| Nationality | Rich, Robert, second earl of Warwick (1587–1658), colonial promoter and naval officer, was born in May or June 1587, probably at Leighs Priory, Essex, the eldest son of Robert Rich, third Baron Rich and later first earl of Warwick (1559?–1619), courtier and privateer, and his first wife, Penelope Rich (1563–1607), daughter of Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, best known as Sir Philip Sidney's ‘Stella’ and notorious for her adultery.
Early life
Robert was admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 4 June 1603. He was knighted on 25 July 1603 at the coronation of James I. On 24 February 1605 he married Frances (1590–1623), daughter and heir of Sir William Hatton (formerly Newport) and Elizabeth Gawdy; they had at least five children. Sir Robert appears to have been admitted a member of the Inner Temple in the Lent term of 1604 or 1605 by a special arrangement with the reader, John Harris, which was not confirmed until 20 April 1605. He then proceeded to make an impressive entry onto the stage of the Jacobean court. His earliest bent was for drama, performing to acclaim in Ben Jonson's Masque of Beauty in 1609. He also excelled at the tilts.
Robert's public life began with his election to the House of Commons for the borough of Maldon in Essex in 1610, though he left no impression on parliamentary business. Two years later he accompanied Sir Henry Wotton's embassy to Turin. In 1614 he was again returned by the voters of Maldon to sit in parliament, and again maintained a low profile, his mind possibly elsewhere. On 29 June 1614 he became a founding member of the Bermudas Company for the plantation of the Somers Islands. His emerging colonial and commercial interests naturally encouraged him to follow in the wake of his father's highly profitable semi-piracies. In 1616 he obtained commissions from the agent of the duke of Savoy to attack Spanish shipping, fitting out two vessels for a roving voyage in the East Indies. Finding no Spaniards, his captains showed a suitable lack of discretion, attacking and plundering instead a richly laden craft belonging to the mother of the Mughal emperor of India, causing a diplomatic incident which threatened with ruin the legitimate trade of the East India Company. In reprisal the company seized Warwick's own ships. The resulting dispute was not settled for more than a decade, when under pressure from the House of Lords the company consented to pay off a fraction of the privateer's claim to £20,000 compensation. Undaunted, in April 1618, under the same Savoyard commission, Sir Robert sent to Virginia and the West Indies a ship called the Treasurer, commanded by Captain Daniel Elfrith, whose mission ended up landing his patron in further trouble, almost costing him his life.
Ennoblement, politics, and opposition
In the same year, supposedly under considerable pressure from the marquess of Buckingham, Rich's father agreed to purchase an earldom for £10,000. Rich was instrumental in the negotiations which eventually secured his father the earldom of Warwick, having been denied that of Clare on the grounds, subsequently proved specious, that the more senior title was reserved for the blood royal. The first earl did not have the satisfaction of enjoying his title for long, and Rich succeeded as the second earl on 24 March 1619. He was soon embarked on a substantial career in English political life. In the parliaments of 1621 and 1624 he chaired the important subcommittee of the House of Lords' grand committee on the privileges of the upper house. He also took part in legislation for the more effective prosecution of recusants. Beginning already to establish himself as a patron of orthodox Calvinist interests, Warwick found himself temporarily befriended by Buckingham in the aftermath of the ‘blessed revolution’, which swung English foreign policy away from an intended marriage alliance with Spain in 1623 in the direction of a more warlike posture. As Charles I prepared to fight with Spain in vindication of the rights of his sister, the queen of Bohemia, Warwick was appointed in September 1625 to oversee the preparation of defences against invasion in his home county of Essex, much to the disgust of the lord lieutenant of the county, the earl of Sussex. With no real resources to commit to it, the exercise was regarded by the privy council as very largely cosmetic. The secretary of state Sir John Coke wanted the defences repaired at least in order that 'the varie noise of arming and training' might dissuade Spinola from mounting an attack from Dunkirk designed to divert from preparing the English fleet off the south coast (Quintrell, Towards a “perfect militia”, 97). But Warwick's enthusiasm for the task gravely threatened good order in the county, and had a number of unforeseen consequences which appear ironic in light of his later career in opposition to the court. His efforts to improve the training of the local auxiliaries gave a spur to the king's aspirations for a ‘perfect militia’, while his recommendations for financing the county's defence from contributions raised in contiguous shires may well have inspired the levying of ship money nationwide. In the meantime, his first wife having died shortly before 21 November 1623, Warwick married Susan Halliday (bap. 1582, d. 1646), daughter of Sir Henry Rowe, one-time lord mayor of London, and Susan Kighley, and the widow of William Halliday (d. 1624), alderman. The marriage took place between 12 March 1625 and 20 January 1626.
From 1626 onwards, although Warwick retained some influence there, he became gradually estranged from a court set on policies with which he evidently felt little sympathy. In 1625 he and the duke of Buckingham had co-operated in a new commercial venture for the discovery of a north-west passage to the Orient. The passing of any threat of Spanish invasion and the receding of any prospect of major conflict with Spain brought to an end Buckingham's uses for Warwick and the other puritan leaders such as Viscount Saye and Sele. The breakdown was precipitated by Warwick himself, who procured the disputation at York House in February 1626 designed to push Buckingham off the fence in the matter of Arminian innovation. After Buckingham came down firmly on the opposite side from Warwick, the earl's dependants in the House of Commons led the attack on the duke in the parliament of 1626. Although Warwick was evidently opposed to the forced loan, he avoided open hostility in order to protect his privateering interests, and instead preferred 'a moderate strategy' of encouraging the opposition of others (Cust, 229). Consequently, he was able to secure a potentially valuable privateering commission with complete independence from Buckingham's admiralty jurisdiction in 1627, but by then he had received his punishment for disloyalty, for he and his clients lost office and influence in their power base of Essex. Warwick himself lost the lieutenancy powers granted the year before, while Sir Francis Barrington, Sir Thomas Barrington, Sir William Masham, and Sir Harbotle Grimston found themselves ejected from the deputy lieutenancy. In the struggle for the petition of right Warwick was one of the band of peers who supported the lower house, and on 21 April 1628 he made a spirited speech against the king's claim to imprison without showing cause. His stand no doubt helps to explain the persistent frustration of his ambitions for sole control over the Essex lieutenancy, and for the further flourishing of his outward-looking personal foreign policy.
Colonial interests
The experiences of the 1620s deepened Warwick's contacts with the leading men of the puritan party, adding significantly to his maturing association with colonial ventures in the Americas. On 16 November 1618 he had become an original member of the Guinea Company and Amazon River Company. On 9 June 1619 he had additionally become a councillor of the Virginia Company. But Warwick's aggressive exploitation of his stake in the Bermudas to further his privateering interests in the west, as well as incidents such as Captain Elfrith's plundering expedition to the Caribbean in 1618, exposed the Virginia Company's investments to the risk of Spanish retaliation. The leadership of the company consequently split into two factions in 1620, one headed by the earl of Southampton, Lord Cavendish, and Sir Edwin Sandys, the other by Warwick and his kinsman, Sir Nathaniel Rich. Although a duel to settle the dispute between Cavendish and Warwick was narrowly avoided, the company was fatally stricken and its business wound up four years later. The earl had himself long since moved on by then.
In 1620 Warwick had attempted to persuade the original puritan ‘pilgrims’ to settle on the coast of Guiana at the mouth of the Orinoco, in accordance with a plan drawn up long before by Sir Walter Ralegh. When they made landfall more than 1000 miles north, Warwick was instrumental in securing the patent to John Peirce, which he himself signed on 1 June 1621 as a member of the Council for New England, under which Plymouth Colony existed for the first eight years of settlement. It was as president of the council that he signed the second patent, to William Bradford, on 13 January 1630. The patent for the Massachusetts Bay Colony to John Endecott and his associates, dated 19 March 1628, was procured by them through the influence of Warwick also, although it has been said that the enterprising earl looked to relocate the settlement there to the Caribbean as part of his consistent efforts to thrust to the heart of the western Spanish empire. On 19 March 1632 Warwick granted to Lord Saye, Lord Brooke, John Hampden, and others what is known as the old patent of Connecticut, under which the town of Saybrook was established, but the earl's authority for making this grant was disputed. The conflict within Massachusetts which arose in consequence was part of a wider struggle between the ‘merchant interest’, led by Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and the puritan interest led by John Winthrop. Three months after his grant to Saye and the others, Warwick was ousted from the presidency of the council. However, he remained sympathetically disposed to Winthrop and the eventual victors in the struggle for the soul of the American venture.
Apart from turning his attentions to the management of his extensive interests in Bermuda, Warwick now became heavily involved in the colonial adventure with which his name is associated most intimately. On Christmas eve 1629 the redoubtable Captain Elfrith and his companion Captain Chamock landed on the island of Catalina, known thenceforth as Providence, 60 miles off Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. On 4 December 1630 the patent founding the company of adventurers for the island was granted to Warwick, Lord Saye, Lord Brooke, Oliver St John, and a number of other noted English puritans. John Pym was treasurer of the company. Warwick's house in St Bartholomew's was frequently the venue for its meetings. Despite high hopes for the opportunities the new settlement might afford for the exploitation of the region's wealth, the venture became an enormous financial burden on its principal backers. Envisaged by Warwick as a base for his privateering activities against Spanish shipping, the island was far too exposed to survive for long the hostile attentions it inevitably attracted. The first attack came in 1635. Smelling an opportunity, the Dutch West India Company made an offer to buy as early as 1636, but Warwick did not respond favourably until 1639, by which time he had incurred debts of £2430. But Warwick had failed to disengage himself from his expensive commitment by the time the colony was finally overrun in 1641. In 1638 he had purchased the fourth earl of Pembroke's patent for the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and he spent much of the 1640s trying to turn them into a more viable platform from which to attack Spanish interests.
The personal rule
If Warwick was effectively trying to conduct an independent foreign policy by charter company, in parallel with and often at cross-purposes to that of his king during the 1630s, then that was an accurate indication of his standing in the politics of the personal rule. Unhappily, his fortunes at home very largely mirrored those of his enterprises in the Caribbean, perhaps helping to explain his periodic consideration of the possibility of taking up the reins of Providence in person. Warwick was the undoubted leader of the body politic of Essex, one of the greatest landowners and clerical patrons of the county. It has been estimated that between 1603 and 1640 candidates sponsored by Warwick and his father before him were returned in forty-one of sixty-four parliamentary elections. Not surprisingly, in the absence of parliaments, leadership of local opinion fell to the earl himself, although thanks to his repeated failure to monopolize the lieutenancy, shared with the lord treasurer Weston from 1630, and Lord Maynard from 1635, he never quite had it all his own way in his home county.
In 1634 Warwick came into sharp conflict with the king over the revival of the forest laws, which effectively subjected the whole of Essex to the threat of an arbitrary mulct. Being the largest landowner in the county, the earl was deeply concerned in this perceived extension of the prerogative, and at the forest court held for Waltham Forest in October 1634 he opposed Sir John Finch, the attorney-general, on behalf of the gentlemen of Essex. Warwick's brother Henry Rich, first earl of Holland, was warden, chief justice, and justice on eyre for all forests south of the Trent, and he used his authority to adjourn the court for a time, but was ultimately unable to hold off judgment. Almost the whole county was fined, but Holland appears to have secured an otherwise suspiciously low imposition on his brother, who paid no more than £1600 despite owning an estate estimated at 16,000 acres. Warwick's leadership of the opposition to ship money in Essex was hardly any more effective. The county was among the most abject in its refusal until 1637, and those areas under Warwick's control in the van of resistance, prompting quo warranto proceedings in investigation of his right to appoint the bailiffs of certain royal bailiwicks under his control. But thereafter, in light of the successful exchequer proceedings against refusers, the failure of a bold personal appeal to the king made by the earl himself, and the subsequent threat of loss of office, the mood in Essex was radically altered. Warwick demonstrated his leadership credentials by shifting from resilience to damage limitation, petitioning for the tax to be levied at the relatively mild rates settled during the shrievalty of Sir Humphrey Mildmay, rather than the more stringent exactions demanded by the new sheriff, Sir John Lucas.
Recognizing a no-win situation when he saw one, the earl, in his opposition to Laudian church policy, also avoided recklessly picking fights. He was, without any doubt, 'the most visible and consistent supporter of the Puritan cause among the English nobility in the first half of the seventeenth century' (Donagan, 388). But equally beyond question are the limits to his powers to protect and to reward, powers sometimes praised beyond reasonable measure, albeit often by men with reason to be grateful for Warwick's real generosity. At one time or another Jeremiah Burroughes, Thomas Hooker, and Hugh Peter all had reason to thank the earl for his protection, yet all of them also ended up undergoing periods of exile which Warwick was powerless to prevent.
The coming of war
Tellingly, it was also Warwick who afforded protection to Calybute Downing amid the furore which surrounded the preacher's sermon, given before the Honourable Artillery Company in September 1640, justifying armed resistance to authority in defence of religion. By then Warwick and his party had been frustrated in their attempts to place a check on the actions of the king, with the dissolution of the Short Parliament which assembled that spring, during which Warwick and ten other earls had opposed a motion that supply be considered before grievance, and after which Warwick himself was arrested and his papers searched. In September Warwick was one of the twelve peers who petitioned the king, beseeching that he call another parliament. It is also clear that Warwick was not above using means of persuasion considerably less elevated than the king's great council, and he certainly appears to have turned to his own advantage the increasingly violent protests of the numerous and well-organized ‘godly party’ in Essex in 1640, even if he did not actively connive in them. In the Long Parliament, which assembled in November, the earl was, reportedly, fairly prominent by his absence from many of the key debates. But his presence was one of the focal points for ‘middle group’ opposition, organized by John Pym in the Commons, which traced its pedigree back to the parliaments of the late 1620s. It was he who secured Sir John Clotworthy the seat for Maldon in Essex, thus ensuring a place at Westminster for one of the leading opponents of the hated lord deputy of Ireland, Thomas, first earl of Strafford. Then in December it was Warwick who was put in charge of overseeing payment of the Scottish army still occupying Newcastle, a responsibility which involved him in lengthy negotiations with merchants and financiers in the City of London, as well as the channelling of almost £300,000 in 'brotherly assistance' to the invaders. In April 1641 Warwick was admitted to the privy council, and he was also appointed to the council of regency which was set up in advance of the king's departure for Scotland that summer. But his admission to the inner circle of government in the spring certainly failed to curtail his hostility to the earl of Strafford, and it was Warwick who took charge of the bill of attainder in the Lords; while the king was evidently no more sure of him by the time of his return to England late in 1641, placing Warwick, along with Essex, Holland, Saye, and Wharton, on the list of those he wished to call as witnesses for the prosecution against the six members whom he intended to impeach for treason in January 1642.
After the king departed Whitehall, Warwick was one of the most active champions of the parliamentary cause. On 28 February 1642 he was nominated lord lieutenant of Essex and Norfolk, at long last realizing one of his principal ambitions, personally putting the militia ordinance into execution in his home county. On 22 October 1642 he was appointed captain-general of a second army which the parliament intended to raise in addition to that under Essex in order to safeguard London and the south-east while their lord general was occupied fighting the king in the midlands. Much of this new force was to be raised in Essex, indicating the extent of its dependence on Warwick's personal lordship. Notably, however, he himself was keen that it be officered by experienced Scottish captains, incurring some mislike among the Essex men, who probably thought of the second army as more of a local defence force than the offensive instrument which Warwick seems to have seen it as. In the event, with the passing of any immediate threat to the capital to which existing forces could not respond adequately, the planned ‘running army’ was allowed to lapse, and Warwick resigned his commission on 23 November, not wishing to give offence to parliament's supreme commander of land forces for any longer than absolutely necessary.
Naval command
Throughout the first war Warwick took a leading part in the parliamentarian war effort, joining the committee of both kingdoms at its inception in February 1643, and taking command of the army of the eastern association in August 1645. It was, however, as commander of the English navy that Warwick did most service, and his swift action in the early summer of 1642 in securing the fleet for parliament placed the king at a strategic disadvantage from which he never fully recovered. Charles seems to have fallen prey to a criminal complacency in assuming that the seamen would remain loyal to him, obey the orders of his appointed admiral, Sir John Pennington, and repudiate Warwick's treasonable claim to command, based as it was on the dubious authority of a parliamentary ordinance. However, the mood of the mariners was better indicated by those detachments prominent in the protests at Westminster against bishops and popish lords in 1641. Seamen had also provided the five MPs with an armed escort at their return from the City to the House of Commons in January 1642. Moreover, the king failed to take into account the significance of parliament's appropriation of tonnage and poundage revenues to the upkeep of the navy, which had not only constituted as grave an attack on his personal prerogative as the militia ordinance, but had also given the seamen an important interest in seeing parliamentarian designs succeed. Additionally, and no less influentially, Warwick's appointment marked a dramatic reversal in the navy's strategic responsibilities. Many mariners had deeply resented the role they had been expected to perform during the 1630s, when they had escorted, even transported, Spanish troops and gold to the Netherlands. Warwick, on the other hand, had a well-earned reputation as the scourge of Spain, and his antipathy towards his Catholic majesty had not been lessened when, just months earlier, Providence Island had finally succumbed to Spanish attack. Consequently, the Spanish ambassador in London watched developments with mounting anxiety in the months from Warwick's first appointment in the spring of 1642 as commander of the fleet, by commission from the lord high admiral, the earl of Northumberland, through to Warwick's bold assertion of his parliamentary authority on 2 July, when he went aboard the fleet even while Sir John Pennington hesitated to put his own commission in execution. Warwick was welcomed almost unanimously within the fleet as an admiral who might lead the navy back to glory, self-respect, and regular pay, and the few dissenting voices were rapidly silenced.
Under Warwick's command, the ships of the parliamentarian fleet guarded the seas, intercepted vessels bringing supplies from the continent to the king or the Irish rebels, and acted as auxiliaries to the land operations of the earl of Essex. They helped in the defence of Hull against the king, removing its magazine to safe keeping in the Tower of London, and in August 1642 in the capture of Portsmouth. In August 1643 Warwick attempted unsuccessfully to relieve Exeter, but in the following May he did manage to relieve Lyme. When the earl of Northumberland withdrew his support for the prosecution of the war, Warwick was appointed lord high admiral in his stead on 7 December 1643, but, when he failed in his efforts to intercept the queen's departure from Falmouth for France on 14 July 1644, his own loyalty was called in question. Warwick blamed the lack of shipping relative to the range of tasks he was expected to perform, as well as parliament's failure adequately to support the ships he had, a grievance which the earl repeatedly protested during the war. However, it was the unavoidable inconvenience of contrary winds that prevented Warwick from lending assistance to the earl of Essex on his ill-advised march into Cornwall later that summer, which ended with the catastrophe of Lostwithiel.
Parliamentarian politics
Parliament was nevertheless sufficiently confident in its naval commander to insist on Warwick's elevation to a dukedom at one stage in its negotiations with the king. Yet in spite of his relative efficiency and popularity in the performance of his lord high admiralty, Warwick was displaced from his command with the passing of the self-denying ordinance in 1645. He laid down his commission on 9 April, declaring that he resigned it back to parliament with the greatest cheerfulness, and should be ready to serve 'the great cause of religion and liberty' in any capacity (DNB). However, it is doubtful whether this was anything more than diplomatic platitude, adopted to mask political defeat and the frustration of ambition. The clue probably lies in the earl's protestation of devotion to that 'great cause' which was in fact increasingly apt to splinter under the force of a violent struggle for political control. It has been plausibly suggested that the presbyterian faction at Westminster, which was so badly crossed by the passage of the self-denying ordinance and the movement for the remodelling of the army command, would have much preferred to see Warwick stay in control of the navy. Having lost the battle, they renewed the struggle, however. On 19 April the government of the navy was entrusted to a committee of six lords, of whom Warwick was the chief, and twelve commoners. It was clear from the composition of the new body that 'Holles and his followers had won one of their occasional successes', and within a short time Warwick had resumed his grip over the command of the navy (Rowe, Sir Henry Vane, 126). In 1646 he was named among the presbyterian and pro-Scottish party in the House of Lords, and in January 1647 he acted with other moderates in the endeavour to formulate a scheme of settlement which would be acceptable to the king. He was also one of the commissioners employed by parliament in April 1647 to persuade the army to engage for service in Ireland.
However, Warwick seems likely to elude any attempt to pen him firmly on any one side of the political and religious arguments internal to the wartime parliamentarian coalitions. He headed the commission of six lords and twelve commoners appointed on 2 November 1643 to govern the colonies of North America and the Caribbean, and his name is inextricably linked with the foundation of the state of Rhode Island, which began with the incorporation of Providence plantation under the governance of Roger Williams in March 1644. So far as his personal commitments may be discerned in this and the other undertakings of his government of the colonies, it is clear that Warwick consistently used his influence in favour of religious freedom. He intervened with the Massachusetts government on behalf of Samuel Gorton, who called his settlement at Shawomet by the name of Warwick. The earl also issued, on 4 November 1645, a declaration establishing freedom of worship in the Bermudas. More importantly for domestic politics, despite his alignment with the presbyterian leaders early in 1647, he abandoned them at the time of the City putsch in July 1647, retiring into Essex, pledging himself to co-operate with Fairfax in vindicating the independence of parliament, and refusing to obey the summons of the Lords to return to his seat in the house. Clarendon remarked that Warwick and Manchester threw in their lot with the New Model Army in such dramatic fashion because 'they were resolved to have their particular shares in the treaty which they believed the chief officers to have near concluded with the king' (Clarendon, Hist. rebellion, 4.245). By this point Warwick had married for the third time, on 30 March 1646, two months after Susan's death on 16 January 1646. His new wife was Eleanor Radcliffe (née Wortley), dowager countess of Sussex (d. 1667), the widow of the sixth earl and also the widow of Sir Henry Lee, first baronet; she was the daughter of Richard Wortley, of Wortley, Yorkshire, and Elizabeth Boughton.
Revolution
Hopes of a peaceful settlement were dashed late in 1647. Warwick used his influence to hinder the presentation of a royalist presbyterian petition from the county of Essex in the spring of 1648, grounds for the rejection of Clarendon's assertion that Warwick was privy to his brother Holland's engagement for the king, and had even promised to join him when Holland raised the county against parliament. The earl's steward, the historian Arthur Wilson, was, however, put to it to deny the charge of complicity at the time, claiming later that the allegations were easily enough rebuffed in the absence of evidence, for 'though falsehood gives Report a Birth, yett Truth gives it a Buriall' (CUL, Add. MS 33, fol. 101).
However, as the events of 1648 unfolded, some of the ambiguities of Warwick's position appear rather to have deepened than to have diminished. On 27 May 1648 the greater part of the parliamentary fleet in the Downs mutinied against the command of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, appointed in place of the politically suspect William Batten. Two days later parliament reappointed Warwick to the post of lord high admiral, in the hope that his popularity would secure the fidelity of the sailors. He went on board at once and, finding, after some futile negotiations, that it was impossible to win back the crews of the nine revolted ships, devoted himself to getting together a new fleet and discharging disaffected sailors and officers. By the end of August Warwick felt strong enough to offer battle to Prince Charles and the revolted fleet off the mouth of the Medway, but a storm prevented the intended action, and want of provisions obliged Prince Charles to retreat to Holland without fighting. Warwick blockaded the prince's ships in Helvoetsluys in September, remaining off the Dutch coast until the end of November, when the winter weather obliged him to return to England. He had succeeded in regaining four of the prince's fleet, and in preventing the rest from preying upon English trade. But he came under fire nevertheless, his loyalty to parliament called in question in consequence of his apparent reluctance to engage the mutineers in battle, and also because his withdrawal in November freed the royalists to resume their lucrative plunder of English shipping. Moreover, all throughout the crisis there had been persistent rumours about the nature of the contacts back and forth between Warwick and representatives of the prince of Wales. Suspicion also fell on the earl's eldest son, Lord Rich, who went to the Isle of Wight in July 1648 on the pretext of being touched for the king's evil. In the autumn of 1648 Warwick's name was invoked in connection with strong support for the negotiations at Newport in the face of growing Independent misgivings, and it was feared that the earl would too readily support the successful conclusion of a personal treaty. Evident royalist expectations of the lord high admiral's loyalty to the king were seemingly dashed by his acquiescence in the new political realities which pertained after Pride's Purge in December. But Warwick remained an object of suspicion to many of the new rulers at Westminster, although some of them may have approved the useful interventions of Edmund Calamy and John Gauden, two of Warwick's closest spiritual counsellors, as moderating influences in the all-important January 1649 debate about what to do with Charles I.
Quiescence, senescence, decease
The execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords need not necessarily have spelled the end of Warwick's authority. However, it clearly could not survive the abolition of the lord high admiralty on 23 February 1649 and the assumption of its powers by the new executive council of state. Neither was there much prospect for the continuation of his personal influence given the political preponderance at Westminster of an Independent faction with more sympathy for Spanish interests than their presbyterian colleagues had ever had. But, with long-time associates such as Sir William Masham firmly ensconced at the helm of the new regime, Warwick is unlikely to have lost touch with political power entirely. Nevertheless, it was clearly not until the fall of the Rump, and then Barebone's parliaments, the ending of the war with the Dutch, and the freezing of hitherto cordial relations with Spain that Warwick resumed any significant interest in affairs of state. Cromwell's western design was justified at least in part by explicit reference to the Spanish despoliation of Providence Island, at which the earl's hopes can reasonably be expected to have been raised. It is probably no coincidence that, at the lord protector's second inauguration on 26 June 1657, Warwick personally bore the sword of state and helped to invest Cromwell in his robe of purple velvet. Although the earl declined to sit in the other house, the marriage on 14 November 1657 of Cromwell's daughter Frances with Warwick's grandson and heir Robert Rich clearly indicated the level of respect the two men had for each other. Robert Rich died on 16 February 1658. In his touching answer to the protector's letter of condolence, Warwick ended by congratulating Cromwell on his 'prudent, heroic and honourable management' of public affairs (DNB). Warwick himself died, apparently much lamented by his lord protector, at Warwick House on 19 April 1658, and was buried at Felsted, Essex, on 1 May. He was survived by his wife.
Assessment
Clarendon's view that Warwick was a jovial hypocrite is informed largely by the dyspepsia induced in the lord chancellor whenever he contemplated the lives and actions of peers of the realm who had had a hand in the rebellion against their king. There is every indication of sincerity in Warwick's godly carriage, while his convivial good humour was evidently much cherished by those zealous Calvinists with an ear for disputation upon whom he placed especial trust. His patronage of the ‘puritan’ interest in England during the 1620s and 1630s did not create a uniformly ‘puritan’ grouping, however, and indeed even among those of his clients who can be identified as rigid Calvinists there were sown the seeds of faction which emerged in the 1640s, condemning Calvinist orthodoxy to ultimate defeat and long-drawn-out decline. The earl's lasting legacy must be sought instead in the American colonies, where his influence had equally complex and unpredictable, yet eminently more fruitful, long-term consequences. |