BAINES, Jeremiah (1611-78), of Horselydown, St Olave, Southwark, Surr.

Baines was descended from one of the many branches of a family that was flourishing in Kirkby Lonsdale by the reign of Henry VIII.20Kirkby Lonsdale par. reg.; R.P. Brown, ‘Christopher Wood’s inscription in Kirkby Lonsdale church’, Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. ser. 2, xxv. 324-6. He was the product of several generations of relatively well-educated men. His grandfather had been licensed as a schoolmaster in Kirkby Lonsdale in 1578, and his father was styled ‘clericus’ on his death in 1620.21Kirkby Lonsdale par. reg.; J.H.D. Bate, ‘The Schools of Westmld. in Tudor and Stuart Times’ (Manchester Univ. MA thesis, 1968), app. D. Very little is known about his upbringing, although to judge from a reference in his will to ‘my [Fox’s] Book of Martyrs in two volumes, which were my father’s’, he was raised in a trenchantly Protestant environment – this would certainly accord with his zealous commitment to the parliamentarian cause in later life.22PROB11/356, f. 237.

Baines evidently remained in Westmorland until at least the mid-1630s and the death of his first wife, but he had probably moved down to London by the time of his second marriage, in 1639, to Katherine Otway, whose family also had strong Westmorland connections.23Kirkby Lonsdale par. reg.; Add. 32477, ff. 1v-3; A. Pearson, Annals of Kirkby Lonsdale (Kendal, 1930), 153. He settled at Horselydown in Southwark, just across the Thames from the Tower of London. Although Southwark was to remain his home for the rest of his life, he retained property in Westmorland and was generally regarded as one of its most prominent sons.24PROB11/356, ff. 236v-237; Cumb. RO (Kendal), WDRY/5/420. He also showed a keen interest in his native locality and was particularly concerned by its lack of godly ministers, petitioning the Committee for Compounding* in 1647 for measures to encourage a preaching ministry in ‘those dark parts of the land … to free them from that Egyptian darkness which they have so long languished under and which hath so much filled the north with ignorance, superstition and malignity’.25CCC 62; HMC 7th Rep. 686-7; Nightingale, Ejected of Cumb. and Westmld. 877, 908. He apparently saw no contradiction between his desire to promote godliness and his own labours as a brewer (his brother-in-law, John Otway, was also a brewer and may have introduced him to the trade). By the time he died, Baines owned over £2,000 stock in a local brewery.26PROB4/7287.

Baines has been associated with the godly faction that assumed control of church affairs in St Olave’s, Southwark, during the course of 1641.27K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 71, 143. He may also have participated in the popular demonstrations at Westminster towards the end of that year against ‘popish’ lords and bishops. He certainly signed the citizens’ petition to the Commons of late November, protesting at the earl of Dorset’s attempt to have the demonstrators cleared by force, and on 1 December he was one of the signatories called in to avow the petition at the bar of the House.28CJ ii. 329b; Lindley, Civil War London, 96-8. Baines and another inhabitant of St Olave’s petitioned Parliament again in the summer of 1642, this time asking for protection against legal proceedings arising from their ‘good service’ to the Commons ‘in pulling down from off the maypole a proclamation concerning the commission of array’.29CJ ii. 695b. The petition was presented to the House by William Strode I on 29 July and probably had the backing of the ‘fiery spirits’. Upon debate, however, it was agreed that the matter should be left to the courts.30PJ ii. 272; CJ ii. 695b. Baines may have been the ‘Mr Baine’ who presented a petition from Westmorland to the Commons in August 1642, which the House praised as being ‘full of duty to his Majesty and respect to the commonwealth, and especially at this time’.31CJ ii. 706b.

Baines took up arms for Parliament at the outbreak of the civil war and, by late 1642, was serving as a captain of dragoons in the earl of Essex’s army.32SP28/5, ff. 204, 206-7. He was possibly an officer in the force with which Sir William Waller* stormed Farnham Castle, Surrey, late in November. And as a lieutenant-colonel in Waller’s Southern Association army, based at Farnham, he probably took part in the siege of Basing and the battles of Alton and Cheriton. Appointed quarter-master-general of Waller’s foot in the spring of 1644, he was captured at the battle of Cropredy Bridge in June and had been released or exchanged by September.33SP28/131, pt. 13; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 293, 523; HMC 7th Rep. 686; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. When Waller’s army was remodelled in the spring of 1645, Baines was said to have been offered a regiment in the New Model army, but he chose instead to serve under Colonel John Fielder* in the garrison at Farnham, where he was very popular both with the soldiers under his command and the Surrey county committee.34SP28/131, pt. 13; Perfect Occurences no. 14 (28 Mar.-4 Apr. 1645), sigs. Q-Qv (E.260.9); CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 341; HMC 7th Rep. 687. He either resigned his commission or was discharged in November 1645.35SP28/131, pt. 13; HMC 7th Rep. 687.

Late in March 1647, Baines signed a petition to Parliament from a group of reformado officers requesting, inter alia, payment of arrears, the settlement of public worship ‘according to ... the best reformed churches’, the abolition of county committees, and that subjects have the benefit of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right.36LJ ix. 95b-96a. This was a highly Presbyterian agenda, and it was also one of the first officers’ petitions to make political demands on Parliament – and the Commons reacted testily: ‘as to their arrears, the House hath and will take them into consideration ... The rest of the petition, which concerns the management of the affairs of the public, it does not concern any to give instructions to the House therein’.37CJ v. 120a. Ironically, the petitioners – according to the parliamentarian diarist Thomas Juxon* – had actually wished to curry favour at Westminster ‘and so render themselves capable of employment in the New Model’.38Juxon Jnl. 151-2.

Baines sided with the Presbyterians in the factional struggles at Westminster and in London during the mid-1640s. He was active as a ruling elder in the 10th London Presbyterian classis, he processed at the head of his old regiment at the funeral of the earl of Essex in October 1646, and he was active during the summer of 1647 in organising petitions to the London Common Council urging defiance of the army and in stirring up the Presbyterian apprentice mob that stormed Westminster on 26 July.39LPL, Sion L40.2/E17, ff. 4, 5, 10; Worcester Coll. Oxf. Clarke Ms XLI, f. 176; CJ v. 283a, 322b; The True Mannor and Forme of the Proceeding to the Funerall of...the Earle of Essex (1646), 3, 5 (E.360.1); HMC 7th Rep. 687; M.P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the Long Parl. 2 July 1644-3 June 1647’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1973), 412. Following the army’s march into London early in August, the parliamentary committee to examine the 26 July ‘riots’ had Baines and other Presbyterian activists imprisoned pending impeachment for high treason.40Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 792; CJ v. 283a, 292b; HMC 7th Rep. 687. The charges against Baines were presented to the Commons by Miles Corbett on 1 October, but further proceedings against him were laid aside as part of Parliament’s campaign to woo civic opinion in the face of renewed civil war.41CJ v. 322b. On 23 May 1648, after the City had presented a petition to Parliament requesting the discharge of those citizens still held in custody for the July 1647 riots, the Commons ordered that Baines be released and the impeachment proceedings against him quashed.42CJ v. 570b.

In the spring of 1649, a group of leading Presbyterians, among them the minister Christopher Love, attempted to rope Baines into a conspiracy for restoring the monarchy – the aim being to persuade Charles Stuart to reject the cavaliers and throw himself upon the military resources of the Covenanted interest in both kingdoms. When Baines was informed of this design, he objected that ‘it was a malignant business’ and told the conspirators ‘that they would never prosper that had anything to do with him [Charles Stuart], for that the sins of him and his father were so great’.43Howell, State Trials, v. 91, 98-9, 121-2. Baines was a witness for the state at Love’s trial in 1651.44Howell, State Trials, v. 271. Baines’s Presbyterian sympathies did not deter him from purchasing former crown lands under the Rump.45C54/3704/26; C54/3772/33; E304/7/V17.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in 1654, Baines was returned for Westmorland, where he seems to have enjoyed a strong interest among the godly ministry and gentry.46Supra, ‘Westmorland’; HMC 7th Rep. 686, 687; Nightingale, Ejected of Cumb. and Westmld. 998. He was named to 15 committees in this Parliament, including those for examining the powers of the Cromwellian triers and ejectors, to review the armed forces and recommend military retrenchment where necessary, for suppressing Socianism and to find revenue for paying off and disbanding all supernumerary forces.47CJ vii. 370a, 370b, 371b, 373b, 374a, 374b, 378b, 380a, 386a, 388a, 394b, 400a, 415b, 419a. His tellerships on 15 and 16 January 1655 reveal his support for the Presbyterian opponents of the court party and their efforts to subject the Instrument of Government to parliamentary scrutiny and revision.48Supra, survey vol. section x; CJ vii. 417b, 418b.

Baines stood for Westmorland again in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, when the two county places were contested by four candidates. He apparently received the second highest number of votes on a poll, but the sheriff chose instead to return the first and fourth placed men: Thomas Burton and Christopher Lister. Baines petitioned the committee of privileges against Lister’s return, but the result was allowed to stand.49HMC 7th Rep. 687. Patronage probably played a part in Lister’s victory – he had influential friends at Westminster, notably Major-general John Lambert*.50Infra, ‘Christopher Lister’. Yet Baines, too, was apparently on friendly terms with at least one of the protectorate’s most powerful figures – namely, Henry Cromwell*, the future lord deputy of Ireland. Baines wrote to Cromwell in terms of some familiarity in September 1657, thanking him for securing an Irish benefice for his eldest son. He also took the opportunity to moan to Cromwell that his own service to the state in the 1640s ‘did not only lose me a trade but an estate, and the Parliament still owes me above £1,000 [in arrears of army pay], which I see no probability of recovering’. It was perhaps with one eye on remedying this situation that he identified himself with ‘the sober and godly ministry and people’ of England in applauding Cromwell’s work in Ireland.51Lands. 822, f. 170; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 313-14.

It is not clear whether Baines stood for Westmorland again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, but if he did so he was not successful. According to a memorandum written either by himself or a friend, he raised forces against Lambert and his army faction in the winter of 1659 and was instrumental in drawing the Irish brigade, which was then in Yorkshire, over to General George Monck*.52HMC 7th Rep. 687. Although these claims are not corroborated by any other source, there is evidence that Baines’s kinsmen, the Otways, were involved in suborning Lambert’s troops.53Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 615-17; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 309. Baines stood for Westmorland yet again in the elections to the 1660 Convention, but his interest was swamped by a resurgence of royalist feeling among the county’s voters.54Lowther Fam. Estate Bks. 1617-1675 ed. C.B. Phillips (Surt. Soc. cxci), 164-5; HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Westmorland’. In the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, the ‘schismatical’ interest in Southwark pitched upon Baines and George Thomson* as their preferred candidates, but neither man contested the borough’s seats. The authorities monitored Baines during the early 1660s for speaking ‘seditious words’ and as ‘one that sold the king’s lands and tore the king’s father’s proclamations off the posts. A prime promoter of the late wars’.55Eg. 2543, ff. 35-6; SP29/79, f. 131; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Southwark’.

Baines died in the spring of 1678 and was buried at St Olave, Southwark on 18 April.56St Olave, Southwark par reg. In his will, he charged his estate with bequests totalling £2,700, having already settled £1,000 apiece on his two elder daughters for their marriage portions.57PROB11/356, ff. 236v-237. His personal estate was valued at £2,725.58PROB4/7287. Baines was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.