BATHURST, John (d. 1659), of St Anne Blackfriars, London, and Clints, Marske, Yorks.

Bathurst belonged to a junior branch of a family that was descended from a Canterbury clothier in the reign of Henry VI. His father was a physician, apparently of modest repute and fortune, and his mother was the daughter of a low-ranking naval officer.17Collins, Peerage, v. 80-2; Thoresby, Ducatus Leodiensis, 16; Misc. Gen. et Her. 5th ser. ii. 226-7; Roll of the Royal Coll. of Physicians ed. Munk, i. 222. Although Bathurst would follow his father into the medical profession, his first known employment was in the less glamorous field of grammar-school education. Thus in 1620, the corporation of Richmond, in north Yorkshire, appointed him master of the town’s free grammar school, with a salary of £20 a year – a post he retained until 1629. How he came to secure this living in a county with which his family had no known connection is a mystery. His experience as a schoolmaster evidently left a deep impression on him, for by 1649 he was propounding a scheme (never realised)

for founding a college for making and training up of schoolmasters ... The revenue to be four thousand [pounds] a year [paid for] by the state, who should lay a tax upon every parish for this purpose. This college to be an inspector and seminary of all schoolmasters of all free schools throughout the kingdom, who are to furnish all places by their approbation.18Harlib Pprs. online, 28/1/14A; C. Hoole, The Petty-Schoole (1659), 32.

The ‘Mr John Bathurst’ who served as schoolmaster from 1639 until 1648 was evidently a relation – perhaps a nephew – who graduated MA from Cambridge in 1639 and was incorporated MA at Oxford in February 1643.19LC4/202, f. 267v; Clarkson, Richmond, 195; Al. Cant.; Al. Ox.

Bathurst consolidated his position in Richmond with his marriage in 1636 to the heiress of one of the area’s leading families, who brought with her an estate at Clints, a few miles to the west of the town.20VCH N. Riding, i. 103; Raine, ‘Marske’, 267. He was described in the parish register on this occasion as ‘Master of Arts and practitioner of physic’.21Marske par. reg. In December 1637, on the day that he was awarded his MD, he applied for admission to the Royal College of Physicians of London, and being examined in physiology and then ‘in questions relating to the method of treating a deep and unclean ulcer accompanied by inflammation’, he passed with flying colours, whereupon the college officers and fellows ‘all to a man agreed’ that he should be elected a candidate – that is, granted his licence to practise medicine and added to the waiting list of prospective fellows of the college. Indeed, so impressed were the college members by the depth of his medical knowledge that ‘without delay’ they asked the college president that Bathurst be proposed for election as a fellow. This was ‘less pleasing’ to the president, who feared that it might set an unwelcome precedent, but ‘at the earnest request of the rest, he suffered himself to be persuaded...[and] for a second time it was put to the vote and he [Bathurst] was declared a fellow by the votes of all’.22RCP, Annals, vol. 3, ff. 186, 187v. Bathurst’s admission was especially irregular in that he had not been awarded a degree by incorporation from one of the universities, which was a requirement of all those wishing to join the college.23G. Clark, Hist. of the Royal College of Physicians, i. 277. He was described in the college Annals as a denizen of Cambridge and a native of Sussex.24RCP, Annals, vol. 3, f. 187v.

Soon after joining the college, Bathurst began a medical practice in London (by November 1643 he was residing near the Old Bailey).25SP19/63, f. 95; Ath. Ox. iii. 1000. Although he was said to have had ‘small acquaintance’ on arriving in the capital and was in the habit of giving away his ‘Lord’s days’ fees’ to the poor, he quickly built up a thriving practice and had prospered sufficiently by 1642 to lend £300 to his kinsman the Richmond schoolmaster, who was described as ‘John Bathurst de Marske ... clericus’.26LC4/202, f. 267v; Turner, Remarkable Providences, ch. 76, p. 96. Some of Bathurst’s early clients were evidently his friends or acquaintances from Yorkshire. In September 1641, for example, he was treating the wife of the Richmond MP and future royalist Sir Thomas Danbie* at Greenwich. Recovering after childbirth, she was apparently afflicted with a ‘droptical humour’ in her limbs.27N. Yorks. RO, ZS, Danby fam. letters and pprs., unfol. [mic. 2087]: Alice Wandesford to Katherine Danbie, 14 Sept. 1641. He may have been the ‘Mr Bathurst’ who was private physician to the parliamentarian grandee Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke by 1647 – although this is more likely to have been his distant relation Ralph Bathurst, who had begun to practise medicine in the mid-1640s, but would not obtain his doctorate until 1654.28Charles I in Captivity ed. G. S. Stevenson, 49. Bathurst the future Member seems to have practised in London throughout the 1640s, and in 1648, the sequestered Arminian cleric Edmund Reeve of the Old Bailey dedicated to his ‘very loving and much honoured friend and neighbour Mr John Bathurst, doctor of physic’ a pamphlet of biblical exegesis.29E. Reeve, A Way unto True Christian Unite (1648), epistle dedicatory; Oxford DNB, ‘Edmund Reeve’; ‘Thomas Wharton (1614-1673)’.

Bathurst’s clientele by the early 1650s included not only the royalist Fanshawe family but the Rump’s foremost soldier Oliver Cromwell*. Bathurst apparently enjoyed considerable influence with the lord general. Late in 1651, he interceded with Cromwell on behalf of Sir Richard Fanshawe, who had been captured after the battle of Worcester and imprisoned at Whitehall. At a meeting of the council of state, Bathurst moved that ‘seeing they could make no use of his [Fanshawe’s] imprisonment ... that he might have his liberty, upon £1,000 bail, to take a course of physic, he being dangerously ill’. This suggestion was strongly opposed by Sir Henry Vane II*, but Cromwell raised no objections, and Fanshawe was released on bail in November 1651.30Mems. of Lady Fanshawe ed. Loftus, 135.

Bathurst may have used his influence with Cromwell not only to help his clients but also the College of Physicians. The college, which had been in decline during the 1640s, revived spectacularly under the protectorate, and it is likely that Bathurst and the two other college fellows who acted as physicians to Cromwell played some part in this renaissance.31Clark, Royal College of Physicians, i. 282, 303. It was partly perhaps in recognition of his efforts on the college’s behalf that Bathurst was elected a senior fellow, or ‘elect’, in 1657, in place of the recently deceased William Harvey.32Roll of the Royal Coll. of Physicians ed. Munk, i. 222. Bathurst reportedly used his position at the court of Protector Oliver to improve his estate in the Richmond area.33E134/171/MISC. In 1655, he obtained the lease of the lead and coal mines in nearby Arkengarthdale. And the following year, he purchased the manor of Arkengarthdale and property in several neighbouring manors. Determined to secure a good return on this investment, he demanded that his tenants take out new leases at much higher rents than they had previously been paying. When they pleaded their inability to meet these new rents, Bathurst apparently threatened them, saying that if they would not comply he would have them evicted and sent to Ireland or the American colonies. The tenants responded by bringing a suit against him in the court of exchequer, but Bathurst – with Cromwell’s help, it was later alleged – won the case and the tenants were forced to accept his terms. He also received support in this dispute from a local royalist landowner, Major Norton*.34E134/25CHAS2/MICH31; E134/25&26CHAS2/HIL20; E134/171/MISC; E134/1588/MISC; VCH N. Riding, i. 36, 38; R. Fieldhouse, B. Jennings, Hist. of Richmond and Swaledale, 133.

It may well have been Bathurst’s intimacy with Cromwell, rather than his proprietorial interest in the Richmond area, which proved decisive in securing his return for the borough in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656. He was described on the election indenture as an inhabitant of London.35C219/45, pt. 1, unfol. A loyal, if largely inactive, member of the court party in the House, Bathurst was the only Yorkshire Member among the ‘kinglings’ – the supporters at Westminster of a monarchical settlement.36A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). He was named to only two committees in this Parliament (on 8 May and 11 June 1657), both of which concerned a bill for restricting building works in the suburbs of London.37CJ vii. 532a, 555a. On 17 June, he acted as a teller in a minor division on the bill for the quiet enjoyment of sequestered parsonages and vicarages by their existing incumbents.38CJ vii. 560a. Neither his hard usage of his tenants, nor the death of Cromwell in 1658 (Bathurst was among the Protector’s official mourning party), appear to have weakened his interest at Richmond, where he was returned again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659.39CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 131. As in the previous Parliament, he was largely inactive in the House. His only appointment was on 17 March, when he was one of four Members ordered to visit the Speaker, Chaloner Chute I, who was at that time indisposed through ill health.40CJ vii. 615v. Bathurst was presumably included in the delegation because he was a doctor.

Within a little over a month after visiting Chute, Bathurst was himself dangerously ill, and he reportedly died on 26 April 1659.41Musgrave Obituary ed. Armitage, 124. According to an entry in the parish register of St Anne Blackfriars, he was buried there on 19 April, but this is clearly an error – not least because he did not make his will until 23 April.42St Anne Blackfriars par. reg. In this document, he left his entire estate, landed and personal, to six trustees, to be administered by them on behalf of his widow and nine surviving children.43PROB11/301, ff. 214v-215. These trustees included the royalists Sir Orlando Bridgeman* and Sir Philip Warwick (the latter, like Bathurst, had married into a family from Marske and was a close friend of Bathurst’s fellow MP for Richmond in 1659, Sir Christopher Wyvill).44Infra, ‘Philip Warwick’; ‘Sir Christopher Wyvill’. He charged his estate with upwards of £600 a year in annuities and over £7,000 in bequests. Two of his sons, Christopher and Philip, were to receive their portions of his landed estate only in the event that they became ‘reformed’ in their ‘life and conversation’. His legatees included the godly Hertfordshire knight Sir Richard Lucy* and the Presbyterian minister of St Anne Blackfriars, John Gibbon. He made numerous charitable bequests, leaving money for the maintenance of schoolmasters in Arkengarthdale and New Forest, Richmondshire; to Richmond corporation for sending two poor scholars to Cambridge and for putting a poor boy to apprentice; to the poor of St Anne Blackfriars and S Sepulchre, London; and to the Royal College of Physicians of London. Among the signatories to his will was one ‘John Tillittson’ – possibly the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, who had close connections with the Cromwellian court in the late 1650s.45PROB11/301, ff. 214v-221v; Calamy Revised, 219-20. Bathurst’s third son Theodore represented Richmond in the Parliament of 1690.46HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Theodore Bathurst’.