GARDNER, Samuel (1594-1660), of All Saints, Evesham, Worcs.

The Gardner family was rooted in Evesham from the third quarter of the sixteenth century at the earliest, and by 1620 had achieved a degree of prominence in the borough. Samuel Gardner’s father, Philip, was bailiff of the town three times before its incorporation, was mayor in 1607-8, and subsequently became an alderman.9Nash, Collections, i. 417; Evesham Borough Records, 2-3, 13, 18. Philip Gardner lived in Bridge Street, the most prosperous quarter, home to many merchant families, and held property in Worcester and Offenham, as well as within the town. He left cash bequests of over £450 when he died in 1617.10Worcs. Archives, will 1618/153 (Philip Gardner). There is nothing to connect either Philip or Samuel Gardner with any particular trade. It seems likely that the family’s wealth lay rather in land, even though the 1641 subsidy assessed Gardner on his goods as one of the four highest rated townsmen, and that they were minor gentlemen of considerable substance.11E179/201/302.

Samuel Gardner proceeded through the normal cursus honorum of the borough remarkably quickly, being appointed coroner on the same day as he was elected a capital burgess in 1625; only five months later he had been made mayor. There is evidence that Gardner’s was something of a reforming mayoralty. During his year an annual meeting to consider the accounts of the outgoing mayor was instituted for the first time, and the civic dignity of the borough was safeguarded by an order to repair the maces.12Evesham Borough Records, 25-8. His father’s will had been prefaced by extensive quotations from Psalm 8 and Proverbs 10, and his funeral monument memorialised him as ‘a lover of the gospel’. It is very likely, although not readily proved, that Gardner espoused the same principles of godliness. Gardner was mayor again in 1633; the only event of note in this mayoralty was the very unusual execution of a prisoner in the town.13Nash, Collections, i. 417; Evesham Borough Records, 34.

One of the most regular attenders of the corporation’s meetings in the 1620s and 1630s, Gardner was nevertheless absent from sessions in December 1641 and on 30 August 1642, when he was elected mayor for the third time. On the latter occasion the council proscribed the annual feast, and substituted a collection for the pressing needs of the poor. Richard Cresheld*, a friend of Gardner’s father, was at this meeting. It may have been thought that Evesham needed its most able burgess at the helm during the expected storm: if so, the burgesses were to be disappointed, for Gardner left the town. What he was doing in 1642 is not known, except that he seems not to have been in Evesham. He may have gone first to Warwick, but certainly by January 1643 he was in London, having raised a troop of mounted harquebusiers for the service of Parliament in the regiment of 2nd Baron Brooke (Robert Greville†). He received a commission as captain from Brooke on 21 January, five days after having lent Brooke £1,000 for three months without interest for the defence of the country against ‘papists and other ill-affected persons’. He raised the troop of horse at his own expense, and put together £100 and ten horses. He collected a further £250 for the reduction of Ireland.14CJ iii. 62b. His first task was to guard an ammunition train en route from London to Warwick via Northampton. He went with Brooke to Staffordshire, was present at the storming of Lichfield cathedral close in February 1643, when Brooke was killed, and took part in the battle of Hopton Heath on 19 March.15SP28/147 pt. 3, ff. 558-60.

After this episode he marched first to Derby, and thence by way of Coventry, Warwick and other towns south towards London. On 18 May 1643, his troop was transferred to the regiment of Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Brooke’s brother-in-law, in the army of Sir William Waller. By this time, the common council of Evesham had decided to address Gardner’s ‘declining the government of the borough’, and gave him a month to return or appoint a deputy. Gardner did neither, and on 25 August he was dismissed from the mayoralty.16Evesham Borough Records, 42. He evidently remained fully committed to the parliamentarian cause.

On 27 April 1643, in recognition of his contribution, the House of Commons requested the Lords’ approval for an order to repay Gardner at 8 per cent interest for his advances in their service.17CJ iii. 62b. It is difficult to piece together with precision his military activities between 1643 and 2 April 1645, when he was discharged from Hesilrige’s regiment, but as a captain in Waller’s army, he was presumably with that army at its major engagements. Thus Gardner is likely to have joined Hesilrige when Waller was at Gloucester, and would have been at the battles of Lansdowne and Roundway Down in July 1643. He stuck with Waller when his army was effectively destroyed at Roundway Down, and would have come through Evesham from Gloucester towards London in the aftermath. From mid-1643, Waller was in command of a new Association of south-eastern counties, and conducted a successful campaign against Lord Hopton (Sir Ralph Hopton*) in Hampshire in December 1643. Other major battles in which Gardner is highly likely to have served were Cheriton (29 Mar. 1644) and Cropredy Bridge (29 June), in which latter engagement Gardiner lost eight or nine men.18L. Spring, Waller’s Army (Farnham, 2007), 66.

In pursuit of the king, Waller marched through Evesham on 10 June.19CSP Dom. 1644, p. 220. Perhaps Gardner was with him. The second battle of Newbury (27 Oct. 1644) marked the climax of the progress of Waller’s army. Waller was sent to relieve Taunton in February 1645, and Gardner was certainly there too, but when the general and Hesilrige laid down their commissions in April, by the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance, Gardner was discharged from his army.20SP28/147/pt. 3, ff. 558-60. From May 1645, Evesham had become the headquarters of the parliamentarian county committee for Worcestershire.21CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 502, 504, 533, 538; A True Relation of the Manner of the Taking of the Towne of Evesham (1645, E.286.14). In August the common council of the borough elected him an alderman, although he did not attend the meeting which elevated him.22Evesham Borough Records, 43. He was in Evesham in December 1645 in order to collect from the county committee a small proportion of the sums owed him by various agents of the parliamentary cause.23SP28/138 pt. 16, p. 76.

It was to be a whole year before Gardner returned to Evesham for long enough to be able to be sworn alderman, but he did not resume his military career. His captaincy passed to his son, also Samuel. More radical than his father, Samuel junior served in the New Model army regiment of horse, initially with the rank of cornet, commanded by John Butler.24E315/5 f. 9. Gardner survived the opposition of the Lords to his commission, and fought at Naseby (14 June 1645). His regiment later blockaded Berkeley Castle, and besieged Bristol and Oxford. 25E315/5 f. 9; Temple, ‘Original Officer List’, 72; M. Wanklyn, Reconstructing the New Model Army (Solihull, 2015-16), i. 51, 61. His military career is easily conflated with that of his father.26Wanklyn, New Model Army, 139.

Gardner senior was sworn alderman at Evesham on 25 August 1646, and was among those signing an order that council members should resume the custom of wearing gowns; mayors and former mayors were to keep an additional gown to denote their standing.27Evesham Borough Records, 44. There were no meetings of the Evesham common council between October 1646 and August 1647. Some 300 soldiers were despatched to the town in April 1647, and this may suggest a degree of internal turmoil there. It was as early as 12 September 1645 that the writ for the by-election at Evesham was moved, but the election took place 14 months later. Gardner was elected to the House of Commons on 15 January 1647, in place of John Coventry, who had been disabled from sitting as long ago as 12 August 1642.28CJ iv. 272a. The Coventry interest, which had dominated electoral politics at Evesham for two decades, was broken, and the election was a matter for the townsmen only. Two aldermen, nine capital burgesses and 519 burgesses signed the indenture electing the three-times mayor.29Worcs. Archives, 705:66/BA228/77/19/7.

Gardner’s election cannot be said to have been supported by a majority of the common council, even though there was apparently a massive showing of townsmen’s approval. Of the 11 aldermen and capital burgesses in support, two were men who never seem to have attended any meetings of the council. By the terms of the charter, 19 aldermen and burgesses could have voted.30Evesham Borough Records, xiii and evidence from attendance lists passim. When he arrived at Westminster on 18 January 1647, described by a sympathetic journalist as ‘the honest major of Esam’, he made very little impact.31Perfect Occurrences no. 3 (15-22 Jan. 1647), 18 (E.372.3). He took the Covenant on 1 February, but the radicalism of his serving army officer son may have compromised his standing in the Commons.32CJ v. 69a. Gardner junior endorsed the Vindication of the army officers presented to the House on 27 April, expressing solidarity with the soldiery and refuting the allegations implied in Parliament’s ‘Declaration of Dislike’ of 29 March.33Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 468-72; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 55-6. On 8 July, Gardner senior was added to the committee for complaints, chaired by the Independent, John Bulkeley, and on the 21st of that month to the committee investigating abuses in the payments of officers and soldiers.34CJ v. 237b, 253a. He was added to the committee for maimed soldiers on 11 November: military matters were the only subject which attracted his attention while in the House.

The chief preoccupation of Gardner senior was the recovery of the money he had advanced for the service of Parliament. On 1 October 1647 the House referred his case to the Army Committee, with a request that his claim be satisfied. Accounts identifying £28,000 earmarked for paying reduced officers were sent for perusal to a committee that included Godfrey Bossevile, William Purefoy I and Gardner himself, evidently with an eye to discovering fraud.35CJ v. 322a. In February 1648, his case had not been settled, but on 15 March 1648, Gardner found the Presbyterian-dominated Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom more helpful, confirming to the House that he was owed £1,224 2s 7d. This sum was revised upwards to a figure of £1,440 7s 7d, perhaps to include the interest allowed him in 1643. The arrears were charged upon the excise, while the remaining interest was charged on sequestrations in Worcestershire. A further sum of £700 he claimed was charged on revenues of the Committee for Compounding.36CJ v. 453a, 499b, 502b; PA, Main Pprs. 21 Mar. 1648. The day after seeing these orders entered in the Journal, Gardner was given leave to return to the country. He probably returned to Evesham, though as a sitting parliament-man did not attend meetings of the corporation, as the order books make clear. Perhaps he would not have been welcome had he done so.

Gardner junior, now serving under Col. Thomas Horton, was sent in May 1648 to quell the rising in Wales by the troops of John Poyer and Rowland Laugharne†, and was at Presteigne in July, when the regiment defeated forces of Sir Henry Lingen.37Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 85, 86. Gardner senior stayed away from the Commons throughout the turbulent summer. He was back in the House by 25 September 1648, when his concerns about the remuneration of soldiers were put to use in a committee – his only nomination to one before Pride’s Purge – investigating debentures given soldiers who had never actually fought for Parliament.38CJ vi. 32a. Between this time and the end of the year, Gardner’s loyalty to the army, or its own to him, was sorely tried. Radicals in the House or in the army may have taken amiss his role in the committee on debentures: of the ten on this committee, three were imprisoned, two or perhaps three were secluded and one was absent, when Thomas Pride* attended with his file of soldiers on 6 December. Alternatively, Gardner may have been outspoken in his reaction to the events of that day; either way, on the 7th he was one of eight members complaining that they had been prevented from attending.39CJ vi. 94a.

The two poles of Gardner’s public life were Evesham and the army: his membership of Parliament seems always to have been less whole-hearted. He returned to the borough after the purge and the execution of the king, and attended meetings of the common council there in February and March 1649. In August 1649 his son refused to go to Ireland.40Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 86. On 21 April 1649, the Rump transferred the £1,440 7s 7d it owed Gardner senior, charged upon the security of the excise, to the more certain security of the confiscated dean and chapter lands, and it is likely that Gardner had gone up to London to ensure this, as he was absent from the Evesham council meeting on the 13th of that month.41CJ vi. 191a, 192a; Evesham Borough Records, 45.

On 26 April 1649, Gardner was named to a committee of the Rump asked to consider ways of settling £20,000 on preaching ministers.42CJ vi. 196a. The timing seems plausible, as Gardner was in London, but it seems odd that one excluded in the December 1648 should have been admitted with no acknowledgement of his conduct that day. But this was a brief visit: in August he was in Evesham and had the satisfaction of signing an order discharging John Winnoll, a councillor who had voted against him in 1643 and had not signed his election indenture in 1647.43Evesham Borough Records, 46. Gardner’s continued presence in civic affairs suggests that he was not completely out of sympathy with national political developments. He remained in Evesham between August 1649 and some time after February 1651, when he returned to London, probably in another attempt to recover some money, and certainly in order to involve himself in other financial dealings.

On 20 October 1651, in the company of John Harington*, he met the Speaker, perhaps to progress the repayment of Parliament’s debt to him, but in November he was still solvent enough to lend £100 to Harington. Gardner nominated ‘Captain Venner’ to pay Harington on bills of exchange: in 1649 he had paid £5 to Evesham corporation to allow a servant of William Venner to practise the trade of butcher in the town: it is very likely that they were former comrades-in-arms.44Harington’s Diary, 69, 70, 72, 73; Evesham Borough Records, 45. The question of Gardner’s status in the Rump remains unresolved. He continued to be named to commissions of assessment, but the fact that he figures in none of the surviving parliamentary records suggests that his concern and interest in Parliament remained the recovery of the money he had advanced. When Harington offered to intercede for him with Oliver Cromwell*, it seems probable that it was this topic, rather than wider political or military matters which lay behind the proposal.45Harington’s Diary, 72.

Gardner’s possible semi-membership of the House of Commons in any case came to an end on the expulsion of the Rump. In July 1653 he was made a magistrate in Evesham, and during the Nominated Assembly solemnised marriages in the town under its legislation permitting this.46Evesham Borough Records, 49: Evesham All Saints par. reg. He was an ally of George Hopkins, the minister of the town who was a member of Richard Baxter’s Worcestershire Association, and throughout the 1650s played a significant part in the parish vestry of All Saints church.47Book of Orders and Agreements, All Saints parish, Evesham, in possession of A H Fryer, Almonry Museum, Evesham, ff. 9, 10, 11, 13; Calamy Revised, 275; G.F. Nuttall, ‘The Worcestershire Association: its Membership’, JEH i. 199. Gardner was a strong supporter of Hopkins and the state church against the perceived threat from sectaries. In the summer of 1655, as a magistrate of Evesham he was a leading member of the group of townsmen who interrogated and imprisoned the Quaker Humphry Smith and his local followers. Smith recorded in detail his examination at Gardner’s house before the magistrate, Hopkins and Theophilus Andrewes*, deputy recorder. Gardner and his colleagues treated the Quakers as if they were Catholics and beggars, drawing upon two recent proclamations against popery and vagrancy to bolster their case.48H. Smith, ‘The Sufferings, Tryals and Purgings of the Saints at Evesham’ in A Collection of the Several Writings and Faithful Testimonies of that Suffering Servant of God...Humphry Smith (1683), Wing S4051, 3-4; Extracts from State Papers Relating to Friends, 1654-72 ed. N. Penney (1913), 111; J. Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers (2 vols. 1753), ii. 50-9; Roberts, ‘Quakers in Evesham’, 63-85. One element that both persecutor Gardner and his victims held in common was army service: many of the Evesham Quakers in 1655 had apparently fought for Parliament and ‘outward liberty’ at Worcester, and Captain Edward Pitway, the leading Quaker of the town was a colleague of Gardner’s on the town council.49The Cruelty of the Magistrates of Evesham in Worcestershire or Some Further Particulars of their Dealings (1655), 7-8. But there the affinities ended, displayed no sympathy for men who had probably been in the county militia. He was fully behind the decision to expel Pitway from his place as capital burgess on 5 October 1655, perhaps recalling that Pitway had not signed his election indenture in 1647.50Evesham Borough Records, 51-2.

Cromwell himself heard of the case of the Evesham Quakers, which was proof enough that Gardner was out of sympathy with the inclusive approach to religious policy professed by the protectorate.51Bodl. Rawl A.47, f. 165. He was in fact named to no assessment or militia commissions after November 1653, and must have decided on a withdrawal to town politics only. His refuge in the commonwealth of the borough was badly shaken by the episode of the Quakers. Gardner died in 1660, still an alderman and magistrate, and was buried at All Saints, Evesham, on 5 May.52All Saints, Evesham par. reg. According to the Quakers, who noted with satisfaction the hand of God in the event, he died by drowning.53Friends House Lib. London, Great Book of Sufferings ii. Worcs. 11. Samuel Gardner junior was ejected from the council by commissioners under the Corporation Act, among them Sir John Pakington*.54Evesham Borough Records, 65, 69. Among the sons of Samuel junior was George Gardner, who died in 1729, ‘a zealous advocate for the Protestant religion and the true interest of his country’.55Nash, Collections, i. 417. None of Samuel Gardner’s descendants sat in Parliament.