BOOTH, George (1622-84)

The Booths of Dunham Massey, a cadet branch of the Booths of Barton, Lancashire, had been prominent in Cheshire affairs from at least the reign of Elizabeth I. The young George Booth became the ward of his grandfather and namesake, Sir George Booth, an active custos rotulorum and deputy lieutenant in Cheshire, after the early death of his father, William Booth, in 1636 left the young man an orphan. CSP Dom. 1638–9, p. 263. Booth’s marriage to Katherine Clinton linked him to the circles of puritan opposition to the religious policies of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. When civil war broke out, he joined his grandfather in leading the Cheshire puritans on the side of Parliament. By 1644 he was serving as a colonel of an infantry regiment in the service of Parliament. In that same year, his wife Katherine having died in August 1643, he contracted an even more politically astute marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of the Parliamentarian leader Henry Grey, earl of Stamford, and sister of the future regicide Thomas Grey^†, styled Lord Grey of Groby. Booth resigned his military commission so that he could take his seat in Parliament for Cheshire as a recruiter in February 1646, but he was excluded from the Commons at Pride’s Purge.

On 24 Oct. 1652 Booth’s grandfather died and he inherited the baronetcy and the powerful Booth family interest in Cheshire. Seen as the county’s natural leader, he was a consistent member of the county’s commissions for the peace, assessment and militia throughout the Interregnum, and was elected for the shire in the first Protectorate Parliament in 1654. CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 295, 318, 358; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 78; A. and O. i. 642, 962, 1079, 1235; ii. 658, 969, 1063, 1428, 1434. See his biography in HP Commons, 1640–60 for a full list of his many local offices. He was chosen again for the second, but was one of those denied his seat owing to the council of state’s suspicions of his disaffection to the government. He was chosen, this time for Lancashire, for the third Protectorate Parliament in January 1659. After this was dissolved and Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate abolished, he made contact with those plotting for the overthrow of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the king.

Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, saw Booth’s value to the royalist movement at this time, judging him ‘a person of the best fortune and interest in Cheshire, and, for the memory of his grandfather, of absolute power with the Presbyterians’. Clarendon, Rebellion, vi. 112. In late July 1659 Charles II appointed him commander-in-chief of all the forces in Cheshire, Lancashire and north Wales which were to be involved in the projected nationwide rebellion. CCSP, iv. 209, 235. Booth’s forces were the only ones to have any measure of success during the rising of early August, when they captured the county town of Chester, and because of this the abortive uprising is usually referred to as ‘Booth’s Rebellion’. He and his followers were quickly defeated by John Lambert^‡ and Booth was captured while trying to flee the country. His estates were sequestered and he was kept imprisoned in the Tower until his fellow excluded Members released him on 22 Feb. 1660, the day after they had been readmitted to the reconvened Long Parliament. A. and O. ii. 1412; Pepys Diary, i. 63, 74. He almost immediately resumed his position in Cheshire and in March and April 1660 was appointed a commissioner of the militia, a justice of the peace and elected a knight of the shire for the county. A Perfect List of all such persons as by commission … are now confirmed to be … justices of the peace (1660), 7.

Booth was thus a hero of the Restoration and was well rewarded for his efforts of 1659. He was a prominent member of the Commons during the Convention, and his name appears first among the 12 members delegated on 7 May 1660 to present Charles II with the Commons’ reply to the Declaration of Breda. On 30 July the Commons requested that he be amply rewarded ‘for his eminent services and great sufferings in the public cause’ and the Lords concurred in this decision, ordering on 3 Aug. that he be given £10,000 from the excise revenue. Both Houses also hurried through his private bill which would allow him to sell parts of his estate. It was first read in the House on 30 Aug. and received the royal assent on 13 Sept. 1660. Booth resumed and added to his local offices, being appointed custos rotulorum and a deputy lieutenant of Cheshire in the summer of 1660. At the coronation in April 1661 he was one of those late converts to the restoration of the king who was raised to the peerage, and he took his title – Baron Delamer of Dunham Massey – from the royal forest near his Cheshire lands. His behaviour in the Commons during the Convention, however, did not suggest that he had been converted to an ideological royalism. He had stated in 1659 that he wished to place conditions on the king’s return, and even in the Convention he revealed his sympathy for a comprehensive church settlement and for the ‘Good Old Cause’ for which he had once fought.

Delamer first sat in the House on 8 May 1661 and came to a further 78 sittings of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament (two-fifths of all its meetings), where he was seldom named to committees, being nominated to only eight during all his sitting days. He stopped coming to the House after 20 Jan. 1662 but on 25 Feb. his recently passed estate act was joined with a similar private act of Heneage Finch, 3rd earl of Winchilsea, in a bill to confirm private legislation passed by the Convention, which received the royal assent on 19 May 1662. He does not appear to have been suffering financially at this time and in 1663 his Cheshire lands were valued at an income of £1,212 p.a., more than any other peer with landholdings in the county. HMC 10th Rep. IV, 372.

Delamer did not attend the House at all between 20 Jan. 1662 and 29 Dec. 1666. The diary of the Cheshire nonconformist minister Henry Newcome makes clear that for much of 1662 Delamer was ill. Diary of Henry Newcome (Chetham Soc. xviii), 57, 58, 60, 87, 94. He was a patron and close friend of Newcome, judging by the number of laudatory entries about the baron which appear in the minister’s diary and later autobiography, which also give an indication of Delamer’s high standing in Cheshire nonconformist circles. Delamer was present at Newcome’s last sermon before his ejection from his ministry on 31 Aug. 1662; in the days following Newcome consulted him on his future ‘and he gave me a very affectionate answer’ and ‘answered me I might bind upon what lay in his power … I bless God much for the kind answer’. Ibid., 117–18; Autobiography of Henry Newcome (Chetham Soc. xxvi).

On 23 Mar. 1664 Delamer registered his proxy with an old colleague from the days of the Protectorate, the Presbyterian Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), for the entirety of the session of that spring. Yet it was principally his strongly Anglican and royalist brother-in-law Robert Bruce, 2nd earl of Elgin [S] and 2nd Baron Bruce of Whorlton (later earl of Ailesbury), to whom Delamer entrusted his business at Westminster. WSHC, 1300/512; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 171–2. In April 1664 he solicited Bruce to use his influence to provide time for the Cheshire opponents of the bill for making the rivers Mersey and Weaver navigable to make their case to the Commons. The following month, when the first Conventicle Bill was being debated in the House, Delamer openly referred to himself as a Presbyterian when he wrote to Bruce begging him to be ‘merciful to us Presbyterians and at least give us leave to play innocently at bowls’. WSHC, 1300/515, 517, 653; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 172. Despite this friendship with Bruce, it was Ashley to whom Delamer continued to entrust his proxy. The proxy registers for the 1664–5 session do not record the recipient of Delamer’s proxy (by which his absence was excused at a call of the House), but on 22 Nov. 1666 he again entrusted his proxy with Ashley, who held it until Delamer reappeared in the House on 29 Dec. 1666.

After his return to the House at the very end of 1666, Delamer proceeded to sit for another 27 meetings, totalling 30 per cent of the 1666–7 session. He probably came back to the House to lend his personal support to the Irish Cattle bill, which he considered ‘for the good of England’, as he told the earl of Ailesbury (as Bruce of Whorlton had become) in a letter chiding him for his ‘absence from London when the Irish bill was yet unfinished’. In another letter to Ailesbury he tried to persuade him to support the bill, warning him,

that now the Irish bill wherein all Englishmen are so much concerned is debating your Lordship will adventure to have the value of your land from a pound to a penny. We country gentlemen are much scandalized at it, and for my part I intend very suddenly myself to come and chide. WSHC, 1300/548, 558; HMC 15th Rep. VII, 175.

His enthusiasm for the bill is further suggested by his choice of proxy up until his return to the House, as Ashley had been one of the most forceful advocates of the bill throughout 1666.

Delamer himself diligently attended all but four of the sittings of the long session of 1667–9. It is not known what part, if any, he played in the impeachment and banishment of Clarendon; his name does not appear on any of the protests signed in the lord chancellor’s favour. He did come more to the fore in the committee established on 9 Nov. 1667 to examine infringements of the Irish Cattle Act. He was named to this committee, and on 3 Mar. 1668 he presented before it letters he had received from Thomas Mainwaring^‡, an associate who had sat with him for Cheshire in the Convention, detailing abuses of the act in Cheshire and Flintshire and the prosecution by illegal importers of a local constable trying to stem the trade. The committee reported this to the House which thereupon ordered Delamer to tell Mainwaring to be prepared to present his information at the next assizes at Shrewsbury. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 244.

It was from this session that Delamer began his parliamentary career in the House in earnest, as he rarely missed any of its sittings for the next several years. Over the period 10 Oct. 1667–24 Feb. 1674 he averaged an attendance level of 96 per cent and was absent for only 13 sittings throughout. His rate of committee nominations still remained relatively low, and he was named to only 73 select committees over this long period, but as the 1670s progressed he found himself slowly being placed on more. In early 1671 he was involved in a number of bills that concerned family members. In January he gave his consent before a select committee to a bill which would allow Edward Clinton, 5th earl of Lincoln, the underage nephew of Delamer’s deceased first wife, Lady Katherine Clinton, to settle a jointure on his prospective bride. On 2 Mar. 1671 Delamer introduced into the House a bill that would enable his son and heir apparent, Henry Booth (later earl of Warrington), still a minor, to settle the family estates independently of his father in consideration of his recent marriage. Over the course of the next few days, Delamer argued the merits of the bill before the committee appointed to consider it. It went through both Houses easily within the space of two weeks, receiving the royal assent on 22 Apr. 1671. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 402, 422, 423. Delamer was clearly grooming his son as his successor and from almost the moment the young man reached his majority in early 1673, Delamer resigned his office of custos rotulorum of Cheshire to him.

From the early 1670s Delamer became more strongly aligned with the burgeoning Country movement in the House. When the second conventicle bill passed the House on 26 Mar. 1670, he added his name to the protest against it. Later that same afternoon he was also one of only four who voted against the passage of the bill for a treaty of union between England and Scotland. NLS, Yester pprs. ms 7023, letter 239. On 9 Mar. 1671 he joined many other members of the nascent Country opposition in dissenting from the resolutions not to commit or engross the bill concerning privilege of Parliament, because ‘there is no colour of law to claim a privilege of freedom from suits’. By the session of spring 1675, during which he was only absent one day and was named to eight committees, he was clearly seen as a member of this group and he played a leading role in the concerted opposition against the Test bill introduced by Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby. Almost immediately Delamer marked out his opposition to the court by registering his dissent, on the first day of the new session (16 Apr.) from the resolution to thank the king for his speech, especially as it made frequent reference to the necessity to prosecute nonconformists. He subscribed to all four of the protests against Danby’s Test bill on 21, 26 and 29 Apr. and 4 May, and the author of A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country singled him out for praise, ‘whose name is well known, as are also his worth, piety, and learning’. The author continued with a criticism of a court which did not recognize Delamer’s true worth: ‘I should mention his merits too, but know not whether that be lawful, they lying yet unrewarded.’ Timberland, i. 138, 154.

Delamer also acted as a recipient of proxies for his fellow Country lords for this and the following sessions. He received the proxy of Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh – who like Delamer signed all four of the protests against Danby’s bill – on 24 May 1675 for the last few days of the session before it was prorogued. William Fiennes, 3rd Viscount Saye and Sele, registered his proxy with Delamer on 26 Oct. 1675 near the beginning of the following short session (of which Delamer missed only five sittings but was named to every select committee established on the days he was there), while Denbigh again entrusted his vote to Delamer on 20 November. There was almost certainly calculation in Denbigh’s decision, for a vote on whether to address the king for the dissolution of Parliament was held that day, and through his vote for the motion, with his two proxies, and his protest against its rejection, Delamer clearly showed his support for this principal objective of the Country group.

He furthered his campaign for the dissolution of Parliament in the following session of 1677–8, when he and his nephew Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford, were among the few peers in the House who endorsed the argument of George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, that the Cavalier Parliament had been dissolved by the long prorogation of 1675–6. HMC Rutland, ii. 38. His overall attendance rate in this session was 89 per cent, but he was most assiduously in attendance during the period from 15 Feb. to 16 Apr. 1677, missing only one sitting. At the beginning of the session Delamer was barely nominated to any committees at all, but from the end of March until the adjournment he was named to every one established while as a member of the subcommittee for the Journal he frequently subscribed his name to the official record of the House’s proceedings throughout March and April. He was also active in the committee for privileges, where on 29 Mar. he presented (under the chairmanship of his brother-in-law Ailesbury) various precedents, culled from old texts, regarding the privilege of the peerage. PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, pp. 127–8.

From 28 Feb. 1677 Delamer was in possession of Stamford’s proxy and, armed with this, he continued to press for the rights of the four peers imprisoned in the Tower for their insistence that Parliament was dissolved: Buckingham, Shaftesbury (as Ashley had become), Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, and James Cecil, 3rd earl of Salisbury. He was given permission to visit the imprisoned lords on 7, 15 and 20 Mar., according to a correspondent of Sir Ralph Verney^‡ (the proceedings in the official minutes were excised in 1680). Delamer argued that the four peers ‘were confined upon a punctilio only, and that if the House would be pleased to release them, it would be acknowledged as a favour’, a motion which ‘caused a long debate in the House, insomuch that Lord Delamer had like to have been sent to them’. Verney ms mic. M636/30, W. Fall to Sir R. Verney, 23 Mar. 1677. Not surprisingly, Shaftesbury marked this advocate and frequent visitor as ‘triply worthy’ in his analysis of political friends and enemies drawn up while he was imprisoned.

Stamford’s proxy with Delamer was vacated upon the earl’s return to the House, after a long adjournment, on 21 May 1677, but Delamer was not present at any of the five meetings in May 1677, before Parliament was adjourned again. When the House convened again for the first five months of 1678, he came to all but four of its meetings, was named to 14 committees and reported from one, on 26 Mar. 1678, on a private bill regarding charitable uses. On 4 Apr. he voted Philip Herbert, earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter. On 8 May 1678 Delamer was granted permission to leave the House for the country on account of his health, and he did not appear in the House again until 29 Nov. 1678, well into the hearings on the Popish Plot. He was then only able to attend for a further 13 days before Parliament was prorogued and ultimately dissolved. He was active in the tumultuous debates of the Cavalier Parliament’s final days and from 23 Dec. 1678 held the proxy of Thomas Leigh, 2nd Baron Leigh, for the Parliament’s final week. On 26–27 May 1679 he endorsed, through his votes and protests, the proposals that the money raised for disbanding the army should be placed in the chamber of London rather than the exchequer, and that Danby should be committed to prison while the charges levelled against him were being drawn up. Danby accurately counted him as an enemy in his political calculations preceding the Parliament of spring 1679.

Delamer diligently attended all but one meeting of the first Exclusion Parliament, where he was named to most of the few select committees established. He consistently acted in April to further the bill for the lord treasurer’s attainder and, after Danby had turned himself in to obviate the attainder, to prosecute his impeachment. He also worked in concert with other members of the Country party against Danby’s leading supporters, the bishops, protesting on 7 Apr. against the rejection of John Sidway’s testimony against Peter Gunning, bishop of Ely and, on 13, 23 and 27 May, signing four protests against the bishops’ right to sit as judges in capital trials. On 20 Mar. he was made a member of the committee to investigate the ‘late horrid conspiracy’ of the Popish Plot, and on 2 May he protested against the bill for the removal of papists from the English capital, fearing that the oaths demanded would catch out ‘honest Dissenters’ instead. He was involved in the proceedings against the Catholic peers accused of involvement in the plot, both as a member of the subcommittee of the Journal who signed his approval of the official record of the impeached lords’ answers to the charges against them and as a member of the committee appointed to consider the Commons’ objections to those answers.

Delamer was one of the signatories to the petition to the king of 6 Dec. 1679 calling for the new Parliament to be summoned, but when that Parliament did finally convene in October 1680 he attended only 22 of its meetings (just 36 per cent), in marked contrast to his perfect attendance in the preceding Parliament. He first sat about a week after the Parliament opened and on 15 Nov. voted and protested against the motion to reject the exclusion bill on its first reading. Eight days later he voted in favour of appointing a joint committee with the Commons to consider the state of the nation. He entered his dissent when this latter motion was rejected. Delamer left shortly after these defeats, on 26 Nov. 1680. This was to be his last appearance in the House, for, although he signed the petition of 25 Jan. 1681 requesting the king to convene the next Parliament at Westminster and not Oxford, and Danby somewhat surprisingly thought that Delamer would stand neutral regarding his application for bail from the Tower, Delamer did not appear at all at the Parliament of March 1681. Vox Patriae (1681), 6–7.

By this time he was growing old, and the mantle of leader of the Cheshire nonconformists and Whigs had passed to his even more extreme and partisan son Henry, who had first been elected for Cheshire at a by-election in 1678 and had been returned uncontested for the first two Exclusion Parliaments. Delamer seems to have been involved in the return of his son to the Commons in early 1678, having apparently ‘resolved’ with ‘the country’ in late September 1677 that Booth would succeed the deceased Member, Sir Fulk Lacy^‡. Add. 70124, R. Strettell to Sir E. Harley, 29 Sept. 1677. Delamer had relinquished his last local office, custos rotulorum of Cheshire, to his heir apparent in 1673 and it was Henry Booth himself who most strongly exercised the Booth electoral interest through his control of the county bench.

When Booth and his partner for Cheshire, Sir Robert Cotton^‡, were challenged by the local loyalists in the election of February 1681, Booth was reportedly prepared to spend £3,500 in order ‘to let the king see that all the Cheshire gentry are not able to baffle the mighty Booth and Cotton interest’ and the two sitting exclusionist members won by a wide margin. HP Commons, 1660–90, i. 151. In the succeeding years Booth became more extreme and infamous in his attempts to prevent James Stuart, duke of York, from succeeding to the throne. He was at the forefront of the celebrations that met the Protestant James Scott, duke of Monmouth, upon his arrival in Chester in September 1682 and was also seriously suspected of involvement in the Rye House Plot of 1683. Hostile Tory commentators were apt to conflate father and son in these schemes, but it is difficult to know to what extent Delamer shared his son’s enthusiasm for or involvement in these ventures. The Tory memorialist Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, Delamer’s nephew, later suggested that Delamer lamented to him ‘the trouble that his son’s conduct gave him’. Ailesbury Mems. 135.

Henry Booth succeeded his father on 8 Aug. 1684, when Delamer died at his house in Dunham Massey. His will, written in August 1671, begins with a lengthy and devoutly Calvinist preamble, in which he confidently proclaims himself one of the elect. He bequeathed only £5 to each of his three daughters and six sons alive in 1671 and all his personal estate to his widow, Elizabeth. Interestingly, he felt the need to explain and justify the reason for these bequests, and particularly the small sums left to his many younger children. As late as the 1740s his grandson George Booth, 2nd earl of Warrington, was still fiercely critical of Delamer’s management of the estate and of his treatment of his younger children, which he saw as the cause of the family’s financial ruin that he was so much at pains to rectify. Warrington, in his memorials on the sad condition of the estate, insisted that Delamer, when still only a baronet, had already piled up mortgages of £9,000 by the time of the Restoration, debts which he was able to pay off by the gift of £10,000 he received from the Commons in 1660. Warrington calculated that only a few years after this unexpected windfall the new Baron Delamer had already racked up similar debts and had to sell a third part of the estate – probably including the lands settled on his wife, which led him to bequeath all his personal estate to her at his death. ‘He was all his life long in the straits which naturally accompany careless management and affectation of popular living, and at his death had not laid up one shilling towards provision for his many younger children, nor left one foot of land that had not some great charge laid on it’, Warrington further fumed. He explained this neglect by his grandfather’s

unaccountable oddness of humour having so little regard to his younger sons that when they’ve come here from school at Holy-day times, after just a formal asking his blessing, they must immediately go out of his sight again, and be kept so while they stayed here, as though his natural affection like as in brute animals were confined to the act of generation … very amazing in a Man esteemed to be both Wise and Conscientious! JRL, Dunham Massey mss, EGR 3/6/2/2/1, 2, 3; EGR 3/7/3/2.

As Warrington’s final comment suggests, Delamer’s character was a topic of contemporary comment, often coloured by the more radical behaviour of his heir. Charles II could not help but be slightly wary of a man who could raise a large force of Cheshire Protestants for armed insurrection in 1659 – even though that uprising had been for his own benefit. He had honoured and rewarded Booth at the time, but by the end of his reign the king may have regretted elevating such a renowned and activist nonconformist family into the English peerage. Delamer’s fiercely Tory and Jacobite nephew Ailesbury, however, could still later write of this hero of the Restoration that ‘although at Court he was not well thought on … yet I knew him to be not only a most worthy man, but a good subject besides’. Ailesbury Mems. 135.