PATESHALL, John (1578-1670), of Pudleston, Herefs.

The Pateshalls were a family of substance in Herefordshire as early as the mid-fourteenth century, and held local office in the county by 1497. Pudleston manor, nearly six miles from Leominster, was bought by John Pateshall’s great-grandfather early in the reign of Elizabeth I.14Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 7, 237. John Pateshall’s grandfather and namesake sat in the last Parliament of Mary I’s reign, but made no recorded impact on it, and this comparative obscurity marked the brief public career of the grandson.15HP Commons 1509-1558. There seems little doubt that the Pateshalls were in decline from the mid-sixteenth century. The Marian MP was buried at Pudleston on 21 November 1567, styled esquire, but when his son made his will in 1628 he was content to describe himself as a gentleman only.16Pudleston par. reg.; PROB11/153/441. Nor was the Pudleston branch of the family given any attention by the heralds; when they compiled their visitation of Herefordshire in 1634, they were more interested in the branch of the family seated at Byford, over 20 miles away from Pudleston.17Vis. Herefs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. n.s. xv), 40. Nevertheless, when John Pateshall’s step-mother died in 1653, her will showed how the family owned a modest collection of silver in their single house at Pudleston.18PROB11/229/607. Pateshall’s marriage in 1618 at the age of 39 was to a daughter of John Colles, the fourth son of a family from the next parish, so it hardly brought with it any great social or material advantage.19Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 132. As a squire whose influence was thus socially and territorially restricted, he seems before 1640 not to have been named to commissions from chancery or exchequer, and had to wait until 1644 before finding a place in the commission of the peace for the county. He did, however, serve as bailiff of Leominster in 1633, an indication of where such influence that was at Pateshall’s command was exercised.20Townsend, Leominster, 294.

Pateshall was sufficiently interested in politics to give his voice in the Herefordshire by-election in November 1641, when Humphrey Coningsby was returned. His brother-in-law, Timothy Colles, was also at the election, as were a number of gentry who were soon to form the core of support for the king in the county, among them Wallop Brabazon and Henry Lingen†.21C219/43/1/209; Webb, Memorials, i. 26. Pateshall was also active at this time as a commissioner for the poll tax that Parliament had sanctioned in 1641. Six years later, Pateshall accounted to the local committee for taking the accounts of kingdom for his involvement, describing how he had collected £391 in two hundreds around Leominster, and had received an acquittance for the money paid in. In this narrative, Pateshall described how he had worked with Wallop Brabazon in his tax collecting, demonstrating how in the early 1640s he was content to be numbered with the nascent royalist group.22SP28/228, pt. 5, f. 1045. When civil war actually came, however, Pateshall was not named in the commission of array in 1642, or in any of the various commissions issued subsequently from the court at Oxford. As a resident in a parish near Leominster, he probably came within the sphere of influence of the Harley family of Brampton Bryan, and was a contemporary of Sir Robert Harley’s* in age. Sir Robert must have played an important part in securing the commission of the peace for Herefordshire that passed under the great seal in August 1644, and Pateshall’s was the very last name included. He was not of the quorum, however, suggesting that he was regarded as a tyro in the magistracy, and possibly that there remained some doubt as to his commitment to the parliamentary cause.23Brampton Bryan MS 27/4.

His elevation to the magistracy was a significant socially upward move for Pateshall, and appointments to the assessment and militia committees followed. He is said also to have been added to the county sequestration committee, but this seems improbable, as his name does not appear either in the published lists of local officials or the correspondence of the commissioners in London.24Webb, Memorials, ii. 408. He was active enough in February 1647 to demand the reduction of the parliamentarian military presence, however, and the subordination of the troops to the county committee.25Add. 70126, unbound, folder 2: petition from Hereford 4 Feb. 1647. In July 1649, his place in the commission of the peace was confirmed, however, so there is no doubt that he was willing to carry on acting in a public role after the execution of the king.26C231/6, p. 157. He was associated with the radicals John James* and John Herring* in his work as a militia commissioner. In March 1651, against a background of rising anxiety in the council of state about the threats from English royalists and the Scots, the militia was augmented and reconstructed, and fresh commissioners appointed. Pateshall and his colleagues reported to the council that in their county they found ‘a better and larger submission to Jesus Christ and the present government than formerly’ and went on to recommend to be added to their number five radicals, among them Wroth Rogers*, Stephen Winthrop* and the self-proclaimed enemy of the Scots, Miles Hill.27Bodl. Nalson VIII, f. 114; M. Hill, A True and Impartiall Account of the Plunderings, Losses and Sufferings of the County of Hereford (1650). The memory of the presence of the Scots army in Herefordshire in 1645, and the sufferings of the parishes that were their reluctant hosts, may account for the break by Pateshall with his former friends, the Presbyterian Harleys, who would not countenance the regicide. Later in 1651, after the emergency of the unsuccessful Scots incursion as near as Worcester, Pateshall was made sheriff.

As the Nominated Assembly of 1653 was intended as the instrument of millenarian hopes, Pateshall’s radical friends welcomed it. He himself may have been somewhat less enthusiastic. Of the nine who were either nominators or nominees of the militia commissioners in March 1651, four signed a millenarian-inspired address to Oliver Cromwell* in May 1653, expressing their thirst for a ‘great and long-desired reformation’.28Milton State Pprs. 92. Pateshall was not one of these, but must at least have been in sympathy with the new regime, in order to have been appointed a judge of cases of debt under an act of October 1653. He served again as bailiff of Leominster in 1653-4, after an interval of 20 years since his last occupation of that office.29Townsend, Leominster, 295. Many of the staunchest radicals were disgusted at the accession to power by Cromwell in December, but like John Herring and Benjamin Mason*, Pateshall did not see the protectorate as a unacceptable imposition. He was named as an ‘ejector’ of clergy under the new state church arrangements established by an ordinance of the protector and council in August 1654, another sign that he was not a religious radical. At the election for the first Parliament under the Instrument of Government, he was returned for the second of the four county seats, after John Scudamore of Kentchurch, but before John Flackett and Richard Reed.30C219/44/1. His position was an acknowledgment of the antiquity of his family.

When the Parliament met in September, a petition from the Herefordshire radicals, among them Benjamin Mason and Miles Hill, denounced the ‘malignants, prelatical or at the most neuters in the cause of Christ’ who had entered the House.31SP18/74/110. The name of ‘John Patchall’ is given in a list of signatories to the petition (a copy: the original has not survived) and this could be Pateshall. On the other hand, he was a magistrate still, but this name does not appear as one of the six justices who sponsored the petition, so there must remain a doubt. In any case, his own contribution to the Parliament was slight. He sat only on the committee for encouraging the export of grain and dairy produce (6 Oct.) and on 4 December was given leave to return home. He was by this time 76 years old, so may have been infirm.32CJ vii. 374b, 394b. Little is known of his life after he left London for Herefordshire. He was made a commissioner under Major-general James Berry* in the emergency of 1655-6, but is not known to have acted.33C115/67/5871. He remained in the commission of the peace until 1660, but when the king was restored there was no longer any room for him in the magistracy. Curiously, his third son, John, was baptised at Pudleston ‘on or about’ 30 October 1669, even though he had been born in the 1630s, suggesting possibly that Pateshall had been opposed to infant baptism before the civil war. He died intestate in 1670 and was buried in his native parish on 24 April, the minister recording him as the oldest resident of Pudleston.34Pudleston par. reg.; Herefs. RO, grant of administration, 9 May 1670. None of his descendants sat in later Parliaments.