‘The old devil of Howley’ is chiefly known to posterity through the correspondence of his enemies, particularly Sir Thomas Wentworth*, his junior by a generation. Savile’s cunning made him a dangerous enemy, especially for those who threatened his power base in the West Riding. This trait first manifested itself at the Yorkshire election of 1597, and was exhibited upon a larger stage during the 1624 Parliament, when Savile was one of the most skilful opponents of a precipitate declaration of war against Spain. However, despite the ample connections offered by his wife’s family and the 6th earl of Shrewsbury, he failed to cultivate Court patronage under James, a neglect which cost him the custos-ship of the West Riding in 1615/16 and began the feud with Wentworth which dominated the rest of his life. From 1626 he secured a place upon the national stage, becoming Charles’s key enforcer in Yorkshire and successfully manipulating local rivalries to frustrate Wentworth’s efforts to undermine the collection of the Forced Loan. The scale of Savile’s achievements has often been underestimated by historians, partly because his papers do not survive in any great quantity, but chiefly because Wentworth, having superseded him in the king’s affections, adopted many of his policy initiatives without ever acknowledging the debt he owed his rival.
I. Savile’s Power Base
Savile’s father, an illegitimate relation of the Saviles of Thornhill, Yorkshire, inherited Howley Hall in Yorkshire, but his chief estates lay in northern Lincolnshire. It was here that Sir John cut his political teeth with the assistance of his half-brother Stephen Thymbleby†, recorder of Lincoln, who secured him a place at Lincoln’s Inn in 1576 and a parliamentary seat at Lincoln a decade later. Thymbleby’s death in 1587 extinguished this influence, and while Savile served as sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1590-1, shortly thereafter he began shifting his interests to Yorkshire. There he amassed an estate of 5,000 acres west of Leeds and an iron forge at Kirkstall, the total yield of which was conservatively estimated at £2,200 a year at his death.
Savile’s chief political asset was the honour of Wakefield, Yorkshire, comprising much of the Aire and Calder valleys, where he served as steward jointly with his father-in-law Sir Edward Carey† from 1588 until 1618, when he was succeeded by his son Sir Thomas*. Throughout this period the family built a following among the Crown’s tenants by granting copyhold leases of intakes from common land at reasonable fines and token rents.
Although Savile’s influence centred upon the honour of Wakefield, by the time of the 1620 general election he had acquired a wider reputation as ‘the patron of the clothiers’, particularly in Parliament. In the first instance, he promoted legislation for the benefit of the cloth industry. Though not an MP in 1601, he was consulted about modifications to the Tentering Act of 1597, and nine years later he was first named to the bill to alter existing legislation concerning the length and weight of kersies (5 Feb. 1606). When a broader measure for regulation of the cloth trade was tabled in the following year, Savile intervened to ensure that the Londoner Richard Gore, who spoke against the bill, was not added to the committee (27 Mar. 1607).
The cloth trade aside, Savile supported a number of initiatives designed to benefit the West Riding and bolster his authority in the area. The Pennine towns depended upon Lincolnshire and the Vale of York for much of their supply of corn, and in the Commons’ debate of 12 Apr. 1624 on restrictions to the export of grain, Savile argued that prices should not be forced so low as to destroy trade: ‘we must take care that the farmer and husbandman be encouraged, for then the poor will not want’.
While Savile offered assistance to a broad cross-section of his neighbours, he was particularly careful to promote the interests of his most stalwart supporters, the large-scale clothiers who dominated the economic and political fortunes of the West Riding, and who played a key role in mobilizing his vote at general elections. Most of these men were Merchant Adventurers, a factor which doubtless sharpened Savile’s opposition to the Cockayne project in 1614. A decade later, when the Company’s newly restored monopoly of cloth exports came under attack in Parliament, Savile sprang to its defence, warning that ‘if we labour too much to prune this Company we may destroy them, and so bring a great mischief to the kingdom’.
The final way in which Savile consolidated his reputation was as a godly patron. Religion was an issue upon which he spoke little in Parliament, but his opinions can be inferred from his behaviour at local level. He was one of the plaintiffs in the 1615 lawsuit which established a trust to control the advowson of Leeds parish church, and confirmed the anti-Catholic firebrand Alexander Cooke as vicar, who had been deprived of his previous cure for non-subscription to the 1604 Canons. Thereafter (in 1619) Savile passed land at Headingley to the parish trustees for a chapel of ease.
For all the benefits which accrued from his local following, Savile never merely used the West Riding as a stepping stone to greater things, but fought tenaciously on behalf of his local community, even when his career might have been better served by a diplomatic silence. Thus in 1614 he was one of the few non-merchant MPs who spoke out against the Cockayne project, and in 1624, when he had everything to gain at Court by supporting a breach with Spain, the better to highlight Wentworth’s misgivings about this policy change, he became one of the most obdurate opponents of war. Even in 1626, while striving to win Buckingham’s favour, Savile repeatedly argued that the collapse of the export trade following the outbreak of hostilities with Spain meant that the West Riding was unable to sustain the level of taxation the government demanded for the war effort. Savile’s local standing was founded upon this hard-won reputation as a principled commonwealthsman as much as any individual initiative, and it was a combination of the two factors which enabled him to challenge far more influential rivals for control of the shire.
II. Early Career
Savile erupted onto the stage of Yorkshire politics at the county election of 1597, overthrowing the official candidates promoted by the Council in the North, Sir John Stanhope* and Sir Thomas Hoby*. His opponents subsequently dismissed his supporters as ‘a few gentlemen and a great multitude of clothiers, woolmen and other freeholders of the West Riding’ - the local constituency he had already been nurturing for a decade - yet he could not have achieved his sensational victory without the assistance of Gilbert Talbot†, 7th earl of Shrewsbury, whose antipathy to Stanhope was deep seated, and who may have persuaded Savile to stand in the first place. The earl’s backing brought the support of his Sheffield tenantry and neighbours such as the Wentworths of Elmsall and Wentworth Woodhouse and Richard Gargrave*, while on the eve of the election Savile won over two North Riding landowners, Sir William Fairfax† and Sir Richard Mauleverer, probably by offering them the opportunity to pair with him the following day. At the hustings Savile seized the initiative, citing the 1413 statute barring non-residents (such as Stanhope) from election, spreading rumours that Hoby’s brother had promoted a bill against the Yorkshire cloth interest in the previous Parliament, and overcoming his opponents’ calls for a poll by the simple expedient of seizing the under-sheriff and riding out of York Castle yard.
Savile’s outrageous conduct earned him three weeks in the Fleet, but he kept his parliamentary seat. At the next election he had the good sense not to challenge the authority of lord president Burghley (Thomas Cecil†), who secured the return of Stanhope’s brother and his vice-president, Sir Thomas Fairfax I*. However, the humiliation Savile had visited upon the Council in the North in 1597 weighed heavily upon Burghley’s successors. In 1604 the newly appointed lord president, Lord Sheffield, was palpably relieved to be able to strike a deal under which Savile received official backing for the knighthood of the shire in conjunction with Francis Clifford*. At the election Savile, who turned out by far the greater number of freeholders, tactfully allowed Clifford (heir to an earldom) to take precedence on the return.
While not one of the leading lights of James’s first Parliament, Savile played a significant role in its day-to-day proceedings, promoting and managing a range of legislation. The first measure with which he was closely involved was a complex bill recasting the 1563 Act for the leather trade, which he reported on 16 May 1604. This was rejected by the Lords, and consequently a fresh draft was tabled on 26 June, which Savile also reported. Savile was lobbied about this bill by the London Cordwainers’ Company, and passions ran high in the City, particularly among the curriers, who were not regarded as members of the leather trade: on 16 June complaint was made of a currier who had remonstrated with Savile over his handling of the bill.
As knight of the shire for the premier county in England, Savile’s opinions carried intrinsic weight in the Commons, but it took him some time to acquire a reputation as a political heavyweight. Having attended the joint conference of 14 Apr. 1604 at which James’s plans to change his title to ‘king of Great Britain’ were revealed, he asked ‘whether in leagues and treaties the king meant to style himself so’. By this he probably meant to imply that a change of name would cause English diplomats to forfeit their precedency at foreign Courts. His nomination to the committee collating objections to the new title (27 Apr. 1604), and his inclusion as one of the members of the Union Commission (12 May) suggests that a sceptical Commons perceived him as a critic of the king’s plans.
While named to the committee for the purveyance bill of 3 Apr. 1604, Savile was not initially one of the diehard opponents of this method of supporting the Household: on 18 May, with the Commons at loggerheads over a proposed national composition, he rejected both fresh legislation and a new composition, offering instead to ‘give double for his shire [than that] which is given now; wisheth that every shire would do the like’. This recommendation would have maintained existing inequalities, to the satisfaction of counties such as Yorkshire (which compounded for a mere £495 in 1609) but would hardly have been acceptable to the Home Counties. Savile’s attitudes had apparently hardened by the next session, when he was named to the committee for a more controversial draft of the purveyance bill (30 Jan. 1606), which met with a hostile reception in the Lords. On 12 Apr. John Hare’s* report of the Lords’ objections was summarized by Savile; Henry Yelverton then used this speech as a cue to launch a ringing defence of the Commons’ bill.
Rising tension over purveyance may explain Savile’s reluctance to concede any increase in the two subsidies voted in February 1606: official spokesmen made much of the royal deficit during a debate of 14 Mar. 1606, but Savile dismissed such claims with the tart observation that ‘many more means will be propounded if we voluntarily offer this’. His mistrust of the government had deepened by 1610 when, having missed the initial debates over the Great Contract, he registered his doubts in a lengthy speech on 2 June. He questioned the merits of exchanging the Crown’s concessions for a vote of supply and an annual composition, arguing that the projected annual ‘support’ of £100,000 in lieu of wardship would be ‘as much as the subjects can well yield’, and he scorned the government’s promises that this contribution would not set a precedent:
if we bargain for those seven things offered, which all are either the straining of the prerogative royal upon the liberties of the subjects or abuses of inferior officers, we shall find that every Parliament there will be some thing or other found wherein the subject will be grieved, and will be enforced to give a further support for the discharge thereof to the king, so that it will be as usual to give a support as a subsidy.
At the supply debate on 14 June Savile returned to the same theme, reminding the king of ‘the poor estate of his subjects’ and moving that official assurances that James would give serious consideration to the Commons’ grievances (most notably impositions) be guaranteed by inclusion in the preamble to the subsidy bill.
In 1614 Savile was returned for the senior county unopposed, and the dispute between Sir John Mallory* and Sir Thomas Wentworth over the second seat was laid aside until his arrival. He did not reach Westminster until after Easter, arriving with a mind to make trouble. He had probably been detained in the north by unrest arising from Alderman Cockayne’s project to supplant the Merchant Adventurers’ monopoly of cloth exports, against which he vented his anger on 20 May:
at this present there was such a stop of the cloth market here [at Blackwell Hall in London] as there was not so little as £4-5,000 worth of cloth out of Yorkshire that they could be bid no money for. And that within ten miles where he dwelt there was not so few as 13,000 people set a-work with these cloths, and many a thousand of them had not £20 stock, many not above 20 or 30s., so as they could suffer no delays in their sale without hazard of starving; and if this stop of cloth continue but one 14 days, he knows not what will follow.
Cockayne and his opponents were questioned the following afternoon, but thereafter the issue received only one mention in the parliamentary record before the dissolution. The problem was that the government, having just agreed to back Cockayne, was in no mood to entertain criticism of the project, while the Commons was reluctant to devote time to an issue which, although a glaring abuse of royal power, was not technically a breach of the prerogative.
To gain even this brief airing of his grievances against Cockayne, Savile apparently came to an understanding with the most influential group in the House, the lawyers who wished to make impositions the centrepiece of the Parliament. As a practical man who expressed little appreciation of abstract concepts such as liberties of the subject, Savile had rarely touched upon this issue in previous sessions: in 1606 he wittily claimed that the eloquence of Sir Francis Bacon had almost persuaded him of the merits of the government’s case over impositions; but he is not recorded to have spoken during the extensive impositions debates of June 1610.
Savile continued to co-operate with the leadership of the House throughout the 1614 session. On 13 May he dismissed a hare-brained plot to unseat Sir Roger Owen as chairman of the investigation into the ‘undertakers’ who had allegedly engaged to manage the House for the Crown, growling ‘that in Sir W[alter] Mildmay’s† time no disorder, now many young gentlemen of a great spirit occasioning this disorder’. Twelve days later he joined the attack on Bishop Neile, after the latter insisted that impositions were an integral part of the prerogative. On 6 June, with dissolution imminent, he gave vent to his frustrations: when John Hoskins asked to be exonerated for his inflammatory remarks about Scottish courtiers, Savile affirmed that this was possible, ‘but he knew no reason now why any question should be put, since none was accused’. On the following morning, as the House prepared a statement confirming its opposition to impositions, there were attempts to sweeten the pill with a last-minute vote of supply, which Savile dismissed out of hand: ‘not to give now, for now will be the gift of undertaking’. Sir Henry Wotton thereupon attempted a clumsy smear, recalling that Savile had offered to farm the Yorkshire recusancy fines in 1610, and suggesting that he might do so again if Parliament were dissolved. The diarist forbore to record Savile’s response, which was doubtless couched in unparliamentary language, but one newsletter writer claimed that Wotton ‘was cried down and in great danger to be called to the bar, but [e]scaped it narrowly’.
III. Origins of the Savile-Wentworth Feud
Savile was dragged before the Privy Council within hours of the dissolution, probably as much out of fear that he would challenge Wotton to a duel as for his speeches. However, he was ordered to remain in attendance for the next five weeks, and was further questioned ‘for alleging he had warning from some of his neighbours not to give anything that should confirm the impositions’.
Savile was undoubtedly relieved by the choice of Wentworth as his successor, calculating that the latter’s youth and inexperience augured well for his chances of reinstatement. Thus in September 1617, having rebuilt a measure of credit with the king, he solicited a letter to Wentworth from the royal favourite, Buckingham, urging Sir Thomas to relinquish the custos-ship in return for a vague promise of ‘as good preferment upon any other occasion’. Wentworth, however, stood his ground, using a copy of Savile’s original resignation letter to support his claim that Savile had been removed for just cause, and protesting that his replacement ‘might justly be taken as the greatest disgrace that could be done unto me’. To Savile’s undoubted dismay, Buckingham sent Wentworth a contrite apology, conceding ‘that I see it was a misinformation given to His Majesty and to me’ and urging him ‘not to trouble yourself ... with any doubt of further proceeding in this matter’.
This humiliation provoked Savile’s enduring feud with Wentworth, which burst into the public domain in the autumn of 1620, when the two men placed their personal rivalry before the county community in a bitterly fought election for the knighthood of the shire. Wentworth’s decision to challenge his rival must initially have seemed the height of folly, as Savile had reached the zenith of his electoral influence in 1614, when his assistance enabled Wentworth to beat off a challenge from Sir John Mallory. However, this victory held a warning for Savile, as Mallory had countered Savile’s dominance of the West Riding by assembling an impressive array of gentry support from the East and North Ridings, ranging from the puritan Sir William Constable, 1st bt.* to the Catholic Sir Henry Constable of Halsham, a coalition which suggests a growing anxiety outside the West Riding over Savile’s domination of the county seats. It was Wentworth who drew the requisite lesson from this election, carefully seeking support from across the county in 1620.
Savile, meanwhile, used the same canvassing methods against Wentworth which had served him well for over 20 years. He declared his intentions with the improbable claim that he ‘had received three hundred letters in two days from gentlemen of worth to move him to stand for election’, and consolidated his support among the West Riding clothiers by portraying himself as ‘their martyr, having suffered for them’ in the aftermath of the Addled Parliament. His credentials as a ‘country’ candidate were reinforced by his determination to stand against Wentworth’s running-mate, secretary of state Sir George Calvert*, and (as in 1597) he used his servants to spread rumours that a courtier, ‘being not resident in the county, cannot by law be chosen; and being His Majesty’s secretary and a stranger, one not safe to be trusted by the country’. Yet for all his extravagant claims, Savile’s support never extended beyond his natural constituency: the petition he submitted to the privileges’ committee in February 1621 was signed by over 300 clothiers, but included only a handful of clothier-gentry such as John Kaye and Gregory Armytage, while the only county figure who seems to have rallied to his side was William Mallory, who blamed Wentworth for his father’s defeat in 1614.
Despite the confident assumption of some of Wentworth’s friends that Savile stood ‘to hazard the loss of all’ by appearing at the hustings, the issue still hung in the balance at election day, when both sides attempted a range of subterfuges. Wentworth, having secured the sheriff’s support, proposed to square off against Savile, leaving Calvert to be returned uncontested, but, as in 1597, Savile frustrated this plan by pairing with his son, Sir Thomas Savile*, at the last minute. The outcome was decided by the sheriff’s blatantly partisan decision to shut the gates of the Castle Yard before all the freeholders had entered, stranding over 1,000 of Savile’s supporters on the wrong side of the barrier. This ruse allowed Christopher Wandesford* and others to swear that Savile had mustered ‘not above one hundred freeholders’ at the election, and while Savile managed to have two high constables punished for canvassing on Wentworth’s behalf, he failed to overturn the result of the election.
IV. The 1624 Parliament
Savile’s fortunes changed in the summer of 1622, when Wentworth was stricken by the first of several bouts of tertian fever, which left him weakened and unwilling to contest the county election in 1624. This was dominated by the recent suspension of the recusancy laws and the likelihood of a breach with Spain, which meant that Savile’s impeccably godly credentials were an invaluable electoral asset. A contest seemed unlikely until the advent of last-minute rumours of ‘an intention in some to have elected persons suspected in religion, which to us all would have been full of danger and scandal’. In the event, Savile was returned without a contest, and the identity of his rivals remains unknown, but it is possible that lord president Scrope attempted to promote Sir Thomas Fairfax II* and Sir Thomas Belasyse*, both of whom had recusant wives. This would certainly explain why Savile was willing to join with Wentworth (who sat for Pontefract) in exposing Scrope’s Catholic sympathies to the Commons in April 1624.
Upon his arrival at Westminster, Savile seemed to have every reason to support Prince Charles, Buckingham and the ‘patriot’ coalition in their efforts to put an end to the pro-Spanish orientation of government policy for a decade and more, yet he quickly confounded such expectations. Even when considering an issue such as the suspension of the recusancy laws, Savile willingly gave James the benefit of the doubt: ‘the king never did prohibit the execution of the laws against papists, but [did] only connive at the non-execution of the laws, which His Majesty might do with honour’.
Savile’s differences with the patriots emerged during the debates over funding for the war likely to arise from a breach with Spain. On 5 Mar. 1624 Sir Edwin Sandys reported the 3rd earl of Southampton’s motion to give the king an open-ended guarantee of financial support for such a war. A similar undertaking had been adopted without dissent on 4 June 1621, but Savile warned that Southampton’s motion ‘was a great engagement, and that having once passed it, it was not in our power to revoke it nor moderate it, but the king would be judge [of] what we are able’.
By the time the subsidy debate opened on 19 Mar., the sum required from the Commons, originally set at £780,000 by James, had been whittled down to £300,000, which it was proposed to assign to defensive preparations and support for the Dutch. Many Members retained misgivings about the scale of such a financial commitment, fears Savile touched upon with a deceptively simple motion, which was ‘to know first what we should do, then how we should do it, and how to levy it’. This opened the floodgates to a range of speakers, who voiced their hopes and fears for a war, and as a result it took most of the morning for the hawks to bring the House back to the question of supply. Calls for a vote on the number of subsidies were judged to be premature by several speakers, including Savile, who disingenuously insisted ‘more danger to ask too little than too much, therefore to be well examined’.
It is difficult to reconstruct the agenda Savile brought to Parliament in 1624. His obstruction of the aims of the patriot coalition may be interpreted as resentment at their failure to solicit his support before the session began, while his obstreperous behaviour, like Wentworth’s over the Forced Loan a few years later, served as a reminder that, although he had been out of office for nearly a decade, he was simply too influential to be ignored. Yet one can also take his speeches at face value: much as he may have lamented the misfortunes of the Protestant cause in Europe, he clearly doubted the ability of the nation to bear the burden of an offensive war, and feared the prospect of blundering into such a commitment without due consideration of strategy and cost.
V. The Move into Buckingham’s Favour
Charles’s accession in March 1625 occasioned fresh elections. Savile declared his candidacy immediately, but Wentworth consulted with friends at Court before making a decision about whether to mount a challenge. In his absence Sir Thomas Fairfax I and William Mallory stepped forward, but the latter eventually withdrew in the face of rumours, spread by Savile’s supporters, about his Catholic connections. This allowed Wentworth to pair with Fairfax, albeit only days before the election, and a close-run contest was, as in 1620, won by Wentworth through the partiality of the sheriff (Sir Richard Cholmley*). On the first day of business at Westminster, Sir Edward Giles tabled a petition from Savile’s supporters, and despite Wentworth’s efforts to secure an immediate adjournment of the session, it was given priority by the committee for privileges. Wentworth’s supporters employed a wide repertoire of time-wasting tricks, but Savile circumvented them by simply endorsing his adversaries’ version of events. This meant that the outcome of the election was quickly referred back to the Commons, which ordered a writ for a new election. However, after a hastily organized campaign and ‘a tedious and troublesome polling’, the earlier result was confirmed.
Savile’s defeat ultimately served him well, as Wentworth’s refusal to countenance any increase in the two subsidies voted at the start of the 1625 session damaged his credit with Buckingham and meant that he was pricked as sheriff of Yorkshire in November 1625 to exclude him from the new Parliament, summoned for the following February. Savile paired with his son, Sir Thomas, while Wentworth promoted the candidacy of his neighbour Sir Francis Wortley*, who had picked a fight with Sir Thomas shortly after the 1625 election. Meanwhile, there were reports that Sir John Savile was courting support in the East Riding on the understanding that he would promote an investigation into lord president Scrope in Parliament. Wentworth responded by pairing Wortley with the undeniably godly Sir William Constable, custos of the East Riding, but then suffered a setback when Sir Henry Savile* (a relative of Sir John, but hitherto a Wentworth supporter) declared for his rival. In a letter to Sir Henry, Wentworth hinted at the prospect of a compromise, and on the day of the election Sir Thomas Savile was conveniently ‘surprised with a sudden sickness’ which obliged him to ‘resign my interest in that business to another’. Wortley also stood aside, leaving Sir John Savile and Constable to be returned without a contest.
Upon his arrival in the Commons, Savile, fresh from suppressing riots among unemployed weavers at Wakefield, demonstrated the same concerns about the burdens of war which had preoccupied him in 1624. On 25 Feb. he claimed that the subsidy to Christian IV of Denmark would cost £50,000 a month, an obviously insupportable sum, and begged for relief for the poorer subsidymen: ‘the copyholder is the third or fourth part of England; he languishes and ready to give up the last gasp, and by raising of the [land]lords’ fines worse’. Two days later he interrupted a series of complaints about mismanagement of Crown revenues to warn that economic crisis caused by the war required urgent action:
there is 30,000 near his house that if there be no help they will seek help themselves. It was at a great hazard this summer, but not so ill as now; the poor being hindered in their trade threatened to take meat out of their mouths, since that if they want work many thousands will be in great extremity. The merchant does not sell for [want] of the cloth in their country.
These concerns meant that when the king made overtures for a grant of supply on 10 Mar., Savile preferred to examine the Council of War’s accounts for the 1624 subsidies: ‘no man will be willing to give his money into a bottomless gulf’. Three days later he pronounced himself ‘much distracted’ over the question of supply, and when a draft reply to Charles’s inquiry about supply was tabled on 14 Mar., he protested ‘that by this answer we have tied ourselves in a parliamentary manner. The charges cannot be borne. If we give never so much, unless things be well rectified at home in the king’s estate it will be to little purpose’.
Savile’s problem in the opening weeks of the session was that he sought a debate on reform of Crown finances, whereas those around him merely wished to attack Buckingham. Thus on 24 Feb., when Eliot hinted that reform should be accompanied by the removal of ministers who wasted the Crown’s revenues, Savile pointedly called for the privy councillors, hitherto conspicuous by their silence, to provide a clear lead to the House. Three days later Savile vented his feelings in a letter to his allies in Leeds, accusing Buckingham’s tormentors of being ‘so resolutely bent and with such eagerness upon the pursuit of a great man as rather than they will fail or surcease they are resolved to hazard the whole estate of the commonwealth’.
For all his newfound dependence on the duke, Savile remained reluctant to endorse any grant of taxation without securing relief for his Yorkshire neighbours, although tact now demanded he phrase his objections more constructively. Thus on 23 Mar. he welcomed Secretary Coke’s report on the Crown’s war budget, but recommended an investigation of waste rather than immediate supply; while four days later an anonymous speech (which can probably be attributed to Savile) endorsed a grant of three subsidies and three fifteenths in return for a discount upon the £10,000-worth of Privy Seal loans then being collected in Yorkshire. This speech brought a swift response from the government over the Easter recess, when Savile led a Yorkshire delegation before the Privy Council to secure a two-thirds’ reduction in the county’s privy seals.
Following the concession on privy seals, Savile moved ever more obviously into Buckingham’s orbit. When Eliot raised the St. Peter incident yet again on 1 May, Savile reminded him that attorney-general Heath* had long since assured the House that Buckingham had acted under direct orders from the king. Four days later, with Buckingham’s impeachment charges almost complete, Savile urged the House to pass a fresh allegation against the duke over to the Lords. The presentation of the impeachment charges was a fiasco, with Charles arresting the two Members who implied that he and Buckingham had hastened the death of his father. Savile counselled against an over-hasty response, and when his own detention in 1597 was cited as a precedent, he tried to put a favourable gloss on the incident, observing that there had been no suspension of the Commons’ proceedings, and the House had simply petitioned Queen Elizabeth for his release as a matter of grace.
By the end of May Savile was being tipped for a peerage to swell the ranks of Buckingham’s supporters in the Lords, while in the Commons his advocacy of the duke had become sufficiently irritating to provoke an attack on his own credibility. A copy of his letter of 27 Feb. was produced by Sir Francis Foljambe on 22 May, and quickly condemned as a gross insult to the House. Savile lost his temper and accused Eliot and Sir William Armyne of conspiring to defame him; forced to retract his remarks, he vehemently denied writing the letter, although he lost credibility by trying to foist the authorship upon his son Edmund and his servant Robert Benson in turn. Examined under oath on 8 June, three of Savile’s associates admitted that they had circulated copies of the letter among the clothiers to drum up support for a petition to Parliament, and had then tried to conceal their role when Savile came under attack in the Commons. With his defence reduced to a number of convenient memory lapses, Savile looked to be on the verge of expulsion, and was only saved by the dissolution of 15 June.
VI. Court Favour and the Forced Loan
Savile’s decision to support Buckingham in his hour of need was based on more than a reduction in the privy seals, which was merely an indication of favours to come. Two weeks after the dissolution his appointment to the newly formed commission to improve the Crown’s revenues gave him the opportunity to implement some of the financial reforms he had advocated in Parliament. Within weeks he secured a patent to compound for the tenures of those holding lands in capite worth under £10 a year in the north of England, effectively a small-scale trial for the revival of the Great Contract which he had advocated on 26 Apr. 1626.
On 8 Nov. 1626 Savile was sworn a privy councillor. There was much speculation as to the reasons, the most convincing being that ‘his merit must spring from the new commission for the royal subsidy [Forced Loan] in that county [Yorkshire], for as yet ... the man hath done little’.
In the absence of much of the relevant documentation it is difficult to chart the course of the Forced Loan in Yorkshire, but Savile apparently overcame a potentially disastrous campaign of non-compliance in two ways. First, he looked to broaden the base of his support within the shire: the Catholic Viscount Dunbar had already been allowed to take a leading role in the East Riding by the autumn of 1626, and in the following spring Savile secured the acquiescence of two key figures in the North and West Ridings, Sir Thomas Belasyse and Sir Thomas Fairfax I (Sir William Constable’s father-in-law), by having them elevated to the peerage in May and October 1627.
Savile’s industry was rewarded by Buckingham, who appointed him comptroller of the Household following the death of Sir John Suckling* in April 1627. In the north he continued to expand his sphere of influence by inaugurating a commission to compound for recusancy fines, a scheme he had proposed to the revenue commission the previous year, which quickly raised the Crown £3,500 a year. This income, and a levy on Newcastle coal, were assigned to maintain a small squadron of ships appointed to defend the east coast against the Dunkirk privateers, whose activities had been a major grievance for the Yorkshire merchants since the outbreak of the war, and when the money ran out Savile supported the project with £5,400 from his own pocket. Finally, Savile was one of the promoters of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden’s project to drain the Hatfield Levels, which brought in £10,000 towards the war effort.
VII. Eclipse and Final Years
Having invested so heavily in prerogative government, Savile opposed the summons of a fresh Parliament in 1628. Even after the decision was taken, he was one of the few councillors who supported Buckingham’s motion that the session be postponed until the end of April, and that the punitive privy seals sent out on the eve of the elections should not be rescinded, ‘lest refractories might thereby be encouraged’.
Savile’s political position began to unravel after the end of the 1628 session. He was ennobled as Baron Savile of Pontefract on 21 July, but the success of the Parliament meant that Wentworth was awarded a barony on the following day. Buckingham’s assassination threatened Savile’s position, but he quickly made overtures to the 3rd earl of Pembroke for support. Wentworth responded with allegations of bribe-taking by Savile’s recusancy commission, and finally surpassed his rival in December, acquiring a viscountcy and succeeding Scrope as lord president.
There were frequent reports that Savile’s health deteriorated after his fall from power, and indeed he died at Howley Hall on 30/31 August 1630. His main estates went to his eldest surviving son, Sir Thomas, but in his will, drafted eight months earlier, he appointed his daughter, Anne Leigh, as executrix, which provoked several years’ worth of litigation between the two over the title to three manors within the honour of Pontefract which he had bought in 1628.