BREWER, Andrew (1615-59), of St Saviour’s, Southwark, Surr.

The Brewers were an ancient Kentish family, whose ancestors had included William de Brewer, the lieutenant of Dover Castle during the reign of King John. In the fifteenth century they had transferred their principal seat from Mereworth to Smith’s Hall at West Farleigh, four miles to the west of Maidstone.8T. Philipott, Villare Cantianum (Lynn, 1776), 150; Hasted, Kent, v. 86, 140. Another branch of the family was based at Boxley and probably included Thomas Brewer (d. 1640), the Brownist publisher of the Pilgrim Press at Leiden.9Hasted, Kent, v. 140; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 628; R.J. Acheson, ‘Sion’s saint: John Turner of Sutton Valence’, Arch. Cant. xcix. 188; R.L. Greaves, ‘Thomas Brewer’, BDBR i. 95.

The future MP was born at West Farleigh in 1615. His parents, Richard and Anne Brewer, already had a son, Thomas, while a daughter, Frances, would follow three years later.10West Farleigh par. reg. Richard Brewer remarried in 1621 and had a further six sons with his second wife, Ann Notley.11Kent Par. Regs.: Marriages ed. W.P.W. Phillimore (1910), ii. 16; West Farleigh par. reg. At some point Richard Brewer entered royal service as a yeoman of the guard.12CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 620. His second son meanwhile pursued a career as a London grocer. Andrew Brewer must have been apprenticed to the Grocers’ Company, although the earliest evidence for his involvement in that Company dates only from 1638, when, as a freeman, he took on two apprentices of his own, John Betts from Littlebourne and Thomas Hilton from Faversham. Over the next 20 years he took on a further eight boys, including two of his half-brothers, Augustine and Richard, and, in 1655, Francis, son of the late Sir William Ellyot*.13Webb, Grocers’ Co. Apprenticeships, 8, 16, 18, 24, 39, 46, 61, 76, 94.

Nothing is known of what role, if any, Brewer played in the civil war in the 1640s, but the war conflict had a major impact on the Brewer family. In late May 1648 Brewer’s elder brother, Thomas, joined the rebellion against Parliament in Kent and was said to have served under Edward Hales† and Lord Goring (George Goring*) at Maidstone and Rochester.14CAM 1285. On 1 June the parliamentarian army under Sir Thomas Fairfax* sent to suppress the rebellion stormed Maidstone.15Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iv. 139-40, 140-2n. Since at the Restoration two of Brewer’s brothers, Thomas senior and Richard, claimed that their father had been murdered in his house fighting for the king in 1648, it seems likely that he was killed during this battle.16CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 246; 1661-2, p. 620. The administration on his estate was granted to the two eldest sons from his two marriages, Thomas senior and Thomas junior, on 29 August 1648.17Duncan, ‘Kentish administrations’, 42.

Andrew Brewer had lived in the parish of St Saviour, Southwark since at least 1642, when his short-lived eldest son, Andrew, was baptised and buried there.18St Saviour, Southwark par. reg. In 1651 he was appointed to his only known local office when he served for a year as the upper churchwarden of St Saviour’s.19LMA, P92/SAV/0668; P92/SAV/0671; P92/SAV/0672. This involved him in dealings with another of the parish officers, Samuel Hyland*.20LMA, P92/SAV/0669; P92/SAV/0667. However why Brewer stood as a candidate at Southwark in the elections for the 1659 Parliament is entirely unknown. In what was apparently a double return after a contest involving more than six candidates, Brewer was considered by some as having been elected, but he left no trace in the proceedings of that Parliament.

That was partly because he did not live to see its end. He was dead by the final week of March 1659, well before the election dispute came before the committee for privileges on 19 April.21Burton’s Diary, iv. 467. In his will, drafted four year earlier, he had stated that he wished to be buried close to his father in the churchyard at West Farleigh, but this was ignored.22PROB11/291/194. He was buried instead in St Saviour’s on 29 March. The entry in the parish register described him as ‘a Parliament man’.23St Saviour, Southwark par. reg. Brewer’s lands in Kent at East Farleigh, West Farleigh, Yalding, Boxley, Maidstone and Boughton under Blean were left to his eldest surviving son, another Andrew, while his second son, Thomas, received those at Cranbrook, the third son, Richard, those at Swanscombe and the fourth son, John, those at Ore and Guestling Green in Sussex.24PROB11/291/194. Andrew junior subsequently attended Lincoln College, Oxford and the Middle Temple, while Thomas was apprenticed to another London grocer, Edward Badgent.25Al. Ox.; M. Temple Admiss. ii. 172; MTR iii. 1259, 1260, 1314; Webb, Grocers’ Co. Apprenticeships, 24. Brewer’s nephew, John† (son of his elder brother, Thomas), became the recorder of New Romney and, as a whig, represented that town in the nine Parliaments between 1689 and 1708.