SMITH, Anthony (d. 1683), of St Nicholas, Durham, co. Dur.

Almost nothing is known about Smith’s background or personal life. He was possibly either the Anthony Smith, son of Edmund, baptised in St Nicholas, Durham, in 1593, or the Anthony Smith, son of Richard, who was linked by marriage to the Durham gentry family the Shadforths.25St Nicholas, Durham par. reg. (bap. 27 Dec. 1593); Coventry Docquets, 661. His description in 1649 as ‘Anthony Smith the elder’, suggests that he had at least one son.26C93/20/12. However, neither Smith nor his son should be confused with the parliamentarian officer Captain Anthony Smyth of Dalton-le-Dale, who was born about 1607 – too early to be the child of the future MP.27SP23/154, p. 542; SP28/266, pt. 3, f. 20; Recs. of the Cttees. for Compounding...in Durham and Northumb. ed. R. Welford (Surt. Soc. cxi), 9, 340; Durham Protestations ed. H.M. Wood (Surt. Soc. cxxxv), 117, 127; Jones, ‘War in north’, 402. Although Smith’s background is now obscure, he was evidently a man of substance in Durham, having established himself as a mercer by 1632 and serving as a churchwarden of St Nicholas in 1635.28Northumb. RO, ZAN.M.13/F.4; Surtees, Co. Dur. iv. 50. He was also a leading tenant of the Durham dean and chapter, and during the winter of 1639-40, he and another future parliamentarian, George Grey (an associate of George Lilburne*), rekindled the tenantry’s century-old grievance over leases and fines.29Durham UL, DCD/K/LP3/24; CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 499-500; Dumble, ‘Durham Lilburnes’, 229. The dean reported the two men to Archbishop William Laud and the privy council, accusing them of having

assembled great companies of his majesty’s subjects, our tenants … without any power or authority, and at these tumultuous meetings [they] persuaded hundreds of our tenants to set their hands and seals to four several papers, obliging themselves to one another to prosecute against their landlords before any judicatory these two should think fit.30CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 538.

It was probably the dean who reported Smith to the court of high commission early in 1640 ‘for his abuse of the Archbishop of Canterbury’.31CSP Dom. 1640, p. 400. Smith’s and Grey’s case was heard before the privy council on 11 March, with the king and Laud both present. The council, reportedly at Laud’s prompting, ruled against the two men and confined them to the Gatehouse until they had revealed the names of their collaborators and had surrendered the £80 or so that the tenants had paid them to prosecute the cause. They paid the £80, but refused to disclose any names. Grey was released on 20 March, but Smith was said to have remained in prison until the meeting of the Short Parliament.32PC2/51, ff. 172v-173, 188v; Durham UL, DCD/K/LP3/25-26; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1051-2; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 422. There is no evidence to support the view of one Durham man that they had acquitted themselves so well before the council that the king himself gave them thanks for the pains they had taken in the cause.33CSP Dom. 1640, p. 51. Smith probably welcomed the Scottish Covenanters’ occupation of County Durham during the second bishops’ war, and in September 1640, the Scots liaised with him and Grey – described as collectors of the dean and chapter rents – about raising money to maintain their army.34CSP Dom. 1640, p. 61.

Smith was appointed a collector of sequestered church rents and the assessment in County Durham in the mid-1640s – offices he retained until about January 1649.35E113/15; SP28/227, pt. 1; Durham RO, D/Gr 403; LJ x. 22a. His later career suggests that he was a man of godly convictions, and it was perhaps his religious sympathies that helped incline him towards Parliament. He was also a political ally of the leading County Durham parliamentarian George Lilburne* and may have signed a petition from the county’s ‘well-affected’ in 1649, complaining of Lilburne’s treatment at the hands of his local rivals, who included Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and John Blakiston*.36Acts of the High Commission Ct. of Durham ed. W.H.D. Longstaffe (Surt. Soc. xxxiv), 249; W. Dumble, ‘Government, religion, and military affairs in Durham during the civil war and Interregnum’ (Durham Univ. M.Litt. thesis, 1978), 162. However, the signature of ‘Anthony Smith’ on this petition does not match the one certain example of the MP’s signature – as a commissioner for securing the commonwealth, in 1657 – and both of them differ from that of the ‘Anthony Smyth’ who signed a petition from the county’s leading parliamentarians to the Commons in 1642 (the signature of Anthony Smyth of Dalton-le-Dale also corresponds to none of the above).37SP18/154/61, f. 117; SP23/153, p. 257; Bodl. Nalson XXII, f. 394. Like Lilburne, Smith does not seem to have enjoyed the trust of the commonwealth regime. Early in 1649, he lost his place as receiver of sequestered church rents, and during the period 1649-53 he was trusted with only relatively minor local offices.38C93/20/12. Following the army’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653, he signed an address from County Durham to Oliver Cromwell* and the council of officers, congratulating them on delivering the nation from ‘slavery and bondage’.39Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 90-1. The petitioners referred to the Rump’s ‘oppressions’ and urged the army to ‘make good your engagements to God and this poor nation’. One of the these ‘engagements’, the petitioners conceived, was to give the county ‘liberty … for the choice of Parliament-men, to speak out our grievances’.

Smith made rapid progress along Durham’s municipal cursus honorum in the early 1650s, and when the city was enfranchised under the Instrument of Government he was elected to represent it in the first protectoral Parliament. It seems likely that he was returned on the corporation interest. His appointment in August 1654 as a Cromwellian ejector suggests that he supported the new government and its desire to maintain a godly, parochial ministry. He was named to at least one committee in this Parliament and possibly as many as ten.40CJ vii. 369b, 370a, 371b, 373b, 374a, 378b, 381a, 381b, 390b, 392b. But the true number is impossible to ascertain because of the clerk of the House’s failure to distinguish between the Durham MP and the Member for Midlothian, George Smith, referring to both as ‘Mr Smith’.

In 1656, Smith emerged as a leading figure in the Cromwellian project to establish a university at Durham – a foundation that it was hoped would remedy the perceived shortage of godly ministers in the northern counties.41Durham Dean and Chap. Lib. SHA 94; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 218, 262; Dumble, ‘Durham Lilburnes’, 240-1. Given that a university would also provide a major boost to the local economy, Smith’s role in promoting the scheme probably played well with the Durham voters, who returned him for the city again in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656. Smith himself was a signatory to the indenture returning Thomas Lilburne and James Clavering for the county.42C219/45, unfol. The presence of three MPs with the surname Smith in this Parliament – Anthony, George and Thomas Smith II – renders the problem of identification even more acute. The Durham MP received at least three appointments – to committees on the probate of wills, the establishment of a court of equity for the northern counties and for confirming the liberties and jurisdiction of the county palatine of Durham.43CJ vii. 446a, 456a, 538a. It is likely that several of the further 26 committees to which one or more ‘Mr Smith’ was named – in particular, perhaps, those relating to the maintenance of the ministry and godly reformation – were his appointments.44CJ vii. 430a, 493b, 515b. Similarly, he may well have been one of the Mr Smiths who served as a teller on either side of a division on 17 June 1657 concerning a bill for sequestered church livings.45CJ vii. 560a. George Wharton listed Smith and Thomas Lilburne among the ‘kinglings’ in this Parliament – those MPs who supported Oliver Cromwell’s* acceptance of the crown.46[G. Wharton], A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). That Smith was at least a diligent MP is clear from the £20 annuity (for seven years) that Durham corporation awarded him early in 1658 in recognition of his ‘charges and pains in the procuring the settlement of the temporal courts here at Durham and of the settlement for directing of a college here at Durham’.47Durham Civic Memorials ed. Whiting, 64-5. In April 1658, a few months after Parliament had been dissolved, he joined George Lilburne, Thomas Lilburne and other County Durham Cromwellians in an address to the protector pledging their lives and estates in the preservation of his person and government.48Durham Dean and Chap. Lib. Allan ms 7, pp. 182-3.

Very little is known about Smith after 1658. There is no mention of him in Durham’s civic records after 1662, which suggests that he resigned or was removed from the aldermanic bench by the corporation commissioners. However, he remained an active member of the Durham mercers’ and grocers’ company to within a few months of his death.49Northumb. RO, ZAN.M.13/F.4. He died intestate early in 1683 and was buried at St Nicholas on 13 March.50Durham UL, DPR, 1682, A206; St Nicholas, Durham par. reg. Smith was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.