Domestic Corresp., Charles I, vol. cccxliii, § 67; cccxlvi, § 115; cccxlv, § 17; cccxlviii, cccl, § 40; cccliv, § 58; ccclxi, § 104; ccclxvi, § 13; ccclxxi, § 58. (R. H.)
He had sat in Parliament (for Marlow) during his father’s lifetime, and in his father’s company. His correspondence shows considerable talent. The extensive portion of that correspondence—in the years 1636 and 1637—which was imposed on him by the Shipmoney business, shews also considerable power of dealing with official details, little as he could have liked them. It exhibits an anxiety to acquit himself conscientiously of a difficult duty, and not to shirk any of the incidents of duty merely on account of their distastefulness. In the ‘Short Parliament’ of 1640 he sat as member for his own county. He does not seem to have sought for any seat in the memorable Parliament which followed.
The Committee of Sequestrations for Huntingdonshire.
His troubles began in 1644. Much to his disgust he was appointed to be one of the ‘Committee of Sequestrations’ for Huntingdonshire. The duty was one which any English gentleman might well have disliked without incurring the reproach either of idleness or of undue fastidiousness. Sir Thomas’ repugnance to the work was backed by a repugnance, not less keen, to those who would fain have been his fellows in its performance.
‘This County of Huntingdon’—so he writes not long after his own nomination to an ungenial office, which he refused to accept on the ground of an illness, that was far from being feigned for the occasion—‘is in an unhappy condition by Sequestrators. Only four or five men, of mean reputation and estate, are “Committees;” and they act (all of them) as Judges, Jury, and Executioners.’ His own experience was destined to become a pregnant comment on that pithy text.
His avoidance of all share in the task of punishing, by fine and imprisonment, those of his old friends and country neighbours who thought that the duty of loyalty to the Crown was still a duty, however glaring the faults of the man who, for the time, wore the Crown, was the primary offence given by Sir Thomas Cotton to the busy patriots who would fain have had him work with them as a fellow-sequestrator. His illness (as I have said) was doubtless real enough; but he also disliked the work, and took no pains to conceal his dislike. Medical advisers told him that Bedfordshire—where he also had property—was a better county than Huntingdonshire for a man who suffered from chronic ague and low fever. But Sir Thomas needed no adviser to tell him that, under the existing circumstances of the country and the times, Eyworth would be a much more satisfactory abode than Conington for a quiet-loving man who had other duties than those of a soldier, who abhorred civil war with all his soul, and who ardently desired such a solution of the current issues as would neither make the King a mere dependent on his Parliament, nor make the Parliament an absolute ruler over the kingdom. Sir Thomas went into Bedfordshire. Lady Cotton continued to abide at Conington. Very soon after his departure she received a summons, addressed to her husband, and couched exactly in these words: ‘You are assessed eight hundred pounds, according to an Ordinance of Parliament. |1643. 16 August.| The King and Parliament hath present use of these monies. Therefore, we pray you, send it up to us at Huntingdon on Saturday next.’ Before the receipt of this very summary ‘assessment’ many of Sir Thomas Cotton’s horses, with a good deal of farm produce and other property, had been already seized, by measures more summary still. Meanwhile Sir Thomas had committed no act of delinquency; he had simply removed himself into another county. Payment was refused.
The Proceedings of the Huntingdonshire Sequestrators at Conington.
The sequel of the story depicts, in small, what was then passing at large over much of the length and breadth of England. The farmers on the Conington estate were told, in the plainest of words, that if they did not pay their rents ‘to us at Huntingdon,’ their moveables would be seized and themselves treated as ‘delinquents.’ Execution, in those days, followed hard on process; and little difference was made, either in word or deed, at the farms and at the manor-house. On one morning, Lady Cotton was visited in her bedchamber—before she could dress—by five troopers, who, under her own eyes, broke open her drawers and trunks, and carried off what they thought meet. On another, one of Sir Thomas’ confidential servants received a similar visit; had his papers rifled in a like fashion, and his apparel stolen. At the stables and out-offices scarcely any three days passed, during the entire summer of 1643—from May to August—without some raid or other for plunder. For much of this there was scarcely the semblance or the pretext of a legal warrant. During those saturnalia of ‘liberty’ there was, virtually, no judge in England, and not a few men did whatsoever seemed good in their own eyes.
Sir Thomas Cotton was old enough to remember the early stages of the long conflict of which—in 1643—this was seemingly the upshot. In the Parliament at Oxford he had sat beside his father and his father’s friends. His correspondence at this time—so far as it appears to have survived—deals merely with the passing events. It contains, I think, no disclosure of any reflections which may have crossed his mind on the principles which underlay them. He was probably shrewd enough to see already that the grossness of the current abuses of popular power carried with it no scintilla of valid blame upon the first leaders in that conflict—the real issues of which were still far off. What he, in common with so many of the best gentlemen in England, was now smarting under was the consequence rather of the royal triumphs of Charles’ earlier years, than of the royal defeats of his later years. Had the policy of Robert Cotton and of John Eliot prevailed a quarter of a century sooner, there would (very probably) have been no county committees of sequestrators; no political scaffolds at Whitehall; no ruling of England by brute force under artificers suddenly transformed into generals; no wholesale massacres in Ireland, fraught with mischief for the whole empire during centuries to come.
Be that however as it may, things were not yet at so bad a pass, but that a curb could, now and then, be put on the necks of such busy patriots as those who sat in perpetual Committee at Huntingdon. Redress was impossible; seeing that the plunder was dissipated almost as fast as it was made. But, in Sir Thomas Cotton’s case, it was found practicable to put a check on its progress. He invoked the aid of a powerful friend, Henry, Earl of Manchester, who represented the authority of the Parliament in Huntingdonshire. The Earl summoned the Sequestrators to show cause for their raids on Conington. He held a court. The new functionaries were brought—after some ineffectual bluster—to confess that they knew of no act done by Cotton which brought him within purview of the Parliamentary Ordinance, nor of any other legal cause to subject him to sequestration. As the words of confession were on the lips of one active Committee-man, another functionary blurted out—most felicitously—‘You are wrong. |Proceedings in the Sequestration of the Estate of Sir T. Cotton; MS. Addit., 5012, ff. 34, seqq.| Master Serjeant Wilde wished it should be done.’ And, in the sequel, ‘Master Serjeant’ proved to be strong enough to protract the inquiry, and even to procure its adjournment to London; though his attempt to maintain the sequestration—on a plea the falsehood of which was conclusively proved—came at last to be entirely foiled.