BALDWYN, Samuel (1618-83), of Elsich, Diddlebury; Stokesay Castle, Salop and the Inner Temple, London.

Samuel Baldwyn’s immediate family suffered the attentions of the Committee for Compounding after the civil war. As late as 1653, Baldwyn’s father, Member for Ludlow in the Short and Long Parliaments, and one who defected to the king’s Parliament at Oxford, had to petition for relief from a fine which he disputed. Samuel’s education at Oxford and the Inner Temple was crowned with his being called to the bar in 1646. With his calling assured, Baldwyn chose as his wife the daughter of a London merchant of Shropshire origins. The main branch of the Walcots lived at the house which bore their name, and like Baldwyn’s family, were royalists during the civil war.13Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, ii. 337-8. Stokesay Castle was the main property to provide the focus of the marriage settlement between the two families, a house which the Baldwyns enjoyed on a long lease from William Craven, 1st Baron Craven.14Salop Archives, 151/61; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, ii. 338. While the republican regimes kept a watchful eye on these two families in Shropshire, Samuel Baldwyn was in London, pursuing a legal career at the Inner Temple. The frequency with which he served as auditor at the inn confirms that London was his main residence. He kept an eye on property opportunities in the country, however, buying lands in Toddington, Bedfordshire, once belonging to Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Cleveland, in 1653 and 1654.15CCC 2167.

Baldwyn seems to have kept out of plots against the government during the 1650s, and played no part in local politics either in Shropshire or London. He was elected to the Parliament of Richard Cromwell* for Ludlow by virtue of his standing as the son of Charles Baldwin, a substitute uncompromised in the eyes of the government, uncontaminated by active adherence to the Stuart cause. There is no evidence that the corporation groomed Baldwyn for the seat in any deliberate way. There seems to be no record of his being admitted as a burgess of the town before his election to Parliament, when he was listed before Job Charlton.16Salop Archives, LB2/1/2 p. 155. For a parliamentary tyro, Baldwyn made something of a mark on the assembly. On 5 February, he served with other marcher MPs such as Edward Freeman and Bennet Hoskins on a committee charged with devising a new church dispensation for Wales, the sub-text of which was a re-opening of the controversy during the Rump Parliament over ‘propagating the gospel’ in the principality.17CJ vii. 600b. The committee was dominated by those more sympathetic to the Harley family than to the millenarian interest represented by Thomas Harrison I*. When the case of Major-general Robert Overton, who had been imprisoned by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell* in 1657 on a warrant which showed no cause, came before the House for redress, Baldwyn was named to the committee which undertook to look into the cases of other prisoners. Overton had been imprisoned on Jersey, and in the debate prior to the resolution condemning his detention as invalid, Baldwyn spoke on the framing of the motion.18CJ vii. 614b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 159.

It seems to have been Baldwyn’s legal expertise rather than his local knowledge that fired him in this Parliament. He was in this respect a contrast with other Ludlow MPs who had been genuine townsmen, and who are known to have reported back in detail to the corporation on the minutiae of their interests at Westminster. Baldwyn evidently exploited his metropolitan contacts, and was in effect the agent for Margaret Herbert, marchioness of Worcester, in her campaign to recover the family’s London residence, Worcester House, from the government, which had taken it over.19CJ vii. 639a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 244, 253. On 6 April, Baldwyn attended a committee on the maintenance of ministers, and queried the decision of the chairman, Thomas Burton, to refer accounts to the knights of the shires for comment. The product of Baldwyn’s intervention was a confirmation that only the Whole House could delegate.20Burton’s Diary, iv. 360. Two days later, he was on a committee that considered the case of another apparent victim of the regime, Thomas Howard, 23rd earl of Arundel, kept out of the country although a Protestant.21CJ vii. 632b. When on 11 April, Baldwyn spoke in a debate on the bid by Lord Craven to be admitted back into England, he was doubtless trying to help the erstwhile landlord of Stokesay Castle. The following day, Baldwyn spoke out in another high-profile case surrounding an individual. On this occasion, he was hostile to the subject, Major-general Thomas Boteler*, against whom Baldwyn argued forcefully. He supported an impeachment, and wanted it processed in the Other House.22CJ vii. 637a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 412.

A pattern is apparent in Baldwyn’s participation in this Parliament. He intervened to support leading royalists and to attack former Cromwellians and republicans. He might have been thought likely to be on the threshold of a long parliamentary career, but this was to be his first and last Parliament. There is nothing to connect him with royalist plotting on the eve of the restoration of the monarchy. He stood for Ludlow again in the 1661 election, the corporation’s choice against Timothy Littleton†, the recorder.23HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 365. In this contest, he was unsuccessful, and the fruitless hearing before the elections committee was chaired by Sir Job Charlton, his colleague in the 1659 Parliament. This seems to have marked the end of any aspirations on his part to further parliamentary service. Baldwyn seems instead to have returned to his legal career. He became close to the restored Church of England. He delivered a legal opinion on the rights of presentation in a church living, and in his own right became in due course a tenant to the dean and chapter of Hereford in the rectories of Diddlebury and Long Staunton.24CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 412; 1673-5, p. 97. By 1666, he had acquired an estate in goods in London worth more than £10,000, which became the figure he put on his losses in the Great Fire.25PROB11/374/272. He was admitted to the order of serjeant-at-law in 1669, supported in the ceremony by John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgewater and George Digby*, 2nd earl of Bristol, former cavaliers, and by one of the wealthy Foley family, representing his west midlands roots.26Baker, Serjeants, 445. The king evidently favoured Baldwyn, promoting him as recorder of Shrewsbury, bestowing on him a knighthood and intervening on his behalf in a dispute between him and his Hereford dean and chapter landlords, to alter a canon law statute made by an earlier bishop.27CSP Dom. 1671, p. 32; 1673-5, p. 97. He reached the summit of his career in 1673 when he became king’s serjeant.

Baldwyn drew up his will in 1679. It was evident by then that most of his moveable property was at Stokesay castle. Perhaps to compensate for the disaster of the Great Fire, he had invested in woodlands in Worcestershire and in scheme of waterways navigation on the Rivers Salwarpe and Stour in that county. In 1681, Baldwyn wrote to console his son-in-law on the death of his only son. Baldwyn was able to recount his own suffering in bereavement, having lost his own eldest son and his son’s son:

Give me leave for your own instruction to tell you that God often times sends [affliction] as a rod to correct and punish us for our sins, and then it should work in us repentance [and] humiliation; and sometimes he sends it for a trial and then it should work in us patience and vigilance.28Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, ii. 337.

Baldwyn was buried in the Temple Church, London, on 15 July 1683. His brother was Sir Timothy Baldwin, a distinguished civil lawyer. Sir Samuel Baldwyn’s son, Charles Baldwin, sat in Parliament for Ludlow as a whig in 1681, 1689 and 1695.29Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Timothy Baldwin’; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 585.