EURE, Ralph (c. 1625-1707)

Ralph Eure succeeded to his elder brother’s barony in late 1672. His origins and activities before he was catapulted into the nobility are obscure. At the time of Eure’s death in 1707, Peter Le Neve, Norroy king-at-arms, wrote that ‘the title is extinct, and the estate before, for he had not above £100 p.a. Before the title came to him he was a journeyman to a woollen draper at £20 p.a. and his diet’. There is no surviving evidence to confirm or deny these lowly origins, but they are not inconceivable as Ralph Eure was a younger son from a cadet branch of the Eure family. He was undoubtedly poor, like his elder brother, whose debts he inherited. TNA, PROB 11/340; C6/217/20. By the 1690s he was in receipt of a regular pension from the court, and at the accession of Anne he had to write a begging letter to have it reinstated. HMC Lords, ii. 399; CTB, x. 167, 733; xi. 124; xii. 345; xiii. 124; xiv. 281; xv. 269; CTBP, 1702-7, p. 350. He may have had a better estate than his brother, for in 1674 he entered a claim to the manor of Leinthall Starkes and Gatley Park in Herefordshire, which had been in the possession of his uncle Sir Sampson Eure^‡. These fell to him, so Eure claimed, at the death of his aunt, Martha Eure, in 1674. The claim was challenged, but by February 1675 Ralph was in possession of a deed of title to the Herefordshire estates. TNA, C6/217/20; Herefs. RO, F76/II/46. He added these estates to the property in Easby in north Yorkshire inherited from his brother, but they did not make a significant difference to his financial situation nor did they confer local power in either Herefordshire or the North Riding. Even when a peer he was not entrusted with commissions or other responsibilities for these regions. Like his brother the main arena in which he could show he was a peer was in the House of Lords, and his attention was predominantly directed towards that body.

He was most active in the early days of his political life. From his first session, that of spring 1673, until the end of the first Exclusion Parliament in May 1679 he was present for at least three-quarters of each session. Yet even so he was not a leading figure in the House. Throughout his entire career he was never entrusted to manage a conference with the Commons. He was infrequently nominated to select committees – or certainly less so than his brother – and just over half of these were for private bills. From his first sitting on 4 Feb. 1673 until his last day of sitting in the second Exclusion Parliament he was nominated to 52 select committees, 27 of which involved private estate legislation or naturalization. Other committees to which he was named were concerned with issues such as protecting and preserving fishing, burying in woollen, and the well-governing of servants and apprentices. Perhaps reflecting his northern roots, he was nominated in February 1678 to the committee for a bill continuing the act against theft and rapine on the northern borders, which his elder brother may have helped frame when it first came before the House.

His political views are more discernible than those of his predecessor, and they were probably influenced by the same devout Presbyterian religion which had earlier led his elder brother to press for the passage of ‘godly’ legislation. From the spring session of 1675 Eure began to align his actions in the House with the country opposition led by Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury. From October 1675 he was named to a number of committees to examine legislation against ‘popery’ and its growth in England. Certainly, Eure showed himself hostile to the ‘Anglican’ policy of Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds), and particularly his proposed non-resisting Test Bill. Eure signed three protests on 21, 29 Apr. and 4 May concerning this bill’s progression in the House. He supported the motion to submit an address to the king calling for the dissolution of Parliament in November 1675 but was not present in the House for the actual division on that motion, nor was he available to sign the protest when the motion was rejected.

In his analysis of the political views of the lay peers, drawn up around May 1677, Shaftesbury considered Eure ‘worthy’. On 4 Apr. he voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter. In November 1678 Eure voted that a refusal to make the declaration against transubstantiation should incur the same penalties as those for the other oaths provided for in the Test bill and was one of the few lords who, during the Popish Plot panic, voted to agree with the Commons that the queen should be removed from court as she was suspected of conspiring in the king’s death. On 23 Dec. he protested at the resolution that Danby did not need to withdraw after the reading of the articles of impeachment proceedings; on 26 Dec. he voted against the Lords’ amendment that the money raised for the disbandment of the Army be placed in the exchequer rather than the chamber of London and entered a protest when the House insisted on this.

In the Exclusion Parliaments Eure joined with the opposition in attacking Danby, the bishops and James Stuart, duke of York, and in supporting the Commons in some of their more extreme measures against these targets. He voted for the attainder of Danby and supported proposals to have active consultation with the Commons on his trial procedure and to exclude the bishops from pronouncing judgment in his case, registering his dissent when these plans were rejected by the House. Browning, Danby, iii. 135, 139, 143; LJ, xiii. 502, 559, 565, 587. On 27 May 1679 he voted against adhering to an earlier vote that the lords spiritual had a right to stay in court in capital cases until judgment of death came to be pronounced. During the long series of prorogations that delayed the assembling of the second Exclusion Parliament, Eure was one of the 16 lords who signed the petition calling for an immediate summoning of Parliament, which was presented to the king by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntington, on 6 Dec. 1679. When that Parliament finally did meet in October 1680 he supported the exclusion of the duke of York from the throne and voted against the rejection of the Exclusion bill, entering his protest when the bill was thrown out on 15 November. He found the Catholic William Howard, Viscount Stafford, guilty of treason. He did not join the opposition on every occasion, withholding his subscription to the protests against the decisions not to commit or suspend Chief Justice Scroggs pending his impeachment.

Eure was also a signatory to the petition of January 1681 requesting the king not to convene the next Parliament in Oxford, and he did not attend that Parliament in March 1681. Vox Patriae (1681), 6-7. He does not appear to have taken part in the political agitation or conspiracies against the court and York in the 1680s and sat in James II’s brief Parliament in 1685, in which he was nominated to just one committee on Deeping Fen. He signed a protest on 4 June 1685 against the reversal of Stafford’s attainder, and his contemporaries consistently placed him among those peers opposed to a repeal of the Test Acts. He did not take an active role in the Revolution of 1688, although on 14 and 15 Dec. 1688 he sat as a member of the provisional government of peers meeting in London during James II’s first abortive flight. Kingdom without a King, 105, 109. On 31 Jan. 1689 he voted in favour of declaring the prince and princess of Orange king and queen of England, and over the following days he voted in favour of the words used by the Commons in their vote, that James II had ‘abdicated’ and ‘that the throne is vacant’, registering his protest on 31 Jan., and 4 Feb. when the House rejected that wording. Eure maintained his high level of commitment to the House throughout the Convention and the first session of the 1690 Parliament, attending at least two-thirds of their sittings. During this period, from 22 Jan. 1689 to 23 May 1690, he was named to only 20 committees, half of them on private bills, as well as committees for the bills to reverse the attainders of William Russell^‡, styled Lord Russell and Algernon Sydney.

Eure participated in the House’s proceedings far less frequently after May 1690. On average he sat in only a third of the meetings of each session of the House during the remainder of William III’s Parliaments, and stopped attending altogether shortly after the accession of Anne. He assigned his first ever proxy on 9 Feb. 1692 to Robert Lucas, 3rd Baron Lucas of Shenfield, although this was vacated by Eure’s return to the House eight days later. He continued to sit intermittently in the House without assigning proxies for most of the rest of the decade, but he entrusted his vote to John Egerton, 3rd earl of Bridgwater, on 13 Apr. 1698, which remained in force until the end of the session on 5 July 1698.

In the Convention Eure voted consistently with the Whigs, largely out of personal conviction, judging by his previous actions in the Exclusion Parliaments. He voted on 31 May 1689 to reverse the judgments of perjury against Titus Oates and entered his protest when that motion was rejected. When the Lords’ amendments to the bill, which would have disallowed Oates from ever testifying in court again, were being voted on, Eure, who was not present in the chamber at the beginning of the sitting, was ‘sent to and desired to be present’, probably by the Whigs who were in the minority in this division; Eure dutifully voted against the punitive amendments. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. v. 162. On 14 Jan. 1690 he dissented from the resolution that it was the peers’ ancient right to be tried in full Parliament for capital offences, and on 13 May he dissented from the resolution not to allow the Corporation of London more time to be heard by their counsel.

In a list compiled between October 1689 and February 1690 by the marquess of Carmarthen (formerly the earl of Danby), Eure was accounted as an opponent of the court. But in later Parliaments his adherence to the Whigs was tempered by an allegiance to the court. He was undoubtedly influenced by the pension he received from the king’s bounty from at least 1691 and perhaps earlier: on 6 Oct. he voted against the discharge of James Cecil * [1113], 4th earl of Salisbury, and Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough from their imprisonment in the Tower, with Carmarthen adding the comment, ‘I think he hath a pension’. Browning, Danby, iii. 181. In 1691 Eure was listed as in receipt of £100 from the royal bounty and similar payments continued throughout the remainder of William’s reign and even increased to £200 by 1697. HMC Lords, ii. 399; CTB, x. 167, 733; xi. 124; xii. 345; xiii. 124; xiv. 281; xv. 269. The court’s influence can perhaps be seen in his voting pattern in the place bill in the winter of the 1692-3 session. Many Whigs supported the bill which was bitterly opposed by the court. At first Eure appears to have supported the bill. He voted to commit it on 31 Dec. 1692, but at its third reading three days later he voted against it. In January 1693 he voted for the first reading of the divorce bill for Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk, and the following month found the Whig Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, not guilty of murder. In February 1694 he voted against reversing the chancery’s dismissal of the case concerning the Albemarle inheritance brought by Ralph Montagu, earl (later duke) of Montagu against John Granville, earl of Bath. In December 1696 he voted in favour of the attainder of Sir John Fenwick^‡. In 1700 he opposed the old East India Company and registered his dissent, on 23 Feb. 1700 against the passage of the bill re-constituting it as a corporation. He again showed his support for the court and ministerial Whigs when he voted for the acquittals of John Somers, Baron Somers, and Edward Russell, earl of Orford in June 1701.

The first session of Anne’s Parliament was the last in which Eure sat. Nevertheless, he was present on 16 Jan. 1703 for the division on the amendments to the penalty clause of the occasional conformity bill and voted with the Whigs to adhere to them, thus ensuring the bill’s defeat in the Commons. He is also listed as voting by proxy against the second occasional conformity bill on 14 Dec. 1703. From 4 Nov. 1704 to the prorogation on 14 Mar. 1705 Eure’s proxy was registered with Thomas Wharton, 5th Baron (later marquess of) Wharton, who would have ensured that Eure’s vote continued to be cast for the Whigs. Illness kept Eure from the House, as he made clear to the lord treasurer Sidney Godolphin, Baron (later earl of) Godolphin, in a letter of 30 May 1705, when he apologized for not attending the last two sessions due to ‘sickness and sores’. In the same letter Eure begged for a continuation of the pension he had received for so many years, upon receiving which he promised he ‘would never give further trouble’. Anne later authorized £100 from the secret service fund to be paid to this indigent noble. CTBP, 1702-7, p. 350.

Eure died intestate on 27 Apr. 1707. His estate was entrusted to the administration of his niece, Bathshua Lister, daughter of his sister Deborah Pickering. With no children and no surviving male heirs from any of the closest branches of the family the title was presumed to be extinct, although only a few days after Eure’s death Luttrell was recording that ‘It’s said Peter Eure, of the bishopric of Durham, succeeds the Lord Eure in his honour and estate’. Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 171. There was some question of whether a male heir could be traced if the heralds went all the way back to younger sons of the 1st Baron Eure, but this was apparently not pursued and Ralph Eure was the last of that title.