DRAPER, William (d. 1672), of Nether Worton, Oxon. and Erith, Kent.

Although there had been a Draper in Deddington in the fourteenth century, and a William Draper who was incumbent of Nether Worton until his death in 1558, the immediate ancestors of this MP were associated with Erith, Kent, and came from a junior branch of the family which had established itself in the London mercantile community.24Bodl. Rawl. B.74, f. 174v; VCH Oxon. xi. 291. William Draper of Crayford, sheriff of Kent in 1651, acknowledged the MP as a kinsman in his will of the same year, and it is therefore likely that the MP’s father was William Draper of London, Haberdasher, who in February 1614 left land in Erith, Redhill and Mottingham to his sons William and Robert, appointed his wife Elizabeth and brother Robert Draper as executors, and named his cousin Henry Draper of Cray as overseer.25PROB11/215/195; PROB11/123/279; Philipot, Villare Cantianum, 145. Following William the elder’s death soon afterwards, his widow Elizabeth and her ‘infant’ son William continued litigation with (among others) the fen drainer Cornelius Vermuyden over local marshland.26C2/JasI/S9/55; C2/JasI/C10/40; C2/JasI/D12/65. Meanwhile the executor Robert Draper became a pious and wealthy Merchant Taylor of All Hallows the Great and Dowgate Ward; recorded in the 1634 visitation of London; the following year he drafted a will leaving a considerable estate to his own two sons – confusingly, Robert and William, although the latter was almost certainly too young to be the future MP – and £100 to his nephew William, son of William.27Vis. London 1634 i. (Harl. Soc. xc), 239; PROB11/168/409; PROB11/169/402; Coventry Docquets, 477 (Robert Draper); Al. Ox. (William Draper).

Given his family background, the future MP probably served an apprenticeship. By about 1630 he had become the ‘brother’ of Francis Osborn of Buckinghamshire, who was the youngest son of Sir John Osborn of Chicksands, Bedfordshire, and a servant of William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke.28‘Francis Osborn’, Oxford DNB. It has usually been asserted that Osborn married Draper’s sister Anna, sometimes given as a daughter of William Draper, but there is no trace of such a sister in family wills, and although Osborn frequently invoked the fraternal relationship, his monument at Nether Worton refers to his wife as a daughter of William Vellett.29Bodl. Top. Oxon. c.165, f. 202; F. Osborne, The Miscellaneous Works (2 vols. 1722), i. xviii; F. Osborne, Advice to a Son ed. E.A. Parry (1896), p. xxx; Wood, Ath. Oxon. (1691-2), i. 268. Another lawsuit involving one William Draper and Cornelius Vermuyden, together with a John Goulding – this this time from 1638 – indicates that our MP might have been the ‘Mr William Draper’ who in December 1634 had married ‘Mrs Anne Gouldwell’ at Bexley in Kent.30C8/39/94; St Mary the Virgin, Bexley, par. reg. If so, that Anne may have been the unwitting cause of this confusion, and the litigation may provide a clue as to Draper’s commercial interests.

Draper’s first known personal connection with Oxfordshire came through his (?second) marriage in October 1636 to Mary Parsons, an heiress who had just attained her majority. Her father Robert Parsons, who had died a few months previously, had recently been responsible for major restoration work on St James church in Nether Worton, and he and his brother or nephew owned all the land in the hamlet.31Nether Worton par. reg.; VCH Oxon. xi. 287 Mary’s inheritance, the subject of a conveyance by the coupl in April 1637, represented about a half share.32Oxon. RO, E23/1/D/40. Their son William was baptized in the parish in January 1639, but Mary’s death that summer perhaps prompted Draper to return to Kent.33Nether Worton par. reg. On 2 June 1640 he was married by Thomas Gataker, rector of Rotherhithe and preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, to the latter’s only daughter, Elizabeth.34‘Thomas Gataker’, Oxford DNB. In indentures of November and December 1641, in which he was described as of North Cray, Kent, Draper conveyed his property in Nether Worton to trustees including Gataker and Francis Osborn. These and other transactions of this date reveal that he was wealthy enough to acquire further land at Little Worton and to buy up others’ debts, and that business brought him into contact with clergy, gentry and physicians in Oxford and elsewhere, among them Accepted Frewen, president of Magdalen College.35Oxon. RO, Gen. XXXVIII/i/1; d.d. Oxon. Nether Worton, 1641; Bodl. MS ch. Oxon. 2011.

Draper’s movements over the next four and a half years are unaccounted for, but it is likely that he spent little time at Nether Worton, from where he was absent when the Protestation returns were made in 1641-2. Once the king had established his headquarters at Oxford and the surrounding area was subject to royalist control, it is plausible that Draper based himself elsewhere, and that – taking into account later employments – he gained some military experience. With the surrender of Oxford a reasonable prospect, in May 1646 he was named to the county committee.36LJ viii. 293b; CJ iv. 512a. He soon became an assessment commissioner for Oxfordshire and that September, with Osborn, joined the county’s commission of the peace.37C231/6, p. 56; A. and O; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. 501, 511. Gataker’s high standing in the Westminster Assembly can have done his son-in-law in the eyes of those in Parliament seeking loyal officials for local reconstruction, but possibly Draper had already proved himself in some capacity.38‘Thomas Gataker’, Oxford DNB.

Draper and his near neighbour, Thomas Appletree (d. 1666) of Deddington, soon came to dominate the county committee, taking it upon themselves to recommend additional members to the authorities in Westminster.39Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 74. Both men were named visitors of Oxford University in 1647, and in 1650-1 were among the inner core of assiduous attenders of meetings, constituting with the one-time governor of Oxford, Thomas Kelsey*, the non-academic presence. Draper used his influence in 1649 to obtain the promise of a fellowship for his nephew John Osborn; when in 1651 the committee in London preferred someone else to the post, the visitors (among them Draper and Appletree) wrote asserting Osborn’s accomplishments and their own danger of being rendered ‘so contemptible in the eyes of this university that we shall not be able to further the work of reformation’.40Reg. Visitors Univ. Oxford, 216, 257, 291, 309-20; R. Brathwaite, A Letter from a Scholar in Oxford (1647), 2. In February 1650 Draper’s and Appletree’s activity in receiving money from delinquents and expending it paying troops was formally recognised when they were made sequestration commissioners.41CCC 152, 168, 172. By April, when they requested assistance, they were evidently overworked.42CCC 206. There were almost certainly compensations, however: both men allegedly profited from opportunities afforded by the sale of materials from the demolished royal palace at Woodstock to rebuild their respective houses at Nether Worton (dated 1653) and Deddington (dated 1654).43Bodl. Rawl. D.1054, f. 11v; VCH Oxon. xi. 98, 288.

In addition to being a militia commissioner, in April 1650 Draper was given a captaincy of horse.44CSP Dom. 1650, p. 505. In the early summer of 1651, as Charles Stuart and his Scottish army marched south, Draper was appointed governor of the resurrected Oxford garrison, formed from a company previously based at Wallingford.45CSP Dom. 1651, p. 188. His first orders were to hold the castle, but its fortifications, already in a poor state when the royalists arrived in 1642, proved more difficult and costly to restore than originally anticipated, and by late August Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood* had ordered withdrawal from and slighting of the citadel on the grounds that it was untenable.46CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 295, 335, 336, 343; Oxford Council Acts 1626-1665, 401-2. Anthony Wood’s assertion that this was an ‘unadvised demolishing’ by Draper of a stronghold ‘which but an year or two before was made impregnable at the charge of £2,000 of the town and country’ and that ‘unadvised fortifying’ attendant on his setting up alternative headquarters at New College was unprecedently disruptive and destructive, is misleading.47Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ii. pt. ii. 646. New College had already been structurally altered when it housed the royalist ordnance, and neither scholars nor citizens were strangers to the financial and physical burdens of preparing defences.48I. Roy, ‘The City of Oxford 1640-1660’, in Town and Countryside in the English Revolution ed. R.C. Richardson (1992), 130-68; Royalist Ordance Pprs. ed. Roy. However, on 8 September the council of state concluded that the rout of royalists at the battle of Worcester rendered the garrison unnecessary, and ordered Draper to slight the new fortifications too and to hand the college back to its master.49CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 408, 416. While his soldiers were dispersed to Windsor and Wallingford, Draper appears to have returned to civilian life, although references to him as ‘Colonel’ Draper indicate a continuing ‘reservist’ role.50CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 432, 435.

When in May 1652 Draper and Appletree attempted to resign their sequestration duties, commissioner of the great seal Bulstrode Whitelocke*, perhaps the most influential man locally at that juncture, endorsed their request, pointing out to the committee for compounding their good service in several matters. Despite the proposal that the be replaced by other county stalwarts like John Cary of Ditchley and Woodstock, and the support of Lieutenant-general Charles Fleetwood*, the committee was reluctant to accept a switch of personnel, especially in the absence of interim accounts.51CCC 570, 576-8. The final upshot is unclear, but Appletree, who eventually expressed himself prepared to continue in office with appropriate assistance, stressed how much Draper would be missed, and the latter remained to the fore in Oxfordshire affairs. That autumn he was also in London, a voluble supporter of Francis Osborn in the latter’s lawsuit over inheritance with his former royalist brother Sir Peter Osborne†. It may have been Draper’s doing that ‘Mr Crooke’, almost certainly his fellow Oxfordshire justice of the peace Unton Croke I* of Marston, was called in as counsel.52The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple ed. G.C. Moore Smith (1928), 312.

The choice of Draper to sit with Sir Charles Wolseley* and Dr Jonathan Goddard* for the county in the Nominated Assembly at Westminster in 1653 is a mark of his record in forwarding the cause of godly reformation. However, once there, his contribution was probably modest. He made only five appearances in Commons Journal, none in connection with its most contentious business. His Oxfordshire experience was harnessed in his inclusion on committees considering rationalization of the treasuries (12 July) and provision for the poor and regulation of commissions of the peace (20 July), and later in his addition to a committee for raising money (28 Oct.).53CJ vii. 283b, 287a 341b. He was among those delegated on 23 August to review the allocation of lodgings to Members, something with which he may have experienced personal difficulty: the previous day had seen a third order from the council of state relating to his accommodation.54CJ vii. 306b; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 455; 1653-4, pp. 75, 98. Local interests clearly underlay his sole appearance as a teller, when on 9 November, with Andrew Broughton* of Kent (conceivably a prior acquaintance), he supported the unsuccessful advocates of the inclusion of Shoton and Stowood in a bill for further sale of forest lands; his fellow Oxfordshire Member Wolseley, an even later incomer to the county, opposed him.55CJ vii. 376b.

Draper’s relatively low profile may partly account for his omission (unlike Wolseley and Goddard) from those members of the assembly identified as friends of godly learned ministry and the universities.56TSP iii. 117-34. While the lack of direct evidence of his religious opinions might indicate an absence of fervour, there are no indications that he aimed to undermine the institutional status quo. Although Draper, like Osborn, does not seem to have attended university or an inn of court, his dealings as a Visitor at Oxford indicate some respect for scholarship. His relations with his father-in-law Gataker, a scholarly and godly preacher par excellence, remained sufficiently cordial for the latter to give Draper and his family various bequests in his 1654 will.57PROB11/241, f. 344v. In January 1656 Draper acquired from his previous wife’s cousin John Parsons, a delinquent who had been criticized by parishioners for his remissness in provision of a curate, a ten-year lease of all his tithes in Nether Worton, but it is not clear whether Draper was any more mindful than Parsons of local spiritual life.58Bodl. MS ch. Oxon. c.49, no. 4468; Oxon. RO, Oxf. Dioc. Papers c.650, f. 56; Parochial Colls. ed. Davis, 113; VCH Oxon. xi. 291. However, consistently enough, when sheriff in 1657-8 he convicted Quakers for not paying tithes.59Extracts from State Pprs. relating to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 53, 64-5, 90.

Draper did not sit again in Parliament but he remained an assessment and militia commissioner and an important servant of the government in his county. From 1655 to 1657 he alternated with Appletree in conducting civil marriages in Deddington.60Holy Trinity, Deddington, Oxon. par. reg. His name headed the list of signatories to a letter that the Oxfordshire commissioners (who included John Nixon*, Unton Croke I* and Richard Croke*) to assist Major-general Charles Fleetwood wrote on 10 March 1656 to the protector, expressing their commitment to the work of godly reformation.61Bodl. Rawl. A.36, f. 340; TSP iv. 595. As indicated, in 1657-8 he was sheriff, working closely with many of this same group.62Bodl. MS Rolls Oxon. 61. Correspondence in these years also reveals his closeness to Francis Osborn, the publication of whose works in Oxford he arranged, despite the hostility of some university figures who interpreted as atheism the pragmatism and worldliness of this apparent apologist for the regimes of the 1650s.63Osborne, Miscellaneous Works, i. 6-35; Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford ii. 684; Wood, Life and Times, i. 257; ‘Francis Osborne’, Oxford DNB. Draper was the dedicatee in 1658 of the second part of Osborn’s Advice to a Son, while his eldest daughter Elizabeth (later the wife of John Osborn) was similarly honoured the following year in Osborn’s Miscellany of Sundry Essayes.64F. Osborne, Advice to a Son (1658), sig. A3v; Miscellany of Sundry Essayes (1659), sig. A2. Osborn died at Draper’s house in February 1659.65Bodl. Top. Oxon. c.165; Osborne, Miscellaneous Works, i. p. xviii.

The return to power of the traditional élite at the end of the decade, represented locally by the election in January 1659 to one of the county seats in Parliament of Henry Cary*, 4th Viscount Falkland, of nearby Great Tew, threw Draper into eclipse. Nonetheless, followed by Appletree he headed the list of Oxfordshire gentry who signed the protestation of those loyal to Parliament during the coup by army officers that October.66A Remonstrance and Protestation of the Well-affected (1660), 26. His wealth and the relative strength in north Oxfordshire of dissent of various kinds doubtless assisted him to weather the Restoration. Although omitted from heralds’ visitation records, he was said to be armigerous at his second son Robert’s admission to Lincoln’s Inn in 1665 and was assessed for the Hearth Tax at an impressive 25 hearths.67Vis. Oxon. 1669 and 1675 (Harl. Soc. n.s. xii), 113; L. Inn Admiss. i. 297. Probably during the 1660s, he acquired from Cresheld Draper†, son and heir of William Draper (d. 1652) of Crayford, land at Erith and Bexley which the latter had intended should to come to the Drapers of Nether Worton only in the event of Cresheld’s early death.68PROB11/215/195. In his will of 20 October 1671 the former MP settled the property on his eldest son William and his wife Jane, daughter of Thomas Appletree. Asking merely to be ‘decently buried without vain pomp’, the testator did not express the pronounced piety shown by Appletree in 1666 or William Draper the younger in 1672.69PROB11/321/52; PROB11/338/407; PROB11/341/182; PROB11/342/305; VCH Oxon. xi. 92. Draper the elder died early in the latter year, to be followed within months by his heir, then serving as sheriff of Oxfordshire.70Bodl. Top. Oxon. c.165; List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 51. Although Drapers continued to be prominent in the county, Cresheld Draper was the sole other member of the family to sit in Parliament.71VCH Oxon. xi. 286-90; HP Commons 1660-1690.