GERARD, Charles (c. 1659-1707)

The Gerards of Hilderstone were a cadet branch of the Gerards of Gerard’s Bromley, established by John, a younger son of the 1st baron. A member of Staffordshire’s Catholic squirearchy, Richard Gerard is an obscure figure. Little is known of him until the furore occasioned by the revelations of Titus Oates led to his imprisonment in Staffordshire in 1679. Shortly afterwards Gerard was allowed to travel to London to provide evidence for the defence of William Howard, Viscount Stafford, against the allegations of the Popish Plot. This provided little respite for Gerard. Soon after arriving in London he was accused of complicity in a campaign to raise money in Staffordshire for a Catholic rising, it being alleged that the funds Gerard was sending to the Catholic college of St Omer (where his three sons were being educated) were for seditious purposes. Richard Gerard was imprisoned; he remained in Newgate until his death on 11 Mar. 1680. HMC Lords, i. 39-40, 144; LJ, xiii. 578-9, 584-5.

Richard Gerard was succeeded by his eldest son Charles, who four years later gained the barony of Gerard of Gerard’s Bromley following the death of his cousin, Digby Gerard, 5th Baron Gerard of Gerard’s Bromley. Charles Gerard succeeded (under the terms of the marriage settlement of the 4th Baron) to sizeable estates in Staffordshire, Cheshire and Shropshire, worth more than £2,500 a year in 1715. G. Ormerod, Hist. of the county Palatine and city of Chester, i(2). 653; English and Welsh Catholic Non-Jurors of 1715 ed. E.E. Estcourt and J.O. Payne, 18, 220, 245. The year after this stroke of good fortune Gerard was given the opportunity to exact revenge for the death of his father when, in May 1685, he was among those who gave evidence for the prosecution during the trial of Titus Oates for perjury, Gerard having made Oates’s acquaintance when they were both students at a Catholic college in France. When questioned by Oates during this trial Gerard stated baldly, ‘I am a Catholic’. State Trials, x. 1124-5. The following year he was listed as one of those to receive dispensation to come to London and the court without taking the oaths. CSP Dom. 1686-7, pp. 67-68.

There is little evidence that Gerard took an active role in promoting the catholicizing policies of James II. Indeed, when the three questions were put in late 1687 Gerard was one of those Staffordshire notables who gave no response. Duckett, Penal Laws, 206. Three analyses of 1687-88 examining the attitudes of the English peerage to the repeal of the penal laws and test simply listed Gerard as a Catholic. One further list classed Gerard amongst the protestant supporters of James II’s policies. Following the 1688 Revolution Gerard took little interest in public affairs though he occasionally came to the attention of the House of Lords, most notably in February 1692 when his claim to privilege of Parliament in a suit with the widow of the 5th Baron Gerard was rejected, the Lords resolving that ‘privilege of Parliament shall not extend to lords that have not first qualified themselves … by taking the oaths and test’. In March 1696, in the aftermath of the revelations of the Assassination Plot, Gerard was taken into custody. Add. 36913, f. 236; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 31. Although the Lords were informed in April that he was one of the three peers of whom the king ‘hath some suspicion’, Gerard was released in May. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 50, 62.

Though Gerard’s death has been recorded as occurring on 21 Apr. 1707, Narcissus Luttrell was reporting his demise as early as the 15th of that month. Gerard was buried in the family vault at Ashley, Staffordshire. He was succeeded in the barony by his brother. His jewels, plate, coach and horses were bequeathed to his widow and the remainder of his personal estate, over and above payment of his debts and costs of his funeral, to his Catholic sister, Frances, wife of Thomas Fleetwood of Calwich, Staffordshire. Stowe 781, f. 17.