and in May 1657 he was one of the visitors named in the act founding the college of Durham (Commons' Journals, vii. 74; Burton, Parliamentary Diary, ii. 536). On 14 March 1652 Rushworth had been made free of the borough of Newcastle, and he was for many years agent for the corporation at a salary of 30l. per annum (Brand, History of Newcastle, p. 482). He was also agent for the town of Berwick, which on 2 April 1657 elected him as its member in place of Colonel George Fenwick, deceased, and re-elected him to Richard Cromwell's parliament in January 1659 (Guild Book of Berwick-upon-Tweed).
As early as 1650 Rushworth's influence with Fairfax had led royalist intriguers to seek to gain him to the king's cause (Report on the Duke of Portland's Manuscripts, i. 587; Tanner MS. liv. 14). In the winter of 1659–60 he was again approached, and Lord Mordaunt obtained through him a knowledge of Monck's conferences with Fairfax (Clarendon State Papers, iii. 651). When Monck restored the ‘secluded members’ to their seats, Rushworth as ‘the darling agent of the secluded members’ became secretary to the new council of state (February, 1660; ib. iii. 694). In the Convention parliament of 1660 he again represented Berwick. On 7 June 1660 he presented to the privy council certain volumes of its records, which he claimed to have preserved from plunder ‘during the late unhappy times,’ and received the king's thanks for their restoration (Kennet, Register, p. 176; Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. p. 231). Reports were spread, however, of Rushworth's complicity in the late king's death, and he was called before the lords to give an account of the deliberations of the regicides, but professed to know nothing except by hearsay (Autobiography of Alice Thornton, Surtees Society, 1875, p. 347; Lords' Journals, xi. 104). Rushworth was not re-elected to the parliament of 1661, but continued to act as agent for the town of Berwick, although complaints were made that the king could look for little obedience so long as such men were agents for corporations (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1667, pp. 188, 290).
In September 1667, when Sir Orlando Bridgeman was made lord-keeper, he appointed Rushworth his secretary (Ludlow, Memoirs, ed. 1894, ii. 495). The colony of Massachusetts also employed him as its agent at a salary of twelve guineas a year and his expenses, but it was scoffingly said in 1674 that all he had done for the colony was ‘not worth a rush’ (Hutchinson Papers, Prince Society, ii. 174, 183, 206). In the parliaments of March 1679, October 1679, and March 1681, Rushworth again represented Berwick, and seems to have supported the whig leaders. Though he had held lucrative posts and had inherited an estate from his cousin, Sir Richard Tempest, Rushworth's affairs were greatly embarrassed (Tempest's will, dated 14 Nov. 1657, is printed by the Yorkshire Archæological Society, Record Ser. ix. 105). He spent the last six years of his life in the king's bench prison in Southwark, ‘where, being reduced to his second childship, for his memory was quite decayed by taking too much brandy to keep up his spirits, he quietly gave up the ghost in his lodging in a certain alley there, called Rules Court, on 12 May 1690’ (Wood). He was buried in St. George's Church, Southwark. Wood states that Rushworth died at the age of eighty-three, but in a letter written in 1675 Rushworth describes himself as sixty-three at that date (Report on the Duke of Portland's Manuscripts, ii. 151). He left four daughters: (1) Hannah, married, February 1664, to Sir Francis Fane of Fulbeck, Lincolnshire (Harl. Soc. Publications, xxiv. 77); (2) Rebecca, married, August 1667, Robert Blaney of Kinsham, Herefordshire (ib. xxiii. 138); (3) Margaret (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xi. 263); (4) Katherine, whose letter to the Duke of Newcastle on her father's death is printed in the ‘Report on the Duke of Portland's Manuscripts’ (ii. 164).
A portrait of Rushworth, by R. White, is prefixed to the third part of his ‘Historical Collections.’ The eight volumes of ‘Historical Collections,’ to which Rushworth owes his fame, appeared at different dates between 1659 and 1701. The first part was published in 1659 with a dedication to Richard Cromwell, which was afterwards suppressed (reprinted in Old Parliamentary History, xxiii. 216). Bulstrode Whitelocke [q. v.] assisted Rushworth by the loan of manuscripts, and supervised the volume before it was sent to press (Whitelocke, Memorials, ed. 1853, iv. 315). He was also helped, according to Wood, by John Corbet (Athenæ, iii. 1267). The second part, containing the history of the years 1629–40, was published in 1680, in two volumes. Certain passages of the manuscript were suppressed to satisfy the scruples of the secretary of state (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. p. 231, 5th Rep. p. 318). In the same year appeared Rushworth's ‘Trial of the Earl of Strafford, dedicated to George Savile, earl of Halifax. It was mainly based on Rushworth's own shorthand notes taken during the trial (Cal. of the Manuscripts of Mr. Alfred Morrison, v. 327). The third part, which contained
