CHISWELL, Richard (1673-1751), of Debden Hall, Essex.

Between 1696 and 1698 Richard Chiswell, a Turkey merchant, made three journeys through the Middle East, of which he wrote accounts.2CSP Dom. 1696, p. 56; Add. 10623. Returned as a Whig for Calne in 1715, he voted in 1716 against the septennial bill. In 1719 he voted for the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts but against the peerage bill, on which he was classed as doubtful, to be spoken to for the Government by the elder Craggs. He was down to be replaced by George Duckett at Calne in Sunderland’s plan, c. Oct. 1721, for the 1722 Parliament, for which he did not stand. His only recorded speech was on 17 Nov. 1721, when he opposed a clause in a bill empowering the King to order his officers to fire upon and sink any ship coming from a plague infected place. With other Turkey merchants he argued unsuccessfully that ships from the Levant Company should be excepted because many of their ships could not be notified of the new law and there was always plague in some part of Turkey. He died 14 May 1751.