SNOWE, Simon (1600-68), of All Hallows, Goldsmith Street, Exeter, Devon.

Simon Snowe’s father seems to have been the first of his name to achieve the freedom of Exeter. Thomas Snowe was admitted as a merchant with no reference made to any apprenticeship he may have served, so he may have been born and educated outside the city. To judge from the Protestation returns of 1642, Snowe was a fairly common name in Devon. Simon Snowe’s mother’s family, the Vilvaynes, were of much longer provenance in Exeter, where they served apprenticeships and gained the freedom from at least the early sixteenth century.13Exeter Freemen, 72. Thomas Snowe died when Simon was a child, and his mother’s second marriage was to John Shere, an Exeter alderman who died in 1623.14St Mary Arches par. reg.; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, bargains and sales 1640-60, conveyance of 16 Nov. 1641; PROB11/141/372. In his last days, Shere evidently harboured some anxiety about his eldest stepson. In Shere’s will, Simon Snowe was given a reversionary interest in some Exeter properties, but alone among the beneficiaries was singled out as the object of his benefactor’s prayer ‘that it would so please his divine majesty so to prosper and to bless him that he lead his life unto the end in his fear and true obedience of his holy will and written word the which the Church of England now professeth.’15PROB11/141/372. This may be simply an expression of hope for the future of Shere’s eldest stepson, he having no male heir of his blood; but it may alternatively suggest some rebelliousness on Snowe’s part.

Snowe’s upbringing was typical of that of a merchant’s son who was himself destined to the commercial life.16Sig. Devon RO, Exeter City Act Bk. viii. f. 196v. He became free of the city in 1625 by virtue of his standing as eldest surviving son of his late father, and soon afterwards contributed without demur to the Forced Loan of Charles I and to the collection for the renovation of St Paul’s Cathedral.17Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, misc. rolls 75; charters and letters patent, XCVIIIa. By August 1626 he was self-assured enough to be the principal reporter to the government on a breach of maritime law in Exeter.18CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 407. He is said to have been married twice, and both marriages were probably to the daughters of Exeter citizens. Although contemporary evidence for it has not been found, his first wife was apparently the child of one Peter Taylor, and a smith of that name gained the freedom in 1590. If this marriage took place, it was short-lived, because Snowe was a bachelor in 1621 and his well-documented marriage to Eleanor Chappell was solemnized in 1626.19PROB11/141/372; The Western Antiquary, vi. 15. The Chappell family of Exeter, to which Snowe’s second wife belonged, was well established in Exeter and produced three mayors of the city between 1540 and 1640.20W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (Cambridge, Mass. 1975), 254. Neither of Snowe’s marriages produced children.

Snowe was admitted to the common council of Exeter in 1635, and down to 1640 served on a number of city committees concerned with the usual municipal topics such as hospitals, wool markets, duties payable at the quay and legacies left to the corporation.21Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 24v, 27v, 30, 31, 32, 39v, 47, 49. The only task with which he was entrusted that carried a degree of political sensitivity was that concerned with the notoriously poor relations between the bishop of Exeter, Dr Joseph Hall, and the city authorities. The bishop and the dean and chapter petitioned the king against the encroachments by the city on their jurisdiction. This was essentially a squabble over rival powers in the cathedral close, and Snowe was one of two councillors despatched to sound out the bishop over his intentions. They came back unsuccessful in their attempt to obtain from the bishop a written note of his complaints, and had to report his ambiguous message that he would be insisting only on points of contention that the corporation would wish to contest by reference to its charter.22Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 41v.

In the late 1630s, Snowe was in a modest way of business as an overseas merchant. In 1638-9 he exported a couple of cargoes of cloth to Madeira and imported three cargoes, including Spanish iron from San Sebastian, but he was not a leading shipper like James Tucker*, the city’s choice to serve in the first Parliament of 1640. Whereas Tucker was assessed for the subsidy on £12 in lands, Snowe was rated on £6 in goods.23E190/950/7; E179/245/12. Nevertheless, Snowe was diversifying into other commercial activity. In 1639 he acquired a share in the pre-emption of tin, a royal grant to patentees, who then enjoyed the sale rights over tin production in Devon and Cornwall. His entry into what potentially could have been a profitable monopoly must have been both a significant indicator of his business acumen and a pointer towards a promising future career. Within the confines of the city of Exeter, his uncle, Robert Vilvayne, was of greater local importance than Snowe. Vilvayne was a doctor of medicine, and lived in Snowe’s own parish of All Hallows, Goldsmith Street. In the civic year 1639-40, Snowe was an auditor of the chamberlain’s accounts, hardly a pre-eminent role. The city’s gift of £20 to Thomas Coventry†, Lord Keeper Coventry, passed through his hands in December 1639, but there is nothing to suggest that Snowe was either particularly active in city affairs or critical of the king’s government at this point. A suggestion that he replaced Tucker as Member for Exeter in the Short Parliament cannot be substantiated, and seems implausible.24Trans. Devonshire Assoc. lxi. 203. Snowe was not among the eight citizens called upon to work out an agenda for ‘Parliament business’ while the Short Parliament sat.25Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 101.

Snowe’s election to the second seat for Exeter in the Long Parliament on 27 October 1640 was not the prelude to an active career in Parliament. With his fellow MP, Robert Walker, he offered security for the loans to be raised to support the king’s army facing the Scots in the north of England (21 Nov.), but whether this was his own personal credit or that of the city of Exeter is unclear.26D’Ewes (N), 52. Soon afterwards, he was making return visits to Exeter, and he was present in the city council chamber when on 30 March 1641 the management of a trust fund in his care was given to another on the grounds that Snowe was in Parliament and therefore unable to sustain his oversight of it.27Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 115v. He first came to the notice of the Journal clerk six months into the life of the assembly on 3 May 1641, when he took the Protestation.28CJ ii. 90a. It was over a year before his name appeared again in the Journal, and then it was to record his report that the mayor of Exeter had authorised the city’s security against over £11,000 in subscriptions to the cause of Parliament, of which £2,000 had been sent to London (7 June).29CJ ii. 610b. A letter of thanks was drafted by the House, but doubts soon arose about the city’s true loyalties, as civil war seemed to impend. The mayor and sheriff of Exeter wrote to Denzil Holles* and John Pym* about a letter written by a group in the common council of the city and forwarded to York for the attention of Lucius Cary*, 2nd Viscount Falkland. The mayor denied that this expression of sympathy with the king’s cause represented the collective mind of the Exeter council, and implicated one or other of the city’s MPs and Peter Balle*, the recorder. Consequently Snowe, Walker and Balle were on 15 July ordered to be questioned by the Committee of Safety, while Holles and Pym drafted letters to the mayor assuring him of Exeter’s continued good standing in the eyes of Parliament.30CJ ii. 674a; PJ iii. 218-9. The continuing absence of both of the city’s MPs was in any case bound to arouse suspicion, and on 1 August both Snowe and Walker were ordered to attend the House.31CJ ii. 699b. By 30 August, Snowe had calculated that the wages due to him by the chamber for his service in Parliament amounted to £53, representing 265 days’ attendance, with a further £6 claimed for books he had bought ‘by the direction of Mr Mayor’.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 139v. As he had previously lodged a successful claim in October 1641 for £63, at the time of the recess of the House, his bill was probably lodged with the chamber after he had returned once again to Exeter.33Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 122. In November 1641 he conveyed to the governors of the hospital some houses in Exeter which his father-in-law had left him.34Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, bargains and sales, 16 Nov. 1641.

Snowe may have intended to withdraw from Parliament in the summer of August 1642, overborne by the ambivalence of the city council and the positive antipathy towards the cause of Parliament evinced by his parliamentary colleague, Robert Walker. He was hard pressed by his business commitments, as he explained to Speaker William Lenthall when making his excuses in September. He had to pay the tinners for their product, and to collect the rents of William Russell†, 5th earl of Bedford, in the south west.35Bodl. Nalson II, f. 146. Snowe regularly attended meetings of Exeter city council, but by the end of the year the attitude of the Commons had hardened towards the MPs, and they were ordered up in custody.36Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 143, 143v, 144; CJ ii. 845b, 888a. But Snowe must have returned to Parliament voluntarily, once Exeter had become unequivocally a parliamentarian redoubt. On 4 February 1643, the committee on absent Members recommended that Snowe be admitted to the House, and a few days later he was among a group of MPs who declared their continued support for Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and his army. His rehabilitation was followed by his appointment to his only committee, for scrutinizing the accounts of the former commissioners for customs. This was a committee in which maritime, commercial interests were naturally prominent, and Snowe was added at the same time as his colleagues from Southampton.37CJ ii. 955a, 958b; iii. 90a. On 6 June he was among a group of seven Members who sought more time to deliberate and wrestle with their consciences before they would take the vow and covenant fashioned in response to the plot associated with Edmund Waller*. He eventually took the oath two days later.38CJ iii. 118b, 120a. He was still a reluctant parliamentarian evidently.

After Exeter fell into the hands of the royalists in September 1643, Snowe was faced with the choice of making good his relationships with the Exeter council, or staying put in London. He chose the latter course, and on 3 October took the Solemn League and Covenant in support of the alliance with the Scots and the introduction of Presbyterianism into the English church.39CJ iii. 262a. Not that Snowe was persona non grata with the Exeter council: on 14 October, it was noted there that Snowe’s continuing absence was costing him seniority in the cursus honorum. The councillors were sympathetic, secured his place in the precedence and agreed that it was ‘not fit that this present employment of his abroad should gain him any disrespect at home’.40Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 152. Thereafter, Snowe seems to have gone to ground. He went unnoticed both in Parliament or in Exeter. He remained in London, receptive in December 1646 to the council’s plans to maintain the monopoly of the west country merchants over the ‘new draperies’, and later successfully reminding the councillors of his entitlement to parliamentary ‘wages’.41Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 188, 190, 196.

During 1647 and 1648 Snowe was engaged in the kind of behind-the-scenes advocacy on behalf of the city that Exeter MPs had been accustomed to in more settled periods. He must have received the petition from the city to the Commons in April 1647 seeking restitution of its outlay of £5,000 in Parliament’s cause (the city found itself sued by citizens who had advanced money on the ‘public faith’) and also played some part in progressing the complaint (June 1647) against ‘regrators’ and other undesirable speculators in the cloth markets.42Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 203, 203v, 205v. In September he was asked to identify an agent in London who would ‘follow the public affairs of the city’ in recovering the citizens’ money and settling their corporate debts.43Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 208; ix. f. 2v. The need for help at Westminster became more pressing when in August the council bought the Exeter bishop’s palace from the trustees for sale of bishops’ lands, and in October set in train proposals to levy a local rate for the maintenance of ministers.44Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. 205v, 211. Snowe was fully behind the purchase of the bishop’s palace, and saw through the conveyancing.45Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 8, 12.

It was probably the intricacies of these plans which brought Snowe back to Exeter in December, having been granted leave by the Commons of one month, and he remained in the city for much of the first five months of 1648, to judge from his appearances in the council chamber.46CJ v. 91a, 353a; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 5v-12v. He had been asked by the House to go with Samuel Clarke* and others to Devon to chase up payments of the assessment, Parliament’s direct tax, but must have paid little or any heed.47CJ v. 400b. He was instead sympathetic to Exeter’s complaints against the burden on the citizens caused by the army’s billeting, and helped prepare the brief given to the agent appointed to lobby ‘our friends and the chief of the army’, but avoided taking on the task himself. Unlike Samuel Clarke, Snowe did not attend the city council during the confrontation between the city and the army in May 1648, but he was asked to promote the principle of restoring military security in Exeter to the local militia.48Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix 14v. This alone was probably enough to identify him as an enemy of the army and the Independents, and he was in London on 6 December to be among those secluded by Thomas Pride* and others of the New Model army.49A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), 28 (2nd pagination) (E.539.5).

Like the majority of Exeter citizens active in government, Snowe must surely have been appalled at the trial and execution of the king in January 1649. He stayed away from Exeter council meetings until September, by which time he must have come to terms with the Rump Parliament, as he attended meetings regularly thereafter.50Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 38v and passim. He was favoured with a lease of a city mill, and the corporation endeavoured over time to settle the debts it owed Snowe for his time in Parliament.51Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. 67, 68. He resumed his career as a councillor, and served as mayor in 1653-4. Snowe proved an energetic and reforming mayor. During his mayoralty, the city concluded its investment in Irish lands, and rewarded its agent with a silver flagon engraved with the arms of the corporation. A municipal brewery was established, the conducting of markets was regulated and the dignity and self-confidence of the corporation shored up in a number of new rules about meetings and the attire of councillors and officers. Most startling perhaps was the award to Snowe and his successors as mayor of a salary of £100.52Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Bk. C1/53.

After his mayoralty had ended, Snowe’s stature in Exeter was enhanced further during the rest of the 1650s when he served as an alderman. He came up with proposals in March 1655 for reforming the city’s finances, supervised the expansion of the hospital and with Thomas Westlake* managed the city’s Irish land investments.53Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 59, 60, 70v, 71. Snowe’s most significant intervention in the public life of Exeter was in the reformation and reorganization of the church. He developed the municipalization of the churches of Exeter which had commenced in 1648 with his full involvement. In March 1655, Snowe and two other city leaders petitioned the ‘committee for augmentations’ (presumably the trustees for the maintenance of preaching ministers) with the help of John Doddridge* in order to seek an increase in the stipends available for city ministers, and the advice of Dr John Owen* was sought on how to attract godly clergy. Further purchases of cathedral property were made, Snowe personally investing £200 in buying and refurbishing for the city the disused cloisters. Those devoted to the episcopal church, the cathedral and the historic parish churches of Exeter naturally portrayed this as an act of plunder, but Snowe also invested in making a start on a public library at St John’s Hospital, which the common council agreed to complete.54Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 62v, 71, 71v, 74. He was well enough regarded by the lord protector’s council to be co-opted to its trade and navigation committee in November 1655, further evidence that Snowe found the Cromwellian protectorate more congenial than he had the early days of the commonwealth.55CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 1-2, 6.

The summoning of Parliament in 1656 furnished fresh means by which church reform in Exeter could be driven on. In October 1656 further purchases of cathedral property were confirmed to have cost the city £2,230, and the expense doubtless spurred the decision to sell the disused organ and melt down brass coinage seized in Snowe’s mayoralty.56Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 78v. With the co-operation of the city’s MPs, Thomas Bampfylde and Thomas Westlake, an act of Parliament was procured which authorised the elimination of some Exeter parishes and the municipalizing of the others. Snowe was the leading figure in implementing the scheme. By 2 December, an aspect of the plan that would be incorporated into the parliamentary bill was the partition of the cathedral into ‘east and west Peter’s’, for separate congregations of Presbyterians and Independents, a concession to the Independent minister, Lewis Stukley.57Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 80, 81. The act had passed by August 1657, and the new wall across the choir of the cathedral was funded partly by raising subscriptions from enthusiasts for it: Snowe gave £100, as did Thomas Bampfylde.58Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 90, 96. A dozen city churches were pronounced redundant, and were offered for sale first to parishioners and then to private contractors, but on condition that the buildings and churchyards could only be used for schooling and/or burials.59Bodl. Walker c.4, f. 266. After the Restoration, Exeter parishioners told the courts how Snowe had padlocked St Paul’s, threatened to ruin the churchwardens and asserted at the Guildhall how ‘he was head and shoulders above the commons’.60Bodl. Walker c.4, f. 267v.

In the climate of the newly-restored monarchy, allegations of Snowe’s cupidity were easy to make and were doubtless sympathetically received. Timber from the cathedral, including 48 planks, was said to have been taken to build his new house, payments were exacted from citizens as the price of preserving a family tomb or a church tower.61Bodl. Walker c.4, ff. 267v, 268v. Closer scrutiny suggests however that with the exception of the appropriation of timber for his house, Snowe was acting as the principal manager of the scheme and as an agent of the common council. His purchase of ‘Paul’s’, alleged to have been for his own use, was actually on behalf of the city, as had been his use of his own resources to buy the bishop’s palace nearly a decade earlier. St Paul’s was conveyed to Snowe for £110, the parishioners paid him £60 and a stand-off then developed as they were unable or unwilling to met the full purchase price.62Bodl. Walker c.4, ff. 260, 266, 277. The disposal of redundant churches was part of a wider vision of a godly city, of which Snowe was the most energetic and committed architect. In the controversy over the churches, his work on behalf of the hospital and the library were overlooked. In his lifetime he created accommodation for a grammar school master at St John’s Hospital.63R. Izacke, An Alphabetical Register of divers Persons (1736), 142. He was the proper heir of Ignatius Jourdain†, but any who recalled the hope expressed by his stepfather 30 years previously, that Snowe would adhere to the tenets of the Church of England, must have marvelled.

In the ratings for the poll tax of 1660, Snowe and his uncle, Robert Vilvayne, were easily the highest taxpayers, but he was not given long to enjoy his civic eminence.64Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 39. There could have been little prospect that someone with so dominant and aggressive a public profile in Cromwellian Exeter would survive the restoration of the monarchy. He attended the Exeter council meeting for the last time on 5 August 1662, doubtless anticipating the order of the commissioners for corporations two days later, which removed him from the government of the city completely.65Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 165 and reverse of vol. By May 1663 he had removed to Westwood, Crediton, and thus was at least able to avoid seeing daily his labours in Exeter dismantled.66Devon RO, 48/13/1/8/14. His will of January 1668 was brief, transferring his property to his brother Thomas Snowe, the Presbyterian minister of Morchard Bishop who was deprived of his living in 1662, another victim of the restored monarchy.67Calamy Revised, 451. Simon Snowe was buried in St Mary Arches, the Exeter parish of his birth, on 29 February 1668. His brother died only months later, leaving Simon’s wealth to the city in what seemed to Exeter’s chronicler an actualization of Simon’s own will. The money was used to fund a schoolmaster for the grammar school, and the profits of the common brewery, of which Snowe had become proprietor, were disposed to support a range of initiatives including scholarships to Exeter College, Oxford, securing a charter for the women’s hospital and improving remuneration for the town clerk and other corporation officers. Not only did these bequests help sustain the spirit of Snowe’s vision, they also took the sting out of any adverse judgments that Exeter’s annalist, the town clerk Richard Izacke, might have been tempted to record against Snowe.68Izacke, Alphabetical Register, 142.