As the country drifted towards war, Littleton remained a resolute Parliamentarian. On 6 June 1642 he wrote to Leveson, an MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, pointing out that Parliament expected all members to be in attendance by 16 June, with a penalty of £100 for non-compliance – to be used in funding the war in Ireland. He then reported on the king's preparations for civil war, including his commissions to raise troops against Parliament in every 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.