WEST, Richard (1636-74), of Roundhurst, Lurgashall, Suss.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1660-1690, ed. B.D. Henning, 1983
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

bap. 17 Jan. 1636, 1st s. of Richard West (d.1642), yeoman, of Haslemere, Surr. by Alice Sturt. m. 29 Sept. 1653, Eleanor (d. 21 Aug. 1699), da. of Caleb Westbrooke of Witley, Surr., 1s. 3da. suc. gdfa. 1653.1

Offices Held

Commr. for assessment, Surr. Aug. 1660-d.

Biography

West came from a Sussex family, but his grandfather, a clothier, had settled by 1609 in Haslemere, where he was frequently in trouble with the court leet for illegal and extortionate milling. West succeeded to considerable property in Haslemere, as well as to Roundhurst, some two miles distant, where he lived. He was returned for the borough with his brother-in-law John Westbrooke at the general election of 1660, defeating two royalist candidates. Lord Wharton marked him as a friend, but he was an inactive Member of the Convention. He may have been appointed to the committees to enable discharged soldiers to exercise trades and to inquire into defects in the collection of the poll-tax. At the general election of 1661 he managed the campaign of Thomas Morrice, whom he is said to have passed off to the electors as a Privy Councillor. His political activity had earned him the enmity of the local j.p., James Gresham. On 21 Mar. 1662 it was alleged at quarter sessions that West ‘with other malefactors unknown, in warlike array and armed with swords, staves and knives, broke into the dwelling house of Lawrence Sturt of Haslemere, yeoman, and carried off a chest’; but this is doubtless a highly coloured version of a family dispute. Later in the same year a commission for charitable uses, on which Gresham sat, ordered him to deliver up the Haslemere charter to the lord of the manor, Sir William More. He died on 27 Feb. 1674, aged 38, and was buried at Haslemere under a Latin inscription. Evidently a conformist, he named his kinsman, the rector of the parish, and his friend, a nonconformist minister, as his executors. Nothing further has been discovered about the family.2

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Author: M. W. Helms

Notes

  • 1. Haslemere (Surr. Par. Reg. Soc. viii), 14, 89, 91; Godalming (Surr. Par. Reg. Soc. ii), 185.
  • 2. Swanton and Woods, Bygone Haslemere, 160, 166-8, 177-80, 340; Q. Sess. Recs. (Surr. Recs. vii), 210-11.