TATE, Zouche (1606-51), of Delapré Abbey, Hardingstone, Northants., and Great Piazza, Covent Garden, London.

Background and early parliamentary career, 1640-1

Having established themselves at Coventry by the 1390s, Tate’s forebears had also prospered as London merchants during the fifteenth century, supplying the municipal offices of alderman, sheriff and lord mayor and serving as MP for the City on four occasions between 1483 and 1510.30Vis. Northants. ed. Metcalfe, 198; Bridges, Northants. i. 365; HP Commons 1461-1504, ‘Robert Tate’; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Sir John Tate’. His great-grandmother and her fourth husband had purchased the former convent of Delapré Abbey, Northamptonshire, in 1548, and it would become the Tate family’s principal residence. Tate’s grandfather had represented Coventry in the 1572 Parliament, and his father, Sir William Tate, sat for Corfe Castle, Dorset, in 1593 and for Northamptonshire in 1614.31R.M. Serjeantson, Hist. of Delapré Abbey, 33; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Bartholomew Tate’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘William Tate’.

Sir William Tate was a man of strongly godly convictions and a patron of puritan ministers.32J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 21. In the will that he drew up two months before his death in October 1617 – in which he expressed a Calvinist sense of assurance as one of God’s ‘elect servants’ – he nominated his father-in-law Edward Lord Zouche as Tate’s guardian. The crown duly granted Tate’s wardship to Lord Zouche for £600, although the duties of guardian devolved largely, it seems, upon Tate’s cousin, Robert Tanfield.33PROB11/130, ff. 497v-480; WARD9/162, f. 273v; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘William Tate’; SP14/161/40, f. 60. Between university and his admission to the Middle Temple in 1625, Tate went to France in order to learn French and to travel.34CSP Dom. 1623-5, p. 105; SP14/153/110, f. 144; SP14/161/40, f. 60; SP14/164/77, f. 127. His marriage in 1631 was to a woman from a well-established Cambridgeshire family, and a granddaughter of Thomas Cecil†, 1st earl of Exeter.35HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Giles Alington’. When Tate was reported as a Northamptonshire muster defaulter in 1635 and summoned before the privy council, William, 2nd earl of Exeter certified as to his ‘infirmity and promise of future conformity’, whereupon he was discharged from further attendance at Whitehall.36CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 517, 546, 581, 583. In 1637, Tate informed the clerk of the council that his laxity in paying his enclosure fine was because he had ‘long been troubled with sore eyes, so that he could neither write nor read’.37CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 465. Although Tate did not stand in the vanguard of godly resistance to the personal rule in the south midlands, his friendship with at least one of the region’s foremost puritan ministers, Daniel Cawdry, may well have begun in the 1630s. Tate’s possible connection with a man who would later emerge as a leading Presbyterian divine may help to explain his own great zeal for Presbyterianism by the mid-1640s.38PROB11/215, f. 312v; P. Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590-1640, 133.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Tate and another godly Northamptonshire gentleman, Richard Knightley, were returned for Northampton.39Supra, ‘Northampton’. According to an eighteenth century chronicle of the town’s affairs, Tate was returned without ‘making any interest and without his knowledge till after the election’, when the mayor and aldermen went to his house at Delapré Abbey to inform him that he had been ‘unanimously elected ... which at first he modestly refused, but after some time, upon their request, did accept of it’.40Bodl. Top. Northants. c.9, p. 93. Neither Tate nor Knightley enjoyed any notable proprietorial interest in the borough, and it seems that they owed their election primarily to their standing within Northamptonshire’s large and influential godly community.41Infra, ‘Richard Knightley’; ‘Zouche Tate’. Tate had been among the signatories to the election indenture returning the equally godly pairing of John Crewe I and Sir Gilbert Pykeringe as MPs for the county.42C219/42/1/159. Tate made no recorded impression on the proceedings of the Short Parliament, and it is not clear that he took his seat.

The election at Northampton to the Long Parliament that autumn resulted in a contest and a double return. The godly majority in the corporation re-elected Tate and Knightley, but a group of 200 or so disgruntled freemen returned a candidate of their own choosing. On 6 January 1641 the House resolved that Tate and Knightley be allowed to sit on a provisional basis – that is, until their return should be declared void – but this would be the first and last action that the Commons took in relation to this dispute, thereby handing victory to Tate and Knightley by default.43Supra, ‘Northampton’.

Perhaps because of the initial uncertainty surrounding Tate’s election, his career in the Long Parliament seems to have begun slowly. He was named to only four committees before the autumn 1641 recess and made no recorded contribution on the floor of the House except to take the Protestation in May 1641.44CJ ii. 54b, 92b, 128b, 133a, 182a. On 19 August, Tate and Sir Arthur Hesilrige departed the Commons without leave upon some ‘discontent (as is conceived)’, whereupon the Houses ordered them to attend its service forthwith, ‘but they proceeded in their journey nevertheless’.45CJ ii. 263b; Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 342 (E.523.1). It has been conjectured that they departed Westminster in protest at the Commons’ failure to observe its own resolution of mid-August to revive the bill for abolishing episcopacy.46Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 99-100; D.R. Costa, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Development of the Civil War in England (to 1645)’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1988), 82. Given Tate’s subsequent prominence in the campaign to effect a thoroughgoing Presbyterian church settlement, there is little reason to doubt his commitment to root and branch reformation from the very opening of the Long Parliament. The godly minister Richard Baxter would claim after the Restoration that a ‘wise and credible Parliament-man hath oft told me that when the [civil] war begun he knew but one Presbyterian in all the House of Commons ... which was worthy Mr Tate of Northampton’.47R. Baxter, Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), 30.

Tate and the war party, 1642-4

Tate received no committee appointments in the Commons between the summer of 1641 and August 1642. However, he was present in the House on at least one occasion during that period – on 11 February 1642, when he advised against the nomination of John Mordaunt, 1st earl of Peterborough as lord lieutenant of Northamptonshire in the Militia Ordinance. ‘He is a very noble lord when he is himself’, Tate declared, ‘but there are a great company of debauche[d] men which comes to his house, and therefore [he is] not to [be] confide[d] in’.48PJ i. 350. Apparently swayed by Tate’s words, the House nominated Henry, 3rd Baron Spencer for the office. A few days later the earl of Peterborough complained to the Lords that Tate had defamed his honour, and he asked for appropriate reparation. But the Lords conceived they could take no action for words uttered in the Commons by a Member of that House.49LJ iv. 582a.

Granted leave of absence by the Commons on 19 March 1642, Tate receives no further mention in the Journal until August.50CJ ii. 488a. However, at some point that spring it appears that Lord Spencer commissioned him as one of his deputy lieutenants. Following a Commons’ order on 9 June enjoining Crewe and other Members who were Northamptonshire deputy lieutenants to oversee the execution of the Militia Ordinance in that county, it was reported ‘that my Lord Spencer and Mr Tate go down this week in a coach together’.51CJ ii. 614a; HMC Buccleuch, i. 304. Before departing for Northamptonshire, Tate pledged to bring in two horses on the propositions for supplying the proposed parliamentary army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and he would duly supply the earl’s commissary with ‘two able bay horses’, complete with riders, their armour and equipment, worth an estimated £48.52CJ ii. 488a; PJ iii. 472; SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 21. On 9 August, in response to a letter from a group of Parliament’s leading supporters in Northamptonshire, the Commons appointed Tate, Crewe and other Commons-men as a committee for the county, with instructions to continue the work of executing the Militia Ordinance there.53CJ ii. 711a. Tate had returned to the Commons by 16 September, when he was named to a committee for receiving information against royalist MPs ‘that they may be proceeded against as the House shall think fit’.54CJ ii. 769b.

Between mid-September 1642 and the end of March 1643, Tate received only six appointments in the House, although several of these suggest that he was aligned with the war party at Westminster.55CJ ii. 825a, 838b, 863b, 919a, 994b; iii. 24b. Thus on 7 November he was named with John Pym and several other prominent Members to prepare a declaration upon a Commons’ vote that the king’s refusal to accept Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire as one of Parliament’s peace emissaries represented ‘a denial in his Majesty and a refusal to grant a treaty’. This declaration was to include reference to the king’s willingness to receive peace overtures from Ireland’s Catholic rebels.56CJ ii. 838b. On 30 March 1643, Tate he was appointed with Pym and other war-party stalwarts to report a conference with the Lords concerning the defacement by Henry Marten and other Commons militants of the ‘superstitious monuments’ in the queen’s chapel at Somerset House. This iconoclastic initiative, which the war party – and presumably Tate also – endorsed, was rightly perceived as an attempt to poison the peace talks in progress at Oxford.57Supra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ iii. 24b. His contributions to debate during these months were apparently few and far between and reveal nothing as to his factional allegiance in the House.58Harl. 164, ff. 312v, 355v; Add. 18777, ff. 123v, 171v.

Tate’s engagement with the House’s proceedings appears to have increased markedly from the late spring of 1643 – perhaps in response to the failure of the Oxford peace treaty. Between May 1643 and mid-February 1644 – when he was made chairman of a major committee for reforming the earl of Essex’s army – he was named to 30 committees, appointed three times as a messenger to the Lords and served as a teller in two divisions.59CJ iii. 80a, 138b, 191b, 352a, 361a; LJ vi. 42a, 103a. His appointments during this period convey the strong impression that he favoured initiatives for strengthening Parliament’s war machine and its propaganda offensive against the king and his adherents.60CJ iii. 86a, 98a, 138b, 154a, 173b, 197b, 257b, 263a, 276b, 278b, 320a, 333a, 342a, 345a, 347a; LJ vi. 103a. On 4 July, for example, he was named to a small committee, dominated by godly Members, for preparing a declaration ‘setting forth the rise and progress of the rebellion in Ireland’, and on 19 July he was teamed with Marten and eight other Members on a committee for vindicating the vow and covenant – the oath that Pym and his allies had introduced early in June (which Tate had taken on 6 June) in response to a royalist conspiracy to deliver up London to the king.61CJ iii. 118a, 154a, 173b.

In August 1643, Tate emerged as a leading supporter in the House of Sir William Waller* – the military hero of the London militants and Tate’s neighbour on King Street, St Martin-in-the-Fields.62Infra, ‘Sir William Waller’; SP28/162, pt. 1. When the peace party and its allies forced a division in the Commons on 2 August to inquire into Parliament’s recent defeats in the west country – which the earl of Essex blamed upon Waller – Tate and John Selden were majority tellers against this proposal.63CJ iii. 191b; Harl. 165, f. 134. On 9 August, he was named to a committee for assisting the London militants in raising a new army under Waller that would be largely independent of the earl of Essex’s authority (Tate may well have had this new force in mind when he donated £50 to Parliament’s war chest on 21 August).64CJ iii. 197b; SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol. Tate became associated with an equally warlike policy on 16 September, when he was named with Pym and many other friends of the Covenanters to a committee for facilitating the negotiations in Edinburgh for an Anglo-Scottish military alliance.65CJ iii. 244a. In a debate on 22 September on the loss of Bristol that summer, Tate questioned Essex’s authority to try the Commons-man principally implicated in this defeat, the war-party grandee Nathaniel Fiennes I* – although Fiennes himself was willing to submit to the lord general’s authority.66Add. 18778, f. 55. That same day (22 Sept.), Tate was listed by John Rushworth* among those MPs who took the Covenant.67Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 481. On 5 October, the Commons dispatched Tate and four of Pym’s closest allies to inform the lord general of proceedings at Westminster to raise horse for Waller’s army by commission from another of Essex’s military rivals, the earl of Manchester.68CJ iii. 263a. Equally revealing is Tate’s appointment on 17 October to a committee for nominating a ‘council of war’ that was intended, it seems, to augment the efforts of the Committee of Safety* to manage the war effort and Parliament’s dealings with its increasingly insubordinate lord general. This committee was dominated by war-party MPs, including Pym, Waller, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Oliver St John.69Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; CJ iii. 278b-279a. Nothing came of this initiative, however, and the Commons settled instead for adding three men to the Committee of Safety who were prepared to take a tough line with the lord general – namely, Hesilrige, Sir Peter Wentworth and, on 12 December, Tate.70CJ iii. 339a; LJ vi. 338b.

Tate’s activities and factional allegiance at Westminster during the early months of 1644 were shaped to a considerable extent by his appointment in first place on 26 February to a committee – set up in response to a City petition – for ‘the reformation of the lord general’s army’.71CJ iii. 408b; Add. 18779, f. 73. As chairman of this body, Tate delivered at least eight reports to the House during February and March.72CJ iii. 410b, 419b, 421b, 424a, 427a, 431a; Harl. 166, ff. 26-7, 28v, 34, 34v, 36v, 39v; Add. 18779, ff. 72, 73; Add. 31116, pp. 239, 243, 254. The committee’s primary task was to nominate and thus reconstitute Essex’s officer corps, and to this end it was obliged to confer regularly with the lord general and his subordinates.73CJ iii. 415a, 422a, 424b, 433b. Sir Simonds D’Ewes described Tate and his fellow committeemen as ‘all violent spirits’ and enemies to Essex’s army, ‘for now it was to be reduced to little above half the number it had formerly been, and many officers were to be discharged’.74Harl. 166, f. 18.

The work of Tate’s committee, which complemented that of Robert Scawen* during the early months of 1644, was part of a wider process of military and political re-organisation associated with the Scots’ entry into the war, the establishment of the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK) and the strengthening of Manchester’s authority as commander of the Eastern Association army. The architects of these highly partisan policies were the war-party grandees; and in helping to bring Essex and his army more firmly to heel, Tate was advancing their agenda.75Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; infra, ‘Robert Scawen’. He revealed his factional loyalties all too clearly on 21 March in reporting a proposal from his committee that Essex be desired by the Commons to promote Manchester and another war-party favourite John 2nd Baron Robartes to senior positions within his army. In making such a recommendation the committee exceeded its remit, however, and it was rejected accordingly.76Harl. 166, f. 36v. Not surprisingly, the committee’s proceedings provoked accusations of political partiality from Essex’s officers, obliging Tate and his colleagues to make a ‘protestation’ to the House that they were motivated ‘not out of favour or affection but in mere duty to the state’.77Add. 18779, f. 73. Once his committee had done its work on Essex’s army, it was retained as part of the Commons’ machinery for addressing military disputes and cases of alleged malpractice by officers and army administrators.78CJ iii. 431a, 442a, 447b, 475a, 500b, 508b, 517a, 519b, 544a, 587b.

Tate made his support for the war party’s programme clear at several other points during the spring and summer of 1644 – a period in which he was named to 25 committees and served as a manager of three conferences with the Lords.79CJ iii. 429a, 436b, 438a. On 1 March, for example, he joined Wentworth, St John and other Commons-men in speaking ‘very highly’ against recent votes in the Lords that authorised any peer to attend meetings of the CBK – regardless of whether they were a member – and Essex to ignore its orders if he so chose. That same day (1 Mar.), Tate was named with Wentworth, St John and five other war-party men to prepare a declaration expressing ‘the resentment this House has of the proceedings of the Lords herein’.80Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iii. 411b; Harl. 166, f. 19. With the war party grandees determined to counter moves by the Essexians to arrange a swift and exclusively English settlement, St John and Sir Henry Vane II ‘set on’ Tate and other Commons-men on 15 March to secure a vote for referring the framing of peace propositions to the CBK. Tate then chaired and reported from a committee, and managed a conference with the Lords, for justifying the Commons’ decision to refer the question of settling ‘a just and safe peace’ to the CBK, ‘so the advice and counsel of the commissioners of Scotland may be had therein’.81Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; Harl. 166, f. 33; Add. 31116, p. 248; CJ iii. 428b, 429a; LJ vi. 471b. Reporting from this committee again, on 23 March, Tate systematically refuted arguments made by the Lords for referring the framing of propositions to a new committee rather than, as the Commons continued to insist, to the CBK.82CJ iii. 435b-436b. After making this report he was appointed to manage a conference to communicate its contents to the Lords.83CJ iii. 436b; Harl. 166, f. 38v. On 16 March, he sided with the war party grandees again in arguing for the establishment of a parliamentary committee to examine a military dispute in the midlands involving Essex’s ally Thomas Lord Grey of Groby*. The Essexians in the House, by contrast, wanted the matter referred to a court martial convened under the lord general’s authority.84Supra, ‘Thomas Lord Grey of Groby’; ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; Harl. 166, f. 34. During the spring and summer, Tate was named to committees for authorising the CBK to liaise with Edinburgh over the draft peace propositions, to reprimand the earl of Essex for disobeying the CBK’s orders, and for recruiting and maintaining Waller’s army.85CJ iii. 466a, 542b, 542b.

Presbyterianism and new modelling, 1644-5

Tate emerged in July and August 1644 as a standard-bearer for a Scottish-style Presbyterian church settlement. Before the summer of 1644, certainly if his appointments are any guide, he had done relatively little as a Commons-man to advance the cause of godly reformation. In October 1643 he had been named to a committee for considering proposals from the Westminster Assembly for the suppression of antinomianism.86CJ iii. 271b. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this was an important committee or that Tate was one of its active members. Similarly, there was nothing exceptional in his appointment during the spring and summer of 1644 to committees for demolishing all ‘superstitious and illegal matters’ in church worship; for the regular payment of tithes; and for establishing a godly ministry in Hampshire.87CJ iii. 470b, 566b, 579b.

The first clear indication of a strong commitment on Tate’s part to settling Presbyterian church discipline in England is his chairmanship of a sub-committee, set up in May or June 1644, of a committee of the whole House to consider proposals from the Westminster Assembly governing the ordination of ministers. His report from this sub-committee on 19 July included the controversial stipulation that ordinands be required to take the Covenant – a clause that ‘cost a long debate’.88CJ iii. 506a, 536b, 542b, 565a; Harl. 166, f. 98v. His status as one of the Commons’ leading men-of-business on ecclesiastical affairs was confirmed with his addition on 19 August to the committee of both Houses to attend the Westminster Assembly.89CJ iii. 593a; LJ vi. 677a. Over the next three years or so, he served as one of the main points of contact between the Commons and the Assembly, and he was regularly employed – often with Francis Rous or Sir Robert Harley – to relay the House’s progress on church reform to the assembled divines or to inform MPs of developments in the Jerusalem Chamber, the room in Westminster Abbey where the Assembly convened. The work of liaising between the House and the Assembly, and of preparing legislation relating to the Directory for Public Worship (the new Presbyterian handbook for services) and other components of Parliament’s church settlement, also accounted for many of his appointments as a committeeman and messenger to the Lords during the mid-1640s.90CJ iii. 611a, 630a, 652a, 675a, 688a, 705b, 730a; iv. 7b, 9b, 10a, 40b, 70a, 90a, 114a, 121b, 131a; LJ vii. 11a, 159a, 264b; Mins. and Pprs. of the Westminster Assembly ed. C. Van Dixhoorn, i. 16, 139; ii. 255, 298, 427, 439; iii. 528, 566, 582, 614, 623, 655, 658, 701; iv. 210, 314, 471; R.S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, 390.

Tate’s evident enthusiasm for a clericalist Presbyterian church set him at odds with some of his war-party allies in the debates of the so-called ‘committee for accommodation’ in September 1644. For whereas St John and Vane II argued for an Erastian church settlement that extended liberty of conscience to ‘orthodox’ religious Independents, Tate and Rous championed the cause of ‘rigid’ Presbyterianism and earned the praise of the Scottish minister and polemicist Robert Baillie for their pains.91G. Gillespie, Notes of Debates and Procs. of the Assembly of Divines and other Commrs. at Westminster, ed. D. Meek, 70, 71, 103; Baillie, ii. 237; J.T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, 110; Y. Chung, ‘Parl. and the cttee. for accommodation 1644-6’, PH xxx. 295-6, 297. Tate was particularly keen to expedite the introduction of the Directory, making a motion to this effect in the committee for accommodation.92Gillespie, Notes, 78; Works of the Rev. John Lightfoot ed. J.R. Pitman, xiii. 337. On 3 January 1645, he headed a Commons’ committee, and was appointed with Rous and Harley the next day (4 Jan.), to manage a conference with the Lords concerning amendments to the ordinance for bringing in the Directory.93CJ iv. 9b, 10a. In March and April 1645, the House looked particularly to Tate, Rous and Harley to liaise with the Scots commissioners ‘touching the proceedings of the Houses in the points of church government’ and to press the Assembly to expedite measures for a confession of faith and rules governing admission to the sacrament.94CJ iv. 90a, 114a, 121b, 131a. On 17 April, the three men were included on a sub-committee of the committee of the whole House on religion that was charged with preparing an ordinance for enforcing use of the Directory and prohibiting the Book of Common Prayer. At some point over the next six weeks, this sub-committee was also ordered to consult with the Assembly and the London ministry in preparing an ordinance for erecting a Presbyterian system throughout the entire kingdom.95CJ iv. 114a; Add. 31116, pp. 410, 419, 423, 439; Baillie, ii. 271-2; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 187-8, 189, 264-5.

Tate’s disagreement with the war-party grandees on the issue of church government did not prevent him working closely with them during the autumn and winter of 1644 in laying the foundations for new-modelling Parliament’s armies. In the eight months or so between the initiation of this process, in September 1644, and early June 1645, when the New Model took to the field in pursuit of the king’s army, Tate was named to about 25 committees, served as a messenger to the Lords on four occasions and as a teller in three divisions.96CJ iii. 652a, 659b, 680a, 734b; iv. 33a, 64b, 70a; LJ vii. 11a, 113b, 159a, 264b.

The beginning of Tate’s involvement in the work of new modelling can be dated to 27 September 1644, when the Commons referred a report from the CBK concerning the ‘miscarriages’ of Essex’s officers ‘in the late disaster in the west’ (the defeat earlier that month at Lostwithiel) to Tate’s committee for reforming the lord general’s army. The oath of secrecy under which the committee had operated since its establishment was confirmed, and it was given power to arrest any person it saw fit.97CJ iii. 641a. Working in close collaboration with a sub-committee of the CBK for investigating the defeat in the west (a body dominated by the war-party grandees), Tate’s committee would prove vital to the cause of new modelling, for the more thoroughly Essex’s reputation was blasted the easier it would be to secure his removal as commander-in-chief and implement wholesale military reform.98Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; J. Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey (2002), 119-21. On 8 October, Tate successfully moved that his committee be given power to examine the prominent Essexian MPs Sir Philip Stapilton and Anthony Nicoll.99CJ iii. 656a; Add. 31116, p. 329. And he clashed with the Essexians more openly on 11 October, when he and Edmund Prideaux I were majority tellers against honouring Parliament’s treaty obligations for the maintenance of the Scottish army in northern England. The defeated tellers were the Essexian grandees Stapilton and Denzil Holles.100CJ iii. 659b; Harl. 166, f. 129v; Add. 31116, p. 330. Clearly enthusiasm for a clericalist Presbyterian church – which Prideaux as well as Tate had demonstrated that autumn – did not necessarily translate into support for the Covenanting interest more generally. Tate’s report from his committee on 21 October in which he detailed the charges against Essex’s quarter-master, Colonel Dalbier, provoked ‘hot debate’ in the House, with Stapilton, Holles and other Essexians defending the officer, ‘yet divers were very violent on the contrary’.101CJ iii. 672b; Harl. 166, f. 154; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 119. On 28 October, Tate re-affirmed his alignment with the war party, acting as a teller with William Strode I in favour of responding to a petition from ‘many thousand’ Londoners, calling for justice to be done upon delinquents – notably, Archbishop Laud – and for holding new elections to recruit the House. The minority tellers were, once again, Holles and Stapilton.102CJ iii. 680a.

Following the ‘narrative’ made by Sir William Waller* and Oliver Cromwell* on 25 November 1644 concerning the second Newbury campaign and the earl of Manchester’s alleged miscarriages as a general, Tate moved to proceed to a vote against the earl, but after a long debate the House instead tasked Tate’s committee with investigating the controversy and reporting its findings ‘with all convenient speed’.103CJ iii. 704b; Harl. 166, ff. 156r-v; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 146. Tate’s committee proceeded in highly partisan fashion, gathering evidence against Manchester from a tight group of Cromwell’s supporters.104D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 286. Moreover, on 28 November, the committee seems to have leaked information to the House – almost certainly passed on from the CBK sub-committee – that Essex had employed Catholics in his army.105CJ iii. 707b; Adamson, ‘The triumph of oligarchy’, 120, 121. On 4 December, the Essexians failed to secure Commons’ orders for lifting the oath of secrecy upon Tate’s committee and for transferring its discussions concerning Cromwell’s charges against Manchester back to the floor of the House.106CJ iii. 713a, 713b, 714a; Harl. 483, f. 120v; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 88-9.

Tate’s most important contribution to the cause of new-modelling was the report he delivered from his committee to a committee of the whole House on 9 December 1644. For instead of detailing the accusations against Manchester, he informed the House that ‘the whole body of their army being infected, nothing would serve for their recovery less than the entire renewing of their constitution’. Identifying ‘pride and covetousness’ as the chief causes of this distemper, he proposed that no Parliament-man should exercise either civil or military office for the remainder of the war. In the bitter and lengthy argument which ensued, Cromwell and other ‘violent’ Members spoke in favour of Tate’s proposal, and when Speaker Lenthall resumed the chair it was probably Tate who made a formal motion in favour of self-denying, which, seconded by Vane II and others, was voted accordingly. Although the Scots commissioners and other onlookers were not sure what to make of this initiative, D’Ewes and Bulstrode Whitelocke, who were present in the House at the time, were adamant that Tate had been ‘set on by that party who contrived the outing of the lord general and to bring on their own designs’.107Add. 31116, p. 356; Harl. 483, f. 122; CJ iii. 718a; Perfect Occurrences of Parliament no. 18 (6-13 Dec. 1644), unpag. (E.258.1); Ludlow, Mems. i. 114-15; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 349; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 3-5; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 89-91; Kishlansky, New Model Army, 29-30, 296. Tate had certainly collaborated closely with the war-party grandees at numerous points during the previous year, regardless of the fact that his clericalist Presbyterian convictions were not shared by the likes of Cromwell and Vane.

Tate and his committee worked hard during the first three months of 1645 on measures associated with the passage of the Self-Denying Ordinance, the establishment of the New Model and other developments resisted by the Essexians, including the execution of Sir John Hotham*.108Supra, ‘Sir John Hotham’; CJ iv. 7a, 16a, 20b, 25a, 25b, 26b, 31b, 35a, 42b, 48b, 49a, 56a, 59b, 60b, 73b, 76b. On 18 January, the House referred the nomination of regimental officers in the New Model to Tate’s committee.109CJ iv. 25a. On 21 January, he presented to the Commons

the names of 12 colonels for the 12 regiments of foot and 10 for the 10 regiments of horse, amongst which Sir Thomas Fairfax* being named for the first colonel of horse, it was afterwards upon a long debate resolved that he should be commander-in-chief over the whole army ... it being from thence inferred that the Lord General Essex must be laid aside...110Add. 31116, p. 375.

It was Tate’s report, therefore, that initiated the formal, and highly divisive, proceedings in the House that day (21 Jan.) for appointing Fairfax as commander-in-chief of the New Model and for beginning the process of nominating his senior officers.111CJ iv. 26. From this point onwards, however, the work of selecting officers was referred to a committee of the whole House chaired by a leading member of Tate’s committee – indeed, its co-chairman with Tate by early 1645 – John Lisle.112Supra, ‘John Lisle’; CJ iv. 27a; R.K.G. Temple, ‘The original officer list of the New Model Army’, HR lix. 50-1. The only subsequent occasion on which Tate is known to have contributed to the deliberations over Fairfax’s officer list was as a majority teller on 28 February in favour of nominating the radical officer Captain William Bough.113CJ iv. 64b; Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 54, 66. It is also worth noting that despite his experience in matters of military administration, he was not among those appointed to the Army Committee* late in March 1645, which was dominated by leading supporters of the New Model.

Parliamentary career, 1645-6

Tate was probably among the busiest men at Westminster between June 1645 and March 1646. During that period he was named to approximately 45 committees and to eight teams for managing or reporting conferences with the Lords, served as a messenger to the Lords on seven occasions and acted as a teller in two divisions.114CJ iv. 180b, 187a, 192a, 209b, 228a, 231b, 242a, 307a, 324a, 328b, 344a, 345a, 351a, 351b, 364a, 397a, 449a, 454b; LJ vii. 441a, 458a, 469b, 670a, 708a; viii. 4b, 186b. Much of his work at Westminster, certainly during the summer of 1645, derived from a familiar source – his chairmanship of the committee for the reformation of the army, or as the clerk of the Commons generally referred to it, ‘the committee where Mr Tate has the chair’. It was to Tate’s committee that the House, after ‘much debate’ and several divisions on 23 June, referred the sensitive task of transcribing and, where necessary, translating and deciphering, the king’s correspondence that had been seized at Naseby. Although 24 Members were added to the committee for this purpose, the work of examining the correspondence and preparing it for publication was undertaken principally by Tate, with the assistance of a handful MPs of whom the Independents Edmund Prideaux, Miles Corbett and Sir Peter Wentworth seem to have been the most active.115CJ iv. 183; Harl. 166, f. 221v; Add. 18780, f. 86; The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645), passim (E.292.27); E. Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles (1648), 183 (E.414.17); J. Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), pt. 1, p. 91; J. Peacey, ‘The exploitation of captured royal corresp. and Anglo-Scottish relations in the British civil wars, 1645-6’, Scottish Hist. Review, lxxix. 215-17. Tate was appointed a messenger to the Lords on 26 June and again on 1 July to carry up those letters the committee had read, along with assurances that the remainder would follow once they had been examined by the Commons.116CJ iv. 187a, 192a; LJ vii. 458a, 469b; Peacey, ‘Captured royal corresp.’, 216. In a report from his committee on 30 June, Tate recommended that the ‘most material’ letters be communicated to the City at a meeting of Common Hall and also sent to Scotland ‘and into foreign parts’ for propaganda purposes. The Commons agreed to these recommendations and assigned the task of communicating the letters at Common Hall to Tate, Lisle and the prominent Independent Samuel Browne. On 3 July, the three men presented a selection of the letters at Guildhall, after which they each delivered a speech by way of commentary.117CJ iv. 190a, 194b; Add. 18780, f. 57v; Add. 31116, p. 436. In his oration, Tate contrasted the king’s obduracy towards Parliament with his favours towards the Irish rebels, and he urged his hearers to

stand to your arms and defend yourselves, for there is no hopes for you unless you can submit your necks to the queen and be transformed into Irish rebels and papists. I know not how you can obtain any favour at court, especially having such a mediator as ... a Parliament that is so hated by this king; as long as that mediates for you, you shall have nothing. But if you can have a popish Catholic queen to solicit in your behalf, you shall have anything. I know you are too much Englishmen and Protestants to submit to such base conditions. Therefore, lay aside all divisions and unite yourselves in this cause, that you may be masters of the popish party, that otherwise will kill you all.118Three Speeches Spoken at a Common-Hall (1645), 7-8 (E.292.29).

The three men’s speeches were reportedly greeted with ‘great acclamation’ by the citizens and Parliament-men present.119Add. 18780, f. 61v. The Commons would refer further caches of captured royalist correspondence to Tate’s committee over the next six months; and the task of communicating these letters to the Lords and preparing them for publication would occupy him intermittently at Westminster during the autumn and winter of 1645 and into early 1646.120CJ iv. 248a, 320b, 324a, 344a, 345a, 349b, 372a, 416b, 426b; LJ vii. 708a; Peacey, ‘Captured royal corresp.’, 224-5. However, it is not clear what role, if any, he played in ensuring that evidence in this correspondence of the Covenanters’ secret negotiations with the king was withheld from public view.121Peacey, ‘Captured royal corresp.’, 227-9, 231.

But the area of parliamentary business that seems to have accounted for most of Tate’s assignments and workload at Westminster between June 1645 and March 1646 was the establishment of Presbyterian church discipline. In addition to his role in liaising between the Commons and the Westminster Assembly, he was named to numerous committees and to conference teams for settling Presbyterian church government in London (and in Covent Garden, where he resided, specifically), publishing the Directory, preparing legislation for excluding ‘ignorant and scandalous’ persons from the sacrament, and on related aspects of Parliament’s ecclesiastical programme. A great deal of the burden in such matters was shouldered by a relatively small group of Commons-men and in particular by Tate, Harley and Rous.122CJ iv. 170a, 174a, 180a, 218a, 218b, 224a, 231a, 231b, 242a, 252a, 276a, 290a, 300b, 317a, 324a, 328b, 348a, 352b, 373a, 381b, 397a, 398a, 411b, 413b, 454b; LJ vii. 670a; viii. 186b. It was Tate who chaired and reported from a three-man committee – his colleagues on this occasion being Rous and Whitelocke – that the Commons set up on 3 July to counter an attempt by the Lords to exempt peers’ private chapels from Presbyterian church government.123CJ iv. 224a, 231a, 242a. And it was evidently Tate again who chaired a sub-committee – established on 8 August – of the committee of the whole House on religion that was charged with preparing the ordinance for excluding scandalous persons from the sacrament.124Add. 18780, ff. 88, 92; Add. 31116, pp. 448-9. On 20 August, he reported from this sub-committee

a list of notorious sins ... for which persons guilty of them were to be suspended from the communion, and also a relation of the former uses in many Protestant churches beyond sea in the suspension of such persons, and also of the form used in primitive times and of the opinion of the Greek fathers and other divines that lived in those times... .125Add. 31116, p. 453.

The burden of the sub-committee’s case was that the ministry must uphold ‘public discipline ... the pastor of the flock is to pass by nothing which is detrimental to the people and what doth not conduce to the benefit of the church’. Tate concluded his report, which was evidently the product of extensive consultation with members of the Assembly, with proposals that articulated the ministers’ desire to give parish presbyteries and Presbyterian classes the power to judge scandalous offences and to exclude unrepentant sinners from the sacrament. But this was too much for Browne, Selden and John Wylde, who criticised the sub-committee’s work as an example of the clergy grasping after ‘an unlimited power’.126Harl. 166, ff. 255v-256; Add. 18780, ff. 102-4; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 270-2. The House looked to Tate a week later (27 Aug.) to thank the Scottish Presbyterian minister Alexander Henderson for his sermon to the Commons that day and to request than another of the Scots commissioners preach the next fast sermon.127CJ iv. 254b.

Having passed votes on 26 September 1645 that would make a standing committee of both Houses the final court of appeal for communicants excluded from the sacrament, the House ordered the 8 August sub-committee to amend the draft ordinance accordingly and referred this task to the particular care of Tate and Rous.128CJ iv. 290a; Add. 18780, ff. 126v, 127; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 275-6. After the sub-committee had reported the amended draft ordinance on 3 October, Tate moved that the presbytery should have a discretionary power to suspend communicants for offences not specified in the legislation, pending adjudication by the proposed standing committee of both Houses. But although he seems to have regarded this proposal as an acceptable compromise between the Erastian majority in the House and the clericalist majority in the Assembly – which was adamant that the ministry, not Parliament, should be the ultimate arbiter in such matters – Selden, Vane II and several other Commons-men thought that it still conceded too much power to the clergy.129Add. 18780, ff. 133v-134v; Add. 31116, p. 470; Harl. 166, ff. 267v-268; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 277. As chairman of a committee set up on 8 October to make yet more changes to the draft ordinance on scandalous offences, Tate reported these amendments on 10 October, whereupon the House voted, after two divisions, in favour of adding a clause stating that the presbytery be allowed to suspend communicants from the sacrament only for the specified offences ‘until it be otherwise declared by both Houses of Parliament’.130CJ iv. 300b, 303a; Add. 18780, ff. 140, 143v; Add. 31116, p. 471; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 278. Tate appears to have been unhappy with this vote, for he was closely associated with initiatives in the Commons and the Assembly to lengthen the catalogue of offences for which the presbytery could exclude communicants.131CJ iv. 309a, 324a; Add. 18780, f. 144; Mins. and Pprs. of the Westminster Assembly ed. Dixhoorn, iii. 701; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 280-1. Nevertheless, when the London Presbyterians petitioned the Commons on 19 November, complaining that the ordinance for excluding scandalous communicants gave too little power to the clergy and presbyteries to discipline offenders, Tate chaired the committee set up to express the House’s indignation at this perceived slight to its privileges.132CJ iv. 348a; Add. 18780, ff. 167-168v; Add. 31116, pp. 486-7; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 282-3. On 28 November, however, he revealed his exasperation with the House’s Erastian punctiliousness by questioning its resolve to take issue with the Assembly on the question of jure divino Presbyterianism. The House and the Assembly ‘are come to a near point’ on church government, insisted Tate, yet ‘now we fall into question, which will put off the business again as far as ever it was – as they did at Uxbridge [the Uxbridge peace treaty], when our commissioners desired an answer, they [the royalist commissioners] would demand questions and so put off the treaty without any fruit’.133Add. 18780, f. 171v; Add. 31116, p. 490. In a session on 4 February 1646 of the committee of the whole House on religion, he reported a vote of the committee of accommodation (which had been revived late in 1645) that

there being an inclination to bear with our brethren [the Scots] in the matter of subordination [to the clergy] ... a very great impediment, likely to hinder the work committed to this committee, is the want of a full rule for purging the congregations in point of receiving the sacrament and choosing fit officers [elders]... .134CJ iv. 428b.

But the Commons voted against authorising the committee on religion to consider an expedient for ‘settling the business concerning the keeping [of] scandalous persons from the sacrament’.135CJ iv. 428b; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 286-7.

Tate’s high-profile Presbyterianism may explain, in part, why the House selected him on a regular basis between mid-1645 and early 1646 for assignments to liaise with the Scots, draft Commons’ communiqués to them and to address Scottish concerns at Westminster.136CJ iv. 174b, 177a, 180b, 188b, 198a, 205b, 209b, 223b, 226a, 227a, 245b, 252b, 274b, 275a, 298b, 307a, 340a, 422a; LJ vii. 643a; Harl. 166, f. 219v. In July, he helped steer an ordinance through the Houses for appointing a parliamentary commission to reside with the Scottish army in England – a measure that the Scots commissioners hoped would heighten awareness at Westminster of the hardships and difficulties that General Leven’s troops endured without adequate supply.137Supra, ‘Committee of Both Kingdoms’; CJ iv. 205b, 209b. On 18 August, Tate was named in first place to a committee to respond to letters from the commissioners with the Scottish army and to ‘take care to see such things sent as they now write for and as they shall, from time to time, desire’.138CJ iv. 245b. And it was Tate, as chairman of the committee for reforming the army, who took a lead in drafting legislation that summer for paying the arrears of Essex’s officers and their Scottish colleagues who had been laid aside as a consequence of new modelling.139CJ iv. 174b, 177a, 180b, 226a, 235b. He also chaired a committee in August for reprimanding the Scots’ and their English allies’ arch-enemy, the prominent London radical John Lilburne, for encouraging a petition to the House, complaining that his recent arrest had been the work of a Presbyterian conspiracy.140CJ iv. 254a; J. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, HJ xliii. 628-32. Tate’s contribution to preparing what would become the Newcastle peace propositions began in mid-August with his report from a conference with the Lords concerning the Scots commissioners’ desire for re-opening negotiations with the king on the basis of the Uxbridge treaty articles. His services were particularly sought after by the Commons when it came to framing a peace proposition for ‘a settlement of reformation [in religion] by Act of Parliament’.141CJ iv. 243b, 354b, 364a, 365a, 428a, 454b, 478b; LJ vii. 539b-540b; viii. 186b.

Yet by no means all of Tate’s appointments and work at Westminster in relation to the Scots were attentive to their interests or uncritical of their proceedings. In the autumn of 1645, he was named to several committees, and helped to manage a conference with the Lords, for pressing the Scots to deploy their army against Newark – as Parliament had repeatedly requested – complaining of abuses committed by their troops in northern England and demanding the return of English towns in their hands.142CJ iv. 274b, 275a, 298b, 307a, 340a; LJ vii. 643a. Moreover, on 29 January 1646, he was named to a committee for investigating the publication of a pamphlet by the Scottish propagandist David Buchanan that was deeply critical of the parliamentary and religious Independents.143CJ iv. 422a.

However, there is good reason to suppose that Tate’s collaboration with the Scots commissioners and the Westminster Assembly during the second half of 1645 in promoting a ‘rigid’ Presbyterian settlement served to widen the disagreement that had emerged between him and the Independent grandees late in 1644 over church government. By early 1646, with the end of the war now in sight, it is likely that he had conceived a dislike of their policies and principles more generally. On 21 February, he was a teller with Alderman Thomas Atkin against debating a petition from the London common council attacking the Independent MP Francis Allein for having revealed evidence of collusion between City leaders and the Scots commissioners over settling Presbyterianism ‘according to their Covenant’. Given the opportunity, the House would likely vindicate Allein and criticise the City – as Tate and Atkin realised – and this is precisely what happened after the Independent grandees Hesilrige and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire won the division. According to the London diarist Thomas Juxon*, the attack on Allein emerged from a new-formed alliance between the Lords, the Scots, the Assembly and the City, which was determined to represent the Independents as ‘men of no justice, as men that would have no peace, no government, nor no kingly power and as men that would disunite the two kingdoms’.144CJ iv. 449a; Add. 31116, p. 511; Juxon Jnl. 102-4.

Early in March 1646, Tate and Rous conferred with Baillie and the ‘Covenant-engaged’ group in the Westminster Assembly concerning the passage through the Lords of the ordinance for excluding scandalous offenders from the sacrament. The two men informed the ministers that if the earl of Manchester and other Essexian peers could remove a clause for establishing lay commissioners in each county as the final court of appeal, ‘and put in their room the classical Presbyteries to be reporters to the Parliament of all the not-enumerat[ed] [i.e. uncatalogued] cases of scandal, they [Tate and Rous] are confident to carry it in their House, according to the Lords’ amendment’. It is interesting to note that the clause the Scots and their friends wanted inserted was precisely that moved by Tate in the Commons on 3 October 1645.145Baillie, ii. 359; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 290-2. The efforts of Tate and Rous to secure amendment of the ordinance in the Lords were evidently part of a much larger campaign by the Essexians and their Scottish and London allies to prescribe the terms of settlement both in state and church in anticipation of the king’s imminent surrender.146Baillie, ii. 359; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 108-115.

Parliamentary career, 1646-7

Tate’s alignment with the Presbyterian grandees at Westminster during 1646 is hard to doubt, although it was probably not until 1647 that he was drawn into their innermost counsels. Between April 1646 and July 1647 – when he took leave of absence for almost five months – he was named to 60 or so committees and two Commons’ teams for managing conferences, served as a messenger to the Lords on seven occasions and acted as a teller in four divisions (all in 1647).147CJ iv. 553a, 599a, 622a, 737b; v. 69b, 70b, 131b, 146a, 146b, 172b, 209a, 217a, 236b, 253b; LJ viii. 408b, 437b, 590a, 697b; ix. 261a. A high proportion of his appointments during this period related to the House’s religious and ecclesiastical policies and its dealings with the Westminster Assembly.148CJ iv. 502a, 511a, 518b, 549a, 595b, 622a, 625b, 688a, 714b, 719b; v. 2b, 7b, 10b, 11a, 35a, 51v, 66a, 69b, 70b, 119b, 145b, 146a, 146b, 151a; LJ viii. 437b, 697b. He was by no means the only Commons-man with strong Presbyterian sympathies who was named to committees on 16 and 22 April 1646 to reprimand the Assembly for the breach of parliamentary privilege inherent in its petition to both Houses of 23 March, a petition in which the divines had attacked the ordinance for excluding scandalous offenders as unfit for purpose and as a denial of the power they claimed for themselves by divine right. Indeed, it is likely that he and Rous were included on the 22 April committee, which was dominated by the Independents, precisely in order to make clear to the Assembly that even its closest friends in the Commons were displeased with its proceedings on this occasion.149CJ iv. 511a, 518b; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 293-4.

Like the Assembly, however, Tate remained dissatisfied with Parliament’s measures to counter heterodoxy; and on 29 April 164, he and Nathaniel – or possibly Francis – Bacon procured an order authorising the Commons-men who were members of the Assembly (who included Tate, of course) to draft an ordinance ‘for the prevention of the growth and spreading of heresies and blasphemies and for the punishment of divulgers and assertors of them’.150CJ iv. 526b, 556a; The Eng. Levellers ed. A. Sharp (Cambridge, 1998), 64-5. When, on 18 May, the House re-opened the whole debate surrounding exclusion from the sacrament – possibly as an olive branch to the Scots, who now had custody of the king – it referred the task of enumerating further scandalous offences for which presbyteries could exclude communicants specifically to Tate and Francis Bacon.151CJ iv. 549a; Add. 31116, p. 539; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 295-6. Several of his appointments in May and June suggest that his Presbyterian convictions did not push him into the pro-Scottish camp in the House on every issue. On 23 May, for example, he was named with Browne, Fiennes and Alexander Rigby I – all firm Independents – to manage and report a conference with the Lords for justifying a Commons vote and a speech by the Independent grandee Evelyn of Wiltshire, asserting Parliament’s right to dispose of the king’s person as it saw fit.152CJ iv. 540a, 553a, 570b; Add. 31116, pp. 538-9. However, it was probably no accident that most of his appointments that summer relating to the Newcastle propositions concerned initiatives designed to render them more conformable to the Scots’ desire for closer union between the kingdoms.153CJ iv. 575a, 576a, 587a, 599a, 617a; LJ viii. 408b.

Baillie continued to regard Tate and Rous as his most reliable friends at Westminster, and it was on their motion that he procured a Commons order on 22 July 1646, urging the Assembly to finalise its work on a new catechism and ‘public confession of faith’ – an order that Baillie and his friends also used to divert the Assembly from consideration of objections by its Congregationalist contingent against divine-right Presbyterianism.154CJ iv. 622b; Baillie, ii. 379, 388; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, i. 312-13. At some point late in August, Baillie sent Tate a long memorandum of the church-related matters which they had agreed, in conversation the night before, needed expediting in the House. These included the ordinances for establishing Presbyterian classes nationwide and for punishing heresies and blasphemies, the suppression of itinerant preachers, and the introduction of measures for purging Oxford University of enemies to the Covenant and allowing the Assembly to vet senior academic appointments. Baillie concluded his letter by reminding Tate that ‘if such things be not minded by you and some others as your special work, that which is most dear to you – the honour, truth and church of God – is like suffer yet more. Your more than ordinary favour to me makes me bold to be your remembrancer’.155Baillie, ii. 393.

On 2 September 1646, Tate and ‘Mr Bacon’ – probably Nathaniel – presented from the Commons’ committee of the Westminster Assembly the ordinance for punishing heresies and blasphemies. Setting aside the objections of Hesilrige and his fellow Independents Cornelius Holland and Henry Marten, the House gave this draft legislation a second and third reading and then referred it to the committee of the whole House on religion.156CJ iv. 659b; Harington’s Diary, 34; The ordinance made it a civil offence, punishable in some cases by death, to espouse or disseminate any one of a lengthy list of perceived heresies – including the assertion that ‘church government by Presbytery is Antichristian or unlawful’ – and was attacked by Richard Overton, William Walwyn and other radicals as a ‘Romish’ imposition upon godly consciences.157An Ordinance Presented to the Honorable House of Commons, by Mr. Bacon...and Mr Taet[sic] (1646, 669 f.9.69); An Ordinance Presented to the Honourable House of Commons (1646, E.354.16); Some Modest and Humble Queries Concerning a Printed Paper (1646, E.355.1); Eng. Levellers ed. Sharp, 64-5; The Writings of William Walwyn ed. J. R. McMichael, B. Taft, 236-44; A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the Eng. Revolution, 382-3; Y. Chung, ‘Parliament, the heresy ordinance of 1648 and religious toleration in civil war England’, Jnl. of Church and State, lvii. 130-1. But though the Presbyterian leadership in the Commons, the Assembly and the City approved of ‘the ordinance against sects and heresies’ and pushed hard for its passage into law – which would be delayed until May 1648 – it contained nothing that would greatly trouble ‘orthodox’ Congregationalists.158Baillie, 401-2; Harington’s Diary, 38; Hughes, Gangraena, 381-3; J. Coffey, ‘A ticklish business: defining heresy and orthodoxy n the puritan revolution’ in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture ed. D. Loewenstein, J. Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), 117-18; Chung, ‘The heresy ordinance of 1648’, 119-20, 126-8, 145.

The Scots’ withdrawal from England – an issue that did much to shape Parliament’s proceedings during the second half of 1646 and early 1647 – lent urgency to the quest for a religious settlement that would satisfy both the Covenant-engaged interest and the Erastian majority in the Commons. On 9 October, the House debated the confession of faith that the Assembly had drafted, and ordered Tate and Selden to prepare it for publication, but only for the eyes of Parliament-men that they ‘may advise thereupon’.159CJ iv. 688a; v. 2b. Two months later, on 9 December, Tate was named in first place to a seven-man committee ‘to bring in an enumeration of those more crying national sins for which the nation hath not as yet been humbled before God’ – a subject on which he was clearly an expert.160CJ v. 7b. His last appointment of 1646, on 31 December, was his nomination in second place, after Holles, to a committee for handling complaints about unordained preachers – a breed that Tate was undoubtedly keen to suppress.161CJ v. 35a. On 4 January 1647 he was named in first place to a six-man committee to consider how to sustain a preaching ministry in Ireland and to bring in an ordinance ‘for settling the same form of church government in the kingdom of Ireland as is, or shall be, established in the kingdom of England’.162CJ v. 40b.

Tate’s involvement in Irish affairs at Westminster before 1647 had been limited. He had been included with Harley, Sir John Clotworthy*, William Jephson* and Richard Salwey* on a committee that the Assembly had set up in April 1645 for sending godly ministers to Ireland.163Mins. and Pprs. of the Westminster Assembly ed. Dixhoorn, iii. 582. And he had occasionally been named to committees in the Commons for supplying the Protestant forces in Ireland or consolidating Parliament’s claim to manage Irish affairs.164CJ iii. 154a, 286a, 609a; iv. 428a, 521a, 582b. His most important appointment in this respect was his nomination in July 1645 to the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs* – a standing, bicameral committee that was dominated by Clotworthy, Jephson and other prominent Presbyterians.165CJ iv. 191a; Supra, ‘Committees for Ireland’. However, Tate is known to have attended only five meetings of this committee.166CSP Ire. 1633-47, pp. 416, 423, 463, 476, 512.

During the winter of 1646-7, certainly, Tate spent more time addressing Scottish concerns regarding the disposal of the king and preserving ‘the union between the kingdoms’, than he did on Irish matters.167CJ v. 30a, 45b, 65b. It was undoubtedly with one eye on reassuring the Scots that he helped promote an ordinance early in February for a national day of public humiliation ‘to seek God’s assistance for the suppressing of the great growth of errors and heresies’.168CJ v. 66a, 69b, 70b; LJ viii. 697b. At some point that month (Feb. 1647), Tate, Harley, Holles, Edward Massie and ‘other worthy Presbyterian Members of the House’ attended the committee for complaints (a successor, in part, to the recently abolished Committee for Examinations*) in order to denounce the activities of Anabaptist preachers and other ‘schismatical offenders’.169[J. Gauden], Hinc Illae Lachrymae, or the Impietie of Impunitie (1647), 4 (E.421.6). Tate would take charge that spring of initiatives for removing obstructions in settling Presbyterian church government in the provinces and for perfecting the confession of faith.170CJ v. 145b-146b, 151a.

Tate figured prominently in the Presbyterians’ campaign during the spring and summer of 1647 to dismantle Fairfax’s army and pack off what remained to fight in Ireland. Late in March, after the House had received reports of political agitation in the army, it set up a four-man committee, consisting of Holles, Tate, John Swynfen and Colonel John Birch to prepare a declaration condemning the soldiers’ proceedings. Penned by Holles, this ‘declaration of dislike’ branded the army enemies of the state.171CJ v. 127b, 129a. On 1 April, Tate was a teller on two divisions for transferring command of Parliament’s armies in Ireland from the Independent grandee Philip Sidney*, Viscount Lisle, to parliamentary commissioners and for appointing the prominent Presbyterian Sir William Waller as commander of the forces to be sent from England to Leinster and Ulster. Tate was a teller with Holles in the first division, defeating the Independent grandees Hesilrige and Evelyn of Wiltshire.172CJ v. 131b. However, it was his addition on 7 April to the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs (DHCIA), which had taken over from the CBK as Parliament’s principal executive, that most clearly revealed his commitment to Presbyterian designs against the army.173Supra, ‘Committees for Ireland’; CJ v. 135b; LJ ix. 127b. During April and May, when Presbyterians dominated the committee’s proceedings – at times, to the complete exclusion of their party rivals – Tate attended on a regular basis and was therefore a leading participant in the drive to disband most of Fairfax’s army as cheaply as possible and send the remainder to Ireland.174CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 682; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 744; CJ v. 171a; SP21/26, pp. 49, 50, 51, 70, 74, 78, 83, 85, 89 and passim. He was present, for example, at the crucial meeting on 28 May when, as instructed by the Commons, the DHCIA determined the time and manner of disbanding those of Fairfax’s troops that refused to fight in Ireland. The committee earmarked all the most radical and troublesome regiments for early disbandment, beginning with Fairfax’s own.175CJ v. 176b-177a; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 748-51; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, f. 139v. It seems to have been Tate who reported proposals from the DHCIA on 14 May for dispensing with the Scottish forces in Ulster, which the committee considered surplus to military requirements.176CJ v. 171a, 172a, 172b.

In the aftermath of Cornet Joyce’s removal of the king from Holdenby House early in June 1647, Tate was named to four small committees – two of which he reported from – for communicating with Parliament’s commissioners at Fairfax’s headquarters and for informing the army of the House’s efforts to provide the soldiery with pay and ‘public satisfaction’.177CJ v. 208b, 215a, 215b, 216b, 235b. These appointments notwithstanding, Tate seems to have remained committed to the cause of disbanding or, if necessary, resisting the army. On 12 June and 8 July he carried up to the Lords ordinances for empowering the DHCIA to dispose of sums totalling £35,000 to further the work of drawing off troops from the New Model for service in Ireland.178CJ v. 209a, 236b; LJ ix. 261a. And on 19 June, he and Presbyterian Commons-man Harbottle Grimston were majority tellers against ordering the City to disband the force of reformadoes it had raised to defy the army.179CJ v. 217a. On 19 July, with Presbyterian resistance to the army crumbling, Tate and 12 other Members – most of whom were no friends to the Independents – were granted leave of absence.180CJ v. 250a. He was still at Westminster on 21 July, however, when he and Sir Anthony Irby were tellers in favour of delaying consideration of proposals from the army for addressing its grievances over pay and its fears of Presbyterian conspiracy to invite in foreign forces. The victorious tellers were Hesilrige and Evelyn of Wiltshire.181CJ v. 253b. The next day (22 July), he was ordered to prepare an ordinance for paying the money Parliament owed to poor shoemakers in Northampton.182CJ v. 253b. But as this would be his last mention in the Journal until the autumn, it seems likely that he left Westminster shortly thereafter and was not present in the House during the Presbyterian ‘counter-revolution’ of late July and early August. His addition on 23 November to the committee for investigating the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July would certainly support this argument.183CJ v. 367a.

Parliamentary career and death, 1647-51

Tate’s involvement in the Commons’ proceedings during his last year in the Long Parliament was apparently neither as intense nor as overtly partisan as it had been in 1646-7. Between returning to the House – which he had done by mid-November 1647 – and Pride’s Purge in December 1648 he was named to 35 committees and served as a messenger to the Lords on six occasions and as a teller in two divisions.184CJ v. 403a, 423b, 479a, 545a, 548a, 549a, 558b, 564a; LJ ix. 639b; x. 231b, 237a, 239b, 262b. Most of his appointments during late 1647 and early 1648 relate to four areas of parliamentary business – addressing the army’s material needs; suppressing the threat of Leveller agitation among the soldiery; the oversight of municipal and church government in London; and the removal of obstructions to the work of settling Presbyterian discipline.185CJ v. 360a, 363a, 376b, 387b, 393b, 403a, 414b, 423b, 427a; LJ ix. 639b. He was active that winter on the standing committee for adjudging and excluding scandalous offenders from the sacrament, which had apparently assumed responsibility for establishing Presbyterian classes in the provinces.186Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 430, 432. His tellership with Sir Walter Erle on 4 March 1648 against approving the declaration of the Parliament-men who had fled to the army after the July 1647 riots is confirmation of his continuing alignment with the Presbyterian interest in the House. The majority tellers were, once again, Hesilrige and Evelyn of Wiltshire.187CJ v. Late in March, he was named to committees for reviving the feoffees for buying impropriated livings ‘to be employed for pious and charitable uses’, and for drafting an additional ordinance for the stricter observance of the sabbath.188CJ v. 519a, 522a.

Faced with the prospect of renewed civil war, the Commons turned to Tate late in April 1648 to prepare and carry up to the Lords a declaration requiring the clergy in London to supplicate God for his blessing upon Parliament’s proceedings ‘in this great conjuncture of time’.189CJ v. 545a; LJ x. 231b. ‘We have assurance out of the word of God’, Tate wrote

that we are not in the least danger if God almighty be not incensed against us for our sins and wickedness, which our consciences testify that He is exceedingly against every one of us in particular and the kingdom in general. Yet we believe that if we do heartily and sincerely humble ourselves and turn to the Lord, crying mightily to Him in fervent prayer, with a lively faith in Christ, we shall certainly be delivered from all evils and dangers...190[An Order of Partliament] Die Martis 25 April, 1648 (1648, 669 f.12.14).

It was doubtless with an eye to seeking God’s forgiveness for the nation’s sins that Tate served as a messenger to the Lords on 1 and 2 May to request the peers’ consent to the confession of faith and the recently revived ordinance for punishing blasphemies and heresies.191CJ v. 548a, 549a; LJ x. 237a, 239b. Although this ordinance was very much the work of Tate and other Presbyterian Commons-men, its passage into law on 2 May (having been resurrected in the Commons just a month and a half before) was probably part of the Independent grandees’ efforts to co-opt the Covenant-engaged interest in the impending struggle against the royalist-Hamiltonian axis and a sell-out peace with the king.192Chung, ‘The heresy ordinance of 1648’, 139-40. During May and June, the House regularly enlisted Tate’s services in helping to settle the kingdom’s militia, secure London against the threat of royalist insurrection and to assure the City and those agitating for a treaty with the king of Parliament’s sincerity in seeking a settlement.193CJ v. 551a, 555a, 565a, 566a, 574a, 591b, 592b, 593a. It was Tate and Crewe who, on 18 May, carried up ordinances to the Lords for making Major-general Philip Skippon* commander in chief of the forces in and around London – a measure that would prove vital in securing the City for Parliament during the second civil war.194Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; CJ v. 563b, 564a; LJ x. 262a, 262b. On 10 June, Tate reported a draft of the Commons’ answer to the Surrey petitioners, assuring them of Parliament’s efforts to secure a safe and well-grounded peace and to ease the burdens of the people.195CJ v. 593a. Tate was doubtless eager for the resumption of negotiations with the king, but it is almost certain that, like other ‘rigid’ Presbyterians, he favoured the ‘three propositions’ – preconditions to which Charles was to be compelled to agree to before any personal treaty. These included the settlement of Presbyterianism in England for three years.196CJ v. 577b. Having been granted leave of absence on 7 June ‘for recovery of his health’, Tate seems to have departed Westminster before the end of the month and would be declared absent and excused at the call of the House on 26 September.197CJ v. 588a; vi. 34a.

Tate had evidently returned to Westminster by 4 October 1648, when the House ordered him to bring in an ordinance for the maintenance of ministers in Northampton. He was named to three committees that autumn relating to the treaty at Newport – including that established on 26 October to inform Parliament’s negotiating team of the House’s dissatisfaction with the king’s answers to the proposition for settling Presbyterianism.198CJ vi. 62a, 75b, 82a. On 23 November, he joined William Prynne and John Maynard in speaking against the army’s Remonstrance and its demands for an end to the treaty and justice against the king.199Bodl. Clarendon 31, f. 313. Tate’s last appointment in the Commons was on 29 November, when he was ordered to thank the Presbyterian divine Obadiah Sedgwick – the minister of the London parish in which Tate resided, St Paul, Covent Garden – for his sermon to the Commons that morning.200CJ vi. 91a. Predictably, Tate was excluded at Pride’s Purge, whereupon he withdrew from national politics.201A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62).

Tate died early in 1651 and was buried at Hardingstone on 8 January of that year.202Hardingstone par. reg. In his will, he declared that ‘I do above all desire that my children be brought up in honest callings in the nurture and admonition of the Lord’. He bequeathed a total of £35 to the poor of Northampton, Hardingstone and Covent Garden, with a further £120 to be bestowed as his wife and Edmund Calamy and ‘Nathaniel’ Cawdry (almost certainly a scribal error for Daniel Cawdry) – both prominent Presbyterian divines – should think fit ‘for the relief of God’s poor that suffer for conscience sake’.203PROB11/215, f. 312v. Tate’s grandson sat for Northampton in the early eighteenth century.204HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Bartholomew Tate’.