CHESHIRE, Richard (d. 1658), of Shrewsbury.

The Cheshire family was long settled in Shrewsbury. William Cheshire was a Shrewsbury glover in 1508, as was his grandson, Adam. Adam Cheshire was admitted a burgess of the town in 1598 at the same time as his eight sons, among them Richard, the MP’s father.11Salop Archives, 6001/290, A2/17. Richard Cheshire senior was also a glover. Catherine Llewellyn, his wife, was also from a family of Shrewsbury merchants and prominent townsmen. Catherine’s brother, Richard Llewellyn, was to become mayor in 1647 and an alderman.12PROB11/175/188; Glam. RO, Cardiff MS 3.179. Richard Cheshire senior commanded enough status and income to send his son to Shrewsbury school. After his schooling, Richard junior forsook the family tradition of mercantile activity in favour of the more important industry of drapery. He served an apprenticeship to a Shrewsbury draper, and on completion, became a freeman of the town in 1633. He married, in the same year he became a freeman, Mary Poyner in the Shrewsbury parish of St Chad. The couple may have lived in St Chad initially, where the first of their children was born, but by 1637 they had settled in St Julian’s parish, where Cheshire served as churchwarden for two terms of office. Between 1637 and 1645, many children were born to the Cheshires in St Julian’s; by that time the children’s father was appearing as ‘Mr’ in the parish register entries.13St Julian par. reg.

In the mid-1630s, Cheshire was active enough in the drapers’ company to become a steward, and in 1640 was included in a delegation to the Short Parliament to ‘see what good may be done for the company’.14Salop Archives, 1831/6, f. 58. On the eve of civil war he became a common councillor of the town, and on 14 October 1642 was included with Humphrey Mackworth I* and Thomas Hunt* among those charged by the king with high treason. All three probably shared the same advanced Protestant outlook. With Shrewsbury securely in royalist hands, Cheshire and his parliamentarian colleagues found themselves henceforth excluded from corporation meetings.15Owen, Blakeway, Hist. Shrewsbury, i. 430-1. Cheshire did not take up arms, nor can it be demonstrated that he left Shrewsbury, the threat of a charge of high treason notwithstanding. He may have simply resigned himself to enduring the royalists’ rule over the town and garrison. During the latter part of the civil war, Cheshire seems to have moved within Shrewsbury, back to the parish of St Chad, where from 1644 ten baptisms or burials of the family were recorded.16St Chad par. reg.

When Parliament recovered Shrewsbury in February 1645, Cheshire was restored to membership of the corporation. He was never a member of the Shropshire county committee, however, and so was politically far less active than either Hunt or Mackworth, his fellow sufferers in 1642. Instead, Cheshire continued his business as a draper and in 1647 represented the drapers’ company in its efforts to create a cartel among the Shrewsbury merchants in that line of trade. They sought to use their collective buying power to corner the market for Oswestry Welsh cloth, and Cheshire was named as one of eight drapers who were to make weekly visits to Oswestry to buy fabrics.17Salop Archives, 1831/6 f. 65v. This responsibility suggests that Cheshire was back at work full time.

The apotheosis of Cheshire’s civic career came in 1652 when he became mayor of Shrewsbury. During his mayoralty, the corporation undertook to repair housing on the Welsh bridge, and improvements to the town’s water supply were set in hand, but there is no suggestion that Cheshire was in any way unusual among Shrewsbury mayors in the 1650s.18Glam. RO, Cardiff MS 3.179, f. 13v. The year 1654 was something of an annus mirabilis for him. In June, he married for the second time, to Martha Baker. The St Chad parish register records the reading of banns by three different ministers. On 5 July he was returned to the first protectorate Parliament as the senior of Shrewsbury’s two Members: either because Humphrey Mackworth I* (by this time serving on the lord protector's council) encouraged the Shrewsbury corporation to select him or simply because he was the retiring mayor.19Salop Archives, 215/67. In August, Cheshire was named as an ‘ejector’, a commissioner for regulating the clergy under the new arrangements for the Cromwellian church. This was his first nomination to any committee appointed from London, and once again the hand of Humphrey Mackworth I may have been behind his appointment. Cheshire had never been among the elders appointed to the Shropshire classis in 1647, and his precise religious views are opaque, although we may be confident that he could be numbered among the Protestant orthodox godly. In September, he took his seat. At Westminster, he was named only to one committee, that charged with discussing the supply of whale oil with Baltic and Greenland merchants.20CJ vii. 375b. It can only have been Cheshire’s mercantile background that recommended him for the appointment. He seems not to have sought subsequently a seat in the Parliament of 1656.

Cheshire was named as an assessment commissioner in 1657, but in September 1658 he drew up his will. Only four children were mentioned, but it would be unwise to assume that all others born to him and to his first wife had predeceased him. One of his sons, Daniel, had gone overseas, but the will is silent as to the precise destination. Cheshire died within weeks of making the will, and was buried at St Chad’s on 15 October.21PROB11/285/186; St Chad par. reg. Martha Cheshire, his widow, left bequests to three Presbyterian dissenting ministers, Samuel Beresford, John Bryan and Francis Tallents, when she made her will in 1676. She also left rings to Samuel Brindley, a member of a dissenting family related to Cheshire from at least the 1630s.22PROB11/351/330; The People of God. Shrewsbury Dissenters 1660-1699 Part 1 ed. J.V. Cox (Salop Record Ser. ix), 13-14, 26-7, 34-8, 45; Calamy Revised, 51, 83-4, 474-5. None of Richard Cheshire’s descendants is known to have sat in later Parliaments.