JACKSON, Joseph (c.1605-62), of St Werburgh, Bristol.

Joseph Jackson and his brother, Miles*, were sons of a family that had moved to Bristol from Combe Hay in Somerset. Their father, Miles, ‘came out of Yorkshire’, but was successful in business in Bristol, on the Back. Like other leading Bristolians, such as Humphrey Hooke*, Richard Longe* and John Taylor*, the Jacksons were relative newcomers, at least on their father’s side.21Vis. Som. 1623, 53; Vis. Som. and Bristol, 1672, 183; PROB11/129/196. The origins of their mother’s family, the Byrds of Bristol, lay in Gloucestershire.22S.K. Roberts, Letter-Book of John Byrd (South Wales Rec. Soc. xiv), p. xi. Following apprenticeship to his parents, Jackson settled in the city centre parish of St Werburgh, where his children were baptised from 1631, and where he served as sidesman from 1634. He was later churchwarden, in a parish which had benefited from the munificence of Richard Longe* and the more modest bequest of Elizabeth Seymour, wife of Sir John Seymour*. To judge from the outlook of these benefactors, St Werburgh was not a parish that could be called puritan.23Bristol RO, P/St. W./chw/3(b). Added to his involvement in parish life was Jackson’s initiation into, and steady progress through, the hierarchies of the Society of Merchant Venturers and the city corporation. By 1640, Jackson had held the minor office of warden for a year in the Society, and had become a common councillor of the corporation: significant achievements but nothing remarkable in a Bristol merchant aged 35. He seems not to have been in any way outstanding in his commercial activities, either; unnoticed in any of the adventures to discover new trade routes, and not prominent because of the scale of his business enterprises, which included trading into Portugal.24Bristol Deposition Bks. 1643-7, 20.

In July 1639, when common councillors voted to fill the living of Temple parish, Jackson voted against his brother, Miles, Humphrey Hooke and Richard Longe. He voted instead with Richard Aldworth* and John Taylor for an alternative to Abel Lovering, the minister appointed, who later became a royalist.25Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 91. Two other votes of December 1639 and February 1640 may provide an insight into Jackson’s political outlook. He supported the majority view on the council in support of the Bristol merchant, William Chetwyn, as city chamberlain, against the crown’s preference for Ralph Farmer, who was neither burgess nor freeman.26Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 95v-97, 98v, 99. When the city won a reduction in its Ship Money imposition, Jackson voted against Humphrey Hooke, who wanted to minimise the amount borne by the chamber, rather than the citizens.27Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 100v. Jackson may have seen the chamber as the best defence of Bristol’s local interests against outsiders. Nevertheless, he offered £75 in the collection to supply the army in Ireland (14 June 1642); his modest contribution compared with the £200 offered by Hooke and Longe betrays a limited wealth compared with that of the merchant grandees.28Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 120v.

Jackson’s motives in joining the committee for defence of Bristol and for accepting a commission from the city as a militia captain, in the late summer of 1642, were probably genuinely defensive.29Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 123, 124. As sheriff from September that year, Jackson was in the thick of the citizens’ strategies to avoid being drawn into the impending civil conflict. When Sir John Seymour called upon the city to decide whether it would join the pro-parliamentarian association of neighbouring counties, he promoted joining as a bulwark against the invasion of Bristol by the king’s supporter, Sir Ralph Hopton*. Jackson took the citizens’ equivocal reply to Seymour and was among a group who visited Gloucester to warn the parliamentarians who controlled the city government there not to send a force to Bristol; but misjudging the different mood in Gloucester, he and others found themselves imprisoned until they promised to work to establish a garrison in their city.30Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 19; A Declaration from the City of Bristoll (1643), 2 (E.83.13) Although Jackson was nominated by Parliament for a number of tax commissions in the first half of 1643, and was not included in the king’s commission of array, he was not a staunch parliamentarian. By the summer of 1643, he was inclining to the royalists, voting to present £10,000 to the king, and apparently happy to sign a protestation not to bear arms against Charles I or contribute to the parliamentary cause.31Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 33, 37.

Unlike Luke Hodges* and the other strong supporters of Parliament who disappeared from view after the surrender of the city by Governor Nathaniel Fiennes I* to the royalists, Jackson collaborated with the king’s government in Bristol. It was either he or his brother, Miles, who held civic office from September 1643, and he served on a committee to raise payments of £20 a week from the citizens for the garrison.32Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 38, 49. He or his brother drew up instructions for a delegate to represent the concerns of the city to the king's court at Oxford, but when in April 1644 the chamber divided on a gratuity of £500 to the queen, neither he nor his brother cast a vote. In the summer he complained that he had not been reimbursed for gifts of money he had given to Fiennes and Colonel Thomas Essex during the time that the parliamentarians controlled the city, and was duly compensated. In March 1645 he served on a committee to improve the civic administration of Bristol, and shortly afterwards (1 April) was appointed assistant to Alderman Richard Longe in his ward.33Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 69, 71, 94, 96.

On the eve of the New Model army’s storm of Bristol, Jackson, with the royalists Richard Longe and John Taylor, participated in a series of votes on the composition of the council. The intentions of those voting are hard to judge, but seem connected with the imminent assault on the city, which took place on 10 September. Miles Jackson, Richard Aldworth and Humphrey Hooke held aloof, but if Joseph Jackson intended to signal diehard opposition to the army, he had reconsidered by the 20th, when he was asked to accompany the town clerk with a petition to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* headquarters at Bath.34Bristol RO, 04246/4, pp. 110, 116, 119. In the period of reconstruction after the war, Jackson helped frame instructions for the city’s MPs, and was sworn alderman in September 1646: unusually, since he had yet to serve a term as mayor. His real sympathies remained somewhat opaque, as he approved a payment of arrears of £30 fees owing to the royalist and former recorder, (Sir) John Glanville*.35Bristol RO, 04026/23, p. 152. Mastership of the Society of Merchant Venturers followed in the wake of his promotion of alderman, and Jackson led negotiations with Sir William Waller* who had been granted ‘prisage’ on all wine imports. The merchants reached a deal over excise that satisfied both parties.36Soc. Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 112. A few years later, after his mayoralty, Jackson pursued the city’s interests in defending its privileges in exports of calfskins.37Soc. Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 221, 226.

When Lieutenant-general Oliver Cromwell* visited Bristol en route for Ireland in July 1649, he stayed at Jackson’s house, and the alderman evidently had no qualms over conforming to the commonwealth government.38Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 196. Jackson was active in pursuing the city’s interests vis-à-vis parliamentarian officials who detained money thought to be properly Bristol’s, and he finally became mayor in 1651.39Bristol RO, 04026/24, pp. 82, 88, 89, 145 His standing as a leading Bristol merchant and government supporter rendered him a natural choice as a commissioner for protecting the naval timber supplies of the Forest of Dean in 1649, and his complaints against Spanish pirates led to an official protest to the Spanish ambassador. Such a response was not possible when another of Jackson’s ships was seized in error by the English government, as occurred in the same year. In September 1652, however, he was granted a commission for a private man-of-war to combat threats to Bristol Channel shipping from whatever quarter.40CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 54, 56, 74-5, 78; 1651-2, p. 573. Whatever the improvements in Bristol commerce, civic life in the city was not a story of tranquil conformity to the republican government. It was probably a response to murmurings of discontent on the Bristol streets that led the council in March 1653 to impose fines on its members for breaches of confidentiality. Both the Jackson brothers voted in council first for the fine to be £50, then £150, before splitting the difference to settle for £100.41Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 45. The Jacksons seem to have adapted easily to the protectorate. Joseph and his brother helped draft an address and recognition to the lord protector, which was taken up to London in August 1654, and Joseph also sat on the committee which prepared instructions for the city’s MPs on the eve of the first Protectorate Parliament.42Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 64, 67; 04026/24, p. 155.

Jackson was fiercely opposed to the rise of Quakerism in Bristol. In January 1655 he despatched warrants to constables to apprehend Quakers as disguised Franciscan friars, ‘laughed openly on the Tolzey’ when a Quaker’s house was ransacked, and a few months later imprisoned a woman for wearing sackcloth and ashes ‘for a sign’. In February that year, the local apologists for the Quakers alleged that Jackson contributed significantly to apprentice rioting in Bristol by provocative words he addressed to the garrison soldiers, who were sympathetic to the sectaries. They catalogued other examples of provocation by Jackson.43J. Besse, Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers (2 vols. 1753), i. 40, 41; The Cry of Blood (1656) 33, 37, 75, 80, 91, 92, 94, 98-101, 123 (E.884.3). Either he or his brother Miles helped draw up a remonstrance to Parliament in November 1656 that denounced the menace of Quakers.44Bristol RO, 040264/5, p. 119; 04026/25(ii), p. 58. Jackson’s credentials at Westminster in this exercise must have been aided by his membership since November 1655 of the protectoral council’s trade committee, and he was in London in January 1657 to promote a renewal of Bristol’s act for better preaching of the gospel, a reorganisation of the ministry in the city.45CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 1; Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 122, 135, 142-4; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 273.

In December 1657, Jackson was at the forefront of efforts to put the city on alert against a royalist uprising, and was part of the committee that drew up the recognition address (20 Oct. 1658) to Richard Cromwell* when he became lord protector. He was chosen by the council, without involvement by the wider body of freeholders, to sit in the Parliament of 1659. He was by this time a senior civic figure, with nearly 13 years’ experience as an alderman behind him. As in previous elections, a committee of the Bristol council which included brother Miles drew up instructions for its MPs. One issue which the Bristolians wanted to pursue was an extension of the terms of their charter; another, that the militia be controlled not by nominees from the council of state but by the corporation. In the event, the Parliament was too short for either of these ambitions to be realised, and whatever Jackson's activities behind the scenes, he did not trouble either the Journal clerks or the informal diarists of the assembly.46Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 172, 173, 180, 182. As ever, it was what they took to be the city’s mercantile and civic interests that came first with Jackson and his fellow merchant councillors.

The city continued to press for control over its own militia in February 1660, and in May, Jackson was one of the draughtsmen of the congratulatory address to Charles II. It was his security that facilitated the purchase of gold, presented in London to the new king by Robert Aldworth* as Bristol’s gift. Jackson sought to adapt himself to the restored monarchy as easily as he had negotiated other changes of national government, and was as usual named to various civic offices in September 1660. The following November, he was entrusted with securing, for the use of the city’s poor, supplies of butter, a commodity in which the Bristol merchants had long claimed a special privilege over produce from south Wales. But in April 1661, he was singled out as a rank Anabaptist (which he was not) by a Bristol cavalier in a letter to the government. At the next round of council elections, in September 1661, Jackson was elected to the offices of clavenger, auditor and trustee of the free school, but in October was subject to a failed attempt to unseat him from the council. He attended no more meetings.47Bristol RO, 04264/6, pp. 43, 45; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 569; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 310. He had first made his will in July 1658, feeling himself in need of putting his affairs in order as he embarked on a journey to Oxford, not so very far from Bristol. At the end of 1661 he declared himself to be on his deathbed, leaving bequests for his young children who were to be ‘educated in the fear of God and as much as may be kept from fashions of the world’. Jackson’s will reveals how the Bristol merchant community families were interlocked through marriage; his step-father was the royalist, Humphrey Hooke, while his step-son-in-law was the persecutor of Quakers, Robert Aldworth. Jackson died on 5 January 1662, and was buried at the city centre church where he had been a churchwarden. Among his non-family beneficiaries were three Bristol ministers, his ‘loving friends’, who would all be ejected from their livings in September 1662.48PROB11/312/203.