WARING, Edmund (c.1638-87), of Owlbury, Lydham, Salop and Llandinam, Mont.

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

Family and Education

b. c.1638, 1st s. of Walter Waring of Owlbury by Jane, da. and h. of Humphrey Robinson of The Lynches, Bishop’s Castle, Salop. educ. L. Inn 1656. m. by 1667, Mary (d.1676), 2s. suc. fa. 1658.1

Offices Held

J.p. Salop July 1660-d., Mont. 1662-d.; commr. for assessment, Salop and Mont. Aug. 1660-80; cornet of vol. horse, Salop c. Oct. 1660, farmer of excise Sept. 1660-2; freeman, Ludlow 1662; commr. for corporations, Salop 1662-3, recusants 1675; common councilman, Bishop’s Castle by 1679.2

Commr. for wine duties 1670-4.3

Biography

Waring’s grandfather, a Staffordshire lawyer, acquired Owlbury and Llandinam by marriage, together with the rectory and advowson of Bishop’s Castle. His father, a royalist commissioner of array in the Civil War, compounded in 1646 with a fine of £511. Waring was returned for Bishop’s Castle, two miles from his home, in 1660, and marked as a friend by Lord Wharton. He was named only to the committees to provide an establishment for Dunkirk and to support the drainage of the fens; but he must have given satisfaction to the Court, for he was awarded the county excise farm, and included in the Montgomeryshire list of the projected order of the Royal Oak, with an income of £700 p.a. When he was named to the assessment commission, the Lords were careful to insert his address to distinguish him from his republican cousin, who had sat on the high court of justice and represented Bridgnorth under the Protectorate.4

Waring was re-elected in 1661 together with William Oakeley, who married his sister two years later. Another sister married (Sir) Job Charlton, thereby strengthening his interest at Court. But he was not active in the Cavalier Parliament, in which he was appointed to only 19 committees, of which the most important was for the conventicles bill on 8 Dec. 1670. As commissioner for the wine duties, he was said to occupy a place ‘of trouble and difficulty, rather than of profit and honour’. He was included in the opposition list of the court party in 1671, and received the government whip in the autumn of 1675, but he was noted as absent by Sir Richard Wiseman. According to A Seasonable Argument, Waring needed a pension ‘to keep him out of prison’, while in Flagellum Parliamentarium he was described as ‘an excise officer and collector of the hearth-money, worth £700’. In fact his only connexion with the unpopular hearth-tax was as surety for the receiver for Kent, a liability from which he was discharged by the King ‘in his princely compassion of the poor condition of the said Waring’. He was among those to be managed by (Sir) Joseph Williamson on the working lists, marked ‘doubly vile’ by Shaftesbury, and included on both lists of the court party in 1678.5

Although blacklisted among the ‘unanimous club’ of government supporters, Waring was again returned at both elections of 1679. Shaftesbury marked him ‘vile’, but he was absent from the division on the first exclusion bill, and was appointed to no committees in either Parliament. He probably gave up his seat to the courtier, Sir Richard Mason, in 1681, but regained it four years later. A moderately active Member of James II’s Parliament, he was appointed to the committee of elections and privileges and to three others. He died intestate, and was buried at Bishop’s Castle on 9 Nov. 1687.6

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Authors: M. W. Helms / Eveline Cruickshanks

Notes

  • 1. Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 2), x. 50; F. A. Crisp, Frag. Gen. n.s. i. 81-83.
  • 2. SP29/41/85; Cal. Treas. Bks. i. 473.
  • 3. Cal. Treas. Bks. iii. 414, 1028, 1171.
  • 4. Crisp, 58, 61; Cal. Comm. Comp. 1184; CJ, viii. 224.
  • 5. CSP Dom. 1670, p. 178; Cal. Treas. Bks. iii. 928; v. 1249.
  • 6. Crisp, 83.