The Drurys claimed descent from one ‘Drieu’, supposedly a companion of William the Conqueror. They settled in west Suffolk, where the senior branch resided at Rougham, four miles from Bury St. Edmunds, and first represented the county in 1391. However, by the sixteenth century the Rougham branch had been overshadowed by their kinsmen at nearby Hawstead. Consequently, although this Member needs to be distinguished from the head of the elder line, a namesake knighted at James I’s Coronation, there can be little doubt as to his identity. Indeed, Sir Robert Drury of Rougham is not known to have held any significant public office.
The Hawstead branch was founded in the fifteenth century by Roger Drury, whose son, Sir Robert, sat for Suffolk and served as Speaker in 1495.
Drury was knighted at the siege of Rouen in 1591 by Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex (a distinction remembered in his epitaph), and married Bacon’s daughter four months later on his seventeenth birthday. Under the settlement £300 p.a. was set aside for his wife’s jointure and £700 for the heirs male of the marriage. Two years later Bacon purchased Drury’s wardship.
In September 1598 Drury was reportedly intent on accompanying the English general Sir Francis Vere† to the Low Countries, but he was evidently still in England the following 1 Mar., when he was attacked by Sir William Woodhouse, with whom he had served in Normandy and his rival for a commission in the Netherlands. Chamberlain reported that although Drury had been ‘left ... for dead’, he was ‘like to recover’, and indeed later that year he served under Essex in Ireland.
Drury remained in Dutch service until his men went into winter quarters in 1602. In November of that year he distinguished himself in the accession day tilts. He subsequently journeyed to Italy; certainly Joseph Hall, the future bishop of Norwich, then rector of Hawstead, thought Drury was beyond the ‘snowy Alps’ on the accession of James.
By 1605 Drury was a gentleman of the privy chamber. The remainder of his father’s debt to the Crown, amounting to almost £626, was remitted before he accompanied the 1st earl of Nottingham (Charles Howard†) on his mission to Spain, where it was rumoured, falsely, that he had killed Sir Robert Killigrew* in a duel.
Drury may not have returned to England by the time Parliament reconvened in November 1605. After the Christmas recess, and in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, Cecil, by now earl of Salisbury, determined to clamp down on English recruitment for the Spanish forces, and on 6 Feb. 1606 the Commons resolved to find a remedy for ‘the danger of such as do or shall serve in the Spanish wars’. It was perhaps unwise of Drury, whose cousin, Ambrose Rookwood, had been executed for his complicity in the Plot, to intervene in the ensuing debate, in which he related the assurances he had been given that Protestants were welcome in the Spanish forces. Experience, he was told, proved the contrary: English officers had been discharged ‘merely because they would not take that oath and become Romish’. At this suggestion that he was not being truthful, Drury found himself ‘somewhat touched’, whereupon ‘the House gave him leave to speak again’.
Salisbury, whose nephew William Cecil†, Lord Burghley, had married one of Drury’s sisters, sent for Drury to explain his speech. Drury argued that the proposal to prevent Englishmen from serving in the armies of Spain threatened ‘that liberty we have now in going beyond the sea’. He had not, he claimed, been motivated to speak ‘by any particular respect’, but had merely intended ‘to move others to that which I thought substantially concerned all gentlemen; wherein I did jealous [sic] the disposition of the House something too unsensible’.
Drury made four further speeches in the 1605-6 session. He contributed to the debate on the third reading of the bill for better observance of the Sabbath on 17 Feb., when he appears to have joined with Sir Edward Greville in calling for allowance for ‘sufficient recreation’ on Sundays. Five days later he objected to the conditional submission offered by the sheriff who had imprisoned the coachman of Sir Edwin Sandys*.
On 8 Mar., possibly trying to ingratiate himself with Salisbury, Drury spoke in favour of compounding for purveyance, arguing that James would not surrender his prerogative without recompense, as ‘the king will not depart with any thing, [that] must be left to his successors’, and that the law was sufficient guarantee that the Crown would adhere to any agreement. In the supply debate six days later he urged ‘a necessity to grant more’.
Writing to Salisbury on 1 Apr. to justify his conduct over the recruitment of soldiers for the Spanish army, Drury tried to mitigate the earl’s displeasure by claiming that he had been helpful on ‘two matters particularly concerning the king’. One was presumably composition for purveyance, while the other was the subsidy. He claimed that it was a result of his ‘good hap by my coming at the instant’ into the chamber that the motion for an additional subsidy was carried by a single vote on 18 March. In the same letter Drury warned Salisbury that it was ‘very injurious’ that the king should ‘be wrongly informed of men’s words in particular and our meaning wrested by the carriers, contrary to all honest construction’.
Drury was named to five further committees during the course of the session, among them the committee for the bill to pave Drury Lane (19 Mar.), which had acquired its name from the town house built by his father near its junction with the Strand. However, he can have taken no part in the discussion of the measure, for he was attacked by a burning ague and confined to his chamber for a fortnight. On Heigham’s motion he was given leave to go into the country on 31 March.
Drury made no recorded speeches in the third session, but was named to two committees. On 4 Dec. 1606 he was among those appointed to consider a bill for the relief of Norfolk widow. He was again given leave to depart from Westminster on 11 Mar., on this occasion because his wife and daughter were ill.
On 18 May Drury was granted of two-thirds of the Rookwood estate, forfeited for recusancy.
In the fourth session Drury was named to four committees, including that for the purveyance bill on 26 Feb. 1610. He made no recorded speeches, but acted as teller against recommitting the answer on the Great Contract on 2 May.
In August 1610 Drury took his wife and daughter to Spa. He appears to have returned to England by December, when the daughter, his only surviving child, was buried at St. Clement Danes. He left no trace in the meagre records of the fifth session. John Donne* wrote two of his most elaborate poems on the death of Drury’s daughter, and the two men travelled together on the Continent in the winter of 1611-12, taking in Amiens, Spa and Heidelberg, where Drury formed a poor opinion of the Elector Palatine. On his return to England, Drury was reproved by the Privy Council for scandalous speeches about the king’s intended son-in-law.
Sir Robert Drury runneth at the ring, curveteth his horse before the king’s window, haunteth my Lord Rochester’s chamber, even when himself is not there, and in secret divideth his observances between him and the house of Suffolk; and all this (they say) to be ambassador at Brussels.
Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton ed. L. Pearsall Smith, ii. 28.
Later Chamberlain reported that he was willing to pay £2,000 for the Venice embassy.
On 14 Feb. 1614 Drury wrote to Sir Robert Cotton* that ‘the statesmen’ attending the king at Newmarket believed that a new Parliament was imminent. He was willing, he added, to leave the Suffolk county seat to ‘some younger spirit which may be ambitious of it’, and for this reason had applied instead for a seat at Thetford, where he was keeper of the king’s game. However, the corporation had replied that ‘their love did engage them to the commandments of my Lord of Northampton’. Drury asked Cotton to find out Northampton’s ‘disposition in it’ and, if Drury was ‘forced to seek a knightship of the shire, that he will do me the favour to let his tenants know his favour to me’.
Drury was nominated to three committees in the Addled Parliament. Two were for bills - to naturalize Sir Francis Stewart* (23 May) and repeal an Elizabethan statute regulating fish packing (24 May) - while the third was to recommend what action to take in view of Bishop Neile’s disparaging remarks about the Commons (25 May). He was probably the ‘Sir John Drury’ who moved unsuccessfully for the putting of the question in the final supply debate on 7 June.
Surviving less than a year after the dissolution of his last Parliament, Drury died of a fever on 2 Apr. 1615, and was buried at Hawstead the following June. In his will he left £100 to be spent on a monument, but his widow, who never married again, paid £140 to Nicholas Stone, the leading sculptor of the day. He had originally provided for £5,000 ‘to be paid unto a noble person, who I have been justly bound that acknowledgement for many favours and assistances in my necessity’; but in the last year of his life he was able to halve his obligation to this unidentified benefactor. His inventory shows that he had received at Lady Day no less than £1,660 in rent. A correspondent of his widow reported from London that it was said that James had declared ‘that he could not tell how [Drury] had been frustrated of his suits but he was willing he should been cofferer’ of Prince Charles’s Household. The estate was to be divided among his three surviving sisters, the youngest subsequently marrying Sir Edward Cecil*. Hawstead went to Sir William Wray*, whose grandson sold it in 1656.