POTTER, George (1600-62), of Exeter, Devon.

The Potter family had lived in Devon since the middle of the sixteenth century, settling at Iddsleigh on the marriage of Tobias Potter with a daughter of the lord of the manor, Hugh Osburne. The eldest son of this union, Hugh Potter, became a lawyer and was receiver-general of the household of Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, from the mid-1630s; and the second son, George, was a merchant in the city of Exeter.4Alnwick, Northumberland MS U.I.6, unfol. Little is known of George Potter’s early life. In February 1628 he married the widow of Thomas Pope at St Paul’s, Exeter, and by this time he was well established as a merchant (although he is not mentioned in the roll of freemen), being rated in the same parish for goods worth the nominal sum of £6 in the subsidy of 1629.5Devon and Cormw. Rec. Soc. xv. 362; Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 11.

George Potter’s return for the Cornish borough of West Looe for the Short Parliament in April 1640 was almost certainly at the prompting of his brother’s boss, the earl of Northumberland, although he was not the official candidate put forward by the duchy of Cornwall.6DCO, letters and warrants 1639-43, f. 44v. Potter apparently played no part in proceedings at Westminster, and he was not re-elected in November 1640.

During the civil war, Potter remained at Exeter (having moved from St Paul’s to St Sidwell’s parish), and in the mid-1640s he was drawn into financing the royalist war effort in the west.7Devon Protestation Returns, 336. On 23 June 1645 he joined Peter St Hill in signing an agreement with the commissioners of the revenue of the duchy of Cornwall to farm the tin produced in Devon and Cornwall; and on 21 August Sir Edward Hyde* ordered the customs’ collectors to deliver £500 in wool to Potter, for the use of the governor of Barnstaple, Sir Allan Apsley.8CCSP i. 273, 297. Potter’s association with the royalists continued in the early months of 1646, when he worked with the prince’s receiver to raise money, and lent sums for the purchase of provisions and military stores for the garrison on the Isles of Scilly. After April 1646, when Exeter surrendered and the royalist cause in the west was collapsing, Potter fled to St Malo in France, whence he operated a barque supplying Scilly and Jersey, and it was only with the capture of his ship at Brest that Potter returned to England to make his peace with Parliament.9CCSP i. 308, 315, 325. On 7 July 1646 Potter compounded under the Exeter Articles, for having contributed £40 to the king’s cause.10CCC 1384. In January 1648 he was pardoned on payment of a fine.11LJ ix. 655. Potter found no difficulty in resuming his activities as a merchant in Exeter. In June 1648 he was in a position to pay £75, and to enter a bond for the payment of the remainder, making up £500 he owed to the corporation as executor of Thomas Bridgman (who had died in 1641).12HMC Exeter, 205. He also joined other Exeter merchants in petitioning the council’s committee for examinations in June 1651.13CSP Dom. 1651, p. 275. Shortly afterwards, the papers captured at the battle of Worcester revealed the extent of Potter’s collaboration with the royalists in the mid-1640s, although he had already compounded and no further proceedings were taken against him.14HMC Pepys, 278.

By 1660, Potter was established at St Stephen’s parish in Exeter, and paid nearly the same subsidy rate there as he had 30 years before.15Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 20. He remained close to his brother, Hugh, and was sole executor and principal beneficiary of his estate under a will drawn up on 15 January 1659.16PROB11/308/43. Hugh Potter died in the spring of 1662, and George followed him that November.17MI, St Stephen’s churchyard. His wife had died in 1636, and their only recorded child, a son, had died shortly after his marriage to an Exeter woman, leaving no heirs. As a result, Potter’s will, written in March 1662 with a codicil added just a few days before he died, was an exercise in tying up loose ends. He was concerned to fulfil his outstanding obligations as executor to his brother and to Thomas Bridgman. He also made provisions for a number of relatives in and around the city, including the offspring of his sisters, Gertrude Snell and Mary King, and agreed to write off the debts owed by his widowed (and now remarried) daughter-in-law, Mary Alford. The bulk of the estate was to go to his niece, Joan King, on her marriage to another kinsman, Hugh Stofford. The probate of Potter’s will was granted to his son-in-law, John King, in May 1663.18PROB11/311/267.