WESTON, Benjamin (1614-73), of Ashley House, Walton-on-Thames, Surr.

Weston was a younger son of the 1st earl of Portland, one of the most prominent Catholic ministers at the court of Charles I, who served as lord treasurer from 1628. Benjamin does not appear to have been educated at either university or inn of court, but during the early 1630s he accompanied his eldest brother, Jerome Weston†, a gentleman of the privy chamber, on the latter’s embassy to Paris, Florence, Venice and Turin.31CSP Dom. 1631-3, p. 383. He then spent time with his brother-in-law Basil Feilding, Lord Feilding, ambassador extraordinary to Venice from 1634.32CSP Ven. 1632-6, pp. 286, 340, 350-1; Warws. RO, CR2017/C116/1-2. Weston arrived back in London on 1 November 1635, following the death of his father, in whose will he received a modest annuity of £300.33CSP Ven. 1632-6, p. 472; Strafforde Letters, i. 389.

Despite his long sojourn(s) abroad, connections had been established for him at home: in August 1634, for example, he was recorded with his brothers and his brother-in-law Feilding as a burgess of Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight.34Add. 5669, f. 97v. In May 1637 he obtained with his brother Jerome, now 2nd earl of Portland, a potentially lucrative licence to export woollen cloths.35CTB i. 607; 1672-5, p. 597. On his marriage in 1641 to Elizabeth, widow of Charles Villiers, 1st earl of Anglesey (d. 1630), and sister-in-law of the 1st duke of Buckingham, Weston acquired a substantial estate at Ashley Park, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, which gave him a long-term stake in the county.36Manning and Bray, Surr. ii. 767.

In February 1641 Weston was returned to Parliament for Dover, as a replacement for the recently deceased Sir Peter Heyman*. He had no proprietorial influence in the town, and may have owed his election to his sister-in-law’s brother, James Stuart, 1st duke of Richmond, lord warden of the Cinque Ports. For the next two and a half years there is scant evidence of his presence in the Commons. In April, like his elder brother Nicholas Weston*, he was recorded as having opposed the act to attaint the lord deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford.37Harl. 165, f. 85; Verney, Notes, 58. On 3 May he took the Protestation, but then disappeared from the Journal for months, although on 18 December he tabled a motion against levying the star chamber fine imposed on Michael Sparkes, the puritan printer associated with William Prynne* – a sign of dissent from at least one oppressive policy of the personal rule.38CJ ii. 133b ; D’Ewes (C), 309.

Weston’s continued lack of visible engagement with the work of the House was against a backdrop of suspicion regarding his family’s association with the court and with Rome. In November 1641 the Lords, citing a solemn commitment to Protestantism made by Weston’s brother Jerome, 2nd earl of Portland, blocked the Commons’ move to deprive him of the government of the Isle of Wight. But in August 1642 the Houses were united in finding the earl, a commissioner of array for Hampshire, and Nicholas Weston complicit in an attempt to seize Portsmouth for the king. Portland was sent to the Tower and on 16 August his brother Nicholas was disabled from sitting in the Commons.39Northants. RO, FH133, unfol.; ‘Jerome Weston’, Oxford DNB; CJ ii. 720a, 722b-723a. On 7 September Benjamin Weston took the covenant to support Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as Parliament’s commander-in-chief, but then disappeared from view.40CJ ii. 755b.

In June 1643, with Portland released but under suspicion of involvement in the plot of Edmund Waller* and Nicholas living in retirement, the Commons ordered an investigation into whether Benjamin Weston might contribute financially to the parliamentarian cause.41CJ iii. 146a. Ordered three months later to account for his absence to the committee for sequestering estates of those who had neglected to serve in Parliament, he apparently provided convincing proof of his fidelity (in the face of Portland’s defection to Oxford), and on 10 October was permitted to take his seat.42CJ iii. 256b, 271b. He took the Solemn League and Covenant on the 19th, but then proved little more visible in the House than he had been previously.43CJ iii. 281b; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 480.

Discussion of the proposals of regional commander Sir William Waller* for Farnham Castle provided the context for Weston’s first nomination on 21 September 1644, when he was added to the committee for the southern associated counties.44CJ iii. 635a. Four weeks later he was placed on a committee to investigate petitioning about the castle, located some 24 miles from his Surrey home (18 Oct.).45CJ iii. 669b. In the meantime he was among Members nominated to consider the Irish Adventurers’ petition (27 Sept.).46CJ iii. 640b. Thereafter, however, his attendance is indicated solely by the award and subsequent payment of the weekly allowance.47CJ iv. 161a; SC6/Chas. 1/1662 m. 10r; SC6/Chas. 1/1663 m. 8r-d; SC6/Chas. 1/1664 m. 15d; SC6/Chas. 1/1664 m. 15r.

Weston appears to have been preoccupied by preservation of the family patrimony, both as executor to his mother in April 1645 and, in the autumn, as rescuer of portions of his brother’s sequestered estates in Lincolnshire; leave to go into the country granted on 7 November was probably for this purpose.48PROB11/193/16; SP20/1, pp. 985, 1040; CJ iv. 335a. He was also involved in settling the estates of his step-daughter’s husband, Thomas Savile†, recently created by the king 1st earl of Sussex.49CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 462-3; PA, Main Pprs. 5 Mar. 1668. On 11 February 1646 Weston was permitted to visit this former royalist in the Tower, where he had been imprisoned following his accusations against Denzil Holles* and Bulstrode Whitelocke*.50CJ iv. 436b. On the 20th Weston carried to the Lords votes of the Commons concerning Savile.51CJ iv. 448a. Following the latter’s release and request to compound, Weston secured another leave of absence in August.52CJ iv. 648a. In the next 12 months he reappeared in the Journal only as the submitter of a petition which was referred to the Committee for Revenue (19 Nov.).53CJ iv. 725a.

Despite his apparent lukewarm attitude to Parliament during the early 1640s, by summer 1647 Weston sided with the Independents – among those won over, according to Presbyterian leader Holles, by financial favours, but possibly also influenced by a hostility to the Scots stemming from a desire to protect Savile’s estates in the north, and perhaps even expressly deputed by his family to represent them within the government. 54‘Memoirs of Denzil Lord Holles’, in F. Maseres, Select Tracts (1815), 269. In the wake of the forcing of the Houses by a Presbyterian mob on 26 July, Weston signed the declaration of those Members who had taken refuge with the army (4 Aug.).55LJ ix. 385b. He returned to Westminster following the overthrow of the coup, and on 6 August was among MPs named to investigate the threat to Parliament posed by supporters of Presbyterianism in London.56CJ v. 269a. His apparent reward came on 14 September, when he was chosen to prepare the ordinance for removing the sequestration of the earl of Portland.57CJ v. 300b. Additionally, in January 1648 he obtained an order for payment of a £1,000 annuity owing to his wife.58SC6/Chas. 1/1665 m. 17r.

Weston did not resurface in the Journal until March 1648, but his appointments to the committee for petitions (8 Mar.) and to work on the ordinance settling the jurisdiction of the court of admiralty indicate that there were those prepared to entrust him with significant power.59CJ v. 486a, 505b. That month he was added to the lay leaders of the Presbyterian classis for Kingston in Surrey, an appointment that marked him out from the rest of his family.60The Division of Surr. 5. As political tensions remounted, Weston was placed on the committee chasing the defaulters on Kentish musters.61CJ v. 538a. Yet he then disappeared again from view until some time after Pride’s Purge.

Weston was named as a commissioner for the king’s trial in January 1649, but attended neither the preliminary meetings in the Painted Chamber nor the trial itself.62Muddiman, Trial, 194. He did not take the dissent from the vote of 5 December 1648 until 2 February, three days after Charles’ execution, and was not visible in the Commons until 7 March 1649, when he was named to the committee to consider taking away kingship and the House of Lords.63PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 631-2; CJ vi. 158a. After a gap, in the early summer he was named to a handful of different committees, most notably the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs (20 July).64CJ vi. 219b, 251b, 265b, 266b. However, an unprecedented clutch of appearances in the Journal in September and October give the impression that he was still largely driven by issues of personal interest. One of two committee nominations was to consider pensions being paid by Parliament, of which he himself was a recipient (19 Sept.).65CJ vi. 296b, 298a; SC6/Chas. 1/1667 m. 14d; SC6/Chas. 1/1668 m. 10d. After several postponements, a bill concerning his 2,000 acres of Fenland was read on 19 October; debate was adjourned four days later and was then apparently buried, caused by or occasioning Weston’s disappearance from the record.66CJ vi. 299a, 300a, 309a, 310b, 311a.

Weston appeared in the Journal only twice in 1650 and in 1651, three times in 1652, and not at all in the final months of the Rump in 1653. Yet his contribution to proceedings was not inconsequential. Named in 1650 to committees dealing with the sale of royal property (14 Mar.) and the revenues from recusants’ lands (20 Nov.), on 9 January 1651 he was a teller with Henry Marten* in a vain attempt to prevent liability for forfeiture of delinquents’ estates being dated from 4 January 1643.67CJ vi. 382a, 499b, 522a. A year later (13 February 1652) he allied again with Marten in a division, this time successfully excluding from the act of oblivion a proviso benefiting Alderman John Fowke of London, but was in a minority when he was a teller with Sir John Trevor in an attempt to tie the authority of the act to that of the Rump (24 Feb.).68CJ vii. 88b, 96b.

While his inclusion on a committee discussing relief for the families of those killed in the service of Parliament suggests Weston was not without sympathy for sufferers on that side (2 May 1651), his underlying motivation once more appears to have been protection of the interests of recusants and delinquents he had taken under his wing.69CJ vi. 569b. In the first half of the 1650s – apart from other activity as a trustee for such people – he was engaged with the Committee for Compounding on behalf of and/or as a trustee for Edward Somerset, 2nd marquess of Worcester; Jane, dowager Viscountess Montagu; other Westons; his sister’s family, the Astons; and the family of Sir Richard Tichborne of Hampshire.70CCC 1710-11, 1877, 2171, 2532, 2544; W. Suss. RO, SAS-BA/100; SP23/129, pp. 753-5, 809; Lincs. RO, HOLYWELL/109/22a; SP23/251, f. 317. With Colonel James Temple*, he sought the release from sequestration of lands in Sussex belonging to his Catholic son-in-law, Sir Charles Shelley, on the ground that he had been too young to be counted as a papist.71CB; CCC 2171, 2370-1. Meanwhile, tellingly, he had made his last recorded appearance in the Rump on 24 November 1652, when he arrived in the House too late for a call of MPs.72CJ vii. 220a.

In May 1655 Weston obtained a pass to go to Flanders, but he had returned by 2 December when he was party to an indenture as a trustee for the county in a lease connected to the Surrey gaol.73CSP Dom. 1655, p. 585; 1655-6, p. 256; Surr. Hist. Centre, QS5/4/4/15, 16. Since he continued to be appointed to commissions of oyer and terminer between 1654 and 1658, it cannot be entirely excluded that he was also elected to the second protectorate Parliament, and was the ‘Mr Weston’ added on 20 March 1657 to the committee for the remonstrance to consider the best means of securing the nation against royalists.74CJ vii. 508b; C181/6, pp. 8, 12, 49, 59, 89, 114, 124, 137, 145, 167, 170, 211, 218, 234, 236, 274, 277, 305, 307. If so, however, his constituency does not appear, and the name may have been a mistake. In the meantime, on 7 February 1657 Weston petitioned unsuccessfully for the inclusion in the naturalization bill of four-year-old René de Sabran, plausibly a connection of the former French envoy to England, while in 1656 and 1657 he and his brother Portland were petitioning the protector and Parliament about the children of their sister Elizabeth, Lady Netterville, a case referred to the committee for Irish affairs in June 1657.75CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 629-31; CJ vii. 487a, 561a.

Weston has been regarded as having been returned for the Sussex constituency of Midhurst to the Parliament of 1659, although the lack of an indenture and the absence of his name from the records of the Parliament, make confirmation difficult.76OPH xxi. 256. His candidacy could have been advanced by the family of Francis Browne, 3rd Viscount Montagu. Initial reports suggested that its voters returned two other men, William Yalden* and John Humphrey, although there is (equally) no other evidence for Humphrey’s election.77Mercurius Politicus no. 550 (13-20 Jan. 1659), 176 (E.761.6).

On the other hand, Weston arrived promptly at Westminster when the Rump reassembled in May 1659. Named on 7 May to the committee to peruse the assembly’s previous record, he was then included on committees dealing with prisoners of conscience (10 May), giving audience to an envoy from Hamburg (14 June), and enhancing the state’s funds by borrowing from government office-holders (22 June).78CJ vii. 645a, 648a, 685a, 691a. Invisible in the Journal in July, on 10 August, at the height of royalist insurgencies Weston was twice a majority teller: once against adding additional men to the militia commission for Middlesex; once for reading in every parish of the proclamation against the plotter Sir George Boothe*.79CJ vii. 754b. Given his personal connections, his motivation is obscure.

As tension mounted between Parliament and the army, two days later Weston was granted leave to go to Yorkshire on unspecified business.80CJ vii. 757a. He had returned to the House by 7 October, when he was named to a committee to give an audience to Giovanni Salvetti, ambassador from the duke of Tuscany.81CJ vii. 793b. Proceedings of the House were ‘interrupted’ on the 13th, but there is no evidence that Weston returned with other Members at the end of December. Following the re-admission of the secluded Members, it is not clear whether it was this Weston or Henry Weston*, MP for Guildford, who on 27 February 1660 was added to the committee preparing a bill settling Hampton Court on General George Monck*.82CJ vii. 855a.

Weston did not sit in Parliament after the Restoration, choosing instead to concentrate on rebuilding the fortunes of his family. This process was aided in May 1661 by the renewal of the patent to transport woollen cloths.83CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 605. Weston continued to be appointed to local commissions.84SR; C231/7, p. 367; C181/7, pp. 7, 103, 131, 156, 186, 203, 233, 270, 311, 324, 342, 359, 383, 399, 425, 443-4, 478, 493-4, 528-9. He was living in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, when he died, intestate, in May or June 1673, when administration of the estate was granted. Weston left no male heir.85PROB12/50, f. 40.