CORBET, Sir John, 1st bt. (1594-1662), of Stoke upon Tern and Adderley, Salop.

The Corbets of Stoke were a branch of that family junior to the Corbets of Morton Corbet, but were nevertheless recognisably an important part of an eminent Shropshire gentry house. John Corbet’s grandfather, Reginald Corbet, had been a king’s bench judge and his father, Richard Corbet, had married the daughter of Sir Thomas Bromley, lord chancellor under Elizabeth I. John Corbet was the second son of that marriage, but his circumstances were transformed by the deaths of his father and elder brother even before he had completed his education. Corbet’s father, who was described variously as of Stoke and Chesthull Grange, died shortly before January 1603 and his elder brother, also Richard, died around 1615. The young John Corbet was named an overseer of his brother’s will, but the younger Richard Corbet entrusted his estates for the benefit of the two sons of his that were living at his death.20PROB11/125/544. In 1621, the elder of these, a third Richard, then living in Islington, Middlesex, conveyed the estates to John Corbet in exchange for an annuity.21Salop Archives, 327/2/4/1/5/43. The selling out of the patrimonial estates to a younger son occurred after the remarriage of the widow of John Corbet’s elder brother outside Shropshire. John Corbet’s inheritance made him proprietor of Market Drayton, ‘an ancient market town consisting of many several burgages’.22Salop Archives, 327/2/4/1/8/1/7. These transactions were not achieved without conflict, however; in what must have been among his earliest resorts to law he sued a family of former stewards for not releasing estate papers, and as late as 1648 the settlement was still subject to litigation by the descendants of John Corbet’s brother.23Salop Archives, 327/4/5; 327/2/4/1/8/1/7.

After an education possibly at Cambridge and certainly at Lincoln’s Inn, Corbet married around August 1618 Anne Mainwaring, daughter of a Shropshire gentleman, who brought a portion of £1300 to the marriage. Corbet was subsequently admitted to the commission of the peace of his native county, and in 1627 was created a baronet. The honour seems to have sharpened Corbet’s appetite for conflict with his neighbours. By 1629 he was embroiled in a dispute with Robert Needham, Viscount Kilmorey. At the heart of the quarrel was the question of rights in the chancel of Adderley church, of which Corbet was proprietor. Corbet denied Needham seating in the chancel, despite the latter’s claim as a viscount to social precedence over him.24Harrod, Hist. Shavington, 47. Motivated at least in part by a desire to by-pass Corbet on matters of rights of access and precedence in Adderley church, Kilmorey constructed a chapel-of-ease at Shavington, which was consecrated in June 1629.25Harrod, Hist. Shavington, 47. Corbet challenged Kilmorey’s right of way to do so, and was evidently minded to test Kilmorey’s assertions of social precedence, asserting that ‘an English baronet was as good as an Irish viscount’.26Oxford DNB. The case went to the court of arches, and when the verdict went against Corbet, he appealed to the court of delegates.27CSP Dom. 1631-33, p. 495; Harrod, Hist. Shavington, 44.

The case between Corbet and the Needhams smouldered for several years, during which Kilmorey was succeeded by his son, but burst into fresh conflagration in September 1633 when in a deliberately provocative move, Corbet chose to have one of his servants, an Irish footboy, buried in the chancel at Adderley near Kilmorey’s tomb. The second viscount took the case to the earl marshal’s court, where he secured an order to have the footboy’s body removed, and on the strength of his success applied for a licence to have his own chapel erected at Adderley church. Among the witnesses in the case was Edward Cressett of Upton Cressett, father of Richard Cressett*; there seemed local unanimity that Corbet was ‘impetuous and imperious’.28Harrod, Hist. Shavington, 53, 55. Even so, when Corbet drew up a trust in June 1634 to provide for his children, he was able to draw on the help of mainstream Shropshire gentry figures such as Thomas Mytton* and Sir Richard Lee*.29Salop Archives, 327/2/2/19/5.

In April 1635, a quarter sessions presentment at Shrewsbury denounced the raising of fees for the county muster-master, the official in charge of training the militia, as a grievance. When one of the justices reproved the jurors, Corbet offered them his support and instructed the clerk of the peace to read the Petition of Right of 1628. When the point in the text noting the oppressions of the lieutenancy was reached, Corbet halted the reading and pointed to the words with his finger.30C.L. Hamilton, ‘Salop Muster-Master’s Fee’, Albion ii. 27. He was supported in the court by Francis Charlton, elder brother of Robert Charlton*, but not by the majority of his fellow-magistrates. The incident was reported to the privy council by John Egerton, 1st earl of Bridgewater, and Corbet was sent to the Fleet Prison on 10 June.31CSP Dom. 1635, p. 455. The severity of the treatment meted out to Corbet encouraged support among the gentry for his stance. It was reported in Shropshire that in the Fleet he was ‘in health and hearty for all his imprisonment’, and the affair fanned out into a wider critique of the government’s heavy-handedness.32Salop Archives, 5981/A/155; E.S. Cope, ‘Politics without Parliament: The Dispute about Muster Masters’ Fees in Salop in the 1630s’, HLQ xlv. 279. From prison, where he remained for the rest of 1635, Corbet managed his continuing legal correspondence as Kilmorey won permission from Archbishop William Laud to extend Adderley church, in what was bound to be viewed by the archbishop as an opportunity to subject lay authority to ecclesiastical church law.33CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 238, 455, 507.

Inevitably, Corbet’s stance cost him his place in the commission of the peace. New woes assailed him in 1636 as Peter Egerton, presumably a relation of his persecutor, Privy Councillor Bridgewater, complained to the council of Corbet’s oppressions. This was a twist in the Corbet inheritance saga, as Egerton was a tenant at Stoke, and at the heart of the case was Corbet’s accusation that Egerton was not maintaining his land adequately. The council ordered Corbet to be compensated but to deliver possession to Egerton. As was his wont, Corbet appealed, but the judgement was upheld in October 1638.34CSP Dom. 1636-7, 181, 385; 1637, p. 99; 1637-8, p. 404; 1638-9, p. 60. To round off a decade in which he had challenged neighbours, relatives and the government itself, in May 1639 Corbet lent his name to a petition to the privy council against rating in Shropshire, in which he was joined not only by major gentry figures such as William Pierrepont* but also, ironically enough, by Kilmorey, who had recently won a final judgment against Corbet in the dispute over chancel rights.35CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 59; 1639, p. 252. Despite the turbulence of his public life, Corbet was evidently wealthy, able to provide a portion of £4,000 when his eldest son married the daughter of the London merchant and customs farmer Sir John Wolstenholme* in September 1640.36Salop Archives, 327/2/11/2.

When elections for a Parliament in 1640 were announced, Corbet was in immediate contention for a seat. He was ‘slighted’ by a meeting of gentry on or around 10 March that fixed its choice on others for the county seats; but nothing daunted, immediately set about securing one of the seats for Shrewsbury. He successfully persuaded Thomas Mytton to make sure that the sheriff withheld the writ for the town election until after the shire election had taken place.37Belvoir Castle, letters 1.23. This was to no avail, however. Corbet was obliged to wait for a seat until 29 October, when he was elected as knight of the shire to the second Parliament of the year.38Eg. Ch. 5755. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was Corbet’s record of standing up for public rights, embodied in the episode of the muster-master’s fees, that on this occasion recommended him to the electors of Shropshire. They chose to overlook his history of antagonism towards neighbours and relatives.

Corbet was able to make an impression on the Commons almost immediately, by pledging the large sum of £1,000 towards efforts to disband the armies in the north and joined with Sir Richard Leveson* to double his offer in March 1641.39D’Ewes (N), 52, 439. He was named to an early joint committee with the Lords (30 Nov.) on the hearing of witnesses in the case against Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, and in April 1641 was one of those in charge of arranging Westminster Hall as a venue for the trial. He was also named to the important sub-committee on religion.40CJ ii. 39b, 54b, 122b; Harl. 478, f. 3. Early in March 1641 he acted as a teller in a division on the New Sarum election. There was confusion over which side was aye and which no, but Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, at least, was clear that Corbet’s was the side which saw both statute and common law threatened by the mayor’s return.41CJ ii. 95b; Procs. LP iv. 718. Corbet took the Protestation on 3 May, and on 4 June took his revenge against the earl of Bridgewater.42CJ ii. 133b. After a recital of the facts in the case, the Commons resolved after an hour that the Shropshire muster-master’s fee was contrary to the Petition of Right and that Bridgewater should make reparation to Corbet.43Procs. LP iv. 718. The House went further, ordering that other privy councillors whose names were on the warrant that sent Corbet to the Fleet should compensate him, and that the clerk of the peace should be sent for as a delinquent.44CJ ii. 167a; Procs. LP iv. 724-5. In fact, the penalties inflicted on the council proved less impressive than the rhetoric, when it was realized that peers could only be fined after a judgment in the Lords, and when the archbishop of Canterbury was excepted from the declaration on the case that passed the Commons on 29 July.45CJ ii. 228b; Procs. LP vi. 141, 405. The impeachment of Bridgewater himself was managed by John Wylde*, but on 9 November the earl pleaded not guilty to the charges of levying excessive sums on the people, putting Corbet out of the magistracy and orchestrating his punishment. The Lords lacked the will to take the case further, possibly because it was an impeachment essentially on Corbet’s behalf.46Procs. LP vi. 610-11; CJ ii. 255a, 257a, 271b, 274b, 275a; PA, Main Pprs. 9 Nov. 1641.

On 30 November, Corbet was named as one of a deputation of 12 to wait on the king at Hampton Court with the Grand Remonstrance and the more emollient declaration against armed crowds in Westminster. He left for the palace the following day.47CJ ii. 327a; D’Ewes (C), 212, 219-20. Corbet’s boldness of manner was doubtless the quality that his colleagues valued in him as a messenger to the king, and he was chosen for the same task on 21 February 1642. On that occasion he was to ask the king to pass what became the Militia Ordinance, and was required to ride to Dover, where the queen was to take ship to France. Corbet made excuses, however, claiming that the task needed a man to ride post haste, and he could at his age only travel by coach. Francis Newport* was chosen in his place: an ironic and probably erroneous substitution by the Commons in the light of political allegiances soon afterwards.48PJ i. 428, 433. Corbet retained the loyalty of some of the Shropshire gentry, who attended the Commons on 7 March to deliver a petition which William Pierrepont moved should be entered in the clerks’ book as others had been. At the end of April, two justices from Market Drayton wrote to Corbet and Sir Richard Lee of a libel against John Pym* that had been published there, and after debate in the House the libeller was ordered to attend the summer Shropshire assizes some months hence.49PJ ii. 2, 235. The likelihood of his attendance must have looked remote almost immediately, even to Corbet, as disorder began to sweep across the country. Corbet himself had in March ordered the seizure of Shavington chapel, in an attempt to settle another old score, and his wife executed the order on 8 May with a group of 40 armed retainers.50Harrod, Hist. Shavington, 70-3.

On 27 May Corbet was selected for another task that required him to leave London. He was required to go to Chester to oversee the despatch of regiments to Ireland, with instructions given him by Sir William Brereton*, among others.51CJ ii. 588b, 589a. He may have been absent for some time; the Journal clerks made no further mention of him until on 22 July, when he, Pierrepont and Richard More* were mandated to implement the Militia Ordinance in Shropshire to combat the king’s commission of array.52CJ ii. 686a. They brought back the report of the activities by Francis Newport and Sir Richard Leveson* that were to lead to their being disabled from sitting further in the Parliament (6 Aug.) and soon afterwards Corbet was among the additions to the committee to instruct the judges loyal to Parliament on circuit, even though by this time Shrewsbury had been lost to the royalists. More realistically, he was on the same day (20 Sept.) appointed with Sir Robert Harley*, Wylde, More and Brereton among others, to a committee which dealt with those offering to equip dragoons.53CJ ii. 686a, 774a, b; LJ v. 269-70; PJ iii. 284. Representatives of the various west midlands counties, including Corbet and More, were ordered on 3 October to attend the lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, for military instructions, which could only remain theoretical given the state of military affairs in Shropshire, but he attended the meeting in Worcester on 8 October when an association between Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire was founded.54Add. 70004, f. 68. By November Corbet was involved in parliamentary work that did not confine him to his own county.55CJ ii. 791b. He was on a committee that oversaw the work of army commissaries, and with William Purefoy I* was sent to the army (14 Nov.) to observe and report back to the Commons. It was particularly apt, given his experiences in the mid-1630s, that a particular task of his was to ensure that the country people were not abused by false musters.56CJ ii. 841a, 843a, 848b; Add. 18777, f. 57v. He was back at Westminster by the 30th, when he was charged with inviting a minister with his surname to preach before the Commons, and with thanking him after the sermon.57CJ ii. 870a, 904b.

Corbet appears in late December 1642 to have been more bellicose than his colleague, William Pierrepont. They were tellers on opposite sides in a division on the 29th, in which Corbet was in favour of widening the circle of guilty men around George Lord Digby* as he faced impeachment.58CJ ii. 905b. In January 1643 a number of army-related committee appointments followed, which stood him in good stead for nomination on 16 February as colonel for Shropshire in the west midlands association.59CJ ii. 928b, 943a, 953b. His commission was taken to the Lords by his senior Shropshire colleague, Richard More.60CJ ii. 967b. At this point, Corbet was regarded as a senior parliamentarian and a worthy representative of the Commons. He joined John Pym, Sir Walter Erle and Sir John Clotworthy in discussing with the Lords the revised proposals for a peace treaty, and afterwards reported back to the House, and was a member of a delegation to the earl of Essex on the same subject.61CJ ii. 975a, 978a, 978b. He was not initially one of the ‘fiery spirits’ identified by Sir Simonds D’Ewes as the most fierce opponents of the king, and persisted in working for a treaty throughout March, but on 3 April supported the breaking off of treaty negotiations at Oxford unless the king indicated support for Parliament’s propositions.62Harl. 164, ff. 304v, 305v, 315, 352; CJ ii. 992b, 999a; iii. 28b. His membership of the committee to enforce the orders against the queen’s capuchin spiritual advisers suggests how far he was from being a peace party man.63CJ iii. 8a.

Corbet was in April 1643 identified as a necessary signatory of guarantees to those lending to Parliament on the ‘public faith’.64A. and O. i. 127. In the wake of the plot associated with Edmund Waller*, he took the ‘new oath and covenant’ on 6 June, and involved himself in the investigations to uncover the plot’s details. When John Glynne moved that MPs in the army of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, should form the council of war to try the conspirators, Corbet announced that his commission bore Manchester’s signature, when others such as Sir Thomas Myddelton* and Clotworthy made their excuses.65Harl. 165, f. 103. The Shropshire gentry lacked confidence in him, however. Richard More had taken Corbet’s commission to the Lords in mid-February, but Corbet remained at Westminster until the summer, when ominously, it was ordered on 14 June that Corbet no longer had to be a necessary signatory on public faith bills in Shropshire.66CJ iii. 130b. On 4 July, the nascent Shropshire county committee called for an alternative to Corbet as their colonel. Sir Robert Harley* offered Corbet some support publicly, but D’Ewes for one thought that Harley wanted also to satisfy the petitioners so that they would be encouraged to act more vigorously. The root of the objection to Corbet lay in his personality; his critics described him as a ‘haughty, proud, choleric man’. For his part, Corbet seemingly shrugged off the slight, claiming that he never sought the commission in the first place, but confided his resentment to D’Ewes, complaining how Sir Thomas Myddelton and others had drawn him into the military for his money, before treating him in an underhand way.67Harl. 165, f. 143; CJ iii. 152b. Corbet was succeeded as colonel by Thomas Mytton.68CJ iii. 155a.

Despite the loss of his command in Shropshire, Corbet remained active in military affairs in the House, albeit at a somewhat reduced level. He supported the formation of a committee to investigate the causes of the loss of Sir William Waller’s* army in the west (2 Aug.) and on 12 October was named to a committee on financing the armies.69CJ iii. 191b, 274a. In another revisiting of his past, that month Corbet found himself named to a committee to investigate abuses at the Fleet prison.70CJ iii. 288b. He was first named to the bodies charged in November with reforming the west midlands association and raising money for Myddelton’s army, and despite his reputation for being difficult to deal with was asked to broker the troubled relationship between Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh and the committee at Coventry (2 Dec.).71CJ iii. 298b, 321a, 328a. Through 1644 he continued to be named to committees on a range of military and other topics, but cannot be shown to have taken a leading part in any of them. He was called as a witness in the trial of Archbishop Laud on 9 March, presumably so that he could relate his experiences as a victim of ‘Thorough’ during the 1630s.72CJ iii. 422a. In May he acted as teller in two divisions, on each occasion opposing Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, on the ordinance for the Committee of Both Kingdoms* and on fiscal support for the Gloucester garrison.73CJ iii. 483b, 536a.

Corbet’s involvement in the investigations after Waller’s plot had evidently impressed his colleagues, because on 15 July 1644 Corbet was made a commissioner for martial law and confirmed as among the quorum of that body in August.74CJ iii. 562b, 607a. He was called upon with others to adjudicate in controversies involving military command, such as the case of Colonel Thomas Carne, deputy governor of the Isle of Wight, and that of Colonel Samuel Jones*, governor of Farnham.75CJ iii. 635b, 637b. Corbet was named to important executive committees such as the Committee for Examinations and was appointed on 9 August to the Committee for Plundered Ministers, which confirmed a previous order of 9 January 1643 naming him to that body.76Supra, ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’; CJ iii. 585a. He was doubtless in religious terms a Presbyterian. Corbet was named to the committee chaired by Francis Rous on admission to the Lord’s Supper (26 Nov. 1644) and was in 1646 to be named as a commissioner to judge cases of exclusion from the sacrament under the Presbyterian church arrangements.77CJ iii. 705b; iv. 563a. In his case, unlike that of some other Shropshire nominated men, he was probably enthusiastic about the Presbyterian classes established in his native county in 1647.

Corbet had from the outset of the civil war been involved with raising taxation to support the field armies and garrisons, and from 1644 had been named to committees concerning the excise and other expedients.78CJ iii. 391a, 473b, 482a, 536a. In August 1644 he sat on a committee chaired by Giles Grene concerned with naval finance, and in December considered, with members of the Committee of Navy and Customs, a petition of ship-owners. Membership of this committee followed in May 1645, as did an important appointment to the committee for excise on 6 June.79CJ iii. 601a, 722a; iv. 64a, 154b; A. and O. This last-named position may have come to Corbet after the consultations between Pierrepont, the excise commissioners and himself in February on an advance from the excise to help Shrewsbury garrison. The parliamentary record suggests that Corbet was always careful to ensure that his own concerns were not forgotten. Despite his wealth, he had been plundered by the royalists in 1643, and had been promised an ordinance to provide recompense.80CJ iii. 31a. His name appeared in June 1645 on the list of MPs whose privations entitled them to the token pension of £4 a year, and on the 30th of that month a reminder was sent to the Lords about the slumbering impeachment of the earl of Bridgewater, even though it must have had no longer any prospect of progressing.81CJ iv. 161a, 189b. In March 1646, Corbet was granted reparations from the Buckinghamshire estate of a royalist he had informed upon to the agencies of penal taxation.82CJ iv. 474b, 603b.

By this time, Corbet was numbering himself among those evincing some sympathy at least for the Scots, and on 11 July he was one of those MPs entrusted with those sent to the Scottish army in England to monitor its conduct.83CJ iv. 204a, 208b, 210b. Later in the year (15 Nov.), he was sent with Edward Bayntun* to be a commissioner to the Scottish Parliament, but if he went on this journey it was a very short one, as he was in the House on 6 December to act as a teller in a division on finance for the Northamptonshire committee.84CJ iv. 367b. In the face of the rising strength of the Independents in Parliament during 1646, however, Corbet’s participation in Westminster affairs tailed off markedly. He was named to only ten committees that year, and was granted leave of absence on 16 July. It was not until late October that he was active in the Commons once more, on a committee to determine the differences between Sir Robert Harley and John Birch*.85CJ iv. 617b, 703a. In 1647, he was again named to ten committees, a number of them cockpits for conflicts between Presbyterians and Independents. Among these must be considered the committees on scandalous publications (12 Dec. 1646 and 3 Feb. 1647), those on contentious ‘recruiter’ elections in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Shropshire (6 Apr. 1647) and on the continuing controversies involving the committee in Coventry (24 Mar. 1647).86CJ v. 11a, 72b, 90a, 122b, 134a. Corbet was given leave again on 20 August 1647, and was away for over a year, appearing again on 13 June 1648 doubtless sympathetic to the attempts by Sir Robert Harley and his clients to rebuild the militia as a counter-weight to the New Model army.87CJ v. 280a, 330a, 597b.

Corbet’s name appears on at least two contemporary lists of Members secluded at the purge by the army on 6 December 1648.88A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 28 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5). The last mention of him in the Journal had occurred on 23 September, when he and Thomas Hunt* were asked to hasten the collection of the assessment in Shropshire.89CJ vi. 30b. He seems completely to have withdrawn from public life thereafter, although he continued to be named as an assessment commissioner under the Rump Parliament. He made no accommodation with the Cromwellian protectorate, but neither was he restored to the commission of the peace when the king returned in 1660. Lord Newport (Francis Newport*) complained of him to the privy council in November that year for not supplying horse for the newly-reconstructed militia, in what must have seemed like a like an echo of events of 25 years previously.90Eg. 2537, f. 266. Corbet died in July 1662, and was buried at Market Drayton. One of his daughters married Sir Humphrey Brigges*.91Fam. of Corbet, 356.