NANFAN, John (c.1598-1678), of Birtsmorton, Worcs.

The name Nanfan sounds Cornish, and indeed the family’s roots are to be found in Cornwall rather than in Worcestershire. John Nanfan was the eighth generation of his family to own Birtsmorton, however, and it was his family which had extended Birtsmorton Court to make it an impressive moated gentry residence. The first Worcestershire Nanfan, another John, had bought the manor in 1424-5, had been sheriff of Cornwall and esquire of the body to Henry VI. He sat for Worcestershire in the Parliament of 1445. The representative of the third generation at Birtsmorton, Richard Nanfan† (d. 1507), was perhaps the most distinguished member of the family, achieving a knighthood and the post of deputy at Calais as well as representing his country on an embassy to Spain, and Cornwall in two Parliaments. Of his illegitimate offspring, William continued the tradition of service in Parliament, while John managed the patrimony of Birtsmorton.13VCH Worcs. iv. 31; HP Commons 1509-1558. The family suffered some decline in social standing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: although it spread scions into the nearby parishes of Castlemorton and Pendock, its influence became quite localised.

Giles Nanfan, John Nanfan’s grandfather, was a Catholic recusant: his second wife was the sister of Robert Southwell, the Jesuit priest executed in 1595. Giles’s son from this marriage, also Giles (half-brother to John Nanfan’s father) kept the old faith in the 1620s.14Little Malvern Letters I. 1482-1737 ed. A.M. Hodgson, M. Hodgetts (Catholic Rec. Soc. Pbns. recs. ser. lxxxiii), 148-9. John Nanfan was left a ward of court in 1614, after the deaths in a space of two years of his father and then his grandfather. His wardship was granted to his mother.15Worcs. Archives, 705:101/BA 1097/1. For him, as first son, there was mapped out the conventional role of country squire. For his younger brother, Thomas, there was a career in the church, which after Oxford, led him only to the rectory of Pendock, adjacent to his home parish, where he died in 1659, mourned there as ‘a zealous minister of the Word of God’.16Al. Ox.; Pendock par. reg. John Nanfan’s first appointments to office in the county were modest and came comparatively late, suggesting that the family’s downward mobility was continuing. His marriage to Mary Fleet alias Walsgrove was with a Worcester city family, which had established a noted charity and had supplied two MPs to the Parliaments of 1572 and 1589. Nanfan’s father-in-law, Edward Fleet alias Walsgrove, was high bailiff of the city in 1610, and was permanent alderman in 1634. He was, however, described in 1627 as ‘gentleman’, a reminder that his was a family without standing in the county.17HP Commons 1558-1603; Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 63.

There was nothing in John Nanfan’s settled background as a country squire to suggest opposition to the government or any other kind of distinctiveness. At the outbreak of the civil war in 1642, he seems to have been courted by both sides. He was named in July 1642 as a commissioner of array for the king in the additional list of Worcestershire commissioners, having been omitted from the first list in June.18Northants RO, FH133, unfol. Nanfan’s time as a commissioner of array was very brief. He did not sign the Declaration of August 1642 at the county assizes, an expression of readiness to attend the king to put into effect the commission of array in defence of his person and honour, the privileges of Parliament and the liberties of the subject.19Three Declarations (1642), 3 (BL, G3808.10). The Declaration repudiated a grand jury presentment at the previous quarter sessions, orchestrated by John Wylde* and Humphrey Salwey* in favour of the parliamentary Militia Ordinance.20A Letter Sent from Mr Sergeant Wilde and Humphrey Salwey esq. (1643), 6 (E.107.14). By 16 September Nanfan had sent a paper to his kinswoman, Brilliana Harley, for the perusal and advice of her husband, Sir Robert Harley*. In it, Nanfan explained his mistake in agreeing to become a commissioner of array. For her part, Brilliana believed that he was ‘sorry for what he has done’.21Add. 70004, f. 56.

By October, Nanfan had thrown in his lot with the parliamentarians. He was among the founders at Worcester (8 Oct.) of an association of gentry of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire to repel the forces levied by the commissioners of array, and to deploy the trained bands under the command of the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux). His signature appears alongside those of Wylde and Salwey.22Add. 70004, f. 68.

At least initially, Nanfan was able to wipe away any stain of suspected royalism through the good offices of John Wylde*, who acted as Nanfan’s advocate to the Commons.23CJ ii. 791b. With the withdrawal of Essex’s force in the autumn of 1642, however, the county was ceded to the royalists, and Nanfan appears first to have acted as a justice of the peace for the king (or at least as a civil commissioner) in the summer of 1643, and then to have withdrawn from public life.24Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 98/1652 20. In August 1644 he interceded with Colonel Edward Harley*, his kinsman, on behalf of his relative Giles Nanfan, a prisoner of Parliament’s.25Add. 70004, f. 225. He was not among those who petitioned the House of Lords in September 1644 to speed up work on the ordinance for a new county force, nor was he named to the committee for the county when the ordinance was published two weeks later.26PA, Main Pprs. 7 Sept. 1644; A. and O. i. 507-11.

Nanfan’s commitment to Parliament was lukewarm. He was allowed to rent estates of royalist delinquents, and appeared on assessment commissions, but that was as far as the county committee would trust him.27Add. 5508 f. 188; A. and O. There was a suspicion that his eldest son, Bridges Nanfan†, was an active royalist, and when he was confronted with his past in 1651, readily admitted that he had taken the king’s side in the first civil war.28CCC 2785. John Nanfan’s inclusion in the commission of the peace in June 1649 suggests more that there was a shortage of candidates for the bench than that he had become committed to the cause of the commonwealth.29C231/6, p. 160. He had been removed from the bench by November 1653, when he was also omitted from the Worcestershire assessment commission, which suggests that he was yet to surmount all suspicions of his loyalties, and his trusteeship of a Nottinghamshire Catholic recusant’s estate in 1650 may indicate persisting, if discreet, sympathies with the faith of his grandfather, Giles.30CCC 2385.

Nanfan’s appearance as a candidate in the 1656 election must have come as something of an unwelcome surprise to the government and its local supporters. The dominant force in county politics during the protectorate was Nicholas Lechmere*, and in his wake came two other candidates, Sir Thomas Rous* and Edward Pytts*. Major-general Berry* represented the military interest, and Nanfan was able to make progress through the decision of Talbot Badger* not to stand again. The most that can be surmised about Nanfan’s motivation was that he represented a strand of opinion in the county suspicious of the government and the army, but it was probably Lechmere who ensured that when Nanfan appeared at Westminster he was not given the entry ticket necessary for admission. He was thus excluded from the first session of the Parliament, not as a republican, but as an alleged crypto-royalist.31Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 1640-63 ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xxv), 274.

Either just before or shortly after his election, Nanfan was in dispute with Richard Baxter over what the minister regarded as the malicious misattribution to him of a petition against popery which was circulating in Worcestershire. Nanfan denounced the petition and the man he presumed to be its author, at the assizes, provoking a wrathful response from Baxter. His later comment on Nanfan was that he was ‘a justice of all times’.32Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 198. Under the terms of the Humble Petition and Advice, in January 1658 Nanfan and the other excluded Members were allowed into the House for the second session of Oliver Cromwell’s* second Parliament. He was elected on 21 January to the privileges committee, evidently a mechanism which the disgruntled newly-admitted MPs intended to use to effect against the lord protector’s council. The following day he was named to a very large committee to consider an act on the registration of marriages, and this represented the sum of his involvement in the work of the assembly.33CJ vii. 580b, 581a. In the protracted debates on whether and on what terms the House should correspond with the Other House, Nanfan offered the view that that name for the second chamber was ‘absurd and repugnant’, on the grounds that those who sat in it would consider the same title applied to the Commons.34Burton’s Diary, ii. 401. This was not a rejection of the principle of the second chamber, and tends to confirm that Nanfan was probably a crypto-royalist in outlook.

Although he played only the most modest of parts in the second protectorate Parliament, Nanfan was not deterred from standing again for election. He did so on two further occasions. On 19 January 1659 he opposed Nicholas Lechmere and Thomas Foley for the county seat. There were many at the poll, and Lechmere recorded that he and Foley together spent £614 to keep out Nanfan and John Talbot of Salwarpe.35E.P. Shirley, Hanley and the House of Lechmere (1883), 28. Talbot was of a family which had tried hard to implement the commission of array in 1642, confirming where Nanfan’s loyalties by this time lay. He had no difficulty in keeping his place in the commission of the peace in 1660, and on 9 April 1661 stood for Worcester in the election for the Cavalier Parliament, no doubt drawing on an interest he would have gained through his wife’s connections with a noted city family. He was narrowly beaten by Thomas Street*, whose credentials as a Worcester citizen were much stronger than his own. Performing better than either of them was a leading county royalist, Sir Rowland Berkeley, who came top of the poll with 615 votes.36Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 298; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 467.

This was Nanfan’s last attempt at a seat in Parliament, and thereafter he confined himself in politics to the role of country magistrate and squire until his death in 1678. He returned to the fray against Baxter, having been exercised by the latter’s 1659 publication of A Key for Catholics. Nanfan took up his own pen, and published An Answer to a Passage in Mr Baxter’s Book, probably in 1660.37Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 198; An Answer to a Passage in Mr. Baxter’s Book (1660, BL, 8122.c.63). His children had no difficulty keeping in with the restored monarchy. His eldest son, Bridges, seems to have been acceptable to both court and opposition in the Exclusion Crisis, while another son, Thomas, was a militia foot captain and was probably a lieutenant at the garrison of Chepstow in 1661. Nanfan died on 8 February 1678, and was buried at Birtsmorton three days later.38Birtsmorton par. reg.; Nash, Collections, i. 86; Vis. Worcs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. xc), 73; Worcester Chamber Order Bk. 63. Bridges Nanfan was the last of the family to sit in Parliament.39HP Commons 1660-1690; CSP Dom. 1661-62, p. 184.