The Ottleys of Pitchford owed their status to wealth made as merchants of the thriving county town, with its monopoly in the finishing of Welsh cloth.

Richard was present at the siege of Bridgnorth in 1646 and was covered by the surrender agreement negotiated by his father, which allowed the Royalist garrison to choose between peace and exile.

[12] On 16 June 1646 Richard was given a pass to travel to Shrewsbury to speak to Parliament's County Committee,[13] probably in connection with his father's request to compound for delinquency, which was made on that date.

A decision on the allowance for Lady Ottley and the children was soon made: a fifth of Sir Francis's estates was handed over to them for their maintenance by an order of 5 September 1646.

Richard Ottley spent a considerable part of this time in London with his father, often having to attend Goldsmiths' Hall, where the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents was housed.

On 12 January he wrote to his mother from Gray's Inn to report that his father had obtained permission to live at home and that his personal property had been secured while he compounded.

[16] In April Lady Ottley wrote to him to report that Sir Francis had not actually gone home as there was a possibility he would be prosecuted by Humphrey Mackworth,[17] who, although reckoned a cousin, was the Parliamentarian governor of Shrewsbury.

[20] On 24 March Sir Francis, with his last extant letter, sent Lettice a copy of Eikon Basilike,[21] purportedly a collection of Charles I's final meditations and apologia: the same book had recently been sent by Adam Ottley to his mother.

On 9 March 1650 Richard Ottley took the oath of loyalty before two Middlesex justices of the peace to the Commonwealth, "as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords.

In July he obtained a pass to journey into Wales and to Oswestry on business, and in September he travelled to Yoxall to visit his wife's grandmother in Staffordshire.

[24] Lettice Ottley was by this time pregnant with their second child, as one of her great aunts, Cassandra Willoughby of Wollaton Hall noted shortly afterwards in a letter.

Ottley witnessed the funeral of Cromwell in November 1658 and wrote from Gray's Inn to inform his mother, enclosing a printed description.

On 25 November 1659, a day after General Monck took overall command of the army, Richard and Adam Ottley were given a pass by Charles Fleetwood allowing them to travel between London and Pitchford without further hindrance:[32] the regime had ceased to wield effective authority and had given up the attempt to control its enemies.

After General Monck's intervention against the remaining Commonwealth forces, at the beginning of 1660, Richard Ottley came back into public life and began to take part in local government.

[35] Shrewsbury was still held by the stalwart Parliamentarian Colonel Thomas Hunt, who carried out a review of military resources and preparedness during April and arranged a muster of his forces for 1 May.

On 19 June Ottley and Scriven issued a document at Shrewsbury that effectively annexed the resources promised to Hunt's militia to their own force, ending the dual military authority that had existed formally to that point.

[38] On 16 July a letter was issued by command of Charles II urging the Mayor of Shrewsbury to appoint Adam Ottley as town clerk.

However, then position then was not, as the king had been informed, vacant: the post had been filled during the Commonwealth by Thomas Jones, who was to prove a resourceful opponent to the new dispensation.

Edmund Waring, a former Parliamentarian governor of Shrewsbury, and Vavasor Powell, a Welsh Independent preacher and theologian, were arrested and imprisoned.

They wrote to tell Newport that the king was troubled by large numbers of petitions from those arrested on mere suspicion and that they were to be released forthwith.

However, the borough of Shrewsbury elected as its two members its town clerk, Thomas Jones, a leading Presbyterian although never an enthusiastic Parliamentarian,[51] and Robert Leighton, who had been uncommitted in the Civil War.

In October 1661 he had a new deed of appointment drawn up for Francis Tallents, the Presbyterian minister of St Mary's Church,[52] which was technically a Royal Peculiar but actually in the gift of the council.

The Corporation Act of December 1661 gave Newport and Ottley an opportunity, as it sought to remove Presbyterians from office by forcing them to abjure the Solemn League and Covenant.

However, the deputy lieutenants sent men to impose house arrest on the mayor and aldermen and removed them from office for refusing to take the oath.

[57] However, in July 1663 Newport used the rumour of a plot to seize Chester Castle to send Ottley after supposed conspiratorial meetings of ejected ministers in Shrewsbury, with detailed instructions for spying and intimidation.

[58] In October, with rumours of plots still abounding, Newport told Ottley to confine military preparations to the close guarding of the major towns to avoid the expense of mobilising the militia outside the time of the general muster.

[59] Later he reverted to warning that the Presbyterians of Shrewsbury might be in league with conspirators in the North of England and recommending that they and Waring be subject to a fishing expedition with a view to "entrap some of them in their answers."

[50] Newport, later first Earl of Bradford, was to dominate elections until his death in 1708, gradually evolving into a Whig and suffering for it when he opposed the succession of James II.

The Ridgeway family fortune was based on the first earl's exploitation of land assigned to him as an "undertaker," or government contactor, during the Plantation of Ulster.

[3] The following family tree is based on information extracted from the heraldic visitations of Shropshire,[69] Lord Hawkesbury's pedigree[70] and the Pitchford parish register.