Exeter

Exeter was the unchallenged capital of the far south west, its nearest commercial rival, Bristol, too far distant to pose as a significant economic competitor. The population numbered around 8,000 in the 1670s, significantly less than that of Bristol. Compton Census, 276-7. It was the most important seaport in either Devon or Cornwall, but the bulk of shipping used the berths at Topsham, on the Exe three miles below Exeter, rather than risk the unsatisfactory mid-sixteenth century canal into the city itself. W.B. Stephens, Seventeenth-Century Exeter (Exeter, 1958), pp. xx, xxi; W.G. Hoskins, Devon (1954), 498. The most important aspect of Exeter’s commerce was the overseas trade in the various territorially distinct Devon cloths, including Barnstaple bays and Taunton cottons, which were manufactured in a broad hinterland of the city that extended into north Devon and Somerset. Most of Exeter’s trade was with France and the ports of northern Spain, but commerce with Ireland was also important. The principal Exeter merchants exported cloth in ships which they did not themselves own, and they imported the same miscellany of goods, a mix of staples like grain and Spanish iron on the one hand, and various foodstuffs on the other, which would have been encountered in any south-western seaport. Stephens, Seventeenth-Century Exeter, chap. 1, passim. The fortunes of Exeter as a port fluctuated. A recovery from a slump of the 1620s has been traced in the mid-1630s, but in 1640 trade was again hit by a recession. Stephens, Seventeenth-Century Exeter, 32-5. The city’s governors were acutely aware of the fragility of their economy, and invested much energy in opposing the Caroline government’s Ship Money, through delegations to the privy council and the Devon sheriff. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 18, 64v.

The governance of Exeter was vested in the mayor and a council called the Twenty-Four, with the help of a recorder, two bailiffs and a sheriff, on the authority of a charter of 1627, the last in a long series. It prevailed until 1834. W. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (1975), 28. There was during the 1620s and 30s a strongly puritan element in the city government, personified robustly by Ignatius Jourdain†. It was said in the 1620s that even the ungodly agreed that when it came to choosing Parliament-men, ‘if you choose any, choose Jourdain, he will be right for the commonwealth and do the city service’. F. Nicolls, The Life and Death of Mr Ignatius Jurdain (1655), sig. A2-3 (E.730.9). The presence of a faction around the pugnacious Jourdain undoubtedly exacerbated the chronic low-level conflict between the city and the cathedral authorities that flared up again in 1636. This dispute focused on questions of authority and jurisdiction in the cathedral close and churchyard, both sides frequently claiming a violation of their respective liberties. In 1637 the squabble became serious enough for the mayor and Twenty-Four to secure the legal services of Sir Thomas Gardiner* and Edward Herbert I*, the queen’s attorney-general, and in 1638 the city rewarded its unnamed ‘friends’ in London with salmon pies. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 41v, 60v, 61, 69, 70v, 72, 75v, 79; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 200-1. As ammunition in the city’s cases before the London law courts, the charters were taken to Westminster in 1638, and remained there until after the first Parliament of 1640 had assembled. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 81, 90, 102. By July 1639, the city council feared that its powers in commissions of the peace and gaol delivery were likely to be brought into question by the judges. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 90.

Exeter was entitled to two seats in Parliament, and in 1640 rewarded its Parliament-men with a 4s. per diem allowance, a reduction from the 5s. bestowed in 1589. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 139v, 140v; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 225. The returning officer was the sheriff and the franchise vested in the freemen. In the six years between 1634 and 1639, an average of nearly 26 men per year were admitted to the freedom of the city, but in 1640 there were 54 admissions. As 18 of these were admitted in August, it is probable that electoral considerations played a significant part in the sudden increase. Exeter Freemen, 130-5. The background of simmering disputes over city authority inspired in the mayor and Twenty-Four a keen, if specific, interest in the Parliaments of 1640. Initially, the city’s own business drove the councillors’ interest. On 24 March a committee of eight was appointed to meet every week to discuss parliamentary business, and on 6 April a record of the election of MPs was made in the act book. In selecting Robert Walker to sit, the councillors departed from custom by returning a serving mayor. The heightened sense that Exeter’s privileges were being challenged probably explains why they wished to send their leading citizen; the day he was chosen, Walker requested copies of the oaths sworn by mayor and bailiff, to add to his portfolio of city documents in London. His election is certainly not to be taken as evidence that the council was supine before the mayor, because the act book records a contemporaneous order that any mayor who defied aldermen and council had to submit to their judgment after a cooling-off period of 15 days. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 101, 101v. Once in London, Walker sought the authority of the temporary mayor (‘lieutenant’) in Exeter to remove the charters from the study of the recorder, Peter Balle*, in order to promote the city’s case against the cathedral. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 102.

Walker’s colleague in the second Exeter seat in the Short Parliament, James Tucker, was noted for having accompanied Jourdain in what was taken as an affront to the bishop of Exeter. In 1639 the incident had ended in Tucker’s appearance before the privy council, so he may have been selected for the seat as a representative of the puritan group in the Exeter council chamber. He was not returned to the Long Parliament, remaining active in city affairs; instead, Walker was accompanied in the second Parliament of 1640 by Simon Snowe, whose profile contained no history of opposition to the government, nor any of service to the city that was in any way extraordinary. Unlike Tucker, Snowe was not an alderman, and as one of the pre-emptors of tin enjoyed a privilege from the crown. The pairing of Walker and Snowe may have been intended by the Exeter electors as a conciliatory gesture towards the Caroline government. As earlier in the year, a city committee for parliamentary business was authorised to identify ‘grievances’ for the Parliament, and among these were the conduct of the dean and chapter and the Exeter brewers. In 1641 there was concern that the tonnage and poundage grant to the king would compromise the collection of the city’s petty customs. Continuity was confirmed when the parliamentary burgesses were ordered the usual ‘wages and charges’. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 111, 115v, 117v, 118v, 122-v. The council rewarded John Maynard* for his help, but relations with the recorder, Balle, were strained. In the Short Parliament he had offered disobliging pronouncements about the validity of electing a mayoral Parliament-man (which may have cost him his seat at Tiverton) and in November 1641 the council expressed dissatisfaction with his infrequent visits to the city and the long intervals between his gaol deliveries. They invited him to attend more often or resign his place. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 125.

The pattern of Exeter’s parliamentary business as an extension of that of the city chamber was disrupted by January 1642, as the chamber came under pressure from local petitioners anxious about the influence of the popish higher clergy. There is evidence from this point of a shift in the council’s outlook, away from a preoccupation with jurisdictional rivalry and towards an engagement with wider issues. The mayor, aldermen and Twenty-Four petitioned Parliament late in January 1642. In their analysis, the economic recession they were experiencing was exacerbated by a collapse of their trade with Ireland, where the rebellion was in full spate. But ‘the grounds of all’ were events in London, where the ‘popish party’ was intent on undermining ‘the rights and privileges of Parliament and just liberty of the subject’. LJ iv. 536b-537a. In the timing of the submission of this petition and another pair of petitions in July both to king and Parliament, ‘supplicating for a happy accommodation’, the Exeter chamber was echoing the response of the Devon magistrates, whose meetings at Exeter seem to have set the pace. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 137v; I.R. Palfrey, ‘Devon and the Outbreak of the English Civil War, 1642-43’, Southern Hist. x. 30-1.

The former MP, Tucker, was among the small delegation from the chamber authorized to meet Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath, in August 1642; whether or not Bath came armed was to determine which of their alternative briefings they were to follow. In the event, the earl entered the city peacefully. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 138; Palfrey, ‘Devon and the Outbreak’, 32. Bath’s visit did not swing Exeter behind the king during the civil war, however. He left without having secured the city’s loyalty, and from the summer of 1642 Exeter was parliamentarian in allegiance. M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 62-77. The city successfully weathered a siege by Sir Ralph Hopton* and was bolstered by the arrival of Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, in January 1643. Emboldened by the presence of Stamford’s ‘grey coats’, the chamber was able to act on its irritation with Balle by dismissing him as recorder in favour of Edmund Prideaux I*, who was sworn on 2 May 1643. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 143, 146v. His initial term in the post was short-lived, as Stamford’s departure from Exeter to defeat in Cornwall left the city vulnerable to another siege. Attempts by Robert Rich†, 2nd earl of Warwick, to raise the siege were unsuccessful and Exeter eventually fell to Prince Maurice in September. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction, 77-85. Robert Walker, who had withdrawn from public life during Exeter’s period of rule by Parliament, returned to chamber meetings in October, and in January was at the Oxford Parliament, with the blessing of the city council, which in May reimbursed him for attending that assembly for 66 days. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 157v. In 1644, Princess Henrietta, the king’s daughter, was born in the city, and the chamber bestowed cash gifts on the king, the queen and the prince of Wales. R. Izacke, Remarkable Antiquities of the City of Exeter (1731), 158. The following year, in May, Sir Edward Hyde*, Sir John Colepeper* and other members of the royalist council of war were entertained in the city, garrisoned for the king by Sir John Berkeley*. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 165.

In April 1646, Exeter surrendered to the New Model army, and those parliamentarian city councillors who had been excluded from the chamber were restored in seniority by parliamentary ordinance. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 176. By August, leading councillors were in conflict with the garrison soldiers, under the command of Robert Hammond*, over issues of authority and religious observance. Some citizens were imprisoned, and the constables obstructed, while demands for greater financial support were made of the citizenry on behalf of the garrison. The council attempted to restrict preaching to ordained ministers, but senior officers announced in the cathedral their intention to continue their religious meetings at Exeter Castle, provoking some disorder in the city. The councillors lobbied Edmund Prideaux I and the Committee of the West, complaining that the soldiers ‘soar very high, and if their wings be not clipped ’twill be very dangerous’. T. Edwardes, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 41-5 (E.368.5). The citizens found a ready ear in Thomas Edwardes, the controversialist Presbyterian minister, who published their critical commentary in Gangraena.

In attending the Oxford Parliament in January 1644, Robert Walker and the city chamber had defied the Westminster Commons order of 6 March 1643 disabling him from sitting. The by-election for his replacement was held on 15 December 1646, with the names of 41 freemen appearing on the indenture. C219/43/1. The freemen returned Samuel Clarke, son-in-law of Ignatius Jourdain. His election came four days after the chamber resolved to petition Parliament to restrict the ‘new draperies’ cloth trade to Exeter freemen and to reduce the tax burden imposed on the city under parliamentary ordinances for the monthly assessment. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 188, 188v. During the civil war, Clarke had spent time in London lobbying Parliament in the interests of Exeter’s embattled parliamentarians, and earlier in 1646 had led the opposition to the garrison’s encroachments on the civil authority and its promotion of religious Independency. His election was therefore a direct rebuff to the military. The chamber soon added to the list of matters it wished to lay before Parliament. In April 1647, it sought recovery of debts incurred in the service of the parliamentarian cause, and requested help with suppressing abuses in the cloth trade. The councillors decided in September that what was really required was a London agent who would ‘follow the public affairs of this city’ to lobby the House. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 199.

The first fruits of the agent’s work was intended to be an ordinance to maintain the city ministers by means of a local rate on property, first mooted in October 1647 and put in the hands of Simon Snowe and Samuel Clarke by March 1648. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 211, ix. f. 10v. The city was disturbed again in February 1648 by the billeting of soldiers, and the council redoubled its efforts to reduce the number and cost of troops. The agent chosen to represent the city’s case to Parliament was Henry Prigge, a draper whose house had been ransacked by royalists when Exeter fell to them in September 1643 and who had participated in the 1646 election of Clarke. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 8; Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction, 84-5. The principal reason for the city’s predilection for London agents was that its own parliamentary burgesses were inactive at Westminster. Snowe was in Exeter for much of the first five months of 1648, and Clarke dated his last day in London as 26 September 1647. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 35v. This was despite the upsurge of admissions to the body of freemen in 1647 and 1648 (32 in 1647, 36 in 1648 from a low of seven in 1644), which suggests active interest in the city in the privileges of the freedom. Exeter Freemen, 138-40. The contradiction in the council’s seeking parliamentary support and legislation on the one hand, while on the other regarding benignly the absence of its own MPs from Westminster, is presumably to be explained by political distaste in Exeter for Independency. The troops at the centre of the confrontations between soldiers and city fathers, which peaked in May, were New Modellers under Sir Hardress Waller*, and Samuel Clarke was soon identified by them as the army’s most determined opponent in Exeter. Clarke denounced the soldiers to their faces as having ‘done no service for the Parliament’, and described the most recent ordinance on billeting, of 23 September 1647, as ‘not the Parliament’s ordinance, but ... made by the general and army’. LJ x. 269b-272a.

Clarke and Snowe were bound to be regarded as hostile to the army when it embarked on its purge of Parliament in December 1648. Clarke was not in London on 6 December, but Snowe was, and he was secluded from entering the Commons chamber. The mayor of Exeter refused to collaborate with the regicide government. Izacke, Remarkable Antiquities, 160. Not until March 1651 did the chamber resume contact with ‘the states’, as the town clerk described the Rump Parliament, and decide to erect the commonwealth’s arms over the mayor’s chair in the guildhall. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix ff. 74, 74v. The thaw was continuing the following year when anxiety about the number of poor people in the city provoked a petition to Parliament which linked poverty in Exeter with the high level of the chamber’s debts. Agents were again selected to promote the petition: the town clerk, Thomas Westlake*, and Simon Snowe, who had resumed a civic career but never again attempted to resume his seat in the Parliament from which he had been secluded. The Exeter councillors agreed that they all needed to ‘improve their interests in their friends’. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 87; x. f. 8. In an echo of events in 1640, the city charter was in January 1653 again ordered to be taken to London for scrutiny, at the insistence of a parliamentary committee investigating former royal revenues. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 16v.

Exeter was not directly represented in the Nominated Assembly of 1653, but an alderman, Richard Sweete, who had participated in the election of Clarke in 1646, sat as one of the Members for Devon. It was to Sweete that the chamber naturally turned for help when it sought to further the interests of citizens who had lent money to Parliament ‘on the public faith’ after an open meeting at the Exeter guildhall. The total of these advances made by Exeter citizens was reckoned at £1,420. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 37, 39. The city recovered its two parliamentary burgesses under the Instrument of Government of December 1653. Neither of the two elections to Oliver Cromwell’s* Parliaments saw the rush of new admissions to the body of freemen that had coloured the background to the elections of 1640, suggesting perhaps that the chamber was controlling the electoral process more tightly than previously. Exeter Freemen, 142-44. In elections to the first protectorate Parliament, the corporation broke with recent precedent by returning the recorder, Thomas Bampfylde, and another lawyer, Thomas Gibbons. Gibbons was made a freeman two days before the parliamentary return was made out, doubtless to legalize his election. He had held temporary military command in Exeter in the summer of 1647, and it is possible that the mayor and Twenty-Four regarded his brief military commission as a model of military governance in contrast to the confrontations of 1648. Furthermore, as a lawyer he was well placed to fulfil the lobbying functions on which the Exeter chamber had placed a premium for many years. In a further suggestion that the city council was changing its view of the role of its parliamentary burgesses, in October 1654 Gibbons was awarded £20 for his work at Westminster ‘about the city’s affairs’, and in 1657 Bampfylde was given a round £50, but there was no mention of what had been the customary 4s. per diem allowance. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 53, 56v, 86v.

The populace of Exeter remained loyal to the protectoral government during the Penruddock rising of 1655, but was never enthusiastically in support of it, and it was reported that the prisoners awaiting trial in the city were often visited by citizens. Izacke, Remarkable Antiquities, 163. In March 1656, the corporation resumed work on a scheme to rationalize the city parish boundaries and improve the level of maintenance for ministers, first discussed in October 1647. Experienced parliamentary hands such as Simon Snowe and John Doddridge* were active in promoting the plans, which included a library that the chamber was willing to invest in. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 62v, 74. The determination to see through this plan probably lay behind the changes in the MPs returned to the second protectorate Parliament. Bampfylde was retained, but Gibbons was replaced with the town clerk, Thomas Westlake. The pace of activity increased after the Parliament convened. In October 1656, £2,230 was paid by the city for a grant of cathedral close property that included the cloisters and the ‘privileges’ (property rights) over the old churchyard. This obliterated the cathedral’s legal existence and seemed to bury the chronic dispute between city and cathedral beyond peradventure. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives Act Bk. x. f. 78.

The Exeter churches reorganization united the parishes to the cathedral, and it was initially intended to bestow all presentation rights on the lord protector. It was decided by the chamber on 2 December that Westlake would pursue the matter in the House as a parliamentary bill. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 80. Later that month, the division of the cathedral into ‘East and West Peter’s’, for separate Presbyterian and Independent congregations, was agreed, and the consent of the Independent minister, Lewis Stucley, obtained by the chamber. The choice of parliamentary statute as a vehicle for the scheme seems to have been chosen by the corporation a little reluctantly, the bill ‘to be passed if it cannot otherwise be directed and perfected’. Bampfylde and Westlake were to manage progress through the House, and back in Exeter one of the main promoters of the scheme was Simon Snowe. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 81, 84v. The bill was passed on 27 March 1657, and published on 9 June, although the text has not survived. CJ vii. 513b, 553b. In parallel with the act, which amalgamated some city parishes, making a number of church buildings redundant and subject to sale, was the formation of the Devon and Exeter association of ministers, in which the role of moderator was taken by George Hughes of Plymouth and that of scribe by the Exeter minister, Mark Downe. The associated ministers placed themselves under the protection of the lord protector, thanking him for the ‘free use of the holy ordinances of God’. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 90, 106v-107v; Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 150. Despite the original intention of making the protector the sole proprietor of Exeter church patronage, some advowsons remained still in the hands of private individuals, among them Sir John Copleston*. CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 77; Bodl. Walker c.4, f. 275.

In 1658, 74 new freemen were admitted, the largest annual total in this period, exceeding even the 54 new entrants of 1640. Exeter Freemen, 145-7. The Exeter Members returned to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament were the tried and experienced duo of Bampfylde and Gibbons. The former was brought to the chair as Speaker, but Gibbons made little impression on the House. The city seems for once to have had no particular agenda to pursue in this Parliament, the councillors investing much of their time in working out the details of their 1657 act of Parliament. On 28 December, the mayor and Twenty-Four recorded a declaration that Parliament should sit unmolested, a criticism of the army grandees who had intervened on 13 October to end the sitting of the revived Rump. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 127. This chamber order paved the way for the Declaration of the Gentry of the County of Devon, which Bampfylde took to London on 14 January 1660. As in 1642, the city early in 1660 provided a convenient venue for political co-operation between county gentry and civic elders. The Declaration was framed by the gentry at the county quarter sessions, but they referred to Exeter’s ‘inhabitants groaning under high oppressions and a general defect of trade’, and called for a restitution of the Members secluded in 1648. A Letter from Exeter (1660, 669.f.22.75). At this point, there is nothing to suggest that this was in fact a coded call for the monarchy to be restored, as the sales of church property in Exeter proceeded, Bampfylde himself receiving a deed days before he set off for London. Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 127v, 128. In the 1660 election, Bampfylde held his seat, but the second seat was contested between John Maynard* and a returning royalist, Richard Ford†, on a double return. The Commons ruled in favour of Maynard, to uphold the freeman franchise.