SHAPCOTE, Robert (1621-bef. 1690), of Bradninch, Devon.

The patrimonial estate of the Shapcotes was Shapcott Barton, in Knowstone, seven miles from South Molton, where Exmoor runs into North Devon. The family had lived there time out of mind, and in the first half of the seventeenth century the best known of the Shapcotes was Thomas Shapcote, who practised law in Exeter and whose son held the office of clerk of the peace between 1641 and 1645.22W.G. Hoskins, Devon (1954), 422; Stephens, Clerks of the Counties, 77. His brother, Henry Shapcote, followed him in moving south, to establish himself at Bradninch, in the Culme valley, an honour or manor of the duchy of Cornwall. Henry was mayor there in 1625 and 1630, marrying a local woman, Wilmot Hill.23Croslegh, Bradninch, 127. Robert Shapcote was their eldest son. Henry Shapcote held property in Tiverton, which he conveyed in 1629 to George Hartnoll*, or Hartnell, of a family prominent in that town. By 1633, Robert Shapcote had been left an orphan at the age of 11. After a period as a sojourner at Exeter College, Oxford, he was admitted in 1638 to Lincoln’s Inn. The fact that the names of the manucaptors who stood him surety there were not recognizably Devonian suggests that he may have been removed from the west country for some of his earlier education.24LIL, Admiss. Bk. 6. f. 149v.

Shapcote reached majority age on the eve of the outbreak of civil war, but to judge from his absence from the record during the early years of the conflict spent his time pursuing legal studies in London, before being called to the bar in 1645. He was later said by his critics to have spent some of his time in Exeter during the war, taking the side of the king in the royalist-occupied city and it was even rumoured that he had served in a royalist regiment.25SP18/74/1-2. Five months before his call, however, he had given up his rooms at Lincoln’s Inn because he was serving in the army of Parliament’s lord general, the earl of Essex.26LI Black Bks. ii. 366. He returned to his native county in the wake of the success of the New Model army in the south west after Naseby, but was given command of one of the Devon county regiments by the Committee of the West, under Edward Massie. Shapcote’s active service was short-lived. Although he successfully blockaded Exmouth in February 1646, his soldiers were camped outside Exeter in March and as early as April his regiment was reported as having been ‘reduced’.27LJ viii. 114; Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva, 191, 251; M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 130; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 416. He is unlikely to have been disappointed by this check to his military career, for in May that year he married Anna Walrond, of a significant gentry family living near Tiverton, holding at least two manors and much more wealthy and influential than his own. It was probably the authority of his father-in-law, the magistrate and committee-man Henry Walrond, rather than his own long-dead father’s property, that was the basis of his success in the recruiter election for Tiverton in December 1646.28C219/43/2.

Shapcote was in the House by 1 February 1647, when he took the Covenant.29CJ v. 69a. Two weeks later he was named with other knights and burgesses of Devon and Cornwall to a committee investigating the murder charge against Warwick, 2nd Baron Mohun.30CJ v. 89a. It was to be his only committee appointment in this Parliament. He was doubtless, like most of the Devon parliamentarians, politically conservative in outlook and therefore out of sympathy with the general drift towards greater radicalism as the Independents gained the upper hand during 1647, but his contradictory willingness to be elected and reluctance to attend the House is curious. In October, he wrote to the Speaker in response to a general summons of Members, to claim that his absence was ‘first caused by that general order of disabling Members; not that I am really guilty of any thing (if the truth of my case be known) but because I would not give any offence or be the cause of any disturbance’.31Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 551. He was presumably referring to orders of July 1647, which hardly explains his absence prior to that, and his half-admitted admission of some kind of guilt may be an allusion to his royalist cousin, the clerk of the peace.32SP23/183/58. He expressed himself willing to remain in the country, nursing his wartime losses but untroubled further by ‘expense of time and money’. The emphasis Shapcote placed on expense is probably crucial in explaining his loss of interest in taking his seat. Another call of the House prompted a similar letter from Shapcote the following April, expressing his desire to clear his name, vindicate the trust placed in him by the electors and satisfy his conscience. He declared himself willing to abide by the verdict of the serving Members from Devon, who he was confident would know that he was clear of ‘just exception’.33CJ v. 330a, 543b; vi. 34b; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 5.

What seems like a determined unwillingness to take his seat was not part of a general revulsion from public life. Shapcote was named to the Devon commission of the peace early in 1647 at the latest, and was practising as an attorney at the Easter quarter sessions that year.34Devon RO, QS rolls, Easter 1647. A further local distinction came to him that year when he secured the potentially income-generating recorderships of Bradninch and South Molton. The former appointment he owed to his own interest in his native parish, but he must have benefited from the delinquency of his cousin, Thomas Shapcote, the clerk of the peace, to secure the latter. In August 1648, he was active as a militia commissioner, signing a commission for the colonelcy in west Devon, and was part of a group of committeemen which included William Morice*, William Fry*, Sir John Northcote* and Arthur Upton* which reported to the Speaker that month on the problems facing them, including ‘intestine seditions’.35Add. 44058 f. 35; Bodl. Tanner 57 f. 173. Soon afterwards, Shapcote actively supported the election of Morice to Parliament for one of the county seats.36C219/43/2.

Shapcote seems never to have attended the Devon quarter sessions as a justice of the peace, and was left out of the commission of 30 June 1649 which provides a useful gauge of willingness to accept the government of the Rump.37Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8; DQS 28/5. As a non-attender at Parliament with lingering doubts about his allegiances, he was a victim by default of Pride’s Purge: his name appears on a list of December 1648 of those secluded.38A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). Nevertheless, he continued to co-operate with the magistrates, as a lawyer and as a recorder. He was asked in January 1649 to settle a dispute in Cullompton; gave information into the court in July relating to a matter at Knowstone; in January 1650 he and another attorney who like him enjoyed a special relation to the court as a ‘counsellor’ were asked to determine a problem at Brampford Speke, and he acted as a legal spokesman for the ratepayers of two of the hundreds of Devon.39Devon RO, QS rolls Epiphany, Midsummer 1649; Epiphany 1650. The many recognizances he signed from Bradninch and Tiverton, as mayor of the former place in 1651, and as recorder, are further testimony to his energetic legal work on behalf of the commonwealth.40E.g. Devon RO, QS rolls, Easter 1651, Michaelmas 1651, Midsummer 1652, Epiphany 1653. Neither his finances nor his reputation seem to have suffered following the litigation over the will of his father-in-law Walrond, who died in 1650.41C10/16/171.

As a legal adviser to the Devon bench and as a recorder of a borough, Shapcote enjoyed most of the authority of the county justices of the peace but without their high profile in relation to any council of state intent on manipulating the commission for political advantage. His view of the dissolution of the Rump in 1653 is unlikely to have been a positive one, but he had by the inauguration of the protectorate built up a sufficient interest in Tiverton to be returned on 12 July 1654 for that borough to the Parliament which was to meet in September. It was a controversial election, however, and less than a month after the poll, papers challenging the outcome were lodged with the lord protector’s council. Shapcote was declared by some of his opponents to have been a royalist field officer under Sir John Acland. The Independent minister, Lewis Stucley, deposed that Shapcote was well disposed to Charles I while Exeter was garrisoned for the king during the civil war, while another witness asserted that he had only supported Parliament once ‘the earl of Essex was like to carry the west before him’. The minister of Tiverton denounced Shapcote for threats he had allegedly made against the godly in the town. He was said to be a gamer, whose bowls and cockfighting matches attracted ‘many loose gentlemen together’. His opponents had supported John Blackmore*, an associate of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell* from his army days, but the election was allowed to stand, and Blackmore found a seat at East and West Looe, Cornwall, instead.42SP18/74/1-2.

Once at Westminster, Shapcote was named to committees to review the functions of the judges for ‘poor prisoners’ appointed by the Nominated Assembly (15 Sept.), which was intended to draw upon his legal experience. A further committee on reviewing the size of the armed forces soon followed (26 Sept.), and on 5 October he was named to the important committee of privileges with fellow Devonians Thomas Gibbons and William Fry.43CJ vii. 383a, 370b, 373b. Before November, he was named to three other committees and his place on the privileges committee confirmed.44CJ vii. 374a, 381a, b. Then, on 7 November, while the Commons busied itself with reviewing the Instrument of Government, he was obliged to inform the House of a pamphlet circulating in London which purported to represent a speech of his in that Parliament. George Thomason picked up one version of the speech the day before Shapcote stood up to clear himself, and another version of it, bound with a pamphlet on behalf of Members excluded from sitting, was put about at much the same time.45The Speech of Colonel Shapcott (1654, 669.f.19.34); Colonell Shapcot (Knight of Devonshire) his Speech (1654, E.816.7). Shapcote was said to have made his speech on 30 October, in response to an intervention by Bulstrode Whitelocke. The proceedings that day were a sitting of the committee of the whole House, on the subjects of indemnity for tender consciences in the religious provisions of the Instrument, which would have given little scope for Whitelocke’s supposed proposal that the three kingdoms be bestowed on Cromwell and his posterity as an acknowledgment of his merits.46CJ vii. 379b; Burton’s Diary, i. lix; The Speech of Colonel Shapcott. Shapcote was said then to have launched into a diatribe against the lord protector as having destroyed the kingdoms, imposed draconian new laws and violated old ones, substituted sectaries for the orthodox clergy, burdened the country with crippling taxes and a new debtors’ court to destroy the nobility and gentry. If a king should be required, Shapcote was said to have concluded, let it be ‘he whose unquestionable right it is’.47The Speech of Colonel Shapcott.

On 7 November the House declared the work ‘treacherous, false, scandalous and seditious’, changing treacherous to ‘treasonable’ after a vote. The serjeant-at-arms was sent to seek out the author and printer.48CJ vii. 383a. News of the speech had soon reached the west country, and the Dorset Presbyterian, John Fitzjames*, an old ‘comrade’ from Massie’s brigade who was no doubt that Shapcote was the author, immediately wrote to him, endorsing the awkward questions he had apparently raised about religious heterodoxy and the treatment of former royalists – especially those included in articles of war.49Alnwick, Northumberland 551, f. 8v. A copy of Shapcote’s speech also reached the exiled royalist court, but as a sympathiser shrewdly observed, ‘if such a speech as that have been publicly uttered, me thinks it is so strange that both Cromwell and the speaker should so long outlive it’.50Nicholas Pprs. ii. 137. If the speech was indeed a fabrication, it is not clear why Shapcote was chosen to have these utterances foisted upon him, but the perpetrators may have identified him as someone whose political record in the 1640s was ambiguous and who was therefore plausible as a royalist. After this brief excitement, Shapcote resumed his rather lacklustre parliamentary career, and was appointed to only three more committees before the end of December, although he later wryly recalled his involvement in one of these, in which he found ‘nothing but delay ... the same things over and over again’.51CJ vii. 387a, 407b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 104. There is no record of his having attended in the final weeks of the Parliament, when the Instrument came under increasing attack from the Presbyterian interest.

By his modest profile in the work of the House and his brief notoriety during the episode of the forged speech, Shapcote was hardly likely to be identified as a protectorian, but on his return to Devon, he seems to have become willing to help the government as a militia commissioner, a task he had accepted under the Long Parliament. In March 1655 he was one of the commissioners for the county, put on alert as news of a rising reached London. In this capacity, he helped Unton Croke II* defeat the Penruddock rebels at South Molton, and continued in good standing in the eyes of the Devon magistrates. Exeter castle was historically an outlying component of the honour of Bradninch, where Shapcote retained a copyhold interest. When the justices wanted a grant of the castle and its courtrooms for the county, therefore, Shapcote was the obvious choice to negotiate with John Disbrowe*, the lord protector’s major-general in the west.52Devon RO, QS Order Bk. 1/9, Midsummer 1655; Croslegh, Bradninch, 50. In the spring of 1656, his reliability in the eyes of the government was confirmed when he was appointed a commissioner in the sensitive issue of fraudulent debentures. Debentures had since the late 1640s been a financial instrument by which those owed money by the state, typically for military service, could claim lands, and the appearance of forgeries was a scandal and a public danger.

The Tiverton election for the second protectorate Parliament in 1656 seems to have been less contentious than that of 1654, and Shapcote was again returned. In comparison with his earlier conduct in Parliaments, he seemed invigorated. He was named to at least 60 committees, was again a member of the privileges committee, and associated himself with the cause of improving the personal security of the protector.53CJ vii. 424a, 429a. On 26 September, he was named to a committee on the prisoners still in Exeter gaol after the Penruddock trials, and subsequently reported from it. Shapcote’s committee proposed clemency for six out of the seven. The House proved more merciful than the committee on the seventh, substituting a sentence of transportation for that of death.54CJ vii. 429a, 430a, b. This became for a couple of months a standing committee for reviewing condemned prisoners, and Shapcote reported on further cases.55CJ vii. 442b-443a, 449b. On 18 October he reported from the committee on the case of the diarist, Thomas Burton*, which cleared him of all charges.56CJ vii. 440b-441a. Other committees in which Shapcote played a leading part, as reporter, in the opening months of this Parliament included those on bills to allow the reversal of attainders against formerly condemned individuals such as John Deane (31 Oct.), to grant John Brooke, 1st Baron Cobham legal control of his own lands (9 Dec.), and to review leases to individuals of caretaking rights at the palace of Westminster (11 Dec.).57CJ vii. 446a, 447b, 462b, 465b, 466b-467a. These were hardly committees of the first importance, but as a Member free of any special responsibility he called to bodies sitting on a range of mainly legal topics, including the proposed equity court in York (20 Nov.) and the reform of the forest laws (6 Dec).58CJ vii. 456a, 465a.

An explanation for Shapcote’s new-found enthusiasm for service in Parliament may lie in his angling for another post. On 19 November, Henry Cromwell*, the lord deputy of Ireland, expressed himself content with either Shapcote or another individual for the office of solicitor-general in that country. Shapcote had evidently been lobbying John Thurloe* for the position, and Cromwell left it to him to decide which of the two should be appointed.59TSP v. 612. As a seeker of office, Shapcote was unlikely to say or do anything to mar his prospects, and might be expected to have worked hard and made himself useful. In the case of the notorious Quaker, James Naylor, which took up so much of the House’s time that autumn, Shapcote took mainly a lawyer’s view, arguing on 8 December for procedures that would save the time of the House.60Burton’s Diary, i. 36, 77. He wanted the House to look at the wider issues in the affair, fearful that the country would conclude that an offence had been created for which there was no defining law. He supported John Disbrowe in calls for an adjournment, and opined on 12 December that while his private view was that Naylor should die, he could find no law that allowed that sentence to be passed in a case of that sort. In the absence of the Lords and the church courts, precedents were hard to find: ‘The power sticks most with me of anything’. A lesser sentence would suffice to punish Naylor and discourage others. Shapcote’s remarks did not please at least one member of the Cromwellian household. That night at dinner, Richard Cromwell* declared that Naylor should be hanged and ‘very much slighted’ what Shapcote had been saying.61Burton’s Diary, i. 104, 125-6 Undaunted, on 12 December Shapcote persisted in calling for Naylor to be given a life sentence in prison, and the following day repeated his concern that the House had without precedent acted as a judicature.62Burton’s Diary, i. 155, 157, 161, 165.

In the first three months of 1657, most of Shapcote’s committee appointments related to petitions brought in by private individuals, including the settling of Irish lands on Sir Theophilus Jones* and others, and he was naturally named to the committee for the ministry in Exeter.63CJ vii. 482b, 484a, 488a, 491b, 493a, 494b, 495b, 496b, 499a, 505b. The most important piece of legislation that he was involved in, for his own career at least, was the bill to regulate new building in London (9 May), which was still proceeding through the House in June.64CJ vii. 531b, 555a When on 30 May the power of appointing salaried sub-commissioners was debated, Shapcote moved that the posts should be in the gift of the lord protector, so that the House should be spared the chore of approving every individual in turn.65Burton’s Diary, ii. 160. A few days later, when John Lambert offered a petition from a Holborn man who wanted to make tenements of his property, Shapcote spoke sharply against it, reminding the House that the point of the legislation was to ‘suppress these nuisances’. On 9 July, he was appointed one of the sub-commissioners, under what a critic was soon to denounce as the ‘abominable, oppressive, wicked act’ for new buildings.66C231/6, p. 371; A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 10 (E.935.5).

In the debates over the Humble Petition and Advice and the offer of the crown to Oliver Cromwell, Shapcote seems to have confined himself to contributing to discussions on procedure. He served on committees to convert additional votes on the Humble Petition into a bill, and on 4 June reported from the committee which settled on the ‘Additional Petition and Advice’ as the vehicle for dealing with the issues thrown up by the original petition. He was keen on prioritizing the Humble Petition over other business (5 May) and expressed concern about its implications for the legitimacy of earlier acts and ordinances (27 May).67Burton’s Diary, ii. 106, 135. On 4 June he also reported on a bill aimed at improving procedures for selecting individuals for public office, but was checked by the Speaker from introducing any further bills from his committee.68CJ vii. 545a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 171. A few weeks later this bill was entrusted to a fresh committee, to which Shapcote was named with fellow Devonians Henry Hatsell, Thomas Bampfylde and Edmund Fowell; other legislation on which Shapcote reported were the bills against lavish styles of living and for indemnity (where he was a stand-in for the sick Thomas Burton), both of which passed the House on 19 June. He had been the first-named to the committee on ‘immoderate living’ and was evidently that bill’s principal author.69CJ vii. 559b, 563a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 257-8.

On 30 May, Shapcote had been named to the important committee on public revenue, and intervened in debates on the public finances on a number of occasions in the following weeks. He opposed the moves by Sir Christopher Packe to ensure that naturalized foreign merchants should pay customs duties, arguing that revenue had nothing to do with naturalization, and spoke against two other provisos brought in by Packe to protect City of London revenues.70CJ vii. 543a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 193-4. He acted as teller against a grant of lands in Ireland to Charles Fleetwood*, framing his objection as a scrupulous insistence that public faith debts should be met before awards were made to individuals, however eminent – which Fleetwood himself went along with (12 June) – and on 10 June proposed the relative tax burdens of the three nations to be included in the bill for assessments. As a mechanism for collecting the money from the localities he advocated following the procedures which Charles I’s government had employed in collecting Ship Money, and found himself out of sympathy with the rating methods which were in fact adopted.71CJ vii. 550b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 218, 225, 234. Land in Ireland was of interest to him; he suggested a tax burden for that country ten percent lower than that adopted by the House, suggested sales of forests and lands in Ireland and in his report from the committee on public faith debts was confident that they could be cleared by discoveries of lands bought with fraudulent debentures. Here he was drawing on his experience as a commissioner for the debentures, and confirming his interest in setting himself up over the Irish sea.72Burton’s Diary, ii. 212, 214, 225, 239.

In the last few weeks before the House adjourned in June 1657, Shapcote had much to say about the Additional Petition and Advice, reporting from the committee working on tidying up the constitution within the timetable before the House rose. His differences with Packe of a few weeks earlier were forgotten, as they worked to ensure the passage of the Additional Petition on to the statute book. Shapcote was in favour of due solemnity – ‘I mean not unction, and the like’, he hastened to add – but a solemn proclamation of the chief magistrate, and a set of oaths to be taken by protector and Parliament-men.73Burton’s Diary, ii. 248, 274-5. There were those in the House who on religious grounds scrupled against oaths, but Shapcote argued that they were common in legal transactions between individuals and that they had been employed in the Recognition of 1654. When on 24 June, Thomas Bampfylde* declared that the power of nomination by the lord protector to the Other House was against the Humble Petition, Shapcote, with the legislative clock at the eleventh hour, urged that the matter be settled lest the constitution left Members ‘tossed up and down here and their lives ripped up’.74Burton’s Diary, ii. 289, 291, 298. Two days later the House rose.

In his conduct during 1657, Shapcote had been a government supporter if not a spokesman, and in December he was able to thank Henry Cromwell for the post of solicitor-general in Ireland, which had come to him at last through the good offices of Cromwell, Thurloe and Dr Robert Gorges, Cromwell’s secretary.75Henry Cromwell Corresp. 355. He promised to travel to Ireland as soon as he was able, and had first to attend the next sitting of Parliament, which reconvened in January 1658. There he was again unsurprisingly supportive of the government. When the custody of the records of this Parliament was raised, he urged clarity in deciding the function of the Other House before any documents were moved, and wanted the second chamber to be known as the Lords. On 28 January, with two other Cromwellian supporters from Devon, Henry Hatsell and John Copleston, he urged the lord protector to print his speech of 25 January, in which Oliver Cromwell had tried to head off the preoccupations of the House with constitutional niceties. On 30 January, Shapcote feared the consequences of the interminable wrangling over the ‘grounds and foundations’ of the Houses, lest they all be turned out.76Burton’s Diary, ii. 349, 377, 393, 399, 402; CJ vii. 589a. He spoke presciently. Shapcote tried to intervene on 2 and February on the title of the Other House, but the next day Cromwell abruptly dissolved the Parliament.77Burton’s Diary, ii. 422, 435, 436.

Shapcote was secure in his paid posts as commissioner for debentures and for buildings in London, and he could look forward to his Irish solicitor-generalship. He continued to be an authority on prisoners guilty of capital offences, certifying in February 1658 on the case of a Dorset rebel captured in Penruddock’s rising of 1655.78CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 343. The Irish solicitorship finally came to him in October, but his attempt at one of the Tiverton seats in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament was unsuccessful; he was nudged aside by the crypto-royalist Sir Coplestone Bampfylde and Francis Warner, a London carpet-bagger. He was probably in Ireland at the time of the election, with little prospect of exerting any influence in his own candidature: he was certainly in Wicklow early in March. Nevertheless, the Tiverton election was contested on his behalf by Thomas Gorges*, who continued a friend of Shapcote’s as evidently did Col. Edward Cooke*, whom Shapcote had tried to help in 1657. The appeal to the House over the Tiverton election failed, however, and Shapcote is unlikely to have concerned himself further about it, as John Thurloe saw to it that he was granted the post of Irish attorney-general held in tandem with the solicitorship.79Henry Cromwell Corresp. 461-2; CJ vii. 612b; TSP vii. 627.

He was back in England to be readmitted as one of the secluded Members to the revived Long Parliament (21 Feb. 1660) and reclaimed his seat. He sat on three committees between 24 February and 10 March, including one which deliberated on the release or continued custody of prisoners, an interest of his in the Cromwellian Parliaments.80CJ vii. 851b, 854a, 871a. Despite assertions to the contrary, it seems unlikely that he retained legal office in Ireland after the collapse of the protectorate.81HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 427. Shapcote came back into the House for Tiverton in the Convention, but was a critic of the court. He had much to say on the indemnity bill, taking a hard line against Irish Protestants who had supported Catholic rebellion; indemnity had been an interest of his in the Parliament of 1656. He spoke in favour of leniency towards those suspected of any part in the trial of Charles I.82HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 427. After the Parliament was dissolved, he returned to Ireland, and in May 1661 was returned to the Irish Parliament for Wicklow, where he had been living in 1659. He was very active there, but had to contend with doubts about his loyalty to the crown.83CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 261; CJI i. 595; Bodl. Carte 31, f. 413. He slowly worked his way towards the approval of the government in Ireland, asserting in January 1662 that he simply sought to continue practising at the Irish bar and would be very pleased to be promoted serjeant-at-law, but those closer to the lord lieutenant, James Butler, 1st duke of Ormond, than he was persisted in considering him ‘an obnoxious person’.84Bodl. Carte 31, ff. 390, 409, 411, 415, 417, 418. In 1663, he was caught among the lesser associates of the reckless rebel and adventurer, Col. Thomas Blood, and Ormond reported Shapcote’s involvement to the privy council in England, fearing him as ‘a very leading man in the House, of a bold seditious spirit’.85CSP Ire. 1663-5, pp. 111-2, 116. His role was enough to deter the government from recalling Parliament, and in June 1663 Shapcote was arrested with a view to shipping him to London for interrogation. Ominously, the king had decided that Shapcote should be made an example of, but by October, the evidence against him was looking thin.86Bodl. Carte 32, f. 668; 43, f. 192; 46, ff. 122-4; CSP Ire. 1663-5, pp. 128, 132, 141, 266-7, 303. By December, his prospects were improving, as his relative by marriage, Sir Courtenay Pole†, spoke up on his behalf.87CSP Ire. 1663-5, p. 322; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 611; HMC Egmont, ii. 8. The pardon came through on 18 August 1664.88Bodl. Carte 59, f. 17v; 43, f. 365; 145, f. 25; 165 ff. 200-201v; CSP Ire. 1663-5, p. 428.

Shapcote re-established himself, to the chagrin of his Irish enemies: ‘What makes this man so high if there were not mischief in the bottom, methinks he is unworthy of his prince’s mercy.’89HMC Egmont, ii. 12. Proceedings at law against him were dropped, but in November 1665 he was suspended, then expelled from the Irish Parliament, with a bill against him in the English Parliament barring him from civil employment.90Bodl. Carte, f. 216v; CJI i. 338-9, 340, 344, 351, 352, 354. He remained in Ireland, and in July 1668 was granted a 2,000-acre estate at Ballyfin, outside Maryborough in Queen’s County, through the good offices of his Pole relatives.91NAI, 999/306/2. He continued to practise at the Irish bar in the early 1670s, although he never escaped the censure of the government, and kept in touch with his property interests in Bradninch.92HMC Var. iii. 232, 234, 235, 241; Devon RO, 1978A/11/12. In 1681, his daughter’s marriage settlement described him as of Dublin, he renewed his copyhold at Bradninch in 1683, but was dead before 3 May 1689. His posterity had died out within a generation after him.93Devon RO, 1262 M/T1/1; HP Commons 1660-1690.