BARTON, Nathaniel (c.1616-72), of Derby, Derbys.

Barton’s father, a minor Shropshire clergyman, was probably the Edmund Barton of Oxfordshire who had been admitted at Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1594.24Al. Ox. In his youth, Barton witnessed his father ‘several times suffering under episcopal tyranny’ – presumably a reference to harassment by the Laudian church authorities – and yet this did not deter him from pursuing his own career in the ministry.25N. Barton, The Representation or Defence of Collonel Nathaniell Barton (1654), 3. Similarly, although ‘principled against episcopacy, as it was stated and exercised in this nation’, he had no insuperable objection to ordination by bishops and was to take holy orders from the bishop of Lichfield ‘not long before the wars broke forth in England’.26Barton, Representation, 3, 4. In 1639, he married a Derbyshire woman, and early in 1642 he referred to himself as ‘minister of Foremark’ – a parish lying between Derby and Burton-upon-Trent.27Longstone par. reg.; PA, Main Pprs. 26 Feb. 1642, f. 101. Either Barton had replaced the curate who had been installed in the parish in 1639 – one Nicholas Folkingham – or he was chaplain to Foremark’s leading resident, the puritan knight Sir Thomas Burdett.28Derbys. RO, D1232/O/20; Clergy of the C of E database; J.T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict (1988), 10.

In February 1642, Barton and Burdett were among the signatories to the county’s petition to the Commons calling for tougher measures against papists and the advancement of the ‘blessed work of reformation’.29PA, Main Pprs. 26 Feb. 1642, f. 101. And during that summer, Barton emerged (or so he later claimed) as one of the most zealous of the Derbyshire parliamentarian interest.

Even before the [king’s] standard was set up at Nottingham, I was so far observed to own and declare for the Parliament that I had notice given me that some of the then intended enemies in these parts did threaten to hew me in pieces. It is well known how industrious I was both to procure monies to be lent on the propositions [for maintaining the earl of Essex’s army] and [to] encourage men to engage in the service at the very first.30Barton, Representation, 11.

His decision to side with Parliament was evidently linked to his godly religious sympathies. He objected to the ‘pomp and interest’ of episcopacy and condoned ‘godly and conscientious Protestants’ absenting themselves from their parish church when ‘there was nothing there but common prayer-book service, read by some ignorant, sottish and drunken fellows (for ministers I cannot call them)’.31Barton, Representation, 4, 6. His father evidently shared his godly convictions, signing the 1648 declaration of Shropshire’s ministers in support of the Covenant and a Presbyterian church settlement.32A Testimony of the Ministers in the Province of Salop (1648), 5 (E.442.18).

With the outbreak of civil war in 1642, Barton put his clerical career on hold and joined Captain Thomas Sanders’s* troop in the regiment of horse that Sir John Gell raised that autumn to defend Derbyshire against the royalists: ‘England’s necessity and this county’s necessity did put a sword into my hands and called me at first to act in some civil capacities’.33Derbys. RO, D1232/O/70; Barton, Representation, 7. Yet despite exchanging his clerical habit for a buff coat, he continued to preach. Indeed, he later claimed that ‘when ... I was in motion as a soldier in England’s service, I have preached in very many, if not most, counties in England ... and this not to oppose but to second the faithful ministers of the Gospel where ere I came’.34Barton, Representation, 2. He had been commissioned as a captain of horse by July 1643, when he and another ‘martial minister’ and their troops spoiled Peterborough cathedral of a satin table cloth and other items that previous parliamentarian raiding parties had missed.35Gunton, Hist. of the Church of Peterborough ed. Patrick, 334. Shortly afterwards, he and Sanders (by now a lieutenant-colonel) were captured when the parliamentarian forces defending Burton-upon-Trent were overrun by the queen’s army; but they were quickly exchanged.36Certaine Informations no. 27 (17-24 July 1643), 212 (E.61.19); Barton, Representation, 11.

Barton’s martial skills evidently impressed Sanders (as they did Sir William Brereton* also), who made him a captain in the regiment of horse that he raised in Derbyshire late in 1643.37Infra, ‘Thomas Sanders’; Barton, Representation, 11; Brereton Letter Bks. i. 79. However, in order not to offend the proud and prickly Sir John Gell, Sanders was obliged to cede Gell nominal command and to content himself with the rank of major rather than colonel. Inevitably, this confused arrangement proved unworkable, and by 1645 the county’s political and military leaders had begun to divide into rival factions under Gell and Sanders. It was probably at some point during the first half of 1645 that Barton joined Daniel Watson* and other Derbyshire officers in petitioning the Committee of Both Kingdoms*, requesting that the ‘honest, godly, valiant and faithful’ Sanders be made their colonel and commander.38Derbys. RO, D1232/O/70.

Barton seems to have retained Gell’s trust longer than Sanders did, but Sir John’s high-handed proceedings against Sanders and his officers eventually proved too much for him.39Derbys. RO, D1232/O/20; Brereton Letter Bks. i. 96, 233. By September 1645, he had quit Derbyshire – allegedly because Gell had forced him out – and, with Sanders’s approval, he placed himself at the service of Sir Thomas Fairfax*, the commander of the New Model army.40Derbys. RO, D1232/O/46, 56, 65; D258/12/16, pp. 41-2; Barton, Representation, 12. Through the ‘favourable mediation’ of Oliver Cromwell*, Barton and his troop were incorporated into the New Model regiment of horse under Colonel Richard Graves.41Barton, Representation, 12; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 103. Shortly after joining the New Model, Barton gave evidence against the Gells to the Committee for Examinations*.42Derbys. RO, D258/12/16, pp. 41-2. The Gell-Sanders rivalry had a national political dimension, with Sanders and Barton having ‘a great dependence’ on the Fairfaxes and other Independent grandees, and the Gells relying on Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, who headed the Presbyterian faction at Westminster.43Infra, ‘Thomas Sanders’; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/14, 40. Nevertheless, allegations by the Gells that Sanders and his captains were separatists and ‘that they go about to suppress the gentry’ were entirely groundless.44Derbys. RO, D1232/O/25. Similarly, it was Gell’s ‘pride and policy’ that his opponents primarily objected to, not his politics or religion.45Derbys. RO, D1232/O/32.

Barton later claimed that his service in the New Model ‘was to me a kind of recreation’ in comparison with the hard usage he had suffered in Derbyshire.46Barton, Representation, 12. He also enjoyed the confidence of Fairfax, Cromwell and Henry Ireton* – men who could (and did) do much to advance his military and political career. Nevertheless, on several occasions during 1646 he remarked wistfully to Sanders that he would rather serve under him anywhere than under Graves.47Derbys. RO, D1232/O/65, 67. When Graves, a Presbyterian, quit his command in June 1647, Barton became major of the regiment under the future regicide Colonel Adrian Scrope*.48Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 107. Though lampooned as a coward by the army’s opponents, Barton acquitted himself well during the second civil war.49A Case for the City Spectacles (1648), 11 (E.422.7). At the battle of St Fagans, in May 1648, he commanded the left wing of the parliamentarian horse, winning the gratitude of Cromwell for his role in the victory.50Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 107; Fairfax Corresp. ed. Bell, i. 23; Barton, Representation, 12. And in the aftermath of the battle of Preston in August, he and his men helped to maintain pressure on the retreating Scots after the death of Colonel Francis Thornhagh*.51Barton, Representation, 12-13.

In December 1648 Barton attended the deliberations of the council of officers at Whitehall, where he argued that the army should focus on the programme laid out in the army’s November Remonstrance (drafted by Ireton), ‘that justice may be executed [upon the king]... I shall desire that the merit of the Remonstrance may be considered and no other thing offered that may intermingle’.52Clarke Pprs. ii. 103. His committee appointments on the council suggest that he favoured bringing the king to trial – indeed, it was reported that he and Sanders ‘censure the king deeply’ – while his voting pattern indicates that he, like Ireton and other ‘conservative’ officers, was willing to let Parliament have the final word in religious and civil matters, contrary to the Levellers’ insistence that toleration and other key liberties were inalienable rights and should therefore be beyond the power of Parliament to alter or circumscribe.53Derbys. RO, D3287/43/27/35; Clarke Pprs. ii. 132, 156, 190, 270; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 394; B. Taft, ‘Voting lists of the council of officers, Dec. 1648’, BIHR lii. 147, 148, 149. The Leveller leader John Lilburne identified Barton as one of Ireton’s leading allies on the council.54J. Lilburne, The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England (1649), 39, 74 (E.567.1). And Barton sank even lower in the estimation of ‘the Levelling party’ when he and Scrope’s officers tried to prevent their men joining the Leveller-inspired army mutinies in the spring of 1649.55A Full Narrative of All the Proceedings Between His Excellency the Lord Fairfax and the Mutineers (1649), 3 (E.555.27); Barton, Representation, 13; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 109-10. On 19 May, four days after the mutineers were ‘seasonably suppressed’ at Burford, Barton was created a bachelor of divinity at Oxford in the presence of Fairfax, Cromwell and their officers.56Wood, Fasti, ii. 146. After Burford, Scrope’s soldiers were either disbanded or sent to Ireland.57Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 114. Cromwell apparently offered Barton a regiment of horse in the expeditionary force to Ireland, but Barton, ‘being not capable of going at that time’, decided to retire from the army.58Barton, Representation, 13.

Barton was a major figure in Derbyshire under the Rump. On 2 March 1650, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the county’s militia forces, with the honorary rank of colonel, and a week later (9 Mar.) he was promoted to the Derbyshire bench.59C231/6, p. 180; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 504; Barton, Representation, 13; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 395. According to Barton, Ireton himself ‘was pleased to move me a year before [to serve as a magistrate], yet for a time I waived it and had not undertaken to act in that capacity had there not been very few (though in commission) who then would act as justices in this county’.60Barton, Representation, 13. Barton had the opportunity to combine his roles as preacher and magistrate in 1650, when the Quaker evangelist George Fox declaimed against one of his sermons and was subsequently imprisoned by Barton and Gervase Bennett* for blasphemy.61J. Camm, An Answer to a Book which Samuel Eaton put up to the Parliament (1654), 55 (E.735.9); Jnl. of George Fox, i. 2. Barton was opposed not only to the Quakers but also, it seems, to the Baptists. He approved of Richard Baxter’s 1651 tract in support of infant baptism, Plain Scripture Proof, buying up many copies and circulating them among his friends. However, according to one of Baxter’s correspondents, Barton ‘in divers things differs from us’.62Cal. Corresp. Richard Baxter ed. N. H. Keeble, G. F. Nuttall (Oxford, 1991), i. 79. The likelihood is that Barton was an ‘orthodox’ and non-separating Congregationalist who was committed to the maintenance of a publicly-maintained, parish-based ministry. By 1652, he was preaching the ‘Friday lecture’ at Derby, for which the corporation paid him a stipend of £20 a year.63Derby Local Studies Lib. DBR/E/3, Derby Chamberlains’ Accts. 1652-92, unfol. And in 1654, he was appointed an ejector for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.64A. and O.

Barton made a temporary return to active military duty in 1651, when he served under Sanders against the invading Scots and commanded a force of dragoons at the battle of Worcester.65Barton, Representation, 13; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 13; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 283-4. His arrears of army pay by the early 1650s were sufficient for him to purchase (using debentures and public faith bills) a share of several former crown, church and forfeited estates.66E113/11, unfol.; E121/4/6, 8, 101; E121/5/1/2, 18; C54/3602/8; C54/3677/30; C54/3806/5; C 54/3819/9; C54/3986/13; Gentles, ‘Debentures Market’, 250. The dissolution of the Rump by the army in April 1653, which confirmed Cromwell as the most powerful man in the three kingdoms, heralded Barton’s emergence onto the national political stage. If Barton can be credited, he was Cromwell’s personal choice as one of the two Members to represent Derbyshire in the Nominated Assembly (the other Member was Barton’s local ally Gervase Bennett).67Barton, Representation, 14. Barton was named to seven committees in this Parliament, including those to consider ‘the propriety of incumbents in tithes’ (19 July), ‘for the business of the law’ (20 July) and for relieving the poor and regulating the commission of the peace (20 July).68CJ vii. 285a, 286b, 287a, 287b, 290a, 306b, 328a. On 12 August, he made a report from this last committee concerning additions to the county assessment commissions.69CJ vii. 299b.

Three of Barton’s five tellerships in the Nominated Parliament are particularly revealing of his political alignment in the House.70CJ vii. 304b, 330b, 336b, 345b, 351b. On 19 August 1653, he was a minority teller with Alderman Robert Tichborne in favour of adjourning a debate on legal reform and thus forestalling the appointment of a committee for re-casting the law ‘into a new body’.71CJ vii. 304b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 269. Then on 6 October, he was a minority teller with William Spence against a motion for an inquiry into prisoners held for criminal causes – which was evidently an attempt by John Lilburne’s friends at Westminster to challenge the legal basis of Parliament’s 27 August order for continuing his imprisonment.72CJ vii. 330b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 258. And on 20 October, Barton was a minority teller with Henry King in favour of giving a second reading to a bill for abolishing the Rump’s Engagement against monarchy and the House of Lords.73CJ vii. 336b. There were ‘many worthy witnesses’, he would claim the following year, ‘of my constant and resolute opposing those dangerous principles that were then at work. It is well known that when the vote for the new body of the law was passed in the affirmative, I ... did make an open protest against it’.74Barton, Representation, 14. Not without reason did those MPs committed to wholesale legal reform and the abolition of tithes refer to Barton, Matthews, Tichborne and their allies as of ‘a contrary spirit and principle’ to ‘the Saints’ and ‘purposely chosen and packed together ... to hinder the honest party in the House’.75A Faithfull Searching Home Word (1659), 16 (E.774.1). Nevertheless, Barton’s politics were popular with enough of his fellow Members to secure his election on 1 November to the seventh council of state (and thus automatic appointment to the eighth), where he was joined by Bennett.76CJ vii. 344a, b. Barton attended 19 of the council’s 28 sessions and was named to several conciliar committees.77CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. xxxvi, 229, 237, 257, 262, 268. On at least eight occasions he was paired with Bennett as to minor items of council business.78CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 229, 231, 236, 237, 241, 251, 252, 256, 272.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Barton stood as a candidate for one of the four Derbyshire county seats. He claimed that after the electoral writ had been sent down, ‘divers came to me to know whether I would stand ... There were intimations given from all parts of the country [i.e. county] of a desire that I should be one’. On election day, ‘the generality’ of the county’s voters returned him ‘in the first place’. However, one of the defeated candidates, Sir Samuel Sleigh*, petitioned the House against Barton’s return on the grounds that he was still in holy orders and therefore disqualified from sitting in the Commons.79Supra, ‘Derbyshire’; Barton, Representation, 1-2, 14; CJ vii. 375a. In response, Barton published a pamphlet, The Representation or Defence of Colonell Nathaniell Barton, highlighting his service in Parliament’s cause and subtly playing up his past intimacy with the Protector.80Barton, Representation. He admitted that he was a public lecturer at Derby (though he denied receiving any stipend for his pains), and that ‘if ever I be so happy as to see a church government according to the word of God settled in this nation, I hope I shall then soon discover which service [military or clerical] I most esteem and prefer’.81Barton, Representation, 2, 14-15. As to his being in holy orders, he argued that since episcopal ordination was no longer ‘in force by present laws and ordinances, but in some sort null, how can use be made of orders against me?’82Barton, Representation, 3-5. Like his old enemy Lilburne, however, he asked for justice on more emotive grounds than the mere letter of the law.

I bless the Lord I can say it from my heart that out of my affection to my native country and to the welfare of God’s people in this nation, I have worn a sword and answered divers calls to secular employments ... Out of my well-wishes to the good people of this nation I came into this Parliament and find a law objected against me ... I look upon you as, and know you to be, a Christian Parliament. And I am confident you will look upon me not as an alien or captive, but as a free-born Englishman and one that hath proved himself no less. And therefore I hope I need no naturalisation that may make me capable of having my share in England’s immunities and freedoms and of wearing the favour of my country’s confidence and good affections of me. If I am a transgressor it is for, and not against, the public interest of this nation.83Barton, Representation, 15.

The House referred Barton’s case to the committee of privileges, which was still considering the matter when Parliament was dissolved in January 1655.84CJ vii. 375a.

Barton’s Representation was the work of a man who seems to have been broadly sympathetic towards the Cromwellian settlement. There is no evidence that he joined Sanders in the autumn of 1654 in agitating against the protectorate as a betrayal of the ‘good old cause’.85Infra, ‘Thomas Sanders’. The establishment of the rule of the major-generals, however, seems to have pushed Barton closer to Sanders’s view that the protectorate was incompatible with the principles of parliamentary sovereignty and the ‘fundamental rights and freedoms of the Commonwealth’.86The Petition of Several Colonels of the Army (1654, 669 f.19.21); B. Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army: causes, character, and results of military opposition to Cromwell’s protectorate’, HLQ xlii. 26-8. In November 1655, Major General Edward Whalley* reported to Secretary John Thurloe* that Sanders refused to acknowledge his authority: ‘he is a good man, but too much over-persuaded by Colonel Barton, who preached an angry sermon the day before I came to Derby, but was very cautious [not to incriminate himself]’.87TSP iv. 241.

The turn away from military rule in 1657 towards more traditional constitutional forms apparently did little to restore trust between Barton and the protectoral government. He does not appear to have stood for election to the second or third Cromwellian Parliaments, and he received no appointments between April 1654 and the fall of the protectorate five years later. By 1658, he was apparently pursuing his calling as a minister at Tutbury, in Staffordshire.88Derby Local Studies Lib. Deeds, no. 2547. It was not until after the restoration of the Rump in May 1659 that he again enjoyed the favour of England’s governors. In July, the House agreed to Sanders’s request that Barton serve as his major, and a few weeks later it added him to the Staffordshire militia commission.89CJ vii. 709b, 734a. The suddenness of his return to military service took him by surprise. ‘I scare yet know where I am’, he wrote to Sanders from Westminster, ‘having been so long a stranger to affairs here’.90CJ vii. 723a; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/81.

Barton’s letters to Sanders in the summer of 1659 are full of concern at the threat of royalist uprisings and the need to tighten security in Derbyshire.91Derbys. RO, D1232/O/80-3, 85-6. But when news of Sir George Boothe’s* rebellion, and of Presbyterian support for it, reached Westminster early in August, he was even more perturbed that the conflict had divided the Lord’s people: ‘let the success go which way it will, I fear the gospel will be a sufferer by it, for I have much wondered that ever any godly Presbyterian ministers should ever expect or have reason to believe that the cavalier party should forget their old hatred’.92Derbys. RO, D1232/O/86. On 7 August, the council of state ordered that blank commissions be sent to Barton for raising four troops of volunteer horse and foot in Derbyshire and Straffordshire; and by mid-August, he had joined Sanders in Derby, where the two men helped to head off a rising in support of the rebels.93SP28/226, unfol.; Bodl. Rawl. C.179, p. 308; The Copy of a Letter from an Officer under the Lord Lambert (1659), 2-3 (E.995.3); CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 563. The moderation that the two men showed in dispersing the insurgents led to accusations of complicity with Boothe.94Derbys. RO, D1232/O/89, 102. An informer for the commissioners for sequestrations in London claimed that there was ‘more than [a] suspicion that Colonel Sanders and Major Barton were traitors in neglecting their duties at the breaking out of the rebellion at Derby’.95CCC 755. Sanders and Barton compounded their offence in the eyes of many in the army when they joined John Okey*, Francis Hacker* and other officers in denouncing a petition that John Lambert’s* forces sent to Parliament in September, demanding, among other things, their colonel’s promotion to major-general and the establishment of a senate as a check upon the legislative.96Supra, ‘John Lambert’; Baker, Chronicle, 655-6; Clarke Pprs. v. 312; Mayers, 1659, 244, 246; D.P. Massarella, ‘The Politics of the Army 1647-60’ (York Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1977), 609.

Sanders and Barton were among a group of senior officers that opposed the army’s dissolution of the restored Rump in mid-October 1659 – and later that month, they and about 15 other officers were removed from their commands for refusing to subscribe an ‘engagement’ pledging loyalty to Lambert and his confederates.97Declaration of the Officers of the Army Opened, 29; Clarke Pprs. iv. 62; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 148. In a petition to General Charles Fleetwood* on 1 November, nine of the ejected officers, including Barton, Sanders, Okey, Matthew Alured* and Harbert Morley*, denounced the army’s proceedings. It had never been part of the Good Old Cause, they argued, ‘to wrest all power and authority out of the hands of the people’s representatives in Parliament and to fix it in the army’. They insisted that all standing forces should be subordinate to Parliament and demanded the holding of new elections on as broad a franchise ‘as the safety of the cause will bear’.98Add. 4165, ff. 38-42; A True Narrative of the Proceedings in Parliament (1659), 55-62 (E.1010.24); TSP vii. 771-4; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 618-21.

The committee of safety (the interim government set up by the army in October 1659) evidently regarded Sanders and Barton as a security threat, for at some point in November or December they were imprisoned at Coventry.99CJ vii. 797b. Late in December, the two men joined Colonel Francis Hacker* in seizing Coventry and securing the north midlands for the re-restored Rump.100Supra, ‘Francis Hacker’; Mercurius Politicus no. 601 (29 Dec. 1659-5 Jan. 1660), 998-9 (E.773.39); Z. Grey, An Impartial Examination of the Fourth Vol. of Mr Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1739), 136-7; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 289; Beats, ‘Derbys.’, 357-9. Barton was then ordered to Stafford, where he helped Thomas Crompton* to disband local units they deemed disaffected.101CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 298-9; HMC Leyborne-Popham, 138-9. Barton was also involved in purging Derbyshire’s parliamentary committees of Lambert’s supporters and in settling its militia forces.102St. 185, f. 151; Derbys. RO, D1232/O/104; CCC 775. With the approval of General George Monck*, the Rump gave Sanders a new regiment of horse and restored Barton as his major.103CJ vii. 804a, 815a, 839a; A Letter Sent from General Monck (1660), 4 (E.1013.6); Clarke Pprs. iv. 240-1, 254, 255; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 289-90. Sanders and Barton had joined Monck in London by 10 February 1660, when, ‘as two officers that very much inclined to admission of the secluded Members’, they were consulted by the general about whether to pressure the Rump into issuing writs for new elections. The two men signed a letter to the Rump from Monck and his officers on 11 February, complaining that Lambert, Vane and their allies continued to enjoy office or influence, urging restrictions on religious toleration and demanding recruiter elections.104Baker, Chronicle, 685, 686, 689; Clarke Pprs. iv. 275; R. Hutton, The Restoration, 93; Massarella, ‘Politics of the Army’, 695-7.

Despite his association with Monck and apparent support for measures that made a return to monarchy almost inevitable, Barton did not profit from the Restoration. He lost all his offices, military as well as civil, and was forced to relinquish the crown and church property he had acquired during the 1650s – much to his resentment, it was reported.105E113/11, unfol.; Calamy Revised, 33. By 1661, he was said to have ‘thrust himself into the chapelry of Cauldwell and there exercised his bad parts’ – although, in fact, he had probably been presented to the benefice by Sanders, whose Derbyshire estate lay in and around Cauldwell.106Derbys. RO, D1232/O/100; Calamy Revised, 33. Predictably, Barton was ejected from his living in 1662, but he continued to preach at Cauldwell and at Sanders’s house at Little Ireton.107Calamy Revised, 33. In 1667, Sanders settled lands upon ‘Nathaniel Barton of Cauldwell, clerk’ and four other gentlement to hold in trust for his children.108Derby Local Studies Lib. Deeds, no. 2505.

Barton died late in 1672 and was buried at Longstone on 26 December.109Longstone par. reg. In his will, he made bequests totalling over £850, including £5 to his fellow ejected ministers, and named his ‘noble friends’ Thomas Sanders and his son among his supervisors. His personal estate was inventoried at £437.110Staffs. RO, B/C/11, will of Nathaniel Barton, 1673. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.