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Barnardiston favouring Russell and Sydney, and stating that ‘the papists and high tories are quite down in the mouth,’ and that ‘Sir George [Jeffreys] is grown very humble;’ and upon these words the accusation was founded. Jeffreys, who had a personal concern in the matter, tried the case, and directed the jury to return a verdict of guilty on the ground that the act of sending the letters was itself seditious, and that there was no occasion to adduce evidence to prove a seditious intent. An arrest of judgment was moved for, and it was not till 19 April 1684 that Jeffreys pronounced sentence. A fine of 10,000l. was imposed. Barnardiston resisted payment, and was imprisoned until June 1688, when he paid 6,000l., and was released on giving a bond ‘for the residue.’ The whole case was debated in the House of Lords, 16 May 1689, and Jeffreys judgment reversed. It was stated at the time that during his long imprisonment Sir Samuel's private affairs had become much disordered, and that he lost far more money than the amount of the fine. An account of the trial was published in 1684.

Barnardiston took no forward part in parliament as a speaker, but his financial ability was fully recognised. In 1690 he was nominated a member of the important commission appointed to audit and control the public accounts, which discovered many scandalous frauds and embezzlements, and first effectively supervised the expenditure of the public money. In 1691 a quarrel with Sir Josiah Child, governor of the East India Company, who had been originally brought into its direction by the influence of Barnardiston and his friends, caused him to retire from the management, and afterwards to withdraw the money he had invested in its stocks. The dispute was one of party politics, Child being an adherent of the tories, who were at the time in a majority on the board of directors, while Barnardiston continued in his whig principles. In 1697 Sir Samuel narrowly escaped imprisonment for a third time on disobeying the instructions of the House of Commons when deputed by them to attend a conference with the House of Lords for the purpose of regulating the importation of East India silk. Little is known of Barnardiston's career after this date. He retired from parliament in 1702, at the age of eighty-two, and died, 8 Nov. 1707, at his house in Bloomsbury Square, London. He was twice married, (1) to Thomasine, daughter of Joseph Brand of Edwardstone, Suffolk, and (2) to Mary, daughter of Sir Abraham Reynardson, lord mayor of London. He had no children, and his nephew, Samuel, son of his eldest brother Nathaniel, succeeded to his title and estate, and died on 3 Jan. 1709–10. Another nephew, Pelatiah, brother of the second baronet, was third baronet for little more than two years, dying on 4 May 1712. On the death a few months later (21 Sept. 1712) of the fourth baronet, Nathaniel, son of Pelatiah Barnardiston, the first baronet's youngest brother, the baronetcy became extinct. Sir Samuel's house, Brightwell Hall, was pulled down in 1753.

[Davy's MS. Suffolk Collections, vol. xl. (Addit. MS. 19117 ff.); State Trials, vi. 1063–92, 1117, ix. 1333–72; Pepys's Diary, ed. Bright, iv. 438–9; Mill's India, i. 103; Parl. Hist. iv. 422–3, 431–4; Commons' Journal, x. 13; May's Parliamentary Practice, 19, 172; Luttrell's Brief Relation, passim; Calendar State Papers, 1649–50, 1661–3; Bluebook of Members of Parliament; Granger's Biographical History; Macaulay's History, iii. 297; Hallam's History, iii. 23–4.] 

BARNARDISTON, Sir THOMAS (d. 1669), parliamentarian, was the eldest son of Sir Nathaniel and Lady Jane Barnardiston, and was knighted by Charles I on 4 July 1641. He was frequently one of the parliamentary assessors for Suffolk from 1643 onwards, and was on the committee of the Eastern Counties' Association. Cromwell addressed a letter (31 July 1643) to Sir Thomas and his neighbours, in which he spoke of them as his ‘noble friends,’ and urged them in very forcible terms to raise 2,000 foot soldiers (Camden Society Miscellany, v. 87). In 1645 Barnardiston became M.P. for Bury St. Edmunds, in place of a member disabled as a royalist; he brought a regiment of foot to the assistance of the parliamentary forces at Colchester in 1648, and was perhaps the Thomas Barnardiston appointed by the parliament in 1649 comptroller of the mint (Cal. Dom. State Papers, 1649–50). Sir Thomas was M.P. for Suffolk in Cromwell's parliaments of 1654 and 1656, and in Richard Cromwell's parliament of 1658–9. He was in 1654 one of the commissioners ‘for ejecting scandalous, ignorant, and insufficient ministers and schoolmasters’ from Suffolk. On 20 Nov. 1655 he headed the list of those who signed a declaration to secure the peace of the commonwealth in the eastern counties; to his signature great importance was attached by the major-general of the eastern counties (, State Papers, iv. 225). But Sir Thomas's republican sympathies disappeared with the Restoration. He was elected M.P. for Sudbury in 1661 on a double return, but was unseated. He received a baronetcy from the king on 7 April 1663 ‘for the antiquity of the family and the virtues of his ancestors.’ He died in October 1669, and was buried at