HARDING, Richard (c.1593-1657), of Pewsey, Wilts. and St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster.

The Hardings of Pewsey were of recent yeoman descent and modest means.8PROB11/44/31. On his death in 1609 John Harding left his family in financial difficulties. In theory, he had left his younger son, Richard, a reversionary right to rents in Pewsey, £40 in cash, and the right to basic maintenance in his mother’s household.9PROB11/113/541. Yet even these modest bequests were not guaranteed, as his mother was faced with paying off debts of around £4,000; and in January 1612 she was forced to appeal for help to her near neighbour and landlord, William Seymour, 2nd earl of Hertford.10Add. 5496, f. 105v. Hertford may have already assisted Richard Harding by securing his attendance at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn; he also introduced him to court, where Harding met his future wife, the sister of Sir Ralph Clare†, a prominent court servant and later ardent royalist. The bride may have had a somewhat shady past. She had been an ‘acquaintance’ of the 1st earl of Suffolk, who had granted her an annuity for life of £300 from his lands, without the countess’s knowledge. After the earl’s death in 1626 the dowager countess refused to continue the payments, forcing Mrs Harding to bring the matter before the privy seal in 1632, and chancery in 1634, where the case was found in her favour. After further procrastination, the king intervened in 1638, proposing a compromise and threatening the countess with punishment if she did not comply, but the result is uncertain.11CSP Dom. 1631-3, p.399; 1634-5, p.417; 1637- 8, p. 559; HMC Hastings ii. 77; PC Regs. iii, f. 128; Coventry Docquets, 426; HMC Cowper ii. 9, 192.

As with his promotion at court, Harding’s candidature at Great Bedwyn in the elections held on 31 March 1640 is attributable to the Seymour interest, and his fellow MP was Hertford’s nephew, Charles Seymour*.12C219/42/59. A petition to the House on the first day of the session queried the return, but Harding’s election as the first placed candidate was confirmed on 28 April, along with that of Seymour, by the committee of privileges. Otherwise, Harding was not noticed in the records of the session.13CJ ii. 3b, 14b, 15a; Aston’s Diary, 78, 146. He was re-elected for Great Bedwyn on 31 October 1640 alongside Sir Walter Smyth*, and in the early months of the Long Parliament proved himself to be a loyal Seymour client.14C219/43/32. On 13 March 1641 he was named to the committee on a bill to allow the 4th marquess of Winchester, who was related by marriage to the Seymours, to lease out lands in Hampshire.15CJ ii. 103b. In April Harding joined Sir Francis Seymour* in voting against the attainder of the 1st earl of Strafford (Thomas Wentworth†).16Verney, Notes, 59. He continued to attend the House thereafter, took the Protestation on 3 May with the majority of members, and was still in the Commons on 13 August, when he was named to the committee on a bill for the abolition of the court in the marches of Wales.17CJ ii, 133a, 253b. A month earlier, and no doubt at the behest of Hertford as the new governor of the prince of Wales, Harding was made groom of the prince’s bedchamber.18CSP Dom. 1641-3, p.63. Harding had joined the king at York by the middle of March 1642, when he wrote to Sir Edward Hyde* that he was missing his friends in London.19CCSP i. 226. He was formally recorded as absent from the Commons on 16 June 1642.20CJ ii. 626n.

Harding was a member of the Oxford Parliament from its creation in the new year of 1644 and signed the letter to the 3rd earl of Essex of 27 January.21Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574. Retribution was swift. He was disabled from sitting at Westminster on 5 February, and in July he was assessed to pay a fine of £1,000 - although no further proceedings were taken until March 1648, when his goods in Westminster were sequestered.22CJ iii. 389b; CCAM 435; CCC 92. In August 1644, as Essex became trapped in Cornwall by the king’s army, Harding was on hand to act as agent from the king to the lord general, who was brother-in-law to the now marquess of Hertford.23HMC 6th Rep., 21. Harding was said to be ‘a gentleman who had been before of much conversation with the earl and much loved by him’, but he could not persuade Essex to abandon Parliament and throw in his lot with the royalists.24Clarendon, Hist. iii. 395. At the end of the first civil war, Harding went into exile, travelling with the prince of Wales to the Channel Islands in the spring of 1646 and thence to France, where he attended the court at St Germain in October 1648.25CCSP i. 359, 375, 377, 441. Despite the suspicions of the Covenanters, Harding attended Charles Stuart to Scotland in December 1650, and kept up a regular correspondence with the secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas†, who remained in the Low Countries.26Nicholas Pprs. i. 208, 237, 261; CCSP ii. 69, 77.

In later years, Harding became famous for his devoted service to the exiled Charles Stuart. The ladies of court took to him. The princess of Orange wrote to him hoping to mend fences with her brother in September 1652; her aunt, the queen of Bohemia, knew Harding well, praising his ‘full and honest letters’ in 1654, and describing him, affectionately, as the ‘reverent Dick Harding’.27CCSP ii. 453; Nicholas Pprs. i. 126n; ii. 93. He counted among his particular friends Hyde and the marquess of Ormond. Both men spoke affectionately of Harding’s devotion to Charles, but were frustrated at his carelessness in his correspondence concerning the court, and more particularly, his inability to keep the king within the bounds of his limited financial means. In April 1656 Hyde complained to Ormond that Harding had been too free in Paris with news of the king’s journey to Flanders, and in September 1656 Ormond told Hyde that ‘the king and Mr Harding must answer for their squandering’.28CCSP iii. 107, 168. Not that Harding was benefiting personally from the king’s extravagance – quite the opposite. In July 1657, Hyde wrote that Harding’s penurious state had made him ill:

Poor Dick Harding is again fallen into a new fit; he has pawned every little thing, the cup which the princess gave him and every spoon, and has not a shirt to his back, and yet will not importune his master if he should see him.29Bodl. Clarendon 50, f. 77.

By the end of the year ‘honest Harding’ was dead.30CCSP iv. 67.

In his will, which he wrote in ‘great pain’ in May 1657, Harding confirmed his loyalty to ‘the true Catholic Christian religion professed and maintained by the Church of England’, bequeathed mourning rings to the king and Ormond, left his French and Latin books to Ormond and Hyde, and put the disposal of his body into the hands of Hyde and Secretary Nicholas.31PROB11/308/295. His only daughter, Honora, who was in the household of the princess of Orange, was placed under Hyde’s guardianship, but she received little from the will beyond the burden of her father’s debts.32PROB11/308/295; CCSP iv, 83. In September 1658 she complained to Hyde that she could not find a full list of her father’s creditors, and in November she received some relief from Sir Ralph Clare, who agreed to allow her a small pension and advised her to seek further relief from the marquess of Hertford.33CCSP iv. 83, 106. There were also hopes that she might be paid the arrears of the Suffolk annuity owed to her dead mother, or that she might resign her place at court in return for a financial settlement.34CCSP iv. 122, 129, 132; v. 740. In February 1661 she was granted a royal pension of £300 per annum, but in June 1676 complained to the earl of Danby that the money had not been paid for 5 years, leaving her at the mercy of her creditors.35CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 523; Eg. 3352, f. 9. Honora Harding died unmarried in 1681.36PROB11/368/507.