CURZON, Sir John (1598-1686), of Kedleston, Derbys.

The Curzons claimed descent from a companion of the Conqueror and were one of Derbyshire’s oldest gentry families.41William Woolley’s Hist. of Derbys. ed. C. Glover, P. Riden (Derbys. Rec. Soc. vi), 96; S.P.H. Statham, ‘Later descendants of Domesday holders of land in Derbys.’, Jnl. of the Derbys. Arch. and Natural Hist. Soc. xlviii. 67-8. At the time of Curzon’s birth, they had held the manor of Kedleston for four hundred years and had supplied MPs for the county for over two centuries.42Woolley’s Hist. of Derbys. ed. Glover, Riden, 97; ‘John Curson’, HP Commons, 1386-1421. Curzon was raised in what was probably a godly household and certainly attended ‘the most important centre of puritanism in the university of Oxford’, Magdalen College.43J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 85-6. In 1623, he married a daughter of the noted puritan lawyer Sir Thomas Crewe, who was to serve as Speaker of the Commons in the 1624 and 1625 Parliaments.44HP Commons 1604-1629. Crewe’s influence on Curzon’s religious development may well have been considerable.45T. Bancroft, Two Bookes of Epigrammes (1639), unpag. The puritan divine Robert Cleaver dedicated his 1625 tract A Declaration of the Christian Sabbath to Curzon and his brothers-in-law John Crewe I* and Edward Stephens* ‘as professed friends to the cause wherein I deal and religious observers of that sacred ordinance of God’.46R. Cleaver, A Declaration of the Christian Sabbath (1625), epistle dedicatory. Returned on his father-in-law’s interest for Brackley, Northamptonshire, in 1628, Curzon made no known contribution to the House’s proceedings.47HP Commons, 1604-1629.

Despite his puritan sympathies, Curzon seems to have been one of the crown’s most diligent and trusted servants in Derbyshire. Either he or his father served as a commissioner for the Forced Loan in 1627, and, as high sheriff for 1637-8, Curzon evidently took great pains in collecting Ship Money.48C193/12/2, ff. 9v, 82; R.J. Burton, ‘Ayd to his Majesty King Charles I, 1627’, Jnl. of the Derbys. Arch. and Natural Hist. Soc. xxi. 81; CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 327, 597; 1638-9, pp. 29, 297; 1639-40, p. 454; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 44-5, 47, 50, 52. In addition, having been appointed a deputy lieutenant for the county by 1639, he was involved in its the military preparations for the bishops’ wars.49CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 297; HMC Cowper, ii. 228, 259, 260; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 67. In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, he and John Manners* (soon to become 8th earl of Rutland) stood together for Derbyshire against a third candidate, Sir John Harpur.50B. W., To the Faithfull and True-Hearted Covenanters (1644), 3 (E.257.6). Curzon and Manners had a common friend in (Sir) John Gell (father of John Gell*), Curzon’s half-brother and business partner in the High Peak lead industry. It was Gell who persuaded Manners to stand.51Infra, ‘John Manners’; Derbys. RO, D258/7/20/29; J.R. Dias, ‘Lead, society and politics in Derbys. before the civil war’, MH vi. 49. Yet the Curzons were also close to the Harpurs – both families having been clients of the earls of Shrewsbury and later of the earls of Devonshire.52Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 72. In the resulting poll on election day, 26 March 1640, Curzon took second place with 1286 votes to Manners’s 1479.53Supra, ‘Derbyshire’. Curzon almost certainly owed his return to the strength of his interest as one of Derbyshire’s foremost governors and landowners, although he took the precaution of treating the voters for several days before the election with free wine, sherry and sugar.54KB27/1677, m. 1381. As in 1628, however, he made no appreciable impact at Westminster.

Curzon was returned for Derbyshire again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, this time taking the senior place.55Supra, ‘Derbyshire’. In keeping with his form in previous Parliaments, he started very slowly in the Commons, receiving only nine committee appointments before the outbreak of civil war.56CJ ii. 44b, 50a, 93b, 157a, 158a, 162a, 180a, 196a, 634a. The parlous state of public finances seems to have weighed upon him more than most issues at Westminster, and his first recorded act in the Long Parliament, on 21 November 1640, was to pledge £1,000 towards securing a City loan for paying off the English and Scottish armies in northern England.57Procs. LP i. 229, 232, 236. He was subsequently named to committees on several important financial initiatives.58CJ ii. 162a, 180a, 196a. His appointment to committees for investigating William Piers, the Laudian bishop of Bath and Wells (12 December), for recusants (26 May 1641) and to the Derbyshire commission for disarming recusants (August 1641), further suggests that he was involved, if only peripherally, in Parliament’s campaign to suppress popery.59CJ ii. 50a, 158a, 267b; LJ iv. 385a.

Curzon’s knighthood and English baronetcy (for which the crown waived the £1,095 creation fee), which were granted within days of each other in August 1641, were evidently part of royal efforts that summer to court support for the king in his struggle with the parliamentary leadership.60SO3/12, f. 165v. But in Curzon’s case, Charles would be disappointed. On 14 March 1642, Curzon presented a petition to the Commons from Derbyshire – the signatories of which included two of his sons – calling for tougher measures against ‘the malignant party’, denouncing ‘the many cursed plots that have been invented against our beloved friends of Scotland and our poor distressed brethren in Ireland’, and expressing the hope that ‘this kingdom may still continue one of Christ’s golden candlesticks ... and the whole kingdom a people in covenant with God’.61PA, Main Pprs. 26 Mar. 1642, ff. 27-123; To the Honourable the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses of the House of Common [sic] (1642, 669 f.4.80). As the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes rightly observed, this petition contained ‘much to the effect of former petitions from other counties, only it expressed more zeal and earnestness for the reformation of religion than other petitions had done’.62PJ i. 36.

Curzon was nominated by Manners (now the earl of Rutland) in the spring of 1642 as a deputy lieutenant for Derbyshire under Militia Ordinance.63Infra, ‘John Manners’; HMC Cowper, ii. 310. And in mid-June, he pledged to bring in two horses on the propositions for the maintenance of the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.64PJ iii. 473. Later that same month, Curzon and Rutland were the leading figures in an abortive attempt to create a consensus among the Derbyshire gentry for an accommodation and ‘the safe keeping of the [county] magazine’.65Derbys. RO, D258/38/2/3; A.J. Fletcher, ‘Petitioning and the outbreak of the civil war in Derbys.’, Derbys. Arch. Jnl. xciii. 38-9; Beats, ‘Derbys,’, 103. The Commons was perhaps trying to bind Curzon more closely to its service when, on 3 August, it ordered him and other leading Derbyshire men to put the Militia Ordinance into execution in the county and granted him leave to stockpile arms and ammunition for the defence of his house.66CJ ii. 701a, 702b; LJ v. 260b. The men appointed on 3 August formed the nucleus of the Derbyshire county committee, of which Curzon became an active member.67CJ ii. 828a; LJ v. 428a; SP28/226, unfol. He was evidently regarded as an enemy by the Derbyshire royalists, who plundered his house in September.68Special Passages no. 6 (13-20 Sept. 1642), 41 (E.118.20). His decision to side with Parliament was almost certainly linked to his godly religious convictions (he should not be confused with the Oxfordshire royalist Sir John Curzon of Waterperry).

Curzon seems to have been absent from the House during the winter of 1642-3, when he was probably helping Sir John Gell secure Derbyshire for Parliament. He had returned to Westminster by February 1643, and between then and November 1644 – when he apparently took unofficial leave of absence for several months – he was named to over 50 committees. Most of these appointments provide no clear guide as to his factional alignment in the Commons – assuming he had one – although several place him closer to the war party grandees than to their peace-party rivals. His only assignment in relation to the Oxford peace treaty in the spring of 1643 was to help draft articles of cessation that D’Ewes and other pro-peace MPs objected to as ‘much for the advantage of the forces under the command of the earl of Essex’.69CJ ii. 978b; Harl. 164, f. 306. And that autumn, he was included on half a dozen committees for supplying the armies of Essex and of his rival Sir William Waller* and for pressuring the lord general into taking the offensive against the royalists.70CJ iii. 237a, 253b, 267a, 274a, 276b, 278b. Curzon’s inclusion on the 26 February 1644 committee for ‘the reformation of the lord general’s army’, chaired by Zouche Tate, is particularly revealing.71CJ iii. 408b. This committee’s primary task was to nominate and thus reconstitute Essex’s officer corps – and D’Ewes described its members as ‘all violent spirits’ and enemies to Essex’s army, ‘for now it was to be reduced to little above half the number it had formerly been, and many officers were to be discharged’.72Harl. 166, f. 18. Curzon also received numerous appointments in 1643-4 concerning the sequestration of Parliament’s opponents and for advancing or managing the war effort – particularly in Derbyshire, the Midlands Association, the northern counties under the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) and in London.73CJ ii. 957b, 978b, 994b; iii. 111b, 140a, 220a, 237a, 298b, 320a, 333a, 372b, 391a, 400a, 457a, 482a, 507b, 508b, 532b, 536b, 567b, 574a, 592a, 602b, 617a, 618a, 647b, 654a, 655b, 679b. At least one such committee – set up on 13 November 1643 for removing obstructions on the collection of assessments in London – he was named first to and may have chaired.74CJ iii. 309b.

Yet the regularity with which Curzon was chosen in 1643-5 to liaise with the lord general on midland association matters, or was named to committees for the supply and ordering of his army, does not point to an MP radically at odds with the Essexian interest.75CJ iii. 253b, 267a, 274a, 276b, 278b, 322b, 326b, 408b, 435b; iv. 58b. And there are signs his opinion of the lord general and his peace-party friends began to improve during the course of 1644. He appears to have thought highly of Essex’s military protégé in the midlands, Thomas Grey, Lord Grey of Groby*, and to have backed him in his quarrel with the war-party grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige* during 1644.76Infra, ‘Thomas Grey, Lord Grey of Groby’; ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ iii. 435b, 507b, 567b, 592a, 618a. And he also seems to have favoured initiatives that autumn for smoothing over complaints against some of Parliament’s aristocratic commanders and for inquiring into the profits of parliamentary office – an issue of particular concern to the more peace-minded Members, who suspected their opponents of spinning out the war for their own profit.77CJ iii. 617a, 695b. It may well be significant that Curzon’s name disappears from the Journal between mid-November 1644 and late January 1645 when momentum was gathering at Westminster for new-modelling and self-denial. He seems to have accepted the need for military reform – at least, he was named to several committees in February and March 1645 for the recruitment and supply of the New Model.78CJ iv. 42b, 52a, 59b, 71a. What he may have balked at, however, was Essex’s replacement as commander-in-chief by Sir Thomas Fairfax*. Nevertheless, the Commons entrusted him with overseeing the collection of assessments for the New Model in Derbyshire.79CJ iv. 59b, 186a. And with the north midlands an important theatre of military operations in the spring and summer of 1645, he became an important figure in Parliament’s efforts to maintain and deploy its forces in Derbyshire.80CJ iv. 102a, 110a, 118b, 267a, 463a, 633a; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 403; 1645-7, pp. 12, 422.

As a leading member of the Derbyshire county committee and a friend and kinsman of the Gells, Curzon inevitably became entangled in the factional quarrel between Sir John Gell and his nominal subordinate Major Thomas Sanders* that divided the county political and military leaders from 1644. His position was further complicated by the fact that the Committee of Both Kingdoms* looked to him for advice in trying to reconcile the conflicting parties.81CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 85, 95; 1644-5, pp. 171, 174, 338. But though he was on amicable terms with Sanders until at least mid-1644 – when he styled himself Sanders’s ‘loving neighbour and friend’ – he was much closer to Gell.82Add. 18979, f. 156; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/7. The several references to Curzon in Sanders’s correspondence during the early months of 1645 are ambiguous in nature, but suggest that he was doing Sanders favours at Westminster in an effort to keep him from making further trouble for his half-brother.83Derbys. RO, D1232/O/22, 34. A reconciliation was rendered impossible however by Gell’s increasingly high-handed proceedings in Derbyshire and by Essex’s replacement as commander-in-chief by Fairfax. Fairfax’s appointment encouraged Sanders’s defiance of Gell, who had relied on Essex to support his authority. By June 1645, Curzon was firmly in the Gell camp, and the following month he tried (unsuccessfully) to have Sanders’s forces sent to join the Scottish army besieging Hereford.84Infra, ‘Thomas Sanders’; Derbys. RO, D258/56/2/1/12, 40. He backed the election of Sir John’s brother Thomas Gell* at Derby that autumn, for it was almost certainly at Curzon’s instigation that the Commons ordered Derby’s mayor to proceed to election immediately, ‘all excuses apart’ – this was after Sir John had ensured that the rival candidate, who was one of his officers, would be out of town on military duties.85Supra, ‘Derby’; CJ iv. 283a; Add. 28716, ff. 43v-44. And when the Sanders faction delivered a list of charges against Sir John Gell to the Commons in October, Curzon presented counter-charges.86Derbys. RO, D1232/O/59; CJ iv. 321b. He continued to defend Sir John’s authority when even Thomas Gell thought it a lost cause.87Derbys. RO, D1232//O/56; D258/12/16, pp. 48, 64. In the event, Sir John Gell remained in command until the disbandment of the county’s forces, which Curzon and other Derbyshire Members oversaw in August 1646.88CJ iv. 633a, 656b.

Curzon’s tally of approximately 32 committee appointments between early 1645 and March 1647, when he took an extended period of leave, was not that of an MP in the thick of the political action at Westminster. That said, he received his first (and only) appointments as a messenger to the Lords and as a conference manager during this period, served as a teller in four divisions and was an active member of the Presbyterian-dominated Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports*.89Supra, ‘Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports’; CJ iv. 184b, 251a, 366b, 511b, 612b; LJ vii. 452b; ADM7/673, pp. 198, 201, 310. And having apparently shunned the Scots while they were allies of the war party, he emerged as one of their Commons’ patrons after they switched allegiance to the Essex interest late in 1644. It was probably no accident that his one appointment as messenger (24 June 1645) was to carry up to the Lords the draft of a letter congratulating the Scots on their supposed victory against Montrose and expressing a desire for a good correspondence between the two kingdoms.90CJ iv. 184b; LJ vii. 452b. He appeared more openly in the Presbyterian cause on 5 December, when he and Denzil Holles were majority tellers in favour of appointing the pro-Scots MP Sir Anthony Irby to a parliamentary commission for residing with General Leven’s forces besieging Newark – a highly sensitive mission in terms of Anglo-Scottish relations.91CJ iv. 366b. Similarly, in the summer of 1646, Curzon was involved in efforts by the Presbyterian interest to make the Newcastle peace propositions more palatable to the Scots.92CJ iv. 576a, 612b. Even more revealing, perhaps, is that although he was included on several committees set up in 1645 and 1646 for appeasing the Scots, he did not feature on any of the Commons’ numerous committees for pressing Parliament’s grievances against the Scottish army occupying the northern counties.93CJ iv. 226a, 250a, 663a. Yet although he seems to have moved into close alignment with the Presbyterian grandees as the war drew to a close, his political concerns did not always coincide with theirs. On 10 July 1646, for example, he was named to a committee on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.94CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 162.

Curzon’s involvement in the House’s proceedings seems to have tailed off noticeably after the earl of Essex’s unexpected death in September 1646. Granted leave of absence four times between September and the following July, he probably attended the Derbyshire county committee more frequently in 1647 than he did the Commons.95CJ iv. 678a, 734b; v. 109b, 236b, 330a; SP28/226; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 402. Thomas Gell informed Sir John Gell in February 1647 that Curzon was resentful that he had ‘lost his friends in the Parliament in sticking to you’, and he was henceforth resolved ‘to live much in the country and little at London’.96Derbys. RO, D258/39/36; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 274-5. Yet Curzon returned to the Commons that autumn and served as a teller in two divisions – the second of which, on 11 November, was against a proposal that church lands be used as security for the payment of army arrears.97CJ v. 348b, 356b. With the New Model soldiery clamouring for arrears of pay, Curzon could not have made his hostility to their interests clearer. Later that month, he was added to a committee set up to examine information concerning the role of his brother-in-law Edward Stephens in the July 1647 Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster.98CJ v. 367a. Curzon was granted leave of absence again on 11 December and probably did not return to the House much before 4 May 1648, when he was named to a committee for settling the kingdom’s militia – an important piece of legislation given the impending Scottish invasion.99CJ v. 380a, 551a. The next day (5 May), he was a minority teller with Giles Grene in favour of an amendment that would have weakened the force of a motion to put the seven northern counties into a posture of defence. The majority tellers were the Independent MPs Sir Peter Wentworth and Sir William Brereton.100CJ v. 551b.

Curzon apparently stood aloof from the parliamentarian war effort in 1648, and his decision to take leave of absence on 29 August – just two days after the surrender of Colchester to the New Model army – smacks more of disappointment than relief.101CJ v. 556a, 602a, 664b, 673b, 689b. Indeed, it was reported on 5 September that Curzon intended to return to Derbyshire and to defy an order for the call of the House at the end of the month.102Derbys. RO, D258/30/14/3. Nevertheless, he had resumed his seat by 26 September, and in the three months before Pride’s Purge he was named to four committees (three of them for maintaining a guard of horse around Westminster) and served as teller in four divisions.103CJ vi. 34a, 47a, 55b, 57b, 60a, 69b, 70b, 93a. His support for the treaty of Newport is evident from his tellership with Sir Martin Lumley on 18 October in favour of sending a letter of encouragement to the parliamentary commissioners on the Isle of Wight.104CJ vi. 55b. And in the series of divisions preceding the crucial vote on 5 December that the king’s answers at Newport formed a satisfactory basis for settlement, he was a teller in favour of continuing a debate on the army’s seizure of Charles at Carisbrooke Castle.105CJ vi. 93a. Like Thomas Gell, Curzon was among those secluded by the army at Pride’s Purge, whereupon he withdrew quietly to Derbyshire.106Derbys. RO, D258/30/14/10.

Although Curzon was omitted from all local commissions under the Rump, he was allowed to retain his office as receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster.107CSP Dom. 1654, p. 147. His stock improved during the protectorate, when he was restored to the Derbyshire bench and added to the oyer and terminer commission for the Midland circuit.108C231/6, p. 306; C181/6, p. 215. However, there is no evidence that he sought to resurrect his parliamentary career during the 1650s. He claimed to have made a valuable contribution to the restoration of monarchy in 1660, and he was certainly involved in remodelling the Derbyshire militia commission in the spring of that year.109Add. 22548, f. 73; St. 185, ff. 151, 151v. He stood as a candidate for the county in the elections to both the 1660 Convention and the Cavalier Parliament, but failed to win a seat on either occasion.110Add. 34306, f. 11; Derbys. RO, D258/34/5/2; D5557/2/59. He retained his place on the bench in 1660 – much to the disgust of the Derbyshire royalists, who regarded him as ‘a great Presbyterian ... [and] a great enemy to the king and his friends’. They also implied that he had profitted from his offices under Parliament and the protectorate, claiming that his personal estate was worth £10,000.111Newton, ‘The gentry of Derbys.’, 6, 8. In 1664, having again been accused of ‘obstructing upon all occasions his Majesty’s service’, he wrote to Viscount Mansfield (Henry Cavendish†) protesting his loyalty to the king’s ‘revenue, service and interest’

[I] do assure your lordship I have not a Presbyterian nor sectary in my family, nor in the parish and town I live in, being all my own inheritance, and it is known to your lordship and others what I did in order to his Majesty’s happy restoration both in this and other counties and what opinion the late usurpers had of [me].112Add. 22548, f. 73.

Yet it was later alleged that despite being a justice of the peace he had made no attempt to suppress a Presbyterian conventicle that met regularly in the house of his gentry neighbour Thomas Sanders.113J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 37; R. Clark, ‘Anglicanism, Recusancy and Dissent in Derbys. 1603-1730’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1979), 204. Moreover, in 1666 he refused to sign a declaration of the Derbyshire gentry pledging money for a new royal army to guard England against the Dutch.114NRA 618, Misc. pprs. at Radbourne Hall, no. 1. He stood as a candidate in the 1670 Derbyshire by-election, but was heavily defeated on a poll, receiving a mere 308 votes.115Derbys. RO, D258/34/5/2. Not even his former son-in-law, German Pole*, voted for him.116Derbys. RO, D258/17/40.

Curzon died on 13 December 1686 and was buried at Kedleston on 18 December.117Cox, Churches of Derbys. iii. 181; ‘The regs. of Kedleston’ ed. Simpson, 113. In his will, he made bequests totalling in excess of £7,000.118PROB11/386, f. 145v. Three of Curzon’s grandsons – John Curzon†, Nathaniel Curzon† and William Curzon† – sat for Derbyshire and other constituencies between 1701 and 1747.119HP Commons, 1690-1715; HP Commons, 1715-1754.