CHARLTON, Robert (c.1591-1655), of Apley Castle, Wellington; Haughmond, Upton Magna, Salop and Gray’s Inn, Mdx.

The Charltons were established as gentry at Apley by the middle of the fourteenth century.10Vis. Salop 1623 i. 100. William Charlton†, a brother of Robert Charlton’s great-grandfather, sat as knight of the shire for Shropshire in 1554, in the second Parliament of Mary, probably on the interest of the earl of Shrewsbury. The Charltons benefited from the dissolution of the monasteries, acquiring lands of the religious houses of Wombridge, Lilleshall and Shrewsbury, and they enjoyed influence at Much Wenlock. Their new properties did not make them automatically Protestants, however; under Elizabeth, William Charlton was denounced by the bishop of Lichfield as an ‘adversary of religion’, and some members of the family persisted as recusants.11HP Commons 1509-1558. In the seventeenth century, the celebrated minister Richard Baxter, a native of Shropshire, considered the Charltons ‘one of the chief families in the county’.12R. Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret, the Daughter of Francis Charlton (1681), 1. Robert Charlton’s father married Margaret Barker of Haughmond, another family which did well out of the dissolution: the great tithes of Wellington formed part of the marriage settlement.13Vis. Salop 1623 i. 27; PROB11/130/547. In his will, made in 1609, Andrew Charlton was able to leave portions of £500 to each of his three daughters and properties in a dozen locations to be invested in a trust for his younger children. Bequests of wrought silver were left to five of his offspring, and the poor of three townships were to receive gowns and coats on Christmas Day, here styled the feast of the nativity to avoid papist associations.14PROB11/130/547. For there seems little doubt that by this time the Charltons had been protestantised; Robert Charlton’s generation was headed by his elder brother, Francis, ‘a grave and sober worthy man’ in the eyes of his godly son-in-law.15Baxter, A Breviate, 1-2.

In a deed of 1614, Robert Charlton is described as a third son, although he was the fifth son born to his father, and at birth was the fourth surviving.16NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 1614. As a younger son, he was put to the law. In his father’s will, he was the subject of the only significant qualifier. He was to receive a quarter of a third part of the estate, but extra to that another £30 a year so long as he was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn within nine years. Andrew Charlton stipulated that no award would be forthcoming if Robert was negligent in his studies, although there is a hint that even as he was making his will he relented somewhat, as towards the end of the document he repeated the condition but bestowed another £200 without reservation. Perhaps there were doubts as to Robert’s academic ability, because there is no record of his ever being called at Gray’s Inn.17PROB11/130/547; Harl. 1912, f. 211. Nor is there evidence that he ever married. In the will of his elder brother, Francis, drafted in November 1642, Robert appears as a somewhat marginal figure, named as a trustee to raise marriage portions for Francis’s children, but easy not to notice in the lists of close relatives and their children. Whereas his brother Andrew, a Bristol alderman, received a bequest of £500, Robert was given Francis’s best horse.18PROB11/191/333.

The Charltons were related to the Lloyd family of Aston Hall and the Clives of the Styche. From the 1620s, the Charltons, including Robert, acted as trustees and partners in collusive legal actions in the conveyancing of Lloyd property.19NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 427, 1134, 1811, 1893. These relationships and his godly Protestant outlook probably accounted for Charlton’s support for Parliament during the civil war. He cannot be shown to have been an immediate zealot for the parliamentarian cause, however. Not until 1644 was he named to a Shropshire committee, and until then he probably lay low, probably remaining at Gray’s Inn while the county lay under royalist control. The family underwent a kind of diaspora; his elder brother, a parliamentarian, moved to Bristol at the start of the war.20C6/109/104. His relatives Walter Barker and Andrew Lloyd*, by contrast, were among the first militia commissioners for Parliament, and Charlton was drawn into parliamentarian local administration in their wake. By March 1645, Charlton had become a stalwart of the county committee, among the core of the members who sent off despatches to Sir William Brereton* and to Speaker William Lenthall*.

The committee was established at Shrewsbury by March 1645. From there they directed the siege of High Ercall until forced to abandon it in April, but made a garrison at Benthall instead.21Bodl. Tanner 60A, ff. 11, 52; Brereton Letter Bks. i. 209, 217, 225, 231, 241-2. Deferring to Brereton on the deployment of troops, the committee was hampered by the hostility of the country people, who had been provoked by impoverishment and plunder by the royalists.22Brereton Letter Bks. i. 243, 265-6, 277-8. Later in the year, the committee’s bullish tone of the spring had given way to unrelieved anxiety, and their reports to Brereton dwelt on the ubiquity of the enemy.23Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 143, 206-7, 387. A mildly critical tone crept into their correspondence with Brereton, whom they blamed for keeping their own soldiers out of Shropshire; they later found fault with his conduct of the resumed siege of High Ercall.24Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 279, 353, 413, 447. Charlton was despatched in December to meet Brereton to convey the committee's concerns.25Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 427. Their relations with Thomas Mytton*, the other commander, were worse. They accused him of sullying the good name of the committee, and he in turn was quick to blame them for dividing the loyalties of the soldiers and setting up rival authorities.26Bodl. Tanner 60B, ff. 444, 463. These tensions dissipated somewhat as Parliament’s victory in Shropshire solidified beyond undoing in 1646. Charlton was among the commissioners who negotiated the surrender of Bridgnorth for Parliament after besieging the town, and in that capacity signed the surrender articles on 26 April.27Brereton Letter Bks. iii. 171. On 8 June, the Bridgnorth corporation waived the usual restrictions on the making of ‘foreign’ burgesses and allowed Charlton, Robert Clive* and Andrew Lloyd* to be burgesses whenever they wished, an order which probably marks the date of the parliamentary election there.28Salop Archives, BB/C1/1/1, f. 47v.

It was not until 24 September 1646 that Charlton appeared in the Commons. The first committees he sat on seemed to reflect unfinished military business in the midlands, and may have involved an element of score-settling on his part. The government of Chester (24 Sept.) was a topic that the Shropshire committee took a view on, as their soldiers had been diverted there. The review on 10 October of the major-generals’ pay, in a committee where Robert Clive also played a part, was a chance for the Shropshire committeemen to exert some authority over Brereton and Mytton.29CJ iv. 674b, 690a. On 29 October, Charlton was named to a committee charged with drawing up instructions for county committees to pursue royalists’ estates, and another the same day which sought to balance the claims of those pursuing Members of Parliament in the courts with the parliamentary privilege their quarry enjoyed.30CJ iv. 708a, 709a.

On 9 December, Charlton took the Covenant, along with other Shropshire and Herefordshire Members. He sat on his last committee that year on the 31st, and was named to no other committees until 22 March 1647, when he was called upon to help with the ordinance to prevent royalist ministers from occupying church livings.31CJ v. 7b, 35a, 119b. On 27 March, Charlton was involved with the committee that drew up a protestation of its high opinion of the New Model, a response to unrest in the army over pay arrears and the plans for disbandment. He is more likely to have sided with Sir Robert Harley and his son Edward Harley than with Thomas Pury I and Richard Salwey, colleagues of his on this occasion. Generally, Charlton took the Presbyterian line on military matters, as in April when he sat on the committee for drafting the ordinance on the London militia.32CJ v. 127b, 132b. The committee dealing with the Newcastle-upon-Tyne elections was also to address the question of elections in Shropshire, and was a vehicle for the Harleys.33CJ v. 134a. Charlton was probably sympathetic to Sir Philip Percivalle*, whose case came before a committee in June; the following month, on the eve of the Presbyterian-inspired disturbances in London which led to the forcing of the Houses and the withdrawal of Independent MPs to the protection of the army, a number of Shropshire MPs including Charlton, won permission to retreat to the country.34CJ v. 195a, 249b.

Charlton did not trouble the clerks in the Commons again until January 1648, to appear on a committee to with repairs to war-damaged churches, in a pattern of attendance that by this time suggested a very lukewarm politician.35CJ v. 425a. Another six months elapsed before he appeared again, not as a member of a committee but rather as the subject of one. In a glaring breach of parliamentary privilege, it was reported that his lodgings had been forced, and papers taken. More shockingly, the child to whom he was guardian had been kidnapped.36CJ v. 593b. This brought to public gaze a struggle within the Charlton family that came to dominate the rest of Robert Charlton’s life. After the death of his elder brother, Francis, on 22 November 1642, Robert had tried to exercise guardianship over his nephew, Francis junior.37J.T. Wilkinson, Richard Baxter and Margaret Charlton (1928), 21. The text and provisions of the will of Francis Charlton senior, stuffed as it is with the names of many relations and trustees, provide no insight into why Robert Charlton was able credibly to pose as guardian, given the survival of the child’s mother, Mary, beyond the fact that he was heir to the Apley Castle estate in the event of the boy’s death. As Richard Baxter, who later married Margaret, the sister of Francis junior – put it, ‘the wise and good mother Mary durst not trust her only son in the hands of one that was his next heir’.38Baxter, A Breviate, 2.

The whole affair was in fact doubtless coloured by the politics of the civil war. After her husband’s death, Mary Charlton remarried, after leaving Shropshire for Oxford. Her second husband, Thomas Hanmer, was a royalist, who took over Apley Castle and turned it into a royalist garrison. Robert Charlton had to endure the spectacle of his family home in the hands of the common enemy, and ensured that in the campaign to reduce Shropshire in 1645-6 to the will of Parliament, which he supervised as a county committeeman, the castle was stormed. Baxter hints at the horror of the scene in which mother and children ‘saw part of their buildings burnt, and some lie dead before their eyes, and so Robert got possession of the children’.39Baxter, A Breviate, 2; Wilkinson, Richard Baxter and Margaret Charlton, 22. In Baxter’s account, Mary Hanmer surprised Charlton and spirited the children away to Essex, the event which came to the attention of the Commons in June 1648. Charlton could at least rely on the sympathies of Robert Clive*, who chaired the investigative committee. Confirmed as a gross breach of privilege, the coup was punished by the arrest of various actors in it, but by mid-July they had been released, and Robert Charlton was left to seek redress in the courts.40Baxter, A Breviate, 2; CJ v. 593b, 594a, 605a, 638a. These events coincided with the end of his parliamentary career; whether as a direct consequence of what he might have experienced as a humiliation, or because of the hardening political divisions in the Commons, he sought and received permission to absent himself from Westminster, and seems not to have returned.41CJ vi. 6b, 34b. Though his name figures on one of the contemporary lists of those secluded at the army’s purge of the House on 6 December 1648, it is unlikely that he was present in Westminster at the time.42A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62).

Charlton also withdrew from (or was removed from) all local government commissions in 1649. The dispute between Charlton and his sister-in-law now became the subject of chancery suits, which must have absorbed much of his energy.43NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2417. They turned less on the guardianship of Francis Charlton, but more on the issue of the Apley Castle patrimony. The family’s moveable assets had been split as a result of the diaspora during which Francis senior had moved to Bristol, Apley Castle had been occupied by the royalist Thomas Hanmer, and Robert Charlton had moved to Gray’s Inn before taking up a somewhat peripatetic life as a Shropshire committeeman directing various sieges and military excursions, from Wem, Shrewsbury and elsewhere. According to Mary Hanmer, plate worth £400 and cash of £100 had been split between Charlton and herself, and Francis Charlton senior had suffered plunder to the tune of £3,000 at least.44C6/109/104. Robert Charlton testified how Apley Castle deeds had been sent to him in pillowcases from Oxford, while he was at Wem, by Cicely Mildmay, a daughter of the Barker family of Haughmond and wife of Henry Mildmay*.45C6/111/81.

Robert Charlton spent his last days at Haughmond, which had been leased to him by the Barkers.46NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2411, f. 1. He died suddenly and intestate there in 1655, and was discovered dead by Andrew Lloyd*.47NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2946. A fresh burst of litigation erupted immediately after his death, which focused on the behaviour of his relations and servants, who were said to have raided his study in order to find evidences of their debts to him. Charlton had evidently acted as banker to many of those surrounding him. An action was brought against these by Charlton’s heir, his sole surviving sibling, Mary Tilston, who claimed that his estate was worth £5,000.48Vis. Salop 1623 i. 102; NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2411, f. 1. Andrew Lloyd disagreed, and while declining to put a figure on it, insisted Charlton's wealth was much more modest. Even so, among the choice items in Charlton’s possession were a ‘piece of plate encompassing an Indian nut’ and a jewel which had belonged to Lucy Hay, countess of Carlisle, together with her portrait in a gold frame.49NLW, Aston Hall Deeds, 2946, 2411, f. 1. Unfortunately, there is no clue as to how Charlton had acquired these valuables. His nephew survived a quarrel with his mother, who became dependent on Richard Baxter for advice and spiritual guidance. Baxter mediated in their dispute, to some extent at least, and in 1662 married Francis Charlton’s sister, Margaret.50Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 318. Francis Charlton inherited Apley Castle; the family was represented in Parliament from 1725 by St John Charlton†, who sat for Bridgnorth on the Whitmore interest.51Baxter, A Breviate, 2; HP Commons 1715-1754.