William Pole could trace his family back nine generations to ancestors from Cheshire, but another branch of the Poles had been seated at Ford, in Musbury, Devon since the Conquest. Pole’s grandfather was the antiquary Sir William Pole, who rebuilt Colcombe Castle, which stood on two manors once owned by the Courtenay family of Powderham.9Prince, Worthies (1701), 505. Like Sir William, his son, Sir John Pole, was ‘much addicted’ to local history, and made additions to Sir William’s The Description of Devon, but these were to be lost during the civil war.10Prince, Worthies, 505-6. Sir John served briefly in Parliament in 1626, having succeeded his brother-in-law, Francis Courtenay as knight of the shire. Pole then became a conscientious Devon magistrate and sheriff, doing his best to collect Ship Money despite his personal antipathy towards it.11HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Pole’. The Pole family took an interest in colonial enterprises during the 1620s. Two of Sir John Pole’s siblings apparently emigrated to New England during the life of the ultimately unsuccessful Dorchester Company.12F. Rose-Troup, John White (1930), 458.
William Pole was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1616 when he was not much over a year old, doubtless a deliberate gesture of paternal pride in both son and alma mater. He was married at 18 to the daughter of Sir Thomas Trenchard*, but the marriage soon ended with the death of Grace, his wife. Pole quickly remarried, into the St. Barbe family of Ashington, Somerset. Of the six children from this marriage, only the four daughters were still living by August 1653.13PROB11/233/250. William Pole seems to have played no part in local government until his election to Parliament in 1640, but this is unsurprising, given the prominence of his father. It is said that among Sir John Pole’s achievements was the recovery of Honiton’s right of sending burgesses to Parliament, but direct evidence of his involvement in this seems hard to locate, and the Victorian source for it does not inspire confidence.14A. Farquharson, Hist. Honiton (Exeter, ?1868), 37. Even before 1640, William Pole was borrowing money, albeit a small sum, from a local yeoman, which remained unpaid three years after Pole had died.15PROB11/233/250.
Pole was returned to the Long Parliament, on the interest of his family, after Honiton had recovered its franchise. He made hardly any impact on it at all, and it was certainly not for his record of usefulness in Parliament that he was knighted by the king on 19 April 1641. He was not noticed by the Journal clerk until a few weeks after this, on 3 May, when he took the Protestation.16CJ ii. 133a. Not until February 1642 did he make another appearance, on this occasion when with the much more senior, but reluctant, Edward Hyde* he was required to visit the king to express Parliament’s wish that Charles should not take personal custody of the prince of Wales (24 Feb.). It was Hyde who reported back that at Canterbury, when Pole, Charles Howard*, Viscount Andover, and he had given the king their message, the latter had charged them with taking one of his own to both Houses. When they failed to take it to Westminster by the king’s stipulated time, they had had to return, and Andover had been given a replacement message to take to the Lords (28 Feb).17PJ i. 449, 456, 479.
This episode of ineffective errand-running was Pole’s last recorded service in Parliament. He continued to attend the House, however. On 24 May 1642, he wrote his father a letter full of news, describing the contest over the militia as ‘the main affair of this kingdom in our hands’. He reported how it was ‘feared’ that the king’s appointment of deputy lieutenants in Yorkshire would be repeated for other counties, but predicted that such an event would be achieved ‘with more authority’ than Parliament's militia ordinance, passed ‘by a late strange accident here’. Pole went on to describe how the lord keeper, Baron Lyttelton (Edward Littleton†), ‘whom we very much confided in’, had decamped to York, taking the great seal; and how the prevailing notion that an accommodation needed to be reached with king was ‘not universally relished’. Pole also conveyed bad news to his father about the ‘daily exigencies and difficulties’ of supplying the expeditionary force in Ireland, and concluded that by trusting that God, ‘the supreme disposer’, would ‘turn all fears to the best’.18Antony House, Carew-Pole PC/G4/9/20.
Pole’s scepticism towards the militia ordinance, his revelation that he was a confidant of the lord keeper, his insight that not everyone wanted a settlement with the king, are all pointers towards his sympathies with the embattled monarch. Whether the recipient of the letter, his father, was able to reach similar conclusions about Pole is not known. When civil war broke out in England, Pole was named as a commissioner of array, as was his father, but the latter was dropped from the commission of the peace in January 1643 and was named thereafter to parliamentarian Devon committees only.19HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Pole’. Sir John was active in the cause of Parliament, and led his own soldiers against the royalists at Modbury in February 1643.20M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1997), 220. He later confessed that it was to his ‘great grief’ that William Pole took up arms for the king. Quite where and how Pole served the king in arms is not known. He seems not to have had his own regiment, and none of the old soldiers of Devon, wounded in the civil wars and petitioning for maintenance after 1660, cited service under him. His brother, Sir Courtenay Pole, probably served as a captain in the horse regiment of Sir John Hele.21A List of Officers claiming to the Sixty Thousand Pounds, col. 65. Hele was related by marriage to the Courtenays of Powderham, which doubtless explains Sir Courtenay Pole’s choice of regiment.22HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir Courtenay Pole’; Prince, Worthies (1701), 401. Sir William Pole may well have served under Hele, too, for the same reason, but no evidence has been found to confirm this. After Pole’s death, an informer came forward to say he had supplied him with a horse in 1643 or 1644 for use in the king’s army.23CCC 2307.
Wherever Pole served, the House of Commons was in no doubt by the summer of 1643 that he was ‘in actual war against Parliament’, and on 24 June disabled him from sitting further in it. It also identified a sum of £2,500 in the hands of Sir Thomas Trenchard, Pole’s father-in-law in his first marriage, which was payable to him. That the Commons chose at this point to target the insolvent Trenchard suggests strongly that this was a punishment to be visited on the neutralist, or lukewarm parliamentarian, Trenchard, as well as upon the royalist Pole.24CJ iii. 142b. The money was sequestered for military purposes. Pole ignored the ruling of the Westminster Parliament, however, and turned up at the king’s rival assembly at Oxford in January 1644.25Names of the Lords and Commissioners Assembled (1644), 7 (E.32.3). He must have been at Exeter when it surrendered to the New Model army in April 1646, because he was able to plead the articles of surrender when negotiating his case with the agencies of penal taxation. Even before then, on 29 December 1645, the Committee for Advance of Money assessed him at £1500, and an order was made for him to be brought in custody to London. After the fall of Exeter, the Committee for Compounding moved against him, and fined him £1142, at a tenth of his estimated income (7 Aug. 1646).26CCAM 667. In 1647, he petitioned to be allowed further time to argue for clemency, claiming lameness as a reason for delays in attending to his affairs.27CCAM 667. In March 1648 he was included in a list of individuals who had compounded for their estates.28CCC 86.
No more is heard of Pole, who died in January 1649, probably in Colyton, during the trial of the king he had tried to serve. Six months after his death, an order was made that his estate should be seized.29CCAM 667. His widow tried to pay a fine on the debt owed Pole’s estate by Trenchard, claiming that it was the only likely source of income she could identify, and that individuals who had stood surety to her late husband were also now in serious financial trouble because this debt had not been paid.30CCC 1314. The estate was still being targeted by local agents of the republican government as late as January 1652.31CCC 537. After the death of Pole’s widow, Catherine, some time before late August 1653, Sir William Pole’s grandmother, Lady Jane Pole, was still trying to recover a debt owed her by her grandson since 1645. Pole had previously borrowed £200 in 1641 from a local gentleman, William Putt, but also a small sum of £20 in 1639 from a yeoman, suggesting not only that Pole’s indebtedness had been of long duration, but also that it begun before the civil war.32PROB11/233/250. Pole died leaving only daughters, and his younger brother, Sir Courtenay Pole, became head of the family after Sir John died in 1658. Sir Courtenay sat for Honiton in 1661, and his son, John Pole, sat in six Parliaments from 1685.33HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Courtenay Pole’, ‘John Pole’.