GURDON, Brampton (1607-69), of Letton, Norf.

Born in 1607, Brampton Gurdon was the first child of his father’s second marriage.33‘Gurdon pprs.’ 369. His Christian name reflected gratitude for the sizeable estates in Norfolk brought to the family by the future MP’s grandmother, Amy Brampton, and had already been bestowed not only on his father but also on an elder half-brother, who died in 1621 aged about 20.34Winthrop Pprs. i. 260. The Gurdons’ house at Assington at which Brampton junior was brought up was only several miles from the Winthrops’ house at Groton, and, on entering the Inner Temple in 1625, Gurdon probably shared his lodgings with John Winthrop junior, son of the future governor of Massachusetts.35I. Temple database; Winthrop Pprs. i. 318. The occasional references to him in the Winthrop correspondence suggest that he spent the years between his time at the Inner Temple and his marriage assisting his father at Assington.36Winthrop Pprs. ii. 87-9, iii. 295. Assuming that the earlier tensions between Brampton senior and his eldest son, John*, had persisted, it seems likely that Brampton junior had sided with his father.

Gurdon’s marriage in 1636 to Mary Polsted, daughter of a prosperous London merchant, Henry Polsted, may well have been arranged through the bride’s brother-in-law, Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston*, head of one of the few families in south-west Suffolk who more socially elevated than the Gurdons. The dowry provided by Polsted is likely to have been generous and Gurdon’s father matched it by settling on to him all his estates in Norfolk.37‘Gurdon pprs.’, 369; Crisp, Vis. Notes, vii. 173; PROB11/220/159; PROB11/212/272. This was much more than most younger sons could hope to receive. The Brampton inheritance thus passed to Gurdon and his descendants, and the newly-married couple took up residence at the former Brampton seat at Letton, about 20 miles to the west of Norwich. For the next two centuries, this branch of the family was associated more with Norfolk than with Suffolk.

Gurdon’s father and half-brother were among those who took the lead in mobilising Suffolk against the king at the outbreak of the civil war. The death of Sir Robert Crane* in February 1643 propelled Gurdon into the war effort as well. Four months after Crane’s death, the lord lieutenant, James Howard, 3rd earl of Suffolk, named Gurdon as Sir Robert’s successor as captain of one of the local militia companies of foot.38Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/9: earl of Suffolk to B. Gurdon, 29 June 1643; HA54/1/1: warrants to B. Gurdon, July 1643; SP28/176: acct. of Samuel Moody, Nov. 1643-Jan. 1644, f. 15. Although not as crucial as it might have been, for Suffolk saw no fighting in this period, this office elevated Gurdon to a position of some military importance. Thereafter his local responsibilities proliferated. He was soon appointed to the assessment commission and to the Suffolk standing committee.39A. and O.; Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE1/O2/1, f. 87v. Especially revealing was his appointment to the local committee for scandalous ministers, to which he was named by the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†) in March 1644. His participation in the work of this committee (he is known to have attended several of its meetings) suggests that he approved of what could be seen as a trial run at creating a Presbyterian classis.40Suff. Cttees. for Scandalous Ministers ed. Holmes, 25. Indeed, when such classes were set up in Suffolk the following year, he and his father were named as elders for the Babergh hundred.41Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 429.

Before long Gurdon was also being entrusted with responsibilities beyond the county limits. In September 1644 the committee of the Eastern Association at Cambridge (quite possibly at the behest of Sir Henry Mildmay* and Francis Bacon*) selected him as one of the civilian observers accompanying its army in the field.42Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: Sir Henry Mildmay and Francis Bacon to earl of Manchester, 23 Sept. [1644]. It was probably in that capacity that he and Humphrey Walcott* oversaw the payments made in December 1644 to the association’s cavalry regiments.43Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: Eastern Assoc. cttee. warrants, Dec. 1644. Such first-hand experience of the army no doubt proved useful the following month when he attended the meeting of the association, held at Bury St Edmunds on 30 January, to consider their disquiet about proposals to reorganise the parliamentarian armies.44Suff. ed. Everitt, 84. His role in the running of the Suffolk militia increased further in April 1645 when Parliament appointed him as a deputy lieutenant.45CJ iv. 125b; LJ vii. 342a. Until then Gurdon had only been indirectly involved in the main military action, but the advance eastwards through the midlands by the king’s army in May 1645 changed that. The Suffolk county committee’s response to this latest threat was to authorise Gurdon to raise a regiment of horse. He did so immediately, using his own money to guarantee his troops pay, and 11 days later they were among the forces which decisively defeated Charles I at Naseby (14 June). The following month they helped reinforce the garrison at Cambridge when the king briefly occupied nearby Huntingdon.46‘Gurdon pprs.’, 337-9. With the power of the royalist army finally broken, this unit was soon found superfluous and disbanded. Gurdon could thus claim an honourable, if rather brief, period of service in the parliamentarian army.

For several decades the Gurdons had been trying to create an electoral interest at Sudbury, the constituency nearest to their estates at Assington, which Gurdon’s father had represented in the 1621 Parliament. He possibly tried to stand again in the Short Parliament election, but lost out to Sir Robert Crane in the messy contest held there in October 1640. The decision by the Commons in September 1645 to fill the vacancy created by Crane’s death gave the Gurdons their chance to claim his seat.47CJ iv. 262a. With his eldest son already sitting as MP for Ipswich, Brampton senior put forward Brampton junior. The £8 4s they spent wooing the corporation was a very small outlay to undo the humiliation they had suffered five years earlier.48Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: acct. of Brampton Gurdon, 1644-5.

The evidence for Gurdon’s service in the Long Parliament is obscured by the failure by the clerks to distinguish between him and his brother in the Journal. By this stage, John Gurdon was an experienced MP who had emerged as an active supporter of the Independents. It is therefore reasonable to suppose most occurrences of ‘Mr Gurdon’ in the Journal refer to him. Until late 1648, just about the only certain information about Brampton Gurdon (apart from his subscription to the Covenant in February 1646 and his appointment to the Suffolk assessment commission in December 1647) is that he was named to the large committee appointed on 6 October 1647 to prepare proposals for the religious settlement to be sent to the king. That, in compiling the relevant Journal entry, the clerk garbled Gurdon’s name suggests that it was unfamiliar.49CJ iv. 454a, v. 327b, 400b. Gurdon may not have made much of an impact at Westminster, but that seems not to have displeased the Sudbury corporation; during these years the mayor of Sudbury regularly sent him gifts of sugar as tokens of appreciation.50Suff. RO (Bury), EE501/2/7: mayoral acct. late 1640s. In late November 1648 he was one of the three Suffolk MPs ordered to arrange that assessment levies be collected as quickly as possible in the hope of appeasing the army.51CJ vi. 88a. He may thus have been elsewhere when the army finally intervened to purge the Commons.

Gurdon was not among the MPs purged on 6 December 1648, but he nevertheless made plain his disapproval of the army’s actions by remaining away from Westminster over the following months. In contrast to his brother (who was named as one of the king’s judges but who refused to attend), Gurdon took his time before seeking re-admission and it was not until 4 June 1649 that he was allowed to resume his seat, presumably having made his dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote.52CJ vi. 223b. How frequently he attended thereafter is almost impossible to say. The Journals continue to make no distinction between the Gurdon brothers and, once John became a councillor of state in 1650, there are even stronger grounds for believing that the elder brother was by far the more active. It is only because John was also included that there is no doubt that Brampton was named to a committee on 25 April 1651 to consider the petition of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.53CJ vi. 567a. The government, with the approval of colleagues in the Rump, evidently thought he was sufficiently loyal to be given the sensitive task of serving on the court held at Norwich in December 1650 to try the leaders of the most recent East Anglian rebellion.54A. and O.

Gurdon had continued to participate in local government throughout the upheavals of 1649 and 1650, but the relative attention he gave to Suffolk and Norfolk affairs changed. It may well be that hitherto he had been so active in Suffolk mainly because he had needed to look after the family’s interests on behalf of his ageing father. Once Gurdon senior had died in the spring of 1650 (aged 83), there was an opportunity for Brampton junior to devote more time to his own interests in Norfolk. However, his withdrawal from public life in Suffolk was not immediate. His prominent role in that county’s militia was confirmed within weeks of his father’s death when he was promoted colonel of one of its cavalry regiments.55SP25/119, p. 65. On the other hand, from late 1650 he was named to Norfolk rather than Suffolk commissions.56A. and O. He had probably been a Suffolk justice of the peace for some years (although he appears never to have attended quarter session meetings) but from 1650 to 1657 surviving records show him to have been a reasonably assiduous attender at the Norfolk quarter sessions.57Norf. QSOB, 35-96. One particular case, that concerning witchcraft allegations made against Mary Childerhouse, repeatedly came before the commission during these years and each time it was Gurdon who was asked to investigate.58Norf. QSOB, 39, 64, 93. In February 1656 he was included on the commission appointed by the council of state to consider the plight of the worsted weavers of Norfolk.59CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 201. It was in Norfolk that Gurdon, whose doubts about the events of early 1649 had given way to approval for the republic, concentrated his efforts in support of the protector and his government. As a result, he became a figure of some substance in its affairs.

The town of Sudbury lost its right to parliamentary representation in the Instrument of Government of 1653, depriving of an obvious route into the 1654 or 1656 Parliaments. In seeking instead a seat for Norfolk, he may have hoped to strengthen his local standing, but he encountered humiliating rebuffs. In the 1654 poll Gurdon received just 857 votes, more than 300 short of what was needed to win a county seat.60R. Temple, ‘A 1654 protectorate parliamentary election return’, Cromwelliana, ser. 2, iii. 58. Two years later the Norfolk electorate were in no more of a mood to elect anyone closely associated with the government, especially if they were linked to the local acting major-general, Hezekiah Haynes*. This time, although Gurdon gained more votes (1,059), he came even further down the poll, achieving only fourteenth place.61Norf. RO, MS 197, unfol.; Norf. Arch. i (1847), 67. His half-brother, Robert, fared no better several days later when he stood in the Suffolk contest.

Gurdon had to wait until the summer of 1659, when he was able to reclaim his place in the restored Rump and sit again at Westminster. As his half-brother is known to have had difficulty attending this resumed session because of ill-health, it seems that, more so than on previous occasions, undifferentiated references in the Journal may well be to Brampton. He was evidently the ‘Colonel Brampton’ named to the revived Committee for Plundered Ministers on 25 June 1659 and to a committee set up on 1 July on legislation against the Quakers and others disturbers of public worship.62CJ vii. 693b, 700b. On 9 July, amid the justified fears of a royalist uprising, both Brampton and John were appointed to a committee on a bill for searching out of suspicious lodgers in London.63CJ vii. 710b. The following week the council of state granted him accommodation at Whitehall.64CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 32. It was presumably in his absence that a temporary troop of mounted volunteers was mobilised in his name in Norfolk on 14 July, but, as the true extent of the threatened rebellion became apparent, the expectation on the part of the authorities in London was probably that he should re-join his men to help secure the Norfolk defences. On 15 August the Commons confirmed his appointment as colonel of his troop of horse.65Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: warrants, July-Aug. 1659; names of those charged with horses and arms, 19 Aug. 1659; CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 132, 322, 324; CJ vii. 755b, 760a. At the height of the crisis he had been appointed to both the Suffolk and the Norfolk militia commissions and it was probably Gurdon who, on 29 September, presented the Commons with the letter from Edward Oxborough complaining about one of the Suffolk troops, which had refused to be demobilised until they had been paid in full.66A. and O.; HMC Portland, i. 687. The following week the Commons used Gurdon as their messenger to inform the Suffolk commission that they had received their petition (possibly relating to this same incident).67CJ vii. 789a, 793a.

There were celebrations at Letton in May 1660 when the news arrived that the king was to be restored. The revellers was probably joined by Gurdon’s eldest son, who supplied them with gunpowder to add to the merriment.68‘Gurdon pprs.’, 371. Gurdon’s sentiments are unknown. After 20 years of unprecedented importance, with John becoming a figure of national standing and Brampton a leading figure in both Norfolk and Suffolk, the Restoration was a major setback from which the family took at least a generation to recover. During the course of 1660 Gurdon was removed from all his local offices and replaced by men whose loyalty to the restored dynasty had been more conspicuous. Although technically he received a pardon from the king in August 1660, unlike some tainted by their links with the republic, he was never really forgiven.69PSO5/8, unfol. Perhaps unfairly, he probably suffered by association with his brother, John, who, if he had not actually participated in the regicide, was closely linked to those who had. Brampton Gurdon remained under suspicion. In April 1668 his house was searched for hidden arms. When pistols and muskets were uncovered, they were confiscated for use by the local militia.70Norf. Lieut. Jnl. 107. However, he was sufficiently reconciled to the Church of England, as re-established after the Restoration, to be able to purchase, as one of his last known acts, the advowson of one of the local churches.71Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/9: pprs. on Garveston sale, July-Aug. 1668.

Gurdon died in November 1669, having already settled most of his estates on to his eldest son, Brampton, and was buried in the church at Southburgh, the village adjacent to Letton.72PROB11/332/217; Southburgh par. reg. In 1692 the estates passed to his grandson, Thornhagh Gurdon, author of the History of the High Court of Parliament (1731), and, from there, until the early twentieth century, they passed in an unbroken descent through the male line. After a gap of almost two centuries several of these descendants sat in Parliament for East Anglian constituencies during the latter half of the nineteenth century and in 1899 one of them, Robert Thornhagh Gurdon, was raised to the peerage as Lord Cranworth.