Having tried unsuccessfully to find a third way, he switched his support to the Royalist cause – a decision that led to his financial ruin, as large debts made it impossible to redeem his estates from sequestration after the victory of Parliament.

His mother, Mary, was from the neighbouring county of Warwickshire, where the Fishers held the manor of Packington in chief[4] and the advowson of the parish church.

[6] His widow, also Mary, then occupied the manor house with her other daughter Anne Dilke, and then soon died, making it difficult for Sir Robert to get the will executed.

[9] His father was suspected of Puritan sympathies and had supported a controversial minister at St Michael's Church in Penkridge,[3] where the Littletons held the advowson.

About three years earlier his father had run into financial difficulties in the wake of his term as Sheriff of the county and had moved his household to Worcester to economise.

[13] It appears that the Littleton family returned to Pillaton soon after Edward's admission to the Inner Temple, perhaps during 1618, and their financial situation began to recover as a result of a switch to demesne farming and animal husbandry.

[20] At some stage, presumably later in the year, Littleton was faced by a summons to the House of Lords over £300 arrears, against £2700 paid in, and petitioned for a stay until Easter 1638 to give him a chance to complete the collection.

[21] Although Littleton had sought to portray himself as zealous in collecting money for the king but frustrated by inefficient constables, Sir John Skeffington, his successor as sheriff, gave a very different picture in a letter to Nicholas from his Staffordshire home at Fisherwick.

When the king's commission of array wrote urging him to mobilise on the royalist side he joined with other local gentry in signing a refusal "without supreme authority or greater motives of more demonstrable dangers to raise the armes of their county".

Ultimately Leveson's neutralist policy failed in the face of the king's order to suppress all third Force troops, and he reluctantly took up the royalist cause.

[32] Parliament's counter-attack was launched under Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, lord of the manor of Penkridge, and as such a neighbour of Littleton,[33] although he had substantial holdings around Warwick.

Brooke took Stratford upon Avon and on 2 March, St Chad’s Day, invested the cathedral close at Lichfield, which had been fortified by the royalists.

[37] On 7 May he was similarly nominated to enforce an emergency financial measure, "An Ordinance for the speedy raising and levying of money thorowout the whole Kingdome of England, and dominion of Wales for the relief of the Common-wealth..."[38] On 6 June he was listed among those MPs who took the Covenant, expressing their willingness to continue the war in defence of the Protestant faith.

"[42] In January 1644 he joined the Oxford Parliament[43] and on 4 March was disabled from attending Westminster, together with Sir John Borlase, 1st Baronet, "for neglecting the Service of the House, and going to the other Party.

"[44] On 31 July 1646 the writ was moved for by-elections to replace Littleton and Sir Hervey Bagot, a committed royalist disabled as early as 24 November 1642,[45] as Staffordshire MPs.

Denbigh himself admitted to Mackworth that a Captain Gower, who had travelled widely with him, had been encouraging him to go over to the king and that his defection would be accompanied by a royalist rising in Huntingdonshire.

Littleton had announced in Staffordshire that he was raising forces on Denbigh's behalf, apparently in order to launch a third party, with the help of Sir Walter Wrottesley and Gerard Scrimshaw of Aqualate Hall.

Swinfen, a member of the Staffordshire parliamentary committee, had warned that Littleton had made his peace with the king, precipitating his flight to Oxford.

Isolated from his Staffordshire base, Littleton was impotent to contribute to the royalist cause in the area, and parliamentary soldiers occupied Penkridge in 1645 after the briefest of skirmishes.

[53] Littleton applied to compound but this was impossible because of the complications caused by his own personal debt of £3000 and the surety for the vast sum of £50,000 he had stood for his father-in-law and brother-in-law.

"[43] This seems to be a misreading of Mary Anne Everett Green’s calendar of the committee proceedings, which show this as the sum demanded of Sir Edward's brother, Fisher, on 10 December 1650 to redeem parts of the estate he was then claiming.

[57] Sir Edward's failure to compound is asserted by the History of Parliament in a biography of his son and successor,[58] which cites Green's calendar as evidence.

[59] On 1 August 1650 the Commons passed an act that allowed creditors and mortgagees to pay a portion of the delinquent's fine relating to the lands they claimed and thus gain possession.

On 1 October 1650 the Commons debated a resolution from the army committee intended to expedite cases where landowners had tried to conceal the extent and value of their holdings.

[67] Fisher Littleton continued to buy back the family estates and agitated for the more rapid release of land for this purpose: on 30 June 1653 the Council of State referred to the committee a petition on this subject he had submitted.