VENABLES, Peter (1604-69), of Kinderton, Middlewich, Cheshire.

The Venables family was apparently of Norman origin and had settled at Kinderton, in south east Cheshire, by the end of the twelfth century.31Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 1, pp. 187, 198. Venables’s father having died while the future MP was still a minor, his wardship was granted to his mother.32WARD9/159, f. 215v. As head of the family on attaining his majority, Venables enjoyed the titular rank of ‘baron of Kinderton’, an honour said to have been created by the Norman earl of Chester soon after the Conquest.33‘Peter Venables’, HP Commons 1660-1690. His grandfather, Sir Thomas Venables†, had represented Cheshire in 1553 and 1563, and Venables too, by the 1630s, was very much of one of the county’s governing and social elite.34Harl. 2093, ff. 97, 118, 162v; HP Commons 1509-1558; HP Commons 1558-1603. His saltworks alone generated £550 profit a year (on sales of £750 a year), and with an estate in Cheshire that included at least seven manors, he exercised a considerable proprietorial interest – not least because his numerous tenants were apparently on short term leases.35SP23/196, pp. 451, 503-4; M.D.G. Wanklyn, ‘Landed Society and Allegiance in Cheshire and Shropshire in the First Civil War’ (Manchester Univ. PhD thesis, 1976), 355-6; Cheshire IPM ed. Stewart-Brown, 121-34. His puritan neighbour Sir William Brereton* claimed in 1646 that he was a ‘tyrant among his tenants’.36SP23/196, p. 481; Brereton Lttr Bks. iii. 139. He further alleged that Venables was ‘an enemy of [godly] reformation’, and this is certainly consistent with Venables’s patronage of the Cheshire divine William Bispham, who would emerge as a keen supporter of Sir Thomas Aston’s* pro-episcopacy campaign in 1641 and, subsequently, a committed royalist.37IND1/70001, f. 117; PA, Main Pprs. 27 Feb. 1641; T. Aston, A Remonstrance Against Presbytery (1641), 3 (E.163.1); Brereton Lttr Bks. iii. 139; Walker Revised, 88; J. Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 153, 154 Nevertheless, Venables was by no means an unswerving loyalist before the civil war, for by 1640 he had joined Brereton in encouraging his tenants to resist the collection of Ship Money.38CSP Dom. 1640-1, pp. 17-18; P. Lake, ‘The collection of ship money in Cheshire during the sixteen-thirties’, NH xvii. 66.

Venables was linked through his brother-in-law Robert Cholmondeley†, 1st Viscount Cholmondeley of Kells [I], with a Cheshire political grouping – the ‘barons’ – that ‘tended to be strongly anti-puritan ... relatively indulgent towards Catholicism and Laudianism, ready to identify with the interests of king and court and willing to take an authoritarian line when it came enforcing the crown’s demands’.39Morrill, Cheshire, 34; R. Cust, P. Lake, Gentry Culture, and the Politics of Religion: Cheshire on the Eve of the Civil War (Manchester, 2020), 173. The barons’ candidates for the shire places in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 were Brereton and Sir Thomas Aston, who were both identified in Cheshire as leading critics of Ship Money.40Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Morrill, Cheshire, 32-4; Lake, ‘Ship money in Cheshire’, 68; ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain ed. T. Cogswell, R. Cust, P. Lake (Cambridge, 2002), 260-1. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Aston and Brereton stood again, and on this occasion they were joined by Venables. The ensuing contest for the shire places may have been a three-way struggle between the men, or it is possible that Venables and Brereton stood together as the preferred candidates of the faction opposed to the barons – a group headed by Sir George Booth and Sir Richard Wilbraham. Although Venables seems to have remained close to Viscount Cholmondeley and certainly shared the barons’ dislike of puritanism, he had worked closely with the Booth-Wilbraham group as a deputy lieutenant in 1639-40 – notably, in mustering the county’s trained bands for the second bishops’ war.41Supra, ‘Cheshire’; SP16/462, ff. 5-11; Cheshire RO, ZCR 63/2/6, ff. 60v, 69v, 80, 81, 96v; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 181-2. On 19 October 1640, after ‘much feuding and faction’, Venables was returned for the senior place (not the junior as some accounts state), while Aston was rejected in favour of Brereton.42Harl. 2125, f. 133; C219/43/1/77-8; Morrill, Cheshire, 34. Booth, Wilbraham and their friends evidently approved of the result, for their names figured prominently among the parties to the election indenture. The names of the barons are conspicuous by their absence.43Supra, ‘Cheshire’; C219/43/1/77-8; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 182.

Despite claims to the contrary, Venables received no committee appointments in the Long Parliament.44Morrill, Cheshire, 43. Overall, he made very little impression upon the House’s proceedings. If he had indeed enjoyed the backing of the Booth-Wilbraham group in the autumn of 1640, he would have disappointed his electoral patrons in April 1641 by voting against the attainder of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†); the assertion that he was not a Straffordian is clearly mistaken.45Procs. LP iv. 42, 51; Morrill, Cheshire, 43. Again, he was out of step with the Booth-Wilbraham group in his initial willingness to endorse Sir Thomas Aston’s pro-episcopacy petitioning campaign.46Supra, ‘Sir Thomas Aston’. Having already presented a petition to the Lords from Cheshire in defence of episcopacy, in March 1641 Aston consulted Venables and the two Chester MPs Sir Thomas Smithe and Francis Gamul about presenting another petition in the name of the county, this time denouncing a root-and-branch petition purportedly from Cheshire, but probably the work of London anti-episcopal polemicists.47Add. 36913, f. 64; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 265-6; Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics’, 173-4. According to Aston, the three men approved of his counter-petition ‘as fit to be done [i.e. presented to Parliament], though they conceived not by them, seeing the first petition was in the Lords’ House and not in theirs and it was questionable whether, being of the Lower House, they might join in a petition to the Lords’.48Add. 36913, f. 64; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 271-2. However, they advised Aston to proceed with his counter-petition, professing that ‘if they were called they would be ready to testify how much they thought the country [i.e. county] injured in it [i.e. by the puritan petition]’.49Add. 36913, f. 64. Nevertheless, it was Venables who, on 22 May, presented to the Commons the so-called ‘Attestation’ from the Booth-Wilbraham group which, while repudiating the fraudulent puritan petition, criticised Aston for his presumption in not consulting them and claiming to speak on the county’s behalf in his counter-petition.50Harl. 2081, f. 93; CJ ii. 154a; Procs. LP iv. 525; Cust, Lake, Gentry Culture, 279-81; Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 267.

Although the Cheshire Attestation has been seen as aimed primarily against Aston rather than Brereton, Venables may well have presented it in the spirit of wishing a plague on both their houses.51Lake, ‘Popularity and petitions’, 267-8. Gamul, for one, implied that Venables was incapable of any sustained political commitment: ‘the baron is so unconstant in his resolutions ... none can please him, he is so touchy’.52Harl. 2081, f. 93. The two Houses showed more faith in his public-spiritedness, for in August 1641 they appointed him and Brereton commissioners for disarming recusants in Cheshire.53CJ ii. 267b; LJ iv. 385a. He seems to have remained at Westminster during the tumultuous events of the winter of 1641-2 and was certainly present during the debates in the Commons early in January 1642 about the appointment of a lord lieutenant for Cheshire.54JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp. Lttrs. to Francis Legh, folder 10: Legh to Legh, 10 Jan. 1642; Newton, House of Lyme, 166-8. According to Venables’ kinsman and fellow MP Peter Legh (cousin of Richard Legh*), Raphe Assheton I and Alexander Rigby I opposed the appointment of James Stanley†, Lord Strange (the future 7th earl of Derby) in favour of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, but Venables ‘did stand neuter till he saw which was the stronger side’.55Newton, House of Lyme, 166-7. On 7 February, Venables was granted leave of absence by the Commons to administer the estate of Peter Legh, who had died a few days earlier from a wound received fighting a duel.56PJ i. 303; Newton, House of Lyme, 181. Venables, who had attended Legh in his dying hours, seems to have taken it upon himself to bring his assailant to book, writing grandiloquently, in March, that the ‘eyes of the kingdom’ were upon him to secure justice in the matter.57Greater Manchester County RO, E17/89/18/2; Newton, House of Lyme, 171, 172, 175.

Although Venables was described by Brereton as ‘one of the most forward in declining the Parliament’s trust’, he seems to have remained at Westminster until at least early June 1642.58Brereton Lttr Bks. iii. 139. That month, he informed his friend the astrologer and future royalist Elias Ashmole that he was still hopeful of a ‘clear understanding betwixt the king and Parliament’, and in terms that suggest he sided with those in the House who were ‘much affected to accommodation and moderation’.59JRL, Legh of Lyme corresp. Lttrs. to F. Legh, folder 11: Ashmole to Legh, 24 June 1642; Coll. of Arms, Cheshire and Lancs. Vis. Pprs. 1663, f. 36; Newton, House of Lyme, 168-9; Morrill, Cheshire, 41-2. His likely distrust of John Pym* and his allies seems to have hardened over the next few weeks, however, and in mid-July, the Commons summoned him to attend the House on suspicion that he had been instrumental in having the ‘scandalous’ publication A Declaration or Resolution of the County of Hereford printed.60LJ v. 192b; CJ ii. 665a, 679a; PJ ii. 187, 231, 233. The import of this pamphlet was that Parliament had been hijacked by an unrepresentative and power-hungry faction – Pym’s ‘junto’ – to the likely ruin of the Church of England, the laws of the land and the king.61A Declaration or Resolution of the County of Hereford (1642, 669 f.6.49).

Venable’s suspension from sitting by the Commons on 2 September 1642, and the House’s vote on 5 January 1643 that he contribute £500 toward the maintenance of the parliamentary war effort, were little more than empty threats, for by the autumn of 1642 it is likely that he had thrown in his lot with the Cheshire royalists – a group that included his brother-in-law Viscount Cholmondeley.62CJ ii. 750a, 916a. He was named to both the June and October 1642 Cheshire commissions of array, and early in 1644 he attended the Oxford Parliament, signing its letter to the earl of Essex on 27 January, requesting that he arrange a peace treaty.63SP23/196, p. 466; Northants. RO, FH133; Cheshire RO, DLT/B11, pp. 76, 83; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575.

Venables’ attendance at Oxford, for which the Commons at Westminster disabled him from sitting as an MP, seems to have constituted his main offence in the eyes of Parliament.64CJ iii. 374a. In about May 1645, he signed a petition from Cheshire’s royalist leaders to the king, requesting military assistance to clear the county of rebels and make possible the collection of assessments that had been imposed upon the inhabitants ‘but not leviable without an army that is master of the field’.65JRL, TW/292. But this petition was never delivered. Certainly his claim after the war that he had neither acted as a commissioner of array nor taken up arms against Parliament (as his son Thomas did) was not challenged, even by Brereton.66SP23/126, p. 512; SP23/196, pp. 449, 466, 477, 481; CCC 1184. That his debts by the end of the war amounted to less than £300 suggests that he had not over-exerted himself financially in the king’s cause.67SP23/196, pp. 453, 491. Nevertheless, when he petitioned to compound, in about April 1646, his fine was set at an uncompromising two-thirds of his estate – that is, £9,800 – and that of his son at £2,500.68SP23/196, pp. 464, 466; CCC 1184. He was assessed at a further £2,000 that year by the Committee for Advance of Money* and seems to have had considerable trouble paying this sum and hence in removing his estate from sequestration.69CCAM 433-4; P.J. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire election of 1656’, BJRL xlix. 422.

In May 1648, Venables petitioned the Committee for Compounding*, requesting an abatement of his fine, claiming that he and his son had used their ‘utmost endeavours’ to submit themselves to Parliament before the end of 1645, but had been obstructed by the king’s soldiers and ‘enforced to fly unto the furthermost parts of Wales for their safety’.70SP23/126, pp. 477, 512. He also insisted that he had lost all his personal estate and that the bulk of his real estate consisted of ‘saltworks, candle rents and mills, which are casual profits and subject to continual charge’ and therefore not worth two-thirds of the value put on them.71SP23/126, p. 512. The Commons duly reduced the two men’s fines to a combined sum of £6,150 – which was still the largest composition fine paid by a Cheshire royalist after that of Venables’s brother-in-law Viscount Cholmondeley.72CCC 1184; Morrill, Cheshire, 206.

Venables played no known part in public affairs between the late 1640s and the Restoration. One authority has stated that he was imprisoned during the 1655 royalist uprisings of early 1655 – but if so, he had been released by June of that year, when his friend Charles Walley* wrote to him from London.73Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 422; TSP iii. 523. At some point in the late 1650s, he was named for Cheshire on a list of possible leaders of a projected royalist uprising, but there is no evidence that he was involved in cavalier conspiracies during the 1650s.74Bodl. Eng. hist. e. 309, p. 19. The Peter Venables who was described by the Cheshire Quakers as a ‘moderate’ man, ‘free from persecuting spirit’, was probably the civil-war sequestrator of that name.75Extracts from State Pprs. rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 110. Venables himself was apparently deeply hostile to the puritans, as he showed after the Restoration in his harassment of the Cheshire dissenting minister Adam Martindale.76The Life of Adam Martindale ed. R. Parkinson (Chetham Soc. o.s. iv), 147, 155. Venables was restored to the bench in 1660, returned for Cheshire to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661 and commissioned as a deputy lieutenant in 1662.77HP Commons 1660-1690; Cheshire RO, DLT/B11, p. 127.

Venables died on 13 February 1669 and was buried in Middlewich church on 19 February.78Middlewich bishop’s transcripts; Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. pt. 1, p. 200. No will is recorded. He was the last of his line to sit in Parliament.