SPRING (SPRINGE), Sir William (1613-54), of Pakenham, Suff.

There were many Suffolk gentry families who became wealthy through the manufacture and sale of cloth but few had risen quite so spectacularly as the Springs. The founder of their fortunes was Thomas Spring, the wealthiest clothier in Lavenham during the fifteenth century, when the town, the centre of the Suffolk cloth trade, was among the richest in England. The family’s contributions to the rebuilding of the local church ensured that it remains what they intended it to be – perhaps the most impressive parish church in the kingdom. It was such munificence which lay behind the comment by the seventeenth-century antiquary, Matthias Candler, that the Springs ‘have all of them had the love of their country very much’.25Soc. Antiq. MS 667, p. 155. Within the lifetime of Thomas’s grandson, John, who was knighted by Henry VII and who bought the ex-monastic estates at Packenham, they could undoubtedly count themselves among the leading gentry families of the county.

Sir William Spring’s father, William Spring senior, inherited the family estates in 1601 at the age of 12, was knighted by James I in 1611 and sat for both Bury St Edmunds and Suffolk itself in the Parliaments of the 1620s. William Spring junior, born in 1613, was brought up in a fervently godly household. His father was closely associated with Richard Sibbes, the celebrated preacher of Gray’s Inn and master of St Catharine’s, Cambridge, who was one of the most eminent godly divines of the age. Sibbes had been brought up in the Pakenham area and when he died in 1635 he appointed Sir William Spring senior (together with Sir Nathaniel Rich† and Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston*) as overseers of his will.26PROB11/168/423; The Works of Richard Sibbes ed. A.B. Grosart (Edinburgh, 1862-4), i. p. cxxx; M. Devers, ‘Richard Sibbes’, (Ph.D. diss. Univ. of Cambridge, 1993), 59. The brief life of Sibbes prepared by the vicar of Thurston, Zachery Catlin, in 1652 was written for the son.27J.E.B. Mayor, ‘Material for a life of Dr. Richard Sibbes’, Antiquarian Communications, i, no. iv. 255. The endowment of two lectureships at Ixworth and Cockfield during the 1630s provides further evidence of the piety of Spring senior.28W. Prynne, Canterburies Doome (1646), 376. So does Sir William Spring’s choice of his old Cambridge college, Emmanuel, for the education of his son William. It is likely that William junior married Elizabeth, one of four daughters of Sir Hamon L’Estrange, soon after he left Cambridge (without a degree): the marriage had certainly taken place by the time his father died in March 1638. As Sir William lay dying at the house of Sir Thomas Gawdy at Redenham, William’s wife gave birth to a son, who was then brought to his grandfather’s bedside to be christened.29Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ii. 233. On Sir William’s death the following day, his son gained control of the family estates.30C142/697/21.

Spring stood for one of the Bury St Edmunds seats in October 1640 but was defeated in the face of the superior influence of the Jermyns.31Harl. 384, f. 191; Harl. 387, f. 127. Shortly before the Long Parliament assembled, he told Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, whom he was about to succeed as sheriff of Suffolk, that he hoped the new Parliament would have ‘a happy issue’.32Harl. 387, f. 127. The grant of a baronetcy towards the end of his year in office was perhaps partly a reward for his services and partly a ploy by the king to win his support.3347th PRO Dep. Kpr.’s Rep. 135; CB, ii. 129n.

Any hopes that the king had of receiving his support were soon to be disappointed, however, for it was Parliament which made most use of Spring’s services. In January 1642 he, along with the sheriff of Suffolk, and Maurice Barrowe*, were instructed by the Commons to search Hengrave Hall, the home of one of Spring’s Catholic neighbours, Elizabeth, Countess Rivers, who was suspected of stockpiling weapons.34CJ ii. 378b; PJ i. 73. Several weeks later, Spring was one of the persons to whom D’Ewes sent copies of a letter which Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston and the other Suffolk MPs had organised, warning the disaffected clothiers of the county that they should not march to London. D’Ewes hoped that Spring would convey this message to the villages around Pakenham.35PJ i. 266; CJ ii. 412b.

During the 1640s Spring distinguished himself as one of the most active of Parliament’s supporters in Suffolk. Following the outbreak of hostilities in 1642, he was appointed to all the local commissions established to prosecute the war against the king. He was a member of the Suffolk standing committee from its inception and became one of the more regular attenders of its meetings.36SP28/243; Harl. 163, ff. 277v-278; Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: Suff. co. cttee. to Brampton Gurdon, 7 July 1643; Eg. 2647, f. 72; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 244; Suff. ed. Everitt, 27, 69, 72, 73, 79, 139; Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE1/O2/1, f. 87v; Luke Letter Bks. 377; Suff. RO (Ipswich), HD36/2672/73. He was also among local gentlemen who met at Bury St Edmunds on 17 January 1643 to discuss how to organise the new Eastern Association and who then wrote to Parliament seeking further advice.37Harl. 164, ff. 277v-278; CJ ii. 956b. He had meanwhile been busy raising money for the cause. In late 1642, Spring, Thomas Chaplain* and Samuel Moody* collected over £7,500 for Parliament in money and plate lent by sympathetic inhabitants of the hundreds around Bury St Edmunds.38P. Fisher, For the…Cttees. for the Co. of Suffolke (1648), 6 (E.448.13). Spring took his subsequent appointment as an assessment commissioner seriously and in May 1643 was one of the two commissioners whom Parliament made responsible for the proper enforcement of the assessment ordinances within the county. For a time he acted as the high collector of assessments for Thredwastre, the hundred containing Pakenham.39A. and O.; Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE1/O2/1, f. 109; Fisher, Suffolke, 26. Initially, most of the money collected in Suffolk was paid to Moody, although Spring and Edmund Harvey II* were probably assisting him from as early as 1643. Both Spring and Harvey were among the county commissioners who audited Moody’s accounts in February 1644.40E113/11: answer of Christopher Smyth, 14 Jan. 1663, and answer of Edmund Harvey, 17 Nov. 1662; Suff. ed. Everitt, 43, 60; SP28/176: acct. of Samuel Moody, Nov. 1643-Jan. 1644, ff. 7, 19. Several days later, the collection system was reorganized, with the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†), the commander of the army of the Eastern Association, ordering that Moody, Spring and Harvey share the work as joint-treasurers and receivers-general.41Suff. ed. Everitt, 67. In January 1645, Spring was among the delegates from Suffolk who attended the meeting of the Eastern Association at Bury, where plans were laid to oppose the implementation of the New Model on the grounds that it would entail the disbandment of Manchester’s army and thus threaten the security of East Anglia.42Suff. ed. Everitt, 84. Afterwards he was one of those sent to lobby the Committee of Both Kingdoms.43SP28/243: Suff. co. cttee. to Edward Lelam, 21 Feb. 1645. Spring may have been even more active than usual during the summer of 1645 when the king’s army cut loose in the east midlands, too close for comfort to East Anglia, before being defeated at Naseby.44CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 527; SP28/243; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 38; Suff. RO (Ipswich), HD36/2781/51a.

For men like Spring, the war seemed a God-sent opportunity to promote the cause of ‘further reformation’ in religion. During 1644, Spring served on the commission which purged the ranks of the Suffolk clergy of any who were thought to be morally, theologically or politically suspect.45Suff. Cttees. for Scandalous Ministers ed. Holmes, 25. In November 1644 he was one of eight members of the county committee (others included Maurice Barrowe*, Francis Bacon* and Moody) who sent a letter to the Committee of Both Kingdoms reporting that the county defences were solid, but that their real worry was the growing numbers of ‘antinomians and anabaptists’. They requested that priority be given to the speedy completion of a religious settlement.46Univ. of Chicago, Bacon coll. 4552. In May 1645, Spring, Barrowe, Moody, Chaplin and William Heveningham* wrote to some of Suffolk constables to instruct them on their duties, urging that they enforce the use of the Directory of Worship and the observance of the monthly fasts.47Suff. RO (Ipswich), HD36/2781/45. All this activity appears to place Spring firmly in the camp of the religious Presbyterians.

At some point between early September and late October 1645, the corporation of Bury St Edmunds held a recruiter election returning Spring and Sir Thomas Barnardiston* (Sir Nathaniel’s son), both of whom had solidly supported the war against the king over the past three years.48Supra, ‘Bury St Edmunds’. For the Bury corporation, Spring was an obvious choice, being the head of a well-established county family with a seat in close proximity to the town. It was for those same reasons that his father had been elected for the constituency 20 years before. Sir William’s election was also probably as much a reflection of the Barnardiston interest as that of his colleague, for Sir Thomas’s father, Sir Nathaniel, was one of Spring’s closest friends. After Sir Nathaniel’s death in 1653, Spring contributed an elegy on the doctrine of bodily resurrection to the volume of tributes issued in memory of the man whom Spring thought had ‘faithfully in all employments served his country’.49Suffolks Tears (1653), 1-3. Moody and Chaplin, with whom Sir William had worked so closely in recent years, were probably among Spring’s strongest supporters on the Bury corporation at the time of the 1645 election.

The earliest evidence that Spring had taken his seat at Westminster dates from 25 February 1646, when he took the Solemn League and Covenant.50CJ iv. 454a. Spring’s record during 1646 may provide further evidence of his Presbyterian sympathies. In June of that year he was included on the committee to determine scandalous offences and he was also one of the commissioners named in the ordinance, approved two days later (5 June), for preventing impious persons taking communion.51CJ iv. 563a; A. and O. He presumably approved of the moves to sell off the estates of the bishops, for in November 1646 he was appointed the committee for settling any disputes arising from those sales.52A. and O. It also seems likely that he supported the attempts by Denzil Holles* to negotiate a deal to allow the Scots’ army to leave England. Thus, on 5 September 1646, he was included in the large delegation, headed by Holles, which the Commons sent to the City to raise the £200,000 needed to pay off the Scots.53CJ iv. 663a.

By the spring of 1647, Spring’s ill-health was interfering with his attendance at Westminster. In March 1647, Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston expressed concern to John Winthrop that their friend would not be ‘of long continuance’.54Winthrop Pprs. v. 145. It seems unlikely that Spring was in London during that summer’s crisis and on several occasions that autumn he was absent from the Commons with permission.55CJ v. 330a, 366b. He was apparently well enough in late June 1648 to be one of the four MPs sent back to Suffolk by the Commons when it was feared that the trouble in Essex, where the royalists were holding out at Colchester, might spread to Suffolk.56CJ v. 611a, 611b. But his poor health meant that he was still absent from London three months later.57CJ vi. 34b. The Commons order of late November 1648 that he, Brampton Gurdon* and Maurice Barrowe encourage the speedy collection of the assessments in Suffolk suggests that he was among those who hoped that the army could be paid off to prevent it taking power into its own hands.58CJ vi. 88a. That hope proved futile, and, less than a fortnight later, Spring was among those purged from the Commons by the army.59A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 28 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5). Although his name continued to appear on the commissions of the peace and the assessment commissions for Suffolk, Spring played no part in the work of the local commissions after the purge.60C193/13/3, f. 60v; Names of the Justices of Peace (1650), 53; Stowe 577, f. 49; C193/13/4, f. 92; Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/1-3; A. and O. In fact, he had not been performing these duties for several years, no doubt because of his attendance at Westminster and his ill-heath.61SP28/243; Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/1. It is therefore not entirely certain that his inactivity after 1648 was a display of principled disaffection. He seems to have spent these years living at Pakenham.62Essex RO, D/DQs.18, ff. 65, 70v, 83v, 114, 117, 129v.

In July 1654 Spring was one of 18 men who stood for the ten county seats which Suffolk had been allocated in the Instrument of Government. The 1,134 votes he received put him in second place, just behind Sir Thomas Barnardiston and just ahead of Sir Thomas Bedingfield*, who had resigned as a judge in 1649 rather than serve the republic.63Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755, f. 140v. The new Parliament assembled at Westminster in September 1654 but Spring was to play no known part in its proceedings. This was almost certainly due to his declining health. On 13 December 1654, his condition was sufficiently bad for him to add a codicil (making provision for his mother) to the will he had prepared over a year earlier.64PROB11/249/376. His death four days later probably occurred at Pakenham, where he was then buried.65CUL, Add. 3310, p. 74.

Spring left his wife large debts and a young family. The debts were dealt with by sales of some of his lands at Cockfield, while Lady Spring’s jointure was augmented to help fund the upbringing of the three surviving children.66PROB11/249/376. Most of the remaining estates passed to the elder son, William†, when he came of age in 1663. This younger Sir William, who had married a daughter of Sir Dudley North* in 1661, went on to sit for the county as a whig in the second and third Exclusion Parliaments. For three generations, therefore, successive Sir William Springs had sat in a total of seven Parliaments under James I, Charles I and Charles II. This tradition did not survive the death of the 2nd baronet in 1684, for although the male line continued until 1769, none of his descendants sat in Parliament.