RICH, Charles (1616-73), of Leighs Priory, Essex and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Mdx.

Charles Rich was born a younger son of Sir Robert Rich†, the future 2nd earl of Warwick. It was probably not until 1658 that he would have been thought likely to inherit the family peerages. The first of the deaths which edged him closer to the earldom was that of his parents’ second son, Henry, who drowned in 1637.16CSP Dom. 1637, p. 308. When his future wife, Mary Boyle, first meet him, she found Charles ‘a very cheerful, and handsome, well-bred, and fashioned person’.17Warwick, Autobiog. 5. His attempts to woo Frances, the daughter of Sir Richard Harrison*, came to nothing, and, when his friends, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) and Thomas Howard*, fought a duel over her, Rich acted as second to Howard. Once his friendship with the Boyle family had been restored, he successfully courted Broghill’s sister.18Warwick, Autobiog. 5-14; Lismore Pprs. 1st ser. v. 121; C54/3267; Dorothy Osborne: Lttrs. to Sir William Temple, 1652-54, ed. K. Parker (Aldershot, 2002), 142-3. The £7,000 portion which her wealthy father, the 1st earl of Cork, provided for her was just one advantage of the match, all the more so as Rich at this time expected to gain an inheritance of no more than £1,400 a year from his father.19Warwick, Autobiog. 8. The Boyles in turn gained kinship with the Rich family at a time when Warwick was in the ascendant as one of the leading opposition peers in Parliament. Rich abandoned his legal studies early the following year.20Chatsworth, CM/22, no. 154*.

Despite the crucial part played by Warwick in the parliamentarian war effort, Rich seems to have avoided military service during the civil war. His wife would later claim that she had always been ‘much averse to his engaging in the wars’.21Warwick, Autobiog. 20. In August 1642, when there was widespread disorder throughout Essex, he spent his time hunting.22A. Wilson, The Inconstant Lady (Oxford, 1814), 135. There is some evidence that he was used as the intermediary by which the family kept in touch with his elder brother Robert*, who had joined the king at Oxford. Charles was given permission in March 1643 to make a brief visit to Oxford and in about April 1644 he was able to make contact with his brother at Reading. He may have played some part in persuading Robert to return to London several months later.23LJ v. 672a, 647b.

Rich owed his election in September 1645 as the recruiter MP for Sandwich to the nomination of his father. As de facto lord admiral of Parliament’s fleet and one of the commissioners exercising the office of lord warden of the Cinque Ports, Warwick enjoyed a powerful interest in Sandwich, although his intervention there to secure his son’s return was deemed a violation of electoral protocol by the Commons and was referred to the consideration of the committee of privileges (where the matter disappeared).24Supra, ‘Sandwich’; CJ iv. 311a. Rich had taken his seat by 29 October when he took the Covenant in the House.25CJ iv. 326a. He was named to less than a dozen committees before Pride’s Purge, and none of these were of great significance.26CJ iv. 351b, 658b, 687b; v. 195a, 486a, 618a, 641b, 643a, 665a; vi. 87a. As might be expected of Warwick’s son, a number of Rich’s appointments in the Commons were related to his father’s role as a leading parliamentarian peer and a key figure in naval affairs. Rich was an obvious choice in March 1646 to carry up to the Lords an ordinance for continuing the Committee for Foreign Plantations, of which his father was chairman.27Supra, ‘Committee for Foreign Plantations’; CJ iv. 481b, 482b; LJ viii. 225a-b. His presence on the committee set up in August to thank the Scots commissioners for their part in presenting the Newcastle Propositions to the king suggests that he, like his father, welcomed Scottish participation in the peace process and the maintenance of close relations between the two kingdoms.28CJ iv. 643a. Rich was one of the pallbearers at the funeral on 22 October of Warwick’s cousin, the Presbyterian grandee Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.29The True Mannor and Forme of the Proceeding to the Funerall of the Right Honourable Robert Earle of Essex (1646), 16 (E.360.1). The departure of Rich’s brother-in-law, the 2nd earl of Cork (Sir Richard Boyle*), to the continent in late 1646 without compounding for his delinquency encouraged Rich to petition Parliament to recover £8,000 from the Boyle estates on the basis of a bond which had formed part of his marriage settlement.30CJ v. 42b-43a; Add. 31116, p. 592.

In support of his father’s efforts in the spring of 1647 to send a down-sized New Model army to Ireland, Rich carried up to the Lords in April the Commons votes for replacing Sir Thomas Fairfax* and Oliver Cromwell* as prospective commanders against the Irish rebels with Philip Skippon* and Edward Massie*.31CJ v. 133b. He also acted as a teller on 8 April in a division concerning the parliamentary delegation sent to negotiate the surrender of Dublin. The opposing, majority tellers were the leading Independent MPs Cromwell and Sir William Masham.32CJ v. 137b. Rich was named to a committee set up early in June to investigate allegations by the leading Anglo-Irish MPs Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle, his brother Algernon Sydney and Sir John Temple that the recently-elected ‘recruiter’ MP Sir Philip Pervivalle was a royalist collaborator.33Supra, ‘Sir Philip Percivalle’; CJ v. 195a. Thereafter, Rich’s name disappears from the Journals for some nine months, and it is not clear how closely he adhered to his father in defying the army during the summer of 1647. Rich had resumed his seat at Westminster by 8 March 1648, when he was named to a committee to consider various petitions to the Commons.34CJ v. 486b. On 16 March, he was a minority teller with the Independent MP Denis Bond in a division concerning the terms on which the Catholics who claimed relief under the Oxford articles of surrender should be allowed to compound for their estates.35CJ v. 501b. Rich was declared absent when the House was called on 24 April.36CJ v. 543b.

Throughout the summer of 1648 Rich did what he could to help Parliament suppress the uprising in Essex. On 5 June he assisted in the preparation of the indemnity bill which was intended to encourage the release of those members of the county committee who had been seized at Chelmsford the day before. He was among the delegation of MPs which then travelled to Chelmsford in an unsuccessful attempt to offer those terms to the rebels.37CJ v. 585b; Wilson, Inconstant Husband, 145. More drastic measures were thus required and later that month Rich was included on the Commons’ committee which made plans for the capture of 20 hostages in retaliation.38CJ v. 618a. In the meantime Rich had been to Essex to assess the crisis on the ground. His presence there was all the more important as his father was distracted by the need to re-establish Parliament’s control over the fleet. On the road back to London Rich met his wife on her way to Leighs. Lady Rich ignored his advice and her presence at Leighs ensured that her brother-in-law, the 1st earl of Norwich (Sir George Goring†), issued strict orders against the looting of the house when the rebel army passed by on their way to Colchester several days later.39Warwick, Autobiog. 18-20. The time she spent at Leighs with only her father-in-law’s chaplain, Anthony Walker, for company seems to have caused her to undergo some sort of conversion experience.40Warwick, Autobiog. 20-4. Her husband remained in London.41CJ v. 618a, 641b; Warwick, Autobiog. 20.

Rich evidently supported negotiations with the king at Newport in the autumn of 1648, serving as a teller in divisions in August and November to facilitate the treaty and render the terms of Parliament’s peace propositions more palatable to the king. The opposing tellers on each occasion were Independent MPs.42CJ v. 684b; vi. 70b, 71a. Not surprisingly, Rich was among those MPs secluded by the army at Pride’s Purge on 6 December.43A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649, 28 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5). There is no record of his having subsequently entered his dissent from the vote on 5 December in order to resume his seat and the Journals contain no references to him after that date. He probably shared his wife’s deep disapproval of the regicide.44Warwick, Autobiog. 24-5. There is however one piece of anecdotal evidence which places him in the Commons after the purge. Lucy Hutchinson would recall an incident on Christmas Day 1650 when Thomas Harrison I* criticised her husband, John Hutchinson*, and ‘some young men handsomely clad’ sitting next to him for appearing in the House in clothes which were too fashionable. Of the young men, the only one she identified by name was Rich.45Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 197. She may, of course, have been mistaken.

This is the only indication that Rich had any inclination at all to serve under the republic. The new regime would have been quick to make use of any support a member of the Rich family might have been willing to give them in Essex and yet Rich was kept off all the local commissions until 1656. The death in February 1658 of his nephew, Robert Rich (who had married Oliver Cromwell’s* daughter, Frances), meant that Rich became heir to his brother with a reasonable expectation of eventually inheriting the earldom. Their father’s death two months later brought that possibility even closer. The late earl’s will specified that Charles was to receive his plate, goods and chattels, but, perhaps feeling that this was insufficient, Charles tried to challenge the will on the grounds that some of its pages had been missing.46PROB11/276/373.

Rich’s status as heir to the earldom may have helped him gain one of the Essex seats in the elections for the 1659 Parliament. He narrowly defeated Henry Mildmay* on a low turnout.47Bramston, Autobiog. 162; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 439. It may also be that, once elected, he did no more than attend the opening few days of the Parliament. He and Sir Walter Erle* were responsible for dragging Chaloner Chute* to the Speaker’s chair when they assembled on 27 January and the following day he was included on the committee for elections and privileges.48CJ vii. 594a-b. Thereafter he seems to have played no further part in proceedings. There may be a simple explanation for this. Rich is known to have suffered from gout and this may already have been sufficiently severe to restrict his movements. Before long the condition would reduce him to a bad-tempered, foul-mouthed, bed-ridden invalid.49Warwick, Autobiog. 33-4; Memoir of Lady Warwick (1847), 71-266; Corresp. of the Fam. of Hatton, ed. E.M. Thompson (Camden Soc. n.s. xxii-xxiii), i. 40; A. Walker, Leez Lachrymans (1673), sig. A2v.

Rich succeeded to the family earldom in late May 1659 following the death of his elder brother. Within weeks his brother-in-law, the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†), had hopes of involving him the ill-fated royalist uprising planned for that summer.50CCSP iv. 235. The following year Warwick unsuccessfully supported (Sir) Harbottle Grimston* and Oliver Raymond* in the Essex county poll for the Convention.51Bramston, Autobiog. 114-15; CCSP iv. 670. He took his seat in that Parliament in the revived House of Lords, supported the Restoration and was one of the parliamentary commissioners who travelled to The Hague in May 1660 to wait on the king. His ill-health however prevented him from playing much of a public role in the years which followed. He eventually died in 1673. Walker, preaching the funeral sermon at Felsted on 9 September 1673, praised him as ‘a true son of the Church of England’.52Walker, Leez Lachrymans, 27. Both his only son, Charles, and his only surviving brother, Hatton, had predeceased him so the titles passed to his cousin, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Holland. Leighs Priory was bequeathed to his nephew, the 3rd earl of Manchester (Robert Montagu†).53Walker, Leez Lachrymans, 30; Morant, Essex, ii. 102.