Few early Stuart figures have enjoyed a worse reputation than Sir James Bagg. Vilified by contemporaries and historians alike, he has frequently been characterized as a corrupt local tyrant, whose fraudulent dealings were exposed in Star Chamber during the 1630s. To some extent this view of Bagg is justified: from at least 1628, Sir James was dubbed by his enemies ‘the bottomless bag’. Moreover, like his father, who was unquestionably dishonest, Bagg resorted to extortion whenever it suited his purposes. He was also arrogant and foul-mouthed to his enemies, and yet servile to the point of obsequiousness to those whose favour he courted. Yet, for all his faults, Bagg was also a loyal servant of the Crown, whose energy and efficiency in an age of sluggish administration aroused widespread admiration at Court and in the Navy. During the war years of the 1620s, moreover, Bagg jeopardized his own finances in order to discharge his official duties.
The eldest son of a Plymouth merchant, Bagg was educated at the University of Leiden. While still a minor his father, who from about 1608 was debarred from trading on his own account by a post in the customs, used his name to take over and operate shipping importing goods from Portugal and Spain.
Although now a piracy commissioner, customs official and Member of the Commons, Bagg was ambitious for further preferment. In October 1621 he wrote to the de facto head of the Navy commission, John Coke*, offering to perform ‘any service that in these parts you may be pleased to command me ... in such business as concerns the Navy’.
Following the summons of a fresh Parliament in 1624, Bagg, by now a familiar figure in South Cornwall, was returned as junior Member for West Looe. He almost certainly owed his seat there to Sir Bernard Grenville*, who owned the local manor of Killigarth and whose son Bevill Grenville* owed Bagg or his father £120.
Bagg’s enhanced authority aroused the jealousy of another of the duke’s clients, the vice-admiral of Devon, Sir John Eliot*. Following the death of James I in March 1625, Eliot, correctly observing that Bagg’s commission was no longer in force, dismissed the seamen pressed at Exeter by the latter’s officers.
Despite having been re-elected to the Commons, Bagg was obliged to remain at Plymouth to oversee the victualling of the fleet. However, in early August he wrote to Buckingham stating that he might still be able ‘to do your lordship some Parliament service’ in respect of the Tunnage and Poundage bill, which had still to be enacted. Many of the local coastal towns, he observed, had written to their parliamentary representatives about the havoc being wrought by North African pirates on West Country shipping. Indeed, within the last week, three local vessels had been captured off the Lizard. This was good news for the king, thought Bagg, as it ‘will invite those of the Parliament to capitulate in passing that bill’.
In September 1625 the king and Buckingham visited Plymouth to inspect the naval preparations and hasten the departure of the fleet. Some of the victuals provided had been found to be defective,
In the aftermath of the Cadiz expedition, Bagg was fully occupied in providing for the sick and injured survivors and in finding fresh crews for the ships.
The calling of another Parliament saw Bagg once more returned for East Looe. This time he travelled to Westminster, and by 22 Feb. at the latest he had taken his seat. Among his parliamentary colleagues was his local rival, Sir John Eliot, who was appointed chairman of the committee to investigate the complaints of those merchants whose goods had recently been seized by the French. Eliot and his committee quickly discovered that the French were responding to the news that English officials had seized certain French goods on suspicion that they were contraband. Among those implicated was Bagg, who had raided the lodgings of a Frenchman in Plymouth and confiscated a gold chain and a hatband set with precious stones. During the course of its inquiries, Eliot and his committee were informed that Bagg had profited from the seizure of £150 worth of pistoles that were found aboard the St. Peter. Buckingham had ordered this money to be restored to its owner, but instead of complying with this instruction Bagg had forced the Frenchman to sell his coins for £80. Under questioning, Bagg hotly denied that he was guilty of any wrongdoing. The gold chain and hatband, he declared, had been seized on suspicion that they belonged to a Spaniard. As for the failure to restore the pistoles to their owner, this was not his doing. On the contrary, he protested, he had not only offered to mediate in the dispute between the Frenchman and the relevant Admiralty official, but had actually paid more than the £75 that had been demanded. Eliot and his fellow committee members were unimpressed by this story, however, as the Frenchman complained that he been forced to compound with Bagg against his will.
In the absence of hard evidence of any wrongdoing, it is not surprising that Bagg escaped punishment for his role in the seizure of French goods. Moreover, it soon became clear that although Eliot detested Bagg, his prime target was not his local rival but his former patron, Buckingham, whom he had come to loathe. The ruin of Buckingham was an objective also shared by the 3rd earl of Pembroke and his clients in the Commons. Astonishingly, in early March, Bagg learned of the plot to topple Buckingham from one of Pembroke’s own chief supporters, William Coryton*, who also revealed that Pembroke was secretly behind the election to Parliament of one of the duke’s most troublesome critics, Sir Robert Mansell. Bagg was appalled, and shortly after 3 Mar. he warned the duke of the impending attack. He also identified key members of Pembroke’s circle with seats in the Commons, among them, he suspected, Eliot, whose conduct ‘tends to the depraving of the present government, and crossing His Most Sacred Majesty’s princely and just demands’.
Bagg played only a marginal role in the ensuing struggle between Buckingham and his enemies in the Commons, although he did what little he could to defend his patron. On 7 Mar. he was appointed to attend a conference with the Lords on the international situation, and on 25 Mar. he was sent with Thomas Fotherley to notify Buckingham of the Commons’ charges against him.
After the dissolution Bagg determined to exact his revenge on Eliot. On 1 July the commissioners for Buckingham’s estate reported that Bagg had ‘made a collection of sundry exceptions against Sir Jo[hn] Eliot’s accounts and some proceedings in his office of Vice Admiralty’. One month later, apparently at Bagg’s suggestion, Buckingham established a commission of inquiry into Eliot’s conduct that was dominated by Bagg and his allies.
Parliament’s failure to vote subsidies in 1626 led the king to demand a Forced Loan. Bagg heartily approved of this levy, and deplored the clamour among the common sort for a fresh Parliament. Consequently, he was appalled when Eliot and others refused to contribute. In his view the statutory prohibition on the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent did not bar the subject from lending the king money in times of necessity. Those who hid behind Magna Carta to justify their refusal to pay were relying upon ‘an extorted concession to a rebellious army’. Far from guaranteeing English freedoms, Magna Carta ‘is now made a chain to bind the king from doing anything, and a key to admit the rascal to everything’. As well as serving as one of the commissioners for Devon and Cornwall, Bagg drew up for Buckingham a list of those individuals whom he thought would also make ideal commissioners. Chief among these was John Mohun who, upon Bagg’s recommendation, became vice-warden of the Cornish Stannaries in place of William Coryton.
In March 1627 Bagg was ordered to help furnish victuals for the forthcoming expedition to relieve the Huguenots of La Rochelle. As money was short, Bagg was instructed to use his own credit and also whatever else he could raise from the sale of prize goods locally. On receiving these instructions, Bagg immediately set about gathering the necessary provisions with his customary energy, and in mid-June, shortly before the fleet sailed, a grateful Buckingham sent him a letter of thanks.
Following Buckingham’s return to England, Bagg was charged with billeting 1,200 sick and wounded soldiers and sailors in and around Plymouth, and was assigned £3,500 for the purpose. He set about this new task with his customary energy, for which he was once again praised by Buckingham, who also instructed him to sell for his own benefit a quantity of salt brought back from the Ile de Ré.
Bagg was initially prevented from taking his seat in the new Parliament by the preparations for setting out a new fleet for La Rochelle. However, he promised to come to Westminster ‘as soon as I can see this fleet off the coast, or fitted’. In the meantime, he penned a letter of advice to Buckingham on parliamentary affairs, which began by denouncing the methods employed by the supporters of Coryton and Eliot, who had recently triumphed in the county election for Cornwall. A commission of inquiry should be instituted, he suggested, staffed by nine of the leading members of Cornwall’s gentry, all of whom happened to be his own friends and allies. Had the duke acted upon this advice, however, he would quickly have provoked a privilege dispute with the Commons, which ever since 1604 had claimed the sole right to judge election returns itself. Equally misguided was Bagg’s observation that the Commons would never accept as Members Eliot, or his allies, Bevill Grenville and John Arundell, who had been returned for Launceston and Tregony respectively, on the grounds that all three men were outlaws. Outlawry had not been a bar to membership since 1604. However, not all of Bagg’s advice was quite so obviously flawed. He sensibly suggested that the duke’s followers should enlist the support of the clerk of the Commons, John Wright, whose office made him ‘the most usefullest man of the House’. Hitherto Wright had ‘done worst service to His Majesty’, whereas, remarked Bagg, ‘it is much in his power to do good’. Perhaps less wisely, Bagg recommended that the new Speaker, (Sir) John Finch II, should not ‘insinuate’ himself with Members of the Commons, but ‘endure their frowns, and hazard his credit with them for His Majesty’s service’.
Bagg’s hopes that the Commons would investigate the activities of his opponents in the recent election for Cornwall were quickly dispelled. Rather than take action against Eliot and Coryton, the House turned its attention to Bagg’s allies, who had employed underhand means in a futile attempt to prevent the election of both men. Bagg was horrified that these ‘honest western gentlemen’ should be ‘so troubled’, but he was powerless to prevent them from being brought before the bar of the House. Shortly thereafter, he himself was called into question by the Member for Bere Alston, William Strode, who on 8 Apr. claimed that he had embezzled the £3,500 delivered to him by Buckingham in November 1627 for billeting the sick soldiers and seamen on their return from Ré. Strode also alleged that Bagg, in order to make good the deficit, had then double-charged the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. Bagg was unperturbed by these accusations, which were evidently groundless, and reassured Buckingham on 21 Apr. that he would show that he was ‘your faithful servant’. Were it to be proved that he was guilty of any error, it would be of form rather than substance.
Bagg was kept abreast of developments in Parliament by Buckingham, who wrote him an optimistic letter, now lost, on 4 April. Bagg was delighted to receive this missive, and to learn of ‘the happy and blessed way of the Parliament’, but he hoped that the king’s subjects would not prove so demanding ‘as hereafter to forget their prayers’.
Bagg was granted his wish to come up sooner than expected, for on 30 Apr. he set out for Westminster to answer the charges levelled against him by Strode. He presumably performed this task satisfactorily, as the Commons subsequently failed to initiate formal proceedings against him, but on 13 May he was accused by Thomas Sherwill, a former mayor of Plymouth and now one of the borough’s parliamentary representatives, of having had a hand in the attempt to rig the county election in Cornwall. Bagg, who had recently been threatened with gaol by Sherwill at a meeting of Plymouth’s mayor’s court for employing bad language in public, deflected this accusation by replying that he would ‘be ready to sign any charge’ against those who had openly sought to deter Eliot and Coryton from standing, four of whom were now found guilty of misconduct.
Bagg was not permitted to remain long at Westminster, for in mid-May the fleet returned to England, having failed to breach the defences around La Rochelle. The king immediately resolved to set out a second, much larger force, and on 18 May Bagg was instructed to provide as many ships, men and provisions as he could in Devon and Cornwall, using his own credit and that of his friends if necessary.
Bagg was at Plymouth when he heard of Buckingham’s murder, of which he claimed to have had a premonition. Bereft of his patron, he was now dangerously exposed, and not surprisingly he appealed to the duke’s former client, Secretary Conway (Sir Edward Conway I*) for protection. The king had no intention of cutting him adrift, however, and by early September, despite the widespread lack of enthusiasm for further military adventures, he had succeeded in amassing an armada of 51 ships in Plymouth Sound.
Following the end of the wars with France and Spain, Bagg, who had frequently expended money without waiting for a formal warrant owing to the distance between Plymouth and London, found it difficult to recover the sums he had laid out in the king’s service. However, in July 1630, after declaring that Bagg had had an eye ‘for the good of our service’ rather than ‘delayed the same for want of warrants’, the king instructed the Exchequer to set aside its normal procedures,
Perhaps the main reason Bagg failed to achieve high office was the cumulative damage done to his reputation at Court during the mid-1630s. Serious trouble first erupted in 1633, when the Admiralty commissioners who had taken office on Buckingham’s death commenced an investigation into Bagg’s recent Vice-Admiralty accounts. They eventually calculated that the Admiralty was owed more than £29,000, but Bagg replied that, deducting various allowances and an unpaid loan of £16,000 to the king, he was actually more than £7,000 in credit. While Portland, the senior Admiralty commissioner, was alive this investigation proceeded at a snail’s pace, but in July 1635 Bagg was ordered to attend the Admiralty Court judge Sir Henry Marten*, and in May 1636 he was instructed to respond to a list of objections to his accounts.
Unlike the Admiralty’s investigation, which was conducted out of the public gaze, a lawsuit filed in Star Chamber by one of the king’s creditors, Sir Anthony Pell, attracted more attention. Sometime during the early 1630s Pell had paid Bagg £2,500 to intercede with Portland to obtain repayment of his debt. However, after parting with his money, Pell had been horrified to learn that he would receive nothing at all unless he relinquished almost half of his debt and lent more money to the king. In the subsequent Star Chamber case Bagg pleaded that every penny of the money he had received from Pell had gone into Portland’s pocket. However, in November 1635 the judges ruled by the narrowest of margins that he was guilty of extortion. Only the intervention of the king, who remained deeply grateful for his loyalty during the war years of the 1620s, prevented Bagg from being punished. Bagg was so relieved at this narrow escape that he openly celebrated, ‘for which’, according to George Garrard*, ‘even his friends condemn him’.
Bagg did not live long to savour his triumph over Mohun. He may have been seriously ill by 11 June 1638, on which date the newly appointed lord high admiral, Algernon Percy*, 10th earl of Northumberland, agreed to allow him to hold the post of vice-admiral of South Cornwall jointly with his son George. Certainly he was confined to bed by mid-August.