HUMFREY, John (c.1622-c.1663), of London.

The roots of the Humfrey family lay in Somerset, but John Humfrey’s grandfather, Michael Humfrey†, settled in Dorset in the 1590s. Michael Humfrey served Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk, and did well out of his master’s acquisition of high office as lord treasurer. He survived both the collapse of Suffolk’s power and investigations into his own corruption to sit as knight of the shire for Dorset in 1626.17HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Michael Humfrey’. His son John Humfrey, father of the 1659 MP, settled at Fordington, near Dorchester. In 1621, John Humfrey senior, a widower, married Elizabeth Pelham, daughter of Herbert Pelham of Compton Valence but previously of Michelham, near Hailsham, Sussex.18Vis. Dorset 1677, 53. Elizabeth Pelham’s maternal grandfather was Thomas West†, 3rd Baron De La Warr, the first governor and captain-general of Virginia, who drowned in 1618 on a second visit to the colony. Both the Humfreys and the Pelhams were later, in their turn, to play a significant part in colonizing New England. John Humfrey junior was one year old at the time of the heraldic visitation of Dorset in 1623.19Vis. Dorset 1623, 57. It seems natural to suppose that he received an education at the free school in Dorchester, although no direct evidence survives to confirm this. During his childhood, his father was developing his interests in overseas plantations. When what was to become the Dorchester Company assembled at the free school in March 1624, Humfrey senior was confirmed as treasurer.20Whiteway Diary, 140.

Elizabeth Humfrey died in November 1628. John Humfrey senior married in 1630 for a third time, to Susan Clinton alias Fiennes, sister of Theophilus, 4th earl of Lincoln.21Whiteway Diary, 100; Jnl. of John Winthrop, 1630-1649 ed. R.S. Dunn, J. Savage, L. Yeandle (1996), 119. That year the Humfrey family was living in London, near the house of Stephen Denison, minister at the church of St Katherine Cree. Humfrey senior approved of Denison’s Calvinist orthodoxy, and it is reasonable to suppose that his son would have been subject to Denison’s ministry.22Collns. Mass. Hist. Soc. ser. 4, vi. 15; ‘Stephen Denison’, Oxford DNB. His third marriage did nothing to dampen Humfrey senior’s interest in America. The Dorchester Company had been wound up, but another, London-based Massachusetts Company claimed his support; he organized weapons supply and helped draft the governor’s oath in 1629, and his efforts were recognized that year when he was appointed assistant governor. In March 1630, Humfrey pulled out of the voyage to New England on the Arbella, the ship named after his new sister-in-law.23Recs. of the Governor and Co. of Mass. Bay ed. N.B. Shurtleff, i. 25, 37, 39, 40, 60, 70. He had evidently been expected to sail. On 17 April 1634, he finally did so, taking his wife and almost certainly his eldest son, by this time aged about 12, with him. Some 2,000 planters were said to have left Dorset for New England that summer.24Whiteway Diary, 143. The Humfreys settled on a 500-acre plantation near Salem.25Recs. of Massachusetts Bay ed. Shurtleff, i. 147. Humfrey senior had become an assistant governor by 1634, a member of the Massachusetts defence committee by 1635, and was acting as a magistrate by May 1636. He kept these offices, and in June 1641 was appointed serjeant-major-general of the colony.26Recs of Massachusetts Bay ed. Shurtleff, i. 118, 145, 174, 175, 195, 228, 256, 288, 319, 329.

There is no doubt that Humfrey senior was prepared to stand up to the coercive religious policies of Charles I. In 1633 he appeared before a privy council committee accused of actively discouraging episcopal government through his colonial enterprises.27Jnl. of John Winthrop, 90; Winthrop Pprs iv (Mass. Hist. Soc. 1944), 451-2. Furthermore, before leaving England he was active in distributing literature extolling the potential virtues of what became known as the ‘New England Way’ of organizing gathered churches.28Gods Promise to his Plantation (1630), preface by John Humfrey; W. Coddington, A Demonstration of True Love (1674), 13-4. He and another enthusiast for America were denounced by Archbishop William Laud as ‘a couple of imposterous knaves’.29Jnl. of John Winthrop, 537. Church government went hand-in-hand with secular authority. When Humfrey arrived in New England, he brought with him proposals from the leaders of the Saybrooke colony, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele and Robert Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, that they should come over from England if the Massachusetts Company would incorporate a hereditary aristocracy. The peers’ suggestion fell on stony ground, but in 1637 Sir Ferdinando Gorges commissioned Sir Henry Vane II*, Humfrey and others to establish a new province in Maine.30Jnl. of John Winthrop, 120, 224. These schemes show how well-connected Humfrey was to the puritan elite in England, and in Massachusetts he was close to John Winthrop, was a member of the First Church at Salem, and in every respect counted a ‘gentleman of special parts of learning and activity and a godly man’.31Jnl. of John Winthrop, 323; Recs. of the First Church in Salem, Mass. 1629-1736 ed. R.D. Pierce (Salem, Mass., 1974), 16-17.

Humfrey senior joined the Salem church after the Independent minister Hugh Peter, a friend since at the latest 1630, established himself there in 1636.32Collns. Mass. Hist. Soc. ser. 1, vi. 251; ser. 4, vi. 11. Peter reported to John Winthrop in September 1638 that John Humfrey junior had recently accompanied his father on a return visit to England. Humfrey senior intended to return the following spring, and had done so by April 1639.33Winthrop Pprs. iv. 62, 110. Whether John Humfrey the younger had come back to New England with his father is unclear. Humfrey senior now entered a troubled period in his life in New England. He quarrelled with John Endicott, a leader of the Massachusetts colony, which was patched up when Humfrey tearfully acknowledged his own errors. Humfrey seemed perpetually restless, and when he began to express interest in other colonial settlements, it was inevitable that he would forfeit the sympathy of John Winthrop, and he had to work hard to recover it.34Winthrop Pprs. iv. 110, 166-7; Jnl. of John Winthrop, 323. A number of domestic disasters that befell the Humfrey family were naturally attributed by Winthrop to the hand of a disapproving God. Stored crops of theirs to the value of £160 were the object of an arson attack by the Humfrey’s own servants, and in 1641 a case of persistent child sexual abuse against the younger John Humfrey’s half-sisters was uncovered in all its distasteful detail.35Jnl. of John Winthrop, 334, 370; Recs. of Massachusetts ed. Shurtleff, ii. 12-13.

In March 1641 Humfrey senior accepted an invitation to be governor of Providence Island (modern-day Providencia, Colombia) off the Mosquito Coast, a fulfilment of his expressed interest in colonising much further south than New England.36T. Hutchinson, Hist. of the Colony of Massachuset’s Bay (1765), 15. That month, from Boston, he was writing to Edward Montagu†, Viscount Mandeville, on the problems of colonists on Providence and in Florida, and in June arrangements were in hand to transport him to his new command. Within a couple of months, however, he decided to returned to England, probably with the encouragement of Lord Saye, because the Spanish seized Providence, ending any immediate prospect of developing islands in that part of the Caribbean. Humfrey sailed on 26 October 1641, and in the last miles of the crossing was nearly drowned off the Isle of Wight, according to Winthrop.37HMC 8th Rep. ii. 49; CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 317, 320; Jnl. of John Winthrop, 323, 347, 371, 414-5. He left behind him family, who had to deal with the exposure of the sexual abuse case in his absence. The silence of the sources in New England about John Humfrey junior strongly suggests that he had crossed the Atlantic with his father, despite the fact that earlier in 1641 he had followed his father into the Massachusetts military company or militia.

It was Humfrey senior who wrote to Winthrop from Weymouth in July 1642, on the eve of the punitive expedition to Ireland to put down the rising there. During this venture, in which returned New Englanders played a prominent part, the older Humfrey held the rank of serjeant-major, an echo of his commission in Massachusetts.38Winthrop Pprs. iv. 352-3; H. Peters, A True Relation of the Passages of God’s Providence (1642), 4-5 (E.424.15); CCC 66; LJ v. 95a. The entire history of the Humfrey family from the 1620s predisposed them to support the Parliament. Their careers in England become difficult to disentangle, as both eventually held the rank of colonel, but in the 1640s neither seems to have headed a field regiment. With Humfrey senior in the west country, bound for Ireland in the summer of 1642, it must have been the son who was active in building defences around south London, under the command of Philip Skippon*. It seems logical to suppose that it was this Humfrey who helped administer martial law around London in 1644 with the rank of colonel.39CJ ii. 725a; iii. 562b; v. 299b. A Massachusetts deed of the early 1640s identifies a ‘Mr John Humfrey’ as a Southwark linendraper, and this may well be the future MP, as his father’s gentry status would have fitted ill with a trade.40Suffolk Deeds [ed. W.B. Trask], (12 vols, Boston, Mass. 1880-1902), i. no. 44. It was probably Humfrey junior, with the rank of major, who was in August 1644 appointed to the Kentish regiment commanded by John Birch*, to help remedy the reluctance of the men of Kent to march out of their county; later he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the same regiment.41CSP Dom. 1644, p. 450; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. During the spring of 1648, when rumours of royalist plots against Parliament were prevalent, an expeditionary force consisting of a foot regiment under either the father or the son was ordered to be sent to France.42CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 24-5, 52. At some time between 1642 and 1645, Humfrey senior was given various duties in connection with the royal children. Like Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, their physician, in December 1645 he was relieved of his charge and awarded a pension out of receipts at the court of wards.43LJ viii. 24b; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 134; 1656-7, p. 331.

Humfrey junior has been identified as the sword-bearer during the king’s trial, but this rests on a misreading of various items among the calendars of state papers.44F. Rose Troup, John White. The Patriarch of Dorchester (1930), 460. The swords of state were originally the king’s, and were used in the ceremonial at his trial.45J.G. Muddiman, Trial of Charles I (1928), 73, 204. They were granted by the trustees, in lieu of a debt, to a woman who left them in the keeping of Humfrey senior. It was he, not his son, who was the sword-bearer, but after his death Humfrey junior, as executor, was awarded £50 by the council of state on the misapprehension that the elder Humfrey had bought them for the king’s trial. In 1657, the son was ordered to make good the owner’s loss.46CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 214; 1653-4, pp. 364, 451, 457; 1657-8, pp. 83, 173; 1658-9, p. 27; Dep. Keeper’s 5th Rep. App. II, 30 Nov. 1657. It seems more in keeping with the roles of Humfrey senior as an actor in solemn ceremony and as an invigilator over royal children that he should be the Colonel Humfrey who in May 1649 took a doctor to attend his old New England friend and associate, Hugh Peter.47CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 130. Humfrey junior is more plausibly associated with brief service in Ireland, between 1647 and 1649. Around this time, there was a ‘reformado’ regiment under Colonel Humfrey, intended for deployment in Ireland. As in 1642, there was again an association between the Humfrey family and Skippon, commander-in-chief of the planned expeditionary force.48CCC 66; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 429, 437; Worcs. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXVI, f. 16v. Humfrey’s regiment was stationed in Herefordshire.49Worcs. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXVII, n.p. Another former New Englander colonel whose regiment was intended for Ireland, and who had been promoted by Skippon in the early years of the war, was William Eyres, but there is nothing to suggest that Humfrey shared Eyres’s Leveller sympathies.50The Serious Representation of Colonel William Eyre (1649), 1-2; ‘William Eyres’, Oxford DNB. Some fitful connections between Humfrey – probably the son – and Ireland continued: in 1649 he was required to transport gold coin to Ireland, hardly the duties of a busy front-line commander.51CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 429, 437.

The problems of identity persist, but it seems more likely that the civilian offices bestowed on a John Humfrey after the regicide were directed towards the father. After the trial of the king, goodwill was extended by Parliament towards Humfrey senior to the extent that he was granted an office in the London custom house.52CJ vi. 115a; LJ x. 635a. As early as September 1646, writing to John Winthrop from Gravesend, Humfrey could see no future for himself, as he contemplated his material losses and family sufferings in New England

I see my hopes and possibilities of ever enjoying those I did and was ready to suffer anything for utterly taken away.53Winthrop Pprs. v. 101-2.

Humfrey senior had petitioned for a customs surveyor’s place, asking for a reward for having identified ways of raising money for the state.54PA, Main Pprs., HL/PO/JO/10/1/279. The custom house surveyorship was augmented by Parliament with the posts of trustee and contractor for crown land sales, which came the way of Humfrey senior in July 1649. These opportunities were consolidated the following year in appointments to the Navy Committee (an unusual elevation for one who was not an MP) and as a trustee for the sales of crown fee farm rents.55A. and O.; CJ vi. 420a; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 260, 267. Humfrey senior was active in these posts, his signature visible on surveys of crown lands made prior to sale.56S.J. Madge, Domesday of Crown Lands (1938), 207, 349.

Humfrey junior enjoyed a less auspicious career in the army while his father was collecting offices. In August 1649, he commanded a troop of dragoons in the regiment of John Okey*, and was still in post until September 1651 when he returned to England with Oliver Cromwell*.57Worcs. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS XVII, f. 26; LXIX, n.p.; Wanklyn, New Model Army, ii. 82-3. It was he, rather than his father, who was granted the farm of the inland excise in Devon and Cornwall, in the last quarter of 1651, but he gave it up after the quarter-year expired.58E351/1296 m. 22. John Humfrey senior died in December 1652, soon after making a nuncupative will. Death, rather than alienation or disapproval, accounts for his disappearance from the counsels of the contractors and trustees when a new act was passed on the 31st.59Madge, Domesday of Crown Lands, 105, 343. On the 19th, however, in what was a further indication of the high regard in which the Humfrey family was held, all the elder Humfrey’s offices, including those involving former crown property sales, were bestowed by the Rump Parliament on his son.60PROB11/230/213; CJ vii. 55a. Humfrey junior would have been by experience a credible successor to his father in these offices. With the City businessman and administrator, John Ireton*, Humfrey had in 1644, presumably by virtue of his role in defending the capital, converted part of London House, episcopal property near Smithfield, into a prison. Years later he petitioned for recompense.61CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 209, 241, 263; CJ vii. 170b, 171a. But when his father’s offices in property sales had come to him, Humfrey seems not to have made anything of his opportunity. After the dissolution of the Rump he took instead a post in the army, and in the summer of 1653 was instrumental in quelling fenland disorders.62CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 114, 115, 116, 120, 128-9, 141. A subordinate and close associate of his during his army career in the 1650s was Edward Tyson of Bristol, a colleague since his earlier brief involvement in Ireland.63CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 412, 620; 1653-4, p. 115; Scot. and Protectorate ed. Firth, 288. Humfrey was not regarded as a soldier tout court, however: the Nominated Assembly included him as a judge of poor prisoners (debtors) in October 1653.

Humfrey was willing to adapt to the changes in republican governments, and in December 1653 transferred his allegiance to the Cromwellian protectorate. With the rank of colonel he was given charge of merely a troop rather than of a regiment of dragoons, and by the end of January 1654 had taken them to Scotland, where he remained for a year or so.64Scot. and Protectorate ed. Firth, 24, 261. His family background – and especially his late father’s experience in acting as a trustee – must account for his selection as a trustee for the maintenance of preaching ministers in the Cromwellian church settlement, but instead of settling down to this role, he took charge of a regiment bound for West Indies, in the lord protector’s ill-fated ‘Western Design’. Humfrey may have regarded this as an opportunity to vindicate his father’s optimistic vision of English settlement in the Caribbean, which had vanished when the Spanish took Providence Island. The campaign as a whole, however, was disastrous, and Humfrey did not even succeed in ensuring that at least his own part in it was creditable. By June 1655 he had sailed for Jamaica with Robert Sedgwick, like Humfrey’s father a colonial entrepreneur.65Scot. and Protectorate ed. Firth, 288; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 55; supra, ‘William Crowne’; ‘Robert Sedgwick’, Oxford DNB. When his regiment 800 men arrived, early in November, they proved ineffective in building forts.66TSP iv. 600-1. Humfrey made a nuisance of himself by demanding special attention, and then was laid low by a long bout of sickness: as early as November 1655 he was of reported to be ‘extreme sick’.67Collns. Mass. Hist. Soc. ser. 5, i. 381. In October 1656, the commander-in-chief, Edward D’Oyly, discharged Humfrey before consulting Secretary John Thurloe* on the matter.68Clarke Pprs. iii. 40; Narrative of General Venables, 141; TSP iii. 751; iv. 390-1, 602-3, v. 476. His departure and the comparatively prompt payment to him for his service only fuelled resentment among other officers who thought that Humfrey was receiving privileged treatment.69TSP vi. 391; Dep. Keeper’s 5th Rep. App. II, 11 July 1655.

Despite this inglorious episode, Humfrey remained an object of concern for the Cromwell family. The lord protector himself wanted to find Humfrey a job, and consulted his son, Henry Cromwell* about it. The lord deputy in Ireland gave it some thought, and came up with a suggestion that he be made a major of foot in that country, an offer of a remarkably lowly posting for someone who had once been invited to important offices in London. It is unclear whether Humfrey took up the offer, but in July 1658 it seems likely that he went to Dunkirk, to serve not as a colonel or even as a major, but as a captain.70TSP vi. 743; vii. 278. Given the earlier complaints of Humfrey the father about his losses and the steadily deteriorating opportunities for office that seemed to be open to Humfrey the son, despite the goodwill of Oliver Cromwell towards him, it may be that a major attraction of a parliamentary seat to Humfrey lay in freedom from arrest for debt. He certainly seems to have been keen to enter the Commons in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659. He was presumably the John Humfrey initially reported to have been elected at Midhurst. If he was, the influence of the Pelhams in Sussex, or of the West (barons de la Warr) family in Hampshire, might have accounted for his brief credibility as a candidate, although reports that he was elected must have been a mistake.71Mercurius Politicus no. 550 (13-20 Jan. 1659), 176 (E.761.3).

Nothing in his immediate family or career history linked him with Bridgnorth, where he eventually did find a seat. Although he is said to have been married, taking his wife with him to the West Indies in 1655, he cannot be shown to have married into a Shropshire family. The most plausible link between Humfrey and the borough must be through his fellow-burgess, Edmund Wareing, whose estate and extended family lay in the district. Edmund Wareing’s father, the London merchant Richard Wareing, was Humfrey senior’s ‘good friend’ when he returned to England in 1642.72Winthrop Pprs. iv. 352-3. Wareing provided not only Humfrey but also the Winthrop family with credit, and the Wareing-Winthrop association went back at least to Richard Wareing’s purchase of Groton, Suffolk, a manor which the emigrating Winthrops had once held.73Winthrop Pprs. v. 6. This network from the New England returners persisted. When it became clear that the Humfreys would never return to Massachusetts, their lands in Salem were re-allocated to Stephen Winthrop*, and in 1651, Humfrey (or possibly his father) and Edmund Wareing were required to act together as commissioners in courts martial.74Winthrop Pprs. v. 261; Suffolk Deeds, i. no. 57; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 479. A further possible connection between Humfrey and his constituency was through William Crowne, who had sat for the borough in the 1654 Parliament. Like Humfrey, Crowne had returned from Massachusetts.

Humfrey was named to no committees in his single Parliament. He is known to have intervened in debate on one occasion, 12 February, when the case of the crypto-royalist, Robert Danvers alias Villiers, was discussed. Humfrey sought Danvers’ expulsion as a ‘Jesuited fellow ... a very unworthy person to sit in this House’.75Burton’s Diary, iii. 244. Humfrey relied for his information on George Fownes, vicar of High Wycombe, who was moving towards becoming a Baptist. Fownes was born and educated in Shropshire, and it was probably both the geographical link and religious affinity that drew him to the Member for Bridgnorth.76Calamy Revised, 210. After the closure of this Parliament, Humfrey’s movements are uncertain. He probably remained in London, where in June 1660 he witnessed codicils to the will of Philip Skippon, his former commander in London and his intended commander in Ireland.77PROB11/300/399. The Restoration of the monarchy must have filled him with anxiety, as former friends of his father’s, such as Hugh Peter, went to the scaffold, but there is no evidence that Humfrey escaped to America. There was a convincing report that he died in 1663, when a petitioner to the king laid claim to an estate of his in Jamaica, proof that the Western Design had at least added to Humfrey’s small property portfolio.78CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1661-1668, p. 195. Humfrey probably had no children; the composer, Pelham Humfrey (1647/8-1674) is said to have been his cousin.79‘Pelham Humfrey’, Oxford DNB.