BAESHE, Sir Edward (1594-1653), of Stanstead Abbots, Herts., and Aldersgate, London

Baeshe owed much of his wealth and status to his grandfather, Edward Baeshe, who rose from relatively humble origins (he was the son of a Worcester tradesman) to become surveyor general of the victuals of the navy – an office he held for 40 years at a salary of £50 a year.29HP Commons, 1509-1558, ‘Edward Bashe’. It was by virtue of his office that he was returned for the naval port of Rochester in 1554, representing the borough again in the Parliaments of 1559, 1563 and 1571. In 1559 he purchased Stanstead Abbots, Hertfordshire, which became the family’s principal residence, and subsequently acquired a house in London and land in various counties, most of which he re-sold.30VCH Herts. iii. 369; HP Commons, 1558-1603, ‘Edward Bashe’. His son – Baeshe’s father – appears to have settled down as a country squire in Hertfordshire and aspired to little more than a place on the bench and consolidating his inheritance.31C142/253/81. He died in 1598 when Baeshe was just four years of age.32Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 242. Baeshe’s mother remarried while he was still a minor to George Manners†, the future 9th earl of Rutland.33CP. Baeshe almost certainly owed his return for Lincoln in 1614 to his stepfather, who was one of the town’s patrons.34HMC 14th Rep. viii. 95; Lincs. RO, L1/1/1/4, f. 155. However, he appears to have been entirely inactive in the House and was not re-elected in 1621.

Baeshe’s career during the 1620s and 1630s appears to have been largely uneventful. Although he purchased a place as a chamberlain in the exchequer (at a salary of £52 a year) in 1625, his duties in the court of exchequer were undertaken by deputies and there is no evidence that he was closely involved in the administration of crown finances.35Sainty, Exchequer Officeholders, 4, 19. He was returned for the Lincolnshire borough of Stamford in 1628 on the interest of the 2nd earl of Exeter – probably as part of a reciprocal electoral arrangement between Exeter and Baeshe’s stepfather, George Manners, whereby Manners secured the return of one of Exeter’s clients at Grantham.36HP Commons, 1604-29, ‘Stamford’. Baeshe was named to 14 committees in this Parliament, all of relatively minor importance, and made no recorded contribution to debate.37CJ i. 892b, 895a, 898b, 899a, 901b, 904a, 908b, 911a, 913, 914, 919a, 922, 932b; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Edward Baeshe (Bashe)’. His connection with Lincolnshire was strengthened in 1633 as a result of his second marriage, which was to Mary Mountague, the niece of Sir Edward Mountague†, Baron Mountague of Broughton, whose daughter married the Lincolnshire peer Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey.38Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 243. Mary Mountague’s dowry appears to have included ‘manors, lands and tenements’ in Lincolnshire.39PROB11/225, f. 355. In addition, Baeshe continued to enjoy the patronage of his stepfather – by now the earl of Rutland – and in August 1634 he was made a freeman of the Lincolnshire borough of Grantham, where the earl was honorary recorder.40Lincs. RO, Grantham borough min. bk. 1, ff. 8, 29. The following year, Baeshe assigned his estate to Rutland and several other trustees, with instructions that, should he die heirless, they were to sell his property to purchase impropriate church livings and to grant the rights of patronage to the master and fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge – Baeshe’s alma mater.41Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 242. Baeshe contributed £40 towards the construction of a new, Laudian-style chapel at Peterhouse during the mid-1630s.42Peterhouse Archives, Chapel Box, ‘Acct. of charges in building and adorning the college chapel’. Despite his appointment as a justice of the peace in 1626 and to the Home circuit oyer and terminer commission in 1633, he seems to have shown little interest in local government and was removed from the Hertfordshire bench in 1637 for failing to attend the judges to be re-sworn in office.43C231/5, p. 256; Coventry Docquets, 73.

Baeshe appears to have enjoyed relatively little influence in his native Hertfordshire. It seems that few of his closest friends – who included the Essex peer Lord Newburgh (Sir Edward Barrett†) and the Worcestershire knight Sir Thomas Lyttelton* – were Hertfordshire gentlemen.44HMC Rutland, i. 502. Largely because of his connection with the Manners family, his standing was greater in Lincolnshire; and in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 he was returned for Grantham on Rutland’s interest.45Supra, ‘Grantham’. He was named to just two committees in this Parliament and was again apparently inactive in debate.46CJ ii. 4a, 15b. That summer, he informed Rutland of resentment among the ‘common people’ at the king’s persistence with military preparations against the Covenanters without the ‘appointment’ (backing) of a Parliament.47HMC Rutland, i. 521. However, the nature of Baeshe’s own views regarding the Scots and the bishops’ wars is not known. He was not re-elected in the autumn of 1640, when his seat at Grantham was taken by Thomas Hussey I, the scion of a leading Lincolnshire gentry family.

It appears that Baeshe sought to remain neutral during the civil war. There is no evidence that he was active on, or even sympathised with, either side in the conflict. That he made no substantial contribution to Parliament’s coffers is clear from the Committee for Advance of Money’s* determination to make him pay most of the £1,000 for which it assessed him in September 1643. In the event, Baeshe paid the committee £800 – £92 in the form of distrained rents.48CCAM 239. Thereafter, almost nothing is heard about Baeshe until his death, childless, on 12 May 1653. He was buried at Stanstead Abbots on 18 May.49SP46/139, f. 209. In his will, in which he asked to be buried ‘without any solemnity but a dole to the poor’, he left the bulk of his estate to his widow and niece and bequeathed annuities of about £325 and legacies of about £240. One of his largest bequests – £30 to Bishop Ralph Brownrigg – may offer some clue as to his religious views.50PROB11/225, ff. 355-6. A moderate Calvinist, Brownrigg had accepted preferment from the king as bishop of Exeter in 1642, much to the disappointment of his relation and close friend, the early parliamentarian grandee John Pym*.51Russell, Fall of British Monarchies, 412. After the Restoration, Baeshe’s lands were settled by act of Parliament upon his cousin, the royalist Sir Ralph Baeshe KB.52LJ xi. 299a; Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 242. None of Baeshe’s immediate family sat in Parliament.