PORTER, Henry I (1614-66), of Lancaster, Lancs.

The pedigree that Porter submitted during the 1664-5 visitation of Lancashire traced his descent back only as far as his grandfather, who served as vicar of Lancaster from 1582 until his death in 1609 and was apparently a man of trenchantly Protestant piety.20Vis. Lancs. ed. Raines, 234; VCH, viii. 29, 30; Lancaster ed. Brierley, 183; Richardson, Puritanism, 66. Porter’s father died when he was barely a year old, leaving him a modest inheritance of just four burgage-tenements in Lancaster and a few messuages and lands in the surrounding parish.21Lancs. IPM ed. Rylands, 3. Despite his relatively obscure background, Porter married into one of Lancashire’s most ancient and godly families, the Ashursts of Ashurst.

Like his brother-in-law William Ashhurst* – whom he sometimes assisted in legal and property matters – Porter sided with Parliament in the civil war and was accounted ‘a fierce, rigid man’ against the king.22Lancs. RO, DDM/19/37; RCHY/2/2/24; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 362. He and his troop of horse were certainly fierce against the people living in and around Lancaster, whom they regularly divested of their money and goods.23SP28/161, pt. 1. His loyalty to Parliament was rewarded with appointment as deputy governor of Lancaster Castle under William West*.24Gratton, Lancs. 41; Chandler, Liverpool, 350. In May 1648, however, during the second civil war, he was among a group of diehard Presbyterian officers in Lancashire who declared, in effect, their refusal to join the forces being raised by the county’s MPs Raphe Assheton II and Alexander Rigby I to resist the invading Scots. The officers professed their abhorrence not only of royalists but also of sectaries – and, by implication, of the New Model army – and their adherence ‘to the Solemn League and Covenant of the three kingdoms in every branch of it, and ... that we love, desire, and should much rejoice in the regal and regular government of his Majesty that now is’.25Lancs. Civil War Tracts, 248-51; J.R. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics in Lancs. and Cheshire during the Reign of Charles I, 1625-49 (Sheffield Univ. PhD thesis, 2014), 272-3.

As a farmer of sequestered property in Lancashire from the mid-1640s until at least the early 1650s, Porter probably did rather well out of the war – he was described in 1660 as ‘a great persecutor and plunderer of the royalists’ – and may well have augmented his own estate as a result.26SP19/118, ff. 281, 282; Blackwood, Lancs. 95; Gratton, Lancs. 41, 62, 173; Lancs. Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. J.H. Stanning (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xxxvi), 189, 190; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 381, 464. A correspondent of Colonel John Moore*, writing in February 1649, claimed that that ‘proud coxcomb Porter’ had acted in concert with Thomas Fell* and another confederate to defraud him of his family property, and that they had probably made £700 over the least two years as farmers of sequestered estates – ‘thus go your public monies away to such prowling knaves’.27SP19/118, ff. 281r, 281v, 282; CCAM 891. Porter seems to have played no part in local government under the Rump and was allegedly distrusted by the governor of Lancaster Castle during the late 1640s, Captain Thomas Rippon.28SP19/118, f. 282. However, by April 1654, Porter he had attained the rank of major – presumably in Lancashire’s militia forces.29Lancaster ed. Brierley, 344.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Porter was returned for Lancaster, where he obviously enjoyed considerable influence not only as a property-owner (by 1664, he owned by far the largest private residence in the town), but also as a senior office-holder in the corporation.30E179/250/11; CCC 3098; Lancaster ed. Brierley, 344; M.A. Mullett, ‘Conflict, politics and elections in Lancaster, 1660-88’, NH xix. 64, 65. He received only two appointments in this Parliament – to the committee of privileges (to which he was added in relation to the parliamentary elections in Ireland) and to a committee for considering the powers and composition of the commissions for trying and ejecting scandalous ministers.31CJ vii. 370a, 373b.

Returned for Lancaster again in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Porter received eight committee appointments – all of them falling between early October 1656 and mid-February 1657.32CJ vii. 435a, 443b, 446a, 447a, 448a, 472b, 490b. The most important of these committees was that set up on 31 October to consider ‘the great misdemeanours and blasphemies’ of the Quaker evangelist James Naylor. It was also charged with the task of preparing a bill to supply defects in the laws against blasphemy.33CJ vii. 448a. Porter contributed to debate in the House’s standing committee for Catholic recusants; and on 30 December, he tried to secure the reading of a bill for satisfying claimants in a 1652 Act for the sale of forfeited estates, but was foiled when Luke Robinson succeeded in diverting the House from ‘private’ to ‘public business’.34Burton’s Diary, i. 148, 269; CJ vii. 477a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 414.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Porter surrendered his place at Lancaster to his eldest son Henry Porter II. Either Porter or his son made at least a show of welcoming the Restoration, for one of them signed a loyal address to Charles II from the Lancashire and Cheshire gentry in London in the spring of 1660.35SP29/1/35, f. 68. As mayor of Lancaster for 1659-60, Porter was probably one of the moving spirits behind the corporation’s surrender to the crown of fee farm rents that it had purchased ‘from the late powers’.36CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 49. He also tried to curry favour with the new regime by using his recent promotion to the Lancashire bench to prosecute the Quaker leader George Fox. But this strategy seems to have backfired, for if Fox can be credited, Porter had to go to court to defend his conduct, ‘and when he came before the king, he having been a zealous man for the Parliament, several [courtiers] spoke to him concerning the plundering of their houses, so that he soon returned again into the country’.37Jnl. of George Fox, i. 358, 359, 361, 362-3, 368, 371, 375-80, 381. His parliamentarian past notwithstanding, Porter was not ejected by the corporation commissioners, and in 1664 his name headed the list of aldermen in Lancaster’s new royal charter.38Lancaster Charters ed. Brownbill, Nuttall, 18; Mullett, ‘Elections in Lancaster’, 64, 65.

Porter died in the autumn of 1666 and was buried at St Mary, Lancaster on 14 November.39Lancaster ed. Brierley, 278. No will is recorded. The Lancashire royalist William Blundell claimed that ‘Major Porter is supposed to have died of grief, having lost his children in the great plague of London and being bound for much of their debts’. Similarly, Fox alleged that after Porter’s death his widow was imprisoned in Lancaster Castle for debt.40Jnl. of George Fox, i. 384, 463. Besides his son, no other member of Porter’s immediate family sat in Parliament.