POWELL, Nathaniel (c.1600–1675), of Court Lodge, Ewhurst, Suss., and Wyarton Place, Boughton Monchelsea, Kent.

Nathaniel Powell was one of the great social climbers of the mid-seventeenth century, rising from relative obscurity to obtain wealth and status through the iron business, and through partnership with local peers. His father Meredith Powell moved south from Shropshire at the end of the sixteenth century as the adopted son of an uncle, William Crowther, vicar of Wiveliscombe, Somerset.32Add. 39482, ff. 396-7, 401. Meredith himself entered the ministry, serving from 1599 as vicar of the notoriously godly parish of Dedham, Essex, and then from 1603 as rector of Brompton Ralph, Somerset.33Al. Ox.; IND1/17004, f. 85v.

By February 1632 Nathaniel Powell was at one of the inns of chancery, and he remained there for at least a year longer, but he was already a landowner.34C54/2872/12; C54/2952/8 In June 1627, two months prior to his marriage to a daughter of William Muddle of Ewhurst, Sussex, Powell’s father settled on him a modest property in Brompton Ralph.35CB; E. Suss. RO, PAR 324/1/1/1; C54/2715/4. In the 1630s Powell engaged in a series of increasingly valuable land deals in Sussex and Kent, sometimes with his father-in-law and sometimes with one Walter Yonge. By the middle of the decade these might be worth over £1,000.36C54/2889/1; C54/2872/12; C54/3041/30; C54/2914/30; C54/2917/4; C54/2952/8; C54/2913/32C54/2920/26. Ewhurst was the location of an iron-smelting furnace belonging to Nicholas Tufton, 1st earl of Thanet, and in time Powell built on Muddle’s contacts to become involved with both the iron business and the Tuftons.37Cent. Kent. Studs. U455/T113/13, 15-17; U455/E1. In July 1634 he became a sewers commissioner for Sussex, doing work vital for the iron industry.38E. Suss. RO, DAP1/2/3, p. 17. By May 1636, when he and John Tufton, the 2nd earl, were granted a licence for 21 years to produce iron at Thanet’s furnace in Northiam, Powell had entered a partnership which was to last for 30 years.39SO3/11, unfol; N. Powell, The Animadverter Animadverted (1663), 32–3.

Before the civil war, Powell’s interest in the water supply for his iron-works dominated his local appointments. In May 1638 he was permitted to divert the river Rother into his lands at Ewhurst, while in May 1639 he was appointed water bailliff for the levels of Newnham, Etcham, Hevenden, and Newenden.40E. Suss. RO, DAP1/2/3, pp. 175, 180. In July 1640 he surveyed Ewhurst on behalf of the sewers commissioners.41E. Suss. RO, QR/E50. From 1639 to 1651 he consistently attended their meetings, and after the Restoration he became the leading figure on the commission.42E. Suss. RO, DAP1/2/3, pp. 228-62; DAP1/2/4, pp. 1-193; DAP1/2/5, pp. 10, 11, 24, 34, 43, 46, 50, 56, 76, 86, 110, 118, 140, 143, 171, 176, 184, 189, 194; DAP1/2/6.

Meredith Powell died in 1642, probably leaving only a small estate.43Cal. Wills and Administrations, Taunton, 330. During the civil war, his son appears neither to have played any part in county administration, nor to have assisted the royalists. Nevertheless, his allegiance may have been suspect owing to his association with Thanet, who having been briefly in arms for the king at Chichester, fled to the continent in April 1643. The earl returned in February 1644, compounded, and was discharged of his delinquency within the year; thereafter he conformed to successive governments, assisted by Powell.44CP; The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford ed. D. G. H. Clifford (1990), 95. During 1644-5, Powell acquired from Thanet lands in Bodiam, including Bodiam Castle for which he and three others paid the earl £6,000 in March 1645, and it was Powell who evidently controlled the estate until well into the restoration period.45Preston Manor, Brighton, Thomas-Stanford coll., ES/AT/2; Suss. Manors, i. 50; VCH Suss., ix. 242, 263; C54/3320/23; C54/3344/31; E. Suss. RO, NOR16/4. The acquisition of one of the finest examples of a moated medieval castle in the country expressed Powell’s wealth and status in a most ostentatious manner. Between April 1644 and March 1645 Powell sold parcels of the Bodiam estate to men such as Samuel Hyland*, who bought the Court Lodge for £1,400, raising over £2,000 in all.46C54/3332/38; C54/3320/22; C54/3320/2; C54/3320/21; C54/3333/47. This was probably an attempt to protect Thanet’s heavily sequestered property, or to raise money for him.47Cent. Kent. Studs. U455/O4. It may have been in the same spirit that in June 1646, Powell begged to compound for various parcels of land in Sussex and Kent which he had purchased from the sequestered and imprisoned recusant, Christopher Roper, 4th Baron Teynham.48CCC 888; CP; LJ v. 318, 339; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 374. Two years later he also acquired the manor of Moat.49C54/3383/33; E. Suss. RO, NOR15/3, NOR18/2, NOR15/75.

The first indication of Powell’s participation in county administration came in April 1647, when he was involved in attempts to remodel the sub-committee of accounts. With other seeming political neutrals Thomas Dyke†, William Thomas, William Marlott, William White, and Anthony Fowle, Powell wrote to the Presbyterian-dominated Committee for the Accounts of the Kingdom, suggesting that the local sub-committee should include men such as Henry Goring* of Highden, Thomas Middleton*, Hall Ravenscroft*, and Sir William Morley*, who were either known delinquents or suspected royalists.50SP28/257, unfol.

Although he may be presumed to have opposed the execution of the king in 1649, Powell was nominated to the county bench in 1651, making his first appearance at the quarter session at Lewes in April 1652. Thereafter he attended spasmodically until April 1655.51E. Suss. RO, QO/EW2, ff. 31v, 38, 46, 61; QO/EW3, f. 3; ASSI35/92/9. Sometimes he sat alongside Harbert Morley*, the most important figure in Sussex, with whom he shared an interest in the iron industry, and from whom he obtained in April 1651 a lease of the Hawkesden Forge in Mayfield.52E. Suss. RO, QI/EW2, f. 11v; E. Suss. RO, Glynde 1229. Morley and Powell both provided ordnance for the Rump Parliament, agreeing to deliver 500 pieces of ordnance into the stores by the end of February 1653, and Powell at least was in contact with navy commissioners and with the council of state over aspects of his business after the Rump’s dissolution.53CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 503, 533, 591; 1653-4, p. 71; SP18/30, f. 74. But it is plausible that Powell joined the disparate group of men around Morley, who, disillusioned with successive regimes, became a focus for opposition to the protectorate.

Such an association would explain Powell’s entry to Parliament in 1654 as Member for Rye, where Morley’s influence in the county was at its greatest. Both men stood for the single seat which the town had been given by the Instrument of Government, but Morley probably regarded it merely as an insurance policy; elected also for the county, he opted for that.54E. Suss. RO, Rye 47/149/14. At the first election on 7 July Powell received only one vote to Morley’s 16 (from the mayor, William Burwash).55E. Suss. RO, Rye 47/148, unfol. However, in spite of efforts by Thomas Kelsey*, governor of Dover Castle, to secure the return in Morley’s place of Thomas St Nicholas*, steward of the chancery for the Cinque Ports, when the by-election was held on 29 November, Powell – who was not present – was returned with unanimous support, suggesting that Morley’s votes had been transferred to him en bloc as Morley’s approved successor.56E. Suss. RO, Rye 1/14, f. 151; 47/149/15; 47/151/3; 47/151/5; 47/152, unfol. Powell took the oath of a freeman on 7 December.57E. Suss. RO, Rye 1/14, f. 153.

However, confusion then arose when it appeared that the writ had not been returned, as instructed, to the governor of Dover, a responsibility laid by the mayor of Rye on Powell himself.58E. Suss. RO, Rye 47/152. Whether this was a delaying tactic on the part of the hostile Kelsey is unclear, but it may have helped ensure that Powell made no impression on the first protectorate Parliament. Indeed, he may not even have arrived in London before the assembly was dissolved on 22 January 1655.

Suspicions of an alignment with Morley may explain Powell’s removal from the county bench sometime after August 1655, when his name disappears from the list of magistrates eligible to attend the assizes.59ASSI35/96/10. The dating of this suggests the agency of Major-general William Goffe*, seeking to curb Morley’s power. However, another factor may have been the despatch to the Tower in March of Nicholas, Lord Tufton (later 3rd earl of Thanet), on suspicion of plotting against Oliver Cromwell*.60CP; Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, 125.

Powell was nominated as sheriff of the county in 1656, possibly to ensure he could not be returned to the second protectorate Parliament.61Mercurius Politicus, no. 338 (27 Nov.-4 Dec. 1656), 7411-2 (E.500.3); Longleat, Whitelocke pprs. xxiv, f. 34. By the time the Humble Petition was presented to Cromwell in March 1657, Powell had been restored to the bench, despite the fact that he was also now suspected of being a Catholic recusant.62ASSI35/98/9. In August 1658 a pass was granted for Powell to travel abroad with John Tufton and Lady Frances Tufton, children of the earl of Thanet – perhaps not for the first time, since he may have accompanied them for the early part of their trip to Utrecht between April 1655 and 1657.63CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 578; Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, 125-6, 137-9. In 1658 doubts about his religion prompted Powell to obtain a certificate from the chief baron of the exchequer certifying that he was a Protestant.64E. Suss. RO, QI/EW2, f. 36.

Powell’s religious views are opaque. He was friendly with Thomas Sharpe, sequestered rector of Beckley, Sussex, who was renowned for his determined allegiance to the Prayer Book, and (among some) for popery.65Add. 39483, f. 207; Al. Cant.; Walker Revised, 360; Blaauw, ‘Passages of the Civil War in Suss.’, 72-7. Powell controlled the livings of Farley and Ewhurst, acquired in 1642 from the Catholic Francis Montagu, 3rd Viscount Montagu, but his presentations reveal little.66Suss. Manors, i. 158; VCH Suss. ix. 268. His appointees of the 1650s included Bartholomew Grave, who had formerly been intruded as a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, by Parliament’s Visitors, and his own son-in-law John Bucke.67Dunkin, ‘Admissions to Suss. benefices’, 217; Add. 39530, f. 28; Add. 39531, ff. 10, 59; Add. 39482, ff. 396-7; Renshaw, ‘Some clergy of the archdeaconry of Lewes’, 221; Al. Cant. Powell’s library included works by leading godly Protestants such as Thomas Gataker and John Goodwin of St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, moderate bishops like Joseph Hall and James Ussher, the ceremonialist Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, and the currently sequestered Jeremy Taylor. He also owned the Beatitudes of Thomas Watson, a Presbyterian involved in Christopher Love’s royalist plot of 1650-1.68PROB4/3536; Oxford DNB.

Powell did not sit at Westminster again. His commercial activity was sufficiently profitable to enable him to acquire Ewhurst manor sometime before 1660, and Kingsnorth manor near Ashford in Kent.69VCH Suss. ix. 154, 266; Add. 5680, f. 31; Add. 5679, ff. 67, 175; C54/3383/33. In August 1659 he paid £20 in militia money, a very large sum.70SP28/335, f. 81. He was, however, involved in extensive legal disputes during the late 1650s, including a row with Samuel Gott*.71C7/442/43; C6/170/123; C6/142/145; C6/164/91.

His close association with the earl of Thanet continued. In 1659 Thanet gave Powell permission to divert water from the Knowle well to supply his house, Court Lodge, in Ewhurst, for a nominal charge.72Cent. Kent. Studs. U455/E16. The same year Powell issued a book detailing a long-running dispute with Sir Thomas Culpepper† regarding the drainage and taxation of the upper levels in Kent and Sussex, reproducing documents garnered during his career as a sewers commissioner as an attempt to vindicate the 1st earl.73N. Powell, A Remonstrance of Some Decrees (1659); C54/3348/13. Three years later Powell published another work on this dispute, dedicated to Thanet, provoking the response from Thomas Herlackenden, Culpepper’s grandson, that, thanks to the earl, Powell had ‘borne a very great sway in all the transaction’ regarding the sewers for 20 years.74N. Powell, A Summary Relation (1662); T. Herlackenden, Animadversions on Several Material Passages (1663), sigs. a3-a4; J. R. Smith, Bibliotheca Cantiana (1837), 73-4. Powell replied with his third book in 1663.75N. Powell, The Animadverter Animadverted (1663), 1-4, 7, 12, 16, 28, 32-3.

In response to the Breda declaration, in June 1660 Powell issued a statement promising future obedience, attested by Harbottle Grimston*, Speaker of the House of Commons and Thanet’s son-in-law.76CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 38; R. Pocock, Mems. of the Family of Tufton (1800), 48-9. Within a month of the king’s return, Powell had been knighted, and on 10 May 1661 he was made a baronet, the fee for which was eventually waived.77Shaw, Knights of Eng., ii. 230; CB; CTB i. 523. In June 1662 he witnessed Thanet’s will, and following the earl’s death two years later, an inventory mentioned ‘Sir Nathaniel Powell’s chamber’ in Thanet House, Aldersgate Street, London.78Cent. Kent. Studs. U455/T276/6; U455/E1, 2. Both chamber and associated outlived the earl, and in the mid-1660s both Powell and the countess of Thanet were ‘correspondents’ of Henry Muddiman, supplying him with news from their locality for the official newspapers he ran.79J. G. Muddiman, The King’s Journalist (1923), 258-9.

Having survived an attempt on his life in November 1660, Powell lived until March 1675.80CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 389; E. Suss. RO, AMS 5691/5. At his death, he was living at Wyarton Place in the parish of Boughton Monchelsea in Kent.81Cent. Kent. Studs. P39/1/2, pp. 4, 7. His will, drawn up in October 1674, requested burial ‘in my vault underneath the Court Lodge aisle in Ewhurst church’, and left provision for a school house to be built at Boughton, and a gold watch to the countess dowager of Thanet. His executor was Christopher Hatton, 1st Viscount Hatton, brother-in-law of the 3rd earl of Thanet.82PROB11/348/106; Add. 39482, ff. 402-3; Pocock, Memorials, 48-9. He left personal property worth over £600, including a large number of legal works and some manuscript treatises.83PROB4/3536.

Powell’s heir, Sir Nathaniel Powell, 2nd baronet, continued to enhance the family’s fortunes and maintained the connection with the earls of Thanet. Unlike his father, he received a conventional gentleman’s education; his second wife was a granddaughter of Henry Lennard*, 12th Baron Dacre. This Powell did not sit in Parliament, but his grandson Sir Christopher Powell†, 4th baronet, sat for Kent in 1735.84CB; Add. 39482, ff. 396-7; Al. Cant.; Cent. Kent. Studs. U455/O8; HP Commons 1715-1754.