HICKS, Sir William, 1st bt. (1596-1680), of Beverstone, Glos., Ruckholts, Leyton, Essex and Austin Friars, London.

The son of the secretary and man of business to Elizabeth I’s chief minister, Lord Burghley (Sir William Cecil†), Sir William Hicks was a landowner who owned estates in Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire but whose strongest ties were with Essex. His mother had enjoyed a life interest in the manor of Ruckholts at Leyton in the south-west tip of Essex as part of her jointure estates from her first marriage. As it was conveniently close to London, her second husband, Sir Michael Hicks, had used it as his principal country seat until his death in 1612 and she had continued living there until her own death in 1635.25PROB11/167/301. Sir William then bought it from his step-brother, Gabriel Parvishe, and so Ruckholts remained his usual place of residence.26Morant, Essex, i. 24; VCH Essex, vi. 195. His creation of a baronet in 1619 ensured that Hicks enjoyed a secure place in the ranks of the Essex gentry.27CB; The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N.E. McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 260. It was a mark of his standing within Essex that by the late 1630s he was serving as one of the deputy lieutenants of the local militia.28Maynard Lieut. Bk. 334, 341, 413.

As had been the case in 1626, he owed his election at Great Marlow in 1640 to the influence of his wife’s family, although this time, instead of her father, it was her brother, William, 6th Baron Paget, who secured him his seat. The brevity of the Short Parliament prevented Hicks making his mark on its proceedings. Several weeks after its dissolution he served on the special commission of oyer and terminer which tried some soldiers accused of vandalising the church at Kelvedon in Essex.29C181/5, f. 178; Bramston Autobiog. 76. He did not seek re-election when the Long Parliament was summoned.

Hicks’s position as a deputy lieutenant made his support all the more valuable to either side within Essex. He chose Parliament, which duly confirmed him in office.30Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. This meant that he went on to play an active role in raising troops.31Eg. 2646, f. 303; Eg. 2647, f. 314; Stowe 189, ff. 26, 34. Parliament also included him on the various local commissions for Essex which raised the taxes to pay for the war against the king.32A. and O. In October 1645 Bulstrode Whitelocke* undertook some unidentified business with the Committee for Advance of Money as a favour to Hicks and Francis, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham.33Whitelocke, Diary, 181. When it was proposed at about that time that Beverstone Castle, Hicks’s Gloucestershire seat, should be slighted, the Committee for Both Kingdom decided that, as it could be defended by a garrison of only 40 musketeers, its defences should be retained intact. The Committee made it explicit that this was a favour to Hicks in recognition of his exceptional efforts on behalf of Parliament.34CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 84, 85. In 1646 he was nominated as one of the elders of his local Presbyterian classis.35Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 375.

By 1648 Hicks’s support for Parliament had been tested to its limits. In the early weeks of that year William Prynne* published a pamphlet which included Hicks on the list of those justices who ought to be dismissed from the commissions of the peace because they ‘agree not with the frame and temper of the army and us their Lords and Commons sitting at Westminster’.36[W. Prynne], A New Magna Charta [1648], 4 (E.427.15). Confirmation of his wavering loyalties came that May when he supported the petition circulated throughout Essex expressing sympathy for the king and calling for the disbandment of the army. The disaffection within Essex became all the more threatening when their counterparts from Kent, led by the 1st earl of Norwich (Sir George Goring†), decided to cross over the Thames and enter Essex. Hicks reacted by gathering a force of local inhabitants at Chelmsford in a show of support for Norwich.37CSP Dom. Add. 1670, p. 617. Perhaps without Hicks’s knowledge, some of those men then captured the members of the Essex county standing committee. Faced with the spread of the uprising, Parliament decided on 5 June to offer indemnity to the Essex rebels in the hope of dividing them from Norwich’s forces. This tactic was partly successful as a number of them, including Hicks, agreed to take advantage of the offer. One of the Essex royalists would bitterly recall

this deceit so wrought upon the fears of some of mean-spirited countrymen, as Sir William Hicks and others – who marched in the first ranks of our petitioners – that they were frightened into an infamous apostasy to their loyalties and honours, and to a breach of their faith, which they had pre-engaged to the gentlemen of Kent: whom by the bonds of justice, honour and interest, we were obliged to assist.38‘The siege of Colchester’, Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 206.

What the deal did not prevent was Hicks’s sequestration as a delinquent. Proceedings against him were instigated in late September once Parliament had again secured full control over Essex.39CCAM 956, 956. Then, on 16 December, after considering a petition from Hicks, the Commons authorised the Essex county standing committee to proceed with the sequestration.40CJ vi. 53a, 62a, 99a. By June the following year he had agreed to compound, probably paying a fine of £1,000.41CCAM 956; CCC 2144.

In late 1649, with his sequestration proceedings completed, Hicks had plans to travel abroad – along with his eldest son, William, and his nephew Michael, the youngest son of Sir William Armyne*, he was granted a pass to do so in November 1650, although when his son and Michael Armyne reapplied for passes four months later, no mention was made of Sir William.42CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 551; 1650, pp. 357, 529, 562; 1651, p. 520. There were, in any case, reasons for him to remain behind. Although his own case with the Committee for Sequestrations had been settled, he had still to deal with them on behalf of some of his friends. In 1650 he tried to compound for part of the estate of Sir Edward Littleton*, although he was later accused of helping to conceal some of Littleton’s lands.43CCC 2081, 3293. In 1652 Hicks and some of the other creditors of Thomas Savage, brother of the 2nd earl Rivers (John Savage†) applied to have Savage’s sequestration lifted.44CCC 3263.

Hicks remained under suspicion throughout the 1650s. He was one of the suspected Essex royalists who were rounded up and then imprisoned at Great Yarmouth in October 1655. He was released after a couple of weeks in custody when a London clothworker, John Light, agreed to stand surety for him by a bond of £1,500.45CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 367, 385. The Essex commissioners for the decimation tax then fined him £8.46J.T. Cliffe, ‘The Cromwellian decimation tax of 1655’, Camden Misc. XXXIII (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. vii), 435. In June 1659 John Evelyn attended ‘a great feast’ with ‘much company’ hosted by Hicks at Ruckholts.47Evelyn Diary ed. De Beer, iii. 230. During the rebellion of Sir George Boothe* in 1659, Hicks’s house was searched by one of the sergeants-at-arms, John Topham. After the Restoration one of the candidates who sought to displace Topham from his position used this incident as evidence of Topham’s viciousness.48CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 333.

In 1660 Hicks was reinstated as a justice of the peace and as a deputy lieutenant. Over the next two decades he performed these duties conscientiously.49Essex QSOB ed. Allen, 163, 170; William Holcroft his booke, ed. J.A. Sharpe (1986), 2, 4, 15, 19, 22, 25, 33, 57, 61, 64. When one of his neighbours, Laurence Moyer of Low Leyton, came under suspicion of plotting against the government in early 1661, Hicks searched Moyer’s house and discovered a stash of arms. He then informed the secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas†, that Moyer held dangerous republican views.50CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 484-5, 516-7. When the navy board visited Hicks at Ruckholts in 1665 (presumably in connection with the supply of timber from Waltham Forest), Samuel Pepys† was unimpressed by Hicks’s hospitality. His impression was one of genteel and eccentric parsimony.

It is a good seat – with a fair grove of trees by it, and the remains of a good garden. But so let to run to ruin, both house and everything in and about it – so ill furnished and miserably looked after, I never did see in all my life. Not so much as a latch to his dining-room door – which saved him nothing, for the wind blowing into the room for want thereof, flung down a bow pot that stood upon the side-table, and that fell upon some Venice-glasses and did him a crown’s worth of hurt. He did give us the meanest dinner – of beef-shoulder and umbles [heart, liver and entrails] of venison which he takes away from the keeper of the forest – and a few pigeons; and all in the meanest manner that I ever did see – to the basest degree.

Pepys also noted that he owned a portrait of Henrietta Maria, apparently after Van Dyck.51Pepys’s Diary, vi. 222.

Hicks died on 9 October 1680 and was buried at Leyton, where a monument was later erected to commemorate him and his heir, Sir William, the second baronet. He was also survived by two of his other children, Sir Michael Hicks and Letitia, countess of Donegal.52PROB11/365/254. A great-great-grandson, Michael Hicks Beach†, later the eighth baronet, sat for Cirencester under George III and the ninth baronet, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, served twice as Conservative chancellor of the exchequer during the late nineteenth century.53HP Commons 1790-1820.