SPURSTOWE, William (bef. 1585-1646), of St Stephen Coleman Street, London.

The Shropshire Spurstowes were said to be descended from a cadet branch of a Cheshire family of that name. By the 1490s, however, they were settled as cloth merchants in Shrewsbury. In 1491 and 1494 two sons of John Spurstowe of Bunbury in Cheshire were entered on the Shrewsbury burgess roll as shearmen.18Vis London 1687, i. 340; Shrewsbury Burgess Roll ed. H.E. Forrest (Shrewsbury, 1924), 272. When the heralds compiled the family’s pedigree in 1633, they began with William Spurstowe’s grandfather, Roger Spurstowe, which suggests that during the sixteenth century the family achieved a marked upward social mobility in their adopted town.19Vis. London 1633, ii. (Harl. Soc. xvii), 259. William Spurstowe’s father, Thomas, died in 1585, when William was very young, although he was the eldest of three living children at that date. This must push back his likely year of birth to no later than 1583, even allowing for the possibility that one of his siblings was a twin.20PROB11/68/568. Thomas Spurstowe was a shearman, but his will gives no indication of particular wealth or of a distinguished or even a wide social circle. William Spurstowe received the kind of training that was typical for the son of a working cloth producer. He was apprenticed to a Shrewsbury draper, and became free of the drapers’ company there in 1597. What marked him out from the run of Shrewsbury apprentices was the period he spent during his training in London. Like other provincial trading companies, the Shrewsbury drapers maintained good contacts in the London markets, and Spurstowe evidently quickly found a niche in the metropolis.21Mendenhall, Shrewsbury Drapers, 65.

Although Spurstowe maintained his contacts in Shrewsbury throughout his life, he never returned there to live, and instead set himself up in business in London. The core of the Shrewsbury cloth trade was traditionally the processing of Welsh cloth for the London markets, and Spurstowe must initially have located himself within that enterprise, but he is later to be found exporting ‘bays and finer fabrics’.22Mendenhall, Shrewsbury Drapers, 65. By 1606, Spurstowe had begun to demonstrate a talent for representing his industry against threats by outside interests. He led the Shrewsbury drapers’ battle in 1606 against the depredations of the alnager, Tey.23Mendenhall, Shrewsbury Drapers, 92. That year, he was one of a group from the cloth industry that advised a House of Lords committee on a bill that passed that House on 3 May as 3 Jas. I c. 17. Spurstowe fought successfully to ensure incorporation into the act of a clause that allowed for shrinkage in the Shrewsbury product. The costs of lobbying for this protective clause amounted to twice as large a sum as the annual average income of the Shrewsbury drapers’ company, indicating how crucial this concession was judged to be, and how important Spurstowe had become in the esteem of the Shrewsbury drapers, even at this early date.24Mendenhall, Shrewsbury Drapers, 142-3. He continued to report to the drapers of his home town on work he had undertaken on their behalf in London, while building up a business that justified the description of him by one authority as ‘the Dick Whittington of the Shrewsbury drapers’.25Salop Archives, 1831/6 f. 5; Mendenhall, Shrewsbury Drapers, 92. Despite this prominence, in April 1611, he was still only 49th in seniority in the drapers’ company, showing how Spurstowe was demonstrating success in lobbying and commercial enterprise not because he was a senior member of his guild but because of his innate qualities of energy and determination.26Salop Archives, 1831/6 f. 13.

Spurstowe’s marriage into the Surrey family of Parkhurst placed located him among the gentry rather than among the trading classes, and helped him establish himself as a merchant princeling, if not a merchant prince. He was probably established in the City parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street by 1613, when Henry Spurstowe, son of William, was baptised. Another son, William, whose date of birth or baptism is unknown, became a noted puritan clergyman.27Oxford DNB. Spurstowe served as a juror on the parish inquest of St Stephen’s in December 1622.28GL, 4458/1, n.p. In March 1624 he was active on committees in the parish, and at the end of that year paid a fine rather than shoulder the office of constable.29GL, 4458/1, pp. 14, 19. Not only was he too exalted socially to be anything other than a choice by rote for this particularly onerous office, he was also too busy. Nevertheless, he was willing to take on offices of trust, as an auditor and as trustee for parish lands, responsibilities he discharged for over 14 years.30GL, 4458/1. pp. 14, 29, 31, 39, 48, 69, 90, 103, 108. He was also willing to represent the parish to higher authorities, as in January 1626 when the parishioners launched a campaign to determine for themselves without reference to the government the choice of trustees or feoffees of parish property. Spurstowe and others were selected to meet the lord keeper to lobby for this measure of self-determination.31GL, 4458/1, p. 27.

St Stephen’s Coleman Street was one of the most radical parishes in London. The residents had purchased the advowson, giving the parishioners effective control of clerical appointments. When differences arose between the parishioners and the minister, Samuel German, occasioned apparently by German’s ‘negligence in his ministry’, Spurstowe was a vestry committeeman.32GL, 4458/1, pp. 5-6; C. Hill, Economic Problems of the Church (Oxford, 1956), 296, quoting E. Freshfield, Some Remarks upon the Bk. of Recs. and Hist. of the Parish of St Stephen’s, Coleman St. (1887), 6; Kirby, ‘Radicals of St Stephen’s Coleman St.’, 100. John Davenport was subsequently elected minister in 1624, at the very time that Spurstowe was beginning to make his own mark on the parish.33Hill, Economic Problems, 255-6. In January 1625, Spurstowe was chosen by the parish to serve on the common council of the City of London, and he served for about two years.34GL, 4458/1, pp. 20, 44.

The early 1620s saw Spurstowe become a member of the East India Company. In September 1621, £1,200 of joint stock was transferred to his holding, and £500 was added from another source less than two years later.35CSP Col. E.I. 1617-21, p. 505; 1622-24, p. 226. In 1624, Spurstowe joined the ‘generality’ of the company in petitioning against their Dutch rivals, and by July 1625 he had been elevated to the general court of the company, sitting on committees with leading London merchants Nicholas Crisp*, Henry Garway, Job Harby and the distinguished writer on economics, Thomas Mun.36CSP Col. E.I. 1622-4, pp. 490-1; 1625-29, p. 80. He subsequently regularly figured among the company’s committeemen, where his personal views are opaque by the very nature of the historical record. Occasional glimpses are afforded of his lifestyle. In October 1626, Spurstowe at a meeting spoke of a friend who had £1,700-£1,800 in gold, and in 1628 he and Thomas Mun were selected to go to the Downs and provide a guard for an arriving shipment of gold bullion.37CSP Col. E.I. 1625-29, pp. 145, 180, 218, 230, 257, 298, 364, 483, 485, 524, 605. It is clear that although Spurstowe was taking on apprentices who in the early 1620s were becoming free of the Shrewsbury drapers, he was starting to become influential in a number of other spheres, including the overseas trade in luxury goods and the world of colonial development more broadly.38Salop Archives, 1831/6 f. 37v. In 1624 he was the 10th most wealthy man in his parish.39Kirby, ‘Radicals of St Stephen’s Coleman St.’, 119.

It was probably because of Spurstowe’s growing influence in London that in 1627 the government of Charles I sought to make an example of him. While a common council man, Spurstowe refused to pay towards the Forced Loan, and in June it was ordered that he should be confined to the Gatehouse prison, in Westminster. This sentence did not deter the East India Company from electing him a committeeman in July, and it may have been Spurstowe’s high profile in City business activities that persuaded the privy council the same month to banish Spurstowe to Warrington, in Lancashire. In September, the attorney-general was ordered to bring together those who had not gone to their places of confinement, among them Spurstowe and Samuel Vassall*, but Spurstowe may never have been detained for any length of time. When in January 1628 orders were given for the release of Forced-Loan prisoners, Vassall was in the Marshalsea, but Spurstowe in the custody only of a messenger.40APC 1627, pp. 351, 429; 1627-8, pp. 58, 218; CSP Col. E.I. 1625-9, p. 364. It may have been because of this conflict that Spurstowe’s name was not put forward again by St Stephen’s Coleman Street when nominations to the common council were determined in December 1627.41GL, 4458/1, p. 44.

Another sphere of activity for Spurstowe was transatlantic colonisation. By 1629 he was involved with the Massachusetts Bay Company, where he joined his minister at St Stephen’s Coleman Street, John Davenport. In July 1629 he was present at a general court, and the following month was prominent in marshalling arguments against allowing the emigrants to New England to control the plantation and development of the colony and to relinquish the governing charter. His principal opponent in the debate was Sir Richard Saltonstall, who secured a vote in favour of allowing significant devolution to the colonists.42Recs. of the Governor and Coy. of the Mass. Bay ed. Shurtleff, i. 48, 50; F. Rose Troup, John White the Patriarch of Dorchester (New York, 1930), 50. Spurstowe does not seem to have been active in the Massachusetts Company after 1629, and there is nothing to suggest that he contemplated joining those from his parish, including the minister, Davenport, who emigrated to America.43Hill, Economic Problems, 255-6. He seems rather to have invested more energy into puritan reforms at home, not least through his membership of the London Mercers’ Company. Spurstowe had been free of that company since 1597, and its freemen must have overseen his early training jointly with the Shrewsbury drapers. He was active in deploying the resources bequeathed to the mercers by one of their number, Richard Fishbourne, who died in 1625. Fishbourne’s bequest included £2,800 for impropriations to be bought up. In pursuit of Fishbourne’s objectives, Huntingdon was settled upon as a town where the mercers should seek to establish a lectureship.

Huntingdon had been Fishbourne’s birthplace, but the mercers’ offer was received there with less than unalloyed gratitude. Some in the town urged that the bequest should all be devoted to poor relief, on the grounds that there were lectures already in place. A majority of the Huntingdon council wanted £60 of the £100 annual income from the endowment for the poor, and £40 for a lecture. This proposal was supported by the mercers after their envoys to Huntingdon had reported back. When the council then requested that the money should be spent on augmenting the income of the existing incumbent, the celebrated Dr Thomas Beard, the mercers demurred, and proceeded to forge ahead with plans for a new lectureship in Huntingdon. At this point the king intervened to lean heavily on the mercers to bolster the already entrenched position of Beard, a former royal chaplain. It was Spurstowe who was selected as one of a party to wait on Charles at Nonsuch to try to persuade him to allow the company a free choice. The delegates appeared to have succeeded, only to be thwarted by the intervention of John Williams, bishop of Lincoln.44J. Morrill, ‘The Making of Oliver Cromwell’, in Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution ed. Morrill (Harlow, 1990), 26, 29-31; C. Hill, Economic Problems of the Church, 270-1; I. Doolittle, The Mercers’ Company 1579-1959 (1994), 53.

The first lecture at Huntingdon was finally given in 1631, six years after Fishbourne’s death. The lecturer, John Pointer, had to endure the disapproval of Archbishop William Laud, who argued that no corporation had the right to determine the status of any cleric. It is possible to speculate on the views of the borough’s burgess in the 1628 Parliament, Oliver Cromwell*, but it is clear that the Huntingdon case was another illustration of Spurstowe’s willingness to challenge the government, already evident in the episode of the Forced Loan detention and in the campaign for self-determination at St Stephen’s Coleman Street. Furthermore, the whole principle of the Fishbourne lectureship, corporate lay intervention to fund a godly ministry, was nurtured in other spheres of Spurstowe’s daily life. In St Stephen’s Coleman Street, John Davenport was one of the four feoffees for impropriations who were ministers, and the feoffees were well represented in the trading companies, especially those focussed on America. These were all godly networks and centres of determined opposition to the government of Charles I. Early in 1640, after Pointer had been removed from the lectureship, Spurstowe and Cromwell were active in trying to secure his reinstatement.45Morrill, ‘Making of Oliver Cromwell’, 42.

In April 1629, Spurstowe was exempted from holding all parish offices thereafter, having served as common councillor and fined off as churchwarden. Nevertheless, his name continues to appear in St Stephen’s Coleman Street vestry book through the 1630s as a trustee alongside Isaac Penington*, Sir Thomas Wroth* and Augustine Garland, father of the regicide, Augustine Garland*.46GL, 4458/1, p. 90. He continued in this fiduciary role after the departure of John Davenport for the Netherlands in 1633. In April of that year, Spurstowe signed the petition in favour of Thomas Withring*, the foreign postmaster.47CSP Dom. 1633-34, p. 39. He was probably the ‘Mr Spurstowe’ who belonged to the Levant Company in the 1630s. If he was, he was not particularly active in it, but in 1637 petitioned the governing body to bend the rules slightly in order to allow his time-served son a share in a cargo, even though he had not formally been admitted. The case was deferred.48SP105/149 p. 284 Given the extent of the overlap of membership in the trading companies, it was more likely to be this Member than not. The East India Company provided the main focus for his energies. Between January 1635 and January 1640, he served on at least 19 committees, and undertook numerous commissions on his own on the company’s behalf.49Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1635-39, pp. 7, 34, 43, 49, 56, 73, 83, 86, 158, 162, 178, 185, 194, 228, 237, 306, 310. These activities spanned the whole range of trading and shipping concerns, and reveal Spurstowe to have been as skilled in the purchase of ballast for ships and in the recruitment of crew as in more cerebral occupations such as checking accounts and settling disputes between members. The political complexion of the East India Company was in marked contrast to that of the Massachusetts Bay Company, however, and it has been observed that among the leading East Indiamen, only Spurstowe and Mathew Cradock* were to become active parliamentarians.50Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 375-6 and 379n.

When Spurstowe was elected to a seat in the Long Parliament, the burgesses of Shrewsbury must have known that they were returning not only a long-standing friend of the leading trading company there, but also a man with a long and distinctive metropolitan record of opposition to the government. He was soon named to committees, but only to four before the end of 1640, hardly the maximum possible. Religion figured in all these: on popery in London, the un-puritan parish of St Gregory by St Paul’s, on bishops and on promoting preaching ministers.51CJ ii. 24b, 44b, 50a, 54b. He sat on only one committee between 1 January and 27 April 1641, on the post office (10 Feb.), a topic that had exercised him in the 1630s.52CJ ii. 82a. Some of his time was still being devoted to business – he was still managing East India stock in May 1641 – but his retirement in rotation from the East India Company committee in July of that year seems to have marked the end of his business career.53Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1640-43, pp. 153, 177. There was no doubt of Spurstowe’s commitment to Parliament, however: he was included among the MPs who liaised with the City, and his loan of £500 to Parliament in August helped him to a place on the Recess Committee of 9 September.54CJ ii. 136a, 277a, 288b.

Spurstowe was regarded as if he were a fifth Member for the City of London. He went with the London Members to request that the corporation might forbear from calling in their loans to Parliament (3 Nov. 1641) and helped manage the sensitive task of finding appropriate accommodation for the Scots commissioners (1 Dec.).55CJ ii. 304a, 328b, 349a, 352a. As a prominent member of the merchant community, it was natural that he should appear on committees to prohibit the important of currants (27 Oct. 1641), which was a rebuff to the Levant Company, of which Spurstowe was probably a rank-and-file member, and a move motivated by concerns about tax revenue and company privilege.56CJ ii. 295b. He probably subscribed to the Irish Adventure in the spring of 1642.57CSP Ire. Adventurers, 63. He was named to committees that tried to establish good relations between Parliament and corporate business interests, such as the merchant strangers, the Merchant Adventurers and the Hamburg merchants.58CJ ii. 499a, 542a, 590a, 666b, 722b. His many years’ experience of varied mercantile activity recommended him for committees on the eve of the civil war that worked to secure supplies of various kinds for the imminent conflict. Among these were committees to provide gunpowder to Carrickfergus (28 Mar. 1642) and to buy saltpetre (13 June).59CJ ii. 502a, 621a, 633b, 647a; PJ ii. 98-9. On one of the days that the merchant strangers were discussed (26 Mar.), Spurstowe revealed how the disgraced royal minister, Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†), had left a sum of over £47,000 unpaid for pepper bought to supply the king’s army at the time of the second bishops’ war. He had persuaded Spurstowe, who had been acting as spokesman for the East India Company, to sell by painting a lurid scenario of a Scottish advance on London to ‘give laws to them, their wives and children’.60PJ ii. 92.

Spurstowe showed no reluctance to begin preparations for war in 1642. He provided inside information on 6 May to Sir Simonds D’Ewes* on the imminent transfer of the Hull magazine to London, and on 10 June pledged £200 of his own money for the cause.61PJ ii. 287; iii. 484. On 5 July he reported that three or four anonymous citizens were willing to fit out a troop of 100 horse for service in the midlands and the north, and was probably with William Strode I* instrumental in securing a gift of £2,000 from another well-wisher.62CJ ii. 651b, 703a; PJ iii. 172-3. He brought to the House the petition from Shrewsbury in which Thomas Hunt* sought approval for drilling the militia there, and must have approved of the order to investigate the conduct of the Shrewsbury assizes that had produced a declaration that all good laws came through the goodness of the king. He also took an interest in how the king’s proclamations were resisted in the adjacent county of Montgomeryshire.63CJ ii. 737a, 743a, 743b, 762a; PJ iii. 221, 318. Spurstowe was empowered to conduct a number of searches in London in the early months of the war. He went to the houses of William, 4th Baron Petre, to search for hidden money (22 Aug.), to Sir John Heydon’s house to remove arms (23 Aug.) and on 26 August to search for a cannon said to be in another private house.64CJ ii. 731b, 732b, 737b.

To a significant extent, Spurstowe brought with him to the House of Commons his circle of colleagues in the City and in St Stephen’s Coleman Street. On 26 April 1642, he was accompanied on his mission of persuasion to the Merchant Adventurers by Isaac Penington and Anthony Bedingfield, both prominent figures in his parish.65CJ ii. 542a; PJ ii. 222. Bedingfield, an unmarried man some 20 years younger than Spurstowe, had served an apprenticeship in the Mercers’ Company. Spurstowe and Bedingfield sat together on at least 17 committees during the Long Parliament. Penington was also a colleague from the Levant Company. Samuel Vassall and Spurstowe shared membership not only of the Levant Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company, but were also associated in the select club of those who had been detained by the government for non-payment of the Forced Loan. Between May 1641 and October 1645, they were named to at least 52 parliamentary committees together. Vassall was prominent in naval affairs, and would have approved of Spurstowe’s addition to the important Committee of Navy and Customs (19 Aug. 1642).66CJ ii. 728a. Another parliamentary colleague until his death in 1641 was Mathew Cradock, who not only moved in the same trading circles and lived in the same parish as Spurstowe, but was also related to him by marriage through the Wynn family of Shrewsbury.67PROB11/195/154.

Spurstowe had demonstrated a profound and sustained antipathy towards the government of Charles I, and this certainly extended to include the king’s religious policy. Instrumental in the affair of the Fishbourne lecture, supportive of John Davenport and of parish self-determination, he was the classic example of the lay puritan activist. In 1642, he signed a letter to the ministers who had gone to New England, among them Davenport, to return to England to participate in discussions about the future of the church. It has been noted that no less than four fifths of his co-signatories went on to serve as Members of the Rump Parliament.68S. Foster, ‘The Presbyterian Independents Exorcised’, P and P xliv, 68-9. At the end of the year he was named to the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, which probably absorbed much of the time he was able to devote to religious reform. What is striking otherwise is that in the five years he sat in Parliament, only seven of his committees were religious in their subject matter, and four of those were in the first six months of the assembly. These early committees were on the oppressions of various kinds that were generally felt in the House to be urgent, such as popery and church courts.69CJ ii. 24b, 50a, 54b, 128b. The others were related to the setting up of the Presbyterian church arrangements in London in the summer of 1645.70CJ iv. 218a, 300b, 324a. Spurstowe’s support for the Independents’ 1642 letter notwithstanding, the impression conveyed by these appointments is that he leant towards Erastian, Calvinist Presbyterianism, an impression confirmed by his will. He left bequests to some of the Smectymnuus authors of 1641 and the Independent minister Thomas Goodwin, but did not mention John Goodwin, the Arminian Independent incumbent of St Stephen’s Coleman Street.71PROB11/195/154; Kirby, ‘Radicals of St Stephen’s Coleman St.’, 116n. Among the Presbyterian ministers who enjoyed Spurstowe’s full support was his own son and namesake, and it must have given him pleasure officially to thank William Spurstowe junior for his sermon to Parliament in July 1643.72CJ iii. 177a.

The story Spurstowe narrated to the House in March 1642 about the threatened Scottish invasion seems not to have arisen from any hostility of his own towards the Scots. His efforts to secure London accommodation for the Scottish commissioners have been noted, and he seems to have been supportive of the Solemn League and Covenant, even if no record survives of his having taken it. In September 1643, he was among the first movers of the efforts to raise money for the joint war effort with the Scots by sequestering the property of Parliament’s enemies, in what was to become the Committee for Compounding.73Supra, ‘Committee for Compounding’; CJ iii. 258a; CCC 1. In March 1644, he served on a committee asked to work out ways by which the Covenant could be tendered to the English overseas.74CJ iii. 415a. In May, he was involved in promoting to the City the bellicose proposals of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which countenanced only the total surrender of the king’s army.75CJ iii. 478a; Gardiner, Great Civil War, i. 342. In 1643 and again in the summer of 1644 he was involved in efforts to raise money in the City to pay the Scots army. There is no reason to doubt that he approved of his son’s service in the Westminster Assembly, where Scots and English deliberated over an ultimate church settlement.76CJ iii. 258a; iv. 173b, 186a, 202b; Oxford DNB.

Matters relating to trade continued to dominate the list of committees to which Spurstowe was named. From January 1643 he sat on the committee for trade, and on 14 April was named to hear the petition of the Merchant Adventurers and to frame an order to prevent wool exports.77CJ ii. 928b; iii. 44a. His cloth trade expertise was being put to good use here and in subsequent orders and ordinances on the same topic.78CJ iii. 411b, 523b. On 3 January 1644, he was named to hear the petitions of the Levant Company. His credentials as a member of that company were obvious, and he stood in the same relationship to the committee charged with drafting an ordinance to bolster the East India Company (10 Feb. 1644).79CJ iii. 357a, 395b. Spurstowe became involved with matters relating to customs and excise in January 1643, when he helped smooth the transition from one set of customs commissioners to their successors.80CJ ii. 919b; iii. 29b. In June he was a member of a group that entertained the proposals of a Dutch merchant for credit to be raised on the newly-established excise tax, which may have led directly to the scheme to raise credit widely on anticipations of the excise.81CJ iii. 135b, 222a. In January 1644 he was named to a committee chaired by Sir Henry Vane I which reviewed the excise, and the following month was named to the main excise committee. In May 1645, he was one of a group that negotiated with the excise commissioners for funding for the siege of Oxford.82CJ iii. 360a, 393a; iv. 157a. Among Spurstowe’s last tasks was the raising of £2,000 on the excise for the garrison of Shrewsbury.83CJ iv. 275a.

The pattern of Spurstowe’s parliamentary career was determined by his professional and public career before 1640. Parliament was able to put to good use his business skills and depth of experience in London government. He never seems to have taken the lead in any new legislation, nor did he once act as a teller in a division. He was active in supporting the war effort in Shropshire by helping frame an ordinance (6 May 1644) and by acting as a trustee for a bequest left by an overseas merchant, Oxenbridge, for Thomas Mytton’s* army.84CJ iii. 420b, 482a, 545a. Spurstowe’s last committee nomination was on 27 October 1645, when he and Sir Robert Harley* were to interview the lord mayor of London on progress towards electing Presbyterian elders.85CJ iv. 324a. He died in January 1646 and was buried in St Stephen’s Coleman Street. His will was prefaced by a Calvinist preamble of some 37 lines of text, in which Spurstowe abased himself as one ‘not able to think one good thought, much less to labour and seek for ... eternal life’. Apart from the bequests to godly ministers mentioned above, he remembered St. Catherine Hall, Cambridge, where his minister son had been educated, and left £400 for the Shrewsbury poor. He left money for four London hospitals and four London gaols. His bequests amounted to over £7,000 in cash.86PROB11/195/154. None of his posterity is known to have sat in Parliament.