CORBETT, Vincent (1617-56), of Moreton Corbet, Salop.

Vincent Corbett was the heir of the senior branch of one of Shropshire’s most distinguished and extensive families. The Corbetts traced their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest, and Vincent was to be at least the ninth generation of the family settled at Moreton to be returned to a Parliament, where they usually sat as knights for Shropshire. Even before that, there were Corbets returned for Shropshire from 1290, although where precisely they lived is hard to pin down. Continuing this extraordinary tradition, Sir Andrew Corbet, Vincent’s father, sat for Shropshire in three Parliaments in the 1620s. Andrew’s marriage in 1606 to Elizabeth Boothby, with £3,000, had been a marriage between step-siblings, as his father, Vincent Corbett, had a brother, Richard, who had married Judith Boothby. For Judith, it was a second marriage; from the marriage to her late first husband, William Boothby, she brought a daughter, Elizabeth. The marriage between Andrew Corbet and Elizabeth Boothby was hailed by their parents as a perfect match for both emotional and practical reasons: ‘there is like to continue and be great unity and love and much expense saved to the great comfort of the said Dame Judith and Vincent Corbett’.13Salop Archives, 322/3/1. The name bestowed on the eldest son of the marriage, Vincent, was in honour of its co-architect.

Vincent Corbett was educated at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn. His marriage while under age to Sarah Monson or Mounson must have been planned for the same kinds of dynastic reasons as that of his parents. Vincent’s father died in 1637, leaving movable property valued at £2192; but the basis of the family’s wealth was land, which included an estate at Linslade, Buckinghamshire.14Salop Archives, 322/4/5. As Vincent was still a little under 21 at the time of his father’s death, he was technically a ward of court even though he was married, but the wardship remained in the hands of his mother.15Coventry Docquets, 483. Only in 1640 did he receive any local government commissions from chancery, and these came after his election to the Short Parliament at the age of 22. He made no known contribution to the assembly, and was elected doubtless purely because of the family’s pre-eminence in Shropshire and its distinguished history of parliamentary service.

As the political crisis of 1640 deepened, seats in the second Parliament of that year were more keenly contested, and Corbett found himself pushed aside in favour of more experienced candidates. By that year he was a captain of the Shropshire militia, a commission which he took seriously enough to build into a lease of 1639 a clause that his tenants were to repair their property when he was away at war in the service of the king.16Salop Archives, 215/24; Wiltshire’s Resolution, 7. Corbett was knighted as his father had been, and received a baronetcy in January 1642. The first of these honours might have been regarded as virtually hereditary, but the second bound him more closely to the king. At the outbreak of civil war, Corbett threw himself into military activity on the king’s side. In December 1642, leading Shropshire gentry banded themselves into an association ‘for defence of our king and country’, and published their resolution to raise a regiment of dragoons which Corbett was to command.17Wiltshire’s Resolution, 7. The king personally approved the resolution and Corbett’s commission as colonel.18Warws. RO, CR2017/C176. His military career was less than glorious, although bad luck rather than incompetence played a part. John Vicars, in an account published in 1647, claimed that Sir William Brereton* made Corbett ‘fly in a panic fear for his life’ near Nantwich, Cheshire, before besting him again. Another account asserts that on 29 January 1643 Corbett was surprised by a parliamentarian unit while building defences near Drayton in his home county, and was forced to flee ‘in his shirt and waistcoat leaving his apparel behind him’ according to a hostile press.19Lancs. and Chesh. Rec. Soc. xix. 53. It is possible that the two episodes have been conflated.

Corbett seems to have remained in Shropshire during the war. A commission issued to him in July 1643 to raise another regiment of 1,000 infantry seems not to have been acted upon.20Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 57. In the summer of 1644 he was at hand when Prince Rupert hanged 13 parliamentarian prisoners, in a reprisal for the hanging of three native Irish soldiers. One who was to be hanged was a former servant of the Corbett family, who saw Sir Vincent ride by as he was waiting to be executed. He told some onlookers that ‘if Sir Vincent Corbett did know I were here, he would save my life’. Someone rode after Corbett to tell him. He turned back and begged on his knees before Rupert for the life of the servant, who was released after readily agreeing never again to fight against the king.21Gough, Hist. Myddle, 74-5. In April 1645 Corbett defended High Ercall against the increasingly successful advances by Thomas Mytton*, assisted by the Shropshire committee for Parliament. There, in several sorties, he was said to have captured 500 men and four pieces of artillery.22‘Mercurius Belgicus or Memorable Occurrences in Anno 1645’ in Mercurius Rusticus: or the Countries Complaint (1685), sig. Bb3. He garrisoned his own home at Moreton Corbett for the king, suffering the firing of buildings there by parliamentarian soldiers.23SP23/166, pp. 243-6.

As garrisons fell or surrendered, Corbett found himself finally at Bridgnorth, where he acted as a commissioner for the surrender of the garrison (23 May 1646).24CCC 1541. Soon after the surrender he requested the Committee for Compounding* to be allowed to compound on the surrender articles, and asserted that he had taken the Covenant. A prominent parliamentarian figure promised recompense for his outlay in the cause from Corbett’s estate was John Wylde*, who complained that in fact nothing from this source ever came to him.25Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 501. Corbett’s fine was set on 3 December 1646 at £2,022, reckoned to be a sixth of his estate. This was deemed by his inquisitors to be a concession, allowable only if Corbett settled Linchlade rectory on Parliament, but his financial problems were not simply the result of civil war disruption, but were chronic and deep-seated.26CCC 1370-1. The Shropshire chronicler, Richard Gough, recorded that Corbett ‘was put to pay a great sum of money for his ransom’, and had to resort to selling off lands.27Gough, Hist. Myddle, 164.

Sarah Corbett later asserted that she had brought money and lands worth £10,000 to the marriage. If that had indeed been the case, her family’s settlement did little or nothing to stave off the indebtedness of her husband, whose debts probably before the start of the war were of the same order of magnitude as her contribution.28Salop Archives, 322/5/11/4. He complained that his Shropshire lands brought in low rents, and a rental of nine manors and other properties there from 1649 confirms that income was modest.29Salop Archives, 322/5/11/4, 322/6/4. On several occasions, Corbett requested the Committee for Compounding to review his position because of his debts.30CCC 1370-1. Even before his fine was set, he had mortgaged 220 acres of lands in Buckinghamshire, and went on to mortgage more property there in 1650. Among the mortgagees was Corbett’s parliamentarian kinsman, Robert Wallop*.31Salop Archives, 322/5/10/1. Far from being deflected, however, the agencies of penal taxation continued to pay close attention to the prominent royalist soldier, and the Committee for Advance of Money in 1649 valued his estate at £12,941 and his debts at £9,200.32CCAM 736.

Corbett was discharged by the Committee for Advance of Money in June 1649, having finally convinced his tormentors that he really was in very serious debt. In these pressing circumstances, Corbett showed little interest in further political activity. He was said to have been willing to join in a plan to capture Shrewsbury on behalf of Charles Stuart in 1654, but was not regarded as a threat in the more serious emergency of 1655.33Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 91, 146. He lived in Buckinghamshire and London for the last years of his life, dying in the parish of St Clement Danes on 28 December 1656. The inventory made of his property in Linslade valued his moveable property there at less than £200, but it included a folio Bible and a collection of 17 small prayer books: evidence perhaps that Corbett continued the Anglican rites there during the interregnum.34Salop Archives, 322/4/7; PROB6/33, f. 137; PROB6/51, f. 81. The unravelling of Corbett’s financial position continued after his death. The effect of multiple mortgages amounting in Shropshire alone to £5,500 was to jeopardize the entail of his patrimony and the substance of his wife’s jointure, as Sarah Corbett realised when she taxed him with it a few days before his death. In the subsequent legal cases fought over the title to Corbett’s property, witnesses disagreed on his approach to Sarah’s jointure. On one testimony, he seems to have believed that land exchanges and mortgages would improve his wife’s jointure – ‘he would not wrong her for all the world’ – but on another, he was reported as having ‘often said that he would never trust any woman with his estate but of all women his wife was not to be trusted’.35Salop Archives, 322/5/11/4.

It is fairly clear that Corbett was on the point of sorting out his wife’s jointure in the last weeks of his life, but the settlement was pending when he died. The family’s affairs reached a nadir when Francis Thornes, one of his trustees, confidants and former fellow commissioner of array, went to the school of Corbett’s eldest son, Vincent, and took him away as his guardian, thus preventing the child’s mother from access.36Salop Archives, 322/5/10/1; Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. Despite the legal battles, Thornes continued as the son’s guardian, and fixed the marriage of his ward to his own daughter. Vincent Corbett† junior survived these traumas to sit in the two Parliaments of 1679, probably as a whig.