HOLBORNE, Robert (1598-1648), of Lincoln’s Inn, Mdx., and Great Piazza, Covent Garden, Westminster.

The MP’s father, described in 1615 as Nicholas Holborne of Chichester, was almost certainly the same man who became a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn in 1600, and who then specialised in Sussex business.17LI Admiss. i. 115, 172; W. Suss. RO, Add. MSS 13454, 13455, 13456. He was steward of the manor of Bosham, held by the Berkeley family, from before April 1616.18W. Suss. RO, Add. MSS 2277, 12671; SAS-B/479. The MP was probably intended from an early age to follow in his father’s footsteps, since he was sent first to Furnival’s Inn. He succeeded to the stewardship of Bosham after Nicholas’s death early in 1622, some months before being called to the bar.19LI Admiss. i. 172; LI Black Bks. ii. 238; Suss. Rec. Soc. xxix. 17. By the 1640s there was no sign that he had ever had a landed inheritance, and he seems to have relinquished his Sussex ties, if not necessarily also those with the Berkeleys.20VCH Suss. iv. 184; Suss. Rec. Soc. xx. 302; Coventry Docquets, 691. The considerable importance to him of finding a good marriage and advantageous patronage was evident from the horoscope he commissioned from Nicholas Fiske and William Lilly, perhaps in 1633. He was ‘so great a lover of astrology (having it seems experienced the truth thereof in himself)’ that he gave Fiske £100.21Gadbury, Collectio geniturarum, 124; Bodl. Ashmole 391, ff. 25-41.

Prognostications appear to have been only moderately helpful. Holborne’s wife, whom he married sometime in the later 1630s, had aristocratic forebears, being one of the daughters of Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, 1st earl of Leicester. But Anne and her sisters, the surviving offspring of Dudley and his first wife, Lady Alice (née Leigh), were involved in a long-running attempt to secure their inheritance following their abandonment by their father. In 1605 he had left his estates in England, possession of which was already contested by Leicester’s legitimate heirs male, and, having divorced their mother, had married a second wife, converted to Catholicism and settled in Florence. Litigation continued to 1655 and during Holborne’s lifetime Anne could only bring him a disputed interest in Warwickshire lands worth about £80 a year.22SP23/91/536; Warws. RO, CR1841/42; VCH Warws. vi. 126; ‘Dudley, Sir Robert’, Oxford DNB; CP (dukedom of Dudley).

Holborne was more successful in his professional life. During the 1630s his reputation was made by participation in a series of high profile cases which established him as a critic of aspects of Charles I’s personal rule.23e.g. Suss. Rec. Soc. xx. 302. In 1633 he joined Lincoln’s Inn colleagues William Lenthall* and Edward Atkins in defending the feoffees for impropriations – the group who, inspired by the Inn’s preacher John Preston, had raised and deployed money to encourage godly preaching – when they were prosecuted by the crown in the exchequer court. Holborne argued that they had not usurped royal power in making ecclesiastical ordinances, although it was perhaps indicative of the turn his thinking would take in future that he conceded that they might have erred, if unintentionally.24E.W. Kirby, ‘The Lay Feoffees: a study in militant Puritanism’, JMH xiv. 18. The following year he was among the counsel for William Prynne* when he was charged with libel in the court of star chamber.25Rushworth, Hist. Collns. ii. 229. Most notably, in the Michaelmas term of 1637 he joined Oliver St John* in defending John Hampden* in the Ship Money case. Here his arguments, as Archbishop William Laud reported, were ‘very bold’.26HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 117, 136; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 540; Laud, Works, vii. 397; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. ii. 590-1; Strafforde Letters, 130, 140. Called to the bench of his inn in November 1639, his services were in demand.27LI Black Bks. ii. 354; HMC 4th Rep. 26; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 549; 1640-1, p. 344. He could also afford to take up residence in the new Great Piazza at Covent Garden.28Survey of London xxxvi. 96-97.

All these factors doubtless contributed to his candidature for Westminster in the election which took place there on 27 February 1640.29Add. 11045, ff. 73v, 97, 101v. One observer thought he was one of the two who ‘will carry it because they have least relation to the court, for the stream runs that way’. However, Holborne was to be disappointed. He ‘protested’ against the return of John Glynne* and William Bell* but received the apparently unexpected consolation prize of election of a somewhat less prestigious seat at Southwark.30HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 235, 236. There he was proposed by Thomas Savile†, Viscount Savile, a long-standing antagonist of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, Charles I’s chief minister in Ireland. Savile was reported to have told local people ‘to nominate them to choose Mr Holborne burgess, that [he] did always oppose the king, the Ship Money and all monopolies whatever’. Such was Holborne’s reputation that he was elected in the senior seat, ‘he not being present nor so much as seeking for it’.31Add. 11045, ff. 97, 101v.

Holborne duly played a prominent part in the pursuit of grievances in what became known as the Short Parliament, although eventually his contribution took an unexpected turn. Placed on the committee for privileges (16 Apr.), he proposed evading the king’s command to the Commons to adjourn their unpalatable proceedings and attend him in the Lords (20 Apr.), explaining that ‘the king did not adjourn actually: if he can adjourn it must be in person in both the Houses ... we ought to preserve our right by our claim’.32CJ ii. 4a; Aston’s Diary, 20. Among three committee appointments on 21 April, he was first on the list of nominations to view the commission which had been granted to the Convocation of the clergy.33CJ ii. 8a, 8b. Reporting the following day, he could only give ‘an imperfect account’, since the commission had not been obtained; he noted that it had been issued ‘not by ordinary way of privy seal but immediate warrant from the king’, but without further information he did not see how it was possible to debate how far its canons might be binding.34Procs. 1640, 168; Aston’s Diary, 30-1, 33. He was again named first to a committee to prepare for a conference with the Lords on the prevention of religious innovation thought likely to emanate from Convocation, occupying a similar position when its remit was widened the next day (23 Apr.).35CJ ii. 9b, 10a. At last on the 24th he conveyed to the Commons the good news that, through the agency of the lord keeper, John Finch†, Baron Finch, he had secured a copy of the commission.36CJ ii. 11b, 12a; Aston’s Diary, 50.

This might have raised a suspicion in the minds of some MPs. Not only was Finch the judge who, in various notable cases including Hampden’s, had browbeaten his colleagues into taking a hard-line in asserting royal prerogative, but he was also now attempting to steer the Lords, and through them the Commons, in the same direction. On 27 April, with a joint conference in prospect, Holborne endorsed Sir Walter Erle* and John Pym* when they attacked peers’ interference, and particularly Finch’s directives on granting subsidies: he agreed that the Commons should maintain its privilege of independence and that subsidies were its free gift.37Procs. 1640, 179; Aston’s Diary, 69-70. Thereafter, however, his path diverged somewhat – admitting the possibility of hidden dealings with the government. When on the 29th the three men reported different aspects of the conference, Pym advised MPs to be bold and identify grievances as ‘crimes’ but Holborne expressed ‘a contrary opinion’, asserting that to do so was dangerous.38Procs. 1640, 181; Aston’s Diary, 87, 94. A member of the committee set up to assemble material related to Ship Money and tonnage and poundage, he was despatched with St John to retrieve from the judges documents relating to the Hampden case (30 Apr.).39CJ ii. 8a, 17a. The account of his remarks on the legality of the imposition in the House that day suggests obfuscation rather than outright condemnation.40Procs. 1640, 106. His contribution to the grand committee which on 2 May debated the king’s offer to relinquish Ship Money in return for the voting of 12 subsidies could be read as ambiguous. In observing that ‘some of the judges’ had ruled that ‘Ship Money was such a prerogative so incident to the Crowne, that an act of parliament could not take it away’, did he mean simply to oppose what would prove a fruitless attempt to abolish a grievance, or did he mean to assert that the crown possessed this right after all?41Procs. 1640, 194, 208; Aston’s Diary, 130.

Following the dissolution of the Parliament there was obviously a conviction in some quarters that Holborne was drawing closer to the court. On 30 July 1640 a correspondent of Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester, informed him that Holborne was being ‘spoken of for solicitor[-general], which will be a great rise for him’. This might ‘prove but talk’, but it appeared well-grounded.42HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 309. As the lawsuit over the inheritance of Anne Holborne and her sisters went through a period of particular intensity that summer, drawing in the earl (as Dudley’s cousin and the legitimate male heir of the Elizabethan favourite), Holborne could call on impressive support. Leicester was told that Holborne’s

counsel ... were men accounted powerful favourites: first Mr Solicitor Herbert, who did the whole work with all his skill, then Sir Nathaniel Finch, my Lord Keeper’s brother, then Mr Morgan, his nephew, Mr Hearne and Mr Fountayne, great chancery men.43HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 285, 293, 296, 305-6.

Little progress was made in asserting Lady Anne’s claims, but Holborne’s new connections and a transformed outlook were evident when he belatedly entered Parliament that autumn. He was brought in for the Cornish borough of Mitchell, where the Arundells of Trerice had an interest, only after John Arundell I* (briefly a member of Lincoln’s Inn) opted on 9 November to sit for Bodmin.44CJ ii. 23a. Holborne’s first committee appointment on 9 December, more or less on his arrival, was on familiar territory – to investigate Convocation and in particular its proceedings in the absence of a parliament – but he took an unfamiliar position, albeit one perhaps pre-meditated by some of his supporters.45CJ ii. 48a. As Pym hastened on 14 December to declare the Canons issued by Convocation unlawful, Holborne signalled his intention to put the opposite case but moved to defer debate, probably to give himself more time to marshal his arguments.46Northcote diary, 63; Procs. LP i. 591, 598; HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 349

The next morning – seeking, according to sympathetic observer Geoffrey Palmer*, to ‘balance himself equally between both church and commonwealth’ as a servant of the former and a child of the latter – he launched into a two-hour defence of the Canons, bolstered by frequent reference to precedent.47Procs. LP i. 606; HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 349. There were canons made ‘many hundred years ago of which there was never had any confirmation in Parliament’; although Convocation could not ‘make canons to bind a subject contrary to law’, it was in its power ‘to make canons to bind with royal assent’ and to ‘do somewhat’ to bind the laity as well as the clergy.48Procs. LP i. 603, 606, 611; Northcote Diary, 67. The king’s authority was sufficient to call a Convocation outside Parliament, as it had proved in the past, thus the meetings of 1640 were entirely legitimate.49Procs. LP, i. 603, 607, 612. Examining the Canons individually, Holborne conceded that ‘some may be good, some bad’ and even that some might be ‘dangerous’; a particular reservation was that one provision seemed to be ‘meddling too much with the powers of kings’. But he insisted that they should not be condemned wholesale and ‘laid by’, at least until the clergy had had an opportunity to explain their intention.50Procs. LP i. 603, 608, 611-13; Northcote diary, 69.

In some quarters Holborne’s speech was received with astonishment. Sir John Wray*, evidently surprised that he had such an interest in ecclesiastical matters and perhaps even hoping to unmask him as a closet Catholic, asked where and when he had last received communion. He answered that he was ‘a due receiver ... at his parish, but not since the Parliament’, which if it sounded half-hearted to some, was hardly compromising.51Northcote diary, 69. But his arguments were found unconvincing – Leicester’s informant, who thought them effectively dismissed by St John, considered Holborne ‘beaten with his own allegations’ – and the Canons were declared void.52HMC De Lisle and Dudley, vi. 349; Procs. LP i. 622. Holborne risked further hostility on the 21st when the House discussed accusations levelled at Lord Keeper Finch. Simonds D’Ewes recorded that he ‘spoke to most of those four offences’ the previous speaker had addressed, ‘and showed them to be treason’, but a more detailed account suggested otherwise.53Procs. LP ii. 6. According to the latter, Holborne proposed that Finch had in his judgements on Ship Money and forests perverted rather than subverted the laws; not only was this a lesser offence, but if committed in error, it was ‘no great crime’.54Northcote diary, 99.

Such visible defiance of those driving proceedings in the House may explain why Holborne received no further committee appointments until late April 1641. D’Ewes granted him the accolade of ‘learned lawyer’ for his support in declaring void the election at Salisbury of puritan activists John Dove* and John Ivie (3 Mar.), but the matter again revealed his pro-government sympathies.55Procs LP, ii. 613, 617. These did no harm to his professional life and to his relations with some in the upper chamber. On 11 December he had been permitted to act as counsel in the Lords, and although ‘some disliked’ this concession, from time to time it was extended to him again.56Procs. LP, i. 565; CJ ii. 78a, 90b, 121a, 183b, 221b.

Consistently, Holborne also opposed committal of the London petition against episcopacy (8 Feb. 1641).57Procs LP, ii. 392. As the House considered the evidence presented in the trial of crown servant Strafford (15 Apr.), contrary to what Lord Savile might have anticipated four months earlier, Holborne made a lengthy speech in which he ‘went over many articles and argued as strongly on the earl of Strafford’s side as his counsel could have done, and would have enforced that most of them were not proved’.58Procs. LP ii. 569, 573. Four days later, when the Commons declared Strafford a traitor, Holborne tried to demonstrate that Parliament did not possess the appropriate power.59Procs. LP iv. 10; Verney, Notes, 55. On 21 April he was duly among the small minority who voted against the earl’s attainder.60Verney, Notes, 58; Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. None the less, on the 26th he received what was only his second committee nomination of the Parliament, perhaps prompted by those alarmed at continuing attacks on the church who thought he would be a curbing influence when MPs discussed the punishment of members of the late Convocation.61CJ ii. 129a.

Holborne made the Protestation promptly on 3 May.62CJ ii. 133a. On 26 June he was among lawyers appointed to manage a conference with the Lords on the bills abolishing the courts of star chamber and high commission; in the cross-section of opinion represented, he may well be grouped with Edward Bagshawe* (with whom he supplied counsel in the Lords on the 23rd) and Edward Hyde*, whose increasing identification with the defence of the royal prerogative in many ways mirrored his own.63CJ ii. 183b, 189b. When in July the ‘army plot’ was revealed and suspects identified, Holborne appeared sceptical, seeking the production not just of the examination transcripts but of the witnesses themselves.64Procs. LP vi. 84. When it was debated on 12 August, he and John Selden* ‘argued very earnestly’ that the conspiracy constituted ‘no treason at common law’. For it to be so required a military force directed ‘to destroy the king’s person’, with or without an assault on Parliament; ‘to intend [only] to bring an army up against the two Houses or either of them was not treason’.65Procs. LP vi. 376, 383-4; Verney, Notes, 118.

Following the reassembly of the House in October after the recess, Holborne was perceived with Hyde to be one of the ‘champions in maintenance’ of the royal prerogative.66D’Ewes (C), 47n. Like Bagshawe he was doubtless a nominee of the king’s friends to the committee appointed on 13 November to consider the ‘plea and demurrer’ of the bishops, resisting moves to exclude them from the Lords.67CJ ii. 314b. Hearing him embark on a justification of the bishops in the Commons that day, D’Ewes delayed his own departure from the chamber in order to take notes and respond. When his turn came, he recalled Holborne’s habitual thoroughness in searching ‘to the depth of the points in the case’ at moots. On this occasion, said D’Ewes, his fellow lawyer ‘so strongly maintained’ the bishops’ arguments that ‘he could not have performed it more exactly if himself had drawn them [up]’. At this, D’Ewes continued

all the House laughed so long as [i.e. that] I was fain to remain silent a good while, for I believe many ... did suspect as well as myself that either ... Mr Holborne had wholly drawn them or at least had given his assistance therein.68D’Ewes (C), 134-5.

It can have come as no surprise the next month when Holborne stood up after Hyde to assert the bishops’ protest. Although ‘we must submit to a law when it is passed’, there was a risk in silent acquiescence: ‘we shall be involved, and perhaps lose our heads in a crowd when there is nothing to show who was innocent’. ‘A Parliament’, he explained, ‘may do a thing unlawful, as to change our religion ... and then we are bound to ask leave to protest against it’.69Verney, Notes, 136.

Chosen Lent reader at Lincoln’s Inn in February 1642, Holborne provocatively chose to address 23 Edward III c.2, the Statute of Treasons.70LI Black Bks. ii. 359. It was clearly a subject he had been pondering for some time, but to persist with it in the wake of Charles I’s confrontation with Parliament and withdrawal from London the previous month was to sail in dangerous waters. As he had done six months earlier, he defined high treason as a violent and intentional conspiracy against the king and his officers of justice. With an eye (surely) to the current parliamentary debates over control of the militia, he observed that ‘conspiring to levy war is ... treason within this law’, for ‘although it be not in the words of the statute, but yet it is within the meaning and reason of the statute, for how is it possible for any to levy war, but he must conspire the death of the king, or his deposition?’ Furthermore, killing officers of the king was also treason under this law.71R. Holborne, The Reading in Lincolnes-Inne (1643), 1-2, 5-6, 10 (E.246.14). Such reasoning was found sufficiently effective as propaganda to be published from the royalist capital at Oxford a year later.

This revelation of Holborne’s sympathies did not yet serve to sever his association with the Commons. On 29 March he was among the lawyers chosen to manage the trial of Judge Bartlett, and on 30 April and 12 May he once again called on to give counsel and be examined in the Lords.72CJ ii. 504a, 549b, 567b. On 11 August, however, with Hyde (who by early June had abandoned Westminster for the king’s headquarters at York) and two others he was disabled from sitting in Parliament.73CJ ii. 715a. Five days later the House ordered that plate belonging to him be detained.74CJ ii. 722a. Although, unlike Hyde, he escaped exception from the invitation to return to Parliament issued on 21 September, he was permanently excluded on 22 January.75Add. 18777, f. 7a; CJ iii. 374a.

Holborne probably arrived in Oxford with the king at the end of October, since he was created MA on 1 November.76Al. Ox. His reading was printed by a city press the following February.77R. Holborne, The Reading in Lincolnes-Inne (1643), title page (E.246.14). By early 1644, when he sat in the Parliament there, he was riding high in the king’s favour. Knighted that January, in February he was made attorney-general to Charles, Prince of Wales, and a Doctor of Civil Law.78Shaw, Knights of Eng., ii. 217; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 11; Wood. Fasti, ii. 45. Three months later, and nearly 40 years after the departure of her erstwhile husband, Holborne’s long-suffering mother-in-law, who was also in Oxford, was created Duchess Dudley for life, while her surviving daughters, Katherine Leveson and Anne Holborne, were granted the titles and precedencies of dukes’ daughters.79CP. According to Anthony Wood, Holborne was in the royalist party attending the peace negotiations at Uxbridge in 1645.80Wood, Fasti, ii. 45.

Some time that year Anthony Withers of Queen Street, Covent Garden, was charged with concealing Holborne’s goods and holding correspondence with Oxford.81CCAM 503. As the case unfolded, in January 1646 Lady Anne Holborne was examined in London in relation to a similar charge against Joseph Fludd.82SP16/539/3, f. 135. On 4 February she was ordered to depart from Parliament’s quarters on pain of being proceeded against as a spy.83CCAM 53. Precisely what lay behind these allegations is difficult to determine. Holborne himself was in Oxford at the time of its surrender in June 1646, and on 3 December, when he was described as being of Covent Garden, compounded on the Oxford articles.84CCC 1586. As indicated previously, his visible assets were modest and he was fined at one tenth or £95, but suspicion that he had hidden property outlived him.85SP23/91/536; Warws. RO, CR1841/42; VCH Warws. vi. 126; CCC 1586, 2208.

Apparently forbidden to reside in the inns of court, Holborne probably spent his last months in Westminster, but when he died in February 1648 he was buried in Lincoln’s Inn chapel.86Wood, Fasti, ii. 45; Bodl. Ashmole 394, f. 44. In April 1649 Lady Anne was permitted to ‘make her title’ to hangings and goods remaining in her late husband’s former chamber.87LI Black Bks. ii. 381. His edition of William Tothill’s The Transactions of the High Court of Chancery was published a few weeks later.88E.1292.1. Lady Anne outlived the Restoration and left over £1,700 in legacies.89PROB11/312/122. The couple had no surviving children and no close kin of Holborne sat in Parliament.