WARNER, Francis (1614-84), of London and Wickhambrook, Suff.

Like many young men who flocked to the metropolis in the seventeenth century to serve apprenticeships, Francis Warner was of modest origins. His ancestry has been obscured by an understandable tendency to confuse him with a contemporary of the same name, who like the later Parliament-man, was born in Suffolk. The most important family bearing the name Warner flourishing in that county was seated at Hickling Hall, Parham. This is a plausible family with which to link Francis Warner the MP, because the Warners of Parham had connections with the London mercantile community. An Edward Warner of Parham, who died in 1628 without children, was a merchant and citizen of London who made his nephew Francis Warner his heir.14Copinger, Suff. Manors, v. 157; GL, 2480/1, f. 185. This Francis at his death left his estate to his son, Sir John Warner. Unusually in a region noted for its puritanism, Sir John Warner not only converted to Roman Catholicism, but sought membership of the Society of Jesus. He and his wife emigrated to continental Europe in 1664, and both exchanged their marriage vows for membership of monastic orders, leaving their two children in the care of nuns.15[E. Scarisbrike], The Life of the Lady Warner (1692), 58-68. Their estate at Parham was made over to Sir John Warner’s brother, Francis, sometimes thought to be the MP of 1659.16Beaven, Aldermen of London, ii. 88. This Francis was an unmarried Londoner who soon after inheriting the estate at Parham, followed his brother and sister-in-law into a Roman Catholic order, but was drowned in 1667 off Nieuport.17Life of Lady Warner, 120-4.

It seems probable that Francis Warner the MP could claim kinship with this family and its singular history, but he belonged to a much less distinguished branch of it. His father was in fact a minor gentleman of Cratfield, a parish in the same area as Parham. The churchwardens’ accounts of Cratfield show that Robert Warner was assessed for the poor rate on lands in Cratfield and Linstead, and rented lands belonging to the parish before his death in 1641.18Cratfield Churchwardens’ Accts. ed. Botelho, 143. He made a socially advantageous marriage around 1605, with Elizabeth Courthope, of Cranbrook, Kent, an important family of clothiers.19The Danny Archives, ed. J.A. Wooldridge (Lewes, 1966), pp. xiv-xv. Francis was their eldest son, and was entered on the court roll of the manor of Cratfield while still a minor.20Suff. RO (Ipswich), FC62/LI/38. It may have been through links with his mother’s family, more commercially-minded and more eminent socially than his father’s, that Francis Warner was apprenticed to the Leatherseller, Thomas Andrewes, in 1631. Andrewes’s trading activities already extended far beyond the leather industry. He had been a promoter of the short-lived New England colony of the Plymouth Company in the 1620s, and remained a backer of the Massachusetts Bay Company during the following decade. Andrewes was soon to enter trade in both the West Indies and the East Indies. By the time Warner’s apprenticeship indentures were sealed, his master would have been identifiable as a critic of the government of Charles I; in 1627 Andrewes refused to pay the Forced Loan.21‘Thomas Andrewes’, Oxford DNB; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 139, 162, 226.

While Andrewes was becoming more and prominent in London commercial affairs, Warner quietly served his 8-year apprenticeship, becoming free of the Leathersellers’ Company in January 1639. It must have been soon after securing his freedom that Warner married Eleanor Andrewes, his master’s daughter, a pattern common among mercantile families. Given his father-in-law’s staunch support for the parliamentary cause during the civil war, it is probable that during those years Warner simply conducted business in London, although it should not be supposed that he, any more than Andrewes, confined himself to trading in leather. He must be distinguished during this period from Francis Warner of Parham, who was more likely than the new entrant to commerce to have been the creditor of Sir Abraham Dawes, the former customs farmer.22CJ ii. 228a, 241b; Copinger, Suff. Manors, v. 157. In October 1647, he was admitted to the livery of his company, but played no immediate part in its affairs. He was undoubtedly sheltering under the wing of his father-in-law during this period. Andrewes had been a commissioner of customs during the civil war, and one of Parliament’s principal financial backers. In politics, Andrewes’s hostility towards the king was evident in his involvement as a commissioner in Charles’s trial; he attended the court frequently, he was present when the death sentence was pronounced, and although he did not sign the death warrant, was present at the execution. His reward was to be the first lord mayor of London under the new republic.23Oxford DNB. The Leathersellers were suitably impressed, noting in July 1649 that he continued a member of the company while in office, ‘which never lord mayor did before’.24Leathersellers’ Hall, GOV/1/3, unfol.

The advent of the commonwealth helped consolidate the family business. In 1650 Warner was named with Andrewes in a contract to supply the English army in Scotland under Oliver Cromwell* with 5,422 shirts; both men were described as linen drapers.25CSP Dom. 1650, p. 600. The same year, they supplied the army in Ireland with tent canvas.26CSP Dom. 1650, p. 604. Perhaps encouraged by prosperity and Andrewes’s apotheosis as a pillar of the republic, Warner himself began to participate in public life. He took on the office of vestryman in his parish of residence in the City, and served as an auditor at Leathersellers’ Hall. In due course, the former office led him to the position of common councillor in Bridge ward. In 1655, he took on the first of only four apprentices known to have served their time under him.27Leathersellers’ Hall, MEM/5/1, p. 45. Warner’s name headed the list of vestrymen who petitioned the Committee for Plundered Ministers in 1651 on behalf of the Independent minister, Henry Godman, whom they wished to see settled at St Margaret, New Fish Street.28GL, 1175/1, unfol. This invitation to Godman arose from friction between the vestrymen and the minister already settled in the parish, Godman’s cousin, Thomas Brooks. Brooks was a radical Independent, and his uncompromising insistence upon Congregationalist principles may have driven his exasperated parishioners, Warner chief among them, to seek an alternative pastor. In the event, Godman did not come to St Margaret, New Fish Street and Brooks remained, having reached a modus vivendi with the residents.29Calamy Revised, 79, 225; ‘Thomas Brooks’, Oxford DNB; G. F. Nuttall, Visible Saints (Oswestry, 2002), 40, 91. Warner’s support for Godman should not be read as a product of his distaste for Independency; he was by this time probably of this persuasion himself. Like his cousin, Godman was an Independent, and Warner’s fining off rather than accepting the office of churchwarden in 1651 suggests that he was uncomfortable with the apparatus of the state church.30GL, 1175/1, unfol. In February 1660, an annotated list of City officeholders noted him as a Congregationalist.31HMC Leyborne-Popham, 166.

Warner became an alderman in February 1658, and this distinction marked a rapid acceleration in his progress along the cursus honorum elsewhere in his parallel spheres of public activity. In July that year he was admitted to the governing body of the Leathersellers, the court, as an assistant, and was immediately fast-tracked to become master, attending his first meeting in this capacity on 3 August.32Leathersellers’ Hall, GOV/1/4, unfol. In December, he appeared at St Thomas’s Hospital as a governor for the first time: Andrewes was president there.33LMA, HO1/ST/A/001/005, p.126. On 5 January 1659, he was elected at Tiverton to sit in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament. It was a disputed election in which double returns were made out. A group of townsmen sympathetic to the government of the protectorate returned him, while another group declared that the seat had been bestowed on Robert Shapcote*, a figure with a high local profile and a substantial record of parliamentary activity behind him. The House was persuaded to declare Warner the victor, but he made no known contribution to the Parliament, and is not known ever to have sought a seat again.34CJ vii. 612b. With no known family links with Devon, it is something of a mystery that he should have found a seat at Tiverton, but at least two possible explanations seem plausible. In line with other developments in Warner’s career, the influence of his father-in-law has to be taken into account. Andrewes had been an investor in colonial ventures launched from the west country back in the 1620s. Much more recently, the Leathersellers during Warner’s mastership were paying retaining fees to legal counsel, among them two men of great influence in Devon, Serjeant John Maynard* and the attorney-general, Edmund Prideaux I*.35Leathersellers’ Hall, ACC/1/3, f. 107. The latter had been an active matchmaker between candidates and west country seats in the recruiter elections for the Long Parliament, including at Tiverton, in the Independent interest.36Fairfax Corresp. i. 283-4; D. Underdown, ‘Party Management in the Recruiter Elections, 1645-48’, EHR lxxxiii. 249, 252-3, 254-6. Andrewes and Warner had associated themselves with that interest as it continued into the protectorate.

Warner’s public career was curtailed as abruptly as it had begun to flourish. Thomas Andrewes was buried on 20 August 1659, and for a while it appeared that Warner would inherit his mantle. On 2 September, he was chosen from three aldermen candidates to be president of St Thomas’s Hospital in succession to his father-in-law.37LMA, HO1/ST/A/001/005, p. 129. Soon afterwards, he took up the office of sheriff of the City, persuading the Leathersellers to admit to the company ‘a friend’ whom he wished to have as his serjeant-at-mace during his shrieval year.38Leathersellers’ Hall, GOV/1/4, unfol., 1 Aug. 1660. On 7 December 1660, however, he resigned as president of the hospital, requesting that the office be transferred to a former president, the crypto-royalist, Sir Thomas Adams*.39LMA, HO1/ST/A/001/005, p. 131. He involved himself no further in the government of the City, and was discharged from his aldermanship in 1664, although he never repudiated the title afterwards.40GL, 1175/1, unfol.; Beaven, Aldermen of London, i. 60. The silence of the parish records suggests that he probably moved from the parish of St Margaret, New Fish Street at around this time, possibly to Christchurch, a parish at the west end of the City, to which he eventually made a bequest in his will.41PROB11/379/356. There is little doubt that this self-imposed diminution in his ambition on the public stage was induced by the repugnance in which the restored monarchy held the memory of Thomas Andrewes. Even before the Restoration, Warner and his wife were pursued in chancery by Sir Thomas Soame*, who alleged that Andrewes’s income was £10,000, much of which had been conveyed to Warner himself to evade creditors like himself.42C6/146/150. As an executor of his father-in-law’s estate, Warner oversaw the handing over of Andrewes’s accounts for the Irish Adventure of the early 1640s to Secretary Sir Edward Nicholas†, and he had to endure the handing back of church lands and rents worth over £6,000 which Andrewes had acquired by government sales in the 1640s and 50s.43CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 498; LPL, MS 951, f. 48. Warner himself was by no means persona non grata to the monarchy, however; he continued to be named to tax and local justice commissions in London for some years after the Restoration.

The one arena of public life in which Warner continued to be active after the mid-1660s was that of his livery company. He continued to take the occasional apprentice, among them his nephew, Thomas Cuddon, who later became master of the Leathersellers.44Leathersellers’ Hall, MEM/5/1, pp. 54, 68, 83. In 1659, at the height of his short eminence, Warner had been given a lease of tenements and warehouses in Little St Helen’s, property of the company, and in 1662 he had the lease extended to 71 years. Although he had paid an enormous entry fine in 1659 of £1,100, his annual rent of £27 must have seemed increasingly a good investment, despite the plague and Great Fire of the 1660s.45Leathersellers’ Hall, GOV/1/4, unfol.; ACC/1/3, ff. 103v, 123, 145, 146. He served regularly as an auditor of the Leathersellers down to 1670, and attended most meetings of the company’s court down to the early 1680s.46Leathersellers’ Hall, GOV/1/4; GOV/1/5; GOV/2/3. At some time before 1677, Warner bought the estate of Badmondisfield Hall in Wickhambrook, in his native county, but his enduring presence in the counsels of the livery company suggests that he never retired to the country.47Copinger, Suff. Manors, v. 301-2; PROB11/379/356. By the time he drafted his will, he had also acquired lands in Oxfordshire, a tavern in Cornhill, in the City, and enjoyed leases from Christ’s Hospital as well as from the Leathersellers. He attended his last meeting at Leathersellers’ Hall on 24 January 1684, and died on 17 February that year. Warner left his property to his only son, Andrewes Warner, whose forename aptly commemorated his grandfather’s crucial influence on the family. Slingisby Bethell*, himself a Leatherseller, witnessed Warner’s will. He made small bequests to three Congregational ministers, Samuel Cradock, Thomas Cole and William Cooper, all of whom had been ejected from their livings in 1662. Cradock was a neighbour of Warner’s in Suffolk, but their inclusion in the will suggests that Warner was motivated more by sectarian zeal than by local piety.48Suff. Hearth Tax 1674 (1905), 309. None of Warner’s descendants is known to have sat in later Parliaments.