GERARD, Francis (1617-80), of Harrow-on-the-Hill, Mdx.

Francis Gerard was the eldest son of the leading Presbyterian MP, Sir Gilbert Gerard. He was educated at Gray’s Inn and Cambridge University, and then travelled abroad on a three-year pass, dated 8 July 1638.16PC Reg. iii. 327. He had returned to England by February 1641, when he was elected for the newly-enfranchised Cinque Port of Seaford.

Gerard received his first mention in the Journal on 12 March of the same year, when he was named to the committee on a bill concerning St Leonard’s Hospital in Nottinghamshire.17CJ ii. 102b. He took the Protestation on 3 May, and in the following weeks he was named to two committees relating to parishes in Middlesex.18CJ ii. 133a, 156a, 180a. Gerard played a minor role in the attack on the Caroline regime during the summer. On 12 June, when the army plot was debated, he asked for the names of those who had sworn an oath of secrecy to the king to be made public, and on 3 July he was involved in the reading of impeachment articles against certain judges.19Harl. 5047, f. 17v; CJ ii. 198a. Thereafter, no further mention is made of Gerard in the House until he was recorded as absent on 16 June 1642.20CJ ii. 626a.

The details of his movements during this period are uncertain, but by early 1645 he was in France from where he negotiated his return to England and resumption of his seat in the Commons.21HMC 7th Rep., 450, 453. The suggestion that Gerard had been with the king during this time arises out of confusion with another Francis Gerard, a Clement’s Inn lawyer who lost the office of filazer to the court of common pleas for Yorkshire on account of his royalism only one month before the MP returned to Westminster.22CCAM 504-5. It was this other Francis Gerard who was named to administer an oath of allegiance in Oxford on 12 April: the date lies between our Member’s return to the House on 3 April (to be formally readmitted the next day) and his first committee appointment on 18 April.23Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 281; HMC 7th Rep., 450, 453; CJ iv. 99a, 115b.

Despite his earlier ambivalence, there is no doubt that from the spring of 1645 Gerard was a committed supporter of Parliament and its war effort. He took the Solemn League and Covenant on 30 April 1645.24Harl. 166, f. 206. He was added to all committees on ordinances relating to Middlesex and Westminster on 5 May and was later named to two committees concerned with raising men, horses and supplies for the local forces in Hampshire (24 May) and Middlesex (7 June).25CJ iv. 132a, 153b, 168b. On 10 June he and his father were added to the Middlesex county committee, and later in the month he was appointed to committees to discuss the disposal of prisoners taken by Sir Thomas Fairfax* at Naseby and to consider the letters seized in the ‘king’s cabinet’ after the battle.26CJ iv. 170b, 177b, 183b. On 25 July he was named to a committee to decide who would choose elders of the Presbyterian congregations in London, and month later he was appointed to the committee on an ordinance to consider the almshouses in Leicester.27CJ iv. 218a, 256b.

From the end of August 1645 Gerard’s parliamentary career again stalled, and he was named to no committees from then until 4 March 1646.28CJ iv. 462b. In the late spring of 1646 there were the first signs that Gerard had joined his father and his allies within the Presbyterian faction at Westminster. On 15 May he was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers with a number of key Presbyterians, including Sir Thomas Dacres, Sir Walter Erle, Francis and Nathaniel Bacon and Sir John Evelyn of Surrey, and on 24 June he was ordered to give the thanks of the House to the Smectymnuuan minister, William Spurstowe, for preaching at a fast day.29CJ iv. 545b, 585b. Gerard also shared Presbyterian concerns to reduce the size and thus the cost of the army. On 6 July he was named to a committee to consider how the debts of those who had contributed to the parliamentarian war effort might be repaid; on 24 September he joined his father on a committee to settle military affairs in Cheshire; and on 10 October he was appointed to a committee to investigate the commissions of senior officers, alongside his father and other heavy weight Presbyterians such as Sir William Lewis, Denzil Holles and John Glynne.30CJ iv. 603a, 674b, 689b. On 17 October Gerard was appointed to consider if the seizure of the household goods of the recently deceased 3rd earl of Essex, evidently an insult to the memory of his father’s friend and patron, constituted a breach of privilege.31CJ iv. 696b.

Gerard’s Presbyterian sympathies were all the more evident in the spring of 1647, as plans to reduce the New Model and ship the remaining regiments to Ireland were put into practice On 25 February 1647 he presented a petition to the House on behalf of the Presbyterian peer, Robert Rich†, 2nd earl of Warwick.32CJ v. 97b. On 19 March he was teller with Edward Bayntun in two votes against reading a report on the case of the Presbyterian polemicist, Colonel Edward King, on both occasions being opposed by key Independents, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Sir William Armyne.33CJ v. 117b. On 2 April Gerard was appointed to a committee on the controversial London militia ordinance and later in the day to a joint committee to discuss the City loan to pay off the Scots, alongside leading Presbyterians such as Holles, Lewis, Sir Philip Stapilton, Sir William Waller and Sir John Clotworthy.34CJ v. 132b, 133a. He was named to a committee against obnoxious publications, including a pamphlet defending the conduct of the army, on 23 April.35CJ v. 153a. On 3 June Gerard told for the Presbyterian minority against deleting from the Journal Holles’s controversial declaration of 29 March that army officers who defied Parliament were ‘enemies of the state’.36CJ v. 197a. After the army’s unauthorized removal of the king from Holdenby on 5 June, Gerard was added to a joint committee to meet with the Scottish commissioners, and later went to the House of Lords to request them to sit on Sunday afternoon ‘in regard to the urgent haste and necessity of affairs’.37CJ v. 200a-b.

Gerard seems to have been absent from the Commons from the beginning of June, and there is no record of his activity during the ‘forcing of the Houses’ in late July and early August. After the New Model’s occupation of London, however, he joined his father in being named, on 18 August, to the committee on an ordinance to declare null and void all legislation in the intervening period.38CJ v. 278a. From then until May 1648 Gerard was again absent, (except for a single committee appointment on 13 December 1647) and he was granted formal leave to go into the country ‘for recovery of his health’ on 6 March 1648.39CJ v. 380a, 481b. It may have been during this period that Gerard married the daughter of the Essex Presbyterian, Sir Thomas Cheke, whose wife was the earl of Warwick’s daughter.40CB. A personal connection with Warwick may have influenced the choice of Gerard, on 29 May, as messenger to bring back from the Lords the ordinance appointing the earl as lord high admiral.41CJ v. 577a. Over the next few months, Gerard’s involvement in politics was characteristically sparse. On 12 August he was named to the revived committee on the engagement for subsidies for relief of the north.42CJ v. 481b, 577a. It was not until early November that Gerard became actively engaged, serving as teller four times on motions crucial to the success of the Newport Treaty negotiations with the king. On 6 November he told in favour of a motion to bring in candles to extend the debate on which royalists would be ‘excepted’ from pardon in the treaty, and three days later he joined Sir Walter Erle as teller against putting the question that those who had already received a pardon and had gone overseas should remain banished.43CJ vi. 70b, 72b. On 9 November he was with the majority in a vote against the banishment of Lord Willoughby of Parham.44CJ vi. 73a. On 24 November Gerard joined Arthur Annesley in telling in favour of continuing negotiations with the king for a few days more – a motion opposed by Edmund Ludlowe II and Robert Goodwin – and it was probably this that led to his exclusion from the House at Pride’s Purge on 6 December.45CJ vi. 86b; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 147. Both he and his father were imprisoned, but were released on 20 December.46Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1355, 1369.

Little is known of Gerard’s activities during the 1650s, although it is likely he remained in Middlesex as he was appointed to two sewers commissions in the county, in January 1654 and February 1657.47C181/6, pp. 5, 200. In January 1659 he was returned for his father’s old seat of Middlesex to the third Protectorate Parliament.48Clarke Pprs. iii. 174. On 27 January Gerard was authorised as a commissioner to administer the oath of allegiance as set out in the Humble Petition and Advice, and he was named to the committee on elections on 28 January.49CJ vii. 593a, 594b. On the same day Gerard moved that Dr Edward Reynolds, the moderate Presbyterian vicar of St Lawrence Jewry, be the preacher on the next fast day and was ordered to invite him to do so.50CJ vii. 594b; Burton’s Diary iii. 11. Like other Presbyterian veterans from the 1640s, Gerard appears to have accepted the protectorate as a bulwark against military rule, and given it at least qualified support. Gerard certainly had little time for the army and its allies. On 14 February he interrupted a long speech by Robert Stapylton* in favour of limiting the powers of the protector, arguing that ‘we have heard a long sermon: it is late to have another’, and going on to suggest that Stapylton had no right to sit in the House, having been ordained: ‘he has been chaplain to a regiment, and in army too, as I am informed’.51Burton’s Diary iii. 268. Gerard told in favour of continuing a debate on 24 February which led to a vote referring the deployment of the navy in the Baltic to the protector, thus acknowledging his primacy over the armed forces.52CJ vii. 607a. Gerard’s later activities also suggest that he was a supporter of the protectorate. He played a role in sorting out the thorny problem of how the Commons were to ‘transact’ with the Other House: on 6 April he was appointed to a committee to consider how such business might be managed, and on 8 April told for the majority in favour of putting the question that only members of the Commons could serve as messengers to the upper chamber.53CJ vii. 627a, 632b. It is also telling that Gerard’s final recorded contribution to this Parliament, in the debate over measures to curb the army on 18 April, was an attack on Colonel Matthew Alured, who had raised the spectre of Pride’s Purge by asserting that the military should have the right to ‘interrupt’ those former cavaliers in the House of Commons who were disqualified from sitting. Gerard countered that ‘it is not for any soldier to interrupt any member here, whether he have right or no. It must be the Parliament that must judge of that’, and he demanded that Alured name the individuals concerned.54Burton’s Diary iv. 460.

Gerard returned to the restored Long Parliament in February 1660, after the readmission of the Secluded Members on the initiative of George Monck*, and he was named to five committees, including those to draft the qualifications for the election of new Members (22 Feb.), to consider a bill providing security for a City loan (29 Feb.) and his final appointment, on 3 March, on the bill to revive the jurisdiction of the county palatines of Lancashire and Cheshire.55CJ vii. 848b, 856a, 860b. Thereafter, Gerard’s political career fizzled out. He was moderately active as MP for Bossiney in the Convention Parliament, and was an unsuccessful candidate for Middlesex in 1679. He died in December 1680 and was succeeded by his eldest son Charles†, who later served as MP for Middlesex and Cockermouth.