to cast serious suspicion on the Earl, who nevertheless survived this investigation, as several others, and never actually deserted Parliament. 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. He served to the bitter end of hostilities in the Midlands: the siege of Worcester, which began on 21 May 1646 and ended on 23 July. Littleton heads the list of knights present in the garrison at the end of the siege. Sequestration Littleton's estates were subject to sequestration and forfeiture. As early as 25 June 1646, even before he surrendered at Worcester, Parliament granted one of his small estates, Little Saredon, to a local minister. He was listed as a delinquent in a report from the Staffordshire sequestrations solicitors to the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents in March 1648. The complexity of some of the financial transactions in which he was involved, mainly through the dealings of the Courtens, gradually became apparent. 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. This he noted in an application he made on 11 June 1649 to avoid any accusation of contempt for not compounding by the due date. The committee accepted his explanation but he remained unable to compound because of his debts. Cokayne probably depending on Kimber and Johnson, asserts that Littleton ultimately compounded for his estates and gives the fine as £1347 6s. 8d. Wedgwood thought that "on 10 December 1649 he had been fined £1134, and sequestration had been suspended on payment of half." 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. Sir Edward's failure to compound is asserted by the History of Parliament in a biography of his son and successor, which cites Green's calendar as evidence. Various creditors had claimed parts of his estates but on 13 June 1650 tenants were ordered not to pay any rent to extenders, i.e. temporary exploiters, of his estates but to pay it directly to the local sequestrations committee