LONG, Walter II (1592-1672), of Whaddon, Wilts.; later of Whitcott Keysett, Salop

Long’s family were clothiers who had owned property at Whaddon, two miles north of Trowbridge, since the mid-thirteenth century, though they did not purchase the manor itself until the 1550s; the first MP in the family was Long’s uncle Thomas Long, who sat for Westbury in 1571. Add. 15561, ff. 1-12; Add. 11757, f. 7. Long’s father, Henry, whose will suggests puritan sympathies, inherited or purchased at least five manors neighbouring Whaddon, and other property in Trowbridge, Devizes and Marlborough. However, his fortunes suffered a serious reverse in 1610, when he was obliged to sell lands to pay a debt of £2,000 arising from a protracted Chancery suit. He settled dowries of £1,000 upon each of his four daughters, and £500 upon two sons, but at his death in 1612 his debts amounted to £3,089. VCH Wilts. v. 172; C142/331/111; Add. 15561, ff. 52v, 79, 99; C2/Jas.I/L7/1; Hants RO, 44M69/L16/1/1. Walter, his second son, inherited no land, but his welfare was commended to the family’s ‘special friend’, the master of the Rolls Sir Edward Phelips*. PROB 11/119, f. 443v; Wilts. RO, 947/1673/1.

In 1616 Long’s mother, Rebecca, married Henry Sherfield*; Long apparently resided with the couple in Salisbury, receiving from them an annuity of £50. Add. 15561, f. 103; Hants RO, 44M69/L34/2, 4; Wilts. RO, 903/1, 2. In August 1620 Long sailed in the expedition to suppress the pirates of Algiers, and on 5 Nov. following wrote from Malaga to Secretary (George) Calvert*. However, his involvement in the expedition was cut short by news of the death of his childless elder brother in January 1621. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/3; SP14/117/60; C142/394/5. He inherited an estate heavily encumbered with debts, and to make matters worse his father had assigned portions of £1,833 to his younger brother and two sisters. Furthermore, his mother held one-third of Whaddon manor and other estates in jointure, while another third of Whaddon’s profits were claimed by a Warwickshire cousin, who prosecuted his claim in Chancery. Long was therefore forced to borrow heavily from Sherfield; by December 1621, when he married his first wife, he owed his stepfather £1,550. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/5, 13/1, 28. Long doubtless hoped that his wife’s dowry would relieve his debts, but while her portion was initially set at £1,150, jointure arrangements meant that he eventually received only £500. Wilts. RO, 947/1130. In the following year Long continued to borrow heavily, procuring £800 from Sir Robert Bennett* and £1,933 from other creditors. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/6, 9, 12, 17; Wilts. RO, 947/903/4.

By 1625 Long may have felt compelled to obtain a parliamentary seat in order to evade his creditors. His election at Salisbury was assisted by Sherfield, the town’s recorder, who took the second seat himself, but the task may not have been easy. C219/39/224. Writing to Sherfield shortly before the election, Long inquired after his prospects, noting that ‘I am sorry you are so much straitened therein, and I cannot be so unmannerly as to importune in that which you cannot with convenience effect, but if it may be had without prejudice or much trouble unto you I shall be glad of it’. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/31. Once at Westminster Long made no impression upon the records of the House. Nor did parliamentary immunity allow him to resolve his debts: in May 1626 he urged Sherfield to buy his Wiltshire manor of Broughton Gifford, as ‘my occasions do press me speedily to make money and nothing which I have is likely to yield me money so speedily as this’. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/34.

In view of his financial problems, it is surprising that Long was elected knight of the shire in 1626. He was no doubt assisted by Sherfield, and perhaps also by William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, who found a seat for Long’s brother-in-law, Sir John Evelyn. (Sir) James Bagg II* certainly regarded Long and Sherfield as two of Pembroke’s allies against Buckingham, an assessment borne out by Long’s subsequent activities in the House. CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 113; Misc. Gen. et Her. (ser. 2), iv. 329. Long made 30 recorded speeches in 1626, but the number and nature of the bill committees to which he was appointed largely remains a matter for conjecture, as the records do not differentiate between him and Walter Long I or Robert Long. Either Walter I or Walter II, both from a puritan background, was among the committee named to draft a petition to the Crown for the removal of recusant officeholders (20 Mar.), and to consider a bill to mitigate the sentence of greater excommunication (2 May). In the debate at the second reading of the simony bill (14 Feb.), one or the other condemned the lack of punishment for those guilty of the offence. Procs. 1626, ii. 38, 321; iii. 120.

While one of the chief promoters of attacks on Buckingham during the 1626 Parliament, Pembroke did not wish to be directly implicated in the favourite’s impeachment. This made Long, who had no direct connections with the earl, particularly useful during the session. On 23 Feb., during debates on Buckingham’s arrest of a French ship, the St. Peter, which had caused a diplomatic rift, Long supported satisfaction for the English merchants who had suffered reprisals, but urged the House to ‘let it sleep, but not to lay it quite aside’. He was included on the investigating committee (23 Feb.), and when Sir John Eliot reported its findings on 1 Mar., he accepted that the incident should be pursued as a grievance against Buckingham. Ibid. ii. 103, 109, 169. Impeachment proceedings began in earnest on 13 Mar. when Dr. Samuel Turner*, another Pembroke client, offered detailed charges against the favourite. Clement Coke angered the king with the rash observation that ‘it is better to suffer by a foreign hand than at home’, but Long argued that the speech had not been intentionally seditious, and Coke was exonerated. Ibid. 273, 289, 292. When the House commenced detailed investigation of the charges against Buckingham, Long insisted that ‘the interruption of the merchants’ trade [is] a cause of our evil, as the unnecessary pressing of ships when they were ready to go forth and raising great sums of money from them’. Even the duke’s most inveterate opponents accepted that the king would need a substantial incentive to allow the impeachment to proceed, and in the subsidy debate of 27 Mar. Long supported a vote of three subsidies and three fifteenths. Ibid. 322, 380.

Long’s attacks on Buckingham became more pronounced after the Easter recess. On 20 Apr., when the House was diverted from debating the several grievances against Buckingham by a royal demand for increased supply, Long, prompted by Eliot’s suggestion that the matter should be dealt with within two days, worried that ‘if we set a day I am afraid of interruptions among ourselves, not from the king’. Ibid. iii. 34. Charles offered to consider the case against the favourite personally, but on 2 May Long, among others, insisted that the impeachment before the Lords proceed as planned, on the somewhat tenuous grounds that ‘many proofs must be tendered and examined which the king should not be troubled withal’. Ibid. 123, 129. Two days later, while the House debated the charge that Buckingham was responsible for the increase of popery, Long moved to investigate whether the duke, while in Spain, had knelt to adore the sacrament during a Catholic procession. Ibid. 163. On 27 Apr. Long served as a teller for a motion to consider the provocative allegation that Buckingham’s interference over medical treatment had hastened King James’s death. Long expanded his attack on 9 May, asserting that ‘it is a felony in the law for a common person to give physic and the person to die upon it ... The duke is no physician; he has applied potions to the king. If then it be a felony in a private person, then what is this?’ Ibid. 84, 210. He was a teller for the division on whether to commit Buckingham into custody, and subsequently supported (Sir) Nathaniel Rich’s appointment to chair the committee to consider how best to effect this; however, the Lords ignored the Commons’ request. Ibid. 201, 213. Charles was understandably enraged at the allegation that Buckingham had connived at his father’s death - he, having also been present, was thereby implicated - and he had Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges committed to the Tower for presenting this charge at the impeachment hearing. On 12 May Long offered an impassioned defence of the two men:

The imprisonment of these gentlemen grieved me as much as any. I have endeavoured to know whether any precedent. I hear of now, only one in Queen Elizabeth’s time that spoke in the House what the House upheld him not in. I have heard of a precedent in 2 Henry IV when upon such an occasion the Commons showed the king that no Member should be committed but for felony or treason, and that spoken in his hearing. That Buckingham is cause of all this, for all our interruptions have happened when his business has been in handling. These gentlemen were employed in the examining of these offences of the duke. Their papers are taken and seized on, we know not whether all the proofs are gone. We ought to make such a Remonstrance there in this infringement of our liberty, that we have our Members and their papers; to preserve our honour, and maintain what we have done. Ibid. 244.

Despite vociferous protests, the two men continued in detention, and the Commons attempted to procure their release via both a Remonstrance and a bill. John Pym and Sir Nathaniel Rich both argued against pursuing the Remonstrance, but Long, perhaps fearing a wider attack on parliamentary liberties, argued that it should be ‘enlarged, and therein to desire His Majesty to punish those who have made him break his royal word, which was that we should have full liberty of speech’. Ibid. 305.

The release of Digges and Eliot failed to placate Long, who intensified his attacks against the duke. On 3 June he criticized the latter’s appointment as president of the Council of War, on the grounds that Buckingham had been the one ‘who sent away our forces against the Protestants’, an allusion to the loan in 1625 of ships to the French, which had been used against the Huguenots at La Rochelle. He also complained about the recent creation of new peers (including (Sir) Dudley Carleton*) to reinforce the duke’s party in the Lords, and the enforced absence from the Upper House of two of the duke’s opponents, the earl of Arundel and Bishop Williams of Lincoln ‘who for ought I know is kept away for nothing but because they think he will give his voice against the duke’. Long continued that ‘I cannot think this kingdom can stand as long as this man does affront the highest court of England’, and called for these points to be raised at a conference with the Lords. He took great offence at Carleton’s reference to ‘new counsels’, and moved ‘that we may make a protestation that whosoever shall presume hereafter to give any such advice to the king for taking of such new ways of counsel shall be judged a traitor’. Ibid. 351, 353, 363. On 6 June Long was the first to speak after the Remonstrance against Buckingham was read to the House:

If any man will get preferment, it is a received opinion that it must be by him [Buckingham]. It is not so much the poisonous informations of those vipers that do us so much harm, only as that those who are good men dare not do right nor let the king know the truth, being kept from his presence, and hazarding their estates, their fortunes, and their beings if they offend one man.

This speech was criticized by chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Richard Weston for casting a general aspersion against the king’s servants, but Long insisted that ‘I am clear in my own thoughts, and so I hope I am in the opinion of the House’. Ibid. 378. On 9 June he called for copies of Charles’s peremptory demand for rapid progress over the supply bill to be made available to the House. With the dissolution imminent, Long’s final speech urged that grievances be redressed before subsidies were granted, and made it clear that the chief grievance was Buckingham:

The expectation of justice against the duke of Buckingham is that which sticks most with me. And in what state will the kingdom stand if this great improvident man be still in that great office? And I think he accounts this council as a spider’s web which he can easily break through. If the House see justice passed against this man tomorrow, I think the [subsidy] bill would go on the next day. Ibid. 406, 426.

However, Parliament was dissolved three days later.

Long was soon punished for his criticism of Buckingham, being removed from the Wiltshire bench on 8 July. Som. RO, DD/PH219/66. In the following month he received a punitive Privy Seal loan targeted against the duke’s opponents; this was not pressed, and he was later discharged from payment. E401/2586, ff. 25, 546. He also opposed the Forced Loan which followed: on 11 Oct. 1627 the loan commissioners for Wiltshire reported that he had ‘refused to lend anything’. SP16/80/33(I). The king evidently intended to prevent Long from sitting in the coming Parliament and in November he was pricked as sheriff for Wiltshire. Wilts. RO, 947/1860/1. However, he was returned for Bath on 27 Feb. 1628, in contravention of that part of the nolumus clause in the writ of election which prevented sheriffs from serving as MPs. Although he had no known influence at Bath, his estates lay only nine miles east of the borough, and he may have enjoyed the support of the neighbouring landowner Sir Francis Popham*, whose son John* took the second seat. C219/41A/61. As in the 1626 Parliament, Long was appointed to few bill committees but made a number of widely reported speeches. Once again, he was rarely distinguished from Robert Long, MP for Devizes, but most of the speeches ascribed to ‘Mr. Long’ can probably be attributed to him.

Long played a modest part in the debates over the Petition of Right, as he remained focused on Buckingham, a priority which now ran counter to the interests of the earl of Pembroke, who had settled his differences with the duke in the autumn of 1626. During the debate on the election of Sir John Eliot and William Coryton on 12 and 13 May, Long called for the imprisonment of the Cornish deputy lieutenants who had attempted to pervert the county election in favour of Buckingham’s candidates. CD 1628, iii. 376, 388. In May, the Lords attempted to amend the Petition of Right with a ‘saving clause’ for the prerogative, which prompted Long to protest that ‘all loans are a great grievance, and why should we admit any such urgency of necessity I know not, since the king might, if he could, have had money sooner and in greater proportion’. Ibid. 481. An interest in religious matters emerged during the debate on the subscription bill, which required clergymen to conform only to those of the Thirty-Nine articles sanctioned by Parliament - a measure which would have reversed the deprivation of around 90 puritan clergymen in 1604. He supported this bill, asking whether, ‘if a man be inducted and then after there be an alteration, whether it be fit for him to lose his living for not subscribing to the alteration.’ Ibid. 519.

Charles eventually assented to the Petition of Right on 7 June, but in the frenetic debates which preceded this ratification, the Commons resolved to draft a Remonstrance detailing Buckingham’s misdeeds. Long supported this project in a speech of 11 June:

In discharge of my duty to this House - that has received much prejudice by misreports in the [in]quisition of those evils, whereupon the fame goes up and down that it is out of a discontent of a few - I will speak what I think: the duke of Buckingham is the cause. I will make this distinction: he is not ‘the’ cause of all, but ‘a’ cause of some, and the only cause of others.

He accused Buckingham of promoting innovations in religions and government, and held him responsible for military setbacks, the deterioration of fortifications, ports and ships, and the decay in trade. Ibid. 245. On the following day, in his eagerness to proceed with the Remonstrance, Long urged the House to lay aside other legislation, and he later reminded Members of Charles’s promise to allow them sufficient time for legislation if subsidies were voted. On 14 June he moved that ‘suspected’ Arminians be named in the Remonstrance, successfully pressing for the inclusion of Bishops Neile and Laud. Ibid. iv. 282, 320, 330. A week later Long joined the attack on (Sir) Edmund Sawyer* for revising the customs rates without parliamentary approval, and called for him to be imprisoned, expelled from the House and barred from sitting again. Ibid. 419. Long also claimed that the Crown received £2,000 p.a. from purveyance duties imposed on malt, questioning the legality of this levy, and moving for its inclusion as a grievance. Five days later he returned to this subject, warning the House that ‘if we ever had occasion to settle this business, it is now. I am confident the king is made [to] believe he may take it without Parliament. Let us not now grant we know not what.’ Ibid. 376, 448.

Long evidently believed that the government would not interfere with his election for Bath despite his position as sheriff of Wiltshire, but his continued hostility towards Buckingham eventually brought the matter to a head. On 30 June 1628, shortly after Parliament was prorogued, he was sued in Star Chamber, though the charge against him was less that he had breached the conditions of his writ of election than that he had neglected his shrieval duties. CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 183. In late October attorney-general (Sir) Robert Heath* outlined the charges and demanded that Long be subpoenaed, but Long had probably left London for the country by this time, for on 4 Nov. Sir Valentine Browne* reported to Eliot that Long was away and ‘intends not to be found’. Add. 46190, f. 175; J. Forster, Sir John Eliot, ii. 378.

During the 1629 session Long continued to be a prominent figure. On 30 Jan. he was named to the committee to investigate irregularities in the printing of the Petition of Right. He was also named to committees to consider the case of the merchant John Rolle*, whose refusal to pay Tunnage and Poundage had resulted in the seizure of his goods (30 Jan.; 3 and 7 February). Ibid. 924b, 925b, 926a, 927b. When Charles exhorted the House to proceed with the Tunnage and Poundage bill on 28 Jan., Long expressed his ‘sorrow to see how we are still pressed to this point. I hoped those near the chair would have truly informed His Majesty of our good intentions. But we see how unhappy we are’. CD 1629, p. 22. His interest in religious matters was expressed in two speeches in which he condemned the release from gaol of a dozen Jesuit priests, and demanded that the House be informed of the number of Catholics at Court (13 and 17 February). Ibid. 205, 220. He played a leading part in the tumultuous scenes on 2 Mar., during which the Speaker was forcibly kept from adjourning the House. Reinforcing Eliot’s condemnation of Tunnage and Poundage, he stated that ‘[any] man that shall give away my liberty and my inheritance, if any of them shall pay Tunnage and Poundage without gift by Parliament I shall vote him that does it to be a capital enemy to the kingdom’. Ibid. 264.

Long was among the nine Members selected for punishment following these events. When summoned before the Privy Council on 3 Mar., it emerged that he had fled to Wiltshire, whereupon a Proclamation was issued calling for his arrest for sedition and ‘crimes of a high nature’. Add. 15561, f. 118v; Eg. 2978, f. 49; SP16/530/22; 16/139/63; Stuart Royal Procs. ed. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes, 228-9; APC 1628-9, p. 351; HMC Buccleuch, iii. 341. The king’s messenger, sent to apprehend Long, was met at Trowbridge by Long’s uncle, William, who ‘abused him with reviling speeches’ before throwing a full chamber pot over his head, ‘at which he [William] and his wife much rejoiced’. SP16/251/26; 16/219/14(I); Historical Collections ed. J. Rushworth, i. 686. Appearing before King’s Bench on 27 Apr., Long faced concurrent charges relating both to the 2 Mar. incident and to his rregular election at Bath, a matter which was still pending in Star Chamber. On 6 May he unsuccessfully applied for a writ of habeas corpus, and on the following day was examined by attorney-general Heath. Advised by his counsels Robert Mason* and Henry Sherfield, Long argued that his parliamentary privilege meant that he should not be pressed to answer for what he had said or done in the House. He languished in the Marshalsea until February 1630, when he was fined 2,000 marks by Star Chamber and ordered to be remanded in the Tower for ‘his presumption in quitting the personal service of sheriff whereunto he was obliged by oath, to play the busybody in Parliament’. C115/105/8121; Add. 46190, ff. 177-8, 181, 183-5, 187; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 540; SP16/142/35; 16/143/11; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 203; D’Ewes ed. W. Notestein, 495; T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, i. 55. His estates were seized to secure recovery of the fine, despite an appeal for clemency. C115/106/8384, 8391, 8392; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 231. His plight attracted interest and sympathy: in March Lady Coventry promised to gather support to free him if he submitted to the Crown, but he replied that he had acknowledged the justice of his sentence in a petition to the Lords ‘and I do not know what other submission to make’. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/22. On 3 Oct. Long agreed to offer bail for his release, but retracted on learning that the other prisoners had refused similar offers. S.R. Gardiner, Hist. Eng. ii. 110. He remained in prison until July 1633, though in April 1631, through the intercession of Secretary Dorchester (Sir Dudley Carleton), he was allowed leave to visit his wife at her deathbed. SP16/189/91; M. Keeler, Long Parl. 257; HMC Cowper, ii. 8.

Long’s estate, already encumbered by debts of £4,000, suffered further by his imprisonment and fine. D’Ewes, 495. On 10 Mar. 1629 he had conveyed most of his Wiltshire properties, worth at least £2,300 p.a., to trustees including Edward Kirton* and the lawyers Edward Littleton II* and Robert Mason. C54/2743/16; Wilts. RO, 947/958. In November 1630, however, Littleton and Mason were charged with being accomplices with Long in defrauding the Crown; Long was questioned about this subterfuge in the Exchequer. Meanwhile, the courtier John Ashburnham* was assigned the benefit of Long’s fine, collecting £200 p.a. from his estate. SP16/487/56; Birch, 162. In February 1632 Long wrote to Sherfield that late payments from tenants had ‘much troubled us and put us to great straits for moneys to supply our occasions and keep our credits upright’. Hants RO, 44M69/L34/23. He was forced to sell some of his properties to satisfy the Crown and other creditors. Some Wiltshire lands were transferred to his son, Robert, while Bawdrip manor, Somerset, was sold to Sir Samuel Rolle* for £4,550. C54/3018/3; Wilts. RO, 947/1154, 1860/4.

Late in 1633 Long married the widow of Sir Richard Foxe, though ‘with much opposition of my wife’s friends’, thereby securing property in Shropshire and Herefordshire. C142/530/150; Hants RO, 44M69/L34/25. He resided in Shropshire for the remainder of the decade, and in 1635 the 4th earl of Pembroke charged him with defaulting on musters in Wiltshire. CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 413, 469; PC2/47, p. 103. True to those convictions which he had earlier displayed regarding unparliamentary taxation, Long resisted paying Ship Money and in 1639 secured the arrest of the constable who had allegedly over-assessed him. SP16/422/45. In 1641 he petitioned for compensation for his Star Chamber fine; he was paid £1,333 in instalments, but does not appear to have received the additional £5,000 indemnity promised him. SP16/487/56; Wilts. RO, 947/1871; B. Whitelocke, Mems. of Eng. Affairs, ii. 105.

In December 1641 Long was returned to Parliament for Ludgershall in place of John Ashburnham’s brother, William, who had been expelled from the House following his part in the first Army Plot. One of the Wiltshire parliamentarians exempted from the king’s pardon in November 1642, Long played an active part in the military organization of Wiltshire and Shropshire, raising a troop of horse and fighting at Edgehill, where his horse was shot from under him. Wilts. N and Q, ii. 27; R. Steele, Tudor and Stuart Procs. i. 279. Following the end of the First Civil War, Long emerged as one of the leaders of Presbyterian faction in the Commons, and was consequently one of the 11 Members displaced by the Army in August 1647. He fled to Calais, Whitelocke, 199. but had presumably returned by the following November, when he was nominated by Parliament as sheriff for Wiltshire. It is uncertain whether he ever took up this position. Wilts. RO, 947/1860/4. Disabled at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, he also lost his office as Chancery registrar. Soon afterwards he switched sides, joining the royalists in exile. Keeler, 257.

Long had returned to England by October 1659, when he was restored to his Chancery office despite protests from the widow of the former incumbent, Sir Thomas Jermyn*. Aylmer, 88-9; Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke ed. R. Spalding, 576-7. He was created a baronet at the Restoration, and in 1671 was again pricked as sheriff, despite being 80 years old and ‘unable to travel without a litter’. CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 145. He made his will on 20 Sept. 1672, asking to be buried at night ‘for avoiding the trouble and pomp of funeral solemnities’. Owed £37,036 from various debtors, he bequeathed plate, jewels and an annuity of £250 to his third wife, £2,000 to his eldest son Walter, 1,600 acres in county Meath to his second son Robert, and a further £1,110 to various servants and relatives. Wilts. RO, 947/1132, 1676/1, 2. He died on 15 Nov. 1672 and was buried at Whaddon. Wilts. RO, 669/1. His son Walter sat for Bath at the Restoration, but died childless in 1710, whereupon the family estates passed to his nephew Calthorpe Parker, a younger son of Sir Philip Parker†, who assumed the surname Long. Wilts. RO, 947/2190; CB. Long’s widow lived at Harefield Park, Middlesex, with Juliana, widow of Sir Richard Newdigate†, to whom she was related through the Parkers. VCH Mdx. iii. 242. In her will of 1688, she mentioned a portrait of Long which had been procured from the financier Sir Richard Vyner for £140. PROB 11/393, f. 176v.