ASHE, Edward (1599-1656), of Candlewick Street, London; later of Fenchurch Street, London and Heytesbury, Wilts.

Edward Ashe’s career was based on a strategy which had been carefully thought out by his father. Five of James Ashe’s sons - John*, Edward, Joseph†, Jonathan and Samuel - survived into adulthood and most, to varying degrees, became clothiers. While the eldest, John, established himself as the greatest clothier in the south west, Edward as the second son based himself in London. In 1616 he was apprenticed to the Drapers’ Company and he later rose to become one of its livery men.22Drapers’ Co. ed. Boyd, 6; Recs. of London’s Livery Cos. Online. By the 1630s he was taking delivery of much of the cloth sent to the capital by their father and he was doubtless also the usual London intermediary for other members of the family.23C107/20: acct. bk. 1631-41. Most of those cloths would then have been exported and the Ashes had extensive continental contacts; in 1637 Thomas Windebanke*, then staying in Paris, asked his father, the secretary of state, Sir Francis Windebanke*, to pay Edward £100 so that he could obtain credit from a merchant in the French capital.24CSP Dom. 1637, p. 146-7. By the early 1630s Ashe’s London house was at the sign of the Golden Lion on Candlewick Street in the parish of St Michael’s Crooked Lane.25Reg. of the Scholars admitted into Merchant Taylors’ School, i. 165; W.D. Cooper, ‘Extracts from the passage-bk. of the port of Rye, 1635-6’, Suss. Arch. Coll. xviii. 175; Inhabitants of London, 1638, 147; Principal Inhabitants, 1640, 6. Later he moved to a substantial house in Fenchurch Street.26‘Sir Roger Twysden’s Journal’ iv. ed. Larking, 189; PROB11/259/229. He also owned a country estate at Halsted in Kent, bought from Thomas Pope, 2nd earl of Downe.27Hasted, Kent, iii. 15.

In 1640 the dominant electoral interest in the Wiltshire constituency of Heytesbury was that of Thomas Moore*, who held the local manor and the hundred. It therefore likely that Ashe was elected as MP for the town with Moore in the autumn election with Moore’s backing. A year later Moore would sell him the manor.28Hoare, Hist. Wilts. i. (Heytesbury), 150; VCH Wilts. v. 136. Thus, as with the purchase of the manor of Westbury Mauduits by Edward and John Ashe in 1640, the Ashe brothers quickly acquired landed interests in the constituencies they represented.29VCH Wilts. viii. 155. That John sat as MP for Westbury however makes it very difficult to trace Edward’s activities in the Long Parliament. Often it is impossible to be sure which ‘Mr Ashe’ was which. Reconstruction of Edward’s parliamentary career is thus speculative and much remains uncertain.

During his first two years as an MP, it is possible that Edward sat on the committees concerning the planters of Virginia (18 Dec. 1640), the Merchant Adventurers (14 July 1641) and the foreign merchants of Dover (22 Mar. 1642), and supported the bills to control wool exports (3 Feb. 1641), against superstition (13 Feb. 1641), usury (19 Mar. 1641) and innovations in religion (17 Feb. 1642) or to reform the ecclesiastical courts (27 Apr. 1641).30CJ ii. 54a, 77b, 84b, 108a, 128b, 210b, 437b, 491b. But all those appointments could just as easily have been his brother. References that must refer to Edward, such as his taking of the Protestation on 3 May 1641 or the addition of both the Ashe brothers to the committee for accounts on 26 March 1642, are rare.31CJ ii. 50a, 54b, 133a, 499b. It was Edward who invoked parliamentary privilege in March 1641 when one of his servants, John Daniel, was arrested, but it is uncertain which brother did the same when another of their servants, John Brownejohn, was arrested in February 1642.32CJ ii. 104b-105a, 419b; PJ i. 316. On 10 June 1642, when Parliament appealed to individual MPs for horses and money, Edward generously offered four horses and promised £500 ‘at an hour’s wanting for the service’ if they had to be deployed.33PJ iii. 468. That same day he was included on the delegation sent to London to raise money there, while he, rather than his brother, may have been the MP who, along with Sir Walter Erle*, was asked the next day to make enquiries in the City about the sales of royal jewels by Henrietta Maria at Amsterdam.34CJ ii. 617b, 619a-b. Either brother could have reported the news of the petitioning campaign in Somerset, as conveyed to them via Alexander Popham*, on 13 June.35PJ iii. 66, 67; CJ ii. 622a. Edward was certainly third in the list of MPs named to the committee on the Merchant Adventurers on 12 July.36CJ ii. 666b.

Edward is also the most likely recipient of the letter that John Ashe wrote on 7 August reporting the efforts by a number of Somerset gentlemen loyal to Parliament to oppose the attempt by the 1st marquess of Hertford (William Seymour†) to implement the king’s commission of array. He was also probably the person who then arranged for this letter to be presented to the Commons on 9 August and he was certainly the MP sent to deliver it to the Lords.37CJ ii. 711b; LJ v. 275a, 278a-279b; A Perfect Relation of All the passages and proceedings of the Marquesse Hartford (1642, E.111.5). The extent to which the Ashes were becoming personally associated with the parliamentarian cause was made clear later that month when ‘great multitudes’ attacked the house in Fenchurch Street. He complained about this to the Commons on 26 August on the grounds that this was another violation of his parliamentary privilege.38CJ ii. 737a-b.

In the weeks immediately following the battle of Edgehill (23 Oct. 1642), as the king’s forces advanced towards London, at least one of the Ashe brothers was active in encouraging the capital to prepare for the expected attack, whether it was organising quartering for troops (28 Oct.), checking the defences of the Tower of London (3 Nov.) or liaising with the London militia committee (10, 12 Nov.).39CJ ii. 825b, 833a, 842b, 846b. Even after the immediate crisis had passed, with the victory at Turnham Green (13 Nov.), he continued to press for London to be kept in a state of high alert.40CJ ii. 852b, 854b, 863a, 863b. This does seem more likely to have been Edward. While John undoubtedly had his own significant business connections with the City of London, Edward, being based there permanently, was always even more of a London figure. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that he was the one more interested in London affairs in Parliament.41CJ ii. 886b, 925a. Thus, one of the rare committee appointments for this period which can definitely be assigned to him was his addition on 23 June 1643 to the Committee of Navy and Customs, to which the House referred the consideration of complaints against one of the searchers of the port of London.42CJ iii. 141a. Another such appointment concerned the price of wine (5 Oct. 1643).43CJ iii. 263b. He may also have taken an interest in the Eastland Company (24 Mar. 1643) and in the Merchant Adventurers (14 Apr.), and he, not John, probably helped negotiate loans from the latter and from the customs commissioners in August 1643 to finance the navy.44CJ iii. 16b, 44a, 222a. Not that he ignored events in the west, especially after the royalist successes there during the summer of 1643. Both brothers were named to the committees for the relief of Exeter, the lone example of parliamentarian defiance against the royalist advances in Devon (3 Aug.), on the Gloucestershire clothiers (22 Aug.) and to receive the accounts for the army in the west under the command of Sir William Waller* (12 Sept.).45CJ iii. 192b, 214b, 238a. One of them also raised money for Waller’s army in September 1643 by persuading some of their fellow MPs to lend £100 each.46CJ iii. 240b-241a, 245a, 267a, 341b. At about the same time, Edward lent £2,000 for the defence of Plymouth.47CJ iii. 293b, 335a, 339b. Meanwhile, he was one of those encouraging the city of London to lend money for Parliament’s armies and for that of the Scots.48CJ iii. 253b, 258a, 274a. That November he was added to the Committee for Scottish Affairs, which had been created several months earlier in order to raise money for the Scots’ forces in Ulster and those soon to enter England. This committee would evolve in 1644 into the Committee for Compounding.49Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; CJ iii. 305a.

In February 1644 Ashe was among the MPs named temporarily to the Excise Committee after it was asked to investigate the excise commissioners’ ticketing system.50CJ iii. 393a. In June 1644, he joined this Committee as a permanent member.51A. and O. The significance of this appointment was that Ashe was keen to continue lending money to Parliament and that the most convenient way of underwriting those loans was to secure them against the excise revenues. In September 1644 Parliament instructed the excise commissioners to begin repaying £15,000 which a number of lenders, headed by Ashe, had already given to buy clothing and weapons for the army.52LJ vi. 712a; CJ iii. 636a, 637b, 639-640a. When, in the spring of 1645, there were hopes of a new campaign to recapture the south west, he provided £4,000.53LJ viii. 344b-345a. Several months later, just as Sir Thomas Fairfax* was about to fulfil those hopes, Ashe persuaded several creditors to lend money to pay the garrisons in four of the towns on the Dorset coast – Lyme, Weymouth, Poole and Wareham. Ashe’s own contribution came to £800.54LJ vii. 450a, 451a. By September he had lent a further £1,000 so that cavalry forces could be brought from the north to reinforce Fairfax.55CJ iv. 261b, 264b; LJ vii. 564a. He carried on lending money for as long as the fighting continued. On 18 June and 15 July 1646 he made a further two loans totalling £2,500 at the usual eight per cent interest on the excise. This would be repaid to him in six instalments between February 1647 and March 1648.56C107/17: acct. bk. 1644-7, unfol.

But this worked the other way round as well. Ashe’s own willingness to lend made it easier for him to ask the excise commissioners to do likewise. He therefore became one of those MPs to whom the Commons regularly turned for this purpose. In early December 1644 Miles Corbett*, Samuel Vassall*, Anthony Bedingfield* and Ashe asked for £3,000.57CJ iii. 716a. In April 1645 he or his brother asked for £2,000 and then both the Ashe brothers, together with Thomas Hodges I* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, asked the commissioners for immediate payments to help pay off those soldiers to be disbanded under the New Model.58CJ iv. 99a-b, 106b, 119a. The following month the Ashes headed the committee appointed to approach the commissioners for £20,000 to finance the siege of Oxford, with Edward and Bulstrode Whitelocke* being told to take the lead in this matter.59CJ iv. 157a-b. In September 1645 he was probably part of the delegation that asked for £5,000.60CJ iv. 259a, 263a. Several weeks later, when the king advanced to Newark-upon-Trent, he and others were sent to extract a further £2,000 from the commissioners to pay for the defence of the Isle of Ely.61CJ iv. 302b. Similarly, the Commons relied on him in February 1646 when it wanted the excise commissioners to pay the troops operating in north Wales.62CJ iv. 443b. He may also have taken the lead in July 1646 when the Commons wanted to reassign the loan of £40,000 which had been underwritten by the excise revenues.63CJ iv. 629b. Moreover, Ashe’s effectiveness in this role meant that he was often used in negotiations with other potential lenders, such as the corporation of London or the Merchant Adventurers.64CJ iii. 587a; iv. 3b, 104b, 135a, 164a, 173b, 298b, 299a, 641b, 650b. He may also have proved a useful link with the London militia committee.65CJ iii. 527b, 659a; iv. 263a, v. 132b. That would have been why in June 1645 he headed the list of MPs sent to tell them to send reinforcements to relieve Taunton.66CJ iv. 168b.

Throughout all this, Ashe always took an interest in a wide range of commercial issues coming before the Commons, whether it was alum mines (7 Feb. 1644), a dispute over currants sent to Bristol (10 May), the case of a Dover customs official (23 May), Anglo-Dutch trade (24 July), the affairs of the Levant Company (17 Sept. 1646) and petitions from one of the sheriffs of London (10 Mar. 1645), woollen manufacturers (14 Nov. 1646) and the London weavers (27 May 1647).67CJ iii. 390a, 487b, 504b, 568a, 570a; iv. 72b, 671a, 722a; v. 187a. In May 1644 he also delivered the petition from the English merchants in France complaining that their goods had been seized at St Malo.68Harl. 166, f. 62v. Such was Ashe’s standing in the city that in 1646 his livery company, the Drapers, elected him to serve as their junior warden. Ashe declined, however, possibly because he was already busy.69Johnson, Drapers, iii. 172n; iv. 138. It should also be noted that from early 1646, following the election of his nephew James* as MP for Bath, Ashe’s activities in the Commons are slightly easier to reconstruct, as the Journals were now a bit more likely to differentiate between family members.

By July 1647 Parliament felt itself increasingly under threat from both the army and the army’s most vocal critics, the London mob. Ashe probably thought that the mob was the lesser menace. As one of the MPs asked to investigate the London Engagement on 22 July, he may well have believed that their demands for a form of Presbyterianism were, in themselves, reasonable enough.70CJ v. 254a. Unlike the hard-line Independent MPs, he was not cowed into withdrawal from Westminster. But unlike some of the Presbyterian hardliners, he did not see this as an opportunity for simple Presbyterian triumphalism. As a teller on 2 August, he sided with those reluctant to endorse the proposal from the House of Lords that the king be invited to come to London.71CJ v. 264b. Having also that day been named to the committee on the bill to increase the powers of the Presbyterian-dominated ‘committee of safety’, he was himself added to it the following day.72CJ v. 265b, 266a; LJ ix. 370b. But, as Ashe had possibly foreseen, all this soon became irrelevant when the army entered London, enabling the Independents to regain their majority in the Commons. He then found himself included on the committee on the bill to reverse everything passed by him and his Presbyterian friends between 26 July and 6 August.73CJ v. 278a.

John Ashe’s response to this setback was to withdraw temporarily from Parliament. Edward was more sanguine. Since the previous February, he had been a member of the Committee for Compounding, which John had chaired since its creation in 1644. In John’s absence, Edward now took over as the Committee’s principal spokesman in the Commons. In September he carried up the latest sequestration bills to the House of Lords and over the weeks that followed he reported on the composition cases of Sir Henry Knollys and Sir John Poulett*.74CJ v. 301b, 302a-305a, 312b-314b, 321a, 331a; LJ ix. 436a. In the meantime he probably also sat on the committee on the bill to ban delinquents from holding civic offices (28 Sept.).75CJ v. 320a.

The army meanwhile remained restless and by mid-November 1647 threatened to march on London unless its pay was forthcoming. Ashe led the delegation from the Commons which attempted to persuade the excise commissioners to find a loan of £20,000 to satisfy the soldiers.76CJ v. 358b, 360b. He was also one of the MPs sent on 20 November to press the corporation of London to pay the city’s assessment arrears.77CJ v. 365a. His support for the tactic of trying to keep the army at bay by making some effort to meet its financial demands was equally evident the following March when he oversaw the passage of the bills to pay several individual officers, including Richard Browne II* and Edmund Harvy I*.78CJ v. 477b, 479a, 480a; LJ x. 98b. That spring he probably chaired the committee to audit the accounts of the customs commissioners and he certainly reported on its findings to the Commons on 4 April.79CJ v. 480a, 526a-b. He may well, in theory, have been inclined to agree with his friends on the corporation of London, when, on 1 June, they demanded, in contravention of the policy of No Addresses, that a personal treaty be concluded with the king based on the Covenant. But when he was named to the committee to prepare the Commons’ reply, he might equally, as ten months earlier, have been hesitant about pressing ahead too hastily.80CJ v. 581a.

As a resident of Kent, Ashe was especially concerned by the outbreak of the rebellion there in late May 1648. He was an obvious choice for the Commons committee on the subject (14 June) and he was subsequently named to the committees on the troubles in Essex (15 June) and Surrey (11 July) as well.81CJ v. 599b, 601b, 631b. Unsurprisingly, he was also appointed as a commissioner in the emergency Kent sequestrations bill.82CJ v. 652b. On 17 August he was one of those sent to warn London of the rumours of a planned royalist uprising within the city.83CJ v. 673b. Even once those rumours proved to be unfounded, he supported the bill to raise cavalry forces in the capital (22 Aug.) and sought a urgent funding from the customs commissioners (23 Aug.).84CJ v. 678a, 681a. He may also have been included on the committee on the bill to sequester the latest Surrey delinquents (9 Sept.).85CJ vi. 10b. That October he again deputised for his brother in his absence, when he carried another batch of composition bills up to the Lords.86CJ vi. 44b, 45a; LJ x. 530a. Other committee appointments during this period included those on the bills to grant lands to John Bastwicke (24 Oct.), to speed up the assessment collections (22 Nov.) and, less certainly, to sequester the estates of the Essex delinquents (1 Nov.), while he was also named as one of the commissioners in the bill to push ahead with further sales of episcopal lands.87CJ vi. 60a, 67a, 81b, 83b. He was still at Westminster on 1 December, when, with John Birch* and George Thomson*, he was asked to prepare legislation in response to a petition from those London merchants who traded with the French.88CJ vi. 92a.

Although Ashe was not a victim of the purge of the Commons on 6 December 1648, he would doubtless have preferred to continue negotiating with the king rather than to put him on trial. He waited until after the death sentence had been carried out before seeking readmission to the Commons through taking the dissent to the vote of 5 December, which he did on 2 February.89PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 631-2; CJ vi. 129a. His known activities in Parliament over the next two years mostly followed much the same pattern as before. As he was still a member of the Committee for Compounding, he was interested in any business relating to delinquents, whether it was the question of how far that Committee’s revenues had already been spent (12 Mar. 1649) or the bill to sell off some of the estates still under its control (6 Apr. 1650).90CJ vi. 161b, 279a, 308a-b, 393b, 436b, 528a. Economic matters as various as petitions from merchants, the state of the coinage (6 July 1649) and the ban on trade with Scotland (23 July 1650) seem also to have attracted his attention.91CJ vi. 216a, 232a, 251b, 335a, 427a, 444b. As before, he was always useful when Parliament wanted to borrow money from London.92CJ vi. 250a. He may have helped air complaints about the collection of the assessments in November 1650.93CJ vi. 499a. What seems to have been new was his growing interest in naval affairs. Some of this was simply an extension of his usual willingness to voice the concerns of his mercantile colleagues, as when on 21 December 1649 he was probably the person who raised the issue of free ports in the House.94CJ vi. 336b. Similarly, he was among MPs added to the Committee of Navy and Customs on 9 March 1650 for the specific task of drafting a bill to prevent foreign attack on merchant shipping.95CJ vi. 379b. A year later he was added to the committee on naval stores after a bill on the powers of the lord high admiral were referred to it (13 Feb. 1651).96CJ vi. 534a. Any interest in military matters on land is less evident, although he and Nicholas Lechmere* may have taken the lead in early 1651 in pressing for legislation to reform the militias.97CJ vi. 528b, 534b.

Like his elder brother, Ashe becomes especially difficult to trace in the Rump throughout most of 1651 and 1652 because the three Ashes are usually referred to interchangeably as ‘Mr Ashe’. Only five committee appointments from this period related unquestionably to Edward. These were to the committees on relations with Portugal (10 Apr. 1651), the petition from the Cheshire justices of the peace (11 Dec. 1651), the raising of money from the sales of forfeited estates (15 July 1652), the queries from the compounding commissioners concerning the general pardon and the amalgamation of the various revenue departments (both 27 July 1652).98CJ vi. 560a, vii. 49b, 154b, 158b, 159a. It may well be that he was also the one named to the committee created on 4 November 1652 to encourage merchants to allow their ships to be requisitioned for naval service.99CJ vii. 210b. Ashe was sufficiently concerned about the related problem of recruiting sailors to man those ships that in January 1653 he submitted plans to the council of state via Thomas Scot I* for the navy to find such sailors by securing the release of prisoners held at Algiers. Ashe claimed that he could find the money and ships for such an expedition at Venice, Naples and Livorno.100CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 82, 508, 509. Nothing came of this idea.

The dissolution of the Rump in April 1653 effectively ended Ashe’s political career. When two months later he was elected as a London alderman, he paid a fine of £1,000 in order to resign after serving for only 11 weeks.101Beaven, Aldermen of London, i. 211, 234; ii. 82. That both Heytesbury seats had been abolished would have made it more difficult for him to seek re-election to Parliament in 1654. Yet he was still active enough to take on his nephew, Joseph Ashe (son of John), as an apprentice that same year.102Recs. of London’s Livery Cos. Online. But he died in the summer of 1656; he was buried in All Hallows Staining, London on 29 July.103All Hallows Staining Lane, London par. reg. Under the terms of his will, Ashe’s property was mostly divided between his three surviving sons, with William†, the surviving son from his first marriage, receiving the lands at Westbury and his second wife and her two sons, John and Edward†, receiving the lands in London and at Halsted.104PROB11/259/229. William, who became a whig, sat as MP for his father’s old constituency in every Parliament between 1668 and 1701, with his half brother, Edward, sitting alongside him as the other Heytesbury MP between 1679 and 1685. Their sister, Elizabeth, married Thomas Foley† and became the mother of Elizabeth, wife of Robert Harley†, later 1st earl of Oxford.105HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1715.