STRODE, Sir Richard (1584-1669), of Lower Chalmington, Cattistock, Dorset and Newnham, Plympton St Mary, Devon.

The life story of Sir Richard Strode seems to have been conditioned by the marriage that was arranged for him, when he was 12 years old, with a distant cousin. The settlement would have bestowed Parnham, the Dorset estate of Sir Robert Strode, on Sir Richard had it been adhered to, but Strode’s first wife, Katherine, died around 1608. His father-in-law then cancelled an entail in favour of his own brother, setting Sir Richard on a lifetime’s career of litigation.20HP Commons 1604-1629. His finances must have been depleted by successive lawsuits, and in the 1620s, Strode was involved in a number of speculative ventures doubtless to recoup some of his outlay. He was one of a number of individuals who could see the potential of draining and enclosing Sedgemoor in Somerset, where he had inherited the manor of Middlezoy, although Strode’s proposals seem never to have proceeded beyond the sketchiest of calculations.21SP16/44/53; VCH Som. vii. 117. He was a committee member of the Dorchester company for settling in New England, but that failed.22Whiteway Diary, 61. More promising, until the tin industry was destroyed by the civil war, was his ownership by 1625 of an eighth share in a tin mine or ‘pitch’ in the stannary of Plympton.23Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 72/1034. It was as a local proprietor and heir to an important south Devon gentry family that he was returned to the 1604 Parliament, and residence in Dorset, with membership by marriage of the Erle family, secured him a place in the Parliament of 1626.

Strode’s character was certainly in question by 1626. The last time he attended Dorset quarter sessions was October 1626, and within a few months he was talking of how he had been put out of the commission of the peace. Typically, he concluded that his fall from favour was directly related to his exposing electoral corruption by Sir John Strangways*.24Dorset Quarter Sessions 1625-1638 (Dorset Record Soc. xiv), 28; HMC Cowper, i. 305. During the early 1630s, Strode began to move away from the puritan mainstream in the church. He shared with John White, the puritan minister at Dorchester, not only a religious outlook, having children baptised by White, but an interest in overseas expansion, as envisioned in the Dorchester Company. But during the early 1630s, Strode was patron and promoter to John Traske, a highly unorthodox preacher, who was accused in high commission of Judaism. By June 1634, Strode claimed to have abandoned both Traske in particular, and ‘gadding abroad to other ministers’ in general. Traske was degraded in the court of high commission from his ministerial office, and Strode was admonished. The suspicion lingered, however, that Strode was ‘a schismatical person’, and even ‘a man ill affected to the state’.25SP16/261/55-7; Oxford DNB for Traske. It is certainly true that strands in Strode’s personal life tended to intertwine to no good purpose. Further evidence presented at the high commission hearing related to his visit, armed with a pistol, to an Easter service at Cattistock, where his hated cousin, Sir John Strode, and his wife were present.

Strode was quick to attack any who dared disparage him. In 1635, he brought a suit in the newly-revived high court of chivalry against two Dorset neighbours. One had allegedly claimed that Strode had forfeited his knighthood as a consequence of the high commission case, and was supposed to have compounded the offence by answering to a question at a muster of the trained bands that Strode’s contribution to the militia would be ‘an ass ready furnished’.26Cases in High Ct. of Chivalry (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 278. The other petitioned to have Strode’s case against him, for describing a servant as better suited to working for Strode because of his base qualities, dismissed as vexatious. 27Cases in High Ct. of Chivalry, 59. In the same year, Strode was actively pursuing a suit against the estate of the late Dr Nicholas Love, warden of Winchester College.28Coventry Docquets, 394. Also in 1635, a kind of annus mirabilis of litigious activity for him, he was granted a hearing in star chamber against Sir John Strode in pursuit of what he insisted was his rightful inheritance in Dorset. He claimed that Sir John had oppressed him both in that court and in chancery for 35 years. The promised hearing was either not held, or was indecisive, and Strode petitioned again in January 1638.29CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 215; Coventry Docquets, 430.

From the early 1630s, Sir Richard was in dispute with William Strode†, his own son, about Newnham, the family estate at Plympton. Strode’s sister-in-law believed him to be intent on selling Newnham to fund dowries for his daughters. This threat lay over Strode’s son throughout the decade.30HMC Portland, iii. 31, 40, 51, 57, 60. On top of this and the repeated legal assaults against his kinsman in Dorset, in 1638 Strode quarrelled with his younger brother, William Strode I*. The root of this dispute lay in the decision by their father, Sir William Strode, to make his second son his executor and his sons-in-law overseers, thus avoiding giving Sir Richard any responsibility in the disposition of his estates.31PROB11/196, f. 137. It might have been predicted that the elder Strode brother would dispute the will, or at least William’s Strode I’s administration of it, and that he would write to the latter to make it clear that he was ‘your brother better than you are to me’. Sir Richard tried to enlist the help of the 4th earl of Bedford (Francis Russell†), and furnished the earl with a narrative of how William Strode I had walked away ‘in a scornful manner, saying he would hear what I could say but not any more of my letters’.32Harl. 7001, f. 137. The nadir in these attacks by Strode on his nearest family came in March 1640, when he burst into the bedchamber of his son and his heavily-pregnant wife at Newnham, and smashed it up.33HMC Portland, iii. 61-2.

Against this background of notoriety, both locally in two counties, and at court, and the inevitable inference of mental instability that must be drawn from it, it seems at best doubtful whether Strode was ever recorder of Plympton.34HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Richard Strode’. The sole evidence that he held the office comes from a petitioner of January 1639, whose wording and punctuation could easily be construed as a request that either Strode, or the recorder, or ‘some such indifferent man’, might mediate in his case.35SP16/409/9. Certainly Sir Nicholas Slanning* had the office by March 1640, and he, unlike Strode, had at least attended an inn of court. It is true, however, that Strode’s son held the office during the 1660s.36HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Strode I’. Whatever the case, Sir Richard Strode was certainly interested in public affairs. In August 1639, he visited the jury chamber in Exeter castle, when the Devon grand jury was conferring at the assizes. He tried to persuade them to adopt a paper he had written against Ship Money as a jury presentment, but was pre-empted by the judge, Sir John Finch†, who in open court regaled all present with Strode’s biography to date, larded with examples of his ‘unjust spirit’. According to Finch’s own report to Archbishop William Laud, Strode’s attempt at a rejoinder was ill-judged and feeble, and the jury declined to adopt his paper. Finch noted that Strode was obsessed with alleged abuses by a minor official who had distrained one of the cows at Newnham.37CSP Dom. 1639, p. 439. The judgment that Strode’s opposition to Ship Money should best be characterized as based on ‘expressly constitutional grounds’ seems rather implausible in the light of his quarrelsomeness.38M. J. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (Exeter, 1994), 179.

It is perfectly in keeping with Strode’s character and conduct that he should have returned himself to the first Parliament that met in 1640. An indenture for Sir Nicholas Slanning and Sir Thomas Hele was returned by the mayor and electors, but another, which has not survived, was brought in. On 20 April, a motion was carried that it should be discovered how the indenture for Strode reached the Commons: whether it had been brought to the clerk of the crown by the sheriff of Devon, his deputy or by Strode himself. The House had not pronounced on the case when the Parliament was dissolved.39CJ ii. 7a. It will not have helped Strode’s case that a vocal member of the privileges committee, John Maynard, had supported Strode’s son and daughter-in-law during their tribulations, and less than three weeks earlier had assured the family that a display of equanimity and natural familial conduct on their part would serve to ‘heap more coals of fire’ on Sir Richard’s head.40HMC Portland, iii. 62.

In the general election later in 1640 for what became known as the Long Parliament, Slanning and Michael Oldisworth* were returned for Plympton, and both chose to sit for other boroughs where they were also elected. By-elections were held around 15 and on 20 November, when respectively Sir Thomas Hele and Hugh Potter were returned. Following one of these three elections, Strode must have made his own candidacy public, and perhaps again sent in an indenture on his own behalf. His name appears on the crown office docquet book for the Long Parliament, below that of Hele. Strode’s name is struck through and Potter’s inserted below it, suggesting that perhaps it was after the meeting around 15 November that Strode’s return was made. On 25 November a petition of his, no doubt in favour of his own election, was referred to the elections committee, by now chaired by Maynard, and it never again emerged.41C193/32/18; CJ iii. 319a. When Sir Robert Harley replaced Maynard as chairman, Strode petitioned once more (5 Sept. 1643), but the outcome is again unclear.42CJ iii. 319a. A printed list of Members published in 1644 gives Strode as Member for Plympton, and he himself seems never to have abandoned the belief that he was properly elected.43A New Catalogue (1644), sig. A3(i.) (E.1144.3). He wrote in 1652 on what he might do were he ‘now in the House a Member as I was elected by law and by the privilege of Parliament I now ought to be’, but he was never considered a Member by his colleagues, and is not known to have played any part in the by-election for Plympton in 1647.44Som. and Dorset Notes and Queries, viii. 244. This is not to say that he did not stand in a by-election elsewhere.

Whether or not he believed himself at the time to be a Member of it, Strode petitioned the House on 5 February 1641. It was yet another attack on Sir John Strode, whom Sir Richard now blamed for Sir Robert’s change of mind about the Parnham inheritance. Strode wanted Henry Scobell, chancery registrar and by this time if not soon afterwards under-clerk of the Commons, to explain earlier chancery orders in the case.45PA, Main Papers, 5 Feb. 1641. It is possible that Strode’s motive for seeking a parliamentary seat had all along been the opportunities it would have afforded for revenge against his many perceived enemies. The House was evidently receptive, as on 13 February a bill to settle Sir Robert Strode’s estate on Sir Richard was given its first reading, and on 29 May it went to a committee which included ‘the knights, citizens and burgesses of Devon, Cornwall and Dorsetshire’ in general, but in which west country men by name were conspicuously few.46CJ ii. 84a, 160b. Again, the bill never re-appeared.

During the civil war, Strode remained in step with the rest of the Strode family in Devon by taking the side of Parliament. At some point before June 1643, Strode’s house at Newnham was plundered by the royalists.47Add. 35297, f. 21v. He was later to assert that he raised 3,000 dragoons for Parliament, an extraordinary claim, but one that was evidently given some credence by Parliament. His name is not to be found among those Devon stalwarts for the parliamentary cause who became the backbone of the war effort managed from Plymouth. In 1649, the Devon standing committee acknowledged that Strode, Sir George Chudleigh† (Strode’s brother-in-law) and Sir John Pole had become bound for a sum lent for Parliament’s service by a Plymouth man, whose executor was now claiming the return of the principal and costs. By 1652, in hearings before the Committee for Indemnity, Strode was being described as having been a deputy lieutenant in 1643.48SP24/78, order of Devon standing cttee. 23 Aug. 1649; petition of Strode, Chudleigh and Pole, 21 Sept. 1652. Whether he ever held that title formally seems doubtful. What is more certain is that when the earl of Stamford came to Plymouth in January 1643, Strode was given the title of chief scoutmaster to his army. Nothing has been discovered of his military service. He played no part in the abortive treaty of February 1643 between the Devon parliamentarians and the Cornish royalists. He was not among the Devon gentry with Stamford’s army who were in Exeter when it surrendered to the king in September.49M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 202. His own later petition to the Committee for Indemnity, separate from the one jointly with Chudleigh and Pole, frankly described how he had been released from the Plymouth debtors’ prison because of his unique qualities for the role of scoutmaster.50SP24/78, petition of Sir Richard Strode, n.d. This raises the question as to whether Strode had in fact been gaoled over the local Ship Money dispute which had taken him to the Devon assizes with his paper. Despite his colourful personal history, William Mercer included an encomium to Strode in a collection of poems in 1646, characterizing him as working indefatigably ‘for Devon’s good’, with pen as well as sword. No publications Strode may have written in the 1640s seem to have survived.51W. Mercer, Angliae Speculum, or England’s Lookingglasse (1646), sig. L3 (E.327.13).

Strode’s position in the army was probably virtually honorary, a sop to his gentry status and his family ties with the most eminent individuals in the Parliament’s service in Devon, among them Chudleigh, Sir Francis Drake*, Robert Savery (lieutenant-colonel in Plymouth garrison), Sir John Yonge* and of course, William Strode I*.52Harl. 6861, ff. 1-7v. Nevertheless, Strode’s good affection to the Parliament was sustained, and he was now able to draw upon many years of petitioning the law courts to good personal effect. He led a delegation of ‘well-affected’ western gentlemen who petitioned the House in November 1644, and as a consequence the Committee for Advance of Money listened apparently sympathetically to his surely fantastical claim that he had raised 3,000 dragoons. This was the committee where his brother, William, played a dominant part in proceedings.53CJ iii. 698b; CCAM 38. In May 1645 he petitioned again for money, on this occasion in a joint submission with his sister, the wife of Sir Francis Drake*, and obtained a further order for relief from the Committee for Advance of Money.54LJ vii. 374b. Yet another petition followed a few months later. Strode now made common cause with the widow of the distinguished parliamentarian officer, Sir William Fairfax, who had died on active service. Strode emphasised his endurance in the cause of opposing Ship Money, and put his own losses at more than £1,000, claiming another £1,000 owing to him for his commission as scoutmaster.55PA, Main Papers, 1 July 1645; LJ vii. 470a. He then began to make ‘discoveries’ of delinquents’ estates in London.56CCAM 46.

Strode was named to Devon committees through the 1640s, and was included in the re-organization of the standing committee in August 1648, but never seems to have been active.57Add. 44058, ff. 26v-27. He was never in the Devon commission of the peace, so the regicide did not oblige him to make any expression of assent or dissent in connection with it. At some time in the early 1650s, he was sent to the Fleet prison for debt. He persisted with his hobby-horse of the Parnham estate, regardless of the political climate. In 1652 he seems to have had printed some customized pages for a copy of Ephemeris, an almanac by Nicholas Culpeper, together with some handwritten further annotations.58Som. and Dorset Notes and Queries, viii. 201. Whether this was a variant in proof stage of the publication intended for a limited print run has not been established, nor has Strode’s printed and annotated copy of Ephemeris, known to Victorian antiquaries, been located. In it, Strode petitioned Oliver Cromwell* for help with the Parnham case, the enemy now being Sir John Strode’s son. The petition has the hallmarks of Strode’s usual thesis that great men had thwarted him, the 1st duke of Buckingham (George Villiers), Finch and Lord Keeper Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry†) now cast in the role. Coupled with his demand for justice came a request in favour of a bill ‘to pass in Parliament for restoring of the ancient and due liberties to Christ’s servants that the signs of eclipses coming and the crying sins now being unrecompensed, may not presage and provoke more vengeance upon this nation’, adopting a distinctly millenarian tone.59Som. and Dorset Notes and Queries, viii. 201, 204, 244-5; Bayley, Dorset, 37-9. Strode was released from prison in November, but only having suffered the indignity of hearing that his petition to the judges of common pleas had been destroyed on the orders of Chief Justice Rolle.60Som. and Dorset Notes and Queries, viii. 247-8.

During the 1650s, Strode seems to have stayed on the side of the protectorate governments. He had long held property at Lambhay, near the harbour in Plymouth, and around 1656 leased it to Henry Hatsell*, who built warehouses for victualling naval vessels there.61Plymouth and W Devon RO, 1/132, f. 249v; HMC Lindsey (Supp.), 5. The ‘Squire Strode’ of Dorset, suspected in 1655 of sympathy with the Penruddock rebels, would have been one of the Parnham Strodes, related to the Wyndham family. Strode used adherence to the king’s cause as a ready justification for his lawsuits in that period, including one at the Committee for Indemnity over his manor of Middlezoy in Somerset.62CSP Dom. 1655, p. 249; SP24/78, petition of Sir Richard Strode, 19 Feb. 1651. He was interested enough in electoral politics to play a part in the 1659 election for Dorset, organizing his interest around Cattistock in favour of Sir Walter Erle* and John Bingham*.63Alnwick, Northumberland ms 552, f. 64v, Fitzjames to Mr Clement, 1 Jan. 1659. Strode was, or had been, Erle’s brother-in-law, as his late second wife had been Erle’s sister, and Strode and Erle had collaborated as long ago as 1624 in the Dorchester Company.64Rose-Troup, John White, 63, 98.

At the restoration of the monarchy, Strode seems to have subsided into private life. It was not until the mid-1660s that he began to appear once again on local tax commissions, and then only in Dorset, not in Devon. He kept his lease of property in Plymouth and sold Middlezoy, maintaining poor relations with his son, William, to whom he had had finally to make over Newnham.65Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/273; VCH Som. viii. 117; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Strode I’. He was engaged in suits at law during the 1660s with his Drake and Davy relations by marriage.66C5/420/68, C6/165/132. When he drew up his will in 1669, he was living at Chalmington, and had decided to vest his interest in Parnham, for which he had fought at law most of his life, in the king. His relationship with his third wife must not have been easy, since Strode alleged she ‘wrongly’ called his second son John instead of Joseph. Avoiding his closest family altogether in the process, he named Sir Thomas Clifford† and John Churchill† as his executors. He promised his youngest daughter £500 if she married a merchant, and another £1,000 if her future husband became a Baptist, which Strode himself seems to have become by this time.67PROB11/333, f. 222v. His wish to be buried at Chalmington in his own garden was thwarted: after his death in October 1669 he was interred at Plympton St Mary.68Vivian, Vis. Devon, 719. His son, William, turned against the political inclinations of both his father and uncle by supporting the court in the Convention and Cavalier Parliaments.