PARKHURST, Robert (1630-74), of Pyrford, Surr.

Educated under Richard Holdsworth, familiar as his parish minister in London, at the puritan college of Emmanuel, Parkhurst was nurtured in Presbyterian circles.18Al. Cant. He was married young to one of the daughters of a recent lord mayor of London notable for having defied the Independents in Parliament and the New Model.19Manning and Bray, Surr. i. 50; Beaven, Aldermen, ii. 63. However, the securing of his complicated and far-flung inheritance in the west of England and Ireland after his father’s death in August 1651 required him to cultivate the commonwealth and protectorate regimes.20C5/387/190; C6/5/46; C6/114/85; C10/13/18.

Since his grandfather’s time it had proved difficult to secure to land in Ireland acquired through forfeited mortgages and direct investment, but like his father, instead of selling out altogether Parkhurst appears to have sunk even more money and effort into the enterprise. In 1653 he assigned some stakes to others but he or his kinsman John Stowell may have been present in Dublin in February 1655 to hear the court there uphold his claims to some forfeited lands.21SP63/283, f. 123; SP63/285, f. 126; SP63/286, f. 1; SP63/290, f. 264; SP63/298, f. 281; SP63/300, f. 157. It was established on that occasion that Parkhurst was not a delinquent.22SP63/286, f. 1. As his petitions continued into the later 1650s and, with regard at least to the recovery of debts owed to his grandfather from the estate of the deceased Irish rebel Sir Phelim O’Neale, became entangled in the question of awards for the payment of arrears to army officers, he seems to have gained a largely sympathetic hearing, if no ultimate resolution.23CSP Ireland, 1647-60 and Addenda, pp. 658-9, 839, 859-60.

In 1659 Parkhurst was elected to Parliament for Guildford, the borough seven miles from his estate at Pyrford for which his father had sat on five occasions. On visiting terms with John Evelyn the diarist and the recipient of favour in 1660, he is probably to be counted among the covert royalists.24Evelyn, Diary, iii. 183. However, he made no recorded contribution to proceedings.

Squeezed out by the Onslow interest, Parkhurst perhaps did not even attempt to stand for the Convention. None the less, in March 1660 he was appointed a militia commissioner and joined the commission of the peace; thereafter he was regularly named to local office.25A. and O.; A Perfect List (1660), 54; SR. Made a gentleman of the bedchamber, in 1661 he received support from Charles II in his continuing quest to secure the former lands of Phelim O’Neale, but this availed him little and the case dragged on.26Carlisle, Gent. of the Privy Chamber, 172; CSP Ireland 1660-2, p. 265; SP63/319, f. 29.

Parkhurst made his will on 14 November 1674 and was dead within six days.27PROB11/347/378; Manning and Bray, Surr. i. 50, 157. He had an agreement with Sir Robert Vyner to make over to him – in addition to property in London which he had already relinquished – his ‘manor in the west’ (probably the Gloucestershire estate) in return for about £1,500 and instructed his executors to dispose also of his Irish lands ‘immediately’. This was intended to fund £1,000 portions for each of his surviving younger children, with an extra £500 for his daughter Elizabeth, who was to be joint executor with her elder brother the heir, another Robert Parkhurst.28PROB11/347/378; Hist. Gazetteer of London: Cheapside, 336-42. But three years later the latter sold Pyrford and Wisley too, he or the MP having ‘spent a fair estate’, leaving their most visible presence as the memorial in Guildford church, enhanced by Elizabeth.29VCH Surr. iii. 380, 432-3, 567-8; Evelyn, Diary, iv. 255. The purchaser was Denzil Onslow†, sealing the ascendancy of that family in the area. No descendant of this MP sat in Parliament, but his half-brother John Parkhurst† was first elected in 1678 and went on to have a lengthy career at Westminster.