STEPHENS, John (1603-79), of Over Lypiatt, Bisley, Glos. and Vine Court, Middle Temple.

The Over Lypiatt branch of the Stephens family had acquired that seat in 1610, and it came only to John, a younger brother, by his purchase. The seller in 1624 was Edward, the elder brother, and it was to Edward that John Stephens owed his parliamentary seat, when he joined him as burgess for Tewkesbury in October 1645.30Glos. RO, D745/M1, f. 54. Prior to 1640, Stephens had made most impact on his inn of court, the Middle Temple, where he had been called to the bar in 1628. His father, attorney-general to Prince Henry and then Prince Charles, had intended him for Oxford. John Stephens never went there after – perhaps because of – his father’s death in 1613 when he was only ten.31Glos. RO, D745/M1, f. 45. Thomas Stephens had been a bencher at the Middle Temple, and in the event the inn provided John with a valuable training: Stephens looked set to follow in his father’s footsteps as a prominent London lawyer.32J.B. Williamson, The M. Temple Benchbook (1937), 92, 120. He was added to the Gloucestershire commission of the peace in 1639, but played little part in county government beyond that, as his legal practice kept him in the capital. The Stephens family as whole were active in opposition to Charles I’s personal government. John’s brother Edward was described by a Laudian cleric as ‘a favourer of the pretending holy side’ (i.e. a puritan) and Nathaniel Stephens, their cousin, was a candidate in elections for the Short Parliament before becoming knight of the shire in November 1640. John himself would intervene occasionally in legal cases in the interests of the puritan interest, as around 1638 when he advised the newcomer Sir William Guise not to dispute a title with one of the Berkeleys of Berkeley. Guise defied him, and made enemies of the Stephens family and Sir Robert Cooke*.33Mems. of the Fam. of Guise ed. G. Davies (Camden 3rd ser. xxviii), 120.

Stephens found himself up against the campaign by William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, to recover the power of the church. Soon after his inclusion in the commission of the peace, he and his fellow magistrates met in Tetbury parish church, to avoid the plague then at Gloucester. They were later summoned before the court of high commission as a result, on the grounds that it offended against canon law to hold secular meetings in a church.34SP16/500, f. 68. At the start of the first civil war, John Stephens was named as a deputy lieutenant and began to be named to Gloucestershire committees, first of assessment, and later of sequestration. He played no military role himself, but vacated his house to provide an out-garrison for Parliament in 1643.35VCH Glos. xi. 103. He was forced to endure various humiliations at the hands of the royalists. His son was captured at the fall of Cirencester to Prince Rupert in February 1643, and was taken to Oxford along with John George*.36CJ iii. 159a, 189b. He gave evidence at the trial of Nathaniel Fiennes I* for surrendering Bristol to Prince Rupert.37W. Prynne and C. Walker, A True and Full Relation, ‘Catalogue of Witnesses’, 6. Later in the war, on New Year’s Day 1645, Over Lypiatt was fired by Sir Jacob Astley in the name of the king.38VCH Glos. xi. 103.

In 1644 (22 Feb.), Stephens was named to the Committee of Accounts, a body of non-MPs charged with auditing the accounts of army officers and local committeemen. Stephens may have become involved with Gloucester garrison in this capacity, acting with Thomas Pury I* to regulate the complex accounting relationship between citizens and soldiers. It was, however, Stephens’s nephew, Colonel Thomas Stephens, who was required with Pury to attend the Committee of Both Kingdoms in February.39CSP Dom. 1644, p. 23; 1644-5, p. 564; A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire, 1640-1672 (1997), 53-4. The contacts that suggested Stephens as a member of this body were through the inns of court: like Stephens, William Prynne*, who chaired the Committee of Accounts, was a prominent London lawyer. There was also a business relationship between Prynne and Edward Stephens: Prynne had defended Stephens during the dispute over the Tewkesbury by-election of 1641, and framed a defence of Edward Stephens when he refused to pay a fine for refusing a knighthood in the early 1630s.40Add. 12511, ff. 2-19; Inner Temple, Petyt 511/23, f. 1. Stephens was a leading member of the Committee of Accounts at least down to December 1645, and provoked protest from the Sussex county committee whose members considered the attentions of the auditors excessive.41CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 687; 1644-5, p. 627; CJ iv. 368b.

Stephens succeeded Sir Robert Cooke, his former associate, in his seat at Tewkesbury, after a ‘recruiter’ by-election on 3 October 1645.42C219/43/196. First named to a committee on 18 October, Stephens was given charge on this occasion of a bill to deal with the egregious royalist, the 5th marquess of Winchester (John Paulet), captured by Oliver Cromwell* at the siege of Basing House. It later became Stephens’s committee for impeaching Winchester. For him to have made his parliamentary debut in this way suggested how potentially valuable Stephens was to the House, as did his nomination on the same day to the Committee for Compounding at Goldsmiths’ Hall, that dealt with the fining of royalists for their delinquency.43CJ iv. 313b, 408a. It was natural that Stephens should be appointed to the committee for Gloucester that met at Westminster (as against the local committees that oversaw the garrison at Gloucester and taxation and sequestration in the county). He and the Gloucester MP, Thomas Pury I, a leading figure in army finance, worked together to draft an ordinance, published ten days after it was commissioned, to raise money for the Scottish army.44CJ iv. 321b, 353b; LJ viii. 22a, b. Stephens was one of the MPs who joined with the Committee of Both Kingdoms in drafting a rebuff to the king’s proposal to come to Westminster.45CJ iv. 395b. Thus within three months of taking his seat, Stephens was established as an effective Member and one whose sympathies lay with those who took a firm line against the king.

Stephens took his duties on the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee seriously, attending his first meeting of this important committee of penal taxation on 4 November, and regularly thereafter.46SP23/2, p. 121. The composition of the committee was changing after the withdrawal of the Scots, and Stephens’s appointment was one of a number that marked a more thorough-going approach to Parliament’s enemies. Stephens was on a committee that reviewed procedure after an order was passed to diminish the role of county committees in certifying royalists’ estates, and in January 1646 presented the first of many reports from Goldsmiths’ Hall.47CJ iv. 367a, 406a. By early July, Stephens had brought to the Commons for approval 43 cases of royalist compositions.48CJ iv. 442a, b, 468a, 486a, b, 556b, 564b, 605a. In May 1646, Stephens took to the Lords the order granting a pardon to those who voluntarily compounded, suggesting that he was behind this development, which was intended to speed up the process by which the large number of royalists was dealt with after Naseby and the campaign in the west.49CJ iv. 532b, 534b. In October of that year, he was involved in the committee that began a re-structuring of the procedures by which concealed estates were to be ‘discovered’ in the localities. The problems facing the Goldsmiths’ Hall committee at this point were the general inadequacy of revenue for Parliament, the departure of the Scots (who had been active in the committee at the outset) and, from December 1646, the demands by the Lords for involvement in the committee’s affairs. In February 1647 there blew up a dispute between the Houses over the terms of the ordinance to re-form the Goldsmiths’ Hall committee. Stephens and Alexander Rigby I were asked to investigate the basis of the committee’s authority. Stephens was a manager of the conference with the Lords on 3 February, intended to resolve differences between the Houses. His colleagues were a balanced group of Presbyterians and Independents: he himself should probably be counted among the latter. He took the lead in revising the Lords’ ordinance, and was named a commissioner in the final published version, that transformed the Committee for Compounding into a committee of both Houses.50CJ iv. 708a; v. 8b, 70a, 70b, 72b, 73a, 73b, 75b, 76a, 78a; A. and O. i. 914-5.

Outside his activities at Goldsmiths’ Hall, Stephens was involved in developing a system of indemnity for soldiers. This interest arose at least partly from his work on the Committee of Accounts: he continued to be involved in new auditing committees, and his appointment on 21 July to a committee charged to examine abuses in payments to officers and soldiers suggests that he was no uncritical friend of the army. After this appointment, he is not mentioned in the Commons Journal until 15 September, suggesting that he avoided the turbulence at Westminster between the army and its opponents during the summer by staying away.51CJ v. 166a, 199a, 237b, 253a, 302a. The ‘Mr Stephens’ included on one of the lists of those Members who took refuge with the army following the Presbyterian coup at Westminster of late July was possibly John, but Nathaniel or William Stephens would have fitted more easily into this company.52HMC Egmont, i. 440.

As one whose own house had been garrisoned for Parliament and subsequently damaged by a royalist raid, Stephens may nevertheless have felt that his own interests were bound up with those of the army. Thomas Pury I, a principal army paymaster, brought in an ordinance (18 May 1646) to compensate Stephens for his losses from the estate of Sir Jacob Astley, who had destroyed Over Lypiatt. Stephens was content to assign the estate to Astley’s family, benefitting from the rents, even though his grant did not pass the Lords until December 1647.53CJ iv. 536a, 550b; v. 397a, 410b; CCC 82, 1303.

Stephens leaned towards the Independents in politics, as suggested by his appointment in November 1647 to the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs (the Independents having re-established their control of Parliament’s Irish executive from the summer of 1647). No sooner was he elected to this committee than Stephens brought a report from it, probably relating to the supply of £50,000 for Ireland.54CJ v. 347b, 348b, 385a, 385b. It is clear that he was a valued and speedy drafter of ordinances. Among his work was the ordinance granting the chamberlain of London authority to pursue arrears of monies held by accountable officers, in order to pay the officials of the Committee of Accounts (Dec. 1647).55CJ v. 347b, 364b, 384b; A. and O. i. 1046-7. Of greater public impact, in January 1648 he was responsible for the ordinance suppressing stage plays. The original ordinance of 1642 had lapsed, and on 22 January, Stephens was put in charge of drafting a new one. Nine days later, he brought his draft to the House for a first reading, and on 11 February it passed the Lords without demur. The ordinance has been described as ‘conceived in the very spirit of Prynne’ for its harsh penalties against players and spectators: and doubtless Stephens was advised by Prynne himself, his former colleague in legal matters and on the Committee of Accounts, on its content.56CJ v. 440a, 450b, 461b, 462a; A. and O. i. 1070-2; Gardiner, Great Civil War, iv. 68-9. The ordinance distances Stephens from the libertarians among the Independents. His religious views seem to have been orthodox, even Erastian. He certainly supported the settling of royalists’ rectories on trustees like himself in order to promote godly clergy, assisted the payment of tithes in London, and helped to secure support for Dr William Gouge, the surviving feoffee for impropriations, an outright Presbyterian.57CJ v. 431b, 460b, 519a. With John Harington*, he brought in an ordinance for settling preaching ministers in Bath, and was a friend of Harington’s through the 1650s.58CJ v. 539a; Harington’s Diary, 77-8. Stephens kept avenues open to a wide spread of social contacts, probably by virtue of his professional competence. He was approached by men of very different political views, including Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester, and Sir Gilbert Gerard*, for favours for royalist friends. His connection with the latter was a family one, since Gerard had been a party to the marriage settlement between Stephens and Elizabeth Ramme back in 1626.59CCC 1243, 1243; Glos. RO, D745/M1, f. 162v.

In the aftermath of the second civil war, Stephens helped draft an ordinance on tumultuous petitioning, helped devise the high court to try the insurgent royalist colonel, Sir John Owen, and drafted ordinances to remove from London and its hinterland all Roman Catholics and royalists.60CJ v. 567a, b, 593b, 601b, 602b, 603a. The renewed fighting hardened the attitudes of many associated with the army against the king, but did not noticeably affect Stephens. On 3 July, the Commons had devised three propositions as preconditions for treaty negotiations with the king: parliamentary control of the militia for ten years, a settlement of religion and a withdrawal by the king of declarations against various parliamentarians. Stephens acted as intermediary between the Houses when the Lords refused to insist on these as minimal conditions. The Lords’ stance was met with a stiffening of the Commons’ position in a vote that the three propositions should become acts when the king came to Westminster; the Lords conveyed through Stephens their view that the Commons’ vote was unparliamentary. The Commons stuck to its position, and Stephens’s role in all this was to try to maintain avenues of communication between the chambers.61CJ v. 633b, 635b, 636a, 637a; Gardiner, Great Civil War, iv. 159.

As the political crisis deepened in the autumn of 1648, Stephens again withdrew, on 29 September receiving permission for a month’s absence. He was back by 25 November, to be named to a minor committee; during the marathon session on 4-5 December, Stephens was a teller, with the radical John Lisle, against putting the main motion on the Treaty of Newport. It suggests that at the fatal moment, on the eve of Pride’s Purge, his pro-army instincts contended with his belief in the binding claims of the Covenant.62CJ vi. 93b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 357. At the purge, his brother, Edward, was imprisoned and secluded, and it was probably William Stephens (recruiter MP for Newport, Isle of Wight), rather than John, who was the ‘Mr Stephens’ who sat on committees of the Rump down to November 1651, when John Stephens was formally re-admitted.63CJ vii. 44a. Until that time, it is likely that Stephens withdrew to the Middle Temple, and concentrated on his legal interests: he was by this time playing a leading part in the affairs of the inn. His experience in the area of compounding with delinquents recommended him for committees on removing obstructions to the sales of crown and church lands. In November 1652, he was on a committee considering how to sell the remaining royal parks, and in January 1653 was involved in enabling legislation for selling royal forests, and in promoting the sale of what was left of the king’s property.64CJ vii. 46b, 86b, 112a, 222b, 245a, b, 250b. Stephens’s other main interest continued to lie in supporting the army and navy. In April 1652, he served on committees to investigate possible sources of finance beyond the monthly assessments, and for transferring the powers of the indemnity committee, that had arbitrated in complaints against soldiers, to alternative bodies.65CJ vii. 127a, 128a.

Stephens oversaw two bills in the final months of the Rump: one was on reallocating the probate of wills to other bodies, in the wake of the closure of church courts. Nothing seems to have come of it. His last committee appointment under the Rump was ordered on 4 February 1653, when he reported amendments to a bill for setting the poor on work.66CJ vii. 246a, 255b. Stephens was named to the Gloucestershire assessment commission during the Nominated Assembly, and he seems to have had no difficulty in adapting to the protectorate, serving as a magistrate and finding nomination to other local offices, such as the commission for ‘trying and ejecting’ ministers.67An Act for an Assessment; A. and O. To judge from his later comments, however, he disapproved of the regime of the major-generals. He was made treasurer to the society for propagating the gospel in New England at some point in the 1650s, but by July 1658 the governors were chasing him up because he had not acted, requiring him to ‘promote the business or send the act up’.68GL, 8011, p. 59; 7952: loose paper, 1 July 1658.

Returned to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament on his own interest as knight of the shire in 1659, Stephens played a vocal part in debates in the House, even though he was named only to four committees.69CJ vii. 614b, 632a, 637a, 639a. In debate, he sided with those ‘country’ MPs and Presbyterians who were critical of the protectorate, questioned the legality of the Humble Petition and Advice and argued for a return to the ‘ancient constitution’. When the powers of the lord protector were discussed on 9 February, Stephens also expressed a negative view of the pre-purge Long Parliament, of which he admitted he had been a Member; it had been ‘too much on the part of pulling down’. He hoped the current assembly would ‘be as much for building up’, but he sought a return to as much of the ‘constitution we lived under’ as possible.70Burton’s Diary, iii. 158; Schilling thesis, 45-6. Ten days later, he made clear his objection to the abolition of the House of Lords was based on his view that the Solemn League and Covenant, an oath which had bound him to the preservation of the privileges of Parliament, and the king’s person and authority, was a ‘covenant with God, not with the Scots’. Taking inspiration from his legal background, Stephens employed the metaphor of the scales of justice to describe conflicts between the two Houses: ‘sometimes the Lords were too heavy, and sometimes the Commons’, but he wanted a restoration of the old Lords, not a revamped Other House.71Burton’s Diary, iii. 357-8; Schilling thesis, 94. On 22 February, he countered arguments that the old Lords meant a restoration of delinquents against the commonwealth by calling for only the return of non-offending peers, and the filling of empty spaces in the chamber by new creations.72Burton’s Diary, iii. 404-5; Schilling thesis, 99. Such new creations were far from ideal, however. On 28 February he again argued that the ‘ancient fundamental right’ of the old peers should be recognised and ‘the old foundation restored’, and on 1 March questioned the authority by which the new, Cromwellian Members sat in the Other House.73Burton’s Diary, iii. 537-8, 562-3; Schilling thesis, 135-6, 142.

Stephens’s principal objection to the Cromwellian Other House was to its powerful military element, the major-generals and allies who ‘have endeavoured to make the greatest breach upon our liberties that can be’.74Burton’s Diary, iii. 404-5, 537. He denounced the major generals explicitly on 4 March, paraphrasing I Kings 12:10: ‘The little fingers of major-generals have I found heavier than the loins of the greatest tyrant kings that ever went before’.75Burton’s Diary, iv. 11.; Schilling thesis, 160-1. In this spirit of hostility towards military grandees, he was named to a committee to draw up an impeachment against Major-general William Boteler* for oppressions in Northamptonshire. In Stephens’s view, men like Boteler ‘bring a scandal upon your army’.76CJ vii. 637a; Burton’s Diary, iv. 405, 408. He also made clear that his idea of the old Lords restored was in respect of their social composition, rather than their relation to the Commons. He declared himself content with the Commons’ right to approve the members of the second chamber, and wanted the list of Members perused again. He thought the lord protector was due a competent maintenance ‘in its due place’, but sought a bill to safeguard the rights of the people.77Burton’s Diary, iv. 20-1, 323; Schilling thesis, 164. His preferred religious settlement was a ‘moderate presbytery’, and he described his former opposition to rigid Presbyterianism: ‘I would not have consciences imposed on, nor blasphemies and errors encouraged’. In this spirit, he wanted Quakers suppressed, and told of a Friend in Gloucestershire, a justice, that could lead ‘three or four hundred out with him at any time’. He meant Colonel Mark Grime, of Gloucester.78Burton’s Diary, iv. 337; Jnl. of George Fox ed. J.L. Nickalls (1952), 279, 369; Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration, 126-7. Like many contemporary gentry and ministers, Stephens thought the Quakers a mix of the brain-washed – ‘those I pity’ – and sinister Jesuits: ‘those I pity not’.79Burton’s Diary, iv. 443-4.

By opposing the army, Stephens was inadvertently involved in the downfall of the protectorate of Richard Cromwell. His fear and dislike of the officers’ intentions had been evident throughout this Parliament, and on 18 April he declared it an undoubted breach of parliamentary privilege for the officers’ council to meet independently while Parliament sat. Following his line, the House resolved that no army officers should meet without the lord protector’s permission, and that no-one should hold a military commission without affirming that free Parliaments should not be interrupted by the army. It was Stephens, leading 30-40 other MPs, who took these resolutions up to the Other House, about whose Members he had been so sceptical.80CJ vii. 641b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 460 The diarist, Thomas Burton*, one of the group, thought – ironically, in the light of Stephens’s previously robust remarks – that they conducted themselves with too much humility. On 21 April, against a background of army manoeuvres outside Parliament, Stephens sought a declaration that the army should be in the hands of men approved by Parliament, citing a book of the time of Edward the Confessor. He was willing to give his support to the view that the militia should be under the control of the protector and both Houses, his earlier reservations now gone.81CJ vii. 642b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 465, 478. It was too late, however: the army grandees forced Richard Cromwell’s resignation.

Under the revived Rump Parliament, Stephens was named a militia commissioner in Bristol, as he had become recorder for that city at the end of March. He accepted the post upon the invitation of Joseph Jackson*; admitting himself ‘but a stranger’ to the city, but confident of his calling: ‘I look upon it as you intimate in your letter, as the footsteps of a divine appointment’.82Bristol RO, 04264/5, p. 185. He was noted as absent from the House in September 1659, and was fined, suggesting he was giving more attention to Bristol than to Westminster, but when the Rump was revived a second time, he returned to sit on a committee to allow approvals of ministers outside London (7 Mar. 1660).83Bristol RO, 04264/6, p. 3; CJ vii. 717b, 752b, 790a, 866a. He was evidently happy with the plan for the Convention, as he was named to the committee responsible for the act to summon it, and worked with Prynne on arrangements for reconvening the House of Lords.84CJ vii. 868b, 871a, 872b. He was selected on 8 May by the Bristol corporation to sit in the Convention, and became an active Member of it, being named to up to 35 committees and making some 49 speeches.85Bristol RO, 04264/6, p. 18; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Stephens’. In June 1660, Stephens, Robert Aldworth*, John Knight† and four councillors presented gold worth £500, a petition and the city’s fee farm rents to the king.86Bristol RO, 04264/6, p. 22. Stephens took an interest in ecclesiastical matters in this Parliament, and, perhaps surprisingly, promoted a modified form of episcopacy. He attended a city council meeting on 19 September, and in March 1661 was able to warn the corporation about quo warranto proceedings being launched against Bristol.87Bristol RO, 04264/6, pp. 20, 36. He was in Bristol again in August that year, but on 27 May 1662 the council considered the resignation letter he had written on 1 April, acknowledging past favours but pleading bodily weakness. He was replaced by Sir Robert Atkyns*.88Bristol RO, 04264/6, pp. 42, 58. Stephens seems to have moved into open sympathy with nonconformists in the last years of his life.