PUREFOY, George (1606-61), of Wadley, Gt. Faringdon, Berks.

The Purefoys were an ancient and distinguished family. It would be claimed that seven of this MP’s ancestors had died at the battle of Bosworth Field fighting for Henry VII.22J. Hinckley, A Sermon preached at the funerals of … George Purefoy (1661), 25. The family’s many different branches traced their ancestry back to a forbear who had lived at Misterton in Leicestershire in the late thirteenth century.23Vis. Leics. 1619 (Harl. Soc. ii), 32-3; Nichols, Leics. iv. 599; Burke Dorm. and Extinct Baronetcies, 431. The Warwickshire Purefoys were distant relatives, with William Purefoy I* and William Purefoy II* both being seventh cousins twice removed in the male line of this MP. Through his maternal grandmother, George Purefoy was also their third cousin twice removed. In the early fifteenth century one of the cadet branches of the Leicestershire Purefoys had settled in Buckinghamshire, when they acquired the manor of Shalstone by marriage.24VCH Bucks. iv. 224. But in the sixteenth century the Shalstone branch had renewed their links with Leicestershire, for this MP’s grandfather, Edward Purefoy, had married a distant relative, Joyce Purefoy, the heiress to some of the Purefoy estates there, centred on the manor of Drayton-in-the-Clay (now Fenny Drayton).25Vis. Berks. i. 267; Nichols, Leics. iv. 591. Perhaps mindful of the family’s origin, their son, George Purefoy, the MP’s father, seems to have regarded Drayton as his principal seat.

The Purefoys were thus already substantial landowners. Under the future MP, they would become even more so. George junior was the eldest son of his father from his first marriage. His maternal grandfather, Sir Valentine Knightley, had no surviving son by the time he died in 1618. As the eldest son of his eldest daughter, Mary, Purefoy – then aged only 12 – received everything, although Knightley’s estates came heavily encumbered with debts.26PROB11/132/722. Significantly for Purefoy’s subsequent career, this inheritance included Knightley’s lease on the manor of Wadley at Great Faringdon, held from Oriel College, Oxford, and previously held by the Unton family.27VCH Berks. iv. 495; Coventry Docquets, 566. Purefoy thereby gained lands in Berkshire to supplement those in Leicestershire and Buckinghamshire that he would later inherit from his father, and already knew that he would soon become independently wealthy when he completed his education at King’s College, Cambridge and at Gray’s Inn. The choice of King’s (presumably preceded by a spell at Eton) no doubt reflected the fact that his uncle Edward Purefoy had been a fellow of the college since 1611.28Al. Cant.

Purefoy’s marriage to Anne Glover further increased the family’s estates, or rather, confirmed their hold on the Glover lands. Purefoy’s father’s third wife, Jane, was the widow of Anne’s father, Sir Thomas Glover.29Nichols, Leics. iv. 594. Father and son married on consecutive days in the same church, St Ann Blackfriars, in February 1627.30St Ann Blackfriars par. reg. As she was her father’s co-heiress, on the death of George senior in 1628 Anne’s lands passed from the control of her stepfather to that of his son, her husband, now of age.31Nichols, Leics. iv. 594-5, 600; Pevsner, Leics. and Rutland, 153. Henceforth, George junior held all three of these separate inheritances. His maturity was such that he was reputed to have been ‘an old man at twenty’.32Hinckley, Sermon, 36.

Purefoy made the most of his Berkshire property. Throughout his life Wadley appears to have served as his main residence and it was in Berkshire that he established himself as a local public figure of some consequence. From 1629 he sat on the Berkshire commission of the peace.33Coventy Docquets, 63; C231/5, p. 10. As such, he helped enforce the Book of Orders.34CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 560-1. In November 1639 he became the local sheriff.35Coventry Docquets, 369; List of Sheriffs, 6. But he did not completely neglect his properties elsewhere. Writing in the mid-eighteenth century, the Buckinghamshire-based antiquary, Browne Willis, would claim that Purefoy had ‘often retired’ from Wadley to Shalstone and that he had ‘exercised great hospitality and charity at both his seats’.36B. Willis, Hist. and Antiquities of the Town, Hundred and Deanry of Buckingham (1755), 263. The implication that Drayton was, in comparison, neglected by Purefoy seems justified.

His appointment as the sheriff of Berkshire in 1639 gave him his first taste of national politics. Purefoy distinguished himself as one of the sheriffs least able – or willing – to tackle the problem of collecting Ship Money. In March 1640 he wrote to the secretary of state Edward Nicholas†, setting out a long list of excuses as to why so little of the controversial tax was coming in; the most important, as he saw it, was that everyone expected the new Parliament to abolish it.37CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 588-9. Purefoy was one of seven sheriffs summoned by the privy council two months later to explain why they had failed to collected the sums demanded by the most recent writ.38PC2/52, pp. 474-5; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 126. In his case, £3,871 of the £4,000 due from Berkshire would never be collected.39Gordon, ‘Collection of ship-money’, 156. Even allowing for the considerable resistance he faced, the privy council may have been right to suspect that Purefoy was not really trying. This was not his only problem. On 18 June 1640 soldiers from Dorset who had been pressed to serve in the war against the Scots, mutinied when they were passing through Faringdon. Purefoy called out the local trained bands and, although many of the men escaped back to Dorset, he was able to arrest some of the ringleaders.40CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 316, 323-4; PC2/52, pp. 566-7. The following month he had to search for some of the Berkshire troops who had deserted in the north. The excuse he gave to the other secretary of state, Sir Francis Windebanke*, was that they had not been paid because he was finding it difficult to collect the county’s coat and conduct money.41CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 506-7. In December 1640, once his year in office had ended, Purefoy joined with two of the other ex-sheriffs, Sir Christopher Yelverton* and Martin Lumley*, in petitioning the House of Lords for protection against any attempts by the crown to pursue them for their failure to collect their Ship Money levies.42HMC 4th Rep. 30. In the event, the government seems not to have pursued them any further. Meanwhile, Puller’is time as sheriff had also required him to preside over both sets of parliamentary elections in Berkshire in 1640.

Two decades later, in preaching Puller’s funeral sermon, John Hinckley claimed that his subject had responded to the outbreak of civil war by seeking a licence from the king to allow him to travel abroad, but that

he chose rather to bury himself alive, in a private and obscure concealment of himself … rather than behold, much less join his hand in the rending the bowels of his own country.43Hinckley, Sermon, 28.

Purefoy had subsequently told Hinckley that ‘the anger of the malcontents arose from the leaven of their own ambition’.44Hinckley, Sermon, 28-9. Yet this was not quite true. From the start Purefoy had clearly and actively sided with Parliament. As early as August 1642 he was a member of the new pro-parliamentarian standing committee for Berkshire to whom the House of Lords sent instructions for the defence of the county.45LJ v. 311a. Throughout the following decade he was consistently appointed by Parliament as an assessment commissioner for Berkshire.46A. and O. This was hardly the fastidious inactivity he depicted later, but he could legitimately claim that the war placed him in a difficult position. His lands at Wadley and at Shalstone were in areas much fought over by the two sides, explaining why his estates were ‘rent and torn’ as a consequence.47Hinckley, Sermon, 33. Faringdon changed hands and was occupied by rival garrisons twice between 1644 and 1646. The local church was badly damaged, so Purefoy later paid for the restoration of the monument there commemorating his great-uncle, Sir Henry Unton†.48Fuller, Hist. Worthies of Eng. (1688), i. 159; R. Strong, ‘The ambassador: Sir Henry Unton and his portrait’, 108, 110, in The Cult of Elizabeth (1999). That Purefoy probably rebuilt his house at Shalstone in the 1650s may also have been because of war damage to the previous building.49RCHME Bucks. ii. 253. These consequences would have given him good reason to have had ambiguous attitudes towards the civil war. If he cannot be said to have been uninvolved in it, he might well, like many of the other participants, have nevertheless thought the whole business to have been distasteful. He continued to hold his local offices in Berkshire after the abolition of the monarchy in 1649.50A. and O.; Sheffield Archives, EM1480.

By the early 1650s another native of Drayton was beginning to acquire fame and notoriety. George Fox, the founder of quakerism and the son of a local weaver, certainly knew of Purefoy and it is more than probable that they were acquainted and that the Foxes were among Purefoy’s Leicestershire tenants. In 1651, on being released from prison, Fox returned to Drayton. This prompted the local rector, Nathaniel Stephens, a Purefoy appointee and Fox’s earliest known critic, to observe that ‘never such a plant was bred in England’. According to Fox, Stephens made this comment to Purefoy.51Jnl. of George Fox, i. 14. That same passage implies that Fox had already mentioned Purefoy in the section of his journal that is now lost. Purefoy was said by Hinckley to have rejected ‘all the locusts of old-new-furbished heresies (which have swarmed out of the bottomless pit in these later times)’.52Hinckley, Sermon, 31. The likelihood is that during these years he supported Stephens’s public campaign against Fox.

The election on 12 July 1654 for the Berkshire knights of the shire to sit in the first protectoral Parliament returned Purefoy as one of the five new MPs. For all his properties elsewhere, there was no question that Purefoy was a substantial Berkshire figure who had proved himself as an active county official. Any assessment of Purefoy’s role in this Parliament is complicated by the presence of his distant kinsman, William Purefoy I. Only one reference in the Journal can be linked unambiguously to George Purefoy; on 31 October 1654 he was included on the committee appointed to consider the petition from the syndicate headed by Sir William Killigrew† for the draining of the Lincolnshire fens.53CJ vii. 380a. Any further observations rest on the less-than-certain assumption that the Journal consistently distinguished between George as ‘Mr Purefoy’ and William Purefoy I* as ‘Col. Purefoy’. Even then, ‘Mr Purefoy’ was appointed to just three committees – to present the declaration for a fast day to the lord protector (18 Sept. 1654), to consider the bill to eject scandalous ministers (25 Sept.) and to assess the petition from Thomas Levingston* and his wife Anne (21 Nov.).54CJ vii. 368b, 370a, 387a. George Purefoy cannot be said to have made any great contribution to this Parliament and he did not stand for re-election in 1656.

Purefoy evidently accepted the Restoration. Indeed, his support for Charles II’s return was sufficient that he was one of the 12 Berkshire gentlemen proposed as possible knights of the Royal Oak. His estates were then said to be worth £3,000, more than any other Berkshire men considered for this honour.55Burke Commoners, i. 688 He continued to sit as a Berkshire justice of the peace and was added in March 1660 to the equivalent commission for Buckinghamshire.56C231/6, p. 159.

Purefoy died in March 1661 and his funeral was held on 21 April at Drayton. That he was buried there, rather than at Faringdon, seems to have reflected a deliberate wish to associate himself with his Purefoy ancestors.57Hinckley, Sermon. He had already made arrangements to divide his estates. As early as 1650, he had settled his lands at Shalstone on his eldest son, George junior.58VCH Bucks. iv. 225. In October 1660 he handed some of his lands (possibly including those at Shalstone) over to five trustees and, by the will he drew up three months later, he transferred them to his third son, Knightley Purefoy. At the same time he gave other lands to Henry Purefoy, George junior’s eldest son.59PROB11/304/375. Those probably included the Leicestershire lands. The following year, Henry was created a baronet.60CB. But Sir Henry died unmarried in 1686 and none of his five brothers left male heirs. The youngest of the brothers, Francis, sold Drayton in 1706.61Nichols, Leics. iv. 592, 600. Meanwhile, the lands left to Knightley Purefoy passed down to his descendants, who based themselves at Shalstone. That male line died out in 1762, so those lands then passed to the descendants of this MP’s daughter, Mary, who had married Thomas Jervoise†. Having again passed through a female line from the Purefoy Jervoises, the eventual inheritors of Shalstone, the Fitz Gerald family, changed their name to ‘Purefoy’ by royal licence in 1900.62VCH Bucks. iv. 225.