PULESTON, Roger (1566-1618), of Emral, Worthenbury, Flint.

The Pulestons took their name from the Shropshire manor upon which they were living in the thirteenth century. One branch of the family settled at Emral in 1283, and while the estate was briefly forfeited during the Glyndŵr rebellion the family survived to participate in Flintshire politics after the Union of 1536. DWB (Puleston of Emral). Several distant relatives sat in Parliament during the early Tudor period, but Puleston’s father, a man of business for Edward Seymour, 1st earl of Hertford, was the first of the senior branch to be returned to the Commons, sitting for the Seymour borough of Great Bedwyn in 1584 and 1586. HP Commons, 1558-1603, iii. 260-1.

Puleston himself should not be confused with his relative, Roger Puleston of Highgate, Middlesex. STAC 5/P63/37; C2/Eliz/P1/63, 2/Eliz/P12/27; Dwnn, 310. At his father’s death in 1587 he inherited 2,500 acres in Maelor Saesneg, Flintshire and up to 1,350 acres in Denbighshire. CHES 3/81/24, 3/94/18. He was returned to the Commons for Flintshire in the autumn of 1588, possibly with the support of his father-in-law, then a justice on the Chester circuit. At the contentious Denbighshire election of the same year, he supported John Edwards† of Chirk, a relative by marriage, and served as knight for Denbighshire himself in 1593. He missed the next two parliaments, but was returned once again in 1604. As an experienced shire knight, he was named to attend the conference at which King James laid out his initial plans for the Union (14 Apr. 1604) and another to explore proposals to compound for wardship (22 May); he was also one of those named to provide evidence of local abuses by purveyors (7 May) and was appointed to committees for bills concerning the finances of the royal Household (18 June) and the annexation of estates to the Crown (4 July). CJ, i. 172a, 202a, 222b, 241b, 252a.

Puleston was named to the committee investigating the privilege claim of the Flint Boroughs MP, Roger Brereton, on 3 Feb. 1606. Later the same day he was ordered to attend a conference with the Lords about recusancy legislation, and he was subsequently one of the delegation who presented the Commons’ grievances to the king (14 May). Among his committee nominations, that for the Welsh cottons bill (10 Mar.) was of most obvious interest to his constituents. Ibid. 263a, 281b, 309a. Puleston did not appear in the records of the next session until 10 Mar. 1607, when he was included on the committee for a naturalization bill. When the session was delayed by the illness of Speaker Sir Edward Phelips, Puleston was among those ordered to consider the appointment of a substitute (23 Mar.), but eight days later he was noted as being absent, and he does not seem to have returned to the House until 4 June, when he was named to the committee for an estate bill for the Stanley family, who owned substantial lands in Flintshire. Towards the end of the session, he was one of the committee ordered to collate procedural precedents from the Journal (19 June). Ibid. 351a, 354a, 378a, 386a, 1035a.

Puleston was added to the privileges’ committee at the start of the fourth session (9 Feb. 1610), and on 13 Mar. he made an interim report on the disputed by-election at Bridgnorth, caused by a vacancy created upon the promotion of his brother-in-law Edward Bromley* to an Exchequer judgeship. Later, in the subsidy debate of 14 July, he secured a proviso allowing the Welsh counties to delay payment of their quotas until collection of the mise due upon the accession of King James was complete; half the counties affected paid up to a decade late, while the rest remitted nothing at all to the Exchequer. Puleston was also one of those appointed to draft a game bill, upon the king’s personal recommendation (22 Mar.), and was named to the committee for a bill to confirm the title of contractors purchasing Crown lands (5 July). Ibid. 392a, 409b, 414a, 446a, 449b.

At the 1614 election Puleston was replaced as knight of the shire by Robert Ravenscroft; knighted in August 1617, he did not enjoy the honour long, dying on 17 Dec. 1618. The Emral estate passed to his brother George, and subsequently to his cousin John Puleston, a justice of Common Pleas during the Commonwealth. Shaw, ii. 165; NLW, Puleston 32; CHES 3/94/18. The judge’s grandson, another Sir Roger, sat in the Commons three times at the end of the century. The senior branch of the family died out in the male line in 1732, after which date the estates passed away through several collateral branches. DWB (Puleston of Emral).