SWEETE, Richard (1608-aft. 1662), of Exeter, Devon.

Gilbert Sweete, Richard Sweete’s father, was in 1629 the third highest rated payer of subsidy in Exeter. Only James Tucker* paid more on goods.16Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 9. Members of the Sweete family were established Exeter citizens by the beginning of the seventeenth century, and one Richard Sweete, a merchant and almost certainly the grandfather of the future Member, conveyed property in 1602 in St Kerrian, the parish where his namesake was born in 1608.17C147/55. Gilbert Sweete was able to aspire to marry into the minor gentry family of Blackall of Cowick, a parish just outside Exeter, and by 1616 had moved with his family from St Kerrian to St Mary Arches parish, the most desirable address for Exeter merchants.18St Mary Arches par. reg. In 1626-7, he was among the Exeter contributors to the Forced Loan.19Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, misc. roll 75. He served a mayoral term in 1633-4, noted by Exeter’s principal annalist for the recovery by the city council of nearly £500 in rents and dues owed by the cathedral and senior clergy.20Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. C1/53, f. 52. Another chronicler noted how that year work to improve the canal between Exeter and Topsham, Exeter’s estuary port, was undertaken, which would have enhanced Sweete’s trading activities.21Devon RO, 73/15.

Gilbert Sweete was regularly granted letters of marque against piracy in the late 1620s for four ships of Topsham, which made him relatively unusual among the more important Exeter merchants who did not generally invest directly in shipping.22CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 297, 303, 306, 308; 1629-31, p. 154. In 1629 he was a partner in setting out a ship for Newfoundland, probably bound for the cod fisheries there.23CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 224. His son was taken into the family business. Richard Sweete was probably Gilbert’s second surviving son, as nothing is known of Gilbert’s actual second son, Henry Sweete. Richard was apprenticed to his father, and acquired his freedom of Exeter in 1634 by dint of his apprenticeship. He was churchwarden of St Mary Arches in 1638-9, but the most notable event that befell him before the civil war was his marriage in 1635 to Elizabeth Jourdain, daughter of the formidable Exeter puritan, Ignatius Jourdain†. The Jourdains and Sweetes were neighbours in St Mary Arches parish, and the marriage made Richard Sweete a brother-in-law of Samuel Clarke*. It seems unlikely that either of these marriages could have gone ahead without the consent of the patriarch, Jourdaine, nor is it plausible that the religious views of his sons-in-law were a matter of indifference to Ignatius.

Five months after Richard Sweete and Elizabeth Jourdaine were married at St Mary Arches, Gilbert Sweete died, after making a will extolling salvation through the merits of Jesus Christ, his ‘alone and all sufficient saviour’.24PROB11/168/563. By the custom of the city of Exeter, Richard Sweete was left money out of one third of his father’s estate, but he was probably by this time in business on his own account. In 1638-9, he was exporting and importing cloth, as did the other Exeter merchants, but the profile of his business differed from that of James Tucker*, for example, whose core activity was exporting the traditional Devon cloths to the Atlantic coast of France. Richard Sweete exported a wider range of cloth, including Norwich stuffs and Spanish broadcloth, to further-flung ports: Madeira, Bordeaux and Bilbao. If that year was typical, wine and other imports from Bordeaux balanced his exports in scale, and the 11 cargoes he exported compared unfavourably with Tucker’s 51.25E190/950/7. The impression of a man with relatively modest business interests is confirmed by evidence from the 1641 subsidy, in which Sweete was rated in St Mary Arches only on £4 in goods.26E179/245/12.

Sweete was slow to involve himself in the civic government of Exeter after his becoming a freeman in 1634. He took office as a churchwarden, doubtless working under the eagle eye of Jourdain, in 1638, but was not the man who collected Ship Money in 1639 during the mayoralty of James Tucker: that was the junior of a father and son pair with the same name but of lower social status.27Trans. Devonshire Assoc. xxxiii. 264-5; E179/245/12. Sweete was evidently working at his business in the late 1630s, and unsurprisingly for a son-in-law of Ignatius Jourdain was inclined to support causes favoured by Parliament. When the parishioners of St Mary Arches signed the Protestation in August 1641, Sweete was among the first of them to add his name to the lists headed by the minister, Ferdinando Nichols, and leading citizens Aldermen John Hakewill and James Tucker.28St Mary Arches par. reg. In the summer of 1642, he contributed £50 to the Irish Adventure on behalf of one of his Jourdain relatives, and a further £200 on his own account. Sweete’s widowed mother also invested.29CSP Ire. Adv. 185, 228, 239, 351; J. Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1875), 436. He was not a member of the Exeter committee established to defend the city against royalist incursions, but there is no evidence that he left Exeter during their subsequent rule in the city between 1643 and 1646.

Sweete’s induction into the common council or ‘Twenty-Four’ came as a direct consequence of the expulsion in September 1646 from the council of the leading royalists Sir Hugh Crocker and Philip Crossing. Crocker’s offences had been ‘manifest opposition to the Parliament’ and ‘cruelty to those that were well affected to their cause and proceedings’.30Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 180v. Sweete was among the nominations of the parliamentarian chamber led by Adam Bennett as replacements. He was immediately named to a committee charged with reviewing the working of the cloth hall, and proved a regular attender of council meetings after his swearing-in.31Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 181. In December 1646, he was involved n setting the local customs rates at Exeter quay, in April 1647 helped to identify the site for a new ‘pest-house’ required to isolate the poor who suffered from plague and other infectious epidemic diseases and, as a result of complaints from the assize judges who had been displaced from their usual lodgings at Bedford House by the multitude of poor people, accommodation for the healthy poor. He was on a working party to set out the bounds of ‘burnt or wasted’ (civil war damaged) property in the suburbs in September.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, ff. 188v, 197, 198, 209.

Sweete seems occasionally to have stayed away from council meetings, but there is no pattern in his absences, which were presumably owing to business commitments.33Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bks. viii. and ix. He was at the meetings of the council on 9 and 10 May 1648, when it was resolved that Parliament should be petitioned in order to rid the city of billeting soldiers, and that Sir Hardress Waller* should be told to lodge his men in alehouses rather than impose them on citizens’ homes.34Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 13v. The stand-off between city and army deepened, but Sweete was not at the meeting on 15 May which determined to restrict communications with Waller to writing, nor did he lend his name to the order which sought to place Exeter castle under the control of the city’s own militia rather than the New Model.35Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 14, 14v. It is possible, but beyond certain proof, that his absences were tactical, and evidence of more sympathy with the Independent-dominated army than would have been acceptable to most of his colleagues in the Exeter chamber. It is much easier to read his continuing attendances after the execution of the king as confirmation that he found no insurmountable moral obstacle in the regicide. The Exeter chamber held no meetings between 30 January and 24 April 1649, a mark of the revulsion generally felt in the city, but when business did begin to return to some kind of normality, Sweete’s was once again a familiar face among the Twenty-Four.36Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 30. He served successively as sheriff, bailiff and mayor from late 1649 through to the autumn of 1652, by so doing becoming one of the most prominent Exonians to serve the new republic. His loyalty to the commonwealth appears even more striking in the light of the refusal of the mayor elect in October 1649 to serve, necessitating the selection of a deputy or ‘lieutenant’.37Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 41.

In March 1651, Sweete was the first-named in a chamber committee charged with drawing up a sheet of the city’s losses during the civil wars, prior to submission to Parliament as a petition.38Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 74. It may have been the task of presenting the petition to the Rump that drew Sweete to London in late September that year, necessitating the appointment of another ‘lieutenant’ mayor in his place.39Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 82. If so, it was an official journey that did not obviate the need for another, planned in January 1652, when Sweete was in mayoral office, to request relief for the Exeter poor driven from their homes by ‘fire and other sad accidents’ in the wars. On this occasion it was not Sweete but Thomas Westlake* and the Presbyterian minister John Bond who were required to travel to the capital, although Sweete was asked to enlist the support of Major-general John Disbrowe* in the city’s campaign*. During Sweete’s mayoralty, it was agreed to reduce into one the two separate petitions in hand for the city’s debts and for relief of its poor, with Sweete naturally in a leading role.40Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 87; x. ff. 7v, 8. A reform that must be partly attributed to him was the improved record-keeping of the city’s property transactions.41Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 7.

The inclusion of Sweete among the Devon Parliament-men who attended the Nominated Assembly in July 1653 accorded with a precedent in Exeter that the outgoing mayor was an appropriate choice for service at Westminster. The most obvious other possible influence on Sweete’s selection was John Disbrowe*, with whom Sweete had held recent discussions over Exeter’s petition. There is no evidence from before the Parliament assembled that Sweete held millenarian or other notably radical religious views, nor can he be associated with a particular gathered church. Lodgings were found for him in Whitehall with one of the York representatives, but he played only a minor part in the deliberations of the Parliament. He was named only to two committees: on trade and corporations (20 July), which was only to be expected for one of his background, and on public debts (5 Sept.), to which he was added with a number of other late nominees.42CJ vii. 287a, 314a. Sweete’s only other known contribution was as a surety for the clerk-assistant to the House, Robert Davy, who was presumably from a branch of the Devon family of that name.43CJ vii. 299a. In mid-November, the Exeter council chamber restated once again its intention to petition Parliament, identifying Sweete as its intended conduit, but this resolution came too late, as Parliament dissolved itself just a few weeks later.44Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 37, 39. Sweete’s low profile, in a Parliament in which the pace was set by radicals of one kind or another, might have suggested that he should be numbered among the conservatives. However, the anonymous but well-informed contemporary analyst of this assembly identified Sweete among the more radical Members, who were unsympathetic towards the maintenance of a church under state auspices.45A Catalogue (1654, 669.f.19.3).

Back in Exeter after December 1653, Sweete resumed his place in the council chamber, although he was a regular rather than an unfailing attender. He participated in the meetings which approved the amalgamation of Exeter parishes and the municipal taker-over of the cathedral, but was not among those who contributed towards the partitioning of the cathedral into separate areas for Presbyterian and Independent congregations.46Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 96; Bk. 64, ff. 219, 304v, 307, 314. Occasionally, he was called upon to settle disputes on the corporation’s behalf, as befitted a senior member of the council, and he sat as a justice of the peace in the city ex officio as alderman in 1655-6, but he was by no means prominent.47Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 102v. He acquired a modest estate in co. Limerick when the Irish Adventure lands were allocated in the mid-1650s.48Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 210. Sweete continued as an alderman throughout the remaining political changes of the 1650s, and did not withdraw at the restoration of the monarchy. Only when he was tendered the oaths of supremacy and allegiance by the commissioners for corporations did he decline to conform to the new regime. He attended his last meeting on 3 June 1662 before being ejected from the corporation on 7 August.49Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x, p. 361. He is lost sight of subsequently; perhaps like Simon Snowe*, he moved to a parish outside Exeter. He was the first and last of his family to sit in Parliament.