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- Betrayer of Thomas More, torturer of Anne Askew, entrapper of John Fisher, suppressor of monasteries, destroyer of the Priory of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Richard Rich was, correctly, called by Hugh Trevor-Roper a man "of whom nobody has ever spoken a good word." Naturally, he died in bed, rich and comfortable, and his descendants enjoyed their lives as wealthy and powerful aristocrats for over 300 years.
In the movie The Man for All Seasons, Rich perjures himself against Thomas More in order to become Attorney-General for Wales. More responds, "Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world...but for Wales?"
Brice Clagett, soc.genealogy.medieval, 12 Dec 2002:
As Adrian Channing pointed out, Stow's "Survey of London" says that Richard Rich, 1st Lord Rich, was son of Thomas, son of John, son of Richard the mercer and sheriff of London. But other sources say that Lord Rich's father was Richard, son of Thomas, son of Richard the sheriff. CP 10:774; Donald Lines Jacobus, "The House of Rich," TAG 22:26 (apparently based on a Lansdowne manuscript). The Visitation of Essex, Harl. Soc. 13:176, makes Lord Rich a grandson of the sheriff (via the sheriff's son John who d.v.p. 1458), but that is chronologically impossible.
Most of Lord Rich's biographers say that he was born in the parish of St. Lawrence Jewry, London, where Richard the sheriff lived and was buried. But Rich himself asserted that he was a native of Basingstoke, Hampshire. W. Gurney Bentham, "The Oath Book, or Red Parchment Book of Colchester" (1907) p. 157. Probably for that reason, Bindoff 3:192 asserts that Lord Rich was the son of one John Rich of Penton Mewsey (Hampshire), who in 1509 left a house in Islington, Middlesex, to his son Richard on condition that he was obedient to his mother. Indeed it seems that this is the only Richard Rich who is known to have existed at the time. Basingstoke and Penton Mewsey are 20 miles apart.
The various sources and theories are discussed in Mary Elizabeth Doyle, "Sir Richard Rich, First Baron Rich (1496?-1567), A Political Biography" (Harvard Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1967, unpublished), pp. 19-22, 208. Doyle blows alternately warm and cool on the Penton Mewsey theory; speculates that John of Penton Mewsey might have been a grandson of Richard the sheriff of London, and says "it may be assumed that [Lord Rich] was a member of the London family," offering only weak support for that assumption. She further suggests that "it would seem that Sir Richard Rich deliberately concealed his parentage," without saying why she thinks that.
Rich must be among a very small company of peers of the real whose parents' names are uncertain. Would that that were his only claim to fame.
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