WATSON, Daniel (1617-83), of The Nether Hall, Burton-upon-Trent, Staffs.

The Watsons had been residents and property-owners in Burton-upon-Trent since at least the 1540s. Watson’s father established a thriving tanning business and had prospered sufficiently by the early 1630s to be assessed at £10 for composition for distraint of knighthood.27E407/35, f. 155v; Shaw, Staffs. i. 12; C. Owen, Burton upon Trent (Derby, 1994), 52. In his will of 1634, he bequeathed numerous tenements and lands in Burton-upon-Trent and Hanbury to his wife and three sons and made legacies in excess of £400. One of the witnesses to his will was the future Staffordshire parliamentarian Michael Noble*.28PROB11/169, ff. 227-8. Daniel Watson – a younger son from his father’s second marriage – received a gentleman’s education at Cambridge and the inns of court before pursuing a career in the law.

Watson took up arms for Parliament during the civil war, serving as a captain in the Derbyshire parliamentarian horse alongside Nathaniel Barton* and Thomas Sanders*.29Brereton Letter Bks. i. 73, 96, 205, 216, 526. Watson would marry the daughter of another of his fellow captains, Edward Villiers.30PROB11/323, f. 401; Brereton Letter Bks. i. 527. When the queen’s army approached Burton-upon-Trent in the summer of 1643, Watson was so determined that ‘the cavaliers should never possess his goods [that he] fired his own house, whereby about 20 more [houses] were set on fire’. Watson, Sanders, Barton and Colonel Richard Hoghton* were captured when the royalists took the town, but they were quickly exchanged.31Bodl. Add. C.132, ff. 52r-v; Certaine Informations no. 27 (17-24 July 1643), 212 (E.61.19). Watson and Villiers were among the Derbyshire officers who served under Sir William Brereton* in 1644-5 and were employed by him to help disband his forces at the end of the war.32Brereton Letter Bks. i. 73, 96, 205, 216, 524, 526; iii. 269. It was probably at some point during the first half of 1645 that Watson joined Barton and other Derbyshire officers in petitioning the Committee of Both Kingdoms*, requesting that the ‘honest, godly, valiant and faithful’ Sanders be made their colonel and commander.33Derbys. RO, D1232/O/70. Yet Watson’s military duties do not seem to have interrupted his legal studies to any great extent, for in May 1645 he became a barrister at Gray’s Inn.34PBG Inn, i. 353. He established a legal practice in Burton-upon-Trent after the war and numbered many members of the local gentry among his clients.35Owen, Burton upon Trent, 52.

Appointed to the Staffordshire bench in 1649, Watson attended the county’s quarter sessions assiduously throughout the interregnum.36C231/6, p. 153; Staffs. RO, Q/SO/5, pp. 189, 297, 491; Q/SO/6, ff. 1, 123v. He evidently enjoyed the confidence of successive regimes during the 1650s, and his appointment in 1655 as a Staffordshire commissioner under Major-general Charles Worsley* suggests that he was regarded as sympathetic to the cause of godly reformation.37CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 257; TSP iv. 648; Pape, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 322, 334. In the elections to the third protectoral Parliament in 1658-9, he was returned for Lichfield, taking the junior seat to Thomas Minors. Watson had been appointed recorder of Lichfield by 1663 at the latest, and it is likely that he was returned in 1659 on the corporation interest.38Vis. Staffs. ed. Grazebrook, 299. He was named to only two committees in this Parliament, and his only known contribution to debate was on 30 March 1659, when he informed the House of a royalist arms cache in Staffordshire.39CJ vii. 594b, 622b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 303. That summer, he may have been involved in securing Staffordshire for Parliament in the wake of the royalist-Presbyterian rising under Sir George Boothe*.40J. Sutton, ‘Cromwell’s commrs. for preserving the peace of the Commonwealth’, in Soldiers, Writers, and Statesmen of the English Revolution ed. I. Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden (Cambridge, 1998), 157-8. Watson defeated Minors in the elections at Lichfield to the 1660 Convention and was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.41HP Commons 1660-1690; G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 342. However, Minors petitioned the Commons against Watson’s return, complaining of sharp practice by his rival, and Watson was unseated by order of the House on 27 June.42CJ viii. 76a.

Watson was omitted from the Staffordshire commission of peace at the Restoration, but managed to retain his offices as steward of Newcastle-under-Lyme and recorder of Lichfield. At some point in the early 1660s, he was described by a Staffordshire royalist as a former captain and major against the king who ‘pretends to be loyal and orthodox’.43‘Gentry of Staffs.’ ed. Kidson, 36. His loyalty to the restored monarchy, whether genuine or pretended, saw him restored to the Staffordshire bench in 1668.44C231/7, p. 330. Appointed deputy steward of Stafford in 1677 by the town’s new high steward, James Scott, 1st duke of Monmouth, he probably sided with the whigs during the Exclusion crisis.45CSP Dom. 1677-8, p. 33.

Watson died in the summer of 1683 and was buried at St Modwen, Burton-upon-Trent, on 19 June 1683.46St Modwen par. reg. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his line to enter Parliament.