BAKER, Sir John, 2nd bt. (c.1608-53), of Sissinghurst, Cranbrook, Kent, and Fleet Street, London.

Sir John Baker† (1489-1558), attorney-general, chancellor of the exchequer, and Speaker of the House of Commons in the reign of Henry VIII, established his family among the wealthiest and most prominent Kentish gentry.19HP Commons 1509–1558; ‘Sir John Baker’, Oxford DNB. His sons Richard Baker† of Sissinghurst and John Baker† of London sat for the Sussex constituencies of Horsham, Bramber, and New Shoreham in the mid-sixteenth century, while the latter’s son, Sir Richard Baker† (1568-1645) of Highgate, the historian, sat for Arundel and East Grinstead towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign.20HP Commons 1509–1558; HP Commons 1558–1603; ‘Sir Richard Baker’, Oxford DNB. Sir Henry Baker, the father of our MP, who was a grandson of Richard Baker of Sissinghurst, married into a wealthy merchant family with strong connections to the Sidneys, earls of Leicester, and was made a baronet in 1611.21CB.

At his death in 1623, Sir Henry Baker left estates in Kent, Middlesex, London, and Essex, as well as Hastings priory in Sussex, a substantial portion (£2,500) for his daughter Elizabeth, and generous provision for his younger son Thomas and an unborn child. The wardship of his elder son John passed, as he wished, to his widow and her uncle, Sir Richard Smythe† (d. 1628) of Leeds Castle.22WARD5/19, unfol.; PROB11/143/504; E. Suss. RO, Rye MS 116/29-31. After education at Jesus College, Cambridge, Baker, like his sister, married into the family of Sir Robert Parkhurst, master of the Clothworkers’ Company, and governor of the Londonderry plantation, who served as mayor of London in 1634.23Al. Cant. Baker’s bride was Sir Robert’s daughter Eleanor, while in 1628 Elizabeth Baker married Sir Robert’s son Robert (Sir Robert Parkhurst*).24Vis. Kent (Harl. Soc. xlii), 64; Vis. Surr. (Harl. Soc. xliii), 97.

In the 1630s Baker appears to have been a somewhat contentious figure in Kent. As a sewers commissioner, he was involved in long-running disputes which came to the attention of the privy council.25E. Suss. RO, DAP1/2/3, pp. 97-8; APC 1629-30, p. 309; CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 480. He also made a number of controversial decisions during his tenure as sheriff of the county in 1633-4. Attention was subsequently drawn to prisoners who had been reprieved by Baker, and although a planned prosecution was dropped after a report by Sir Francis Windebanke*, his fellow secretary of state Sir John Coke appears to have intended to revive proceedings against Baker as late as May 1636.26CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 471; 1635-6, pp. 465-6. If these went ahead, they did not affect his position on the commission of the peace.27CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 743.

In 1637 Baker secured permission to erect a private chapel at Sissinghurst, and to keep a domestic chaplain. The chapel was evidently lavish, with a gallery for family members and a ‘fair carved screen’ engraved with their coat of arms. While architectural details are incomplete, the conception was evidently not a puritan one; the plans stipulated use of the Book of Common Prayer.28Cent. Kent. Stud. U24/Q9. While Baker’s chaplain, Richard Brearcliffe, from 1641 vicar of Buckden, Huntingdonshire, appears to have remained unmolested by the Committee for Plundered Ministers during the civil war, some of the other local clergy who participated in the consecration of the chapel were more controversial. They included Christopher Monkton, later sequestered from the living of Orpington; Robert Abbot, later removed from Cranbrooke; Daniel Horsmonden, a supporter of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, sequestered from Ulcombe and Goudhurst; and most importantly, Dr Edward Fulham, a prebendary of Chichester cathedral and chaplain to Bishop John Bancroft of Oxford, who would be imprisoned during the civil war.29Walker Revised, 209, 219, 222, 297.

Like many of his forebears, Baker secured a seat in Parliament for a Sussex constituency. In the elections to the Short Parliament in 1640, Baker stood for Hastings, probably on his own interest, given that he owned Hastings Priory. Although the election at Hastings aroused considerable controversy, the dispute appears to have had less to do with Baker, against whom no allegations were made, than one of the other candidates, Robert Reade*, an outsider, who was secretary and nephew to Sir Francis Windebanke. On 17 March Baker was informed that he and Reade had been returned, but when he attended the Hastings Court Hall on 31 March to take the oath as a freeman of the borough, there was a hostile reception led by ‘refractory’ members of the corporation, who opposed the election.30Hastings Museum, C/A(a)2, f. 88; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 556; 1640, p. 2. The mayor claimed that Reade and Baker had been returned all but unanimously, while the freemen claimed that the election had been illegal, objecting to Reade’s patrons, his association with Windebanke, his suspected Catholicism, and alleged bribery on his behalf.31SP16/450, ff. 77, 79; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 28. But the protest against Reade had no effect, and both he and Baker were returned. Neither man made an impression on the brief parliamentary session.

Baker did not secure a seat in the Long Parliament. His appointments to commissions of oyer and terminer in June 1641 and January 1642, and to the royalist commission of array in August 1642 point to his perceived sympathies. By the end of May 1643 the Committee for Sequestrations had ordered their commissioners in Kent to investigate his delinquency.32SP20/1, pp. 57, 79. That July Baker was assessed at £600, but at this juncture it became clear that his property had already been sequestered, and his assessment was respited pending further enquiries. These revealed that the sequestrators in Westminster had seized his ‘richly furnished’ house in Covent Garden, while the Kent county committee had sequestered his estate in Kent, reported to be worth £2,000 a year.33CCAM 181-2; SP19/90, ff. 1-7. On 10 August his case was referred to the House of Commons.34CJ iii. 200a.

Baker’s lack of concrete support for the king actively may have been occasioned by his need for support from Parliament in another matter. For many years he had been involved in an acrimonious dispute with Sir Thomas Walsingham, whose ancestors had been ousted by the attainder of Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1554 from property now held by Baker. This case was brought to the attention of the House of Lords in February 1641, and a series of petitions and counter-petitions were then delivered to Westminster by both sides, but it was only early in 1644 that the case appeared to be near resolution.35HMC 4th Rep. 47, 84; HMC 5th Rep. 14; HMC 6th Rep. 5; LJ iv. 674a; vi. 430b. As a royalist, Baker would clearly have stood little chance of defending his claim, and by February he had taken the Covenant.36SP23/65, p. 175. In a subsequent petition to Parliament he admitted to having been with the king at Oxford, but claimed he had ‘much disliked their proceedings, and thereupon took the first opportunity to lay hold upon the favour of the Parliament’. Baker swore that he had neither borne arms against Parliament, nor contributed to the king’s party, adding that he was ready to engage both his life and fortune for Parliament. He also claimed to have debts of £10,000 and to have lost £3,000 by the seizure of his estate.37CCC 840; SP23/65, p. 173; Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 547; LJ vi. 445a; HMC 6th Rep. 6.

Settlement of the dispute with Walsingham continued to be delayed, and in the meantime Baker faced the prospect of having to compound for his former delinquency. 38LJ vi. 529a, 530, 540b, 542a, 544a, 575a, 581a; HMC 6th Rep. 11. A fine of £5,000 proposed in July was swiftly reduced to £3,000.39CJ iii. 573a, 603a; CCC, 840. Perhaps hoping to facilitate a favourable resolution of the property dispute, Baker agreed to pay £2,000 by 20 September, and the remaining £1,000 within 3 months, to secure the lifting of sequestration.40CJ iii. 620a, 625a; LJ vi. 701b, 703a; HMC 6th Rep. 26; CENT. KENT. STUD. U24/T279. In the summer of 1645 he endeavoured to pay his assessment (£400) rapidly.41CCAM 182 By that October the House of Lords had decided to dismiss Walsingham’s claims.42LJ vii. 284a-b; HMC 6th Rep. 51; LJ vii. 304b, 324b, 325b, 326a, 361a, 367a, 369b, 385b, 403b, 466a, 488b, 575a, 633b, 653a; HMC 6th Rep. 52, 53, 55, 69, 76, 80, 81; PA, Main Pprs. 4 July 1645, f. 31.

Baker evidently remained in debt. Shortly after arranging the marriage of his son in May 1650, Baker sold portions of his estate in Devon.43Cent. Kent. Stud. U24/T279; C33/273, f. 114; C54/3548/9. But on 9 May 1651 he was confined in the upper bench prison for debts amounting to £8,600.44A List of All the Prisoners in the Upper Bench Prison (1653), 9. It was probably there that Baker died in January 1653. He was succeeded as third baronet by his only son John, who with his mother was forced to sell large portions of the family estate to Nathaniel Powell*.45Cent. Kent. Stud. U24/T279, unbound deeds; C54/3815/12. They appear to have retained property to the value of £1,200 a year.46C33/273, ff. 114-5, 530. On the death of Sir John Baker junior in 1661 the baronetcy became extinct.47CB. By 1674 the family seat, Sissinghurst, had been sold for £7,500.48C38/183/14.