RICH, Nathaniel (d. c.1701), of Stondon Massey, Essex and Eltham, Kent.

Nathaniel Rich was descended from Richard Rich, sheriff of London in 1441. A branch of the family descended from this common ancestor produced Richard, Baron Rich†, the lord chancellor of Henry VIII, and his descendant Robert Rich†, second earl of Warwick.30Morant, Essex, i. 188, ii. 101. Nathaniel’s ancestors were solid, but much less prominent, Essex gentry, seated at Horndon. One of them, Sir Robert Rich, Nathaniel’s great-uncle, became master of chancery. A kinsman of uncertain relationship to Nathaniel, Thomas Rich of Leyden, established himself at North Cerney, near Cirencester, by 1610, but it cannot be demonstrated that this interest was significant in the election of Nathaniel Rich for Cirencester in 1647.31Vis. Essex 1612 (Harl. Soc. xiii), 277; Vis Herts. (Harl. Soc. xxii), 86; Vis. Glos. 1682-3 ed. Fenwick and Metcalfe, 142-3; VCH Glos. ix. 261; Glos. N. and Q. v. 309-10. Nathaniel acquired a manor through the will of his uncle, Sir Nathaniel Rich†, a merchant adventurer, who died childless in 1636. Stondon had only been in the hands of Sir Nathaniel since around 1610.32VCH Essex, iv. 244. Nathaniel followed his uncle into Gray’s Inn in 1639, and also inherited his religious radicalism. Sir Nathaniel’s rector at Stondon Massey, Nathaniel Ward, was deprived by Archbishop William Laud for his puritan views, and emigrated to Massachusetts.33VCH Essex, iv. 247; Oxford DNB, ‘Nathaniel Ward’. Rich’s marriage to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edmund Hampden of Buckinghamshire, made him a first cousin, by marriage, to John Hampden*.34Vis. Bucks. 1634 (Harl. Soc. lviii), 70.

This local religious background of opposition to Laud helped propel Rich into the parliamentary armies at the outbreak of the civil war, but the immediate circumstances of his enlistment lay at Gray’s Inn, where a lifeguard to the earl of Essex was formed under the command of Philip Stapilton*. The lifeguard, which included Edmund Ludlowe II*, performed indifferently at the opening skirmish of the war, at Powick Bridge, outside Worcester. Its young officers did better at Edgehill.35Ludlow, Mems. i. 39-42. The following year, Rich was commissioned into the army of the earl of Manchester as a captain of horse, and by April 1644 had progressed to become lieutenant-colonel of Manchester’s own horse regiment in the Eastern Association. Rich’s own troop consisted of 114 men at this point, and kept up its numbers into the following year.36C. Holmes, Eastern Association (Cambridge, 1973), 240. Through the Hampden family Rich may have had social contact with Oliver Cromwell*, but was probably for military reasons alone perfectly willing to give evidence against the earl of Manchester’s half-hearted conduct of the war after June 1644, from the time that Manchester had learned of plans to exclude the king from a role in government. Rich declared that since his army had been at York to support Sir Thomas Fairfax* and the Scots, Manchester had been ‘always backward to put his army to action’.37Quarrel between Earl of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell ed. Bruce (Cam. Soc. n.s. xii), 96. According to John Lilburne, the future Leveller leader, there was no love lost between Cromwell and Rich despite their co-operation, and in 1647 Lilburne recorded a rebuke given by Cromwell to Rich in company in London at the time of the proceedings against Manchester.38Jonah’s Cry out of the Whale’s Belly (1647), 8 (E.400.5).

Rich was clearly in sympathy with the reorganisation of the army, but his outspokenness against Manchester prejudiced the Lords against his commissioning into the New Model. On 21 January 1645, the Commons approved Fairfax’s selection of Rich as a colonel.39CJ iv. 26b. But the Lords proposed him first as major in the horse regiment he would have led, and then reduced his rank to captain. On 28 February, when Rich’s command came back to the Commons for approval, Presbyterians including John Glynne and Christopher Wray would not approve him at all, in opposition to Sir Arthur Hesilrige. The following day, Sir Simonds D’Ewes led opposition to Rich’s commission as colonel, on grounds of precedence. D’Ewes argued that Rich should be honoured to serve under the more senior commander, Sir Robert Pye II*.40CJ iv. 65b; Harl. 166, ff. 180-1; Add. 31116, f. 196. On 3 March, the Commons voted for Rich’s appointment as major under the Presbyterian-inclined Pye, but when the officer list reached the Lords on the 13th, Rich’s name was omitted altogether.41CJ iv. 66b; LJ vii. 278b. It was the resignation of his command by the severely wounded Colonel Algernon Sydney* that allowed Fairfax not only to bring Rich back into the army, but to promote him to be colonel of a horse regiment.42Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 65, 73.

Rich fought at Naseby, and was involved in the reduction of the south west, serving with distinction, leading 1,000 horse and dragoons at the battle of St Columb in Cornwall (7 Mar. 1646).43Anglia Rediviva, 43, 217. He was one of the parliamentary commissioners who concluded the surrender articles when Oxford capitulated to Parliament. On 2 January 1647, he and Fairfax were elected to the two seats at Cirencester amid some confusion; as no return was produced when the House considered the election nearly two weeks later (15 Jan.), the whole matter was shelved. As Fairfax was a very reluctant absentee candidate, and as Rich’s only connection with Gloucestershire was via the interest of his kinsman, Thomas Rich, at North Cerney, another promoter of the pair must be sought. The éminence grise was probably Thomas Pury I* of Gloucester, an Independent and leading figure on the Army Committee. By March 1647, Rich’s regiment was in Norfolk, where it mustered to protest against being included in an expedition to Ireland.44Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 31. On the 21st, the army council met, and drafted four questions on the key issues facing them. Rich was unwilling to see included a question on which regiments were to be continued in service, suggesting some uncertainty on his part about the future of his own regiment.45Petition of the Officers and Souldiers in the Army (1647), sig. A3(1) (E.383.12). In May, Rich himself was one of the commanders given power to muster the army at a general rendezvous, and signed a letter to the London common council, later referred to Parliament.46Clarke Pprs. i. 19; CJ v. 208a. At Saffron Walden church on 16 May, he professed himself uneasy at proceedings in his regiment in his absence, finding ‘some things not fit, and impertinent and extravagant’, but nevertheless voiced reservations about the scheme to ship his comrades-in-arms to Ireland.47Clarke Pprs. i. 63. Rich was selected to be one of the group of officers charged with extracting the common elements in the regimental petitions against disbandment and shipment to Ireland, and in favour of payment of arrears and indemnity, and on 29 May was one of the council of officers committee charged with conveying to the lord general the anxieties of the army. On 2 July Rich was one of the army commissioners that met parliamentary delegates at High Wycombe to discuss the army’s grievances.48Clarke Pprs. i. 80, 109, 148.

Rich’s prominence in the high counsels of the army accounted for his presence at Woburn in late July 1647, when Cromwell, Henry Ireton*, Thomas Rainborowe* and Thomas Hammond met the king to discuss, albeit obliquely, The Heads of the Proposals devised by the senior army officers. The king’s response, through John Ashburnham*, was instead to offer the generals whatever honours and advantages they and their friends sought, demonstrating the size of the gulf between the parties.49J. Ashburnham, Narrative (2 vols, 1830), ii. 90-1; Maseres, Tracts, ii. 367-8. Faced with a blank unwillingness on the part of the king to discuss the issues, Rich found himself at the same time the object of scorn from the Levellers, presumably because of his readiness to be counted a spokesman of the army high command. Lilburne published an attack on Rich as a ‘juggling, paltry base fellow’, reminding Cromwell of his own attack on Rich in 1644, warning him and honest men in the army to beware of Rich as ‘a plague and pest’.50Jonah’s Cry out of the Whale’s Belly, 8. He had been appointed one of the army’s committee of junior and senior officers ‘to look over engagements’ at Reading, and two days later (18 July), was appointed to the committee to treat with the agitators or agents of the soldiers over constitutional reform, guaranteeing Rich a role at the debates at Putney in October.51Clarke Pprs. i. 183, 216, 223. Rich’s main speech at Putney (29 Oct.) was in support of Henry Ireton’s criticisms of the Levellers, and would have confirmed Lilburne in his poor opinion of him. Speaking after Rainborowe had asked why the franchise should be confirmed in some men and not others, Rich argued that 80 per cent of the populace had no fixed political interest in property, and that in a universal franchise those without an interest would choose others without property to represent them. He raised the spectre of such an assembly voting to abolish property. He urged instead a moderating of the current arrangements so that the poor had a voice. Under pressure from Rainborowe, Rich had to clarify his position, and to restate that he did not mean that the franchise should be confined to the rich, or that the poor should be excluded, only that there were no grounds for an equality in the franchise.52Clarke Pprs. i. 315, 320-1.

After Putney, new agents were appointed to represent the soldiers in five regiments, including Rich’s.53Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 203. His regiment was quartered at the Mews in London from January 1648, countering unrest in the capital, and on the look-out for subversive Leveller books and papers.54CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 8, 14, 15. In May, he was ordered to march troops through the City and Southwark, to act as a barrier against further insurrection in Kent.55CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 81. The Levellers continued attempts to win over the regiment to their project, by convening a meeting at St Albans, at which representatives of the separate troops were to give accounts of developments, but the meeting was broken up by unsympathetic officers. Nevertheless, the agitators succeeded in presenting a petition to Fairfax calling for the release of detained agents, so that the army could fulfil its ‘first engagements to the people, and each to the other, by settling and securing the nation’s common rights and freedoms’.56The Armies Petition (1648), 3, 6-7 (E.438.1). Rich’s regiment was drawn further into suppressing the Kentish rebellion in favour of the king. Rich was at the battle of Maidstone on 1 June, and he was active in reducing successively the castles of Dover, Walmer, Deal and Sandown in July and August, despite hostile newspaper reports that he had been routed. In fact, it was he who routed an invading force landed from revolted navy ships under the command of the prince of Wales.57Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 966, 1137, 1228; HMC Portland, i. 456, 481; CJ v. 635a, 634b; Everitt, Community of Kent, 267, 270; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 20 (8-15 Aug. 1648), sig. Z2(i) (E.458.24); R. Ashton, Counter-Revolution (1994), 441. Rich was appointed governor of Deal castle in the aftermath of the suppression of the Kent revolt, and was empowered to impose martial law on his territory. He was seriously considered for the post of governor of Walmer castle – the command went elsewhere – and was reported as calling for £1,400 to be spent on the refortification of the Kent castles.58CJ v. 685a, 686a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 22 (22-29 Aug. 1648), sig. Dd(i) (E.461.17); no. 24 (5-12 Dec. 1648), sig. Gg2(ii) (E.462.34); CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 210, 212, 236. Rich was called at Gray’s Inn in November 1648, but can hardly have had time to practise as a barrister.59Harl. 1912, f. 220v.

In December, Rich’s regiment called for a dissolution of Parliament and a settlement of ‘rules ... between the people and their representatives’.60Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 118. He himself played a minor part in the forcing of the Houses during Pride’s Purge. He reported to the House on the imprisonment of some Members, and with Henry Ireton and Edward Whalley* prevented the 16 imprisoned MPs from gaining access to Fairfax, telling the outraged MPs that the lord general was ill.61Second Part of the Narrative (1648), 4, 8 (E.477.19); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 167. At the Whitehall debates of the general council of officers (14 Dec.), Rich asserted that no future government could have power over consciences, but doubted whether the ‘chief magistrate’ should have any power in religious matters at all.62Clarke Pprs. ii. 77-8. On the 29th, Rich spoke further at the debates, following the prophetess, Elizabeth Poole of Abingdon. It seems likely from their respective contributions that she had been introduced to the general council by Rich. She had shown an officer, probably Rich, that

it was not the gift of God in me, nor the act of diligence in him, but in reference to that spirit of eternal power which had called me to believe and him to act, neither was he to be slack in action, nor I to be staggering in believing.63Clarke Pprs. ii. 152.

Her speech was followed by a providentialist contribution from Rich, in which he compared the current political crisis to a purification by God’s fire ‘through which all things must pass’, and declared that he rejoiced to hear Elizabeth Poole’s testimony.64Clarke Pprs. ii. 150-3. His tone suggests that at this critical time at least, Rich shared the millenarian thinking of a wide range of contemporaries.

Rich was not named a commissioner of the high court of justice to try the king, but there are suggestions from a decade later that he shared Cromwell’s perspective on the trial. On 5 January 1649, Elizabeth Poole was again called in to the officers’ council at Whitehall. Rich wanted to know whether if for the highest breach of trust, inconsistent with the very purpose for which government was ordained, there should be ‘an outward forfeiture of life itself, as of the trust in itself’.65Clarke Pprs. ii. 166. Later that day, he accurately predicted that the king would refuse to plead, and thus cause difficulties for his prosecutors.66Clarke Pprs. ii. 169. After the execution, in the much reduced Commons of February 1649, the unfinished business of the Cirencester by-election of 1647 was resurrected. Thomas Pury I seems to have been the main protagonist in ensuring that the army candidates were finally declared returned, and on 17 February, the day that the final report on the by-election was brought in, Rich was named to a committee of the House on the powers of the Kent county committee.67CJ vi. 136a, 142a, 144b, 146b.

Rich was a teller in 19 divisions in the Rump Parliament down to April 1653. In the years 1649-51 these were at the rate of three or four a year, but he acted in eight divisions in 1652. In 1649, he supported his fellow army officer Ireton against two civilians in a division over limitations in the bill for indemnity and oblivion (25 Apr). He acted with Thomas Grey, Lord Grey of Groby to oppose William Purefoy I in a move by the latter to refer the matter of tithes to a relatively minor committee on probate (18 May); tithes were a thorny issue in the matter of the future government of the church. He was again opposed to Purefoy in a division over an act for relief of debtors. Purefoy wanted former delinquents excluded from its provisions, while Rich seems to have preferred a more inclusive approach. 68CJ vi. 195b, 211b, 289b. It is hard to detect any strong pattern of allegiances by Rich in these divisions; he was on opposite sides in later divisions to his former allies in some of them, Grey of Groby and Francis Allein.69CJ vi. 211b, 269a, 438b. In July 1650, Rich was opposed to a rigid disqualification as an excise commissioners of any salaried public official. In 1651, his tellerships involved the lengthy technical details of the act for selling delinquents’ estates.70CJ vi. 584b, 589a. Most of his tellerships in 1652 arose from detailed discussions on legislation that concerned him as a soldier: the indemnity act (according to Ludlowe a particular favourite of Cromwell and his allies), a bill for relief on articles of war, and continuing sales of forfeited estates. In one of these (28 Sept.), he partnered Cromwell.71CJ vi. 124a, 140b, 148b, 186b; Ludlow, Mems. i. 345.

Rich was named to some important executive committees of the Rump, including the Committee for Plundered Ministers, the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs and the Committee of Navy and Customs. At the Committee for Plundered Ministers he attended the examination before it of the Welsh radical minister William Erbury, a fellow-millenarian, but had little or nothing to say.72Clarke Pprs. ii. 233. Many of his ad hoc committee appointments in 1649 were on topics related to sales of crown or delinquents’ lands, from which he himself profited.73CJ vi. 162a, 199b, 205b, 241a, 254a, 258b, 259b, 298a, 325b, 330b. In 1650, land sales and discoveries of estates for sale continued to figure largely in his appointments, although he was also named from December 1649 to committees charged with developing the means to ensure a preaching ministry, in York specifically and also nationally.74CJ vi. 336a, 358b, 368a, 403b, 420b, 428b, 430a, 436b, In December, Rich was entrusted with providing military security for a high court of justice in Norfolk to try rebels there, although he seems not to have been one of the commissioners at the court itself.75CJ vi. 504a; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 455, 468. From June to October 1651, his regiment was in the field to counter the invasion of Charles Stuart, and a number of his men were killed at the battle of Worcester (3 Sept.). In October, a vote was taken that his regiment should not be reduced.76CJ vii. 24b, 117a. His involvement in a committee to settle lands on Bridget, the widow of Henry Ireton, helps confirm the impression that Ireton and Rich had been close. Rich was later in charge of arrangements for Ireton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.77CJ vi. 195b, vii. 49a; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 5. While 1652 was his busiest year in divisions, it was also a year when his nominations to committees declined. Named to 51 committees in 1649, his total was reduced to 15 in 1652, with only one nomination in the early months of 1653 before the Rump was expelled. Even so, he was a member of the committee to consider the petition of the army officers (13 Aug.), to be an important engine of constitutional change, as the radicals despaired of this Parliament.78CJ vii. 164b; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 43.

It would appear that Rich was a genuine enthusiast for the experiment after the dissolution of the Rump, although Ludlowe later contended that Rich had been suborned by Cromwell into the lord general’s personal project.79Ludlow, Mems. i. 345. Rich worked diligently as a commissioner of the admiralty and navy from July 1653.80Add. 22546, ff. 141, 144. He was co-opted by the council of state to committees on the post office, Spanish silver, inspection of the public revenues, the Irish and Scottish committee and the committee for treasuries.81CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 299, 301, 318, 336, 394. He was accused of heavy-handed tactics by a syndicate that farmed the inland letter post.82CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 23-4. During his tenure at the admiralty he promoted his kinsman, Jeremiah Rich, the stenographer.83CSP Dom. 1654, p. 514; B. Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (Oxford, 1989), 208; Oxford DNB, ‘Jeremiah Rich’. He was not selected to sit in the Nominated Assembly, however. Like many religious radicals, Rich was bitterly disappointed at the advent of the protectorate, and the feeling of distrust was evidently mutual, as he was removed from his command in December 1654, at a time of heightened anxiety about unrest within the army.84Wanklyn, New Model Army, ii. 68. From February 1655, Rich moved into open opposition of the regime, and was later summoned by Cromwell before the council, to be subsequently committed to the custody of the serjeant-at-arms.85Ludlow, Mems. i. 380. His particular offence, according to Cromwell, was to have hindered the collection of the decimation tax designed to fund a new militia system.86Clarke Pprs. ii. 245. Considered for release from custody in February 1656, still detained in March, Rich was again in trouble the following summer, for refusing to pledge not to act against the government, and was confined to Windsor castle (14 Aug.) for two months. A royalist reported that the trigger for the lord protector’s displeasure was Rich’s return for a constituency in elections for the 1656 Parliament, but he was not successfully elected anywhere.87CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 190, 215; 1656-7, pp. 67, 71, 130; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 10.

Rich’s political fortunes were temporarily transformed by the return of the Rump Parliament. He was proposed as ambassador to Holland, but declined (27 June 1659).88CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 377, 385. Rich was from May 1659 an active Member, and sat on many committees concerned with shoring up the new government. These included committees on forming a council of state, on appointing admiralty and navy commissioners, and on formulating a common position on how the Parliament had been unlawfully interrupted in 1653, and how it was restored.89CJ vii. 656a, 656b, 661a. He served on the committee that harried the prominent Cromwellian, Philip Jones*.90CJ vii. 663a. He supported Sir Henry Vane II in voting thanks to petitioners from Hull who bemoaned the former apostacy from the Good Old Cause, and was first named to the committee charged with organising a national militia.91CJ vii. 690b, 694b, 727a. He recovered his horse regiment in July, accepted the professions of loyalty from Jerome Sankey* in Ireland, and helped draft the declaration of thanksgiving for the defeat of Sir George Boothe’s* rising.92CJ vii. 704a, 709b, 719a, 776b, 786a; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 387. Between 11 May and 11 October, Rich was named to 35 committees, on a wide range of issues opened up in this assembly but rarely pursued to a productive conclusion. He evidently still adhered to his millenarian religious principles, signing a tract advancing the Fifth Monarchist cause.93The Fifth Monarchy, or Kingdom of Christ (1659).

When the Wallingford House faction of army officers threatened Parliament, Rich acted as a mediator. Before the army again prevented the Rump from sitting, he sought to prolong the debate that culminated in a resolution to manage the army through commissioners. His name appeared in a remonstrance of 13 October against the forcing of the Parliament, but the officers allowed him to retain his regiment without imposing their loyalty oath upon him. His own justification for continuing was that he hoped to influence the army, but according to Ludlowe, it was Rich’s friendship with Vice-admiral John Lawson that kept him involved. With Ludlowe, he argued against a proposal debated by the officers that a new Parliament should be called, and found himself excluded from the officers’ proposals (13 Dec.).94CJ vii. 796a; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 165, 174. Rich joined his friend Lawson at Portsmouth to raise a revolt against the Wallingford House officers.95Ludlow, Mems. ii. 183-4; Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 347. When Parliament reassembled again, Rich continued to act as a peacemaker between army and Parliament, and sought to ensure that soldiers recently in rebellion but now contrite would enjoy their liberty as well as their lives and estates.96CJ vii. 802b. Once again, the officer list of Rich’s regiment was scrutinised by the House, and he was confirmed in command; but even before the admission of the Secluded Members (21 Feb.), he and Ludlowe found themselves increasingly unpopular with that faction.97CJ vii. 805b, 812b, 815a, 817b, 820a, 866a: Ludlow, Mems. ii. 217. General George Monck* bestowed Rich’s regiment on Richard Ingoldsby* at the end of February, but at Bury St Edmunds, Rich made a last-ditch attempt to rally his men to the Good Old Cause, against Ludlowe’s advice. His troops deserted him. On 7 March, Rich had to defend himself in the House against allegations originating in the army.98CJ vii. 866a; Ludlow, Voyce, 85; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 238; Baker, Chronicle, 690; Wanklyn, New Model Army, ii. 129.

After 1660, Rich was a natural target for informers. He was arrested in January 1661, and in September was reported to have a degree of liberty at the Fleet prison. In August 1662 he was ordered to be moved to Southsea castle.99CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 1660-1, p. 520; 1661-2, pp. 82, 112, 463. His old protégé Lawson secured his release in November 1663, although Rich was even then not willing to say whether he would take the Oath of Allegiance to the king.100CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 342. Other agents were also at work on his behalf, after his second marriage, to Anne, daughter of Robert Kerr, earl of Ancram [S], and he was finally released in 1665.101Oxford DNB, ‘Nathaniel Rich’. He retired to Stondon Massey, where in 1684 the churchwardens presented him for only going to church once in 14 years, and that for a funeral. He evidently continued as a nonconformist, leaving £10 to the minister of the Stondon meeting. He made his will on 21 Oct. 1700, and had died by 3 March 1702. His son Nathaniel was a receiver of the land tax in Essex.102VCH Essex, iv. 244, 247; PROB11/464/12.