In our first ‘Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments‘ article of 2025, Editor of the 1640-60 House of Lords section, Dr David Scott, considers the leading parliamentarian peer, Viscount Saye and Sele, and his relationship with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

‘The Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies’ concluded the renowned church leader Richard Baxter about the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 (R. Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth, or Political Aphorisms Opening the True Principles of Government (1659), 457). Local communities in early Stuart England – ‘our streets’ – could certainly be divided and fractious places, where puritans and church-conformists, town oligarchs and merchant interlopers, often clashed, sometimes violently. But the ideas and loyalties that would mobilise these groups for war came from other sources – the royal court, the legal establishment, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the political networks of the aristocracy. These were the seminaries of government but also potential nurseries of civil strife, and in no county were the divisions they generated more profound during the 1630s than in Oxfordshire.

In the north-east of the county, in his medieval castle at Broughton near Banbury, resided its most influential nobleman, William Fiennes, 1st viscount and 8th Baron Saye and Sele. Few peers in England had a smaller estate than Lord Saye, or a greater sense of aristocratic entitlement. His viscountcy was a recent creation, but his barony was among the oldest in England and his ancestors had been companions of William the Conqueror. With this ‘ancient precedency’ he felt a baronial duty to defend English liberties and therefore to school first King James and then King Charles to abandon their claims to personal sovereignty and to rule instead solely through Parliament and the counsel of Protestant noblemen, such as himself. His piety was equally elitist. By the late 1630s he had withdrawn from the ‘grosse corruptions’ of Church of England services – indeed, he thought the very notion of a national church was ‘popish’ (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale (1641), 15-16 (E.198.16-17)). The only true ‘Churches of Christ’ were free-standing congregations of committed puritans (Ibid, 12); how the great mass of the population that fell short of his godly ideal should worship was a matter for Parliament to decide, not King Charles or his bishops.

Saye’s circle of godly grandees was centred on Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties but extended across the Atlantic to the puritan colonies of New England. As members of the most high-profile colonising venture of the day, the Providence Island Company, he and his aristocratic friends ran what amounted to their own, anti-Spanish, foreign policy, and in 1639-40 they conspired with the Covenanter rebels in Scotland to bring down Charles’s regime in England.

Some 30 miles south of Broughton Castle, at Oxford, a very different kind of network and ethos prevailed during the 1630s. The city’s most powerful figure was the chancellor of the university and archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The son of a Reading cloth-seller, Laud owed his rise to ecclesiastical eminence entirely to royal favour. He and like-minded clerics, backed by King Charles, championed a style of worship and politics that was the opposite in almost every respect to Saye’s. The Laudian bishops exalted king over Parliament, church ceremony over preaching, and enforced religious practices designed to level and integrate the entire laity, the nobility included, in due reverence to ‘his sacred Majesty’ and ‘the beauty of holiness’. Such was Saye’s determination to inoculate his sons against this ‘popery’ that he sent them to study under the Calvinist theologian William Ames at Franeker University in The Netherlands. Ames taught that bishops had ‘brought in with them the Roman Antichrist…to the utter oppressing of the Churches of God’ (W. Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (1642), 203-4).

Saye and Laud confronted each other face-to-face in April 1640 in the Parliament that Charles called to fund the war against his Scottish rebels. Smarting at the Covenanters’ efforts to remove the Scottish bishops from civil authority, Laud tried to assert the principle that the English bishops were integral to proceedings in the House of Lords. Saye gave this notion short shrift, insisting that ‘there was no necessity at all for the presence of the Bishops … the High Court of Parliament could proceede without [them]’ (HMC Le Fleming (1890), 8; E.S. Cope and W.H. Coates (eds.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640 (Camden Society ser. 4, vol. xix, 1977), 220). In fact, their ‘absolute dependancy upon the King’ rendered them unfit for parliamentary duty altogether (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale, 6). After Charles dissolved this ‘Short Parliament’ a few weeks later for refusing to grant him taxes, Laud threatened Saye with violent retribution and called him ‘the Greatest [religious] Separatist in England’ (BL, Harl. 6424, f. 44v). But when the Scottish invasion of northern England that summer forced Charles to call another Parliament, it was Laud who would be at the mercy of his enemies. Denounced in the Commons as ‘the stye of all Pestilent filth that hath infected the State and…Church’, he was imprisoned in the Tower for high treason (Mr. Grymstons Speech in Parliament (1641), 2 (E.196.22)). Now it was Saye’s turn to ‘spit…venome’. In a speech in the Lords in March 1641 he derided the archbishop for his ‘mean birthe…violence and inconsiderateness’, and pronounced him fit only to ‘canvas for a Proctors place in the Universitie’ (Two Speeches of the…Lord Viscount Say and Seale, 11).

One of Parliament’s first military moves after the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642 was to send Saye and his newly-raised regiment to seize Oxford. In propaganda terms alone the city was a great prize, never mind its strategic importance. Laud had certainly understood its value; Saye was less astute. During his brief occupation of the city he neglected to fortify it against the king, fearing to anger the university, and he allowed his soldiers to take pot-shots at the ornate Laudian porch that had been added to the University Church during the archbishop’s chancellorship. After pillaging Saye’s castles at Broughton and Banbury that autumn, royalist troops occupied Oxford, which would serve as Charles’s wartime headquarters until his surrender in 1646.

By the time that Saye helped to orchestrate Laud’s execution in 1645 he was battling enemies of his own in Parliament. He lived a further 17 years – long enough to see the monarchy and the church restored in the early 1660s along lines that would have gratified the archbishop. The final twist in their rivalry would occur posthumously in the 1830s, with the university hosting the Oxford Movement that would enshrine Laud’s legacy in modern Anglicanism, while the extravagances of the 15th Lord Saye and Sele led to the great sale at Broughton of 1837, ‘in which the castle was stripped of its contents even to the swans on the moat’ (H. Gordon-Slade, ‘Broughton Castle, Oxfordshire’, The Archaeological Journal, 135 (1978), 142). Having weathered all such storms, Broughton Castle today is still home to the Fiennes family, and to swans on the moat. It remains among the best-preserved medieval castles in England; a monument to aristocratic resilience in uncertain times.

DS

The biographies of Saye and Laud will appear in the forthcoming 1640-60 Lords section.

For a related article, see: Vivienne Larmine, ‘”Cakes, Cheese and Zeal”: Puritan Banbury, the Fiennes family and civil war radicalism’, History of Parliament,