LOWTHER, Richard (1584-1659), of Vine Court, Golding Lane, St Giles-without-Cripplegate, London.

Lowther was the scion of one of Westmorland’s oldest and wealthiest families, the Lowthers of Lowther, who had settled in the county by the early thirteenth century.16Foster, Yorks. Peds. sub ‘Lowther of Lowther’; Phillips, ‘Gentry in Cumb. and Westmld.’, 155. He should not be confused with his Yorkshire kinsman and namesake who was admitted to Trinity College and King’s Inns, Dublin, in 1619, represented Berwick-upon-Tweed and Appleby in the 1620s and served as an officer in the king’s army during the civil war.17Alumni Dublinenses ed. G.D. Burtchaell, T.U. Sadleir (Dublin, 1935), 514; King’s Inns Admiss. Pprs. 1607-1867 ed. E. Keane, P.B. Phair, T.U. Sadleir (Dublin, 1982), 294; HP Commons 1604-29; E.T. Bewley, ‘Some notes on the Lowthers who held judicial office in Ireland’, Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. ii. 7. The future Short Parliament MP made his life and career in London and was an active member of the Middlesex magistracy and on the county commission to collect contributions for the repair of St Paul’s Cathedral.18Mdx. Co. Recs. ii. 137, 179; iii. 4, 87, 169; LMA, CLC/313/I/B/004/MS25474/002, p. 51. He was a resident of All Hallows, London Wall, by 1615, had moved to Shoreditch by the mid-1620s, and by 1633 he had settled in St Giles, Cripplegate, where he was a ‘pew-fellow’ of his ‘noble friend’ Sir Henry Croke†.19All Hallows, London Wall par. reg. (bap. 21 Apr. 1615); Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DLONS/L/1/1/6/5; Owen, Lowther Fam. 110, 422.

Called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in 1614, Lowther had built up what was apparently a thriving legal practice by 1630, referring that year to his ‘growing fortunes’.20Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DLONS/L/1/1/6/4; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 483. His clients during the 1630s included the future Cumberland parliamentarian leader Richard Barwis*, and he also served as a man-of-business in London for his ‘good friends and brethren of the corporation of Appleby’.21C8/38/113; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DLONS/L/1/1/6/5. His interest in the town and the likely approval of Appleby’s patron Francis Clifford, 4th earl of Cumberland proved sufficient to secure his return for the borough, probably in absentia, to the Short Parliament in 1640. He was described on the election indenture as ‘Richard Lowther of Gray’s Inn’.22Supra, ‘Appleby’; C219/42/2/54. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

Lowther seems to have remained in London for the duration of the civil war and was deemed sufficiently well-affected by Parliament to retain his place on the Middlesex commission of the peace (with a brief hiatus in the mid-1650s).23C231/6, pp. 43, 148, 297; GL, Vintners’ Co. accts. 1642-5, unfol.; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DLONS/L/1/1/8; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 455. He was almost certainly the Richard Lowther whom the London Brewers’ Company retained as its counsellor-at-law during the 1640s.24GL, Ms 5442/6, unfol. He died in the spring of 1659, without surviving children, and was buried at St Margaret, Lothbury on 21 April – although notice of his burial was entered in the register of St Giles, Cripplegate.25St Giles-without-Cripplegate par. reg.; Owen, Lowther Fam. 422. No will is recorded. Numerous members of the Lowther family sat for Appleby and other northern constituencies after the Restoration.