Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex

History of Parliament Online - CRANFIELD, Sir Lionel (1575-1645), of Wood Street, London; later of Chelsea, Mdx.; Copt Hall, Essex and Milcote, Warws.

[ca.1628] Copy of the Covenant sealed by the Earl of Middlesex (Lionel Cranfield) at the sealing of his pardon. The Warrant for his Pardon and release of all debts; and Sign Manual of Charles 1 for his Pardon; and Robert Heath's (the Attorney General) warrant to deliver up the above-mentioned Covenant.

First Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts 1874, p.34 of the text

Discussion on the subject of the Lionel Cranfield Family Genealogy

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Family and Education bap. 13 Mar. 1575, 2nd s. of Thomas Cranfield (d.1595), Mercer of Basinghall Street, London, and Martha, da. of Vincent Randall, Mercer of London.1 educ. St. Paul’s; appr. London 1590; factor (Germany) 1594-7; M. Temple 1618.2 m. (1) 1599 (with £500), Elizabeth (d. July 1617), da. of Richard Shepherd, Grocer, of St. Bartholomew’s Lane, London, 3da. (1 d.v.p.);3 (2) 30 Dec. 1620, Anne (d. 3 Feb. 1670), da. of James Brett of Hoby, Leics., 2s. (1 d.v.p.) 2da. (1 d.v.p.).4 kntd. 4 July 1613;5 cr. Bar. Cranfield 9 July 1621, earl of Middlesex 16 Sept. 1622.6 d. 5 Aug. 1645.7 sig. Lionel Cranfield.

Offices Held

Freeman, Mercers’ Co. 1597, liveryman 1604;8 Merchant Adventurer 1601;9 cttee. Virg. Co. 1612, member, Council of Virg. by 1620-3.10

Recvr. (Queen’s jointure lands) Som. and Dorset 1604-at least 1607, (Crown estates) 1605-13;11 freeman, Hythe, Kent 1614, Southampton, Hants 1623;12 j.p. Herts. 1614-24, London and Westminster 1618-24;13 trustee, Gresham Coll. London 1615-17;14 commr. new bldgs., London 1615, 1618, oyer and terminer, London and Mdx. 1618, the Marshalsea 1623, sewers, Herts. 1617, Gt. Fens 1623, charitable uses, Herts. 1621, subsidy, Herts., London, Mdx. and king’s Household 1621-2, Mdx. 1624, disafforestation, Crown forests 1622, fen drainage, Gt. Fens 1622.15

Farmer, lics. to export unwrought cloth 1604-6, currant impositions 1604-10, Great Farm of customs, 1604-11, wine licences 1605-14, tobacco duties 1606-16, starch duties 1607-10, logwood duties 1608-13, sugar duties 1621-5;16 commr. to license starchmakers 1607-8;17 contractor, sale of Crown lands 1607-12;18 surveyor-gen. of customs 1613-19;19 recvr. impositions on alien merchants 1613-16, lics. for sale of wine in taverns 1614-24.20

Farmer, customs [I] 1613-18;21 v.-adm. Munster [I] 1614.22

Master of Requests (extraordinary) 1616, ordinary 1618-?19;23 master, gt. wardrobe 1618-21;24 master, Ct. of Wards 1619-24;25 commr. navy 1619, Treasury 1620, ld. treas. 1621-4;26 PC 1620-5.27

Commr. reform of king’s Household 1617, Navy 1618-23, Crown debts 1619, logwood imports 1620, export of ordnance 1620, Treasury 1620, aliens 1621-2, banishment of Jesuits and seminary priests 1622, starch manufacture 1622, purveyance compositions 1622, defective titles 1622-3, piracy 1623, buildings 1624.28

Biography Cranfield’s translation of economic success into a political career was unique in early Stuart England. Of his contemporaries among the great moneyed men, Paul Bayning never sat in the Commons, Baptist Hicks* entered the Commons only at the end of his life, and the parliamentary activity of Arthur Ingram* was always secondary to his business interests. Only Cranfield sought to bring business efficiency into government, and his failure reveals much about Jacobean politics.

Cranfield’s father left him £320, which he increased to £2,500 in two years, chiefly by trading in northern kerseys; by 1601 he was said ‘to draw as great a trade as an alderman’. He earned a deserved reputation for sharp dealing and penny-pinching, but his first marriage, to his former master’s daughter, was apparently based on mutual ‘good liking’. His brother-in-law John Suckling*, secretary to lord treasurer Dorset (Thomas Sackville†), helped him to secure the receivership of Somerset and Dorset for £800, which yielded around £300 a year. With Ingram, he speculated in pepper imports and ordnance exports; ‘one rule I desire may be observed between you and me’, Cranfield urged him in 1607, ‘is that neither of us seek to advance our estates by the other’s loss, but that we may join together faithfully to raise our fortunes by such casualties as this stirring age shall afford’.29

Ingram also introduced Cranfield to the lucrative field of revenue farming, and thereby to his Court patrons, the Howard family. Cranfield took a share of the 1st earl of Suffolk’s currant farm in November 1604, and two months later became a partner in the patent for licensing taverns and the sale of wine held by Suffolk’s kinsman, lord admiral Nottingham (Charles Howard†). Following the failure of a joint venture with Sir Edward Greville* for the domestic manufacture of starch, he sublet the farm of starch import duties from Henry Howard, earl of Northampton. He also bought a small share in the great farm of the Customs and joined two of the leading syndicates for the sale of Crown lands, acquiring substantial parcels for himself. His friend and biographer Bishop Goodman recorded that the land sale contractors met in his house in Wood Street. He enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, and was a member of the brilliant literary circle - including Ben Jonson, Richard Martin* and Christopher Brooke* - which convened at the Mitre tavern in Fleet Street.30

In 1612 Cranfield advised Northampton, newly appointed to the Treasury commission, on how to increase the rental on the Great Farm, and the earl brought him into central government as ‘a special friend of mine own, more witty and of better judgment in those mysteries than any of those that in respect of their trade into those countries were thought most fit to undertake the search’. Cranfield subsequently recommended the creation of the post of surveyor-general of customs and a fresh imposition on alien merchants, both of which he then secured for himself, while he also received a knighthood and a pension of £150.

As lord warden of the Cinque Ports, Northampton secured Cranfield’s return for Hythe in 1614. Cranfield was named to the committee for the expiring laws continuance bill (8 Apr.), but does not appear to have had a positive legislative agenda during the session. However, it was only a matter of time before his own interests came under scrutiny. On 6 May Sir John Sammes maintained that the Crown might save £15,000 p.a. ‘by cutting off receivers’, and added that there was ‘a surveyor appointed of the custom who hath £1,000 from the king’. Cranfield responded that there was ‘no office of so great charge and with so little profit, and with so great ease to the subject’, and proposed a general inquiry into officers’ fees, but was countered by the Bristol merchant Thomas James, who argued that the farming of the customs removed the need for a bureaucracy costing £8,000 p.a., and attacked the intrusive powers granted under Cranfield’s patent. Cranfield defended his receivership, but agreed to deliver up for inspection the patent for the surveyorship of the customs, insisting ‘if there could be found anything in it to the hurt of the subject, he would not only be content to give it up, but that the House should punish him also’. He produced it the next day, and the newsletter writer John Chamberlain noted ‘some beagles have Sir Lionel Cranfield in chase’, but his lengthy defence of his office was not needed, as no report was made before the end of the session.31

Northampton died nine days after the dissolution, but Cranfield still had friends at Court, for on being elected sheriff of London in July 1614 the king offered to pay his fine for refusal of the office rather than lose his services. Cranfield’s attack on the shortcomings of Alderman Cockayne’s monopoly of the cloth trade cannot have pleased the latter’s patron, lord treasurer Suffolk, who vetoed his attempt to revive the long dormant office of under-treasurer of the Exchequer in the autumn of 1616; but Cranfield was still able to secure his first Court post as an extraordinary master of Requests.32 He quickly identified the rising favourite, George Villiers, earl of Buckingham, as a potential patron, yielding the profits of his farm of the impositions on alien merchants to the latter in 1616. Even before Suffolk fell in July 1618, Cranfield was ‘labouring daily from morning till night in that great business of the Household’, and while Villiers, by then a marquess, rejected his offer to purchase the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster on the death of (Sir) John Dackombe* in January 1618, this was only because he had been selected to succeed the notoriously corrupt Scottish courtier Lord Hay as master of the Great Wardrobe. Cranfield ran the office on a fixed budget of £20,000 p.a., and was allowed to keep any sum saved on that allocation, which helped to increase his own income to £13,000 a year. Master of the Wards in 1619 and a privy councillor from February 1620, he cemented his place in Buckingham’s affinity by marrying the favourite’s first cousin, Anne Brett, although only after he was guaranteed a life interest in his savings on the wardrobe account in lieu of a dowry. The profits of office served to purchase Sir Thomas More’s† old house in Chelsea, a more suitable address for a minister than Wood Street.33

Cranfield joined the Treasury commission early in 1620, and having already established his own reformist credentials in the Household, he was probably dismayed at the appointment of the lawyer Sir Henry Montagu* as lord treasurer at the end of the year. With another Parliament in the offing, he was nominated for a seat at St. Ives, Cornwall by Prince Charles’s Council, but in the end Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, a debtor and friend, secured his return at Arundel. Cranfield exhibited considerable leadership skills in the Commons, and where the king or Buckingham set a clear agenda he usually followed; but he was prepared to see corruption exposed, particularly where such revelations embarrassed potential rivals. However, when the House failed to follow his lead, he showed considerable impatience. He was, in the words of his modern biographer, ‘essentially an administrator, and he had an administrator’s authoritarian temperament’. Both his zeal for practical reform and his personal ambition brought him into uncertain alliance with his fellow privy councillor Sir Edward Coke*.34

The session opened with a debate about the Commons’ privilege of free speech, which many considered had been breached by the detention and interrogation of Members after the dissolution of 1614. This disrupted secretary of state Sir George Calvert’s call for an immediate grant of supply, and despite the concerted support he received from other privy councillors, nothing was resolved. Towards the end of this debate, Cranfield urged that a proposed petition for free speech be dropped because the king had already made the traditional grant. To sweeten the House, he also endorsed Sir Robert Phelips’s motion for a petition for stricter execution of the recusancy laws, and conceded ‘that the supply and grievances might go together hand in hand’. The drafting of a free speech petition was entrusted to a committee, which failed to agree on a text, whereupon the matter was referred back to the House on 12 February. Calvert and Sir Edward Coke swiftly attempted to stifle the petition, but a groundswell of opinion developed for both a petition and a bill for free speech, despite Cranfield’s efforts to the contrary: ‘the question, what free speech is. If that be to speak home to any grievance, they may assure themselves of it’.35 The king furnished an acceptable compromise on 15 Feb., whereupon Christopher Brooke urged a vote of two subsidies. He was ably supported by ministers and courtiers, with Phelips being one of the few dissident voices, but the latter was eventually silenced by Coke, which allowed Cranfield to observe, ‘I will not speak for money, I see everyone is so free as that no spur need be added’. He reassured John Carvile that the king would be happy to allow redress of grievances after supply was voted, promised that impositions would not be raised so far as to hinder trade, and exhorted Members to commence proceedings against grievous monopoly patents.36

The furtherance of attacks on corruption was a consistent theme of Cranfield’s speeches during the opening weeks of the session: as early as 8 Feb., when Henry Lovell* complained about threats from an official of the Court of Wards, Cranfield was quick to promise that if any wrong had been done ‘by himself or by his procurement, he was ready to make satisfaction in his person or estate or both’. He also urged ‘that the corruption of other courts of justice might likewise be considered of’, and a standing committee was duly established for this purpose.37 On 21 Feb. he moved that the committees for courts of justice, trade and patents should each have a set day for their meeting, and it may not have been a coincidence that on the same afternoon, the committee for courts of justice examined the patent for the licensing of alehouses, which was run by two of the lord treasurer’s servants. The report delivered to the House the following morning implicated Buckingham’s brother Christopher Villiers and the Scots courtier Patrick Maule as promoters of this patent, whereupon several courtiers urged that they be exonerated. Coke, however, opposed this, and was supported by Cranfield: ‘I see not how you can exempt any except you mean to overthrow the whole business’.38 He was similarly unsympathetic towards the backers of another of the favourite’s kinsmen, the inns patentee (Sir) Giles Mompesson*: ‘here is a projector and a patent. He had had no patent if the referees had done their duty’; although he also acknowledged, ‘this is other men’s case now, it may be mine tomorrow. If I have at any time misled the king, I had rather submit myself to the mercy of the king than that any dishonour should come to the king or hurt the commonwealth’. He was keen that the referees should be included in the impeachment charges referred to the Lords - ‘if the referees be not spoken of, all the fault of the grant would lie on the king’ - but there were pragmatic limits to his zeal: on 5 Mar., when Sir Edward Villiers* was named as one of the promoters of Mompesson’s gold and silver thread patent, Cranfield assured the House that ‘Sir Edward Villiers had no countenance from the marquess in it’.39

If the more covetous members of the Villiers clan were one of Cranfield’s main targets, another was lord chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*). On 28 Feb. Cranfield referred a jurisdictional dispute between the Wards and Chancery to the committee for courts of justice, but his attacks on the conduct of Chancery officials led to a clash with John Finch II. At the committee the following day, he responded with a lengthy catalogue of the shortcomings of Chancery procedure: ‘(1) protection of sureties, (2) bills of conformity, (3) discharges of executions by orders, (4) exorbitant fees, (5) money for days of hearing, (6) decrees upon references, (7) chamber-orders, (8) undue finding of offices’.40 Two weeks later, with Phelips now in the chair of the courts of justice committee, Cranfield, Brooke and Coke launched a well-orchestrated attack on one of these grievances. This concerned bills of conformity, which were injunctions issued by Chancery to prevent the seizure of a defaulting debtor’s estate. Cranfield had already broached this subject with the king, who was, he said, so angry ‘as I never saw him since I served him’, and had offered to issue a Proclamation against them. The Commons, however, considered legislation essential; Cranfield was named the drafting committee on 20 Mar. (as a privy councillor), was instructed to thank the king and, if he deemed it appropriate, to ask him to release those imprisoned over this issue.41 By this stage, bribery charges were piling up against the chancellor, who was impeached after Easter. During the recess, further corruption charges were levelled against the civil lawyer Sir John Bennet*, judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, which Cranfield furthered by offering the investigating committee lodgings in the Court of Wards.42

For all his interest in judicial corruption, Cranfield later recalled that he had ‘proposed to have made [trade] his masterpiece, for he hath been bred in it’. He chaired the committee for trade, an important position during an economic depression, and in his first report on 13 Mar. he listed 21 ‘heads of those things which were thought to be the causes of the want of money’, which broadly comprised ‘the want of importation of money ... the exportation of money ... the consumption of coin and bullion within the land’. He successfully moved for the drafting of a bill to prevent the export of ordnance (30 Apr.), but referred the bill to prohibit the import of Irish cattle back to committee, promising to furnish Irish trade figures at the autumn sitting (18 May). On 30 Apr., when Sir Henry Poole offered a bill for wool and cloth, which was not read, he complained, ‘there are 75 laws for clothing; let us make one good law out of them’.43

Cranfield’s failure to develop solutions to the trade depression owed something to the fact that he became embroiled in a protracted debate over the Virginia Company, of which he was a member. As an erstwhile farmer of tobacco customs, Cranfield was aware of the profits to be made from rapidly growing imports of Spanish and Virginian tobacco, by which means he hoped to increase Crown revenues. However, the means by which he proposed to achieve this brought him into conflict with two of the Company’s leading lights, the 3rd earl of Southampton and Sir Edwin Sandys*. On 24 Feb. Cranfield supported Sir Hamon L’Estrange’s attack on the Virginia lottery, the Company’s other significant source of income: ‘I am of the Company of Virginia, but I hear these lotteries do beggar every country they come into. Let Virginia lose rather than England’. Sir Dudley Digges wanted to ask Southampton to suspend the lottery, but Cranfield moved ‘to send to the king to stop it’, and was himself appointed to the task; two days later he reported James’s assent. Having been deprived of this revenue, the Company sought a ban on the import of Spanish tobacco, which would benefit the Virginia planters, but reduce the overall volume of the trade. Cranfield warned that a ban might breach the 1604 peace treaty and provoke a wider trade dispute, but, perceiving that Members were unmoved by this argument, he declared that ‘to clear all questions and doubts, he would have tobacco banished altogether out of this kingdom, as a thing pernicious to the state and health of the people’. Such an initiative would have delighted the king, but it found little favour in the Commons, and as it would have eradicated a rapidly growing source of customs revenue, it is unlikely that Cranfield intended his motion to be taken seriously.44

Over the Easter recess James issued a Proclamation striking down several of the most odious monopolies condemned in Parliament, but there was general agreement that this should be confirmed by statute. Cranfield, sent to thank James for his initiative (21 Apr.), was harangued about the Commons’ presumption in continuing its investigation into the referees of the patents, but when he reported this three days later, the House responded with a resolution to begin interrogating the lord treasurer’s servants about the alehouse patent.45 Cranfield was unlikely to have found the prospect of a vacancy at the Exchequer disagreeable, but he was prompted to action when other developments threatened Buckingham’s interests more directly. An investigation into Irish affairs commenced on 26 Apr., but four days later Cranfield delivered a peremptory royal command to desist: ‘the king wisheth to have this work left wholly to himself, that he may make it his masterpiece’. Members grudgingly obliged, but there was uproar two days later when Sir Edward Villiers, beneficiary of several of the patents condemned before Easter, finally took his seat in the Commons. Cranfield, conveniently forgetting his earlier hostility to the gold and silver thread patent, now observed that Villiers merely had a pension from the profits of this monopoly, and insisted he was ‘here charged with no other fault’.46

Cranfield was similarly out of tune with the developing sympathies of the House over proceedings against the Catholic barrister Edward Floyd, who was discovered to have insulted the king’s daughter upon learning of the Protestant defeat at the battle of the White Mountain. His attendance at a meeting of the Privy Council may have caused him to miss the fevered debate of 1 May about the punishments to be inflicted upon Floyd, but when the king questioned the Commons’ claim to jurisdiction over this case the following morning, he was one of those who persuaded the House to consult James before proceeding any further. The Lords were also affronted at the Commons’ claim to pass judgment without reference to the Upper House, and it was presumably to avoid a jurisdictional quarrel like that which had hamstrung the Addled Parliament that Cranfield and other ministers consistently urged the House to refer Floyd’s punishment to the king rather than the Lords. Feelings ran high over this dispute: Cranfield threatened to call Sir Edwin Sandys to account for misrepresenting one of his speeches; and he intervened when Coke exceeded his instructions at the conference of 11 May. Coke thereupon complained that ‘there was the spirit of contradiction among our committee, pointing at him; and adding withal, that he who should seek to sow sedition in the House was not worthy of his head’.47

On 28 May the sudden announcement of an adjournment in seven days’ time dismayed the House, when Cranfield vainly urged that what time was left should be devoted to Chancery reform. At a conference the next day it became clear that James’s mind was made up, and on 30 May, when a motion was made to send a tactless message to the Lords, Cranfield protested that ‘he was in a great strait between his duty to the king, and his duty to this House’. He was quickly called to account, and despite the intervention of the courtiers Sir Henry Vane and Sir Humphrey May, he was not allowed to complete his speech. That night Ingram wrote entreating him to be in his place next day, but begging him ‘to be careful that if you speak, it may be with such moderation as it may give no cause of exception’.48 On the morrow, Sir Edward Cecil complained of the ‘ill offices’ some councillors performed in providing the king with exaggerated reports of the Commons’ debates, but Cranfield did not rise to the bait, offering reassurances that any bills offered for the royal assent would be passed, and pledging his word that there would be another meeting in the autumn. His temper had frayed somewhat by the afternoon, and when the Devon merchant John Delbridge stated that there was no point in seeking to pass bills in so short a time and cast aspersions upon the lack of progress on the trade committee, Cranfield condemned his ignorance and warned that ‘if any man have a mind to discontent the king and country and to hinder all good, he may further us to this discontented departure’. Unable to resist a parting shot at Southampton and Sandys, he growled, ‘I think many wise men in the House know how and by whom we are now interrupted and diverted’. Digges and Sandys promptly sprang to Delbridge’s defence, whereupon Cranfield turned on Sandys, for which he was chided by Cecil. ‘I will take no exception for my part’, Cranfield replied, ‘but pass by all and desire the general good’.49 Tempers cooled as it became clear that a dissolution was not imminent; nevertheless, on 2 June, when Sandys was exonerated from any blame for words spoken in earlier debates, solicitor general Heath moved to have Cranfield cleared by a similar vote; and Cecil later sent Cranfield an apology for any offence given. Cranfield’s final speech on 4 June was more conciliatory: he promised a relaxation of the rules on cloth exports from the outports, and offered to allow Delbridge to examine the customs books for the last seven years.50

Cranfield’s rising influence is illustrated by a memorandum he wrote to the king shortly after the adjournment, in which he outlined Southampton’s attempts to wreck the session and urged that the earl be banished to his country estates; this probably influenced James’s decision to arrest Southampton and Sandys on 15 June.51 Cranfield, meanwhile, was raised to the peerage in July 1621, and appointed lord treasurer in September. In this office he trebled the value of his landed estate to over £100,000, and enjoyed an annual income of at least £25,000. But his zeal for retrenchment, the roughness of his manners and his opposition to war with Spain produced a rift with Buckingham. An inept attempt to replace the favourite with his own brother-in-law Arthur Brett completed the estrangement, and in 1624 he was impeached for corruption. He was removed from office, fined £25,000 and was compelled to surrender Chelsea to Buckingham. With an income reduced to £5,000, he suffered severely in the Civil War, his principal estates in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire lying ‘most unfortunately between the two armies’. He died on 5 Aug. 1645 at the town house of his friend the 4th earl of Dorset (Sir Edward Sackville*). In his will of 1642 he had asked to be buried in Gloucester Cathedral, where his friend Goodman was bishop, but in the event he was interred in Westminster Abbey. His elder son, who had represented Liverpool in the Short Parliament, succeeded to the earldom.52

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629 Authors: Alan Davidson / Simon Healy Notes 1. M. Prestwich, Cranfield, 49; HMC Sackville i. 16. 2. Ibid. 50; M. Temple Admiss. 3. Prestwich, 50-1. 4. Ibid. 261-2. 5. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 153. 6. CP. 7. Prestwich, 583. 8. Ibid. 50. 9. HMC Sackville i. 22, 49; Prestwich, 50. 10. Recs. Virg. Co. ed. S.M. Kingsbury, i. 372. 11. SC6/Jas.I/1646-8; CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 209; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OEr2, 22. 12. G. Wilks, Barons of Cinque Ports, 69; HMC 11th Rep. iii. 23. 13. C231/4, f. 60; C181/2, f. 331v. 14. Mercers’ Hall, London, Gresham Repertories I, pp. 209, 222. 15. APC, 1615-16, p. 122; C181/2, ff. 297v, 303, 305; 181/3, ff. 35v, 49, 97; CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 336, 374; C66/2165 (dorse); 66/2282/1 (dorse); C212/22/20-2; C93/9/10; Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 564. 16. Prestwich, 67-9, 244, 376, 475-6; HMC Sackville, i. 68-9, 87-96, 101, 118-21, 130-1, 173; A.F. Upton, Sir Arthur Ingram, 7-8; CD 1621, vii. 438-41. 17. CD 1621, vii. 438-9. 18. Salop RO, 5586/10/6/1; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OEr38; Upton, 24-7. 19. Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OEc1, 29, 40; Prestwich, 120-1. 20. E351/765-72; Prestwich, 196-7; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 259; 1623-5, p. 40; E101/526/27. 21. Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/Hi1; Prestwich, 126-8; Upton, 85-8. 22. Prestwich, 128. 23. Chamberlain Letters, ii. 131, 204. 24. E351/620; Prestwich, 227, 262; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OW3. 25. WARD 9/414. 26. Chamberlain Letters, ii. 204, 609; APC, 1618-19, p. 174. 27. APC, 1619-21, p. 102; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 609. 28. CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 89, 168; APC, 1619-21, p. 316; T. Rymer, Foedera, vii. pt. 3, pp. 210, 236, 239, 247; pt. 4, pp. 19, 46, 77, 96. 29. Prestwich, 49-53, 63; Upton, 7-11, 17. 30. HMC Sackville, i. 68-9, 87-100; Salop RO, 5586/10/6/1; Prestwich, 60-70; Upton. 11-14, 19-21, 24-7; Ct. of Jas. I ed. G. Goodman, i. 304. 31. L.L. Peck, Northampton, 122, 144; Prestwich, 119-21, 155-7; Procs. 1614 (Commons), 35, 165, 168, 174; Chamberlain Letters, i. 528. 32. Prestwich, 157, 172-6; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 39; Fortescue Pprs. ed. S.R. Gardiner (Cam. Soc. n.s. i), 41-42. 33. Prestwich, 194-7, 227-41, 260-2, 266-7; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 168; G.E. Aylmer, ‘Attempts at administrative reform, 1625-40’ EHR, lxxii. 253. 34. DCO, Letters and Warrants, 1620-1, f. 39v; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OE23; Prestwich, 324. 35. CD 1621, ii. 22; CJ, i. 517-18; R. Zaller, Parl. of 1621, pp. 37-41. 36. CD 1621, ii. 89-90; Nicholas, Procs. 1621, i. 48-9; Zaller, 47-9. 37. CD 1621, ii. 44; CJ, i. 514b; Zaller, 40, 51-4. 38. CD 1621, ii. 123; CJ, i. 530b; Nicholas, i. 75; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 345. 39. CJ, i. 530b; CD 1621, ii. 147, 168; Nicholas, i. 137; Zaller, 62-4. 40. CD 1621, iv. 117; vi. 272-3, 292-5; Zaller, 61, 91-2. 41. CD 1621, ii. 221-2; v. 55; CJ, i. 564b, 571b. 42. CD 1621, iii. 16-17; Zaller, 97-9. 43. CD 1621, ii. 212-13; iii. 119; CJ, i. 597a, 625b. 44. Nicholas, i. 133, 271; CD 1621, ii. 135; v. 73-74; vii. 453-7; CJ, i. 528b, 552a. 45. CJ, i. 586, 589-90; Nicholas, i. 308-9; CD 1621, ii. 318-19; C. Russell, PEP, 109-11. 46. Nicholas, i. 356-9; ii. 3-4; CJ, i. 597-8; Zaller, 118-19, 124-5. 47. CJ, i. 603-8, 610b; Nicholas, ii. 5, 21, 63; CD 1621, iii. 144, 173-5, 206, 239-40; APC, 1619-21, p. 379; Zaller, 104-115; Russell, 117-18. 48. CJ, i. 629a; CD 1621, iii. 327; Nicholas, ii. 121-2; Prestwich, 318- 20. 49. Nicholas, ii. 129-30, 140; CD 1621, ii. 417; iii. 358, 363, 373-6; iv. 399. 50. CJ, i. 636a, 639a; Cent. Kent. Stud. U269/1/OE191; Nicholas, ii. 167-8. 51. CD 1621. vii. 615-17; SIR EDWIN SANDYS. 52. R. Ruigh, Parl. of 1624, pp. 314, 329-30; Russell, 200-1; PROB 11/194, f. 127

Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex (1575 – 6 August 1645) was a successful merchant in London, England.

More...Wiki - Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex

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Lionel Cranfield was the second son of Thomas Cranfield a mercer or merchant of London and his wife Martha Randall(Randill). He was baptised 13 March 1575 and was educated at St. Pauls School . He was apprenticed to a merchant in silks and cloth and in this trade he made a vast fortune. In 1605 he entered Royal (government service) and was knighted in 1613, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Cranfield on 9th July 1621. He became Earl of Middlesex on 16 September 1622. He was impeached at the instigation of the Duke of Buckingham whose extravagance he opposed, but he was pardoned in 1625. His first wife Elizabeth Shepard died in 1617 He held the following position's; Receiver of Customs for Dorset and Somerset 1606, Lieutenant of Dover Castle 1613, Surveyor General of Customs 1613-1624, Member of Parliament for Hyde1614 and for Arundel 1620-21, Master of Request's 1616, Keeper of the Great Wardrobe 1618-22, Master of the Court of Wards and Liveries 1619-24, Chief Commissioner of the Navy 1619-24, Privy Counsellor 1619-20, a Commissioner of the Treasury 1620, Lord High Treasurer of England1621-1624, in 1624 he was suspended from office on charges of mismanagement of his various offices, found guilty, fined and imprisoned in the Tower of London for two weeks. Lionel Cranfield 1st Earl of Middlesex died 6th August 1645 at Dorset House, Salisbury Court, London he was buried in St. Benedicts Chapel Westminster Abbey his burial place and that of his second wife Anne is a large tomb with white marble effigies and heraldic achievements at each end. The Latin inscription translated reads;

Sacred to the memory of Lionel Lord Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, who by that discerning Prince James I, being called to attend the Court, was for his excellent parts and wit, bountifully rewarded both with honours and profit; Master of the Requests, Wardrobe, President of the Court of Wards and Privy Counsellor. The new and illustrious, as well as difficult province of Lord Treasurer of England he filled, How indefatigably he underwent, His titles of Knight, Baron Cranfield and lastly Earl of Middlesex, with various other honours , abundantly testify. From hence envy swelling, all its efforts were made to raise storms against him. Whilst he briskly standing on his guard, encouraged by his assurance of innocence, was shamefully tossed about; and barely escaping shipwreck, in a composed winter cast anchor, and spent and finished his life in a retired leisure; Here, lying concealed, being whist wearied out first, and wasted afterwards, this pilot was roused up to undertake a safer voyage, and made the port of heaven. He died 6 th August 1645, about seventy years of age , he had two wives, both of which brought him issue. Elizabeth the first , bore him daughters, Elizabeth now Countess of Mulgrave, Martha, Countess of Monmouth and Mary who died before marriage. His other wife surviving, Anne now Countess of Middlesex, and who, when God shall please, is to be buried in this tomb on which is placed her effigy, bore him James, heir to the honour and Earl of Middlesex, Lionel and Edward now living; and of the other sex Frances Lady Buckhurst and Susanna who died an infant 25 June 1647