CORBETT, Robert (c.1606-76), of Stanwardine-in-the-Wood, Baschurch, Salop.

Most of what we know about Robert Corbett is derived from his clerk, the chronicler Richard Gough, of Myddle. The Corbetts of Stanwardine-in-the-Wood were a junior branch of the Moreton Corbet family, which was itself a division of one of the most illustrious and numerous houses in Shropshire. By 1562, Stanwardine was the manor occupied by Robert Corbett’s grandfather, a second son, who died in 1593.11NLW, Brogyntyn, ETG 1 / 2. Thomas Corbett, Robert’s father, married Margaret, the daughter of his first cousin, Vincent Corbett of Moreton Corbett.12Vis. Salop 1623, i. 136-8. Robert Corbett was an only son, and although the heir of Stanwardine, was also a son of the Moreton Corbett family through his parents’ marriage. Thomas Corbett died when Robert was no more than ten years old, and his mother remarried, to Sir Thomas Scriven of Frodesley, scion of another centuries-old Shropshire family.13Vis. Salop 1623, i. 435. Robert Corbett’s higher education was confined to a period at the Inner Temple, where he was neither given office in the governance of the inn nor called to the bar. No note of his manucaptors (sponsors) at the Inner Temple seems to have survived.

Corbett’s introduction to local government seems to have been a rather traumatic one, in that he was he was made a ‘Ship Money sheriff’ after no previous experience as a commissioner of chancery or exchequer. The extent of Corbett’s local administrative involvement is of interest because Richard Gough describes him as being a master in chancery.14Gough, Hist. Myddle, 86. He was certainly never a master in ordinary, a senior judicial position, and his profile was much more that of an unexceptional gentry figure. He took over in 1635 from a sheriff whose period in office had seen the introduction of Ship Money, and Corbett was left with a burden of £178 uncollected by his predecessor.15CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 348; 1636-7, p. 202. He seems to have knuckled under to the task, and reported in November 1636 that no-one in either the commission of the peace or the lieutenancy had been remiss in making payments.16CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 202. He was able to despatch a report of general conformity to the Church of England and pass on details of the rating dispute between the corporation of Much Wenlock and the county, but nothing in his year of office suggests that he was a reluctant agent of the personal rule of the king.17CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 19-20, 334. He left £40 uncollected, but that was less than a quarter of his predecessor’s arrears. Corbett sought the help of his step-father and of Thomas Davies, man-of-business to John Egerton, 1st earl of Bridgewater, in auditing his shrieval accounts.18NLW, Gwysaney transcripts 24. In 1636, probably while sheriff, Corbett was named as a local commissioner in a chancery case over Shropshire common land, which may have confused Gough into believing him to be a chancery master, but only in August 1641 was he named to the commission of the peace for the first time.19Salop Archives, 465/430.

Not long before taking on the shrievalty, Corbett had married. Writing many years after Corbett’s death, Gough identified his wife as Elizabeth Ludlow, whom he took to be the daughter of Sir Henry Ludlow* of Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, but the antiquary’s memory was at fault. As is clear from two Ludlow family wills, Elizabeth Corbett was the daughter of Henry Ludlow of Hill Deverill and Tadley.20PROB1/189/251; PROB11/195/272. Henry Ludlow was an irascible figure. When his eldest son, Edmund Ludlow of St Martin in the Fields, Westminster, drew up his will in 1645, he recorded his father’s oppressive conduct in the text, and Henry Ludlow’s other children petitioned the privy council against the settlement which their father had imposed on them.21PROB11/195/272; HP Commons 1604-1629. Gough’s identification would have made Robert Corbett the brother-in-law of Edmund Ludlowe II*, the regicide; the true relationship is that Corbett’s wife was first cousin of the regicide in the half-blood.22Ludlow, Mems. i. 438. There is no evidence of any association between Corbett and his prominent relative by marriage.

In February 1640, Corbett tried to enlist Bridgewater’s help in recovering some lands which his family had held as tenants. Corbett believed the lands to have been ‘wrested’ from him without the knowledge of the proprietor, Elizabeth Stanley, wife of William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby. As in 1636, Corbett approached Bridgewater via Thomas Davies, and added to his suit an account of developments in the build-up to elections for the Short Parliament. He described the competitors for the Shropshire seats, and made it clear that he was in support of ‘Cousin’ Corbett, that is, Vincent Corbett*. Robert Corbett expressed himself confident that, with Bridgewater’s help, Vincent Corbett would perform well in the election.23NLW, Gwysaney transcripts 24 (ii). Even at this point, Corbett was evidently not out of step with Shropshire gentry opinion. But however compliant Corbett may have been towards the Caroline regime during the 1630s, and however comfortable he was in 1640 in framing addresses to the president of the council in the marches, by 1642 he was conducting himself politically in a very different way. By 1642 he had become sufficiently critical of the king to be charged with ‘speaking certain words tending to treason’. He appeared before Sir Paul Harris, and was released on sureties offered by 1st Lord Newport (Sir Richard Newport†) and Sir Timothy Tourneur.24Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 2, vii. 271. Although commentators have been hesitant to confirm that this Robert Corbett was the Stanwardine man, the social rank attributed to him of esquire in the original source suggests that it was indeed the future Member, as the forename was unusual among the Corbetts at that time. By the time of this incident, Shrewsbury had declared for the king, and the royalist party in the county was in the ascendant. Not only Harris, but also Newport and Tourneur were leaders of the king’s party, and Corbett may have owed his lenient treatment to neighbourhood ties between himself and his interlocutors.

Whatever the reasons that impelled Corbett into this confrontation, he was quickly identified with the parliamentarians in Shropshire. He was named to the first county committees, although in 1643 these were in name only, as the royalists controlled the territory. When the first parliamentarian garrison was formed at Wem, he was not active in the committee which directed the war effort on Parliament’s behalf, however, and has to be considered as only contributing modestly, in assessment committees and the like, to the cause. Nor is there reason to believe that he ever held military rank. The assertion that Corbett was a colonel in the parliamentary army, rising to the rank of major general seems unfounded.25Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 2, viii. 201. Gough tells us how the life of one of Corbett’s servants, in arms for Parliament, was spared by Prince Rupert at the intercession of (Sir) Vincent Corbett, by this time a royalist commander in Shropshire. The anecdote is presented as an indication of Sir Vincent’s magnanimity, but it was also suggestive of a continuing affinity, despite opposing civil war allegiances, between two branches of the Moreton Corbet family.26Gough, Hist. Myddle, 75.

Corbett was no soldier, but was rather a godly country gentleman whose natural environment of public service was the bench of magistrates. He came back into the commission of the peace when Parliament took control of the county, and by the 1650s was a mainstay of the bench. The orders of the Shropshire magistrates in the late 1640s are lost, but from January 1652 his regular presence at sessions is recorded.

Corbett’s reliability as a magistrate both in and out of sessions – he viewed dilapidated churches and bridges and arbitrated in disputes and other difficult cases – is tacit confirmation that he adapted readily enough to the regicide, and transferred his allegiance without demur to the Cromwellian protectorate.27Salop Quarter Sessions, i. ed. R. Lloyd (1902), 2, 9, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 33, 38, 42, 48, 50, 53, 55, 57, 63. In 1647 he was named along with many other Shropshire gentlemen to the embryonic Shropshire Presbyterian classis, and in 1654 to the Cromwellian commission to approve ministers. There was nothing contradictory about these appointments, which suggest only that Corbett was pious and in the mainstream of lay puritan adherence.

He was elected with his first cousin, Philip Yonge of Caynton, to the first protectorate Parliament. Unlike Yonge, however, he seems to have made no impact at all at Westminster, being named to no committees and not noted as speaking from the floor of the House. He was probably present, however, as his name temporarily disappears from the attendance lists at Shropshire quarter sessions. Gough, too, records that Corbett was part of what turned out to be an unproductive assembly.28Gough, Hist. Myddle, 86. The Shropshire MPs were dominated by the Mackworth interest, to which Yonge was attached by marriage ties, and it is reasonable to assume that Corbett was part of this network. There seems no evidence that Corbett sought any further involvement in national politics.

After his return to Shropshire, Corbett resumed his career as an active magistrate, but disappeared completely from all local government activity shortly after the Restoration.29Salop Archives, 465/705. He died in 1676, and was buried at Baschurch, the burying-place for Stanwardine. Although a number of sons were born to him and Elizabeth, only one, Thomas, survived. Thomas Corbett sold Stanwardine to the Wynnes of Wynnstay, north Wales, and removed to Worcester. He was still a burgess of Shrewsbury in 1685, apparently, when he voted for Edward Kynaston† and Sir Francis Edwards†, 1st Bt, both supporters of James II when the king remodelled the corporations.30Salop Archives, 6001/4077, p. 343. No further link between this branch of the Corbetts and Parliament can be traced, but a grandchild of Thomas Corbett was the Rev. George Costard, ‘mathematician, astronomer, general scholar and an author of some eminence’, who died in 1782.31J.B. Blakeway, Sheriffs of Salop (Shrewsbury, 1831), 118.