Strode must be distinguished from two contemporary namesakes: a cousin who wrote poetry, and became a canon of Oxford cathedral; and a parliamentarian colonel who was elected for Ilchester in 1646.
The Westminster sitting of the 1625 Parliament again brought Strode a solitary bill committee appointment, on 8 July, which concerned the Sackville estates. Four days earlier he defended the actions of Buckingham’s client, Sir John Savile*, during the disputed Yorkshire election, complaining that the charges against him were insufficiently precise. On 9 July he welcomed the king’s offer to adjourn the sitting on account of the plague, but his motion for a unilateral reply by the Commons was rejected in favour of a joint response with the Lords.
During the Westminster sitting Strode had avoided criticizing the government, a reflection, perhaps, of his father’s close relationship with Buckingham However, Sir William Strode was becoming increasingly sceptical about the Crown’s financial and religious policies, and not surprisingly this was reflected in his son’s performance during the Oxford sitting. On 2 Aug. Strode affirmed that, although the Arminian cleric, Richard Montagu, was a royal servant, it was safe to proceed against him for his contempt of the Commons in publishing Appello Caesarem. He was named on 8 Aug. to the conference with the Lords on the subject of the government’s leniency towards Catholics. His response on 6 Aug. to the Crown’s request for a supplementary grant of supply was naïve but scathing; Members should consider ‘how the two subsidies and fifteenths, payable more than one year hence, can supply the navy to go out within 14 days’.
By the time the next Parliament was summoned, Sir William, fully occupied as a billeting commissioner in Devon, apparently kept his own electoral options open by having his son returned at both Bere Alston and Plympton Erle. Strode finally opted to represent the former borough on 18 Feb. 1626, whereupon his father filled the Plympton vacancy.
Unlike his father, who remained essentially loyal to the government and to Buckingham, Strode increasingly allied himself with the duke’s critics during this session. Immediately after (Sir) John Eliot’s first report on the St. Peter affair on 22 Feb., Strode called for the ship to be released, and the next day he moved for two of the prime witnesses, the lieutenants of the Tower and of Dover Castle, Sir Allen Apsley and Sir John Hippisley* respectively, to be examined separately. When Buckingham’s involvement in the St. Peter’s second arrest became known on 1 Mar., Strode cautiously urged that the duke be heard by his counsel before the matter was adjudged a grievance. However, by 1 May he was openly holding the royal favourite responsible.
The 1628 Parliament saw Strode become even more vocal, with at least 34 recorded speeches, though he still attracted only nine committee nominations. Of the five bills that he was appointed to scrutinize, one concerned the confiscated West Country estates of Sir Walter Ralegh† (23 May). He returned to this topic on 19 June, when he attacked the 2nd earl of Cork’s bid to strengthen his claim to a share of Ralegh’s property by legislation: ‘No reason why any private man should have benefit by the attainder of another. If [the] earl of Cork’s title were good before this bill, then it is still; if bad, why should we make it good?’ This sensitivity to injustice, and an inclination to define complex situations in black-and-white terms, typified much of Strode’s parliamentary performance. He was equally impatient of arguments that Sir Thomas Monson’s patent for making process in the Council in the North was only partially flawed, asserting on 30 May that if one section constituted a grievance, then the whole of it was affected, ‘as a man wanting an arm must needs be said to be an unsound man’.
True to his puritan background, Strode made religion his initial priority in the 1628 session, calling on 20 Mar. for Members to join in the customary corporate communion and fast. He was subsequently named to bills to reform abuses on the sabbath, increase peace and unity in church and commonwealth, and encourage preaching (1, 7 and 17 April).
Strode was well aware of the value of martial law for disciplining soldiers, but he objected strongly on 22 Apr. to the manner in which it was now impinging on the civilian population. ‘If a soldier wrong me, I must complain to a martial court, and am then subject to that court. Moved that all matters between countryman and soldier to be ordered by commission of oyer [and terminer]: and between soldier and soldier by martial law’. He was also considerably exercised by the tactics employed by the Privy Council to enforce unpopular policies at local level, and on 25 Mar. argued that pursuivants should not be paid for bringing alleged offenders up to London. When Sir Humphrey May asserted on 15 May that the Council imposed fees only when a suspect was proved guilty, Strode responded by highlighting a recent case involving the high constable of Roborough hundred, Devon, the administrative district which included Meavy. This officer had recently been summoned before the Council for allegedly disrupting impressment, and, despite being discharged, was made to pay £12 in fees. Accused by (Sir) John Coke of maligning the Council, Strode qualified his comments only so far as to place the blame on subordinate officers. Nevertheless, despite finding fault with the Council’s treatment of this high constable, Strode apparently had few qualms about the Commons’ own decision to send for the gentlemen who had opposed the election of Sir John Eliot and William Coryton as Cornwall’s knights of the shire, since he was added on 9 May to the committee appointed to examine them once they reached Westminster.
Like Eliot, Strode supported Sir Thomas Wentworth’s proposal on 28 Apr. for drafting a bill to enshrine the liberties of the subject, and on 1 May emphasized the importance of using this measure to curb arbitrary imprisonment. Later that day the king made clear his opposition to this strategy, by demanding to know whether the Commons would rely wholly upon his royal word to protect and uphold the subjects’ liberties. In response, Strode backed calls on 2 May for a Remonstrance justifying the Commons’ actions. He showed no obvious interest in the Petition of Right until 20 May, when he produced a neat critique of one of the Lords’ proposed amendments to its text: ‘That it is a difference when a man does a thing contrary to my command and when he does it without my command: he thinks "not warrantable by law" is not of so much force as "unlawful". However, most Members concurred with Sir Edward Coke’s view that the two word forms amounted to the same thing.
On 13 June Strode picked up on John Selden’s concerns that the details of the general pardon were being withheld from the Commons for some underhand reason, and advised that if the attorney-general (Sir Robert Heath*) would not produce them, the king should be approached instead. His suspicions about the government’s attitude to revenue collection had presumably not been eased by reports of covert moves towards a revised book of customs tariffs, a topic which he had been appointed to help investigate on 17 May. Predictably, on 24 June he gave his backing to the proposal for a separate Remonstrance against the unparliamentary collection of Tunnage and Poundage, asserting that this would help to ‘strike a terror into them that would infringe our liberties’.
Strode was remarkably quiet during the opening weeks of the 1629 session. Indeed, he is not known to have spoken until 12 Feb., when he backed Eliot and Selden’s confrontational strategy in the Tunnage and Poundage dispute, arguing that the Commons should give priority to recovering the goods confiscated from merchants such as John Rolle*. He may, however, have developed doubts about this approach by 23 Feb., when he apparently questioned the value of trying to punish the customs farmers responsible for impounding Rolle’s merchandise. Overall, he seems to have been rather more vexed by reports that the Crown was flouting anti-Catholic legislation, and on 16 Feb. he moved that the lord chief justice, Nicholas Hyde*, should be called to account for reprieving a condemned priest ‘upon the king’s bare word’.
Strode’s part in this demonstration was far too conspicuous for him to avoid retribution. A warrant for his arrest was issued the following day, though he evaded the king’s despised pursuivants for nearly a month. Accused of sedition and riot in the Commons’ chamber, he refused to answer for his actions to any court except Parliament itself, and applied persistently for bail. In June 1629 he ‘was so bold as to ask the judges whether they would ... bail a seditious priest, though not seditious Parliament-men, as they were charged to be’. However, when he was finally offered bail, he refused to be bound over for his good behaviour, on the grounds that this would constitute an admission of guilt, and he remained in prison until January 1640. In reality, the terms of his detention were not particularly harsh, and he was able to prove his father’s will in February 1638.
Freed as part of the preparations for the Short Parliament, Strode with some difficulty once again secured a seat at Bere Alston, and was also returned there in the following autumn. Now a close ally of John Pym*, whose daughter married Strode’s nephew, Sir Francis Drake†, in January 1641, he emerged as an uncompromising opponent of the Crown. Clarendon (Edward Hyde†) described him as ‘one of those ephori [magistrates] who most avowed the curbing and suppressing of majesty’. A leading protagonist of both Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth*) and Archbishop Laud, he achieved notoriety as one of the Five Members whose attempted arrest by the king in January 1642 helped to precipitate the Civil War.
his indefatigable industry, his fervent and zealous intention upon the businesses of state. He was none of those that peep now and then into the House to inquire, ‘What news?’; that sit there sometimes for recreation, that are present mainly to help a friend, or promote an interest: but he set his heart and shoulders to the work, and stretched all his sinews about it.
The Restoration regime took a less generous approach to Strode’s career. His body was exhumed in September 1661, and thrown into a pit in St. Margaret’s churchyard, Westminster.