SHUCKBURGH, Richard (1596-1656), of Shuckburgh Hall, Upper Shuckburgh, Warws.

The historian of Warwickshire, William Dugdale, was convinced that Shuckburghs had lived in Shuckburgh since the beginning of the twelfth century. They had certainly been rooted there for centuries, and in the early modern period were of solid county gentry standing. Richard Shuckburgh’s grandfather and father were both sheriffs of Warwickshire, and his father was a justice of the peace.17Dugdale, Warws. i. 309-10. Richard Shuckburgh entered public life tentatively, only after he inherited his father’s estate, and then did not penetrate the inner circle of the quorum. He was not named to commissions of oyer and terminer, or any other commissions out of chancery, but from the late 1630s diligently attended something over 70 per cent of quarter sessions meetings.18Warwick County Records, ii. pp. xix, xxi. It was from this background as a man becoming more involved in the public life of the county that he stood as a candidate for election to Parliament.

Shuckburgh first came to county-wide prominence as a partner of James Compton*, Lord Compton, in the second election held for the Warwickshire seats in the Long Parliament, ordered after the House declared the first invalid. Polling took place with the agreement of the candidates over the five days from the reading of the writ on Monday 28 December 1640. Nothing has been found to link Shuckburgh with Compton before this election, and his appearance may have owed much to opinion among the Warwickshire gentry that representation at Westminster should not be left to men from the south of the county only.19A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 128. Shuckburgh may also have sought to improve his own standing in the county. That Shuckburgh beat at the poll the rebarbative William Combe*, whose standing and honour as a gentleman had been publicly brought into question, is perhaps unsurprising, but it was nevertheless a surprise to the sheriff, who managed to declare Compton and Combe elected despite polling figures to the contrary.20Warws. RO, CR 2981/box 8/bdle. 25/9; ‘William Combe’, supra. On 30 January, William Purefoy I* raised in the interests of William Combe the question of whether the election had been conducted properly, but nothing came of a referral to the privileges committee.21Procs. LP ii. 320, 330; CJ ii. 76b.

According to sympathetic testimony before a hostile Warwickshire county committee in 1644, Shuckburgh attended the House regularly before August 1642, but if he was in the Commons before May 1641, no record survives of it.22Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1). He may have delayed attending as he waited for confirmation that the seat was his. The first reference to him in the Journal is to his taking the Protestation, on 3 May 1641.23CJ ii. 133a. His first and only committee appointment was five days later, to a committee working to tighten the laws against popish recusants.24CJ ii. 139a. He was subsequently named as a commissioner to disarm Warwickshire recusants, and may have held firm anti-Catholic views, as one who in 1634 had been granted a lease of recusants’ lands, no doubt after petitioning the government.25Coventry Docquets, 270. His will of 1655 was certainly distinctly Calvinist in tone. On 29 June he was given leave to go to the country, though was evidently back in the Commons by 11 August, when he attracted attention by having Samuel Rolle* announce to the House that a servant in the London house where he lodged had discovered a plague spot on herself. Already in a panicky mood, the Members readily granted Shuckburgh permission to leave.26CJ ii. 191b, 250b; Procs. LP vi. 352-3, 360; Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1).

When he returned, which was according to his supporters only a few days later, it was certainly not to become more active in the affairs of the House. Not until November did Shuckburgh make any further impression, but on this occasion it was to bring to the House some papers which had been intercepted by magistrates in Warwickshire and passed on to him. The documents contained queries on obedience to the king, on the reasons for the presence of the Scots army in England, on the legitimacy of Parliament’s Protestation and on the break-up of the church: all calling into question the validity of policies pursued by Parliament, and indeed implying that some were treasonous. The copies reported by Shuckburgh were not the only ones, as they had also come to the attention of the lord mayor of London, and others took up the libels, linking them with the master of St John’s College, Cambridge.27CJ ii. 323b, 325a; D'Ewes (C), 327. Shuckburgh did nothing more than report the writings he had received from fellow-justices, and played no part in the unravelling of the plot they were alleged to substantiate.

Shuckburgh in fact stayed consistently aloof from the reform programme of Parliament, and refused to be drawn into any declarations of support for Parliament alone. From January to June 1642 he apparently attended the House, but made no mark at all on its proceedings, except on 2 February when he and Dr George Parry argued unsuccessfully for the lighter punishment of expulsion from the House, instead of imprisonment in the Tower, for Sir Edward Dering, whose Collection of Speeches was judged to be apostacy against the cause of godly reform.28PJ i. 263. Eventually however, Shuckburgh’s lack of sympathy for the positions taken by the king’s critics in the Commons could be concealed no longer. On 10 or 11 June, he refused to commit himself to providing horses for Parliament alone, saying that he had ‘horses in readiness to defend the king, the commonwealth, the laws and the Parliament.’29PJ iii. 480n. This was a gesture of defiance which could hardly be overlooked, and when Shuckburgh left the Commons for the third time with the permission of the House, on 21 August, it was to return to a home, on the Warwickshire-Northamptonshire borders, which was not secluded from what was developing into military confrontation. 30Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1); CJ ii. 713b.

Three weeks after he left the Commons, Shuckburgh was arrested by the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) and brought to Northampton for questioning by Lord Kimbolton (Edward Montagu†), the 1st earl of Stamford (Henry Grey*), 2nd Baron Robartes (John Robartes) and William Purefoy I* about his conspicuous failure to support Parliament. After Shuckburgh’s responses were recorded, he was conveyed to London, where he was examined by Henry Marten* and Robert Reynolds*. An important allegation against him was that as a justice he had refused to examine some men of the king’s, passing through his area en route from Nottingham to Oxford with military intelligence.31Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1); CJ ii. 775b.

He was in the custody of the House for 17 days before 7 October, when the articles against him, together with his responses, were read. Shuckburgh was released on bail of £4,000, pending a further hearing of the case, and he returned to Upper Shuckburgh.32CJ ii. 798b. Two weeks later occurred the incident for which he became famous, or notorious. Dugdale recorded the story that on 22 October 1642, the eve of the battle of Edgehill, Shuckburgh was out hunting, and passed with horses and hounds before the ranks of the king’s army. Charles, on asking and being told who he was, summoned him and forthwith knighted him. The following day, Shuckburgh appeared with his tenants and servants on the field of battle in the service of the king.33Dugdale, Warws. i. 309-10. Shuckburgh’s own account, given, it has to be said, before the hostile county committee of Warwickshire, was rather more prosaic. On the eve of the battle, he rode out to the rendezvous on Shuckburgh Field on behalf of one of his neighbours to try to recover some horses. He spoke to some of those who had quartered with him the previous night, and they escorted him to the king. He was knighted ‘I confess altogether undeservedly’. However implausible his story of the horse recovery mission, his account at least makes it clear that he was associating with leading royalist commanders two days before Edgehill, and had not ridden into the camp unawares, as Dugdale’s version implies. There seems little doubt that Shuckburgh was in arms for the king at Edgehill, not least because he himself did not explicitly deny it.34Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1).

Shuckburgh seems to have been denied much success as a royalist soldier. Dugdale’s sequel to his hunting adventure was that after Edgehill, he then fortified Shuckburgh House and defended it against parliamentarian troops, ‘till he fell, with most of his tenants about him’. But at some point relatively early in the war, and certainly before April 1644, his estate had been sequestered by local committees. Shuckburgh had to send a message to Oxford to assure the royalists that he was not a voluntary prisoner of Parliament. He was imprisoned first at Warwick, then in Kenilworth castle, and was probably thereafter monitored closely under what was in effect house arrest at Upper Shuckburgh.35Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1); Symonds, Diary, 192. The story recounted by one of Shuckburgh’s servants that he welcomed parliamentarian officers to his house, and that one of them, Captain Lawson, had to be restrained from ordering a volley to be fired in thanks for Shuckburgh’s hospitality, was produced in Shuckburgh’s defence, and was doubtless an exaggeration.36Warws. RO, CR 1248/box 16/9 (1). He had been identified in the summer of 1642 by William Purefoy I as unsympathetic towards Parliament, and it was Purefoy who moved successfully for his expulsion from the House on 13 January 1644.37CJ iii. 366b; Add. 18779, f. 48. It was later alleged by Purefoy that the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding) had excused Shuckburgh’s attending the king on the grounds that it might have been in order to ‘do good offices’.38CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 445.

Thereafter, his was the life of any other royalist delinquent, facing intermittent enquiries from the authorities. In September 1646, he attempted to compound for his delinquency, although he had been sequestered and had been promised a certificate to that effect from the Committee for Sequestrations.39CCC 1218. In November 1649, he came under the scrutiny of the Committee for Advance of Money, and in November 1651 the old charges against him from the mid-1640s were resurrected. He managed to stave off a re-opening of the case.40CCAM 1155. During the 1650s he was a correspondent of Dugdale and Sir Simon Clarke on antiquarian topics, including Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, and thus seems to have preferred a gentler, more contemplative life under the unsympathetic regime than active opposition to it.41Dugdale, Diary and Corresp. 239-41, 245, 285. He was in London when he died on 13 June 1656, but his body was brought back to Upper Shuckburgh for interment there, to honour the request in his will.42PROB11/259, f. 80. His widow later married John Keating, chief justice of common pleas in Ireland, and she was buried outside Dublin in 1677, although she has a memorial inscription in Upper Shuckburgh.43Misc. Gen. et Her. 2nd ser. iii. 353.