SANDYS, William (1606-69), of Fladbury, Worcs. and Axe Yard, King St., Westminster

Within Worcestershire, the Ombersley branch of the Sandys family was more prominent and territorially powerful, but those of that name at Fladbury had an equally distinguished history in the affairs of Parliament and the church. William Sandys’s grandfather, Miles Sandys, sat for eight separate seats in Parliaments between 1563 and 1597, though none of them lay anywhere near Worcestershire. The family seat at Fladbury, a demesne of the bishops of Worcester, was acquired in July 1569 during the time of Miles’s brother, Edwin, bishop of Worcester from 1559 to 1576.13Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/4/23399 f. 142. Before this link with Worcestershire, the family hailed from Hawkshead, Lancashire. Sir William Sandys, the father of this Member, was in the Worcestershire commission of the peace in the 1620s and 1630s, and had a place in commissions of oyer and terminer for Wales and the marches by virtue of the jurisdiction of the council for the marches over four English counties.14Harl. 1622, f. 82v; C181/4, ff. 162, 185v; C181/5, pp. 147, 188, 210-12, 250-1, 320-22, 344-5, 380-1. He also held the office of gentleman of the privy chamber in the household of the king.15LC3/1. William Sandys was the second cousin twice removed of Samuel Sandys* of Ombersley, and by the mid-seventeenth century the branches of the family had gone their separate ways.

William’s name was inserted in the leases of Fladbury from the bishops of Worcester from July 1608, and in 1633 his was the first of three lives on the estate which comprised 284 acres, rents, mills and fishing rights.16Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/4/23399 f. 142; BA 2636/139/47680. The lease included the bailiwick of the manor, to which Sandys added the bailiwick of the hundred, but none of this added up to much of a patrimony. His manor of Askham, Nottinghamshire, was also held of the church, this time of the archbishop of York, another legacy of his great-uncle Edwin’s influence.17PA, Main Pprs. 15 June 1641. The lack of a freehold estate was a powerful motive for Sandys’s business energies, and the political climate of the 1630s favoured ‘projectors’, seeking to improve their fortunes.

William Sandys was an entrepreneur, and from 1636 began work on a scheme to improve the waterways of the west midlands. At his own cost, he proposed to make navigable the Warwickshire Avon from Warwick to the Severn at Tewkesbury, and the privy council looked favourably on the scheme. The council did nothing to deter him from proposing that he himself should underpin the scheme financially, but also appointed commissioners to identify landowners and others on the river who might pay fines or, in theory, be recompensed for works undertaken.18CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 280. Within three years, Sandys made it possible for boats of 40 to 50 tons to pass from Tewkesbury to Stratford-upon-Avon, involving excavations of new sections of channel, with sluices at a number of towns and villages along the route.19Nash, Collections, i. 446. Among the towns to benefit from this was Evesham, which gained improved access to the important Severn carrying trade, and it was doubtless to recognise his contribution to this that the corporation gave Sandys an accelerated civic promotion, including a place as justice of the peace, on 26 September 1638.20Evesham Borough Records, 38.

Sandys had at the outset of the Avon scheme made it clear that this was to be the first of a number of similar works, with the Teme from Worcester towards Ludlow the next target.21CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 280. The threat of the Avon and Teme opened up to competitor towns was too much for the members of Worcester corporation, who regarded Sandys’s activities as a challenge to their commercial interests. Even before Sandys had received privy council backing, the city corporation, with John Nashe* prominent in the committee dealing with the matter, was attempting to discourage support for him. In December 1636 the Worcester chamber decided to petition the king against Sandys.22Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 299, 312. At the same time Sandys fell foul of Sir William Russell, sheriff of Worcestershire, who sought compensation for damages caused by his navigation works. This dispute spilled over into violence against Sandys’s servants, when Russell’s man dropped a heavy stone on to their boat from Eckington bridge. At a meeting called at the Talbot in Worcester, Russell chose to interpret Sandys’s plans as an attack on his liberties: ‘You may see what a fine business he hath in hand; he goeth about to entitle the king to men’s inheritances and when a man defends his inheritance calleth it incivility’. Russell refused to accept the commission appointing him and other county gentry to oversee Sandys’s operations, declaring that ‘he would not betray his country’. It was doubtless to prevent this kind of language spreading that by January 1637 the king himself was intending to be present at a privy council meeting called to settle their differences.23CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 522-3; 1636-37, 203, 351, 357, 372, 377, 384, 408; Add. 15857 f. 211.

Charles was impressed by Sandys’s enthusiasm for opening up waterways to trade, which could liberate even very small towns, such as Alcester in Warwickshire.24CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 382. Correspondence and conflict over the navigation proposals put Sandys in the limelight as an energetic projector, and in 1639 he and John Child were granted a patent to farm the duty of 1s per chaldron on coal which from 1599 had been levied by the hostmen of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The grant to Sandys and Child was made as part of a deal between the crown and the Newcastle hostmen, a society of coal producers, whereby the hostmen would pay a shilling per chaldron in return for the privilege of a monopoly of production on the Tyne. In the face of opposition from coal shipping interests in London, however, the king was forced, in February 1639, to cancel the monopoly and withdraw the grant to Sandys.25Extracts from the Records of the Company of Hostmen ed. F.W. Dendy (Surtees Soc. cv), 77-8; PC Regs. iii. 234-5; E122/215/14; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 507. In April, Sandys was facing opposition at Askham from tenants and from the farmer on behalf of the dean and chapter of York, who held the rectory, to his plans to improve the manor by enclosing it. A hearing before the Lords did little to clear up the matter, and Sandys again petitioned them in June 1641.26CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 57-8; PA, Main Pprs. (Parchment), 15 June 1641. A sign of the king’s continued favour, however, was the bestowal on Sandys of the office of deputy lieutenant, some time between 1637 and 1642.

A friend of Sandys from the Middle Temple was Bulstrode Whitelocke*, who invested £1,100 in Sandys’s navigation schemes. Whitelocke never saw the money again, as Sandys’s project ran into difficulties. Eventually Sandys sent Whitelocke eight deer in recompense, which as Whitelocke ruefully remarked, ‘proved dear cattle to him’.27Whitelocke, Diary, 119. Despite the gloomy business outlook and opposition from his tenants in Nottinghamshire and, more importantly from his fellow deputy-lieutenant, the powerful Sir William Russell, in Worcestershire, Sandys at least retained the gratitude of Evesham. Sandys had never attended any sessions of the common council there, and in 1640 leased his interest in Fladbury to his brother-in-law, Henry Sandys, probably because he had failed to make any money from his navigation schemes and was in the unenviable position of owing money to the king.28VCH Worcs. iii. 354; Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/139/47680; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 173-4. He also stood surety for the debts of the 21st or 14th earl of Arundel (Thomas Howard), when he himself had few resources.29CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 476. Evesham returned him as burgess for both the Short and Long Parliaments, and in his financial circumstances he evidently intended a London base throughout his tenure of the seat, which provided him with immunity from creditors.

Evidence for the circumstances of his selection is sparse, but it seems likely that for the April 1640 Parliament there was no contest. He made no discernible mark on this assembly. The elections for the Long Parliament were contentious. John Coventry*, son of the recently-deceased Lord Keeper Coventry (Thomas Coventry†), had harboured parliamentary aspirations in his adopted county of Somerset, and was well placed to persuade the corporation of Evesham to support his candidature: on 4 September the chamber had elected the 2nd Baron Coventry (Thomas Coventry†), his brother, as high steward.30Evesham Borough Records, 41. John Coventry, Serjeant Richard Cresheld and Sandys were returned, the former two on the Coventry interest, on the votes of the mayor and aldermen.31C219/43 iii/82. Sandys must have been returned on the wider franchise of the townsmen.

Sandys might have been expecting trouble from Coventry, whose connections at Westminster would have been far more extensive than those of Sandys, and who would have found it easier to query Sandys’s election in the House, rather than take the matter up with Evesham common council. On 6 November Sandys got himself elected to the committee of privileges, which might be expected to have stood him in good stead in any challenge. The following day, however, the matter of the Evesham election was referred to the committee.32CJ ii. 21a, 22b. No report was brought back to the House from this committee, and it proved to be Sandys’s brief involvement with the duties on sea-coal which gave Coventry, the driving force against him, the opportunity he needed to mobilize opinion. On 10 November Coventry succeeded in getting his case on the agenda of the committee of privileges. The Speaker announced to the House the same day that Sandys had voluntarily confessed himself to be a projector, citing the coal patent, but Sandys told Geoffrey Palmer* that Coventry, his competitor, had been the real informer.33CJ ii. 26a; Procs. LP i. 82, 84, 87. On 21 January 1641, Sandys was expelled from the Commons as a monopolist, and a new writ was issued for an election at Evesham, in which Coventry was confirmed as burgess.34CJ ii. 71a; Procs. LP ii. 236-7. A week before his expulsion (15 Jan.), he offered to supply grain at reasonable prices to Bristol corporation and was granted a storehouse in the city for one year.35Bristol RO, 04264/3 f. 110.

Sandys did not return to Worcestershire, or at least played no further part in either the government of the county or of Evesham: he was not named to the royalist commission of array, nor in the early stage of the civil war did he take arms. The early date of his expulsion from the Commons meant that he was not among those royalist MPs who seceded to the parliament summoned to Oxford. He was soon, however, remembered by the king’s courtiers as an energetic businessman, and of course the son of a former gentleman of the privy chamber, with something to offer. By December 1643 he was in Dunkirk, corresponding with Henry Jermyn*, the favourite of the queen, about a secret mission on the king’s behalf. His work was arms procurement: he made contacts with Sir John Shaw, an Antwerp merchant, about the shipping of 8,000 guns and complementary ammunition. By January 1644 Sandys was confident he could supply arms worth £30,000 from the Dutch, and probably had in mind Bristol, in royalist hands, as the port of entry. The condition he placed on this promise was that the English royalists should ensure that goods were available at the port for shipping back to the Dutch: no-one would carry arms and sail back with empty holds.36Royalist Ordnance Pprs. i. 373, 381-2; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 510. He corresponded with a sea-captain who could be relied upon by the queen to ship arms, and with Lord Percy (Henry Percy*), the king’s general of artillery.37Ordnance Pprs. i. 386. In March, writing from Mardyck, he was optimistic about his chances of landing a large quantity of match at Weymouth.38Harl. 4713, ff. 182-3. He was probably the ‘William Sandys of Rotterdam’ accused in the House of Commons on 8 March 1644 of high treason for ‘levying war against the king and Parliament’. Serjeant John Wylde*, knight of the shire for Worcestershire, was one of the committee charged with drawing up an impeachment against him.39CJ iii. 421b. In May, Sandys was back at Dunkirk, still optimistic of success in getting arms to the royalist governor of Scarborough, and in touch with Van Tromp, admiral of the States General, about a ship he intended to use for gun-running.40CSP Dom. 1644, p. 159-60.

There are difficulties in disentangling the various members of the Sandys family in the mid-1640s, but it seems likely that by the summer of 1644 William Sandys had been recalled from the continent of Europe to command the newly-garrisoned Hartlebury castle in Worcestershire, with a complement of 40 horse and 120 foot.41Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 158. Sandys’s enemy, Sir William Russell, had controlled the royalist war effort there during 1643, but had quarrelled with his gentry colleagues, including Samuel Sandys* of Ombersley, and had been forced to relinquish his position.42Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 131-4. It may have been this change of leadership, in which the high command passed to Prince Rupert, which had provided the courtier William Sandys with an entree back into local service for the king. Quite what the commission given Sandys entailed is hard to fathom, beyond his holding the rank of captain. It is likely that his captaincy was in the regiment commanded by Col. Samuel Sandys, his kinsman: Henry Townshend, the principal contemporary commentator on the civil war in Worcestershire, noted that Col. Sandys and other members of the Sandys family, together with Lord Windsor (Thomas Windsor alias Hickman), were in the garrison with William Sandys in May 1646.43Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 208-9. As governor of Hartlebury, William Sandys seems not to have ventured from the castle, or been involved in local skirmishes. He exacted fiscal and material support from the neighbouring parishes, however, in a way which did nothing to endear him to Henry Townshend, whose own parish of Elmley Lovett was in Sandys’s catchment area: according to Townshend, Sandys ‘sharked’ the neighbourhood. When Sandys surrendered the garrison to Edward Whalley* on 14 May 1646, he was considered by Townshend to have done so with cowardice and indecent haste, without a shot having been fired, but Townshend’s views on the burden of fiscal exactions coloured his perceptions of the entire war as it was fought in the county.44Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 209, 224, 264.

Sandys appears not to have stayed in the county for the final denouement at Worcester in July, when the city surrendered to Parliament. He seems instead to have slipped away, and by early 1647 was once again preparing to serve the king’s cause abroad, this time as an ambassador in Brussels: he was in place by mid-March.45CCSP i. 362, 367. There was little enough estate at home to detain him. Fladbury rents had been collected first by the receiver for all the bishop’s estates, and by September 1648 had been sold by Parliament. He faced sequestration on his Nottinghamshire manor.46Nash, Collections, i. 447; CCC 168, 532, 1512; Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/40 f. 146v. Thus unencumbered, from this point until at least the mid-1650s, Sandys was a remarkably mobile member of the exiled court. In August 1649 he was given a roving commission to procure funds for Charles Stuart, and undertook an exhausting itinerary across Europe in pursuit of resources. After a meeting with Charles at Stirling, at which he gave his king an account of affairs in Poland, he went from thence to Brussels, then to towns in Brabant and Flanders, on to Holland and to Frankfurt to meet merchants who might have supplied money. After this he journeyed to Liege and Antwerp, through Flanders and Zeeland to Hamburg, Danzig and Riga, all by land. From there he went to Muscovy, between May and July 1650, to meet Lord Colepeper (John Culpeper*), on his mission to borrow money from the czar, visiting, as Sandys himself put it, ‘all places probable to serve his majesty’.47Add. 38847, ff. 48-52; Clarendon, Hist. v. 233.

This was only the start of a further round of travels which included calls at Hamburg, Bergen, the Orkneys, Hamburg and Paris. After December 1651, Charles sent him to Denmark to seek arms for a rallying of the royalist cause after the rout at Worcester, and on the way back to give him an account of how he had fared, Sandys was ‘robbed of money and clothes to the value of 80 guilders’.48Add. 38847, ff. 48-52. By this time a somewhat querulous tone is detectable in Sandys’s reporting back: he had been given little financial support for his travels. In October 1652, Edward Hyde* noted how Sandys was currently without a commission from the king, although he had come to France as soon as he knew Charles was there.49Bodl. Clarendon 43, f. 329v. It may have been exasperation with his employers which led Sandys, in March 1653, apparently to sell to the English republican government an arms consignment he had located initially in the interests of Charles Stuart. Sandys remained in Paris, attached to the ‘Louvre’ group, initially focussed on the queen dowager: from his early contacts with Jermyn back in 1643 to his association with Percy, Colepeper and Robert Long in the 1650s, Sandys had shown himself to be sympathetic to those hopeful of a Scots Presbyterian alliance with the French. Most Worcestershire royalists were more like ‘old royalist’ Sir John Pakington*, distrustful of Presbyterians. These loyalties, as well as Sandys’s apparent treachery over the arms supplies, helps explain the evident suspicion of Edward Hyde toward him.50CCSP ii. 18, 154, 181, 203-4, 212-13, 235, 341; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 10-11.

Sandys’s exotic career after his expulsion from the Commons in 1641 departed from what became the norm for the Worcestershire royalists. After 1660, his lack of credibility with Hyde, now earl of Clarendon, and his absence from the county during the years of plots and rumours of them did little for his local standing. While men like Pakington had come into their own in a powerful alliance with Lord Windsor, Sandys’s best suit was with the corporation of Evesham, where there was unfinished business over eligibility for a voice in parliamentary elections. When the bishops’ lands were restored, Sandys recovered his lease of Fladbury.51Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/40/43815, f. 146v; BA 2636/139/47680. This was with the blessing of the king, who expressed himself pleased with Sandys’s evident intention to revive his scheme of making the Avon navigable, ‘a work of so public a concernment and benefit’.52Add. 5759, f. 34. Evesham corporation, having ejected him from his civic positions during his absence abroad, was happy to welcome him back, first as alderman in the place of Theophilus Andrewes* (recorder from 1659 to 1660), then as MP for the town, as part of a general return to the status quo ante.53Evesham Borough Records, 57, 61.

Returned once again for the borough in the Cavalier Parliament, this time his place went unchallenged, and Sandys became one of the most active committeemen in the House. He sat on committees dealing with bills on navigation, drainage and land reclamation projects, but was by no means simply a single issue politician. It is striking, however, that he never achieved office at court. Sandys probably welcomed the fall of Clarendon in 1667: he certainly investigated his misdeeds in parliamentary committee.54HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Sandys’. Sandys was last named to a committee on 24 November 1669, and is thought to have died around a month later. He was certainly dead by 15 February 1670.55CJ ix. 112a; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Sandys’; Evesham Borough Records, 78. None of his descendants sat in Parliament.