county. Leveson failed to commit himself to Parliament and was summoned by the House of Commons in August. However, 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. Littleton, on the other hand, did not vacillate but immediately rallied to Parliament. A week after he wrote to Leveson, he was back at Parliament, where he was ordered, along with two other MPs, to notify his father-in-law Courten that he must not sell or move his stocks of saltpetre, an essential component of gunpowder, which Parliament intended to buy from him. On 6 August the king, then at York, appointed Littleton Custos Rotulorum of Staffordshire, to replace Essex, who was Lord Lieutenant of the county and a leader of the opposition among the Lords. If this was intended to loosen the Devereux-Littleton connection, it failed. Active for Parliament By February 1643 the royalists were dominant across most of Staffordshire. 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, 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. He was killed on the first day of the siege by a sniper but the garrison capitulated on 5 March. On 14 March the Commons considered a letter from the successful soldiers at Lichfield, which included a request for money and saddles. Littleton and another MP were ordered to write a letter of thanks from the House. Four days later the House committed to his care and that of a Lancashire MP some captured saddles, to be shared between troops in their respective counties. On 27 March Littleton was commissioned, along with other MPs from his county, to enforce a law providing for the sequestration of the estates of "notorious delinquents," i.e. royalists. 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