SKEFFINGTON, Sir Richard (?bef. 1594-1647), of Fisherwick, Staffs.; later of Hawksyard, Armitage, Staffs., and Earl Street ward, Coventry, Warws.

Skeffington was descended from a family that had settled in the Leicestershire village of that name in the thirteenth century.21S.H. Skillington, ‘The Skeffingtons of Skeffington’, Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc. xvi. 77. The Staffordshire branch of the family was founded by the London merchant and alderman Sir John Skeffington, who had purchased the manor of Fisherwick, near Lichfield, in 1521.22VCH Staffs. xiv, 241; Shaw, Staffs. i. 365. Skeffington’s great-grandfather John Skeffington† had represented Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1559, and his elder brother Sir John Skeffington† was returned for the borough in 1626.23HP Commons 1558-1604; HP Commons 1604-29. According to his monumental inscription, Skeffington ‘spent his youth in the study of the liberal arts’ and was noted for his godly piety – a claim confirmed by Richard Baxter’s description of him as ‘very godly ... a most noble, holy man’.24R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae ed. M. Sylvester (1696), 44.

Returned for Tamworth in 1625, possibly on the interest of Staffordshire’s lord lieutenant, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Skeffington played no recorded part in that Parliament’s proceedings. The following year, he married into the Newdigates of Arbury, in Warwickshire, having been part of their social circle since at least the early 1620s. In 1634, he purchased the manor of Hawksyard, in south-east Staffordshire, making it his principal residence, though by 1640 he was evidently living in Coventry.25Stowe 184, f. 19; C2/ChasI/S36/68; C2/ChasI/S117/52; E115/347/44; E115/374/50. As might be expected of a cousin and close friend of Sir Edward Dering* and a member of the godly Warwickshire circle around Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, he was much heartened by the reformist zeal shown in the early days of the Long Parliament.26A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws. 1620-60 (Cambridge, 1987), 122; Larminie, Seventeenth Century Newdigates, 75. In a letter to Dering in November 1640, he expressed the hope that the two Houses would lay aside all private affairs ‘and not break up until [public] business be thoroughly settled. This is my earnest request to my dear friend Mr [John] Pym*, to whom I entreat you to commend me’.27Stowe 184, f. 19. In December, he informed Dering that ‘good people are joyed with your proceedings [at Westminster]’ and that he had sent a copy of one of Dering’s speeches to his sister, the wife of the godly Cheshire MP Sir William Brereton*.28Stowe 744, f. 1.

With the outbreak of civil war, Skeffington sided with Parliament – a decision almost certainly linked to his godly religious sympathies. He was an active member of the Warwickshire county and sequestrations committees and a correspondent and political ally of Brereton, the commander of Parliament’s forces in the north-west, who thought him ‘a most precious, excellent man’.29Add. 61682, f. 6; LJ vii. 394b; HMC Portland, i. 120, 167; CCC 189, 491, 1499; Brereton Letter Bks. i, 206, 211, 299, 385, 528; ii. 258, 313, 314, 352, 485, 501; iii. 101, 226; Hughes, Warws. 360-2. He also enjoyed the trust of Parliament and the Committee of Both Kingdoms*.30CJ iv. 453b; LJ vii. 688a; viii. 184b; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 305. One of four candidates in the recruiter elections at Stafford, in October 1645, he was defeated by what Brereton regarded as sharp practice on the part of the ‘worse party’ – that is, the Presbyterian interest.31Supra, ‘Stafford’; Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 216, 217-18; D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (1954), 192-5. In the recruiter elections for Staffordshire the following summer, Skeffington and Brereton’s kinsman Colonel John Bowyer were returned on 13 August 1646, Skeffington taking the junior seat. Brereton’s support for the two men was a major factor in securing their election.32Supra, ‘Staffordshire’; Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 558; iii. 131, 176, 192. Certainly Skeffington’s proprietorial interest in Staffordshire was relatively small, and he probably enjoyed a higher political profile in Warwickshire than he did in his native county.

In his brief career in the Long Parliament, Skeffington was named to only seven committees, including those for indemnifying persons who had acted on the authority of Parliament (15 Oct. 1646) and for removing obstructions on the taking of public accounts (25 Jan. 1647). None of these appointments reveal anything substantial about his factional alignment in the House – if indeed he had any.33CJ iv. 690a, 694b, 695a; v. 14b, 27a, 62b, 84b. Nor can anything significant be deduced from his taking the Covenant, on 9 December 1646.34CJ v. 7b. If his monumental inscription can be credited, ‘his quiet spirit met with so many, so just, occasions of sorrow for the divisions in the church and state and for the sad effects thereof, as turned his employment into such a burden as caused him to retire’ from Parliament to Broxbourne, in Hertfordshire, near his sister’s house.35Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 67. Yet it seems strange that such a ‘quiet spirit’ should have figured quite so prominently on the Warwickshire county committee, or have sought a parliamentary seat at a time of intensifying factional conflict at Westminster. It is more likely that he was forced to retire through illness.

Skeffington died on 2 June 1647 – just a few months after withdrawing from the House – and was buried at Broxbourne.36Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 67. In his will, he asked to be buried ‘without pomp or solemnity’ and charged his estate with bequests in excess of £2,000 and annuities of £130 (rising to £190 as his children came of age). He appointed Brereton, another brother-in-law Michael Biddulph* and his ‘very loving cousin’ John Swynfen* as overseers of his will.37PROB11/214, f. 28. His eldest son, Sir John Skeffington*, 4th bt., represented the Irish constituency of counties Down, Antrim and Armagh in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament.