Cranfield’s translation of economic success into a political career was unique in early Stuart England. Of his contemporaries among the great moneyed men, Paul Bayning never sat in the Commons, Baptist Hicks* entered the Commons only at the end of his life, and the parliamentary activity of Arthur Ingram* was always secondary to his business interests. Only Cranfield sought to bring business efficiency into government, and his failure reveals much about Jacobean politics.
Cranfield’s father left him £320, which he increased to £2,500 in two years, chiefly by trading in northern kerseys; by 1601 he was said ‘to draw as great a trade as an alderman’. He earned a deserved reputation for sharp dealing and penny-pinching, but his first marriage, to his former master’s daughter, was apparently based on mutual ‘good liking’. His brother-in-law John Suckling*, secretary to lord treasurer Dorset (Thomas Sackville†), helped him to secure the receivership of Somerset and Dorset for £800, which yielded around £300 a year. With Ingram, he speculated in pepper imports and ordnance exports; ‘one rule I desire may be observed between you and me’, Cranfield urged him in 1607, ‘is that neither of us seek to advance our estates by the other’s loss, but that we may join together faithfully to raise our fortunes by such casualties as this stirring age shall afford’.
Ingram also introduced Cranfield to the lucrative field of revenue farming, and thereby to his Court patrons, the Howard family. Cranfield took a share of the 1st earl of Suffolk’s currant farm in November 1604, and two months later became a partner in the patent for licensing taverns and the sale of wine held by Suffolk’s kinsman, lord admiral Nottingham (Charles Howard†). Following the failure of a joint venture with Sir Edward Greville* for the domestic manufacture of starch, he sublet the farm of starch import duties from Henry Howard, earl of Northampton. He also bought a small share in the great farm of the Customs and joined two of the leading syndicates for the sale of Crown lands, acquiring substantial parcels for himself. His friend and biographer Bishop Goodman recorded that the land sale contractors met in his house in Wood Street. He enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, and was a member of the brilliant literary circle - including Ben Jonson, Richard Martin* and Christopher Brooke* - which convened at the Mitre tavern in Fleet Street.
In 1612 Cranfield advised Northampton, newly appointed to the Treasury commission, on how to increase the rental on the Great Farm, and the earl brought him into central government as ‘a special friend of mine own, more witty and of better judgment in those mysteries than any of those that in respect of their trade into those countries were thought most fit to undertake the search’. Cranfield subsequently recommended the creation of the post of surveyor-general of customs and a fresh imposition on alien merchants, both of which he then secured for himself, while he also received a knighthood and a pension of £150.
As lord warden of the Cinque Ports, Northampton secured Cranfield’s return for Hythe in 1614. Cranfield was named to the committee for the expiring laws continuance bill (8 Apr.), but does not appear to have had a positive legislative agenda during the session. However, it was only a matter of time before his own interests came under scrutiny. On 6 May Sir John Sammes maintained that the Crown might save £15,000 p.a. ‘by cutting off receivers’, and added that there was ‘a surveyor appointed of the custom who hath £1,000 from the king’. Cranfield responded that there was ‘no office of so great charge and with so little profit, and with so great ease to the subject’, and proposed a general inquiry into officers’ fees, but was countered by the Bristol merchant Thomas James, who argued that the farming of the customs removed the need for a bureaucracy costing £8,000 p.a., and attacked the intrusive powers granted under Cranfield’s patent. Cranfield defended his receivership, but agreed to deliver up for inspection the patent for the surveyorship of the customs, insisting ‘if there could be found anything in it to the hurt of the subject, he would not only be content to give it up, but that the House should punish him also’. He produced it the next day, and the newsletter writer John Chamberlain noted ‘some beagles have Sir Lionel Cranfield in chase’, but his lengthy defence of his office was not needed, as no report was made before the end of the session.
Northampton died nine days after the dissolution, but Cranfield still had friends at Court, for on being elected sheriff of London in July 1614 the king offered to pay his fine for refusal of the office rather than lose his services. Cranfield’s attack on the shortcomings of Alderman Cockayne’s monopoly of the cloth trade cannot have pleased the latter’s patron, lord treasurer Suffolk, who vetoed his attempt to revive the long dormant office of under-treasurer of the Exchequer in the autumn of 1616; but Cranfield was still able to secure his first Court post as an extraordinary master of Requests.
Cranfield joined the Treasury commission early in 1620, and having already established his own reformist credentials in the Household, he was probably dismayed at the appointment of the lawyer Sir Henry Montagu* as lord treasurer at the end of the year. With another Parliament in the offing, he was nominated for a seat at St. Ives, Cornwall by Prince Charles’s Council, but in the end Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, a debtor and friend, secured his return at Arundel. Cranfield exhibited considerable leadership skills in the Commons, and where the king or Buckingham set a clear agenda he usually followed; but he was prepared to see corruption exposed, particularly where such revelations embarrassed potential rivals. However, when the House failed to follow his lead, he showed considerable impatience. He was, in the words of his modern biographer, ‘essentially an administrator, and he had an administrator’s authoritarian temperament’. Both his zeal for practical reform and his personal ambition brought him into uncertain alliance with his fellow privy councillor Sir Edward Coke*.
The session opened with a debate about the Commons’ privilege of free speech, which many considered had been breached by the detention and interrogation of Members after the dissolution of 1614. This disrupted secretary of state Sir George Calvert’s call for an immediate grant of supply, and despite the concerted support he received from other privy councillors, nothing was resolved. Towards the end of this debate, Cranfield urged that a proposed petition for free speech be dropped because the king had already made the traditional grant. To sweeten the House, he also endorsed Sir Robert Phelips’s motion for a petition for stricter execution of the recusancy laws, and conceded ‘that the supply and grievances might go together hand in hand’. The drafting of a free speech petition was entrusted to a committee, which failed to agree on a text, whereupon the matter was referred back to the House on 12 February. Calvert and Sir Edward Coke swiftly attempted to stifle the petition, but a groundswell of opinion developed for both a petition and a bill for free speech, despite Cranfield’s efforts to the contrary: ‘the question, what free speech is. If that be to speak home to any grievance, they may assure themselves of it’.
The furtherance of attacks on corruption was a consistent theme of Cranfield’s speeches during the opening weeks of the session: as early as 8 Feb., when Henry Lovell* complained about threats from an official of the Court of Wards, Cranfield was quick to promise that if any wrong had been done ‘by himself or by his procurement, he was ready to make satisfaction in his person or estate or both’. He also urged ‘that the corruption of other courts of justice might likewise be considered of’, and a standing committee was duly established for this purpose.
If the more covetous members of the Villiers clan were one of Cranfield’s main targets, another was lord chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*). On 28 Feb. Cranfield referred a jurisdictional dispute between the Wards and Chancery to the committee for courts of justice, but his attacks on the conduct of Chancery officials led to a clash with John Finch II. At the committee the following day, he responded with a lengthy catalogue of the shortcomings of Chancery procedure: ‘(1) protection of sureties, (2) bills of conformity, (3) discharges of executions by orders, (4) exorbitant fees, (5) money for days of hearing, (6) decrees upon references, (7) chamber-orders, (8) undue finding of offices’.
For all his interest in judicial corruption, Cranfield later recalled that he had ‘proposed to have made [trade] his masterpiece, for he hath been bred in it’. He chaired the committee for trade, an important position during an economic depression, and in his first report on 13 Mar. he listed 21 ‘heads of those things which were thought to be the causes of the want of money’, which broadly comprised ‘the want of importation of money ... the exportation of money ... the consumption of coin and bullion within the land’. He successfully moved for the drafting of a bill to prevent the export of ordnance (30 Apr.), but referred the bill to prohibit the import of Irish cattle back to committee, promising to furnish Irish trade figures at the autumn sitting (18 May). On 30 Apr., when Sir Henry Poole offered a bill for wool and cloth, which was not read, he complained, ‘there are 75 laws for clothing; let us make one good law out of them’.
Cranfield’s failure to develop solutions to the trade depression owed something to the fact that he became embroiled in a protracted debate over the Virginia Company, of which he was a member. As an erstwhile farmer of tobacco customs, Cranfield was aware of the profits to be made from rapidly growing imports of Spanish and Virginian tobacco, by which means he hoped to increase Crown revenues. However, the means by which he proposed to achieve this brought him into conflict with two of the Company’s leading lights, the 3rd earl of Southampton and Sir Edwin Sandys*. On 24 Feb. Cranfield supported Sir Hamon L’Estrange’s attack on the Virginia lottery, the Company’s other significant source of income: ‘I am of the Company of Virginia, but I hear these lotteries do beggar every country they come into. Let Virginia lose rather than England’. Sir Dudley Digges wanted to ask Southampton to suspend the lottery, but Cranfield moved ‘to send to the king to stop it’, and was himself appointed to the task; two days later he reported James’s assent. Having been deprived of this revenue, the Company sought a ban on the import of Spanish tobacco, which would benefit the Virginia planters, but reduce the overall volume of the trade. Cranfield warned that a ban might breach the 1604 peace treaty and provoke a wider trade dispute, but, perceiving that Members were unmoved by this argument, he declared that ‘to clear all questions and doubts, he would have tobacco banished altogether out of this kingdom, as a thing pernicious to the state and health of the people’. Such an initiative would have delighted the king, but it found little favour in the Commons, and as it would have eradicated a rapidly growing source of customs revenue, it is unlikely that Cranfield intended his motion to be taken seriously.
Over the Easter recess James issued a Proclamation striking down several of the most odious monopolies condemned in Parliament, but there was general agreement that this should be confirmed by statute. Cranfield, sent to thank James for his initiative (21 Apr.), was harangued about the Commons’ presumption in continuing its investigation into the referees of the patents, but when he reported this three days later, the House responded with a resolution to begin interrogating the lord treasurer’s servants about the alehouse patent.
Cranfield was similarly out of tune with the developing sympathies of the House over proceedings against the Catholic barrister Edward Floyd, who was discovered to have insulted the king’s daughter upon learning of the Protestant defeat at the battle of the White Mountain. His attendance at a meeting of the Privy Council may have caused him to miss the fevered debate of 1 May about the punishments to be inflicted upon Floyd, but when the king questioned the Commons’ claim to jurisdiction over this case the following morning, he was one of those who persuaded the House to consult James before proceeding any further. The Lords were also affronted at the Commons’ claim to pass judgment without reference to the Upper House, and it was presumably to avoid a jurisdictional quarrel like that which had hamstrung the Addled Parliament that Cranfield and other ministers consistently urged the House to refer Floyd’s punishment to the king rather than the Lords. Feelings ran high over this dispute: Cranfield threatened to call Sir Edwin Sandys to account for misrepresenting one of his speeches; and he intervened when Coke exceeded his instructions at the conference of 11 May. Coke thereupon complained that ‘there was the spirit of contradiction among our committee, pointing at him; and adding withal, that he who should seek to sow sedition in the House was not worthy of his head’.
On 28 May the sudden announcement of an adjournment in seven days’ time dismayed the House, when Cranfield vainly urged that what time was left should be devoted to Chancery reform. At a conference the next day it became clear that James’s mind was made up, and on 30 May, when a motion was made to send a tactless message to the Lords, Cranfield protested that ‘he was in a great strait between his duty to the king, and his duty to this House’. He was quickly called to account, and despite the intervention of the courtiers Sir Henry Vane and Sir Humphrey May, he was not allowed to complete his speech. That night Ingram wrote entreating him to be in his place next day, but begging him ‘to be careful that if you speak, it may be with such moderation as it may give no cause of exception’.
Cranfield’s rising influence is illustrated by a memorandum he wrote to the king shortly after the adjournment, in which he outlined Southampton’s attempts to wreck the session and urged that the earl be banished to his country estates; this probably influenced James’s decision to arrest Southampton and Sandys on 15 June.