HORSMAN, Edward (1617-93), of Stretton, Rutland.

A resident of Ripon, Yorkshire, when he had been granted arms in 1590, Horsman’s grandfather had also owned a sizeable estate in Kensington, Middlesex. In 1616, Horsman’s father, Robert, sold the Kensington lands to Sir Baptist Hicks – the grandfather of the Rutland peer Baptist Noel*, 3rd Viscount Campden – for £2,679.25Vis. Rutland, 34; Survey of London, xxxvii. 25, 26, 29, 87; VCH Rutland, ii. 148. Having married into one of Northamptonshire’s leading puritan families, the Pickerings of Titchmarsh, Robert Horsman resided with his in-laws until the late 1620s, when he and his family settled at Stretton on the Rutland-Lincolnshire border.26Infra, ‘Sir Gilbert Pykeringe’; Howlett, ‘Days of shaking’, 54. In 1623, Robert and his brother-in-law, Sir John Pickering†, had presented one William Marshall to the living at Stretton; and in 1627, Horsman alone presented the godly minister Jeremiah Whitaker – a future moderator of the Westminster Assembly.27IND1/17002, f. 10v; HMC Rutland, ii. 148; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the church courts: the diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 17-18; Oxford DNB, ‘Jeremiah Whitaker’. In 1629, the wardship of Pickering’s son (Edward Horsman’s cousin), the future parliamentarian (Sir) Gilbert Pykeringe*, was granted to Robert Horsman, Edward Bagshawe*, Sir Erasmus Dryden†, Francis Nicolls† and Pickering’s widow.28Coventry Docquets, 469; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 179. It was through membership of this godly Northamptonshire network that Robert Horsman became friendly with the puritan grandee, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele. In 1633, Saye and Horsman presented another godly divine and future member of the Westminster Assembly, Thomas Hill, to the living at Titchmarsh. Hill, like his patrons, was a noted critic of the personal rule of Charles I.29Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 179-80; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the church courts’, 18.

Robert Horsman was among the Northamptonshire gentlemen and ministers who campaigned to secure Sir Gilbert Pykeringe’s return for the county in the elections to the Short Parliament.30Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the church courts’, 250. Horsman, his eldest son Robert and Edward all signed the Rutland petition to the Lords of March 1642, requesting that the kingdom be put in a posture of defence; that popish peers be disqualified from voting; the suppression of papists and ‘superstitious, innovating ministers’; and the relief of Ireland’s Protestants.31PA, Main Pprs. 29 Mar. 1642. All three men would side with Parliament in the civil war: Horsman senior serving on the Rutland county committee; Robert Horsman junior as governor of the parliamentarian garrison at Rockingham Castle, Rutland; and Edward, as a captain in the regiment of Eastern Association horse commanded by Oliver Cromwell*. As an officer in Cromwell’s regiment, Horsman saw action at Marston Moor and, very probably, at the second battle of Newbury.32SP28/125, pt. 3, unfol.; SP28/173, pt. 2, unfol.; Howlett, ‘Days of shaking’, 55-7; Firth, ‘The raising of the Ironsides’, 30. Edward quit the Ironsides with the establishment of the New Model army early in 1645; and from 1647 was regularly appointed to assessment and militia commissions for Rutland. In 1650 he was commissioned as a major in the Northamptonshire militia regiment commanded by Thomas Brooke*.33CSP Dom. 1650, p. 505. And in 1651 he was commissioned as a major in a militia regiment formed to defend the Eastern Assocation and midlands from royalist insurrection and Scottish invasion.34CSP Dom. 1651, p. 514; SP25/65, pp. 294-5.

Horsman was selected by the council of officers to represent Rutland in the 1653 Nominated Parliament. He almost certainly owed his selection to his connections with Cromwell and Pykeringe – Horsman named two of his sons Oliver and Gilbert. He was appointed to the standing committees on tithes and the army, 19, 20 July, but played no further recorded part in the House’s proceedings until 1 October, when he was assigned special care of a committee to consider a petition from inhabitants of Hambleton, Rutland, who were in dispute with their landlord, the regicide Thomas Wayte*, who had quarrelled with the Horsmans during the civil war.35Infra, ‘Thomas Wayte’; CJ iii. 351a, 429b-430a; vii. 286a, 287a, 328a; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 83. An anonymous pamphleteer listed Horsman among those members of the Nominated Parliament who favoured a publicly-maintained ministry – a claim supported by his appointment in August 1654 as a Cromwellian ejector for Leicestershire and Rutland.36Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 420. His exalted connections were doubtless important in securing his appointment to the Army Committee* in July 1653 – and to its successors under the protectorate – and to the December 1653 admiralty and navy commission.37Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 385. In August 1654 he was made a teller of the exchequer, with a salary of £400 a year.38Sainty, Officers of the Exchequer, 237; Archaeologia, xxxviii. 82.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Horsman and another Cromwellian, William Sheild, were returned for Rutland, apparently without a contest. Horsman received only appointment in this Parliament – to a five-man committee set up on 24 November for drafting a new assessment bill.39CJ vii. 388b. A few months after his appointment as a customs commissioner in March 1656, he resigned his tellership to George Downing* ‘for diverse considerations’.40Sloane 3243. With other former Ironsides, he took part in Cromwell’s funeral procession in November 1658.41Burton’s Diary, ii. 527. Returned for Rutland again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, he received no committee appointments and is known to have spoken only once on the floor of the House when, during a debate concerning the Scottish Members on 12 March, he questioned the legislative basis of their right to sit. His speech, according to Thomas Burton*, was ‘very short, trembling and to no great purpose’.42Burton’s Diary, iv. 146.

With the fall of the protectorate in April 1659, Horsman appears to have lost his office as a member of the Army Committee, but retained his place as a customs commissioner.43CJ vii. 657a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 254. By late 1660 he had been removed from all public office. His house at Stretton was licensed as a Congregationalist place of worship under the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence.44CSP Dom. 1672, p. 200. Horsman died in the spring of 1693 and was buried at Stretton. In his will, he charged his estate with bequests totalling almost £1,000.45PROB11/414, f. 267. He was the only member of his immediate family to sit in Parliament.