MAIJOR, Richard (c.1604-60), of Hursley, Hants.

The Maijors migrated from Jersey to Southampton towards the end of the sixteenth century, when the family was headed by John Maijor, a brewer, who became mayor of the town in 1600.28Hants RO, 1609B58/1. His son, another John Major†, who was mayor in 1616, established the family’s status within the wider county community and sat as MP for Southampton in 1628.29C181/3, f. 20; HP Commons 1604-1629. In his will of 1629, as well as bequests to the poor of Southampton, South Stoneham and Cosham on the Isle of Wight, he designated £200 for the building of an almshouse, left £500 to his widowed eldest daughter, and gave smaller sums to more than 50 other descendants, kin, friends and servants; two beneficiaries were absent in the East Indies, suggesting Maijor had links with inter-continental trade.30Hants RO, 44M69/G4/1/33; PROB11/155/349.

Richard Maijor had graduated in 1624 from Queen’s College, Oxford, from whom the family leased land at Cosham.31Al. Ox.; PROB11/155/349. He married five years before his father’s death, and his widowed mother had possession of the Southampton house (among other properties) until her death in 1646, so it looks as though Maijor settled first at Allington and then in the parish of Hursley, where he bought land in 1639.32VCH Hants, ii. 510; iii. 419, 486. Evidently comfortably circumstanced, Maijor compounded for his knighthood (in response to the second commission) at a sizeable £18, and from November 1639 served as sheriff of Hampshire.33Add. 21922, f. 183. In that capacity he presided over both the spring and autumn elections in 1640.

From the outbreak of civil war, he emerged as a zealous supporter of the parliamentarian cause. On 23 July 1642 he was named to what became in effect the county committee; confirmed as a member subsequently, he became very active on it, and also appeared on most local commissions.34LJ v. 233b-234a, 691b-692a; vi. 125a; CJ ii. 686b; Add. 24860, ff. 134, 136, 145; A. and O. That November he provided four horses ‘completely armed with great saddles, pistols, carbines and buff coats valued with their furnitures at £20 a piece’, as well as £20 cash, and in July 1643 a further two horses for Colonel Richard Norton*, to whom he subsequently lent £50.35Add. 24860, ff. 9, 42, 45. Maijor was involved in organising the collection of money for the relief of Ireland in 1643.36Add. 24860, ff. 11, 13-41, 46-7, 50-53v, 75-6, 127. As treasurer for the receipt of contribution money in Fawley division (from Oct. 1644), he had the responsibility of explaining to the Committee of Both Kingdoms* the refusal of the county committee to contribute towards the garrison at Southampton on the grounds that the town had county status, and thus should be provided for by its own establishment.37Add. 24860, ff. 79v, 80, 84. In the disputes over its governorship in the summer of 1645, he brought his influence in the region to bear in favour of Norton’s candidate, John St Barbe*.38Add. 24860, ff. 113, 116, 125. Eventually, Maijor became treasurer for the county.39Add. 24861, ff. 3-10, 13, 15, 37, 40v-41.

With Norton and John Bulkley*, Maijor met the local ‘clubmen’, and found them to be less inclined to royalism than to ‘self-preservation from plunder and unauthorised levies of money’.40Add. 24860, f. 133. As he acquired powerful contacts further afield, for example on the Committee of Navy and Customs at Westminster, he came to be recognised as a powerful figure in Hampshire by men like Sir Henry Mildmay*, who sought Maijor’s help in collecting his rents there.41Add. 24860, ff. 88-90, 114. Such contacts were doubtless enhanced by Maijor’s friendship with Norton, with whom he was in frequent correspondence, and with whom he apparently shared religious views which were hostile to strict Presbyterianism, and amenable to moderate Independency.42Add. 24860, ff. 113, 125, 127v Like Norton’s, Maijor’s appointment to the second Hampshire classis in December 1645 seems to indicate an interest in promoting preaching ministry rather than full-blown commitment to an ecclesiastical system.43King, Bor. and Par. Lymington, 263. In March 1646 Norton shared with Maijor his concerns about the pressure for jure divino Presbyterianism being exerted on the Commons, and with John Hildesley* in April 1647 they were responsible for the appointment of a congregational Independent minister, Nathaniel Robinson, as rector of St Lawrence Southampton (a beneficiary of Maijor’s mother’s will the previous year).44Add. 24860, f. 149; Speed, Southampton, 175-7; Calamy Revised, 413; PROB11/196/506.

It was probably through Norton that Maijor made what was to be his most significant contact, that with Oliver Cromwell*. Maijor loaned £100 for Cromwell’s regiment sometime before October 1645.45Add. 24860, f. 139. A marriage between Cromwell’s son Richard Cromwell* and Maijor’s daughter Dorothy, first mooted in February 1647, was promoted through the good offices of Norton and Nathaniel Robinson.46Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 585, ii. 8; Add. 24861, ff. 11, 17, 20, 22. That December Maijor appears to have been involved in some way in negotiations between Cromwell and royalist grandees such as John Ashburnham*.47CSP Dom. 1647-8, p. 186. In March 1648 the lieutenant-general, impressed by the family’s piety, told Norton that he found Maijor ‘wise and honest’ and commended his ‘plainness and free dealing’, while Norton informed Maijor that Richard Cromwell ‘looked upon your family as fearing God and upon you as a man by whose conversation he might much advantage himself’; Norton also sought to counter ‘ill reports’ about Oliver which sprang from the ‘adverse party’ among parliamentarians.48Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 590; Add. 24861, f. 17. However, Oliver Cromwell’s dissatisfaction with the financial terms offered by Maijor, who was rumoured to be ‘thrifty even to miserliness and an unscrupulous oppressor of his tenantry’ delayed negotiations.49Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 591-2, ii. 29-30, 102-3; Add. 24861, ff. 24, 26, 27; VCH Hants, iii. 419. The wedding finally took place on 1 May 1649, by which time Cromwell was the most powerful man in the commonwealth.50Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 8, 12-13, 21, 27-30, 40-1, 46-7, 52, 56-7, 61-2; Stowe 142, f. 56. As he journeyed towards Ireland in July, he told Maijor: ‘I have delivered my son up to you, and I hope you will counsel him: he will need it, and indeed I believe he likes well what you say, and will be advised by you’.51Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 95. In the months that followed, Cromwell not only sent Maijor news of military campaigning, but also outlined the guidance Maijor was to offer: Richard Cromwell was to ‘mind and understand business, read a little history, study the mathematics and cosmography’; these were desirable, combined ‘with subordination to the things of God’ and they were also ‘fit for public services, for which a man is born’.52Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 102-3, 159-60, 235-6, 289, 329-30, 425-60.

Maijor served the republican regime from 1649 as a member of the Hampshire county committee, not least in the demilitarisation of the region.53SP23/248, p. 69; Add. 24861, f. 44, 47-52, 54, 56, 74; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 196, 293; 1652-3, p. 406. In July 1652 the parson of Nutshelling dedicated to him a treatise on the sabbath, confident that because he had ‘so endeared unto you the whole country round about, by your incessant endeavour for the people’s welfare’, it would be the better received.54T. Chafie, The Seventh-Day Sabbath (1652), A2v (E.670.3). A glimpse of his wider interests and contacts around this time is revealed by his petition referred to the committee for mines in September 1652 and another presented to the Rump in April 1653 by Colonel Harbert Morley* on behalf of Maijor, Miles Fleetwood*, Bulstrode Whitelocke* and one other for a lease of gold and silver mines in Ireland.55CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 407; 1652-3, p. 266.

Following the dissolution of Parliament later that month, Maijor emerged as a member of a close circle around Oliver Cromwell; in June he was awarded lodgings in Whitehall.56CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 415, 425. His recommendation to the Nominated Parliament, which met in July, almost certainly came from Cromwell rather than the gathered churches in Hampshire. In the spring Maijor had supported a petition from the county in favour of the maintenance of a preaching ministry, albeit apparently prefering a different text, perhaps drafted himself, to that submitted. Nevertheless, Maijor was opposed to radical sectaries, those who

have risen up amongst us … who (stretching themselves beyond that line of liberty and indulgence vouchsafed by you to tender ones of a meek and peaceable spirit, though of different principles and persuasions) have spoken and written many perverse things whereby no little neglect hath been cast upon the ordinances of Jesus Christ and the faithful ministers and dispensers of the ministries of God.

He also opposed those pamphlets

thrown abroad (artificially peradventure to alien[ate] the minds of the people from the present establishment) that there are designs on foot to take away the present maintenance of the ministry by tithes and to divert them to other uses, to leave them to the arbitrary and hungry allowances of men against whose sins they are sent, to divest the universities and colleges of those lands and revenues whereunto the good hand of God hath endowed them … whereby the hearts of many of the godly of this nation have been filled with scandal and distraction.57Add. 24861, ff. 71, 72.

Nevertheless, Maijor rejected ‘those forms, ceremonies and superstitious vanities’ contained within the Book of Common Prayer, and sought to

maintain those mounds and boundaries which have been set up by your acts and declarations to the liberty vouchsafed by you to men peaceable and godly of tender consciences, though of different principles and judgments, that no gaps and breaches be made in them by popery or any other damnable heresies and blasphemies.58Add. 24861, f. 72v.

Maijor made little visible contribution to the Nominated Assembly, which sat from 4 July, but he proved a fairly assiduous attender at meetings of the council of state, to which he was added on 14 July, and his activity on both bodies appears for the most part closely interconnected.59CJ vii. 284b, 285a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. xxxvii-xl; 1653-4, p. 25. Of his three parliamentary committee appointments, one was to that for Irish affairs (9 July), which conceivably had some relation to his earlier petition for a lease for mining precious metals.60CJ vii. 283b. His nomination to the committee to find ways of improving returns from customs (23 Sept.) grew out of experience on conciliar sub-committees.61CJ vii. 323b; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 114, 122. On 15 September his report to the Commons of proposals from some Southampton merchants regarding coal-mining in the New Forest and of a letter from Richard Norton and himself on the subject, which had been under conciliar consideration for some weeks, was referred to the parliamentary committee for trade, to which Maijor was then added; this was against the backdrop of his involvement in conciliar sub-committees on trade and on forests.62CJ vii. 319a; CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 82, 92, 115, 139, 187. His sole outing as a teller, with Kentish MP Colonel William Kenwricke*, for the small majority who favoured expanding the scope of the act regarding writs of error (7 Nov.), is more difficult to explain, although on at least one occasion he was deputed as a councillor to investigate a legal matter.63CJ vii. 347a; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 211.

One of three men who tied at the bottom of the poll at the election for the next council of state on 1 November, Maijor secured his place only when the Speaker picked names from a hat.64CJ vii. 344a; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 230. An average attender, he was named to four sub-committees relating to foreign affairs, ordnance, the mint and a matter concerning fellow Hampshire man Francis Rivett.65CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii, 237, 258, 268. Maijor was one of 13 men selected for the protector’s council in December (with £1,000 a year), and he signed the warrant for the proclamation of Cromwell as protector on 17 December.66CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 298; TSP i. 642; iii. 581; Add. 18739; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 139. Over a year of fluctuating attendance, his committee nominations indicate a continuing interest in religious affairs and opposition to radical sectaries.67CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. xxvii-xxxix, 381, 385, 402, 404; 1654, pp. xxxvi-xliii, 7, 12, 28, 43, 65, 190, 195, 207, 210, 215, 217, 220, 222-3, 245, 249, 251, 253, 263, 270, 275, 290, 308, 312, 315, 318, 320, 330, 354, 370.

Maijor appears to have withdrawn from affairs at Whitehall and Westminster after September 1654. He attended the council on 17 October and then not at all in November and December, and was not named to subsequent councils of state, although he may have been co-opted occasionally to help deal with particular matters.68CSP Dom. 1654, pp. xlii-xliii; 1655, pp. 50, 106. Although he was returned to the first protectoral parliament, he made no recorded impression on its proceedings.

Nevertheless, there is no evidence that he was disaffected towards the Cromwellian regime. He remained active as a justice of the peace for the remainder of the 1650s, and matters of local importance continued to be referred to his attention by the council, as in June 1655, when complaints against members of the corporation at Southampton by his old friend Nathaniel Robinson were referred to a body of men which included Maijor and Richard Cromwell.69Add. 24861, ff. 105, 107, 122; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 222. When Major-general William Goffe* arrived in the region that November, he mentioned receiving ‘much kindness’ from both Maijor and his son-in-law, as well as advice on nominations for the commission for the security of the commonwealth.70TSP iv. 229, 238, 363. Appointed to the commission himself, Maijor continued to work alongside Goffe, not least to address the ‘wicked spirits’ and ‘unworthy carriage of the magistrates of the town of Southampton against the godly party’.71TSP iv. 764. In September 1656 Goffe sought Maijor’s help against a suspected design by opponents of the regime.72TSP v. 397.

Maijor was not returned to the 1656 Parliament. In December 1658, as elections were called for the Parliament of his son-in-law’s short-lived protectorate, he was reported sick.73TSP vii. 548. He died in April 1660, leaving his two daughters as his co-heirs.74Noble, Mems. of House of Cromwell, i. 360, ii. 440. The parliamentary careers of his two sons-in-law – the other being John Dunch* – were conclusively terminated by the Restoration.