SMALMAN, William (aft. 1603-43), of Kinnersley Castle, Herefs.

The Smalman family was established at Wilderhope in Shropshire by the sixteenth century, and recorded as gentry by the heralds in their visitation of that county in 1623.6Vis. Salop 1623 (Harl. Soc. xxix), 438. But William Smalman’s great-grandfather is said by an authoritative nineteenth-century antiquary to have acquired property at Elton, Herefordshire, and the family was certainly at Kinnersley by 1616.7Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 164. William’s father, Francis Smalman, combined the life of a Herefordshire squire with that of a London businessman, acquiring the rebuilt Kinnersley Castle but marrying twice with widows of London merchants. Francis Smalman was a Herefordshire justice, subsidy commissioner and sheriff, and served as Member for Leominster in 1621. He owed his seat to the Coningsby family of Hampton Court, and his eldest son by his first marriage, also Francis, married Catherine Coningsby, sister of Fitzwilliam Coningsby*. When Francis Smalman junior predeceased his father, followed to the grave shortly afterwards by his wife, administration of Catherine’s estate was granted to her brother, Fitzwilliam, rather than to Francis Smalman senior or his younger son, William, but this does not seem to have marked any breach in the links between the Smalmans and the Coningsbys: subsequently William Smalman acted in public life in close association with his more eminent uncle.8PROB6/14A, p. 134.

Despite both his parents’ London, mercantile links, William Smalman (who rendered his name thus) appears to have been bred as a member of the county gentry, attending Oxford University and staying there long enough to graduate in 1630.9Add. 70086, undated petition on bill for £400,000, May 1642. Shortly afterwards he was married in London to Lucy Whitney, daughter of Sir Robert Whitney of Whitney and Pencomb, a family as illustrious in Herefordshire as that of Coningsby, further evidence of the capacity of the Smalmans to make advantageous marriages. After the death of his father in 1633, William Smalman began to appear in the commission of the peace, but seems to have taken no particular interest in county administration. In the late 1630s, he appears to have borrowed heavily from Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester, to the tune of £6,000, suggesting that the family’s entry to the ranks of the county gentry was not achieved on the strength of its own finances.10CCAM 208. He was elected to sit for Leominster, his father’s old seat, in the Short Parliament of 1640, presumably on the Coningsby interest, but seems to have made no impact on its proceedings. His fellow burgess, Walter Kyrle, was associated with both Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Pye*, and was thus better placed than Smalman to retain a seat when Sampson Eure decided to sit, capitalising on his own interest in the borough. Thus, when elections were held for the second Parliament of 1640, Smalman found himself without a seat.

The termination of his brief parliamentary career did not mark the end of Smalman’s interest in public affairs. In February 1642, he was reported to have turned out in response to an order from Parliament to secure the county’s powder magazine, but this was not an indication that he was to be regarded as sympathetic to Parliament’s cause.11Add. 70003, f. 204. The following month, he was one of a group of nine Herefordshire county gentry who wrote to their knights of the shire to express their disapproval of the radical drift of reforming policy in Parliament. They had been provoked by the despatch to the county, for mass signatures, of Parliament’s Protestation in defence of the Protestant religion, the king’s authority and parliamentary privileges. They supervised the taking of the Protestation in the Herefordshire boroughs, but expressed their doubts to their MPs whether it could be anything other than a voluntary assent. Smalman was joined in this letter by his kinsman and probable patron, Fitzwilliam Coningsby, and by others who were to form the core of the royalist party in Herefordshire in the civil war: Wallop Brabazon, William Croft†, and Thomas Price. Their criticisms of the Protestation must have been made in the full knowledge that one of its principal authors was Sir Robert Harley, one of the knights of the shire. Their letter concluded with a manifesto for an alternative approach to political reform, one based on coupling a purge of popish ceremonies in the church with enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer, a drive against Protestant sectaries and a bill for more orderly parliamentary elections: presumably implying their wish for a new Parliament.12Add. 70003, ff. 227-8v.

The nine gentry, who were soon to acquire the sobriquet, ‘The Nine Worthies’, wrote again to Harley and Humphrey Coningsby* on 28 April, although Coningsby’s name appeared merely for form’s sake, as he did not in any practical way support the real driver of reform, Harley. Their second letter was an even blunter expression of what they considered the will of the shire. Against the alarmist tone of Parliament’s public pronouncements, they asserted that there was no threat from foreigners or from papists, and were optimistic that Protestants in rebellion-torn Ireland could be protected. They looked forward to the treaty with the belligerent Scots and to the king’s acquiring tonnage and poundage for life, laying at Parliament’s doors the delays in achieving both these schemes.13Add. 70003, ff. 238-9. The key principles of their approach – a defence of the episcopal Church of England, recognition of the king’s constitutional primacy, the maintaining of trust in the king, and the need to guard against Parliament’s encroaching on the king’s prerogative – informed a pamphlet, A Declaration, or Resolution, of the County of Hereford, published towards the end of June. As one of the Nine Worthies, Smalman was almost certainly an author or promoter of it.14A Declaration, or Resolution, of the County of Hereford, (1642), in Webb, Memorials, ii. 343-4.

The Nine Worthies were said to be behind the disruption of the Hereford assizes in August 1642, when a mob crying up the king and damning the ‘roundheads’ intimidated the gentry in attendance, including Walter Kyrle and William Crowther*.15Harl. 7189, f. 241v. Inevitably, Smalman was named as a commissioner of array for the king in the summer of 1642, as was his father-in-law, Sir Robert Whitney, lieutenant to John Scudamore†, Viscount Scudamore [I] in the county troop.16Northants RO, FH133, unfol.; I. Atherton, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: the career of John, first Viscount Scudamore (Manchester, 1999), 224-5. Immediately after the commission had been received, Smalman was reported to be out in the Herefordshire countryside, raising soldiers for the king.17Add. 70110, f. 71. It does not seem likely that he ever took a military commission himself, but Brilliana Harley described how Smalman continued to operate as a royalist commissioner of array in June 1643, having evaded capture during the short-lived occupation of Hereford by Sir William Waller* in April.18J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 168. In July, Smalman, Sir Walter Pye and Henry Lingen summoned Brampton Bryan Castle, held by Brilliana Harley in the absence at Westminster of her husband, Sir Robert. In their approach to the castle they were involved in an incident at Leominster, in which it was said that a blind man was killed by them for professing loyalty both to king and Parliament, and Brilliana reported how they took her flock of sheep.19HMC Bath, i. 7, 8, 11, 22; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 169-75. Smalman and his colleagues threatened her with dire consequences if she refused to surrender, citing the ill-treatment of Catherine Stuart, widow of George Stuart, 9th seigneur of Aubigny (killed at Edgehill), as a precedent.

Upon these terms if your ladyship should be obstinate we cannot promise and expect those conditions for you that are fit for your quality, especially my Lady Aubigny having been so ill-treated by the Parliament, neither any quarter for those that are with you, who further must look for all extremity upon their families and substance forthwith.20HMC Bath, i. 8.

Brilliana met this threat calmly and with dignity, and Smalman’s party sat down for a long siege, which lasted for six weeks, being resumed in the spring of 1644. Presumably Smalman stayed at home during the first siege, contributing towards the efforts of the besiegers. But this was to be his last action on behalf of the king, as he died in September 1643 and was buried at Kinnersley. Inevitably, his estate attracted the attention of the agencies of penal taxation after Herefordshire came under parliamentarian control from December 1645, in the context of the pursuit of the earl of Worcester’s estate. Smalman’s debt to Worcester attracted the interest of both informers and committeemen.21CCAM 208-9; CCC 1784. Smalman’s son-in-law, James Pytts†, sat in three Parliaments from 1660.22HP Common, 1660-1690. His widow married John Booth of York, a royalist captain; the daughter of John and Lucy Booth married John Dutton Colt†, who sat for Leominster in seven Parliaments as a resolute opponent of James II.23HP Commons 1660-1690.