Richard Deane

Richard Deane (bapt. 8 July 1610– 1 June 1653) was an English military officer who supported the Parliamentarian cause in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. He was a General at Sea, major-general and one of the regicides of Charles I. Biography 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.