SCOTT, Thomas (c.1566/7-1635), of St. Alphege, Canterbury and Egerton, Godmersham, Kent

Puritan radical, diarist and proponent of parliamentary reform, Scott should be distinguished from his cousin Thomas Scott (d.1610) of Scot’s Hall, who represented Aylesbury in the 1586 Parliament and served as sheriff of Kent in 1601-2. He must also be differentiated from the author of Vox Populi, a treatise critical of the proposed Spanish Match published in 1620 by a former chaplain of James I. HP Commons, 1558-1603; Oxford DNB sub Thomas Scott, ?1580-1626. Descended from ‘privy councillors, peers and princes’, Bodl. Ballard 61, f. 113v. or so he claimed, Scott was drawn from the ranks of the middle gentry. His father Charles, a younger son of Sir Reginald Scott of Scot’s Hall, purchased Egerton manor, six miles north-east of Ashford, in 1574 and was appointed to the bench in 1587. P. Clark, ‘Thomas Scott and the Growth of Urban Opposition’, HJ, xxi. 3; Cal. Assize Recs. Kent Indictments, Eliz. ed. J.S. Cockburn, 255. An evangelical Protestant convinced of his own unconditional election, Charles was among the Kentish gentlemen who tried to persuade Archbishop Whitgift in 1584 to reinstate godly ministers deprived for non-subscription. PROB 11/87, f. 282; DWL, Morrice ms L(V), p. 11. Scott’s mother, Jane, was the daughter of the Marian rebel Sir Thomas Wyatt II of Allington Castle, and through her Scott was related to the puritanically-inclined Finch family of Eastwell, Kent.

Unlike his father, Scott went to university, probably being the Thomas Scott who entered Corpus Christi, Cambridge in 1582, when he would have been 15 or 16. Clark, 3, n. 11. From his father he inherited the bulk of the Egerton estate in 1596, PROB 11/87, ff. 282v-83v. as well as an evangelical Protestant zeal and introversion. As one commentator has observed, and as Scott’s diary clearly demonstrates, family prayer and religious instruction was ‘an almost daily routine for the Scott household’, and Scott himself ‘suffered quite often from melancholic despair’. Once he spent three or four days ‘in much mourning and many prayers and tears’ until finally he made his ‘peace with God ... in hope that I shall never relapse’. Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 4-5. Within a few months of entering into his inheritance, Scott married Elizabeth Webb, the coheir of a Canterbury merchant, but she died a few years later leaving him a daughter. A second marriage soon followed, into the family of one of Scott’s puritan neighbours, the Knatchbulls. This brought Scott less than 100 acres but quickly gave him a son and heir. By December 1611, Scott had taken up semi-permanent residence in Canterbury, where he rented a house belonging to the city’s archdeacon, Charles Fotherby, which he dubbed ‘Charlemagne’s Hospital’. At first the two men enjoyed a cordial relationship, though Fotherby was a religious conservative, but they quarrelled after Scott turned the dining room into a lodging for a cousin and his wife. Bodl. Ballard 61, ff. 2, 49v-51. Evicted by Fotherby from the cathedral pew which he had built at his own cost, Ibid. f. 2v. Scott retaliated by complaining vociferously about the quality of the accommodation, accusing him of breaking verbal promises to improve the property, such as building a wall to separate his house from a disorderly alehouse. Though Fotherby agreed to reduce the rent to compensate Scott for making improvements himself, he declined to renew his lease when it expired in Michaelmas 1612. Ibid. ff. 9v, 53-7. Consequently, Scott turned to his kinsman Henry Finch*, who leased him his house in the Whitefriars. Scott, however, proved typically ungrateful, complaining of the high rent and the shortness of the let. Ibid. f. 60v. Fotherby, meanwhile, threatened legal action to recover six months’ rent, and accused his former tenant of ‘ungentlemanlike’ behaviour. When Scott, then unwell, retorted that Fotherby’s own disregard of his promises was not that ‘of a Christian man nor of a civil man, but of an absurd, arrogant, tyrannical and Anti-Christian humourist’, Fotherby countered that Scott appeared to be ‘not so much weakened in your body as in your brain, whereby you have surfeited in your wits’. Ibid. ff. 60v-1v, 63-4. Scott retained enough sense to settle his debt after Fotherby threatened him with arraignment before Star Chamber, Ibid. f. 69. and vented his rage in his diary. Believing himself born of noble blood, he sneered at Fotherby’s attempts to disguise his own low-birth by concocting a pedigree, and mocked his new coat of arms as ‘a flying falcon (or buzzard, I know not which)’. It was, he commented, ‘the folly of this age’ to accord respect to ‘huffing prelates and their proud holy-water-pissers’. Ibid. ff. 14v-15, 113v, 115. Whether the dispute with Fotherby went deeper than their quarrel over rented property, as one commentator has hinted, is impossible to determine. Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 9.

In September 1613 Scott, anticipating that Parliament would soon reassemble, wrote to his cousin Sir John Scott* urging him to stand for the county, along with Sir Edwin Sandys* ‘or some such, (if we have any other such)’. As this new Parliament would ‘be our making or marring’, only the ‘very cream’ of Kent society should be chosen, for if weak men were elected it would be ‘a very enthralling of our liberties and a most pernicious precedent’. Bodl. Ballard ms 61, ff. 88v-9v. Scott must have been disappointed when both his cousin and Sandys were defeated in 1614 by Sir Thomas Walsingham I and Sir Peter Manwood, but he was pleased on hearing of John Hoskins’ violent outburst against the Scots in the Commons. Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 8.

Sometime between 1616 and 1621 Scott began working on a treatise entitled ‘A Discourse of Polletique and Civill Honor’, which he dedicated to the earl of Arundel, with whom he claimed a distant kinship. Though never completed, its central theme was the extension of honours to those whose low birth ought to have precluded them from such dignities. Deploring the sale of honours, as well as the ‘ill government’ of Canterbury ‘by brewers, bakers, hostlers, drovers, tailors and other mean mechanics’, he asked Arundel, as a commissioner for the office of earl marshal, ‘to be a means that this inundation of knights and esquires do not increase any longer’. Paradoxically, however, he also proposed the creation of a new order of knighthood ‘for the honour of some neglected and deserted families’, which should be styled the Order of Gideon, the Crown, or the Union. This clearly resulted from Scott’s resentment that, despite his supposed ancient pedigree, he had never been dubbed. Dorothea Scott (1883) ed. G.D. Scull, 145-64.

Scott was appointed a magistrate for Kent in 1617, and became a freeman of Canterbury in the following year. Soon after he joined the city’s Common Council. However his tenure was brief, for at around the same time that his kinsman John Finch II* was ejected from the recordership he too was replaced, possibly as part of a purge of perceived religious radicals on the corporation. Unlike Finch, Scott never recovered his position, and may have harboured ill feeling towards the corporation thereafter. At the parliamentary election of December 1620, he declined to stand, despite the urgings of his supporters, because ‘as yet God did not call me unto it, neither was there any need of my service’. Cent. Kent. Stud. U951/Z17/2, pt. 14. By the time of the next general election, however, Scott had discovered divine inspiration. In 1624 the city’s aldermen were attempting to recover control over the city’s militia, which they had recently lost, and consequently they agreed to endorse the candidacy of John Latham, secretary to Kent’s lord lieutenant, the duke of Lennox, whose favour they desperately needed. Latham, however, was neither a resident nor a freeman at the time the writs of summons were issued. See CANTERBURY for further details. Scott was outraged, as he considered Latham ‘a man much suspected for his religion’, who would only serve the interests of Lennox, ‘on whom he depends’. Cent. Kent. Stud. U951/Z17/2, pt. 14. Along with the lawyer Thomas Denne, he challenged both Latham and the captain of the city’s militia, Sir William Lovelace*, who withdrew at the last moment. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U66, f. 25v. There is no evidence to support the charge apparently levelled by Alderman Hunt that Scott had originally entered the fray on Latham’s side: ibid. f. 25. Although Scott and Denne emerged triumphant, Scott later lamented that his presence at Westminster cost him £100 ‘and gained me much ill will and little thanks, even from them that laboured for me’. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U66, f. 22. Scott left no mark on the records of the 1624 Parliament, but he may have written an account, found among the papers of his uncle, George Wyatt of Boxley, Kent, of the report given by Charles and Buckingham to a committee of both Houses on 24 Feb. regarding the Spanish marriage negotiations. Pprs. of George Wyatt ed. D.M. Loades (Cam. Soc. ser. 4. v), 207-22. The Spanish Match certainly alarmed Scott, both as an evangelical Protestant and because the last time there had been a Spanish marriage his maternal grandfather, Sir Thomas Wyatt, had led the rebellion against it and been executed in consequence. It seems likely, as one commentator has observed, that Scott had read and digested Wyatt’s account of his motives. P. Clark, Eng. Prov. Soc. 97-8.

In 1625 Scott helped install the puritan preacher Herbert Palmer as lecturer at St. Alphege, Canterbury, contributing £10 p.a. out of his own purse towards Palmer’s maintenance. Procs. 1628, vi. 136; Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 5. That same year he again stood for one of the city’s parliamentary seats. The corporation, having still not regained control of its militia, threw its weight behind its new muster-master, John Fisher, a close dependent of Kent’s new lord lieutenant, the earl of Montgomery (Sir Philip Herbert*). It also supported the local landowner Sir Thomas Wilsford. Neither man was acceptable to Scott, for though Fisher was a freeman at the time the writs had been issued, and Wilsford was ‘a worthy knight’, both were non-resident. Apart from the two corporation-backed candidates, Scott faced competition from Sir Henry Wotton* (another non-freeman), (Sir) John Finch II and Sir George Newman*. On the day of the election the corporation candidates were declared the victors, although there were protests that Scott and Newman had received most of the legitimate votes. Scott did not attend the hustings himself, perhaps sensing that he would not be permitted to win as he. He claimed in his diary that he had not wished to serve again anyway, but had only intended ‘to lend my name, as it were, unto those honest men that desired to maintain their liberty by this appeal’. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U66, f. 4r-v.

Scott’s temerity in challenging Montgomery’s candidate may explain why he was removed from the bench soon after 20 July 1625. Scott described himself as one of the ‘deprived justices’ in January 1626: Dorothea Scott, 136. In the following January he fell out with his neighbour Sir Dudley Digges* after failing to convey a letter by Digges to Sir John Hippisley* concerning the forthcoming county election. The letter, sent unsealed to Scott for his perusal, appeared to disparage Scott’s cousin for having once allied himself with Sir Edwin Sandys, for whom Scott himself had reluctantly canvassed in 1625. Scott admitted that Sandys had ‘betrayed us and our freehold’ in the 1625 Parliament, but he pointed out that Sir Edwin had enjoyed a deservedly high reputation until then. Digges would never be able to prove that Scott’s cousin ‘and those worthies and true Patriots that joined with him in the election of Sir Edwin Sandys did either unworthily or unadvisedly’. Ibid. 133-43; Procs. 1628, vi. 131.

Following this rupture, Scott turned to Canterbury’s impending parliamentary election. Little had changed since the previous year. The corporation, still desperate to secure Montgomery’s favour, endorsed another of Montgomery’s client, the courtier James Palmer, who was admitted to the freedom despite being non-resident. It also supported its former recorder (Sir) John Finch II, a rising star at Court. Resentment among the commonalty at the corporation’s choice of the outsider Palmer led Sir John Wilde, a longstanding resident of the city and a friend or servant of Archbishop Abbot, to offer Scott an electoral alliance. Scott initially hesitated as Wilde was not a freeman, but by the following day he had resolved to stand ‘if the commons do not fall off’. He now reasoned that, since ‘the king’s writ, and the statutes, and the reason of them, and the commons’ right and freehold, are now no further regarded than men list’, his supporters might just as well vote for Wilde, whom he later described as his ‘near and dear kinsman, neighbour and special friend’, as for Palmer. Besides, faced with a choice between two ineligible candidates, it was clearly better to vote for Wilde, who was resident. To those who argued that Palmer could more for Canterbury because of his connection with Montgomery, Scott countered that Wilde’s influence with Abbot would be even more useful. As a sop to his own conscience, however, Scott determined not to vote for Wilde himself. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U66, ff. 16r-v, 17v-19v, 20v-1v; Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 14; Procs. 1628, vi. 131.

Although Scott was now partnered with Wilde, he still sought to avoid standing himself. On 9 Jan. he told the town clerk that he ‘no more desired to be a Parliament citizen than to be a constable or churchwarden’, and the next day he wrote to Edward Scott that if he could withdraw ‘assuredly I will, for my health and wealth’s sake’. For this he required two aldermen to be chosen, ‘whether they were willing or not’, for he considered it their civic duty to stand. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U66, ff. 21v-2. However, the aldermen had no intention of abandoning their candidates, and consequently Scott met Wilde on 1 Feb. to cement their pact. Neither man was sure they would triumph, Ibid. ff. 22r-v. but when news of their meeting leaked out it induced panic among the aldermen. According to Scott, they laboured until almost midnight, ‘entreating, persuading, threatening’ his supporters, and used their control over the drink trade to put pressure on the town’s innkeepers. They threatened others with impressment and accused Scott of failing to pay his taxes and spreading a false rumour that Finch had decided not to stand. Some of Scott’s supporters succumbed to such bullying, but others stood firm. Ibid. ff. 23v-4v, 26-7v. Consequently, the aldermen rigged the election. Palmer and Finch were elected by acclamation after the sheriff refused to hold a poll, leaving an outraged Scott and his supporters to appeal to the Commons, but without success. Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 15; CJ, i. 869a.

For the second time in a row Canterbury had returned candidates who were not legally qualified to represent their constituents. Scott recognized that this practice was now common, and reckoned that over 200 Members, or more than two-fifths of the 1626 Parliament, were non-resident. He nevertheless argued that ‘no law ... can bind Kent or Canterbury where all Kent and Canterbury is not truly and legally represented’. Parliament should address this grievance, but to achieve true representation pocket boroughs must also be abolished and the overall membership of the Commons increased, ‘if not doubled’. It was ‘not proportionable’ to suppose that each shire and borough could be adequately represented by just two Members. Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 16.

There is no direct evidence that Scott ever broadcast his views on parliamentary reform, although he probably discussed them with his fellow Canterbury radicals. However, the treatise he wrote following a sermon delivered at the Cathedral by Dean Isaac Bargrave was certainly intended for circulation among his closest friends and allies. Bargrave’s sermon, preached in March 1627, has been described as ‘a homily on obedience’, designed to secure compliance following the government’s demand for a Forced Loan. Scott responded to it with one of the most extreme political statements made before the Civil War. He challenged Bargrave’s assertion that refusal to obey the divinely ordained prince amounted to disobedience to God. Kings, like other magistrates, were created by Man, and obedience to their commands was conditional upon their good conduct. The proper function and duty of the prince was ‘the wealth and service’ of ‘the congregation of the Lord’, and those like Pharoah and Herod who abused their power were tyrants who ought to be resisted. Scott agreed that puritanism went hand-in-glove with disobedience to the prince, but whereas Bargrave saw this as a damning indictment of puritans, Scott regarded it as one of their chief virtues. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who regarded the term ‘puritan’ as a form of abuse, Scott embraced it. Perhaps the most radical feature of Scott’s treatise was its author’s identification of Charles I as a tyrant. It was the duty of the ‘conscientious puritan’, he argued, ‘to reprove our king, in all loyal and dutiful manner ... saying ... wherefore hast thou not obeyed the voice of the Lord?’ Scott pointed to the ascendency of the duke of Buckingham as the principal cause of Caroline tyranny. Buckingham was a monster, who bore the mark of the Beast and had poisoned King James; he was likened to the eleventh century Mercian eoldarman, Eadric Streona, a traitor who had murdered 40,000 Kentish folk, and to Edward II’s favourite, Piers Gaveston. Charles urgently needed to be rescued from his principal adviser, through whom the kingdom’s wealth was draining away and its military forces were being destroyed. The only body capable of performing this task was Parliament. Some might object that this was not the proper function of Parliament, but Scott argued that to deny Parliament emergency powers would leave the people remediless and at the mercy of ‘him that is more likely to betray us all than to deliver us out of our enemies’ hands’. There were certainly sound medieval precedents to support this view, but Scott was on unsafe ground when he asserted that the 1626 Parliament was ‘not yet legally dissolved’ and therefore might reassemble itself. R. Cust, Forced Loan, 176-80. Despite his brave talk of resisting an unjust prince, Scott paid the £8 demanded from him for the Forced Loan ‘to escape imprisonment and death’. Procs. 1628, vi. 222-3.

For returning Montgomery’s nominees at two successive elections, Canterbury’s oligarchy was given control over its militia once more. The intervention of Montgomery’s client, the muster-master John Fisher, was evidently vital, and when fresh parliamentary elections were announced in February 1628 the magistrates resolved to grant him a seat. Scott, however, was aghast that Canterbury might be represented by a man whose debauched lifestyle and lukewarm religious commitment offended godly sensibilities. Ibid. 129-30; Cent. Kent. Stud. U951/Z17/2, no. 14. He was equally dismayed that the corporation intended, at Montgomery’s behest, to bestow the remaining seat on James Palmer. Approached by ‘divers preachers and citizens’, he reluctantly put himself forward for election once more. Procs. 1628, vi. 129, 132, 228. This time, however, he refused to ally himself with Sir John Wilde, who had also decided to stand again. Regretful for having earlier abandoned his opposition to non-residents and non-freemen, he turned instead to his kinsman (Sir) John Finch II, who had been the corporation’s choice in 1626. Many members of Canterbury’s godly community regarded Finch as unacceptable. Since the last parliamentary election, he had become attorney-general to Charles I’s Catholic queen, and was closely associated with Buckingham, whom many regarded as ‘the greatest enemy to the puritans in the world’. Scott himself certainly considered Finch as an ‘arrant timeserver’, but he doubted that Finch had disowned his evangelical past. Not long ago, he recalled, Finch had ‘spoken very earnestly against the Arminians at the Dean’s own table’. As Scott regarded anti-Arminianism as ‘the right strike of a rank puritan, as now puritans everywhere are defined’, it followed that Finch remained a puritan. Ibid. 136. Finch was also the only candidate, apart from Scott himself, who was a resident freeman, although he lived in Canterbury only during vacations. Scott now attached more importance to these qualifications for standing than ever, as they were ‘the only way to prevent slavery and ruin’. As he explained in his diary, if outsiders continued to be permitted to sit in Parliament it would be impossible to prevent those who wished to subvert the government of the Church and State from packing the Commons. The consequences of this would be disastrous. Before long they would ‘have such laws and statutes enacted, and such taxes and impositions established, and such faction and division grow in the kingdom, and such transcendency and treason of favourites, and such popery, [and] Arminianism’, that the country would ‘not be able to endure’. Canterbury did not need to resort to courtiers or the clients of noblemen to represent them, he argued, for the city enjoyed a ‘good store of sufficient knights, esquires, lawyers and other gentlemen, aldermen and other inhabitants, free and eligible by law’, who could perform the duties required of a Member of the Commons. Ibid. 127.

Though the aldermen again resorted to coercion, many voters refused to be intimidated, Ibid. 129, 136; Cent. Kent. Stud. U951/Z17/2, no. 14. and it was the alliance of Scott and Finch which triumphed at the hustings in March. Any sense of euphoria was quickly dispelled, however, by Montgomery’s reaction to the rejection of his nominee, Palmer. A few weeks after the election, four companies of Sir Pierce Crosby’s Irish regiment were billeted on the city until further notice. APC, 1627-8, pp. 370, 373. By then Scott had taken up lodgings next to the Three Gloves in Westminster. From there he wrote urging his wife Mary to lock her door to prevent soldiers from being stationed in their house. However, Mary proved unable to prevent two ‘lusty Irish popish soldiers’ from entering, and though she paid them to leave they quickly returned, forcing her to join her husband. Before this happened, Scott received a visit from the mayor of Canterbury’s chief serjeant, who demanded that he allow two soldiers to be billeted in his house or pay the cost of their board and lodging elsewhere. Scott was incensed, declaring these demands to be ‘against the liberty of a free Englishman and gentleman, and of a Parliament-man’. For what purpose were these Irish Catholic soldiers stationed in Canterbury, he asked, if not to ‘help set up popery and the Excise; and, as some of them do already give out, cut the puritans’ throats?’ Scott was further angered by news brought by a steady stream of visitors from Canterbury. His supporters at the last election complained of being ‘hardly used’, whereas ‘others that were of my Lord of Montgomery’s faction were gently dealt with, or not at all’. He advised those who suffered unfairly to complain to the Commons, ‘and I and my friends will assist you’. Procs. 1628, vi. 219-21, Scott later recorded that his ‘best friends’ at Westminster were the MPs Sir Robert Cotton, Sir James Perrot and Richard Tomlins, and also the former Speaker (Sir) Ranulphe Crewe*. Ibid. 239.

Scott’s refusal to contribute towards the cost of billeting set an example which others quickly followed, and it was to him that Canterbury’s discontented freeholders now turned. APC, 1627-8, pp. 78, 86. On 18 June he received a letter from two of his supporters, Thomas Reader and John Lee, seeking advice on how best to proceed as they had heard that the Commons had refused to listen to complaints about billeting. Scott, who is unmentioned in the records of the Parliament, replied the following day that this was partly true, as the House had already raised the matter with the king. Complaints about the principle of billeting should therefore be directed to Charles and the Privy Council. However, the Commons should be informed of beatings and robberies, and that most of the soldiers stationed in Canterbury were papists who had threatened to join forces with the king’s enemies. Scott asked Reader and Lee to keep this advice secret, as it ‘cannot do either you or any other man any good’. Clearly he did not wish to be accused of orchestrating a campaign of disobedience. In a postscript, Scott relayed the news that the excise commission, which had threatened to impose an additional financial burden on the localities, had been cancelled at the request of the Commons, ‘to our very great comfort and joy, and I doubt not of you, and all good men’. He added that he soon hoped to be able to pass on more good news ‘concerning the soldiers, projectors and other grievances, of which we have and daily do complain’. Procs. 1628, vi. 221-2. For the commn. and its cancellation, see CD 1628, iv. 241-2, 373, 380.

Following the prorogation of 26 June, Scott, who was by now ‘out of money, sick and in physic’, made his way back to Canterbury. En route he met a Canterbury upholsterer named Matthew Burnley, from whom he gathered that the soldiers stationed in the city had not yet departed. ‘Be of good comfort’, Scott remarked, ‘there is order taken that they will be gone very shortly’. Burnley rapidly relayed this conversation to Alderman James Master, captain of the Canterbury militia, who retailed it to Buckingham, making it appear that Scott had accused his fellow citizens of folly in allowing the soldiers to remain for so long. Master also informed Buckingham that Scott ‘was the cause why Canterbury men refused any longer to billet the soldiers’. Scott was arrested by the Privy Council at the beginning of July and held in his wife’s former lodgings in Westminster. Procs. 1628, vi. 224-7; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 185. After a delay of nearly two weeks, during which time he likened his anticipated suffering to that of Christ, he was brought before the board, where he assumed that Buckingham had determined to make an example of him. In fact the case against him had already begun to collapse, as Master’s account of his conversation with Burnley was not supported by Burnley’s own testimony. Master was forced to admit that, while his report of Burnley’s words to him had been truthful, ‘I cannot swear that Mr. Scott said them unto him’. In Buckingham’s absence, it was left to Montgomery to lure Scott into making some sort of damaging admission. He began by conceding that Burnley’s evidence suggested that Scott had done no more than speak ‘like an honest gentleman’, but added that Scott’s refusal to allow soldiers to be billeted in his house had set an example that others had followed. Scott replied that he had resisted billeting because Canterbury’s mayor had no authority over him while he sat in Parliament. Master then joined in the attack, observing that Scott’s wife had been in Canterbury even if Scott had not, and she had refused to billet the troops sent to her. Scott later recalled that ‘here again I might have run into the greedy cat’s mouth’, but he pointed out that the two soldiers concerned had forced an entry in his wife’s absence. Seeing that it was useless to pursue this line of inquiry any further, Montgomery tried another: ‘it is a question whether your being a Parliament man exempt you from his authority, who is your magistrate in Canterbury’. However, Scott was prevented from answering by the belated intervention of Buckingham’s enemies on the Council. ‘What need you talk so much?’ demanded the Lord President, the earl of Marlborough (Sir James Ley*), who had recently been sacked as lord treasurer at the duke’s insistence, ‘Burnley justifies you’. He was seconded by the lord keeper (Thomas Coventry I* ), whose relations with Buckingham had been strained for some time. ‘Burnley, it seems, played on both hands’, asserted Coventry, ‘But you, Mr. Scott, are in no fault’. Procs. 1628, vi. 227-34. The case was thereupon dismissed, although Scott refused to pay the messenger’s fees, arguing that they should be met instead by his accuser, Master. Ibid. 236-42; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 227. Scott attributed his rescue by Marlborough and Coventry to God, who had ‘raised up ... two noble Nicodemuses’. However, he was dismayed by the silence throughout his hearing of the chancellor of the duchy, Sir Humphrey May*. Scott believed that his arraignment was a breach of his parliamentary privilege, and thought that May, who also sat in the Commons, should have spoken out. He had not seriously expected him to do so, though, ‘for I know whose creature he is’. Procs. 1628, vi. 233-5.

Following his release, Scott recorded the details of his arrest and arraignment so that he could present an account of his ordeal to Parliament when it reconvened. There is no evidence that he did so, however, nor is it clear what part, if any, he played in the parliamentary session of 1629. Possibly he supported the attack on his fellow burgess for Canterbury and recent ally, Sir John Finch, having called for the latter’s removal as Speaker in 1628. Clark, ‘Urban Opposition’, 23. Scott remained a thorn in the flesh of the authorities over the next few years. His spirits were temporarily lifted by Buckingham’s assassination, but in October 1628, and again in July 1632, he refused to attend musters or to appear before the lord lieutenant to answer for his contempt. His dissatisfaction with the growing influence of anti-Calvinists within the church led him to help organize a second lectureship at Canterbury and to denounce the attempts of the city’s clergy to enforce kneeling at communion. However, unlike one of his daughters and his maid-servant, who attended a private prayer meeting in 1632, he never joined the city’s separatists. On hearing in the autumn of 1629 that there would be a fresh Parliament, Scott began canvassing his fellow citizens to return him again, but his hope of a new Parliament which would champion the cause of anti-Arminianism was quickly dashed. He left Canterbury a few years later to take charge of the Egerton estate after the death of his only son in January 1632. Ibid. 23-5. In ‘perfect memory’, though in declining health, he drew up his will on 31 Oct. 1634. Surprisingly, it is devoid of religious preamble. Apart from his wife’s jointure lands, a couple of houses in Godmersham and a few scraps of land, he conferred his entire estate on Katherine, his second daughter by his first marriage, though his heir in law was his infant grandson. After making a few minor corrections to the will in the following March, he died on 4 May 1635. Dorothea Scott, 199-203; C142/745/83. His place of burial has not been ascertained. It may have been Scott’s grandson, Thomas, who represented Canterbury in Parliament in 1654.