STONHOUSE, Sir George (1603-75), of Radley, nr. Abingdon, Berks. and Knightsbridge, Mdx.

George Stonhouse, clerk of the greencloth to Elizabeth I from 1558 until his death in 1573, bought from her the manor of Radley just outside Abingdon in 1560.24VCH Berks. iv. 412. Although they were never great landowners, this was sufficient to give the Stonhouses a strong and often undisputed electoral interest in the single-Member constituency of Abingdon throughout the seventeenth century. In time George’s eldest son, William, father of this MP, inherited the lands at Radley, while a younger son, Sir James, founded a cadet line in Essex at Amberden Hall, Debden.25CAM 1226; VCH Essex, viii. 172; CB iii. 89. In 1628 William bought the baronetcy that would cause so much trouble four decades later.26CB ii. 37; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 103. That same year his eldest son, Sir John, was elected at Abingdon. It was only because Sir John died in 1632, just four months after their father and leaving no heirs of his own, that his younger brother, George, inherited the family estates and the baronetcy.27Ashmole, Antiquities, i. 138-41.

Sir George’s new status was marked by his addition to the Berkshire commission of the peace. The following year he married into the peerage; his wife, Margaret, was a daughter of Lord Lovelace. His appointment as sheriff of Berkshire in 1637 ought to have been a routine, but, in this case, it required him to collect the £4,000 demanded from the county under the 1637 Ship Money writ. He faced a number of rating disputes arising from that collection, of which that at Sunninghill seems to have been the most intractable.28CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 89, 210-11, 348-9. Even so, he left uncollected only £20 – a testimony to his energetic organisation.29Gordon, ‘Collection of ship-money’, 156. At some point during the 1630s he was also appointed as one of the Berkshire deputy lieutenants.30CSP Dom. 1640, p. 476.

In March 1640 Stonhouse secured his election at Abingdon after assiduously entertaining the electorate with lavish hospitality, much to the disapproval of his opponent, the borough’s recorder, Bulstrode Whitelocke*.31Whitelocke, Diary, 119-20. His single committee appointment during the Short Parliament was that on the popish hierarchy (16 Mar.).32CJ ii. 105b. That summer he experienced first-hand some of the problems arising from the king’s decision to attempt to resume the war against the Scottish Covenanters. In July he wrote to the lord lieutenant of Berkshire, the 1st earl of Holland (Henry Rich†), to explain that most of the men whom he had enlisted in his capacity a deputy lieutenant had deserted and that they were encountering significant difficulties in the collection of coat and conduct money.33CSP Dom. 1640, p. 476.

That autumn he was re-elected at Abingdon, probably without any opposition. What evidence there is suggests that, if anything, he initially supported the Long Parliament in its conflict with the king. His experience that summer may have alerted him to some of the problems in maintaining the two armies in the north of England. On 21 November 1640 he agreed to lend £1,000 to Parliament, while the following May he was included on a committee appointed to discuss with the House of Lords a possible disbandment of the armies.34Procs. LP i. 229, 232, 236; CJ ii. 152a. He took the Protestation on 10 May 1641.35CJ ii. 141a. Even once the civil war had broken out he preferred to side with Parliament, for in September 1642 he gave Parliament four horses and three months later he offered it an unknown sum of money.36CJ ii. 772b; Add. 18777, f. 109v. He also took the oath of support introduced by the Commons in the aftermath of Waller’s plot.37CJ iii. 118b. Parliament in turn appointed him to two of the local commissions for Berkshire created in 1643 to raise money for its cause.38A. and O. On this interpretation, the fact that he had been one of the commissioners of array for Berkshire appointed by the king in July 1642 meant little, with the king probably having named him only because he was one of the existing deputy lieutenants.39Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. But Stonhouse’s support for Parliament was far less solid than it seemed. He began to absent himself from Parliament and by late September 1643 that non-attendance was sufficiently conspicuous to attract attention. He was ordered to appear before the Committee for Sequestrations on 10 October to face questions about it.40CJ iii. 256b. He probably failed to do so. The Commons drew the obvious conclusion and on 22 January 1644 they expelled him.41CJ iii. 374a.

Stonhouse’s expulsion opened him to threat that his estates would now be sequestered. By July 1644 the Committee for Advance of Money had assessed him to pay £1,600 but had not taken any action.42CAM 436. The fall of Oxford made it unrealistic for him to hope that he could escape from the attentions of the Committee for Compounding and so, on 31 December 1646, he petitioned them to seek leave to compound. His fine was fixed at £2,705.43CCC 1629. He had paid half that sum by May 1649, which helped persuade the committee three months later that the amount due from him should be reduced to £1,460.44CCC 1629. What is less clear is what, if anything, Stonhouse had done to support the king.

Little is known of his activities during the 1650s. He is most unlikely to have had sympathy with either the republic or the protectorate and, for that reason, he probably preferred to keep a low profile. Only in 1660 did he return to public life when he was re-elected to his old seat in Parliament. What is known is that it was during the 1650s that relations between him and his eldest son, George, began to break down. In 1652 ‘the perverseness of his carriage towards his parents’ forced Stonhouse to send George junior away to France. Two of the tutors appointed to accompany him found him intolerable and resigned.45PROB11/348/30; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 562. Sir George would later accuse his son of dishonesty, drunkenness, bad language and threatening behaviour and he considered the woman he married as no better than ‘a kitchen-wench-strumpet’.46PROB11/348/30. Disinheriting him in favour of the second son, John†, was easy enough. Control of the family estates was handed over to John when he married in 1668.47PROB11/348/30. What proved more difficult was his attempt to prevent George junior inheriting the baronetcy. Ideally Stonhouse would have preferred to surrender it in favour of a new grant that would include a special clause allowing the title to pass to John rather George. In 1670 Charles II did grant him such a patent, but the request that the existing baronetcy be suppressed was refused. George junior therefore inherited the earlier title when Sir George died in 1675, but it was John who got the second one and the family estates.48CB ii. 37, iv. 47. Sir John also inherited his father’s seat in the Cavalier Parliament.49HP Commons 1660-1690.