WAKERINGE, Dionysius (1618-56), of Church Hall, Kelvedon, Essex.

The Wakeringes took their name from the village of Great Wakering close to the south-western tip of Essex. Ancestors of this MP can be identified as residents of that parish as early as the fourteenth century, and John Wakeringe, bishop of Norwich and keeper of the privy seal in the early fifteenth century, had been a member of the family.16Vis. Essex 1552, 1558, 1570, 1612 and 1634, i. 513-14, 613; Morant, Essex, i. 306. Their links with Kelvedon, a parish in the centre of the county, halfway between Chelmsford and Colchester, where they leased the manor of Church Hall from the bishops of London, seem to have dated from the time of Dionysius Wakeringe’s father, the barrister John Wakeringe.17Morant, Essex, ii. 150; B.L. Kentish, Kelvedon and its Antiquities (London and Chichester, 1974), 12. That most of their estates were leased indicates that they were not one of the wealthier Essex families. John Wakeringe may have relied on his legal practice for most of this income and, although the young Dionysius went up to Cambridge in 1633 as a fellow commoner, he was probably also expected to become a professional lawyer. The family’s standing within the county was considerably enhanced in 1641 when Dionysius married into the Everards of Much Waltham. Not only were the Everards important in their own right, but also, through his new mother-in-law, Wakeringe was linked to the extensive and powerful Barrington connection. His wife was a cousin once-removed to Oliver Cromwell*. In 1642 Parliament briefly made use of Wakeringe as an assessment commissioner and then as a commissioner to raise money and arms on the Propositions.18SR; LJ v. 203b. But it was only much later that he was named to local office on a regular basis. John Wakeringe died in 1646, apparently in debt, which was no doubt why Thomas Talcot and Edward Smith were able to buy the lands at Kelvedon in December 1647 in the sale by Parliament of the estates of the bishop of London. The £1,699 they paid for it was presumably beyond Wakeringe’s means.19PROB11/198/217; Bodl. Rawl. B.239, p. 4.

For some the king’s execution in 1649 was a reason to withdraw from local administration. For Wakeringe, in contrast, it was a chance to emerge as a major county figure. He quickly became one of the most active local officials in Essex. By early 1650 he had been added to the Essex bench; in August 1650 the council of state added him to the militia commission; and three months later he was included by Parliament on the assessment commission.20C193/13/3, f. 25; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 268; 1651, p. 366; A.and O. The surviving order book reveals that thereafter he was almost always present at the quarter session meetings held at Chelmsford and that he undertook much of the day-to-day administration of local justice in the area around Kelvedon.21Essex QSOB ed. Allen, 1-104. It was no doubt as someone who could be relied upon to perform the duties that he was one of the seven Essex judge for poor prisoners appointed in October 1653. He probably also relished the chance to serve on the 1654 commission for scandalous ministers.22A. and O. His friendship with Ralph Josselin, the vicar of Earls Colne, is consistent with the notion that he was one of the godly and Josselin had doubtless assumed that Wakeringe would take his advice seriously when, during a visit to him at Kelvedon in August 1651, he had warned him ‘to stand up for the name and gospel of Christ’.23Josselin, Diary, 175, 241, 330. This reputation for religious and administrative enthusiasm does much to explain Wakeringe’s election as an MP in 1654.

No Wakeringe had ever before been elected to Parliament and, without his recent labours at a county level, it is unlikely that Wakeringe’s candidacy in 1654 would have been taken seriously. The support of his father-in-law, who was elected for one of the other county seats, no doubt helped. In any case, with 12 seats available (not counting those at Colchester and Maldon), getting elected as an MP in Essex was easier than it had ever been before. Wakeringe’s three committee appointments during the course of his first Parliament was a respectable number for a novice MP. Quite why he had an interest in the trade in fish oil – he was added to the committee on the corn supplies when that item of business was referred to it (12 Oct. 1654) – is not clear, but his other committee appointments do seem to have been in character. His knowledge of local administration probably gave him an interest in the proposals for making the offices of sheriff and under-sheriff less burdensome (4 Dec.), while a godly reputation would be enough to explain his appointment to the important committee which was given the task of defining what offences should be included within the term ‘damnable heresies’ (12 Dec.).24CJ vii. 375b, 394b, 399b.

During the 20 months between the 1654 and 1656 Parliaments Wakeringe’s workload as a magistrate continued to increase. He began being appointed to the commissions of gaol delivery for Colchester from February 1655 and later that year he was one of those to whom the council of state referred the business which had arisen concerning the Colchester corporation.25C181/6, pp. 82, 104, 150; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 354. In July 1655 he had the Quaker James Parnell arrested and imprisoned in Colchester Castle. Parnell died in custody the following year.26J. Parnell, The Fruits of the Fast (1655), sig. [A4v], B2v, [B3v], C2 (E.854.14); The Lambs Defence against Lyes (1656), 3, 6, 17 (E.881.1); The First Publishers of Truth, ed. N. Penney (1907), 92. In the wake of the appointment of the Essex commission to secure the peace of the commonwealth, the local major-general, Hezekiah Haynes*, singled out Wakeringe, Everard and Sir Thomas Honywood* as being ‘exceedingly satisfied in the justness of the action, and most forward in it’.27TSP iv. 317, 320. Wakeringe was as useful a local agent as the protectoral regime could have hoped to find.

Eight of the men who had sat for Essex in the 1654 Parliament were re-elected for those same seats in 1656, including Wakeringe. During the first four weeks of that Parliament all that is known of Wakeringe is that he voted on 22 September with those who wanted the excluded MPs admitted to the House.28Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 166. But in three weeks from the middle of October, Wakeringe was named to nine committees. His interest in the work of under-sheriffs, evident in 1654, resurfaced on 13 October. His nomination to the committee to investigate how the sales of bishops’ lands had been conducted is explained by his direct personal interest (17 Oct.). Of the other committees on which he was included, the most significant was that to consider the allegations against James Naylor (31 Oct.). It is unlikely that he had much sympathy for Naylor’s plight. His appointment to the committee on the abolition of the court of wards on 29 October was followed three days later by that to the committee on the related proposal to abolish purveyance.29CJ vii. 447a, 449b.

Wakeringe did not live to see the end of the session. Josselin heard on 24 November 1656 that he had fallen ill with smallpox and four days later it was confirmed that he had died. Josselin paid tribute to him as ‘a great man of our county and friend to the ministers’ right’.30Josselin, Diary, 385. A record of local Quaker traditions compiled in 1709 would claim that Wakeringe, ‘was taken with the smallpox, his tongue being very much swelled in his head, saying “Oh! this Parnell. Oh! that I had never meddled with this Parnell”, and so died’.31Penney, First Publishers of Truth, 97.

The news of Wakeringe’s death had filtered through to Westminster by 11 December when Thomas Burton* was told by John Disbrowe* and Robert West*. According to Burton, Wakeringe had been ‘well in the House but a little before’.32Burton’s Diary, i. 107. That it should have been Disbrowe who told Burton is interesting, as a later and unsubstantiated tradition would claim that the Anne Everard who married Disbrowe in 1658 was Wakeringe’s widow.33W. Betham, The Baronetage of Eng. (1801-5), iii. 239n. The two of them were in fact already distantly related, as the mother of Wakeringe’s widow had been a cousin of Disbrowe’s first wife. The Wakeringes’ only child, Mary, certainly made a well-connected marriage to Francis St John*, the eldest son of the lord chief justice, Oliver St John*. They too were already related, being second cousins through their mothers. All this seems to reflect pre-existing friendships between the Wakeringes and the Disbrowes and St Johns. The death of Wakeringe marked the end of the senior male line of his family. The lease on the lands at Kelvedon therefore passed, via his daughter, to the St Johns.34Morant, Essex, ii. 150.