CHEEKE, Edward (d. 1674), of Stanton St Gabriel, Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset.

Edward Cheeke was one of a small group of Dorset MPs (including James Dewy I*, Edward Butler* and James Baker*), which rose to prominence during the interregnum, only to return to obscurity after the Restoration. His genealogy is obscure. There were landowners of that name in the Isle of Wight and Somerset, and numerous branches of the Cheeke or Chicke family in the Dorset parishes of Hermitage, Buckland, Steeple and Church Knowle.14Vis. Hants. 1686 (Harl. Soc. n.s. x), 100-1; CCAM, 741; Dorset RO, Buckland, Church Knowle, Hermitage and Steeple par. reg.; PROB11/196/495. Edward Cheeke may even have been the son of Robert Cheeke, rector of Dorchester free school and, from 1617, rector of All Saints church in the same town.15Whiteway Diary, 174. Edward Cheeke was certainly well-established in Dorset by 1640, when he entered a legal dispute with the powerful Bond family over the title of a ninety-nine-year lease of Stanton St Gabriel in the parish of Whitchurch Canonicorum, which he had purchased in the previous year.16C2/ChasI/C37/50. He was listed as resident at ‘Gabriells’ in the spring of 1642, when he signed the Protestation.17Dorset Protestation Returns, 102. During the civil wars Cheeke’s activities are equally obscure. He apparently had no dealings with the Dorset county committee or the county treasurer in this period, and did not share in the reallocation of sequestered estates. He may have been the Cheeke who lent £20 to the garrison at the siege of Lyme Regis in 1644, and as a result had his property seized by the royalist besiegers.18Bayley, Dorset, 130.

The purge of the Commons in December 1648 and the execution of the king in January 1649 led many Dorset gentlemen to withdraw from county politics in the early years of the commonwealth. This power vacuum gave Cheeke his chance to enter local government for the first time. In April 1649 he first appeared on the assessment commission, and by November he had gained sufficient credit with the new government to be appointed commissioner for compounding in Dorset, with Baker, Dewy and others.19A. and O.; CCC 163. On 7 February 1650 Cheeke was appointed, with Dewy and the new county treasurer, Samuel Bull, as a member of the new sequestration commission for the county, a body which effectively usurped the power of the old county committee dominated by the major gentry.20CCC 171; Dorset Standing Cttee. ed. Mayo, pp. xxii-xxiii. Other appointments to local commissions followed. In 1653 and 1654 Cheeke was appointed to bodies to regulate poor prisoners, scandalous ministers and pirates.21A. and O.; C181/6, p. 33; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 275. In the summer of 1654 he was listed as a voter in the Dorset county elections to the first protectoral Parliament.22C219/44, unfol.

With the appointment of John Disbrowe* as major-general of Dorset in 1655, Cheeke acquired a sympathetic and influential patron. During the Penruddock rising in March, he was appointed as a militia commissioner, and in December he became a commissioner for securing the peace of the commonwealth in the county, working directly under Disbrowe.23TSP iv. 336-7. Cheeke went on to serve as commissioner for charitable uses in 1656, and for assessment in 1657, and by this time he had also become a justice of the peace, being criticized as a persecutor of Quakers.24Dorset RO, DC/LR/D2/1, unfol.; A. and O.; SP18/130, f. 46. Unlike Dewy and other allies of Disbrowe, Cheeke may have had Presbyterian sympathies, as in 1658 he was approached by the moderate Presbyterian MP, John Fitzjames*, who asked him to lend his support to a godly minister in a tithe dispute.25Alnwick, Northumberland MS 552, f. 49.

Cheeke may have owed his election as MP for Bridport in 1659 to his influence on local commissions and the proximity to the borough of his estate at Whitchurch: residents of the parish included various families (such as the Hodders, Orchards, Sampsons and Merryfeilds) who had interests in Bridport.26Dorset RO, Whitchurch Canonicorum par. reg. Cheeke’s recorded attendance at Westminster covered only three days (11-13 Apr.), and he was named to only three committees: two on petitions and one to draw up the impeachment proceedings against Major-general William Boteler*.27CJ vii. 634b, 637a, 637b. Although he was named to two further local commissions in July 1659 and January 1660, Cheeke seems to have had little more to do with the commonwealth regime, and he attracted none of the animosity directed towards men like James Dewy, who was forced to flee to the continent after Charles II’s return. By 1662 Cheeke had ceased to sit on the commission of the peace and was living in retirement at his comfortable nine-hearth house in Stanton St Gabriel.28Dorset Hearth Tax, 95. He died in 1674, and was buried at Whitchurch on 7 September.29Dorset RO, Whitchurch Canonicorum par. reg. There is no known will.