Plympton Erle

Plympton Erle, or Plympton St Maurice as it was generally known except in the context of parliamentary elections, was a small borough and parish. When Parliament’s Protestation of May 1641 was sent down for the assent of the population, 159 male residents in Plympton St Maurice subscribed it. Devon Protestation Returns, 235-6. The adjacent parish, Plympton St Mary, was described in the seventeenth century as ‘a great and vast parish, containing several hamlets and villages and many thousand souls’, although it produced 374 signatories to the Protestation. DWL, John Quick, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, 401. The stannary district of Plympton included both Plymptons, although it was Plympton Erle that was the coinage town, where tin was stamped and taxed before sale. G.R. Lewis, The Stannaries (Cambridge, MA, 1908), 45, 90, 126. Tin production in Devon was from 1629 lower than at any time since the late thirteenth century, tailing off completely during the 1630s before flickering into life again around 1640. In 1642 only three people presented tin at a coinage in Plympton, and the civil wars nipped in the bud any suggestion of a revival. T. Greeves, ‘Four Devon Stannaries’, in Tudor and Stuart Devon ed. T. Gray, M.M. Rowe, A. Erskine (Exeter, 1992), 44-5, 63, 69. By far the largest producer in Plympton stannary in the 1620s, before the slump, was Sir William Strode†, father of William Strode I* and Sir Richard Strode†, who contested this seat in March 1640. Greeves, ‘Four Devon Stannaries’, 51, 54, 55.

The government of Plympton Erle was vested in a corporation which derived its authority from a charter of 1602. The common council consisted of eight principal burgesses and the mayor; there was a wider body of burgesses called the Four and Twenty Men, from whom the mayor and principal burgesses selected a bailiff. J.B. Rowe, Hist. of the Borough of Plympton Erle (Exeter, 1906), 113-19. All surviving indentures from elections between 1640 and 1660 were made out in the name of the mayor or deputy mayor, the bailiff and the burgesses, and it is clear from the charter that the franchise lay in the freemen of the borough rather than to holders of freehold property there. No single proprietorial interest was dominant. In elections under James I and Charles I before 1640, the families of Hele and Strode had developed a strong claim on the borough, and were represented at the contested election on 7 March 1640. On one indenture, Sir Nicholas Slanning, the recorder of the borough, and Sir Thomas Hele were returned by the sheriff, mayor, bailiff and burgesses. C219/42/1A. Another indenture, which has not survived, returned Sir Richard Strode, and may have been brought in by himself. A motion was made in the House on 20 April. The somewhat confused order referring the case to the committee of privileges seems to have recognized that Slanning and Hele were returned by the major part of the electors, and the issue to be determined appears to have been how Strode’s indenture reached the Commons, whether by the sheriff, Sir Nicholas Martyn*, or by Strode himself. CJ ii. 7a. If by the latter, it would have been a gross irregularity, but the House had not determined the matter when the Parliament was dissolved.

In the initial election for what became known as the Long Parliament, Slanning was again successful, but if Hele stood (which is far from certain), he was beaten to the second seat by Michael Oldisworth, secretary to Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, who enjoyed much influence in the region as steward of the duchy of Cornwall (which included Plympton) and lord warden of the stannaries. Both Slanning and Oldisworth opted to sit for seats elsewhere, and although no indenture survives, a by-election must have been held around 15 November which returned Hele, as he had taken his seat by the 21st. D’Ewes (N), 52. On 20 November another election was held, and on this occasion Hugh Potter was successful. C219/43/1. Potter was the household secretary of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, standing in similar relation to his aristocratic employer as Oldisworth did to Pembroke, and the inference to be drawn from Potter’s appearance is that this indicated collaboration between the two earls and the deployment of the stannaries interest to good electoral effect. At one of these three elections held in the final months of 1640, Sir Richard Strode must have stood and perhaps again sent in an indenture. His name appears on the crown office docquet book for the Long Parliament, and on 25 November a petition of his, doubtless making out that he had been properly elected for Plympton, was referred to the elections committee, though it was never to emerge again. C193/32/18; CJ iii. 319a.

During the civil war, Plympton was occupied by soldiers of the king and of Parliament at various times, one householder there apparently being told by the royalists billeted on him that he was for Parliament, and by occupying parliamentarians that he was for the king. SP19/142/126, quoted in M. Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (Exeter, 1994), 229. Sir Thomas Hele became an active royalist commander, disabled from sitting in the House on 22 January 1644 for joining the king at Oxford. Only after Devon had come under the control of Parliament was it possible to hold a by-election for Hele’s seat. On 9 February 1646 a writ was ordered to be issued, but it called for a successor to Slanning (killed in action 1643), who actually had sat for Penryn. CJ iv. 434b. Nothing further was done to rectify the error until 11 November, when a fresh warrant was issued, to substitute the name of Hele for that of Slanning as the Member whose seat was to be filled. CJ iv. 719a. An election was held on 25 February 1647. It must have been contested. A surviving indenture made out in the name of the deputy mayor, the bailiff and burgesses, meeting together ‘of their mutual assent’, returned Edward Moulton, a Plympton Erle burgess, but his return was evidently disallowed. In 1652, Moulton was listed by the Committee for Compounding as not having been proceeded against, but mention of him from that quarter suggests he may have been under suspicion of disaffection towards Parliament. C219/43/2; CCC 3259. A second return was made on the same day, now illegible but perhaps under the hand of the mayor rather than the deputy, for Christopher Martyn, another local man who served as churchwarden on the eve of the civil war and had since attained the rank of major in the parliamentarian garrison of Plymouth. The crown office docquet book records Martyn as having been elected, but there is no reference in the Commons Journal to any referral to the privileges committee. C219/43/2; C193/32/18. The contested election probably accounts for the signatures of 18 freemen on Moulton’s indenture, six of which were the marks of illiterate men. This was the only occasion in this period when signatures and marks appeared on an indenture for this borough.

Both Potter and Martyn kept their seats at Pride’s Purge in December 1648, but Potter withdrew from politics while Martyn went on to become active in the Rump Parliament. On 9 March 1653, during debate on a bill for a ‘new representative’, the question was put that Plympton should be reduced to one parliamentary seat. CJ vii. 265b. Although this proposal fell at the vote, an even more drastic regime was imposed on the borough under the Instrument of Government later in the year: it lost its representation altogether. Only when the traditional electoral arrangements were revived under the Humble Petition and Advice did Plympton recover its seats. In the election held for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, Henry Hatsell and Christopher Martyn were returned. Hatsell was the leading naval administrator under the protectorate, who was buying himself into Plympton St Mary and who by the end of 1659 was the proprietor of Plympton St Mary manor and Saltram House. Returned both for Plympton and Tavistock, Hatsell elected to sit for the borough nearest to his home. In elections for the Convention the following year, an older pattern began to reassert itself. Christopher Martyn kept his place, albeit for this Parliament only, but the first seat went to William Strode, son of the Sir Richard Strode who had fruitlessly claimed the seat twice in 1640. HP Commons 1660-1690.