Slingsby Bethel

Slingsby Bethel (1617–1697) was a Member of Parliament with republican sympathies, during the period of the English Civil War.

Slingsby Bethel was the third son of Sir Walter Bethel of Alne, North Yorkshire, who married Mary, the second daughter of Sir Henry Slingsby of Scriven, near Knaresborough, and was baptised at Alne 27 February 1617. Being a younger son, he was placed in business, and went to Hamburg in 1637, staying there until December 1649.

He was strongly opposed to the cause of the cavaliers, but did not approve of the conduct of the Protector, nor did he, as member for Knaresborough in the parliament of 1659, support Richard Cromwell's adherents in their efforts to procure his succession as protector with unlimited powers of action. In the new council of state appointed to hold office from 1 January 1660, he was the last of the ten non-parliamentary members. When the estates of his uncle, Sir Henry Slingsby, the unfortunate cavalier who suffered for his devotion to the royal cause, were sequestered, they were bought in for his family by Mr. Stapylton and Slingsby Bethel; the letters which passed between them on this matter are printed in the Diary of Sir Henry Slingsby (1836), pp. 344–54, 411.

Through success in trade and through his family descent, he acquired considerable property in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and for many years after the Restoration he passed a retired life in London, living on his means, and taking no active part in opposition to a government which he distrusted. But on 24 June 1680 Bethel, who was a member of the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers (elected Master for 1692-93), and Henry Cornish, were chosen sheriffs of London and Middlesex, though they were unable to serve in consequence of their not having taken the oaths commanded by the Corporation Act. The country was divided into two parties through religious and political differences; Bethel and his colleague being the candidates of the whig and popular party in the city. Roger North, the tory historian, in his Examen, p. 93, says of them that 'the former used to walk about more like a corncutter than sheriff of London. He kept no house, but lived upon chops, whence it is proverbial for not feasting "to Bethel the city"'; and Dryden, in the first part of his Absalom and Achitophel threw at Bethel, under the name of Shimei, all the slanders of his opponents.

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