WATERHOUSE, Nathaniel (c.1615-63), of Old Spring Garden, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, and Limehouse, Stepney, Mdx.

Waterhouse belonged to a junior branch of a family that had settled in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, by the mid-sixteenth century.12Familiae Minorum Gentium ed. Hunter, 844-7. His father, an Inner Temple barrister, had represented the Yorkshire borough of Aldborough in 1589 and Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1601, but had become ‘much indebted unto divers persons’ and was to spend the last three decades of his life a prisoner in the Fleet. Having thrown away a promising career and impoverished his family, he was accounted, not surprisingly, ‘a man notoriously infamous and of no credit’.13C6/106/175; C8/94/157; HP Commons, 1558-1603, ‘David Waterhouse’.

As a younger son of a ‘decayed’ gentleman, Nathaniel was poorly placed to make any notable mark even at local level, let alone upon national affairs. His emergence from relative obscurity owed much to the fact that his mother’s niece, Elizabeth Boucher, married Oliver Cromwell*, making Waterhouse a cousin of the parliamentarian commander and future lord protector.14Boucher, ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Wilts. relatives’, 27; ‘Notes on the fam. of Elizabeth (Bourchier), wife of the protector, Oliver Cromwell’, The Gen. n.s. xxviii. 72. Waterhouse’s younger brother Joseph was appointed a cornet in the troop of horse that Cromwell raised during the summer of 1642.15SP28/1A, f. 159; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 1, 6. By early 1643, Nathaniel, too, had joined the earl of Essex’s parliamentarian army, serving as a cornet in Sir Robert Pye II’s* troop of horse in the regiment of Colonel John Hampden*.16Supra, ‘Sir Robert Pye II’; SP28/5, ff. 190, 304. Waterhouse would remain a cornet in this regiment until at least May 1647, when he signed a petition to Sir Thomas Fairfax* from Pye and other Presbyterian officers and soldiers in the New Model army, expressing their ‘resolution and readiness to defend the authority of Parliament and not to direct or dispute the proceedings of those by whose power they have acted’.17SP28/19, f. 40; A Petition of Divers Officers of the Army (1647, 669 f.11.15); Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XLI, f. 136v.

Waterhouse had put his Presbyterian associations firmly behind him by October 1650, when he was operating as Cromwell’s financial agent in London and, it would appear, his private steward.18SP28/71, ff. 4, 6; Hunts RO, Cromwell-Bush 731/148; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 571; CCC 393. The high esteem in which Cromwell held Joseph Waterhouse – who had volunteered as a physician to the parliamentary army in Ireland in 1649 – may have helped to secure Nathaniel’s preferment under the lord general.19Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 6; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 493, 495; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 394. By January 1651, at the latest, he was closely involved in the legal dealings and land transactions surrounding the forfeited estates in Monmouthshire and west Glamorgan, south Wales, that Parliament had granted Cromwell in 1648.20Hunts RO, Cromwell-Bush 731/28A; CP25/2/576/1652Mich; CCC 393, 603; L. Bowen, ‘Oliver Cromwell (alias Williams) and Wales’, in Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives ed. P. Little, 180-2. Late in 1651, the Rump passed an act for settling lands upon Waterhouse, John Thurloe* and a third gentleman as trustees for the maintenance of Cromwell’s daughter Bridget, the widow of Henry Ireton*, and her children.21CJ vii. 52a; CCC 658; Nichols, Leics. iii. 800.

Waterhouse’s employment under Cromwell was transformed into a public office with the establishment of the protectorate late in 1653. As steward of the lord protector’s estates, he worked closely with Cromwell’s household steward John Maidstone* and probably also with his chief financier Martin Noel*.22Supra, ‘John Maidstone’; CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 92-3, 203, 208, 347, 593; 1655, pp. 113, 191; 1655-6, pp. 14, 28, 220; 1657-8, pp. 218, 290; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 85, 103-4, 327; HMC 2nd Rep. 98; HMC Var. ii. 115; Abbot, Writings and Speeches, iv. 174; R. Sherwood, Ct. of Oliver Cromwell, 33-4, 42. Waterhouse was able to lend the government £1,000 in the mid-1650s towards repairing Whitehall and other state residences.23CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 247. His connection with the court and family of Cromwell may well have been a factor in recommending his father-in-law, Edward Keling, to the voters of Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1654 and 1659.24Supra, ‘Edward Keling’.

Waterhouse was returned for Monmouthshire to the second protectoral Parliament in November 1656 in place of Major-general James Berry, who had opted to sit for his native Worcestershire. Waterhouse’s only known link with Monmouthshire was as steward of Cromwell’s sizeable estate in the county. He was named to only four committees in this Parliament – none of any great significance or in connection with the Humble Petition and Advice – and made no recorded contribution to debate.25CJ vii. 470b, 514b, 528b, 543b. Probably irregular in his attendance at Westminster, he was not listed among the ‘kinglings’ – those MPs who had supported offering Cromwell the crown – and there is no trace of him in the 1658 session. Late in 1657, as part of a Cromwellian revival of the old royal household offices, Waterhouse was made master of the green cloth and John Maidstone cofferer under a new comptroller of the household, Philip Jones*.26Supra, ‘John Maidstone’; TSP vi. 722; Sherwood, Ct. Of Oliver Cromwell, 46-7.

Waterhouse retained his office under Lord Protector Richard Cromwell*, and in the elections to the third protectoral Parliament he was returned for Monmouth Boroughs.27PRO31/17/33, p. 73. He received only three appointments in this Parliament – to the committee of privileges (28 Jan. 1659) and to committees set up on 5 February for supplying a godly ministry in Wales and the northern counties.28CJ vii. 595a, 600b. Again, he seems to have made no contribution to debate. The day before the army’s coup against the protectorate that April, the lord protector employed Waterhouse, his ‘confiding servant’, in a failed attempt to secure the loyalty of Francis Hacker*, who commanded the City’s horse guard.29Supra, ‘Francis Hacker’; Ludlow, Voyce, 265. Following the fall of the protectorate, Waterhouse’s wife was required to surrender her lodgings in the queen’s robe room at Hampton Court, and the council of state designated his house in Old Spring Garden, Westminster, as lodgings for John Downes* and Nicholas Love*.30CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 381; 1659-60, p. 144. In July 1659, Waterhouse received from the exchequer the £2,000 that the restored Rump had granted Richard Cromwell for his ‘present occasions’.31CJ vii. 665a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 576. The following month (Aug.), he petitioned the council, probably in connection with its insistence that he assume responsibility for suing those persons who still owed mourning charges for Protector Oliver’s funeral.32CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 146, 149. In the summer of 1660, a few months after the Restoration, Charles II directed Robert Harley* to collect money still in the hands of Waterhouse and other Cromwellian household officers.33HMC Portland, iii. 229. And in May 1662, the sons of a Scottish royalist petitioned the king, requesting permission to recover six or seven thousand pounds from Waterhouse that were supposedly due to the crown.34CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 371.

Waterhouse died early in 1663 and was buried at Stepney on 12 February of that year.35St Dunstan, Stepney par. reg. In his will, in which he described himself as of Limehouse, Stepney, he divided his estate between his wife and his two daughters, and in the events that all three died before his daughters had married or reached the age of 21, he stipulated that his estate be sold to provide legacies totalling £400 for his brother Joseph and other relations. He bequeathed his personal estate to his father-in-law Edward Keling, ‘in recompense of his love to me’ and for the ‘education and breeding’ of his two daughters.36PROB11/310, f. 329v. No other member of Waterhouse’s immediate family sat in Parliament.