FREEMAN, Edward (1607-84), of Gray’s Inn, Mdx.; Presteigne, Rad. and Norton, Bromyard, Herefs.

Background and early career

The Freeman family was established in Blockley and adjacent parishes where Worcestershire borders Gloucestershire long before 1600: in 1526 it was said to have been rooted there ‘from old time’.21VCH Worcs. iii. 267. One branch of the family owned Batsford; another held Evenlode manor from 1605, and was related to Fitzwilliam Coningsby*, to whom descended property in that area; the Evenlode Freemans were also seated at Neen Sollars in Shropshire.22Rudder, New Hist. Glos. 265; VCH Worcs. iii. 285, 349; J. Habington, Survey of Worcs. (Worcs. Hist. Soc. v), ii. 69. Indeed, an Edward Freeman of Neen Sollars was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1640, and has to be distinguished carefully from the MP, whose origins were more obscure.23GI Admiss. i. 225; VCH Worcs. iii. 349; BRL, MS 3420; Herefs. RO, F55/68; CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 215, 231, 240; Vis. Glos. 1682-3 ed. Fenwick and Metcalfe, 64-5. For whereas the Freemans of Evenlode and Neen Sollars were unambiguously of gentry status, other branches of the family at Blockley and Ebrington were yeomen, sometimes shading into parish gentlemen. Our Edward Freeman’s father was described as ‘esquire’ when Edward was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1635, but this was more suggestive of the family’s aspirations than of any secure footing among the gentry. The registers of Blockley and Ebrington contain many entries for the Freeman family, but only when Edward returned to his native heath to have his daughter baptised in 1637 did the vicar accord him the distinction of the prefix ‘Mr’. Otherwise, the family’s vital events were recorded plain, with no nod to their status. The family was sensitive to aspersions cast upon their gentility; between 1635 and 1638, Edward Freeman’s father brought a case in the court of chivalry against Blockley men who had challenged his status during a land dispute, and Edward himself was drawn into the contest.24Cases in the High Court of Chivalry, 1634-1640 ed. Cust and Hopper (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 97-8, 202-3. Edward Freeman’s grandfather, John Freeman, seems to have been the most distinguished member of the family, enjoying friendships with the neighbouring gentry when he made his will in 1594; thereafter, his branch of the Freeman family fell into decline.25PROB11/84/347.

As a second son of a family with no great wealth, Edward Freeman was obliged to seek a living, and his admission to Gray’s Inn at the late age of 27 may suggest that his career was impeded by lack of financial resources. Called to the bar in 1640, he retained close links with his inn, which provided him with the springboard for his legal career. That year, he found work as a pursuivant or apparitor to the bishop of Gloucester, and summoned the clergy to Convocation until he was overcome by an illness.26Glos. RO, GDR L/53. By this time he had married into a Herefordshire family, and from the outbreak of the civil war was settled at Presteigne, Radnorshire. He was a captain in the regiment of Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford by November 1642, and was mentioned in one of Stamford’s despatches from the Presteigne district during his campaign against the royalists in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire: ‘One Mr Freeman, a counsellor at law ... is this countryman, who fought very bravely and took away many arms with his hands’.27LJ v. 426a.

It is almost certain that Freeman came to Presteigne as a client of Sir Robert Harley*: the Brampton Bryan family had land and patronage interests in Presteigne that were retained even after they had sold the living of the town, and Edward Harley* was mentioned in the same despatch that described Freeman’s notable conduct.28Brampton Bryan MSS, 8/33, 8/34, 83/26, 87/1. It was quite probably our Freeman who, pretending to be one of Prince Rupert’s party, discovered details of royalist intentions concerning a possible attack on Gloucester.29A Full Declaration of all Particulars (1643), 10 (E.97.6). He may have been the lieutenant-colonel who wrote to Parliament in October 1643 about his treatment in the aftermath of Stamford’s disastrous defeat at Stratton, in Cornwall, and may indeed have been involved in an exchange of prisoners.30PA, Main Pprs. 18 Oct. 1643; CJ iii. 183a. More certainly, he was in charge of local forces in Herefordshire in the aftermath of Naseby in 1645, his troops deployed by the Committee of Both Kingdoms in the reduction of the royalist garrisons in Worcestershire, such as Madresfield, in preparations for a siege of Worcester.31CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 323. It was in this context of brief service in the Herefordshire county regiment that he acquired the title of ‘Colonel’, which usually prefixed his name during the rest of the 1640s and 1650s. He accompanied Edward Massie* to a dinner at the Leathersellers’ Company in January 1646, and was made a member of the company as a favour to Massie. He doubtless shared the Presbyterian outlook of both Massie and Harley.32Gent. Mag. 1833, ii. 304.

In April 1646, Freeman was involved in the composition for royalist delinquency of the Freeman family of Bushley, Gloucestershire, evidently kinsmen of his. John Freeman had been shot dead during the siege of Gloucester in August 1643, while fighting for the king. His father later offered to compound, pleading that he went to the king’s garrison of Worcester through fear, and had property seized by the Gloucestershire committee. Edward Freeman and John Freeman’s surviving son undertook that the estate would be compounded for.33CCC 1017; Glos. N. and Q. iii. 151-2, 168; VCH Worcs. iv. 48. Edward’s standing guarantor for royalist relatives may have prejudiced the Herefordshire county committee against him, to account for his inclusion in a listing by the committee of 524 persons it sought to charge with delinquency.34Add. 700061, loose. Another name on the list was that of Bennet Hoskins*, an associate of Sir Robert Harley’s, so both men may have been listed as part of the struggle for local dominance between Colonel John Birch* and the Harley faction. By February 1647, Freeman was confirmed as a recipient of Harley’s patronage, being appointed to officiate on Harley’s behalf as deputy steward of Hereford, and later, Hoskins advised Harley that he had given Freeman ‘a hint to use our worthy ministers with respect’.35HMC Portland, iii. 161. The implication of Hoskins’s comments was that Freeman held some position as an agent dealing on Harley’s behalf, either privately or publicly. Whether acting as a private agent or as a state’s servant, Freeman was reported to have gone on the south Wales court circuit, thus drawing once again on his legal experience.36Clarke Pprs. ii. 158; HMC Portland, iii. 161.

The antipathy between Sir Robert Harley and both the civilian Independents and the officers of the New Model army culminated in Harley’s exclusion from the House of Commons in December 1648. If Freeman was Harley’s client, or was the client only of Harley, it is surprising that he weathered the eclipse of his patron, the execution of the king and the inauguration of the commonwealth to acquire legal office under the Rump. He was appointed attorney-general (state’s attorney) to the courts of great sessions in four counties of south Wales, and was added ex officio to the commission of the peace there. Freeman may have acquired a new patron, or may simply have solicited the post, knowing that supporters of the new regime were relatively thin on the ground in Wales. Perhaps through the influence of the Harleys, he was appointed recorder of Leominster in 1650, and retained this office until his death; it must have provided him with both self-confidence and local standing. In June 1651, the commissioners for compounding appointed Freeman steward of sequestered estates in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and later extended his powers over sequestered properties in south Wales.37CCC 454, 507. He was never one of the dependables of the Herefordshire county committee, like John Flackett* or even Edward Harley*; indeed, Freeman’s name never appears in the surviving records of that committee at all.38SP28/229. His career suggests a somewhat deracinated figure.

Faction-fighting in south Wales in the 1650s

By the good offices of the far-away London commissioners, not only was Freeman admitted to office in the murky world of south Wales sequestrations (25 Nov. 1651), but also his 18 nominations for posts as sub-commissioners were apparently accepted.39SP23/98, p. 81. A week later (2 Dec.), Freeman brought in articles before the commissioners for compounding, who met at Goldsmiths’ Hall, against the individuals in five south Wales counties that his own men had supplanted.

This was an attack on the nominations to local office of Colonel Thomas Harrison I*, Colonel Philip Jones* and Henry Herbert*.40CCC 507, 827. Until January 1650, Jones was a commissioner for compounding himself, so for Freeman to have tackled him head-on suggests either a great deal of self-confidence or a powerful backer. He was evidently proceeding on evidence that the south Wales sub-commissioners for sequestrations had not all resigned, as they should have done under the act of 25 Jan. 1650, which vested sequestration business in new officers.41A. and O. ii. 330. Going beyond his brief, Freeman offered suggestions for posts in Monmouthshire; even though none of the Goldsmiths’ Hall commissioners was Welsh, they must have reminded him that his writ did not run in that county. Jones, Harrison and Herbert signed a paper at a further meeting at Goldsmiths’ Hall on 12 December, when Freeman was made to justify his criticisms. On this occasion, the commissioners were more wary of Freeman, and ruled that his nominations could proceed only after those already in post had been scrutinised and found wanting.42SP23/98 p. 75; SP23/36, f. 262.

In his general articles laid before the commissioners on 2 December, Freeman had made clear the ad hominem nature of his case. The south Wales sub-commissioners had detained more than £5,000 of sequestration monies in their own hands; had filed no accounts at Goldsmiths’ Hall for over five years, and some of them had built ‘new sumptuous costly houses and bought vast estates’ from no visible source other than the sequestration money.43SP23/98 p. 75. Freeman singled out Colonel Philip Jones, born, he alleged, to no more than £7 a year but now annually enjoying £1,000. Moreover, a number of the sub-commissioners were Jones’s servants or military subordinates. They were reluctant to sequester Catholics and other delinquents, and they ‘set out and let the sequestered estates ... to friends and creatures of their own at extreme undervalues’.44SP23/98 p. 75. Finally, Freeman drew attention to the overlap between the activities of the well dug-in sequestration officials and those of the Propagation commissioners, by then nearly two years into their regime.

When Freeman was obliged to justify his complaints against Jones and his associates, he was unable to muster much evidence that was convincing. He evidently spoke against particular individuals, identifying men who were alleged to be clerks of Philip Jones and John Herbert, a colleague of Jones’s from the Cardiff garrison. Others he excepted against as working for the propagation commissioners; in the case of one man, weakly, he raised objection to residence on the border of the county for which he had been appointed. Most of the sub-commissioners were cleared, because Freeman’s grounds for complaint were disallowed. Jones, Harrison and Herbert mounted a counter-appeal against Freeman’s candidates. Freeman’s own nominees had mostly never been appointed to office by parliamentary ordinance. If the Glamorgan nominees were typical, however, they had demonstrated some commitment to Parliament in other ways. Hugh Jones and Matthew Hopkin of that county had been, respectively, a tithe farmer in 1648 and an agent of the county committee in 1646. Freeman seems to have worked to produce a list of new men, whose associations with former committees were minimal. As it happens, most of Freeman’s suggested officials were later to find places on the Welsh assessment and militia commissions between 1657 and 1659, as they were drawn in from the penumbra of servants of the state at parish level. 45E113/2; A. and O.

The outcome of these mutual recriminations at Goldsmiths’ Hall was that only three were dismissed. Two, Robert Thomas and Walter Herbert, of Glamorgan and Breconshire respectively, were small fry who had been appointees of Jones. The most significant casualty was one of Freeman’s own nominees: John Gunter of Tredomen, Breconshire, under-clerk in chancery and a deputy of Robert Coytmor in his office of prothonotary of the Carmarthen circuit. Gunter’s offences were failing to file accounts (for some money of the state that had passed through his hands at some earlier point) and non-residence.46SP23/36, f, 262; Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 193; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 265-6. Thus the contest between Philip Jones and Freeman might be said to have ended in a draw on this occasion, but Freeman persisted. On 10 March 1652, in his capacity as attorney-general for the south Wales counties, he presented a petition to Parliament challenging the activities of the commissioners for propagating the gospel in Wales. This opened up a new front against Philip Jones and his colleagues, which developed into a veritable war of attrition.

In June 1650, supporters of the propagation act had petitioned Parliament with thanks for the ‘inestimable benefit’ of the legislation, asserting the preaching of the gospel as ‘not the least and most inconsiderable means to secure and establish your present government’.47A New Declaration and Remonstrance of the Inhabitants of South Wales (1650), 5 (E.605.3). Freeman’s first petition of just over six months later was of such an opposite tenor that it seems likely to have been framed consciously and deliberately as a response. The petition of March 1652 developed the theme, dwelling on the ejections of ministers, the failure to replace them, the absence of the promised new schools, the alleged disposal of tithes worth £20,000 by the commissioners, their friends and relatives, and the profound spiritual torpor that had been worsened by this dispensation.48A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Transaction (1654), 1-2. Freeman stood at the bar of the House, and made a speech to set the petition in context. He conceded the existence of separated congregations in south Wales, but stressed again the inadequacy of the itinerants appointed under the act and, in virtually identical terms to those he had employed in 1651 against the sequestrators, denounced the propagators’ letting of tithes ‘to friends, creatures and alliance of their own at extraordinary undervalues’.49True and Perfect Relation, 8. The petition seems to have been received graciously by the Speaker, and it was referred to the Committee for Plundered Ministers. There, the petitioners encountered hostility from Thomas Harrison I, who had been first-named among the propagation commissioners, and failed in their attempt to secure a commission to investigate their regime. In the twists and turns of the commissioners at the Plundered Ministers Committee, it was evidently Freeman who led the attack, at one point demanding access to a book of accounts of 60 folios, produced once by Harrison but never seen again. 50True and Perfect Relation, 9-12.

The evasions of the propagators continued until the dismissal of the Rump, and Freeman became their bête noire, even as they were his. At the end of the century, the highly partisan chronicler of the ejected Anglican clergy, John Walker, heard a story that the itinerants prayed for Freeman’s downfall, that he fell ill, but recovered.51J. Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), 13. Fanciful this may have been, but Freeman paid a high material price for his persistence. In July 1652 came two challenges to his authority: one from Welsh drovers who objected to his involvement in a legal case of theirs, and another from Monmouthshire sequestration commissioners who would not accept one of his deputies.52CCAM 877; CCC 593. In August, Richard Creed, described at this point as Harrison’s servant, but one who was to become son-in-law of the leading ‘propagating’ minister Walter Cradock (a sympathiser of the Cromwellian protectorate), secured a warrant for Freeman’s arrest. The bane of the propagators was detained by messengers of the council of state on his way into the meeting of great sessions at Presteigne, Radnorshire, brought to London and imprisoned (as he tells us) for 16 weeks. The order book of the council of state suggests a period of detention of more like half that time, but it is evident that Freeman was kept waiting for his examination by the council, and when at last it came, nothing that was against him was made to stick.53True and Perfect Relation, 13; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 354, 380, 381, 416, 420, 425, 432, 433, 447, 455, 456. What may have provoked his arrest was the first of a number of publications which he brought out to publicise his campaign. The Petition of the Six Counties of South-Wales (1652) includes the petition of March and the resolutions of the House on it, a response from Vavasor Powell, one of the pre-eminent ministers funded by the scheme and an anonymous reply to him from a writer based near Hereford, which was almost certainly Freeman. A further reply to Powell also incorporated in the tract was from Alexander Griffith, an ejected minister from Glasbury, near Hay-on-Wye, who was to assume leadership of the anti-propagation movement, at least as it manifested itself in print. The Petition was published after 9 May, and marks the first collaboration of Freeman and Griffith.

Freeman’s contribution is revealing of some of its author’s motives. He believed that the church in Wales before 1650 was in better heart than it was after the propagators had got to work on it, but attributed an upsurge in popery to their meddling. He descanted as before on the personal acquisitiveness of the commissioners, but confessed himself unfamiliar with the picture in north Wales, thus suggesting why his partnership with Caernarfonshire-born Griffith was so useful. Finally, Freeman introduced what was to become another evergreen theme of the propagators’ critics: that they intended to extend the scheme to England. As a Herefordshire man, Freeman evidently considered himself to be living on the frontier, attributing the rumour that propagation would arrive in western England to a published letter by Miles Hill that he had recently read.54The Petition of the Six Counties of South-Wales (1652), 8-19. Hill, thinly disguised in The Petition, was a Leominster mercer who had suffered from financial problems around 1640, but who had become treasurer of the Herefordshire committee until October 1646 and who was regarded as an ‘extreme radical’ in politics and religion, hostile to Sir Robert Harley and his sons.55G.E. Aylmer, ‘Who was ruling in Herefordshire from 1645 to 1661?’, Trans. Woolhope Nat. Field Club, xl. 386.

After the dismissal of the Rump, and during the high tide of religious radicalism represented by the Nominated Assembly, Freeman lost his post as south Wales attorney-general. His successor, Edmund Jones*, was a former delinquent royalist, though it is unclear whether this was publicly revealed at the time of his appointment.56CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 423, 452; CCC 1524. More pointedly, Edmund Jones was son-in-law of a sequestrator, had allegedly helped Philip Jones to bargains of land and enjoyed an estate in Llangwm, Monmouthshire, whose living was leased in 1655 by Richard Creed, one of Freeman’s tormentors.57The Distressed, Oppressed Condition (1659), 3; LPL, Comm. XIa/3 p. 129; Oxford DNB, ‘Walter Cradock’. During his protracted detention at the behest of the council of state, such evidence as there was against Freeman had been presented by John Morgan, sequestrator and lay preacher in Monmouthshire.58CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 455; T. Richards, Hist. Puritan Movement in Wales (Neath, 1918), 146. There is no doubt, therefore, that Freeman’s loss of office was a direct reprisal by the Philip Jones camp for his persistent and very public criticisms of the propagators.

Freeman’s own version of events portrays him as a victim of the propagators’ cronyism, but there is some evidence that he himself was linked to at least one controversial south Wales family. In 1650, Freeman became a trustee of the marriage settlement of Hoo Games of Breconshire, in a transaction that also included members of the royalist Kemys and Aubrey families of Glamorgan. Games had attempted to lead a rising in Breconshire in the second civil war, Sir Nicholas Kemys had been killed in Chepstow castle after seizing it in the same month for the king, and the Aubreys of Llantrithyd were involved a number of revolts against Parliament. The accusations of former royalism that Freeman was happy to level at his opponents could easily be reflected on to him.59NLW, Penpont 694; CCC 512. There was no evidence that he was an active royalist plotter in the mid-1650s, however. He practised law in the Leominster district, and was invited by the estate steward of Henry Marten* to arbitrate in a manorial dispute.60Brotherton Lib. Univ. of Leeds, Marten Loder MSS, vol. ‘Thomas Deane Letters I’, f. 39. He seems if anything to have been more in tune with the conservative tone of the protectorate than with any of the preceding republican regimes, and indeed was rumoured in 1654 to be ‘entertained into favour by the lord protector’.61Brotherton Lib. Marten Loder MSS, vol. ‘Thomas Deane Letters I’, f. 44. Alexander Griffith’s continuing attacks in print on both the lay propagation commissioners, especially Philip Jones, and against Vavasor Powell kept Freeman’s name before his readers, and there is evidence that Gray’s Inn served as a clearing house for these London critics.62A True and Perfect Relation; TSP ii. 93, 128, 129. He may well have been the Edward Freeman who, evidently in straitened circumstances, petitioned the first protectorate Parliament as a ‘reduced’ (disbanded) officer in the hope of acquiring a grant of lands in Ireland.63The Humble Petition of the Subscribers (1654, 669.f.19.57). There is no record of his success or otherwise in this endeavour, but by May 1658 he had gained enough respect in his inn to be elected ancient, and that year was appointed an extraordinary master in chancery, his feud with Philip Jones – an influential member of the protector’s council – notwithstanding.

The 1659 Parliament

As recorder of some nine years’ standing, with a recently enhanced chancery career behind him, Freeman was a natural choice to represent Leominster in 1659 in the only Parliament of Lord Protector Richard Cromwell*. He was named to the important committee of privileges (28 Jan.), and wasted no time in returning to his pet subject. On 5 February, he and Evan Seys took the lead in a committee to consider the ministry in Wales and how church revenues there had been managed in the past.64CJ vii. 595a, 600b. As before, the main target among the former lay commissioners of the propagation act was Philip Jones. He worked behind the scenes to bring Jones, who had been comptroller of the household of the first lord protector, to heel. Freeman, who had begun as a client of the Presbyterian Harleys, was not averse to drawing upon help from unlikely quarters. He was able to exploit resentments among republican army officers such as John Okey* and Matthew Alured* to pull in their support against conspicuous pillars of the Cromwellian establishment.65Burton’s Diary, iii. 82-4. He also made common cause with David Morgan*, who had an estate in Herefordshire and who had clashed in the recent elections with Rowland Dawkins*, a relative and staunch ally of Jones. Morgan, supported by Freeman, accused Jones to his face in front of the protector of having bought a great estate with tithe money, the allegation Freeman had first made in 1651.66Henry Cromwell Corresp. 482-3. They drew first blood with the expulsion from the House (12 Feb.) of Edmund Jones, who had taken Freeman’s legal post in south Wales, which must have been particularly gratifying to the Herefordshire man. The climate encouraged yet another reprise of the pamphlet case against the propagators, which now incorporated the murky details of the attempt to audit Welsh church finances in 1655.67The Distressed, Oppressed Condition.

Elsewhere in this Parliament, Freeman was named to several other committees: on the petition of the Long Parliament’s Navy Committee stalwart, Samuel Vassall* and the important committee for Scottish affairs (1 Apr.); on the impeachment of another Cromwellian, Major-general William Boteler* (12 Apr.) and on the petition of the disbanded soldiers of Lancashire. This last was a reminder that Freeman had once been a ‘reduced officer’ himself.68CJ vii. 623a, 623b, 637a, 638a. But these must have been but minor deviations from his main campaign. In these circumstances, he would have been indignant at George Thomason’s annotations to a pamphlet which appeared in London on 12 May, after the protectorate had been dismantled by the army and the Rump restored in its place. It offered a catalogue of eminent office-holders who had clung on to power through most of the interregnum regimes, denouncing them in cameo pen-portraits. Unlike Freeman, Philip Jones as an old Rumper was still in the House, and was included in the libel. The identity of each target was supplied in handwriting by Thomason, who inserted Freeman’s name over what was evidently instead intended as an attack on Edmund Jones, his successor as south Wales attorney-general.69Twelve Queries Humbly Proposed (1659), 4, 5. Presumably the anonymous author had not noticed Jones’s expulsion on 12 February.

Later career

The role of petitioner to Parliament against Jones and his colleagues passed now to Bledry Morgan, an associate of the Carmarthenshire Member in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, but Freeman was doubtless doing all he could in the background. His tenacity and perseverance at last paid off, mainly because of the parliamentary climate of suspicion against Cromwellians. With Edmund Jones gone, fire could be concentrated on Philip Jones, and his enemies closed in for the kill during May, while the revived Rump sat and Richard Cromwell continued to cling on somehow to his office of lord protector. Freeman had only to sit out the upheavals in London, and welcome the Restoration of Charles II. In June 1660 he was made governor of Tenby, in the heart of Philip Jones’s former fiefdom. His gift of a military drum to the corporation of Leominster suggests his enthusiasm for the king’s return.70Townsend, Leominster, 292. He kept his recordership, and in September 1660 was restored to his Welsh legal office.71CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 281. He became a justice of the peace in Herefordshire, having exercised that authority earlier only in Wales.

In July 1661, Freeman became a correspondent of Edward Hyde*, 1st earl of Clarendon, the king’s chief minister. He provided with Clarendon with the statistics he had bandied about in his numerous pamphlet excursions with Alexander Griffith, on the tithes detained in Wales in the 1650s. He was now thinking about the terms of the act of indemnity and oblivion, and the new opportunities it suggested for holding the propagators to account: ‘Great sums have been given by the propagators amongst themselves and agents as fees and salaries’.72Bodl. Clarendon 75, ff. 411-2. Once again, he recited his litany of their wrong-doings, reminding Clarendon that although the new act exempted from investigation interregnum salaries allowed on public business, the authority by which the propagators dispensed funds was an unlawful one. Once posing as critical friend of the republic, Freeman was now able to use his obsession as a means of turning in its adherents to the cavalier government. In Herefordshire, he took the answers of defendants to bills out of the court of exchequer, and kept Clarendon informed of the activities of men he thought might threaten the king.73E113/8; Bodl. Clarendon 78, f. 38. It was entirely in keeping with his new role that he appeared at the bar of the House of Lords in February 1665 to inform on the sheriff of Leicestershire for arresting servants of Thomas Brudenell, 1st earl of Cardigan, by which action they had breached parliamentary privilege.74LJ xi. 655a. From his base in Presteigne, he remained active in legal affairs in Radnorshire through the 1670s, although he seems also to have maintained a house in Bromyard.75Herefs. Militia Assessments of 1663 ed. M. Faraday (Cam. Soc. 4th ser. x), 38. Towards the end of 1684 a lawyer from his own inn petitioned for Freeman's office, reporting him to be ‘old and sickly’. He had in fact already died, early in August, and had been buried in Presteigne (9 Aug.). No descendants of his were to sit in future Parliaments.76NLW, E. Williams Colln. 92; Chirk 12784; CSP Dom. 1684-5, pp. 229, 232.