‘The greatest and most famous lawyer of that age’, according to John Rushworth, Noye sprang from an obscure gentry family in one of England’s remoter corners. He is said to have been born at St. Buryan, in the far west of Cornwall, where his forebears had owned the barton of Pendrea since the mid-fifteenth century, though he probably grew up at Carnanton, his father’s other principal estate, which was leased from the Crown.
Naturally, Noye found his services much in demand both in his native county and Devon, and the local standing which he thus acquired doubtless contributed to his repeated success in obtaining parliamentary seats at Cornish boroughs.
The second session provided further evidence that Noye’s talents were being recognized within the House. Besides the ten bill committees to which he was nominated or added, he was named on 14 Apr. 1606 to a select committee to search for records concerning purveyors. Appointed on 10 Apr. to attend a conference with the Lords about grievances in ecclesiastical causes, he was also included in a select committee for framing a petition of grievances (18 April).
By comparison, the third session passed off quietly. Named on 24 Nov. 1606 to attend the Lords to hear their views on the Instrument of Union, he was also included in a select committee on 11 Dec. to prepare for a conference on the same subject. However, Noye’s few recorded utterances on the Union, during a debate on 21 Feb. 1607, were apparently technical points about naturalization.
The opening two months of the first 1610 session brought Noye little business of real note apart from an appointment on 7 Mar. to prepare for a conference with the Lords about Dr. Cowell’s controversial legal dictionary, the Interpreter. He evidently followed the progress of an estate bill promoted by John Arundell* of Trerice, one of Cornwall’s most powerful gentry leaders, as on 24 Apr. he highlighted drafting errors in the text which contributed to the measure’s rejection. Even the vexed issue of impositions initially provoked little reaction from him. On 30 Apr. Noye vouched for the accuracy of a medieval statute produced as evidence on this subject, and on the following day he was named to a committee to search for further precedents, though he appears not to have taken part in this exercise. However, the king’s efforts to prevent the Commons from discussing any aspect of impositions which touched on the royal prerogative drove him to a fresh attack on the government on 18 May, in which he defended the Commons’ duty to investigate grievances, notwithstanding royal prohibitions. ‘If we may not say this is our right, if we may not complain, because we are commanded not to complain; then we must bear any apparent wrong ... Therefore I think it very convenient and behoveful for us to answer that we must of necessity dispute it.’
Noye’s rare outbursts in the Commons clearly did him no harm in the government’s eyes. Already a West Country piracy commissioner of several years’ standing, in August 1610 he was appointed to help overhaul the confused corpus of penal laws. In December 1611 he was added to the prestigious commission of oyer and terminer for the Verge, though he was dropped from this again after about two years. It is not known whether Noye sought a place in the short-lived 1614 Parliament. In its aftermath, he was once more invited to assist with reviewing and simplifying existing statutes, Sir Francis Bacon* classifying him as ‘not overwrought with practice, and yet learned and diligent, and conversant in reports and records’.
Noye returned to Parliament in 1621 as a nominee of the Prince’s Council. An initial approach to Fowey proved unsuccessful, but he secured a place at Helston, a borough barely 20 miles from his presumed birthplace.
Noye made at least 85 speeches during the first sitting, and when expounding on subjects with which he was particularly familiar, be it the English cloth trade (20 Feb.) or enrolment procedures in Chancery (27 Apr.), he undoubtedly spoke with great authority. Indeed, in the course of this sitting he became accustomed to ruling magisterially on matters of procedure, such as the correct handling of petitions (12 Mar.), relations between the Commons and the Lords or Convocation (14 Mar. and 15 May), and the precise nature of a parliamentary adjournment (1 June).
Such embarrassments detracted only marginally from the real strengths of Noye’s performance during this sitting. Bringing to the House his previous experience on the commissions for overhauling old laws, most recently in the summer of 1620, he became a key figure on the committee established on 13 Feb. to prepare the bill for repeal and continuance of statutes, to the extent that discussions might be suspended if Noye was unable to be present.
In the same class as Lloyd’s patent, and particularly detestable to Noye, was the patent for supervising the licensing of alehouses. As he informed the House on 22 Feb., the king himself had declared his opposition to such monopolies, which involved ‘power to dispense with penal laws or to compound them’. Private individuals should not exercise power which properly belonged to the Crown; ‘it layeth a scandal upon justice’. Such patentees had dishonoured the king ‘in fixing their bills upon posts like mountebanks and quack salvers that go to cure the toothache [;] that those things which are the king’s royalties should be thus set to sale, it is a foul abuse’. In short, the very rule of law was being undermined by these patents. In Noye’s view it was Parliament’s duty to restore the correct balance, and such action should be welcomed by the Crown. As he put it on 19 Feb., ‘so far from clipping it ... our petition to the king may be to extend his prerogative.’
Politically naïve as this outlook was, Noye’s certainty that these grievances could be defined as legal problems and resolved accordingly made him unflinching in his pursuit of the patentees. He refused to accept (Sir) Giles Mompesson’s* attempts to shift blame onto his deputies, and sought to have him investigated over more than just his inn-licensing patent (20 and 26 February). Sent on 27 Feb. to search for precedents for possible action against Mompesson, on 6 Mar. he was nominated to assist in the presentation of the Mompesson committee’s findings.
Naturally Noye was also drawn into proceedings against the Commons’ other targets in 1621. Named on 20 Apr. to the committee to prepare charges against Sir John Bennet* over his conduct as an ecclesiastical court judge, he responded vigorously to Bennet’s evasions, dismissing some allegations as inadmissible, but defining the procedural course which led to the erring Member’s expulsion from the House (23 April).
In the second sitting of the 1621 Parliament, grievances were much less to the fore, and Noye’s expertise was correspondingly less in demand, although he still spoke nearly 20 times. He was named to a select committee to consider a bill against informers, and also to a conference on the same theme (29 Nov. and 1 December). Predictably he adopted a hard line over the efforts of the patentees Lepton and Goldsmith to revenge themselves on Sir Edward Coke* for the treatment which they had received during the first sitting. Having warned on 29 Nov. that anything other than firm action against them would encourage other monopolists, on 13 Dec. he urged Members to find a means of seeking judgment against the two offenders. During the previous sitting, a process of scire facias had been brought successfully against Herne’s fish-processing patent, and on 29 Nov. he introduced a bill to confirm the verdict, but this measure failed to progress further.
Away from this familiar territory, Noye once again proved to have a less certain political instinct. On 28 Nov., when the Commons decided to impose double the usual rate of subsidy on recusants and their relatives, he moved for a proviso exempting the archbishop of York, whose son Tobie Matthew* had converted to the Roman faith. However, as John Chamberlain reported, this ‘unseasonable jest’ gained him ‘nothing but the reputation to favour or savour of that sect’.
Further embarrassment followed. On 7 Dec., after it was decided to submit a fresh petition to the king, discussion turned to the manner of the petition’s delivery. One option was to send it via the Speaker. This was suggested by Noye himself, but in so doing he unwittingly precipitated a lengthy argument. As a furious John Hawarde noted in his diary, ‘Mr. Noye, who first moved this most unfortunately ... put us now into a debate of three hours at the least, yet in the end said himself that if the Speaker went there must of necessity be an adjournment which could not possibly be without danger of a cessation’. William Hakewill and others questioned the accuracy of Noye’s altered opinion, while Christopher Brooke openly criticized Noye for raising the idea of going to the Speaker in the first place, and the proposal was eventually dropped as being contrary to normal practice.
Having now had his fingers badly burnt, on 15 Dec. Noye enthusiastically backed the strategy of a protestation of the Commons’ privileges, recognizing that a further message to the king would simply generate another censure. When, on 18 Dec., James curtailed the time available for drafting the Protestation by threatening an imminent prorogation, Noye sensibly recommended the shortest feasible statement: ‘long arguing argues a doubt, and we are out of doubt of the right of our privileges’. This time the Commons took his advice.
Around the end of 1621, a rumour circulated that Noye would be sent as a commissioner to Ireland, along with other perceived troublemakers such as Sandys and Sir Edward Coke, but in the event he was spared this service. In general, his reputation was still rising. He gave the autumn readings at Lincoln’s Inn in 1622, and during this decade he added to his list of clients the East India Company, the earls of Bridgewater and Cork, and the marquess of Winchester.
In January 1624 Noye was once again nominated by the Prince’s Council for a seat at Fowey, and this time he was elected by the borough.
Because Noye engaged with less business overall in this Parliament, it is easier to isolate the items which particularly interested him. One of these was the bill for cancelling Herne’s fish-processing patent, reintroduced after its failure in 1621, for which he chaired the committee stage. He also followed another piece of Cornish business, the Mohun estate bill, which was designed to resolve a long-running feud in a family which Noye had known for several years. On 5 Apr. he intervened during the third reading, criticizing a clause on leases, and helped to secure a second committee phase in which he was included.
Almost certainly the legislation to which he devoted the bulk of his time concerned continuance of statutes. Appointed on 24 Mar. to manage the bill, he had it re-committed to the whole House on 1 Apr. in response to poor attendance at the original committee, and apparently chaired all subsequent discussions during its passage through the Commons. On 10 Apr. he confirmed that the bill addressed the thorny problem of whether statutes had lapsed through the failure of the 1621 Parliament to finalize a continuance Act, and he presumably played a leading role in the conference with the Lords on 22 May when the Commons explained their objections to amendments introduced in the Upper House.
Inevitably Noye was drawn once again into the investigation of grievances, and was named to bill committees on inns and concealed lands (22 Mar. and 1 Apr.), as well as select committees concerned with patents which affected gold-wire-drawing, sea-coals and the staplers (3 Apr. and 25-6 May). He was also appointed to two committees to inquire into impositions (9 Apr. and 11 May).
To the on-going debate about war, Noye contributed little. On 16 Apr. he opposed a bill for re-arming the militia, on the grounds that it would give too much power to deputy lieutenants, and was nominated to the committee for drafting a new version. His most significant interventions came on 11 and 12 May, when, during the subsidy bill debates, he furnished the House with precedents that justified making the Council of War financially accountable to the Commons, and clarified the question of how that accountability should be enforced. He was also appointed on 1 Apr. to search for precedents for raising loans to meet the Navy’s immediate needs in the face of the Spanish threat.
Noye’s apparent lack of commitment to Prince Charles’s parliamentary agenda extended to the campaigns to undermine government ministers who opposed war with Spain. Far from being swayed by the political excitement of the chase, he seems to have judged the attacks on government ministers on their individual merits. He had a particular interest in one of the allegations of corruption directed at lord keeper Williams, as he had served as counsel to Lady Grace Darcy in the legal battle for control of the advowson of Sutton church, Surrey. However, on 21 Apr. he used this fact to excuse himself from offering more than an impartial outline of the case. When efforts at arbitration in the dispute broke down, and a bill was introduced to resolve the matter, he was named to its committee stage (7 May), but attended only one meeting. On 27 May he produced a medieval precedent to justify his opinion that a woman who had falsely accused Williams should be severely punished, and demonstrated that the Chancery decree on which the claims were based had been fair.
Although Noye had scarcely behaved like a partisan of Prince Charles during the 1624 Parliament, there is no firm evidence to suggest that the government’s attitude towards him changed at the outset of the new reign. While it is unclear whether the re-constituted duchy of Cornwall Council retained his services, in early 1626 he secured the Cornish hundredal stewardship which he coveted, and he continued to be named to minor commissions. It is not known whether he sought a place in the 1625 Parliament, and he featured in its proceedings only because he was requested on 21 June to deliver in the poor relief bill which had been entrusted to him at the end of the previous session.
The 1626 Parliament once again brought Noye no shortage of business. Although named to only 15 bill committees, he was appointed to the committee for privileges as well as 18 select committees, of which a dozen involved drafting, and another four inquiries into grievances. His 50 or so recorded speeches included five reports from committee, on the wine imposition (25 Feb. and 8 Mar.) and bills concerned with apparel and poor relief (28 Apr., 9 and 25 May). He also chaired the committee of the whole House during debates on the king’s request for urgent supply (13-14 Mar.), the continuance of statutes (13 Apr.), and Tunnage and Poundage (8 June).
As usual, Noye was in his element unravelling intricate problems of law, for example whether Sir Robert Howard was entitled to parliamentary privilege in his dispute with the High Commission, a conundrum which generated precedents dating back to the reign of Edward I (21 March).
The campaign to impeach the duke of Buckingham undermined Noye’s preferred modus operandi, and propelled him into uncharacteristically radical behaviour. Like many Members, he showed no interest in using the inquiry into the detention of the St. Peter as a weapon against the duke. As initially presented to the Commons, the issue was about providing relief for merchants whose goods had been confiscated. Noye objected to the moves to divert debate onto the question of Buckingham’s involvement, not least because the evidence was so thin. As he observed on 22 Feb., ‘we are not about the business we began with. For any man to charge a man upon a single letter is to let in accusation upon all courts of justice’. He followed this with a plea on 1 Mar. ‘that some speedy course may be taken for the relief of the poor men, and not to make a quarrel among ourselves’.
if any man will complain of the greatest subject in the kingdom, he may be heard. [But] to bring inquiries hither is as a justice in eyre to give a charge to a grand jury, and not fit. To present by common fame, he will not speak whether it be fit or no.
That said, Noye was too senior a figure in the House to stand aloof from developments. He was appointed on 21 Mar. to search for precedents after the king demanded Turner’s punishment, and was named as a reporter for the conference with the Lords called on 30 Mar. to discuss Charles’s further pronouncements on the Commons’ behaviour. The king’s increasingly aggressive defence of his favourite apparently caused Noye to review his own stance. Although on 1 Apr. he argued against the drafting of a Remonstrance in defence of the Commons’ privileges, on the grounds that Charles’s recent observations did not constitute a threat to them, later the same day he dropped his objections to Turner’s accusations. ‘Common fame is ind[i]cium, a ground of inquiry but not of condemnation. Though there were no precedents of this, yet it were good to make one of this ... If we should not proceed upon fame, I know not how we shall proceed.’
For the remainder of the Parliament, Noye engaged more fully in the pursuit of Buckingham. On 3 Apr., in the committee for drafting the Remonstrance, he criticized (Sir) John Eliot’s choice of precedents, but offered several of his own, including one which helped to justify the inquiry into the St. Peter arrests. He also resisted a proposal by Sir Richard Weston that the Remonstrance should hold out the prospect of further supply. When the House debated on 22 Apr. whether to present charges on the basis of common fame, he asserted that this was indeed a sufficient ground where treason was suspected: ‘No other way of inquiry here ... No fault to go unpunished because no man dare accuse’. Although it might prove impossible for the Commons to substantiate the charges, for example if key witnesses were peers, this should not prevent the House from passing on their findings. Having thus helped to clear the way for the impeachment to be brought, he was appointed on 3 May to assist Eliot during the formal proceedings in the Lords.
The Forced Loan of 1626-7 obliged Noye to reconsider his outlook once again. It is difficult to say how far he disagreed with the Loan in principle, for although his services were retained by a Loan refuser, Sir Walter Earle*, he contributed £10 to the levy himself. Around the same time he appeared before the Privy Council to plead two quite unconnected cases, one a dispute over fishing in North America, the other a private property matter, while in March 1627 he felt able to approach Buckingham’s secretary, Edward Nicholas* on behalf of his friend Sir Francis Basset, the vice-admiral of Cornwall. In the following June Noye was appointed a commissioner for inquiry into exacted fees in the Westminster courts, and on the face of things it was business as usual.
In March 1628 Noye was elected at Helston for the second time, presumably with the support of the Godolphin family, who normally controlled the borough’s patronage. During the first session of this Parliament he was named or added to ten bill committees and 19 select committees, attended five conferences and delivered 40 recorded speeches. Although he did not sit on the committee for privileges this time, he was appointed to help consider two questions of privilege, the Commons’ right to self-adjournment, and a breach of the ban on the reporting of debates (10-11 April).
For once, Noye’s objectives in seeking election to Westminster were crystal clear. As far as he was concerned, the very foundations of the state were threatened by two glaring injustices, arbitrary imprisonment and the use of martial law in peacetime, and he was determined that Parliament would provide redress. His own credentials in this battle were laid down on 29 Mar., when William Hakewill referred to Noye’s role in the Five Knights trial. Appointed on 16 Apr. to a conference on the liberty of the subject, he produced a fourteenth-century precedent about imprisonment without bail, and made observations on two Tudor cases. He followed this up the next day at a similar meeting with a much longer argument against the Crown’s position that it was on occasion acceptable to imprison without showing cause.
In the meantime, on 18 Apr. Noye had turned his attention to the problem of martial law. In essence, he had no objections to its use in time of war, providing it was applied only to soldiers actually in the field. However, the 1626 commission extended to sailors as well, who were properly regulated by their own laws, and it was being used to discipline troops who were currently billeted between campaigns, and to whom the Common Law should apply. Noye also considered that the commission made excessive use of the death penalty: ‘if all [the articles] were executed, it would waste an army; if not executed, it will make the government contemptible’. Four days later, he stated explicitly that the 1626 commission, as presently enforced, was in his view illegal: ‘there must not be a new law where there is no distress’. Naturally Noye relied on precedents to support his case. Having already brandished several on 18 and 19 Apr., he was appointed to conduct a further search with John Selden, finally exhibiting the fruits of his labours in the House on 7 May.
Noye broadly supported the strategy of a new bill for the liberty of the subject, but even at this juncture he was not prepared to go as far as Coke or Eliot in laying down the law to the king. When the bill was debated on 30 Apr., he found fault with the very clause which was intended to guard against arbitrary imprisonment. In his view any demand that arrest warrants must declare the cause of committal was likely to suffer amendment in the Lords. His preference was for essentially the same tactics which he had outlined on 26 Apr., a legislative strengthening of the habeas corpus process, and a petition to the king for a formal declaration that he would not imprison without good cause.
So far as grievances were concerned, Noye engaged with few other issues during this session. As one of the most prominent Cornishmen in the House it was perhaps inevitable that he would become involved with Eliot’s attacks on John Mohun and his fellow Cornish deputy-lieutenants, and although his views on this episode are not recorded, he was named or added to four related committees.
In marked contrast to this relaxed attitude, Noye was determined that the bill for continuance of statutes would complete its passage, and, in the face of considerable apathy, he drove this business through the Commons almost single-handed. Named to the preliminary drafting committee on 17 Mar., he urged action on this front four days later, and raised the issue once again on 30 Apr., complaining that no-one else was attending the committee. Further agitation in subsequent weeks finally resulted in a draft bill which he presented to the House on 30 May.
In the political hot-house of the 1629 session Noye attracted rather less business, receiving just six nominations to select committees, although he was also requested to attend the Lords on 5 Feb. to act as counsel in a precedence dispute. On 21 Jan. he was appointed to help check whether the Petition of Right had been correctly enrolled at Westminster in accordance with the king’s promises. Staying aloof from the arguments which raged over religion during the session’s opening weeks, he contributed only to the debate on 6 Feb. about John Cosin’s pardon for an alleged attack on the royal supremacy, when his principal concern was whether the Commons were entitled to summon attorney-general Heath from the Lords as part of their inquiry.
On the vexed subject of Tunnage and Poundage, Noye took an unexpectedly hard line, considering his ambiguous stance in the previous June. On 12 Feb. he launched a vigorous attack on the dubious legal arguments which had been deployed to justify collection of the subsidy during the previous three-and-a-half years, claiming that these tactics, and the accompanying seizures of merchants’ goods, were the principal obstacle to a resolution of the crisis. In his view the correct balance of the law had yet again been disturbed, and needed to be restored before normal business could resume.
We cannot safely give unless we be in possession, and the proceedings in the Exchequer nullified, and the information in the Star Chamber, and the annexation to the Petition of Right ... I will not give my voice to this until these things be made void; for it will not be a gift but a forced confirmation; neither will I give it ... [without] a declaration in the bill, that the king hath no right but by our free gift. If it will not be accepted, as it is fit for us to give it, we cannot help it. If it be the king’s already, as by these new records it seemeth to be, we need not give it.
At the same time, however, he believed that visible progress on the Tunnage and Poundage bill was an essential precursor to any requests for the restitution of merchants’ goods, a more moderate stance than that adopted by Eliot and his allies.
In late October 1629 Noye helped to secure bail for Denzil Holles, one of the Members implicated in the disturbances in the Commons on 2 March. However, this was a less provocative gesture than it appears, since Holles in the process broke ranks with Eliot and the other conspirators who had thus far refused to be bound over for good behaviour. Shortly afterwards a rumour circulated that Noye would become attorney of the Court of Wards upon the next vacancy. Nothing came of this, but from March 1630 he was once more named to the government commissions from which he had been excluded since the Five Knights’ trial, a clear sign that the Crown was seeking a rapprochement with him.
Popular expectations were swiftly disappointed. Within weeks Noye was prosecuting rioters opposed to the new projects for fen drainage, and preparing a warrant for increasing the imposition on coal exports. During the next two-and-a-half years, he acquired the unsavoury reputation of a turncoat, one who had ‘appeared a stout patriot of the commonalty’, but who, for the sake of personal gain, ‘wheel’d about to the prerogative, and made amends with his future service, for all his former disobligations’.
It appears that Noye accepted his elevation with some reluctance. According to Clarendon (Edward Hyde†), the Court won him round only ‘by great industry and importunity’. He is said to have demanded full details of his official salary before accepting the post, as he believed that the attorney-general should not engage in private practice, and needed to know what compensation he would receive for his loss of earnings. Having taken on the role, however, he executed it to the best of his ability, even with a certain grim humour. ‘Check’t a little in private by a friend for innovating and bearing too hard upon the poor subject,’ he allegedly replied that ‘"atturnatus domini regis is one that must serve the king’s turn"’.
Defining Noye’s attitude towards religious affairs is more difficult. On receiving news of his death, Laud lamented the passing of the greatest friend the Church had ‘of his condition’, and there was some truth in this. How far he sympathized with the archbishop’s theological views is unclear, he was on intimate terms with Laud’s close associate Peter Heylyn.
Noye’s role in the evolution of Ship Money has generally been misrepresented. He had in fact taken an interest in maritime affairs for some years, perhaps as a result of his professional involvement in the Greenland Company dispute of the late 1620s, and indeed claimed to have been a prime mover behind the establishment of the Fishery Society in 1632. As a Cornishman at Court he was also under some pressure from his friends in the West Country to address the threat of piracy in that region.
Contrary to the stories put out by puritan pamphleteers, Noye’s final illness dated not from May 1634, and the execution of the Star Chamber sentence on Prynne, but from at least the previous winter. It was apparently a particularly acute case of the stone, accompanied by severe haemorrhaging and latterly jaundice. His condition was already regarded as dangerous by 3 June 1634, when he made his will.
Noye’s estate and reputation came under attack almost immediately. Within weeks the government sealed his study and removed a quantity of his papers, though he had in fact already destroyed part of his collection, allegedly to prevent other lawyers benefiting from the fruits of his labours. Libels were circulated, claiming that at his post-mortem ‘there was found in his head a bundle of proclamations, in his maw moth-eaten records, and in his belly a barrel of soap’. In the autumn the same story featured in a scurrilous new play, A projector lately dead, while two years later Henry Burton’s Divine Judgments upon Sabbath Breakers spread the story that Noye’s final illness was a punishment for his treatment of Prynne.