STEPHENS, Nathaniel (1589-1660), of Eastington, Glos.

The Stephens family acquired the standing of gentry in Gloucestershire after the purchase by Nathaniel Stephens’s grandfather of Horsley manor, with the house at Chavenage, in 1564. Four years later he augmented his estate with the purchase of Eastington.34VCH Glos. x. 128; xi. 178. Nathaniel’s father added further to the family’s landed property, sat for Newport in Cornwall in 1593, and married a daughter of Edward St Loe†, who sat in two earlier Elizabethan Parliaments. On his majority, Nathaniel Stephens was granted livery of his estates after being ward of his uncle, Thomas Stephens†, a Middle Temple lawyer and attorney to Princes Henry and Charles.35Glos. RO, D547A/E1. He was granted the farm of the hundred of Whitstone in 1617, which entitled him to levy ‘hundred weight’ dues from its taxpayers.36Glos. RO, D149/M10. While he was later to enforce his right to impose this duty, he himself became an opponent of the Forced Loan and compulsory knighthoods during the early years of Charles I’s reign, and lost his place on the bench of magistrates in 1637.37CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 59; R. Cust, Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626-28 (Oxford, 1987), 310, 334. He was a patron of Calvinist ministers at Eastington. Richard Capel, who dedicated his translation of an anti-Arminian tract to Stephens, was succeeded as rector there by William Mew. Mew was a product of the most fiercely puritan Cambridge college, Emmanuel, and became a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines in the 1640s.38VCH Glos. x. 136; Al. Cant. ‘William Mew’. During the 1630s, Stephens was persistent in his opposition to the activities of the Merchant Adventurers’ commission on reform of the cloth industry, unsurprising in one who came from a clothing district, and whose grandfather had been himself a clothier.39CSP Dom. 1631-3, pp. 238, 312, 434, 449. He was no social radical, however, and quelled an enclosure riot at Frampton-on-Severn, a manor which he was soon to purchase, in 1631.40CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 87.

Stephens stood unsuccessfully in the Gloucestershire election for the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640. He intervened as an interloper to wreck an agreement of the county magistracy whereby Sir Robert Tracy and Sir Robert Cooke were to be returned without a contest. It is clear from the sneers of the Laudian commentator John Allibond that Stephens, who had probably not been restored to the magisterial bench, represented weaving interests, and was supported by Calvinist clergy such as John Geree of Tewkesbury.41CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 580-3. Stephens’s record of outspoken opposition to the Merchant Adventurers doubtless enhanced his credibility as a candidate. The conduct of the election, in which the sheriff adjourned the poll from Gloucester to Winchcombe, over 15 miles away, declaring ‘cry Stephens as long as you will Stephens shall not have it’, was calculated to destroy his candidacy.42Aston’s Diary, 153. Stephens’s party apparently held that lessees for lives were entitled to vote, suggesting that they sought a wider franchise. Stephens petitioned the Short Parliament about the election, but it was dissolved before any conclusive outcome was reached.43Aston’s Diary, 147, 153-6.

Stephens was more successful in the second Gloucestershire election of 1640, and was returned on his own interest as knight of the shire. He was not especially prominent in the early months of this Parliament. He was added to a committee (16 Dec.) to consider the case of ‘Mr Poole’, presumably Henry Poole*, by virtue of his local interest. His place on committees in the spring of 1641 for bills against popish recusants (26 Mar.) and disorders in parliamentary elections (31 Mar.) indicate subjects in which he had a personal interest.44CJ ii. 113b, 114a. On 4 June, he brought to the House a petition from inhabitants of the Forest of Dean who had intercepted carts containing arms, belonging to the Catholic Sir John Wintour.45Procs. LP iv. 718. 722, 723, 725, 728. The following day, he was given the first of several permissions during this Parliament to return home on health grounds. On 14 July two minor officials of the council in the marches of Wales were haled before the Speaker for serving a writ on Stephens despite their knowledge that he was an MP; two weeks later they were freed after kneeling in submission at the bar of the Commons. The case illuminated the resentment against the court in the marcher counties, as well as Stephens’s own sensitivity to personal attacks.46CJ ii. 210a, 231a. On the same day that the officials were sent for, he was named to a committee to consider the patents of the Merchant Adventurers whom he had opposed at personal cost in the 1630s.47CJ ii. 210b.

Stephens was by no means among the most active of MPs in 1641 and early 1642, despite his associations with the reforming element in the Commons. He is not mentioned in the Journal between July 1641 and later January 1642, when he was added to a committee on timber sales in the Forest of Dean. After that he was named only to one further committee, on better maintaining the preaching ministry (25 Mar.), before 13 August 1642, when the Commons, in the build-up to civil war, ordered Sir Robert Cooke and Stephens to return to their county to secure it against military attacks.48CJ ii. 403b, 496b, 719a. Stephens committed himself to providing two horses and armour for any forthcoming conflict, but was probably not in the House again until February 1643.49PJ iii. 470. He departed for the county with the rank of deputy lieutenant having been bestowed on him by Parliament. With that authority he helped organise meetings of the gentry, to persuade waverers such as John Smyth of Nibley to the virtues of the parliamentarian Militia Ordinance, and to raise money in Gloucestershire. In November he was active in moves to mobilise Bristol for Parliament, but with little success.50Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 15. By December his paramount concern, shared with Sir Robert Cooke, John Stephens* and John George*, was for the security of Cirencester, ‘frontier town towards the king’s headquarters’ against an attack by Prince Rupert.51Glos. RO, D7115: letters of 6 Dec. 1641 [recte 1642], 29 Aug. 1642, 26 Sept. 1642, 19 Oct. 1642, 9 Dec. [1642]. When that town fell to Rupert in February, the townspeople blamed Stephens as well as their MP, John George, for the ensuing plundering.52‘A particular relation of the action before Cyrencester’ (1643) in J. Washbourn, Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1825), 163-4, 172.

Stephens was among a number of individuals whose personal financial contribution towards raising the army of Sir William Waller*, sergeant-major-general in the western counties of England, was recognised by Parliament in February 1643; Stephens and his colleagues were awarded a repayment with interest of eight per cent. Stephens took to the Lords the order for his own reimbursement (2 Mar.), and was asked to impart to Waller the uncomfortable intelligence that some of his troops of horse and foot were significantly under strength.53CJ ii. 964b, 971b, 978a, 985b, 986a. Stephens himself reported these weaknesses to the House, using the threat to the much-prized city of Gloucester to galvanise the Commons into action: the royalists ‘might ere long be masters of it if no aid were sent to relieve the same’.54Add. 18777, f. 163; Harl. 164, f. 305v. Payment of the armies in general, and that of Sir William Waller in particular, was Stephens’s main concern through much of the next few years. He sat on committees to trace money voted for the army (22 Mar.), to ensure that the forces in the north could be paid regularly (22 June) and for supply to Waller’s army (8 July).55CJ iii. 12a, 140a, 159b. In August, a week or so before the start of the royalist siege of Gloucester, Stephens was one of a small group of MPs selected by the House as trustees for monies allocated to Gloucester garrison, and on the day the siege began (10 Aug.) with Sir Edward Bayntun* and John Ashe* was asked to urge the Gloucester authorities to resist their attackers. After the siege ended on 5 September, Stephens’s working stock for the garrison was increased to £4000, and he and Thomas Hodges I* were asked to prepare a letter of thanks to Edward Massie*, who had commanded the city’s defences.56Harl. 165, f. 193; CJ iii. 241b, 242a. While Thomas Pury I*, his colleague in handling Gloucester garrison monies, was in the city during the siege, Stephens was at Westminster.

Stephens’s hostility to the Merchant Adventurers lay behind his tellership in a division of 7 October 1643. An ordinance presented to the House by Giles Grene confirmed the Adventurers in their corporate privileges in return for advances towards the parliamentarian cause, but Stephens and Denis Bond opposed it, losing the division by ten votes.57CJ iii. 265b. This was one of five divisions in which Stephens was a teller, over his eight years in this Parliament. The only other one to occur in 1643 was when he sought to prolong the scrutiny by the Commons of a goldsmith whose property it was decided had been wrongfully sequestered. Taking a hawkish line, he lost the division by five votes (9 Sept.).58CJ iii. 235a. With the arrival in the House in December 1643 of his cousin, Edward Stephens, it becomes difficult to distinguish which ‘Mr Stephens’ was meant by the clerk when writing the Journal. (Sir Simonds D’Ewes* distinguished between them by noting that Nathaniel was the elder and taller.)59Harl. 166, f. 126. The Stephens active in building the liturgy and moral tone of the new Presbyterian church in January 1645 was probably Edward, who was consistently interested in this topic. Nevertheless, Nathaniel Stephens certainly held Presbyterian inclinations, and introduced the rector of Eastington, William Mew, a member of the Westminster Assembly, to preach to the Commons.60W. Mew, The Robbing and Spoiling of Jacob and Israel (1643) (E.79.10).

The siege of Gloucester marked Stephens’s emergence as one of the treasurers of the garrison. Supplies of muskets from the Tower of London were procured by him for Gloucester in October, and with Pury and Hodges he was to receive the special duty on currants that helped sustain the garrison with essential supplies, including clothing, from January 1644. The estates of royalist delinquents were also squeezed for contributions to the garrison fund.61CJ iii. 295a, 309a, 369b, 401b, 417a, 432b, 492a. Again, Parliament was left indebted to Stephens for his personal contribution, and he himself was named to the committee on an ordinance for his reimbursement (23 Mar. 1644).62CJ iii. 435a. His family’s commitment to Gloucester went beyond the merely financial. Stephens’s eldest son, Henry, was granted a commission as colonel of the parliamentarian Gloucester city regiment in April 1643. In June of that year, Nathaniel’s servant was granted a pass to visit Henry in a royalist prison in Oxford, where he later died. Stephens maintained a close personal connection with Gloucester after his son’s death, and received the city’s traditional courtesy gift of lamprey pies until the late 1640s at least.63Glos. RO, GBR/B3/2, p.254; GBR/F4/5, f. 365; J. Dorney, A Brief and Exact Relation (1643), 15 (E.67.31).

When the authority for the Committee of Both Kingdoms* was renewed in May 1644, an ordinance which bestowed on the Committee very wide-ranging powers of independent action, but which had been laid aside in February, was revived. For D’Ewes it was a ‘monstrous ordinance’; Denzil Holles and John Maynard were among others who agreed. But Stephens likened these speakers to the Israelites’ messengers into Canaan, who allowed potential obstacles in the promised land to outweigh in their minds its future blessings, and revealed himself to be on the side of those who saw the potential of the Scots alliance.64Harl. 166, f. 64v. He could see its value in achieving military security in his home region. It may have been that paramount concern that predisposed him to more patience with the difficult governor of Gloucester, Edward Massie, than that shown by his colleague, Thomas Pury I. In April 1645, Stephens was asked to compose a conciliatory letter to Massie, who had quarrelled with Pury and others, to encourage him to remain at his post. The controversial Massie divided the Stephens family. On 16 May 1645, Nathaniel brought in a petition from Gloucester inhabitants requesting that the governor stay in the city. On the same day, his cousin, Edward, brought in a petition requesting Massie’s removal. Both petitions were dismissed.65Harl. 166, f. 210.

When Massie left Gloucester to help reduce the south west to Parliament’s authority, Stephens and Hodges were required to join the committee in the city that maintained military government during the very short interregnum before Thomas Morgan was appointed governor.66CJ iv. 159b, 162b; LJ vii. 478a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 548, 564. Given his personal sacrifices for Parliament, Stephens was a deserving case for the £4 per week allowance made by the Commons for its most necessitous Members; he had sat on the committee which drafted the necessary ordinance.67CJ iii. 729a, iv. 161a. Stephens was active in harnessing the excise as another source of funds for Gloucester. Stephens, Hodges and Pury advanced sums to the garrison on the credit of the excise and secured an ordinance to recover their losses from that source (26 Apr. 1645).68CJ iv. 99a, 106b, 108b, 124a. His dealings with the excise qualified him for membership of committees on better regulating the tax, and on securing an advance for Parliament’s siege of Oxford (30 May). On Stephens’s initiative, discoveries of plate still in the hands of royalists were to be examined before the Committee for Advance of Money before half the proceeds were allocated to Gloucester.69CJ iv. 150b, 157a, 158b. Stephens’s speech in favour of the Committee of Both Kingdoms ordinance probably suggested him as one of the commissioners to reside with the Scots army in England (12 Aug.) but he was granted a dispensation allowing him to continue to devote most of his time to the needs of Gloucester garrison.70CJ iv. 234a, 237b, 239a; LJ vii. 533a.

Stephens was granted two periods of absence from the Commons in 1646, suggesting that his health continued to cause him concern: on one occasion he visited Bath for a cure.71CJ iv. 521b, 648a. Ill-health probably explains why he was named to 11 committees that year, a relatively modest number for one formerly so active. He continued to work on behalf of Gloucester (4 May, 29 June), but his interests widened to include the introduction of martial law, the sale of papists’ and delinquents’ estates and the raising of money for Ireland: all related to the interests of the armies.72CJ iv. 394b, 534a, 591a, 613a, 641b. His son-in-law, John Fitzjames*, sought information from him on the future of Massie’s brigade, in which he served. In the autumn of 1646, Fitzjames also engaged Stephens to promote his interest in recruiter elections: first in a Cornish seat, then at Shaftesbury.73Alnwick, Northumberland 547, ff. 35v, 40v, 44, 50v-52, 54v, 58v, 64v, 66, 75. It is clear that Stephens and Fitzjames were not seen by proponents of the New Model army as friends of theirs. Fitzjames’s letters to his father-in-law were intercepted by the Independents; Stephens received them only ‘when Mr [John] Rushworth* or those to whom he delivered them had made as much use of them as they thought fit’.74Alnwick, Northumberland 547, f. 64v. It is also apparent that Stephens’s influence was not as powerful as Fitzjames would have wished: ‘Pray sir, do what you can, you promised me so much’ was Fitzjames’s plaintive entreaty when his campaign to secure a seat was winding up unsuccessfully.75Alnwick, Northumberland 547, f. 75.

Despite being thus singled out by the Independents as out of sympathy with their cause, Stephens continued to serve during 1647 on committees concerned with the broad topic of army finance. In May he was named to a committee for raising £200,000 on securities of impositions and sales of estates, and insisted on a heavy fine on Francis Newport* (20 May). With Pury and Giles Grene he was given oversight of implementing the ordinance for raising £50,000 for Ireland.76CJ v. 168b, 179a, 287a, 347b, 354b. It was probably his cousin Edward who worked with Holles on London security during the period of the ‘forcing of the Houses’ in early August.77CJ v. 263a. Nathaniel may have been the ‘Mr Stephens’ who was included on one of the lists of those Members who took refuge with the army following the Presbyterian coup at Westminster of late July.78HMC Egmont, i. 440. After the New Model army secured its grip on the capital, Nathaniel was named to the committee to investigate his cousin’s conduct.79CJ v. 367a. He may not have been a darling of the Independents, but at this point he was evidently committed to a properly-funded and effective parliamentary army, and it was probably his commitment to Gloucester garrison that bound him to Thomas Pury I and to a wider range of men associated with the New Model. His son-in-law thought he had some influence via Michael Oldisworth* with the 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*), for example.80CJ v. 462b; Alnwick, Northumberland 547, f. 54v.

In 1648, Stephens sat on 23 committees on range of subjects. Religious settlement in Gloucestershire occupied some of his time, as a trustee in a seizure of three rectories of the delinquent Sir Henry Frederick Thynne towards a preaching ministry (14 Jan.); and in an ordinance towards a reorganisation of the ministry in Gloucester (24 Mar.) which he took to the Lords.81CJ v. 431b, 512b. More widely, he was named to an ordinance for restituting the defiant Protestant scheme of the 1630s, the feoffees for impropriations. Stephens served with his cousin Edward on an ordinance for the better payment of tithes, confirming his outlook on church finance as essentially conservative, and on a committee for stricter sabbatarian observance.82CJ v. 519a, 522a. Other topics claiming his attention included equal rating in tax assessments, indemnity for tenants and the powers of the admiralty court.83CJ v. 434a, 447b, 505b.

On military affairs, Stephens was among those who wanted a strong militia to counter the unrest sweeping through the localities in the spring of 1648. He was named to a committee for punishing defaulters on a muster of the militia in Kent, one of the most disordered counties (20 Apr.), and on the reform of the militia nationally (4 May).84CJ v. 538a, 551a. During the second civil war, he was a key figure in reorganisation of the militia in the Welsh marches to incorporate Breconshire and Radnorshire, two weak counties, and on 11 May took the ordinance to the Lords. The same day he was first named in the list of those charged with rewarding the New Model brigade of Thomas Horton, heroes of the battle of St Fagans near Cardiff.85CJ v. 555b, 556b, 557a. When Kent was brought under Parliament’s control, Stephens was named to the committee to organise a public thanksgiving, but in July was given permission to retire again to the country, and there is no further mention of him in the Journal until 9 October. His son-in-law congratulated him on some improvement in his health in August.86CJ v. 581a, 597a, 647b; Alnwick, Northumberland 548, f. 19.

Some confusion surrounds Stephens’s position in the events leading to Pride’s Purge of Parliament on 6 December 1648. It was reported in a newspaper hostile to the Independents that Stephens spoke on 28 September critically of the king’s response to the Treaty of Newport, but that he was easily silenced. Stephens apparently criticised the House’s willingness to accede to the king’s desire that nothing in the treaty should be binding unless the whole was agreed, and tried to reverse a resolution, but was shouted down.87Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 27 (26 Sept.-3 Oct. 1648), sig. Nn2(v) (E.465.19); OPH xvii. 478. The Independents then pushed forward a stronger critical voice, John Lisle. If it was Nathaniel and not William Stephens (the latter being only one of that name to survive the purge), it shows how deeply his sympathies with the military lay, even at this late stage. To support this suggestion that Stephens was critical of the treaty is the evidence that he sat on committees justifying Parliament’s actions during the civil wars (17 Nov.) and on 20 November took to the Lords the Commons resolution that the king’s refusal to repudiate the actions in Ireland of his lord lieutenant, James Butler, marquess of Ormond was unsatisfactory. The revival of hostilities by Ormond on the king’s behalf was to be a significant theme in the Rump’s charge against Charles at his trial.88CJ vi. 79a, 81a. That Stephens was named to the committee charged with presenting the Covenant to the king for his acceptance (27 Oct.) should not be taken as evidence of his unqualified support for the treaty, as his colleagues included the Independent, John Wylde. Perhaps more suggestive of a shift by Stephens against the army was his participation in a committee for disbanding the supernumerary forces (22 Nov.).89CJ vi. 83b.

Stephens’s last appointment to a committee came on 25 November. A modern historian considers Nathaniel, the most senior of his name in the House, to have been the Mr Stephens who was a teller against the motion that the question be put, after the all-night sitting of 4-5 November.90Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 160. If correct, this would make Nathaniel active in working for some alternative to the army purge of Parliament up until the last minute. It could certainly not have been Edward Stephens, who was among the most vocal opponents of the army, and who was arrested on 6 December. Unfortunately, that still leaves John Stephens, Edward’s brother, and William Stephens, recruiter MP for Newport, Isle of Wight, as possibilities, but John Stephens broadly followed his brother’s line, and the absence of a forename in the clerk’s recording of him probably betokens the senior man of that name, Nathaniel. During the purge of Parliament by the army, which began on 6 December, Stephens remained untouched. On 12 December, he reported to the House the imprisonment of their colleagues, and urged the remaining Members to assert their privileges.91The Second Part of the Narrative (1648), 4 (E.477.19).

Stephens is reported to have commented on rumours of a trial of the king in a speech in the Commons:

Some speak of a strange cure; they would cut off the head to save the body, but as that is impossible in the natural body so it is unlikely in the politic body.92Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xxii. 132.

There is no evidence that Stephens ever resumed his seat in Parliament after December 1648. He continued to be named to assessment commissions and retained his place as a magistrate in Gloucestershire through most of the 1650s, though his temporary removal in July 1653 strongly suggests that he was completely out of sympathy with the Nominated Assembly.93A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 100; C231/6, p. 264. He attended to his depleted estate, attempting to recover his right to collect ‘hundred weight money’ from residents of Whitestone hundred.94Glos. RO, D149/M10, M11. He did not retire to seclusion in the country, however. He maintained a house in London, and in November 1649 was active on John Fitzjames’s behalf at the Rump’s committee of accounts. Fitzjames recommended his father-in-law’s services as an advocate to his friend Edward Cooke*, who was drifting slowly towards support for the future Charles II. Fitzjames reported to Stephens in November 1649 how the only way to get business done was to take the Engagement and become a justice of the peace: this was not an observation to make to an enthusiastic commonwealthsman, but it probably described Stephens’s own attitude.95Alnwick, Northumberland 548, f. 80v; 549, ff. 1, 4. He accepted the protectorate with sufficient enthusiasm to be named as an ejector in the Cromwellian church settlement, but during elections for the second protectorate Parliament was a supporter of George Berkeley* in the interests of county harmony.96Alnwick, Northumberland 551, ff. 92v, 93.

Stephens made his will in December 1658 in London, noting that ‘it is the great statute of heaven that all that are born must die’.97PROB11/304/403. He was able to go to Westminster on 27 December 1659, in a vain attempt with other secluded Members to gain admission. He and 21 other Members were kept out by the army, however.98A Brief Narrative (1660), 3, 4 (E.1011.4). He died on 22 May 1660, and was buried at Eastington. A legend that after having been collected from Chavenage by Henry Ireton* and Oliver Cromwell* to support the regicide against his wishes, he was dangerously ill until his death is of nineteenth-century origin, and has no substance.99Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xxii. 131-2; Williams, Parlty. Hist. Glos. 53; R.W. Huntley, Chavenage. A Tale on the Cotswolds, 1648 (1845). After his death, Stephens’s daughter Abigail became the second wife of Edward Harley* of Brampton Bryan. Nathaniel Stephens’s grandson was Robert Harley†, 1st earl of Oxford. One of his grand-daughters married Sir George Strode†, Member for Lyme Regis in 1679.