Sir Walter Erle, MP

Family and Education b. 22 Nov. 1586, 1st s. of Thomas Erle of Charborough by Dorothy, da. of William Pole of Shute, Devon; bro. of Christopher. educ. Queen’s Oxf. 1602; M. Temple 1604. m. 7 May 1616, Anne (d. 26 Jan. 1654), da. and h. of Francis Dymoke of Erdington, Warws., 1s. d.v.p. 2da. suc. fa. 1597; kntd. 4 May 1616.2

Offices Held

Freeman, Poole 1613, Lyme Regis bef. 1631, Weymouth 1640; sheriff, Dorset 1618-19; j.p. Dorset by 1622-6, 1629-48, 1657-d., Devon 1647-8; dep. Lt. Dorset 1625-6, by 1642-3, collector of loan 1626, commr. of sewers 1638, oyer and terminer, Western circuit 1640, July 1660, assessment, Dorset 1640-8, 1657, Aug. 1660-d., Poole Aug. 1660-1, suppression, of enclosure riots, Dorset 1643, sequestration 1643, accounts 1643, chapter, Westminster Abbey 1645, militia, Dorset 1648, Mar. 1660, scandalous ministers 1654, col. of militia ft. Apr. 1660.3

Committee, Virginia Co. 1620; gov. Dorchester New England Co. 1624-7; member, council for Virginia 1621; treas. for reformado officers, 1644; lt. of Ordnance 1644-5, 1647-8; commr. for Admiralty 1645-8, propositions for relief of Ireland 1645, exclusion from sacrament 1646, bishops’ lands 1646, indemnity 1647-9, scandalous offences 1648.

Capt. of horse (parliamentary) 1642-3.4

Biography The Erles were not of much account in their native Devonshire before they moved to Charborough, which they had acquired by marriage, about the middle of the 16th century. Erle, the first of his family to enter Parliament, was a Presbyterian in religion and a moderate opponent of the Court in politics; his principles remained unaltered throughout his long career. After his dazzling triumph in the county election the previous year, he retired in 1660 to the borough for which he had first been elected nearly half a century before. Although in the sunset of his long and eventful political career, he showed no diminution of energy. Twenty-one of his speeches in the Convention are on record, and he was named to 58 committees. As father of the House he was the first Member appointed to the committee of elections and privileges, and in the opening weeks of the session he was also among those named to the drafting committee and the committees for the land purchases and indemnity bills. He did not take a conspicuous part in the prolonged debates on the exceptions to this bill, but in favouring the naming of individuals rather than categories he reduced the danger of a wholesale proscription. On 12 May he moved that the great officers of state should be chosen by Parliament, subject to confirmation by the King. He spoke in favour of the petition from Oliver St. John, and acted as teller in favour of the admission of William Lenthall† to pardon.5

Erle had not forgotten his youthful exploits as a Low Countries soldier, which gave him a lifelong interest in military affairs, more successfully displayed, perhaps, in administration than on the field of battle. He was on the committees to nominate commissioners for the army (23 July), and to settle the militia (6 Nov.). In these capacities, as so often before, he must have been a thorn in the flesh of the court spokesman. Never, he said, had he known any bill entrench so much upon the liberty of the subject as the militia bill, which provided for martial law. He was teller in favour of a motion to hear complaints against the militia commissioners, 16 Nov., and cited examples of the unruly and insulting behaviour of the soldiers. He moved ‘to do somewhat for the good of the people’, instead of making them pay excise to maintain expenditure on defence. He had already opposed excise as a substitute for feudal revenues, preferring instead a perpetual land rate. While at first sight it might seem only fair that compensation for abolishing the court of wards should be borne by the landowners who complained of it, rather than by the public at large, it must be remembered that a substantial imposition on land would have increased the inducements to sell out which Erle was offering at this time to the middling gentry with property adjoining Charborough. His reasons were personal, and explain also his support for Cooper’s motion to give the guardianship of a minor to his grandfather rather than to his mother. Erle’s daughter-in-law, by her second marriage to the younger brother of Francis Hawley, Lord Hawley, had taken Erle’s grandchildren into a royalist household, and Erle’s closing years were dominated by his anxiety to ensure that his heir Thomas Erle should be brought up in the fear of the Lord, ‘not that I have any intention to withdraw him from his duty and all due respects to his mother, but that I have a desire to have him educated by my advice’. The boy must in any case succeed to the settled estate but, by appropriating all his spare cash to the purchase of land, Erle could hold out a substantial bribe to the Hawleys to submit his grandson, in his own interests, to the effective guardianship of such Puritans as Thomas Grove, Thomas Moore and Henry Whitehead, failing which, the unsettled estate was to go to his granddaughter and her husband, Thomas Trenchard I.6

Indeed it was religious issues that moved Erle often to eloquence. He was the only Member to object to the selection of the Royalist Dr Gauden to preach before the House. He wanted a grand committee on the subject (6 July) and protested against the re-imposition of the 39 articles. He justified the attack of Sir John Northcote, his old comrade-in-arms of Civil War days, on the idleness of cathedral clergy. He rebuked Robert Bruce, Lord Bruce, son of the Dorset landowner whose enclosures he had been ordered to defend in 1643 for speaking meanly of those who prayed by the spirit. In the vital debate on religion, he favoured separating the discussion of doctrine and discipline (16 July). He was teller for the motion to hear the petition from the intruded ministers (21 July), having postponed the leave of absence which he had obtained two days before. On 17 Nov. he was added to the committee appointed to bring in a bill for modified episcopacy in accordance with the Worcester House declaration.7

Erle’s long parliamentary experience made him a keen and sometimes cantankerous watchdog in matters of procedure and privilege. In this session he turned a severe eye on the press, whether it was engaged in producing misleading accounts of debates (25 June), specious Anglican propaganda (30 June) or a crack-brained pamphlet called The Long Parliament Revived. His report from committee recommending the apprehension of the printer of this last work was accepted on 17 Nov. Nor was he disposed to allow the Upper House to encroach upon the privileges of the Lower; he was responsible for managing the conference on the Lords’ order forbidding George Pitt to cut timber on his wife’s property in Gloucestershire (4 July). Already he had been sent to the Lords to encourage them to pass speedily the assessment bill, returning with a dusty answer (25 May). It was the Lords who struck out of the Post Office bill Erle’s proviso that Members’ letters should be carried free in session time.8

In most of these issues, Erle was in the minority, and each of his four tellerships ended in defeat. He had many relatives in the Convention but even in that assembly, from which Royalists and their sons were supposed to be excluded, there could be embarrassing moments for a man with Erle’s record. On one occasion he found himself sitting cheek by jowl with young (Sir) Ralph Bankes, whose father’s property at Corfe Castle had been pillaged by Erle’s servants to provide material for repairs to Charborough, previously destroyed by the Royalists. ‘I was about to have asked you how far forth you thought me in equity obliged to that which you seem to require’, he wrote. Erle had emerged from the Civil War with much cleaner hands than the Brownes and Trenchards, for instance, but he was probably well-advised not to seek re-election in 1661. He remained an active justice of the peace till the year of his death, and even when he was too ill to hold a pen the force of his character and the clarity of his mind enabled him to dictate a will complicated in both its testamentary and personal provisions. He was buried at Charborough on 1 Sept. 1665.9

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690 Authors: M. W. Helms / John. P. Ferris Notes 1. Did not sit after Pride’s Purge, 6 Dec. 1648, readmitted 21 Feb. 1660. 2. Keeler, Long Parl. 165-7; St. Botolph Bishopsgate Reg. i. 54. 3. Hutchins, Dorset, i. 32; ii. 452; Merc. Pub. 12 Apr. 1660; Dorset RO, Q. Sess. Order Bk. 1625-37; APC, 1625-6, pp. 305, 329; C181/5/225, 377; Eg. 784, ff. 50, 59v, 72v; Lyme Regis mss. B6/11, f. 16; Trans. Devon Assoc. x. 312. 4. E. Peacock, Army Lists, 50. 5. Bowman diary, ff. 5v. 28v; CJ, viii. 2, 8, 11, 27, 61; Clarendon SP, iii. 748. 6. Christie, Shaftesbury, i. p. xviii; Old Parl. Hist. xxiii. 14, 15, 18; Dorset RO, D60/F 2; PCC 158 Mico. 7. Bowman diary, ff. 56, 65v, 80v; Cal. Cl. SP, iv. 319; Old Parl. Hist. xxiii. 5. 8. H. Robinson, Brit. Post Office, 48-51; Old Parl. Hist. xxxiii. 56. 9. G. Bankes, Story of Corfe Castle, 256-8; Dorset Hearth-Tax ed. Meekings, 115-17; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 552. Go To Section

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Earle

Sir Walter Erle or Earle (22 November 1586 – 1 September 1665) was an English landowner and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1614 and 1648. He was a vigorous opponent of King Charles I in the Parliamentary cause both before and during the English Civil War.

Early life

Erle was the son of Thomas Erle of Charborough House in Dorset and his wife Dorothy Pole, daughter of William Pole of Columpton, Devon. He inherited the estate Charborough at the age of 11 on the death of his father. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford on 22 January 1602 aged 15. In 1604 he became a student of Inner Temple.

In 1614, Erle was elected Member of Parliament for Poole. He was knighted on 4 May 1616, and in 1618 served as High Sheriff of Dorset. Like many of the other leading citizens of Dorset, he was an early investor in projects to colonise New England. He and his brother Christopher were both shareholders in the Virginia Company in 1620, and he attended the meeting of that company on 21 May 1621. He was a friend of John White and became a founder member of the Dorchester Company, being described as "Governor of the New England Plantation".

Parliament and imprisonment

In 1621 Erle was re-elected MP for Poole and was elected again in 1624 and 1625. He was also one of the Justices of Peace for Dorset. In 1625, he was elected MP for Lyme Regis. Parliament was dissolved without voting subsidies to the Crown, and the King attempted to shore up the governmental finances by imposing forced loans on the genrty. Erle was one of the four men in Dorset who refused to pay and as a result he was summoned before the Council, and imprisoned for almost a year in the Fleet Prison before he was able to obtain a writ of habeas corpus. On hearing the case, the judges upheld the prisoners' right to be released, setting a major legal precedent in the restriction of the Crown's autocratic powers. His brother Christopher took his seat at Lyme Regis in 1628.

Short and Long parliaments

After King Charles ruled without parliament for eleven years, Erle was elected MP for Lyme Regis in the Short Parliament in April 1640. On the day after the dissolution of Parliament, he was one of the six men arrested on the King's orders under suspicion of treasonable correspondence with the Scots, with whom England was by this time at war. In November 1640, Erle was returned as MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis for the Long Parliament, and was appointed one of the managers of the prosecution in the impeachment of Strafford, but entrusted with proving the charge that Strafford had plotted to bring over the Irish army to suppress unrest in England he bungled his case so that the hearing was at first adjourned on the grounds that the "evidence was not ready" and then the article was in effect dropped altogether. This failure may have contributed significantly to the decision to abandon legal process and proceed against Strafford by Act of Attainder.

Civil War

On the outbreak of the Civil War, Erle became a Colonel in the Parliamentary army. He succeeded John Pym as Lieutenant of the Ordnance in 1643, and was also appointed military governor of Dorchester. However, when he led his forces to besiege Corfe Castle in 1643 he was repulsed after six weeks having lost a hundred men, and he fled Dorchester by sea at the approach of a superior Royal army under Lord Carnarvon. In 1645 he received the thanks of the Commons for deciphering some intercepted letters, and the following year was one of the four commissioners sent to negotiate peace with the King. He continued to sit in Parliament until 1648, when he was excluded in Pride's Purge.

Later parliamenary career

Erle was returned as MP for Dorset in 1654 for the First Protectorate Parliament and in 1659 for the Second Protectorate Parliament. In April 1660, he was elected again as MP for Poole in the Convention Parliament.

Erle died at the age of 78.

Family

Erle married Ann Dymoke daughter of Francis Dymoke, and sister of Sir Henry Dymoke, and through her acquired the manors of Erckington and Pipe, Warwickshire, which he sold to Sir Walter Devereux, Bt. Their son Thomas was also an MP in the Long Parliament with his father, and the latter's son, also called Thomas was a distinguished general.