Denzil Holles, 1st Baron Holles

Denzil Holles, 1st Baron Holles PC (31 October 1599 – 17 February 1680) was an English statesman and writer, best known as one of the Five Members whose attempted unconstitutional arrest by King Charles I in the House of Commons of England in 1642 sparked the Civil War.

Holles was the third son of John Holles, 1st Earl of Clare (c. 1564–1637), by Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Stanhope. The favourite son of his father and endowed with great natural abilities, Denzil Holles grew up under advantageous circumstances. Destined to become one of the most formidable antagonists of King Charles's arbitrary government, he had been Charles's childhood friend. The Earl of Clare was, however, no friend to the Stuart administration, being especially hostile to the Duke of Buckingham; and on the accession of Charles to the throne the king's offers of favour were rejected. In 1624 Holles was returned as Member of Parliament for Mitchell in Cornwall, replacing his brother John who chose to sit for another constituency. In 1628 he was elected MP for Dorchester. He had from the first a keen sense of the humiliations which attended the foreign policy of the Stuart kings. Writing to the Earl of Strafford, his brother-in-law, on 29 November 1629, he severely censures Buckingham's conduct of the expedition to the Isle of Ré; "since England was England," he declared, "it received not so dishonourable a blow"; and he joined in the demand for Buckingham's impeachment in 1628.

To these discontents were now added the abuses arising from the king's arbitrary administration. On 2 March 1629, when Sir John Finch, the Speaker, refused to put Sir John Eliot's Protestations and was about to adjourn the House by the king's command, Holles together with another member, Sir Walter Long, thrust him back into the chair and swore "he should sit still till it pleased them to rise." Meanwhile, Eliot, on the refusal of the Speaker to read the Protestations, had himself thrown them into the fire; the usher of the black rod was knocking at the door for admittance, and the king had sent for the guard. But Holles, declaring that he could not render the king or his country better service, put the Protestations to the House from memory, all the members rising to their feet and applauding. In consequence a warrant was issued for his arrest with others on the following day. The King meanwhile decided to rule without Parliament for eleven years after the dissolution in 1629.

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