A notable lawyer, historian and antiquary, and an acknowledged expert on Commons’ procedure, Hakewill was one of the dominant figures in the early Stuart House of Commons. However, despite his talents, he never achieved high office, perhaps because his opposition to impositions made him unpopular with James I.
I. Early Life
Born at Exeter in 1574, Hakewill was the son of a merchant whose family had long been settled at Totnes. His father, granted arms in 1601, was frequently described as being ‘of Totnes’,
II. The First Jacobean Parliament
Hakewill was returned to Parliament for the Cornish borough of Mitchell in 1604, probably on the interest of John Arundell* of Trerice, whose land bill he reported from committee on 22 May 1610.
The New Executions bill was not the only measure which Hakewill steered through the Commons in 1604. On 20 June he reported the bill to prohibit married men from residing in college with their wives and families, and on the following day he debated it at its third reading. The measure failed to become law, and consequently when it resurfaced in the second session Hakewill defended it from criticism (3 Mar. 1606).
In November 1604, shortly after Parliament was prorogued, Hakewill joined the newly revived Society of Antiquaries, being elected its register and ‘convocater’ of assemblies. The society became defunct once again in about 1607, but sometime during the intervening period Hakewill prepared a paper for its members entitled ‘The Antiquity of the laws of this Island’, which challenged chief justice Fortescue’s assertion that the Common Law was essentially unchanged since the time of the ancient Britons. He concluded ‘that the British laws were altered by the Romans, theirs by the Saxons, and theirs again much altered by the Danes which mingled with some points of the Saxon law and fewer of the Roman law’.
Hakewill’s name is not mentioned in the records when the Parliament briefly reconvened in November 1605. Following the Christmas recess, however, he was named to 11 bill committees, including one on the emerging issue of impositions (19 Mar. 1606), but made no recorded speeches.
In March 1607 Hakewill, now a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, was instructed by the king and queen to search the records of the Tower to discover whether previous queen-consorts had enjoyed rights and privileges which had fallen into disuse, there having been no queen-consort in more than 60 years.
When Parliament reassembled in 1610, Hakewill began to play a more active role in its affairs, chairing five legislative committees. These included the committees for the Dorchester bill, which he twice reported (26 Feb. and 11 June), and the Chelsea College bill, which he reported on 6 July. His position as chairman of the committee for the bill on woods, which he reported on 21 May, is confirmed by the fact that on 1 May Sir Richard Paulet handed him a proviso.
Hakewill’s emergence as a committee chairman was indicative of his growing stature at Westminster, which was confirmed on 28 June, when he delivered a brilliantly argued, erudite speech on impositions.
In the remainder of his long speech, Hakewill undermined the Crown’s claim that impositions were warranted by precedent by considering in detail the historical record. Between the Norman Conquest and the end of Mary’s reign, a period of almost five centuries, Hakewill maintained that impositions, properly understood, had only been laid half a dozen times. All were unlawful, he averred, but as each had been moderate, laid in times of great necessity and had been (with one exception) of short duration they were ‘to be borne withal’. By comparison, the new impositions were heavy, permanent and, despite ‘some sparks of rebellion’ in Ireland, had been laid in peacetime. It was not, however, the medieval record which gave colour to the king’s right to levy impositions, argued Hakewill, but the doubtful practices of Queen Mary, who had resurrected impositions ‘after they had been so many years dead and rotten’. Among these Marian levies was one upon cloth, still in force, which had given rise to complaint in Parliament and caused numerous conferences to be had with the judges. Hakewill admitted that he could not discover the outcome of these conferences, but he noted that had judgment been given for the queen the fact would not have been kept quiet.
Hakewill’s speech was impressive for its clarity and learning, and it earned him immediate recognition. On 10 July he was appointed to the committee for drafting a summary of the chief arguments used by both sides in the impositions debate, which summary was to be kept among the House’s records.
III. The Addled Parliament
Following the dissolution, Hakewill obtained access to the Commons’ Journals, which were in the custody of the clerk of the Commons, Ralph Ewens†, a fellow member of the queen’s Household. He read them all and noted down anything he found regarding procedure, intending to compile a tract more detailed than the one penned by his fellow Exonian and likely former mentor, John Hooker. He subsequently drafted several chapters. Those on the passing of bills, the duties of the Speaker and speaking in the House have survived, but chapters on early procedure, committees, the duties of the clerk, and the conclusion of a Parliament have not. One chapter, on bills, was published in Hakewill’s own lifetime, but most of the manuscript remained unpublished, and the existence of no less than three versions of the chapter on speaking in the House suggests that Hakewill never completed the entire work to his own satisfaction. Nevertheless, he lent out portions of his manuscript to interested colleagues, among them Sir Edward Montagu, in whose papers one version of the chapter on speaking in the House survives.
In April 1612 Hakewill assisted Recorder Montagu, who was retained by various barons to protect the status of their younger sons against the claims of precedence advanced by the holders of the newly created baronetcies. The issue was determined in the barons’ favour after a hearing before the king, and Hakewill recorded the arguments employed by both sides.
During the general election of 1614 Hakewill advised Sir Edward Phelips* on electoral tactics should Phelips’ son, Sir Robert*, be opposed for the county seat.
It was not merely as a procedural expert that Hakewill contributed to the life of the Commons in 1614. When the issue of impositions resurfaced in mid-April he placed himself at the forefront of the attack. During the second reading debate on the impositions bill he concurred with Hoskins and Whitson that these levies were ‘the chiefest cause of the king’s wants’. Furthermore, whereas Sir Dudley Digges thought that the bill should be committed without discussion, having been fully debated in 1610, Hakewill not only successfully opposed the motion on the grounds that a majority of Members had not served in the last Parliament, but reprised the preamble to his speech of nearly four years earlier.
It was not only Hakewill’s continued opposition to impositions which placed him at centre stage. On 5 May he also announced that he would not support the bill to prevent the waste of gold and silver thread, which had been given a second reading, unless it were made temporary or contained a clause allowing the king to dispense with it. His reason was that he would ‘never consent to any penal law except that which be for the ease of the subject’. Later that same day he intervened near the end of the subsidy debate, after Sir Thomas Lake I demanded to know whether the House intended to supply the king. Like Sir Anthony Cope, Hakewill thought that it was still too soon to put the question. Nevertheless, he realized that it was necessary to reassure the king, and therefore recommended that the privy councillors in the House, of whom Lake was one, should tell James ‘that all those have spoken are united in wishing to relieve the king’. This motion enjoyed the support of Sir Thomas Cheke I and Hakewill’s kinsman, Sir Jerome Horsey.
During the Parliament Hakewill emerged as a leading advocate of legislation to prevent the export of iron ordnance. This is not altogether surprising, for he had been raised in a maritime community where the consequences of an enemy armed with English guns must have been all too apparent. In the 1601 Parliament he had three times spoken in support of such a bill, on the final occasion (18 Dec.) attempting in vain to rescue it after it had ‘fallen into an everlasting sleep’. Although he had not been so vociferous in the first Jacobean Parliament owing to the 1604 peace with Spain, he had twice been named to committees to consider similar legislation (12 Apr. 1604 and 17 Mar. 1610).
Hakewill was designated to speak at a joint conference with the Lords on impositions when the king dissolved the Parliament on 7 June. He and the other intended spokesmen were subsequently ordered to attend the Council, where the notes and papers they had prepared were burned.
IV. The Search for Office, 1615-19
It was perhaps in the hope of improving his standing with James that Hakewill, at the beginning of 1615, offered an ingenious scheme for augmenting the royal revenue. He had discovered, or so he supposed, that royal pardons had been sold for profit under Edward III, and he suggested that the practice be revived. If each pardon fetched £5 apiece, he calculated that the king might increase his annual revenue by £400,000,
A further drawback of Hakewill’s scheme to sell pardons, pointed out by Archbishop Abbot, was its similarity to the sale of papal indulgences.
Hakewill’s career prospects improved markedly in 1617, by which time he had become a bencher of his Inn. He had attracted the attention of the new lord keeper, Sir Francis Bacon*, who included his name on a shortlist presented to James of men capable of serving as a law reporter, a defunct office which he wished to revive.
Hakewill’s professional activities required him to live close to the capital rather than at his family home in Exeter, which he inherited in June 1615. He accordingly moved to Buckinghamshire sometime before December 1616, when he became a member of the county bench. He settled near Wendover, close to his kinsman by marriage, Sir Jerome Horsey, who lived a few miles to the south-west at Great Kimble, and whose office as the local receiver of duchy of Lancaster fines he held in reversion. It has been supposed that he lived in Wendover itself, at Bucksbridge House on Heron Path, but there is no direct evidence for this. On the contrary, by 1653 he dwelt at the Hale, a seventeenth-century timber-framed house just outside the town.
V. The 1621 Parliament
Following the summoning of James’s third Parliament, Hakewill was again returned for Tregony. He rapidly re-emerged as one of the leaders of the House, but maintained a low profile during the debates which led to the fall of his patron in May 1621. Indeed, only when it became clear that Bacon was doomed did Hakewill participate in the Commons’ investigation of Chancery. On 27 Apr. he was one of four Members appointed to inquire into the irregular manner in which the fees payable to the masters in Chancery had been authorized. The next day he reported that the fault lay with an inexperienced clerk, who had never composed a Privy Seal before and had ‘thought it a warrant to the Great Seal’. Following Bacon’s fall, Hakewill advised his colleagues to consult the Lords to decide whether decrees obtained corruptly under Bacon should be reviewed by auditors appointed by both Houses (28 May).
The House’s anxiety to prevent Bennet from escaping was unsurprising, as the monopolist and Member for Great Bedwyn, (Sir) Giles Mompesson, had only recently fled after his misdeeds had been exposed by the House. Unlike the inquiries into Bacon and Bennet, the investigation into Mompesson involved Hakewill from the outset, for on 19 Feb. he moved to have Mompesson’s patent for the licensing of inns brought before the House for inspection.
The grant itself is so large as there is no landed man but shall be brought under his hand, for there is no land which is not in charge under one of the eight auditors in the Exchequer but is subject to his inquisition. Nay, much of the ancient Crown land is ... subject to his inquisition. Yea, many copyhold manors, forests, parks, castles and other houses of the king are within his compass.
CD 1621, ii. 190.
The next day, Hakewill distanced himself from the failure to name at this conference the referees who had advised the king to issue the patents of monopoly granted to Mompesson and others. He argued that, although one of the conference spokesmen himself, he had been detailed to address solely the grant of concealments, for which there had been no referee. Thus, instead of accepting his share of the blame, he rounded on his fellow spokesmen, all of whom, he asserted, should have raised the subject.
If Hakewill was unrelenting in his pursuit of Mompesson, he was no less eager to bring to book other monopolists, among them Sir Francis Michell and his associates, who enjoyed a monopoly for licensing alehouses. On 21 Feb. he announced that Michell’s patent was worth more than £150 each year to its holders,
In its pursuit of individual monopolists the Commons was exploring uncharted waters, for while the House’s right to punish its own Members was undisputed it remained unclear whether it was equally entitled to punish offenders against the state. Hakewill, whose knowledge of medieval precedents was unrivalled, offered guidance from the outset. On 23 Feb. he recommended that the Commons should fine Michell on its own authority, and claimed that there were precedents for doing so which should be followed ‘lest we lose our privileges’.
Hakewill’s familiarity with the records saved the House from undertaking a pointless search in early May. The Commons sought to join the Lords in punishing the Catholic barrister, Edward Floyd, who had allegedly disparaged the king’s son-in-law and daughter. However, on 2 May Hakewill discouraged a search for precedents, having already scoured the records himself in vain. Instead, he persuaded the House to instruct Floyd’s gaolers to stay their hand until it had been decided what to do.
If Hakewill deployed his learning to remind his colleagues of the limits of their power he also used it to summon up precedents to defend their legitimate authority. The king announced that the Commons could not punish Floyd, as it was unjust to condemn a man without first examining witnesses upon oath. James’s assertion implied that the Commons lacked the power to administer an oath and that it was not a court of record, but on 5 May Hakewill pointed to the House’s statutory obligation to keep a Journal as evidence to the contrary. Moreover, he reminded his listeners that in 1593 the Commons had administered the Oath of Supremacy to an intruder, and that James himself had admitted that the Lower House was a court of record during the Buckinghamshire election dispute of 1604.
The Commons was not alone in benefiting from Hakewill’s archival expertise. The Lords were well acquainted with Hakewill, who had earlier written to them regarding Mompesson and whose advice they had sought regarding the examination of witnesses in the case of the gold and silver thread monopoly.
Hakewill’s expertise was not limited to the orders of the House, as he frequently also offered his colleagues guidance on electoral law. During the debate on the Leicestershire election (9 Feb.), for instance, he agreed with many other Members that the sheriff had been ill advised to block the return of the non-resident, Sir George Hastings. Though residence was a requirement of election it was the responsibility of the Commons to judge the validity of returns and not the sheriff, whose duty was limited to expressing the wishes of the freeholders.
Hakewill’s knowledge of precedent was encyclopaedic, but he was far from infallible, as his unfounded assertion that the Commons were entitled to fine Michell clearly demonstrates. Although probably spared the necessity of admitting his error on that occasion, he was less fortunate on 7 Dec., when he declared that Sir Thomas Hoby was mistaken in believing that the Speaker could not be sent to the king with a message, for in 1566 Speaker Gargrave had delivered a petition concerning the succession. On checking the Journal a little later he was obliged to admit that he ‘found not this precedent fully warranted’.
In general the precedents cited by Hakewill were correct. This did not mean, however, that his advice was always followed. When the attorney-general, Sir Thomas Coventry*, brought a message from the king on 10 Mar., Hakewill recommended that he stand a few feet within the bar, as this was where the chancellor of Scotland had stood on giving evidence to the Commons in 1607. However, the House permitted Coventry to approach the table instead.
Hakewill’s advice was not always heeded in electoral matters either. On 17 Feb. he was overruled when he argued that there was no need to amend the Leicestershire return, despite the sheriff’s error in disallowing Hastings. He encountered no more success when he argued, on 26 Feb., that William Man’s return for Westminster was void. The electors of Westminster had originally chosen Edmund Doubleday to be their representative, but Doubleday had died before Parliament met and so the inhabitants had returned Man in his stead. Hakewill pointed out, quite correctly, that Westminster had acted unlawfully in conducting two elections on the same writ, but the House eventually permitted Man to retain his seat. Hakewill was similarly disregarded when he challenged Minehead’s right to return Members on the grounds that it had lost its right to the franchise on forfeiting its charter in 1609.
As well as providing guidance on procedure and electoral law, Hakewill spearheaded an attempt to overhaul the entire Common Law in 1621. On the king’s instructions he and several other leading lawyers had laid the groundwork for such a project in the summer of 1610, but both in the final session of 1610 and the Parliament of 1614 the intended reform had gone unmentioned. Now, in 1621, the issue was revived in the Commons, whose Members may have hoped thereby to persuade a sceptical James that parliaments could be useful and productive. On 13 Feb. Hakewill’s earlier efforts were praised by Edward Alford, whereupon Hakewill declared that there were so many unrepealed obsolete statutes that the law had become an offender against itself. Moreover, it was not always clear whether statutes remained in force, for while two leading reference works reported one law to have been repealed the judges had concluded the opposite. The resulting disagreement was of considerable significance, as the law in question prescribed hanging as its penalty. He therefore supported the appointment of a committee to review the work already carried out. The House approved of this motion and deputed Hakewill to assist the new committee, but needless to say the running of the committee quickly fell to him. When the House rose for Easter on 27 Mar. it was he who proposed that the committee should meet the following morning, and he who laid the committee’s completed bill before the House on 26 May, having probably drafted much of the measure himself. The bill recommended the repeal of 80 obsolete statutes and the revival of several moribund Acts. However, after receiving a second reading on 29 May, it disappeared from sight.
Overhauling the Common Law was not Hakewill’s only legislative concern in 1621. During the 1614 Parliament he had steered through a bill to regulate and reform parliamentary elections, and when the issue re-emerged on 8 Feb. 1621 he suggested referring the earlier measure to the privileges committee, of which he was a member.
The ordnance bill and the measure to overhaul the Common Law were undoubtedly Hakewill’s chief legislative preoccupations in 1621, but he also took a keen interest in several other bills, among them those concerning the Charities Act (14 Feb.) and Wadham College, Oxford (21 Mar.), both of which he reported. On 21 Apr., during the inquiry into Sir John Bennet, he proposed that a bill regarding the administration of the estates of the deceased be drafted.
Hakewill played an important role in the House’s largely unsuccessful attempts to order its legislative business more efficiently. On 21 Mar. he supported the establishment of a committee to arrange all the bills and grievances in order of priority before the Easter recess. Moreover, when the Commons reconvened after Easter, he proposed that a catalogue of grievances be drawn up as this would enable a 12-strong committee to determine which bills were most necessary to pursue (26 Apr.) and so ‘husband much time’. Following the Whitsun break, he recommended that all legislative committees should cease their work, except those which were ready to report their labours (28 May).
On 4 Jan. 1622, two days before the 1621 Parliament was formally dissolved, John Chamberlain, a normally well-informed source, reported that Hakewill had been hauled before the Council.
VI. Reluctance to Serve in Parliament, 1624-6
On 7 Feb. 1622 Hakewill donated £13 6s. 8d. towards the Palatine Benevolence.
Hakewill may have been unsettled by his detention following the 1621 Parliament. Certainly he did not seek re-election at the 1624 general election, even though John Arundell of Trerice, who was probably responsible for providing him with a seat on previous occasions, remained an active parliamentary patron. However, he proved unable to avoid the Commons entirely, for in April he was retained as counsel by the boroughs of Amersham, Great Marlow and Wendover, all of which petitioned jointly to be restored to the franchise.
The Buckinghamshire boroughs were not the only clients Hakewill represented in Parliament prior to his own election. On 4 Mar. he and two other lawyers served as advocates for Sir John Cutts* and Toby Palavicino, the defeated candidates in the Cambridgeshire election, and five days later he acted for the 12 burgesses of Chippenham, whose monopoly of the franchise was contested by the borough’s freemen.
Hakewill served as Lent reader at Lincoln’s Inn in 1625. Later that year he surrendered his reversion to the receivership of the revenues of part of the duchy of Lancaster’s lands, which he had been granted in 1606. On the accession of Charles I he remained reluctant to seek re-election to Parliament, and therefore did not serve in either 1625 or 1626. However, he may once again have made his services available to those who wished to challenge their defeat before the committee for privileges.
VII. The Parliament of 1628-9
Hakewill did not choose to return to the Commons again until 1628, when he once more represented Amersham. He was immediately appointed chairman of the prestigious committee of privileges and returns, a position for which he was eminently well suited.
Hakewill’s resumption of his parliamentary career was almost certainly linked to the Forced Loan of 1626-7. Like impositions, the Loan raised fundamental questions about the king’s right to help himself to private property. Hakewill was not slow to draw comparisons between the two, but would no longer debate the property rights of the subject. On 26 Mar. he declared that anyone who doubted that the subject possessed an absolute right to his property was ‘not worthy of his coat or his life’. He added that some issues, like certain passages of Scripture and impositions, were so clear ‘that had they not been expounded they had never been doubted’.
If Hakewill was alarmed at arbitrary imprisonment he was no less concerned about the billeting of troops. Complaints against billeting were so numerous, he declared on 8 Apr., that if they continued ‘I should doubt whether I were in England or no’. Indeed, he was reminded of Fortescue’s description of fifteenth-century France, so pestered with men-at-arms that it had been almost impossible to find lodgings. However, Hakewill did not doubt that the king would desist from further billeting on receiving a petition from the House, just as Edward III had done three centuries earlier.
Hakewill believed that the law already afforded the subject sufficient protection, both for his goods and his person. This being the case, he saw no need for further legislation except to confirm existing rights. Thus when the House debated whether to legislate in detail or merely to confirm existing laws, Hakewill argued for the latter approach. Speaking on 29 Apr., he denied that a bare confirmation would leave the subject no better off than he was before. Confirmation would put into print several unpublished laws which remained largely unknown, even to many lawyers. These neglected statutes were ‘of as great consequence for the liberty of the subject if not greater than any that are printed’. Besides, he added,
Will not the occasion of making of this law of confirmation, so notoriously known, be transmitted to all posterity ... will not the resolution of this House and all our arguments and reasons against imprisonments without a cause expressed ... be a great means to stay any judge hereafter for declaring any judgment to the contrary, especially if there be likelihood of a Parliament?
There were practical reasons, too, which pointed to confirmation as the most satisfactory approach. The Lords had recently demonstrated that they were unwilling to endorse the Commons’ unequivocal condemnation of the king’s right to imprison without cause shown. This being so, it was hardly likely that the Upper House would consent to a bill on the same subject. Even if they did, it was unrealistic to suppose that the king would permit such a bill to pass into law. For these reasons, Hakewill urged his listeners to be guided ‘by probabilities’ rather than vain hopes.
Hakewill was entirely correct in his assessment that Charles would do no more than confirm existing laws. However, he was thoroughly misguided in assuming that such a confirmation would provide sufficient protection for the subject’s liberties and goods because the king believed that his actions had been lawful. As Sir John Eliot put it, ‘all the question is what the law is’. This was a question which, as one historian has perceptively observed, ‘would not be answered by a bare confirmation’.
It has been fairly remarked that ‘Hakewill’s misgivings were to be justified by the king’s first answer to the Petition, if not by the second’.
Either the addition is idle or operative. If it be idle, it is neither worthy of the Lords to give nor for us to receive; if operative, then it must work to strengthen our liberties or to weaken them. Strengthen you are all of opinion it does not, why then it does weaken; if weaken, why is it here? Is not our petition by this means become felo de se?
Ibid. 537.
Thanks partly to Hakewill the Commons refused to back down, and four days later the Lords withdrew the offending clause. Thereafter, Hakewill was one of the lawyers in the House who provided the Commons with technical advice on the procedures required to enrol the Petition.
The issues addressed by the Petition continued to occupy Hakewill even after it completed its passage through the Commons. On 31 May he announced that he had received a letter from ‘a good friend in Oxford’ regarding a sermon recently preached there by one of the king’s chaplains, Roger Manwaring. The latter, already notorious for having preached that the king was entitled to levy money without the consent of the subject, had justified his former arguments. In addition, he had claimed that no layman could properly judge matters relating to the Church, a criticism which appeared to relate to the Commons’ recent attacks on Arminianism. This intervention prompted the addition of Hakewill to the committee for drawing up charges of impeachment against Manwaring.
Apart from revealing the contents of Manwaring’s Oxford sermon, Hakewill did not join the chorus of protests against the Arminians in 1628, neither did he take any recorded part in the attack on Buckingham, although he did report the bill to confirm the letters patent issued to the duke’s former enemy, Sir John Digby*, earl of Bristol, on 31 May.
Following the dissolution, Hakewill retired to relative obscurity. In April 1631 he offered his enthusiastic support for an expedition ‘concerning astronomical observations’ that the professor of astronomy at Merton College, Oxford, Dr. Bainbridge, hoped to send to Alexandria, in Egypt.
Hakewill did not seek election to either the Short or the Long Parliaments. However, in December 1640 the House of Lords assigned him as counsel to the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth*) at the latter’s request, and in the following April he appeared at the bar to defend his client from articles of impeachment.
On 13 May 1642 the House of Lords appointed Hakewill counsel to Sir George Strode and Richard Spencer who, like Strafford, had articles of impeachment preferred against them by the Commons.