WINWOOD, Richard (1609-88), of Quainton, Bucks.

After a long career as a university administrator, diplomat and civil servant, Sir Ralph Winwood served briefly as one of James I’s secretaries of state. As his eldest surviving son, Richard Winwood inherited estates in Buckinghamshire, his book collection and possibly something of his zealous Protestantism.20Lipscomb, Bucks. i. 397; VCH Bucks. iii. 308, iv. 94; Whitelocke, Diary, 401. However, Richard’s mother retained possession of the family’s principal seat at Ditton Park on the Thames opposite Windsor, and he did not inherit this until after her death in 1659.21VCH Bucks. iii. 308; Ship Money Pprs. ed. C.G. Bonsey and J.G. Jenkins (Bucks. Rec. Soc. xiii), 77. In the meantime, his residence was at Quainton, a property five miles to the north-west of Aylesbury which had been acquired by Sir Ralph in 1615.22VCH Bucks. iv. 93, 94. During the late 1630s and early 1640s he purchased additional estates in Buckinghamshire.23VCH Bucks. iii. 319; iv. 55-6.

The expulsion in May 1641 of the new MP for Windsor, William Taylor alias Domville*, gave Winwood his chance to enter Parliament, although only after a disputed by-election. He was allowed to take his seat by 5 July, for it was then that he took the Protestation.24CJ ii. 199b; Procs. LP v. 504. But no sooner had he done so than his opponent from the by-election, Richard Braham†, petitioned the Commons against the result.25CJ ii. 200a-b; Procs. LP v. 517. The matter was still unresolved a year later.26CJ ii. 643b. His first committee appointment (24 July) was an important one, for it was to the committee considering the first militia bill, which could indicate that he had quickly sided with the majority in the Commons which was subjecting the king’s policies to increasing criticism.27CJ ii. 223a. Despite his position as one of the newest MPs, he was named to the Recess Committee created in September 1641 to remain in session during the king’s journey to Scotland.28CJ ii. 288b. Once Parliament reassembled he was named a further couple of committees, including the delegation of 30 December which attended on the king to discuss rumours that the queen and the royal children were to be seized.29CJ ii. 327b, 360b. In April 1642 he was one of the local MPs who were asked to thank those Buckinghamshire residents who had offered to lend £6,000 to help suppress the Irish rebellion.30CJ ii. 519a. That spring, he invested £300 as an Irish Adventurer.31Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 194.

In May 1642, with the political crisis deteriorating towards open hostilities, Winwood was one of the six pro-parliamentarian deputy lieutenants appointed for Buckinghamshire by the lord lieutenant, William, 6th Baron Paget.32Whitelocke, Diary, 131; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 169. This was subsequently confirmed by the House of Lords following Paget’s desertion to the king.33LJ v. 178b. In the meantime, he and three of his colleagues, including John Hampden* and Arthur Goodwin*, had organised for the £300 raised in the county for the planned campaign in Ireland to be transported to London.34Bucks. Contributions for Ireland, 2. Winwood was also one of the local gentlemen who met at Aylesbury in June to take control of the county in Paget’s absence.35Nugent, Hampden, ii. 458. Then, on 5 July, the Commons instructed him, together with Hampden, Goodwin and Bulstrode Whitelocke*, to organise military recruitment there.36CJ ii. 654b. Winwood personally provided five horses for the troop commanded by Richard Grenville* in Goodwin’s regiment.37Bucks. Contributions for Ireland, 131. The fact that some parliamentarian soldiers gave him a rough time in the middle of August when they intercepted some goods he was transporting to London was probably just an unfortunate incident; that the soldiers accused him of being ‘of the malignant party’ when he tried to explain that he was an MP counts for little as evidence of his actual stance at that time.38PJ iii. 308-9.

By mid-October, with the king marching east from Shrewsbury towards London, Buckinghamshire was put on high alert. A letter from Edmund West* informing the Commons about their preparations reported that Winwood had raised a troop but that they were unsure what to do with it.39Add. 18777, f. 41. The Commons sought to end that uncertainty by sending Winwood, Whitelocke and Thomas Fountaine* to take control.40CJ ii. 819a. On reaching Buckinghamshire, Winwood and Whitelocke decided to base themselves at Ditton Park. After several days of some confusion, the immediate crisis seemed to pass with the news of the inconclusive outcome of the battle at Edgehill. The pair then returned to Westminster.41Whitelocke, Diary, 137-8. But the crisis had not passed. Barely a fortnight later Prince Rupert was marching through southern Buckinghamshire on the way to Brentford. His route took him close to Ditton Park and the Winwood estates are unlikely to have been unaffected. Even if Winwood was not present in the county at this point, the impact of the war must have been brought home to him and probably coloured his attitudes towards it thereafter. Within weeks he would be supporting the legislation to compensate those who had been plundered by the royalist army.42CJ ii. 879b. On 2 January 1643 he carried up to the Lords the bill to secure reinforcements to defend north-west Buckinghamshire.43CJ ii. 910b; LJ v. 523b.

By now fully aware of the war’s seriousness, Winwood supported the moves for a negotiated solution. In late January 1643 he was one of the eight MPs given the job of delivering Parliament’s peace proposals to the king. They did so at Oxford on 1 February.44CJ ii. 945a; LJ v. 575a, 577b; Add. 18777, f. 135; Add. 31116, pp. 43-4; Whitelocke, Diary, 141; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 195. He may well have been chosen for this task on the recommendation of either Whitelocke or Edmund Waller*, two of his friends who were also members of the delegation. He had returned to London by 14 February, when he attended a meeting of the Committee for Irish Affairs, of which he was an active member during 1643-4.45Add. 4782, f. 87; Add. 4771, f. 53. On 30 March 1643 he was sent as a messenger to the Lords to request their concurrence in maintaining the major garrison in Buckinghamshire at Aylesbury.46CJ iii. 24a; LJ v. 680a. If peace was unattainable by negotiation, winning the war was more important than ever and protecting his own county, the immediate priority.

But he continued to have doubts as to whether war should be regarded as the only possible option. On being asked to take the covenant imposed on the Commons in the aftermath of the discovery of Waller’s plot later that year, he hesitated, asked for more time and then finally took it two days later on 8 June.47CJ iii. 118b, 120b. That Waller was a friend must have given him pause for thought. Moreover, this pattern was repeated that autumn when MPs took the Solemn League and Covenant. He again asked for time to consider his position before agreeing to take it on 3 October, eight days after most of his colleagues had complied.48CJ iii. 259b, 262a. Seeking military assistance from the Scots may seemed to him to be a dangerous escalation of the conflict.

Yet what he did not doubt was the need to defend Buckinghamshire and Berkshire from any royalist advances. For him, allowing either of those counties to be overrun would have solved nothing. The proximity of the fighting only made it all the more important that this front line was held. Over the next three years the incessant theme of his activities at Westminster was the need to find money for the troops protecting those counties. As before, he was particularly concerned that the garrison at Aylesbury was paid as regularly as possible and kept up to strength. It is more likely that he took the lead in the spring of 1644 in negotiating with the Revenue Committee for the £3,000 needed to pay the soldiers there.49CJ iii. 252a, 297a, 437b, 452b, 489b. He also pressed for more money for the garrison at Abingdon.50CJ iv. 19b, 101b, 337a. Understandably, however, he was most concerned about the state of the garrison stationed at Windsor Castle.51CJ iii. 388a, 507b; iv. 399a. After helping in November 1644 to raise £500 for these soldiers, he and the other Windsor MP, Cornelius Holland*, were asked by the Commons to organise its distribution.52CJ iii. 703a, 705a. A year later the emergency payments to provide them with victuals were similarly paid via Winwood and Holland.53CJ iv. 351a, 352a. He also seems to have been one of those behind the idea of melting down some damaged brass statues from the castle to raise cash for the local garrison.54CJ iv. 279a, 399a, 402a. These were probably parts of the unfinished tomb for Henry VIII in the Lady Chapel of St George’s Chapel.55M. Mitchell, ‘Works of art from Rome to Henry VIII’, Jnl. of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxxiv. 192; Windsor Castle, ed. S. Brindle (2018), 210. His constituents were no doubt as pleased as the soldiers when these payments were made. All three of these garrisons remained crucial military bases for Parliament as long as Oxford held out as the royalists’ headquarters. Winwood was therefore always keen to raise men or money for another attack on the university city.56CJ iii. 521a, 523a, 654b; iv. 157a. But he was not just doing so with other peoples’ money; in November 1645 he volunteered to lend £500 to Parliament.57CJ iv. 346a; v. 74a, vi. 192a; CCC 804. By the following year he probably had little sympathy with those at Oxford who were determined to continue holding out.58CJ iv. 505a.

Throughout these events the MP to whom Winwood was closest was Whitelocke. They had shared lodgings in 1643 when Winwood and his wife had lived with Whitelocke at Sir Robert Payne’s house at Highgate, with Winwood lending Whitelocke his coach for the daily commute to Westminster.59Whitelocke, Diary, 146. Their friendship seems to have been cemented by their mutual love of hunting, especially hawking.60Whitelocke, Diary, 222, 262, 279, 396, 448, 495, 499, 501, 512. In July 1645 when the 1st earl of Sussex (Sir Thomas Savile†) threatened to implicate Whitelocke and Denzil Holles* as having conducted secret negotiations with the king, it was Winwood who travelled to Deptford to warn Whitelocke. Asked by Whitelocke why he had taken this risk, he replied that he would ‘adventure his life’ for him ‘because he was his friend and loved him’.61Whitelocke, Diary, 169, 171. It is also possible that some of Winwood’s political positions were influenced by Whitelocke, for the older man was someone else who continued to see a negotiated settlement as likely to be the preferable solution. Winwood may nevertheless have supported the Self-Denying Ordinance.62CJ iv. 88a, 477a.

Winwood’s activity at Westminster seems to have declined sharply following the surrender of Oxford. His interest may have waned now that the immediate disruptions to his locality had passed. Between the summer of 1646 and the purge in late 1648 he was named to just two committees, both of which had distinctly godly overtones. The first, in October 1647, was that to investigate claims that unsuitable dons had been given academic positions at Cambridge, while the second four months later was the committee to consider the additional bill for the observance of the sabbath (23 Feb.).63CJ v. 331b, 471a. By April 1648 he was being listed as one of those MPs absent from the House.64CJ v. 543b. Such apparent lack of enthusiasm would not have endeared him to those radicals who purged the Commons in December 1648 and so he found himself among the majority excluded from Parliament.65A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 29 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5).

Winwood kept a low profile during the 1650s. By then he had ceased to hold any local office. In September 1651, on his triumphal journey back from Worcester, Oliver Cromwell* stopped at Aylesbury and spent a day hunting with hawks lent by Winwood. That, in itself, should not imply that he supported what Cromwell now stood for, as Whitelocke had almost certainly made the arrangements.66Whitelocke, Diary, 270-1; Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 351. Winwood seems to have campaigned in 1654 for at least one of the Buckinghamshire candidates in the parliamentary elections, because he attempted to obtain Whitelocke’s support by sending him a hawk, although which candidate it was he supported remains unclear.67Whitelocke, Diary, 393. Five years later he helped get Whitelocke’s son James Whitelocke* elected at Aylesbury.68Whitelocke, Diary, 502. In the meantime, in 1655, 1656 and 1657, Whitelocke pulled strings on his behalf to ensure that he was not nominated as sheriff.69Whitelocke, Diary, 418, 419, 450, 480. In 1657 Winwood was put back on to the Buckinghamshire assessment commission.70A. and O.

Tipped off by his friend, the physician William Denton (brother of Sir Alexander*), Winwood probably resumed his seat in the Commons immediately following the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February 1660.71Mems. of the Verney Fam. iii. 463 Nine days later he was added to the committee for widows and maimed soldiers after it was told to turn its attention to the condition to the poor knights of Windsor.72CJ vii. 857a. Thus, almost 19 years after he had been elected, he was still giving attention to constituency business.

The dispute over the New Windsor franchise resurfaced in 1660 and deprived Winwood of the chance to get re-elected there. He also stood unsuccessfully for one of the Buckinghamshire county seats in 1661. It was not until much later in Charles II’s reign that he was able to resume his parliamentary career, when he was elected to the three Exclusion Parliaments as a whig.73HP Commons 1660-1690. At the very end of his life he was one of the whig collaborators who cooperated with James II’s policies. In 1689, a year after his death, his widow commissioned a monument to him for the church at Quainton from the sculptor, Thomas Stayner. The epitaph mentioned his service as a deputy lieutenant after the Restoration while carefully omitting any reference to his earlier service during the civil war.74Lipscomb, Bucks. i. 397; RCHME Bucks. ii. 242; Pevsner, Bucks. 608; With no children and with no surviving brothers, his estates went to his nearer relative through his late sister Anne, who had married Edward Montagu I*. It was therefore her son, Ralph Montagu†, 1st earl and later 1st duke of Montagu, who inherited them in 1694 on the death of Winwood’s widow.75VCH Bucks. iii. 308.