FENWICKE, Robert (c.1593-1668), of Bedlington, Northumb.

Fenwicke belonged to a junior branch of the Fenwicks of Fenwick Tower and was thus a kinsman of Sir John Fenwick* and his sons John Fenwick* and William Fenwicke*.31Fenwick, The Fenwicks of Northumb. 49; Hodgson, ‘The manor and tower of Bitchfield’, 106-7. After selling his patrimonial estate at Bitchfield in the south of Northumberland, he moved to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and in 1637 he was described by a Laudian cleric as a ‘prime man’ in the town’s ‘puritan’ faction.32Hodgson, ‘The manor and tower of Bitchfield’, 105; CSP Dom. 1637, p. 549. He was certainly trusted by Berwick corporation, which in 1638 appointed him one of its agents, along with (Sir) Thomas Widdrington* and John Rushworth*, in a property dispute with the crown.33CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 456-7. The Laudians’ opinion of him as a puritan activist was fully borne out during the second bishops’ war, when, ‘to the great danger of his person and ruin of his estate’ he served as a liaison officer with the invading Covenanter army, helping the Scots to distinguish between their friends and enemies in Northumberland. According to the Covenanter general Sir Alexander Leslie (the future earl of Leven), Fenwicke’s assistance to his army ‘served much to the holding up of a right understanding between the kingdoms and did obviate evils of a national quarrel and effusion of blood’.34LJ x. 5b-6a.

Given Fenwicke’s role in helping to bring down the personal rule of Charles I, Berwick corporation was perhaps ill-advised in choosing him to solicit the king concerning the town’s lectureship in 1641.35Berwick RO, B1/9, f. 211v. On the other hand, he was the perfect choice when Parliament was looking to strengthen its ties with the Scottish Covenanters in the summer of 1643. In August, the Committee of Safety* paid him £150 ‘for a journey to be taken by him into Scotland and his continuance there where he is to be employed about the service of the state’. His London assignees for the receipt of this sum were the parliamentarian grandees’ men-of-business John Dillingham and Dr William Stane.36SP28/264, f. 209. Fenwicke was probably still in Scotland in October, when the two Houses appointed him, Richard Barwis* and Bryan Stapylton* as commissioners to the Scottish Parliament and to accompany Leven’s army on its invasion of northern England.37CJ iii. 279a; LJ vi. 273b. In late November, Fenwicke was one of the signatories to the Anglo-Scottish military treaty that accompanied the Covenant.38LJ vi. 365b, 366b.

Fenwicke worked closely with Sir William Armyne*, Richard Bawis* and the other commissioners during 1644 and the first half of 1645 in remodelling the civil administration of the northern counties and obtaining quarter and provisions for the Scottish forces.39Harl. 7001, f. 177; SP46/106, ff. 90-310; LJ vi. 357b, 400; vii. 43b, 59a-60a; CJ iv. 179b, 180a; HMC Portland, i. 169, 181, 182, 185; [J. Musgrave], Yet Another Word to the Wise (1646), 4 (E.355.25). Like Armyne, he went out of his way to cultivate the goodwill of the parliamentary grandee and northern magnate Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, and in May 1645, the earl acknowledged himself ‘much beholding’ to Fenwicke ‘for his care and forwardness in all such matters as do concern me in those northern parts’.40Supra, ‘Sir William Armyne’; Alnwick, P.I.3(q): Hugh Potter* to Northumberland, 15, 23 May 1645; O.I.2(f): Northumberland to Potter, 20 May 1645. Although Fenwicke was involved in Parliament’s efforts to establish a Presbyterian classis in Northumberland in 1645, it is likely that the depredations of the Scottish army in the northern counties inclined him politically towards the Independent, anti-Scottish interest – of which the earl of Northumberland and Armyne were prominent members.41Supra, ‘Sir William Armyne’; HMC Portland, i. 324; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 74; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 365-6. It was certainly anticipated that he would lend a sympathetic ear to the complaints of the leading men of Newcastle in July 1646 about the Scots taking free quarter in the area.42Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 387. It is also significant that the House of Lords, which was dominated by the Presbyterians from the spring of 1646, attempted to scratch his name from the list of contractors in the November 1646 ordinance for the sale of bishops’ lands.43LJ viii. 560a. This potentially lucrative position was probably Fenwicke’s reward for his services as a parliamentary commissioner, and the Commons, where the Independents retained a majority, insisted that his name stand.44LJ viii. 566b, 567a. Over the next eight years, he was named as a contractor or trustee in four more ordinances for the sale of church and crown lands. His duties as a contractor, which he performed diligently, obliged him to take up residence in London.45A. and O. i. 889; LPL, Comm Add 1, ff. 1, 39.

Fenwicke’s links with leading Independents notwithstanding, the earl of Leven wrote to the Lords in January 1648, highlighting the vital role that Fenwicke had played in the second bishops’ war and urging that he be suitably rewarded.46LJ x. 5b-6a. The royalist press was less generous in its assessment of Fenwicke’s worth

this is that Fenwicke, that renegado traitor to his country, who, a little before the first invasion of the Scots [in 1640], run [sic] away to Edinburgh and guided them through Northumberland and over the Tyne at Newburn Haugh. A beggarly fellow all his life time, before this rebellion brake out.47Mercurius Elencticus no. 11 (2-9 Feb. 1648), 82 (E.426.12).

On 22 and 29 February, Parliament granted Fenwicke £1,000 from such concealed delinquents’ estates as he could discover to the Committee for Compounding* (it would take him over five years to receive the full amount), and the office of register in the ecclesiastical courts of the dioceses of Durham and York, ‘when they shall be settled’, in ‘consideration and recompense of his faithful services and great losses’.48CJ v. 454a; LJ x. 76a, 81b; CCC 2982-3; CCAM 943-4, 1084. With this money and the profits from his various offices, he purchased numerous church, crown and forfeited properties, and during the early 1650s he established a country seat for himself at Bedlington in Northumberland.49C54/3403/11; C54/3520/26, 27; C54/3524/20; C54/3563/26; C54/3734/24; C54/3758/27; Col. Top. et Gen. i. 126, 288; CCC 1737, 2983. His role in central government proved no hindrance to his advancement in the north, where the Rump appointed him a sequestrator and a justice of the peace in three counties.50SP28/240, f. 23; C231/6, p. 193.

Fenwicke’s stock seems to have risen even further after the fall of the Rump, for in May 1653 he was selected by the council of officers as one of the men to represent the four northernmost counties in the Nominated Parliament – apparently with special reference to Northumberland.51Supra, ‘Northern Counties’. He had been named to just one committee in this Parliament – the committee for Scottish affairs on 20 July – when he was granted leave for six weeks on 8 September.52CJ vii. 286b, 316a. Although the council assigned him lodgings at Whitehall on 19 September, there is no evidence that he returned to Westminster before the Nominated Parliament was dissolved.53CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 4, 157.

He apparently had no difficulty negotiating the transition from commonwealth to protectorate, and on 12 July 1654 he was returned for Northumberland to the first protectoral Parliament.54Supra, ‘Northumberland’. It was doubtless his prominence in county affairs since the early 1640s that gave him such a strong electoral interest. He was named to just three, or possibly four, committees in this Parliament – the clerk’s occasional failure to distinguish between the three MPs with the surname Fenwick making it impossible to determine the exact number.55CJ vii. 370a, 371b, 373a, 387a. An active member of the commission for ejecting scandalous ministers in the four northernmost counties, he was recommended by Deputy Major-general Charles Howard* for appointment as sheriff of Northumberland in October 1655, being one of the few ‘fit men’ in the region.56LPL, COMM VIII/I, p. 441; TSP iv. 72. In the event, Fenwicke was spared this dubious honour.

Fenwicke was returned for Northumberland again in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656 and was allowed to take his seat by the protectoral council. He was named to between six and nine committees in this Parliament and played a leading role in drawing up a bill for suppressing theft upon the Borders.57CJ vii. 427a, 429b, 439b, 456a, 459a, 464a, 504a, 532a, 538a; Burton’s Diary, i. 175, 345; ii. 282. On 11 June 1657, he informed the House that a Northumberland royalist had slandered him as ‘a base fellow, his father hanged for felony, and he did wonder who sent him to the Parliament’.58CJ vii. 554b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 219. These slurs upon Fenwicke’s good name were refuted by Sir William Strickland and the Speaker, Sir Thomas Widdrington, who described him as ‘a person of blood and worth’ and ‘of an ancient family’.59Burton’s Diary, ii. 219-20. The Commons summoned the offending royalist as a delinquent, but when he was called to the bar of the House on 23 June, Fenwicke ‘stood up to excuse the business’, obviously feeling that honour had been satisfied.60Burton’s Diary, ii. 271.

Fenwicke remained a force in local government until at least the summer of 1658, and according to one report he was active in securing Northumberland against the royalists during Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in the summer of 1659.61Stowe 185, f. 161; SP18/220/71, f. 116; CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 330, 360; 1658-9, p. 69. At about the same time, or so it was alleged, he supported Robert Mitford’s* heavy-handed attempts to secure maintenance for Morpeth’s Congregationalist minister Thomas Binlowes.62Infra, ‘Robert Mitford’; C6/143/126. Yet for all his local prominence, Fenwicke either did not seek re-election to Parliament or could not secure a seat after the franchise reverted to its traditional form in 1659. In 1661, he was forced to relinquish some of the property he had purchased at Bedlington, although he tried (with the help of one of Sir Arthur Hesilrige’s* northern stewards) to resist the re-assertion of the bishop of Durham’s lordship in the town.63Durham Univ. Lib. Mickleton and Spearman ms 46, pp. 183-4; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 205.

Fenwicke died in August 1668 and was probably the ‘Robert Fennick’ buried within the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster on 12 August.64C5/605/65; St Martin-in-the-Fields par. reg. In his will, he directed that his estate be sold to support his widow and to pay his debts, which amounted to at least £70.65PROB11/329, f. 40. He was the only one of his line to sit in Parliament.