BADGER, Talbot (1622-57), of Hanley Castle, Worcs.

The Badger family had been resident at Pool House, a substantial farmhouse in Hanley Castle, from the sixteenth century. The house was held of the lord of the manor, and Rowland Badger, occupier of the property in 1603, owned lands in the parishes of Abberton and Pershore, as well as in Hanley. His children made marriage alliances with other Worcestershire minor gentry.15Worcs. Archives, 989.9:50/BA 4399. Talbot Badger’s grandfather, John Badger, was a Roman Catholic, in the judgement of the diocesan authorities ‘thought among the papists to be a great learned man, and in that respect doeth very much harm because many depend upon him although indeed his learning and knowledge in divinity is very little’. John Badger escaped from the diocese of Worcester to Tewkesbury, where Talbot Badger was later to marry.16C.D. Gilbert, ‘Catholics in the Diocese of Worcester, 1580-1’, Midland Catholic Hist. i. 21. When he died in 1598, John Badger’s tomb in Hanley Castle was decorated with a cross, and the baptism in the church in 1600 of the adult Rowland Badger (probably Talbot’s uncle) suggests a family converting from Catholicism at about the same time as their fellow-parishioners, the Lechmeres, of whom Nicholas Lechmere* was the most notable.17Hanley Castle par. reg.; Nash, Collections, i. 563; Hanley and the House of Lechmere, 16. John Badger of Welland (d. 1607) was a Protestant member of the family concerned in 1605 to pay for proper instruction for the young son of another Rowland Badger.18Worcs. Archives, Worcester consistory court wills, 1607/25 (John Badger). Not all the Badgers renounced their old religion, however: family members were active in supporting the old faith in the 1620s, and on his deathbed in 1657 Talbot Badger prayed that his own brother would embrace the ‘reformed Protestant religion as containing in it the only way to salvation’.19Little Malvern Letters I. 1482-1737 ed. A.M. Hodgson, M. Hodgetts (Catholic Rec. Soc. Pbns. recs. ser. lxxxiii), 148; PROB11/275, f. 63. In 1639 Talbot Badger followed his uncle, Rowland Badger, to Oxford, and presumably returned to Hanley to take up the life of a small parish squire.

None of the family before Talbot Badger played any part in the administration of the county above parish level. Rowland Badger, Talbot’s brother, gave evidence in the case of the Worcestershire royalist commissioners of array against their erstwhile leader, Sir William Russell, in 1643. He seems to have been returned for the grand jury, but was rejected before service. The charge to which Rowland Badger was asked to speak, that Russell had returned recusants to the sessions grand jury, fitted in with the Catholic profile of the family, and its evident royalist associations.20Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 1640-63 ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 131; C.D. Gilbert, ‘Catholics in Worcestershire 1642-51’, Recusant Hist. xx. 340. But whatever the relations between the Badgers and the Russells were in 1643, the following year Talbot Badger was commissioned as a cornet in the parliamentarian troop of horse under Col. Thomas Archer*. His troop was raised under the ordinance of 27 September 1644 which authorised the raising of a force no larger than 4,000-strong to reduce the city and county of Worcester to parliamentary authority: Nicholas Lechmere*, John Wylde* and Humphrey Salwey* were among those who signed his commission. In July 1645, Badger was promoted to a captaincy in the same county force, which had become the regiment of Badger’s neighbour, Col. William Lygon of Madresfield, and served until August 1646, when the regiment was disbanded after the successful taking of Worcester. Badger evidently spent most of his military service in his home territory of west Worcestershire, where he raised over £1,000 by way of fiscal exactions from the populace.21SP28/138 pt. 9.

After demobilisation in 1646, Talbot Badger assumed the management of sequestered estates on behalf of the county committee. The estate of his neighbour, the royalist Sir William Russell, was one of those under his supervision, as was probably the property of his own recusant brother, Rowland.22Add. 5508, f. 190v; Little Malvern Letters I, 189. Still only 25 in 1647, and newly-married, Badger was setting himself up. His name cannot be found among the members of the Worcestershire county committee which had been formed at Warwick, which ran the parliamentarian war effort from Evesham in 1645-6, and which negotiated the surrender of Worcester in July 1646. But as a prominent ex-soldier in the county, it was natural that his abilities should be harnessed somehow in the service of the state. He was, moreover, well connected. He was a kinsman of Nicholas Lechmere*, the most powerful figure among the Worcestershire county committee, and its treasurer until July 1646.23‘Nicholas Lechmere’ infra. The Lechmere and Badger families had been intertwined in land transactions in Hanley Castle since the 1570s, and Nicholas Lechmere and Talbot Badger shared a godly Protestant outlook.24Worcs. Archives, 705:974/BA 9032/29; Hanley and the House of Lechmere, 25. William Dingley or Dineley of Charlton, another of Lechmere’s kin, was with Badger given the task of farming the sequestered manors of the dean and chapter of Worcester. Four years later, Badger bought the rectory of Longdon, formerly property of Westminster Abbey, from the trustees for their sale, but cannot be said to have availed himself of all the possibilities of purchase that his contacts would have afforded him.25Worcester Cathedral Lib. MS E142; VCH Worcs. iv. 117. The minister of Longdon benefited from his purchase, in that he received an augmentation of £20 from Badger’s tithes.26LPL, Comm. XIIa/16 pp. 398-9. His progression in 1648 on to the assessment commissions for the county came, therefore, as recognition of the good work he had done on the state’s behalf as a manager of its estates.27A. and O.

As Nicholas Lechmere’s power grew after his election to the Long Parliament in July 1648, so Badger’s status rose accordingly. In March 1650 he was admitted to the county bench of magistrates, and with his military experience was probably active at the battle of Worcester in September 1651, although he was never a commissioner of the county troop. Badger’s election to the first protectorate Parliament denoted the high water mark of Lechmere’s local influence. Of the five successful candidates, only Col. John Bridges represented another interest, that of the military; the others – Sir Thomas Rous, Edward Pytts, Badger and Lechmere himself – formed an emerging Cromwellian establishment in the county, focussed on Lechmere, who was soon to become attorney-general of the duchy of Lancaster.28Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 270.

Talbot Badger’s contribution to Parliament in 1654 was modest. He sat on four committees, in which he was never out of the company of either Lechmere or Sir Thomas Rous, two prominent members of the county committee which had given him his first military appointment. The committee for the ordinance for ejecting scandalous ministers (25 Sept.) was probably that closest to his heart: he was subsequently named as a commissioner in Worcestershire.29CJ vii. 370a; A. and O. His orthodox godly outlook predisposed him against the Unitarian John Biddle, who was summoned before a committee (12 Dec.) including Badger, Lechmere and Rous. The committee was given wide powers to ban Biddle’s books and see them burned.30CJ vii. 400a. His other appointments, to committees to review ordinances for Scotland (29 Sept.) and to encourage the distribution of grain (6 Oct.), cannot be linked to any special expertise or interests of his, other than his association with the ubiquitous Lechmere.31CJ vii. 371b, 374b.

After the closure of this Parliament, Badger returned to Worcestershire, and in 1655-6 moved into a position of some local importance as a commissioner to assist Major-general James Berry* and as a captain in the county militia. Badger had been associated with county committees for penal taxation since 1647, but always as an agent rather than as a committeeman. Now, with William Collins*, he was one of seven commissioners who re-opened proceedings against royalists. In February 1656, they moved against high-profile former delinquents such as 2nd Baron Coventry (Thomas Coventry†), the son of the late lord keeper, and Thomas Savage. But the decimation was neither long-lasting nor wide in scope, and ran against the compromising instincts of county leaders like Sir Thomas Rous and Lechmere.32TSP iv. 546; Worcs. Archives, 705:134/BA 4459/1/iii. Badger appears not to have stood for election to the 1656 Parliament. His place was taken by the less pliant John Nanfan*, and it is possible that Badger paid a price for his involvement with the regime of the major-generals.33Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 274.

On 26 August 1657 Badger died, in a year which Lechmere noted as bringing the deaths of many Hanley parishioners, from divers causes. He was buried at Hanley Castle the day following his death. Badger was admired by his eminent kinsman, who described his exemplary character and edifying conduct on his deathbed:

He was much in fervent prayer and died full of faith and hope, uttering these his last words in a triumphant tone, ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, I come, I come’.

James Warwick, minister of Hanley, concurred, recording in the parish register that Badger was ‘above all, a sound Christian’: somewhere in the tributes there was perhaps the slightest suggestion that this had been remarkable in one from a recusant family.34Hanley Castle par. reg.; Hanley and the House of Lechmere, 25-6. Badger’s heiress married into the local Young family, and in 1705 his grandson was a militia captain. His descendants never again achieved county gentry status.35Nash, Collections, i. 566. James Badger, appointed to the living of Hanley by Lechmere in 1697, who ‘strangely neglected’ the school there, was only a distant relative of Talbot Badger.36Nash, Collections, i. 567; VCH Worcs. iv. 517-8.