Characterized as one of the few leaders of the Commons who can justifiably be regarded as an archetypal country Member,
I. Background and Early Life
Alford’s paternal great-grandfather came from Holt in Denbighshire. Alford’s father, an intimate servant of William Cecil†, Lord Burghley, lived in Buckinghamshire, and hoped that his son would become a lawyer and enter Cecil’s service.
Though educated at Lincoln’s Inn in accordance with his father’s wishes, Alford turned his back on the law. He had no need to earn a living, for by the time he came of age, in about 1587, he had cash to spare. Indeed, in June 1588 he was able to acquire the mortgage on two Buckinghamshire manors for £1,900.
II. The First Jacobean Parliament, 1604-10
Several members of Alford’s family had previously sat in Parliament: his father had twice sat early in Elizabeth’s reign, and his uncle Francis had been a leading Member in the 1570s and 1580s. Alford himself first entered Parliament in 1593, when he came in for Beverley, presumably on the interest of his second cousin, the Yorkshireman Sir Lancelot Alford†, who had represented the town in 1589. He made no recorded impression in the Commons, and evidently did not seek re-election before 1604, when he was returned as junior burgess for Colchester. Alford had not previously been associated with this Essex borough, and therefore presumably owed his seat there to its high steward, Lord Cecil (Robert Cecil†), son of the late lord treasurer.
Alford played little recorded part in the 1604 session. On 1 June he was named to the joint committee appointed to consider the bishop of Bristol’s book, which had accused the Commons of adopting delaying tactics in respect of the Union, and six days later he criticized John Tey* for opposing the bill to reform abuses associated with the importing and printing of popish books.
Shortly before the end of the 1604 session Alford parted with the three manorial stewardships that he had held since 1596.
During the third session, Alford spoke more frequently. On 27 Nov. 1606 Christopher Brooke proposed that the Commons should confer with the Lords and begin drafting bills to bring about the Union desired by the king. Alford was alarmed, and replied that ‘we be neither ready for bill nor conference’. Two days later he ‘impugned’ the bill to explain the Free Trade Act of 1606 when it was reported by Hoskins. The Union continued to hold his attention, and on 10 Dec. he suggested that the committee for conferring with the peers on the question of commerce between the two kingdoms should be given subject headings as a basis for discussion. Alford clearly understood the importance of careful preparation, just as he also appreciated that Members needed to be kept well informed if business was to proceed smoothly. During the previous session the House, presumably in order to save time, had abandoned its former policy of requiring committees to announce their adjournments the next day in the chamber. This meant that Members who missed a meeting were not publicly informed where and when a committee planned to reassemble. Alford was dissatisfied with the altered procedure, which must have affected committee attendance, and on his motion (16 Dec. 1606) the new policy was overturned.
Alford’s success in overturning the order that had prevented committees from announcing their adjournments to the House may have emboldened him to tackle the more general problem of low attendance. During the previous session many lawyer-Members had deserted the House to go on circuit, leaving those who remained, such as Alford, to carry on regardless. At the end of February 1607 the king asked Members to refrain from leaving in view of the urgency of the Union, but despite this injunction the House began to empty with the approach of the assizes.
Although Alford failed to secure the passage of the attendance bill, he had begun to emerge as a key figure in the Commons. On 12 Mar. he was appointed to speak at a forthcoming conference on the ‘conveniency’ of the Union, and on 30 Mar. he strongly advised resisting the Lords’ demands for a meeting to discuss naturalization. At an earlier conference the Commons had been prevented from drawing a distinction between Scots born before and after James’s accession, and as the Lords had not changed their position Alford thought that it would be ‘levity’ to accept another meeting.
During the session Alford, though an occasional resident of the capital himself, emerged as an opponent of London’s legislative interests. On 29 Apr. 1607 he described the bill to confirm the lands of the City livery companies as ‘dangerous’, whereupon his former antagonist, London’s recorder, Sir Henry Montagu, leaped up and ‘satisfied the House amply’. Interestingly, despite his vigorous opposition to the measure, Alford secured a place on the bill committee (4 May).
It was not only in the City that Alford may have been considered troublesome. Although he seems to have owed his parliamentary seat to Robert Cecil, now earl of Salisbury, Alford was not afraid to frustrate the interests of the king. On 27 Apr. 1607 he condemned as ‘an unlawful course’ the punishing of men in Star Chamber for failing to obey Proclamations. Under Henry VIII, he claimed, no man had been deprived of his life, liberty or goods for this offence, but now they were subject to fines and imprisonment, and he urged that ‘some course be taken’.
Alford was added to the privileges committee when it was expanded to inspect the clerk’s Journal (19 June).
Alford was evidently more concerned with the economic difficulties of his neighbours and constituents than he was with the financial problems of the king. On 19 Feb. the fishermen of Brighton wrote to him complaining that the townsmen of Great Yarmouth were preventing them from fishing off the Norfolk coast. Some of them had been imprisoned, others fined, and collectively they claimed to have sustained losses amounting to £200 in one night alone. A few weeks later Alford received a similar complaint from the ketchmen of Colchester. Both sets of complainants urged him to support a bill limiting the powers claimed by Great Yarmouth that had been prepared by the town of Lowestoft. In addition, the Brighton men provided Alford with a signed petition to present to the Commons.
The Lowestoft bill was apparently not the only measure to have been entrusted to Alford. He headed the list of those named on 7 July to the committee for the bill to prevent debtors from attempting to cheat their creditors by assigning their debts to the king, and reported the measure as fit to sleep later that same day.
Alford unsuccessfully opposed the hunting bill on 21 Apr., the sea-sand bill on 4 May, and the swearing bill on 20 June, but successfully supported the commitment of the bill to repeal the New River Act of 1606. The committee was told to appoint ten of its members to survey the waterway in the next session, and when it reported on 16 July Alford’s name headed the list of surveyors.
III. The 1614 Parliament
Following the announcement of fresh elections in February 1614, Alford was again returned as junior burgess for Colchester, although his former patron, Salisbury, was now dead. On the first full day of business (8 Apr.), the House started to appoint a committee to determine the right of the attorney-general to sit, whereupon Alford interrupted, arguing successfully that the matter should be decided by the Commons as a whole. A committee to search for precedents was nevertheless still needed, to which Alford was named. Shortly thereafter the House established its privileges committee. Alford was included, and the following day he reported its deliberations concerning the Northumberland election.
Like many of his colleagues, Alford was displeased when Secretary Winwood sought an immediate vote of supply (12 April). Demands for subsidies were normally made in the middle of a session rather than at its beginning, and therefore Alford asked that the Commons be ‘no further pressed upon the present, as breeding jealousy’. Rather ominously, however, he also indicated that he saw no case for supply at all, whether now or later, because the country was not at war.
Many in the Commons shared Alford’s view. Consequently, in order to persuade the House to loosen its purse strings, the king offered a legislative programme aimed at redressing numerous grievances. Alford was evidently unimpressed with these ‘grace bills’, and on 18 Apr. he opposed the passage of one of them. Two days later, when Sir James Perrot pressed for 11 others to be given second readings, he replied that they should proceed alongside the petitions for grievances rather than be accorded preferential treatment. Though careful not to belittle the bills explicitly, he remarked that there were some who considered them to be of little value, including a knight who had said that ‘he would not give 3d. for them’. Later, during the third reading debate on the bill regarding respite of homage (20 May), he commented that if the bill’s only achievement would be to take away the right of certain officers to demand fees ‘he thinketh little grace in it’.
Following the Easter recess, Alford joined the mounting attack on impositions. On 5 May he complained that duties laid upon corn damaged the interests of farmers, and proposed that consideration of supply should be deferred until the House had received satisfaction. In so doing he recognized that this might mean that ‘we shall not part with the king in love’.
The Sabbath bill was not the only measure that Alford tried to torpedo. On 9 May he urged the House to reject Henry Jernegan’s bill to reverse a Chancery decree on the grounds that Jernegan had had so many bills passed that they should not be troubled with any more.
Alford supported the bill to prevent overcrowding in London. Although he had recommended allowing a similar measure to sleep in 1607, he was now concerned that unless action was taken the poor would so increase ‘as will draw infection’. Indeed, he suggested (1 June) that the bill would be improved if it also included a provision to prevent the erection of theatres.
Alford favoured showing leniency towards the disgraced chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Sir Thomas Parry, who had been found guilty of exerting undue interference in the Stockbridge election (11 May). Parry had already been dealt with severely by the king, and if the Commons added to his punishment the result would be so disproportionate that any future Parliament would be reluctant to investigate others guilty of the same offence. Alford nevertheless remained alert to the dangers of ‘packing’, in all its forms. Indeed, when Sir Warwick Hele suggested (6 May) that the way to avoid unwieldy committees was to limit their membership to 30, Alford dissented, ‘lest the Privy Council and the king’s counsel at law might make 10 of them’.
IV. The Spring Sitting of the 1621 Parliament
Alford does not resurface in the records until December 1620, when he was re-elected to Parliament as junior burgess for Colchester. He arrived at Westminster in early 1621 in a considerable state of anxiety, as a Proclamation of 24 Dec. prohibited all discussion of matters of state. Alford not only obtained a copy of this document, but underlined the phrases that most concerned him.
Alford had been reluctant to vote supply in 1614, and was scarcely more willing to do so in 1621. On 15 Feb. he suggested giving just one subsidy and two fifteenths.
Alford’s annoyance with Calvert was not merely an expression of irritation at the size of grant agreed. The secretary’s behaviour undermined the king’s promise to respect the Commons’ right of free speech, for if Members were unable to debate in secret, few would be willing to speak their minds openly. Only three days earlier (13 Feb.), Alford had recommended that anyone found guilty of reporting debates without permission should be sent to the Tower.
Just as Alford championed the Commons’ right to free speech, so too he defended its dignity. Early in the Parliament (15 Feb.) he upbraided the Speaker, Sir Thomas Richardson, for showing too much deference at a conference with the Lords, overlooking the fact that Richardson was a newcomer to the Commons and therefore unfamiliar with its procedures.
The issue which dominated Alford’s parliamentary agenda between February and June 1621 was not free speech or the dignity of the Commons but Chancery reform. In 1614 he had supported, and perhaps even helped to draft, a bill on this subject introduced by Nicholas Fuller. Now that Fuller was dead it fell to him, among others, to pursue the matter further. His dislike of Chancery stemmed from the fact that he had been a defendant in the same suit for the last 24 years, over the course of which time one of the plaintiffs had actually forgotten that he was involved. As Alford pointed out, during the same period a man could qualify as an apprentice three times over. Yet Alford’s case, though unusual, was far from unique. Sir Edward Coke, no admirer of Chancery himself, proposed that legislation be drafted to bring Chancery and the other equity courts into line with the Common Law courts by limiting the time allowed to each case (13 February).
Alford’s campaign to reform Chancery coincided with the Commons’ wider assault on the lord chancellor (Sir Francis Bacon*). Alford himself seems not to have been particularly interested in helping to topple Bacon, as his grievances were of long standing and he would continue to pursue them long after Bacon’s fall. Nevertheless the wider campaign meant that, for the moment, the Commons was willing to listen to him at considerable length. On 26 Mar. Alford laid before the House a wide-ranging, 17-point programme of reform.
The Commons did not immediately respond to these suggestions. Indeed, it was not until 25 Apr., when Alford repeated his demand, that a committee to regulate Chancery was established. Alford himself was naturally included, and probably served as chairman, as the list of committee members, marked to indicate attendance, survives among his papers.
Although Chancery reform was uppermost in Alford’s mind, the other Westminster courts were almost as bad, and a bill to regulate their fees was therefore introduced. Many Members were anxious to widen its provisions to include local courts and town corporations, but Alford, fearing that this would merely clog the bill, argued that it should remain unaltered (3 May).
Alford seems to have initiated very little legislation himself. However, after hearing about abuses in the Rochester and Minehead elections, and being a member of the committee for privileges and returns, he suggested that a bill to regulate parliamentary elections be prepared (3 March). Hakewill was consequently instructed to draft one, but there was little enthusiasm to take the matter further and Alford had to repeat his demand on 18 May, when it was learned that Star Chamber had received a complaint concerning irregularities in the Radnorshire election. The bill was not finally laid before the House until November, when it disappeared in committee.
Alford continued to be troubled by the use of Proclamations, a subject he had first drawn to the Commons’ attention in 1607. On 22 Feb. he complained that these royal edicts were ‘a troublesome thing to the country’, and cited as proof the recent Proclamation to enforce Lent, which served merely to raise the price of foodstuffs on which the poor depended, such as butter, cheese and herrings. His chief objection to the use of Proclamations, however, was that they usurped the right of Parliament to make law. Those who failed to observe Lent should be punished according to the statute enacted for that purpose, and not by Proclamation, he argued, or else ‘what do we here to make laws?’ His views found a ready audience in a House where the fear that parliaments faced imminent extinction was widespread, and consequently he was seconded by Perrot and Thomas Crewe. Alford’s concern that parliaments were in danger of being replaced by Proclamations resurfaced on 21 Apr. during a debate on the alehouse patent for, like Sir Edward Sackville, he thought that patents should be condemned by Parliament rather than royal decree.
One reason for Alford’s dislike of Proclamations is that by 1621 many of them were ‘annexed to the monopolies which are grievous to the realm’.
Although Alford vigorously supported the free trade bill, he also favoured a degree of protectionism. Far from opposing Sir Edwin Sandys’s proposal to ban the import of Spanish tobacco, he merely demanded that the right to grow tobacco be granted to those living in England (16 May).
London’s commercial interests were difficult to defeat, however, not least because they were bound up so closely with those of the king. On 14 May Alford was incensed when Calvert implied that James would not allow the Commons to investigate a complaint against the City-based Merchant Adventurers, whose alleged offences included laying impositions on cloth. Indeed, he was so angry that James had once again interfered with the Commons’ right to discuss a matter that had been brought to their attention that he recommended that all further business should cease. If Members did not defend their right to debate this topic, and so preserve an essential element of their free speech, they might as well say ‘farewell parliaments and farewell England’. It was left to Sir Henry Vane to defuse this potentially explosive crisis by denying that James had prohibited an investigation into abuses committed by the Merchant Adventurers. James’s only concern was that the House should avoid discussing those ‘private things’ that ‘concerned him merely and the State’.
Just as Alford favoured prohibiting some foreign imports, so too he wanted to ban the export of certain sorts of goods, such as ordnance (30 April). When Calvert replied that this was would prevent the king from arming his friends and allies, Alford retorted that special dispensations might be granted, but only by Parliament.
Farmers who exported their corn in spite of the ban ran the risk of being exposed by ‘informers’, whose evidence was rewarded by the king. Informers were widely hated, and early in the Parliament a bill was introduced to outlaw their activities. Alford enthusiastically supported this measure, and on 8 Feb. revealed that he and some officers of the Exchequer (perhaps friends of his late father, a former teller) had inspected the financial records together. They had discovered that informers made £50,000 each year but netted the king just £1,000 over the same period.
Many of Alford’s speeches on trade reflected his desire to protect the interests of his Sussex neighbours. Similar motives may explain his intervention in the debate on the bill to enable Prince Charles to lease out lands belonging to the duchy of Cornwall on 28 Feb., when, thinking perhaps of those who dwelt on the Duchy manor of Shoreham, he requested that the rights of tenants who had previously compounded be confirmed.
While the interests of his neighbours were never far from his mind, Alford did not forget his Colchester constituents. In February they preferred a bill to give them the right to levy taxes on local shipping to fund the paving of their town and repair of the harbour. Many in the Commons were appalled, and demanded that the bill be thrown out after only one reading (21 February). Among the measure’s sternest critics was Sir William Strode, who thought that there were ‘too many impositions already’. Alford may have secretly sympathized with this view, having previously attacked the impositions levied by the king. Nevertheless, he mounted a robust defence, pointing out that Colchester’s prosperity was essential to the local economy.
Alford emerges from the records of the 1621 Parliament as a voice of moderation where individual misconduct was concerned. On 21 Mar. he and a handful of others argued that Robert Lloyd, Member for Minehead, should not be ejected for instigating an objectionable patent, as his fault was error of judgment rather than malice.
On 28 May the king announced that Parliament would rise for the summer on 4 June. Alford was aghast, as much still needed doing. That afternoon he proposed seeking permission to sit three weeks longer, ‘so we may perfect somewhat’. The following day he declared in desperation that, according to the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, the king could not dissolve a Parliament that had not finished debating its grievances.
As the sitting neared its end, Members recalled the events that had followed the dissolution in 1614, when Hoskins and several others had been arrested for making inflammatory speeches in the Commons. Sir Edwin Sandys was particularly nervous, and therefore, on 2 June, Alford asked the House to clear him from ‘imputations of speaking’.
Alford was appointed to help present the Commons’ grievances to the king the next day. On the final day of the sitting (4 June) he was instructed to help draft the Commons’ declaration which pledged the ‘lives and fortunes’ of Members in the defence of the Palatinate.
V. The Winter Sitting of the 1621 Parliament
Following the adjournment Alford was not, in fact, arrested. On the contrary, shortly before Parliament reassembled the Privy Council, perhaps hoping to keep him happy, appointed him to the commission for balancing trade. On the first day of the new sitting (20 Nov.) Alford immediately put himself into the driving seat, proposing that the Commons wait for a day or two before putting any of the bills held over from the summer to the question so as to give themselves time to refresh their memories, ‘to which the House inclined’.
It soon became clear why Alford was so tetchy. Over the summer Sir Edwin Sandys had been arrested, despite having been cleared by the Commons at the end of the previous sitting. Moreover, the king had published a second Proclamation prohibiting licentious speech in matters of state. Alford was incensed, for it now appeared that the king’s earlier promise to allow the Commons free speech was worthless. On 23 Nov. he complained bitterly that James, having summoned Parliament with the express aim of seeking its advice over the Palatinate, now wished to prevent it from discussing matters of state, which necessarily included the fate of the Palatinate and a host of other matters, among them religion. He admitted to being uncertain whether Sandys had been arrested for ‘Parliament business’, but if this were not the case ‘it were good it were cleared’. In any event, it was now apparent that the Commons had been made ‘subject to the Council table’, and unless Members asserted their rights they would ‘lose the privilege of a free Parliament’. He also complained that, despite having previously earned the king’s praise for voting two subsidies, the Commons had been traduced as cunning and malicious. In a thinly veiled reference to the councillors in the House, he added that ‘a mistaking sewer’ was responsible. Alford was answered by Calvert, who accused him of being more fearful than was necessary. The recent Proclamation had merely sought to forbid idle chatter in alehouses, he said, while it was absurd to suppose that the king had issued contradictory commands, ‘as though His Majesty meant to ensnare and take advantage of us’. Indeed, were James to learn that Alford had suggested otherwise ‘he will not endure it’. Despite this barely concealed threat, Calvert added that there was no need for Members to fear imprisonment for speaking their minds. Alford, however, was unmoved, and after asking to be forgiven if he had said anything ‘undutiful’, insisted that the offending Proclamation be read. When this was done Sir Dudley Digges announced that Alford ‘hath erred’, whereas Mallory, who shared Alford’s dismay at Sandys’s arrest, declared that he had ‘moved well’.
Far from feeling chastened after his bruising clash with Calvert, Alford continued to make difficulties for the government. On 24 Nov. he grumbled that ‘we daily lose our privileges’.
As one of the foremost defenders of the Commons’ right to free speech, Alford favoured petitioning the king to have Prince Charles marry a fellow Protestant rather than a Spanish infanta. When Bevill expressed concern ‘lest we should be too bold’, Alford retorted (1 Dec.) that Elizabeth had been petitioned to grant permission to discuss her marriage, ‘and took it well, though it was feared she would dissolve the Parliament’.
VI. The 1624 Parliament
Following the dissolution Alford’s fear that he would be arrested proved groundless, although a handful of other Members were certainly imprisoned. In May 1622 he and his fellow commissioners for trade were criticized for failing to complete their report.
When a fresh Parliament was summoned in 1624, Alford was re-elected as Colchester’s junior burgess. Shortly after taking his seat he was reappointed to the committee for privileges (23 Feb.), and helped rebuff competing calls for the committee to be thrown open to all Members or restricted to knights of the shire.
Alford seems to have arrived at Westminster in 1624 in a more conciliatory mood than he had in 1621. When Eliot proposed, on 27 Feb., that the Commons petition the king to confirm its privileges, Alford did not express wholehearted agreement but instead intervened to prevent a confrontation with James. ‘When time serves’, he quietly announced, he would ‘concur with this gentleman’, but in the meantime he suggested appointing a select committee to draft a bill in the form of a declaration.
Many Members were not only eager to advise James to end the marriage negotiations but also to persuade him to embark upon a war to recover the Palatinate. Alford shared the widely held desire to break off the Spanish Match, but he was less enthusiastic about a war. On 27 Feb. he suggested that the Commons should first consider the marriage, so as ‘to take away all fears and rubs’, rather than the Palatinate, because ‘if we once leave England [we are] not good Englishmen’.
In the short term the rebuff delivered to Sandys helped to slow the headlong rush to war. However, Alford seems to have recognized that conflict was inevitable and that his best course of action was not to oppose a war but to try to minimize its economic impact on the country. This became apparent on 11 Mar., when Heneage Finch proposed telling James that if he took the Commons’ advice and broke off the negotiations they would be ready to assist him with their bodies and goods ‘to the uttermost’. While Alford agreed that it was necessary to decide how to pay for a war, he objected to the size of commitment implied by the word ‘uttermost’.
Like many of his colleagues, Alford feared that subsidies would be misapplied. On 19 Mar. he drew attention to fourteenth-century precedents that allowed the Commons to entrust the money to men accountable to Parliament, and on 24 Apr. he recommended the appointment of eight treasurers rather than four, ‘for some may die’.
Alford described the issue of funding the war as ‘the greatest matter he ever spake in, in Parliament’.
As in previous parliaments, local interests were never far from Alford’s mind, as his contributions to the debates on war funding showed. During the discussion of the purveyance and cart-taking bill (13 Mar.), he complained that counties which had not compounded for purveyance, such as his own native Sussex, were forced to bear an unfair share of the burden. In his view only composition agreements made in Parliament should be tolerated.
Alford may also have been active on behalf of some of his London neighbours. The Carpenters’ Company, which like Alford owned property in the Whitefriars,
Alford remained busy right up until the end of the session. On 28 May he called for the deputation responsible for presenting the Commons’ grievances to the king to be appointed, and in anticipation of a second session later that year moved that those petitions which had not yet been dealt with be handed to the clerk of the Commons. The next day, just before the Parliament was adjourned, he suggested that those patents that had been condemned be given to the king. His colleagues, unsure whether this was sound advice, instructed the clerk of the Commons to do whatever his predecessors had done.
VII. The 1625 Parliament
Throughout the 1624 Parliament, and in marked contrast to his behaviour in 1621, Alford had given the king no cause for offence. His new-found docility seems not to have gone unnoticed, for on 19 June, three weeks after the session ended, he was appointed to the Sussex bench. In the following spring, when preparations for war with Spain had begun in earnest, he was also instructed to help press seamen for the Navy in his native Sussex. By that time he had again been elected junior Member for Colchester. Despite competition from another candidate, the commonalty had insisted on choosing him ‘in respect of his long and loving service to this corporation’.
In the 1625 Parliament, the first of Charles’s reign, Alford was active from the first full day of business (21 June). As well as being appointed to the committee for privileges, he also suggested establishing a grand committee to consider ‘all the weighty business concerning the king and kingdom’. Furthermore, along with Sir Arthur Ingram, he again proposed a bill to regulate the conduct of elections.
When Parliament reassembled at Oxford at the beginning of August, Alford was again deeply involved in its business. On 2 Aug. Heath reminded the Commons that Charles had said he would personally deal with his servant, the Arminian cleric Richard Montagu, who had offended the House by describing Calvinists in print as puritans. In reply, Alford, whose papers include a list of errors committed by Montagu in his A New Gagg of 1624, observed that all magistrates and deputy lieutenants were also the king’s servants, ‘so that if we admit this we shall take the way to destroy parliaments’.
VIII. The 1628 Session
Alford’s refusal to countenance further supply, and his insistence on bringing Montagu before the Commons, showed that he could still be a thorn in the government’s side. Over the autumn the king resolved to summon a fresh Parliament, but to exclude from its ranks known troublemakers such as Alford by pricking them as sheriffs. Consequently, Alford played no part in the 1626 assembly, although he may have gained detailed knowledge of its activities, for as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex he helped his son to a seat at Shoreham. He remained in disfavour after the dissolution, when orders were given to remove from the bench leading opponents of the lord admiral, the duke of Buckingham (8 July 1626).
It is not known whether Alford contributed to the Forced Loan, but on the back of a copy of the instructions sent to the commissioners responsible for its collection he indicated that he was fundamentally opposed to the levy. ‘The subject’, he wrote, ‘hath such a propriety in his goods as it cannot be taken from them [sic], or any part of them, without assent in Parliament’.
Following the issue of fresh writs of election in February 1628, Alford again stood for Parliament. He was no longer guaranteed a seat at Colchester, where the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich*) was attempting to extend his influence, and therefore later that month got himself returned for the junior place at Steyning, a borough roughly five miles north-east of Offington. He still hoped that he would also be chosen at Colchester, for as late as mid-March he promised its bailiffs that he would not desert the borough ‘till you leave me’,
As well as taking care of his own election, Alford may have helped other candidates hostile to Buckingham find places. In 1629 Sir Allen Apsley recalled that in 1628 his son had been offered a seat by Alford, whom he described as ‘one of the faction’, on condition that he ‘should have given his voice against the duke’.
By involving Alford in local Admiralty administration Buckingham may have hoped to gain him as an ally in the Commons, or at least to induce him to moderate his criticism of the handling of naval affairs. In the short term this policy perhaps paid off, for while Alford was certainly fiercely critical of the inadequacy of the country’s naval defences – he complained on 23 Apr. that ‘the seas are not guarded’, that timber was in short supply and that powder was so scarce ‘we cannot get it’ – he did not initially blame Buckingham.
If there was a rapprochement between Alford and the duke it did not survive the king’s initial answer to the Petition of Right, which many Members, including Alford, regarded as unsatisfactory and evidence of Buckingham’s malign influence. On 11 June Alford complained that the seas were unguarded and that it was ‘impossible one man should manage so many offices’. Though he did not hold Buckingham directly responsible for the nation’s ills, he thought he had abused his power and therefore charges should be laid.
One of the key issues before the Commons in the spring of 1628 was how best to secure the rights and liberties of the subject. Like the rest of the House, Alford was pleased when the king declared on 25 Apr. that he would be willing to confirm Magna Carta and declare that every subject had a ‘fundamental propriety’ in his goods and a ‘fundamental liberty’ in his person.
The Petition of Right focused on recent grievances, but Alford had not forgotten the Commons’ long-running campaign against impositions. On 22 Mar. he reminded the House of the petition against impositions that it had received in 1625. Two months later he called for a copy of the impositions bill to be brought into the House. On 13 June, Alford condemned the commissions for raising additional impositions and an excise duty, declaring them to be of the ‘greatest consequence’ and designed ‘to overthrow all our liberties’. Eleven days later, during the third reading debate on the bill to prevent impositions from being laid on merchandise, he observed that before 1603 no king had claimed the right to impose before adding that the king was entitled to take ‘nothing’ from his subjects except by way of subsidy. Another longstanding grievance which Alford sought to revive was his own complaint against the use of Proclamations.
Alford objected when the king, having already forced the Commons to sit over Easter, also refused to allow it to rise over Whitsun. If Members were to be denied these customary short breaks, he declared, it ‘may much trench upon our liberty’ (29 May). However, despite these misgivings he had always advocated the virtue of regular attendance, and consequently he himself remained at Westminster. Nevertheless, during the debate on fining the absentees (2 June) he proposed fixing the penalty at 10s. per Member rather than the 20s. that was finally agreed, arguing that ‘if we sit when we need not, let us be temperate in punishing’.
Although he had attacked Richard Montagu three years earlier, Alford took no part in the 1628 debates on Arminianism. Nevertheless he was appointed to consider a bill for maintaining the peace and unity of the church (7 Apr.), and on 6 June he urged the Commons to include the danger to religion in the Remonstrance.
Alford remained at Westminster until at least three days before Parliament adjourned on 26 June.
Following the dissolution, or perhaps earlier, Alford began to compile a journal of the 1628-9 Parliament, but though he collected numerous separates and a copy of the ‘True Relation’ of 1629 he never completed the project.
Alford drafted his will on 11 Feb. 1631, in which he left the lion’s share of his property to his only daughter Elizabeth rather than his eldest son John, who was returned for New Shoreham to both the Short and Long Parliaments.