An enthusiastic smoker, with a reputation for being over fond of drink, Hoby was an acknowledged expert on heraldic matters and a collector and student of old manuscripts.
Hoby was extremely well connected at Court. From 1582 until 1603 he was brother-in-law to Charles Howard , 1st earl of Nottingham and lord admiral, whom he served as secretary during the Armada campaign and to whom he owed the vice-admiralty of Milton hundred, a position created specially for him.
I. The 1604 Session
Elected in February 1604 to represent Rochester in Parliament again, Hoby was appointed a deputy to administer the Oath of Supremacy to his fellow Members by his former brother-in-law Nottingham on the first day of the session.
Hoby’s knowledge of precedent played a significant part in the debates concerning Griffith Payne, who had been elected for Wallingford despite being the town’s mayor. When the matter was raised on 3 Apr., Hoby drew the House’s attention to the decision of the Commons in 1593 regarding Richard Hutton, bailiff of Southwark, who had been permitted to retain his seat following a vote. This precedent, if followed, held out the possibility that Payne’s return might be upheld, a prospect which Francis Moore considered unacceptable. On 25 June Moore called for a fresh election after pointing to another precedent which showed that mayors should not be elected. Hoby objected to this argument, saying that it would be unfair to ‘exempt some and admit some’. In the end the House permitted Payne to remain in place, but ruled that in future no mayors would be admitted.
Early in the session Hoby played an important role in defending the House’s right to determine its own membership after it was called into question by the Buckinghamshire election dispute. This was not surprising, for in 1597 he had led the Commons’ investigation into the exclusion of three of its Members.
Hoby played an active role in the debates concerning the proposed adoption of the name ‘Great Britain’ for King James’s newly united realms. On 14 Apr. Hoby and various other Members conferred with the Lords on this subject. Though his words went largely unrecorded,
Hoby’s involvement in the early Union debates contrasts with his apparent lack of interest in the proposed abolition of wardship. This indifference is surprising, as the motion to abolish wardship was made by the Cecil client Sir Robert Wroth I, and Hoby was Cecil’s first cousin. Although appointed to the committee established following Wroth’s motion (23 Mar.), and named to two joint conferences with the Lords (26 Mar. and 22 May),
As in the earlier parliaments in which he had sat, religious issues appear to have exercised Hoby a good deal. The range of topics with which he was concerned suggests that he held puritan sympathies. As well as being named to help consider Sir Edward Montagu’s motions (23 Mar.), which included the abuses of commissary courts and the suspension of godly ministers, he was appointed to committees for bills which dealt with clerical marriage (11 May), popish books (6 June) and church attendance (27 June). It was partly on his recommendation that the popish books bill was committed. On 7 June he also participated in the debate which followed the third reading of the bill for providing a godly and learned ministry, but his words went unrecorded. On the following day, after it was reported that the House had offended Convocation by debating religion, he mischievously suggested that a committee of 20 Members ‘least affected to a Convocation’ be established to investigate the precedents.
Perhaps Hoby’s most significant contribution to the session was to deliver a speech against making peace with Spain, which he gave on 12 May, shortly after the arrival in London of the negotiating team sent by Spain and the archdukes. His decision to speak on a matter of foreign policy was notable in itself, for under the late queen the Commons had not generally been encouraged to do so. Now that Elizabeth was dead, Hoby was the first to assert the right of the Lower House to debate foreign policy, pointing to medieval precedents to make his case and even drawing attention to the fact that Elizabeth herself had consulted the Commons about whether to declare war on Spain. He claimed that the Commons, which represented ‘the strength and virtue of this kingdom’, was the proper place to discuss the making of war and peace, ‘how slightly soever other[s] may esteem of us’. Though poorly recorded in the Commons Journal,
The Spanish ambassador naturally complained to James about this speech, but though the king subsequently slighted Hoby in public, the French ambassador, the count of Beaumont, believed that neither James nor Robert Cecil were actually displeased with him.
Hoby’s speech of 12 May raises more questions than it answers. It is by no means clear whether Hoby was acting independently or in consort with others, such as the earl of Nottingham, whose income as lord admiral was bound to suffer once peace with Spain had been secured.
Throughout the first session Hoby participated in the process of formulating new legislation, being named to 45 bill committees. However, since he was not a lawyer, he was never asked by the House to draft measures himself. He may have been responsible for introducing legislation on behalf of the Cappers’ Company of England, though, which company had petitioned him before the commencement of Parliament for his ‘best means, furtherance and voice’ to revive a statute of 1571 making the wearing of caps compulsory.
Although the Cappers’ bill is the only measure which Hoby is thought to have introduced in 1604, he persuaded the House to order a nova billa to be drafted which would disqualify outlaws from sitting in the Commons (21 Apr.), a previous measure having been voted down on his motion. When the new draft was brought into the House on 16 May it was placed in Hoby’s custody, suggesting that he would chair the bill committee that was appointed on the following day, to which he was named.
Apart from the Lady Kildare committee, none of the bill committees to which Hoby was named appear to have concerned matters of direct concern to north Kent. He may have owed his inclusion on the committee for the bill to permit Anne of Denmark’s chancellor, Sir Thomas Monson*, to exchange some land with Trinity College, Cambridge to his friend (and Monson’s colleague) Sir George Carew, who also had a seat in the House (26 May).
II. Personal Misfortunes, 1605
Five weeks after Parliament was prorogued on 7 July, Hoby was dismayed to learn of plans to transfer his lease of Shurland manor, which only had a few years left to run, to the Scottish favourite Sir James Hay. Besides ‘my principal seat’, Hoby also stood to forfeit an annual income of £200, which was the profit he received from the manor after payment of rent to the king.
Hoby’s loss of Shurland forced him to find alternative accommodation, and by 21 Mar. he had taken up residence at Blackfriars, perhaps in the house that his mother was to bequeath him in her will five years later. It also led to the eclipse of his electoral influence at Queenborough. Though he supported Sir John Brooke for the vacancy created following the death of Sir Edward Stafford, the successful candidate at the by-election held in October was Richard Wright, who was loosely connected to the new resident of Shurland, Sir Philip Herbert.
III. The Second Session of 1606
Hoby resurfaced at Westminster in January 1606. Though his earlier absence meant that he would have escaped destruction had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, the ‘horror of that dismal project’ nevertheless haunted him, ‘even in my dreams.’
From Hoby’s point of view, perhaps the most important issue of the session was the attack on his wool patent. Following the submission of a certificate (16 Apr.) drawn up by a number of clothiers and spinners which complained that Hoby’s licence was unlawful and responsible for rising wool prices and a fall in quality, the House permitted counsel for both sides to be heard. Accordingly, on 1 May, the clothiers’ counsel argued that Hoby and his agents caused scarcity and high prices and mixed sand and water with their wool to increase its weight. In response, Hoby’s counsel, Ranulphe Crewe*, retorted that the king had recently confirmed the patent on the recommendation of his chief financial officers. He added, moreover, that if Hoby’s deputies were guilty of buying wool ‘on the sheep’s back’, the clothiers were at liberty to do the same if they wished. He also pointed out that, while the patent did indeed contravene an Edwardian statute, this legislation was subject to amendment by royal Proclamation. At the end of the hearing, the House ruled in Hoby’s favour.
Hoby intervened only twice in the debates that session. On the first occasion (10 Apr.) he underlined his reputation for being a stickler in procedural matters by asserting that it would be ‘against the order to be judge and counsellor’ if the king’s counsel in the Commons were allowed to give evidence regarding the attainder of the Gunpowder plotters. The second occasion on which he spoke was the day immediately before Parliament was prorogued (26 May), when he opposed Richard Martin’s proposal to draw up a short bill aimed at punishing a preacher who had delivered an ‘invective sermon’ at St. Paul’s on the previous day. He argued that, in view of the shortness of time, it would be better to ask the king to punish him instead.
IV. The Third Session, 1606-7
Following Parliament’s reassembly in November, Hoby was reappointed to the privileges’ committee (19 November). Immediately beforehand, however, the House considered whether to order by-elections in those cases where Members had been called to serve the Crown elsewhere. Hoby argued that on previous occasions it had only been necessary to authorize fresh elections in those instances where a Member had been appointed a legal assistant to the Lords. Averring that this rule debarred the sitting of the attorney-general, he added that ‘it were good the rest of the king’s Counsel were in like case’.
As a member of the privileges’ committee, Hoby was appointed to help consider whether Members were obliged to stand bareheaded at conferences with the Lords (12 Mar. 1607) and whether the House could continue to conduct business during the Speaker’s enforced absence (23 Mar. 1607). Two weeks before Parliament was prorogued he and a number of other members of the committee were instructed to consult the clerk’s Journal to review all matters of privilege which had arisen that session (19 June).
Though he had refused to endorse the Instrument, Hoby was not excluded from participating in the subsequent parliamentary proceedings regarding its contents. On 27 Nov. 1606 he seconded Humphrey May’s request for a conference with the Lords to determine which of the two Houses would initiate proceedings on each of the subjects raised by the Instrument. However, whereas May thought it appropriate that legislation for the abolition of the hostile laws should begin in the Lords, Hoby argued that such a bill should begin in the Commons, because bills of repeal, like bills of subsidy, always originated in the Lower House.
As the hostile laws bill took shape, Hoby found that his earlier opposition to the Instrument had evaporated. Addressing the House on 29 June, he declared himself converted: ‘I was against the Instrument of the Union, as it was drawn, but I am for the bill’, which conferred benefit on the king’s subjects. However, he spoiled his performance by describing those Members who were attempting to amend a clause which permitted jurors in Border trials to reject witnesses they deemed unfit as secretly endeavouring, ‘under a fair show, to overthrow the bill’. Bowyer noted in his journal that ‘many privately misliked this brain-sick taxation of others’, while William Holt upbraided Hoby for his ‘indiscretion’. Nonetheless, it was Hoby the convert who was detailed to carry the bill up to the Lords later the same day.
Apart from the hostile laws bill, Hoby’s legislative interests during the session appear to have been limited. He was appointed to three committees for measures to allow named individuals to sell some of their lands in order to pay their debts (26 Nov. and 15 Dec. 1606), and two others concerned with naturalization (6 Dec. 1606 and 26 Feb. 1607). His remaining bill committees dealt with the relief of a Norfolk widow, Mary Cavendish (4 Dec. 1606), the punishment of the parents of bastard children (9 Dec. 1606) and the abuses of the Marshalsea Court, to which committee he was added on 21 Feb. 1607. Surprisingly, Hoby was not named to the committee for the bill to assure Cheshunt vicarage to his cousin Salisbury, though he was dispatched to the Lords with the bill three days after it received its third reading (16 Dec. 1606).
Hoby held a ‘great feast’ on 12 Feb. 1607, while Parliament was still in session. This was probably another party thrown for a select gathering of Members, like the feast held at Merchant Taylors’ Hall three years earlier. One of the guests, John Pory, Member for Bridgwater and a noted newsletter-writer, thought it a great success, departed ‘prettily well whittled’, and rushed home to write up an account to present to the king ‘for want of foreign intelligence’.
V. Lawsuits and Polemical Tracts, 1607-9
Following the end of the session Hoby initiated two lawsuits. In the first he accused the leading citizens of Queenborough of encouraging their fellow townsmen to kill his cattle and graze their beasts on land belonging to the castle, ‘even to the very walls’.
During the spring of 1609 Hoby published his first polemical tract. It was prefaced by an open letter addressed to ‘all Romish collapsed ladies of Great Brittany’, a misogynistic diatribe which chastised those women who preferred to seek after religious truth themselves rather than trust their husbands’ judgment. According to Hoby, females not only lacked the intellectual ability to comprehend religious issues but were also more likely than men to fall prey to the wiles of Catholic seminary priests. Husbands whose wives allowed themselves to be lured into recusancy were then suspected of disloyalty, their careers were blighted and they were held in contempt, for ‘how do you think he should be reputed wise, who can no better order his own house? How should he be held fit for government in the State, who cannot bring those that are so near him to the conformity of the Church?’
Though women who converted to Rome formed the substance of the preface to his tract, Hoby’s main target was Thomas Higgons, a renegade English minister who had fled abroad. Formerly ‘stained with puritanism’, Higgons, who had once ordered ‘a poor harmless May-Pole’ to be cut down because he thought ‘it came out of a Romish forest’, had deserted the Anglican Church for Rome in 1607. Hoby was appalled that anyone could choose to join the ‘viperous brood’ which had sought to justify ‘that dismal project, that Gunpowder Plot’, and he accused Higgons of becoming a ‘Vulcanian apprentice’. Yet, though impelled to use his pen to avenge himself on those who had sought to murder him, ‘or my good friends, at least’,
more antic and juggling tricks than my ears had ever heard, or my heart could otherwise have believed. In so much that (as two of my selected people, still present, can witness), my ears glowed. Such hallowed perfumes, as if the priest or his idol had been scarce sweet, such facings, such knockings, such adornings, yea and such elevating, as never was, nor yet is, in the Greek mother church, until this day.
Hoby, Letter to Mr. T.H. 104-6.
Were he to renounce Catholicism, Hoby argued, Higgons would be in good company, as Alençon, ‘my first master’, had refused to admit either priest or confessor into his presence at his death, but had made ‘public profession before those that were then present that he had sufficiently confessed to God, and that he had placed the whole hope of his salvation upon Jesus Christ’. In a bid to attract the attention of James, Hoby added that Mary, Queen of Scots, ‘that thrice excellent and renowned princess’, had also hoped to be saved by Christ’s merits alone.
Rather surprisingly, Hoby’s hope that Higgons would disavow Catholicism and return to England was realized in 1610. Through Hoby’s intercession Higgons obtained a benefice in Kent, and the authorities, anxious to make the most of this startling propaganda success, allowed him to preach a penitential sermon at St. Paul’s in March 1611.
Hoby’s tract of 1609 is interesting not merely for what it says about Higgons but for what it suggests about the religious views of its author. Hoby’s disparaging reference to puritanism, coupled with his veneration of the Virgin Mary, contrasts with the godly views he seems to have held in 1604. It may be that the calamities in his personal life, which began towards the end of 1604 and which precipitated a retreat into scholarship, acted as the catalyst for a reappraisal of his religious outlook. Evidence other than the tract against Higgons suggests that Hoby had shifted his views away from mainstream Calvinism. In 1615 he engaged in a friendly correspondence over a property matter with the dean of Christ Church, Oxford, a college which has been described by one historian as ‘having produced a number of early Arminians’, though the dean’s concern to protect Hoby’s interests may have stemmed from the latter’s success in reconverting Higgons, a former member of Christ Church.
VI. The Sessions of 1610 and the 1614 Parliament
Hoby played little recorded part in the fourth session of Parliament. He was named to just nine bill committees, including one to assure the lands of his Kent neighbour, Sir Henry Crispe of Quex, in the Isle of Thanet (12 Mar. 1610) and another to naturalize Jane Drummond, one of his wife’s colleagues in Anne of Denmark’s Household (26 February).
The degree to which Hoby was active during the fifth session of Parliament is impossible to establish owing to the paucity of the records. He may have been the Member who, on 2 Nov., proposed to answer the king only after giving consideration to the terms of the Great Contract, a suggestion which Sir Maurice Berkeley found unacceptable, ‘for then we must refer the king to the end of all the business’. He certainly spoke again that day, but his words have gone unrecorded.
In February 1612 Hoby granted the king a reversionary interest in a Gloucestershire sheep pasture which he had inherited three years earlier from his mother, who had bought it for £1,800.
Hoby entertained members of Rochester’s corporation shortly after Christmas 1613,
Following reports of the speech delivered by Bishop Neile opposing a conference with the ‘factious spirits’ in the Commons over impositions, Hoby sought to lower the temperature in the chamber. While Fuller, Sir William Walter and Sampson Hopkins responded to Neile’s insult by attacking the bishop’s character and reputation, Hoby persuaded the Speaker to order the House to address the content of the offending speech rather than the defects of its author (27 May). It was thus the cooler-headed Hoby rather than one of the House’s firebrands who was chosen to communicate to the Lords the displeasure felt in the Commons and to request a conference on impositions (28 May). The choice was well made, for one of the Members who accompanied him to the Upper House recorded that Hoby delivered his message ‘very well’. It was undoubtedly because Hoby spoke as the voice of moderation that a tearful Neile subsequently sought him out to protest that his speech had been seriously misreported.
Hoby appears to have spoken with rather more passion on a petition to abolish the newly created rank of baronet, which petition Secretary Winwood attempted to stifle as tending to question the king’s discretion in the creation of honours. Hoby, who approved of the petition, was appalled at Alford’s suggestion that the House should vote on whether the committee that had examined the petition should be allowed to report its findings. Such a vote would be ‘a disgrace to the committee’ and would look supine. ‘Woe to that time’, he expostulated on 23 May, when ‘an humble petition of the grieved gentry of England shall be called an entering upon the king’s prerogative’. Claiming that the matter ‘concerns him more than any other in the House’, and promising to explain why this was the case later, he ‘did not doubt but there would be enough said both for the honour and profit of the king and also for the abolishing of that baronetical order’. He was subsequently named to a second committee, but not before he had reminded the House of the principle that no Member who had spoken against the matter in hand could be permitted to serve.
Hoby perhaps appreciated that he could not object to both baronetcies, which were essentially a money-raising device, and parliamentary supply, and therefore he spoke in favour of granting the king subsidies. He also objected to hearing the grievances of the Virginia Company before action had been taken to relieve the king’s wants, though the fact that he said so stemmed in part from his anger at the offensive behaviour of the company’s lawyer, Richard Martin*, who had accused the Commons of proceeding in a slow and disorderly fashion.
Hoby was named to just seven bills committees during the course of the Parliament, of which two concerned proposed land sales (13 and 19 May). The others dealt with the repeal and continuance of expiring statutes (8 Apr.), the repeal of a clause in an Act of 1543 which permitted the king to alter Welsh law without Parliament’s consent (18 Apr.), the Court of Wards (14 May), the foundation of a hospital at East Grinstead, Surrey by the late 2nd earl of Dorset (Robert Sackville*) (16 May) and the naturalization of the daughters of Sir Horace Vere (17 May).
VII. Final Years
Following the dissolution an Uxbridge yeoman was arraigned before the Middlesex bench on suspicion of having burgled Hoby’s house.
Later that year, Hoby drafted his will and sold his wool patent to a consortium led by Viscount Fentoun.