SOUTHBY, Richard (c.1624-1704), of Somerford Keynes, Wilts.

Richard Southby’s connection with Cirencester lay entirely in his marriage with Katherine Strange in 1648. Before this union he was merely the heir to a Berkshire estate, who spent the first civil war pursuing his studies in Oxford and at Gray’s Inn. His interest in Somerford Keynes brought with it an interest in Cirencester. Somerford Keynes itself was bought by Robert Strange from the crown during Mary’s reign, and he added the farm of Chesterton, near Cirencester, with properties in that town, to his estate in 1558.11Aubrey, Wilts. Top. Collections ed. Jackson, 160; Glos. RO, D2525, Acc. 2614T, box 9, bdle. 2. It is clear that the Strange family had owned small estates in the Cirencester area for some generations previously, and was part of the ancestry of the town’s MP in 1640, John George.12Misc. Gen. et Her. ser. 4, v, 209; Vis. Glos. 1623 (Harl. Soc. xxi), 247-8. Indeed, a Thomas Strange† sat for the town in the 1572 Parliament, and signed many returns to the Commons as bailiff; he must have been a member of this family.13HP Commons 1558-1603, i. 164. In 1617, Robert Strange cut out the interest of his brother, John Strange, in the Cirencester and Chesterton estates, denouncing John for ‘the evil course of his life’ and his ‘froward and ungrateful carriage of himself towards me that have often with my cost and pains sought his reformation and the furtherance of his good’.14Glos. RO, D2525, Acc. 2614T, box 9, bdle. 2. The heir to the estate in 1655 was another Robert Strange, who died aged 23, unexpectedly and without issue, in June 1654.15Cirencester par. regs.; Aubrey, Wilts. Top. Collections ed. Jackson, 159.

The following year, Somerford Keynes and the Gloucestershire Strange properties were divided among the three sisters of the late Robert Strange. A curious feature of the indenture governing the division was the involvement of Maximilian Petty, one of the civilian Levellers in 1647, who had argued at the Putney debates between senior and junior army officers that the property qualification for the parliamentary franchise should be wider than a 40s freehold, but should exclude servants and alms-takers.16Glos. RO, D182/III/200; Oxford DNB, ‘Maximilian Petty’. Petty, settled probably by this time in Berkshire, was here acting as a solicitor for Richard Southby, whose wife was one of the sisters. By this deed, Southby acquired Somerford Keynes. The Chesterton and Cirencester properties, together worth £102 a year in 1653, went elsewhere, to Katherine Southby’s sister, but the husbands of the three heiresses were admitted to the Cirencester manorial court. The ‘heirs of Robert Strange’ became benefactors of Cirencester church.17Glos. RO, D2525, Acc. 2614T, box 9, bdle. 2; P86/1/IN6/3, f. 19.

Richard Southby was therefore drawing on his own interest, or that of his family by marriage, when he was returned to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659, having served in no local office. He was named to no committees, nor did he make any other impression on the assembly. His political career began later, in a very modest way in 1660, with appointments to the Wiltshire militia and the commission for assessments. In 1661, he was involved in a series of transactions involving Gloucestershire properties which suggest that he needed to mortgage. It took him another 20 years to return to the House of Commons as knight of the shire for his native county. To judge from his will, made in 1700, he had by the end of his life sold out of Gloucestershire completely; in 1685 contemporaries recorded that there was no longer any representative of the Strange family resident in Cirencester.18Glos. RO, D2957/p. 216/19/1, 2; p. 238/68/1-6; p. 364/205A/1; PROB11/475/69; Glos. RO, P86/1/CW4/1.