JENNYNS (JENNINGS), Richard (c.1619-68), of Holywell House, St Albans, Herts. and Churchill, Som.

Jennyns was probably born in about 1619, as he was said to be aged 24 when he married in 1643.23London Mar. Lics. ed. Foster, 760. He spent time at Oxford during the early 1630s, as it was there that George Courthop* first befriended him, but he seems never to have formally matriculated.24Memoirs of Sir George Courthop ed. Lomas, 112. Admitted to the Inner Temple in 1634, three years later he was given permission to travel abroad.25I. Temple database; Privy Council Regs. i. p. 177. Those travels took him to Italy where Courthop encountered him at Livorno. Courthop later recalled that Jennyns ‘had been some time in Italy and learnt the language; and was then residing at Florence where the duke and grandees of the court delighted much in his company’.26Memoirs of Sir George Courthop, ed. Lomas, 112. Courthop then stayed with Jennyns in Florence, but left him there when he travelled on to Rome.27Memoirs of Sir George Courthop, ed. Lomas, 113. Jennyns also studied at Padua.28Brown, Inglesi e Scozzesi, 151

The death of his father in July 1642 thrust Jennyns into the political limelight in Hertfordshire just at the moment when a civil war had become unavoidable. The writ for the by-election to replace his late father as the St Albans MP was moved on 5 August and he was probably returned soon after. He was also named by Parliament as one of its new deputy lieutenants for Hertfordshire on 25 August.29CJ ii. 736a.

Jennyns may have been a reluctant MP, however. He never played any conspicious role throughout his time in the Long Parliament. Nothing at all is known of his activities at Westminster until early June 1643, when, with other MPs, he took the oath condemning the recent royalist plot associated with Edmund Waller*.30CJ iii. 118b. It may be that he was distracted by affairs in Hertfordshire. He was a member of the county standing committee and, as such, signed a warrant in July 1643 concerning the sequestration of the lands of Lord Capell (Arthur Capell*).31Add. 40630, f. 125. By the summer of 1644 he was also serving on the commission of the peace.32Herts. County Recs. v. 342. When he was named to his first Commons committee, it was on a matter directly relating to the organisation of the war effort in Hertfordshire; on 22 February 1644 the Commons appointed a committee, including Jennyns, to establish how much money Hertfordshire was owed for free quarter.33CJ iii. 405a. It was over a year before he received another appointment, when he was among the MPs added on 2 May 1645 to the committee to consider the latest proposals from the Scottish commissioners.34CJ iv. 130a. Six weeks later he was also named to the committee to consider what to do with the royalists captured at Naseby. That too had a local dimension, as those prisoners had since been transferred to St Albans.35CJ iv. 177b.

On 21 August 1645 Jennyns was given permission to go into the country for a month.36CJ iv. 249a. He next surfaces in January 1646 when he and his wife were captured by royalist forces at Faringdon in Berkshire. On 18 January Richard Browne II* was instructed by the Commons to seek their release. That overture was successful and three days later the Commons agreed an exchange with one of their own prisoners, Thomas Weston, the younger brother of the 2nd earl of Portland.37HMC 7th Rep. 453; CJ iv. 410a, 413b; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 313. Jennyns was granted a further period of leave on 6 August.38CJ iv. 639a.

Thereafter he was mentioned in the records of the Long Parliament only in connection with his personal affairs. When, within weeks, one of his servants, Thomas Sell, was arrested, the Commons ordered his release on the grounds of breach of parliamentary privilege.39CJ v. 281b. Jennyns was still absent when the House was called on 9 October.40CJ v. 330a. But he invoked parliamentary privilege on his own account to avoid being sued when, in October 1647, the court of chancery upheld the case of his unmarried sisters, Alice and Anne, who had sought payment of their portions.41HMC 7th Rep. 8. Turning to the Commons for assistance, the sisters seem to have been sympathetically received, because on 25 December MPs ordered Jennyns to appear before them.42CJ v. 405b, 415b. Probably following his failure to appear, on 9 February 1648 the Commons ordered that he should make an answer in chancery. That amounted to the removal of his immunity.43CJ v. 459a; HMC 7th Rep. 8. Jennyns had still not responded by 25 February, whereupon the Commons ordered his barrister, Edmund Prideaux I*, to answer for him.44CJ v. 472a-b. Two months later the Commons decided that it would take evidence in this case on 29 April, although other business seems to have intervened.45CJ v. 545b, 547b. Nothing more was done until 14 August when, after hearing another petition from the sisters, the Commons ‘peremptorily’ ordered Jennyns to appear the next day.46CJ v. 670a. Again, he probably refused to appear. This order was repeated ten days later.47CJ v. 681b. Eventually the purge of the Commons on 6 December saw Jennyns secluded from the House, at which point his immunity disappeared.48A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 28 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 377.

Jennyns was heavily in debt. Possibly with a view to avoiding his creditors, he may have been granted permission to travel to Holland in May 1650.49CSP Dom. 1650, p. 540. But if he took it up, he did not remain abroad for long, as that December he was accused of sheltering in Whitehall with his family for the same purpose.50CSP Dom. 1650, p. 489. But he did have some money. Two years later an investigation by the Committee for Compounding established that he had acquired goods worth £105 3s 11d., including a bed with yellow silk lace, from an undischarged delinquent and former MP, Henry Brett* of Westminster. Brett and Jennyns were still being pursued for this money in late 1653.51CCC 523, 581, 3051. Probably to meet his financial obligations, he sold his Somerset property, the manor of Churchill, in 1652 to a London-based barrister, John Churchill†, who probably considered it to be his family’s ancestral seat. That raised £5,900.52Green, ‘Manor of Churchill’, 42; Collinson, Som. iii. 580; A.L. Rowse, The Early Churchills (1956), 114, 147; HP Commons 1660-1690. Years later, long after Jennyns’s death, Churchill’s cousin once removed, another, much more famous John Churchill†, by then married to one of Jennyns’s daughters, attempted without success to buy it back.53HMC Bath, ii. 174, 175.

Jennyns tried to re-assert his position in St Albans in the summer election to the second protectorate Parliament encouraged by ‘his friends and neighbours’. Allegedly threatened by the successful candidate, Alban Coxe*, and thwarted by the army, he petitioned unsuccessfully.54Museum Eng. Rural Life, FR HERT 5/1/1, f. 5. This became an ongoing grudge that Jennyns cultivated. Things came to a head in early 1658 when he made a number of allegations to the authorities against Coxe. His main point was that Coxe was a disreputable rogue whose loyalty to the protectorate was highly questionable, but his most serious allegation – that Coxe had made some questionable remarks at a dinner at St Albans a year earlier – relied mostly on hearsay.55Museum Eng. Rural Life, FR HERT 5/1/1, ff. 11, 19-27. A committee of the council of state considered Jennyns’s claims in late May 1658 but seems not to have pursued the matter.56Museum Eng. Rural Life, FR HERT 5/1/1, f. 258.

With the restoration of the second borough seat for Richard Cromwell's Parliament in 1659, Jennyns and Coxe found themselves being elected together as the MPs for St Albans. Jennyns’s sole recorded contribution to its proceedings was an intervention in the debate on 28 January 1659 about where the fast day sermons should be preached. Perhaps mischievously, Sir Arthur Hesilrige* had suggested these should be delivered in private in the Commons chamber because the preachers would have a duty to reproach them for their many faults, which it would be unseemly to be aired too publicly. Jennyns countered that it would be regrettable if this was indeed the case. But his preference for the traditional location, St Margaret’s, was voted down.57Burton’s Diary, iii. 13.

Jennyns resumed his seat in the Long Parliament at the earliest possible opportunity, when the secluded MPs were re-admitted on 21 February 1660. That same day he was named to the committees on the bills to appoint a new council of state and to continue the customs and excise.58CJ vii. 847b, 848a. He was also one of the five new assessment commissioners appointed by the Commons for St Albans.59CJ vii. 858b. Elected to the Convention in 1660 and then to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, he remained the MP for St Albans until his death. He was buried in the abbey church there on 8 May 1668.60HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Richard Jennings’. The death of his two surviving sons extinguished the male line of his family. The Jennyns lands eventually passed via his son-in-law, the 1st duke of Marlborough, to the Spencer family.