WEAVER, Edmund (1611-c.72), of Above Eign, Hereford and the Inner Temple.

Edmund Weaver was baptised at Much Cowarne, the parish of his maternal grandfather. This may have reflected the uncertain social standing of Edmund’s father, who, as a younger son of a relatively minor gentry family, was in 1611 working to establish himself in Hereford as a citizen. Richard Weaver achieved success there not only as a businessman but as a noted Member of Parliament, and Edmund enjoyed the conventional education of the eldest son of a gentleman. Only the unpleasant incident in 1639, when an ill-tempered dispute over the Weavers’ social standing ended in the court of chivalry, suggested doubt as to the place of the family in Herefordshire society. As this case unravelled in interrogatories and depositions, it was alleged by the counsel for Walter Pye, a kinsman and now adversary of the Weavers, that Edmund and not Richard may have called Pye ‘knave and base knave’.8College of Arms, Ct. of Chivalry, Acta (4), ff. 6-7. Edmund seems to have done little or nothing to build up his own profile in Hereford. Although he was called to the bar in 1637, he seems not to have played any significant role at the Inner Temple, nor was he named before 1641 to any Herefordshire commission issued from chancery, and then it was to a minor commission of enquiry in Hereford.9I. Temple database; C181/5, p. 390.

Nevertheless, Brilliana Harley evidently considered that Edmund had some claim to the Hereford seat left vacant on the death of his father on 16 May 1642. She was working in the interests of her eldest son, Edward Harley*, for whom she was ambitious. Three days after Richard Weaver’s death, which occurred after a long illness which provided ample time for pondering the succession, Brilliana was sharing her thinking with Edward. According to Dr Nathaniel Wright, family friend and physician to the Harleys, the two obstacles to Edward’s becoming burgess for the city were the other sitting Member, Richard Seaborne, and Edmund Weaver. Both had to be squared: Sir Robert Harley should address Seaborne, while Ambrose Elton should dissuade his son-in-law, Weaver, from pursuing the seat for himself.10Brilliana Harley Letters, 162. Elton must have been considered biddable. Wright himself set to work on him, recognising that Weaver had at his disposal ‘power over many voices’ in Hereford.11Brilliana Harley Letters, 163. These votes were presumably the remains of Richard Weaver’s interest, and it is revealing of the limited influence of the Harley family in the city in May 1642 that no direct approach to Weaver himself seems to have been contemplated. The plans that Brilliana and Edward were hatching, and any that Edmund Weaver may have harboured for himself, were scotched when the high steward of Hereford, Sir John Scudamore†, Viscount Scudamore [I], announced that he wished the seat to be bestowed upon his son, James Scudamore*.

During the civil war, Weaver seems to have lain low. His father-in-law, Ambrose Elton, threw in his lot with Parliament, serving on assessment commissions until February 1648 but retaining his place in the commission of the peace for the county until at least 1650. His son, Weaver’s brother-in-law, Ambrose Elton junior, was first a commissioner for sequestrations (June 1643), a magistrate by 1644, and served Parliament as a commissioner of the militia and the assessments until the Rump was expelled. Neither of the Eltons served in public life during the Cromwellian protectorate, but they evidently saw no virtue in following Sir Robert and Edward Harley into seclusion as early as 1650.12Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 168; C193/13/2, 4; Brampton Bryan MSS, 27/4; The Names of the Justices (1650, E.1238.4); A. and O. Weaver, by contrast, was named to no county offices at all, either for Parliament or for the king. Later allegations emanating from sources either in or sympathetic to the New Model army that Weaver was a ‘cavalier’ cannot be substantiated. He probably spent most of the war at Hereford, but was not taken prisoner when it fell to John Birch* on 18 December 1645. In January 1646, Birch asked Sir Robert Harley* to help him win over the ‘extremely disaffected’ citizens, suggesting that if Weaver was indeed in the city, he may well have been among these discontented but not openly rebellious citizens.13Add. 70005, f. 2 (3rd foliation).

The writ for Hereford was moved on 11 September 1646. At the election it was evident that neither John Birch, by this time installed as governor, nor Sir Robert Harley and his associates, had been able to impose their wishes on the electors. Bennet Hoskins was successful in taking the first seat because of his father’s long association with the city. Edmund Weaver contested the second seat against Herbert Perrott*, a member of the committee for Herefordshire and Gloucestershire and thus a colleague of Edward Harley.14SP28/5/1030. Weaver’s victory over this representative of parliamentarian government suggests that he was at best a neutral, perhaps sympathetic to the crowds who had appeared around Hereford in the spring of 1645, hostile both to king and Parliament.15Add. 70005, f. 35 (2nd foliation). The first mention of Weaver at Westminster comes on 1 February 1647 with his taking the Covenant, in the company of his fellow-burgess, Hoskins, and Robert Andrewes, recently elected for Weobley. This was undoubtedly Edmund Weaver, as his first name was identified by the clerks in the Journal entry.16CJ v. 69a. Thereafter, Weaver becomes impossible to identify in the Journal at a glance, because the clerks consistently wrote ‘Mr Weaver’, which could be either Edmund or the more prominent John Weaver.

The contexts in which the name of ‘Mr Weaver’ appears in the Journals after February 1647 suggest strongly that Edmund Weaver was out of sympathy with Parliament, and that in fact most of the Journal entries refer to his near namesake, John Weaver. This is not to suggest that Weaver merely allowed himself to be elected, always intending to be an absentee. Initially, he and his associates in public life probably meant to make some impression. The Herefordshire committee wrote to him as well as to the other Members for seats in the county in March 1647, complaining of the burden of the soldiery, meaning specifically those under the command of John Birch. In April, Birch sold the castle at Hereford for the use of the county, and Weaver’s name once again was listed among those trustees.17Add. 70005, f. 30 (4th foliation); Webb, Memorials, ii. 421. In March, the Mr Weaver who served on two parliamentary committees with an anti-military flavour was probably Edmund. In one, the object was the dispute between the Coventry committee and the Warwickshire gentry; apart from the west midlands interest in this which may have attracted Weaver, a colleague on the committee was Sir Robert Harley, the nearest political ally Weaver probably had in the House. Three days later (27 Mar.), a committee on the petition from the army included not only Sir Robert and Edward Harley, but a Gloucester Member admittedly of a different political hue, Thomas Pury I.18CJ v. 122b, 127b. It may have been his involvement in these committees and his association with the Harleys that stimulated radical elements in the New Model into producing a paper on the crypto-royalist complexion of committees in Wales and the marches, in which Weaver was denounced as a ‘cavalier’, elected by royalist delinquents. This was a ranging shot at Weaver, but can have done nothing to encourage him to throw himself into Westminster life.19Clarke Pprs. ii. 158.

Through the summer of 1647, one of the Weavers was active in drafting propaganda justifying to the country the conduct of Parliament, examining the circumstances and implications of the forcing of the Houses by the Presbyterian-inspired mob, and working towards the production of accounts for those soldiers killed in Parliament’s service.20CJ v. 210a, 269a, 272a, 278a, 320a. None of this activity, confident in its assertion of Parliament’s executive role, suggests the participation of the diffident and uncommitted Edmund. On the other hand, it is distinctly possible that the committee of 22 June on the ordinance for the seal of the south Wales great sessions, which included both Sir Robert and Edward Harley, claimed his attention.21CJ v. 220b. The presence of other Herefordshire Members on a committee is unfortunately insufficient in itself to prove that Edmund was the Weaver named to it. William Crowther of Weobley took charge of a committee (30 Sept.) to draft a proposition on acceptance of the Presbyterian faith, to be submitted to the king, and his colleagues included a Weaver; but as Edmund was noted as absent only three days after this important body was formed, it seems scarcely credible that he could have been the one named to it.22CJ v. 321b, 327b, 330a.

On 7 December, the allegation that had begun in the army, that Weaver either had been or still was a royalist, was laid before the Commons in an information against him. This officially placed him in a form of quarantine, as his case was referred with others of a similar kind, to a committee, but in fact he must have left the Commons for the last time in the summer. He was still sufficiently trusted to be named to a commission for charitable uses in December 1647, and to an assessment commission the following March, but these proved to be his last nominations. In April 1648 he was excused at a call of the House because his case was still before that committee, confined in limbo.23CJ v. 376, 543b. There was little prospect of a recovery while the stock of the Harleys, the nearest thing he had to a patron – Sir Robert was high steward of Hereford – was so low, but in any case Weaver seems to have withdrawn entirely from public life. He appeared in no committee lists back in Herefordshire after March 1648; he never made it into the commission of the peace either in the 1640s, 1650s or later, although nor did he figure in the lists of men suspected by the 1650s regimes of disaffection. Weaver seems never to have played any role in the government of the city of Hereford.

After his withdrawal from the public stage, only occasional glimpses are obtained of Weaver’s private life back in Hereford. He borrowed money in 1651, recording his debt of £200 in the Gloucester court of record, and in 1654 was presented at the view of frankpledge in Hereford for not contributing to road repairs near his property.24Glos. RO, GBR9/1, unfol.; Herefs. RO, transcripts of Hereford docs. 22.iv.iii.; 22.xiv.viii.; Herefs. RO, BH12/3. A quarrel between Weaver and one of his sons came to the attention of the mayor of Hereford in 1658. Weaver devised a recognizance as a means of forcing his reluctant son to undertake some action, but had second thoughts about enforcing it and asked the mayor to discard it before it was recorded, ‘for we are reconciled and I hope better of him and that I shall not need to trouble you any more therein’.25Herefs. RO, BG11/5/7. The return of the king seems not to have tempted Weaver back into public life. He and his sons sold up lands in and near Hereford, but retained his patrimonial estate at Above Eign.26Herefs. RO, F94/II/73. He died some time before March 1672, when letters of administration were granted in the local diocesan court. In later centuries, the Weavers seem to have hovered between the ranks of the upper middle class and the minor gentry.27Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 18.