Pym was one of the great parliamentarians. According to Clarendon (Edward Hyde†), who knew him at the peak of his powers in the 1640s, ‘he had a very comely and grave way of expressing himself, with great volubility of words, natural and proper; and understood the temper and affections of the kingdom as well as any man’.
In 1605 Pym acquired a reversion for life of the county receiverships of Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Wiltshire, and in the following year took up his duties in succession to Henry Audley†. The annual remuneration was £100, to which he was entitled to add fees from the bailiffs and farmers who reported to him. He acquired a reputation for efficient administration, and from 1618 was apparently the principal officer responsible for the disafforestation of Pewsham and Blackmore forests. Despite his frank appraisals of the revenues likely to accrue to the Crown from this project, he attracted the favourable notice of Sir Lionel Cranfield*, who became his first clearly identifiable patron.
In the course of his routine duties Pym had intermittent dealings with the residents of Calne in Wiltshire, and these presumably explain how he secured a seat there in 1621.
Pym established his godly credentials on 16 Feb. by vigorously denouncing Thomas Sheppard’s claim that the Sabbath bill contradicted the king’s pronouncements on religious observance. This diatribe was commended by Sir Baptist Hicks, but considered ‘too violent’ by Sir Edward Seymour, and the harsh punishment which Pym recommended for Sheppard was not adopted.
As the struggle over patents intensified, Pym emerged as one of the clearest exponents of impeachment procedure, with a firm sense of the respective roles to be played by the Lords and Commons. He summarized his views on 20 Apr. during a speech on Sir John Bennet’s offences:
This great Parliament is the great watch of the kingdom to find out all faults. For some causes now in two Houses; and, as there is an examination and inquisition and judgment and execution, the first left to us, the latter to them, though not altogether excluding us ... we should reserve this power of inquisition in this business wholly to ourselves. ... So we may labour then to find the utmost of his faults, first, and to that end every Member of the House to speak his knowledge and then send for all that can speak in it; and so leave nothing but judicature to the Lords.
CD 1621, iii. 30; Nicholas, i. 283; Russell, ‘Parl. career’, 158; C.C.G. Tite, Impeachment and Parl. Judicature, 134.
Added the next day to the committee to draft charges against Bennet, he stuck firmly to these principles during the rest of the sitting. On 15 May he argued against going to the Lords with a complaint about the diocesan chancellors of Peterborough and Durham until the inquiry into their offences was completed. Three days later he unsuccessfully opposed the Lords’ request to examine a trunk belonging to the outspoken Catholic Edward Floyd, asserting that, as the Commons had not based their complaint against Floyd on its contents, the Lords should reach their judgment only on the evidence already presented to them. At this stage Pym showed no interest in impeachment as a weapon to be used against government ministers, and he took no part in the proceedings against Lord Chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*). Perhaps for this reason he failed to anticipate that his boast on 30 May about Parliament’s success in reviving impeachment would be badly received in a House rendered nervous by the king’s sudden announcement of an imminent recess. Mortified by Members’ reactions, he briefly left the Chamber.
Pym’s talents ordinarily found more favour than this. His ready grasp of complex administrative issues brought him three committee appointments concerned with the reform of Chancery (25 and 27 Apr.), while he was named on 26 Apr. to help review the Commons’ agenda. Two days later he secured the rejection of a bill to set up courts leet by observing that the measure was unnecessary, since it duplicated powers normally exercised by the Crown.
Pym scored an early success in the Parliament’s second sitting, persuading the Commons on 24 Nov. to seize the papers of the patentees Lepton and Goldsmith, whose conspiracy against Sir Edward Coke had just been revealed. He probably joined the search party himself, as his diary falls silent for the duration of this exercise, which rendered possible the subsequent inquiry into the whole affair.
After the dissolution, Pym was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. It has been suggested that his role in investigating the Lepton and Goldsmith affair had incurred the displeasure of the royal favourite, Buckingham, but his ostensible offence was his speech on religion on 28 November. Instructed to supply the government with a copy, he initially protested that he had not written it down, and had no notes for it. Nevertheless, after a sharper command, he delivered in a copious summary. Presumably not by coincidence, Pym’s parliamentary diary ends abruptly following his own summary of this speech.
Although Pym maintained households around this time at both Brymore and Wherwell, Hampshire, he was unable to find a seat in the 1624 Parliament in either the latter county or Somerset. Instead, he stood for election at Chippenham, though his close association with disafforestation in this district rendered him obnoxious to many of the poorer local inhabitants. His return on the narrow franchise was challenged by Sir Francis Popham*, who claimed the backing of a wider electorate, and this prompted him to accept a nomination at Tavistock from Sir Francis Russell* as well.
Once back at Westminster, Pym again kept a diary, though like its predecessor it also lacks its final pages, for reasons which are unclear. Pym made ten fewer speeches in 1624 than he had in 1621, but his nominations to the committee of privileges and 43 other committees demonstrated that his standing in the House had now risen. Even his obstinate behaviour over the Chippenham election dispute did no lasting damage to his reputation. By 25 Feb. he had decided to sit for Tavistock, but put off formally declaring his intentions, and resisted a motion for Sir Francis Popham to be allowed to sit, arguing that this would pre-empt the committee for privileges’ verdict on Chippenham’s franchise. Nevertheless, so long as he technically remained a candidate for that seat, he was barred from speaking at the hearings into the dispute. Accordingly, on 10 Mar. he finally opted for Tavistock. At the committee for privileges the next day, he was ‘heard at large with much favour to say what he could, and was very long but to very little purpose, in so much as Mr. [Christopher] Brooke said he had delivered a great deal of false doctrine’. After further delays the Commons finally ruled in Popham’s favour on 9 April.
Although he had been thwarted over the Chippenham franchise, Pym enjoyed greater success on issues of parliamentary management. On 23 Feb. he amended Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby’s motion on the introduction of new bills to render it more flexible, and on 23 Mar. winning agreement for all committees to be able to hear counsel and summon witnesses. He also blocked a move on 1 Mar. to prevent Members’ names from being recorded in the Journal whenever they made a motion, arguing that ‘he would innovate nothing without good reason’, although evidence taken from the Journal may have contributed to his arrest two years earlier.
With war against Spain now very much on the Commons’ agenda, Pym rallied enthusiastically to the cause, which he equated firmly in his mind with religious duty. Indeed, like many others in the House, he saw the anticipated conflict as the main issue to be addressed by the Parliament, and when (Sir) John Eliot threatened to derail proceedings on 27 Feb. with an inflamatory speech defending parliamentary privilege, he noted anxiously that ‘divers were afraid this motion would have put the House into some such heat as to disturb the greater business’. When his friend Sir Benjamin Rudyard finally broached the subject of war on 1 Mar., Pym privately assessed the speech as being ‘the mould of the resolution of the whole Parliament’, though his personal enthusiasm for Rudyard’s propositions was not widely shared. During the ensuing debate he moved for a conference with the Lords to prepare a message inviting the king to break off the Spanish treaties. Appointed to attend this conference, he also proposed an obsequious vote of thanks to Prince Charles (2-3 March).
Open debate of war in turn highlighted domestic religious issues, and here Pym was in his element. Occasionally he addressed primarily legal problems, such as the technicalities of Lady Darcy’s advowson bill (14 May). However, his priority, as in 1621, was to safeguard England by clamping down on Catholics. He supported the revival of the previous Parliament’s bill against recusants, which had failed to become law (25 Feb.), while on 1 Apr. he renewed his call for covert recusants to be liable for the same treatment as those who openly avoided church attendance. His targets included Sir Thomas Gerrard, 2nd Bt.*, whose election at Liverpool he denounced on 10 March. On 2 Apr. he proposed a check on the orthodoxy of recently appointed deputy lieutenants, and the next day was appointed to attend the conference about the Commons’ petition against recusants. Pym was also named to select committees to examine the latest recusancy certificates, and to investigate reports of popish schoolmasters and corrupt academics (28-9 April).
The 1625 Parliament was the last occasion on which Pym is known to have kept a diary. The best surviving account of this assembly, even if it suggests ‘a level of coherence and clarity of direction such as the actual exchanges on the floor of the House almost certainly failed to achieve’, the diary was sufficiently authoritative that Eliot drew heavily on it when writing his Negotium Posterorum.
At the Oxford sitting, Pym attracted one more legislative committee nomination, on the topic of simony (2 August). The mood of the House was now increasingly hostile towards Buckingham, and when Edward Clarke leapt to the duke’s defence on 6 Aug., Pym moved for him to withdraw from the Chamber while Members considered his offence. Two days later he was back on more familiar territory, backing Sir Miles Fleetwood’s call for the petition on religion to be revived, and requesting consideration of some fresh evidence of the Crown’s lenient treatment of papists. Shortly thereafter he was nominated to attend a conference to address these matters. Despite Pym’s growing association with religious affairs, his background in financial administration was not forgotten, and following the conference on 8 Aug. when Buckingham defended the government’s foreign policy, he was entrusted with reporting the speech by lord treasurer Marlborough (James Ley*) on the state of the royal finances.
Pym was also very much in evidence in the 1626 Parliament, making 65 recorded speeches, and receiving nearly 50 committee appointments. The sheer weight of business probably explains why he ceased to keep a diary. He was omitted from the committee for privileges until 11 Feb., so that his own request for privilege for a servant could be heard first, but thereafter he made a distinctive contribution to its proceedings. In general he was reluctant to see questions of privilege escalate into disputes. Even in relation to the controversial exclusion of Sir Edward Coke, who was barred from attendance by his new status as a sheriff, Pym reminded the committee on 14 Feb. that it should not rush to conclusions until the relevant precedents had been checked. When Coke requested privilege in a court case, reviving the initial dilemma over his status, Pym was unmoved, commenting on 9 June: ‘That our privileges are ours by reason of our attendance here; and since we dispense with his being here, that therefore we may forbear allowing him his privilege’. His proposal on 21 Mar. for a conference with the Lords to resolve the thorny problem of Sir Robert Howard’s* excommunication was rejected, but undaunted he urged the House on 3 May to adopt a diplomatic approach towards High Commission over the same matter.
Pym’s receivership probably explains why he headed the committee list for the bill concerned with the Gloucestershire estates of Richard Fust (1 June), as well as his inclusion on legislative committees concerned with sheriffs’ accounts, concealments, and oaths to make true accounts (11 and 14 Feb., 14 March). He was the first Member appointed to the committees to scrutinize bills on bribery and the restitution in blood of Carew Ralegh (3 and 24 March).
Almost from the opening of the session, Pym was active on religious issues. In response to Sir Benjamin Rudyard’s proposal on 10 Feb. for a committee to examine a host of problems such as recusancy and clergy funding, he welcomed the initiative, but called for the widest possible brief. He was promptly named to this committee, and subsequently received nominations to eight legislative committees whose subjects ranged from preaching to patronage rights (14 Feb., 25 May). Among these was a bill for educating recusants’ children as Protestants (1 Mar.); on 15 Feb. he was sent to the attorney-general, (Sir) Robert Heath*, to request a copy of a similar bill that had been introduced in 1624.
Pym was one of the very few Members who believed from the start that the second arrest of the St. Peter on Buckingham’s orders constituted a grievance. While it is possible that his patron Russell was encouraging him to support this early attack on the duke, his comments on 22 Feb. and 1 Mar. indicate that he based his conclusion less on the circumstances of the arrest itself, than on the issue of whether the ship’s cargo had then been misappropriated, thereby depriving the Crown of its rightful dues. One of the first Members to call on 1 Mar. for Buckingham to be invited to explain his part in these events, he was also to the fore after the Lords took offence at the wording of the Commons’ message to the duke. Named on 4 Mar. to the committee to tone down the official record of the summons, he was appointed the same day to help report back from the conference at which the dispute was resolved. Despite the Lords’ evident distaste for the Commons’ inquiry, on 1 May Pym reiterated his belief that the St. Peter affair was indeed a grievance, on the same grounds as before.
For six days after Dr. Turner’s sensational attack on Buckingham, Pym kept his own counsel, but finally, on 17 Mar., he added his voice to complaints that the accumulation of too many offices in one man was a cause of the nation’s problems. The next day he backed Eliot’s call for Turner’s allegations to be thoroughly checked before the Commons considered censuring him, and he served on the so-called committee for the ‘causes of causes’ established on 20 Mar. to assemble evidence against the duke. His attitude hardened as the king began to apply pressure on the House over Turner. On 1 Apr. he reported from the previous day’s conference, when Buckingham attempted to soften the impact of Charles’s recent comments, but almost immediately set to work on drafting a remonstrance in defence of the Commons’ privileges.
The king’s decision in early June to arrange Buckingham’s election as chancellor of Cambridge University was an obvious slight to the Commons. However, Pym was far more alarmed to discover that the party sent to Cambridge to solicit support for the duke included John Cosin and Robert Mason II*, men ‘who have been agents to utter Montagu’s book ... so that it may be suspected a conspiracy to bring in Arminianism’. Pym’s fear of a plot at the heart of government to subvert the established Church may help to explain his reluctance the same day to see John More expelled from the Commons for warning of ‘new counsels’. Appointed on 6 June to help draft the letter of complaint to Cambridge, which he then reported to the House, he nevertheless called the next day for the dispatch of this missive to be postponed while the Commons addressed the king’s objections to it.
Two days after the Parliament ended, Pym and the other leading figures in the impeachment of Buckingham were summoned before attorney-general Heath, who questioned them about the charges levelled at the duke, and instructed them to hand over their evidence. However, they declined to cooperate, on the grounds that they lacked the necessary authority to reveal proceedings in the Commons, and no further action was taken against them.
It has been claimed that Pym was one of the leading Members who attended a meeting before the opening of the 1628 Parliament to discuss the Commons’ priorities. While there is some doubt over whether such a gathering actually took place, there is no question that he was now one of the most prominent figures in the Commons. During the 1628 session he was appointed to nearly 50 committees and made over 90 speeches.
By comparison, Pym was even more obsessive about religious affairs in 1628 than he had been in 1626. Nominated on 20 Mar. to the committee to draft a petition for a general fast, and to the consequent conference on the following day, he shortly afterwards took the chair of the grand committee on religion, effectively turning it into his personal vehicle. As the battle over subjects’ liberties took up ever more of the Commons’ time, he moved on 7 Apr. for a subcommittee to maintain progress on religious business. However, in no sense did he regard spiritual matters as being separate and distinct from secular problems. Indeed, on 22 Apr. he demanded urgent action against adultery, ‘to stay the overflowing of this sin for which we find the judgment of God upon the land’.
The Catholic threat preyed constantly on Pym’s mind, but he regarded some Anglicans as almost equally dangerous. On 28 Apr. he reported from the grand committee for religion concerning complaints against both the Arminian Montagu and Richard Burgess, vicar of Witney, Oxfordshire, who had been preaching against puritanism. Both men were duly summoned before the committee. Of the two, Burgess was the easier nut to crack. An initial show of defiance was crushed, at Pym’s request, by a spell in the Tower (9 May), and although work continued thereafter on a charge to be presented to the Lords, Pym seems to have lost interest in the case, and had to be requested on 3 June to attend the drafting committee. As his step-brother Francis Rous was also one of its members, he perhaps felt that his own presence was not required.
Pym presumably absorbed some of his views on the liberties of the subject from the debates which dominated the Parliament’s opening weeks, since he personally contributed very little to these discussions. His observation on 26 Mar., that ‘the oath ministered by the commissioners for the loan is against the law’, was commended by Sir Robert Phelips as suggesting one method of challenging arbitrary taxation. He also shrewdly advised on 3 Apr. that the grievance of impressment could best be addressed by dealing with local abuses rather than questioning the king’s power. Even so, his nomination later that day to the committee to plan the next steps in safeguarding liberties was essentially a testimony to his general reputation in the House, as was his appointment on 4 Apr. to assist Digges at the forthcoming conference on the same topic.
Given this growing focus on fundamental rights, Pym was predictably scathing on 26 Apr. about the Lords’ attempt to modify the Commons’ propositions on liberties: ‘The words of "reason of state" are too sublime: we know no such thing. Let us leave it where it is.’ Two days later he was nominated to help draft the bill on liberties proposed by Sir Thomas Wentworth. He was unimpressed by the king’s offer to accept such a bill providing it merely restated existing documents such as Magna Carta, and on 5 May objected to a motion to have this undertaking recorded in the Journal, as it ‘trenches into the liberty of the House’. The king’s demand to know whether the Commons would trust his word produced a yet stronger reaction on 6 May.
Our assurance in the king’s word were sufficient if we knew what the king’s sense and meaning is. We have not his word only, but his oath also at his coronation; and I am persuaded if the king knew the law, that he ought not to commit without [stating a] cause, he would not. We complain of our unjust imprisonments upon loans. I hear not any say we shall have no more, or that matter of state shall be no more pretended when there is none. For billeting of soldiers, it is said that it is against the law. I doubt not but the [Privy Council] lords have a rule they go by. ...We all rest in the king’s royal word, but let us agree in a rule to give us satisfaction.
Ibid. iii. 98, 123, 264, 271.
In view of Charles’s stubborn resistance to an explanatory bill of liberties, Pym welcomed the counter-proposal for a Petition of Right, which he recognized might circumvent the king’s objections. Having helped to draft the bill of liberties, he was automatically appointed to the committee to draw up the Petition, and was also named to check the text’s fair copy (6 and 8 May). Not surprisingly, he both opposed the Lords’ proposed amendments to the Petition and was nominated to help explain why the peers’ alterations were unacceptable (13 May). He insisted on 20 May that the Petition must continue to state that abuses had been committed by the king’s authority, and dismissed the Lords’ additional clause about sovereign power as introducing a novel concept quite distinct from English law.
During the 1629 session, Pym received 16 committee nominations and made 18 recorded speeches, though by now the scale of his influence was such that he must have spoken more frequently than this. As ever his priority was to seek a remedy for religious grievances, but he faced two early obstacles. He partially dealt with the first of these on 21 Jan., when he persuaded the Commons to postpone by nearly a week its debate on the king’s response to the Petition of Right. In the meantime this issue was consigned to a select committee, to which Pym was added.
Howsoever it is alleged that the Parliament are not judges in matters of faith, yet ought they to know the established and fundamental truths, and the contraries unto them; ... there is no court can meet with this mischief but the courts of Parliament. The Convocation cannot because it is but a provincial synod, ... the High Commission cannot, for it hath its authority derived from parliaments.
The House was convinced, at least temporarily, and resolved immediately afterwards to give religion precedence over all other business.
Attorney-general Heath’s clumsy subpoena against John Rolle on 9 Feb. brought the attention of most Members sharply back to Tunnage and Poundage. Pym was named on 14 Feb. to the committee to consider the Exchequer Court’s decision to uphold the detention of Rolle’s goods, and on 19 Feb. he urged the Commons to resolve the impasse by settling the legal status of Tunnage and Poundage rather than pursue Eliot and Selden’s strategy of treating the dispute as a matter of parliamentary privilege.
The liberties of this House are inferior to the liberties of the kingdom ... and the main end is to establish possession of the subjects, and to take off the commissions and records and orders which are now against us; ... the way to sweeten the business with the king and to rectify ourselves is first to settle these things and then we may in good time proceed to vindicate our own privileges.
This was sound advice, but Eliot and Selden now had the upper hand. Once the House decided to try to use the privilege that extended to Members’ goods as a means of recovering Rolle’s confiscated cloth, it became essential to establish whether the customs farmers who had impounded it were acting on their own behalf, and thus fell within the Commons’ jurisdiction. This was a highly technical question, and on 20 Feb. Pym tried three times to resolve it, either by referring to the customers’ lease or by drawing on his knowledge of Exchequer practice. However, his warning that the king almost certainly retained an interest in the customs farm was disregarded, and the Commons blundered on into total deadlock with Charles. Pym does not feature in the accounts of the tumultuous events of 2 Mar., and it is unclear whether he attended the House that day.
By 1630 Pym had entered the circle of the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich*) and Lord Brooke (Robert Greville*), and like them became a leading figure in the Providence Island Company during the following decade. The same contacts led to his selection as a grantee of the Saybrook colony two years later. Arguably ‘the master-mind that governed the whole course of the Providence Company’, his duties as treasurer were hugely time-consuming, and perhaps prompted his decision in 1639 to surrender his receivership.