Роберт Рич, Уорик графының екінші титулы: Англия саяхатшысы және теңдесі

English naval officer, politician and peer

Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick KB, PC (May/June 158719 April 1658) was an English naval officer, politician and peer who commanded the Parliamentarian navy during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. A Puritan, he was also lord of the Manor of Hunningham.

Warwick's Puritan connections and sympathies gradually estranged him from the court but promoted his association with the New England colonies. In 1628 he indirectly procured the patent for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in 1631 he was granted the "Saybrook" patent in Connecticut. Forced to resign the presidency of the Council for New England in the same year, he continued to manage the Somers Isles Company (the Somers Isles being one of the colonies that sided with the Crown) and Providence Island Company, the latter of which, founded in 1630, administered Old Providence on the Mosquito Coast. Meanwhile, in England, Warwick opposed the forced loan of 1626, the payment of ship money, and Laud's church policy.

By the summer of 1640 Warwick had emerged as the centre of the resistance to Charles I. This was the result of decades of resisting actions including opposing Charles I's compulsory loans during the 1620s and in January 1937 – 12 years into Charles I’s personal rule – personally presenting the case for a new parliament to the king. In September 1640, Warwick signed the Petition of Twelve to Charles I, asking the king to summon another parliament. Over the early part of the new parliament, Warwick led one wing of the opposition to Charles I. The Warwick House group pushed for further reform than the more conciliatory Bedford House group, and in particular urged the need for the execution of the Earl of Stratford. In 1643, he was appointed head of a commission for the government of the colonies, which the next year incorporated Providence Plantations, afterwards Rhode Island, and in this capacity, he exerted himself to secure religious liberty. The subject was criticized for not recapturing the royalist fleet in 1648 when Prince Rupert suffered mutiny and disarray in Hellevoetsluis. However, he was dismissed from office on the abolition of the House of Lords in 1649. He retired from national public life, but was intimately associated with the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, whose daughter Francis married his grandson and heir, also Robert Rich, in 1657 (the marriage was a short one as the grandson died the following year).