Minutes of the Bedfordshire Committee for Sequestrations 1646-7

Summary

When in 1936 Dr. G. H. Fowler published the Civil War papers of Sir William Boteler from the Trevor-Wingfield muniments (B.H.R.S. XVIII) he added in an appendix a note that “after the foregoing documents had been cased and calendared, a bundle of papers from a subsequent deposit of the same collection proved to be the minutes of the County Committee for Sequestrations. There are 36 folios, of which 12 are mutilated in one corner; they represent 28 sessions of the committee between May 1646 and May 1647; the greater part seems to be in the handwriting of Sir William Boteler. If one may judge from the corrections and erasures, these minutes were made in the committee itself, as each item was dealt with. They are fuller and often more interesting than the few orders of the committee printed above, and show exactly how it did its work.” The catalogue number of the minutes is TW 895.

The history of the county during the Civil War has been set out by (among others) Mr. H. G. Tibbutt, in the Elstow Moot Hall Leaflets nos. 3 and 6: “Bedfordshire and the first Civil War” and “Bedfordshire and the Protectorate”. Dr. Fowler, in his introduction to the papers published in B.H.R.S, XVIII, listed the names of the eleven Bedfordshire country gentlemen who composed the first Committee of Parliament for the county set up by ordinance in December 1642, when the Midland Association was formed. He says that of the numerous special committees appointed later, of which the County Committee for Sequestrations was one, these eleven were almost invariably members. The names of eight of them certainly appear in these minutes, of whom Thomas Rolt of Milton Ernest and James Beverley of Eaton Socon were by far the most active. However, the person amongst whose papers these were found, Sir William Boteler of Biddenham, seems to have been the presiding member, and Humphrey Fysh of Northill, Sir Thomas Alston of Odell, Sir William Bryers of Pulloxhill and John Neale of Bedford were also prominent. The committee’s solicitor was Mr. Floyd, and the executive officer Captain Smith.