JAMES, John (1610-81), of Astley, Worcs. and Trippleton, Leintwardine, Herefs.

The family of John James had lived at Astley, a parish three miles south of Stourport-on-Severn, since at least the first half of the sixteenth century. The most distinguished forebear of John James was his great-great-grandfather, Hugh James, who had been a groom of the privy chamber to Henry VIII.20Vis. Worcs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. xc), 52. This courtly connection did not, however, elevate the family very far. When his baptism was recorded at Astley in 1610, John James’s father was described as ‘gent.’, and it is clear that the family was at that time of the standing of parish gentry only, despite the tendency of some historians to see the family as of county gentry status.21Astley par. reg.; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 232. Of greater consequence was the family of his mother, the Winfords. As a second son, John James could not inherit the patrimony of Astley, and his marriage to Jane Higgins brought with it the modest estate of Trippleton, in the parish of Leintwardine, on the borders of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Radnorshire near Ludlow.

A neighbouring family to John James at Trippleton was that of the Harleys of Brampton Bryan. Sir Robert Harley* appointed Thomas Doughty in 1622 and John Yates in 1638 to the living of Leintwardine, and it was probably under the influence of this succession of puritan ministers, and other eminent local clergy of similar persuasion for whom Harley was patron, that James developed his radical religious leanings.22J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads. The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 56. By December 1640 it is clear that James was a familiar face at Brampton Bryan, on close enough terms with the Harley family to drop in on the young Edward Harley* at Oxford, and to carry correspondence between him and his mother, Lady Brilliana.23Brilliana Harley Letters, 104, 106. As the political crisis deepened, James showed no signs of detaching himself from the Harley interest, but while James was looked upon as a friend by the Harleys, there is no evidence that he took any active role in politics at this time. Indeed, in June 1642 he was ‘very ill’ and was attended by Dr Nathaniel Wright, the physician to the family at Brampton Bryan.24Brilliana Harley Letters, 170, 174.

For all his earlier position in the political shadows, John James was soon numbered with the Harleys by those who led majority opinion, royalist and conforming to the Prayer Book, in Herefordshire. In July 1642, Lady Brilliana Harley provided her husband with an account of the opening of the summer assizes at Hereford. The judges read a letter from the king which declared his intention to uphold the character of the Church of England as it had been in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and which enjoined magistrates and jurors to extirpate popery, anabaptism and separatism. The charges of the judges to the grand jury took up these themes, and when the list of grand jurors was presented, the future royalists Sir William Croft and Wallop Brabazon whispered to the judge, who then took exception to the inclusion of John James. He was afterwards allowed back, and three others were eliminated, but from this point he was associated with the views espoused by the Harleys, marked by radical Protestantism and opposition to the policies of the king.25HMC Portland, iii. 95. The result was that James, like his prominent neighbours, was increasingly isolated in local gentry society. By February 1643, Brilliana Harley was acutely aware of her vulnerability in the absence of her husband at Westminster and her sons in the army of Sir William Waller*, and was grateful to James for his support at Brampton Bryan. She wrote to Edward, her son

There is none that bears part with me but Mr James, who has showed himself very honest. None will look towards Brampton, but such as truly fears God but our God still takes care of us.26Brilliana Harley Letters, 188.

In the same letter she reported the conclusion of the royalist council of war at Hereford that the best way to reduce Brampton Bryan castle was to blow it up.

In March 1643, James was indicted at the Herefordshire quarter sessions, in a list of alleged offenders headed by Stanley Gower, William Lowe and John Yates, all strongly parliamentarian clergy, who left the county that year for London, having been in effect driven out by their political enemies. The charge at sessions was orchestrated by Sir William Croft, the leading royalist in the county, and extended to Sir Robert and Edward Harley. Brilliana reported in a coded letter to her son that among the 24 jurors presenting offences to the court were a handful of locals, including some from Leintwardine, but most were unknown to her.27HMC Portland, iii, 106; Brilliana Harley Letters, 193; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 152.

With the diaspora of the puritan ministers and the call to Edward Harley to lead a company of horse for Parliament, James must have been compelled to choose whether to stay at Trippleton or to leave, and it is highly likely that he took the latter course. At any event, he was not at Brampton Bryan when after withstanding a siege by the royalists, and after the death of Lady Brilliana on 31 October 1643, the occupants of the castle surrendered (23 Mar. 1644).28HMC Bath, i. 22-33; Longleat House, Portland mss, xxiii, ff. 199-203. After his staunch support of Brilliana Harley, it seems improbable that he would have stood idle while the defenders of the castle struggled against the siege, and his disappearance from the locality is possibly an indication that he followed Edward Harley into one of the parliamentary armies. A man of his name served in Buckinghamshire with the rank of captain in 1645, though no more has been discovered about him.29BHO Cromwell Association Online Directory.

James re-appeared in Herefordshire in 1647, as an agent of the county committee, ordered to fell timber on the estates of sequestered delinquents, and as an assessment commissioner. His name does not occur among lists of members of the standing county committee, however, so he cannot be considered as a leader of support for Parliament in Herefordshire at this point.30Add. 16178, ff. 115v, 117v, 118, 119v, 158; A. and O. As the grip of the parliamentary regime tightened on the western counties, so James became more prominent as one of their important local agents. It was his work as a commissioner for sequestrations in Herefordshire after the execution of the king that drew him to the attention of the Compounding Commissioners. He was acting as a sequestration commissioner in the county by February 1650, and in the autumn of that year he was chosen as high sheriff, at a time when enthusiasts for the republic were rare there. In December the Compounders sent him a colleague to help, complimenting James on his diligence.31CCC 172, 384; List of Sheriffs (List and Index ix), 62. Elevation to the bench of magistrates in Herefordshire accompanied his appointment as sheriff, or followed very quickly, and it is unsurprising that his services as a justice were employed also in neighbouring Worcestershire, his county of origin and where his influential relatives, the Salwey family, may have promoted his virtues.32C193/13/3; C193/13/4; Names of the Justices (1650), 50 (E.1238.4); CCC 391.

There seems no reason to doubt that James was genuinely enthusiastic for the commonwealth; in January 1651 he wrote to the Compounding Commissioners assuring them with some pride that he was still active in pursuing sequestration cases in Herefordshire. The claims on his time were, after all, not inconsiderable. His public duties included not only those of the shrievalty, the bench of magistrates in two counties and the work of sequestration, but by this time also the remodelling the militia had fallen to his lot. He had been a militia commissioner from 1648, but in 1650 was given a commission as captain of horse in Herefordshire. In March 1651 he wrote loyally with Wroth Rogers* and others to request a stiffening of the Herefordshire committee, and two weeks later the government confirmed its continuing confidence in him by giving him command of horse and dragoons in Worcestershire.33CCC 391; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 509; 1651, p. 120; HMC Portland, i. 561. The creation of the county militias was important to the government as a way of weaning the country from the imposition of the standing army, and those at Westminster had to be sure of the loyalty of militia leaders. Humphrey Salwey* would have been by this time a likely guarantor of James’s bona fides, since his earlier associates, the Harleys, were not only out of local power, but were even imprisoned in 1650.34Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 193.

When James accepted the colonelcy of the Worcestershire militia, he could hardly have foreseen how soon it was to see active service crucial to the very survival of the regime. Even so, the government was from the outset serious about strengthening the local forces, and Gloucester corporation was directed to supply him with horse in April 1651; in June he was listing volunteers.35HMC 12th Rep. IX, 498, 499. Although it is not known what precise part was played by James at the battle of Worcester on 3 September, he must have been there. Two weeks earlier he arrested Sir John Pakington* at Westwood, and brought him to the city.36Worcs.Archives, 705:349/BA 5117/2/v/15. On 21 August, the city chamber desired to confer with him about a peaceful surrender of the city to Charles Stuart. Four troops of horse came into Worcester from Thomas Harrison I*, and James did what he could to rally them, but on 22 August he and the county committee were forced to withdraw.37Bodl. Tanner 54 f. 176. Subsequently, the success of the militia forces at the battle was singled out by Oliver Cromwell* for special mention.38Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 461, 462; Worden, Rump Parliament, 265. Five days after it, James was made governor of the city.39Add. 5834 p. 134. He was busy in the aftermath of the engagement, searching for a trunk full of gold reportedly abandoned by the enemy at Worcester: a quest still exercising the council of state in June 1652.40CSP Dom. 1651, p. 469; 1651-2, p. 307. James was effectively the head of the security forces in Worcestershire, interviewing suspects at the behest of the council of state in the last months of the Rump.41CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 484.

James’s religious radicalism, forged in the fire of puritanism fed by the Harleys in Brampton Bryan and its environs, was undiminished. His godliness was recognised in his appointment to the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, although even at the height of millenarian expectations of the government in the early 1650s he was sufficiently in sympathy with state-supervised religious provision to nominate the minister Charles Sumptner to the living of Stanton, on the north edge of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire.42Add. 36792, f. 77; Calamy Revised, 470. In 1650 and 1651 he was active in collecting rents of Presteigne rectory on behalf of the Committee for Plundered Ministers, which diverted them in the interests of St Antholin’s church, London.43E113/8. A connection which has been made between James and Morgan Llwyd, the Fifth Monarchist minister of Denbighshire, is unconvincing.44B. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (1972), 64. The James associated with Llwyd was an elder of his church and a resident of Wrexham, too distant from Trippleton to be plausible as the future MP.45A.H. Dodd, ‘A Remonstrance from Wales, 1655’, BBCS xvii. 288. James of Trippleton, though radical, was not detached enough from the government to support calls for the independent churches to nominate their own representatives at Westminster.

Still, as a man of known godly standing, who had worked hard for the commonwealth in his locality and led troops which had acquitted themselves well at the battle of Worcester, James was an obvious choice to represent Worcestershire in an assembly which was intended to build on the more radical achievements of the Rump. The Presbyterian Edward Harley was probably being ironic when he seemed to be taking a sanguine view of James’s involvement in the Nominated Assembly

Herefordshire may hope to thrive, for besides two for ourselves, I hear that we are to furnish Worcestershire and Gloucestershire with the abilities of Mr James and Mr [Robert] Holmes.46HMC Portland, iii. 203.

By the time James had been nominated for service in the new assembly, he had become custos rotulorum of Herefordshire, a position he would retain until 1660.

Once at Westminster, James quickly became a busy Member, being named in July and August 1653 to committees charged with considering means of streamlining public accounts and office-holding, and dealing with prisons and prisoners. On 23 August he was nominated to a small committee investigating property belonging to the government in London and Westminster, and with four others was asked on 21 September to bring in a bill for the sale of delinquents’ estates, a subject on which he could bring to bear his experiences as a sequestrator in Herefordshire and Worcestershire.47CJ vii. 283b, 287ab, 306b, 322a. He was a teller on a motion that the countess of Derby be allowed to compound for delinquency at one sixth (27 Sept.); his fellow teller was Samuel Moyer, his opposing tellers Walter Strickland and Robert Tichborne. On a tied vote, the Speaker cast against James’s side, but it is hard to interpret this vote as having factional significance.48CJ vii. 325a. On 15 October he was a teller with Hugh Courtney, one whose Fifth Monarchist credentials seem more certain than those of James, against a motion that the committee for accounts should have Duchy House as their headquarters.49CJ vii. 334b. The only recorded occasion when James was asked to introduce a piece of legislation was on 24 October, when he was charged with bringing in a bill to settle lands on Elizabeth Guise, widow of the Worcester tailor hanged by the royalist garrison for spying for the commonwealth in 1651.50CJ vii. 338b

On 1 November, James was elected to the new council of state. Fifteen places were balloted for, and James came twelfth, with 53 votes. A week later he was appointed to the council’s committee for lunatics, which comprised eight other members, including Oliver Cromwell; and to its committee for ordnance. At the end of the month he joined the council’s committee for Scottish and Irish affairs.51CJ vii. 344b; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 237, 272. As a body, the council was becoming concerned about the disturbances to public worship caused by disruptive religious radicals, and on 12 November published an order forbidding interruptions to services and the mouthing of blasphemies.52A Declaration...for the Protection of all Persons peaceably assembled for Public Worship (1653). Any impression that as a consequence of his election to the council James was losing his radical credentials and supporting the public ministry in an unqualified way, or becoming completely involved in the minutiae of committee work, is quickly dispelled by his activities on 10 December.53This discussion of events in Dec. 1653 is based on Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 334-43. The question of state religious provision and the continuation of tithes had remained unresolved from the deliberations of the Rump. On 17 November a motion was carried for a bill abolishing lay patronage of livings to be presented. On the 26th, it was voted to have the bill read on 1 December. The committee for tithes (of which John James was not a member), charged with devising a plan for the maintenance of the ministry, preferred instead to offer its own report on the matter. The bill itself, which contended with the report for the attention of the House, was never read. The report, which occupied the Members for six days, contained four clauses, which would have formed the basis for future legislation. The first dealt with the means by which unfit ministers were to be ejected from livings and new ones presented. This was the only clause of the report on which a vote was taken. What was suggested was a development from the pattern of the commissions for the propagation of the gospel in Wales and the north of England, and the proposals of the Independents provisionally accepted by the Rump. A body of national commissioners in six circuits covering England and Wales was to work with county officials to remove and appoint ministers.

Opposition to the committee’s proposals would have come from a range of MPs: from those who could not support the continuation of tithes even in the commuted form suggested in the report, and from those against the state ministry in any form. The two positions were not identical. Some, such as the Member Samuel Hyland, opposed the continuation of tithes but supported the notion of a state ministry, financed some other way. By contrast, the author of A True Narrative, a commentary on these developments, evidently found distasteful the whole concept of the ordained ministry. Others would have found things to scruple against in the list of proposed commissioners, a mix of Presbyterian, Independent and even Baptist representatives, but inevitably open to objection on grounds of religious denomination or local political orientation.

A vote on the proposals for appointing and removing ministers, the first clause of the report, was taken on 10 December. John James was a teller for the noes with Henry D’Anvers, against Col. Philip Jones and William Sydenham. The presence of Jones, a fellow member of the council, as a teller for the yeas suggested where the loyalties of Cromwellians lay, but James’s opposition cannot be attributed without question to his alleged Fifth Monarchist persuasions. There were many other motives among the 58 objectors (including the tellers) who won the day against the 56 yeas: not least the possibility that similar plans, but ones thought more practicable, were under consideration. James cannot be considered among those who objected to the whole role of the magistrate in religious matters, since only a month earlier he put his hand to a recommendation of an orthodox minister for the living of Stanton, on the Worcestershire-Gloucestershire border.

These were to be James’s last few days in Parliament, and perhaps like Samuel Hyland, he was appalled by the actions of those who used the single vote on the 10th as a reason to organize the resignation of the entire House two days later. For James the vote not only led to his unexpected return to Trippleton, but also cost him his place on the bench of magistrates in Herefordshire and Worcestershire.54Add. 36792, f. 77. From this apparent stance of opposition to the protectorate it has been assumed that he was the man of his name who signed A Word For God.55TSP iv. 373-84, discussed in Dodd, ‘Remonstrance’, 279-92. This remonstrance was first assembled by Vavasor Powell, the millenarian Radnorshire minister, in February 1654 as a reaction to the events of the previous December. The gist of it was that God would withdraw his favour from any government which was established contrary to Scripture. After some months of circulation, the remonstrance disappeared from public view, to surface again in print in December 1655, in this version fulminating against Cromwell’s Hispaniola expedition and the institution of the major-generals. That this published text could not have been exactly the same as that contrived by Powell in February 1654 is obvious; unfortunately there is no way of telling how many signatories were party to one or other or both versions.

Certainly, not only one but two men called John James signed the published draft. One of them seems the same as the Wrexham associate of Llwyd’s who had supported his minister’s call for separatist congregations to nominate their own representatives to the Nominated Assembly. The other is more plausibly the Trippleton squire, but it has been suggested instead that he was a Radnorshire yeoman who had emigrated to Pennsylvania by 1690 after having become a Quaker.56Dodd, ‘Remonstrance’, 288. However, the relative frequency with which the name occurs in the marches of Wales makes it unlikely that a decisive verdict can be derived from purely local evidence. John James was certainly patron in 1655 to an Independent congregation at Trippleton, which gave a Quaker visitor a sympathetic hearing on at least two occasions.57First Publishers of Truth ed. N. Penney (1907), 115. This suggests his continued commitment to separatist movements, but also implies a certain lack of sympathy in his congregation for Powell, known for his robust anti-Quakerism. James was willing to handle tithes, and served in 1655 as the manager of those of Presteigne.58Presteigne par. reg.; W.H. Howse, ‘The Rectory of Presteigne, 1552-1712’, Rad. Soc. Trans. xxvii. 39-40. More decisively, perhaps, he continued to be named to local commissions of the protectorate, including those dealing with scandalous ministers and that securing the safety of the protector himself.59A. and O. Neither of these bodies would have sought the attentions of someone totally at odds with the principles of the government. On balance, therefore, it seems unlikely that he was a signatory of A Word For God; and if he did sign, he may have done so immediately in the rather sour aftermath of the dissolution of the 1653 Parliament.

The government’s nomination of James to local commissions under the protectorate was not merely an attempt to bring a dissident back into the fold. In the Herefordshire elections to the 1656 Parliament, James was a candidate at the poll, held on Lugg Meadow on 20 August. He stood with Major-general James Berry and Captain Benjamin Mason in what was plainly a demonstration of support for the major-generals’ rule, remembering perhaps his own military background. Among their opponents was Col. Edward Harley, whose family was emerging from a period of withdrawal from politics to play a much more conservative role in matters of politics and religion than it had before the civil war. In the event, Harley, Berry, Mason and Bennet Hoskins were successful, despite some confusion about the circumstances of the poll.60HMC Portland, ii. 208. Despite his own failure to be elected, James continued to serve on local militia and assessment commissions down to the restoration of the monarchy, and maintained his position on the bench of magistrates. Under the restored Rump he was added to the commission of the peace for Radnorshire, where willing supporters of the government were doubtless harder to find even than in Herefordshire or Worcestershire. The Quakers considered him sympathetic enough in 1659 to list him among those who, while not Friends themselves, would be well-disposed towards them. James is listed for Radnorshire as ‘not in commission’, suggesting the list was compiled before 15 August. His brother, Robert James, was listed among the ‘moderate men’ in Worcestershire.61Extracts from State Papers relating to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 110-11, 115. He continued to collaborate with Edward Harley, whose standing in the 1656 election against James evidently did not prevent their co-operation, in the founding of a free school at Leintwardine in 1659, whose first trustees were Harley, James and a number of other long-standing associates of Harley and his father.62Brampton Bryan MSS, bdle. 97.

The Restoration was a blow for James from which his public career never recovered. He lost all his local offices, ceding the position of custos rotulorum to Edward Harley. Unlike Edward Harley, James was too much associated with the separatist cause to be an acceptable candidate for Parliament. On 27 May 1663 he made an answer to a bill against him in exchequer concerning his handling of the rents of Presteigne rectory.63E113/8. It seems quite plausible that he was the John James who served as an elder of the Radnorshire congregation, founded by Walter Cradock and Powell, which was served by the part-time ministry of Henry Williams and Henry Maurice after the Restoration.64Records of a Church in Broadmead, 518. Nevertheless, it is clear that James retained close relations with the Harley family, whose members inclined increasingly towards Presbyterianism and accommodation with the restored episcopal Church of England. He retained sufficient standing with the Harley family to dine at Brampton Bryan in 1677, and regale his hosts with reports of the forthcoming Radnorshire election.65HMC Portland, ii. 354.

James chose the lawyer Thomas Harley and Sir John Edwards as executors of his will. Thomas Harley, and his brother, Edward, a trustee for James’s estate, took this duty seriously, although it seems to have brought conflict with the beneficiaries, James’s many children.66Brampton Bryan MSS, bdle. 68, packet 1. James died in 1681 and was buried on 10 May at Leintwardine. 67Leintwardine par. reg.

John James’s son Higgins James married first the daughter of Wallop Brabazon, one of the leading Herefordshire royalists of the civil war, and after her death the daughter of Edward Pytts* of Kyre, one whose political loyalties would have to be described as ambivalent. None of John James’s descendants seem to have sat in Parliament, but his son’s brother-in-law, Samuel Pytts, was tory Member for Hereford 1699-1700 and Worcester 1710-15.68Vis. Worcs. 1682-3 ed. Metcalfe, 65; HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 308.