Richard Deane (regicide)

Richard Deane (1610–1653), Englishman who supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War. He was a General at Sea, major-general and regicide.

Deane was a younger son of Edward Deane of Temple Guiting or Guyting in Gloucestershire, where he was born, his baptism taking place on 8 July 1610. His family seems to have been strongly Puritan and was related to many of those Buckinghamshire families who were prominent among Oliver Cromwell's supporters during the English Civil War. His uncle or great-uncle was Sir Richard Deane, Lord Mayor of London in 1628–1629.

Few records of Deane's early life survive, but he seems to have had some sea training, possibly on a ship-of-war. At the outbreak of the Civil War he joined the parliamentary army as a volunteer in the artillery, a branch of the service with which he was constantly and honourably associated.

In 1644 he held a command in the artillery under Essex in Cornwall and took part in the surrender after the second Battle of Lostwithiel (2 September 1644). Essex (Letter to Sir Philip Stapleton, Rushworth Collection) calls him "an honest, judicious and stout man", an estimate of Deane borne out by Clarendon's "bold and excellent officer" (book xiv. cap. 27), and he was one of the few officers concerned in the surrender who were retained at the remodelling of the army.

Appointed comptroller of the ordnance, Deane commanded the artillery at Naseby (14 June 1645) and during Fairfax's campaign in the west of England in 1645. In 1647 he was promoted colonel and given a regiment. In May of that year the Parliament of England appointed Oliver Cromwell as lord-general of the forces in Ireland, and Deane, as a supporter of Cromwell who had to be reckoned with, was appointed his lieutenant of artillery. Cromwell refused to be thus put out of the way, and Deane followed his example. When the war broke out afresh in 1648 Deane went with Cromwell to Wales. As brigadier-general his leading of the right wing at Preston contributed greatly to that victory.

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