GREENE, Nicholas (c.1608-70), of Winterbourne Stoke and Grittleton, Wilts.

Greene was a prime example of the type of new man who came to the fore in the 1650s, having emerged from a family with no evident recent tradition of political service. A younger son, described as a yeoman of twenty in his first marriage licence in 1628, he lacked a university or inns education.18Jackson, Britton, Hist. of Grittleton, 14. By the time he died over 40 years later he had greatly extended his landed base, acquired a business interest outside the county and become a gentleman of substance, although his commonwealth past and a probable inclination toward religious nonconformity excluded him from public life after the Restoration.

It seems likely that Greene was brought up to some trade, perhaps related to the Wiltshire clothing industry. His first marriage to Elizabeth Chaffin from the neighbouring village of Maddington lasted only 18 months and left only a short-lived daughter, so during a decade of widowerhood he had ample opportunity to concentrate on setting himself up.19Mar. Lics. Salisbury 1615-1682, 63; Winterbourne Stoke par. reg. From his father, who died intestate in 1635, he may have inherited no more than a lease of Winterbourne Stoke parsonage.20Jackson, Britton, Hist. of Grittleton, 14. Significantly more important, it seems, were his subsequent connections with the White family of Grittleton. In 1639 he married the former Hester White, widow of Sefton Jones, who had appeared in the 1623 heralds’ visitation and whose mother was Mary, daughter of Bishop John Still of Bath and Wells.21Mar. Lics. Salisbury 1615-1682, 188; Jackson, Britton, Hist. of Grittleton, 14; Vis. of Wilts 1623, 214-15; Hoare, Hist. Wilts. iii: Westbury, 28. Through Hester, Greene gained a life interest in the Jones estate at Brook; in 1651 he bought it from Sefton’s granddaughters.22VCH Wilts. vii. 152. Through her family, he acquired access to a useful social and political network which included their kin, the Somerset and Wiltshire clothing family of Ashe.

Greene’s nomination in February 1643 as a commissioner under the parliamentary ordinance for raising money and men in the western associated counties indicates an early commitment to the cause, shared with the Ashes and with his brother-in-law Walter Wright, who by this time was serving at Bristol under Nathaniel Fiennes I* as lieutenant-colonel of his regiment of foot.23A. and O.; S. Turton and J. Peachey, War in the West: Part I (Bristol, 1994) vi. 608-9. It may also suggest the influence of the lord of the manor of Winterbourne Stoke, Sir Edward Hungerford*, at that juncture commander of forces in Wiltshire.24VCH Wilts. xv. 278. Following the further parliamentary ordinance of 7 May Greene was assessed as enjoying an income of £80 a year in Brook, the fourth highest figure returned for the hundred of Westbury.25A. and O.; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxxix. 448. Richard Greene of Mere, probably his elder brother of that name, confessed in December 1645 to correspondence with the royalists, whereupon he took the Covenant and compounded; he may well have been the Mr Green who the previous month had negotiated on behalf of the sequestered bishop of Salisbury, Dr John Davenant.26‘Falstone Day Book’, ed. J. Waylen, Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxvi. 353, 355, 358. Nicholas, on the other hand, had kept the faith. In January 1646 the county committee noted that he had suffered much from the enemy on account of his affection to Parliament and accepted £20 in taxation, evidently accounted a modest amount for his land ‘as well in Dorset as in Wiltshire’.27Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxvi. 364.

Added to that committee in June 1648 with other activists William Eyre II* and William Ludlowe*, Greene joined the commission of the peace in January 1649 and from that July was one of the most regular attenders at quarter sessions, unusually appearing at all locations.28CJ v. 580b; C231/6, p. 131; C193/13/3, f. 69v; C193/13/4, f. 110; C193/13/6, f. 96v; C193/13/5, f. 116v; The Names of the Justices (1650, E.1238.4), 62; Stowe 577, f. 58v; Wilts. RO, A1/160/1, ff. 133, 151, 157, 164, 169, 175, 180, 185, 191, 200, 217; A1/160/2, pp. 21, 59, 97, 121, 129, 143, 159. His appointment in April 1650 as a captain in the militia may imply a record of military service at some earlier point as well as a recognition of enthusiasm for the commonwealth.29CSP Dom. 1650, p. 506. It was as Captain Greene that the council of state issued to him alone that November an instruction to examine one Maurice Jarvis of Allcannings.30CSP Dom. 1650, p. 442. Regularly named as an assessment commissioner from April 1649, he was made a sequestration commissioner in February 1650 and by 1652 constituted, with William Ludlow and Bennet Swayne, the driving force behind sequestrations in south Wiltshire.31A. and O.; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxvi. 356. It is likely that this advantaged him in the purchase of Mere Park from Lord Arundell in 1653.32CCC 1223.

Parallel religious zeal probably also commended Greene as a candidate for the Nominated Parliament, where he sat for his county with another relative parvenu, Colonel Thomas Eyre*, and with Anthony Ashley Cooper*. On 15 June 1653, over two weeks before the session began, he and Eyre were allocated the Westminster lodgings which had previously been occupied by Rumper and fellow Wiltshire activist John Dove*.33CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412. However, Greene’s contribution to proceedings appears to have been small. He was nominated to only one committee, that for the poor and the regulation of commissions of the peace (20 July).34CJ vii. 287a. On 2 December, ten days before the Parliament resigned, he was given leave to go into the country.35CJ vii. 361b. In the meantime, like Eyre but unlike Ashley Cooper, he was not reckoned a friend of the universities and the traditionally educated ministry, and was probably an opponent of tithes.36A Catalogue of the Names of the Members of the last Parliament (1654), f. 19 (E.669.3).

Back at home, Greene soon made another advantageous marriage. His third bride was Elizabeth, widow of his brother-in-law Walter White, who in 1651 had obtained for herself and her children a £200 a year pension from Parliament in recognition of White’s service and arrears before his death at Bristol in June 1643.37Grittleton par. reg.; CJ vii. 170a; Jackson, Britton, Hist. of Grittleton, 14. Not only was she something of an heiress in her own right, but insanity in her family meant that she and Greene exercised longstanding guardianship over her close kinsman John Walwyn and his property near Great Malvern, Worcestershire.38Salop Archives, 2705/33 and 34, 1623/48; VCH Worcs. iv. 127. Furthermore, Walter had been an only son, and as the widower of his eldest sister as well as stepfather to his underage heir (also Walter), Greene could wield considerable influence.39MIs Wilts. 1822, 38; Jackson, Britton, Hist. of Grittleton, 14.

After his own wedding at Grittleton before fellow justice William Shute, Greene exhibited his commitment to innovative legislation by conducting at least 15 civil marriages there.40Grittleton par. reg. He continued to be prominent in county administration and was not forgotten by central government. In March 1654 he was placed on a commission of oyer and terminer for Wiltshire.41TSP iv. 296. A year later, in the aftermath of Penruddock’s rebellion, he sat on a commission with a remit including also Devon, Dorset and Somerset, which tried insurgents at Salisbury.42CSP Dom. 1655, p. 114. Meanwhile, the commission of triers and ejectors had apparently instructed him and two others to oust the vicar of Grittleton, John Trotman. On 22 May 1655 they wrote to Oliver Cromwell* complaining that, while they had managed to secure parish corn by locking the barn, Trotman had broken open the doors, made derogatory remarks about the protector and sued the parishioners for tithes. Their request that the matter be pursued and Trotman replaced by Thomas Pritchard, a godly minister, was subsequently approved and implemented, although the incumbent by the later 1650s was the staunchly Calvinist head of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Thomas Tully; the latter found it a troublesome parish, disturbed by unlicensed (and female) preaching.43CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 170, 201, 218; Jackson, Britton, Hist. of Grittleton, 19; Calamy Revised, 92; ‘Thomas Tully’, Oxford DNB.

With Dove, Ludlow, Thomas Eyre and James Hely*, Greene was active by late December 1655 on the Wiltshire commission to assist John Disbrowe* as major-general for south-west England.44Bodl. Rawl. A.33, f. 157. When that expedient in local government was terminated, Greene was appointed in November 1656 as a commissioner for the security of protector.45A. and O. He was again named an assessment commissioner in 1657 and July 1659, and he was quite probably the Captain Greene who had raised a troop in Wiltshire whom the council of state recommended in September 1659 should be continued in his position as part of the militia.46A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 191. But his last recorded appearance at quarter sessions was at Marlborough on 4 October, and as he was not among commissioners in January and March 1660 it looks as though he had failed to join the many in the county who rallied around the recalled Rump or General George Monck*. He certainly faded abruptly from public life.

It is plausible that after the Restoration Greene was disaffected in religion as well as politics. His will, drafted in 1670, was pious but unspecific, leaving the place of his burial to his executrix and resigning his ‘soul to God my creator hoping only to find favour in his sight through his son our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the alone advocate for my poor soul’, but his surroundings are suggestive. Mark King, incumbent of Winterborne Stoke, was ejected in 1662 (as was Tully’s former curate at Grittleton) and later licensed as a Presbyterian.47Calamy Revised, 309. Greene’s stepson Walter White (d. 1678) was reported to have assisted the conventicles of Presbyterian minister Henry Stubbes and to have specifically excluded the use of the Prayer Book at his funeral.48HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Walter White’. On the other hand, Greene’s prosperity seems to have endured. By 1662 Mere Park may have been lost to him, but he could still settle on his elder son several parcels of land in Wiltshire (not including Grittleton) and one at Yatton, Somerset.49Wilts RO, 270/41. He and his wife still had oversight of, and potential profit from, Walwyn property in Worcestershire.50Shropshire Archives, 2705/34 and 35; Birmingham City Archives, 3197/ACC 1919-025/280866; His will mentioned purchase of coppices – probably those in Westbury and elsewhere sold to ‘Nicholas Greene esquire’ at an unknown date after 1649 for £10,000. Some of these went with the lease of Winterbourne Stoke parsonage to his younger son Walter Greene, while his elder daughter Margaret was to have £800, supplied by her brothers within three months. ‘Goods at Cardiff’ indicate business connections with Wales evidently still enjoyed by his elder son ten years after Greene’s death in September 1670.51PROB11/334/413; Hoare, Hist. Wilts. iii. Westbury, 38; Cardiff Recs. ed. J.H. Matthews, iii. 119-38. In June 1688 Nicholas the younger was proposed with James Hely as a potential justice of the peace when James II sought to recruit nonconformists.52Wilts. Arch. Mag. xviii. 374. Although none of Greene’s direct descendants in the male line served as an MP, his stepson Walter White’s son and namesake was elected for Chippenham in 1695 and 1705.53HP Commons 1690-1715.