God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [180]
Clarendon believed that Cholmley had initially accepted the parliamentarian commission because of his friendship with Sir John Hotham, who had refused the King entry to Hull in April 1642. Hotham too had second thoughts. Late in 1642 he promised Lord Digby, a prisoner in his charge, that he would surrender the town to the King. When it came to it, he changed his mind and drove away the besiegers, but by April 1643 he and his son were at odds with other parliamentary commanders. Troops under the command of the younger Hotham were ill-disciplined and this had led him into conflict with the Fairfaxes, Cromwell and Hutchinson. The elder Hotham, in the course of this dispute, had referred to Cromwell and Hutchinson as ‘Anabaptists’, suggesting that he, at least, was unimpressed by the attempt to identify the parliamentary cause with more advanced reformation. By the early summer of 1643 their disaffection with the parliamentary cause had led both Hothams into correspondence with the Earl of Newcastle about changing sides. In mid-April the younger formally approached Newcastle promising to do the King good service. When their intentions became public on 18 June the younger Hotham was imprisoned in Nottingham Castle. In his defence he alleged that the strength of the parliamentary forces was restricted to defacing churches. He escaped from Nottingham and contacted Henrietta Maria, who seemed willing to welcome his defection, before going to Hull to see his father. By the time he got there, however, the Commons had ordered the traitors” appearance at Westminster, and he was arrested from his bed on the authority of the mayor. The defences were put in the hands of the citizens, and his father Sir John, hearing what was up, fled in a hurry on horseback. He was knocked off his horse at Beverley, however, and returned to Hull, whence father and son were sent to London by sea. Their court-martial was long delayed, suggesting that there was some sympathy for their position in London, but they were eventually found guilty and executed in January 1644.81
Although Henrietta Maria had seemed willing to welcome this kind of friend, many other royalists took a sterner view. Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State to Charles during the war, wrote of the father: ‘The rebels have seized him, his son, their wives and children, and sent them all prisoners to the rebellious city, London, where the justice of God will, I believe, bring him to be punished by the same usurped power that at first did encourage him in his first act of rebellion; for falser men than he and his son live not upon the earth’. Others thought him proud and covetous. There was a more charitable view, although not an entirely positive one: that he was a man of judgement, albeit one whose passion and pride overbore that judgement on occasion. Views of the son were less equivocal: Clarendon thought him full of ‘pride and stubbornness’ and Cholmley, who was after all on thin ice here, described him as ‘a very politic and cunning man, [who] looked chiefly at that which stood most with his own particular interest’.82
Fighting alongside Cholmley at Guisborough was Sir Matthew Boynton, a gentleman of sufficiently significant standing to have been knighted on 9 May 1618 and created a baronet the following week. Member of Parliament for Heydon in the 1620s, he had by 1637 become sufficiently concerned about the direction of affairs in England to have sold lands in the Tees Valley, intending to follow the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World. He pulled out at a late stage but joined the Independent church at Southwark. When war broke out he acted quickly, raising troops for Parliament, and it is easy to see the roots of this political and military history in his previous history. It was Boynton’s second son who took Sir John Hotham (his own uncle) prisoner at Beverley on