BULLER, Francis II (1630-82), of Shillingham, St Stephen-by-Saltash, Cornw., and the Middle Temple, London.

Francis Buller II was the eldest son of the major Cornish landowner and prominent Presbyterian MP, Francis Buller I*. He was forced to flee from the family home of Shillingham, near Saltash, when the royalists captured Cornwall in the early months of the civil war, and went with his mother to Plymouth. In December 1642 Francis was taken into the care of his cousin, Sir William Courtenay.18Buller Pprs. 87. In later years his education was more conventional. In January 1646 he was admitted to the Middle Temple, being bound with his father and the Tavistock recruiter MP, Edmund Fowell*, and he matriculated as fellow commoner from Trinity College, Cambridge, in the following autumn.19Al. Cant.; MTR ii. 937. On 14 March 1648, Francis II was granted licence to go to France, presumably for a grand tour, and he had left by May of that year.20LJ x. 113a; Buller Pprs. 100. His period abroad appears to have lasted no more than a year, as in May 1649 he was apparently at Oxford to receive an honorary MA, although it seems odd that the son of a secluded Member should be thus rewarded.21Wood, Fasti, ii. 137.

At about this time he secured a lucrative marriage with the daughter of Ezekiel Grosse of Golden in Cornwall, acquiring lands across the county as well as in Plymouth, in a marriage settlement involving William* and John Coryton.22Antony House, Carew-Pole BS/14/3. Although the marriage was licensed in October 1652, it seems that this was an ex post facto arrangement, as the couple’s eldest children were born in 1651 and 1652, and they were already deep in litigation over the Grosse inheritance in July 1652.23Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 57; C10/16/106. Indeed, comments made by William Coryton to Francis Buller I suggest that the marriage may even have pre-dated Francis II’s departure on his grand tour in the spring of 1648.24Buller Pprs. 100. In the early 1650s Francis II returned to his legal studies, asking his father to be patient with the ‘errors’ that he and his brother, John, had committed as students, ‘as being sharers in humanity’, and sending him detailed accounts of their expenditure.25Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/1/58; BA/20/3. In November 1652 Francis II was called to the bar, and for the rest of the decade he was mostly based in London, where he practised as a barrister.26MTR iii. 1042. He was consulted by a Cornish tenant faced with prosecution at the assizes in May 1657, and was still active as a lawyer in November 1658, when he moved into chambers in Essex Court.27Cornw. RO, BU/603; MTR, iii. 1128.

From the mid-1650s Francis Buller II’s career becomes difficult to disentangle from that of his father – a situation further complicated by his father’s usual suffix of ‘junior or ‘the younger’ to distinguish him from his uncle, Francis Buller of Tregarrick, who died in 1650 – and from the 1660s there is also confusion between Francis II and his son, another Francis. Contemporaries did not always make it clear to which Francis they were referring in correspondence or other paperwork, and the situation is made still more complex by the death of all three within five years of each other. However, the apparently total retirement of Francis I from political life after 1648 makes some distinction possible, as from that time Francis II clearly took on a major role in running the family estates. In May 1654, for example, he was in south Wales, where the family owned an estate.28Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/14/6. Many of the references to local government probably refer to Francis II. The ‘Francis Buller’ added to the Cornish commission of the peace in March 1657, and then named as commissioner for the militia and assessments in 1659 and the spring of 1660, was almost certainly Francis II, rather than his father.29C231/6, p. 361; A. and O.

From the mid-1650s Francis II was also playing an increasingly important role in the family’s parliamentary interests. In 1654 he had protested that he did not want to take a seat, telling his father that ‘I would be private, and follow my own business. I am no ways desirous of the employment and wish it may fall on them that are more ambitious of it’.30Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/14/6. Such sentiments perhaps reflected Presbyterian unease at the newly-established protectorate, but they did not preclude active involvement in the elections. In August of the same year, Francis II was happy to work with his brother, John Buller*, in managing the elections at East and West Looe, and John’s return for the combined constituency in 1656 may have been with Francis’s encouragement.31Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/14/5. Equally, it was probably Francis II, rather than his father, who arranged the election of William Whitelocke* for West Looe in January 1659.32Whitelocke, Diary, 504. It was thus entirely appropriate that Francis II and John* should be returned for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659, with John representing the family borough of East Looe and Francis II taking one of the two county seats. Their uncle Anthony Buller* also sat for this Parliament, and the activity of all three becomes confused in the Journal and surviving diaries, as any of them might be recorded as ‘Mr Buller’. It is possible, however, that Francis II was the MP named to the committee for elections and privileges at the beginning of the session, and to the committee for the representation of County Durham in its later stages.33CJ vii. 595a, 622b.

Francis Buller II was returned for Saltash in 1660 and again in 1661, but his later life was blighted by a conviction for misprision of treason in 1666, and a crippling fine, that forced the sale of his estates, and retirement to Cambridgeshire.34HP Commons 1660-1690. A series of indentures sought to secure the main patrimonial estates for his son Francis, who in 1674 seems to have taken possession of the Cornish property in return for settling his father’s debts and paying him a modest allowance of £160 per annum.35Antony House, Carew-Pole BS/14/10-11. Financial embarrassment did not prevent Francis II from taking as his second wife the widow of Sir John Maynard of Tooting Graveney in Surrey, and, in 1670, he arranged a match for his eldest son with his wife’s step-daughter.36Antony House, Carew-Pole BS/14/9. This son died in 1679.37PROB11/360/242. Francis II lived on until 1682, and his threadbare will, drawn up a few weeks before his death, indicates the success of his father’s ploys to divert the patrimonial estates elsewhere.38PROB11/422/257. Francis II was succeeded by his grandsons, Francis and James, who sat for Saltash after 1688.39HP Commons 1690-1715.