GOUGH, Sir Richard (1655-1728), of Edgbaston, Warws. and Gough House, Chelsea, Mdx.

The Goughs were of Welsh origin but had been long settled in Staffordshire where they had purchased Oldfallings early in the seventeenth century.Shaw, Staffs. ii. 187-93. Sir Richard Gough, a younger son, made a great fortune in the East India trade, having been ‘brought up’ under Sir James Houblon, M.P., and as a youth enjoyed the advice and assistance of ‘the great Sir Josiah Child’. He ‘was reckoned to be well skilled in the knowledge of the British trade and commerce in general, and in that particular branch of it to the East Indies, equal to any in his time.’H. Gough to T. Wotton, c.1740, Add. 24120, f. 387. In 1714 he purchased 18 burgage houses at Bramber giving him control of one of the seats there.’A State of ... Bramber’, Lowndes mss, West Sussex RO. Returned in 1715 for Bramber, for which he sat till his death, he voted for the septennial bill, went into opposition with Walpole in 1717, was absent from the division on the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, and voted against the peerage bill. He died 9 Feb. 1728, directing in his will that he should be buried in the church at Edgbaston, where he had bought an estate in 1717. His will continues:

I lay my bones and ashes there to reproach them that shall succeed me in the possession of the ... estate in Edgbaston which I have acquired by the blessing of Almighty God very worthily and honestly through my own application and industry, if ever they should be such ill husbands as to spend or waste the same, as a memorial for them to remember that they will then likewise sell my bones and ashes.PCC 43 Brook.