HARBY, Edward (c.1603-1674), of Adstone, Northants.

Harby’s family had moved from Cambridgeshire to Northamptonshire in the Tudor period, acquiring former monastic lands at Adstone – about eight miles south east of Northampton – in the mid-sixteenth century, which it was reported in the 1640s that Harby had ‘almost doubl’d by oppression’.26Vis. Northants. 84; Baker, Northants. ii. 18-19; Bridges, Northants. i. 230; J. Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), pt. 1, p. 91. The Harbys had been associated with the Drydens of nearby Canons Ashby for several generations, prompting the well-founded suspicion of the Laudian church authorities that the puritan convictions of Sir John Driden* were shared by Harby.27Supra, ‘Sir John Driden’; Bridges, Northants. i. 230; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 14. Driden and Harby were among the signatories to the indenture returning the godly pairing of John Crewe I and Driden’s nephew Sir Gilbert Pykeringe for Northamptonshire on 19 March 1640 in the elections to the Short Parliament.28C219/42, pt. 1, piece 159.

Having married the daughter of a prominent Higham Ferrers landowner and municipal officeholder, Harby set his sights that spring on the borough’s single parliamentary seat, provoking (perhaps deliberately) a contest with Sir Christopher Hatton*, who was duchy of Lancaster steward at Higham and a future royalist. On election day, 28 March, Hatton’s supporters – who included the head of the town’s leading family (the king’s chief military engineer, Thomas Rudd) and its Laudian vicar – polled 21 votes to Harby’s 13, and Hatton was duly returned. Harby’s defeat was all but inevitable, given his unwillingness to follow Hatton’s example and receive votes from the townsmen generally instead of exclusively from among the municipal officeholders.29Supra, ‘Higham Ferrers’; infra, ‘Sir Christopher Hatton’; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Rudd’; A. N. Groome, ‘Higham Ferrers in 1640: a midland market town on the eve of civil war’, Northants. Past and Present, ii. no. 5, 243-51. There is no evidence that Harby stood for election again that autumn.

In January 1642, Harby joined Richard Knightley* and other godly Northamptonshire gentlemen in a petition to the Commons, protesting at the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members and requesting (among other things) that papists be disarmed and imprisoned, the voting rights of ‘popish lords and bishops in the House of Peers’ be removed and that the kingdom’s militia ‘put into such hands as may be confided in’.30The Petition of the Knights, Gentlemen, and Freeholders of the County of North-hampton (1642), 3-5 (E.135.36). In August, he was appointed to the parliamentary committee for executing the militia ordinance in Northamptonshire, and later that month he donated silver plate worth £70 to Parliament’s war chest.31CJ ii. 711a; LJ v. 277a; SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol. His reasons for siding with Parliament were almost certainly linked to his godly religious convictions; although according to one royalist commentator, he was ‘a wet Saint; and once with a company, having drunk a cellar dry, bestrid the barrels and sung psalms’.32Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy, pt. 1, p. 91. He was one of the most active members of the Northamptonshire county committee during the civil war, which may well explain why his recommendation by the Commons on 30 December 1643 as county sheriff was not approved by the Lords.33SP28/121A, ff. 4-7, 19; SP28/122, ff. 92v-93; SP28/213, pt. 1, unfol.; SP28/238, f. 18 and passim; SP28/299, ff. 1004, 1009, 1316, 1341; Northants. RO, IC/244, 246; Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 123, 162; Tanner 59, f. 139; Tanner 62, f. 449; Tanner 63, f. 157; Tanner 64, f. 1 Luke Letter Bks. 369 and passim; HMC Portland, i. 60, 82; HMC 5th Rep. 69, 103; CJ ii. 354b; LJ v. 583b, 618a; vi. 381b. His inclusion on the list of the county’s sheriffs is therefore an error.34List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 94.

In the ‘recruiter’ election at Higham Ferrers on 13 October 1645 to replace Hatton, who had been disabled from sitting by the Commons, Harby was returned for the borough apparently without opposition.35C219/43/2/72. Harby took the Covenant in the House on 31 December 1645, but he made no further impression on its proceedings until 2 July 1646, when he was granted leave of absence.36CJ iv. 393a, 598b. He was added to the committee for absent Members on 10 June and again on 8 July 1647 in relation to its investigation of suspected crypto-royalist recruiter MPs.37CJ v. 205a, 238a. But these would be his only committee appointments before Pride’s Purge in December 1648. At the call of the House on 9 October 1647 he was declared absent and excused on grounds of ill health.38CJ v. 329b. On 23 December, he and other Northamptonshire MPs were ordered by the Commons to expedite the collection of assessment money in the county.39CJ v. 400b. The next day (24 Dec.), he presented a petition to the House, which ordered that it should be read the following week – although there is no evidence that it received further consideration.40CJ v. 403a. His only appointment at Westminster in 1648 was as a teller with Sir Walter Erle on 11 August in a minor division concerning the membership of the Wiltshire militia committee.41CJ v. 667b.

Although Harby was not among those secluded at Pride’s Purge, it is unlikely that he sat in the Rump before 23 July 1649, when a vote was passed for his re-admission to the House.42CJ vi. 268a. The ‘Colonel Harby’ named to a committee on 23 December 1648 was almost certainly a clerical error for Colonel Edmund Harvey I.43CJ vi. 103a. And it is probable that his addition to the Committee for Compounding* in January 1649 was effected in his absence.44CJ vi. 107b, 113b. He was named to only two committees during the Rump’s first sitting: on a bill for settling the militia (28 May 1650) and a bill for recompensing the London alderman John Fowke (27 Feb. 1652).45CJ vi. 417a; vii. 100a. During 1652 and early 1653 he attended meetings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, although there is no record of his formal admission to this body.46SP22/2B, ff. 126, 128, 210v, 220v.

Harby retained his place on the Northamptonshire bench and assessment commission under both the commonwealth and protectorate. But there is no evidence that he stood for election to any of the protectoral Parliaments. Following the restoration of the Rump in May 1659, he resumed his seat and was named to five committees in June and July on a range of matters, including legislation for an oath to be administered to judges and other ‘ministerial officers’.47CJ vii. 684b, 689b, 691b, 702a, 710b. Granted leave on 23 August, he does not seem to have returned to the Commons until mid-January 1660.48CJ vii. 766b. On 21, 23 and 24 January, he was named to committees concerning the office of custos brevium, the qualifications for Members to sit in the House and for remodelling the commissions of peace.49CJ vii. 818a, 818b, 821a. These would be his last parliamentary appointments. He was omitted from the magistracy and all other local commissions following the Restoration. In 1662 he took into his care the ejected Presbyterian minister Robert Allen, who was licensed in 1672 to preach in Harby’s house at Adstone.50CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 305; 1672, p. 198; Calamy Revised, 7.

Harby died on 9 July 1674.51Vis. Northants. 85. His place of burial is not known but it was very probably Adstone. In his will, he made bequests totalling approximately £1,100, including £50 to his ‘loving friend’ Allen and £10 ‘to be distributed amongst poor ministers or ministers’ widows’. A ‘great part of his estate’ he claimed was ‘now out of my hands upon bonds and other securities’, and he evidently doubted that all of it would be recovered by his executor.52PROB11/346, ff. 178r-v. Harby’s eldest son Edward was returned for Northamptonshire to the 1689 Convention, but died before he could take his seat.53HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Edward Harby’.