HUNGERFORD, Edward (1632-1711), of Farleigh Castle, Som., Corsham, Wilts., and Hungerford House, the Strand, Westminster.

Born into a family with a long tradition of service in Parliament, the young Hungerford had the added prospect of considerable wealth. He was heir to land in five counties from his father, Anthony*, and through him from his childless uncle Sir Edward Hungerford*, who died in 1648. He matriculated from Queen’s College, Oxford, in June 1649, but unlike Sir Edward and another uncle, Henry Hungerford*, who had both preceded him there, he did not graduate.20Al. Ox. He departed further from family custom in not attending an inn of court.21Al. Ox.

It seems that Anthony Hungerford, a delinquent on account of his attendance at the Oxford Parliament, may have been pressed for money in hand and concentrated on seeking an advantageous match for his son. Although Anthony obtained a discharge from sequestration payment on some estates inherited from Sir Edward, other fines had to be met, and obligations to female members of the wider family were for the time being substantial.22Add. 33412, f. 77v. While Cicely, countess of Rutland, widow of Sir Edward Hungerford† (d.1607), finally died in 1653, Dame Margaret, widow of Sir Edward (d.1648) enjoyed a very generous jointure until her death in 1673, and meanwhile Anthony had to make provision for his eldest daughter, Rachel, following her marriage in 1653 to Henry Cary*, 4th Viscount Falkland.23CP; HP Commons 1660-1690. Gossip among exiled royalists in December 1655 had it that Edward, described over-optimistically as ‘a person of above £10,000 a year’, had recently been negotiating to marry a daughter of Oliver Cromwell*; Anthony had certainly managed to establish friendly communication with the future protector as early as the summer of 1652.24Nicholas Pprs. iii. 224; J. E. Jackson, ‘Farleigh Hungerford Castle, Somerset’, Som. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Procs. iii. 119. However, Edward’s first marriage, perhaps arranged before Anthony’s death on 17 August 1657, was to Jane Hele, a Devon heiress; according to the parish register of St Giles-in-the-Fields, their wedding took place on 17 December after banns called in November, although their daughter Frances was born in St Martin-in-the-Fields, where the Hungerfords had their London house, on 27 May 1658.25St Giles-in-the-Fields par. reg.; Reg. of St Paul, Covent Garden, pt. i. 10. Jane’s dowry of £4,000 may have proved immediately useful: Anthony’s will destined portions of £3,000 for each of his six daughters, and there was already a mortgage on some of Edward’s lands.26PROB11/273/36; Wilts. RO, 212B/2977.

Hungerford was elected to the 1659 Parliament on the family interest as Member for Chippenham, the seat of his namesake in the Long Parliament. With his uncle Henry, Member for Great Bedwyn, he was nominated on 28 January to the committee for elections and privileges, but that was probably his only appearance in the Journal: the Mr Hungerford named on 13 April to consider the excise was almost certainly the experienced Henry.27CJ vii. 595a, 639a. None the less, Edward was considered by informants writing to Edward Hyde* as among the young men in the House most active in the royalist cause, ‘as honest’ as his brother-in-law Falkland, if less ‘zealous’, ‘forward’ and conspicuous.28CCSP iv. 166-7, 177. Since his brother Anthony, under the name ‘Mr Farley’, had been a royalist agent for several years, such confidence had some foundation.29Nicholas Pprs. iii. 224n, 270. Following the dissolution of this Parliament and the recall of the Rump, as plans were laid in June for risings in various parts of the country, not only ‘two younger brothers of Hungerford’ (he had no others) but also a ‘Jack Hele’ were reported to be ready to assist in Wiltshire.30CCSP iv. 225. Yet that summer, Hungerford himself received his first local appointments as a commissioner for militia and oyer and terminer.31C181/6, p. 377; A. and O.

Early in 1660 Hungerford began to acquire a series of offices which set the pattern for his public service after the Restoration. Named on 26 January as an assessment commissioner for Wiltshire and Somerset, in March he joined the commission of the peace for Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, and became a militia commissioner for all three counties; in April he took on the probably congenial commission of captain of the Wiltshire horse militia.32A. and O.; HP Commons 1660-1690. In the interim, with Falkland, he was a leading supporter of the 13 February ‘Declaration of Oxfordshire gentlemen, ministers and freeholders’ to General George Monck* which sought the return to Parliament of the Members excluded at Pride’s Purge.33CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 361. By mid-March he had made a very substantial secret donation to the king, ‘not three men of the nation having made a like present’, and earned a letter of gratitude.34CCSP iv. 599-600. Once returned again for Chippenham to the Convention, however, he seems to have made much less impact on proceedings than his uncles, Henry and Giles†.35HP Commons 1660-1690. Still, he had his reward when he became a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Charles II.36Shaw, Knights of Eng. i. 165.

Thereafter, a moderately energetic local and parliamentary record was accompanied by spiralling financial difficulties. Hungerford was intermittently busy on committees in the Cavalier Parliament, and capable of useful action in the counties, but despite protestations of loyalty, in the tradition of his family he may have been rather more indulgent to nonconformity than the government desired.37CCSP v. 589; CSP Dom. 1668-9, pp. 224, 529, 533-4; 1670, pp. 384, 417, 448; The Commonplace Bk. of Sir Edward Bayntun, 16, 22-3, 33. Having secured his wife’s inheritance by a settlement in December 1661, following her death in 1664 he sought to sell lands in Devon.38Wilts. RO, 1641/8; LJ xi. 638b, 642a, 645a. Two subsequent marriages – to another, if more modest, heiress and to the widow of a peer – and his son Edward’s brief runaway marriage to the potentially well-dowered Lady Alathea Compton, together with involvement in the Hudson’s Bay Company, failed to address his insolvency.39R. Colt-Hoare, Hungerfordiana (1823), 31-2; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 263; CP.; HP Commons 1690-1714; HMC Rutland ii. 46-7, 53; Rich, Hudson’s Bay Co. 67; CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 543. Proverbial as a ‘spendthrift’ and gambler, he indulged a taste for sport and doubtless dispensed much of his own money in his capacity as officer in the corps of archers which periodically paraded in London.40HP Commons 1690-1714; W. Wood, The bow-mans glory, or archery revived (1682), 76; R. Blome, The gentlemans recreation in two parts (1686), list of benefactors. Although Hungerford bought land in Sussex, he progressively sold his patrimony, including in 1686 Farleigh Castle, which went to the Bayntun family, with whom the Hungerfords had feuded in the early days of the Long Parliament.41Wilts. RO, 9/20/31-2,1461/688; Som. RO, DD/BR/rn/2; LJ xiii. 57a, 59a, 85b, 107b, 120b; HMC 9th Rep. pt. ii. 84; VCH Wilts. vii. 72, 218; viii. 16, 81, 151-3; x. 5, 163; xi. 227; xii. 129; xv, 205, 278; xvi. 23-4; Collinson, Som. iii. 356. His parliamentary career continued into the eighteenth century, but he was the last representative of his branch of the family to sit in the House. He died in penury in 1711.42HP Commons 1690-1715.