ALDWORTH, Richard (c.1590-1655), of Bristol.

Richard Aldworth’s origins lay in the Berkshire town of Reading. His father was probably the Simon Aldworth who was the third son of Thomas Aldworth†, clothier, capital burgess, mayor and probably Member for that town in two Elizabethan Parliaments.34PROB11/59/73; Reading Recs. i. 230, 322; HP Commons 1558-1603. Thomas Aldworth had a brother from whom was descended the Richard Aldworth who was auditor of the exchequer and MP for Reading in 1661.35Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. lvii), 50; Misc. Gen. et Her. n.s. iv. 173. Simon was left property in Reading and Wantage by his father, and may have been the constable of that name arrested while guarding royal treasure in Reading in 1588.36STAC7/1/4. The links between the Berkshire Aldworth family and Bristol long pre-dated Richard Aldworth’s apprenticeship there in 1605, however. A Thomas Aldworth† was Member for Bristol in the 1580s.37HP Commons 1558-1603. It seems highly probable that our MP’s father was himself apprenticed in Bristol, in 1567 to a kinsman of his name already resident in the city.38Bristol Apprentices ed. M. McGregor (Bristol, 1992-4), sub 20 May 1567. An Alderman Robert Aldworth who built docks in Bristol and who died in 1634 was another relation.39Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 88.

Richard Aldworth was apprenticed in 1605 to one who was later an MP for Bristol in the Parliaments of 1626 and 1628, and in a not uncommon pattern, he married his master’s daughter. His apprenticeship would have been over in 1612; as he was not admitted as a burgess of the city until 1624, it seems quite possible that as in the case of Humphrey Hooke*, he left the city to gain mercantile experience overseas. From the mid-1620s he began to take on offices in the city council and his parish. He was also admitted to the Society of Merchant Venturers, and held office in it, but was never one of its high-flying merchant princes. In a subsidy roll of 1629, he was rated at £6 in goods, compared with Hooke’s assessment at twice that.40E179/116/518. In October 1629 he and Hooke were asked by the city council to bring in the arrears for the city’s weekday lectures by ministers, and in 1630 he was appointed a captain of one of Bristol’s trained bands.41Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 16v, 20v. During the prolonged period of strained relations between the government and the city council in the 1630s, Aldworth represented his colleagues on at least one visit to London, after briefings from among others Hooke, Richard Longe* and John Taylor*.42Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 87v. There was nothing in his career to 1640 to suggest any significant differences between him and these councillors. On the eve of the first Parliament of 1640, Aldworth was not involved in the city council committee to brief its MPs, but he was party to the briefing given them by the Merchant Venturers.43Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 102v; Soc. of Merchant Venturers, Merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 23.

In September 1640, Aldworth was despatched to London to take the city’s complaints about the recruitment of soldiers for the bishops’ war, and he was active in securing supplies of gunpowder from the metropolis. The resignations of both Aldworth and John Taylor from their militia captaincies may have been connected with the issue of impressment.44Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 107v, 108; 04026/22, pp. 36, 37. Aldworth helped draft the eirenic petitions to both king and Parliament in May 1642, and the following month contributed £150 towards supplying the army sent to quell the Irish rebellion.45Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 119v, 120v. He was in London soon afterwards to receive money for the city for 84 Bristol seamen sent to Chatham.46Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 171. He was first named to the council’s committee for defence of the city, formed in August, and it fell to him to take on the mayoralty soon after the outbreak of civil war.47Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 123. Even as mayor-elect, in the summer of 1642, he was at the heart of the supply line for the army in Ireland.48SP28/1b/655; 1c/172, 180, 183, 192, 193, 208, 213; 1d/441. When the city was pressed by both sides in the conflict to admit a garrison either for king or Parliament, Aldworth was abused as a knave by the royalist clergy, who identified him as a parliamentarian sympathizer. His wife, Mary, led a group of 200 women who lobbied the city council to admit a parliamentarian garrison, in order to preserve the peace and minimise violence.49A Declaration from the City of Bristoll (1642), 1, 3 (E.83.13). He seized the city armoury, countermanding an order from Lord Herbert (Edward Somerset), son of Henry, 5th earl of Worcester, that the city militia should be deployed in south Wales.50PRO30/5/6, p. 342. Not only did Aldworth persuade the divided council to let in the parliamentarians, he also set up the loan of £3,000 by the city merchants to Sir John Seymour* and the other leaders of their association between the counties adjacent to Bristol.51Bristol RO, 5139/216. During his mayoral year Aldworth had to preside in the Bristol sessions court over separate proceedings begun against Seymour and a tailor who was alleged to have incited the garrison soldiers to plunder.52Bristol RO, JQS/M/3, ff. 207, 213v.

Aldworth drew heavily upon his own personal credit to supply the army in Ireland, and by March 1643 was having to petition Speaker William Lenthall for a sum of nearly £1,000 laid out on that service.53HMC Portland, i. 103, 110; CJ iii. 128a, b. That month, he wrote a brief account of the attempt by a group of Bristolians to betray the city to Prince Rupert; with other narratives of the outrage it was published by order of Parliament. The leading perpetrators of the plot were hanged, despite the intercession of Aldworth and the common council.54N. Fiennes, An Extraordinary Deliverance (1643), 5-6 (E.93.10); HMC Portland, i. 709. But soon enough, Rupert took the city by storm, Governor Nathaniel Fiennes I* surrendered, and on 28 July Aldworth, still a member of the city council, voted for a gift to the king of £10,000. He also signed a protestation not to bear arms against the king or contribute to the parliamentarian cause. 55Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 33, 37. The city accounts record a payment of £122 he made to the royalist army officers, probably the residue of what he had collected for the parliamentarians.56Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 244. These expressions of loyalty to the king notwithstanding, Aldworth withdrew from an active part in city government, other than acting as a ward assistant to Alderman Richard Longe* from April 1645.57Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 110. During the period of royalist occupation, Aldworth did his best to fend off recriminatory cases brought against him at the council of war, pleading for a common law trial.58PRO30/5/6, p. 342.

Aldworth resurfaced into public life in September 1645, when the New Model army took Bristol for Parliament. He stayed out of the frantic round of voting on the council the day before the storm of the city, but on 20 October he was chosen alderman, filling the vacancy created by the death of John Taylor, killed in the city while fighting for the king. Even better, Aldworth benefited from an ordinance of Parliament which restored him to his civic seniority as if the royalist incursion had never taken place.59Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 120, 131. Very soon after Parliament had recovered Bristol, he was writing certificates for Bristol merchants attesting to their loyalty to Parliament.60CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 275. At the point of his election to Parliament in January 1646, therefore, Aldworth was a newly-restored senior civic figure.

In his first year in Parliament, Aldworth made only a slight impression on the House after taking the Covenant on 25 March. He was involved in proceedings against Bristol’s former recorder, Sir John Glanville*, visiting him in the Tower. His involvement in a committee in April on relief to Protestant refugees from Ireland sprang from Bristol’s centrality as a receiving port. He was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers* in May, but in September was given leave to go back to Bristol.61CJ iv. 489a, 501b, 516b, 545b, 662a, b, 663b. After a month at home, he went back to Westminster, mandated by a council committee that had met to provide him with instructions. From London he sent down for the use of Bristol council a recently-published summary of legislation on moral offences, A Whip for a Drunkard, indicating the direction Aldworth intended the city to move.62Bristol RO, 04026/23, p. 95; A Whip for a Drunkard and a Curb for Prophaneness (1646, 669.f.10.53). His involvement in a parliamentary committee on obnoxious publications was further evidence of his intolerance of outlooks that failed to conform to orthodox puritanism.63CJ v. 73a. In February 1647, Aldworth’s accounts for the period of the early 1640s - when he was most active in the parliamentarian cause - were audited, which he would have warmly welcomed. He was named to two committees that summer – the second of which was set up on 2 August, in the wake of the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July, when most of the Independent MPs had taken refuge with the army. The 2 August committee was tasked with drafting an ordinance to augment the powers of the Presbyterian-dominated ‘committee of safety’, which had been established in June to mobilise London against the army. Granted leave by the House on 24 August, Aldworth returned to Bristol, bringing with him fire-fighting equipment, acquired in the aftermath of a fire in Marsh Street: as ever, it was the welfare of Bristol that came first.64CJ v. 95b, 205a, 265b, 283b; Bristol RO, 04026/23, p. 155.

Shortly after the fall of Bristol to Parliament, Aldworth had provided evidence to the Committee of Navy and Customs on the fidelity of Bristol merchants to the cause. He was an active member of this committee from February 1647, unsurprisingly for one who represented England’s second maritime city. He was involved in ordering new frigates to be laid down for the parliamentarian navy in January and February 1647 and continued to be active on the committee after the inauguration of the commonwealth.65CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 275; Add. 22546, ff. 13v, 30, 35; Add. 18986, ff. 15, 17. He was de facto the expert member of the Committee of Navy and Customs on affairs both military and mercantile in the Bristol Channel.66CJ v. 385b. As a merchant, his interests in security and trade were indivisible, and he was bound to be qualified for membership of the parliamentary committee on advancing trade and reforming the customs, named on 6 November 1647.67CJ v. 352a. His involvement in the committee on the escape of the king from Hampton Court may suggest his sympathies lay at this point with the Independents in Parliament.68CJ v. 357a. He was by December owed over £5,000, and the Commons passed an ordinance guaranteeing his reimbursement from excise receipts (27 Dec.). This provided Aldworth with an incentive for seeing the excise settled in south Wales and Somerset, ordered that month, and in January he was added to the committee for excise.69CJ v. 407a, 385b, 416b; LJ ix. 639b.

Aldworth’s personal interests and those of the city of Bristol overlapped. The city council continued to send instructions to its MPs, in October asking Aldworth to try to recover £3,000 owed the city on the ‘public faith’.70Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 169. By May 1648, he had extended the range of payments from the excise to include reparations to the war-damaged buildings of the city, bringing in an ordinance for the purpose. This achievement may have sprung from his participation in the committee chaired by John Doddridge* on damage to property, and this committee may also have been an important avenue by which Doddridge later became Bristol’s recorder.71CJ v. 425a, 549a, 555b. The award to Bristol coincided with the second civil war in south Wales; the further advance of £1,000 to the city to strengthen the fort and the castle there, again on an ordinance of Aldworth’s drafting (21 June), was opportune. He was in any case reporting to Parliament on the dangers facing Bristol.72CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 55, 79. He was given leave of the House to return to reorganize the militia (27 June) and was still there late in September.73CJ v. 609a, 614b; vi. 34b. The reorganization of the militia involved a special levy of £200 on the wealthiest inhabitants, and the setting up of a military court (‘court of guard’) with a purpose-made building in Wine Street, at Aldworth’s instigation.74Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 176; 04026/23, pp. 221, 222. In June, Aldworth had been named to the committee to produce an ordinance for abolishing dean and chapter lands; on 21 August, while Aldworth was in Bristol engaged in his work on the militia, the council framed a petition calling on Parliament to fund preaching ministers in the cathedral from that source. The city’s MPs were asked to acquire an ordinance for that purpose.75CJ v. 602a; Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 183.

Aldworth may have been in Bristol during the build-up to Pride’s purge of Parliament in December. He was unaffected by it, and on 23 December was named to a committee to consider a petition from the London aldermen.76CJ vi. 103b; He may have been conveniently in Bristol for much of the winter of 1648-9; he was party to a letter sent by the authorities there on 5 February on Irish affairs. He was not in bad odour with the leading Rumpers, however. On 28 February 1649 he was excused in advance for not registering his dissent before 5 March to the votes which had precipitated the December purge, and it was not until 18 April that he was actually back in his seat in the House.77CJ vi. 103b, 133a, 153a, 190a; HMC Portland, i. 509. On 26 March the council of state appointed him and the other Bristol MP, Luke Hodges, to a commission on naval timber supplies in the Forest of Dean, which would have been an unlikely appointment for a man thought unreliable. As early in the year as 3 January, the Bristol council had expressed anxiety on this topic to its Members at Westminster.78CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 54; Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 170.

During the rest of 1649 Aldworth interested himself in religious and moral reform matters in the House, serving on committees to repeal Elizabethan statutes on compulsory church attendance (29 June), to review penalties for swearing and cursing (2 Nov.), to erect colleges in Ireland (30 Nov.) and on preaching the gospel (21 Dec.).79CJ vi. 245b, 317b, 327b, 337a. This was all in preparation for an ordinance specifically to encourage the preaching of the gospel in Bristol, which on 1 February 1650, the House asked Aldworth to bring in the following week. This was a few days after the bill for propagating the gospel in Wales had been introduced, and the Bristol variant owed something to that model.80CJ vi. 354a, 365b. The final amendments passed the House on 15 March, and the bill itself was passed on the 29th.81CJ vi. 383a, 388b. Under the terms of this act, Aldworth and Dennis Hollister* were among the commissioners who invited the Baptist minister Thomas Ewins to the city, not to a specific living but as a lecturer on a stipend. Aldworth was evidently at this point sympathetic to a wide range of godly perspectives, for another of his appointees was the Presbyterian Ralph Farmer, given a lectureship at the cathedral.82Records of a Church of Christ ed. Hayden, 103; R. Farmer, The Impostor Dethron’d (1658), 52; Calamy Revised, 186-7, 190. Civic sponsorship was the common factor in his wielding of patronage. The same day that the Bristol bill passed the House (29 Mar.), Aldworth was added to one of the Rump’s main agencies for settling a godly ministry, the committee for regulating the universities, of which he was an active member.83CJ vi. 388b; LPL, Sion L40.2/E16, passim.

Aldworth continued to be active in the Committee of Navy and Customs during the Rump Parliament.84Add. 22546, ff. 30, 35; Add. 18986, ff. 15, 17. He was on a committee to review the structure of the admiralty and navy in February 1651, and took the lead in investigating abuses at Chatham dockyard in January 1652.85SP18/23/22-36a; Add. 18986, f. 17; CJ vi. 354a; vii. 70b. His local interests were what recommended him for the committee on free quarter for troops embarking for Ireland (25 Feb. 1651) and as commissioner in the high court of justice set up in the wake of the Cardiganshire rising (25 June).86CJ vi. 541b, 591b. There were long periods when Aldworth was not named to any committees: June to November 1651 and February to November 1652. His Bristol preoccupations and his work on the Committee of Navy and Customs must have accounted for these ‘disappearances’, rather than political disaffection. He was active in re-forming the Bristol militia during the emergency of summer 1651 caused by the incursion of the Scots under Charles Stuart.87Bodl. Tanner 55, f. 1; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 2. Furthermore, he had added to his commitments the post of cheque or check of customs at Bristol, at a salary of £100, which conflated still further his business, political and administrative interests. In the closing months of this Parliament, Aldworth was named to committees on sales of royal forests and on proceedings of the trustees for sale of the king's goods.88CJ vii. 245a, 250b. His son, Robert Aldworth*, was by this time an experienced commissioner for sales of confiscated lands. The Merchant Venturers had been lobbying Aldworth on its privileges in the export of calfskins and butter; in his position on the Committee of Navy and Customs, Aldworth was of more help to them than most Members for Bristol customarily were. On 8 February 1653, the Merchant Venturers’ petition for the dismissal of local suits against their monopolies was accepted by the House, at Aldworth’s instigation.89Soc. of Merchant Venturers, Merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 83, 84, 145, 196, 226, 234; CJ vii. 256a. On 1 March, the House asked him to draft a letter of thanks to the Bristol authorities for relieving soldiers and seamen there, and a few days before Oliver Cromwell’s* dismissal of the Parliament, he was named to two committees on petitions. He was evidently among the last Rumpers to be recorded by the journal clerk.90CJ vii. 263a, 278a, 280a.

Aldworth played no part in the Nominated Assembly, in which the city was unrepresented. He must have been dismayed by the unrestrained radicalism of his former colleague in promoting the gospel, the Bristol grocer Dennis Hollister, who served for Gloucestershire and who returned to the city to ferment a sectarian spirit that led to the rise of Quakerism there. The broad and inclusive godliness fostered in his bill for propagating the gospel had broken down, and by the time of the elections for the first protectorate Parliament had given way to rancorous partisanship. Even so, Aldworth helped draft the address and recognition from Bristol to the lord protector (2 May 1654), and in August sat on the committee to prepare instructions for the city’s MPs, one of whom was his son, Robert.91Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 63, 67. Aldworth’s age probably prevented him from standing in his own right. The Bristol parliamentary election of 1654 was contested and the outcome was petitioned against; Aldworth and his son, John, soon to be the protectorate’s consul at Marseilles, organised the council’s defence against its critics from the city.92Bristol RO, 04026/24, p. 230. Aldworth was himself sufficiently in tune with the protectorate to accept office as an ‘ejector’ under legislation to establish the Cromwellian church, and was regarded as a potentially reliable enforcer of that scheme in Somerset.93CSP Dom. 1655, p. 144. He is unlikely to have been active in this role, however, as he made his will on 1 December 1654. Among his last public occupations was another reform of the Bristol militia, which was enhanced at the expense of the city garrison, and was inextricably linked with the acquisition of the castle by the corporation.94TSP iii. 184, 231, 299. He lived long enough to play a part in the opening skirmishes of the council’s battle with the Quakers, but died in August 1655, leaving much property in Bristol and the suburbs.95TSP iii. 351; The Cry of Blood (1656), 6-7, 20 (E.884.3).