ATKYNS, Robert (1621-1710), of Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx., and Lower Swell, Glos.

Atkyns was the product of three generations of judges, each one more important than the last, and as far back as the fifteenth century, in Monmouthshire, his forebears were lawyers.29Atkyns, Glos. (1768), 335. Since the mid-sixteenth century Gloucestershire had been their county of residence, but Atkyns was born and bred in his maternal county of Hertfordshire. He followed family tradition in becoming a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. At the time he was called, his father was a newly-made baron of the exchequer, so created by Parliament, though the king had intended the same post for him in 1640. Edward Atkyns was counsel to William Prynne* when the latter was prosecuted in star chamber in 1633, and his legal skills were requested in 1640 by Henry Burton and John Bastwick, when their cases came to the attention of the Long Parliament. A client of the 2nd earl of Salisbury (William Cecil*), Edward Atkyns was promoted to be serjeant-at-law by the king in 1640, and named in the abortive Oxford treaty by Parliament as a prospective judge in king’s bench. Despite initially declining to continue as baron of the exchequer under the Rump (he had been appointed by Parliament in 1645), Atkyns quickly adapted, and was appointed to common pleas by October 1649. He so accommodated himself to the Cromwellian regime that he took part in several trials, though he refused to try Gerard and others for conspiracy to kill Cromwell in 1654. He jibbed only at the restoration of the Rump in 1659, when he declined to take the Engagement, and did not refuse to be a presiding judge in the regicide trials of 1660.30DNB sub Sir Edward Atkyns (1587-1669).

The Atkyns clan were thus becoming hereditary props of the judiciary, courted by and serving both sides: the same thing was later to happen when Robert Atkyns, by then Sir Robert, as a supporter of the new order, replaced his younger brother Edward† as chief baron of the Exchequer when James II was succeeded by William and Mary. Robert Atkyns may at first have been less accommodating than his father. On 14 May 1647 he was assessed at £800 by the Committee for Advance of Money, though no proceedings were begun against him.31CCAM 821. His first known public office was as recorder of Evesham, where he succeeded Richard Cresheld*, like himself a Lincoln’s Inn man. A dominant figure in Evesham at the time was Samuel Gardner*, a supporter of the orthodox minister, George Hopkins, and an enemy of sectaries. On 3 October 1655, Atkyns had made it his business to be in Evesham to deal with the Quakers at a meeting of the borough sessions. He made the Quakers’ refusal of ‘hat-honour’ a central point in his denunciation of the Friends from the bench, and two days later, after he had gone, one of the Evesham capital burgesses was removed from office for his active support of Quakers in the town, and for allegedly abusing Atkyns as recorder.32J. Besse, Sufferings of the Quakers (2 vols. 1753), ii. 52-5; H. Smith, Cruelty of the Magistrates of Evesham (1655), 4-9; Evesham Borough Records, 51-2. In September 1656, the fines that Atkyns imposed were remitted on the authority of the lord protector, after an intervention by Major-general James Berry*.33Besse, Sufferings, ii. 56. At the time of his interventions in Evesham, Atkyns was establishing himself in the region as a landed proprietor. In 1655 he purchased Hempsted, Gloucestershire from his hapless royalist cousin Colonel Richard Atkyns, and before the decade was out added Lower Swell to his estate, though his major purchases in the county, including Sapperton, dated from 1661.

Atkyns first entered the House in November 1656 for Carmarthenshire, on a vacancy caused by the choice of Cromwell’s son-in-law, John Claypoole, to sit elsewhere. He had no more connection with the county than Claypoole: both were presumably nominees of the government, with compliant local sponsorship. Atkyns was appointed to six committees in his first Parliament. Two of the committees were named on 17 December, Thomas Acclom’s land sale bill and the bill for the better maintenance of Northampton ministers; one, on the Gresham petition, on 31 January 1657; one on 17 February regarding the petition of John Jones I*; one on 19 February on the Irish lands bill intended to compensate Bristol’s parliamentarians for their losses; and one on 22 January 1658 when he was named last for the marriages, births and burials bill.34CJ vii. 469a, 484a, 492b, 494a, 581a. Atkyns came into the House while the furore over James Naylor, the Quaker, was raging, but contributed nothing to debate over his case, for all his aggressiveness over the Quaker threat at Evesham in October the previous year. He provided a legal opinion on 16 April 1658, regarding the power of the trustees for bishops’ and dean and chapter lands to intervene in a case involving the recovery of misappropriated church goods.35CSP Dom. 1657-8, p.368.

Atkyns returned to the Evesham council chamber in August 1657, probably to shore up wavering support for him there. The burgesses passed a resolution re-affirming his standing as recorder (1 Sept. 1657), and secured his return to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament. He made no mark on that assembly, and on 13 July 1659 the Evesham burgesses took away his recordership, because of his non-attendance.36Evesham Borough Records, 54, 55, 59-60 Two weeks previously, royalists were gleefully reporting that his father, with another judge, John Archer*, had refused an oath to be ‘constant’ to the commonwealth.37CCSP iv. 257; TSP vii. 553; Clarke Pprs. iv. 284. With the Restoration his father was reinstated on the bench, Atkyns was knighted, and brought into the Cavalier Parliament of which he was a very active Member and indulgent in the matter of religion. In 1662, he succeeded John Stephens* as recorder of Bristol.38Bristol RO, 04264/6, pp. 58-9. Legal honours ensued, but by 1674 Atkyns was turning against the court, and the Stuarts dispensed with his services from 1680 until the revolution of 1688. Restored, he survived into his 90th year, living latterly at Lower Swell. He died on 18 Feb. 1710, and was buried at Sapperton. With his father and brother he is commemorated in Westminster Abbey.39HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Robert Atkyns’.