Few entered more eagerly into the objects contemplated by the Long Parliament, when affairs were advancing to a crisis; and it was for the most part to Sir Edward Rodes, and his two friends the Hothams,[3] that the scheme, for maintaining the peace of Yorkshire (the Treaty of Neutrality), arranged by the two great parties at Rothwell on 29 September, before the war began, was frustrated.
Sir Edward's zeal that may have been quickened by personal injury—One of the stipulations at the treaty was that reparation should be made to "Sir Edward Rodes for the injury done him"—for at the beginning of September 1643, an attack was made on his house at Great Houghton, by a party of royalists under the command of Captain Grey, when, according to the diurnals of the time, all the outhouses were burnt, his goods plundered to the amount of £600, his lady uncivilly treated, some of his servants wounded, and one slain.
[4] Of all the gentry of Yorkshire, there were only two dissenters, on the parliament side, to that engagement of neutrality, young Holham and Sir Edward Rhodes who, although of better quality, was not so much known or considered as the other; but they quickly found seconds enough when the parliament refused to ratify the treaty, and declared it to be injurious to the common cause.Later during the First Civil War Rodes was taken into custody by Parliament, and with the Hothams committed to the Tower of London, but as nothing could be proved against him he was liberated,[6] (Sir John Hotham and his son, John Hotham the younger, were beheaded for treason after they were found guilty of conspiring to hand Hull over the Royalists).
During the Second Civil War, Royalists gained control of Pontefract Castle and started to plunder and capture prominent local Parliamentarians.
It would seem that Rodes was much in Scotland during the protectorate,[11] for he was sheriff of Perthshire, and represented Perth in the parliaments of 1656–8 and 1659–1660 and at the same time that his son was returned for Linlithgow, Stirling, and Clackmannan.
[1][4] After the restoration he was allowed to live quietly at Great Houghton, which became an asylum to the ejected ministers, who refused to comply with the Act of Uniformity 1662.
of Appley, in Shropshire, with whom he had, with other issue, a son, Godfrey (Sir), of Great Houghton, knighted at Havering, 13 July 1615, who married four wives, and left, with other issue, including a daughter, Elizabeth, the third wife and widow of the ill-fated Thomas Wentworth Earl of Strafford, and a son and successor, Sir Edward Rodes of Great Houghton.