STAYNINGS, Charles (1620-1700), of Holnicote, Selworthy, Som.

In the early seventeenth century this MP’s father, Charles Staynings senior, was at least the eighth generation of his family to have lived at Holnicote in the far north-west corner of Somerset.14Vis. Som. 1623, 103-4; Sales of Wards ed. Hawkins, 148-9; T. Gerard, The Particular Description of the Co. of Som. ed. E.H. Bates (Som. Rec. Soc. xv), 31. In 1620, the year the future MP was born, Charles senior extended their estates elsewhere in the county by buying Stowey Castle at Nether Stowey.15VCH Som. v. 195. By the 1630s Charles senior was serving as one of Somerset justices of the peace and as a captain of the local militia.16Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 39, 168. In 1641 Parliament included him on the Somerset subsidy commission.17SR.

Charles, his eldest son, may well still have been a student at Oxford when the civil war broke out in 1642. That he did not progress to Lincoln’s Inn until 1646 may mean that his education was interrupted.18Al. Ox.; LI Admiss. i. 254. By then he had already been added to the Somerset commission of the peace and was acting, on behalf of the county committee, as the treasurer of the hospitals of the western half of Somerset.19C231/6, p. 51; QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 7-74; CCC 83; Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 24. Two years later he became one of the Presbyterian elders for the Taunton classis.20Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 421. Later evidence suggests that Staynings reacted badly to the king’s execution. Yet, in the immediate aftermath, he continued to perform his duties as a justice of the peace.21QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 92, 99, 108. Only from early 1650 does he seem to have withdrawn his services and that would explain why he was dismissed from the commission of the peace in July 1651.22C231/6, p. 220.

The choice of Staynings as one of the Somerset MPs for the 1654 Parliament was probably intended by his supporters as a less-than-positive response to the new Cromwellian protectorate. On 1 August 1654, three weeks after the Somerset poll, a Dunster resident, one J. Garret, wrote to a friend in London with information he wanted to be passed on to the protectoral council. Garret’s explicit purpose was to persuade the council into disabling Staynings from taking his seat. According to Garret, Staynings had disapproved of the execution of the king and, as a result of reading Eikon Basilike, had concluded that Charles I had been ‘the justest and best prince that ever governed this nation’.23CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 281-3. Garret enclosed samples of some of the pro-royalist poems Staynings had been inspired to compose. Staynings’s views on the Rump and Cromwell, as set out in those poems, made plain his contempt.

The thing which Parliament did first intend
The general [Cromwell] hath brought unto an end.
For as at first it was your good intent
To bring delinquents to due punishment,
Ill counsellors, enemies to the state,
Whore-masters, drunkards, and a juggling pate,
The army now hath done’t, and when they went,
They found them in the House of Parliament.
Now old reformers for delinquents go,
For here are those that dare recall them so;
And old delinquents may come home again
And show their faces, just like honest men.24CSP Dom. 1654, p. 283.

Astonishingly, the council ignored this information and Staynings was allowed to take his seat in the new Parliament.

Staynings’s sceptical views doubtless influenced his conduct at Westminster. One of his poems had satirised the Engagement. He seems to have believed that everyone should subscribe it because, as they were living under military rule, they had no real choice.25CSP Dom. 1654, p. 282. That makes it intriguing that he should, on 25 September 1654, have been included on the parliamentary committee set up to consider whether MPs should each be required to declare their support for the protectorate. Would he himself have been willing to swear his support with suitable mental reservations? The same day he was also appointed to the committee considering the bill to eject scandalous ministers.26CJ vii. 370a. As a Presbyterian elder, he may well have supported that measure. On 10 October he was among those MPs added to the committee on chancery after it was asked to consider the legality of those decisions made by the Nominated Parliament and by the councils since 3 July 1653.27CJ vii. 375b. Staynings is unlikely to have been any more impressed by the argument for their legality than he had been by those for any other form of non-monarchical rule.

Staynings did not stand in the 1656 elections, perhaps realising that, unlike in 1654, the council would almost certainly exclude him anyway. Even so, he had been re-appointed to the Somerset commission of the peace by the spring of 1657 and was soon after added to the assessment commissions for Somerset and Devon.28A. and O. But it may be significant that the first record of him acting again as a justice of the peace dates only from October 1658, after the death of Oliver Cromwell*, and then only in connection with a case of sheep-stealing at Selworthy.29QS Recs. Som. Commonwealth, 357.

Yet, if Staynings had little time for the constitutional experiments of the 1650s, he was equally out of place under the restored monarchy. Having been omitted from the Somerset commission of the peace in March 1660, he held no local offices from mid-1660 until 1672 – the year of Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended the penal code against all religious nonconformists. Tellingly, it was only in late 1687, at the height of James II’s attempts to look beyond the existing county establishments, that Staynings became a deputy lieutenant for Somerset.30CSP Dom. 1687-9, p. 116. Such an appointment would be consistent with Dissenting sympathies on Staynings’s part.

Staynings lived on until 4 December 1700 and was buried at Selworthy eight days later.31Hancock, Selworthy, 55, 104. As his marriage had been childless, his principal heir was William Martyn of Exeter, his late wife’s nephew. Under Staynings’s will, trustees were appointed to manage his lands at Nether Stowey and Over Stowey to provide annuities for other family members, including his surviving brother and sister. Bequests totalling £35 were left to the poor of Selworthy, Luccombe, Dulverton, Winsford and Exford.32Hancock, Selworthy, 267-72. Staynings seems previously to have donated money for the poor of Nether Stowey and that money was subsequently combined with other donations to purchase a plot of land to provide a perpetual endowment for the parish.33VCH Som. v. 200.