HOSKINS, Bennet or Benedict (1609-80), of Morehampton, Abbey Dore, and Harewood, Herefs.

The Hoskins family were tenants of the prior of Llanthony abbey at Monkton Grange before the Reformation, their grant dating from the time of Bennet Hoskins’s great-grandfather.20Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 185. It was Bennet’s father who elevated them out of the ranks of the yeomanry. John Hoskins seemed destined for a life as a scholar until, in the first of several instances of verbal indiscretion which set back his career, he was expelled from Oxford for going too far in his role as a licensed jester during a formal occasion at the university.21Wood, Athenae, ii. 624-5. A change of direction took him to the Middle Temple, which was presumably the means by which he met and married Benedicta, the daughter of a lawyer from that inn. Their eldest son, Bennet, is described as Benedict in some records, and it is apparent that the latter name was an echo of his mother’s. He was later usually known as Bennet, however: the name given in honour of his godfather, Robert Bennett, bishop of Hereford at the time of the boy’s birth. The record of his baptism has not survived to confirm which was the name formally bestowed on him.22Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 417-8; Wood, Athenae, 624-5. Bennet Hoskins was first educated at home, his mother proud of him as a ‘great scholar’ in his earliest lessons, his father fearing he might stay a rustic in the Herefordshire environment.23L.B. Osborn, The Life and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1586-1638 (New Haven, 1937), 41, 69. John Hoskins served as burgess for Hereford in three Parliaments. Himself a client of Henry Howard, 1st earl of Northampton, he found himself in serious trouble in 1614 after having denounced the use of patronage at the court of James I. His words were the eye of the storm surrounding the dissolution of the 1614 Parliament. He was sent to the Tower, and had Bennet sent to lodge with him there, ruefully composing a verse to commemorate the occasion

My little Ben, whilst thou art young
And know’st not how to rule thy tongue
Make it thy slave whilst thou art free
Lest it, as mine, imprison thee.24Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 421-2.

According to Bennet, his father had started Greek at the age of ten.25Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 416. John Hoskins may have hoped for such precocity in his son, as he had him admitted to the Middle Temple around the age of 12, bound to himself, and was anxious some years prior to this that Bennet should be able to compose a Latin sentence, presumably a minimum entrance requirement. It was pressure from his father that propelled Bennet along the legal curriculum, fed by impatience with Bennet’s older step-brother.26Osborn, Life and Writings, 77, 82, 89. John Hoskins thus ensured that Bennet’s adolescence was spent away from Herefordshire, and the boy was doubtless exposed to the sophisticated circles in which his father moved. Bennet met Ben Jonson, who called him a brother, the playwright declaring that John Hoskins had ‘polished’ him as a father might a son.27Osborn, Life and Writings, 103. While John Hoskins was advanced to the judiciary through the favours first of Lionel Cranfield, 1st earl of Middlesex, and then of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, Bennet benefited too from this patronage. He took as his first wife, Ann, daughter of Sir John Bingley, remembrancer of the exchequer, whom John Hoskins defended in 1619 in star chamber against allegations of corruption: a side-show to the main attack on Lord Treasurer Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk, another member of the family that had promoted Hoskins.28Osborn, Life and Writings, 257. Bennet stayed in his chambers at the Middle Temple after his call to the bar, fining off readings and taking his brother-in-law, John Bingley, as pupil in 1636.29MTR ii. 773, 790, 793, 800, 811, 846.

After his father's death in 1638, Hoskins came into estates which included Morehampton, a former monastic grange purchased by John Hoskins. His election for Wendover in a by-election in April 1640 was a product of Herefordshire and Middle Temple influences combining. Sir Walter Pye* had been returned at the general election through the local interest of his first wife at nearby Dinton. Pye was also returned for Herefordshire, and chose the county seat. Hoskins inherited this electoral interest at the by-election. The connection between the two men, other than their shared Herefordshire roots, was the Middle Temple. Both had been pupils of Walter Kyrle*, who in effect ran a clearing house for Herefordshire men at his inn.30MTR ii. 646; M. Temple Admiss. ii. 713. Hoskins was not named to any committees in the Short Parliament, but intervened in the protracted debate on the penultimate day of the assembly. The king had pressed the Commons on the need for supply to renew the war with the Scots, and on 4 May had sent a message to the Commons by which he conveyed his willingness to renounce Ship Money in return for twelve subsidies over three years. Not all Members were willing to accept these terms, although Sir Robert Harley* hoped that they would be able to fall down before their king in gratitude, as Abigail had before King David. Sir Robert Cooke followed Harley, but in a hostile speech that criticised the conflict he styled the bishops’ war. Hoskins’s tone was closer to that of Harley. He reminded Members how the king had given them time, had shown a tenderness towards Parliament’s need to debate, and had given up the hated Ship Money. The king was willing to examine the basis of coat and conduct money, ‘military charges’, and there would be time for Parliament to look at other grievances ‘at leisure’ if, Hoskins implied, Members voted supply as the king wished.31Aston’s Diary, 131; Procs. Short Parl. 193-7; A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, (Oxford, 2002), 137. Charles was unable to stomach the line of criticism by Cooke and others, however, and the Parliament was dissolved the following day.

Only after his appearance in this Parliament and his return to the country did Hoskins appear in the commission of the peace. There was apparently no place for him at Wendover in the second Parliament of 1640, nor any evidence that he was an active candidate for a seat in Herefordshire. He helped promote the petition from the county in 1641 opposing the quota imposed on it in the bill for a tax to pay off the armies in Scotland and Ireland.32Add. 70086, unbound: undated petition [1641] from Herefs. At the Hereford by-election in July 1642, it was rumoured that he might put himself forward, but nothing came of the report.33Brilliana Harley Letters, 164. When civil war broke out in 1642 he had still not been named to any commissions out of chancery. He re-entered politics when Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex wrote to him and other Herefordshire men in September 1642, commissioning them in the name of Parliament to raise troops. Sir Robert Harley, the leading parliamentary figure in the county, must have thought well of Hoskins, despite his reported disapproval of one of his father’s compositions, an anthem sung at Hereford cathedral.34HMC Portland, iii. 100; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 419. The royalists did not include Hoskins in their early call to arms in the commission of array, but his enemies later identified his name on a commission for taking accounts of taxes levied for the king’s war effort, dated April 1644 from the court at Oxford.35SP18/74/86i. The only account of how Hoskins may have spent the war years comes from a hostile source, the case against him by republicans and Cromwellians marshalled ten years later. He was said with Thomas Tomkins* to have executed this commission, but it was also alleged that he raised men for the king in Hereford, brought them into the city armed, and gave a charge to the grand jury which was acted upon to the extent that the jurors were later prosecuted as royalist delinquents. When the Scots army besieged Hereford (30 July-1 Sept. 1645), Hoskins reputedly fled the city for Hay-on-Wye, exposing his property to the depredations of the would-be invaders.36SP18/74/85.

For Hoskins to have been adopted as their burgess in Parliament by the freemen of Hereford, in the by-election held after James Scudamore and Richard Seaborne were disabled from sitting, his behaviour and loyalties must have been more ambiguous than his detractors allowed. Hoskins had an interest of his own in Hereford, which he had inherited from his father, but the favour of Sir Robert and Edward Harley* probably eased his adoption as an MP, which in his case at least took place without a challenge on 17 November 1646.37Add. 70125, unbound: Nathaniel Wright and John Flackett to Edward Harley, 17 Nov. 1646. In March 1647, as high steward of the city, Sir Robert nominated Hoskins and Edward Freeman* to be his deputies, and it is hard to imagine that Hoskins would have been elected in the teeth of opposition from the Brampton Bryan family.38Add. 70005, f. 34 (4th foliation). But the sequestration committee was active, and rewards of leases were being bestowed on friends of the Parliament, while its enemies were made to suffer. The patronage of the Harleys was not enough completely to clear Hoskins from suspicion. Even as he left Hereford for London, his wife was implicated in a feud which split the committee. Its clerk, Nicholas Philpott, was dismissed for allegedly favouring royalists. In his defence, Philpott itemised a number of cases he had attended. One of these was that of Richard Skinner, a partisan of Parliament, who had been the subject of a petition to the king by Mrs Hoskins, who sought to recover rents from him. In a chancery answer, she argued that Skinner had been plundered because he was disaffected from the king’s cause.39Add. 70123, unbound: defence of Nicholas Philpott, c.Nov. 1646. Even more immediately, in January 1647, Hoskins figured in a list of persons suspected of delinquency by the Hereford committee as it came under more radical influences, with Freeman and the more active royalists such as Fitzwilliam Coningsby*, Humphrey Coningsby*, Sir Walter Pye and Sir Sampson Eure*.40Add. 70061, loose paper of 30 Jan. 1647. Unlike the others, however, Hoskins and Freeman were not proceeded against.

Hoskins was in the Commons by 21 December 1646, when he was named to a committee on the franchise in County Durham.41CJ v. 21b. His career in this Parliament was short, in effect over by the following May. In most of his ten committee appointments between January and May 1647, Hoskins was in the company of either of John Birch* or Sir Robert or Edward Harley – all three members of the Presbyterian faction. Land sales and the raising of taxation for the army seem to have been the dominant themes in his appointments. His local knowledge recommended him for the committee on the sale of the estates of Henry Somerset, 1st marquess of Worcester (4 Feb.), and he accompanied the anti-episcopal Sir Robert Harley to work on an ordinance to clarify earlier legislation on the sale of bishops’ lands (27 Feb.).42CJ v. 74a, 75b. The same day as the move against the marquess, he was given the principal role in drafting a declaration against disorder by disbanded soldiers. His activities in March are unknown, but early in April, he was named to a committee to consider the management of the London militia. The outcome was the vesting of the London force in the common council for one year. Hoskins and Birch were added to the committee to seek a loan from the City of £200,000 to sustain the war in Ireland, a move accompanied by what proved to be the abortive appointment of the Presbyterian-leaning Edward Massie* as general of horse there.43CJ v. 132b, 147a; Juxon Jnl. 152-3. It was this plan to develop a alternative to the New Model that produced the anonymous pamphlet A New-found Stratagem, distributed among the soldiers of that army around 18 April. The tract was a hostile commentary on a petition emanating from Essex to disband the New Model; it denounced corruption in both Houses of Parliament and identified Edward Harley as an enemy of the soldiers. On 23 April, Hoskins and Sir Robert Harley were named to the committee to consider this ‘obnoxious’ publication.44A New-found Stratagem (1647), 11 (E.384.11); Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 47; CJ v. 153a

In the spring of 1647, Hoskins was associated with the Harleys’ attempts to rid Herefordshire of soldiers and reduce the influence of John Birch, who so often accompanied Hoskins in his Commons committee nominations, but who was persona non grata among the Harleys’ circle.45Add. 70005, f. 30 (4th foliation); Hereford City Lib. Pengelly and Scudamore Pprs. 13; Add. 70105, unbound: letter of E. Harley to Sir R. Harley, W. Kyrle, B. Hoskins and W. Crowther, 12 Apr. 1647. These developments at home were more successful than the fortunes of the Harleys at Westminster. On 11 and 12 May, Hoskins and Edward Harley were named to the committee to settle £5,000 on the lord general, Sir Thomas Fairfax*, which might have been expected to lower slightly the temperature in the New Model, and Hoskins continued work on the ordinance to raise £200,000 for the Irish military campaign. But he left the Commons soon afterwards, so that by 15 July, a month after the army had instigated impeachment proceedings against the Eleven Members, including Edward Harley, he was identified as an absent Member, and his case was referred to the committee on that subject.46CJ v. 167a, 168b, 245a. From the army, and from probably this date, sprang the reports in print that Hoskins had been a royalist commissioner of array.47Clarke Pprs. ii. 157-8.

During 1648, Hoskins was back in Herefordshire, working with Edward Freeman in a legal capacity, and very obviously part of the effort by the Harleys to maintain their interest in the region. At Sir Robert Harley’s behest, Freeman and Hoskins continued to dispense justice in Hereford as his deputies, making forays into south Wales probably as attorneys. Hoskins was anxious lest Edward Freeman's robust approach should alienate the Presbyterian clergy of the district.48Add. 70006, f. 19. In April and September, Hoskins was excused at the call of the House, and probably never returned to London. He was acting as a militia commissioner in May, signing a commission for Edward Harley to be a colonel.49Add. 70006, f. 30. His support for the Harleys in Herefordshire made him vulnerable in the Commons to the attacks by supporters of the army. Had Hoskins been in the House, he would certainly have been forcibly excluded, or even imprisoned along with Sir Robert Harley, when the army purged the Parliament on 6 December. Indeed, his name appears on an early list of those secluded, but it seems more likely that he was absent from Westminster.50A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). Hoskins was re-appointed to the bench of magistrates in July 1649, a surprising vote of confidence by the government in one whose instincts were socially conservative, and an equally surprising acceptance of office. He was subjected to a semi-penal levy of a horse by the Herefordshire committee in January 1650, but his ambitions lay elsewhere.51C115/67/5842. He returned to London, and became prominent at the Middle Temple: on various committees from 1652, auditor for the first time in 1654.52MTR ii. 1042, 1070, 1075, 1089, 1090, 1092, 1096, 1102, 1117, 1127, 1151, 1171, 1172, 1173, 1179, 1180, 1181, 1183. In the latter year, Hoskins was made a circuit judge of the great sessions in south Wales, the apogee of his legal career.53CJ vii. 876a; Williams, Welsh Judges, 172.

Hoskins appeared for Hereford in the first protectorate Parliament on his own interest, though no doubt with the approval of local Presbyterians. His election provoked consternation among the millenarian radicals such as Benjamin Mason* and the former county committee treasurer, Miles Hill. They petitioned the lord protector’s council against the ‘papists, malignants and men actually in arms against the late king’, as well as ‘malignants, prelatical or at the most neuters in the cause of Christ’, and they mounted an ad hominem attack on Hoskins in the form of a narrative of his behaviour during the civil war.54SP18/74/85, 861, 110. Their complaint produced no decisive intervention. On 15 September 1654, Hoskins was named to his first committee, a review of the Nominated Assembly’s arrangements for the judging of debtors and for marriages, in which his legal expertise and distaste for the radicals would doubtless have been deployed.55CJ vii. 368a. On the 19th, Hoskins took the chair of a committee of the whole House for a debate on the Government Bill, the new constitution proposed by the Presbyterian interest to replace the Instrument of Government, and he was voted to the same function again no fewer than 40 times until 4 January 1655.56CJ vii. 368b, 369a-b, 370a-b, 371a-b, 372a-b, 373b, 374a-b, 375a, 376a-b, 377a-b, 378a-b, 379a-b, 380b, 382a, 383b, 385a, 386b, 408a-b, 413a.

Given his ambivalent war record, and the persistent allegations against him, it is an interesting comment on the climate in the House at this time that he should have been promoted by his colleagues to a position of such strategic importance. The object of these endless meetings of the whole House in committee, the bill to restructure the government, was ultimately aborted, along with all other legislation of this Parliament, but there is nothing to suggest that Hoskins personally had a hand in any wrecking. Indeed, he was a manager of the business as well as an occupant of the chair, for example asking for a committee of the whole to review ordinances (10 Oct. 1654), and reporting from that committee to the House in normal session the votes it had taken.57CJ vii. 375a, 383a, 383b. Furthermore, the committee of the whole broke into sub-committees to deal with individual articles or subject areas of the bill on government. As November wore on, the clauses dealing with the summoning of Parliaments, on religious toleration and on the listing of heresies were farmed out to sub-committees, which took decisions (including by means of votes) and reported them back to Hoskins who in turn read them to the committee of the whole.58CJ vii. 388a, 388b, 398a, 399b. The House evidently had every confidence in Hoskins, selecting him over another Presbyterian lawyer, John Glynne, when there was once a contest over who should chair, but progress was painfully slow; Hoskins reported on one occasion in January 1655 that after a day’s sitting, all that had been agreed was one amendment.59CJ vii. 408a, 413a.

Hoskins found time to sit on other committees. Those concerned with law reform were naturally among them, though we can be sure that this devotee of the inns of court was no radical reformer. He was involved with committees on the reform of chancery, including abuses in the issuing of writs from that court, the reviewing legislation for the relief of debtors in prison, overhauling the office of sheriff, and removing the last vestiges of purveyance.60CJ vii. 376a, 376b, 378b, 381b, 383b, 394b, 407b. He was also named to a committee reviewing the lord protector’s ordinance on scandalous ministers (25 Sept. 1654), although he had not been placed among the Herefordshire commissioners appointed in that ordinance when it had been published the previous August.61CJ vii. 370a; A. and O. His being listed that summer among the commissioners to investigate the notorious history of how church monies had been deployed in Wales can be explained by his friendship with Edward Freeman*, for whom the subject was an obsession. Hoskins’s appearance as an addition to the committee on the related topic of allowing market towns to appoint preachers in cases where none was already in place (7 Dec.) may suggest that he was sympathetic to an Erastian approach to religious matters. On the last committee to which he was appointed in this Parliament, an important one on public finance (18 Jan. 1655), he was nominated with five other Members from Herefordshire, including John Birch.62CJ vii. 419b.

Although he had been closely involved with the controversial Government Bill, the Cromwellian authorities continued to think well of Hoskins after the dismissal of this Parliament. As a Welsh judge, he was not available to play any part in the brief superintendency by the major-generals, whose commissioners in Herefordshire were men of more radical stamp.63C115/67/5871. In elections for the 1656 Parliament, Hoskins managed to advance his own interest sufficiently to aim at a knight’s place. It was a contested election, in which the Harley family began to re-assert itself at the hustings for the first time since the purge of Parliament in 1648. In the account of the election, Edward Harley was said to have allied himself with Richard Reed* and John Scudamore* against the military interest, but Hoskins’s name does not figure in the narrative. His name appears second after James Berry* in the indenture, suggesting probably that his own election was uncontested, and on a significant uncompromised interest of his own.64C219/45/2; Add. 70007, f. 80. In the second Parliament of the protectorate, Hoskins played a more limited role, simply appearing on committees, seemingly not taking charge of any of them, and acting as a teller in one division. He was named to the body that considered the security of the protector, and was appointed a commissioner in the ordinance that emerged.65CJ vii. 429a; A. and O. Between the end of September and late November 1656, Hoskins was named to 21 committees. The law was the theme of many: on licensing alehouses (29 Sept.), the statutes on grain sales (7 Oct.), abuses among manorial stewards (13 Oct.), the law of probate and on maritime wrecks (27, 28 Oct) and on debt, this last resuming a topic he had pursued previously in the House.66CJ vii. 430a, 435b, 438a, 446a, 446b, 447a. Otherwise, it was a collection of run-of-the-mill committees in which no other particular theme is discernible.

In February 1657, Hoskins was granted leave of absence, and did not appear again in the record of the House until April, when he was listed among the committee considering the response of the lord protector to aspects of the Humble Petition and Advice, and as in 1654-5 he seems to have favoured constitutional change.67CJ vii. 485b, 524a. On 30 April, Hoskins joined Nathaniel Bacon in moving an amendment to a bill confirming acts and ordinances passed by the protectoral council without further scrutiny, but it was overruled. The same day, he supported a move to have the debts of Philip Herbert*, the late 4th earl of Pembroke, referred to a committee, sharing in the widely-felt sympathy for both the executors and the original lenders in the City.68Burton’s Diary, ii. 82, 83-5; CJ vii. 528b. He adopted a minority view in the case of the Turkey Company, which sought a stay in legal proceedings against it by the widely-detested Sir Sackville Crowe; unlike the many merchants in the House who sympathised with the Levant company men, Hoskins could see no reason for their special treatment, but they were granted their injunction nevertheless.69Burton’s Diary, ii. 100. When the plan to compensate the Gloucester citizens for their wartime losses by land grants in Ireland came up in May, Hoskins and Benjamin Mason, his fellow Herefordshire Member, seem to have supported the proviso tabled by Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) that would have restricted the award to Galway, thus protecting the interests of other who were owed Irish land.70Burton’s Diary, ii. 110-11.

Hoskins attended the second sitting of Parliament in January 1658, and by this time his support for the Humble Petition appears to have strengthened. On 30 January he intervened (although he said he had deliberately held back, as ‘I thought silence was the best service I could do you) to offer a pragmatic response to the question of recognising the new second chamber. In an attempt to break the deadlock he argued that ‘the calling of them to sit there by writ, is making them Lords’, however that might defined; but he insisted a swift resolution on what title they were to enjoy – ‘whether you will call them Lords’ – was the only way that business might progress. Similarly, on 3 February he advocated that business be transacted with messengers of the Other House, against the leading republican Sir Arthur Hesilrige, who identified the message they brought, on banishing papists from London, as an infringement of liberties.71Burton’s Diary, ii. 401, 438. In a further sign of his increasing sympathy with the protectoral regime, in November 1658, Hoskins walked in the funeral procession of the lord protector, by virtue of his judicial post in south Wales.72Burton’s Diary, ii. 525.

There is no record of the elections in Herefordshire for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659, but Hoskins was returned again on the old franchise, for the county. On the opening day of the assembly, he was named to the important committee for elections or privileges, and intervened to lend support for an invitation to the Presbyterian minister Edmund Calamy, rather than to the Independent and Cromwellian John Owen*, to address the Parliament during its planned fast day.73CJ vii. 594b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 12. Hoskins found himself echoing John Birch in expressing unease at government plans to declare its hand in a frank statement of detail on the armed forces establishment (3 Feb.), and declined to join in the near hysteria that accompanied the discovery of a man, William King, completely unelected, sitting in the chamber.74Burton’s Diary, iii. 63, 80 The day that King was exposed, Hoskins moved that the maintenance of ministers in Wales be the subject of a bill. As on a previous occasion, in this concern that the Welsh ministry was being regulated by men hostile to ordained ministers, he was voicing the long-held views of his old colleague, Edward Freeman.75CJ vii. 600b; Burton’s Diary, iii. 80, 82. On three consecutive days (9-11 Feb.), Hoskins spoke on procedural issues in the House, arguing against putting the hearing of petitioners before the business of the House, asserting what he took to be the proper process in committing bills, and urging that no fresh debate be launched on the question of recognising the new lord protector. Hoskins’ speech on 11 February was strongly supportive of Richard Cromwell: ‘If there had been any doubt who was protector after the death of his late highness, we would have been under no great [i.e. considerable] inconvenience. I understand that many minds doubt it; but the reason I know not’. His opponents in this debate were the republicans, who sought to hedge in the powers of the chief magistrate with strict limitations. In response, Hoskins accused them of trying to damage England’s status in Europe, asking rhetorically: ‘You will not have foreign princes address to his highness as protector under such limitations and qualifications[?]’.76Burton’s Diary, iii. 154, 197, 204, 231. In his final contribution to this Parliament, on 12 February, Hoskins took a measured approach in the debate on the fate of Edmund Jones, the enemy of Edward Freeman, later expelled the House.77Burton’s Diary, iii. 235.

Hoskins seems to have withdrawn from the third protectorate Parliament long before it was dissolved in April 1659, and he played no active part during the restored commonwealth. He re-appeared as a candidate in the election for the Convention of April 1660. Robert Harley* wrote to his brother Edward on attempts in Herefordshire to revive the practice of arranging the choice of MPs before the day of the election. The Harleys hoped that Hoskins would join with Edward, and worked for his selection, but unsuccessfully.78Add. 70007, f. 76. A seat even for Edward Harley was not secured easily. Hoskins is not known to have sought another place in Parliament. In the dying days of the commonwealth he was confirmed in his post as a Welsh judge by patent, but lost this office when the king came in. He seems not to have been taken to the heart of the restored monarchy, probably because of his willingness to work with the governments of the protectorate and his association with the Harley family. Despite his semi-retirement from public affairs, Hoskins remained active in the Middle Temple, serving a term as treasurer in 1665-6. He was awarded a baronetcy in 1676, four years before his death.79CB iv. 79. His son, Sir John Hoskyns†, sat for Herefordshire in 1685.