GUISE, Christopher (1618-70), of Elmore and Brockworth, Glos.

The principal seat of the Guise family, Elmore, six miles south west of Gloucester, had been in their possession since the thirteenth century. In his own autobiographical account, Christopher Guise expressed some reservations about the veracity of the generally accepted claim that the Guises were originally French in origin. The deeds in his own muniment room confirmed to him, however, the details of how Elmore had descended since Anselm Guise (d. 1295), and also recorded how the family’s second manor, Brockworth, had been acquired by them in an exchange with the crown at the dissolution of the monasteries.21Mems. of Guise, 106-7. The dominant figure in the family straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was Sir William Guise, ‘bred only to a country life, and taught all the principles of good husbandry’.22Mems. of Guise, 110. Sir William, Christopher Guise’s grandfather, ‘did every Sunday dance at the church house at Elmore’ and stories were told of his exploits in a tavern brawl, and in organising gaol-breaking for a relative.23Mems. of Guise, 110. He was, it seems, in his young manhood untouched by the puritanism that later became prevalent in the Vale of Gloucestershire.

Sir William was still head of the family when Christopher was born, and continued to dominate Elmore. By the time Christopher was a child, Sir William had followed the local pattern and had become a patron of puritans, ‘a great follower and favourer of silent ministers and nonconformists, with abundance of zeal in himself and very profound hypocrisy in most of his’. The repressive religious climate compounded internal family tensions, and poisoned the atmosphere at Elmore. Christopher was removed to Brockworth by his mother, and he attributed his lifelong tendency to melancholy to the stresses in his upbringing at Elmore.24Mems. of Guise, 113. Sir William lived until 1642, and Christopher blamed his own father, William, for not standing up to the old man’s ‘passionate fiery humour’ and ‘morosity’, which was only fuelled still further by the ‘wildness and debaucheries’ of his children.25Mems. of Guise, 115, 120, 121. Christopher himself seems to have escaped from this dysfunctional family through his being sent away to school and subsequently to Oxford (although he does not appear in the alumni records).26Mems. of Guise, 115, 116-7, 118-9. He seems to have been no great scholar, but he later came to appreciate the value of being treated no differently from the sons of tradesmen and others at school, a consequence of his removal from his immediate home environment.27Mems. of Guise, 115. Another escape was hunting, which he describes as ‘a waking trance or pleasing dream’, which might serve as a commentary on his own period of adolescence, which he spent in drinking, and in uncompleted studies at university and inn of court.28Mems. of Guise, 116-9. At the age of 23, and without telling his father, he embarked alone on a disguised tour of England; his own later view of this initiative was that he had thus ‘wasted a winter’.29Mems. of Guise, 122.

The death of Guise’s grandfather coincided with the outbreak of the civil war, and Christopher’s response to these momentous public events was to lie low in London, in order to avoid becoming caught up in them. He managed to raise sufficient money there on the security of his own small property, to be able to return to Gloucestershire in 1644. He found that his father had left Elmore for Wales, as a result of a quarrel between himself and the military rulers of Gloucester: a dispute that lay in pre-war conflicts between branches of the Guise family, one of whom had been town clerk in that city. At the instigation of the Gloucester committee, William Guise was assessed at £1,000 by the Committee for Advance of Money*, and only escaped imprisonment by one vote.30Mems. of Guise, 124-6, CCC 86; CCAM 50, 622, 831. Christopher undertook to manage his father’s appeal to Parliament, and despite many obstacles, not the least of which was the defaulting of the parties from whom he had borrowed funds to travel, succeeded in lifting the sequestration. He was justifiably proud of his ‘maiden negotiation in public’.31Mems. of Guise, 126.

For the rest of the 1640s, Christopher Guise’s life was spent in the private sphere. He had been very briefly married in 1642, but in 1647 took another wife, the daughter of a London merchant of Flemish extraction.32Misc. Gen et Her. ser. 5, i. 19; Mems. of Guise, 128. After an unsettled period of travel between London and various family homes, Christopher and Rachel Guise left their house in London, pawned their silver, buried their money, and lived with her family in Essex.33Mems. of Guise, 129. The leaves of Guise’s autobiographical manuscript that relate to the period when he entered public life were later torn out. We know, however, that his father was again subject to scrutiny by the committees for penal taxation, even when he was sheriff of the county, in 1648; and that in November 1650 Christopher Guise himself had to face unfounded accusations that he had been an active royalist during the first civil war.34CCAM 622, 831, 1278; CCC 512. Both father and son extricated themselves from these difficulties, without prosecution. Christopher entered public life in 1652, becoming a magistrate on the county bench in 1652, suffering removal at some point before October 1653, and gaining re-admission to the magistracy under the protectorate. In the expanded county representation in Parliament established in the Instrument of Government, Guise found himself one of Gloucestershire's five MPs. He reports himself popular in the ‘country’ during the campaigns before the 1656 election, and it is likely that he was elected in 1654 on his own interest as the head, newly come into his inheritance, of an ancient county family.35Mems. of Guise, 129-30.

Guise sat on eight committees during the 1654 Parliament, including those to revise the legislation of the Nominated Assembly in the field of marriage, and to review the ordinance to establish ‘triers and ejectors’ of ministers.36CJ vii. 368a, 370a. Guise never sat on the Gloucestershire committee appointed under this ordinance, after it was passed in August 1654. In this Parliament, he was also named to the committee to consider the size of the military establishment (26 Sept. 1654) and the committee for privileges, to which Guise was added (5 Oct.).37CJ vii. 370b, 373b. He was appointed to the committee to consider petitions from Sir John Stawell* and the purchasers of his estate because the case had a Gloucestershire dimension: a son of Stawell’s was the son-in-law of Nathaniel Stephens*.38CJ vii. 381a; Vis. Glos. 1682-3, 175. His involvement in the committee on financial needs of the armed forces led to further nominations for committees on improving public accounts and how to satisfy those owed money on the ‘public faith’.39CJ vii. 387b, 419a. Guise was a teller in two divisions in this Parliament. On 31 October he was paired with the Cromwellian, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*), when they told for the yeas in a division on prohibiting butter exports when the price rose above 6d. a pound: they won the division by thirty votes.40CJ vii. 380a. On 22 November, Guise was a teller for the noes on a motion that candles should be brought in, to allow further discussion of the proposition that no laws should be altered or taxes imposed except by consent in Parliament. Guise’s side won the division, by 85 votes to 47. His involvement in these divisions has persuaded the editor of Guise’s autobiography of his support for the Cromwellian government.41Mems. of Guise, 88. The evidence seems to point the other way, however. Broghill was certainly supportive of the protectorate, but trade policy was not a factional issue. By contrast, the debate on 22 November was part of the Presbyterian-backed move to replace the Instrument with a new Government Bill, giving more power to Parliament, and Guise’s involvement suggests he had sympathies with this plan. This is also suggested by Guise’s pairing as teller with Colonel John Birch, a leading Presbyterian.42infra, ‘John Birch’. It may also be significant that Guise’s last committee, in January 1655, was intended to scrutinise the government’s debts and on the cost of the army.43CJ vii. 419a.

Despite keeping company with opponents of the regime during the first protectorate Parliament, in 1655-6 Guise was among the commissioners working under the direction of Major-general John Disbrowe*, and seems at least initially to have undertaken this role without any particular reluctance.44Glos. RO, Smyth of Nibley vol. III, f. 71; TSP iv. 354. Leaves torn out of his autobiographical sketch make it difficult to be certain about the conflict which arose between him and his associates, but it seems that he grew increasingly unwilling to help his military colleagues, and was suspected of shielding royalist friends facing decimation.45C. Durston, Cromwell’s Major Generals (Manchester, 2001), 66, 192. When the campaigns in elections to the second protectorate Parliament were under way in July and August 1656, the important figures in the Gloucestershire militia, presumably William Neast* and John Croft*, prevailed on Disbrowe to impede the election of Guise and other candidates standing for the ‘country’ interest. Guise wanted to follow Disbrowe to the Forest of Dean and remonstrate with him, but feared the consequences, and also in the event did not lend support to the complaint to Parliament by Robert Atkyns* and Thomas Overbury about the election.46Mems. of Guise, 129-30; Glos. RO, D/2768/1/1.

This proved to be the end of Guise’s public activities, although he continued to be named to various commissions. He spent much time in the restorative environment of Bath and in repairing the house at Brockworth. Various troubles afflicted him: his wife’s health declined, and the unexpected death of her brother so affected her that she allowed her child to suffer serious burns on the family hearth. After visiting physicians in London and taking waters at Tunbridge Wells, in the spring of 1658, and after various alarms caused by her worsening condition and by law suits, Guise brought his wife finally to London, where she died in March 1659. Guise’s own health collapsed soon after, and ‘he fell into a dead palsy on one side, which much impaired his understanding, which he never recovered to any tolerable degree’.47Mems. of Guise, 132. In his final years he fell prey to the machinations of a former mistress and her relatives, who installed themselves at Brockworth, and persuaded him to grant away various pieces of his estate. Guise died probably at Brockworth, and was buried there on 24 October 1670.48Mems. of Guise, 133.