Richard Steward

– 1651) was an English royalist churchman, clerk of the closet to Charles I and designated Dean of St. Paul's and Westminster, though not able to take up his position because of the wartime circumstances.

On 24 December 1639, on the nomination of the king, who dispensed with the statutory obligation requiring membership of the foundation, Steward became Provost of Eton College in succession to Sir Henry Wotton.

But in the same year he was dispossessed of the provostship of Eton by Parliament in favour of Francis Rous, and was subsequently deprived of his other preferments.

The First English Civil War also prevented him from taking possession of the deanery of Westminster, to which he was nominated in 1645 on the expiry of Archbishop John Williams's commendam.

In January 1645 he, together with five other divines, was sent by the king to the Treaty of Uxbridge, where he vigorously defended episcopacy, and treated the arguments for the presbyterian government in the Church of England by Alexander Henderson and Stephen Marshall as too diffuse.

In August 1646 Charles I, writing from Newcastle, recommended Steward to the Prince of Wales and desired him to defer to his opinion in church affairs.

Steward published: 'The Old Puritan detected and defeated,' 1689, is also attributed to him by the printer Sherlock; it was an attempt to prove that the fifty-fifth canon of James I did not favour extempore prayers.

Richard Steward by Adriaen Hanneman