The Delbridge family can be traced in north Devon by the 1520s, and held municipal office in Barnstaple from around the middle of Elizabeth’s reign. Delbridge himself was born in the town, and rose to local prominence as a successful cloth merchant, his initial business network embracing London, Northamptonshire and the Continent. A puritan, he and his wife’s kinsman Nicholas Downe shipped grain in from London to provide cheap food for Barnstaple’s poor during the hard winter of 1596-7.
By now Delbridge was becoming a regular visitor to the capital. He was at Court in January 1604, seeking government concessions for the local cloth industry. Three years later, with the corporation now at odds with its recorder over the project for a new town quay, Delbridge attended the Privy Council with a complaint against one of Bath’s allies, the local magistrate Hugh Acland. He also held discussions in 1611 with Sir Thomas Lake I* and the attorney-general, Sir Henry Hobart*, probably in connection with the new borough charter.
In 1614 Delbridge was elected to represent Barnstaple in Parliament, a role he would fulfil a further five times. The novice Member was mistakenly described as ‘Mr. Delliverge’ in the Commons Journal, and made little mark on the Parliament’s proceedings. Nevertheless, he was appointed on 8 Apr. to help select statutes for repeal or continuance, and on 5 May to prepare for a conference on impositions. The latter was an issue with which he was to be particularly associated in subsequent sessions, and the same day he supported Sir John Savile’s motion to defer supply, ‘in respect of the little hope yesterday of relief of impositions’.
In 1615 Delbridge was again elected mayor. The same year saw the marriage of his widowed daughter, Mary Ayres, to William Hakewill’s* elder brother, which served to strengthen his ties with Exeter, Devon’s biggest port. He also joined the Somers Islands Company, and having obtained shares in the plantation there, he imported tobacco from the colony in 1620-1.
Back in the Commons in 1621, Delbridge again attracted few committee nominations, but he was significantly more vocal than he had been before, with at least 17 recorded speeches, almost all of which related to trade. While his utterances lacked rhetorical polish, his trenchant and repetitive observations on the realities of merchant life attracted notice, and his command of facts and figures ensured that he was taken seriously. On 26 Feb. he used the debate on the scarcity of money to draw attention to the decline of the Barnstaple cloth industry, where production had dropped by four-fifths, and exports had fallen off dramatically. The next day he blamed the coinage problem on the reluctance of Spanish merchants to pay for goods in silver, but he also highlighted the burden that impositions placed on English traders. Delbridge reiterated the latter point on 14 May: ‘impositions are so great that we cannot send out a £100 in goods to sea, but homeward and outward we pay £25 to the king; perchance the merchant may get £5 for himself, a poor reward considering the adventure’. In the same speech, he also attacked the levies that the Merchant Adventurers were allowed to collect in the provinces, which again undermined local production. On 1 May he successfully moved that the committee appointed to examine the Merchant Adventurers’ patent should also inspect the Company’s own book of impositions. He was nominated on 12 May to help scrutinize the bill on the manufacture of the cloths known as perpetuanos.
Unsurprisingly, given his recent involvement in the American colonies, Delbridge’s other principal concern was to defend the settlers’ tobacco crop. On 26 Feb. Sir Edwin Sandys blamed the import of Spanish tobacco for the nationwide shortage of coin, and proposed to allow only tobacco grown in England’s colonies to be imported. Delbridge was happy to go along with this proposal, even if it meant a trade war. As he remarked optimistically the next day: ‘if the Spaniard should forbid our commodities, happy for England’. One of his reasons for supporting Sandys’s proposal emerged on 18 Apr., when he argued that, because of the high demand in England for Spanish tobacco, West Country merchants were forced to accept lower prices in Spain for their own goods in order to secure a share of this valuable produce. Later that day, however, after Sir Lionel Cranfield and others called for a total ban on all tobacco imports, Delbridge warned that this would have ‘exceeding great’ consequences for the Somers Islands colony. On 23 Apr. he also joined with Sandys in attacking the recent patent for the regulation of the tobacco trade, which was adversely affecting Virginia’s tobacco planters, and he was promptly named to a select committee to investigate these problems.
Despite his objections to the New England Company’s patent, Delbridge made no comment on the bill for free fishing in America until it was reported on 24 May. He then highlighted the domestic consequences of the colonists offering their produce to all comers, requesting ‘that those of that country may be restrained not to sell their fish to any others than those of this kingdom; for now they sell their fish to strangers, and hinder our fishermen’. During the debate on 7 May on the bill against extortionate customs officials, he managed to raise a Barnstaple complaint about the duties levied on cargoes of Welsh lime. As a port town burgess, he was entitled to serve on the bill’s committee. However, his request ten days later, ‘that the patent of the king’s grocery in seizing of men’s grocery may be called in’, fell on deaf ears.
Given the mounting evidence of his mercantile expertise, Delbridge was predictably appointed on 19 Apr. to help prepare for a grand committee debate on trade by drawing together the various problems already considered in the House. Nevertheless, he was disappointed by the Commons’ slow progress on these issues, and objected strongly on 29 May when the imminent adjournment was announced. Asserting that he would ‘freely discharge his conscience, as becometh an honest man’, he continued: ‘we have been here 16 weeks, and in the matter of trade nothing hath been done. I had rather never have gone home than go home in this manner. I do dislike it. I protest I think it will do that hurt that I wish I were in heaven’.
Mr. Delbridge would have no bills pass, but, because trade is much decayed, and lieth a bleeding, he would (to give some satisfaction to the country) that there might be liberty given to trade freely [during the recess] ... notwithstanding the patents and monopolies which are granted, and that the impositions laid on trade, since the last Parliament, may be taken off till that time.
This speech also hit its target. Cranfield immediately confirmed that his statement the previous day had been aimed at Delbridge, but insisted that, even taking impositions into account, Barnstaple’s trade had doubled in the previous 20 years, and that the town had actually secured some concessions from the government over impositions. Sir Dudley Digges now sprang to Delbridge’s defence, affirming that the latter’s main point was rather that local manufacturing was decayed. However, this intervention failed to defuse the situation. A little later, ‘there beginning some heat’ between Cranfield, Sir Edwin Sandys, Delbridge and Sir Peter Heyman, ‘the same appeared to arise by mistaking of each other’s speeches; and all of them, by the general voice of the House, were freed from having spoken anything unfitly’.
In the event, nothing came of Digges’s customs farm project, not least because of Cranfield’s opposition to it. Nevertheless, Delbridge remained silent on the question of trade during much of the Parliament’s second sitting, apparently absorbed in the pressing Palatinate issue. He found his voice again only on 5 Dec., after it emerged that the Commons had misjudged the king’s intentions, and that its petition urging war against Spain would not be received. Breaking the lengthy silence with which the day’s proceedings began, he recited his usual economic concerns, noting that the West Country was now oppressed not only by impositions but also by Turkish and French pirates. Nevertheless,
he would have us lay aside all respects of trade, considering the miserable state of religion [and] the lamentable estate of the king’s children. ... As for the privileges of this House, touching the petition we prepared for the king, he had as willingly hang under the gallows as fry over a faggot. And therefore, the state of religion standing as it doth, he would have us go to the king again and again with our petition, as we do to God, and no doubt but His Majesty will hear us at length.
The bluntness of this argument, and Delbridge’s open defiance of the royal veto, went well beyond what many Members deemed wise at this sensitive juncture, even if many of them sympathized with his sentiments. The next speaker, the more experienced Sir Robert Phelips, immediately sought to redirect the debate, stressing the need to demonstrate the Commons’ loyalty to the monarch. On the following day, acknowledging his error, Delbridge requested pardon ‘if any word amiss have slipped from him’, which was granted ‘by a general acclamation’.
Returned to the Commons for a third consecutive time in 1624, Delbridge was now sufficiently well known to attract a wider range of nominations. He was named or added to the committees for two private bills, one concerning the estates of (Sir) Charles Caesar*, the other the naturalization of three Scots (1 and 4 May). He also attended a meeting of the legislative committee dealing with the enfranchisement of County Durham, serving ex officio as a Devon burgess.
As in 1621, however, Delbridge remained anxious about the mounting crisis over the Palatinate. Although he made no known contributions to the debates about war, perhaps mindful of his earlier faux pas, he could see the potential threat posed by English Catholics. On 1 Apr., following his remarks on impositions, he abruptly changed the subject to London’s recusants: ‘this day sevennight two citizens came to him, and asked him what [was] done against them, ... [since] 3,000 or 4,000 flocked that day to the Spanish ambassador’s house’. Having thus grabbed Members’ attention, he added that there was ‘great expectation through the kingdom that something should be done against recusants’, warning that ‘men suspect things go not so well as is reported’. He seems not to have proposed a specific course of action, but the effect of his speech was to start the ball rolling for a petition against recusants. Ten days later, he was named to the committee to scrutinize the bill to establish three regular sermons in London, another potential means of discouraging recusancy.
Now a well-known figure in the House, Delbridge marked the start of the 1625 Parliament by securing a place on the prestigious committee for privileges. On 4 July he spoke in support of Arthur Bassett*, who had been elected to the Commons despite being confined in a debtor’s gaol. Since this case was already on the committee’s agenda, Delbridge, who was a trustee of Bassett’s estates, was presumably trying to encourage a speedy verdict.
heretofore we had hopes and expectations wherewith to please the country, though we gave away the money. Now there are nothing but discouragements: pardons to Jesuits, the news from [La] Rochelle, ... the interruption of the fishing trade, the losses by pirates. So that, whereas we returned the last time with fasting and prayer, now we may return with sackcloth and ashes.
As Conrad Russell observed, ‘at least one Member, faced with the panoply of official pressure, was still more afraid of his neighbours than of the Crown’.
Delbridge’s first contribution to the proceedings of the 1626 Parliament was, somewhat surprisingly, a motion on 13 Feb., the final day of the Hilary law term, that lawyers should not leave London without permission from the House. Doubtless aware that the spring assizes would shortly begin, he clearly aimed to prevent a general haemorrhage of the Commons’ legal experts. Now generally recognized as one of the more godly Members, he was appointed to three legislative committees concerned with religious matters, namely scandalous clergy, the removal of seasonal restrictions on marriage, and the regulation of ecclesiastical courts (15 Feb., 9 Mar., 6 May); indeed, he was the first nominee to the last of these committees.
The sustained political drama of Buckingham’s impeachment seems largely to have passed Delbridge by. Certainly his comments on these events were rare and limited to issues of which he had some personal knowledge, however tangential. On 22 Feb. he responded to (Sir) John Eliot’s report on the second arrest of the St. Peter by describing the fair treatment he had received from the Danish government after it seized one of his own ships. He was considerably blunter during a debate six days later about the Navy’s failings. Condemning the ease with which Sallee pirates and Dunkirk privateers were plundering English merchant shipping, he noted grimly that the fault lay neither with the king, nor with his ordinary subjects, whose taxes were supposed to be employed to prevent such a situation. Doubtless alluding to Buckingham’s responsibilities as lord admiral, he observed: ‘the omitting of somebody’s office [is] the cause of it, and of our losses’.
Shortly after the Parliament’s dissolution, the Crown sought to boost its naval strength by levying ships from all significant ports. In January 1627 Delbridge was sent to London to present Barnstaple’s excuses, his expenses partially covered by other neighbouring boroughs.
Delbridge’s fixation with impositions continued unabated. On 4 Apr. he urged that the Tunnage and Poundage bill should be used to limit what impositions could be introduced. He also complained on 17 May about an imposition on tobacco.
All things are dead with us, and yet we are called upon to give. When a man hath a good friend that supplies him, he is still in heart, but when a friend dies, misery follows. Soldiers and pursuivants are now our companions, and although in poor towns, where the labourer lives by his trade, he offers his goods to be sold to pay for these billetings, yet nothing will satisfy but ready money. I could say much more, but I speak not to diminish the supply of the king, but to settle and secure the safety of the subject.
Ibid. ii. 304, 310, 314.
On 27 May Delbridge was licensed to go into the country ‘for his health’, but he was back in the Commons three weeks later, and on 24 June launched a final attack on impositions. Complaining particularly about the duties on imported American tobacco, he called for the Tunnage and Poundage bill to follow the format employed during Elizabeth’s reign, which was not generally thought to validate the collection of impositions. Controversially, he also called for a short time limit on the grant of Tunnage and Poundage, so that its execution could be regularly monitored by Parliament.
Delbridge attended the 1629 session, attracting nominations to legislative committees concerned with the promotion of trade, and the Somers Islands Company’s patent (11 and 23 February). Surprisingly, he made no further comments on the Tunnage and Poundage bill, instead making his only recorded speech during a debate on whether parliamentary privilege could be used to recover the goods confiscated from John Rolle for non-payment of this levy. Delbridge was unconvinced by the argument propounded by Eliot and John Selden, that the disputed merchandize had been taken for the benefit of the customs farmers only. As he correctly explained, ‘all seizures use to be made only for the king, and must be so judged, and not for the farmers, albeit the profits thereof by contract goeth to the farmers’. The Commons’ refusal to accept this advice significantly hastened the Parliament’s dissolution. Following that event, he received £1 7s. from Barnstaple corporation towards his expenses at Westminster.
Delbridge may have responded to the latest failure to approve the Tunnage and Poundage bill by refusing to pay customs duties himself. In March 1629 he was brought before the Privy Council ‘upon complaint made of some undutiful carriage of his towards His Majesty, not only in refusing himself but in persuading others to refuse to pay any duties to the king for goods exported and imported’. However, under examination, he convinced the councillors of his innocence, and sensibly discouraged them from sending for his accusers. In the following year he and some partners were granted letters of marque for a 60-ton ship. Delbridge found himself in trouble again in 1631, when one of his shipments of American tobacco was brought into Barnstaple, contrary to a recent Proclamation forbidding unlading at the outports. His excuse that the vessel was insufficiently seaworthy to complete the voyage to the Thames was not accepted by the Privy Council.
In 1630 Delbridge married his surviving son into a local gentry family, the Chichesters of Hall. He himself now possessed a landed estate of several hundred acres, including the manor and advowson of West Buckland, and in 1632 he instituted a perpetual rent-charge on one of his Barnstaple properties, to provide 40s. a year for the poor of the borough.