STEPNEY, Sir John (c.1608-76), of Prendergast, Pemb.

In 1640, the Stepneys considered themselves to have been gentry for 200 years, but the fortunes of the family were established in1546 when Ralph Stepneth was granted the manor of Aldenham in Hertfordshire by Henry VIII. The grant was apparently made as compensation for the seizure of his estate on the Thames for the building of a naval dockyard. Aldenham remained in the family’s hands for 40 years, and the cousin of Ralph Stepneth, Robert, sat in the 1555 Parliament for St Albans. Paul Stepneth sold the manor in 1589, but his uncle, Alban Stepneth, married Margaret, daughter of Thomas Catharn of Prendergast, and settled the Stepneys, with a change of the usual spelling of the family name, in Pembrokeshire.19Clutterbuck, Herts. i. 127; R. Harrison, Some Notices of the Stepney Fam. (1870), 5-6. Alban Stepneth was registrar to the bishop of St David’s, and sat in three Elizabethan Parliaments. His son, John Stepney, was made a baronet in 1621, but died in 1625, while Thomas Stepney, Alban’s younger son, was a gentleman of the privy chamber and in 1622 played a part in saving James I from drowning. John’s eldest son, the second baronet, Alban, died of smallpox in London three years after inheriting. The baronetcy then passed to John Stepney’s younger son, the subject of this biography. John, the third baronet, was related to a number of Pembrokeshire gentry families, including the Philipps family of Picton and the Parrotts of Haroldston.20BHO, Court of Chivalry website, 625.

Stepney’s father had provided in his will that his sons should be educated in grammar schools before entering university to ‘there betake them to the studies of learning’, but it is not known where John Stepney was taught.21PROB11/148, f. 279v. He entered public life in 1634, when he was appointed to the separate commissions of the peace for Pembrokeshire and Haverfordwest. He was pricked as high sheriff of the county in 1636, and soon ran into difficulties in his unenviable role as the rating and collecting officer for the Ship Money writ. Stepney waited until the quarter sessions meeting at Haverfordwest in January 1637 before levying the Ship Money rates, hoping to take advantage of the assembly there of county justices. However the meeting ended in uproar when William Williams of Walwyn’s Castle flipped his fingers at Stepney and snarled at him ‘A turd in your teeth’. Williams was a clerk in holy orders, and took umbrage at Stepney’s ‘journeymen priests’, the curates he employed in the seven livings he held in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire. Another motivation for Williams’ insult was the belief of the Walwyn’s Castle parishioners that they were rated excessively for Ship Money. At Stepney’s instigation, the case went to the court of chivalry, many witnesses were examined at Haverfordwest, and because the case involved a clergyman the court extended its jurisdiction to include the bishop of St David’s.22BHO, Court of Chivalry website, 625. The outcome of the case was inconclusive, but Stepney continued on his course as an energetic and determined Ship Money sheriff, rating the clergy and presenting himself confidently to the privy council as a successful manager of the collection.23CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 230, 389, 469.

When elections were announced for the first Parliament of 1640, Stepney was willing to sit for Haverfordwest, and wrote to the borough to assure the corporation that he would do what he could for them, free of charge.24Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 73. However, in the event, he sat for Pembroke Boroughs, doubtless on his own interest. He made no impact on that assembly, but for the Long Parliament he switched places with Hugh Owen, who had sat for Haverfordwest in the Short Parliament. Some collusive agreement seems likely. His only recorded action in his second Parliament was to take the Protestation (3 May 1641).25CJ ii. 133b. On the eve of the civil war, Parliament named him to the Militia Ordinance for Pembrokeshire (18 Aug. 1642).26LJ v. 304a. His loyalty to the parliamentary cause might have been counted upon, since his father had been deputy steward for the lordship of Narberth to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, who from July 1642 was Parliament’s lord general.27Exchequer Proceedings concerning Wales in tempore James I ed. T. I. Jeffreys Jones (Cardiff, 1955), 298-9. Instead, however, he inclined to the king. In 1637 it was noted that he was descended on his mother’s side from the Somersets, earls of Worcester, and in 1641 he was involved in a legal transaction with Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, concerning the conveyance of lands in four Carmarthenshire parishes.28BHO, Court of Chivalry website, 625; NLW, Picton Castle, 1949 group, 208. In 1647 Col. Philip Jones would inform the Committee for Advance of Money of Stepney’s debt of £2,500 to Worcester.29CCAM, 210. These associations with one of the king’s principal creditors may have helped propel Stepney towards the royal cause.

Stepney garrisoned Haverfordwest for the king from late October 1643, when Sir Francis Lloyd* brought soldiers from Carmarthen. He commanded what was probably a small force of foot soldiers to maintain the garrison.30A List of Officers Claiming to the Sixty Thousand Pounds (1663), 123; Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 13. With other Pembrokeshire gentry, Stepney subscribed the declaration in support of Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery [I] as lieutenant-general and avowing not to aid Parliament in any material way; and the protestation against the resistance to the king’s authority by the townsmen of Pembroke.31Mercurius Aulicus 43rd week, ending 28 Oct. 1643, 605 (E.75.13); Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 121. Stepney’s control of Haverfordwest was to be brief. When in February 1644 Rowland Laugharne†, the parliamentarian commander in south-west Wales, unexpectedly took the fort above Milford Haven, Stepney and Sir Henry Vaughan* were panicked into mistaking bullocks moving at night for advancing parliamentarian soldiers. Stepney, ‘afraid of his own shadow’, was alleged to have sworn ‘God’s wounds, the round-headed dogs were coming’, and abandoned Haverfordwest prematurely. 32J. Vicars, Gods Ark over-topping the World’s Waves (1645), 179-80 (E.312.3). Meanwhile, Stepney’s support for Carbery from early in the war led to his being disabled from sitting further at Westminster, the order promulgated on the same day that the Commons resolved that Carbery himself should be impeached for high treason (19 Apr. 1643).33CJ iii. 52b. Stepney continued in the king’s service, and was evidently summoned to the royal quarters at Oxford, where he appeared at some point after January 1644 to sit in the rival Parliament the king had summoned there.34The Names of the Lords and Commons (1646), 5. He was at Hereford when it surrendered to Col. John Birch* (24 Dec. 1645), and was by this time probably relieved of any military responsibilities.35J. Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana (1646), 334 (E.348.1). He played no known part in the second civil war in Wales.

The parliamentary committees of penal taxation had turned their attention to Stepney by 28 July 1644, when an assessment of £1,500 was levied on him, though the committee was unable to take any action in his case.36CCAM, 436. On 3 March 1646, Stepney claimed to have gone to Hereford in search of a pass from Laugharne to present himself before the Committee for Compounding in London. By 23 April he was in the Compter prison, Southwark, and on 23 December his delinquency fine was set at £1,230, representing a third of his estate’s value. This was reduced to £530 on 1 October 1649 in view of the encumbrances on his estate, which ranged from a debt of £4,000 to Henry, earl of Worcester, to £50 to Haverfordwest corporation. He received his discharge on 31 May 1650. Part of the settlement of Stepney’s dealings with the Committee for Compounding involved the seizure of his church livings; the parishioners of at least four of them petitioned for augmentations of stipends for their ministers, and three parish ministers benefited as a result.37CCC 1036; Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 86, 88; T. Richards, Hist. Puritan Movement in Wales (1923), 50. Just as Carbery found favour with Philip Jones during the 1650s, Stepney also was privileged to enjoy a number of his impropriations during the interregnum.38Richards, Puritan Movement, 237. The quid pro quo was his complete abstention from political activity during the commonwealth and protectorate, apart from his continued service as a common councillor of the borough for which he had sat in the Long Parliament.

In the Haverfordwest election for the Convention of 1660, there was a three-way contest between James Philipps*, William Philipps and Sampson Lort. Stepney proved an enthusiastic manager for William Philipps, his kinsman and a royalist, despite the evident disapproval of the mayor, who backed James Philipps.39Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 168. James Philipps had been prominent in the protectorate, but was a more acceptable candidate to the corporation than Sampson Lort, the most republican-inclined of the candidates. In the event, James Philipps withdrew, William Philipps was victorious and was elected again after the initial election was declared void.40HP Commons 1660-90. None of this was the prelude to an active political career on Stepney’s part. His return to public office had begun by June 1660, when he was recalled to the Pembrokeshire assessment commission. Probably around the same time he re-entered the commission of the peace. His presence in borough affairs secured him the mayoralty of Haverfordwest in 1662. However, a contemporary commentator on the west Wales gentry astutely saw him as ‘a royalist whose facility and noble dispositions have a little clouded his fortunes. The habit of ease hath made his disposition not very inclinable to be over-industrious in his own or the public affairs of his country’.41E. D. Jones, ‘The Gentry of South West Wales in the Civil War’, NLWJ xi. 144. Stepney died between 15 May and 28 August 1676, to judge from his disappearance from the commission of the peace. His will was proved locally, though only the inventory of his property survives, valuing his household goods, in 17 rooms at £70, with livestock and crops valued at £176.42NLW, SD/1676/154. He had no son, and the baronetcy passed to his nephew John, whose heir acquired a Carmarthenshire estate by marriage, and transferred the focus of family activities to that county.