SHETTERDEN, Daniel (bef. 1605-1670), of Eltham, Kent.

In the sixteenth century Shetterden’s ancestors had strong connections with the dissenting stronghold of Sandwich, and there is evidence that more than one of his grandparents’ generation were puritanically inclined, notably his great-aunt Alice, who married one Repent Hubbard in 1573.11St Peter Sandwich par. reg. The most prominent member of the family, however, was Shetterden’s great-uncle, Nicholas Shetterden of Pluckley, a ‘freewiller’ who was interrogated by the Marian regime, and burnt at the stake for heresy in Canterbury in July 1555.12J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments ed. S.R. Cattley (1838), vii. 306-18; D.A. Penny, Freewill or Predestination (Woodbridge, 1990), 52, 76, 143-5. Shetterden’s grandfather, Isaac Shetterden (d. 1574), a London Leatherseller who also owned property in Kent, favoured puritan ministers, and requested that his death should be marked by the preaching of six sermons by Edward Dering, a notoriously godly minister of Pluckley, who was suspended in 1573 and brought before the court of star chamber.13PROB11/56/137; Soc. Gen. Boyd 49538; Oxford DNB. Isaac’s religious views appear to have been shared by his wife, Alice, who subsequently married another leading London merchant and puritan, William Penington, and who also left money for godly preachers in her will.14Soc. Gen. Boyd 37320; PROB11/110/321.

Daniel Shetterden almost certainly grew up, therefore, in a godly household, and surrounded by members of London’s puritan community, including the family of his cousin Isaac Penington*.15Soc. Gen. Boyd 10030; Vis. London, ii. 151-2. Born before 1605, when Alice Penington bequeathed him £50 in her will, Shetterden was a younger son, and may have been destined to follow his father, a Leatherseller, into trade.16PROB11/110/321; Soc. Gen., Boyd 27687. By the time of his father’s death in 1620, however, the death of an elder brother had made Shetterden heir to the estate, and he was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1628, although he was not called to the bar.17PROB11/135/514. In October 1631 he appears to have been living in Charing in Kent, where he contributed to church funds, but he had evidently already married and settled in St Alfege, Greenwich, where the first of his children was baptised on 30 June 1631.18Charing par. reg.; St Alfege Greenwich par. reg. By March 1634 he was living in Eltham, where he remained for the rest of his life.19Eltham par. reg.

During the first civil war, Shetterden’s allegiance lay with the parliamentarian cause, but despite his puritan pedigree, he was content to remain a somewhat lowly administrator in Kent. Named to neither parliamentarian commissions during the 1640s nor to the commission of the peace, his political profile was limited. Shetterden oversaw the felling of wood in Kent for the supply of fuel for London in 1644, and was given responsibility for removing icons, altars and superstitious pictures and crosses from the royal chapel at Eltham, in October of the same year.20CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 664; SP28/235, unfol. More importantly, by May 1644 he was acting as receiver and treasurer for the Sutton lathe or division, after which date he regularly received instructions from members of the county committee and the region’s MPs, regarding sequestered estates, and particular payments.21SP28/234, unfol.; SP28/235, unfol.; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 164; 1625-49, p. 669. On one occasion, in July 1646, he received orders from Parliament to pay money to Degory Wheare, professor of history at Oxford, from the funds in his hands.22SP28/234, unfol. Shetterden probably also worked from the Marshalsea Court in Southwark during this period.23CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 669. The evidence from the papers of the county committee, together with the accounts which Shetterden submitted to the Committee of Accounts, indicates that he continued such service until March 1647.24SP28/120a, unfol.; SP28/210b, unfol.; SP28/234, unfol. Thereafter, he is almost invisible until the mid-1650s. Late in 1651 he faced accusations of financial corruption, and a charge that he had misappropriated £100 of money raised for Ireland, but the outcome is unknown.25SP28/258, ff. 107-8.

Shetterden re-emerged briefly on the public stage during the protectorate Parliaments. He was returned as a knight of the shire for Kent in 1654, but he made a minimal impression on the proceedings, and was named to only one committee, to consider publications by John Biddle, the Socinian (12 Dec.) – an appointment that suggests he sided with the Presbyterian interest in the Commons.26CJ vii. 400a. Shetterden was evidently considered to be an opponent of the Cromwellian regime by the autumn of 1656. He contested one of the county seats against the navy commissioner, Peter Pett* (who was supported by the local major-general, Thomas Kelsey*), and was subsequently prevented from taking his seat by the protectoral council.27CSP Dom. 1656-7, p. 416; CJ vii. 425a. Thereafter, Shetterden played no recorded part in public life, and he probably retired to Eltham, where he may have acted as patron to the local schoolmaster, and non-conformist minister, Caleb Trenchfield.28C. Trenchfield, Christian Chymistrie (1662), sig. A2; Calamy Revised, 492. At his death in 1670, Shetterden made cash bequests worth £1,000 to his five remaining children, as well as £100 for poor, and probably non-conformist, ministers.29PROB11/333/281. He was the only one of his immediate family to sit in Parliament.