness through their experience of civil war and religious upheaval and were often willing to take the initiative, organising purely local and informal parish committees to promote their needs.11 A mixture of central intervention and local circumstances – reformation from above and from below – had changed the way in which the county administration operated. Despite initial appearances, the post-war bench was in fact very different from its pre-war equivalent.

 

Having explored in some detail the principal bodies which ran Cheshire between 1630 and 1660 and the ways in which their work, operation and composition were shaped by the central regimes, this paper will close by assessing three specific though important areas of activity – religious, military and financial – to see in what ways and to what degree policies formulated at the centre impacted upon the county.

The diocese of Chester, created in the 1540s in the course of the Reformation, was not only very large – it comprised Cheshire and Lancashire and parts of Flintshire, Yorkshire and Cumberland – but also poor and plagued for decades by persistent and ingrained Roman Catholicism. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, several bishops of Chester had struggled to contain, convert or crush the recusant minority, found largely in Lancashire but with significant pockets in Cheshire, especially in the south of the county around Malpas and Bunbury and on the Wirral. Prompted by their metropolitan, the archbishop of York, or by the crown, successive bishops of Chester had focused on clamping down upon Catholics and Catholic activities, with considerable success, but in consequence they had tended to ignore other issues, particularly the growing sympathy found within the diocese for moves to make the Church of England lower, simpler and purer and to continue the work of Protestant reform. Indeed, several bishops actively colluded with this growing body of lay and clerical puritans, seeing them as natural allies in their struggles against Catholicism.

In 1619 John Bridgeman, a distinguished academic and ecclesiastical careerist, was appointed to Chester as his first and, as it turned out, his one and only bishopric. During the 1620s he focused on the administrative and financial aspects of his diocese, increasing rents, cutting salaries and gaining stronger episcopal control over various detached territories. In spiritual affairs, he appeared relaxed, lenient and non-interventionist, allowing different brands of Protestantism to thrive within his diocese. However, from the late 1620s onwards he came under increasing pressure from his superiors to enforce the new and very different religious policies being pursued by Charles I, who favoured a high church form of Protestantism often known as Arminianism, which stressed the ornate and ceremonial aspects of churches and church services and promoted the role of the clergy as intermediaries between God and the laity, epitomised by the drive to create permanent altars, railed off from the rest of the church. Charles was anxious to drive the Church of England in this direction and to ensure tight conformity to his brand of Protestantism, even in far-flung dioceses such as Chester. Accordingly, Bridgeman found himself increasingly leant on by the king himself, by Charles’s closest spiritual advisor William Laud, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, and by successive archbishops of York, in whose province Chester lay. In 1629 archbishop Harsnett of York launched a metropolitan visitation of Chester diocese to ensure that the king’s policies were being implemented and that various irregularities, such as the activities of puritan ministers and lecturers, were being eradicated. A clearly unhappy Bridgeman resisted but was compelled to cooperate. During the 1630s Charles and Laud increased the pressure, intervening both directly and via Richard Neile, the new archbishop of York. From 1633 onwards there were annual visitations throughout the diocese and Bridgeman was required each January to return written reports thereon, the originals or summaries of which eventually ended up before the king and his Privy Council. The sort of theological (and material) issues which the king and archbishop were keen to oversee, as well as the degree of central control now being exerted over the religious life of the Chester dioceses, are well illustrated by the return which Bridgeman made to Neile in January 1635, ‘touching the observation of His Majestys pious Instructions’:

Brushing aside arguments in favour of continued leniency, the king commented that ‘the neglect of punishing puritans breeds papists’13 and encouraged Neile to take a consistently tough line with the bishop. Under tight control from above, as the 1630s progressed Bridgeman was forced to ensure compliance within his diocese, through physical changes in church fabric and fittings and through the harassment or suppression of assorted low church or puritan-minded clergy, religious lecturers and patrons who were out of tune with the new royal policies. Happier with the material than the spiritual aspects of royal policy, Bridgeman worked closely with Neile, Laud, the king and others to repair, repave and re-pew parish churches, but he could not avoid the requirement to curb puritan activity and activists. Where necessary, opponents could be brought into line via the church courts. Thus during the 1630s the Chester consistory court was used to enforce outward conformity, compelling recalcitrant preachers or churchwardens to apologise and promise obedience, while the archbishop’s Court of High Commission at York was used to crush – via humiliating penance, fines or imprisonment – more obdurate opponents, including a clutch of Chester citizens who in 1637 expressed support for one of the principal opponents of the king’s religious policies as he passed through the area en route to imprisonment at Caernarfon.14

In Cheshire, as elsewhere, the authority of the king, his archbishops and bishops and of the Church of England as a whole largely collapsed amidst the political crisis of 1640-41, even before civil war had formally begun. With the dead hand of episcopal control removed, not to return until the Restoration, and with no effective central or local authority now able to curb them, a variety of Protestant opinions, faiths and practices quickly sprang forth, some of them openly antagonistic to episcopacy or a state church. For a time, in the early 1640s, some of the Cheshire JPs tried to exert a degree of control over church matters, hearing at quarter sessions allegations of religious or moral misdemeanours of the sort which hitherto would have come before the consistory court, now largely defunct though it continued to meet until 1643, but with the onset of civil war even this very limited spiritual authority ended in 1642-43. Thereafter the experience of civil war, with the opening up of all sorts of new and radical ideas which could be and were spread by a now uncensored press, by uncontrolled pamphleteering and preaching and by a parliamentary army which eagerly embraced the new spiritual and intellectual liberties of the 1640s, changed utterly the religious landscape of Cheshire and of England and Wales as a whole.

By the mid 1640s, even as the main civil war was being fought and won, some moderate parliamentarians were becoming profoundly alarmed by the religious liberty which the war had unleashed and sought ways of turning back what they viewed as a tide of heresy and potential social instability. However, they were outmanoeuvred by more radical parliamentarian politicians and their military supporters, who favoured and cherished the Protestant plurality of the war years, and the central regimes which held power during the later 1640s and the 1650s all strongly favoured broad liberty of conscience for Protestants and firmly resisted any proposal to re-establish a single state faith or church. Accordingly, in Cheshire as in most other counties, the post-war years saw a continuing and strengthening religious plurality on the ground, while at the centre the regimes set out certain restrictions, for example continuing to oppose Roman Catholicism, but otherwise allowed wide religious liberty and diversity. The old parish-based system of the Church of England continued after a fashion, but now shorn of both bishops and effective central spiritual direction. A mixture of local patrons and central government found new men to fill many of the parishes left vacant in the wake of war-time death, desertion, suspension or dismissal – perhaps half or more of the pre-war Cheshire clergy were no longer in post when the war ended – while itinerant preachers were also employed to minister to congregations in still vacant parishes. In 1654 the new Protectoral regime tried to regularise incumbency, appointing a central body of commissioners, sitting in London, to judge the suitability of candidates coming forward for vacant livings, while also establishing county based committees – that for Cheshire comprised twenty worthies, assisted by twelve ministers – empowered to review existing incumbents and to eject any found to be ignorant, scandalous or ungodly. But alongside this rather limp and devolved erastian system, other groups, faiths and sects existed, were encouraged and flourished. In the late 1640s there were attempts to establish a Presbyterian system in many parts of England and Wales, including Cheshire, where in summer 1648 around 60 clergymen met to support such a scheme; after another meeting at Knutsford in the early 1650s, the Presbyterians set up a fairly loose and voluntary organisation to co-ordinate the various Presbyterian preachers and congregations which had become established within the county. There were other Independent or Congregational groups within post-war Cheshire, many of which defy strict denominational labels. During the 1650s both Baptists and Quakers were found in Cheshire, the former probably carried to Cheshire in units of the parliamentary army stationed within the county but then spreading amongst the civilian population, leading to Baptist churches becoming established at Warrington, Nantwich and elsewhere, while Quakerism gained footholds in and around Malpas, Chester, Congleton and other market towns.

If the story of religion is of very tight and centralised oversight during the 1630s, giving way to an almost complete absence of central control during the 1640s and then to a slight resumption of a degree of central guidance, while retaining extensive local freedoms and liberty, during the 1650s, the pattern of military affairs is in some ways a mirror image of this. There was no standing army in early Stuart England and Wales and instead a degree of self-defence and security was provided by the militia, that is part-time, county-based units of foot and a few horse. In theory, all able-bodied males between 16 and 60 were liable to serve and were to be mustered several times a year for training under the command of the lord lieutenant of the county, assisted by deputy lieutenants and perhaps a few semi-professional soldiers. In practice, it was hard to compel attendance and county quotas were quite modest, usually under 2000 foot and a few score horse; moreover, training was often lax and rudimentary and the military equipment, stored in county magazines, old and inadequate. During the early seventeenth century, the Stuart monarchs attempted to overhaul and improve this long-established system by boosting the numbers of men, up-dating and strengthening their equipment and requiring more frequent and stricter musters and more intensive training. This drive for a ‘perfect’ or ‘exact’ militia reached its height in the period 1625-29, the opening years of Charles I’s reign, in part because of the king’s drive for a more orderly and efficient state, in part because he favoured a far more aggressive and belligerent foreign policy than had his father, James I. However, the very poor performance of some militia units which were conscripted into a new army formed to campaign against Spain and France as part of Charles’s brief and inglorious wars against those two powers in the late 1620s and the king’s desire during the Personal Rule of the 1630s to make and keep peace abroad and to curb expenditure at home meant that the drive to improve the militia rather fizzled out or was accorded a much lower priority during the 1630s. Royal and conciliar pressure on the counties over this issue noticeably slackened in the decade or so before the civil war.

There is ample evidence that in Cheshire, as in most other counties, central policy had produced a positive provincial response and that by the 1620s there had been tangible improvements in the quality of the militia. The lord lieutenant of Cheshire, the Earl of Derby, was rather long in the tooth by this time and from the mid 1620s he effectively handed over many of his duties to his son, Lord Strange. However, neither Derby nor Strange was particularly active in Cheshire, and the real work of improving and maintaining the militia fell to a group of active and conscientious deputy lieutenants, men like Sir George Booth, Sir Thomas and John Savage, Lord Cholmondeley and Richard Wilbraham. Their annual reports to the lord lieutenant, and then via him to the king and the Privy Council, talk of regular musters and training and of improvements in stocks of arms, armour and ammunition. By the late 1620s the Cheshire militia, who tended to be organised and exercised by hundred, numbered around 1100 foot and 70 horse, well below the figures achieved in some of the larger, richer and more populous English counties, but a respectable showing nonetheless. During the 1630s the deputy lieutenants attempted to maintain the earlier impetus and standards. In autumn 1631 they reported glowingly that ‘the number of the men being upon the matter the same that wee formerly certifyed, though the men farre more experyenced for the use of their armes. Wee having assigned such to serve upon the said bands as are both young and of the best abilityes who take a delight in that service. Wherein the more to encourage them wee have caused their armes to bee fitted as neere as wee can to the best motheren fashion’. Again, the annual report of autumn 1632 spoke of several days’ intensive and successful training, ‘their armes...in good repaire’, and of plans for a modest increase in the troop of horse, though they noted that they had not in fact been able to muster and view the horse.15 However, such reports tended to become less frequent and rather patchier in the course of the decade and there is a distinct impression that, with the slackening of pressure and control from the centre, the 1630s were marked, in Cheshire as elsewhere, by a degree of inertia or, more optimistically, by a reliance upon the momentum built up in an earlier, more centrally-driven period to carry on and maintain those standards once royal and conciliar attention had moved elsewhere.

During the 1640s Cheshire, like almost all the counties of England and Wales, became a militarised zone, with a large, strong and active military presence. Even before the main civil war broke out in summer 1642, attempts were made to protect the county from possible incursions from across the Irish Sea in the wake of the Irish Catholic rising of autumn 1641. By late summer 1642, with the civil war unfolding at home, both king and parliament were attempting to recruit troops in Cheshire. They initially met with a patchy response, but each side probably succeeded in raising around or a little over 2,000 troops within Cheshire during the opening months of the war. In spring 1643 Cheshire’s involvement in the war and, with it, the military presence within the county, massively increased, as Brereton’s parliamentarians secured most of central and eastern Cheshire and placed it on a war footing, under military control, while the royalists fortified the western parts of the county, particularly the county town and port of Chester, in an attempt to retain a foothold in the North-West. From then until the end of the war in 1646 most of the large towns as well as a scattering of repaired castles and country houses contained more or less permanent garrisons, and towns and countryside endured low level but recurrent raiding, plundering and skirmishing. The major parliamentary operation against royalist Chester, which soon became the focus of the war within the county, involved at its height up to 10,000 troops, many of them drawn from outside the county. From time to time large field armies campaigned, generally quite briefly, within the county. For example, on several occasions either the king or his nephews Princes Rupert and Maurice led royalist armies to or through Cheshire and in the winter of 1643-44 a new royalist field army brought over from Ireland rampaged through the county; in order to meet that threat, the Fairfaxes’ northern parliamentarian army crossed from Yorkshire and engaged the king’s men outside Nantwich, in probably the largest and bloodiest field engagement of the civil war in Cheshire.

All these troops were in Cheshire as part of a national civil war which, whatever differences or divisions there may have been at provincial level by the early 1640s, only occurred because of a breakdown at the centre, because the normal mechanisms of national government and administration based in Whitehall and Westminster were unable to contain and resolve assorted personal, political and religious conflicts, which instead spilled over into a resort to arms. Central authorities, namely king and parliament now acting independently and in opposition, empowered the raising, deployment and employment of troops. Command always rested ultimately with the centre, on the royalist side with the king, his Privy Council and his new Council of War, based in the main at Oxford, and on the parliamentary side with the Long Parliament and the various executive councils and committees it spawned, sitting in London. To the extent that either side had overarching, national strategies during the civil war, they were devised or at least approved and authorised at the centre. In Cheshire, the royalists clung onto the county town for so long in part because the king stressed its importance to his cause and commanded the governor and his garrison to do all they could to retain this outpost, while on the parliamentary side Brereton held military command and looked for authority to an ordinance passed by the Long Parliament in March 1643, creating him commander-in-chief of and in Cheshire. From time to time Cheshire was caught up in major national campaigns, especially when the principal royalist field armies under the king or his nephews were active within the county. On the other hand, almost of necessity day to day command, control, tactics and campaigning had to be left to the initiative of the commanders on the ground, in the provinces, with enormous devolved power to take decisions and seize the initiative. Although in 1643-44 the king included the small part of Cheshire under his control in a much larger regional block of land, comprising much of north Wales and the northern Marches, placed under a single commander – initially Lord Capel and later Lord Byron – in practice the royalist defence of Chester and its hinterland depended on local features, factors, commanders and troops, not on a grand regional operation. Although parliament, too, established larger military ‘associations’ in 1643-45, gathering together clutches of counties under its control and placing them under single commanders and military administrative machines, they never included the North-West in general or Cheshire in particular in any such larger unit. It is a measure of Brereton’s military, administrative and political ability, the position he held and the trust he engendered that, while he did of course lobby and liaise with the centre and was ultimately answerable to and under the control of parliament, its executive Council and the overall parliamentary commander-in-chief, he was accorded considerable freedom and latitude to run military operations in and around Cheshire.

The military presence in Cheshire was greatly reduced after peace returned in 1646. All the defeated royalist forces were, of course, disbanded, and many of the parliamentarian troops were removed to fight elsewhere or were themselves paid off, a process which became all the more pressing in the wake of a string of mutinies which rocked Cheshire and many other parts of England and Wales in 1646-47. A military presence continued right through to the Restoration, with a large garrison maintained in Chester and small pockets of troops elsewhere. Moreover, the county town and its outports retained a military air as one of the principal routes to and from Ireland, where real fighting dragged on well into the 1650s and where the English regimes maintained an army throughout the decade. Equally, we have already noted how several active or retired parliamentarian officers played a role in the administration of the county in the post-war years. However, order, apparent stability and ostensibly civilian forms did return to Cheshire, as to most parts of England and Wales, once the civil war was over. For the most part, Cheshire during the 1650s was not a heavily militarised county and the army – whether under local or central control – played only a limited role in its day to day life.

The rule of the Major Generals in the mid 1650s is often viewed as an exception to this pattern and is seen as an interlude of heavy-handed, centralised, militaristic control. In response to a royalist insurrection, during 1655 the Protectoral regime set up a new tier of local government. England and Wales were divided up into twelve regions, each of which was placed under the control of a senior army officer, holding or given the rank of Major General, assisted in each county by a newly-appointed body of commissioners. The Major Generals and their commissioners were to act alongside, not to supersede, the more traditional and civilian forms of local government. Their brief was to curb royalists and active royalism, to ensure stability and order and also to promote godliness by clamping down on sinful activities and opportunities. They were to raise and command new horse militias in each region and the whole system was to be funded by a new 10% tax imposed upon known royalists. Most Major Generals and their commissioners were in place by autumn 1655, but they were only really active for around a year, for most Major Generals were elected to the parliament that met in September 1656 and were thenceforth involved in parliamentary affairs in London. In January 1657 that parliament decided not to support the system of the Major Generals and the whole initiative swiftly came to an end.

The impact of the Major Generals between autumn 1655 and autumn 1656 could be blunted by a number of factors, including the huge workload they carried, the administrative and logistical difficulties encountered in their regions, the problem of raising enough money to finance the system – the tax on royalists fell well short of what was needed – and active or (more often) passive resistance not only from royalists but also from a wider spectrum of society which often viewed the Major Generals as interfering and unwelcome busy-bodies. Cheshire was grouped with Lancashire and Staffordshire and allocated to Charles Worsley, who proved to be one of the most zealous, harsh and energetic of the Major Generals, very active in arresting, disarming, taxing and extracting sureties from royalists – he took sureties from 470 Cheshire royalists and pushed (unsuccessfully) for the income threshold for the new tax on royalists to be halved so that he could get more money out of more individuals – in clamping down on horse races and other public meetings, in closing alehouses – by spring 1656 he had closed over 200 alehouses in Cheshire – and in purging or putting to work subordinate officials and commissioners. He was assisted in Cheshire by a body of commissioners, on paper evenly divided between civilian JPs and army officers, though in practice the military figures proved the more active and they dominated proceedings, under the oppressive leadership of workaholic Worsley. Indeed, his sudden death in London in June 1656, aged just 34, is often ascribed to overwork. There are even some hints that the central government had come to view Worsley as something of an embarrassment, for his frequent requests were generally ignored and on several occasions candidates he suggested for local office were passed over in favour of more moderate appointees. His successor, Tobias Bridge, oversaw the Cheshire elections to the looming parliament16 but otherwise he had little time to stamp his mark upon the county before he left the region and the system ended. The rule of Worsley and Bridge marked a renewed if brief form of semi-militarised, central control over Cheshire – the Major Generals held power under and acted in accordance with instructions issued by the Protector and his Council and the surviving correspondence between the individual Major Generals and Secretary of State John Thurloe is ample testament to the degree to which they looked for support, authority and reassurance from the centre.17 But what really antagonised the people in Cheshire, as elsewhere, was not so much that they represented the army or central government, but that they were meddlesome social upstarts who were attempting to enforce their own godly moral perspective on the people. Professor Durston’s conclusion about the entire system of the Major Generals could be applied very neatly to the work of Worsley and Bridge in the North-West and to the reaction they evinced in Cheshire: ‘The quintessential feature...was not that it was army rule, nor that it was London rule, but rather that it was godly rule, and it was as such that it was decisively rejected by the great majority of the English and Welsh people’.18

If the level of involvement of central regimes in the religious and military affairs of Cheshire had varied considerably over the period 1630-60, ranging between strong, close and active to weak or virtually non-existent, central government consistently took a keen interest in, and sought close control over, the financial affairs of the county, particularly its payment of assorted taxes and other levies. In the early Stuart period there were few direct taxes and most royal income came from a mixture of crown lands and customs duties. From time to time, this income was boosted by one-off taxes on property and landed income granted by parliament. However, by the seventeenth century this system of parliamentary ‘subsidies’ was proving problematic, for it relied on local landowners assessing the value of each other’s property and this reliance upon self-assessment and self-policing led to difficulties of under-valuation and under-assessment. In an era of inflation, the cash value of a parliamentary subsidy was actually falling, from perhaps £120,000 from the whole of England and Wales in the mid sixteenth century to little more than half that by the reign of Charles I. The decline in Cheshire’s subsidy payments was not so dramatic, for while Cheshire landowners paid perhaps a total of up to £800 per parliamentary subsidy early in Elizabeth I’s reign, by the opening of Charles I’s reign seventy years later the total had fallen gently to around £600 per subsidy. But in the light of the sums imposed and collected in the period 1630-60, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Elizabethan and early Stuart Cheshire was being taxed remarkably lightly.

During the 1630s Charles called no parliaments in England and Wales and so imposed and collected no subsidies or other parliamentary exactions. He sought to balance his books by curbing expenditure and by boosting his non-parliamentary income in a number of ways, including running crown lands more efficiently, increasing rents on royal property and milking the customs for all they were worth, but he also revived and imposed a range of medieval, ‘feudal’ dues. Several of these involved a one-off payment, including fines, imposed in Cheshire as elsewhere, upon those above a certain income who had failed to claim a knighthood at his accession and those who had inadvertently encroached upon the now often defunct boundaries of the medieval royal forests – forest fines brought in somewhat over £2000 in Cheshire, imposed on around 180 Cheshire gentlemen. But much more notoriously, Charles also revived ship money, the right of the crown to collect money in time of war or emergency to pay for ships to defend the coast. This became a recurrent tax in all but name, and was imposed annually throughout England and Wales from 1635 until 1640. Moreover, unlike a parliamentary subsidy, ship money was a quota tax. Each county was set a specific sum which had to paid that year, and it was left to the luckless sheriff to apportion the amount due from each hundred and parish and to badger the constables to ensure that all the money came in and could be dispatched to London. Cheshire was usually required to pay either £3,000 or £3,500 per year, with a further separate charge of £260 or £300 per annum levied on Chester. In Cheshire, as in most counties of England and Wales, ship money proved remarkably successful in purely financial terms, for despite plenty of grumbling, reports by the sheriffs that they were experiencing difficulties and almost unrelenting pressure from the Privy Council, all or almost all the quota was eventually collected and sent to London every year, down to 1639-40 when the payment of ship money collapsed as Charles’s royal authority began to crumble. In a detailed case study of Cheshire, Peter Lake has shown how the Privy Council benefited from new and long-standing disputes between the county and the county town, cleverly playing the role of arbiter and honest broker between the two, keeping both sides sweet and ensuring that payment was received from both, while at the same time turning up the heat on the sheriff. But when payments collapsed in 1639-40 as for the first time the sheriff encountered really strong and widespread resistance, his pleas to the Privy Council for assistance brought little more than conciliar letters telling the sheriff to do his duty and obey the king. Ultimately, in peace-time England central government relied upon cooperation and obedience in the provinces and could wield little effective power in the face of such a ground-swell of opposition.19

During the civil war, both sides imposed a range of new exactions upon the territories under their control in order to raise huge and unprecedented sums to finance their war efforts. Although they occasionally went under different names or were dressed up differently, both sides in fact adopted remarkably similar methods. Thus at the start of the civil war, in 1642-43, both king and parliament sought voluntary loans from their richer supporters and then compelled payment from those who had not voluntarily contributed to the cause; both sides imposed excise duties, effectively a sales tax, on various goods; both sides seized or sequestrated the lands and property of their opponents, the king’s men seizing the property of known parliamentarians or neutrals which lay within royalist territory, the parliamentarians seizing that of known royalists, neutrals or Catholics which lay within their territory; and, most importantly and generally most lucratively, from 1643 onwards both sides began imposing regular weekly or monthly direct taxes on the civilian populations who lived in territory controlled by them. This new regular tax, which the parliamentarians called the ‘assessment’, was – like ship money, which served as a model for the new system – a quota tax, and hundreds or full counties were assigned a particular set sum which had to be paid each week, fortnight or month.

Surviving sources reveal little about the money which the royalists raised during the civil war in Chester and the other parts of western Cheshire under their control. Conversely, surviving accounts reveal a great deal about the income raised by parliament in the bulk of the county between 1643 and the end of the war. The voluntary contributions and compulsory levy collected early in the war brought in around £35-40,000; sequestrations and the income made by running, renting out or selling off sequestrated property brought in over £90,000; parliamentary excise duties, on goods such as meat, salt and beer, was frequently evaded and probably brought in less than £10,000 down to 1646; while assessments brought in around £30,000 – a surprisingly low figure – over the same period. These national exactions, authorised by parliamentary ordinances and collected by the county committee with military backing where necessary, thus produced somewhere around £170,000 in total from parliamentarian-controlled parts of Cheshire in a little under four years, though over and above this a variety of lesser local levies, to support particular garrisons, were also imposed, perhaps adding another £30,000 or more to the total. These were huge sums, completely dwarfing the sums raised in Cheshire by parliamentary subsidies and royal ship money. For example, it is estimated that all the parliamentary subsidies collected in Cheshire between 1590 and 1629, a period of almost 40 years, brought in a total a little under £18,000, an average of around £450 per year. When ship money was at its height in the 1630s, Cheshire (including Chester) was contributing £3,800 per year. In terms of parliamentary exactions, the majority of the county (but excluding its major town and port and some other western areas) was paying perhaps £50,000 per year on average in the period 1643-46, besides the indirect but enormous price to be paid in terms of plunder, free quarter, the destruction of property and livelihoods and so forth. Parliamentary taxes hit far more people and extended far further down the social scale than almost all earlier royal or parliamentary taxes and some historians have suggested that the parliamentary assessments were roughly equivalent to an income tax of 12% or more, which sounds like music to modern ears but was without precedent in the mid seventeenth century. However, two riders might be added at this point. Firstly, although the parliamentary ordinances required the county treasurers to send the money raised to London, where it would pass through a central treasury and then be spent under parliament’s directions, in practice most cash never took this route but was spent within its home county. It has been suggested that 95% or more of the money raised by parliament in Cheshire during the civil war was then spent in Cheshire, the bulk of it to pay soldiers, so at least the money stayed in circulation within the local economy. Secondly, the sums which parliament raised in Cheshire, enormous as they were, are dwarfed by the amounts levied upon and raised in some of the larger, more populous and prosperous counties under parliament’s control. By 1645 Cheshire assessments stood at £245 per month; Essex was required to pay £1,600 per month, while Kent and Suffolk were being assessed at £1,800 per month apiece.

The end of the civil war did not see the end of high taxes, for successive parliaments and parliamentary regimes continued to raise very large sums of money in the late 1640s and throughout the 1650s. The sequestration of estates continued for some time after the fighting ended, but in the late 1640s and early 1650s parliament instead was permitting landowners who had supported the king to ‘compound for their delinquency’, that is to pay a one off fine in return for retaining or regaining most or all of their property. Around 200 Cheshire gentlemen duly compounded, generally attending a central, London-based committee established by parliament for the purpose and thus paying their fines there. Around two dozen Cheshire landowners, most of them quite minor, who had failed to compound by the early 1650s had their estates seized under parliamentary authority. The war time excise also continued and now, in more orderly circumstances, was imposed more efficiently and became a far more lucrative branch of state income. By the 1650s excise duties were often paid by producers rather than by individual retailers or consumers and they were also often ‘farmed out’, that is private consortia agreed to collect the duties in a particular region in return for paying a set sum of money to parliament. During the 1650s the main excise duties collected in Cheshire were imposed upon salt and beer and together they were probably worth around £3,000 per year by the close of the decade. But the heaviest burden by far was the regular assessment which, far from fading away after the war, was retained and increased to provide the bulk of regular state income. In 1647-48 Cheshire (including Chester) was paying around £400 per month in assessments, but by the end of the decade that had more than doubled to £1,100 per month. Assessments in Cheshire, as in most counties of England and Wales, peaked in the early 1650s, with the county paying £1,500 per month or a staggering £18,000 per year – that is more per year than the county had paid in parliamentary subsidies during the forty years 1590-1629. Although by the latter half of the 1650s this had dropped back to a more modest £700 per month, that still worked out at £8,400 per year. Despite this, we should again note that Cheshire remained one of the more lightly assessed counties. For example, under the Assessment Ordinance of June 1654 Cheshire paid more than all the Welsh counties, but in England only the poorest counties of the far north – Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland and Durham – and the small counties of Rutland, the Isle of Ely and Huntingdonshire had to pay a lower assessment. Cheshire’s assessment of £1,100 per month under this ordinance paled besides the sums paid by many of the bigger or richer counties – Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent each had to pay well over £3,000 per month, while Devon, Somerset, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire each had to pay over £2,500 per month. However, the money which Cheshire paid in assessments and excise during the later 1640s and the 1650s was no longer staying within the county, circulating locally and supporting the regional economy, as in the main it had done during the civil war. Instead, under the very much tighter central control re-established and imposed after the war, the money had to be sent off to the central treasury in London, where it was used to fund central, state expenditure. No-one living in Cheshire during the civil war and post-war period could have been unaffected by events, for they would all have been hit very hard in the pocket by the unprecedented taxes imposed by the central regimes. For those who survived the war and looked back wistfully as they contemplated the mountainous tax demands of the 1650s, the era of ship money must have seemed a golden age and life under the lightly-taxing, non-interventionist early Stuart regimes an Eldorado of distant memory, and one that would never fully return.

NOTES

A note on sources

The arguments in this paper rest heavily upon the records of county government, especially the quarter session material, now held at the Cheshire and Chester Record Office, and the papers of the various executive Councils and other central bodies of 1630-60, now held within the State Papers at the Public Record Office/National Archives. In terms of published works, the outstanding study of Cheshire in this period is J S Morrill, Cheshire, 1630-60 (Oxford, 1974), a subtle and thoughtful assessment of the government and administration of the county; this paper rests and builds upon Professor Morrill’s work. See also his national overview of central-local interaction, Revolt in the Provinces (Harlow, 1999). The best concise introduction to religion in Cheshire in the early and mid seventeenth century is to be found in the chapters on ‘The Diocese of Chester’, ‘Roman Catholicism’ and ‘Protestant Nonconformity’ in B E Harris, The Victoria History of the County of Chester, Volume III (Oxford, 1980); on pre-war puritanism, see also R C Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England (Manchester, 1972). The best concise introduction to the administration of Cheshire in the early and mid seventeenth century is to be found in the chapter on ‘Administrative History’ in B E Harris, The Victoria History of the County of Chester, Volume II (Oxford, 1979); see also G P Higgins, ‘The government of early Stuart Cheshire’, Northern History 12 (1976). The militia in Cheshire is examined in detail in G P Higgins, ‘The militia in early Stuart Cheshire’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society 61 (1978) and Cheshire’s ship money in P Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire during the sixteen-thirties: a case study of relations between central and local government’, Northern History 17 (1981). M J Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth Century England (Boydell, 1994) uses Cheshire as a case study and the volume contains a wealth of figures, tables, statistics and analysis about the county. The best study of English local government throughout the Stuart period is A Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces (London, 1986).

Dr Peter Gaunt is Reader in History at University College Chester. He has published extensively on the early and mid seventeenth century and was editor of Cheshire History from 1995 until 2002.

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