GELL, John (1613-89), of Hopton, Wirksworth, Derbys. and St Martin’s Lane, Westminster.

Gell’s father, the first baronet, served as a magistrate and sheriff for the county and, as joint owner of the lease of the lead tithe in the mining parishes of Bakewell, Hope and Tideswell, enjoyed a considerable amount of influence in the High Peak.26A. Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism? The civil war allegiances of the miners of the Derbys. ‘Peak country’’, HJ xl. 29, 39. A firm Calvinist and a patron of godly ministers, he sent Gell to one of the most puritan of the Oxford colleges, Magdalen Hall.27J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (1984), 20, 88; Puritans in Conflict (1988), 59-60, 187; Calamy Revised, 110-1. Nevertheless, according to the Presbyterian divine Richard Baxter, Sir John Gell, like Ferdinando 2nd Baron Fairfax*, was ‘conformable to episcopal and parochial worship’.28R. Baxter, Penitent Confessions (1691), 30. Indeed, Lucy Hutchinson (wife of Colonel John Hutchinson*) believed that the only reason Sir John sided with Parliament at the outbreak of civil war was to avoid prosecution for his zeal in collecting Ship Money: ‘for he had not understanding enough to judge the equity of the cause, nor no piety or holiness, being a foul adulterer all the time he served the Parliament’.29Hutchinson Mems. ed. J. Sutherland, 67. Lucy Hutchinson was not the most impartial of commentators, however, and most of the evidence suggests that Sir John was a sincere puritan and (from the early 1640s) Presbyterian.30Brereton Letter Bk. iii. 37-8.

John Gell, the future MP, was evidently sympathetic to Parliament’s cause, signing the February 1642 Derbyshire petition to the Commons in support of ‘Zion’s prosperity’ and the ‘blessed work of reformation’.31PA, Main Pprs. 26 Feb. 1642, f. 83; Derbys. RO, D258/30/25/2; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 391. If his later career is any guide, he was also a man of puritan convictions. Nevertheless, he played no known part in the civil war. Rather than assist his father as commander-in-chief of Derbyshire’s parliamentarian forces, he preferred to live quietly in the house of his father-in-law John Packer at Westminster.32SP28/332, f. 686; Derbys. RO, D258/38/2/9. This undoubtedly saved him from the controversy and ill-feeling that Sir John’s high-handed proceedings generated among the Derbyshire parliamentarian interest. But it also meant that he was much less influential in the county’s affairs during the 1640s than by rights he should have been. His uncle, Thomas Gell*, hinted at the likely reason for this inactivity, claiming that his nephew was ‘so much ruled by his wife that what he hath is hers, as is too well known to many, but in nobody’s power to remedy’.33Derbys. RO, D258/56/2/1/14.

Gell was an avid consumer of godly preaching and kept a notebook in 1645-6 of sermons given by Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy and other ‘orthodox’ divines – mostly Presbyterians – in London.34Derbys. RO, D258/34/14/1; R. Clark, ‘Anglicanism, Recusancy and Dissent in Derbys. 1603-1730’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1979), 144-5. His correspondence during the later 1640s also suggests that he shared his father’s and mother-in-law’s Presbyterian sympathies, as well as their antipathy towards the army’s proceedings.35Derbys. RO, D258/10/9/9; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 393-4. In about 1648, he seems to have taken up residence at Hopton and, having been appointed to the Derbyshire bench early in 1650, seemed set to play a central role in county affairs.36C193/13/3, f. 12v; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 393. However, his father’s trial and imprisonment in 1650 for concealing a royalist plot, and perhaps also his own Presbyterian convictions, resulted in his removal from the magistracy in July 1651.37C231/6, p. 221; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 394-5, 396; The True Case of the State of Sir John Gell (1650, E.612.17); A True Confutation of a Fals and Scandalous Pamphlet (1650, E.613.9). The ruin of Sir John’s public career meant that Gell was effectively left as head of the family, and he responded well to the challenge. He and his uncle Thomas succeeded in securing Sir John’s release and pardon in 1652-3 and thus in removing the family estate from the threat of sequestration.38C231/6, p. 257; Derbys. RO, D258/8/45; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 395.

Gell’s confidence was such by 1654 that he stood as a candidate for Derbyshire in the July elections to the first protectoral Parliament, defeating Sir Samuel Sleigh* on a poll for the fourth, and last, place.39Supra, ‘Derbyshire’. His appointment the following month as one of the ejectors for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire highlights his commitment to a godly parochial ministry.40A. and O, ii. 969. In the event, however, he made no recorded impression on the proceedings of this Parliament and may have failed to take his seat altogether. Writing to Gell at Hopton in October 1654, the godly Coventry MP Major Robert Beake urged his friend to set aside his scruples and to attend the House

where I am sure you would have done much good. There are left good, honest and stout spirits, who will do all the good they can, though not what they would. Your old excluded friends (most of them) ... do now sit in the House. I beseech you sir, look upwards once more and hearken whether your present complexion will not invite you in.41Derbys. RO, D258/7/13/62(iv).

It seems from Beake’s letter that Gell had refused to take the Recognition, pledging to be true and faithful to Cromwell and the protectoral government, that had been prescribed in mid-September as a condition for admission to the House – an oath that many Members (the ‘old excluded friends’ to whom Beake referred) had initially refused to take.42Burton’s Diary, i. pp. xxxii-xxxvi; Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, iii. 194-6.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Gell stood for the county again and this time topped with the poll with 1,059 votes.43Derbys. RO, D258/34/5/1; D258/34/5/5-7. In light of his evident misgivings as to the constitutional propriety of the Cromwellian regime, it is no surprise that he was among those excluded from the House by the protectoral council as an opponent of the government.44OPH xxi. 36-7. He was returned for Derbyshire again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, and on 8 April he received his one and only Commons appointment – to a committee concerning Thomas Howard, 23rd earl of Arundel.45Derbys. RO, D258/34/5/3; CJ vii. 632a. One possible reason for his inactivity on this occasion is that much of his time was taken up with keeping a parliamentary diary. Written in his own hand, probably from rough notes made in the House, Gell’s diary provides an accurate abridgement of Commons debates for the majority of sittings between 5 February and 8 April. Unfortunately, it is far less detailed in terms of its reporting of individual speeches than the parliamentary diary kept by Thomas Burton*. It seems likely, given Gell’s lack of engagement with parliamentary politics, that he was writing for the benefit of someone not privy to the House’s proceedings. But the diary offers no clue as to who that person might have been, or anything about the author’s own political sympathies.46Derbys. RO, D258/10/9/1-2; W.A.H. Schilling, ‘The parliamentary diary of Sir John Gell, 5 Feb.-21 Mar. 1659’ (Vanderbilt Univ. MA thesis, 1961).

Gell seems to have welcomed a restoration of monarchy by early 1660, signing the Derbyshire address to General George Monck* for a ‘free and full Parliament’.47St. 185, ff. 148, 149; D3287/44/4/11/2. He was restored to the county bench in March and was active on the Derbyshire militia commission.48A Perfect List (1660), 10; HMC 9th Rep. ii. 396. He made such a strong showing as a candidate for Derbyshire in the elections to the 1660 Convention that his kinsman Sir John Curzon* resigned his interest to him, and the royalist Henry Cavendish, Viscount Mansfield† considered acting as his running mate.49St. 185, f. 145; Derbys. RO, D5557/2/59. But the idea of such a partnership proved distasteful to both men; and Mansfield, through a mixture of force and chicanery, secured the return of himself and another candidate on election day.50‘Derbyshire’, HP Commons 1660-1690. Gell’s omission from the bench that autumn was undoubtedly welcomed by Derbyshire’s royalists, who regarded him as the ‘most rigid Presbyterian’ in the county.51S.C. Newton, ‘The gentry of Derbys. in the seventeenth century’, Derbys. Arch. Jnl. lxxxvi. 7.

Although he attended Anglican church services, Gell emerged during the 1660s as Derbyshire’s leading patron of nonconformist worship and employed several ejected Presbyterian ministers as his chaplains.52J.T. Cliffe, Puritan Gentry Besieged (1993), 47, 70, 71-3, 88-9, 128, 214; Calamy Revised, 474. His wife was no less zealous a Presbyterian, and she relied for spiritual counsel upon, among others, Richard Baxter.53Derbys. RO, D258/8/51; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry Besieged, 70-1. Gell was one of several leading Presbyterians who were elected to the Convention in 1689, but he died on 8 February of that year without taking any known part in the Parliament’s proceedings.54Derbys. RO, D258/38/4; HP Commons 1660-1690; Cliffe, Puritan Gentry Besieged, 191. He was buried at Wirksworth on 23 February.55Wirksworth par. reg. In his will, he bequeathed £2,000 to each of his two younger daughters and £100 for erecting a ‘handsome monument’ to his father.56PROB11/395, f. 127. Gell’s son Philip Gell† represented Steyning in 1681 and Derbyshire in the 1689 Convention.57HP Commons 1660-1690.