POLLARDE, Hugh (1603-66), of King’s Nympton, Devon.

The Pollard family was well established in Devon by the early modern period: ‘the name is numerous and allied to noble families’, as one seventeenth-century commentator put it.30Risdon, Devon, 311. The ancestors of Hugh Pollarde (who was unusual in rendering his surname thus) lived at Way, alias Horwood in the time of Henry III, and there were memorials to the family in the church at Horwood, overlooking the Taw estuary in north Devon, a church which the Pollardes improved and extended.31Devon RO, 1392 M/L1644/10; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 597; W.G. Hoskins, Devon (1954), 413. Among Pollarde’s distinguished forebears were his great-grandfather, Sir Lewis Pollard, serjeant-at-law and recorder of Exeter during the reign of Edward VI and his grandfather, Sir Hugh Pollard, who bought King’s Nympton under Henry VII.32Vivian, Vis. Devon, 598. A number of his relatives had sat in earlier Parliaments, among them Richard Pollard† (d. 1542), a supporter of Thomas Cromwell and an enthusiastic enforcer of the dissolution of the monasteries, who sat for Taunton in 1536 and later as knight of the shire for Devon. His son, Sir John Pollard†, represented seats in Devon and Cornwall in five Parliaments during the 1550s and 1560s.33HP Commons 1509-1558. A distant relation was Speaker in 1555. Hugh Pollarde’s maternal grandfather, Sir Henry Berkeley†, enjoyed estates in four counties and sat as knight for Somerset in 1584 and 1586.34HP Commons 1509-1558. Lewis Pollard, Hugh’s father, was a highly-respected member of the Devon gentry and colonel of a regiment of trained-bands. With admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy, a writer in the 1630s on the county described how Lewis Pollard ‘enjoyeth a fair demesne, with a park and manor, [and] keepeth liberal hospitality, both to such as visit him upon his kind invitations, or their own occasions’.35Lysons, Magna Britannia vi. 369. Within 30 years of that picture of confidence and tranquillity, Hugh Pollarde had been forced to sell King’s Nympton because of his adamantine loyalty to Charles I.

Nothing has been discovered of Hugh Pollarde’s education and early years, beyond the fact that when he had barely reached majority age he was married to Bridget, dowager countess of Berkshire and daughter of the 17th earl of Oxford. She was 17 years older than Pollarde. Her first husband, Francis Norris, 1st earl of Berkshire, had shot himself dead with his own crossbow in 1622, but he and Bridget were living apart by 1606 (when Pollarde was only three years old).36‘Francis Norris, earl of Berkshire’, Oxford DNB. The marriage between Pollarde and Bridget Norris was ended within a decade by Bridget’s death, but they had one child, a daughter, together. Whether or not the Pollardes lived at King’s Nympton is not clear.37CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 240. Pollarde’s father, Sir Lewis, was created baronet in 1627, and during the 1630s was a magistrate and deputy lieutenant for his county. He seems never to have attended quarter sessions meetings, preferring instead to act in his own area with his brother-in-law, the father of John Northcote*. The association between Northcote senior and Pollarde senior was close, Sir Lewis acting as overseer of the will of the pious John Northcote senior.38PROB11/165/155. Hugh Pollarde, like John Northcote*, was an officer in the Devon militia but played no part in civilian local government office. He was lieutenant in the foot regiment of his kinsman, also named Hugh Pollard, by 1629.39SP16/150/76, f. 121v; SP16/202/55, f. 108v. This was the regiment whose defects were reported to the privy council by the deputy lieutenants in May 1637.40CSP Dom. 1637, p. 170; 1637-8, p. 306.

Running parallel to his life in Devon as a rather aimless heir to an important and respected Devon family, Hugh Pollarde lived a very different existence in London when he was there. He was part of a drinking and roistering circle with associations at court. Among his circle were Henry Wilmot*, George Goring* and perhaps one of the brothers of Sir Edward Stradling*.41Wit Restor’d (1658), 16-17. On the basis of this evidence, contained in a contemporary account in verse of their exploits, a modern authority describes Pollarde as ‘a wild young man from a notable Devonshire family’.42T. Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture (Newark, NJ, 1994), 66. It remains a matter of conjecture whether Tom Pollard, a leading actor in the King’s Company, was a kinsman of Hugh Pollarde’s.43Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture, 260, n. 83. By the 1630s, Hugh Pollarde was a widower with a child, and not so young, but the sympathy his circle evinced towards Felton, the assassin of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, makes it possible that he was the Devonian Pollard who in 1629 tried to speak to Sir John Eliot†, imprisoned in the Tower.44CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 499; Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture, 55-6. It was through these London and courtly associations that Pollarde became acquainted with James Smith, poet and fellow-roisterer, who spent time with him at King’s Nympton.45‘James Smith (1604/5-1667)’, Oxford DNB. Smith was a clerk in holy orders, unlikely though that seems, and Pollarde secured his appointment to the living of King’s Nympton in July 1639.46Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs and Literary Culture, 67.

At the end of the 1630s, Pollarde’s very limited military experience looked set to be extended significantly with the outbreak of war in the north with the Scottish Covenanters. As a deputy lieutenant, Sir Lewis Pollard was active in collecting coat and conduct money for the expeditionary force to fight the Scots.47CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 430, 512; 1638-9, p. 438. Hugh Pollarde was himself involved in the preparations at the Devon end of things. The deputy lieutenants reported that Pollarde had been involved in accepting money from individuals in return for exemption from military service in the north. The privy council took the allegations very seriously, the record of their deliberations (20 Oct. 1639) implying that both Pollarde and his younger brother were ‘delinquents’ if indeed they had exacted money in this way.48PC2/48, p. 684; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 974-5; CSP Dom. 1639, p. 544. In the event, however, proceedings against Pollarde were taken no further. Whereas John Northcote* found a civilian occupation helping the war effort under the direction of Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, Hugh Pollarde was given a commission as captain. Not that he was quick to march north. In May and July 1640 he was still in London, sending reports to his colonel, Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, who had, it seems, become his patron.49CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 122, 182-3, 441. James Smith, Pollarde’s drinking companion, was by this time Conway’s chaplain, although it seems unclear whether Pollarde introduced Smith to Conway.

The friendship with Smith is sufficient evidence from which to infer that Pollarde himself was no friend to puritans. His reports from London to Conway, general of the king’s army in the north, on events at the Short Parliament focused (rather gleefully) on the scandalous assault on Arthur Ducke* more than on serious affairs of state.50CSP Dom. 1640, p. 122. Another of Pollarde’s old circle, Henry Wilmot*, had much greater responsibilities in the northern army than did Pollarde himself, who characterized Wilmot's news reports as ‘bitter’.51CSP Dom. 1640, p. 441. While the son kicked his heels in London instead of joining his regiment in the north, the father was busy still trying to recruit soldiers in Devon, as the deputy lieutenants explained to the lords lieutenant in the summer of 1640.52CSP Dom. 1640, p. 485, 579. This hints at a discrepancy of perception between Hugh and his father over the significance of the bishops’ wars and also raises the question of whether Hugh Pollarde had any serious political views of his own at this point, or whether he ever in fact journeyed north at all.

By the autumn of 1640, however, Pollarde was serious enough to seek a seat in the second Parliament to be called that year. He was returned at a by-election at Bere Alston caused by the decision of the double-returned Sir Thomas Cheke to sit for Harwich. He may have been returned on the same network of Northumberland clientage that saw to it that John Northcote took one of the seats at Ashburton; certainly Northcote was still a friend of Pollarde’s in June 1641.53Procs. LP v. 422-3. For one who was keen enough to set his cap at a parliamentary seat, he was singularly inactive. Until he voted against the attainder of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford (21 Apr. 1641) he made no impression at all on the House, serving on no committees and making no recorded speeches.54Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. On 3 May, Pollarde took the Protestation.55CJ ii. 133a. But it soon seemed that Pollarde had been active in and around Parliament, if not in ways that were approved. In the second week of March, he and a group of his friends with shared recent experience in the northern army (nominal in Pollarde’s case) fell to grumbling in Westminster Hall that the Scots were being treated better than the English army officers were. From this sprang a meeting where an oath of secrecy was sworn. Among this group were Pollarde’s old drinking chums Wilmot and Goring, and his kinsman, Sir John Berkeley*.56Bodl. Nalson XIII, no. 14 On 11 June, Pollarde was in the House to hear a report of the secret meeting, now characterized as a plot. On the 14th, Pollarde was examined by the Speaker, in a procedure which denied him access to his co-conspirators. Most of his answers admitted to nothing except that an oath was taken, and in any case Pollarde’s involvement was confined to this officers’ complaint over pay, a subservient matter to the more important conspiracy, with the king’s prior knowledge and involvement, to take the Tower and release Strafford.57Two Diaries of the Long Parl. 122; Russell, ‘The first army plot of 1641’, TRHS ser. 5, xxxviii, 85-106.

The procedure to which Pollarde was subjected seems to have been an initial examination by the Speaker followed by a swearing upon oath before a number of peers.58Russell, ‘First army plot’, 86. There seems to be some conflict as to whether Pollarde said under examination that he believed himself bound by the oath he had taken, or not so bound.59Bodl. Nalson XIII, no. 14; Procs. LP v. 138. He chose to play the ingenu, claiming not to know what was meant by Henry Percy’s* propositions to defend episcopacy and to maintain the king’s revenue. He also confessed to some talk of a new general, in which he himself favoured Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, and claimed to have scorned the idea that the army might be brought by the king to London to subdue Parliament.60Procs. LP v. 138. At any event, after his examination, Pollarde was sent to the Gatehouse prison on suspicion of high treason, although his destination was changed the following day to the king’s bench gaol.61CJ ii. 175b, 176a; Procs. LP v. 171. On 30 June, his old Devon friend, John Northcote, preferred his petition for release, and after a meeting with the close committee he was bailed for three weeks on sureties from William Russell, 5th earl of Bedford, and from the earl of Essex: the former his lord lieutenant, the latter his choice for lord general. It was widely reported that Pollarde was going to King’s Nympton to make his peace with his sick father, who was threatening to disinherit him for his part in the army plot.62Procs. LP v. 422-3, 423-4; The Diurnall Occurrences (1641), 176 (E.523.1).

The parliamentary leaders and the House were evidently unconvinced by Pollarde’s responses at examination, and concluded on 24 July that he and the others had plotted with Percy, and on the 26th judged that Pollarde and the others had lied upon oath.63CJ ii. 223a, 224b, 225a. The Captain Chudleigh, examined by the House on 13 August, testifying in effect to mitigate the sentence against the army plotters who were MPs, was surely James Chudleigh, son of Sir George Chudleigh†, fellow deputy lieutenant of Pollarde’s father, and his kinsman.64CJ ii. 255b, 256a; HP Commons 1604-29, iii. 523; M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (1997), 95. It was ordered by the House on 25 August that the officers’ army pay should be stopped, and in the morning of 8 September there was a division on whether Pollarde and William Ashbournham* should have their pay.65CJ ii. 271a, 282b. It was voted by a majority of eight votes that they should not, but in the afternoon another motion, in a thinner House and on a smaller majority (29 votes to 23), reversed the order. Sir Edward Hyde* thought that many MPs considered leniency towards the officers might require leniency towards another detained suspect, Archbishop William Laud. Pollarde’s advocate on this occasion was William Strode I, one of the ‘fiery spirits’, and speaking in opposition to Sir Simonds D’Ewes, who considered the sanction of withholding pay justified because of the seriousness of the plot. Devon connections may have cast Strode I’s judgment in the direction of leniency, and one is reminded of the visit of ‘Pollard’ to the Tower in 1629: Strode was a fellow-sufferer. At any rate, Strode carried John Pym with him in the vote, as well as a majority in the Commons.66CJ ii. 284a; Clarendon, Hist. i.380-1; Procs. LP vi. 685, 690.

While this debate took place, Pollarde was probably in King’s Nympton, where he remained with James Smith. The latter wrote to Conway from there in October, acknowledging the help of both Conway and Pollarde, and commenting acidly on the puritan Devon gentry and their interest in Presbyterianism: ‘our chiefest farmers have their loins girt with a divinity surcingle, and begin to bristle up for a lay eldership’.67CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 144. These remarks are a strong suggestion that Pollarde, for all his vagueness and disavowals in June, really was a supporter of episcopacy. Any thoughts he may have entertained that his troubles with Parliament were at an end were abruptly dispelled on 4 November, when Oliver Cromwell* moved that the plotters be returned to prison, as Ashbournham had apparently visited Sir John Berkeley in the Tower.68D’Ewes (C), 80-1. This set in train a process by which the army plotters were to be delivered to London by their sureties (17 Nov.) and a motion by Denzil Holles against Daniel O’Neill (4 Dec) on fresh allegations of high treason (6 Dec.).69D’Ewes (C), 235; CJ ii. 333b. On 9 December, it was voted that the offence of Pollarde and the others had been misprision of treason, a lesser crime than high treason, which Sir Arthur Hesilrige* considered it to be. Pollarde was defended on this occasion by D’Ewes, who considered his stone-walling statement in June to have been a confession and who apprised the House that Pollarde’s father had recently died. Inevitably, under such a judgment, Pollarde was disabled from sitting further in that Parliament.70CJ ii. 337a; D’Ewes (C), 258. He remained at King’s Nympton, where he and James Smith took the Protestation in the early months of 1642.71Devon Protestation Returns, ii. 461-2.

Pollarde joined the king at York at some point in the first half of 1642, and in July joined John Lord Digby in an expedition to procure arms. The covert operation was discovered by Sir John Hotham*, and Digby was captured. Pollarde escaped, however, and when Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath, returned to the west country in August, journeyed south with him.72Clarendon, Hist. ii. 227, 253, 256; CJ ii. 655a. They were intent on raising regiments for the king, and on intelligence from Sir Samuel Rolle*, Pollarde was declared a delinquent by the Commons (30 Aug.).73CJ ii. 744a. Soon afterwards, Pollarde was at Sherborne with William Seymour, 2nd marquess of Hertford. This makes it more likely that he was commissioned in Hertford’s foot regiment than that he was the Major Pollard in the regiment of Viscount Kilmorey.74Bellum Civile, 16; A Copy of a List (1642, 669.f.6.91). Pollarde was quickly targeted for arrest by parliamentary forces under the earl of Bedford. On 25 September, he was at King’s Nympton, providing military intelligence to the earl of Bath, from which it is evident that his friendship with Northcote, active in the field for Parliament, was at an end. Pollarde was by this time one of the principal royalists in north Devon. He assured the earl confidently that ‘his majesty is in no ill condition’.75HMC 4th Rep. 304, 308; A Remonstrance or Declaration (1642), 4 (E.124.29). His complacency was ill-founded, however. The following day, he was duly arrested. Bath was detained on the 28th, and both men were brought to London.76Some Late Occurrences (1642), 6-7 (E.121.4); A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages no. 15 (12-15 Oct. 1642), 5-6 (E.122.21); E. Andriette, Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot, 1971), 63. Presumably the Commons leadership was behind the publishing of Pollarde’s petition of the previous year, declaring himself innocent of the army plot.77To the Right Honourable the House of Commons (1642, E.124.23). His house and family remained a focus of activity for royalist activism after his removal.78True Newes from Devonshire (1642), sig. A2 (E.83.43).

A number of moves to secure Pollarde’s release from gaol in the Compter were begun during 1643, but none was successful.79CJ iii. 9b, 10a, 10b, 21a, 67b, 73b. His detention persisted not least because it emerged that he had been consulted in June 1643 about the plot involving Edmund Waller*, during which it emerged that Pollarde had been identified as a likely new lieutenant-general under Conway.80Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 324; CJ iii. 123b, 126b, 128a, 154b; HMC 5th Rep. 94; LJ vi. 116b. In August a prisoner exchange seemed close, but in September Pollarde was remanded to the Tower, and his petition was disregarded.81CJ iii. 203b, 223a, 244a, 244b, 245a, 288a. Not until April 1644 was there further serious talk of his release, and it came with an exchange involving the royalist Sir Edward Stradling*, probably a friend of Pollarde’s since the 1630s.82CJ iii. 451a, 463b. Pollarde travelled immediately to the west country, where he became a member of the king’s council in the west, which met at Exeter.83Devon RO, 1392 M/L1644/10, 43, 47; Seymour MSS, 25 July 1644, 19 Aug. 1644. He was an important member of the council, with his own links to the court at Oxford, but also to the queen’s court abroad.84CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 18, 485; Devon RO, Seymour MSS, Pollarde to E. Seymour, 19 Aug. 1644. A colleague was Sir John Berkeley*, with whose career Pollarde’s had long been linked. At some point in 1645 before October, Pollarde took over command of Dartmouth garrison from Edward Seymour*, where he was on his own terms unsuccessful. A raiding party he organised failed (12 Oct.), a mission to Tiverton on behalf of the prince of Wales to pacify a querulous George Goring* seems to have met with indifferent results, and by December he was sending depressed letters to Sir Edward Hyde, reporting the poor condition of Dartmouth garrison.85Devon RO, 1392/L1644/9; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 51; CCSP i. 390. On 19 January 1646 he was obliged to surrender the town to Sir Thomas Fairfax*, after having been wounded during the terminal stages of the garrison’s resistance.86Weekly Account no. 5 (21-27 Jan. 1666), sig. E2 (E.319.7).

Pollarde became once again a prisoner of Parliament at some point soon after the surrender of Dartmouth, and efforts were made by the king’s advisers, as they took ship into exile, to maintain contact with him.87CCSP i. 303, 328. In May, he petitioned to make his composition for his delinquency as a royalist, but not until April 1649 did his petition produce effect. It was probably the fact of his incarceration which led to his being overlooked by the agencies of penal taxation, and probably his release from custody which allowed a settlement to proceed.88CJ iv. 495a, 557a, v. 83b, 85a. He was fined £495, at one-sixth of his estate, and in February 1651 the fine was confirmed at £558 in February 1651, to take account of his recent marriage settlement. He was required to produce proof that his election to Parliament had been made void in 1641. The fine was re-imposed in October 1653, when he paid quickly in the face of complete sequestration of his estate.89CCC 1287. While this case dragged on, Pollarde faced a parallel series of demands from the Committee for Advance of Money, to which he had to plead in February 1652 for more time to pay the £100 levied on him.90CCAM 722.

During the 1650s, Pollarde was recognized as someone who would act in the interests of the exiled king should a rising take place, and he was among the more active royalists in the west country on behalf of the monarchy. In 1652 a message of thanks was sent to him by Charles Stuart, and by 1654 he was with Sir John Grenvile the leading contact the court had with the Devon gentry.91CCSP ii. 167, 359. By 1655, John Thurloe* was aware of Pollarde’s links with the royalist interest, and was told by an informer that he had agreed to raise 3,000 foot and 800 horse to overthrow the protectorate.92TSP iii. 302, 355, 428, 457; CCSP iii. 19. Thurloe’s agent marvelled that Pollarde was allowed to remain at liberty as Penruddock’s rising was in train, but the government must have judged their monitoring of him to be effective.93TSP iii. 457. A joint operation by Pollarde and Robert Rolle* was projected by the royalist council in 1657, but Pollarde only reported back various failures of nerve.94CCSP iii. 409, iv. 34 After the death of Lord Protector Oliver in September 1658, Pollarde was the focus of royalist hopes for a rising in the west, given by them the code-name ‘Bennett’.95CCSP iv. 101, 250, 263, 276, 330, 526-7, 552. He and Grenvile were behind the despatch to Edinburgh of Nicholas Monck, a Devon vicar, to propose a general rising to his brother, General George Monck*. The younger Monck was dismissed out of hand by his furious sibling.96Clarendon, Hist. vi. 155-6.

Pollarde did not lend his name to the call for the secluded Members to return to Parliament and for free elections, suggesting that he was in the terms of the Devon gentry, largely Presbyterian-inclined as they were, a royalist ‘ultra’. After the Restoration, he was rewarded with local office in Devon, and returned to Parliament to sit for the Cornish borough of Callington in the Convention and as knight of the shire for Devon in the Parliament of 1661. Made governor of Guernsey in 1661 and the following year made comptroller of the household and admitted to the privy council, Pollarde also played a significant role as a government manager of parliamentary business. The warrant to him in July 1665 of a payment of £5,000 was in reality a gratuity from the king, though it purported to be for sums due to him from both Charles II and his late father.97CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 471. Whether by post-Restoration extravagance or by civil war losses and penal taxation, Pollarde was obliged to sell King’s Nympton and Oakford manors, his patrimonial inheritance, and after he died on 27 November 1666, letters of administration were granted to his principal creditor.98Vivian, Vis. Devon, 598; Lysons, Magna Britannia, vi. 369-70. His only daughter remained unmarried in 1668.99CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 240.