BECKE, Gabriel (1602-65), of Great Chapel Street, St Margaret’s, Westminster

Becke was descended from a family that had settled at Stanway, Gloucestershire, in the 1560s, when his grandfather, James Beck, had been appointed vicar of the parish.32‘James Beck (CCEd Person ID 145852-3)’, Clergy of the C of E Database. James’s son Job – Becke’s father – had graduated MA from Oxford in 1589, and had become the incumbent of Stanway in place of his father, who would serve out his long clerical career as rector of nearby Bourton-on-the-Hill.33Al. Ox.; VCH Glos. vi. 230; Glos. RO, Gloucester wills 1622/82 (Will of James Becke); ‘Job Beck (CCEd Person ID 129949)’, Clergy of the C of E Database. Job Beck can probably be ranked alongside Gloucestershire’s minor gentry. He owned property across several Cotswold parishes, and was sufficiently affluent to charge his estate with legacies of over £300.34C142/384/115; Glos. RO, Gloucester wills 1619/114; D1375/23. He was also on familiar terms with Stanway’s most prominent parishioner, the Gloucestershire squire Paul Tracy (son of the Protestant reformer Richard Tracy), and with the Buckinghamshire gentleman, John Temple of Stowe.35Glos RO, D1375/22; Oxford DNB, ‘Richard Tracy’. It was probably through the Temples that the Becks became linked with one of the region’s foremost aristocratic families, the Fiennes, Barons Saye and Sele of Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire (the parliamentarian grandee William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sale married one of John Temple’s daughters). In 1643, Saye’s younger son John Fiennes* would refer to Gabriel as his ‘cousin’, although precisely how the two families were related – if, indeed, they were – remains obscure.36Bodl. Clarendon 22, f. 80; Oxon. RO, Baldon pprs., Wi/I/ii/31, 33, 36. The earliest known occasion definitely linking Becke with the Fiennes family is May 1641, when he acted as a manucaptor (surety) for John Fiennes’s younger brother Richard upon his admission to Lincoln’s Inn. But Becke’s first patron – one of his manucaptors when he himself had been admitted to the Inn in 1632 – seems to have been a fellow Gloucestershire man, Richard Bernard of Great Rissington (who was involved in property transactions with the Fienneses by 1641 at the latest).37L. Inn Lib. Adm. Reg. 6, f. 61v; Adm. Reg. 7, f. 20v; C54/3226/7-8; J. Peacey, ‘Led by the hand: manucaptors and patronage at Lincoln’s Inn in the seventeenth century’, Jnl. Of Legal Hist. xviii. 39. In his will of 1644, Bernard would bequeath to Becke the £200 he had invested as an Irish Adventurer, and would make Becke one of his executors.38PROB11/200, f. 263. It would appear that Becke had effectively borrowed this £200 from Bernard, for he would refer to it as part of his half of the £600 that he and Buckinghamshire MP Sir William Drake had invested as Irish Adventurers in the spring of 1642.39Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 176, 180; CSP Ire. Adv. 1642-59, pp. 300, 310.

By June 1643, at the latest, Becke was acting as a man-of-business to the Fiennes family, in particular for John Fiennes and his brother, Nathaniel I*, the parliamentary governor of Bristol. In that month, John Fiennes wrote to his brother explaining the steps that he and his father, Viscount Saye, had taken in Parliament and with the officers of the ordnance to see that Nathaniel’s interests were properly served. Measures had been taken to provide him with powder, ammunition and cannon, and to see that orders were made in Parliament to secure Nathaniel’s appointment to the county committees of Gloucestershire and Somerset (the two counties closest to the Bristol garrison). All this required careful coordination: clerks needed to be seen, orders drafted, MPs squared. So John Fiennes turned to Becke. ‘I have spoken to my cousin Becke to follow businesses for you here’, he assured his brother on 13 June, ‘for unless somebody do follow it, nothing will be done’. Nathaniel’s letters to Becke were to be directed to a house just off Chancery Lane (where Becke was presumably lodging at this time), an address conveniently close to Arundel House, the London residence of Saye and his sons.40Bodl. Clarendon 22, f. 80. By September 1643, he had found employment as part of the administrative staff of the Committee for Advance of Money* (CAM). That month, he was appointed to a five-man sub-committee at Haberdashers’ Hall, set up to keep tabs on what sums remained uncollected on the various assessment ordinances subject to the committee’s jurisdiction. The sub-committee, which was salaried, was to meet weekly and report its deliberations to the main committee.41CCAM 26. Here, Becke would have had an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the CAM’s leading members, of whom Saye was the most senior both in rank and political experience.42Supra, ‘Committee for Advance of Money’. Further places in the parliamentarian financial administration followed. Under the terms of the assessment ordinance of 18 October 1644 to raise funds for the parliamentarian forces in Ireland, Becke was to act as clerk-register to keep a record of all acquittances granted by the treasurers at Grocers’ Hall (where monies for the Irish campaign were to be paid in).43A. and O. i. 550; CTB, i. 202. He retained this role when the assessment ordinance was renewed in 1645 and again in 1646.44LJ viii. 205a-b. His rise in the parliamentarian administration continued in the summer of 1645, when, as a result of legislation introduced in the Lords, he was appointed clerk to the court of wards – almost certainly through the patronage of Saye, who was master of the court.45LJ vii. 385a, 402b, 417a. Becke was installed in this lucrative office in place of Miles Corbett*, who had been obliged to relinquish it by the provisions of the self-denying ordinance.

Meanwhile, despite his expanding list of appointments, he continued his work for the CAM at Haberdashers’ Hall. Early in 1646, as relations deteriorated between London’s Presbyterian-dominated corporation and the parliamentary Independents, the CAM instructed Becke to conduct an audit of the City chamberlains’ books, with a view to seeing how much remained in municipal coffers.46CCAM 40. The timing of the order – when the corporation was forging a powerful alliance with the Scots commissioners and the Presbyterian grandees at Westminster – and the scope of Becke’s enquiry suggest that the aim was not merely to conduct a routine survey of municipal finances, but also to hunt out evidence of possible malfeasance that could be used to embarrass the City government. His alignment with the Independent interest at Westminster – of which both Saye and Nathaniel Fiennes I were prominent members – was demonstrated again with his appointment in June 1646 as counsel for the defence in the trial of the London radical John Lilburne before the House of Lords.47LJ viii. 391a. The previous summer, John Bradshawe* and Becke as his assistant had been assigned by the Commons to defend Lilburne before the London quarter sessions.48CJ iv. 239b. In 1646, Lilburne was charged with libel and scandalum magnatum in having accused the earls of Manchester and Stamford – both of whom were associated with the Presbyterian grouping in the Lords – with treason. And such was the factional acrimony in the Lords that he received backing from Saye’s close ally and fellow member of the CAM, Philip, 4th Baron Wharton. While it cannot be certain who in the Lords was responsible for nominating Becke as counsel for Lilburne, it was probably either Wharton or one of his Independent confederates.49J. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’, HJ xliii. 631-2, 634-5, 636, 637. This pattern of patronage was repeated early that August, when it was Saye, Nathaniel Fiennes I and other Independents on the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs* who secured Becke’s appointment as auditor of the Irish accounts – a politically sensitive post that he retained until at least June 1649.50Supra, ‘Irish Committees’; SP63/261, f. 187; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 486; CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 5, 6, 11-16, 27; CJ vi. 3a, CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 72, 201; J. Peacey, ‘Politics, accts. and propaganda in the Long Parliament’ in Parliament at Work ed. C. Kyle, J. Peacey, 75, 77. The Commons employed him regularly from late 1644 in its legal proceedings against both its royalist and radical opponents.51CJ iii. 653a; CJ v. 220b, 316b, 317a, 385b, 437b, 452a, 529a, 536a. In September 1647, for example, he was appointed solicitor in the House’s prosecution of the radical pamphleteer John Musgrave, whose publications had exposed the machinations of Lord Wharton and other Independent grandees in their dealings with the Scots in northern England.52CJ v. 316b; D. Scott, ‘The Barwis affair: political allegiance and the Scots during the British civil wars’, EHR cxv. 843-63. Becke assumed even greater importance within the ranks of the Independent interest at Westminster with his appointment as a solicitor to John Bradshawe, Philip Jermyn and William Steele* – the three lawyers selected by the Commons on 1 February 1648 to prosecute the ringleaders of the Presbyterian counter-revolution in London in July-August 1647.53CJ v. 452a. This trial was to be before the court of king’s bench, and it is possible that Becke’s belated call to the bar – on 12 February 1648 at Lincoln’s Inn – was in recognition of the elevated position he now occupied amongst the parliamentary counsel.54LI Black Bks. ii. 377.

But Becke was first and foremost an administrator, and a lawyer only second, although he evidently possessed chambers at Lincoln’s Inn by the mid-1640s.55CJ iii. 644b, 653b; iv. 169b; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 544. His circle at the inn was an extensive one, and included a number of members of the society with influential political connections. Thus he was on friendly terms with Parliament’s foremost polemicist – and Saye’s nephew by marriage – the Lincoln’s Inn barrister Henry Parker. When, in 1646, Parker published the confession of one of the leaders of the Irish rebellion, he did so using a text ‘in Master Becke’s hands of Lincoln’s Inn’.56Peacey, ‘Led by the hand’, 38, 44. Becke was also a trustee for another Lincoln’s Inn man, the political Independent and future Rumper Nicholas Love.57Lincoln’s Inn, Admiss. Bk. 7, f. 41v; C 54/3368/29; Peacey, ‘Led by the hand’, 39. Further light on his network at the inn is shed by the occasions on which he acted as manucaptor to students seeking admission to the society. His fellow manucaptor to Richard Fiennes in 1641 was William Randoll, who was related by marriage to Saye’s friends the Knightleys of Fawsley and, through them, to John Hampden*. And in May 1646, Becke stood as manucaptor to a son of the MP and future regicide James Temple, who was Saye’s nephew and Parker’s cousin.58Infra, ‘James Temple’; Peacey, ‘Led by the hand’, 38, 39. Becke’s emergence as one of the inn’s and the Commons’ leading men-of-business helped to establish him more securely among the ranks of the ‘professional’ gentry. By May 1647 he had been granted (or had assumed) a coat of arms and was being described in legal documents as ‘esquire, of Lincoln’s Inn’. The arms he used on his seal – those of the distinguished thirteenth-century Lincolnshire family of Bek, barons of Eresby – announced his (almost certainly spurious) claim to an ancient and exalted lineage.59Oxon. RO, Baldon pprs. Wi/I/ii/27, 31, 33. His marriage in November 1648 to a daughter of the wealthy Hampshire parliamentarian squire Samuel Dunch* was another sign of his rising social status. It also offers one of the few insights as to his religious sympathies, for the Dunch family had a well-earned reputation for godliness.60Infra, ‘Samuel Dunch’; St Dunstan-in-the-West, London par. reg.; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry, 14-15, 86-7; The Puritan Gentry Besieged 1650-1700, 48. Becke himself was sufficiently affluent by the later 1640s to have begun investing in landed property – notably the lease of an estate worth £500 a year that a Gloucestershire royalist had been obliged to mortgage to Becke and another gentleman for £4,335 towards payment of his composition fine.61CCC 1050; VCH Glos. xi. 91. In 1650, Becke purchased numerous fee farm rents in Berkshire and Gloucestershire worth over £200 a year.62SP28/288, ff. 6, 7, 8. And by late 1652, he seems to have acquired some kind of country seat at Minster Lovell, Oxfordshire.63Glos. RO, D678/1/F2/9-11. At some point in the mid-1650s – probably by June 1657, when he was named to the Westminster assessment commission – he bought or leased a house on Great Chapel Street, St Margaret’s, Westminster, which became his main residence.64A. and O. ii. 1074.

Whatever Becke’s attitude to Pride’s Purge and to the execution of the king, he took no recorded part in the work of the Commons after 1648. He seems to have given up his legal practice at Westminster well before 23 June 1653, when the governing body of Lincoln’s Inn ordered the seizure of his chambers ‘for the neglect of payment of [his] fortnight’s commons’.65LI Black Bks. ii. 399. He was named to successive assessment commissions for Oxfordshire under the Rump and the Nominated Parliament, having been appointed to the county bench in March 1647, and in August 1650 he was added to the county’s militia commission.66CSP Dom. 1650, p. 290. Following the establishment of the protectorate, Becke once again returned to service at Westminster. In May 1656, he was appointed solicitor to the protectoral council, with a salary of £200 a year; and in this capacity he was named to a conciliar committee (which he came to chair) set up in June to review and re-draft corporate charters in the interests of ‘religion and good government, and for the discouraging of vice’.67CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 312, 370; 1656-7, pp. 199, 208, 224, 234, 300, 308; 1657-8, pp. 142, 354; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 419; N.L. Matthews, William Sheppard, Cromwell’s Law Reformer, 35, 52–3, 62. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Major-General William Goffe* endorsed the efforts of Becke’s father-in-law Samuel Dunch to secure Becke’s return for the Oxfordshire borough of Abingdon. In the event, however, a rival candidate, Thomas Holt, was elected.68Supra, ‘Abingdon’; TSP v. 215. As solicitor to the council, Becke was among the senior protectoral officials who walked in Protector Oliver Cromwell’s* funeral procession in November 1658.69Burton’s Diary, ii. 524.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Becke was returned for the Hampshire borough of Andover. Described on the election indenture as ‘of the City of Westminster’, he owed his seat entirely to his connection with the Dunches.70C219/47, unfol. Samuel Dunch’s father-in-law had served as steward of Andover from 1599 to 1620, and Becke’s brother-in-law, John Dunch*, had been returned for the borough in 1654 (though he had opted to sit for Berkshire). Given that Protector Richard Cromwell was both high steward of Andover and John Dunch’s brother-in-law (he had married Dorothy Maijor, sister of Dunch’s wife, Ann), it is possible that court influence, too, had played a part in Becke’s election.71Supra, ‘Andover’. He may also have enjoyed a personal connection to the Cromwells as a result of his friendship with the former Gloucestershire royalist John Dutton*, who had himself been a close friend of Oliver Cromwell.72Infra, ‘John Dutton’; PROB11/265 f. 337v. It was a measure of how far Becke had risen in the world that the obscure lawyer from the Cotswolds was now not only a relatively wealthy man, but also linked by ties of family and affection to the ruling house of Cromwell. Despite his closeness to the regime, his involvement in the third protectoral Parliament was apparently slight. He received only one appointment in the House – to the committee of privileges, on 28 January – and made no recorded contribution to debate.73CJ vii. 594b. In light of his service to the parliamentarian cause during the 1640s, and his proximity to the protectoral government during the 1650s, he is unlikely to have welcomed the return of Charles II. The Restoration would mark the end of his public career, and by late 1660 he had been omitted from all local commissions. Despite a reference in a document of April 1662 to several plots of land in Westminster that were ‘the inheritance of Gabriel Beck’, there is good reason to believe that he died in 1665 and not 1662 as is generally supposed.74CSP Dom. 1661–2, p. 353; Oxford DNB, ‘Gabriel Beck’. For besides the fact that his house in Westminster was assessed by the hearth tax commissioners in 1664, the parish register for St Margaret’s records not only the baptism of a son of Gabriel and Ann Becke on 14 December 1662 (this was possibly their only child), but also the burial in the church itself on 9 February 1665 of ‘Gabriel Becke, esquire’.75London and Mdx. 1666 Hearth Tax ed. M. Davies et al., 1707; St Margaret, Westminster par. reg. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his family to sit in Parliament.