When they move to London from the provinces, people tend to disappear into an anonymous morass of faces; they become almost invisible. So when Robert Cotgrave was wanted for a murder in Chester in 1605, he swiftly relocated to the capital. In a city of 7,000 souls, a large proportion of the population might recognise him and he was easy to find. In the metropolis, where there was a crowd of hundreds of thousands in which to hide, he could stay hidden for decades.

But others – including Robert’s brother Stephen – were not attempting to hide, they were just trying to make a living by following economic opportunity. But by absorbing themselves into such a large crowd of nameless faces, they made themselves harder to know in centuries to come.

Stephen Cotgrave must have been born in the 1570s and by the time of his brother’s problems in the early seventeenth century, he was part of a byzantine set of financial arrangements in which nobody could quite prove which family member owned what. The confusion prevented Robert’s money from being confiscated by the authorities, by muddying the waters about what was really his. Stephen was named on his brother’s lease of property in Lea Newbold south of Chester, but he was not living there (he was in London) and he used a servant to pay the rest to his landlord, Sir Randle Brereton.

Apart from these meagre facts, almost nothing can be gleaned about Stephen’s life in London, unlike his family in Chester, who are much easier to trace and follow in the records. He lived most of his life in the parish of St Andrew by the Wardrobe in the City of London, where his children were baptised (and mostly buried). He did well enough in his trade as an embroiderer that when he died in May 1625, the probate arm of the Archdeaconry Court of London bothered to issue his widow Elizabeth with official letters of administration, but not so well that his children avoided the desperate need for Poor Law assistance when Elizabeth died just a few weeks later.

But we know one other thing about Stephen Cotgrave – on 28 September 1614, he was admitted as a member of the Gentlemen of the Artillery Garden. Since before the Norman Conquest, men between the age of 16 and 60 had been obliged to serve in the militia, and repeated efforts had been made to enforce the rules – time and again, Tudor governments passed laws and decrees mandating archery practice. The Trained Bands as they were known had of course to be trained, and in London, the place where that happened was the Artillery Garden in Spitalfields. They had been involved in defending London against the Earl of Essex’s rebellion in 1601 but when James I became king, the country felt safe again and the militia were neglected for a decade.

Then in 1614, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor of London and told him to muster the Bands, identify gaps caused when had died, left town or were no longer fit and able, and to replace them with “sufficient and apt men,” who were them to be “trayned and exercised from tyme to tyme”. The new muster took place in the autumn, which is when Stephen Cotgrave joined up. Their weaponry was inadequate and the men’s “ignorance of order and neglect of their Captain’s command” were problems, so as the years went by, more and better drills were ordered.

It is not clear how long Stephen Cotgrave remained a member, how frequently he attended, whether he took any notice of the Captain’s orders and whether he was any good as a solider. But he was undoubtedly there on that September day in 1614, while his wife was heavily pregnant (she gave birth to a daughter a few weeks later), as the new Trained Bands mustered for the first time in the Artillery Garden.

Sources
National Archives: E178/3636
London Metropolitan Archives: P69/AND1/A/001/MS04502/001
Guildhall Library: MS2088/1; MS2089/1; MS9050/5, f.192r; MS10091/23, f.122r
The Cardew-Rendle Roll: a biographical directory of members of the Honourable Artillery Company, London, 2013, p.578.
Nagel, L. C. (1982) The Militia of London, PhD Thesis, King’s College London.
Cotgreave, P. (2019) Heroes and Villains of Chester and Beyond, Palatine Books.