TEMPLER, Dudley (1627-66), of Wethersfield, Essex.

Dudley Templer belonged to one of the more minor Huntingdonshire gentry families, the Templers of Great Staughton. Born in 1627 at Harrold, the Bedfordshire home of his mother’s family, he was presumably named Dudley in honour of his maternal grandfather. He was still a teenager when the civil war broke out and went up to Cambridge at about the time when victory for Parliament was becoming certain.19Al. Cant. What happened next is unclear.

By the early 1650s Templer was living in Essex and it was there, rather than in Huntingdonshire, that he established himself. Ten years later he was living at Wethersfield, in the northern part of Essex between Thaxted and Halstead, and had plausibly done so since he had first arrived in the county.20Essex RO, D/P 119/25/113. The obvious explanation for this move would be his marriage, about which little is certain. His wife is known to have been called Mary, a person called Purple Templer was living at Wethersfield in the mid-1670s, and another Wethersfield resident, Christopher Purple, probably had a daughter called Mary.21PROB11/303/171; Essex RO, D/DHt/T295/5; D/DHt/T295/17-18; D/P 119/1/1, p. 18; D/DHt/T73/33; IGI; PROB11/187/134. The simplest inference would be that this Mary Purple married Templer and that, through her, he became connected with Wethersfield. Templer’s move to Essex took place despite the fact that he was the heir to his father’s estates at Great Staughton. He seems to have had part of the patrimonial estates settled on him by his father at some point before 1657, although the location of those lands remains unknown.22PROB11/303/171. Possibly, with his eldest son already well established in Essex, Thomas Templer preferred to leave his Huntingdonshire lands to his other sons.

Despite being a newcomer, Templer quickly earned a reputation as one of the most active local officials in Essex. By 1651 at the latest he was a justice of the peace, a militia commissioner and a major in the Essex militia. It was probably the last of these appointments which did most to establish him as someone of consequence in his adopted county, and the other offices probably followed from it.23SP28/227: warrants, Aug.-Oct. 1651; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 92; SP28/153: accts. of Edward Elliston, 1655-6. A militia commission was one office in which youth was an advantage, and as a justice of the peace he was exceptionally assiduous in his attendance at meetings of the Essex quarter sessions.24Essex QSOB ed. Allen, 1-149. Appointment to the local assessment commission followed in due course.25A. and O.

To the government in London Templer must have seemed an ideal candidate for the Nominated Parliament, despite his lack of roots in Essex. Little is known of what Templer did in this Parliament. His nomination to the committee for trade and corporations is his sole appearance in the official records of its proceedings.26CJ vii. 287a. He was said to be among those in favour of maintaining a preaching ministry.27Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 430. This would be consistent with his appointment as a commissioner for scandalous ministers the following year and there is evidence from later in the decade that he took part in the persecution of Quakers.28A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 149; The First Publishers of Truth, ed. N. Penney (1907), 98. In the meantime, the council of state also began employing him to conduct local investigations, such as that carried out in 1655 to determine which faction within the corporation ought to be controlling Colchester.29CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 354, 389.

It was presumably that section of the Essex electorate who, like him, willingly supported the protectorate who got him elected as one of the county’s MPs in August 1656. When Ralph Josselin, the vicar of Earls Colne, met him the following week, he ‘endeavoured to give him the best counsel I could as a Parliament man’.30Josselin, Diary, 379. Templer was far more conspicuous in this Parliament than he had been three years before. During the first six months of the first session, beginning in September 1656, he was named to seven committees, despite several periods of absence from the House. As in the previous Parliament, he was named to the committee for trade (20 Oct.). Given that he was an Essex MP, his interest in the private bills concerning the children of William Masham (25 Oct.) and the Essex estates of the earl of Carlisle (15 Dec.) is easily explained.31CJ vii. 429a, 430a, 438a, 442a, 445a, 468a, 496b. His position as a militia commander and as an MP made him an obvious choice to serve on the Essex commission for securing the peace of the commonwealth, and the performance of those duties was one of the reasons why he spent some time away from Westminster in late 1656.32A. and O.; SP28/227: warrants, 21 Nov. 1656, 20 Dec. 1656; TSP iv. 317. His attendance at Westminster may have become more infrequent towards the end of this first session.

The high regard in which Templer was held by the government became particularly evident at the beginning of the second session in January 1658 when he was one of 23 Members trusted with tendering to their fellow MPs the oath of loyalty to the protector.33CJ vii. 578a. In this at least, Templer was acting as a representative of the government in Parliament. But he did take risks. On 25 January Sir Arthur Hesilrige* asked to take the oaths despite having been summoned to the Other House. Templer was one of the commissioners who agreed to administer them to him.34Burton’s Diary, ii. 347. Over the following weeks Templer’s Huntingdonshire background made him a suitable person to consider the bill which would have united the parishes within Huntingdon.35CJ vii. 588a, 591a. His only other committee appointment before the dissolution on 4 February 1658 was to the committee on bill for the registration of births, marriages and deaths (22 Jan.).36CJ vii. 581a.

The period of political uncertainty following the death of Oliver Cromwell* seems to have enhanced Templer’s local importance. Control of the volunteer forces in Essex during any royalist invasion might now prove crucial. In August 1659, faced with Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in Cheshire, the Rump commissioned Templer to raise a cavalry regiment in Essex.37CJ vii. 749a. He had already been ordered to interrogate the steward of James Howard, 3rd earl of Suffolk.38CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 44. He now promptly made a number of arrests and organised a search of the house of Lionel Cranfield, 3rd earl of Middlesex.39CCSP iv. 337. It is doubtful that this or any of his actions in the months which followed made him popular. Contemplating the state of public affairs on Christmas Day 1659, Josselin was worried that Essex was ‘much troubled by Dudley Templer’s boisterousness’, and, on meeting him four days later, he prayed that God would take pity on him.40Josselin, Diary, 455, 456. Templer’s period of local dominance was in fact almost over. By 5 January 1660 the council of state had decided to include his regiment among those to be disbanded.41CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 301, 307, 308, 310. He may reacted badly to this news. By 7 March, the day after John Lambert* had been placed in the Tower, Templer was under arrest, strongly suggesting that he had supported Lambert’s mutiny.42CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 571. His period in captivity is unlikely to have been prolonged. There was probably never any question of him being rehabilitated to local office after the Restoration.

Thereafter he largely disappears from view. Attempts were made by the exchequer to summon him to account for the money he had handled during the 1650s and in May 1661 he was granted a royal pardon.43E113/8: list of Essex defaulters, n.d.; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 202; PSO5/9, unfol. His decision to mortgage his lands at Bardfield Saling, Great Saling and Shalford, all of which were close to Wethersfield, in October 1662 to raise £1,720 suggests that he was now in financial difficulties.44Essex RO, D/DZu/202. He and his wife Mary were also engaged in long-running litigation over property in Aldbury, Hertfordshire.45C8/139/132; C8/185/169. He died in 1666, probably in March, and was buried in Wethersfield. Administration of his estate was granted that July to his widow, but in January 1667 this was transferred to his brother John, described as a creditor, and the lands finally passed to the descendants of another creditor, Jeffrey Howland.46Essex RO, D/DZu/207. As has been mentioned already, a member of the family, Purple Templer, was still living at Wethersfield in the 1670s. By the 1680s he had moved to Hildersham in Cambridgeshire.47Essex RO, D/DHt/T295/20; D/DC/41/455; D/P 119/25/115. Their eventual fate is otherwise obscure. Purple Templer, a London distiller, would father a son called Dudley Templer in 1721.48St Giles Cripplegate, London par. reg.