LEE, Sir Richard (c.1600-60), of Langley and Acton Burnell, Salop.

The Lee family could trace their history as landowners in Shropshire back before 1300. The manors of Roden and Nordley were owned by the family by the 1370s, and part of the estate of Langley was settled on the Lees in 1377. All of Langley was theirs by 1505.11Vis. Salop 1623, ii. 318; VCH Salop, viii. 143. The steady consolidation of patrimonial estates continued: Acton Burnell manor was bought by Sir Humphrey Lee in 1617. Sir Humphrey, the first baronet, was sheriff of the county in 1600.12Vis. Salop 1623, ii. 320. Richard Lee’s mother was one of the extensive Corbet family of Shropshire, which made Richard a first cousin of Sir John Corbet*.13Vis. Salop 1623, i. 138. Lee was educated in Oxford and married the daughter of a London alderman, according to the standard authority on baronetcies, on 17 June 1626.14CB. This must be an error, however, since a son of Richard and Elizabeth Lee was baptised on 29 May 1625 at Acton Burnell, the parish where a further seven children born to them were baptised down to June 1635. All Lee’s sons and one of his three daughters predeceased him, however. In 1629 Lee was added to the commission of the peace and was admitted to the quorum on 19 July 1633.15Coventry Docquets, 69. During the 1630s, he built up his standing in Shropshire county government, becoming a commissioner of oyer and terminer in 1635 and sheriff in 1638. His period of office in the shrievalty seems not to have become mired in the Ship Money controversy, in contrast with that of his predecessor, William Pierrepont*. A series of property transactions involving Lee in the 1630s shows that he enjoyed good relations with his cousin Sir John Corbet, but also entered a working relationship with Humphrey Mackworth I*, the prominent puritan lawyer of Shrewsbury, who was also a relative of his on his father’s side.16Coventry Docquets, 656-7, 679-80, 708; Salop Archives, 327/2/2/19/5; 1514/535; Vis. Salop 1623 ii. 319. Lee was probably mortgaging his estates in the late 1630s. Certainly there was nothing in Lee’s career before 1640 to suggest any opposition to the government or any particular conflict with any section of Shropshire gentry society.

That Lee was keen to secure a seat in the first Parliament of 1640 is evident from the reports circulating in Shropshire in February of that year. Lee was said to be spreading the notion that Vincent Corbett* and William Pierrepont were partners in standing for the Shropshire seats, and Brilliana Harley thought that Lee himself had been elected for Shrewsbury. Although the gentry nominated Lee for one of the Shrewsbury seats, in the event he was unsuccessful in securing a seat anywhere in that assembly.17NLW, Gwysaney transcripts, 24 ii; HMC Portland, iii. 58; Belvoir Castle, letters 1.23.. Lee was more successful in finding a place in the Parliament that met in November. He was returned for the first of the county seats with his relative and property conveyancing associate, Sir John Corbet. Perhaps a motive for Lee’s campaign to find a seat had been a wish to support the king in his campaigns against the Scots in the bishops’ wars. On 21 November Lee was reported by one of the parliamentary diarists to have offered his own security to the City as a contribution to raising a levy of £100,000 to supply the armies of both nations in the north.18Procs. LP i. 232. Relations with the City figured, too, in Lee’s first committee appointment, to consider the petitions of the London merchants Richard Chambers and Samuel Vassall*, both related to customs payments.19CJ ii. 43a.

Lee was inactive at Westminster; his nomination to his first committee turned out also to be his last. However, he made his political sympathies abundantly clear on 21 April 1641, when he was one of 60 or so MPs to vote against the attainder of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†).20Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. He apparently had no qualms about taking the Protestation at its introduction on 3 May.21CJ ii. 133b. But thereafter he went unnoticed by the Journal clerks until 22 April the following year, when he was given leave to go to the country.22CJ ii. 538a. In the wake of the events in Shrewsbury in the summer of 1642, when the nascent royalist party was mobilized in the king’s commission of array against the minority puritan group including Humphrey Mackworth I* and Thomas Hunt*, Lee was summoned to Westminster to explain himself. Twice thus summoned in August 1642, Lee resisted the call and never returned to Parliament.23CJ ii. 706b, 720a. The Commons had limited means at its disposal by which to retaliate. On 6 September it was ordered that Lee should be removed as a deputy lieutenant, and later the same day disabled him from sitting further in that Parliament.24CJ ii. 755a. It was something of a hollow gesture, however, as Lee had almost certainly resolved for himself by that time not to participate in its activities any further.

Lee’s disablement from further sitting at such an early stage in this Parliament’s life barred him even from attending the king’s rival Parliament at Oxford. He acted as a commissioner of array in Shropshire and was probably based throughout the civil war at Shrewsbury. When that town fell to Parliament on 22-23 February 1645, Lee was present, and became a prisoner. He told Sir William Brereton* that he had heard that the king would come that way with his entire army if a treaty were not concluded. On 16 March, Lee was sent from Shrewsbury to Eccleshall in Staffordshire, and on 18 April the prisoners at Eccleshall gave their word that Lee could be moved without protest or incident to Nantwich.25Brereton Letter Bks. i. 40, 50, 84, 121, 242. He was there by 1 May, and remained there for over a year.26Brereton Letter Bks. i. 340, ii. 141; CCC 1005. It was ordered on 14 May 1646 that he should be sent to London, but on 14 April 1648 was still apparently in custody, and requested permission to attend the Committee for Compounding* to make his composition. He was fined £6,288 on the basis that that was half his estate’s value, with an inducement of a reduction to £5,060 if Langley rectory was settled on the state. The level of the fine was reduced to one third in January 1649, but Lee appealed against even that significant review as being impossibly high, surrendering to the committee’s valuers plate worth £100 as an earnest of his willingness to co-operate.27CCC 1005-6. By 1653, Lee was alienating his manors of Berrington, Stainton and Dunnington to his royalist gentry neighbours as means for him to pay off his debts, but his collaborators, including Francis Newport*, seem later to have considered themselves coerced by him.28Salop Archives, 1514/534/2; 1781/2/3-4.

A significant dimension in Lee’s protracted case with the compounding committee was the tithes he enjoyed, which the state sought to use to augment Shropshire livings. In February 1651 the fine was finally settled at £2,966, with another promise of a reduction if Lee’s tithes were bestowed upon the minister of Ludlow. Lee was discharged by the committee on payment of the final instalment of the fine in April 1652.29CCC 1006. Other parishes to benefit from the state’s redistribution of Lee’s wealth included Cheswardine and Claverley, but an unintended consequence of the process was that the inhabitants of Grinshill complained that the seizure of Lee’s tithes had left their minister with no maintenance.30CCC 2113. Not until 1654 was that particular anomaly ironed out, but it is apparent that it was neither Lee’s complicated property portfolio, nor any heinous behaviour on his part when a commissioner of array, that was making it so difficult for him to escape the clutches of the state’s penal taxation system.31CCC 2113. It was rather because he was thought to be a Roman Catholic. He had been discovered at a mass in Staffordshire, probably soon after his release from detention. On 16 July 1652, Lee was summoned to take the oath of abjuration or face sequestration for recusancy, and later that year the county committee was required to tender the oath to him. A refusal would cost Lee two-thirds of his estate, but even so in November he was reported to have declined to swear. A year later an order was made that two-thirds of Lee’s annuity should be sequestered for recusancy.32CCC 1006-8.

Lee was presumably a ‘church papist’. He had had his children baptised at Acton Burnell parish church according to the Prayer Book rite, and that church remained the burying-place of his family. When in Parliament, he had taken the Protestation of 1641, a vow to defend the ‘true reformed Protestant religion’. He drew up his will in March 1660, but the text gives no clue as to his religious affiliations. He was reported that month to be sick.33Staffs. RO, D868/3/8a. The will incorporated a deed in which Lee sought to raise the means of paying his debts and settling annuities from his much-encumbered estates; the legal expertise of John Rushworth* was drawn upon in this. A mysterious clause bestowing an annuity of £10 on a female whose name Lee had disclosed verbally to his executor but who remains anonymous in the will is bound to suggest a relationship that was to be kept secret because of an illicit dimension to it, perhaps sexual or religious. Various codicils spoke of land transactions in progress and a range of small bequests to those around him, with a marked absence of reference to children, who had mostly predeceased him.34PROB11/298/256. Lee’s daughter married into the Smythe family of Ruckley, and his executor was one of that family. Lee died the following month, and was buried at Acton Burnell. His funeral was evidently large, and thought to be unsurpassed in Shropshire in size until that of Francis Newport, 1st earl of Bradford, in 1708.35NLW, Ottley (Pitchford Hall) MSS, 1959. The parish register ascribed to him a knighthood, but his will made clear that he was a baronet only.36Salop Par. Regs. Acton Burnell, 58. The Smythe family followed Lee in being recusants, and succeeded to his property: in 1668 the Smythes took legal steps to assure their title to the mortgaged estate.37VCH Salop, viii. 24; Salop Archives, 1514/535.