JACKSON, Miles (c.1604-63), of St Nicholas, Bristol.

Like so many other Bristol MPs of this period, including his younger brother, Joseph Jackson, Miles Jackson progressed through the ranks of the two powerful corporate interests in the city, the corporation and the Society of Merchant Venturers. Like a significant number of apprentices in English towns, Jackson married the daughter of his master, Thomas Davis. He seems to have been more interested in mercantile than in civic affairs in his twenties, holding office as warden of the Merchant Venturers ten years before he was admitted to the council of the corporation. In 1620, he signed a petition demanding government help for Bristol merchants from the threat of piracy, and in 1621 actively supported moves to persuade Parliament to confirm the society’s charter. In the year of his shrievalty, Jackson joined with Humphrey Hooke* in sponsoring the Monmouthshire sea captain, Thomas James, on his voyage to find a north-west passage to the Indies.16Recs. of the Soc. of Merchant Venturers (Bristol Rec. Soc. xvii), 10, 185, 205; J.A. Bradney, Hist. Mon. ii. 267. But more memorable for him that year was his tussle with an agent of the privy council, come to Bristol to investigate an insurrection in the Forest of Dean against enclosures. In an exchange of arrest and counter-arrest, Jackson found himself brought before the court of star chamber over what was essentially a trial of strength between the city and the government.17Adams’s Chronicle, 227. Friction of this kind persisted through the decade. In September 1637, Jackson was again summonsed to London, this time to the court of admiralty; as a contemporary city chronicler noted, Bristol ‘was never free from commissions, commissioners and pursuivants’.18CSP Dom. 1637, p. 436; Adams’s Chronicle, 256.

In controversial votes in the city council in the late 1630s on the right to appoint a chamberlain and over Ship Money, both with implications for Bristol’s relations with central government, the Jackson brothers stuck together.19Supra, ‘Joseph Jackson’. On the eve of the Short Parliament of 1640, Miles was named to the city council’s committee to consider ‘public grievances’, probably because of his experiences over the previous decade.20Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 102v. In June 1642, he did not contribute to the city’s collection for the army to suppress the rebellion in Ireland, but no political motive can be read into this - perhaps his business ventures failed him - because two months later he was named to the city’s own defence committee (15 Aug. 1642). Miles Jackson may have been more radical than his brother. Joseph Jackson seems to have been happy for Humphrey Hooke to represent them in their petitions to both king and Parliament in November, but Miles, Richard Aldworth*, Luke Hodges* and less explicably Richard Longe* seem to have had their doubts over Hooke. In the end, however, it was the merchant prince Hooke who led the city’s pleas for reconciliation.21Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 123; 04264/4, pp. 8, 10.

The failure of Parliament to maintain its garrison under Nathaniel Fiennes I* did not persuade Jackson to leave the city. In July 1643, he voted for a gift of £10,000 to the king, and signed the protestation of later that year renouncing the taking up of arms against him.22Bristol RO, 04264/3, pp. 33, 37. On the other hand, when a present to the queen of £500 was proposed in April 1644, he did not vote, and by the winter of 1644, as relations between the royalist occupying force and the citizens grew strained, Jackson seems to have withdrawn from an active role in the city government. Even as the New Model army was preparing an assault on Bristol, in September 1645, Jackson did not emerge to participate in the complex round of voting in the council chamber, and thereafter he becomes temporarily difficult to distinguish from his brother. Although Miles Jackson served as a city auditor during 1646-7, it was not until September 1648 that he played a full role across the range of civic offices.23Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 110, 129, 131, 143, 152, 172, 186. Mayor from September 1649, master of the Merchant Venturers the following year and then alderman of the city, the period immediately following the king’s execution marked Jackson’s apotheosis as a prominent Bristolian. It is probably revealing that he did not join Richard Aldworth and Denis Hollister*, as commissioners for propagating the gospel, in inviting Thomas Ewins to the city as a minister in July 1651. Jackson seems never to have had any inclinations towards radicalism in either religion or politics, and is unlikely to have been sympathetic to the appointment of Sir Henry Vane II* as high steward, or to the influence in the city of a prominent millenarian, Colonel Thomas Harrison I*.24Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 18; R. Farmer, Sathan Inthron’d in his Chair of Pestilence (1656), 46.

There was division within the Bristol council much earlier than the conflict which spilled out into the open in the summer of 1654. Orders encouraging secret ballots (7 Nov. 1651) and enforcing confidentiality (4 Mar. 1653) suggest this, and the return to Bristol of Denis Hollister from the Nominated Assembly in July 1653 worsened matters. In May 1654, Miles Jackson and his brother Joseph, Richard Aldworth and John Haggett, colonel of militia, were among those charged with drawing up the address and recognition to present to Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell*.25Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 63, 64. When the elections for the first protectorate Parliament were held on 12 July 1654, Jackson was a candidate, standing with Robert Aldworth* against John Haggett and George Bishop. That the election was held at all, in a city where the council’s authority over selection of Members had been reasserted during the 1640s, is evidence of a breakdown of consensus among the ruling elite. Jackson’s opponents were soldiers of the garrison, sympathetic to the emerging Quakers under Hollister. In the sour aftermath of the contest, Hollister signed a deposition against Jackson which exposed the latter’s history as an appeaser of the royalists during their occupation of the city between 1643 and 1645. These allegations, based on the record of the common council proceedings, were true, but Hollister’s unwarranted gloss on them was that they were evidence of Jackson’s continuing sympathy for enemies of the government.26CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 331-2; Bristol Deposition Bks. 1650-4, 179-81.

Jackson and Aldworth fought off this challenge to take their seats in the Parliament which opened on 3 September 1654. Jackson made no impression on the Journal clerk or the one diarist of the assembly, but he was mandated in the usual way by a Bristol committee of councillors, including his brother, Joseph.27Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 67. He was able to make a special journey to London in August before Parliament opened to present the city’s recognition of the protector. The complaints of his electoral opponents followed him to London, however, in the form of a petition against the conduct of the election, and some of his time in London was spent in lobbying defensively on the council’s behalf.28R. Farmer, The Impostor Dethron’d (1658), 62-4; Bristol RO, 04026/24, pp. 155, 230. After this Parliament was dismissed, Jackson returned to a Bristol more divided than ever by the presence of the Quakers. While he was not mentioned as a persecutor as frequently in Quaker records of sufferings as his brother Joseph, there was no doubt of his complete identification with the beleaguered orthodox ministers of Bristol.29Friends’ House Lib. Great Book of Sufferings, i. p. 74; The Cry of Blood (1656), sig. A2, 108-11 (E.884.3).

In March 1655, Jackson was involved in the reorganisation of the Bristol militia, a tacit attempt to rid the local military of elements hostile to the corporation.30CSP Dom. 1655, p. 79; TSP iii. 299. In November 1656 the council authorised payment of £50 to him for his allowance of 6s 8d per day for attending the Parliament. Payment was not actually made until 27 March 1658, and then at £53. The delay and the anomaly in the sums promised and paid have led one authority into the view that Jackson represented Bristol again in the second protectorate Parliament, but there is no evidence of this.31Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 116; 04026/25 (ii), p. 58; 04026/26, p. 48; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 268. After returning to Bristol after his parliamentary service, Jackson did not involve himself again in national politics. In December 1657, faced with a rumoured rising of royalists, he joined his brother Joseph on a committee for putting the city on defensive alert, and in January 1659 was a member of the group that drew up instructions for the freshly-elected MPs (Joseph among them), ‘in reference to all kind of grievances as well relating to the commonwealth in general as to the city in particular they think fit of’.’32Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 146, 180.

Jackson was active as a city militia commissioner during the emergency of the summer of 1659, and was noted as such by a hostile royalist commentator.33Stowe 185, f. 157. He was still a militia commissioner for Bristol in January 1660 – appointed by the city, not by the Rump, restored for the second time – and until mid-March at least, the council held out hope that it could continue to control its own militia, a long-term policy of the corporation.34Bristol RO, 04264/6, p. 14. But George Monck* was informed late in February by a Bristol royalist that both Jackson brothers were among ‘the more sober, judicious and moderate of the aldermen’ who ‘disrelish and are active in proceedings against the anabaptistical and fanatic party of this city’, evidence that the brothers were not motivated by republicanism of any kind.35HMC Leyborne-Popham, 161. Indeed, Miles Jackson was responsible for drafting a reply to Sir Charles Coote*, a principal figure in Ireland, who wrote to the council in early March. Coote and his allies in Ireland had already declared for a free Parliament, so the council’s approval of his communication strongly suggests that it (and Jackson) supported this line, which by this time implied some sort of restoration of the Stuart monarchy.36Bristol RO, 04264/6, pp. 8, 13, 14.

Both Miles and Joseph Jackson were members of the committee to brief Bristol’s representatives in the Convention of 1660, and both helped draft the congratulatory petition to the king. Miles was elected to only one city office in September 1660 and September 1661 (his brother held three posts), but he survived attempts to remove him from the council.37Bristol RO, 04246/6, pp. 29, 43, In June 1662, he was included in a working group on plans to request an extension of the charter, and was named to his last city committee, on managing the marsh alongside the Avon, on 4 January 1663. He made his will six weeks later, leaving the garden in Temple Street, bequeathed him by his father, for the benefit of the poor. Intriguingly, his will was witnessed by John Haggett, his opponent in the 1654 parliamentary election, who had been driven from his post as steward of the Tolzey court by the Corporation Act of 1661.38Bristol RO, 04026/6, pp. 61, 71, 73. 78, 79; PROB11/313/242. Jackson died shortly afterwards and was buried on 24 February in St Nicholas church. None of his descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.