LEACH, Nicholas (1621-c.1648), of Stoke Climsland, Cornw.

Nicholas Leach was a member of a minor gentry family from the parish of Stoke Climsland on the eastern edge of Cornwall, bordering the River Tamar. The Leaches may have been related to the more prosperous Leach family of Cadleigh in Devon, but this connection is tenuous. In any case, the Cornish Leaches confined themselves to their immediate neighbourhood and Nicholas’s father, also Nicholas, married a daughter of Edward Herle of Prideaux, a family that also held land in Stoke Climsland.4Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 220; Parl. Surv. Duchy Cornw. i. 32. Father and son took the Protestation in the same parish in 1641.5Cornw. Protestation Returns, 258. In May 1642 Nicholas Leach senior signed (and probably promoted) the Cornish petition to the House of Commons, praising Parliament’s actions and calling for the abolition of ‘ceremonies’ and the Prayer Book, urgent relief for Ireland, and the removal of evil councillors, as well as the advancement of local measures for the regulation of the stannaries and the defence of the Cornish coasts.6‘Cornish Petition’, Bonham’s Sale, London 23 Mar. 2010, Lot 46. By October 1644 the family lands had been sequestered, yielding £60 a year towards the royalist war effort.7Cornw. RO, B/35/229.

Nicholas Leach, who had matriculated from Exeter College, Oxford in October 1638 at the age of 17, inherited the estate on the death of his father in or before 1646.8Al. Ox.; Devon Wills Index, xx. He may have owed his election as recruiter MP for Newport in May 1647 to his cousin, Edward Herle*, who was sheriff of Cornwall at the time and well connected with Presbyterians like Thomas Gewen* and Nicholas Trefusis*. Nothing is known of Leach’s activity in Parliament, however, and although he was named to the assessment commission for Cornwall issued on 23 June 1647, there is no indication that he was involved in the local administration.9A. and O. Leach was absent at the call of the House on 9 October 1647, perhaps owing to illness, and he probably died early in the new year of 1648. On 1 March the Commons ordered that a new writ for Newport be issued, as both Leach and his fellow recruiter, Sir Philip Percivalle*, were dead.10CJ v. 330a, 475a. Leach probably died unmarried, and the family lands passed to his younger brother, Walter, who was admitted to Exeter College in April 1647 and entered the Middle Temple in November 1648, being bound with his cousin, Thomas Herle.11Al. Ox.; MTR ii. 970. After the Restoration, Walter Leach continued to reside in Stoke Climsland, being taxed on a house of ten hearths in the parish, and paying £2 to the ‘free and voluntary present’ in 1661.12Cornw. Hearth Tax, 10, 253. Nothing more is known of the family.