Paule’s father was originally from Norfolk, but following his marriage into a Shropshire family he moved to Bridgnorth, where he served as junior bailiff in 1574, and died in 1614.
Paule kept his house at Lambeth after Whitgift’s death, while his newly acquired position as registrar of High Commission gave him an income, but despite a knighthood in 1607 he remained without a patron for more than a decade. Indeed, his decision to publish a biography of his former master in 1612, which he dedicated to the newly appointed Archbishop Abbot, was an obvious plea for preferment. He commended Whitgift’s scholarship and charity, and stressed his ‘mild and moderate carriage’ towards puritan dissent. This was not a view the late archbishop’s adversaries would have endorsed, but Paule was probably trying to establish his suitability for employment under Abbot, whose relations with puritan ministers were notably less abrasive than Whitgift’s.
In the event it was not Abbot but the archbishop’s young protégé, George Villiers, later duke of Buckingham, in whom Paule found a patron. The two first became formally linked from 1621, when Paule and Sir Robert Heath* were jointly appointed chief clerk of enrolments in King’s Bench, a sinecure held in trust for Buckingham, with the grantees taking a one-twelfth share of the profits. Paule subsequently became a commissioner for Buckingham’s finances, perhaps on the basis of his experience as Whitgift’s comptroller. However, except for the King’s Bench post he did not have access to the duke’s purse-strings, and though he married his eldest son to Anne Brett, one of the Villiers’ Leicestershire relations, he was never one of Buckingham’s innermost circle.
If Buckingham had valued Paule’s political advice, he would undoubtedly have used his extensive patronage to secure him a seat in Parliament. Paule took a lively interest in parliamentary proceedings, and, perhaps in 1624, he submitted a lengthy petition to the Commons about the defects of the legal system, particularly the way in which Chancery poached business from the ecclesiastical courts, an approach hardly calculated to kindle the crusading zeal of the common lawyers who handled the investigation. When Paule finally secured a parliamentary seat at Bridgnorth in 1625, it was almost certainly through his family’s local influence rather than the duke’s intercession. Unfortunately for him, he was involved in a double return with the Cheshire lawyer George Vernon, and the case remained undecided at the dissolution. Neither man left any trace upon the session, although Paule later claimed to have attended the Oxford sitting. If so, the ‘calmness and judgment’ which he remembered as having characterized the subsidy debates seems to have eluded most other commentators.
Vernon was returned for Bridgnorth again at the next election, and Paule was mentioned only tangentially during the session, when one of his King’s Bench clerks attempted to claim parliamentary privilege.
In 1631 Paule bewailed his age and ill-health, but for all his protests he survived another four years, dying on 6 Apr. 1635. In his will of March 1635 he asked to be buried at Lambeth without heralds, feasting or wide distribution of funeral blacks. He assigned his leases to his nephew, John Oldbury, in trust for 10 years, charged with a jointure for his widowed daughter-in-law and other small legacies; his heir was his three-year-old grandson George. Oldbury proved the will at the end of the year, by which time he had also taken up the reversion as registrar of High Commission. No subsequent family member sat in Parliament.