HOBY, Sir Thomas Posthumous (1566-1640), of Hackness, nr. Scarborough, Yorks. and Blackfriars, London; later of Twickenham, Mdx.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604-1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, 2010
Available from Cambridge University Press

Constituency

Dates

1614
1621
1624
1625
1626
1628

Family and Education

b. Oct. 1566, 2nd (posth.) s. of Sir Thomas Hoby of Bisham Abbey, Berks. by Elizabeth, da. of Sir Anthony Cooke† of Gidea Hall, Essex;1 bro. of Sir Edward*. educ. Trinity, Oxf. 1574; volunteer, Low Countries 1586, Ireland 1594; G. Inn 1588.2 m. 8 Aug. 1596, Margaret (d. 4 Sept. 1633), da. and h. of Arthur Dakins of Linton, Yorks., wid. of Walter Devereux of Lamphey, Pemb. and Thomas Sidney of Penshurst, Kent, s.p.3 kntd. 7 July 1594.4 d. 30 Dec. 1640.5 sig. T[homas] Posth[umous] Hoby.

Offices Held

J.p., Yorks. (E. Riding) 1596-1626, 1629-d., N. Riding 1597-1626, 1629-d. (custos rot. ?1610-26, 1629-37), W. Riding 1617-26, 1629-d., Cawood liberty, Yorks. 1609-26, 1628-d., Ripon liberty, Yorks. 1609-26, 1629-d. (custos rot. 1617-26, 1629), York 1625-6, 1629-d., Southwell liberty, Notts. 1629-d., Mdx. 1629-33;6 freeman, Scarborough ?1597;7 commr. musters, Yorks. 1598-1601; col. militia ft., N. Riding 1599;8 member, High Commission, York prov. 1599-1630, subsidy, Yorks. 1601, 1608, 1621-2, 1624, 1629, oyer and terminer, Northern circ. by 1602-26, 1628-d., Mdx. 1621, sewers, E. Riding 1603, N. Riding 1604, R. Ouse 1610;9 member, Council in the North 1603-22, 1633-d., v.-pres. 1605;10 commr. aid, E. Riding 1609, 1612;11 bailiff, Whitby Strand, Yorks. 1609-11, Scarborough 1610-11;12 commr., concealed lands, Yorks. 1612; steward, manor of Ripon 1617-29; receiver, Pickering honour 1621;13 dep. lt. N. Riding 1623-37;14 commr. recusants, Northern counties to 1630, to take Benevolence accts., Yorks. 1630, repair of St. Paul’s cathedral, E. Riding 1633.15

Biography

Sir Thomas Hoby came from a privileged background: his mother, widowed before his birth, remarried the heir to the earldom of Bedford; his older brother was a courtier; his cousins, including (Sir) Robert Cecil† and Sir Francis Bacon*, rose to the highest offices in the land; while lord president Huntingdon helped to arrange his marriage to a Yorkshire heiress. Viewed in this context, his career was an almost unmitigated failure: the most significant public office he held was custos rotulorum of the North Riding; while his impact on the Crown’s religious policies, the issue which exercised him above all else, was almost entirely negative. This was perhaps the inevitable fate of a godly man in an era which saw increasing toleration of Catholicism and the rise of Arminianism, both of which trends he abhorred. However, Hoby’s chief weakness was not his circumstances but his personality: his mother spoke of ‘the unnatural hard nature and insolency of this boy’;16 his allies regarded him as a pedant; while his enemies, who were legion, viewed him as an insufferable prig.

Hoby and his wife were both staunch puritans, studying godly authors such as William Perkins and providing succour for a series of clergymen who were at odds with the ecclesiastical authorities. When in London, their minister was Stephen Egerton, a former activist in the Presbyterian movement of the 1580s. This extrovert godliness was regarded as suspect in Yorkshire, where Catholicism remained potent, while Hoby’s support for a group of priest-hunters tacitly endorsed by the Council in the North made him powerful enemies. In August 1600 a group of huntsmen, among them William Eure† and (Sir) Richard Cholmley*, passed a night at Hackness drinking, gambling, swearing and casting aspersions about Lady Hoby’s relationship with the local curate. The miscreants were eventually fined in Star Chamber, but not before Eure’s father Ralph, 3rd Lord Eure†, then vice-president of the Council in the North, had publicly humiliated Hoby by asking why he had failed to defend his wife’s reputation with his sword.17

Hoby first stood for Parliament in 1597, joining with Sir John Stanhope I* for the Yorkshire county seats. Sir John Savile* mounted a challenge, and while Hoby, a newcomer to the shire, might have been dropped by Stanhope in order to avoid a contest, Savile paired with Sir William Fairfax† on the morning of the election and trounced both his opponents. In the aftermath of this defeat Hoby found a seat at Scarborough, only four miles from his house at Hackness, but four years later, at the 1601 election, this place was taken by his erstwhile tormentor, William Eure. With a personal score to settle, Hoby began lobbying the Scarborough corporation for a seat immediately after Elizabeth’s death. He reminded the townsmen that he was both a property-holder and a freeman of the borough, and was careful to clear his candidacy with two other aspiring patrons, lord president Sheffield and the borough’s high steward, lord admiral Nottingham (Charles Howard†), ‘who will not, I know, prefer any that are named in his honour’s [Nottingham’s] letters before me, in respect that his honour and mine only brother married two sisters’. He was ultimately elected together with Eure’s (conformist) uncle.18

At the start of the new reign, James received many tracts advocating commonwealth reforms, one of which survives among the papers of the heir to Hoby’s estates. While anonymous, the petition could have been written by Hoby: the author described himself as ‘a mean and second’ son, and offered a godly perspective on recent events which Hoby would undoubtedly have endorsed. Moreover, the king was reminded of Infanta Isabella’s claim to the English throne and urged to aid the United Provinces by continuing the war against Spain, a plea Hoby’s brother made in the Commons in 1604. However, James was urged to waive collection of the remainder of the wartime subsidies voted in 1601, a suggestion Hoby is unlikely to have made, as on 2 June 1604 he moved for a fresh vote of supply in return for statutory restrictions on the Crown’s claims to purveyance. Furthermore, there is no independent evidence that Hoby shared the anti-Scots sentiments expressed in the petition. The internal evidence for the identity of its author is therefore inconclusive.19

Already an experienced parliamentarian, Hoby was more active in 1604 than he had been as an Elizabethan Member, though his only significant appointment before the Easter recess was as one of a delegation to the king to justify the Commons’ claim to jurisdiction over the Buckinghamshire election (28 March). On 1 June he spoke in a debate on the proposed abolition of wardship, to unknown effect. The next morning Sir George More tabled a bill regulating composition for purveyance. Hoby was one of several speakers who supported the measure and offered supply if it passed, a notable concession at a time when the 1601 subsidies were still being collected. However, the bill was ultimately laid aside. Included on the committee for the Tunnage and Poundage bill as a burgess for a port town (30 May), he reported its proceedings to the House on 13 June, while in a debate on free trade on 6 June he was one of the few Members who defended the Merchant Adventurers. He reported a bill for confirmation of letters patents on 11 June; but this was stayed ‘upon some special exceptions expressed by Mr. Speaker’, presumably because another bill on the same subject was passing through the Lords. Keen to uphold the privileges of the House, he intervened amid heated debate on 14 May to inquire how the House could effect the release of Sir Thomas Shirley I* from the Fleet in face of the warden’s refusal to co-operate, and a week later he objected to a royal attempt to suppress a bill, even though it libelled the bishop of London, because this created a precedent for royal control of the Commons’ agenda. He was also included on the committee investigating the publication of an attack on the Commons’ proceedings over the Union by Bishop Thornborough (1 June), whom he is unlikely to have been prepared to censure, as the two men’s wives were close friends.20

Religion loomed large in Hoby’s parliamentary agenda. As a resident of what he once termed one of ‘the most dangerous parts of Yorkshire for hollow hearts, for popery’, he helped to quash an amendment to the 1593 Recusancy Act exempting husbands from liability for their wives’ fines. He was also named (6 June) to the committee for the bill to prevent the importation of popish books. An enthusiastic supporter of a preaching ministry, he backed Sir John Heigham’s motion to restore a proviso allowing for the ordination of qualified non-graduates to the bill for a learned ministry, ‘with many reasons, and instances of his own knowledge’. He reported the bill for episcopal leases on 20 June, and was named to committees for bills against simony (18 June), abuses of ecclesiastical courts (16 June), and unjust claims against clerical incumbents (19 June), but took no significant part in Sir Francis Hastings’s campaign against the Hampton Court settlement. He played a modest role in furthering local interests, moving for Scarborough’s exemption from tolls imposed by the Dover harbour bill, and securing an extra committee meeting for the bill for the manufacture of sailcloth. He left London before the end of the session, arriving home at Hackness on 30 June.21

In the winter of 1604-5 Hoby succeeded in persuading his cousin Cecil, now Viscount Cranborne, to block the revocation of Stephen Egerton’s preaching licence by the bishop of London. In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot he was sent to chair a session of the Council in the North, but he attended the reopening of the second session of Parliament in January 1606, where he was named to committees for five bills in the first week alone. These included one to establish 5 Nov. as a day of thanksgiving (23 Jan.), another to enable the underage (Sir) John Hotham* to provide a jointure for any future wife (25 Jan.), and a third to promote a learned ministry (22 January). He took no further recorded part in the session, and was even less active in the next, making a single speech on 5 May 1607 against amendments to a bill for a Gloucestershire school. In 1610 he failed to support to his cousin’s scheme for the Great Contract, and was named to only two committees, one for a bill against plurality and non-residence among the clergy (19 Feb.), and the other for a speedier collection of poor rates (25 May). However, while in London he lobbied on behalf of Scarborough’s corporation in their lawsuit against a rival market at nearby Seamer. He left no trace on the records of the fifth session.22

Hoby’s relations with his Yorkshire neighbours should have improved with the departure of Lord Eure for Shropshire following the latter’s appointment as lord president of the Marches in 1607, but over the next few years he demonstrated an infinite capacity for alienating his peers. In 1604 Sir Richard Cholmley had attempted to make his peace, but Hoby later filed a Star Chamber suit which alleged that Cholmley and a former servant of Lady Hoby had plotted to prosecute him upon a bond of £1,500. He recalled a further catalogue of minor insults, and accused Cholmley of promoting a troupe of Catholic actors. Cholmley claimed the only unkindness between the pair had been a letter from Hoby ‘full of malice and taxation, by reason that this defendant ... proceeded in a service against recusants otherwise than the said Sir Thomas thought convenient’. The two men later clashed over the stewardship of Whitby Strand, when Hoby accused Cholmley of using a bogus patent to embezzle £500. Always alert for real or imagined slights, Hoby was perhaps most sensitive during the period when he aspired to succeed Sir John Stanhope I as custos rotulorum of the North Riding. Stanhope agreed to yield the position in 1607, but Hoby does not appear to have been appointed until about 1610. He immediately made his presence felt by streamlining procedures against recusants, obtaining hundreds of convictions annually at special sessions which he instigated. However, in 1615 he overreached himself by seeking to implement the same procedures in the East Riding: a number of godly j.p.s supported his initiative, but he was frustrated by Sir William Constable, 1st bt.*, newly appointed custos of the East Riding, who clearly objected to Hoby’s presumption in telling him how to do his job. Hoby filed another Star Chamber suit against his opponents, but this proved little more than that he possessed an unerring ability to irritate his colleagues, and the case was dropped.23

Although Hoby served as senior Bailiff of Scarborough in 1610-11, he did not seek a parliamentary seat there again, transferring to Ripon in 1614, where he was appointed steward of the liberty and returned to the next six parliaments on the interest of Tobie Matthew, archbishop of York. He was presumably absent during the first month of the 1614 session, as he did not appear in the records until 7 May, but thereafter he strongly supported the Commons’ attempts to overturn the king’s claim to levy impositions without parliamentary approval. On 16 May either he or his brother Sir Edward moved to seek a conference with the Lords over this contentious issue. The Lords, however, were reluctant to argue this question, and on 25 May it was revealed that Bishop Neile had attacked the Commons for disputing the king’s prerogative. In a stormy debate over the merits of appealing to the Lords or the King for redress, Hoby recalled that a complaint to the Lords against Archbishop Bancroft in 1610 had proved to no avail. He spoke twice in support of a cessation of business pending a resolution of this complaint, which was subsequently agreed. The House also decided to send Sir Edward Hoby to the Lords to ask for an explanation of Neile’s words. Before leaving, Sir Edward asked whether he should deposit a written copy of the message with the Lords if required to do so, whereupon Sir Thomas and others advised that he should not, as it would be contrary to precedent. Speaker Crewe then opened a letter from the king demanding to know why the Commons had suspended their debates. To evade a dispute over this issue Hoby, among others, argued that the order of 26 May did not, technically, constitute a cessation, but merely a decision to focus on one item of business to the exclusion of all others. Meanwhile, the Lords rejected the Commons’ accusations against Neile, and on 1 June Hoby was named to the committee to consider other means of attacking the bishop. In this atmosphere of crisis, Hoby also moved for the House to sit the following day. As this was Ascension Day, a holiday widely discounted by puritans, his motion was voted down. James’s patience was now exhausted, and he resolved to end the Parliament on 7 June unless supply was forthcoming. There was a desperate attempt to procure a vote in the final minutes of the session, when Hoby recalled that in all his parliamentary service since 1589, he had ‘never heard a precedent that any subsidy granted in the House without a committee’. This and other time-wasting motions ensured that the proposal ran out of time, and the Parliament was dissolved.24

In the month he spent at Westminster, Hoby became involved in a range of other issues. Like many of the senior knights in Yorkshire, he had declined to purchase a baronetcy in 1611-12. When Sir Edwin Sandys reported complaints against the new order, Secretary Winwood advised the House not to trench upon the prerogative, whereupon Hoby and his brother both urged a petition to the king, and were named to a committee appointed to draft a suitable text (23 May). He supported the bill to enfranchise county Durham, moving particularly to grant seats to an unspecified port town, while he spoke twice about the Northumberland election dispute. He opposed the bill to give manorial and borough courts jurisdiction over small debt cases, citing, perhaps, the courts at Whitby or Scarborough as examples of an ignorant magistracy: ‘no recorders, almost, come here ... many bailiffs (who so judges) fishermen. From fishing to judgment, and so back to the same’. He was little involved with religious legislation, although this is perhaps not surprising, as such bills were not a major issue during the session. On 7 May he moved to add a proviso to the Sabbath bill allowing those arrested for infringement of the law to sue for bail, while he was subsequently nominated to committees for the bills against clerical non-residence (12 May) and the ex officio oath (31 May).25

In 1619, Hoby was dismayed at the appointment of the crypto-Catholic Lord Scrope as president of the Council in the North. Secretary of State (Sir) Robert Naunton* was eventually obliged to order him ‘to behave becomingly towards the president’, which apparently had some effect, as Hoby joined in the chorus of opposition to a vexatious petition tendered against Scrope in the 1621 Parliament.26 At the beginning of this session, the House debated the cause of the MPs who had been arrested after the dissolution of the Addled Parliament. Hoby, one of numerous speakers who called for legislation and a petition to the king to uphold the privilege of free speech, was included on the committee appointed to draft the bill and petition (12 February). Once this question was resolved, the House focused its attention on monopoly patents. Hoby had already spoken on this issue as early as 6 Feb., when he backed Sir William Strode in calling for the exclusion of monopolists from the committee investigating patents; this promising motion was quashed when Sir Edward Montagu observed that the grievances committee which handled such cases was open to all Members. His objection to monopolies was founded upon an appreciation of their local impact: on 21 Feb. he explained how the alehouse patentees used writs of certiorari to wrest the jurisdiction over licences from J.P.s, and he had the issuing clerk summoned to the bar of the House. His next target was the courtier John Lepton’s monopoly of engrossing bills before the Council in the North, ‘a grant of such an office as never was before nor since, ergo void’, whose extortions he described in detail. On 24 Apr. he tabled a bill to safeguard hospitals against exactions levied under the patent for concealed lands held by Sir John Townshend*, which had been used to extract composition from two of Ripon’s three hospitals, and the next day he joined a chorus of opposition to Sir Henry Poole’s bill to confirm all letters patent not involving office or monopoly, arguing ‘if any particular man [hath] cause to confirm his letters patents, let him bring in his private bill’. He also supported Sir Edward Coke’s call to appoint a committee to investigate the abuses of the alehouse patentees and the Chester Palatine Court during the summer adjournment.27

With only a few exceptions, Hoby’s anger was focused on patents and patentees rather than their sponsors and beneficiaries: on 3 Mar. he called to search the study of Richard Dyke, one of the gold and silver thread patentees; while on 24 Apr. he moved to examine the reference for the alehouse patent penned by lord treasurer Mandeville (Sir Henry Montagu*). His approach was thus significantly different from that of William Mallory, Ripon’s other MP, who used patents to attack the corrupt practices of Buckingham’s affinity. Nor, quite understandably, did Hoby show any interest in the impeachment of his cousin, the lord chancellor (Sir Francis Bacon), although he was later appointed to the committee for drafting a bill to reform Chancery (25 April). As with patents, Hoby’s interest in legal reform sprang from his local experience: William Brereton* later described him as ‘the most understanding, able, and industrious justice of peace in this kingdom’. He was named to the committee for the bill concerning the passing of sheriffs’ accounts (15 Mar.), and to another for making permanent an Act of 1610 preventing the bringing of vexatious suits against local officials for acts committed during the lawful execution of their offices (20 March). He supported the bill inhibiting removal of lawsuits between local litigants from inferior courts, and on 18 May he tabled a bill to standardize court procedure, which was lost through lack of time.28

With confessional war raging in the Holy Roman Empire, religion loomed larger on the Commons’ agenda than it had in 1614. Hoby played a significant part in these debates from the start of the session. He objected to Thomas Sheppard’s* attack on the Sabbath bill, censuring his remarks about puritans hindering the work of ecclesiastical courts and calling for him to be made to submit to the House. He also joined in the tirades against the Catholic barrister Edward Floyd, who had insulted the king’s daughter, searching Floyd’s study (1 May) and calling for closer scrutiny of his papers. However, while he endorsed the gruesome suggestions for Floyd’s punishment, he wisely counselled against offending the Lords by acting without their approval. This advice was ignored, and when a complaint was received, he spoke in favour of a conference at which the Commons could explain their claim to independent jurisdiction.29 He took practical steps to secure stricter enforcement of the recusancy laws, being named to the committee for a bill to void trusts which enabled recusants to escape forfeiture of their estates (2 Mar.), while he preferred two other bills, one to reduce fees payable by a recusant upon conformity (4 May), the other to enforce the weekly 12d. levy on recusant wives stipulated in the Act of Uniformity (5 May). He also secured the rejection of a bill for payment of the debts of the late Sir Stephen Procter, one of his Yorkshire priest-hunting associates, thereby allowing Procter’s widow time to dispose of her estates to (Sir) Timothy Whittingham*.30 He had little to do with local legislation, except for a nomination to the Ouse navigation bill committee (3 May) and the Durham enfranchisement bill, which he reported on 13 March.31

Hoby was less vociferous in the autumn sitting, but played a more prominent role in proceedings. He moved to make the bill to prevent export of wool and fuller’s earth a probationer, and in the subsidy debate on 28 Nov. he made the novel suggestion that recusants should pay double rate,

and would have power given to the j.p.s as well as to the assessors to assess the recusants ... for the recusants nowadays pay nothing at all to taxes or subsidies, nor are at the charge to find any armour or horse ... excusing themselves that their lands are all in the king’s hands.32

Shortly thereafter, the Commons became mired in another privilege dispute over their right to advise the king on matters of state, which James claimed as his sole preserve. They drafted a justification of their proceedings, which the king could hardly accept without conceding their claim; Hoby urged that there was no precedent for such a petition, but others, determined to prolong the confrontation, ensured that it was dispatched.33 On 12 Dec. the king ordered the preparation of bills for an imminent prorogation, which put the Commons, having ceased all other debates pending settlement of this issue, in a new dilemma. Sir Dudley Digges apparently suggested a compromise: the appointment of a committee to survey the state of business. The merit of this proposal was that the Commons could not be accused of ordering a cessation, but they could hardly be said to have resumed business either. Digges was supported by Sir George More, while Hoby moved to make this a committee of the whole House. In the end, Sir Nathaniel Rich’s motion to debate Lepton’s attempted prosecution of Sir Edward Coke was preferred, during which debate Hoby and Mallory rose to speak at the same time; Hoby was allowed to continue, but his speech is not recorded.34

Although he opposed those MPs who aimed to widen the breach between Crown and Commons at the end of the 1621 session, Hoby was apparently unhappy with the king’s role in the dispute, as he initially refused to contribute to the Benevolence demanded in lieu of the subsidy lost at the dissolution. An interview with the Privy Council caused him to modify his opinions, and he eventually contributed £50 for himself and £20 for his tenants, which he paid directly into the Exchequer, perhaps to avoid being seen to countenance the levy in his own locality. When he returned to Westminster in 1624 his first thought was to give bills which had passed either or both Houses in 1621 precedence over new legislation, a motion which was seconded by John Pym and duly adopted.35

In 1624 Hoby was profoundly affected by the suspension of the penal laws against Catholics which occurred during negotiations for the Spanish Match, a concession which had given heart to his worst enemies. Buckingham, Prince Charles and a number of self-proclaimed ‘patriots’ in the Commons held that the best way to reverse this toleration was to vote sufficient funds to induce James to break off the Spanish Match and prepare for war, but the king’s initial demand for six subsidies and 12 fifteenths - around £780,000 - alarmed all but the most stout-hearted. Speaking in the main supply debate on 20 Mar., Hoby found a glimmer of hope in the fact that James had requested rather than demanded such a huge sum, but concluded that ‘the king says that what shall be given shall be employed in the war, but what war he doth not set down ... if the king will declare himself, [we are] to promise to furnish out the business, as occasion will require’. In a debate where nothing less than a generous vote of supply would persuade James to consider a breach with Spain, Hoby was almost certainly signalling his opposition to a war.36 He was, nevertheless, happy to join in the attacks upon lord treasurer Middlesex (Sir Lionel Cranfield*), who had also opposed the war, as Middlesex had countenanced the toleration of Catholics on grounds of fiscal necessity. On 5 Apr. Hoby backed Sir Robert Phelips’ motion to refer the charges against Middlesex to the grievances committee, and he spoke several times during the drafting of the earl’s indictment, although he opposed the addition of a charge of levying an imposition on hops. He was less swift to condemn lord keeper Williams: at the second reading of a bill to reverse a decree concerning Lady Darcy, which Williams had allegedly awarded through bribery, insisting that ‘the justice of this House must first redress the lady’s inheritance, then punish the offence’.37

Hoby’s most consistent concern in 1624 was to revive the recusancy laws. The first individual to draw his fire was Sir Thomas Gerard, 2nd Bt.*, Member for Liverpool, whose failure to attend the House was widely ascribed to his Catholicism. Hoby was one of four men tasked to investigate the matter (10, 12 Mar.), although he failed to find Gerard listed on the recusant rolls in the Pipe Office. He also persuaded the House to reject a general bill to naturalize English children born abroad, warning that this measure would circumvent the existing requirement to take the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance before the Commons. He subsequently moved to complain to the Lords about Catholics who sent money abroad illegally, and was named to committees for the revived bill to levy 12d. a week on recusant women (1 May) and another to outlaw the acceptance of pensions from foreign powers (12 May).38 His chief labour throughout the second half of the session was the perfecting of the recusancy petition. Working on an early draft on 2 Apr., Hoby called for a report on all recusants appointed to public office since 1621. The following day he was appointed to examine a witness who offered pertinent information about the means by which Catholics evaded detection. On 6 Apr. he attended a conference with the Lords, who submitted their own draft petition which omitted any demand for the removal of recusant officeholders. Back in the Commons, Phelips demanded the restoration of this clause, while Hoby wished to expand the terms of the inquiry, moving ‘that all recusants probably suspected might be put into the petition, lest, if such as are ill-affected should bear office, it might prove dangerous’.39 He gradually expanded the remit of the investigation, reminding the House that as Durham had no MPs, Members for neighbouring shires would need to list recusant officeholders there. He also established that common fame was sufficient grounds for inclusion, and extended the inquiry as far as sewer commissioners. At the end of the month the knights of each shire made their presentments. Few named more than one or two minor officials, while Sir James Perrot and Sir William Herbert cited themselves, as both had recusant wives. However, for Yorkshire and Durham Sir Thomas Savile, doubtless acting in concert with Hoby himself, named several of the leading magnates in the North, including the earls of Rutland and Worcester, Archbishop Matthew, Lord President Scrope, and his erstwhile tormentor William Eure, now 4th Baron Eure. When Hoby reported this draft on 12 May, the House resolved to retain Scrope on the list, although various exclusions were agreed, including Archbishop Matthew, who was removed under a resolution to except those whose children, like Tobie Matthew*, had converted as adults. The petition certainly struck fear into the hearts of Yorkshire Catholics, but only a handful of those listed were actually removed from office.40

By the time Parliament next met in June 1625, the threat of a Spanish Match had turned into the reality of a French queen, whose marriage treaty included provisions for the suspension of the recusancy laws which, though kept secret, were the subject of wide speculation. On 23 June Hoby listed the methods used to overturn recusancy convictions: writs of certiorari, pardons, and official letters prohibiting court proceedings, and ‘even the taking of 12d. [for non-attendance] upon a Sunday, which goes to the poor’. Two days later, he claimed that in Yorkshire the number of Catholics had ‘doubled, if not trebled, since this connivancy [in 1622]’; and he called for the conviction of all suspected Catholics whose wives or eldest sons were recusants. It was also in this session that his motion of 1621 to have recusants pay double subsidy reached the statute book. During the session, Hoby also became involved in measures to restrict the persecution of the godly by the ecclesiastical hierarchy: nominated to committees for the subscription bill and to another for restricting the use of excommunication by the church courts (both 27 June), he insisted that as benefices were property, ministers could only be deprived by the Common Law, not the church courts. He reported the Sabbath bill (23 June), and demanded to know the result of the 1624 investigation into a book written by the Arminian divine Richard Montagu. On 30 June he interrupted the subsidy debate to send to the Lords about the fate of the petition on religion then being drafted, which he termed ‘a thing forgotten’; he was one of the delegation who heard the king’s answer to this petition at a conference with the Lords on 9 August. After the adjournment to Oxford, he rejected official pressure for a further grant of supply, moving instead for a committee to investigate the disbursements of the 1624 subsidies by the Council of War, and demanding ‘to be satisfied what more reason [there was] to pass an enlargement of two subsidies now than [there had been on] 10 July’.41

Despite Wentworth’s assumption ‘that Sir Thomas Hoby will be ... mindful of the great man’, by the time Hoby returned to Westminster for the 1626 Parliament the overthrow of Buckingham had replaced even religion as his chief priority, and he quickly co-ordinated his actions with other opponents of the Duke. In the two months prior to the Easter recess, the Commons concentrated on the mismanagement of the war with Spain, emphasizing Buckingham’s shortcomings as lord admiral. Hoby did not have far to search for evidence, as the Yorkshire coast had been inundated with Dunkirk privateers in the autumn of 1625. On 27 Feb. he complained ‘that we cannot have commerce from port to port’, and a week later he insisted ‘that the want of ships to keep the Narrow Seas is the cause that the Dunkirkers do infest us’. Indeed, he repeatedly asked whether the Navy had provided for coastal defence. He welcomed Pym’s motion to question the Council of War, although he warned that they could not be interrogated about the advice they had given the king. He served on the investigating committee, and when the Council’s answers failed to yield significant evidence against the duke, he seconded Pym’s motion to discontinue the inquiry. He was also involved in the concurrent investigation into the mutual trade reprisals imposed by England and France, which uncovered the key case of the St. Pierre of Le Havre. He recognized on 1 Mar. that ‘our grievance is that a ship being legally released was unlawfully stopped’ on Buckingham’s order; while on 11 Mar., after attorney-general Heath* justified the duke’s conduct, he observed that Buckingham had failed to show any warrant for staying the ship a second time. When the House voted to discontinue the investigation, Dr. Samuel Turner launched a comprehensive attack against Buckingham, based upon common fame rather than substantive evidence. The king demanded that Turner be disciplined, but Hoby broke the awkward silence which ensued to suggest that the Commons adopt the usual evasive tactic in such situations, a committee to consider whether the king had interpreted the sense of Turner’s speech correctly. Here Thomas Malet argued that the only precedent for an accusation upon common fame was the Commons’ strikingly unsuccessful proceeding against Bishop Neile in 1614, a claim which Sir Walter Earle and Hoby vehemently denied. The Duke’s enemies then turned this attack to their advantage, inaugurating an investigation into the causes of the evils which Turner had outlined.42

Buckingham’s enemies in the Commons, as well as probing his weaknesses, aimed to delay a vote of supply until they were ready to launch their attack. At a conference on 7 Mar. Archbishop Abbot and the earl of Pembroke appealed for supply: Hoby was one of those appointed to pen a non-committal answer to this request (8 March). Charles then sent his own plea for a speedy vote, which was answered by Hoby’s empty promise ‘that the king shall want nothing that is necessary for him to have and we able to give’. Another royal message on 20 Mar. persuaded Hoby and others to schedule the debate for a week later, but when Secretary Coke tried to pre-empt this timetable on 23 Mar. Hoby insisted ‘it may be some other way as well as subsidy may be found to supply the king. That we should consider of the best and surest way’. He eventually conceded three subsidies and three fifteenths, but moved to ‘make our other businesses ready before we pass the Act’.43

For Hoby, the most important business in 1626 apart from the duke was religion. He was named to the standing committee for religion (10 Feb.), and probably organized the revival of the recusant officeholders’ petition on 21 February. Pym delivered a preliminary report on 2 Mar., when Sir William Alford*, cited for his failure to charge Viscount Dunbar double subsidy as a recusant, protested that he had not received notification from the Exchequer. Hoby, aware of Dunbar’s notorious Catholicism, snapped ‘that this ... is no excuse’, but proceedings against Alford were nevertheless dropped. At a debate of 17 Mar. on the causes of the ills of the kingdom, Hoby raised the question of ‘the growth of popery ... and the ways and means used in this state to make it grow, and the countenancing thereof’. A week later (Sir) John Eliot made Hoby’s accusations against Scrope, Rutland and Dunbar (all members of the duke’s affinity) the centrepiece of a speech about Buckingham’s preferment of Catholics. A heated debate ensued, in which Hoby and others endorsed Eliot’s view that the influence of these three peers had increased recusancy in the north. The petition concerning recusant officeholders fell from view while the duke’s impeachment charges were being debated, but on 11 May Hoby had it revived, and it was eventually readied for delivery to the king on 6 June.44

On 29 Mar. the king condemned the Commons’ proceedings against Buckingham as ‘unparliamentary’, being based only on common fame, but on the following afternoon the duke insisted the House was still able to pursue its grievances. Hoby and others expressed confusion over these mixed messages, and drafted a Remonstrance to justify their conduct. The king’s dismissal of the Commons’ charges against the duke doubtless explains why Hoby and several common lawyers provided unexpected support for the ecclesiastical courts in a debate on the bill for citations, during which they argued that prosecutions could be made on common fame alone. On 20 Apr. the king dispatched a demand for additional supply, whereupon Hoby advised that for the next ‘four or five days we apply ourselves to the greatest grievance we have and send that to the king or to the Lords’. Only then should the House ‘appoint a day for consideration of this business’. This was exactly what happened. On 21 Apr. Hoby was appointed to the steering committee to handle the impeachment; and on 24 Apr. he acted as a teller in a vote to enable this committee to examine fresh charges against the duke, if it saw fit. It was not until 26 Apr. that the Commons held their supply debate, in which Hoby supported the motion for one more subsidy, and advocated technical reforms to improve subsidy yields, including the abolition of residence certificates, whereby wealthy taxpayers could be rated in a county in which they held little land. He also urged ‘that everyone be held up in the subsidy book as they were in Queen Elizabeth’s days’, a controversial motion which was debated at length.45

On 11 May the king arrested Sir Dudley Digges and Eliot for presenting an impeachment charge which implied that Buckingham had conspired to poison King James on his deathbed. In the Commons the next day Sir John Savile’s imprisonment following the Yorkshire election of 1597 was cited as a precedent to justify the Crown’s action, but Hoby denied that this case was relevant, as the Commons had waived its rights on that occasion. On the contrary, he insisted

I never knew any two sent for out of the House to be committed, and think it a great wound to our privilege. Our Remonstrance must be that this is unprecedented, that we are grieved much at it, and desire that, if the commitment be for anything done at the conference, that we may examine it, and determine their punishment if their fault be within our cognizance.

When (Sir) Dudley Carleton tendered further Elizabethan precedents on the Crown’s behalf, Hoby again dismissed his claims: ‘I remember all the precedents ... alleged, but it will not be found that they were committed for anything done by them in the House’. The release of the two Members defused this crisis, but on 5 June the House was angered to learn of Buckingham’s election as chancellor of Cambridge University. As the duke had been charged with engrossing of offices, Hoby spoke for many in considering his election ‘an affront to the House’, and moved to question the dons responsible. This investigation was interrupted by a final royal demand to expedite the subsidy bill, which was ignored: Hoby insisted that supply should take third place behind the Commons’ Remonstrance justifying its proceedings, and the House’s response to Buckingham’s answer to the impeachment charges.46

As one of the steering committee for Buckingham’s impeachment, Hoby was called before attorney-general Heath two days after the dissolution, but Eliot, answering for them all, refused to divulge the committee’s proceedings. Hoby was dismissed from local office a few weeks later, and while he did not refuse the Forced Loan, as he had the 1622 Benevolence, he once again paid his quota directly into the Exchequer.47 Hoby played a prominent role in the Commons in 1628. As in 1626, at he aimed to delay a vote of supply at the start of the session, until the Commons had settled its own agenda: when the privy councillors called for the scheduled debate on supply and grievances on 24 Mar., he secured a vote overturning this order. On 2 Apr., when a list of the Crown’s military needs was submitted to the House, he moved for adequate time to prepare an answer. However, supply was clearly required in exchange for settlement of grievances, and in the supply debate two days later he eventually endorsed the consensus for a vote of five subsidies. When Sir Edward Coke proposed a debate on dates of payment a week later Hoby, unlike Eliot, saw no point in postponing the decision.48

Not being a lawyer, Hoby contributed relatively little to the complex debates over liberty of the subject. His chief complaint was the excesses of the military authorities. When William Strode called for a bill ‘to restrain the unlimited power of deputy lieutenants’ on 24 Mar., Hoby repudiated the Speaker’s suggestion that only soldiers and lawyers should be named to the drafting committee. Appointed to a committee investigating the extortion of billeting money by Surrey’s deputy lieutenants (28 Mar.), he also successfully moved for the suspension of John Baber*, pending investigation of his conduct in quartering troops in Somerset. He considered the refusal of the Cornish deputy lieutenants to come up and answer charges of attempting to pervert Eliot’s election to be ‘the greatest contempt that I ever saw’, and backed the call of John Selden to send the serjeant-at-arms for them. However, he insisted that Sir William Welby should not be treated as a delinquent when called to the bar of the House for interrogation concerning the imprisonment of Lincolnshire militia rate refusers. In the debate on 22 Apr. he condemned martial law as unnecessary for troops on the march, citing the example of the levies raised during the Armada crisis of 1588: ‘the principal gentlemen in every county came up with these men, and brought them to the camp ... they came thither by the Common Law, and by no martial law’, though he admitted that ‘something beyond the ordinary course’ had been used at the encampments.49

Until it became the central issue of the session, Hoby devoted less attention to arbitrary imprisonment than billeting. On 2 Apr., however, he agreed with Selden that the clause in the 1593 Recusancy Act which confined recusants to within five miles of their homes had given statutory confirmation to a prerogative power, and that this constituted a useful precedent for the Commons’ claim to legislate over the imprisonment of Loan refusers. Nevertheless, it is surprising that he was included on the committee drafting the bill for the liberty of the subject (28 Apr.), as on the following day he seemed unsure of its merits, and acknowledged the necessity of some form of prerogative power of imprisonment: ‘it helps not the subject to his liberty one hour sooner to have the cause expressed in the warrant, or declared upon the habeas corpus ... Convenient sometimes for the state not to express the cause; as in Babington’s treason’. Nor did he see the point of focusing upon the technicalities of the bill, moving instead ‘that we may treat of the general according as occasion shall lead us’. On 3 May, when Charles attempted to pre-empt the draft bill for the liberty of the subject by offering to confirm Magna Carta and other charters of liberties in lieu of the bill, Hoby attacked those who reported the Commons’ debates to the king, demanding ‘that they would report the bill when it is drawn, and not report propositions before the bill be drawn’. However, while he moved to continue with the bill, he also criticized Members for neglecting the other business of the House: ‘what time have we left for a bill? Or is there but one bill to pass? Are there not many? Is not the continuation of statutes to be thought upon? I pray you think on the business and on the time’. Following the king’s refusal to accept any ‘new and indeed impossible bonds’ on the prerogative, Hoby agreed with Sir Edward Coke’s query: ‘were there ever general words sufficient for particular complaints?’ and backed the latter’s motion to drop the bill and proceed by petition against specific grievances, naming ‘that illegal course of the Loan, the billeting of soldiers, and martial law’. The Petition of Right was quickly drafted and sent to the Lords, but when the king sent a fresh promise not to imprison for refusal of loans in future, Hoby moved to ignore this offer and proceed to examination of the Lords’ amendments to the Petition instead, a suggestion which was confirmed by a vote of the House on 14 May. Despite his wish of 29 Apr. to preserve some prerogative power of imprisonment, Hoby opposed the Lords’ proposal to insert a saving clause to this effect in the Petition, backing Wentworth’s motion to gather reasons for its rejection, while he was one of many who voiced suspicions of the Lords’ proposal for a sub-committee of both Houses to work out a compromise: ‘The Lords desired this conference to satisfy His Majesty ... If their lordships will propound anything, they shall report it to the House’.50

Amid these debates on the liberty of the subject, Hoby pursued his interest in religious matters. On 20 Mar. he moved for the appointment of a standing committee of the whole House on religion, while the next day he revived the recusant officeholders’ petition, ‘for so you may see how they are increased since the last Parliament by the neglect of the execution of the laws of the land’. He eventually obtained the presentment of suspected recusants on 23 Apr., and three days later reported the bill to prevent Catholics from evading the penal laws by putting their estates in trust, when he secured permission to take further evidence ‘to inform them of new ways taken to prevent the king’s forfeitures’. At the start of the session Mallory had successfully recommended that Savile’s commission to compound with northern recusants be investigated, and on 24 May Hoby had a committee appointed to carry out this inquiry. On 9 June he moved successfully for the engrossing of the Catholic trusts bill, while the next day he moved a proviso to fine recusant and non-resident subsidy commissioners. He reported the names of recusant officeholders once again on 14 and 16 June. The list included the Lords Rutland, Dunbar, Eure and Scrope, now earl of Sunderland, whose secretary James Howell* claimed to have produced a certificate of conformity to frustrate the designs of ‘the little knight that useth to draw up his breeches with a shoeing-horn’; Sunderland’s name went forward to the king on 19 June regardless.51 Hoby was also involved with some of the legislation concerning ecclesiastical jurisdiction. On 16 May he reminded opponents of the bill to deprive adulterous clergy that Mosaic Law prescribed the death penalty, observing dryly that ‘if they were put to death they were sure to lose their living’. When Sir Henry Marten complained that judgments he had made in High Commission rendered the bill to relax the penalties on ‘sermon-gadding’ superfluous, Hoby retorted that the bill was certainly necessary, as he himself had been cited for non-attendance of his parish church when at a sermon elsewhere. Hoby also supported the subscription bill, without which a puritan clergyman could be deprived of his benefice for refusal to subscribe to the 1604 Canons, which had never been confirmed by statute.52 On local matters, Hoby was appointed to the committee for investigating a clash between whalers from Hull and the Muscovy Company (17 May), and he explained why Sir Thomas Monson’s* revival of the patent for fees at the Council in the North was resented: ‘in Lepton’s patent this taking of new fees was never known, but he took the old and the attorneys raised new. In this patent is no new fee; the country is in fear of new fees’ to be raised by the attorneys.53

Like most of the House, Hoby deemed the king’s first answer to the Petition of Right to be inadequate, and on 3 June he and Phelips backed Eliot’s call for a general Remonstrance: ‘I much desire this Remonstrance. There are long reports ready for this House from the committees of religion, of trade, and grievances. I beseech you they may be heard, that you may make useful collections for this necessary work’. However, he was one of the few senior MPs who remained silent during the increasingly hysterical debates of the next two days over whether to continue with the Remonstrance in the face of an explicit royal prohibition. On 6 June he supported Sir Benjamin Rudyard’s motion to ask the king for an explanation of his answer, moving ‘to go by the Lords, else it may be said that the answer is but to half Parliament. The reason why I give precedency to the petition: because the petition has been the work of this Parliament’. One source quotes Hoby as wanting to give precedence to the bills for continuance of statutes and Tunnage and Poundage, though when the latter came up for debate on the afternoon of 18 June he objected, because until the previous week that time been allotted to the standing committee on religion. The debate on the Remonstrance resumed on the afternoon of 6 June, when Hoby offered a comprehensive indictment of the government’s policy on recusants:

There is an inhibition against the execution of the laws against Jesuits and papists, and it is well known that instead of execution the great ones have grants and dispensations. Others are compounded with by some commissioners. Nay, it is executed with that boldness that recusants get themselves indicted that they may be enabled to compound. And in divers counties recusants are lords lieutenant, deputy lieutenants and justices, and have other places of command. What a dishonour in this that our laws are thus isolated and the king’s royal answers thus impinged.

In the debate on the grievances to be covered by the remonstrance two days later, Hoby supported the unsuccessful attempt of Edward Alford to include the proclamation against eating meat in Lent, claiming it to be an usurpation of a statute of Edward VI, and approved of the widespread desire to name Buckingham, urging that ‘the question may be whether the abuse of the duke’s power with the king be not a cause of these [disasters]’.54

After the death of Archbishop Matthew in the spring of 1628, Wentworth persuaded Hoby to relinquish the stewardship of Ripon to Christopher Wandesford*. However, in December 1628, during the political realignment which followed the death of Buckingham and the rise of Wentworth, Hoby regained his place as custos of the North Riding. Parliament reassembled on 21 Jan. 1629, commencing with a clamour over royal infringements of the Petition of Right, when Hoby reminded more timorous Members of their right to submit anonymous complaints to the grievances’ committee. Thereafter he was almost entirely preoccupied with religion, taking care of the revived bill to prevent recusants from assigning their estates to trustees (28 Jan.), and another to relax the penalties for ‘sermon-gadding’ (23 Jan.), both of which had failed in the previous session through lack of time. He headed the investigation into a judicial order to release ten Jesuits from Newgate gaol, which had reversed a minor crackdown on recusants undertaken with a new session of Parliament in mind. He also moved to revive proceedings against Richard Montagu, ‘who did mainly cross and misinterpret the articles of religion’, vouched for the honesty of a petitioner against John Cosin, another of the Arminian divines pardoned in anticipation of the session, and called to persist in the investigation of ‘those inlets to superstition’ among the liturgical practices of Richard Neile, newly promoted to the bishopric of Winchester. Hoby’s final speech secured the establishment of a committee to search the subsidy rolls since 1625 to check whether recusants had been paying double subsidy as the statutes required.55

Hoby spent the 1630s immersed in local administration. His zeal in prosecuting recusants required his removal from the northern High Commission in 1630, by which time financial considerations outweighed religious concerns, though in the following year he was still attempting to indict the Earl of Rutland at quarter sessions. Wentworth removed him from the lieutenancy in 1637 following a squabble with Sir John Hotham and (Sir) Hugh Cholmley* over the rating procedure for Ship Money, pertinently observing that ‘Sir Thomas Hoby hath good abilities, and great experience in those country businesses, if he were not so much addicted to do all, and that alone by himself’. Cholmley commented, less charitably: ‘unless a man become his very slave, there was not any keeping friendship, for he loved to carry all things after his own way and humour, however unjust or injurious soever’.56

Following his wife’s death in 1633, Hoby was involved in litigation which transferred control of the Dakins inheritance at Hackness, worth £1,500 a year, from his wife’s family to his own, an issue which had been a continual source of tension throughout their marriage. He erected a chapel of ease at nearby Harwood Dale in his wife’s memory, and wore a miniature of her set in a gold bracelet around his wrist until his death. He died during the night of 30 Dec. 1640 of ‘a fit of a cold palsy’ and was buried at Hackness. Characteristically, the preamble to his will, drafted nine months earlier, betrayed no doubt about his elect status:

my soul as soon as it shall part from my mortal body shall immediately be retained into an eternal habitation in God’s heavenly kingdom, and that it shall there remain until the day of the last resurrection and ... then both my soul and my body shall again be united together and shall forever after enjoy everlasting life.

His estates descended to a Somerset kinsman, Sir John Sydenham, who had been raised at Hackness but did not return to live there.57

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Author: Simon Healy

Notes

  • 1. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby ed. D.M. Meads, 4, 8-9.
  • 2. Al. Ox.; R.C. Strong and J.A. van Dorsten, Leicester’s Triumph, 120; GI Admiss.
  • 3. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 8-9, 27, 32, 39.
  • 4. Shaw, Knights of Eng, ii. 91.
  • 5. Hackness par. reg. (Yorks. par. reg. soc. xxv), 65.
  • 6. C181/2, ff. 99-100; 181/3, ff. 221, 244, 265-6; 181/5, pp. 164-5; C231/4, ff. 206v, 260-2.
  • 7. Scarborough Recs. 1600-40 ed. M.Y. Ashcroft (N. Yorks. RO pubs. xlvii), 32.
  • 8. Add. 36293, ff. 3, 16, 31-2, 83.
  • 9. T. Rymer, Foedera, vii. pt. 1, 224; pt. 3, p. 174; viii. pt. 1, p. 90; pt. 3, p. 47; SP14/31/1; C212/22/20-3; Fairfax Corresp. ed. G.W. Johnson, i. 210; C181/1, ff. 20, 27, 64; 181/2, f. 127v; 181/4, f. 105v.
  • 10. R. Reid, Council in the North, 496, 498.
  • 11. E179/204/405, 179/283.
  • 12. E214/1496; Scarborough ed. J. Rowntree, 399.
  • 13. DCO, Letters and Warrants 1620-1, ff. 66, 150v.
  • 14. Add. 28082, f. 81.
  • 15. SP17/A/12; HUL, DDHA 18/35.
  • 16. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 24.
  • 17. Ibid.; R.A. Marchant, Puritans and the Church Cts. 26-7, 124-5; M.C. Questier, ‘Practical anti-papistry during the reign of Eliz. I’, JBS, xxxvi. 371- 96; STAC 5/H16/2, 5/H22/21, 5/H42/12, 5/H50/4, 5/H53/26, 5/H67/29, 5/H71/17; HMC Hatfield, x. 325.
  • 18. HMC Hatfield, vii. 412-18; M. Kishlansky, Parl. Selection, 49-55; YORKSHIRE; Scarborough Recs. 1600-1640, 28, 32.
  • 19. J.D. Mackie, ‘A Loyal Subject’s Advertisement’, SHR, xxiii. 1-17, where the author is identified as Henry Howard, earl of Northampton; SIR EDWARD HOBY; CJ, i. 984b.
  • 20. CJ, i. 157a, 228b, 230, 232a, 237, 971b, 972b, 974a, 978a, 987a.
  • 21. HMC Hatfield, xi. 40; CJ, i. 233, 239b, 240-1, 243a, 975b, 986, 992-3; Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 213.
  • 22. HMC Hatfield, xvii. 38, 515; CJ, i. 258, 260a, 396b, 432b, 1040b; Scarborough Recs. 1600-40, 46-7; N. Yorks. RO, mic 2052/5470.
  • 23. STAC 8/12/11, 8/175/4; Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 218; HMC Hatfield, xix. 138; xxiv. 192; C66/1799, 1933; H. Cholmley, Mems. (1787), p. 14; N. Yorks. RO, mic 1827.
  • 24. Procs. 1614 (Commons), 171-2, 258, 263, 343, 351, 353, 360, 366-7, 371, 375, 404-7, 440.
  • 25. Ibid. 171, 217, 290, 320-1, 324, 334, 389, 394.
  • 26. CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 168; CD 1621, iii. 388; CJ, i. 635a.
  • 27. CJ, i. 511a, 518a, 550a, 590a, 635a; CD 1621, ii. 261; iii. 78, 193, 387; v. 345-6, 482-3; vi. 54, 259; Nicholas, Procs. 1621, ii. 37.
  • 28. CJ, i. 536a, 553a, 563b, 589-90; Jnl. of Sir William Brereton (Surtees Soc. cxxiv), 6; CD 1621, v. 82, 380; vii. 293-4; Nicholas, i. 282.
  • 29. CJ, i. 522a, 600-1, 610a; Nicholas, i. 46, 372; CD 1621, iii. 124; v. 360; vi. 121.
  • 30. CJ, i. 534a, 607a; CD 1621, iii. 160; iv. 301; v. 367, 371; Nicholas, ii. 17-18.
  • 31. CJ, i. 553a, 605b.
  • 32. Ibid. 653b; Nicholas, ii. 243-4; CD 1621, ii. 467; vi. 330.
  • 33. R. Zaller, Parl. of 1621, pp.152-61; CD 1621, vi. 229; CJ, i. 660b.
  • 34. Zaller, 164-5; CJ, i. 662a, 663a; CD 1621, ii. 515. Ibid. vi. 234 suggests that Hoby and the others were not being so conciliatory.
  • 35. SP14/127/48; SP14/156; CJ, i. 716a; ‘Nicholas 1624’, f. 2v.
  • 36. T. Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, 211-12; ‘Holland 1624’, i. f. 65v; Holles 1624, p. 47; ‘Spring 1624’, p. 141; ‘Earle 1624’, ff. 98v-99; ‘Nicholas 1624’, f. 96v; ‘Lowther 1624’, f. 39v; C. Russell, ‘Wentworth and anti-Spanish sentiment, 1621-4’, in Pol. World of Thomas Wentworth ed. J.F. Merritt, 47-62.
  • 37. ‘Spring 1624’, pp. 175, 188, 209; ‘Holland 1624’, i. f. 80v, 81v; ii. f. 12; ‘Nicholas 1624’, f. 112v; CJ, i. 696a; Holles 1624, p. 90.
  • 38. CJ, i. 681b, 685a, 696a, 703a, 734-5; ‘Nicholas 1624’, ff. 73v-4, 77; Holles 1624, p. 34.
  • 39. ‘Holland 1624’, f. 77v; ‘Spring 1624’, pp. 168-9, 177-81, 183-5; ‘Pym 1624’, f. 47v; CJ, i. 754, 756; ‘Earle 1624’, f. 116; Holles 1624, pp. 62, 65; ‘Lowther 1624’, f. 54v.
  • 40. CJ, i. 698a, 703a, 707b, 763a, 768a, 776a, 790b; ‘Holland 1624’, ii. ff. 52, 84v; ‘Earle 1624’, f. 185v; Bodl. Eng. Misc. c.855, ff. 131-2; HMC Hodgkin, 42.
  • 41. C. Russell, PEP, 208-9; Procs. 1625, pp. 155-60, 226, 231, 246, 249, 253, 265, 268, 276, 422, 442, 446.
  • 42. Strafforde Letters (1739) ed. W. Knowler, i. 32; Procs. 1626, ii. 68, 116, 123, 137, 142, 149-50, 166, 171, 203, 208-9, 227-31, 256, 259-60, 263-4, 285, 288- 93, 342-3; Russell, 289-90.
  • 43. Procs. 1626, ii. 227, 250, 275, 321, 352, 378-81; Russell, 287-9.
  • 44. Procs. 1626, ii. 13, 81, 138, 180, 307, 357-9; iii. 229-30, 301, 312-13, 317, 377-8.
  • 45. Russell, 291-3; Procs. 1626, ii. 419; iii. 16, 32, 38, 53, 74-80.
  • 46. Russell, 305-7; Procs. 1626, iii. 238, 244, 248, 251, 270-1, 274-6, 280, 371-3, 427.
  • 47. Eliot Letter Bk. ed. A.B. Grosart, 7-8; C231/4, f. 206; E179/214/389; R. Cust, Forced Loan, 239.
  • 48. CD 1628, ii. 89, 122, 133, 301, 307-8, 319, 417-18.
  • 49. Ibid. ii. 90, 168, 385, 393; iii. 5, 25, 28, 33, 37, 360, 362, 364.
  • 50. Ibid. ii. 252, 267-8; iii. 123, 157, 163, 190, 237, 240-1, 272, 390-1, 394, 398, 411, 539, 552; Procs. 1628, vi. 94; Russell, 347-9, 368-9, 371-3.
  • 51. CD 1628, ii. 34, 43, 433; iii. 60, 63-4, 99, 103, 222, 599; v. 204, 373; J. Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae (1727 edn.), 215-16.
  • 52. CD 1628, iii. 433, 439-40, 519, 535.
  • 53. Ibid. iii. 449; iv. 25, 30-1.
  • 54. CD 1628, iv. 70, 143, 154, 162, 204, 206, 267, 271, 323-4, 369; Russell, 378-81.
  • 55. Wentworth Pprs. ed. J.P. Cooper (Cam. Soc. ser. 4. xii) 301; C231/4, ff. 260-2; CD 1629, pp. 6, 72, 74-5, 82, 114, 122, 124, 148, 153, 203, 207, 209-10, 218, 234; CJ, i. 921b; Russell, 394, 402; C. Thompson, ‘Divided Leadership of the Commons in 1629’, in Faction and Parl. ed. K. Sharpe, 245-84.
  • 56. Miscellanea (Cath. Rec. Soc. liii), 374, 380; Strafforde Letters, ii. 94-95, 108; J.T. Cliffe, Yorks. Gentry, 305; Cholmley, 33.
  • 57. Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xvii. 72-93; Borthwick, York wills, Sept. 1646 bdle.; Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 10, 43.