TERRICKE, Samuel (1601-aft. 1670), of Clayton Griffith, Trentham, Staffs., and London.

Terrick was a corruption of the old Staffordshire surname Tellwright, and it is therefore almost certain that the Samuel son of John Telright baptised in the parish of Newcastle-under-Lyme in April 1601 was the future MP.23Vis. Staffs. ed. Grazebrook, 285; Newcastle-under-Lyme Par. Regs. ed. Adams, i. 53. His family had been established at Clayton Griffith in the parish of Trentham, near Newcastle-under-Lyme, since at least the mid-sixteenth century, and his father had served under the Elizabethan admiral Sir Richard Leveson† (also of Trentham) in the Anglo-Spanish war of 1585-1604.24Vis. London (Harl. Soc. xvii, pt. 2), 279; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 83, 85. A second son, Terricke was apprenticed to his maternal grandfather, a London Draper, in 1618, becoming free of the company in 1625, a liveryman in 1635 and taking nine apprentices himself between 1629 and 1656.25Drapers’ Co. Archives, Boyd’s reg. of apprentices and freemen; Johnson, Drapers, iv. 466. Although most of his business and family life was based in London, he seems to have retained close links with his native Staffordshire, and by 1639 he owned the lease of the fee farm rent of the manor of Newcastle-under-Lyme.26HMC 5th Rep. 141; VCH Staffs. viii. 184. Moreover, in February 1641, the Newcastle corporation assigned lands to Terricke, his father and several other trustees for the purpose of providing an annual rent to sustain the town’s poor.27Newcastle-under-Lyme Museum and Art Gallery, Corporation Order Bk. 1, unfol.

Several members of Terricke’s family took the king’s side in the civil war, and Terricke himself was apparently on close terms with the royalist county grandee Sir Richard Leveson*, the heir of the Elizabethan admiral.28Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 85; HMC 5th Rep. 145, 206. However, the future MP should not be confused with his royalist nephew and namesake, for whom Terricke stood surety when he was paroled by the county committee in September 1643.29Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 70; Staffs. Co. Cttee. 182. Evidently trusted by the committee and the Commons, Terricke was appointed to the Staffordshire sub-committee of accounts and to the county sequestration and assessment commissions during the 1640s.30SP28/242, f. 357; Staffs. Co. Cttee. 237. In November 1643, the Commons nominated him to the county committee, but there is no indication that the Lords endorsed this appointment.31CJ iii. 320a. In the autumn of 1644, he signed several petitions to Parliament from many of the committeemen and a large number of the Staffordshire parliamentarians requesting that Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, be allowed to resume his command at the head of Parliament’s west midlands association.32PA, Main Pprs. 1 Oct. 1644, ff. 146-8, 154-6. The leading signatories to these petitions, who included John Bowyer* and Edward Leigh*, headed the pro-Denbigh faction in the county and were therefore broadly aligned with the peace interest at Westminster under Denbigh’s ally – and Staffordshire’s most powerful parliamentarian grandee – Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.

Terricke stood as a candidate in the ‘recruiter’ election at Newcastle-under-Lyme in the autumn of 1645. It is clear from a letter written by his father, John Terrick, that his principal motive in seeking a parliamentary seat was to gain protection from his creditors.33Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 83-4. John Terrick complained that he himself was

daily molested for his interest money, and now they [Terricke’s creditors] will get execution for my body; and so I shall die in durance for his debt and my love. I would to God I had taken my end with my honourable dead master [Admiral Leveson] and been buried at his foot in Wolverhampton ... Then I should have escaped all this [sic] calamities I am like to fall in with my poor son ... As you have been an instrument to draw us into this [sic] troubles, so I beseech you be a means to get us out of them.34Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 83.

One authority has argued that this letter was probably sent to someone in the circle of Sir Richard Leveson.35Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 83-4, 555-7. However, a more likely interpretation is that it was sent to the commander of Parliament’s forces in Cheshire, Sir William Brereton*, whom John Terrick asked to excuse his failure to support the candidacy of Brereton’s friend and ally Sir Richard Skeffington*, having already engaged himself for his son.36Morrill, Cheshire, 177-8. If Brereton was indeed the recipient of this letter, he showed no sympathy with Samuel Terricke’s plight and gave his support instead to Newcastle-under-Lyme’s steward, the future regicide John Bradshawe*. On election day, 4 November 1645, over 100 of the townsmen turned out to return Terricke, apparently without a contest.37Supra, ‘Newcastle-under-Lyme’. He owed his election primarily to his father, who had twice served as mayor of the town and was a man of considerable influence in the borough.38Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 216; Pape, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 80, 145.

Brereton, a leading member of the anti-Denbigh faction in the region, was undoubtedly exaggerating when he alleged that Terricke had been elected by ‘the ill-affected rabble’ and that he was ‘a neuter at best’.39Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 218. Nevertheless, it is clear that Terricke was not the most committed of Parliament-men, suggesting that he had indeed sought a seat merely to keep his creditors at bay. His name appears only twice in the records of the Long Parliament – on 31 December 1645, when he took the Covenant; and on 4 March 1648, when he was named to a committee to examine the accounts of the customs commissioners.40CJ iv. 393a; CJ v. 480a. Given his paltry contribution to public affairs it is something of a mystery why the army went to the trouble of secluding him at Pride’s Purge.41A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669 f.13.62); A Vindication (1649), 28 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5). Perhaps it was a case of Brereton and Bradshawe gaining their revenge. That the cavaliers thought him likely to support a projected uprising in England in the late 1650s was probably wishful thinking on their part.42Bodl. Eng. hist. e. 309, p. 21.

A member of the Company of Merchants of London Trading into France, Terricke made a living importing French cloth, and he had prospered sufficiently by the early 1650s to be elected a warden of the London Drapers’ Company.43Bodl. Nalson XXII, f. 311; CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 408; Johnson, Drapers, iv. 421, 451. However, his debts finally caught up with him in 1658, when he and his son went bankrupt to the tune of £20,000 – probably as a result of the collapse of a Paris banking house.44HMC 5th Rep. 167, 199. Anxious to escape his creditors once again, he was returned for Newcastle-under-Lyme in the elections to the 1660 Convention and was listed by Philip, 4th Baron Wharton as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.45HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Samuel Terrick’; G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 342. As in the Long Parliament, Terricke was named to only one committee, but he was sufficiently attentive of parliamentary business to keep his friend Sir Richard Leveson informed of the House’s proceedings.46HMC 5th Rep. 145, 206. By 1667, he was acting as a political intelligencer to Sir Richard Wynn*.47Cal. Wynn Pprs. 391.

Terricke was still living in 1670, but the date and circumstances of his death remain obscure.48PROB11/335, ff. 230v-231; Johnson, Drapers, iv. 270. He should not be confused with Samuel Terrick, cordwainer, who was buried in the London parish of St Nicholas Cole Abbey on 14 October 1675.49PROB6/50, f. 121; St. Nicholas Cole Abbey par. reg.; Mar. Lics. (Harl. Soc. xxxiii), 200. Terricke was the first and last of his family to sit in Parliament.