A Letter at the Committee of Lords and Commons re: Cinque Ports 1646 ordering the construction of four new frigates for the improvement of the Navy; signed by: Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick (5 June 1587 – 19 April 1658).

Administrative / biographical background
In 1642, following the dismissal of the Earl of Northumberland as Lord High Admiral, Warwick was appointed commander of the fleet by Parliament. 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. As commander of the fleet, in 1648, Warwick retook the 'Castles of the Downs' (at Walmer, Deal, and Sandown) for Parliament, and became Deal Castle's captain 1648-53. 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 Cromwell, whose daughter Francis married his grandson and heir, also Robert Rich, in 1657. Giles Grene Sitting for Corfe Castle in the Short and Long Parliaments, he turned against the Crown, and became a prominent naval administrator until secluded from the Commons during Pride’s Purge. Alexander Bence (born ca. 1590) was an English merchant and politician who sat in the House of Commons of England from 1640 to 1648 and in 1654. He supported the Parliamentarian side in the English Civil War. Bence was the son of Alexander Bence and his wife Marie Squier daughter of Thomas Squier. In November 1640, Bence was elected Member of Parliament for Aldeburgh in the Long Parliament and sat until he was excluded under Pride's Purge. In 1642 he was appointed by parliament as one of the Commissioners for the Affairs of (His Majesty's) Navy, the King having prevented all his principal officers of the navy from performing their duties. Bence was a member of the Worshipful Company of Grocers in the City of London and became an Alderman for Walbrook ward in May, 1653. In 1654 he was elected MP for Suffolk in the First Protectorate Parliament. He was master of Trinity House from 1659 to 1660 Walter Erle On the outbreak of the Civil War, Erle became a Colonel in the Parliamentary army. He succeeded John Pym as Lieutenant of the Ordnance in 1643, and was also appointed military governor of Dorchester. However, when he led his forces to besiege Corfe Castle in 1643 he was repulsed after six weeks having lost a hundred men, and he fled Dorchester by sea at the approach of a superior Royal army under Lord Carnarvon. In 1645 he received the thanks of the Commons for deciphering some intercepted letters, and the following year was one of the four commissioners