EGERTON, Sir Charles (1586-1662), of Newborough Hall, Staffs., and Markenfield Hall, Ripon, Yorks.

Egerton belonged to a cadet branch of the Cheshire gentry family from which the Egertons, lords Ellesmere and earls of Bridgewater, were descended.21Vis. Cheshire, 94, 96-7. His grandfather, a Warwickshire man, had settled in Staffordshire in the early sixteenth century after acquiring the manor of Newborough by marriage.22Shaw, Staffs. i. 93. Egerton’s father served as a soldier in Ireland for much of Elizabeth’s reign, his military career there culminating in his appointment as constable of Carrickfergus castle and governor of the town garrison.23HMC Salisbury, xiv, pp. xxiii, 194-5; HMC Egmont, i. 28. Very little is known about Egerton’s early life beyond the fact that he was born in Ireland in 1586. According to his monumental inscription, he attended St John’s College, Cambridge, although there is no record of his admission there.24Shaw, Staffs. i. 93. Like his kinsman, John Egerton, 1st earl of Bridgewater, he then entered Lincoln’s Inn, and it was probably there that he made the acquaintance of his future father-in-law, the Lincoln’s Inn barrister Leonard Bawtree.25LI Admiss.

Although the greater part of his estate was said to lie in Yorkshire, Egerton’s principal residence was his capital messuage at Newborough, in Staffordshire, which his father settled upon him at his marriage in about 1620.26TSP iv. 765; Shaw, Staffs. i. 93; C33/221, ff. 538r-v. It was while living at Newborough in the 1620s that Egerton became a friend and correspondent of Thomas Morton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (afterwards bishop of Durham), who was perhaps the most Calvinist and anti-Catholic of all Charles I’s bishops.27Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Morton’. Late in 1631, Morton wrote to Egerton in terms which suggest that Egerton, too, was a man of godly and perhaps Calvinist persuasion:

When I see your inward man to be a petitioner in all earnestness unto God, thirsting for the comfort of his gracious spirit, it is evidence enough of God’s blessed work in you...such smoking flax was never quenched, such groans are loud shouts in the ears of the Almighty...and prevail for the obtaining of mercy in the time of need.28Add. 6672, f. 234.

In 1633, Sir William Allanson*, Thomas Hoyle* and their fellow York aldermen wrote to Egerton, asking him to use his influence with the earl of Bridgewater – president of the council of the Marches – to secure the reversion of a nearby church living for the son of the serving incumbent, and the city’s lecturer, the ‘moderate puritan’, Henry Aiscough. ‘The power you have with your noble kinsman we doubt not to be great’, the aldermen assured Egerton, ‘and the experience we have had of your love makes us confident that you will be pleased to make use of that power for the procuring both of his suit and our desire’.29HEHL, EL 6509; VCH York, 201; Marchant, Puritans, 226-7. The aldermen got their wish, possibly through Egerton’s intercession, for the earl would present Aiscough junior to his father’s place in 1642.30‘Henry Aiscough’, Clergy of the C. of E. Database, person ID 112884. Egerton’s social circle in Yorkshire included his cousin Henry Darley* and the equally godly Sir William Strickland*, John Alured* and Thomas Anlaby (father of John Anlaby*).31Infra, ‘Henry Darley’; Yorks. Stuart Fines ed. W. Brigg (Yorks. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. lviii), 163; Coventry Docquets, 645. Because he resided most of the time in Staffordshire, however, it is perhaps not surprising that on several occasions during the 1630s he felt he had been over-assessed for Ship Money on his Yorkshire estates – principally during the shrievalties of Sir John Hotham* and Sir Thomas Danbie*.32Add. 6672, ff. 222; PC2/52, f. 251v; Ripon Millenary ed. W. Harrison (Ripon, 1892), ii. app. p. xv.

Although identified at Westminster as a member of the Staffordshire county committee by late 1642, Egerton appears to have lain low during the early 1640s and avoided making any conspicuous commitment to either king or Parliament.33LJ v. 520b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 103. He would claim after the war that he had been taken prisoner when the royalists stormed Burton-upon-Trent in the spring of 1643, which, if true, indicates that he was regarded as a parliamentarian. According to Egerton’s version of events, after his capture he was taken to Lichfield, where he was kept a close prisoner for 16 weeks and treated ‘cruelly and inhumanly’ by the local royalist commander Colonel Bagot (a son of Sir Hervey Bagot*). With the help of his wife and friends, who managed to secure the intervention of the earl of Newcastle – the command of the king’s northern army – Egerton was released upon parole to go to York, pending his exchange. While at York he was strongly pressed to assist the king, but after repeatedly refusing to do so, Sir William Savile*, the city’s governor, issued an order in August 1643 that Egerton be imprisoned if he did not comply. At the time, Egerton insisted, he was still sick from his previous imprisonment, and fearing for his health, he agreed to sign the so-called Yorkshire engagement, by which the signatories pledged their estates as security on loans for the maintenance of Newcastle’s army.34SP19/120, f. 137; CCAM 907-8. After signing the engagement, Egerton returned to Staffordshire, only to be seized and imprisoned once again by Colonel Bagot, who appears to have had designs on his estate.35SP19/120, f. 137; HMC Hastings, ii. 109. In November 1643, Newcastle wrote to Lord Loughborough (the royalist commander-in-chief in the midlands), asking him to assure Bagot of Egerton’s ‘conformity to his majesty’s service’ and to request that he release Egerton immediately. ‘Sir Charles Egerton came to York to me’, he informed Loughborough, ‘where he confessed some former errors, was sorry for them and, to testify his fidelity, not only paid a sum of money to his majesty’s service but became bound in very great sums borrowed for his majesty’s use, and I granted him thereupon a protection for his person and goods’.36HMC Hastings, ii. 109. However, in a petition to Oliver Cromwell* in 1656, Egerton was adamant that he had not donated any money to the royalists and that the ‘commissioners of Parliament...at York and some of the country committee there and my Lord Ferdinando Fairfax [Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*, commander of Parliament’s northern army] understood as much from me, before the battle at Marston Moor [2 July 1644], in which I was’.37Add. 6689, f. 320. Newcastle was probably mistaken in assuming that Egerton was conformable to the king’s service, but it is also likely that Egerton exaggerated the strength of his commitment to parliamentarian cause during the war years; there is certainly no evidence to corroborate his claim that he fought on Parliament’s side at Marston Moor.

Egerton turned to Parliament to compensate him for losses that he claimed amounted to £9,343 as a result of royalist plundering of his estate during the civil war.38Add. 6689, f. 320. His petition was read in the Commons in mid-September 1645, and a week or so later, Parliament passed an ordinance granting him £300 out of delinquency fines towards his ‘present support’.39CJ iv. 269b, 278a; LJ vii. 596a. In addition, the Commons ordered the committee for petitions to consider how to raise a further £500 from delinquency fines for his ‘present and urgent necessities’.40CJ iv. 278a. The Committee for Compounding* issued warrants in November and December for payment of the £300 out of the fine of Sir William Ford, a Sussex delinquent whom Egerton had nominated.41CCC 27, 788, 789. The brunt of Egerton’s losses was sustained by his estate at Markenfield Hall, near Ripon, which Egerton claimed was one of the first in Yorkshire to be plundered by the royalists.42Add. 6689, f. 320.

Ownership of Markenfield Hall gave Egerton a strong proprietorial interest at Ripon, and on 12 November 1645 the town corporation elected him and Alderman Myles Moodie in place of the disabled royalists William and Sir John Mallory.43C219/43/3/122. It has been suggested that Egerton was elected through the influence of Lord Fairfax, although it was probably not until 1647, when Fairfax purchased the manorial rights of Ripon, that he acquired a strong interest in the borough.44Carroll, ‘Yorks.’, 310; T.S. Gowland, ‘The manor and liberties of Ripon’, YAJ xxxii, 52. Egerton was named to only 16 committees during his three years in Parliament, and he received the vast majority of these appointments in the year after his election; he was named to only one committee in 1647 and none at all in 1648.45CJ iv. 351b, 362a, 368b, 409b, 571a, 586b, 587a, 613a, 632a, 633b, 635a, 653a, 719b; v. 9b, 11a, 100a. Perhaps the most important of his early appointments was to a committee established on 8 December 1645 to investigate the London adventurers for refusing to lend further money for the reconquest of Ireland.46CJ iv. 368b. This committee was dominated by the Independents and those aligned with them and was probably set up to cow the pro-Scottish element among the adventurers, whose refusal to lend money was motivated in part by their desire to have Parliament maintain the Scots and their allies in Ireland.47The State of the Irish Affairs...from the Committee of Adventurers in London (1646, E.314.7).

Granted leave of absence on 15 December 1645, Egerton had returned to Westminster by 26 January 1646, when he presented a list to the Commons of those who had raised forces against Parliament in the liberties of Ripon and Kirby Malzeard in Yorkshire (among the 52 delinquents he named were William Malory, Sir John Mallory and Sir Thomas Danbie).48CJ iv. 377a, 417b; SP23/1, pp. 99-100; CCC 33, 1008. The House then ordered that Egerton have the £500 formerly awarded to him, out of the estates or fines of any of the persons on the list which he should nominate.49CJ iv. 417b; CCC 33, 795. Two days later (28 Jan.), he took the Covenant.50CJ iv. 420b.

During the spring of 1646, Egerton was among the Staffordshire gentlemen who assured Sir William Brereton* of their support for the return of Sir Richard Skeffington* in the recruiter election for the county. It is not clear to what extent this election turned on national political issues, although Brereton was certainly aligned both locally and nationally with the Independents.51Supra, ‘Staffordshire’; ‘Sir William Brereton’; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 176. Among Egerton’s appointments that summer was nomination to a committee on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates (10 July 1646), the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.52CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 162. Egerton’s Staffordshire connections also accounted for several of his committee nominations. Thus on 4 August, he was appointed with two Staffordshire MPs, John Sywnfen and George Abbott II, to ensure that all spare arms in the county were sent to Chester for shipment to Ireland.53CJ iv. 633b. The next day (5 Aug.), he was appointed with Swynfen and the Presbyterian ‘recruiter’ for Stafford, Edward Leigh, to bring in an ordinance for appointing Daniel Evance a lecturer in Lichfield cathedral.54CJ iv. 635a. Evance was chaplain to the leader of the Westminster Presbyterians, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and supported the establishment of a Scottish-style, clericalist church on the grounds of ‘better a tyranny than no [church] government’.55D. Evance, The Noble Order (1646), 41 (E.319.10). Egerton was granted his second leave of absence on 2 September 1646.56CJ iv. 659b.

Having returned to Westminster by mid-November 1646, Egerton was named to a committee on the ordinance for the maintenance of ministers.57CJ iv. 719b. And a month later, he was included on another committee dominated by the Independents – this time to consider measures for satisfying the arrears of the New Model army (10 Dec.).58Supra, ‘John Birch’; CJ v. 9b. With church government also becoming an increasingly contentious issue, he was also named to a committee set up on 12 December for examining a publication by some of London’s Presbyterian ministers in favour of jure divino Presbyterianism.59CJ v. 11a. The majority of MPs – Egerton almost certainly among them – were insistent that Parliament should remain the final arbiter on questions of church government. He was granted his third leave of absence on 29 March 1647.60CJ v. 129b. His next appointment in the House was on 3 July, when he was a messenger to carry up to the Lords an ordinance for a month’s pay for the Northern Association forces, in what seems to have been an attempt by the New Model’s opponents to win over the cash-starved northern army.61CJ v. 231b, 232a; LJ ix. 313a; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iii. 302, 321-2. How far Egerton was complicit in the Presbyterians’ plans is not known. But it was perhaps no coincidence that Egerton was one of several Members whose loyalty to the Parliamentarian cause, and hence their right to sit, came under question in mid-July as the Presbyterian interest finally buckled under army pressure. Observing some ‘sharp votes’ in the House, Egerton drew up a defence of his conduct during the war, which he presented to the Commons on 15 July, along with Sir William Savile’s order of August 1643, by which, he said, he had been forced into signing the Yorkshire engagement.62CJ v. 244b; Add. 6689, f. 320. After hearing his case, the House resolved that he be examined by the committee to receive information against Members, chaired by John Corbett.63CJ v. 244b.

Egerton appears to have taken no part in the Presbyterian counter-revolution of late July 1647 and early August – but nor was he among those Members, mostly Independents, who took refuge with the army. Indeed, there is no evidence that he continued to attend the House at all after mid-July 1647. He received no further committee appointments and was declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October, absent and excused on 24 April 1648 and again absent and excused on 26 September.64CJ v. 330a, 543b; vi. 34b. He had effectively retired from political life long before he was secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December. How exactly he had offended against the army is not clear.65A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.64).

Between 1650 and 1655, Egerton was repeatedly summoned before the Committee for Advance of Money* to show cause why he should not pay his proportion of the Yorkshire engagement, which, like all debts due to royalists, was deemed payable to the state. Egerton’s main defence on these occasions was to produce the Commons’ vote made directly after he had presented his case on 15 July 1647, which stated that Members who followed his example within four days would not incur any further penalty other than possible exclusion from the House.66CJ v. 244b; SP19/9, pp. 12, 41; SP19/12, p. 197; SP19/17, p. 105; SP19/120, ff. 135-7; CCAM 919. In March 1655, he went to John Corbett’s house in Southwark in order to have Corbett verify that the order of August 1643, signed by Savile, was the same order that Egerton had given to Corbett’s committee in 1647.67SP19/120, f. 138. Having gone to such lengths to convince the Committee for Advance of Money of his good affections, Egerton must have been doubly dismayed when Major-general Charles Worsley* and the militia commissioners for Staffordshire summoned him to Stafford in December 1655 and again in March 1656 and, upon investigation, found him liable for decimation.68Add. 6689, f. 320; TSP iv. 473, 765. Egerton petitioned the protectoral council and Cromwell for discharge from decimation, pleading that he had always been ‘faithful to the public and present government’, and in July 1656 the council ordered his discharge.69Add. 6689, f. 320; CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 10.

‘Sore afflicted with the stone’ by the mid-1650s, Egerton lived quietly on at Newborough until his death on 3 May 1662.70Add. 6689, f. 320; Shaw, Staffs. i. 94; CCAM 919. He was buried in Hanbury Church near his seat at Newborough Hall.71Shaw, Staffs. i. 94. In his will, he bequeathed his estates in Staffordshire and Yorkshire to his wife and, after her death, to John 2nd earl of Bridgewater, provided that he pay £1,000 to one of Egerton’s kinsman and £1,000 to Egerton’s ‘loving friend’ John Maynard* for the use of Egerton’s sister Lucy. Egerton valued his personal estate at £4,000. He made the earl of Bridgewater his executor.72PROB11/308, ff. 380r-v. Egerton died without issue and was therefore the last of his line to sit in Parliament.