There is, in the Huntington Library in California, a run of letters from Robert Sibthorpe to his fellow conformist, indeed Laudian, activist, Sir John Lambe. They date from 1639 and can be supplemented by others in the State Papers from the later 1630s and 1640. As John Fielding has shown, both Lambe and Sibthorpe were veterans of the anti-puritan cause in Northamptonshire. Both rose to national prominence in the 1620s, with Sibthorpe achieving notoriety through his famous assize sermon of 1626 in favour of the forced loan. By the end of the decade both had attracted the hostile attentions of parliament and both were rescued by the intervention of the crown. Lambe rose from local office to become, by 1633, dean of the Court of Arches, while Sibthorpe remained an essentially local figure, with livings at Brackley and Burton Latimer. Amongst the local godly Sibthorpe became something of an object of fear and loathing and, as we have seen, features as such in Woodford's diary. Lambe became one of the most notorious agents of the Laudian regime on both the local and national stages. The ideological and political connections between the two were transformed into a kinship relation by Sibthorpe's marriage to Lambe's sister. The letters from Sibthorpe to Lambe thus represent an intimate private correspondence between two political allies and kinsmen who were in more or less perfect ideological sympathy. On Sibthorpe's part, their correspondence was designed to mobilise Lambe's influence and connections at the centre not only for the maintenance of the peace of the church and the furtherance of the king's service but also, by the later 1630s, for the defence of Sibthorpe himself from the machinations of his newly empowered and active puritan enemies.

Living ‘in the midst of the faction’

Sibthorpe took a highly polarised and embattled view of his situation. ‘I live’, he told Lambe in 1639, ‘in the midst of the faction who are too many and too mighty for me.’ ‘My most misery is that I am in the midst of them. Were I but half as remote as you, I would care as little as who cares least and now as little as I can, but I cannot be without some.’ For Sibthorpe felt himself to be assaulted on all sides, with powerful local gentry bent on frustrating his efforts to defend the church and determined to bring him low.