POLWHELE, John (1607-72), of Treworgan, St Erme, Cornw.

The Polwheles were an ancient Cornish family, claiming descent from Drogo Polwhele, chamberlain to Queen Matilda, who was granted lands in Cornwall in 1140. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries this lineage, and the social status that went with it, may have compensated for the family’s relatively modest wealth, as Thomas Polwhele was able to secure a prestigious marriage with a daughter of the Devon landowner and judge Sir John Glanville.10Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 376-7. The Polwheles were also related to leading Cornish families like the Godolphins, the Vyvyans and the Launces.11Vis. Devon, 1620, 130; PROB11/356/6. Thomas was clearly on good terms with the duchy of Cornwall, and as well as holding various leases and other privileges, he was granted a 99-year lease of Pengelly Prior in July 1626, with his 19-year-old son, John, being named as one of the ‘lives’.12Parl. Surv. Duchy Cornw. ii. 203. At this time John Polwhele was studying law at Lincoln’s Inn, which he had entered in 1623, and was associating with some of the more boisterous elements there. In October 1629 the council of Lincoln’s Inn met to consider ‘an unwonted disorder committed by some young gentlemen of this society’, who had attacked a messenger sent to arrest a fellow member, and identified Polwhele as one of the ‘actors therein’. He was not expelled, however, and in 1631 was called to the bar.13LI Black Bks. ii. 286, 299. Polwhele practised as a barrister later in the decade – for example acting as attorney for Henry Walter of Ashbury in Devon in March 1637 – and he also played a minor part in court circles as a poet and translator of Latin authors.14Devon RO, MS 30,308; C.S. Gilbert, Hist. Survey Cornw. ii. 239. Polwhele had returned to Cornwall by January 1638, and it was probably at this time that he married Anne Baskerville, a sister of Francis Baskerville*, who had recently married Polwhele’s cousin, Margaret Glanville.15Polwhele, Traditions and Recollections, i. 13-15; Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 377; St Erme MI; Broad Hinton par. reg.; J. Burke, Geneal. and Heraldic Hist. of the Commoners, 92-3.

It is unclear why Polwhele was elected as MP for Tregony in the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640. His activity in Parliament provides few clues as to his political allegiances in the early months of the session. In the main, Polwhele was involved in local issues, being named, in November 1640, to the committee to consider the allegation that William Coryton* and Sir Richard Buller* had fixed the election at Bossiney by sending in a blank indenture.16CJ ii. 29a; Procs LP i. 145. Polwhele was also concerned with measures against piracy, and in April 1641 reported amendments to a bill against Turks and Moors who had ravaged the south coast, including Cornwall, in the previous decade.17CJ ii. 126b; Procs LP iv. 73. In the same month, he was named to the committee to prepare instructions for the collectors of the new subsidy, again perhaps with the impact on Cornwall in mind.18Procs LP iv. 148; CJ ii. 130b. There is no evidence for his views on religious reform, the trial of Sir Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, or the army plot, and when he signed the Protestation on 3 May 1641 he was presumably joining the vast majority of MPs rather than making a political statement.19Procs LP iv. 172. Polwhele’s main concern at this time may have been his increasingly straitened finances. On 12 July 1641 he was criticised as one of the MPs who had failed to pay their promised poll money, and he defended himself in the Commons, saying that ‘he would very willingly pay it if he knew in what capacity he was to pay’. This exchange may have a bearing on his decision, four days later, to seek permission to go into the country, although as his kinsman Francis Godolphin I* was also released on the same day, there may have been others reasons for his disappearance at this time.20Procs. LP v. 608, 666; CJ ii. 213b.

At the outbreak of civil war in 1642, Polwhele sided with the king, perhaps influenced by Godolphin and other royalist friends and relatives. His decision seems to have come as a surprise to the Commons, which had allowed him to extend his stay in Cornwall as recently as 20 June.21CJ ii. 633b. On 2 September, however, Polwhele was suspended from the House until his case was examined, and on 12 November a warrant was issued for his arrest by the serjeant-at-arms.22CJ ii. 750a, 845b. Although Polwhele’s brother, Degory, became a soldier, John remained a civilian, and kept a fairly low profile in the early months of the war.23Docquets of Letters Patent ed Black, 78; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 467. He was added to the Cornish commission of the peace in October 1643, and soon afterwards travelled to Oxford to join the royalist Parliament there, signing the letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, in January 1644 asking for peace.24Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. In the same month he was disabled from sitting at Westminster, ‘for deserting the service of the House and being in the king’s quarters’.25CJ iii. 374a. Nothing is known of Polwhele’s career in the next two years, although he was evidently in Cornwall in February 1646, when Prince Charles asked him to join other local gentlemen in ‘getting up to the army all the trained men, straggling soldiers and others within the hundred of Powder’ ready for a last stand against the advancing New Model army.26Polwhele, Traditions and Recollections, i. 20-1. Unsurprisingly, Polwhele disregarded this order and instead approached Sir Thomas Fairfax*, who in early March issued him with a letter of protection against plunder by the victorious parliamentarians.27Polwhele, Traditions and Recollections, i. 21. A month later Polwhele petitioned to compound under the Truro articles, admitting that he had assisted the king, and he was eventually fined at a tenth of the value of his estate, which came to the very modest figure of £192 – perhaps indicating his continuing financial weakness.28CCC 1252.

There is no concrete evidence that Polwhele was involved in royalist plots after the first civil war, but Parliament held him in deep suspicion. At the beginning of September 1648 he was arrested with other west-country royalists, perhaps suspected of fomenting the rising at Penzance in the previous spring, but he was released on security in December.29CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 268, 340. In October 1650 the Cornish county committee complained that Polwhele had undervalued his estate when compounding, but no further action seems to have been taken.30CCC 336. In April 1651 it was reported that he was one of those royalists considered ‘less active, but which will immediately repair to a body’ if there was a rising in support of Charles Stuart.31HMC Portland, i. 584. The Committee for Advance of Money was in two minds about his reliability at this time: in April 1651 they discharged his assessment (accepting the plea that his debts were equal to the amount owed) but in the following August they imposed a further assessment of £80.32CCAM 1329. During the protectorate, Polwhele assisted other Cornish royalists in protecting their interests. He was entrusted with various old duchy documents, relating to fishing rights and tin mining, and in July 1654 he advised Jonathan Rashleigh* on his dispute about the ‘fishery in the river of Fowey’ using a transcript of the duchy rolls, remarking that ‘there are things in them not fit to be communicated but to a very faithful hand, and there are very few that I dare trust with them besides your worthy self’.33Cornw. RO, RS/1/1064. This passive resistance was probably the extent of Polwhele’s resistance to the Cromwellian regime. Degory Polwhele was implicated in the Penruddock rising in 1655, but John played no part in this; and numerous references to a ‘Mr Polwhele’ in the correspondence of Sir Edward Hyde* in 1658-9 are probably to an agent using a pseudonym, rather than to the former MP.34CSP Dom. 1655, p. 237; CCSP iv. 103, 108, 119 and passim.

After the Restoration, Polwhele continued to live impecuniously in Cornwall.35Cornw. Hearth Tax, 156. He was an active justice of the peace throughout the 1660s, and acquired a reputation as a ‘persecutor’ of the Quakers in the county, occasionally working in conjunction with his brother, Degory.36Recs. Quakers Cornw. 29, 37, 53, 80. His will, drafted during an illness in 1667, is surprisingly incoherent for a lawyer, and is not properly dated. In it he stipulated that his son and heir, also John Polwhele and also a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, would receive not only what remained of the estate but also ‘several bonds as well for mine as his own debt’ and the responsibility to find portions for his eight siblings. Knowing full well that his family faced ruin, Polwhele tried to protect the core inheritance by giving up a large proportion of his personal estate ‘and those duchy lands which I shall surrender to pay the said debts and portions according to good conscience’. As a result, he gave only token amounts to his other children, ‘in full compensation’ of their portions, and ‘hoping by God’s blessing, if I live, to provide better’ for them.37PROB11/356/6. It is not known whether his hopes were fulfilled by the time of his death, of ‘the spotted fever’, in 1672.38Polwhele, Traditions and Recollections, i. 7.