Earle was descended from minor Devon gentry stock whose roots stretched back to thirteenth-century Somerset. His grandfather, Walter, a Privy Chamber officer under Edward VI and Elizabeth I, acquired through marriage and purchase substantial estates in both Devon and Dorset, including the seats of Charborough and Bindon House. In 1597 Earle inherited over 11,000 acres, of which around two-thirds lay near Charborough. Then aged only ten, he became a ward of the Crown. His wardship was eventually sold to Sir Carew Ralegh* in 1605, and in the meantime his stepfather, Sir Walter Vaughan*, apparently acted as his guardian.
The spiralling costs of the Axmouth project apparently prompted Earle to enter Parliament in 1614. Having secured election at Poole, a borough barely five miles from Charborough, he brought in a bill ‘for the repairing and maintaining of an ancient harbour and a new erected quay or pier near Axmouth’, by which a supplementary levy on goods entering the port would be introduced to cover repairs to the pier. The bill received its first reading on 20 Apr., but on 21 May its provisions were vigorously attacked by the Lyme Regis Member, George Browne, who feared the emergence of an economic rival to his own borough. The measure was committed, with Earle himself entitled as a Dorset burgess to help with its scrutiny, but proceeded no further. It is unclear whether Earle spoke in support of his bill. His only other recorded business was a nomination to help survey old bills, some on religious topics, which had previously passed the Commons but not been enacted (8 April).
Earle became a Dorset magistrate in 1615, and apparently exercised his powers vigorously. Seven years later he allegedly gaoled on his sole authority three poachers apprehended at Charborough, and then sued a gentleman who interceded on their behalf.
Earle again sat for Poole in 1621, when he made more of an impact on the Commons, delivering at least 29 speeches, and attracting nominations to 11 committees, including that for privileges and returns (5 February). Despite his relative inexperience, he already had firm views on procedure. On 27 Feb. he successfully opposed allowing the bill on duchy of Cornwall leases to receive two readings on the same day, reminding Members that a similar attempt to rush through the bill to naturalize the Elector Palatine in 1614 had meant that a major drafting error had almost gone undetected. He also objected on 19 Apr. when Sir John Bennet* sent a message to the House via his lawyers, on the grounds that counsel should be heard only on points of law.
One of Earle’s primary concerns during the first sitting was trade. He twice backed calls for a bill against the export of ordnance (12 Feb., 30 Apr.), and also favoured a ban on imported Spanish tobacco, arguing on 18 Apr. that Spain already restricted imports of English goods. Probably on account of his own trading interests, he was sharply critical of the levies imposed on shipping to pay for the lighthouse at Dungeness, Kent (18 Apr.; 7 May). Although not named to the committee for the bill for freer fishing in America, he apparently attended its meetings, as he was able to comment in the House on its deliberations (1 March).
Earle also emerged at this juncture as a leading advocate of godly religion. Nominated on 5 Feb. to help prepare a petition to the king requesting firmer treatment of recusants, he was appointed ten days later to the conference with the Lords on this same subject. On 11 May he was also added to the legislative committee concerned with recusancy laws, after complaining about its slow progress.
In the opening stages of the second sitting, Earle was doubtless preoccupied with his bill to punish scandalous clergy, which finally received its second reading on 23 November. It is unclear whether he was named to the committee, and the measure was never reported. On 29 Nov. he was nominated to help investigate claims that an Exchequer official, (Sir) Henry Spiller*, had failed to enforce recusancy fines. The following day, concerned by reports that the government had pushed the London Brewers into agreeing to a new levy on malt, he warned of moves to introduce this imposition nationally.
By 1623 Earle had formed close ties with the godly community at Dorchester, Dorset, some 13 miles from Charborough, and particularly with the town’s leading preacher, John White. Actively involved in the early stages of White’s scheme for a new plantation on the Massachusetts coast, which would promote both trade and the Protestant faith, Earle was named as governor when the Dorchester New England Company was formally established in March 1624. His brother-in-law, Sir Richard Strode*, was another of the Company’s leading members.
Earle’s puritan sensibilities seem to have rendered him particularly acceptable to the electors of Poole, who returned him to Parliament for a third time in 1624.
Once again, Earle was named to the committee for privileges. Although he attended ten of its meetings, he apparently spoke only once, on 4 Mar., during a discussion on the Cambridgeshire election dispute, which case he also commented on in the House (16 March). The fact that he supported the exercise of a broad franchise in Chippenham’s elections (12 Mar.) suggests that he shared a similar outlook to the committee’s chairman, John Glanville. On 25 Feb. he opposed the establishment of a sub-committee to sort through the petitions presented to the committee for the courts of justice, on the grounds that some parties might be denied a fair hearing. He subsequently secured nomination to, and attended, the committee to list all petitions delivered into the House (19 and 21 May). His attitude to Sir John Eliot’s controversial speech on parliamentary privilege on 27 Feb. is not known, but he was named to the committee to consider the issues raised by Eliot.
Earle was more closely involved with private legislation than he had been in 1614. This included several items of West Country business. On 16 Mar. he was named to the committee for the Mohun family’s estate bill, after blocking an attempt to have the measure engrossed without this stage of scrutiny. He attended six of the eight committee meetings on the bill to confirm the customs of the Dorset manor of Beaminster Secunda (appointed 13 April). He was also nominated to legislative committees concerning the endowment of Wadham College, Oxford, and the estates of William Seymour*, 2nd earl of Hertford (9-10 March). On 9 Mar. he insisted that the second reading debate on the bill concerning Magdalene College, Cambridge should not proceed until the college’s master, Barnaby Gooch*, withdrew from the chamber; again, he was named to the committee.
Judging from his diary, Earle once more showed relatively little interest in monopolies, apart from the Merchant Adventurers’ patent. However, he raised the issue of the fees charged in the Subpoena Office, and was named to the committee to examine the patents cited in the monopolies bill (19 and 22 April).
Another major priority was, predictably, religion. Earle attacked the usury bill on 8 Mar., on the grounds that it countenanced a practice generally deemed to be contrary to God’s law. On 25 Feb. he called for the revival of the previous Parliament’s proposals for dealing with recusants, and attended the conference with the Lords concerning the newly drafted petition on this subject (6 April). Unusually for a borough representative, he handled the presentment of Dorset recusants on 27 Apr., and was doubtless gratified to be able to name only one, the 1st earl of Castlehaven (Sir Mervyn Audley*). Appointed the same day to examine the collected recusancy certificates, he was added on 1 May to the committee examining corruption in religion and education, and four days later secured a warrant to investigate a Catholic schoolmaster in Suffolk.
Given his anti-Catholic sentiments, Earle naturally took a close interest in the political manoeuvrings aimed at bringing about war with Spain. He attended both of the early meetings at Whitehall during which the Spanish Match negotiations were explained (24 Feb., 2 Mar.), as well as the joint conference on 4 Mar. to discuss the text of the petition urging the king to break off the Spanish treaties. Having secured nomination to the third of these gatherings, he found himself automatically entitled to attend subsequent conferences with the Lords on the same issue, and his diary contains copious records of the discussions on 17 and 22 Mar., and 1 and 17 Apr., besides audiences with the king on 14 and 23 March.
With the accession of Charles I, Earle’s local standing rose conspicuously. In May 1625 he was appointed a Dorset deputy lieutenant, replacing Sir John Strangways, whose patron, the earl of Bristol (Sir John Digby*), was another major political casualty of the drive to war.
Following the Parliament, Earle took steps to rebuild his relations with the government. In December 1625 he sent Secretary Conway a project for raising a troop of carabiniers in Dorset, and noted Conway’s ‘good acceptance of some late endeavours of mine tending to the advancement of His Majesty’s service and the weal public’. Around a month later he was appointed the county’s collector of Privy Seal loans, though he was spared from contributing himself, at the request of the lord lieutenant, the 1st earl of Suffolk. This concession was probably very welcome, as the Dorchester New England Company was starting to fail. Earle and Sir Richard Strode obtained the Privy Council’s permission in March 1626 to export cattle to America, but by the following year the Company’s investors had lost around £3,000, and the plantation was abandoned. These circumstances may explain Earle’s decision to sell his Warwickshire estates in April 1626.
At the 1626 parliamentary elections, Earle was returned for Lyme Regis, five miles from his Devon estates, the borough’s opposition to his Axmouth pier project having clearly receded. With 37 recorded speeches and 30 committee appointments, he was now one of the more prominent figures in the Commons. Named as usual to the committee for privileges, he took a close interest in High Commission’s excommunication of Sir Robert Howard*, twice condemning this as a breach of the Commons’ privileges, and earning a nomination to the committee which investigated the case (17 Feb.; 21 March).
With the Commons seeking explanations for the previous year’s military disasters, Earle on 25 Feb. revived his old complaint about the government’s failure to guard the Channel, drawing on his recent experience as a deputy lieutenant to highlight the inadequate supplies provided for coastal forts. He returned to this theme on 6 Mar., insisting that the root problem was government inactivity rather than a shortage of money. On 28 Feb. he called on Sir Robert Mansell*, officially still a member of the Council of War, to brief the House on the direction of the war effort, and he was appointed on 9 Mar. to help gather written evidence from those councillors of war who were pleading illness in order to avoid Members’ questioning. Nominated to consider Sir Dudley Digges’s* proposal for a privately funded naval war (14 Mar.), his main concern was that this enterprise should be free from government interference (14 April).
Although identified by (Sir) James Bagg II* as a client of the 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, one of the duke of Buckingham’s fiercest opponents, Earle initially played an ambiguous role in the Commons’ attack on the royal favourite. On 11 Mar. he reminded the House of the previous day’s outburst by Clement Coke, who had implied that the government was tyrannical. If he hoped thereby to stir up debate, he was soon disappointed, as most Members were unwilling to revisit this incident. However, when the king demanded that Coke be punished, Earle - who presumably attended the Privy Council several times at this juncture in connection with his American export licence - found himself accused of prompting this unwelcome royal intervention. On 15 Mar. he was obliged to defend his own conduct, assuring the House that he had intended merely to let Coke clear his name.
The king having threatened on 29 Mar. to dissolve Parliament if the Lower House persisted in attacking Buckingham, Earle two days later supported (Sir) John Eliot’s call for a Remonstrance to be drawn up defending the Commons’ conduct. The House agreed with Eliot’s proposal, and on 5 Apr. Earle was appointed to help deliver the resulting protest to Charles. Later that day, he served as teller for the noes when the House voted on whether to heed the king’s request that it adjourn for a week.
On 16 June, the day after Parliament’s dissolution, Earle complied with Secretary Conway’s instruction to hand over a copy of the Remonstrance that he had presumably intended to circulate in the country. The next day, he and the other Members who had prepared the impeachment charges against Buckingham were summoned before the attorney-general, Sir Robert Heath*, but shortly thereafter they were discharged, having declined to divulge any further information on that subject. Nevertheless, the Crown’s retribution followed swiftly, and in July Earle and Strangways were both removed from the Dorset bench ‘for being so busy last Parliament’.
When the election was called, Earle and Strangways were returned unopposed as Dorset’s knights of the shire, doubtless on the strength of their stand against the Forced Loan.
Earle maintained his customary interest in matters relating to religion and trade. Appointed on 21 Mar. to attend the conference with the Lords concerning the proposed petition for a general fast, he received seven nominations to scrutinize bills with religious themes, from encouraging attendance at sermons to barring clergy from serving as magistrates (17 and 21 April). He spoke on two of these measures, on 16 May defending the provisions of the bill against scandalous clergy, and five days later arguing that the bill on subscription to the articles of religion was justified because of the innovations that had been introduced by Convocation. He was named on 24 Apr. to help examine the recusancy presentation certificates, and subsequently to examine and prepare charges against Richard Burgess, the anti-puritan vicar of Witney, Oxfordshire (12 and 19 May).
Earle’s attitude to settlements in the New World had apparently changed since the Dorchester Company’s collapse, for he chaired the committee for the bill on freer fishing in America, reporting this measure on 30 April. Nevertheless, when the bill for restoring Carew Ralegh in blood raised concerns about the legal titles to estates formerly owned by the late Sir Walter Ralegh†, Earle spoke up for the Protestant settlers who now occupied disputed properties in Ireland.
Given Earle’s recent record as a Loan refuser, it was inevitable that he would take a close interest in the Commons’ campaign to secure subjects’ liberties. On 24 Mar. he asserted that the righting of grievances must take precedence over the granting of supply, while the next day he proposed a framework for discussing the recent abuses affecting personal liberty and property rights. Among the final issues on his list were the ‘billeting of soldiers, ... and taxes laid by deputy lieutenants’, and these particular concerns preoccupied him for much of the first session. On 8 Apr., for example, he recited a litany of Dorset grievances:
In my country, under colour of placing a soldier, there came 20 in a company to take sheep. They disturb markets and fairs, rob men on the highway, ravish women, breaking [into] houses in the night and enforcing men to ransom themselves, killing men that have assisted constables that have come to keep the peace. ... This kingdom never knew this wrong. In Queen Elizabeth’s time there were soldiers, but none were forced on us, and men were paid. Nay, in some places they were glad of them, and made a gain of them.
Earle chaired the committee set up on 28 Mar. to investigate billeting abuses in Surrey, which was then (3 Apr.) assigned a wider brief to consider billeting and the behaviour of deputy lieutenants generally.
Meanwhile, however, Earle was also active on other fronts. On 3 Apr. he was named to committees to consider the Commons’ next moves concerning subjects’ liberties, and to frame a bill on impressment. He confirmed Sir John Eliot’s claim on 11 Apr. that West Country magistrates had been prevented from applying the Common Law to billeted soldiers. Still keen not to squander the Commons’ financial leverage on the Crown, he argued on 4 Apr. for a less than generous grant of four subsidies, while on 11 Apr. he and Eliot attempted to postpone a key debate on supply.
As the Remonstrance against Buckingham took shape, Earle returned to his 1626 theme of the neglect of shipping and coastal defence, expressing concern on 6 June that the Irish Catholics currently stationed in Kent might assist a Spanish invasion mounted from Flanders. Having raised on 9 June the issue of shipping lost to Turkish pirates, he chaired the committee appointed four days later to gather precise figures from the Trinity House mariners, and reported back with a schedule on 16 June.
In December 1628 Earle was restored to the Dorset bench. Despite this conciliatory gesture, he returned to the Commons in 1629 in no mood for compromise. Although he made only six recorded speeches during this session, he received 13 committee nominations, many of them relating to key developments. By now firmly allied with the more radical group of Members led by Eliot and Selden, he was named on 21 Jan. to investigate how the Petition of Right came to be published with the king’s first, unsatisfactory answer. Nine days later he was added to the committee that examined the manner in which the Petition had been enrolled at Westminster. He was subsequently nominated to the committee to investigate the confiscation of John Rolle’s* merchandise, the issue that emerged as the principal obstacle to the formal granting of Tunnage and Poundage by Parliament (22 January).
The dispute over the alleged breach of Rolle’s parliamentary privilege distracted Earle only temporarily from his religious agenda. Named on 26 Jan. to help draft a petition requesting another general fast, and the next day to attend Charles when the petition was presented, he probably summed up the views of many Members on 27 January. Responding to the Crown’s latest appeal for Tunnage and Poundage to be given priority by the Commons, he observed:
I am of the number of those that at our last meeting thought the time best spent in vindicating those rights and liberties of the subject which had formerly been impeached and were then in most eminent danger; and in that respect thought it not amiss (for a while) to postpone the business of religion. ... Now give me leave to tell you, that religion offers itself to your first consideration at this time, challenging to herself the right of precedency, and the employment of our best endeavours. ... I know full well that the cause of justice is God’s cause as well as the cause of religion. But what good will those rights and liberties do me, or any man else, that resolves to live and die a Protestant? Nay, what good will they do any man, of what religion soever he be, that resolves to live and die a freeman and not a slave, if popery and Arminianism, joining hand in hand as they do, be a means, together with the Romish hierarchy, to bring in a Spanish tyranny amongst us; under which those laws and liberties must of necessity cease?
Citing recent evidence that the government now favoured Arminianism, he concluded that until true religion was properly safeguarded he had no interest in improving the Crown’s revenues.
The Tunnage and Poundage issue was brought back to the fore by a flagrant breach of parliamentary privilege on 9 Feb., when a Star Chamber subpoena was served on John Rolle. Earle, who had argued only two days earlier that it was now time to make progress on the Tunnage and Poundage bill, to ‘give ... to Caesar those things that be Caesar’s’, now found himself appointed to the committee to investigate this summons (10 February). As the dispute over Tunnage and Poundage came to a head, he was also nominated to help consider the Exchequer barons’ continuing refusal to reconsider the legal status of Rolle’s confiscated goods (14 February). There is no evidence that Earle was involved directly in planning Eliot’s final gesture of defiance on 2 Mar., but he was certainly sympathetic. After the initial reading of Eliot’s Remonstrance, he questioned whether the Speaker had the necessary authority to adjourn the sitting before urging him to permit a second reading: ‘you cannot be ignorant in what a desperate condition the whole kingdom is: and you know not how far that which is in that paper may conduce to the helping of it, and to the service of His Majesty’.
Now thoroughly disillusioned with the government, Earle in July 1629 offered his services to the international Protestant cause as a volunteer in the Dutch army, serving briefly under Lord Vere during the successful siege of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Upon his return, and enormously proud of his exploits, he had the garden at Charborough ‘cut into redoubts and works’ representing the fortifications that he had seen. In 1634, he also brought over a Dutchman to construct a decoy pool for hunting wildfowl.
In May 1639 Earle arranged for his son Thomas† to marry Viscount Saye and Sele’s daughter, thereby affirming his commitment to political reform. Returned for Lyme Regis to the Short Parliament, he was briefly arrested following its dissolution. Sitting for Weymouth in the Long Parliament, he helped to organize the impeachment of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth*), though he failed ignominiously to substantiate the charge that the lord deputy had planned to subdue England with Irish troops.
Earle drew up his will on 12 Aug. 1665. His only son had predeceased him, and his main concern was to provide for his grandchildren, one of whom, Anne Trenchard, he named as his executor. He died a few weeks later, and was buried at East Morden, near Charborough, on 1 September. The will was challenged by his nephew, Christopher Earle†, but upheld on 29 Jan. 1667. Earle was succeeded by his grandson Thomas, a notable soldier who himself sat in 14 parliaments.