PEPYS, Richard (c.1588-1659), of Stoke-next-Clare, Suff.

There were members of the Pepys family living at Cottenham in Cambridgeshire as early as the fourteenth century, but their pedigree only becomes certain from the early sixteenth century, with the various branches of the family deriving from William Pepys, bailiff to the abbot of Crowland and great-great-grandfather to this MP.43Pepys, Gen. 16-19, 53, ped. VII; Chappell, Pepys Fam. 9-10, 20; Burke PB (102nd edn. 1959), 543. Most of the subsequent generations of the Cambridgeshire Pepys family descended from William’s third son, also called William.44Vis. Cambs. 1575 and 1619, 62; Chappell, Pepys Fam. 21, 23-4, 29-32, 37-45; Armytage, ‘Peds.’, 123; Pepys’s Diary, x. 628-9. In 1586 one of those descendants, John Pepys of Cottenham, grandson of the younger William Pepys, married Elizabeth Bendish, a daughter of Thomas Bendish from Steeple Bumpstead in Essex.45Chappell, Pepys Fam. 29. It was probably this connection with the Bendishes which led, in time, to several of the offspring of this marriage (including their son, Richard), settling along the Suffolk-Essex border, close to Steeple Bumpstead. The couple’s eldest son, John, was baptised at Cottenham on 3 May 1587 and Richard must have been born within the next two years, as their grandfather left the future MP £20 in his will drawn up in July 1589.46Cottenham par. reg.; PROB11/74/476; ‘Extracts from a private chartulary’, Topographer and Genealogist, iii. 104. In March 1604, having had a further two sons (Thomas and Samuel) and two daughters (Edith and Eleanor), John Pepys died and Richard Craycrofte became the stepfather to the young Richard when John Pepys’s widow remarried three years later.47Cottenham par. reg. John and Richard Pepys went up to Cambridge together in 1604 and, unlike his brother, Richard stayed on at Peterhouse for four years to graduate.48Al. Cant.; Walker, Biographical Reg. 219. He then proceeded to the Middle Temple, where his admission to the inn was sponsored by his uncle, Talbot Pepys†, and by his elder brother.49M. Temple Admiss.; MTR, ii. 511.

After he was called to the bar in 1617, Richard Pepys made the law his profession.50MTR ii. 614. Apart from a single case in 1640, when he appeared as counsel in a case in the court of wards, little is known about his practice.51CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 220. Among fellow Middle Temple barristers with whom he had dealings were Henry Calthorpe, Geoffrey Palmer* and possibly John Maynard*.52MTR, ii. 786, 823, 982. Another Middle Temple lawyer, Henry Mordaunt, was appointed jointly with Pepys in 1625 as steward of the honor of Clare for the duchy of Lancaster.53Somerville, Office-Holders, 203; MTR ii. 802. In 1627 Pepys was among the group who undertook to rebuild the chambers in the Pump Court. Other members of this members of this syndicate included Talbot Pepys, Henry Mordaunt and Robert Reynolds*.54MTR ii. 716-17, 738-9, 741, 754, 792. One probable consequence of his work as a lawyer was his marriage into the Cutte family, which, like his Bendish cousins, came from north-west Essex. His future brother-in-law, Richard Cutte (father of Richard Cutts*), was another Middle Temple lawyer, and, as early as 1612, Richard and Talbot Pepys sponsored the admission of Francis Cutte of Debden.55MTR, ii. 549. When, in 1620, he married Judith Cutte, Pepys also gained a potentially useful connection to the cofferer to the prince of Wales, Sir Henry Vane I*. As a result of intermarriage between the Cuttes and the Vanes, Pepys’s new wife was both Vane’s stepsister and the sister to his brother-in-law.56Burke PB (102nd edn. 1959), 544; Vis. Essex 1664-8, 70; Rogers-Harrison, ‘Ped. of the fam. of Cutts’, opp. p. 42. Several of his wife’s relatives then followed Francis Cutte to the Middle Temple to be trained under Pepys.57MTR, ii. 802, 808, 827, 860. Years later, Pepys warned one of his sons to be less spendthrift by telling him that, during the early years of his marriage, when he had a young family to support, he had lived on far less than £60 a year.58GL, MS 22424/4.

Pepys’s involvement in the affairs of the Middle Temple provides some clues about his religious views during the 1630s. In 1637 the inn’s dispute with the master of the Temple, Paul Micklethwaite, came to a head when Micklethwaite, acting on the direct orders of the king, removed the communion table from the Temple Church. The affronted benchers nominated Richard Pepys, Richard Townsend and Robert Hatton on 13 October to meet with their counterparts from the Inner Temple to discuss their response. The same three were later asked to draft the letter of complaint to the visitor, Lord Keeper Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry†).59MTR, ii. 858, 859; CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 83-4; 1637-8, pp. 45, 462; 1638-9, p. 206. Pepys also played a part in the next major Middle Temple controversy. In February 1640, Edward Bagshawe*, used his Lent lectures as reader of the inn to attack the temporal pretensions of the clergy, arguing for example that the presence of bishops was not necessary for a Parliament to be valid and that clergymen should not be appointed as justices of the peace. After the new lord keeper, Sir John Finch†, had ordered him to cut short these lectures, Bagshawe visited Archbishop Laud at Lambeth to defend himself accompanied, for moral support, by Pepys and John White II*, who had already been named as the next two readers.60CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 521-4; Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud (Oxford, 1847-60), iv. 132; A Just Vindication of the Questioned Part of the Reading of Edward Bagshaw (1660), 13 (E.1019.6). These indications of Pepys’s dissatisfaction with some Laudian policies accord with later evidence which suggests that he was a devout Protestant, whose main concern was the encouragement of an effective preaching ministry supported by an improved system of tithes.61Worth, Servant Doing, 30-1.

Just when Pepys first became resident in south-west Suffolk is not known. The families of both his mother and his first wife lived close by in north-west Essex and his appointment as steward of the honor of Clare probably indicates that he was already a figure of some local standing in that area by the mid-1620s. That is confirmed by his appointment as a Suffolk justice of the peace in 1634.62C193/13/2, f. 64v. His elder brother, John, owned land at Stoke-next-Clare, which Richard inherited when John died in about 1641, and by the 1650s his eldest son, Richard junior, was living a few miles to the south, at Ashen, just inside Essex, in a house which may have been owned by his father.63PROB11/189/164; GL, MS 22424/3; MS 22424/6; Vis. Essex 1664-8, 70; Suff. RO (Bury), HA517/B4; R.D. Brown, A Village Heritage (Lavenham, 1993), 36, 44. By the 1650s Pepys was living at Stoke, in a house leased from the 2nd Baron Stanhope.64Soc. Antiq. MS 667, p. 190. It may well have been through one of his neighbours, Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston*, that Pepys came into contact with John Winthrop, the former governor of Massachusetts, one result of which was that Pepys’s two eldest sons emigrated to New England.65Winthrop Pprs. iv. 218.

The town nearest to Clare and Ashen was Sudbury, about seven miles to the east, but there was more than this proximity to recommend Pepys to the Sudbury corporation in 1640. The lands of the honor of Clare extended as far as Sudbury and, since the enfranchisement of the borough in 1558, there had been various attempts by the duchy of Lancaster to influence the borough’s parliamentary elections. Given that Bagshawe’s audience with Laud took place only about a fortnight before the town made its return, the choice of Pepys for the junior place (after the town’s veteran MP, Sir Robert Crane*) at Sudbury on 16 March 1640 may not have been a result of direct duchy intervention.66Suff. RO (Bury), EE501/2/7, unf. Perhaps the corporation was influenced by a wish to favour the duchy official with whom they dealt most often. It must also have helped that Pepys was on good terms with Crane, who trusted him enough to name him in 1643 (along with Edward Wenieve*) as a trustee to manage his estates after his death.67PROB11/191/171; Vis. of Suff. ed. J.J. Howard (Lowestoft and London, 1866-76), i. 155-7. That the one other natural candidate, Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, was prevented from standing by his appointment as sheriff simplified the choice.

Pepys’s single recorded intervention in the debates during the Short Parliament was on the most controversial legal issue raised during the session, the legality of Ship Money. His speech on 4 May seems to have confined itself to expressing agreement with Sir John Glanville* that a bill legislating against Ship Money would be too time-consuming and that they should simply declare the levy to be illegal.68Aston’s Diary, 142. When the next Parliament was summoned later that year the corporation of Sudbury chose to send D’Ewes (even although he was still sheriff), rather than Pepys, to Westminster as its MP.

Writing in February 1642 to his two sons in New England, Pepys despaired: ‘we are now in a dangerous and sad condition, every day in fear of civil war. I pray God settle our church and state in peace’.69GL, MS 22424/1. Once it became clear that this prayer had gone unanswered, Pepys sided with Parliament. He was among those included from its inception on the standing committee created to organise the parliamentarian war effort in Suffolk and, from January 1644, he was one of the six members who took it in turn to chair its meetings.70Suff. ed. Everitt, 59, 74, 75, 76, 137; Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE1/O2/1, f. 87v; SP28/243, unf. Parliament continued throughout the 1640s to appoint him to all the main local commissions for Suffolk, including (in 1645) the Presbyterian classis for Bury St Edmunds.71A. and O.; C181/5, ff. 232v-257; SP28/152, no. 20, f. 47; Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 428. From late 1642, he appeared assiduously at those quarter sessions held at Bury St Edmunds.72Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/1, ff. 25-119. Although no longer an MP, there was one crucial piece of business in which Pepys was able to assist Parliament. When Laud stood trial in March 1644, his conduct in the Bagshawe affair formed one of the accusations against him, so both Pepys and White appeared as witnesses to testify that the archbishop had threatened to prosecute Bagshawe in the court of high commission.73Works of William Laud, iv. 132-3. With Sir William Playters*, Sir Thomas Barnardiston* and Edmund Harvey II*, Pepys was one of the Suffolk gentlemen to whom the Derby House Committee turned for assistance in May 1648 when they were faced with a royalist uprising at Bury St Edmunds.74CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 65-7; The Parliament-kite, no. 1 (1648), 8 (E.443.6); A Declaration of the Counties of Kent and Essex (1648, E.443.9); HMC 7th Rep. 26; The Moderate Intelligencer (11-18 May 1648), 1319 (E.443.21).

Pepys’s non-attendance at Suffolk quarter sessions after January 1649 doubtless indicates that he objected to the king’s execution.75Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/1, ff. 126-170v. But he was not removed from the Suffolk bench and, not long afterwards, he was also nominated to the Essex standing committee, the Essex commission of the peace and the Essex assessment commission.76C193/13/3, f. 60v; Stowe 577, ff. 21, 49v; C193/13/4, ff. 36v, 93; SP28/227: warrant of Essex. co. cttee., 5 Oct. 1651; A. and O. In Essex at least he soon proved to be an active justice of the peace.77Essex QSOB ed. Allen, pp. xxxviii, 2, 12, 14, 20, 30, 35. (The possibility that this was instead his eldest son, Richard junior, can be discounted as it is known that in 1657 he had yet to become a justice.)78GL, MS 22424/7. Pepys’s name figured in the discussions between the lord protector and his advisers in early 1654 about possible new judicial appointments and one tradition suggests that he may initially have tried to reject such an offer.79Longleat, Whitelocke pprs. XV, f. 27v; Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, i. 444. Yet, if he had scruples about serving the protectorate, these did not stand in the way of his rapid promotions in 1654. The year began with his appointment as one of three new serjeants-at-law, and at the end of May he joined the ranks of the judiciary as a baron of the exchequer.80Baker, Serjeants at Law, 189-90, 401, 442, 530; Sainty, Judges, 124. He was immediately sent out as an assize judge on the Home circuit.81CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 216, 268. After a singularly brief spell as a judge (less than three months), it was decided to send Pepys to Dublin as one of the six councillors to assist the new lord deputy of Ireland, Charles Fleetwood*.82Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 437-8. Whether at that stage it was envisaged that several of these councillors (Pepys, William Steele* and Miles Corbett*) would head a revived Irish judiciary is not clear, but, almost at once, Pepys was the first to be named as a senior Irish judge. Before leaving London he was granted the office of lord chief justice.83Lascelles, Liber Munerum Publicorum Hiberniae, i. pt. ii. 31; Sainty, Judges, 124. These promotions may well have owed something to his kinship with Edward Montagu II*, his first cousin, who had recently been commissioner of the treasury and for whom he was a trustee.84Pepys, Gen. 62-3; Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 284. Pepys landed in Ireland to take up these new positions in late October or early November 1654.85CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 453, 563, 564, 568. No sooner had he arrived in Dublin than his third son, John, who had travelled over to join him, died of smallpox.86GL, MS 22424/13. Fleetwood interpreted the deaths of both John Pepys and Robert Hammond* as God’s warning to the new government in Ireland.87Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 463-4.

During the 1640s the Dublin courts had ceased to operate, and, when Pepys arrived, the Irish legal system barely existed.88Ball, Judges in Ireland, i. 256-7. As chief justice, Pepys ranked as the presiding judge in the court of upper bench, but, in reality, he was that court’s only judge.89TSP vii. 590; O’Flanagan, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, i. 346, 347n; Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 281. His task was to restore justice to the island as an essential step in consolidating English rule. Within weeks, he was hearing cases and handing down judgements.90HMC Egmont, i. 564-5. He and Sir Gerard Lowther, the chief justice of common bench, were joined as the senior judges by Corbett on his promotion to become chief baron of the Irish exchequer in June 1655 and the three of them acted as the commissioners of the great seal of Ireland until Steele’s appointment as Irish lord chancellor in August 1656.91Henry Cromwell Corresp. 55; Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 520-1; O’Flanagan, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, i. 345, 351, 355. In 1657 they were able to hold assizes, and Pepys served as a senior legal adviser to the council of Ireland.92CSPIre. 1647-60, p. 628; Ball, Judges in Ireland, i. 341; Ladyman, Dangerous Rule, sig. A; Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 481, 503, 526, 588; CSPIre. Adv. 1642-59, p. 397. The bulk of the cases coming before the council were inevitably concerned with the tortuous details of the land settlement, and, from his earliest days in Dublin, Pepys served as the senior member of the commission created to process all the claims to the forfeited lands.93Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 455-6. In a small council, he contributed extensively to policy-making.94TSP iv. 307-8, 668-9, 673, 701, 706-7, 711-12, v. 159, 238, 309; CSPIre. 1647-60, pp. 614, 619, 644, 659, 668-9, 835-6. Unlike Corbett, Steele and Matthew Thomlinson*, he tended to side with Henry Cromwell*.95Barnard, Cromwellian Ire. 22; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 29, 34, 312n. On the death of Oliver Cromwell*, Pepys and the other councillors proclaimed Richard Cromwell* as the new lord protector.96Add. 4159, ff. 70-71.

His income as lord chief justice allowed him to extend his Cambridgeshire estates.97GL, MS 22424/5; MS 22424/7. After he had been in Ireland for less than a year, he told his son, Richard junior, that,

the place I am now in, it is not [sure], save for my life, nor [is] my life sure in this world, but God be thanked for all. Many others have short of what we have and yet are contented. I pray God make us so and truly thankful for God for what we have.98GL, MS 22424/3.

One way in which he marked his good fortune was to donate £50 to the Middle Temple in 1658 for the purchase of books as a acknowledgment of his gratitude.99MTR iii. 1117, 1121.

Lord Chief Justice Pepys died on 2 January 1659.100Worth, Servant Doing, titlepage; Kenny, King’s Inns, 133n; Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 691; Lascelles, Liber munerum publicorum Hiberniae, i. pt. ii. 31; O’Flanagan, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, i. 347n. Edward Worth used the sermon at the funeral service in Christ Church, Dublin, to pay tribute to Pepys as a model servant of God. He elaborated at some length on lord chief justice’s virtues.

He was faithful as faithfulness is opposed to heresy. A catholic Christian, expressly refusing in a dark and gloomy day to leave the ark for a cockboat. A Protestant of the best edition, that is, not superstitious nor factious; not idolatrous, abhorring sacrilege; nor sacrilegious, abhorring idols. Not enlarging the windows of truth to weaken peace, nor enlarging the pillars of peace to obscure truth. In a word, whether we respect God or man, Church or state, he was a lively transcript of the Protestant religion.101Worth, Servant Doing, 27-8.

Henry Cromwell’s tribute was less public and more succinct. His letter informing John Thurloe* of Pepys’s ‘sudden’ death recalled that he had been ‘a good councillor, and a good judge, and indeed a right honest man’.102TSP vii. 590. The bishop of Kilmore, Robert Maxwell, published a short Latin elegy in his memory.103Robert [Maxwell], In Obitum Clarissimi Integerrimique Viri D. Richardi Pepys [1659]. Pepys had served with distinction as lord chief justice at a time when the Irish judiciary was understaffed and when the mere existence of functioning law courts in Ireland was a considerable accomplishment. It was, in one sense, his good fortune that he died while his achievements could still be openly appreciated.

Less than a month before his death, Pepys had commented to his brother that ‘it hath pleased God to increase my estate in a good portion as also to increase my years; and therefore admonish me to look to my end’.104GL, MS 22424/8. In his last weeks, Pepys expressed concern about his son’s capacity to manage the family estates, and asked a brother and two close friends to guide Richard junior, whom he advised to sell all lands in Essex and Suffolk in order to consolidate their holdings in Cambridgeshire.105Pepys, Gen. 61-2; GL, MS 22424/8. The family seem to have retained at least some estates at Ashen, but the lands at Stoke-next-Clare were disposed of over the following ten years to Gervase Elwes† and others.106Vis. Essex 1664-8, 70; Pepys, Gen. ped. VII; Suff. RO (Bury), HA517/B3; HA517/C43; HA517/C48. Pepys’s second wife did not long outlive him, dying in Dublin later in 1659.107PROB11/300/242; GL, MS 22424/13. His brief spell as MP for Sudbury in 1640 did not create a tradition of parliamentary service in his immediate family. Although his cousin, Roger†, sat for Cambridge in 1661 and his cousin once removed, Samuel†, the diarist, sat three times between 1673 and 1685, it was not until 1832, when his great-great-grandson, Charles Christopher Pepys†, was elected for Higham Ferrers, that any of Pepys’s descendants entered Parliament. An even more distinguished lawyer than his ancestor, Charles Christopher Pepys was raised to the peerage as Baron Cottingham on his appointment as lord chancellor in 1836 and later advanced to the earldom of Cottingham.