Francis Hacker

The portrait featured is a newly discovered painting of Francis Hacker which is now on display at the National Civil War Centre, Newark, Nottinghamshire.

His services are there enumerated at length, and special commendation is bestowed on his conduct at the taking of Bagworth House and his defeat of the enemy at Belvoir, where he was in command of the Leicester, Nottingham, and Derby horse (cavalry).

Hacker is further credited with having freely given "all the prizes that ever he took" to the state and to his soldiers, and with having, while prisoner at Belvoir, refused with scorn an offer of "pardon and the command of a regiment of horse to change his side".

Cromwell wrote to Hacker, 25 December 1650, rebuking him for slightingly describing one of his subalterns as a better preacher than fighter, and telling him that he expects him and all the chief officers of the army to encourage preaching.

[8] Hacker was a religious man, but a strict Presbyterian and a persecutor of the Quakers,[9] He confessed shortly before his death "that he had formerly born too great a prejudice in his heart towards the good people of God that differed from him in judgement".

[10] While Cromwell lived he was a staunch supporter of the Protectorate, arrested Lord Grey in February 1655, and was employed in the following year to suppress the intrigues of the Cavaliers and Fifth Monarchists in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.

[12] During the Second Commonwealth (the unstable period preceding the Restoration) he followed generally the leadership of his neighbour Sir Arthur Haslerig, whose "creature" he was (as Mrs. Hutchinson terms him).

[17] The House of Commons did not at first except him from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, but during the debates upon it in the lords the fact came out that the warrant for the execution of the King had been in Hacker's possession.

[23][22] His body, instead of being quartered, was given to his friends for burial, and is said to have been interred in the church of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, London, the advowson of which was at one time vested in the Hacker family.