LOBB, Richard (1608-78), of Mylor, Cornw.

Richard Lobb came from a family of small landowners from Warleggan parish in eastern Cornwall, and made a living as a pilchard merchant, based near Falmouth.16Lobbery, iii. 24. During the early 1640s he was branded as ‘that roundhead Lobb’ and imprisoned at least once; his house near Falmouth was ransacked, and he may have spent time in exile in Holland.17SP19/192, ff. 108, 120, 122v, 147v, 148, 161v-162. With this in mind, it is unlikely that later allegations that he had worked with the royalists in that period were based on truth. One Walter Sheldon complained that Lobb had lent money to the royalist sheriff, Francis Bassett* and to Warwick Mohun, 2nd Baron Mohun, in 1643-4, that he had procured arms from Amsterdam for the royalist garrison at Pendennis, and had sent bills of exchange to France on behalf of the king;18CCAM 1328-9. Richard Arundell* of Trerice even claimed that ‘the said Mr Lobb was in Pendennis Castle when it was a garrison for the king’.19SP19/192, f. 137v.

Such allegations concerning Lobb’s activities during the first civil war led to a series of investigations between March 1651 and March 1652, first by the county commissioners and then by the Committee for Advance of Money. Lobb strenuously defended his reputation, claiming that the charges against him were motivated by malice – the work of ‘malignants of the county’ seeking to pay him out. By February 1652 he had mustered a sufficient number of depositions and testimonials to disprove the case against him.20CCAM 1328-9. On 23 March the Committee for Compounding certified that Lobb had never been sequestered or proceeded against for delinquency, and on the next day he was discharged under the Act of Pardon.21CCC 3258; CCAM 1329.

Despite the allegations against him, there is no doubt where Lobb’s political sympathies lay after the execution of the king. He was appointed as an assessment commissioner for Cornwall in April 1649, and was recommended by the local commander, Sir Hardress Waller*, as a suitable justice of the peace in the new commission list drawn up in the summer of that year, and was duly appointed to the commission in May 1650.22A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 229; C231/6, p. 186. In February 1650 he was commissioned as a captain of the Cornish militia, and in May 1650 he was allowed to purchase the fee-farm rents of the manor of Pawton for £946.23CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 521; E315/140, f.21v. A further boost came in August 1651, when he married Ann Bennett, a relative (possibly a daughter) of the prominent parliamentarian colonel, Robert Bennett*. By the end of the year, Lobb was relying on Bennett as a political ally, and it may have been Bennett’s influence that ensured his appointment as sheriff of Cornwall in November 1651.24Bodl. Rawl. C.934, f. 22; A Remedie Against Ruine, sig. A2. Official favour also helped Lobb to extend his financial interests. In July 1653 he bought part of the share in the Irish adventure held by Richard Hill of London, and in October he was allocated 416 Irish acres in the barony of Rathconrath, co. Westmeath.25CSP Ire. Adv. pp. 72, 349; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 467, 470, 546; Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 206. By the summer of 1654, he had cornered the lucrative pilchard trade in Cornwall, and also had a hand in the sale of conger eels from the ports of Marazion and Mousehole.26Bodl. Rawl. C.789, f. 67v. He also became a member of the Levant Company, exporting tin from Cornwall in the mid-1650s.27Lobbery, iii. 24.

Lobb’s religious views were Calvinist, and he had strong links with the Independent congregations in New England. In 1651 he was involved in a scheme to raise money for the ‘pious work of propagating the gospel in New England’, collecting money among his friends in Cornwall, and pledging £10 per annum from his own pocket.28Bodl. Rawl. C.934, ff. 22, 31v. In this he worked with Thomas Peter, the elder brother of the firebrand Hugh Peter, who owed his position as minister of Mylor parish, and as lecturer at Penryn, to Lobb.29Oxford DNB. In 1651 Lobb, as sheriff, defended Peter in his dispute with another Cornish minister, Sampson Bond (rector of Mawgan in Meneage), who was also involved in the New England scheme.30A Remedie Against Ruine, 20-3. Lobb considered Bond ‘a notorious, insinuating hypocrite’, and Bond, in turn, leant his support to the allegations against Lobb, saying that he was ‘as real an enemy to the Parliament as he seems now to be a friend’.31Bodl. Rawl. C.934, f. 22; SP19/149, f.112v. Peter defended his friend during the investigations, saying that he had been a known enemy of the king from the beginning of the war.32SP19/192, f. 130. During the mid-1650s Lobb used his position as a justice of the peace to promote his own conservative views. At the Truro quarter sessions in 1654 he was ‘the mouth of the court’, presenting the indictment and cross-examining the mystic, Anna Trapnel.33A. Trapnel, Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654), 24-6. In 1656 he was seen as an enemy of the Quakers, denouncing George Fox and his fellow inmates in Launceston gaol as ‘worse than thieves and murderers’, and assisting in the prosecution of members of that sect.34G. Fox, The West Answering to the North (1657), 52, 56, 121 (E.900.3); Coate, Cornw. 346.

Lobb’s return for Mitchell borough in the elections for the 1659 Parliament was presumably the result of his local standing and his godly credentials. He may also have enjoyed the support of the lords of the manor, the Arundells of Lanherne. The connection between Lobb and the Arundells was current as recently as October 1658, when he surrendered a lease of property in Cardinham parish, which he had held from them since 1621.35Cornw. RO, AR4/2003. Lobb’s activity in the Commons was unspectacular, as he was named to only one committee (on the countess of Worcester’s petition on 14 April),36CJ vii. 639a. and made only one speech. This speech, delivered on 18 April, was part of the debate on Parliament’s response to the increasingly aggressive posturings of the army council. Instead of encouraging MPs to face down the army, Lobb ‘made a great deal of stuff against the question, and compared sending them [the soldiers] to their stations with sending the Quakers home’, adding that such an order ‘was an ill answer to their petition’. Lobb, who had experienced the Quaker problem at first hand in Cornwall, and had seen their attempts to petition Parliament earlier in the session, seems to have been suggesting that the army needed to be handled carefully, rather than antagonised.37Burton’s Diary, iv. 457.

Lobb’s political position at this juncture may have been influenced by Robert Bennett, who was no friend of the Cromwellian regime. In June 1659, after the resignation of Richard Cromwell* as protector, Lobb wrote to Bennett denouncing ‘that usurped government of a single person’ and declare his support for ‘the ever-honoured old Parliament in peace and quietness once again … [and] for the carrying on of the good old cause’. He also asked Bennett for practical assistance in the restored Rump for the tinners and ‘pilchard men’, adding that he had written separately to Edmund Ludlowe II*, Thomas Scot I* and ‘my good friend Mr Henry Neville*’.38FSL, X.d.483 (124). The correspondence with Bennett continued through the summer and early autumn, with Lobb condemning the ‘abhorred insurrection’ of Sir George Boothe*, detailing his own endeavours as militia commissioner, and proffering advice that tithes should be abolished and the ministry provided with stipends instead; he also voiced his opposition to tax increases: ‘I cannot work miracles to draw water out of stones, my conscience neither will permit me to take the bread out of poor men’s mouths and see them starve’.39FSL, X.d.483 (125, 127-8). Lobbying of Bennett on commercial matters soon paid off: in late August he thanked him for his ‘great pains about taking off the custom from our fish’, sending two barrels of pilchards as a present from the grateful fishermen; and in October he praised his friend for concessions made to the tin miners: ‘I know not how to express my thankfulness to you, I hope all our tinners and owners of seams will not be forgetful of your great love herein’.40FSL, X.d.483 (128-9)

Hopes of further gains were dashed by the military coup that destabilised the restored commonwealth in the final months of 1659 and by the Restoration of the monarchy in the spring of 1660. With the return of the king, Lobb devoted himself to mercantile activities, and played no part in public life. His antipathy to the new regime can perhaps be seen in his reaction to the ‘free and voluntary present’, extracted by the crown in 1661: he paid up, but 14s 6d of his £2 was discounted as being ‘in the prohibited coin’ minted during the interregnum.41Cornw. Hearth Tax, 254. He was also included in a list of those who had received public money since the beginning of the civil war, whose activities warranted further investigation.42SP28/152/2, unfol. Despite this, in December 1668 Lobb was given certificates from the commissioners for the act of settlement confirming his Irish lands (although the grant was not implemented until after his death).43CSP Dom. 1680-1, p. 146. In the 1660s he continued to be active in the tin trade, exporting bars of the metal to Turkey, and in 1675 he ran foul of the stannary authorities because his shipments lacked the necessary stamps.44CTB iv. 315-6, 770. Lobb had presumably already settled his estate before he drew up his will in 1675, as he left only token amounts to his five sons and five daughters, as well as small sums to the poor of the parishes of Mylor, Feock and Warleggan. He also provided £100 for ‘pious uses’, and bequeathed his ketch, The Richard, to his grandsons, the sons of his eldest son and heir, Richard.45PROB11/357/36. A younger son, Stephen, became a leading dissenting minister in the later seventeenth century, but none of these male descendants sat in Parliament.46Oxford DNB.