PORTER, Endymion (1587-1649), of Mickleton and Aston-sub-Edge, Glos.

By the end of the fifteenth century the Porters were settled at Mickleton, Gloucestershire, and held lands in nearby Chipping Campden. The economic fortunes of the family fluctuated considerably during the sixteenth century, to the extent that they temporarily lost the manor of Aston-sub-Edge, but by the time of Endymion Porter’s birth, his father, Edmund, had regained ownership and was living in the manor house of Mickleton. Endymion’s great-great-grandfather, Sir William, had attended both Henry VII and Henry VIII in a military capacity, but otherwise the family was of local importance only.62Glos. RO, D5626/1/1-3, 18; Townshend, Life and Letters, 2-4; Huxley, Endymion Porter, 17. Edmund Porter’s marriage to his cousin, Angela, introduced an exotic element to the Aston-sub-Edge branch of the family, as Angela’s father, Giles, had served in an English embassy to Spain, took a Spanish wife, and subsequently lived mostly in Spain. Endymion Porter’s mother was therefore half-Spanish, and he acquired at his mother’s knee the language which was to prove his main qualification in courtly advancement.63Harl. 1543, f. 69v.

Although the Spanish element in Porter’s family background was pronounced, there is no evidence that he was brought up as a child in anything other than the orthodox Prayer Book Protestantism of his day. Nevertheless, his experience of Spanish culture was not confined to its manifestation in Mickleton. Perhaps because of the deteriorating economic position of the family, Edmund Porter was happy for Endymion and his brother to accompany to Spain their grandfather, Giles, a member of the mission to witness the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1605. Giles was there as an interpreter, was highly-regarded in the role, and was able to introduce his grandson to the household of the elderly Count Olivares as a page.64Huxley, Endymion Porter, 20. Porter there formed a long and close association with Olivares’s heir, Don Gaspar, who succeeded to the title in 1607. In this environment, it seems highly unlikely that he would have, or could have, persisted with Protestant observance, but by 1611 he had taken service with an English merchant in Madrid, William Calley, whose fraught business affairs were helped by Endymion Porter’s skills in mediation with the Spanish.65PRO31/8/198; HMC Downshire, iii. 111.

Returning to Mickleton in 1612, Porter was assisted by family contacts into the service of Edward Villiers†, half-brother of George Villiers, the future duke of Buckingham. The connection was that Edward Villiers’s sister, Elizabeth, wife of Sir Henry Boteler, was godmother to Porter’s first cousin.66HMC Downshire, iii. 302; Huxley, Endymion Porter, 31. From Edward Villiers’s household in Fleet Street it was but a short step to a place with George Villiers, the favourite from 1614 of James I. Porter’s rise was linked inextricably with that of Villiers. From early 1618 Porter was master of horse and Spanish secretary to the king’s favourite, at this point an earl and who would soon become marquess, and finally duke, of Buckingham.67Huxley, Endymion Porter, 34. Porter’s duties at this time seem to have included acting as paymaster for distinguished poets, painters and musicians patronised by his master.68CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 15, 255, 307; CSP Dom. Add. 1580-1625, p. 631. In 1624 he was suggested for membership of the projected royal academy of his brother-in-law and fellow Buckingham client, Edmund Bolton.69D. Townshend, Life and Letters of Endymion Porter (1897), 140-1. It is from this period that Porter’s steady accumulation of grants of office and lands began. He re-acquired in his own right his patrimony at Aston-sub-Edge, and to set the seal on his credentials at court married in 1619 Olivia, the daughter of Elizabeth Boteler, Buckingham’s half-sister.70Huxley, Endymion Porter, 39, 41-2. Not all of these grants were unsought: with another suitor to the king he petitioned for a new office in chancery, to keep the court records there, and avidly petitioned for financial favours subsequently.71Harl. 1576, f. 107.

Porter was able to play a pivotal role in the negotiations with Spain over the ‘Spanish Match’, moving in timely fashion in 1621 into the household of the prince of Wales, where his linguistic skills in Spanish were seen by Sir Robert Knollys† as portentous.72BL, HMC Trumbull TS, misc. xiv. 57. He was considered by some ‘the first mover’ of the scheme to marry Prince Charles to the infanta.73J. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (1693), 135. He acted first as interpreter for Buckingham and Charles, and in October 1622 was entrusted with a mission to Philip IV, his journey impeded by an injury sustained when his ship collided with another at Calais.74BL, HMC Trumbull TS, misc. xiv. 115; xxxvi. 81. Porter’s message from James I was that the Spanish king should intervene to restore his son-in-law, the elector palatine.75Trumbull TS, viii. 80; Howell, Epistolae, 159-61. From any viewpoint, Porter’s reception in Spain was not less than ambivalent, and he returned in January 1623 to give Charles and Buckingham an account of conditions for the marriage propounded by Gondomar, Philip’s ambassador to England. The following month, Porter helped arrange the incognito visit to Madrid of his masters, and shadowed their journey. His achievements in the long months of this futile expedition were to deepen his appreciation of fine art and to begin buying art on his own account, as well as to authorise payments for additions to the prince’s collection.76Howell, Epistolae, 161,164.

On his return in October 1623, Porter resumed his courtly duties, accompanying Charles in attendance on the royal progress. When Charles ascended the throne in March 1625, he was rewarded with the office of groom of the bedchamber, worth £500 a year for life.77Foedera viii. pt. 2, 23. There were five other grooms, but Porter seems to have enjoyed a position primus inter pares, because of his diplomatic skills and his valued advice to the new king on matters artistic. When in November 1625 Buckingham opened negotiations with the Dutch to fund a Protestant war in Europe, with England at its head, Porter carried the crown jewels to Holland to pledge them as security against a loan.78CSP Dom. 1625-26, pp. 149, 154, 553. From around 1625 Porter became active in helping anti-Calvinist clergy, such as John Cosin, the future bishop of Durham.79Correspondence of John Cosin (Surtees Soc.), i. 50, 95, 97, 99, 100, 106. When in May 1626 the 1st earl of Bristol (John Digby†) appeared before the Lords accused of treason, he denounced Buckingham’s role in the Spanish negotiations, and drew Porter into the net as one whose messages to Spain were intended to secure the conversion to Catholicism of the then prince of Wales. Porter himself was examined by the committee of the Lords, and presented evidence tending more to the vindication of Buckingham in the episode than of Bristol. He was to be cross-examined in Bristol’s defence when the Commons presented a remonstrance to the king expressing their suspicion of, and hostility towards, Buckingham, which precipitated the dissolution of Parliament.80Procs. 1626, i. 329, 513, 594, 595, 597-9, 602.

Porter was rewarded for his loyalty with a veritable shower of appointments, grants and lands which did not dry up when Buckingham, his erstwhile patron, was assassinated in August 1628. He played a leading part in behind-the-scenes diplomacy to create a peace with Spain, leaving England in September 1628 and returning on 21 December when he was shipwrecked at Burton in Dorset. He was accompanied by 30 Spanish officers and 100 soldiers, whose kitting-out, to the tune of £600, suggests that this was an important incident in an Anglo-Spanish rapprochement.81AO1/2132/1; CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 443, 444, 453; CSP Ven. 1628-9, pp. 466, 492, 515. His diplomatic career never subsequently flourished, however, although he presented the congratulations of the English king to the new Spanish regent at Brussels at the end of 1634, and participated in Charles’s negotiations between the fleets of Spain and the United Provinces in 1639.82CCSP i. 53; Strafforde Letters, i. 337; CSP Ven. 1632-36, p. 296; E.B. de Fonblanque, Lives of the Lords Strangford (1877), 60, 61, 67-70; CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 461, 1639-40, pp. 22, 24; Townshend, Life and Letters, 110-14.

Porter became a principal agent of the king’s in the development of his art collection, corresponding across Europe in pursuit of the choicest items.83W.N. Sainsbury, Original Pprs. Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1859), 203-5, 293, 311, 324-6, 352-3. He was an important arbiter of cultural taste at the court of Charles I, his interests extending beyond fine art into the politically more immediately controversial area of drama. He was a friend and supporter of William Davenant, and was prepared to cross swords with Sir Henry Herbert*, master of the revels, taking a liberal, ‘court’ line against the ‘opposition’, or at least morally censorious, standpoint of Herbert.84Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-1673 ed. J.Q. Adams (New Haven, 1917), 22. Sir Thomas Wentworth† thought highly of him, and wrote to Sir Edward Coke† that he would help Porter make all the profit he could from his Ulster grants.85Strafforde Letters, i. 249. Nevertheless, the portfolio of income-generating grants and projects held by Porter was dangerously dependent on the will of the king and the standing of the monarchy in the money markets, and the role as artistic agent must have involved the considerable personal expenditure that Porter later complained of.86CSP Dom. 1641-43, p. 256.

During the 1630s, despite the hostility Porter had attracted because of the scale of the gifts he had received, his finances were not as sound as they might have been; he mortgaged Alfarthing manor and his share of Streatley manor, and sold his post office patent, in which he had never in any case been an accountant to the exchequer.87CCC 1804; CSP Dom.1635-6, p. 355, 1636-7, p. 530, 1660-1, p. 298. Porter continued to be active in helping anti-Calvinist clergy with their promotion plans. He presented a petition to the king on behalf of Accepted Frewen, who became dean of Gloucester in 1631.88SP16/150 ff. 73, 74. His wife’s Catholicism became more strident towards the end of the decade, her association with the papal legate, George Con, producing a number of well-publicised death-bed conversions of close relatives of hers and Porter’s.89G. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome (1935), 208-10. Porter’s own position seems to have been that he wished to convert. Unlike Laud and some of those Arminian higher clergy whom he assisted at court, Porter really was sympathetic to Rome. He went so far as to discuss the matter with Con, but Cardinal Barberini was unhappy with any closet conversion that would allow Porter to continue to attend Charles in the royal chapel.90Add. 15390, ff. 99-100, 418, 502-3; Add. 15391, ff. 87, 123-4, 142; Albion, Court of Rome, 210-11. There the matter seems to have rested: Porter may have continued to make communion with the Church of England until his death.

Porter accompanied Charles on his northern expedition in March 1639, and when the Scots invaded England in August 1640, his son, Charles, was killed fighting for the king at Newburn.91HMC Middleton, 193; HMC Cowper, ii. 260. That autumn, Porter was implicated in a number of exposures of plots in which the activities of Con and the queen were laid bare.92Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1310. In this political climate Porter’s Spanish-influenced upbringing and service with Buckingham, his Catholic wife and his favoured status in the king’s household made him an object of extreme suspicion for the opposition to the government. It may seem surprising, given the rumours which were beginning to surround him, that he was even interested in a place in Parliament, but on 27 February he stood as a candidate for Westminster, a city in which he had been active in civic life for some time.93HEHL, EL 7825(2). He was unsuccessful, but later in the year, on 21 October, was able to secure election to the Long Parliament at Droitwich, Worcestershire, taking the place vacated by John Wylde, who became knight of the shire.94Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 48. No prior connection between Porter and the borough can be traced, but a probable link between them was Thomas Windsor, 6th Baron Windsor, of a family which enjoyed a close relationship, mediated through feasting and state visits, with the bailiffs and burgesses there.95Worcs. Archives, 261.4/ BA 1006/33/622. Lord Windsor had been second-in-command of the fleet which brought home the royal expedition to Spain in 1623, and may have shared Porter’s crypto-Catholic outlook.96W. Prynne, The Popish Royal Favorite (1643), 12 (E.251.9). Both their wives, living in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, were presented for recusancy in December 1640.97Mdx. County Records ed. Jeafferson, iii. 151. A further connection of Porter’s which would have brought him advantage when seeking election in Worcestershire was his friendship dating back at least ten years with Sir William Russell, sheriff of the county, who became embroiled in a dispute over the county seat.98CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 124, 254; de Fonblanque, Lives, 57-8. It is tempting to speculate that an attraction of a seat for Porter might even have been immunity from his creditors.

In the Long Parliament, Porter’s role was virtually pre-ordained. He was, as a member of the royal household, a natural ‘Straffordian’ in April 1641, although he took the Protestation on 5 May.99Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 248-9; CJ ii. 135b. He accompanied Charles to Scotland on his attempt to win over the Covenanters, and while in Scotland he sometimes assumed control of the broad seal of the kingdom, a point later made much of by his Scottish and English enemies.100CJ ii. 232a; [E. Bowles], The Mysterie of Iniquitie Yet Working (1643), 38 (E.76.25); William Prynne, Rome’s Master-peece (1643), 23 (E.249.32). In September 1641 Porter was gloomy about the prospects for peace in Charles’s kingdoms: ‘The public applause opposes monarchy and I fear this island before it be long will be a theatre of distractions’.101Eg. 2533 f. 207. In October, he was an observer of the unfolding of the Incident, a plot to kidnap the earl of Argyll [S.] (Archibald Campbell*) and the marquess of Hamilton [S.] (William Hamilton*), but did not view it as a help to the king’s cause, even if Charles himself was implicated in it.102Christ Church, Oxford, Evelyn MSS, Nicholas Box, Porter to Nicholas, 19 Oct. 1641. He was horrified at the possible consequences of the Irish rebellion, and the allegation that he was a party to Sir Phelim Roe O’Neill’s commission to incite the Irish to rebel was as groundless in fact as the commission itself.103Carte, Ormonde, ii. 256. A letter from Thomas Whyte in Dublin to Porter, read in the Commons on 3 December, brought alarming news of conditions in Ireland, and contributed to the deepening crisis in London.104Tanner Letters ed. C. McNeill (Dublin, 1943) 132; D’Ewes (C), 352. On 20 December Porter tried to arrest his deepening financial problems by petitioning the Lords for support against his tenants on the thousand acres of marshes in North Somercotes, who were withholding rents: even there, Porter felt sure, ‘certain ill-disposed persons’ were behind the rent strike.105PA, Main Pprs. 20 Dec. 1641; de Fonblanque, Lives, 73.

Charles’s abortive attempt on the Five Members in January 1642 led to the king’s departure in haste from London. Porter, who that month was removed from his position in the Westminster militia, was among his retinue. The undignified withdrawal was as much felt by the servant as by the master. Porter reflected in a letter to his wife on his lack of money, the risk to their property from crowd action and the uncertainty of their future. Porter was involved too deeply in the king’s affairs to be able to take any course other than the one he followed: ‘my duty and loyalty have taught me to follow my king and master, and by the grace of God nothing shall divert me from it’.106CSP Dom. 1641-43, p. 256.

From February 1642 Porter was identified by the Commons as being among those counsellors who should be removed from the presence of the king and queen.107CJ ii. 433b. Such was the notoriety he had acquired that the customs searchers in the port of London petitioned the Lords to complain that Porter and Archbishop Laud together had been interfering in their seizures of popish books and relics.108PA, Main Pprs. 15 Feb. 1642. Thereafter, Porter’s standing in Parliament was that of a suspected delinquent papist, although the Commons were slow to disable him from sitting, perhaps because of his potential as a link with the king.109CJ ii. 433b, 444b, 775b. On 18 April, Porter and another courtier, John Ashburnham*, were ordered to attend the House.110CJ ii. 533a. The king wrote to excuse their absence, and the Commons resolved to proceed against them for contempt if they had not appeared by 16 May.111CJ ii. 560b, CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 315. On 13 May, Porter wrote from York to the Speaker to tell him of his intention to stick with the king, ‘to whom I am bound by a solemn oath to serve and follow’.112Bodl. Nalson II, f. 41. On 30 May, the House shrank from declaring Porter and Ashburnham delinquents, and even the order of 9 June to arrest them was not carried out.113CJ ii. 594b, 614b, 626.

While other royalists who sat for constituencies in Worcestershire, including his fellow Droitwich member, Samuel Sandys, were expelled even before the war started, Porter survived as a Member until 10 March 1643. On that day, after correspondence of his with the earl of Newcastle (William Cavendish†), which contained libellous verses, was intercepted and read out in the Commons, he was disabled from sitting further.114HMC Portland i. 98; CJ ii. 997b; A Perfect Diurnall no. 39 (6 -13 Mar. 1643), sig. Qq3ii (E.246.42). On 31 May, William Prynne*, not yet an MP, searching through the papers of William Laud, discovered that in August 1640 Laud had been apprised of a Jesuit plot against the king. A papal agent working with Con had been sent by Cardinal Barberini, the head of foreign diplomacy in Rome, to England to construct the plot. The story had been given by this agent to Andreas ab Habernfeld, a Bohemian Protestant exile, who in turn had passed it on to Sir William Boswell, ambassador at The Hague, who became Laud’s informant. MPs were horrified at the implications of the plot, and no less outraged that Laud and the king had kept the elaborate details from them. The narrative of the plot was extensive, and the range of persons implicated, wide: an ‘Indian nut stuffed with most sharp poison’ was kept by the plotters, members of the Society of Jesus, who had arranged clandestine council meetings in various parts of the British Isles.115Prynne, Rome’s Master-peece, 19. In the long list of named contacts of the plotters, Porter was denounced as

most addicted to the popish religion ... a bitter enemy of the king ... he reveals all his greatest secrets to the Pope’s legate, although he very rarely meets with him. His wife meets him so much oftner …116Prynne, Rome’s Master-peece, 23.

In an account in which it is difficult to disentangle the informant’s words from Prynne’s gloss on them, it was further alleged that two of Porter’s sons were to benefit from their supposed imminent conversions to Catholicism: one to gain Porter’s office at court, another a cardinal’s hat. Porter was a patron of the Jesuits, but one whose movements were approved or countermanded by them as they thought fit for the advancement of their cause in England. Prynne’s account of the plot was ordered to be printed by Parliament. Although there was nothing very new or unpredictable about the revelations, they were startling enough to become a further step on the road by which the king’s crypto-Catholic associates became distanced from any possible future reconciliation with Parliament.117C. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1983), 157-62.

After Prynne had got hold of the Habernfeld plot, he continued to publish further denunciations of popery at court, and Porter was listed, even if no more evidence could be found against him.118Prynne, The Popish Royal Favorite, 56. Scottish and English commentators vied with each other to print the most veracious version of the popish plotting, and Porter, unlike his friend James Howell, did nothing to respond in his own defence.119[Bowles], The Mysterie of Iniquitie Yet Working, 15, 38; J. Howell, The Preheminence and Pedigree of Parliament (1644, E.253.2); Vindiciae Caroli Regis or a Loyall Vindication of the King in Answer to the Popish Royal Favorite (1644), 50-1 (E.257.4). As an attendant on the king, Porter was with Charles on the battlefields of Edgehill, Newbury, Cropredy and Naseby, but never acted in a military capacity: his commission as a colonel was purely nominal. He spent much of the war in Oxford with Charles, and was naturally a member of the Oxford Parliament, signing the letter to Parliament’s lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, asking him to sue for peace.120Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. Hostile newspapers reported his faction fighting with fellow royalists in Gloucestershire, and always emphasised his Spanish links (‘who dares oppose the Spanish faction?’) and his alleged Catholicism (‘one that is an inch thick of popery upon the rib’).121The True Informer no. 20 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1644), 148 (E.30.10); Mercurius &c no. 2 (31 Jan.-6 Feb. 1644), 10 (E.30.18); Mercurius Britanicus no. 22 (5-12 Feb. 1644), 174 (E.32.18). Another enemy commentator attributed to him in February 1644 an uncompromising view of the war, shot through with selfish acquisitiveness:

Hang peace, I will never give my consent to have peace and if the king condescends thereunto, I will get me where I may have my full table, my music, my wenches and my coach with 6 horses.122The Military Scribe no. 1 (20-27 Feb. 1644), 7-8 (E.34.16).

His main role at this time, however, was as general factotum to the king in his various schemes to widen and deepen the war. Thus, Porter was privy to the grandiose scheme of Edward Somerset, Lord Herbert (from 1645 earl of Glamorgan) to raise armies in Ireland, south Wales and the Low Countries, although he did not accompany Glamorgan on his ill-fated journey to Ireland.123CCSP i. 297 In August 1644, on campaign with the king in Cornwall, he wrote to James Butler, marquess of Ormond [I], expressing his view that Ormond’s help was crucial to Charles’s hopes of military success, and regretting that Ormond had not been given command in Ireland sooner. Porter, evidently feeling that royalist prospects were reaching a crisis point, hoped that God would deliver the king from his enemies, ‘as our blinded nation may see all their errors and harken to peace, which as yet they rashly despise’.124Bodl. Carte 12, f. 89. Porter never seems to have initiated any policy himself, however, and cannot be said to have been an important influence on the king’s thinking.

After the battle of Naseby (14 June 1645), where Porter’s own possessions were lost in the retreat, he left England for France on the king’s orders, taking with him letters to the queen.125CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 87. His reception there, as a former client of Buckingham’s and as a servant of the king’s rather than of the queen’s own, was at best lukewarm, and he wrote letters to Edward Nicholas† (the king’s secretary of state) and James Howell which suggest he was by this time ill and depressed.126Nicholas Pprs. i. 70-3; Howell, Epistolae, 431, 504-7, 514-5. His name continued to be on Parliament’s list of persons excepted from pardon, as made plain at the Uxbridge proposals of November 1644 and the Newcastle Propositions of July 1646: there seemed no route back.127LJ vii. 55a; CJ iii. 636a; iv. 356b. Moving on from Paris to Brussels, Porter at least there found more congenial exile company.128CCSP i. 434. He stayed there until after the execution of the king, writing letters home which tried bravely to keep royalists’ spirits up, while descanting on the iniquities of the parliamentarian army, and the equally untrustworthy Independents and Presbyterians.129Add 15858, ff. 114, 115; Eg. 2533 f. 410; Howell, Epistolae, 535-6. He returned to England to pay at first glance a surprisingly low fine of £222, but this was simply recognition that his personal fortune had disappeared, some of it in the king’s service, and that there were no reserves of wealth to be tapped.130CCC 1804.

Porter died in London, and was buried on 20 August 1649 at St Martin-in-the-Fields. No will has survived, although an extract thought to be from a will of 1639 has been printed.131de Fonblanque, Lives, 82. Porter’s eldest son, George, served Charles II as a groom of the bedchamber, on Endymion’s annuity of £500 a year. His youngest son served in the household of James II, going with him to St Germain in exile. George’s eldest daughter, Mary, married Philip Smythe†, 2nd Viscount Strangford [I], to produce descendants.132Townshend, Life and Letters, 250-1; Huxley, Endymion Porter, 306-9. None of the family sat subsequently in the House of Commons. Porter was above all a courtier, for whom service in Parliament was but a means of serving the king.