RICH, Edwin (c.1594-1675), of Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx.

Rich’s father, Sir Edwin Rich, was a younger brother of Robert Rich, 1st earl of Warwick, who had inherited an estate in Norfolk and married into the Suffolk gentry. Rich was trained to the law, entering Lincoln’s Inn in 1612, being called to the bar in 1619, and becoming a bencher in 1638.22LI Admiss. i. 160; LI Black Bks. ii. 213, 345. He retained his East Anglian connections, however, and his marriage, in 1629, was to the widow of Norfolk gentleman Sir John Suckling (thus making him step-father to the dissolute poet, Sir John Suckling*).23The Gen. n.s. xii. 216. His links with his cousin, Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, are harder to trace, but they surely existed, and may account for Rich’s return for the Cornish borough of Fowey in the elections for the Short Parliament in March 1640, perhaps using the influence of the local patron, Jonathan Rashleigh*, on behalf of the kinsman of a known critic of the crown. Rich played no part in the brief session that followed, and there is no indication that he shared his cousin’s dissatisfaction with the regime, or his ‘puritan’ religious views. Rich’s decision to side with Parliament after 1642 (and to lend £100 to the cause) may have been influenced by his parliamentarian relatives; and his appointment as vice-admiral of Norfolk in March 1644 was no doubt a favour from his cousin, the lord admiral.24CCAM 33; Vice-Admirals, 37.

Rich’s promotion to the rank of master in chancery in around 1645, may also have been the result of family patronage; but his abilities were soon more widely recognised, and at the beginning of 1646 he was acting as counsellor for the state in cases before the Committee for Advance of Money – a role expanded in the autumn to include the Committee for Compounding.25CCAM 526; CCC 46, 49-50. His role as an official lawyer continued throughout the later 1640s and early 1650s, and he was heavily involved in the business of sequestered royalists seeking to compound or to pay fines, examining cases, taking bonds and affidavits, and reporting back to the committees with specialist advice.26CCAM 521, 526, 776, 781, 994, 1032; CCC 49-50, 63, 81, 125, 445, 603-4, 894, 1054. In the compounding committee he became expert on impropriated church lands, and worked with the trustees for the maintenance of ministers in reallocating these lands to deserving clerics.27CCC 46, 57, 411, 487, 657, 708, 1120, 1165, 1553. He was discharged from attendance on the Committee for Advance of Money in February 1650, and paid for his services on 6 March.28CCAM 81, 1505. He worked for the compounding committee for several more years. On 21 October 1653 the committee ordered that Rich be continued, with the same allowances, until further notice; and he apparently remained as their counsel until November 1654, when he was instructed to bring all the conveyances and other paperwork to the trustees for the maintenance of ministers, who would take over his primary role thereafter.29CCC 657, 708, 718; E351/439.

The committee work was not Rich’s only occupation during this period, as in April 1649 Parliament ordered that he and other masters should hear causes in chancery in the absence of the lord commissioners of the great seal.30CJ vi. 183a. He was still active as a master in chancery after he had relinquished his other duties, and he remained in post for much of the protectorate, being listed by John Thurloe* as the fourth in seniority in April 1655; by September 1658 he was second.31TSP iii. 410; SP18/182, f. 158. Rich also remained involved in the running of Lincoln’s Inn and was active as a Middlesex justice of the peace during the protectorate, providing information about a fire at Enfield (where he held lands) to the council in October 1656, and being appointed to administer the oath to his fellow justices in April 1659.32LI Black Bks. ii. 391; CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 329; C231/6, p. 431. There were tensions between Rich and the new regime, however, and in October 1658 it was reported that he had refused to attend the parish church at Beccles in Norfolk, had stirred up the townspeople against the preacher and encouraged them to hear a ‘scandalous’ minister instead. Rich was hauled before the council at Whitehall, and admitted that that he was privately in favour of using the Lord’s Prayer in baptism and believed that the sacraments should be administered universally, but denied sedition. His surprisingly frank admission of support for the ‘formalities’ of the Book of Common Prayer prompted the protectoral council to suspend him as a master in chancery – an order it rescinded a few months later.33PRO31/17/33, pp. 86, 279; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 163.

In May 1660, a matter of weeks before the return of the king, the Lords ordered that all proceedings ‘to the apparent wrong and prejudice’ of Rich as a master in chancery be voided.34LJ xi. 12a. He continued to serve in that capacity after the Restoration, and was knighted in July 1666 (perhaps on his retirement).35Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 242. In his last years, Rich busied himself with beautifying the grounds of Lincoln’s Inn. In November 1671 it was announced that he intended ‘to place two statues of good value in the outward walks, at his own charge’, and two years later he had indeed provided statues of Neptune and Hercules, as well as a sundial for the buildings next to the garden, and three decorated boards with the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Creed for the chapel.36LI Black Bks. iii. 76, 452. In April 1675 Rich, now over 80 years of age, was elected as ‘master of the walks’, perhaps in recognition of his earlier benefaction.37LI Black Bks. iii. 99. In the same month he made his will. In it, Rich said that he put his trust in Christ as the sole route of salvation – ‘for I defy the pope and his pardons’ – and left substantial bequests to the poor of Thetford, Beccles and Norwich, and to the parish of Mulbarton, where he was to be buried in ‘a vault which I have prepared for that purpose’.38PROB11/349/254 He died childless in November 1675, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Charles Rich, who was created a baronet in the following year.39CB. In his final years, Rich appears to have become obsessed with the passing of time. Not only did he arrange for the sun dial to be erected at Lincoln’s Inn, he also left in his will a silver watch and a ‘new pendulum clock’; and in the preamble to the same he said that he had come to recognise that ‘my life is like an hour glass, and my riches like the sand in it, which runs with me no longer than I continue here, and then must be turned up by another’.40PROB11/349/254.