Other facts

Birth of daughter Audrey Rich in Enfield, Middlesex

Notes

Richard Lord Rich, Lord Chancellor of England.

From wikipedia

"Sir Richard Rich, 1st Baron Rich (1496/7 - 12 June 1567), was Lord Chancellor during the reign of King Edward VI of England. He was the founder of Felsted School with its associated alms houses in Essex in 1564."

"Since the mid-sixteenth century Rich has had a highly negative reputation for amorality, financial dishonesty, double dealing, perjury and treachery that is seldom matched in all of English history. The low point was his perjury that convicted Sir Thomas More of treason. "

"He was the son of John Rich of Penton Mewsey, Hampshire and Agnes Rich. He was described as being 54 in 1551 .. which gives him a birth year of around 1497. .."

"He may have studied at Cambridge before 1516... In 1516 he entered the Middle Temple as a lawyer and at some point between 1520 and 1525 he was a reader at the New Inn...
in 1529, Thomas Audley succeeded in helping him get elected as an MP. As Audley's career advanced in the early 1530s so did Rich's .."

" .. in 1533 he was knighted and became Solicitor General, in which capacity he was to act under Thomas Cromwell as a 'lesser hammer' for the demolition of the monasteries, and to secure the operation of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy... In an irony, Rich would also play a major part in the fall of Cromwell, .."

"As King's Solicitor, Rich travelled to Kimbolton Castle in January 1536 to take the inventory of the goods of Catherine of Aragon, and wrote to Henry advising how he might properly obtain her possessions."

"Rich became the chancellor (19 April 1536) of the Court of Augmentations established for the disposal of the monastic revenues. His own share of the spoil, acquired either by grant or purchase, included Leez (Leighs) Priory and about a hundred manors in Essex. .. Rich was also a participant in the only recorded torture of a gentlewoman at the Tower of London, Anne Askew, who later stated that Chancellor Wriothesley and Rich had screwed the rack to torture her with their own hands."

"Rich was an executor of the will of King Henry VIII, on which much suspicion has been thrown, and on 26 February 1548 he became Baron Rich of Leez. In the next month he succeeded Wriothesley as chancellor, an office in which he found full scope for the business and legal ability he undoubtedly possessed. .. He was one of the subscribers of the device of 21 June 1553 settling the crown on Lady Jane Grey, but he swiftly abandoned his support (as indeed almost everyone else did). During the final years of the reigns of Henry, Edward, and Mary, he was in favour of whatever religion was in power; he was not Catholic enough to oppose the persecution of the Church under Somerset and Northumberland, and he enthusiastically persecuted Protestants during Mary's reign."

"Rich took part in the prosecution of bishops Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner, and had a role in the harsh treatment accorded to the future Mary I of England. However, Mary on her accession showed no ill-will to Rich. He retired from the chancellorship on the grounds of ill-health in the close of 1551 .."

"Lord Rich took an active part in the restoration of the old religion in Essex under the new reign, and was one of the most active of persecutors. .. but under Elizabeth he served on a commission to inquire into the grants of land made under Mary, and in 1566 was sent for to advise on the question of the queen's marriage. He died at Rochford in Essex, on 12 June 1567, and was buried in Felsted church."

".. By his wife Elizabeth Jenks, or Gynkes, he had fifteen children. The eldest son Robert (1537?-1581), second Baron Rich, supported the Reformation. One grandson, Richard Rich, was the first husband of Catherine Knyvet and another grandson Robert, third lord, was created Earl of Warwick in 1618."

"He is the great villain in in the play by Robert Bolt and the Oscar-winning film A Man for All Seasons. In the 1966 film he was played by John Hurt."

"The historian Lord Dacre dismissed him as a man 'of whom nobody has ever spoken a good word'."