NASHE, John (1590-1662), of St Martin, Worcester

It was the judgement of his eighteenth century kinsman Russell Treadway Nash that John Nashe was of the Ombersley branch of the family, but the evidence points more firmly towards Nashe’s origins as lying in the city of Worcester. The family were of yeoman and minor gentry standing, long settled in the rural parishes of Claines and Ombersley, to the north of the city, but Richard Nashe, John’s father, established himself as a freeman, clothier and member of the city corporation. In 1581 he served as one of the two bailiffs of Worcester (the principal officers by the terms of the 1555 charter) and represented the city in Parliament in 1584.20HP Commons 1558-1603. Richard Nashe died in 1605 before his second son could be apprenticed to him, so later that year John was bound for the usual seven years to Edward Smith, another member of the clothiers’ company. After becoming free of the company and the city, John Nashe set up in business as a clothier, taking on apprentices himself from 1614 and serving as junior and senior warden of the company.21Worcs. Archives, 705:232, BA 5955/2 ff. 51, 89, 104, 109v, 126, 139, 141v. At his death he left a huge fortune, and it must have been during the 1620s and 30s that he built up his business, because the local economy of Worcester was wrecked by the first civil war and then by the 1651 battle there.

His local political career followed the cursus honorum customary in Worcester, and it is hard to identify whether or on what issues Nashe departed from the consensus presented to the world by the mayor, aldermen and burgesses. He was a defaulter on some of his payments for the Forced Loan in 1626 and 1627, but thereafter his opposition was not to the government, but, in the relative safety of the city chamber, to the policies pursued by the two successive Laudian deans of Worcester, Roger Mainwaring and Christopher Potter. 22Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 48. It was after the arrival of Potter that relations between the corporation and cathedral deteriorated sharply. The city had long sponsored a weekly sermon, and Nashe and John Cowcher* were among those who in August 1636 promised to contribute towards the £40 set aside annually for the lecturer’s stipend, so that there should be no public financial burden. When the dean objected to the sermon being delivered in the cathedral, the corporation complained to Archbishop William Laud and mobilised the support of the aged bishop, John Thornborough.23Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 307; CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 359-60, 390-1, 496-7. The dispute was seen by the city fathers, among them by this time Nashe, as an attack on their dignity and a denial of an opportunity to preach the word of God; to the dean and chapter, the corporation was bent on undermining divine service at the cathedral and in promoting its own worldly pomp and self-aggrandisement.24CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 495, 1639-40, pp. 79, 106-7, 107-8, 129-30, 189-90. Despite an intervention by the king, ordering the citizens to attend service in the cathedral, the dispute dragged on through the rest of the decade. Although Dean Potter accused one of the lecturers of using the term ‘altar-monger’ to describe a chorister, the corporation could not be described as aggressively puritan. The lecturers it sponsored were moderate in tone, and annual gifts of sugar and wine to the bishop, and less frequent but regular ones to the dean, continued to be made throughout: the last present to the bishop was made as late as January 1646.25Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, vol. ii, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. 1633-9, ff. 124v, 136v, 176v, 191v, 192, 203v, 204, 218, 219; vol. iii. 1640-69, unfol. ‘Anti-Laudian’ would be a better description of the stance taken by the chamber of which Nashe was a prominent member.

On matters of trade, Nashe is more personally identifiable. The work of William Sandys* to make navigable the Warwickshire Avon was regarded as a threat to the commercial primacy of Worcester. In January 1636 Nashe was one of a committee charged with drafting a petition to the privy council, and probably represented the city at the meeting at Evesham with the commissioners who were promoting Sandys’s scheme. The meeting was unsuccessful, in that it did not obviate the need to carry a petition up to London.26Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 299, 312; Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. 1633-9, f. 183v. As in the case of the dean and chapter, this disagreement did not prevent the chamber from hedging its bets, and in October 1640 Sandys, too, was on the list for a gift of wine.27Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. 1640-69, unfol.

Nashe became permanent alderman in February 1640, and thus achieved the pinnacle of civic office in Worcester. 28Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 335. As one of the most respected citizens, and certainly one of the wealthiest of the premier company of clothiers, he was an obvious choice to represent the city in the Short Parliament. His fellow-burgess, the aged John Cowcher, was related to him by marriage. Cowcher’s wife and Nashe’s mother were sisters, daughters of Thomas Walgrove alias Fleet, who had represented Worcester in Parliament in 1572. Nothing is known of Nashe’s contribution to the first Parliament of 1640, but he seems to have taken his seat, as he was absent from the city sessions meeting on 13 April.29Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A13, box 1, sessions bk. 1632-55, unfol. Three bills of this Parliament would have interested him: one, introduced in the Lords, for the better selling of dyed and dressed cloth; one against the export of woollen cloth, and the other for the removal of the jurisdiction of the council in the marches from the four English counties.30Procs. Short Parl. 320. The Worcester city chamber had long opposed the authority of the Council, and it is likely that Nashe and Cowcher* were active in promoting this bill, which in the event failed to proceed beyond a first reading in the Commons.31CJ ii. 16.

Nashe was back in Worcester for the July and October sessions meetings, and then left for London, to sit for the city in the new Parliament. His role in this assembly was to follow the mandate of the chamber which sent him there, and which rewarded him with fees and sent new year’s gifts to him for his attendance.32Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 349; Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. vol. iii, 1640-69, unfol. Nashe, as a burgess for a city within one of the affected counties, from December 1640 sat on the committee considering the extent of the authority of the council in the marches.33CJ ii. 57a. In June 1641 the committee introduced another bill to exempt the four shires from the council’s jurisdiction. It proceeded as far as the House of Lords, and the Worcester chamber paid a solicitor to lobby in Parliament for its members’ interest in it.34CJ ii. 162b, 191b, 210a, 216b; Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. vol. iii, 1640-69, unfol. Its failure there was only because of a hardening of attitudes against the conciliar courts: another bill, abolishing the court altogether, was introduced on 7 August, and Nashe was again ex officio a member of the committee supervising its passage.35CJ ii. 242b, 253b.

Nashe was able to progress another preoccupation of the Worcester chamber: its quarrel with the dean and chapter of Worcester. By this time, the tide had turned strongly against Laudianism, and the city’s petition against the dean and chapter in February 1641 was referred to a committee dealing with the Laudian bishop, Matthew Wren of Ely.36CJ ii. 86b. Nashe was among the members who took the Protestation on 3 May 1641, the day of its framing, approving, no doubt, of its anti-Laudian sentiments, but he proved not to be a religious reformer in any wider sense: his only committee appointment (28 June 1641) was to consider religious provision at Covent Garden church.37CJ ii. 191b. On 8 April 1642 he successfully sought permission to go to the country for one month, and duly turned up at the sessions meeting at Worcester ten days later.38Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A13, box 1, sessions bk. 1632-55, unfol. This was to be his last appearance at the city sessions until April 1647: during the whole period of the royalist occupation of Worcester, from November 1642 until July 1646, Nashe seems to have lived mostly in London. On 19 September 1642 he promised in the House to bring in £40 for Parliament’s cause, and on 3 October he and John Wylde* went down to Worcestershire to mobilize support for Parliament’s lord general, the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux), in his short-lived occupation of Worcester.39CJ ii. 772b, 791b.

Although he agreed to take the Vow and Covenant on 6 June 1643, it was not until 1 November that Nashe actually swore his support for it, suggesting that he was by no means in the forefront of those wishing to pursue the war against the king with renewed vigour.40CJ iii. 118a, 296b. In August 1643 Nashe was named to a committee to consider the petition of Gloucestershire clothiers, but his activities and movements during 1643-5 are generally hard to follow.41CJ iii. 214b. He was given a period of leave from the House for up to a month in September 1643, but could not by this time resume his civic career in royalist-occupied Worcester. In August 1645 he joined the committee considering petitions to the Commons, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was marking time until he could return to his home city. 42CJ iv. 228b.

Nashe played no active part in the recovery of the city for Parliament but, having won leave of absence from Parliament in June, returned in something of a triumph to Worcester soon after its surrender to Thomas Rainborowe* on 23 July 1646. The customary gifts to the city’s MPs had long since dried up, but Nashe was now once more fêted with the traditional sugar and wine.43CJ iv. 627a; Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. vol. iii, 1640-69, unfol. He was probably among those banqueting at the Guildhall with John Wylde* and other members of the committee for Parliament, and all through 1647 and most of 1648 attended sessions meetings of the city, covering his absence from Parliament first with permission to be in the country and then by pleading sickness.44Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. vol. iii, 1640-69, unfol.; A13, box 1, sessions bk. 1632-55, unfol.; CJ v. 245a, 330a.

Nashe is usually numbered among those secluded at the purge of Parliament by the military in December 1648, on the basis of his being named on two contemporary lists of those kept out of the chamber.45A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 29 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 381.. He was in Worcester on 2 October 1648, and it is quite possible that he returned to London, after an extended period at home, in time to be excluded from Parliament on 6 December. The city chamber voted its ‘Parliament men’ wine in 1648, but it was bestowed at the Talbot inn at home, not sent up to London. Whether he was physically present or not, Nashe certainly stood morally with those secluded, as it was not until January 1651 that he put in another appearance at the city sessions.46Worcs. Archives, 496.5/BA 9360, A10, box 3, city chamberlains’ acct. bk. vol. iii, 1640-69, unfol.; A13, box 1, sessions bk. 1632-55. Throughout the 1650s, Nashe seems to have stayed put in Worcester, harbouring no ambition to return to the wider political stage. He continued to be named to assessment committees for the city under successive regimes, and attended every sessions of the peace in Worcester in his capacity of permanent alderman, from after the sack of Worcester in September 1651 until his death. It is not clear whether he returned to Parliament on 21 February 1660 with the surviving Members secluded in 1648.

Nashe had never married, and in his will of 30 July 1661 he made his nephew Richard Nashe of Droitwich his heir. He left detailed instructions for the building and supervision of almshouses in New Street, Worcester, which still bear his name, and requested that a ‘comely monument’ be erected to him, which stands, complete with full-length effigy, in St Helen’s church. He was buried there on 22 May 1662.47St Helen par. reg. He had been an ambassador for Worcester throughout, and for him service in Parliament meant chiefly an opportunity to serve the city.