LITTLETON, Edward II (1590-1645), of Henley, Salop and the Inner Temple, London

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

Family and Education

bap. 15 Mar. 1590, 1st s. of Edward Littleton I* and Alice, da. of Richard Thornes of Condover, Salop; bro. of Timothy†.1 educ. Christ Church, Oxf. 1606, BA 1609, DCL 1643; I. Temple 1608, called 1617.2 m. (1) 25 Sept. 1617, Anne (d. 6 Feb. 1624), da. of John Lyttelton† of Frankley, Worcs., 3s. d.v.p., 2da. d.v.p.; (2) 1624/5 Sidney, da. of (Sir) William Jones I* of Castellmarch, Llanengan, Caern., wid. of Richard Wynn of Glasinfryn, Caern. and Sir George Calveley of Lea, Cheshire, 1da.; 1s. illegit.3 suc. fa. 1622;4 kntd. 6 June 1635;5 cr. Bar. Lyttelton of Mounslow 18 Feb. 1641.6 d. 27 Aug. 1645;7 sig. Edw[ard] Littleton.

Offices Held

J.p. Salop 1622-d., N. Wales circ. 1622-32, Mdx. Westminster and Home circ. 1632-42;8 member, Council in the Marches 1623;9 commr. oyer and terminer, Oxf. circ. 1623-d., mines, Card. 1625, subsidy arrears, Anglesey, Caern. and Merion. 1626, sewers, Westminster 1634, Surr. and Kent 1639.10

Justice, N. Wales circ. 1622-32;11 steward learned, estates of Sir Thomas Littleton, 1st bt.* 1622-30;12 recorder, Bridgnorth 1626-40, London 1631-4;13 bencher, I. Temple 1629, reader 1632, treas. 1634-8.14

Member, High Commission 1633-41;15 sol.-gen. 1634-9; commr. defective titles 1635;16 c.j.c.p. 27 Jan. 1640-1;17 PC 1640-d.;18 ld. kpr. 1641-d.;19 commr. Treas. 1641-4.20

Col. of ft. (roy.) 1644-d.21

Biography

Littleton succeeded his father as justice on the North Wales circuit at the early age of 32, and while lord keeper Williams intervened to award (Sir) Peter Mutton* precedence as chief justice, the two men shared the profits of both places equally. Clarendon (Edward Hyde†) remembered Littleton as

a handsome and proper man, of a very graceful presence, and notorious for courage, which in his youth he had manifested with his sword. He had taken great pains in the hardest and most knotty part of the law, as well as that which was more customary; and was not only very ready and expert in the books, but excellently versed in records, in studying and examining whereof he had kept Mr. [John] Selden* company ... and upon the mere strength of his abilities, he had raised himself into the first rank of the practisers in the common law courts.22

In 1625, shortly after his marriage to a daughter of the Caernarvonshire judge (Sir) William Jones I*, Littleton secured a seat at Caernarvon Boroughs with the assistance of the Wynns of Gwydir, whose candidate William Wynn* stood down. He was also successful at Leominster, and waived the Welsh seat in favour of his brother-in-law Robert Jones*.23

Littleton was not particularly prominent in his first Parliament. On 23 June he called for ‘some sharp law’ against recusancy, and on 7 July, after the House was asked to issue guidelines for the sheriff who was to conduct the forthcoming Yorkshire election, he and Walter Pye I advised the Commons not ‘to make or declare the law in cases not yet in being’, as this would ‘bring orders to be in the nature of Acts of Parliament’. The following day he urged that the election of Arthur Bassett* should not be invalidated by the latter’s detention for debt under mesne process. On 8 July, when Secretary (Sir) John Coke* pleaded for additional supply on the grounds that the subsidies offered on 30 June were inadequate, Littleton, after brushing aside a motion to have the subsidies paid to parliamentary treasurers, protested that this motion had come ‘very unseasonably’, as the House was now only thinly attended and had already given ‘so freely’. As for Coke’s suggestion that a bare promise of supply would suffice as this would enable the king to take up money on credit, Littleton was astonished, for credit ‘was such a merchant-like word that he knew not what to make of it’. Here, perhaps, Littleton was being intentionally ironic, as the phrase ‘merchant-like’ echoed the late King James’s well-known aversion to negotiations over supply. Littleton may have been present when the session reconvened at Oxford, but on 4 Aug. he was ‘spared for his circuit’, although bad weather caused him to miss the Dolgellau assizes on 15 August.24

Re-elected for both Caernarvon and Leominster in 1626, Littleton again chose the latter seat. He was added to the committee for privileges on 11 Feb., and three days later he addressed the most important election dispute of the session, the return of Sir Edward Coke* for Norfolk while serving as sheriff of Buckinghamshire. He gave a lucid historical summary of the ineligibility of sheriffs to sit in the Commons, but declared himself ‘doubtful what to think’ about Coke’s exclusion, which was undertaken by the Crown for political purposes; he also spoke, to unknown effect, when Selden reported on the precedents for returns of sheriffs on 21 February. The House left the question undecided, and later in the session, when a subpoena was served on Coke, Littleton insisted: ‘This gentleman is a Member of this House returned de facto, and till it be declared that the election be void he is to have his privilege’. With Tunnage and Poundage not yet granted to the new king, a report of 20 Feb. condemning impositions on wine revived a controversial dispute: Littleton declared himself ‘confident the king cannot impose; he speaks it with loyalty to his king and sincerity to the good of his country’, and suggested that other ways to might be found to increase royal revenues. This last topic, debated on 24 Feb., allowed many to protest about the government’s failings; Littleton, by contrast, suggested ‘that we may motion a supply to the king what we mean to give him, but not conclude it till the other businesses are done’, a proposal which was more constructive than most.25

While some of Littleton’s early speeches were not helpful to the Crown, he was notably circumspect in the early stages of the Commons’ proceedings against the duke of Buckingham. On 22 Feb., when Sir Henry Marten* was questioned about the favourite’s role in the detention of a French ship, the St. Peter of Le Havre, Littleton was one of the few who found ‘nothing ill’ in his statement. He referred to the original complaint from the French merchants as ‘a wilful information’ and called for the committee inquiring into the causes of this dispute to examine Sir Allan Apsley (lieutenant of the Tower) and Sir John Hippisley* (lieutenant of Dover Castle) about their role in the arrest of the French ship. This was done on the following morning, when Littleton again volunteered that ‘the king has taken so much care of this action that it is needless for us to go further’; the House ignored his advice, although he was added to the committee investigating the dispute (23 February). He was subsequently named to a committee charged with preparing questions to be put to the Council of War about the conduct of the war with Spain (28 Feb.) and ordered to attend a conference with the Lords over the summons to Buckingham to justify his detention of the St. Peter (4 March). Both of these investigations were designed to produce evidence against the duke, but Littleton expressed no overt hostility to the favourite, and on 1 Mar. he appears to have called Sir Francis Goodwin to account for suggesting that Charles’s behaviour over the detention of the St. Peter ill became a king.26

Littleton was once again absent from the House during the assizes, but when he returned to Westminster after Easter he had clearly decided to throw in his lot with those who sought Buckingham’s impeachment, to the extent that the earl of Bristol (Sir John Digby*) initially chose him as defence counsel when Buckingham filed impeachment charges against him.27 On 18 Apr. Littleton countered requests for increased supply with the disingenuous argument that ‘all our hearts [are] for the king’s service, which will be disadvantaged if we give before our grievances answered’: having thus established his credentials with the duke’s opponents, he was assigned to chair the committee of the whole House drafting the supply bill (25 April). On 22 Apr. he argued that Buckingham could be accused upon common fame rather than substantive evidence:

This House is only a house of presentation, information, or denunciation; and common fame is sufficient for accusation but not for condemnation. ... 12 Jac., bishop of Durham’s case,28 wherein they proceeded upon common fame, and if the Parliament had not broken up I know the Lords would have branded him with infamy to all posterity.

On the controversial allegation that Buckingham’s quack remedies had hastened the death of King James, he endorsed the investigation, observing that even ‘if a madman kill the king it is high treason’. When chancellor Sir Richard Weston protested that the wording of this charge implied an assumption of guilt, Littleton insisted he was mistaken; he was later appointed to assist Sir Dudley Digges in presenting this charge to the Lords (3 May). The duke’s enemies naturally wanted to secure his arrest, but Littleton advised caution: ‘there is nothing in all our charges’, he said on 9 May, ‘that is sufficient to ... [justify] a commitment of the duke’, a decision that would have to be left to the Lords after the Commons filed their impeachment charges.29

The Commons presented their case against Buckingham to the Lords on 8 and 10 May, but further proceedings were halted on 11 May when the king arrested Digges and (Sir) John Eliot, claiming they had implied he was an accessory to the charge of poisoning his father. A Commons’ sub-committee, chaired by Littleton (12 May), ‘found this a matter of too great weight for their consideration’, but he declared ‘on my life that he spoke no such words’ and assisted in drafting the protestation that the entire House took to this effect. Digges and Eliot were released on 20 May, but proceedings over a Remonstrance about this incident, chaired by Littleton, were reported on 22 May and 6 June, by which time a bill to confirm parliamentary privilege had been drafted, and the Remonstrance broadened to blame the duke for ‘the interruptions in this Parliament’. Most of Littleton’s other activity in the final weeks of the session involved various forms of sniping at the Crown. When John More II suggested that if the king attempted to behave like a tyrant towards his subjects his reign would come to a premature end, Littleton was properly shocked: ‘I think we cannot do less for these rash words [than] that the gentleman be committed to the Tower during the pleasure of the House’, which was done. He helped to draft a letter to Cambridge condemning the election of Buckingham as their chancellor (6 June), and chaired a grand committee to consider the king’s message defending the liberties of the university (7 June). He was among those instructed to draft heads for a Remonstrance against Tunnage and Poundage (8 June), and on 9 June, when the king demanded the passage of the subsidy bill by the end of the following week, he proposed not a first reading of the bill (of which he had charge), but rather scheduled a discussion of the answer to the king to take place three days later, hardly a helpful response. In this debate, on 12 June, he remained determined to secure redress of grievances before supply, moving ‘that we make ready our grievances and present them to the king with our declaration, and give the bill a first reading with a reservation that it be not read a second time till we have answer of our grievances’. This echoed the line he had taken over three months earlier, but now it was a time-wasting device likely to hasten the end of the session.30

One of the few private bill committees to which Littleton was named in 1626 concerned a measure allowing his first wife’s brother, Sir Thomas Littleton, 1st bt.* to make a jointure for his wife (9 June). The latter, having served as knight of Worcestershire on four occasions, was defeated at the 1628 general election, whereupon Littleton opted for Caernarvon Boroughs, leaving the vacancy at Leominster for Sir Thomas. Littleton also obliged James Tomkins*, his erstwhile partner at Leominster, by establishing the case for the restoration of parliamentary representation at Weobley, Herefordshire in May 1628: Tomkins’s son William was returned at the resulting election, together with Littleton’s cousin, William Walter. Littleton’s crowded political agenda generally allowed him little time for consideration of more mundane items. In 1628, despite his membership of the Council in the Marches, he ‘fell upon’ the abuses of its authority in Shropshire and the other English counties: ‘land is two years the worse in the purchase by lying within that jurisdiction. Hence the very grounds of the Common Law are taken away, the trial by jury, whence no appeal or writ of error’. However, at the third reading of the bill to confirm copyhold tenures on the Denbighshire lordships of Bromfield and Yale, he denied claims that this would diminish the Crown’s revenues.31

As one of the keener legal minds in the Commons, Littleton was at the heart of the 1628 debates over liberty of the subject. He chaired several of the key standing committees, including those on liberty and property (25 Mar.), supply (26 Mar.) and billeting (8 April), which meant that he spoke far less than he might otherwise have done on these issues. On 3 Apr. he reported the debates on liberty at length, evaluating the various precedents and concluding ‘no law in Christendom hath the power to enable a king to commit his subjects without cause. In Mr. Selden’s study I know he that desires to see it [proved] may’. Such an attack on property, he insisted, must necessarily ‘bring a confusion of all estates’. In virtuous indignation he rebuked the Member for Wells, John Baber, for billeting troops without legal warrant:

the fear of soldiers and command of higher powers is no warrant to impose on others. ... He ought to have suffered rather than to have done injustice. ... This man is to be expelled [from the Commons]. He is unfit to make laws that violates law.

With the assistance of Sir Robert Phelips and his brother-in-law, Charles Jones, he presented the statutory precedents at the conference of 7 Apr.; the speech was tabled and widely circulated, and when the Lords questioned his use of precedents he insisted ‘I will make it good before any man that there is not one title miscited or misapplied’. He was thus particularly outraged when the 2nd earl of Suffolk (Theophilus Howard*, Lord Walden) accused Selden of tampering with the records the Commons had used to establish their case: ‘it concerns the House directly and immediately’, he said ‘and Mr. Selden’s service, approved in this House, ought to be maintained’. He was appointed to the committee to establish the precise words of the slander, which he claimed to have heard himself from a distance, and considered ‘we have cause to desire a particular real punishment may be inflicted on him [Suffolk]’.32

At a conference on 16 Apr. Littleton was said to have reduced attorney-general (Sir) Robert Heath* to silence with his precedents, but in fact, the reverse was true: for all their confident assertions, the lawyers were unable to convince the Lords by precedent alone, and fell back on the very statutes that had so conspicuously failed to contain the prerogative over the previous two years. After another conference a week later, Sir Thomas Wentworth and others suggested an appeal to the judges for a ruling, but Littleton vehemently objected: ‘we do not distrust ... the judges, but yet I hold this to be a cause so great that it is fit to be determined by no means but a Parliament’. On 28 Apr. a committee was appointed to draft a new statute confirming the liberties of the subject, but Littleton, among others, doubted whether a bill could contain adequately express the intent of the debates of the previous month. As for the king’s accusations that precedent was being used to undermined his prerogative, he insisted

For my part it was never in my heart to strain or make anything new by any interpretations. Not only our ends but our actions and words are misinterpreted. We desire nothing new. If any tell me it is new to explain statutes, I will say he never read anything; nothing is more common. ... It is strange, before we have adjudged anything, we are judged to have produced new laws by the statutes so often mentioned ... We desire no new thing, but what is determined in the old.

It was precisely this desire to impose a new interpretation of old statutes which worried both the king, for what it might contain, and Littleton, for what it might omit: ‘can any lay gentleman in the country draw out of this [new draft] statute by reading it that which our resolutions have explained? No, I think good lawyers cannot do it without help of those arguments which here have been made’. The alternative, a petition to establish what the law was, suited his purposes ideally, as it put the onus upon the king to provide a satisfactory answer to the Commons’ complaints.

Let us by no means put it to the question whether we shall trust the king’s word or no. Though we mean well, yet we know not what construction may be made of it. ... We have voted our resolutions; let us put them in a Petition of Right. I doubt not but that we shall have satisfaction.

In the ensuing debate over the text of the Petition, he succeeded in introducing explicit references to the imprisonment of Loan refusers and billeting.33

Having drafted their Petition, the Commons still had to persuade the Lords and the king to endorse it. Littleton dismissed the Lords’ alteration of the word ‘unlawful’ to ‘not warranted by law’ as being inconsequential, but he firmly rejected any amendment designed to preserve the Crown’s prerogative powers: ‘if they would have us leave entire the sovereign power ... over those things expressed particularly in our petition, we deny what we desire and overthrow what we desire to have confirmed’. Once the Lords had waived their objections, Littleton was named to the committee for handling the presentation of the Petition to the king (27 May). As an incentive to a favourable answer, the Commons inched their draft of the subsidy bill forward with a debate over the precedence of the universities; Littleton called Polydore Virgil a liar for claiming Cambridge was the older. The king’s first answer to the Petition, a bare confirmation of existing laws, was entirely unsatisfactory, and raised hysterical fears of an imminent military coup. On 5 June, when Sir John Scudamore moved to ready the subsidy bill for its first reading as a belated concession to the king, Littleton, one of the few to keep his head, observed that the debate concerned the answer to the Petition, not supply, and urged the House ‘let us not talk, but fall upon particulars, and put them to the question’. The king was eventually persuaded to return a more acceptable answer to the Petition at a conference which Littleton attended (7 June); on his return he insisted ‘every man’s heart is so distracted with joy that we cannot express it’; but the House went some way towards satisfying Charles by drafting the preamble to the long-awaited subsidy bill, to which committee Littleton was named (7 June). The moment of levity passed quickly, as the Commons resolved to prepare a Remonstrance against Buckingham. Littleton was appointed to the drafting committee (11 June), although he expressed grave reservations about its purpose

If you intend that this should be an accusation, I will not give my consent until I know more. If you will say to the king he [Buckingham] is the cause of all things positively, I will not go with you; if you will say his power abused has brought ill things upon us, and so he is the cause, have with you. I gave my voice against him the last Parliament because it was upon proof. I would have all the parts gone on with, and see proofs of all.

This motion was probably intended to ensure that the Remonstrance was never completed, although his advice was ignored. By this stage, Littleton was working hard to ensure that the Petition was not jeopardized by an angry dissolution: on 12 June he agreed to let the subsidy bill receive its third reading and be dispatched to the Lords; while he was named to the committee considering the best way to enrol the Petition at the Westminster lawcourts (13 June).34

Charles’s interference with the printing and distribution of the Petition of Right created an unpleasant atmosphere at the outset of the next session, when Littleton was appointed to the committee of investigation (21 Jan. 1629). He recommended the consideration of grievances to a committee of the whole House - ‘this is no new way but necessary’ - and was proposed as Sir Edward Coke’s successor for the chair, ‘but in respect he was now absent, the motion [was] respited’. He played a prominent part in the case of John Rolle*, who claimed parliamentary privilege over the detention of his goods for non-payment of customs. Tunnage and Poundage, Littleton confidently asserted, required an Act of Parliament, and no judge in the kingdom would aver the contrary. He seconded Phelips’ motion for a committee of investigation, to which he was named (22 Jan.), and scoffed at (Sir) John Coke’s appeal for moderate courses: ‘we have moderation preached unto us in Parliament, and we have followed it; I would others did the like out of Parliament. Let the parties be sent for that violated the liberties of Parliament, to have their doom’. The boldness of sheriff Acton, who had detained Rolle’s goods, convinced him that the authority of the Commons had become ‘a mere scarecrow; the neglect of our duty is the cause of this. It is high time to remedy this, or it is in vain to sit here’. Until the forfeited goods were restored, he insisted, the Commons could not legalize the collection of Tunnage and Poundage, and he was appointed to the committee to search the Exchequer records for precedents (14 February). On 21 Feb. he laid some of his researches before the House, insisting ‘it is more advantage for the king to have the Members here than away; which they cannot do, except they have their goods’; while two days later he moved to examine the customs officials who had spurned Rolle’s claim of privilege, ‘and let them be made examples to deter others’.35

Rolle’s case aside, the other major issue of the session was the growing influence of Arminianism on government policy. Like all common lawyers, Littleton had an erastian mistrust of ecclesiastical jurisdiction outside the Common Law: in 1626 he had been prepared to contemplate the incarceration of members of the High Commission for refusing to acknowledge Sir Robert Howard’s* claim to parliamentary privilege; while he twice supported the bill to refer scandalous allegations against ministers to jury trial at the assizes, rather than the church courts, although he wished to impose a minimum property rating of £100 p.a. on jurors. Thus when Sir Nathaniel Rich attempted to define the doctrine of the Church of England using formularies which had not received parliamentary approval, Littleton insisted

The convocation house hath no power to make any canon of the church or to put it upon the state but by the assent of the state. What the convocation house hath made for a canon hath been rejected by Parliament.

The Arminian polemicist Richard Montagu had been under parliamentary scrutiny since 1625, but Littleton had been only peripherally involved in this inquiry, being added to the committee investigating the cleric’s conduct on 3 June 1626. Montagu and other clerical opponents of Parliament had been granted pardons shortly before the session began, and attorney-general Heath was called to account for his role in drafting these. As an assistant in the Lords, Heath could not be compelled to attend the Commons; but Littleton successfully persuaded the House to give him the chance to attend voluntarily, and he and Selden, being fellow-Inner Templars, undertook to give him notice of the accusation (6 February). Littleton brought together the twin themes of the session in the final tumultuous debate of 2 Mar., focusing on the iniquities of Sir Richard Weston*, the crypto-Catholic lord treasurer, in a speech which reflected the language of Eliot’s three propositions:

Though we came all hither with loyal hearts to serve His Majesty, yet let us not be blamed if we forgot not those that sent us hither. And therefore whosoever he be that shall either go about to undermine religion or government or to lay any new impositions upon the people without consent of Parliament, we shall not fear to call him an enemy to his country.

While he had been a nuisance to the Crown during the session, Littleton was not a wrecker, and he was not arrested for his part in the disorders of 2 March. However, he ‘won eternal fame’ in some quarters by arguing for the imprisoned Members in June, and in October he moved a habeas corpus for Selden, who had been detained on other charges.36

In November 1630 Heath exhibited an Exchequer bill against Littleton and Robert Mason* for connivance in a fraudulent conveyance whereby Walter Long* sought to evade the fine imposed on him in Star Chamber, while three months later Littleton, Mason and Christopher Sherland* pleaded unsuccessfully in the test case over composition for knighthood fines. Such demonstrations of his ability to argue a brief, far from damning his chances of promotion, led to his nomination as recorder of London in 1631, in succession to Heneage Finch*. Littleton replaced Sir Richard Shilton* as solicitor-general in 1634, thereby making a considerable financial sacrifice, as his private practice had been lucrative. On the flight of Sir John Finch II* he became Speaker of the House of Lords in the Long Parliament, and while he disappointed the Court by failing to obstruct the militia ordinance, his attendance at Oxford with the great seal constituted a considerable propaganda coup. He died there on 9 Aug. 1645, and was buried in the cathedral.37

In his will of August 1639, Littleton settled his estates on his daughter Anne, and granted a reversion to Edward Littleton, ‘now at school at Amersham’, presumably an illegitimate son. The will was proved by his brother Timothy†, who had followed him as a judge on the north Wales circuit, on 5 Nov. 1649. His daughter brought the Mounslow estate to her cousin, Thomas Littleton alias Poyntz, who sat in the Short and Long Parliaments for Much Wenlock until disabled for royalism, and after the Restoration became a prominent ‘country Cavalier’.38

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Authors: John. P. Ferris / Simon Healy

Notes

  • 1. Vis. Worcs. (Harl. Soc. xc), 64; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 4), iii. 306-7, 311.
  • 2. Al. Ox.; I. Temple Admiss.; CITR, ii. 102.
  • 3. Trans Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 4), iii. 311, 313; Soc. Gen. Hagley (Worcs.) par. reg.; J.E. Griffiths, Peds. Anglesey and Caern. Fams. 191.
  • 4. NLW, 9058E/1046; PROB 6/15, f. 11.
  • 5. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 203.
  • 6. CP.
  • 7. Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 4), iii. 311.
  • 8. C231/4, p. 146; JPs in Wales and Monm. ed. Phillips, 9-10, 27-8, 45-7.
  • 9. NLW, Add. 339F, pp. 148-9.
  • 10. C181/3, f. 89; 181/4, f. 191; 181/5, f. 153; T. Rymer, Foedera, viii. pt. 1, p. 48; C193/8/51; E179/224/598.
  • 11. W.R. Williams, Gt. Sessions in Wales, 94.
  • 12. J.M.J. Tonks, ‘Lytteltons of Frankley and their estates’ (Univ. of Oxf. B.Litt. thesis, 1978), p. 148.
  • 13. Trans. Salop Arch Soc. (ser. 4), liv. 187-8; Salop RO, BB/C1/1/1, f. 35v; Remembrancia ed. W.H. and H.C. Overall, 302; CLRO, Reps. 46, f. 39; Reps. 48, f. 464.
  • 14. CITR, ii. 182, 195, 217-44.
  • 15. Rymer, viii. pt. 4, p. 36; ix. pt. 3, p. 47.
  • 16. Ibid. ix. pt. 1, p. 7.
  • 17. Ibid. ix. pt. 2, p. 249.
  • 18. CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 521.
  • 19. Ibid. 1640-1, p. 439.
  • 20. Rymer, ix. pt. 3, p. 47.
  • 21. Docquets of Letters Patent 1642-6 ed. W.H. Black, ii. 247-8.
  • 22. Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion ed. W.D. Macray, ii. 109-10.
  • 23. NLW, 9058E/1046; 9060E/1246, 1276; Procs. 1625, pp. 205, 675, 684.
  • 24. Procs. 1625, pp. 232, 342, 348, 352, 355, 385; Exeter Coll. Oxf. ms 168, f. 62; NLW, 9060E/1364.
  • 25. Procs. 1626, ii. 21, 36, 40, 60, 74, 84, 116, 123; iii. 407, 409; C. Russell, PEP, 268.
  • 26. Procs. 1626, ii. 92, 97, 104, 108, 149, 168, 195.
  • 27. Exeter Coll. Oxf. ms 168, ff. 99-109; Procs. 1626, i. 372, 279; Russell, 302. Littleton was dropped from the final list of Bristol’s counsel, none of whom were MPs.
  • 28. Richard Neile, bp. of Durham in 1626, but bp. of Lincoln when accused of defaming the Commons in 1614.
  • 29. Procs. 1626, iii. 22, 47, 49-50, 85, 90-1, 140, 203, 210, 214-15.
  • 30. Russell, 305-7; Procs. 1626, iii. 254-5, 257-8, 261, 302, 304, 353, 357-8, 377- 9, 384, 392, 406, 408, 410, 427.
  • 31. Procs. 1626, iii. 404; CD 1628, ii. 144; iii. 154, 185, 474, 574.
  • 32. CD 1628, ii. 98, 128, 284-91, 327, 334-42, 360, 377, 454-8, 515-16; iii. 43; Russell, 356-7.
  • 33. T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 341; Russell, 350-4, 363-4; CD 1628, iii. 48, 53, 223, 234, 272, 285, 317.
  • 34. CD 1628, iii. 508, 543, 545, 623; iv. 48, 120-1, 178, 190, 237-8, 256, 266, 284, 290; Russell, 369-74.
  • 35. Russell, 401-2; CJ, i. 920-1; HMC Lowther, 59, 61, 73; CD 1629, pp. 8, 57, 88, 93, 143, 200, 229.
  • 36. Procs. 1626, ii. 47, 49; iii. 151, 350; CD 1628, iii. 432, 439-40, 442; CD 1629, p. 47, 120, 176, 263-4; C. Thompson, ‘Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629’, Faction and Parl. ed. K. Sharpe, 258-60; Birch, i. 416; ii. 17, 83, 96.
  • 37. Birch, ii. 96; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 241; Clarendon, ii. 110.
  • 38. PROB 11/210, f. 93; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 4), iii. 311-14.