The Palmes family, originally from Somerset, acquired the manor of Naburn near York by marriage in 1226. No family member sat in the Commons until 1510, when the lawyer Brian Palmes was returned for York.
While his father mainly lived in Hampshire, Palmes spent the early part of his adult life at Ashwell, with occasional visits to Yorkshire.
Having succeeded his father in 1613, Palmes was eligible for the senior knighthood of the shire in 1614 in place of Sir James Harington, who had recently died. He was probably backed by John, 2nd Baron Harington*, who died shortly before the election.
Shortly after the dissolution, Palmes became involved in a dispute over the sale of Yorkshire lands he held as a trustee for his relative John Lindley. The purchaser demanded a discount before surrendering his lease of the estate, and his refusal to pay the price previously agreed with Palmes led to a three-cornered dispute between the two men and Lindley’s executors.
Palmes clearly used his old Harington connections to secure a parliamentary seat during the 1620s: he was returned for Rutland with the backing of the new lord lieutenant, the 5th earl of Huntingdon, who wrote to the freeholders on his behalf in 1624.
Much of Palmes’s activity in the Commons during the 1620s followed consistent patterns. One of the clearest was his hostility to abuses of the legal system. In the spring of 1621 he took part in the investigation of charges against Sir John Bennet*, seconding Richard Weston’s motion to send for the chief witness, and calling for the case to be referred to the Lords before Bennet had replied to his accusers.
A substantial number of Palmes’s committee appointments concerned legal reform: bills opposing abuses in the finding of inquisitions post mortem (8 Mar. 1624), the execution of writs of ad quod damnum (21 Nov. 1621), and the misuse of writs of habeas corpus (27 June 1625). He also showed an interest in two controversial bills designed to bring Chancery more closely within the ambit of the Common Law (25 Apr. 1621; 14 Apr. 1624),
Palmes also opposed the abuse of monopoly patents which comprised the principal grievance of the Commons in 1621 and 1624. He took little part in the investigation of individual misdemeanours, although he did call for the arrest of the alehouse patentees on 24 Apr. 1621, presumably because he feared they might flee abroad, like the inns patentee, (Sir) Giles Mompesson*.
Palmes’s hostility to patents was probably aroused by the disruption they caused at local level, particularly in undermining the authority of the sheriff, an office he held four times. On 14 May 1621 he called for the examination of the patent for collection of unpaid fines due to King’s Bench, normally collected by sheriffs, which he may also have found objectionable because its remit included arrears of fines on sheriffs.
Palmes seems to have had virtually no interest in patents which fell outside the remit of local government, though he was named to committees for bills to transfer control of the Dungeness and Winterton lighthouses from private patentees to Deptford’s Trinity House (7 May 1621) and to abolish Sir Ferdinando Gorges’† monopoly of the Newfoundland fisheries (27 June 1625).
Palmes was little interested in economic issues, except during the trade depression of 1621. He objected to the 1621 bill to ban imports of Spanish tobacco in favour of the Virginia Company’s produce, on the grounds that it did not go far enough: ‘tobacco undoes men in their bodies and estates, draws them to drink and [to] continue at it. All kind of men affected with it. Tis high time to banish it’. He was presumably intending to raise similar objections when named to consider a petition from the importers of Spanish tobacco on 26 May 1624.
While many of Palmes’s Naburn relatives were Catholics, his own Protestantism was never in doubt. In his first speech to the Commons in 1621, he complained about the insolence of recusants who practised their religion openly, and called for investigation of Catholic contributions to the imperial campaign against the Elector Palatine.
In the autumn of 1621 Palmes’s interest in the implementation of the recusancy laws led to his inclusion on the committee ordered to investigate the shortcomings of (Sir) Henry Spiller’s* collection of recusancy fines (29 November). On 24 May 1628 he was also named to the committee scrutinizing the work of Spiller’s successors, the commissions for recusancy compositions.
Although he is not known to have spoken on ecclesiastical discipline, Palmes’s committee appointments suggest that he had some interest in the subject. He was twice named to the committee for the bill to widen the scope for clerical subscription to the Canons of 1604 (27 June 1625, 23 Apr. 1628), and was included on others for bills to disbar ministers from being appointed as justices (25 Apr. 1621), to restrict the use of excommunication by church courts (14 Apr. 1628), to facilitate the removal of scandalous ministers (23 Nov. 1621), and to prevent simony in elections to university posts (23 Feb. 1629).
Some of the minor legislation with which Palmes was involved can be connected with local concerns. He had an interest in the York corporation’s bill for the River Ouse (3 May 1621), not only because it was to be funded by a levy on the county, but because its proposal to divert the river would have directly affected his newly acquired manor of Osgodby.
On 4 June 1621 Palmes obliged Sir William Bulstrode, his partner as knight of the shire for Rutland, by moving to punish two bailiffs who had breached parliamentary privilege by arresting a servant of (Sir) James Whitelocke*, Bulstrode’s cousin by marriage.
Palmes’s defence of Hoskins in 1614 shows that he was fully aware of the importance of the privilege of free speech, and it was probably this which earned him a regular place on the committee for privileges from 1621.
Palmes’s reluctance to join the government’s critics in 1621 may have owed something to the arrests which followed the dissolution of the Addled Parliament, but mounting evidence of official misconduct apparently overcame his fears during the course of the session. When the House considered proceedings against monopolists on 5 Mar., he proposed that inquiries should be widened to include the Crown lawyers who had approved the patents, a move which quickly implicated several clients of the favourite, the marquess of Buckingham.
Palmes was not among the handful of MPs arrested for their part in wrecking the autumn sitting of 1621, but he was summoned before the Privy Council when he refused to contribute to the Benevolence raised after the dissolution.
While the exact nature of the relationship between Palmes and the other ‘fiery and turbulent spirits’ whose actions brought the 1621 session to an abrupt end is difficult to divine,
Palmes continued to focus his attention on the passage of legislation in 1624. He moved that a list of unresolved grievances should be compiled from the clerk’s Journals for 1610 and 1621, a task he and Sir Peter Heyman were delegated to perform (10 Mar.),
Palmes’s views on the breach with Spain, the central issue of the 1624 session, are difficult to interpret. Typically, although the entire House was invited to hear Buckingham (now a duke) deliver his account of the failure of the negotiations for the Spanish Match on 24 Feb., Palmes, a stickler for procedure, moved that arrangements should be made for an official report to the House, as ‘it goes but as a committee’.
By the standards of the previous sessions, Palmes was unusually reticent in 1625: he is not recorded to have spoken until 10 Aug., at the height of the debate on King Charles’s request for additional subsidy to pay for the fleet to be sent to Cadiz. When chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Richard Weston held out the prospect of another session to deal with grievances in return for an immediate vote of supply, Palmes suggested that the Crown’s credit could be restored just as easily if the Commons were to undertake to grant supply in this second session. He then alluded to Buckingham’s mismanagement of affairs, the issue all but a handful of Members had been avoiding, reminding the House that ‘for the disorders in H[enry] VII time, [Richard] Empson† and [Edmund] Dudley† were hanged in H[enry] VIII time’. The implicit hope that Buckingham would share the same fate under Charles would have been clear to all, and undoubtedly explains why he was excluded from the next Parliament by being pricked as sheriff of Rutland in November 1625.
Palmes probably wished to see his son elected for Rutland in his stead in 1626, but the memory of the quarrel which had broken out in the shire in 1601, when Sir Andrew Noel had tried to secure the return of his own son Edward Noell†, seems to have persuaded him to come to an agreement with Sir Francis Bodenham* instead. Bodenham took the county seat, and in return his cousin John Balguy secured the return of Brian Palmes at Stamford, where Balguy was deputy recorder.
On being returned to the Commons again in 1628, Palmes declared his objections to the Crown’s abuses over the past 18 months. On 25 Mar., when Sir Peter Heyman recounted the story of his ‘temporary banishment’ to the Palatinate on a diplomatic mission, Sir William Fleetwood II observed that the practice was outlawed by a statute of Edward III, and Palmes and Sir Francis Seymour moved to petition the king to take cognizance of this precedent.
Palmes took no recorded part in the general debates on the Petition of Right, preferring to concentrate instead on the problems of billeting which he had confronted as a deputy lieutenant. At the start of the session, he was named to consider a bill to put the lieutenancy on a statutory footing (24 Mar.), and another to investigate complaints about billeting in Surrey (28 March).
Palmes did not speak at all in the brief session of 1629, during which his interest appears to have been focused on a lawsuit between one of his sons-in-law, William Leeke, and the latter’s half-brother Francis, Lord Deincourt, which came before the Lords; Palmes, Mallory and Sir Gervase Clifton* were all given leave to testify in this case on 7 February.
Leeke was not the only one of Palmes’s relatives to cause him trouble during the latter part of his life. In 1627, he was briefly involved in litigation to secure the jointure rights of his daughter Douglas, and nine years later he was forced to defend another daughter, Mary, the widow of his stepson, Sir Thomas Browne, against the claims of her brother-in-law Sir Robert Browne to a share of her husband’s inheritance.
Palmes served as a commissioner for knighthood fines in Rutland in the early 1630s, and obtained exemption for his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Browne, in Northamptonshire.