MASON, Benjamin (1622-65), of London and Pixley Court, Herefs.

Mason’s paternal family was from Monkton on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, but his office-holding father moved from there via London to Bury St. Edmunds, probably on his marriage into a Norfolk family.20Berry, Pedigrees of Kent, 338; Hasted, Kent, x. 254. An unnecessary difficulty over the Masons’ ancestry has been created by an egregious misreading of the supposed baptismal record of one of Benjamin Mason’s distinguished brother, Charles. It presents the entry for Charles, son of Sir Humphrey Mayes, as if it were ‘Charles, son of Pomfit Mason’.21Eton College Register, 225; Oxford DNB, ‘Charles Mason’; Bury St Edmunds St Mary par. reg. 9 Sept. 1617. No Pomfit Mason ever existed, but in fact Benjamin and Charles Mason’s father was a gentleman with a house on Northgate Street, Bury St Edmunds.22Suff. RO (Bury), E3/10/33.10. William Mason may have matriculated from St John’s, Cambridge, certainly had a legal education at Gray’s Inn, and held the office of custos brevium in the court of king’s bench that he hoped would prove lucrative, though it had evidently not paid out at the time he revised his will in 1626.23Al. Cant.; G. Inn Admiss. i. 88: PBGI i. 149, 202; PROB11/155/404. William Mason was never one of the feoffees of town lands, the predecessor body of the corporation; nor, after the town was granted its first charter in 1606, does he seem to have held civic office under the new arrangements.24Accts. of the Feoffees of Town Lands of Bury St Edmunds, 1569-1622 ed. M. Statham (Suff. Rec. Soc. xlvi); Suff. RO (Bury), D1/1/1; D6/4/1. He was tenant of a 65-acre farm in Hepworth under the feoffees, and collaborated with the town clerk in a trust arrangement for a larger estate west of Bury, and is described variously as ‘esquire’ and ‘gentleman’ in deeds. It was probably he who volunteered his clerk to record depositions in the corporation’s suits against other local gentry.25Accts. of the Feoffees, 268, 306; Suff. RO (Bury), H1/3/4/26; E3/10/33.10. In short, William Mason was a classic town gentleman: in the town, but not entirely of it. A family connection between the Bury St Edmunds Masons and the Mason family of Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, which supplied a Member to Parliaments of 1679 and 1681, has been postulated, but seems implausible in the light of modern research.26Add. 19141, f. 250; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Richard Mason’. Benjamin Mason’s mother re-married after his father’s death, to one of the family of Phillipps of Herefordshire, giving him a connection with Herefordshire, but not an absolute propertied interest there.27SP23/102, p. 81.

In his will, William Mason enjoined his old friend from the king’s bench, Sir Robert Heath†, Charles I’s attorney-general, to be ‘loving and kind to my children’.28PROB11/155/404. Whether by this means or by others, two of Benjamin Mason’s brothers rose through Cambridge University to become dons. Richard became a fellow of Jesus College before being ejected by the parliamentarian authorities. He moved to Edinburgh to study medicine, and practised at Leicester in the 1660s. Charles was a fellow of King’s before he, too, was ejected in 1644. He later became rector of Stour Provost, Dorset.29Al. Cant.; Oxford DNB, ‘Charles Mason’; Add. 19141, ff. 249, 250. A supporter of Benjamin Mason through his later difficulties noted that he had brothers who served in the king’s army, and certainly his clergy siblings must have inclined in that direction to deserve ejection from their fellowships.30SP23/102, p. 74. A third brother, and the eldest of what may have been 12 brothers, the lawyer William Mason, knighted at Oxford in 1645, was an active supporter of the king.31Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 219; PBGI i. 433; CCC 1837-8.

Benjamin’s career was less noteworthy. It was recorded later that he was before the civil war a gentleman who never pursued any calling other than his temporary military one.32SP23/112, p. 359. He later had property in Essex and in Middlesex, and it was probably through residence in London that he came to enlist in the life-guard of the earl of Essex in December 1642. The life-guard was raised from men of the inns of court, and Richard Fiennes was one of the prime movers in it; Mason was later a captain in the regiment of his brother, John Fiennes*.33SP23/112, pp. 363, 373; Ludlow, Mems. i. 38. There was nothing in his family background to suggest why Mason inclined towards Parliament in the civil war. His father’s will conveys nothing of the puritan, either in his friendships or general outlook.

Mason joined the life-guard when it played an important role in blocking the king’s advance on London. He may have been the Captain Mason whose seizure of horses was discussed in the House in June 1643; in August, the lifeguard was involved in the lifting of the siege of Gloucester. In the summer of 1644, Mason raised a troop at his own expense and marched out of London to Oxfordshire, under the command of Colonel John Fiennes.34CJ iii. 110b; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 42-4; SP23/112, f. 365. He left his wife and mother-in-law weeping at their Barbican house because they feared he would run through their inheritance in the parliamentarian cause.35SP23/112, p. 369. Mason participated in the siege of Banbury, and was injured in the foot. He was unable to pull on a boot for months, and gave over his command.36SP23/112, p. 297. This wound was later important evidence in his rebuttal of accusations that he fought at the second battle of Newbury (27 Oct. 1644) on the side of the king.37SP23/112, p. 97. There is a suggestion that he later briefly joined the regiment of Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and was cashiered from it, but even if this were the case, it seems likely that Mason’s active military service in effect ended with his injury. He came to Hereford in the wake of the taking of the city by John Birch* (24 Dec. 1645), to reclaim the estate, at this point still his mother’s, from which he had been excluded by the royalists for three years.38SP23/102, p. 81. Having laid down his commission, he was no longer in a regiment, but nevertheless remained active in Parliament’s service. He rallied support in Hereford in order to repulse the soldiers of Sir Henry Lingen† when they organised a surprise attack on the city gate (Mar. 1646), while Birch was on an expedition as far away as Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, in the closing stages of the first civil war.39SP23/112, p. 255. It was doubtless a reward for this service that Mason was favoured by the county sequestration committee with a lease of the tithes in Kilpeck and elsewhere, confiscated from Sir Walter Pye* (27 July).40Add. 16178, f. 70.

On the death of his mother some time before the end of 1646, Mason inherited a debt owed her by a Herefordshire man who offered him in satisfaction an estate in Somerset if the sequestration of it could be lifted. Supported by John Birch, Mason was able to plead his military service and investment of his own resources for the cause before the Somerset committee, which was sympathetic and released the estate.41SP23/102, p. 81. Then began a long conflict between Mason and elements of the Somerset county committee. On being refused the accumulated arrears of rent from the property, Mason reported the obstructive official to the Committee for Compounding* for pocketing the rents from a choice Somerset rectory. The subsequent imprisonment of the officer demonstrated to the local committee that Mason was not a man to be trifled with, but he himself conceded that when he first went to Somerset, ‘no man had at first more civil usage than myself, and courted to be oftener among them’.42SP23/102, p. 82. He quickly became a controversial figure in the county, and his second marriage, to the daughter of George Dodington of Nether Stowey, provided his enemies with plentiful ammunition. Dodington was a kinsman of Sir Francis Dodington, a royalist commander notorious for ill treatment of prisoners, and Mason was denounced to the Committee for Compounding from February 1648 as an associate of this ‘delinquent’.43Ludlow, Mems. i. 95; ii. 461; SP23/102, pp. 84, 269; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 32-33. Some of the allegations against him, such as the story that he was on the wrong side at the second battle of Newbury, or that he appeared on horseback with Sir Francis Dodington, depended on dubious identification of him by common soldiers who did not know Mason.44SP23/251, pp. 149, 150. If the stories of his alleged help for the rebels in south Wales in May 1648 were intended to deter the authorities in London from employing him, they were unsuccessful.

In February 1650, Mason was invited by an MP to serve as a sequestrator in Somerset, but he was unenthusiastic: ‘I replied that although I should be willing to serve the public, wherein I might for such an employment, my ability and experience were too mean’.45SP23/102, p. 85. He went off instead to Essex, and the leader of the Somerset county committee, John Pyne*, put himself at the head of an orchestrated attempt to scupper Mason’s chances of office, and to promote his own candidates.46CCC 221, 226. Mason evidently lined himself up with Pyne’s enemy, John Ashe*. Like Pyne himself, Mason was in sympathy with the trial of the king and the inauguration of the commonwealth. He did in fact take the sequestrator’s post, and operated in the western hundreds of Somerset. Despite his self-image as a reluctant officeholder, Mason’s dogged clinging to office generated much paperwork in London, as the Goldsmiths’ Hall committee heard numerous deponents assembled both by Mason and his opponents.47SP23/102, pp. 223-53, 257-9, 271-82, 283, 297, 299, 301, 319-21, 329-46, 387-90. He persisted in denouncing other sequestrators, and thereby played a significant part in the faction-fighting that marked Somerset politics under Pyne. The attempts meanwhile by Pyne’s associates to portray Mason as a crypto-royalist who supported the Newport treaty with the king and then refused the Engagement to embrace the commonwealth throw more light on Pyne’s brand of radicalism than on Mason himself.48SP23/112, p. 311. Despite Pyne’s threats, Mason carried on his work ‘in the public service’.49SP23/118, p. 892. Pyne was a Presbyterian in religion; Mason was at this point ‘godly’, as doubtless he had been since the start of the civil war, but there is no specific evidence associating him with any particular religious group.

By September 1650, the Somerset controversy surrounding Mason had reached the council of state, which determined that he and his associates should be removed from their employments.50CCC 306. Despite – or perhaps because of – his personal appearance before them, the councillors had evidently been persuaded that Mason was indeed married to a Roman Catholic, the source for such an allegation undoubtedly being Pyne or one of his allies. Recognising the origins of the campaign against him, the commissioners for compounding took a more sanguine view of Mason and promised him another post if the charges against him carried the day. When, two months later, Mason was imprisoned in Dunster castle, even the council began to query the treatment meted out to him by the Pyne faction.51CCC 353, 355, 365, 358-9, CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 391, 421, 442, 614. It was a further year before Mason was appointed sequestrator in Herefordshire, a county where he had some inherited interest, and where he had come to the notice of the military authorities for his defence of the Hereford city gate in 1646. By 1651, however, his former ally Birch had left both the army and the governance of the county. Wroth Rogers* had succeeded to the post of governor, and Mason soon established a rapport with him. In 1650 he had bought a fee farm rent, perhaps in Somerset, from the trustees, but his work as a sequestrator enabled him to buy the manor of Pixley from the royalist Humphrey Berrington, and thus set himself up as a landed gentleman in Herefordshire. Mason was installed at Pixley before January 1654.52Stowe 185, f. 57; Duncumb, Collections, iv (Radlow hundred, 2nd pagination), 125, where Fraser should be Mason; Glam. RO, CL/Deeds/I/5292.

Wherever precisely his earlier godly sympathies may have lain, Mason became firmly attached to the sectarian interest in Herefordshire of which Rogers was the leading patron. He was added by Rogers and the locally controversial Independent preacher Richard Delamain to a commission from the Committee for Plundered Ministers* intended to authorise Delamain to be the principal Hereford minister.53Impostor Magnus, 21, 26. Mason joined Rogers, Delamain and John Herring* in a letter from the godly of Herefordshire to Oliver Cromwell* in May 1653, after the lord general’s dismissal of the Rump. They rejoiced that the ‘great and long desired reformation is near the birth’, and hailed Cromwell as ‘the instrument to translate the nation from oppression to liberty, from the hands of corrupt persons to the saints’.54Milton State Pprs. 92. Initially, Mason collaborated effectively with Silas Taylor, his colleague as sequestrator in Herefordshire. They seem to have worked together against the erratic former treasurer of the sequestration committee, Miles Hill, even though Hill, like Mason, was a religious radical.55E113/8, answer of Miles Hill. In August 1652, Mason and Taylor were able jointly to write to the commissioners in London an account of their reforming work in estate management, and to present a united front against their detractors.56CCC 604, 605. By April 1653, however, they had fallen out, their discord exacerbated by Mason’s trips back to Somerset on family and perhaps the state’s business.57CCC 621, 637, 1296. Mason seems to have instigated a pattern of allegations against Taylor that carried tedious echoes of his earlier difficulties with Pyne, in his accusations against the Herefordshire man of pocketing state monies and of Catholicism.58CCC 640, 641, 644.

The commissioners in London reacted to the renewed controversy over Mason by reaching for their well-tried strategies. Inevitably, Mason’s attacks on Taylor provoked counter-claims against him by his colleague. The testimony of Mason’s local patron, Wroth Rogers, was not enough to stave off his suspension in July 1653, only a few short months after they both joined with the Herefordshire saints in their laudatory address to Cromwell. Again, there were the depositions in London by friends and enemies of Mason and Taylor. Taylor resorted to print, identifying the religious interest that bound together Mason, Rogers and Delamain, and relating how Mason had ‘scandalously abused’ Silas Taylor by articles against him in Haberdashers’ Hall, where witnesses had perjured themselves.59Impostor Magnus, 21, 26. In November, both men were acquitted of the charges against each other which each had encouraged.60CCC 643-4, 645, 646, 648, 649, 651, 653, 655, 657, 659, 661. No sooner was Mason restored to office, however, but he found himself embroiled yet again in a dispute, this time with the commissioners over his accounts, which his London employers considered unsatisfactory. In March 1654, they found fault with the scale of his expenses for his Somerset work, and threatened his suspension again, but Mason responded with a statement of the losses he had incurred in the state’s service, which he put at £200, not including the costs of his defence in the disputes with Pyne and Taylor.61CCC 678, 694-5. In September 1654, the wrangling between Mason and the commissioners was continuing, but it did not affect Mason's determination again to appear for the godly interest in Herefordshire, on this occasion to denounce those ‘papists, malignants and men actually in arms for the late king’ who had appeared at the hustings for seats in the first Protectorate Parliament.62SP18/74/110.

In February 1655, the commissioners for compounding decided to levy fines of over £600 on Mason for his non-compliance. He petitioned the lord protector in response, citing his expenses of £800 in raising his troop of horse back in 1642.63CCC 718, 719-20, This may have been effective as a strategy for getting the London administrators off his back. The royalist uprisings in the spring of 1655, which provoked the rule of the major-generals, enabled Wrother Rogers, Mason and their confederates to strengthen their hold on Herefordshire by virtue of their work as commissioners under Major-general James Berry*. In the elections of July 1656 for the second of the Cromwellian Parliaments, Mason was a loyal associate of Rogers, a manipulative sheriff who did his best to ensure that the military, godly interest was well represented at Westminster. Mason was himself returned as one of the four knights of the shire, with Berry representing a counter-balance against Bennet Hoskins* and Edward Harley*, who stood for an older, gentry interest in the county.64C219/45/2. His nomination in August as a commissioner for ejecting scandalous ministers in Herefordshire, after he had been passed over for that role in 1654, during his difficulties with the London commissioners, may be taken as evidence that his election was not disapproved of by the lord protector’s council.65CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 72.

Mason’s first committee appointment (23 Sept.) was to the important body on Irish affairs, to which he was named with his local associate, Rogers.66CJ vii. 427a. Wine retailing, excise arrears and legal reform, the subjects of Mason’s committees in October, suggest that he was a working Member with more of an interest in practicalities than in high politics.67CJ vii. 436b, 440a, 441b. His nomination for the committee on improving revenue from papists’ estates was doubtless prompted by his experience as a sequestrator in two counties. It is hard to assess his view on the Naylor affair. He was named to the initial committee (31 Oct.) on James Naylor’s outrageous entry to Bristol, and was the only Herefordshire representative to serve. Wroth Rogers had flirted with Quakerism, and James Berry (who opted to sit for Worcestershire rather than Herefordshire) had declared himself sympathetic to Quakers earlier in the year. It seems likely, therefore, that with these two associates, Mason was among the more sympathetic Members.68CJ vii. 444a, 448a. A number of Mason’s nominations to committees were evidently prompted by his regional interests. Among these were the bodies formed to settle Gloucester cathedral on the corporation of that city (22 Nov.), to secure lands in Ireland due as reparations for the war losses of Gloucester (19 Feb 1657), to allow the Nevill family to sell lands (10 Mar.), and to provide maintenance for Margaret Somerset, countess of Worcester.69CJ vii. 457a, 494a, 501a, 529b. In this last case, the sympathy of the House was probably an extension of the interest in her husband, Edward Somerset, the 6th earl, shown by Oliver Cromwell, who had been granted most of the Somerset family estates. Mason’s appearance on this committee suggests he may have been regarded as loyal to the Cromwellian household.70Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 405; Oxford DNB, ‘Edward Somerset, 2nd marquess of Worcester’.

On 22 November 1656, a servant of Mason’s was arrested for debt. The House took exception to what it regarded as a breach of privilege, and the servant’s creditor was brought to the bar and made to seek forgiveness before being released from custody.71CJ vii. 457b, 458b. Mason served once as a teller, on 10 February 1657, when with Richard Hampden he told successfully for the yeas (82 votes to 53) on a motion that Members should again debate a bill confirming that taxation ought only to be levied by consent in Parliament.72CJ vii. 489a. On 27 March and 7 April, Mason was part of the delegation that waited on the lord protector to discuss the Humble Petition and Advice. He was in the company of many ‘kinglings’, and this justifies his inclusion in the list of those who voted in favour of offering the crown to Cromwell on 25 March; it is noticeable that he was not in the company of Wroth Rogers in these discussions.73CJ vii. 514a, 521a; Narrative of the Late Parliament, 22. An anonymous critic dismissed him as ‘a poor inconsiderable creature that says his lord must bestow some good place upon him or else he cannot serve him’.74Narrative of the Late Parliament, 14. On 28 May, Mason urged that every captain in the fleet should be rewarded with a medal worth £10 for their part in the Spanish war, but ‘this motion relished not’ and was dropped.75Burton’s Diary, ii. 145. Before this session of the Parliament came to an end, Mason joined in the large committee on regulating building in the London suburbs, a device to raise money for the cash-strapped protectorate. His competent if unspectacular performance in this session may have earned him his place on the committee of privileges when the House reassembled in January 1658, but that proved to be the end of his parliamentary career rather than the milestone it might have become had the session not been so short.76CJ vii. 532a, 580b.

Back in Herefordshire, Mason sought to exercise the patronage usually associated with landed proprietors. In January 1656, he tried to reach an accommodation with the elderly Sir Robert Harley* over presentation rights in the adjacent parishes of Aylton and Pixley. As the new proprietor of Pixley, Mason held the right to present to the living, and tried to persuade Harley of the merits of a deal where the two men would present alternately. When it was reported to Edward Harley a few months later that Mason’s efforts to place two ministers had failed, it was in a tone that suggested that it might have been possible for Mason and the Harleys to co-operate. Unlike John Herring, Mason was probably sympathetic towards the comparatively inclusive and broad Cromwellian state church.77Brampton Bryan MSS, 84: Mason to Sir Robert Harley, 24 Jan. 1656; Add. 70083, no. 59. Like Cromwell himself, he had moved away from his religious radicalism.

Thereafter, Mason settled down as a minor landed gentleman on his Pixley estate. He kept this at the Restoration of the monarchy, but lost all his offices of state. In July 1663, he successfully acquired his quietus for his work as a sequestrator, his abandonment of his past probably made easier by his brother, Sir William Mason, a recipient of the royal bounty.78CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 203, 223, 247, 276; CTB i. 546, 610. The following year he visited his kinsman, John Dodington, in the Tower, in the company of Sir Francis Dodington. Dodington was incarcerated for having allegedly disparaged the king, and his treatment suggests that he had been considered a significant threat. Even so, Dodington protested his past services to the monarchy, and Mason’s parliamentarian critics in Somerset would have been interested to see him in these circumstances in the company of the notorious royalist commander, whose acquaintance he had denied in 1650.79CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 203, 204, 220, 249, 287, 433, 461, 466, 472, 477, 547, 554. Mason made his will in 1665, acknowledging his two graduate brothers, but no others, and counting among his friends the royalist Sir Edward Hopton†, who had briefly sat for Hereford in 1661. In a further indication that he had completely abandoned his radical past, he made William Gregory†, who in 1679 was to become Speaker, the overseer of his will; in 1656 Gregory had demanded the poll against Mason at the county election.80PROB11/318/693; Add. 70007, f. 80; HP Commons 1660-1690. He must have died soon after making his will, but the place of his burial has not been discovered. None of his descendants is known to have sat in later Parliaments.