ALDWORTH, Robert (1623-76), of Bristol and Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx.

Robert Aldworth was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1640, and was called to the bar there in 1647. He thus spent the civil war at a distance from Bristol, which after an occupation by a force loyal to the king, only fell to the New Model army in September 1645. Even so, he had an interest in the business activities of his father, and in 1643 complained to Parliament about the seizure of their goods at sea; the matter was referred to the Navy Committee.24CJ iii. 236a. The following year, his father, Richard Aldworth, included Robert as his business partner in supplying clothing to parliamentarian forces in Ireland, a trade which was evidently not prohibited by the Bristol royalists.25CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 665. The nearest Robert Aldworth came to political commitment before 1645 was as a member of a London based committee keeping a watching brief on developments in his native city. After Bristol was taken by the parliamentarians, Aldworth would have been able to return to play a part in civic life, and indeed became a burgess in January 1646 by virtue of his father’s civic status. His academic progress at his Inn suggests that instead of an immediate return to Bristol, he remained in London pursuing his legal studies.

The combination of his recognised professional skills and his father’s influence as a Rumper MP accounted for Aldworth’s appointments to various central government posts concerned with the sales of confiscated lands. One of these, the commission for removing obstructions to sales, was salaried at £200 a year; another, the post of trustee of former crown forests, to which he was appointed in November 1653, carried a salary of £300.26CSP Dom. 1654, p. 397; A. and O. ii. 809; CJ vii. 349a. In the summer of 1654, when he stood for election in Bristol, he was appointed as a judge of poor prisoners (debtors). The opportunity for advancement in Bristol which he did eventually take was the post of town clerk. He was appointed in October 1653, at the height of his father’s influence in the city, and the fee of £5 was the least of the benefits of this position, which put Aldworth at the heart of the city’s political life. From around that time he was named in the nisi prius patent of association, which gave him the authority to hear civil cases at assizes in Bristol. No less significant for him was his marriage to the grand-daughter of Humphrey Hooke*, a Bristol merchant prince officially frozen out of civic affairs but in the 1650s still routinely referred to as ‘Alderman Hooke’. Despite the apparent differences in the political outlook of the Aldworths and Humphrey Hooke, the latter felt well enough disposed towards his son-in-law to leave him money for mourning. Rather more in tune with Aldworth’s politics was Joseph Jackson*, his wife’s step-father.27PROB11/290/248; Bristol RO, 04026/24, p. 146; FCOB 2/5, Great Orphan bk. 2, f. 214.

Aldworth’s credentials as a parliamentary candidate rested partly on his own merits as a successful lawyer and government office-holder, but also on the record and status of his father, whose own advancing years probably kept him from standing for Parliament again in 1654. His colleague as the preferred choice of the city council was Miles Jackson*, brother of his step-father-in-law. The challenge to them from military figures sympathetic to the sects came after years of resistance by the council to widening the franchise beyond its own members. In the aftermath of the contested election, the council was forced to lobby Parliament, and probably the protector’s council, ‘about the burgesses’; evidence of the Aldworth family’s dominance of city politics is visible in the role of Robert’s brother, John, as a delegate to London on this mission.28Bristol RO, 04026/24, p. 230. In the Parliament that met on 3 September 1654, Aldworth was appointed to a committee to review the activities of the judges at Salters' Hall, for poor prisoners. He was himself one of these judges; as a result of the review, their activities were suspended, and Aldworth sat on a committee to come up with a better dispensation.29CJ vii. 368a, 378a. Other committees in which Aldworth was involved were on the continuing efforts to close down the court of wards, and to consider the petition of William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, whose estates included land in Gloucestershire. Neither of these was of great political significance nationally, although the Craven case was to form a sideshow in confrontations in print between the Bristol sects and their local opponents.30CJ vii. 380b, 381a.; R. Farmer, The Impostor Dethron’d (1658), 66-7, 80-1.

Aldworth had been a militia commissioner in Bristol since 1651, but after the failure of the first protectorate Parliament returned to Bristol to take charge of the city militia, in a show of opposition to the national army regulars at the castle, who had been so sympathetic to the sects and who had formed the challenge to his election to Parliament. He had the city’s arms painted on the militia regiment colours, and got the council to invest in new trophies, in what was evidently intended as a morale-booster for the trained bands.31Bristol RO, 04026/24, pp. 240, 243. The radicals among the garrison officers continued to warn Secretary John Thurloe* of the inadequacy of the city’s forces, despite Aldworth’s arrival; the city fathers’ view was that the sectaries’ jeremiads derived from their disappointment at the outcome of the 1654 election.32TSP iii. 161, 169. The visit of Major-general William Boteler* as an arbitrator between the branches of the military seemed to favour the citizens.33TSP iii. 170-2; 184. Aldworth’s plans for the militia were disrupted in March 1655, when he declared himself ‘discomposed’ by the orders for a reorganisation, following the Penruddock rising.34TSP iii. 223, 248-9. The reasons for his discomposure lay in his treatment of the Quakers.

Quaker emissaries had first arrived in Bristol in July 1654, and had quickly won over some of the garrison officers and the former MP, Dennis Hollister*. The election to the first protectorate Parliament had been conducted against this background. In October, the magistrates examined the Quakers, and among the principal antagonists of the emerging sect was Robert Aldworth’s father. On 19 December, an anti-Quaker riot broke out with Bristol bridge at its epicentre, and as town clerk Aldworth was deeply hostile to the beleaguered sectaries. The Friends complained that at the examination of one of their number by the magistrates, the Quaker’s solicitor offered in mitigation that his client had rescued a woman from the mob. Aldworth’s response was apparently to dismiss this as ‘advice against the city’. A rioter who burst into a Quaker’s house and promised he would ‘die like a dog’ was said later to have become ensign in Aldworth’s own militia company.35The Cry of Blood (1656) 39, 40, 41 (E.884.3). Aldworth gave the charge to the grand jury at the Bristol sessions in January 1655 – his office was on this evidence comparable with that of deputy recorder elsewhere – and argued that it was not a religious duty to be silent in the face of the Quaker threat, a kind of retrospective vindication of the rioters. The Quakers catalogued Aldworth’s subsequent rough proceedings against their co-religionists.36The Cry of Blood, 43, 47-54. The militia was being developed as an agency against the sects, hence Aldworth’s anxieties. A reorganisation of it from outside was not only possibly damaging to that project, but was open to infiltration from the very people it was designed to check. In the event, Aldworth was able to report that John Haggett, his opponent in the 1654 election, and other sectaries and their sympathisers had been excluded. He was willing to admit his failings, especially ‘the weakness of my body and my unexperience in such military affairs; yet I am willing still to the utmost to prove a faithful servant to the commonwealth’.37TSP iii. 259-60. The militia was reformed at the expense of the regular army garrison; Aldworth was party to the plan to demolish the castle.38Bristol RO, 04417/1, f. 13v.

Aldworth was a natural choice of the Bristol council as a representative of the city in the second protectorate Parliament. He had personally battled against the sectaries in the city courts and the militia, and had presented himself as a loyal servant of the government.39TSP iv. 379. His high profile in 1655 led to an offer of appointment as one of the six masters in chancery, but the appointment in May seems never to have been followed through. There seems to be no record of Aldworth’s ever having acted in this post.40Abbott, Writings and Speeches, iii. 704; T.D. Hardy, Principal Officers of Chancery, (1843), 92-3. In the second Parliament of his career, therefore, he remained unencumbered by high office. According to his Quaker adversaries in Bristol, however, the 1656 election was not uncontroversial. Major-general John Disbrowe* was asked by the militia commissioners to stand, but was rebuffed by associates of the minister Ralph Farmer with cries of ‘No swordsman’. This was one sign that Bristol’s relations with central government were not unambivalent; the temporary exclusion from Parliament of John Doddridge, Aldworth’s partner at Westminster, was another.41The Throne of Truth Exalted (1657), 105-6 (E.907.2).

Aldworth was slow to make much of an impact on the committees of the House. His first committee appointments were on 7 October, after the Parliament had been sitting for several weeks, on the uncontroversial subjects of customary oaths and artificers’ wages.42CJ vii. 448a, 448b. As a professional overseer of confiscated lands sales, he was a natural choice for a committee to produce a summative account of what was sold and what remained to be sold (17 Oct.), and the abolition of the court of wards claimed his time in this assembly as it had in the last (29 Oct.).43CJ vii. 440b, 447a. His rather lacklustre profile in Parliament was transformed by the events in Bristol on 24 October. On that day, the Quaker James Naylor rode into Bristol accompanied by his adoring followers, re-enacting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The effects were explosive. The city magistrates imprisoned Naylor’s party on the day of their arrival, and examined them on the 25th. The city fathers’ history of confrontation with Quakers predetermined their vigorous response; their more recent uncertain relations with the protectoral government, as evidenced in two successive parliamentary elections, encouraged them to send the examinations to Aldworth in London; he was first named to the committee on the 31st to enquire into Naylor’s case and expose defects in the law.44W. Grigge, The Quakers’ Jesus (1658), 11; CJ vii. 448a; W.C. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism to 1660 (Cambridge, 1955), 251-55. Thereafter, the city council continued to press for action on Naylor, and the affair quickly acquired a dynamic of its own, but little seems to have been initiated by Aldworth personally. On 18 December, he presented the city’s remonstrance on the case to the House.45Burton's Diary, i. 168.

As ever with Bristol's MPs, Aldworth continued to be pressed with the particular concerns of his constituents. The Merchant Venturers, after admitting him to membership - at the same time as his opponent from the 1654 election, John Haggett - got him to promote their perennial concern to preserve the monopoly on calfskins.46Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 277. Among the more mundane matters to animate the city council was their opposition to making the Avon navigable to Bath, and the acquisition of privileges in retailing wines.47Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 109, 116, 120. A Bristol issue which harmonised with wider trends was the remuneration and organisation of the ordained ministry. The act for preaching ministers in the city had run out of steam as its commissioners had like Denis Hollister moved into sectarianism or like Richard Aldworth, had died. In January 1657 Robert Aldworth was asked by the council to procure fresh legislation. He had since the day of his first report on the Naylor affair been involved in parliamentary efforts to strengthen the ministry. He was second named after Thomas Bampfylde to a committee on a bill to provide maintenance to ministers in towns where there was none, and in December was working on a bill to shore up the ministry in Northampton.48Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 122; CJ vii. 448b, 450a, 469a, 519a. Later, Aldworth secured an act which augmented and glossed the original act procured under the Rump. This paved the way for a wholesale restructuring of the city’s parishes, involving transfer of patronage to the city council, a system of ecclesiastical rating, and a rationalisation of the parish boundaries.49Bristol RO, 04264/5, pp. 135, 142-4. While pursuing this issue, Aldworth also sought on the citizens’ behalf to revive Bristol’s admiralty court.50Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 126. On 20 June 1657, he was a teller in a division – which his side resoundingly won – to extend the sitting of the House into the afternoon: his interest in so much local legislation put him on the side of those who wanted to progress business. There is little indication that Aldworth played much part in national politics in this Parliament, although he is listed among the ‘kinglings’ who voted on 25 March 1657 to include the offer the crown to Cromwell in the Humble Petition and Advice.51Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). In the short final session of this Parliament in the new year of 1658, Aldworth was asked to report on the oath taken by the clerk of the House, a commission which drew upon his legal skills and municipal experience.52CJ vii. 579a, 594b.

In July 1658 Aldworth entertained Richard Cromwell* at the city’s expense, and after nearly five years’ service as town clerk, he was elected to the Bristol council in September, but it was a whole year before he was sworn, a delay that must reflect the political uncertainty of the period.53Bristol RO, 04026/26, p. 5; 04264/5, pp. 165, 191. The following January, he was chosen to sit again for the city in Richard Cromwell’s only Parliament. A council committee was set up ‘in reference to all kind of grievances as well relating to the commonwealth in general as to the city in particular they think fit of’.54Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 180. The city fathers’ main interest by this time was an extension of the charter, but nothing was achieved in the short period of this assembly. Later in the year, Aldworth helped search the city’s records for evidence about the constitutions of the hospitals.55Bristol RO, 04417/1, f. 115. During the tumultuous period of the Restoration, Aldworth maintained his grip on the militia, being confirmed as its colonel on 16 January 1660. The city held out for local control of its militia, a claim which the crown was unlikely to concede.56Bristol RO, 04264/6, pp. 7, 8, 14. Aldworth did nothing to provoke the government, and even took up the city’s congratulatory petition to the king in May, but several months earlier had been singled out as ‘fanatic’ by a cavalier adviser of George Monck*, the principal military guarantor of the Restoration. This commentator drew a distinction between the tractable aldermen, such as Miles Jackson* and his brother Robert* on the one hand, and Aldworth, the soldiers and the remaining republicans such as John Okey* on the other. Whether this tendentious analysis was in any way accurate seems doubtful. When Aldworth’s servant in London wrote in admiring terms to Bristol of the news he had heard of the Bristol apprentice disturbances, he must have known that they rose to demand a free Parliament, the return of the secluded Members, not to engineer another republican expedient.57HMC Leyborne-Popham, 144-5, 160, 161; Bristol RO, 07831, under ‘1659’; Mercurius Politicus no. 606 (2-9 Feb. 1660), 1084 (E.775.1). On balance then it seems unlikely that he was active in opposing the Restoration, despite historians’ judgments to the contrary.58HP Commons 1660-1690.

Aldworth’s recordership of Devizes secured him a seat in the Convention for that town, where there was a tradition of recorders progressing to a seat in the Commons.59VCH Wilts. x. 273-4. As for Bristol, he clung on to his position as town clerk there, despite lobbying against him by a prominent cavalier and the application of the corporation act in 1661.60CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 569. It was alleged that his relatives (the Hooke family being the obvious examples) kept him in post; it was less plausibly argued that he had manipulated city ordinances to cling on to office.61CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 224-5. He continued to be named in writs of nisi prius to hear civil assize cases. The cavaliers overplayed their hand against Aldworth; in January 1664, the lord mayor protested against their slanders against the corporation in general and Aldworth in particular, and beat off their challenge.62CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 427-8. Over a decade after he had been named as a master in chancery by the protectorate, in 1667 he was administered the oath as a master extraordinary of that court, which empowered him deal with its business in Bristol.63C231/7, p. 316. He died in March 1676, and was buried in his native parish, although he was living in the parish of St John's at the time, still in post as town clerk.64All Saints par. reg.; Barrett, Hist. Bristol, 446.