PRESTON, John (1587-aft. 1668), of Cricket St Thomas, Som.

The Preston family had held the manor of Cricket St Thomas outside Chard in southern Somerset since 1466.17VCH Som. iv. 135. By the late sixteenth century these lands were owned by this MP’s father, Christopher Preston, who in time became an active justice of the peace. Little is known about the earlier life of his eldest son, although many years later John Preston told one of his friends that ‘in my younger days I was a falconer but never a huntsman’.18Som. RO, DD/HI/B/468: J. Preston to T. Hele, 5 Sept. 1664. The first local office held by the future MP was probably as a captain in the Somerset militia. By 1617 he already held that rank in the foot company commanded by Edward Popham, when the lord lieutenant, the 1st earl of Hertford, impressed by his abilities, transferred him to become captain of the company which had formerly been commanded by Preston’s own father.19Som. RO, DD/HI/B/464: Hertford to J. Preston, 12 May 1617.

Christopher Preston died in the spring of 1623.20Cricket St Thomas par. reg. He left behind modest debts amounting to £213 12s 9d, which his widow, as his administratrix, was able to pay off.21Som. RO, DD/HI/B/451: acct. of Katherine Preston, 6 May 1625. A decade earlier, in March 1613, he had transferred his lands at Cricket St Thomas into his son’s name and three years after that, in January 1616, John had granted them to two feoffees, Robert Harbin and William Mallett.22Som. RO, DD/HI/B/411: indentures, 31 Mar. 1613 and 20 Jan. 1616. These transfers were now recognised by the court of wards in a grant of special livery to Preston.23Som. RO, DD/HI/B/411: indenture, 1 May 1625; Coventry Docquets, 313. This then enabled to him to reclaim those lands from the feoffees.24Som. RO, DD/HI/B/411: declaration, 15 Mar. 1628.

For the time being, Preston’s principal local office remained that in the county trained bands. By 1627 he was the serjeant-major of the company of the 1st Baron Poulett (John Poulett†) and by 1637 at the latest he had been promoted to become its lieutenant-colonel.25Som. RO, DD/HI/B/464: Lord Poulett to Preston, 13 Sept. 1627; list of foot, 19-20 June 1636. He did, however, become involved in one notable political dispute. In 1636 William Strode II* protested against the Somerset Ship Money assessments, in particular those for the hundred of South Petherton. As his lands at Cricket St Thomas lay within that hundred, Preston had a direct personal interest in this matter and he now became Strode’s principal local opponent. (His own assessment at Cricket St Thomas amounted to £2.)26Som. RO, DD/HI/B/463: Cricket St Thomas ship money assessment, 30 Jan. 1637. In April 1637, after the bishop of Bath and Wells, William Piers, had been asked to investigate, Preston was among witnesses who certified the copy of the written statement from the local constable submitted as evidence against Strode.27Som. RO, DD/HI/B/463: information of Thomas Walden, 28 Feb. 1637. Moreover, Preston then tipped off Lord Poulett, via his son, Sir John Poulett*, about the progress of the investigation.28Som. RO, DD/HI/B/463: Sir J. Poulett to J. Preston, [1637]. Preston’s extensive archive relating to the case may indeed have been collected specifically to assist Piers.29Som. RO, DD/HI/B/463. Preston, like many of his neighbours, probably thought that Strode was stirring up this local dispute merely to make a wider political point. Had Strode succeeded, they would have had to find the money he had disputed.

Preston’s role in the Strode case may explain why in July 1639 he was finally added to the Somerset commission of the peace.30Coventry Docquets, 77. But this was evidently to his displeasure, for a year later he asked to be removed from it, possibly as a protest over the king’s latest military expedition against the Scottish Covenanters.31T.G. Barnes, Som. 1625-1640 (Cambridge, Mass. 1961), 303 and n. He had in the meantime been appointed by his fellow justices as the treasurer of the hospitals in the western half of Somerset and, despite his resignation as a justice, he completed his year in that office.32Som. RO, DD/HI/B/462: obligation, 7 May 1640; accts. of Preston as treas. of hospitals, 1640-1. Consistent with the idea that Preston now had his doubts about some of the king’s policies is that he probably voted for the anti-court candidates, Alexander Popham* and Thomas Smyth I*, in the election for the Somerset MPs for the Short Parliament in March 1640.33Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 195. But he remained on sufficiently good terms with one of their opponents, John Coventry*, that several months later he presented him with an ‘excellent gelding’.34Som. RO, DD/HI/B/468: J. Coventry to Preston, 2 Aug. 1640. From 1641 the Long Parliament included Preston on its Somerset subsidy and assessment commissions and, in the case of the 1641 subsidy commission, he is known to have carried out the duties in person.35SR; Som. Protestation Returns, 211, 235, 250. He also took the Protestation at Cricket St Thomas in 1641.36Som. Protestation Returns, 89.

With the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642, however, at least one attempt was made to recruit Preston to the royalist side. After all, his long experience in the militia made him potentially very useful. In late July 1642, the lord lieutenant, the 1st marquess of Hertford (Sir William Seymour†), acting under the king’s commission of array, offered to confirm him in his command of his militia company.37Som. RO, DD/HI/B/464: Hertford to Preston, 30 July 1642. Preston evidently refused and within five days he had clashed with some of the royalist forces raised by Hertford in his attempts to secure the county for the king. Preston joined John Pyne* in his march against Hertford’s rendezvous at Wells. On 4 August some of Hertford’s men, led by Sir John Stawell*, Sir John Poulett, John Digby* and Edmund Wyndham*, intercepted Pyne and Preston at Marshall’s Elm close to Somerton. In the resulting skirmish, Preston was taken prisoner, although he was held for only two days.38Som. RO, DD/HI/B/466: examinations of J. Preston, 5 and 25 Aug. 1642; Bellum Civile, 7-9. This experience did not deter him from continuing as an active supporter of the parliamentarian cause. Later that same month Hugh Rogers*, Strode and Clement Walker* asked him to assist them in securing Bath.39Som. RO, DD/HI/B/466: H. Rogers, W. Strode and C. Walker to Preston, 27 Aug. 1642. The following February, when they feared royalist incursions by Sir Ralph Hopton* into the county, Pyne and Edward Popham* asked Preston to concentrate his men at Taunton.40Som. RO, DD/HI/B/466: E. Popham and J. Pyne to Preston and others, 7 Feb. 1643. But when during that summer Hopton finally turned his attentions eastwards, these parliamentarian efforts to defend Somerset proved insufficient. Men like Preston now had to accept that their county had fallen into the hands of their enemies.

As it turned out, this royalist ascendancy over Somerset was to be only temporary. During the summer of 1645 Sir Thomas Fairfax* repeated Hopton’s success in reverse and so regained the county for Parliament. The apparatus of local government then passed into the hands of the revived county committee, dominated by Pyne and his allies, including Preston. One way in which the Pyne faction hoped to entrench themselves was by securing the return of their favoured candidates in the Somerset recruiter elections. In December 1645 Preston therefore probably supported Henry Henley* and John Harington I* in the contest for the county seats and the following June he was among those appointed to the new commission of the peace who refused to take their oaths in protest over the conduct of the former sheriff, Sir John Horner*, in that election.41Harington’s Diary, 27. Preston did take his place as a justice of the peace in due course, however.42QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 10-50. Meanwhile, the House of Commons had ordered that legal proceedings be started against Sir John Stawell at the Somerset assizes. The county committee therefore approached Preston in August 1646 as a potential witness.43Som. RO, DD/HI/B/466: Som. standing cttee. to Preston, 22 Aug. 1646. He also made himself useful in other ways. In April 1647 he succeeded John Buckland* as the county’s treasurer for maimed soldiers. His disbursements, which amounted to £224 8s 4d during his year in office, provided direct assistance to some of those who had suffered most in Parliament’s service.44QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 37, 42, 72; Som. RO, DD/HI/B/462: receipts, 30 Apr. 1647 and 13 Apr. 1648; accts. of Preston as treas. for maimed soldiers, 1647-8. Moreover, in November of that year he was also appointed as the sheriff of Somerset, an even weightier responsibility.45List of Sheriffs, 125; Som. RO, DD/X/HT/3; DD/HI/B/461. There is little doubt that this appointment was intended to strengthen the position of the Pyne faction and that Preston made the most of this partisan opportunity. As the sheriff’s many duties included overseeing the appointment of the grand juries, he had no hesitation in packing them with men friendly to himself and Pyne.46Som. RO, DD/HI/B/461/3; Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, pp. xxiv-xxv; D. Underdown, Som. in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), 150-1. His year in office coincided with the outbreak of the second civil war, although, in the event, the uprisings elsewhere never spread to Somerset. In taking over from him later that year, Buckland was therefore able to congratulate him on having ‘happily passed through in a time full of danger and hazard’.47Som. RO, DD/HI/B/461/2: J. Buckland to Preston, 18 Dec. 1648.

The creation of the new republic was, for Preston’s conscience, a greater challenge. In the spring of 1649 Pyne made sure that Preston was promoted to the quorum of the Somerset commission of the peace and he expressed the hope that Preston and Henry Bonner would take the lead in handling the commission’s business in the eastern half of the county.48Som. RO, DD/HI/B/467: J. Pyne to Preston, 16 Apr. 1649. However, in early 1650 Preston probably refused to subscribe to the Engagement, a step which led him to be removed from the commission. It was only on 15 January 1651, a full year after the Rump had commanded all adult men to do so, that Preston finally complied.49Som. RO, DD/HI/B/467: Engagement cert. 15 Jan. 1651. That made it possible for him to be reappointed as a justice of the peace the following month.50C231/6, p. 205. But Preston was still not happy. In July 1651 the sheriff, Alexander Pym (son of John Pym*), informed him that the commissioners for the great seal were anxious that he had not yet taken his oath as a justice.51Som. RO, DD/HI/B/467: A. Pym to Preston, 25 July 1651. Preston probably never did take those oaths and by the following spring he had persuaded the commissioners for the great seal to drop him from the Somerset commission.52Som. RO, DD/HI/B/467: F. Swanton to Preston, 27 Mar. 1652.

Preston may have envisaged this as a permanent withdrawal from public life. He was, after all, now in his sixties. But in 1654 he stood for and was elected to Parliament for the first time. His election as one of the 11 Somerset county MPs may have been a last, slight vestige of the influence of Pyne’s faction, although it is rather more likely that Preston was favoured because he had so obviously distanced himself from the republic. He apparently claimed to have stood only very reluctantly.53Som. RO, DD/HI/B/467: R. Dashwood to [Preston], 14 July 1654. A note surviving among Preston’s own papers reveals that, with 1,059 votes, he took sixth place in the poll held on 12 July 1654.54Som. RO, DD/HI/B/442, unf. Quite possibly because he had been elected, the council of state appointed him as one of the Somerset commissioners for scandalous ministers six days before this Parliament assembled.55A. and O. But Preston left no trace at all in any of the records of the 1654 Parliament and, given his previous aversion to the republican oaths, it is quite possible that he never took his seat. He did not stand again in 1656.

In 1656 Parliament included Preston on its Somerset assessment commission, while the 1660 Convention likewise appointed him as an assessment commissioner, as well as a militia commissioner, but this does not mean he remained active in public life.56A. and O. He received no such appointments after the Restoration. Some still remembered his earlier support for Parliament: in 1662 one local inhabitant denounced him as ‘a rebel and a traitor’.57Som. RO, DD/HI/B/467: Preston to F. Poulett, 23 July 1662. He spent these final years in retirement. In November 1669 Preston wrote to his grandson Richard Hippisley, telling him that although ‘weakness and old age have at present much weakened me for a journey’, he still hoped to visit him at Ston Easton in the near future.58Som. RO, DD/HI/A/296: Preston to Hippisley, 17 Nov. 1669. That is the last indication that Preston was still alive, as, in absence of the local parish register for this period or of a will, his precise date of death remains unknown. Four decades earlier, in 1628, Preston’s only child, his daughter Margaret, had married John Hippisley of Ston Easton.59Cricket St Thomas par. reg. Both John Hippisley and their eldest son, John junior, had since died, so, on his death, Preston’s estates all passed either to Margaret or the other son, Richard, both of whom died in 1672.60Som. RO, DD/HI/A/296: expenses on the death of John Hippisley, [1665]; VCH Som. iv. 135. The lands at Cricket St Thomas remained in the hands of the Hippisleys and their descendants, the Coxes, until the late eighteenth century.