CHARLTON, Job (c.1614-97), of Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx., Whitton Court, Burford, Salop and Ludford, Herefs.

Job Charlton’s family had long been established in Shropshire as gentry, but Robert Charlton, Job’s father, was a successful London businessman. He flourished in the 1630s, his business connections helping him to interesting speculative opportunities, such as the opening up of Canada, which came about during the Anglo-French war in the late 1620s. Robert Charlton was at one point a commissioner for the waters off the Canadian territory, enjoying such profits as could be made from the fishing rights there, but seems to have surrendered his stake in this venture before 1640 as the diplomatic situation discouraged aggressive penetration of the land occupied by the French.24CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 9, 114, 129, 145, 151, 158; CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 515; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 123-4. With Job Harby, after whom the young Job was named, Robert Charlton was also part of a syndicate that managed the pre-emption of tin in Devon and Cornwall on behalf of the king.25Bodl. Bankes 38/5; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 389. The consortium paid an annual rent of £16,000, an indication of how profitable the concession must have been.26CSP Dom. 1635, p. 606. Robert Charlton was active in the Fishmongers’ Company, perhaps reflecting his Canadian interests, but equally likely simply confirming his prominence in City life.27W.P. Haskett-Smith, The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers of the City of London (1916), 15. In 1635 Charlton bought Whitton Court and over a thousand acres of land for £3700 and Ludford manor for another £4500, surely evidence of a planned retirement.28Salop Archives, 11/74, 75, 78. He kept his house in Mincing Lane, however, and it was used in 1637 as a poste restante address for Ship Money revenue from Suffolk.29CSP Dom. 1637, p. 435. That year Charlton was still in business with Harby, both of them members of the Levant Company, dealing in the French wine trade.30Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 77n.

Job Charlton had the comfortable upbringing and education that might have been expected of a son of a wealthy gentleman cum merchant prince. He was called to the bar in 1640, aged about 26. The sympathies of the Charlton family in the civil war inclined to the royalists. Robert Charlton was unusual among London merchants in suffering the attentions of the committees for penal taxation, but his profitable concession from the crown in tin made him an irresistible target. He was assessed at £1500 in November 1643, had his tin stocks seized the following month, and later suffered the intrusive investigations of two informers.31CCAM 289-90. On the other hand, Robert Charlton was never subjected to compounding or sequestration, and in 1649 was given reassurances about his ‘loans’ to Parliament. He is unlikely therefore to have been the Mr Charlton from Shropshire who figured in a report on the movements of the king and his party in September 1642.32HMC 5th Rep. 48. This Shropshire figure on the outskirts of Bristol sounds like Job, but nothing further seems to have come of his mobilisation. It may have been Robert Charlton’s kinsman and namesake, from Apley, who inclined towards Parliament and assisted at the surrender of Bridgnorth in October 1646.33CCC 1541; C231/6 p. 74. In that year Job Charlton was under suspicion at Lincoln’s Inn, his colleagues wondering whether or not he was well affected to Parliament.34LI Black Bks. ii. 368, 371. It may have been through this relative’s influence that Job Charlton’s name began to appear in the Shropshire commission of the peace and in tax commissions from 1649, but it certainly does not betoken any profound commitment on his behalf to the republican cause.

Charlton must have been building up his legal practice in the marches of Wales during the 1650s. He is found as a trustee in land transactions of the Newport family, leading Shropshire royalists, in 1651. This was an important alliance which may thus have begun on a professional basis.35NLW, Powis Castle Deeds (2), 10112-24, 10109-10, 16169; Salop Archives, 1037/8/75. Charlton kept out of the royalist intrigues of the mid-1650s, and was well placed because of his property interests around Ludlow to represent that borough in the third protectorate Parliament. There was no controversy surrounding his election on 6 January 1659.36Salop Archives, LB2/1/2, p. 155. He made some impression in his first Parliament. With Samuel Baldwyn*, his colleague from Ludlow, he was named to the committee nominally charged with devising a church settlement for Wales, but which was in truth a vehicle for attacking the ‘propagators of the gospel’ active in the principality under the Rump Parliament. On 6 April he sat on a committee to consider the terms of transacting business with the ‘Other House’, and on 8 April he was named to the committee which investigated the reasons why Thomas Howard, 23rd earl of Arundel, a Protestant, was still apparently kept out of the country. The last committee he appeared on was concerning the impeachment of Major-general Thomas Boteler*.37CJ vii. 600b, 627a, 632a, 637a. In none of these committees could Charlton have been helpful to the Cromwellian government; his contribution to a debate (2 Apr.) on the proposed day of public humiliation, to cavil about the manner by which the fast day would be advertised, was legalistic.38Burton’s Diary, iv. 331, 333. He should probably be considered a crypto-royalist in this Parliament, but he was not yet entirely trusted by agents of the king-in-exile; a correspondent of Sir Edward Hyde* feared that Charlton’s association with men of limited means might mean that he – and they – could be bought.39Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 240; CCSP iv. 19.

After the closure of this Parliament, Charlton began to move quickly towards the royalists, as an associate of Andrew Newport and his brother Francis Newport*, Lord Newport, the local leaders of the so-called ‘Trust’.40Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 236. In May, Charlton was reported by agents for the king to be active not just in the Shropshire area, but higher in the conspirators’ counsels: he was said to have drafted a declaration that would have been issued by the king had a Restoration been brought about by a rebellion.41CCSP iv. 200, 238, 247; HMC 10th Rep. vi. 204, 267-9. Charlton was praised for his ‘clearness of judgment and resolution’, but when the rising of Sir George Boothe* failed in the summer of 1659, Charlton lost his nerve and dropped out of the royalists’ conspiratorial circle.42Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 296. He retained the goodwill of Ludlow corporation, and in April 1660 was returned to the Convention, to play a leading part among the royalists working for the return of the king. There he proved hostile to Cromwellians, seeking to except from the bill of indemnity and oblivion not only all who had participated in high courts of justice, but also those who had petitioned against Charles I, or had been Rumpers, or major-generals’ commissioners. On the other hand, he was relatively well-disposed to Bulstrode Whitelocke*, a fellow lawyer, and Richard Salwey*, a fellow Salopian.

Charlton was made a serjeant-at-law in the first calling of the new reign, and became a forthright cavalier in the 1661 Parliament. The material and visible rewards of his loyalty to the monarchy came quickly. He was knighted in 1662, and the same year became chief justice of Chester. In the mid-1660s, he was able to buy up the Shropshire interests of one of his predecessors in the Ludlow seat, the Cromwellian John Aston*. Aston’s son, then safely domiciled in London, wryly noted how ‘everyone fears Sir Job’.43Salop Archives, 11/185, 195. Although Charlton’s property interests were extensive in Shropshire by this time, and the family estates were long settled on him, he did not succeed his father until 1670.44Salop Archives, 11/366; PROB11/332/652. He was proposed to the House as Speaker in 1673; Henry Coventry† drew attention to his merits as an experienced parliamentarian and a long-standing servant of the king. Illness was the reason cited for his truncated Speakership of only 14 days, but he would have faced political controversy over the Declaration of Indulgence and may simply have felt unable to confront or ride out these difficulties. Thereafter, his parliamentary profile was reduced, but he was inevitably noted as an ardent tory. From 1680, his once comfortable relationship with Ludlow corporation deteriorated into conflict, as the townsmen rejected Charlton’s son as their town clerk. Their stance was naturally taken as a slight by Sir Job, recorder of the borough since 1675. At the same time, he lost his prized Chester judgeship, ‘sore against his will’, which carried with it a place on the council in the marches of Wales, to the unstoppable juggernaut of Sir George Jeffreys.45Bodl. Carte 243, f. 467. As a consolation he was instead made a judge of common pleas. He remained loyal to James II, and retired from the bench in 1689.46HP Commons, 1660-1690; Oxford DNB. In his will of 1691, he left money for a workhouse and house of correction at Ludlow. Charlton was buried at Ludford on 26 May 1697. Two of his sons and two of his grandsons became Members of Parliament.