SEABORNE, Richard (c.1590-c.1657), of Hereford, Herefs.

The Seaborne family acquired a moiety of the manor of Sutton St Nicholas in the sixteenth century. It was a manor near Hereford, and Richard Seaborne’s grandfather, a younger son, moved from there a short distance to Felton. The Seabornes married into minor gentry families, but Richard Seaborne’s attendance at the Middle Temple was for serious study of the law, not for the grounding in the law appropriate for better-established gentry sons.13Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 264. Seaborne (who rendered his name thus) was called to the bar in 1618, and became an active member of the Middle Temple for over two decades, acting as manucaptor (or surety) to a considerable number of aspiring lawyers from Herefordshire and beyond, including Walter Kyrle* in 1618 and members of the extended Scudamore family in 1622 and 1632.14Herefs. RO, BG11/5/34; MTR ii. 625, 629, 677. In the early 1620s Seaborne became a legal adviser to John Scudamore†, 1st Viscount Scudamore [I]. Scudamore was custos rotulorum of Herefordshire, and Seaborne was promoted by the viscount, first to the commission of the peace and then to be clerk of the peace, a salaried position. Scudamore was appointed high steward of the city of Hereford in 1630 on the death of William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, and Seaborne was an immediate beneficiary, replacing Anthony Pembridge of Wellington in the fee’d position of deputy steward of the city.15Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 152; Herefs. RO, BG11/5/3/1. The post brought with it the significant responsibility of managing the Hereford quarter sessions and maintaining its records, tasks identical to those of the clerkship of the peace. Furthermore, Seaborne served as deputy to Scudamore in his role as steward of Hereford cathedral dean and chapter manors.16Hereford Cath. Lib. R820. Though removed as deputy steward, Anthony Pembridge continued as a magistrate for the city, indicating that there were limits to Scudamore’s influence upon a corporation which tried to maintain its independence.17Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 142.

Through the 1630s Seaborne continued his work as deputy steward, justice and clerk of the peace, tasks which must have occupied a great deal of his time.18Herefs. RO, BG11/5/32, 34, 35, He was a trusted agent of Scudamore’s in enterprises such as the collection of money to repair St Paul’s Cathedral, acting as collector for the hundreds of Grimsworth, Webtree, Ewyas Lacy and Huntington, as well as for the city of Hereford.19Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 114. As he divided his time between Hereford and London, Scudamore was well placed to coordinate such fund-raising. Indeed, Seaborne’s involvement in the Middle Temple became more intense as the decade continued. He was chosen as one of the four barristers who were to provide the reader’s feast in June 1634, and in February and June 1640 he was ordered to ‘stand at the cupboard’ and supervise feasts.20MTR ii. 824, 889, 894.

Seaborne’s election as MP for the city for the Short Parliament of 1640 was an acknowledgement of Scudamore’s dominance, but was also recognition of Seaborne’s personal importance there. His fellow burgess, Richard Weaver, was his senior in parliamentary service and, as a former mayor, in standing in the city, so Seaborne took the second seat. He seems to have made no impression on the proceedings of this assembly, but with Weaver was returned again to the second Parliament of that year. Not until 3 May 1641 did he come to the notice of the clerk, when he was recorded as having taken the Protestation.21CJ ii. 133a. Despite this apparent invisibility, Seaborne was evidently active in the House, like so many other burgesses, on matters relating directly to the welfare of his sponsoring borough. In 1641 he had in preparation a bill on the vexed topic of the weirs on the River Wye. Projects to make the Wye more economically productive went back to the early years of the century. Hereford corporation sought by removing weirs along the Wye to make the river navigable to the sea, and doubtless looked with approval on the ‘waterworks’ schemes of William Sandys* in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, but their opponents naturally drew attention to the dependence on obstructive weirs and dams of mills of various kinds.22Hereford City Lib. Webbs Collection, Civil War vol. pp 100-1; Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 152-3; The River of Wye (in true examination) very difficult and chargeable to be reduced (1624); R. Vaughan, Most approved and long experienced Waterworkes (1610). Another bill of purely local interest which claimed Seaborne’s attention was that for securing the endowment of Coningsby’s Hospital in Hereford.23CJ ii. 160a.

On 14 June 1641, Seaborne successfully petitioned to be allowed to return home, but he did not take his leave of London immediately, as in July he was again appointed to ‘stand at the cupboard’, and in October he was appointed as reader in the Lent term of 1642 – a senior appointment confirmed in February 1642, when his son, James, was admitted to the inn.24MTR ii. 910, 912, 920-1. It is, however, very unlikely that Seaborne was active in the Commons during this period.25CJ ii. 174b. His bill on the Hereford navigation was left unfinished, and his case for permission to absent himself was considered at the same time as that of John Coventry, a Straffordian who objected to the whole tenor of proceedings at Westminster. Seaborne was not recorded as having voted against the attainder of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), but may have been in sympathy with those who stood against the opponents of the king’s government. The political attitudes of his patron, Scudamore, are obscure at this point; a modern historian has noted of him that ‘we can know very little about his actions from 1639 to the summer of 1642’.26Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 221. Yet Seaborne’s apparent withdrawal in 1641 was by no means a surrender of his interest in the Hereford parliamentary seats. When his colleague, Richard Weaver, died in May 1642, Brilliana Harley moved immediately to promote the candidature of her son, Edward Harley*, for the vacant seat. It was clear from the outset not only that Seaborne’s approval needed to be sought, but that it needed to be sought by Sir Robert Harley* himself. One of Brilliana’s letters to Edward implies that Seaborne had committed himself to supporting the Harleys’ interest, but their campaign was called off when it became known that James Scudamore, the viscount’s son, would take the seat.27Brilliana Harley Letters, 162, 164.

Whatever his views on events at Westminster, Seaborne was in July 1642 still performing his functions as clerk of the peace, and this suggests that although in June he had been appointed assistant reader at the Middle Temple for the autumn term, he had probably left London well before the beginning of the civil war.28Add. 70058, receipt by Sir Robert Harley to Seaborne, 20 July 1642; MTR ii. 926. His movements from August 1642 until January 1644 are lost to us. He was not named to any of the royalist commissions of array or of taxation, and the absence of records for the civic administration of Hereford prevents us from discovering whether he was still town clerk. In 1644, Sir Robert Harley demanded that Seaborne surrender the county records to him, but as Herefordshire was in royalist hands at that time, it is possible that Harley’s démarche was merely part of the contest between the two sides in the civil war.29Notts. RO, DD/P/6/1/22/4. It is not even certain that Seaborne stuck closely to his patron, Scudamore. Seaborne went to the Oxford Parliament, where he signed the letter of 27 January 1644 to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex seeking peace. He claimed later to have withheld his assent to the vote (12 Mar.) declaring the Westminster Members traitors.30A Copy of a Letter from the Members of Both Houses (1644), 5 (E.32.3); CCC 1125. Neither Viscount Scudamore nor his son James Scudamore, Seaborne’s fellow burgess, signed the letter to Essex, although Humphrey Coningsby, the son of the diehard royalist, Fitzwilliam Coningsby*, did. There may therefore have been some weakening in the solid front presented by the Herefordshire royalists.

Seaborne’s absence from Westminster attracted the attention of the House on two occasions. With Sir Sampson Eure he was required in September 1643 to account for his conduct, and was given until 10 October to explain himself. This tactic is not known to have elicited any response from Seaborne. Five days before the Oxford letter to Essex was signed, Seaborne was again named among the defaulters, but although Eure was disabled from sitting, Seaborne again avoided receiving the ultimate sentence in a concession to him of 14 days’ respite of his case, presumably while further information about him was sought.31CJ iii. 256b, 374a. As the same treatment was extended to his Middle Temple associate, Walter Kyrle, a Leominster Member and a client of Essex, it can only be inferred that there was some suggestion that Seaborne may have been similarly motivated. Alternatively, there was a genuine lack of information in London about Seaborne, but in any event, it was not until December 1645 that his behaviour attracted any notice.

After leaving Oxford, Seaborne made his way back to royalist Hereford. He was there, and was taken prisoner, when John Birch* took the town for Parliament in a surprise raid (18 Dec. 1645).32Severall Letters from Colonell Morgan (1645), 6. In March 1646, he pleaded that he had tried before the fall of the city to Parliament to obtain a pass to travel to London. This would have been in order to throw himself on Parliament’s mercy, and Seaborne claimed that he had solicited Sir Robert Harley to this end.33CCC 1125. It is quite possible, therefore, that Harley may have been behind the Commons’ reluctance to deal decisively with Seaborne in 1644. Seaborne’s arrest at Hereford put him beyond further special pleading. He and others taken there, including George Coke, bishop of Hereford, various knights and the Welsh judge, David Jenkins, were moved first to Gloucester, and then to London. Seaborne was ordered to be brought to the bar of the House.34CJ iv. 396b, 415a. He was disabled from sitting further on 3 January 1646.35CJ iv. 396a.

Inevitably after his arrest as a royalist delinquent, Seaborne was subjected to the scrutiny of the agencies of penal taxation. In March 1646 he compounded for his delinquency from prison in London, and it was not until 6 June that an order for his release was given. He was fined £1,009 by the Committee of Goldsmiths’ Hall, and the Committee for Advance of Money assessed him at £600. His release in June was not the last time Seaborne was coerced into paying fines; in November 1648 he was ordered to be brought to London in custody to pay.36CCC 39, 1125; CCAM 722. The case for his possible links with Harley is strengthened by his appearance in October 1646 among the witnesses which Harley proposed to call, in his case against John Birch, but the decline of Harley’s prestige both in Herefordshire and at Westminster in 1647 and 1648 may account for the revisiting of Seaborne’s case by the penal taxation bodies in those years.37Add. 70107, misc. 12, draft articles, Harley v. Birch.

After the execution of the king, Seaborne was once again mulcted, being required to pay £290 and an annuity of a tenth of that towards the ministry being promoted in Herefordshire by the governor of Hereford, Wroth Rogers*; an information against Seaborne described him as late as December 1649 as a ‘papist and delinquent’.38CCC 1125; CCAM 722. Thereafter Seaborne lived quietly in Castle Street, Hereford, and played no further part in public life or drew suspicion from the republican authorities.39Herefs. RO, transcripts of city docs. 22.xiv.viiia. He died before February 1657, when letters of administration were granted to his son, Richard. He is not to be confused with his kinsman, Thomas Seaborne, an active parliamentarian committeeman in Herefordshire, treasurer of funds raised for the war effort, and twice mayor of Hereford during the trial and execution of the king and the establishment of the commonwealth.40Add. 70005, f. 55 (2nd foliation); Duncumb, Collections, i. 368-9. None of Seaborne’s descendants are known to have sat in later Parliaments.