STEPHENS, Edward (1596-1665), of Little Sodbury, Glos.

The Stephens family could trace back its armigerous ancestry only three generations before Edward Stephens, although they were by 1600 prolific in the Stroud area of Gloucestershire. Edward’s father was attorney-general to both Princes Henry and Charles when they were princes of Wales, and his legal career paid for Lypiatt, which he bought in 1610 for £5,000.19Vis. Glos. 1682-3, 176; Glos. RO, D745/M1, ff. 54, 152v, 154. Before this, the family lived in Hertfordshire and the City of London, and Edward Stephens was born in the parish of St Michael, Cornhill, in April 1596.20Glos. RO, D745/M1, f. 34. He followed in his father’s footsteps in the law, and although he seems to have been admitted to Oxford University, cannot be connected with any college. Although he held chambers at the Middle Temple, and played a limited part in the life of the inn, he was never called to the bar.21MTR ii. 559, 602, 617, 650, 664, 673, 738, 848. In November 1624, Stephens conveyed the whole of the Over Lypiatt estate to his younger brother, John, and settled at Little Sodbury. From the early 1630s, he began to play a part in Gloucestershire county government, as a commissioner of oyer and terminer, a militia captain and justice of the peace. It is assumed that he was the ‘Mr Stephens’ who challenged the king’s right to summon men to accept knighthoods. He was not summoned to accept a knighthood or pay a fine personally, and the defence case in the court of exchequer hung on whether he could legally be in contempt of court for non-attendance when he was simply one on a list. Among counsel offering a case in defence of Stephens was William Prynne*.22Add. 12511, ff. 2-19.

This case did not make Stephens, if it was indeed he who was at the centre of it, completely unacceptable to the privy council, although it seems to have stalled his career as a commissioner of oyer and terminer. Perhaps it blighted his legal career, too, because he never achieved any eminence as a lawyer. It did not affect his suitability as a sheriff, however, and in 1635-6 he took on this arduous role, made more demanding than ever by the need to bring in Ship Money on the first writ. Stephens’s success in this task, and his conscientious letters to the privy council, are evidence that he was not a general opponent of the king. Not only did Stephens bring in most of the sum assessed on his county, he also supplied names to the council of those refusing to pay, and of constables who obstructed the work. The former challenger of knighthood fines was quite a success as a Ship Money sheriff.23CSP Dom. 1635-6, pp. 154, 166, 168, 170, 184, 246, 363-4, 404, 409; 1635, pp. 486, 556, 577, 579; 1636-7, p. 194.

It was this good service to the government of Charles I and his tendency to puritanism (shared with others of his family) that probably earned Stephens the description ‘of fair esteem but a favourer of the pretending holy side’ from an Arminian commentator in 1640. Stephens had apparently been party to a pact to return one man from the Cotswolds and one from the Vale of Gloucestershire as knights of the shire to the Short Parliament, and he could not explain himself to John Dutton* when challenged for abandoning the agreement.24CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 581. Stephens was still in enough favour with the court to be granted manors and rectories at the behest of William Murray, groom of the bedchamber; although it was probably Murray’s post of clerk of the billets in Wales and the marches, rather than his royal household appointment, that worked in Stephens’s favour.25CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 498; IHR, Aylmer checklist of officeholders, 1625-40. Stephens was a candidate himself in the Tewkesbury election for the second Parliament of 1640, held on 22 October 1640, and was double returned. He suffered the same fate in the by-election held for the borough in October 1641, and was not until 25 December 1643 that his election in this by-election was declared good.26‘Tewkesbury’, supra. Before he made his first appearance in the House on 31 January 1644, however, he had been made a deputy lieutenant for his county, and was party to an agreement between this embryonic county committee and the Scottish professional soldiers they hired to command their troops, Arthur Forbes and James Carr.27SP28/14/67. Stephens developed links with the Bristol business community, in order to pay Carr on behalf of the committee, in 1643.28SP28/14/70; Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 231. Stephens was added to the committee for that city when it came back into the hands of Parliament, in 1645. There is no evidence that Stephens served in any military capacity during the civil war. It was his son, Thomas, who became a colonel attached to the Gloucester garrison. At the trial of Nathaniel Fiennes I*, for surrendering Bristol to Prince Rupert, Stephens denied he was at a council of war in Bristol.29W. Prynne and C. Walker, A True and Full Relation (1644) ‘Catalogue of Witnesses’, 2 (E.255.1).

When Stephens entered the Commons in January 1644, he immediately took the Covenant, and before long was named as a witness in the trial of Archbishop William Laud.30CJ iii. 383b, 422a. His brother John and Thomas Pury I* had already been involved in the trial, and Edward Stephens, like them, was a Presbyterian in outlook. Because of his stalwart work in connection with Gloucester garrison, he was rewarded with an ordinance to reimburse himself for his outlay on Parliament’s behalf, and was on the committee to steer the legislation through the Commons.31CJ iii. 435a. In June 1645, he benefited further from an award of £4 per week for maintenance.32CJ iv. 161a. He was named to the committee to determine good practice in selecting elders for the proposed Presbyterian national church, and his commitment to this cause was underscored the following month, when he was selected for service as a commissioner to reside with the Scottish army, as it settled to an inauspicious performance in the English west midlands.33CJ iv. 218a, 237b, 239a; LJ vii. 533a. His standing with the Scots ensured that he was nominated to the committee investigating the circumstances in which king slipped away from Oxford to join them in 1646, and another on the increasingly tense relations between the Scots and the English Parliament.34CJ iv. 540a, 570b.

Apart from his sympathy with the Scots, Stephens was active in contributing to arrangements for the new Presbyterian church, and sat on various committees to introduce lay elders as an authority in scrutinising admissions to the Lord’s Supper. Tensions between the Westminster Assembly, which carefully guarded the authority of ministers, and Parliament, which sought an Erastian relationship with the church, lay at the heart of these developments. Stephens was on a committee to transfer the decision-making on admissions to a parliamentary body, and was named as a commissioner to determine scandalous offences not already listed.35CJ iv. 553b, 563a. In November 1646, he was named to a committee to consider maintenance for bishops, who suffered from a lack of income since the abolition of the Church of England hierarchy, and the following month served on a committee to examine an illegally printed sermon. Like other Presbyterians, Stephens took a hard line against those who published anti-Erastian material without authority, even if the authors were a group of London ministers sympathetic to the Westminster Assembly.36CJ v. 10b, 11a; Jus Divinum Regiminis (1647, E.364.8).

On 16 December 1646, Stephens was added to the important committee for privileges, which suggests a rise in his standing in the House. Against that, however, must be set his periods of absence from Westminster. He was given leave on 7 July and 21 August 1646, and on 19 July 1647, and was absent at a call of the House on 9 October that year.37CJ iv. 604b, 650b; v. 250a, 330a. However, he attended the House in the days following the Presbyterian ‘coup’ at Westminster on 26 July, and was probably the ‘Mr Stephens’ named on 1 August to a committee for augmenting the powers of the Presbyterian-dominated ‘committee of safety’, which had been established in June to mobilise London against the army. On 3 August he was named with Sir Robert Harley, Thomas Gewen, Sir Thomas Soame and other Presbyterian MPs to a committee to meet with the Lords and concert plans with the City in the event the king came to London, as they evidently hoped he would. Stephens, Harley and Gewen were suspect figures in the eyes of the Independents and the army, and were thought to have played a background role in organising the July coup. All three were required to attend the House at the end of September to explain themselves. Stephens went missing instead. The order was repeated in November, but there is no record of Stephens attending the Commons between August 1647 and February 1648.38CJ v. 263a, 266b, 296b, 366b. When he did eventually return, it was to sit on committees connected with enforcing observance of the sabbath and on improving payments of tithes to London ministers.39CJ v. 460b, 471a, 522a.

Clement Walker* records an incident in April, in which Stephens opposed Sir Henry Mildmay’s motion that 150 ‘rich guard coats’ of the king might be sold to pay soldiers guarding Whitehall. Stephens challenged the Speaker’s ruling that the yeas had it. Stephens persisted and forced a division which the Independents lost. Robert Reynolds darkly promised that ‘notice shall be taken of him for putting such a dishonour upon the House’.40C. Walker, Complete History of Independency (1661), pt. i, 87-8. After the riots in London in May 1648, Stephens was one of the MPs charged with investigating the causes. He was a proponent of the Treaty of Newport, as one might have expected from his previous political affinities, and liaised with the London authorities on arrangements for the king’s safety should he come to London in the future. Other committees connected with the progress of the Treaty which claimed Stephens’s attention were those regarding a letter for the king from Parliament, improved security around Parliament (a snub to the New Model), and on how the Covenant might be made acceptable to the king: this last an indication of the extent of the Presbyterians’ wishful thinking.41CJ v. 624a, 678a; vi. 19b, 47a, 63a. Stephens was making himself a prime candidate for the ire of the army, and he duly became a victim of Pride’s Purge. On 6 December, he was in the chamber before Colonel Thomas Pride’s* men arrived. He and John Birch ‘were called forth by feigned messages sent in by some officers under other men’s names, and there violently pulled out of the door, though they called to the Speaker to take notice of the force’.42Complete History of Independency, pt ii, 30; A Perfect List of 48 Members (1648, BL 1560/4166). Stephens was then imprisoned.43W. Prynne, A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648), 32 (E.539.5).

Stephens was free of duress in time to deliver a letter to Lord General Sir Thomas Fairfax* on 30 December, urging him not to allow the death of the king. ‘For subjects to solemnise their sovereign’s murder with a pretended legality’, he wrote, ‘must needs appear a very monstrous prodigy and affrightful to every loyal contemplation’, which must needs bring down ‘national ruin’.44[E. Stephens], A Letter of Advice (1648), 2 (E.536.38). Stephens appealed to Fairfax as the last hope against what would be ‘the most execrable villainy that ever tainted any Christian kingdom’. He reminded Fairfax of divine wrath and ominous classical parallels, alleging that the lord general himself was not safe from the leading Independents, ‘who (it is strongly fancied) are now digging your lordship’s grave’.45Letter of Advice, 3-4. He concluded by warning Fairfax against any who played the treacherous role of the leading Independent preacher, Hugh Peters, and promised him the reputation of Judas Iscariot if he continued in inaction against the king’s judges.46Letter of Advice, 4-5. Stephens was subsequently dropped from the commission of the peace, and presumably continued quietly in private practice as an attorney. Indeed, after this outburst in print, his public career was over at least until February 1660, when he was one of the secluded Members who re-entered the Commons, where, in March, he repeatedly called for the restoration of the king.47W. Prynne, A Full Declaration (1660), [57] (E.1013.22); Clarendon SP, iii. 696. A few weeks later, Stephens was returned to the Convention for Gloucestershire, and while he supported the restoration of the monarchy – naturally, in one who had so publicly opposed the regicide – he probably remained a Presbyterian.48HP Commons 1660-1690. He died in March 1665, and was buried at Old Sodbury, the family burial place.