GRIFFITH, John III (?1623-67), of St Peter, Chester, Cheshire.

Griffith is one of the most obscure Cheshire MPs of the seventeenth century. His lineage is particularly hard to trace given the probable lowliness of his social origins and his possession of a very common name for that part of the country. We know nothing of his family background for certain, beyond the fact that he was the son of one Edward Griffith.1PROB11/232, f. 230v; Cheshire RO, ZMAI/1/27; Cal. Chester City Mins. ed. M.J. Groombridge (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. cvi), 58. Griffith later referred to himself as a ‘stranger’ in Chester, implying that he had not been born in the city; and perhaps the most likely candidate for his paternity is Edward Griffith, yeoman of Christleton, a village near Chester, who was listed among the Cheshire parliamentarians indicted by the royalists at the county assizes in 1644.2TSP iii. 223; Brereton Lttr. Bks. iii. 308. In his will of 1667, John Griffith mentioned property he owned in Christleton.3PROB11/324, f. 223. He may therefore have been the John Griffith who was baptised at Christleton in the spring of 1623 – the name of his father was not recorded.4Christleton bishop’s transcript. He should not be confused with John Griffith, eldest son of the Chester clothier Edward Griffith – both of whom died in the mid-1650s.5PROB11/232, f. 230v; PROB11/235, ff. 73r-v.

Writing to Secretary of state John Thurloe* in 1654, Griffith claimed that he had spent his ‘whole time in all the late wars ... in horse service, till after Worcester fight [the battle of Worcester, September 1651]’.6TSP iii. 217. However, this may not have been entirely accurate, for he was very probably the ‘Ensign Griffith’ who was serving by the spring of 1643 under the commander of Parliament’s forces in Cheshire, Sir William Brereton*, and who was later promoted to lieutenant of Brereton’s foot company and then given his own troop of horse.7SP28/196, ff. 492, 503, 508; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 186, 188, 225 Although commissioned in August 1650 as a cornet in the Cheshire militia horse under Robert Duckenfeild*, Griffith seems to have retained the rank of captain and his own troop to match.8CSP Dom. 1650, p. 510. It was as ‘Captain’ John Griffith that he sat on the court martial at Chester on 1 October 1651 that tried and condemned to death the royalist leader James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby.9The Perfect Tryall and Confession of the Earl of Derby (1651), 2 (E.643.15). Later that month, the Cheshire militia commissioners complained to the council of state about the ‘great oppression’ committed by Griffith’s troops in the county.10CSP Dom. 1651, p. 500; 1651-2, p. 32.

Griffith emerged in the spring of 1655 as one of Secretary Thurloe’s most trusted agents and intelligencers in Cheshire.11P.J. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire election of 1656’, BJRL xlix. 390-1. Between March and July of that year, he wrote numerous letters to Thurloe concerning the dispositions of the ‘honest party’ in Cheshire and the activities of ‘our old implacable enemies the cavaliers’ and advising him on the composition of the Cheshire militia commission set up in the wake of the 1655 royalist uprisings.12TSP iv. 216-17, 223, 226, 263, 273-4, 300, 304, 344, 682. Although consistently styled ‘Captain Griffith’, he accepted a commission as a lieutenant in the troop of militia horse under Chester’s new governor Thomas Croxton.13SP25/77, p. 876. Appointed late in 1655 to the Cheshire commission for securing the peace of the commonwealth, Griffith was apparently zealous in nosing out local royalists for decimation; and according to one contemporary, he enriched himself from ‘such bonds as were take[n] to bind the gentlemen withall’.14TSP iv. 251; Harl. 1929, f. 19. In April 1656, Major-general Charles Worsley* recommended that Thurloe advise with Griffith – who was then in London on Cheshire business – as ‘one that doth you special service in that county’.15TSP iv. 746.

The fact that Griffith was well regarded at Whitehall may have contributed to his relatively rapid progress through Chester’s municipal hierarchy during the mid-1650s, such that only five years separated his appointment as a common councillor and his election as alderman in 1658.16Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, ff. 101v, 122v. He was evidently one of Chester’s most influential figures under the protectorate.17Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 151; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 226. In the winter of 1658-9, he and his fellow alderman and militia officer Jonathan Ridge* stood as candidates for the city in the elections to the third protectoral Parliament. According to one report of the election, the ‘commonalty wholly stood’ for Griffith and Ridge, but most of the senior-officeholders backed Alderman Richard Bradshaw (brother of Alderman Edward Bradshaw*) and the city’s Presbyterian recorder John Ratcliffe*. Despite a vitriolic speech on election day from Ratcliffe in which he denounced Ridge – and possibly Griffith too – as an enemy of the city’s ancient liberties, the freemen chose the two junior aldermen over their more senior colleagues.18Supra, ‘Chester’. Griffith was named to only one committee in this Parliament – the committee of privileges on 28 January 1659 – and made no recorded contribution to debate.19CJ vii. 595a.

Given his close association with Thurloe it is unlikely that Griffith welcomed the fall of the protectorate and the restoration of the Rump. Chester’s republican interest, when urging the Rump to remodel the corporation in the aftermath of Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion in the summer of 1659, recommended that Ridge retain his place as an alderman but that Griffith be demoted to the rank of common councillor.20Harl. 1929, ff. 10-11v; A.M. Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester during the civil wars and Interregnum 1640-62’, in Crisis and Order in English Towns ed. P. Clark, P. Slack (1972), 227-8. The willingness of Chester’s ‘well-affected’ to advise Griffith’s retention in municipal office is difficult to reconcile with his claim after the Restoration that he had supported the king’s cause during Boothe’s rebellion and had remained loyal to Charles II thereafter.21CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 407.

Griffith did not fare well after the Restoration. Indeed, his distant relation, the Shropshire historian Richard Gough, claimed that his estate had been ‘utterly ruined’ – although as Griffith’s will reveals, he died with lands in both Cheshire and Shropshire.22R. Gough, Hist. of Myddle ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), 167. He was arrested and (briefly) imprisoned in July 1660 on the orders of the Lords for his part in the trial and execution of the earl of Derby.23LJ xi. 87b, 88a, 137b. In August 1662, he was removed from Chester’s aldermanic bench by the corporation commissioners for refusing to take the oath abjuring the Covenant.24Cheshire RO, ZAB/2, f. 135. By 1663, he was serving as a collector of excise in Cheshire, but that did not prevent him from being arrested by the authorities in October of that year as a ‘dangerous person’.25CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 298, 407. Having tried to escape from custody during the winter of 1663-4, he was regarded as highly dangerous man by Cheshire’s leading royalists.26CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 436, 453, 454, 460. Nevertheless, in April 1664, the privy council ordered his release after receiving a petition from Griffith’s superior in the Cheshire excise office, claiming that the prisoner was ‘very useful to him in raising his Majesty’s farm of excise of that county’.27Cheshire RO, DLT/B/11, pp. 156-7. At some point in the early 1660s, Griffith moved from Chester and settled at Oswestry, Shropshire, where (according to Gough) he was maintained by his mother-in-law.28SP28/255, f. 134; Gough, Myddle ed. Hey, 167.

Griffith died in the spring of 1667 and was buried at Oswestry on 19 April.29Shropshire Par. Regs. [Oswestry] ed. Fletcher, iv. 652. In his will, he charged his estate with a jointure of £30 a year for his wife Elizabeth and with legacies for his younger children.30PROB11/324, f. 223v. None of his immediate family are known to have sat in Parliament.