HELY, James (1617-94), of Castle Street, Salisbury.

Several Heelys or Helys were established in Salisbury in the early seventeenth century. Henry Heelye held rooms in the ‘the school house’ in Castle Street by 1624, and was still there in 1632.20C. Haskins, The Ancient Trade Guilds and Companies of Salisbury (Salisbury, 1912), 295; Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, f. 366v; G23/1/253; G23/1/254. A namesake who was a tailor – perhaps the same man – was living in St Thomas’s parish in 1637.21Mar. Lics. Salisbury 1615-1682, 137. Richard Heely, ‘musitian’, presented several children for baptism in St Edmund’s parish in the 1610s; James Heely, embroiderer, father of the MP, presented four.22St Edmund, Salisbury, par. reg. As an upholsterer, the elder James Heely was made a free citizen in May 1620.23Wilts. RO, G23/1/264. By 1624 it was almost certainly he who had moved to St Thomas’s, where he had several more children with his wife Joan.24St Thomas, Salisbury, par. reg.

Surviving city apprenticeship and citizenship records contain no entry for James Heely the son, or Hely as he more commonly signed himself. His second certain appearance occurs at his marriage to Jane Hellyard at Alderbury, just south-west of Salisbury, in May 1641. But he was evidently living in the city: at least three of the couple’s children were baptized at St Thomas’s church between 1642 and 1655.25St Thomas, Salisbury, par. reg . His occupation is unknown, but in October 1645 he was elected to the city council as one of the forty-eight.26Wilts. RO, G24/1/4, ff. 16v, 18. It is likely that he had already seen military service, perhaps in the cavalry regiment raised by Sir Edward Hungerford*: in 1656 he and another claimed to have ‘run the hazards of our lives’ for the parliamentary cause for 12 or 14 years.27G. Duckett, ‘Original letters from the Wilts. commrs. to Cromwell in 1655’, Wilts. Arch. Mag. xviii. 376. He was probably the ‘Lieutenant James Heely’ in the ‘new-levied horse’ that its commander, Alexander Thistlethwayte*, sent to reinforce Captain William Ludlowe, governor of Langford Castle, in January 1646.28Perfect Occurrences no. 5 (23-30 Jan. 1646), sig. E3v (E.319.20). By 6 May, when the Commons resolved on the slighting of Langford Castle, Hely was a cornet under Ludlowe in the only cavalry troop to remain in Wiltshire.29Hoare, Hist. Wilts. iii iii (South Damerham), 34; Ludlow, Mems. i. 117, 124. A week later his request to fellow councillors that he be granted the race cup, which he considered he had won the previous year, indicates an established interest in horses; that September a bid of £260 for some of Lord Arundel’s estate indicates some prosperity.30Wilts. RO G23/1/4, f. 20; CCC v. 3270. Whatever the extent of his military commitments, he continued to participate in civic affairs before and after the regicide, attending council meetings, and serving as a constable in 1648 and as steward of the workhouse in 1652.31Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, ff. 40v, 70.

By August 1654 Hely had gained sufficient notice as a reliable activist to be placed on the Wiltshire committee of triers and ejectors.32A and O. In the aftermath of Penruddock’s rising in the spring of 1655, he and William Ludlowe tipped off Thomas Bingham – who described these informants to Major-general John Disbrowe* as ‘two honest, godly men’ – about ‘knavery’ among local officeholders which had impeded the conviction of insurgents.33TSP iii. 377. In July Hely laid information against ten horsemen seen at Standidge, ‘all papists’.34TSP iii. 655. By December Hely and Ludlowe had been appointed to the Wiltshire commission for assisting Disbrowe as major-general for south-west England.35TSP iv. 295, 300. Hely and one of his fellow commissioners wrote to Cromwell in March 1656, suggesting that their instructions to seek out royalist rebels were insufficiently rigorous, and marvelling at the mercy shown to the Seymour family and others

All that we aim at is, that the masque of these men may be pulled off, and the country have a right knowledge of them; as also that we may be able to give an account of the justice of our proceedings, in carrying an equal hand to all that come before us, according to our instructions, wthout respect of persons; and lastly that they may not stand in the way of good people for the future.36Duckett, ‘Original letters’, 375-6; VCH Wilts. v. 150.

Doubtless it was this proven loyalty to the regime, together with a pronounced enthusiasm for addressing perceived social and moral ills, that lay behind Hely’s election to Parliament in 1656 together with Salisbury’s energetic reforming mayor, William Stone*. William Stephens*, who had represented the borough of Salisbury in 1654, but who lost both the recordership and the chance to sit again, blamed his exclusion, and that of Rumper John Dove*, on the determination of others to ‘punish sin’.37Hoare, Hist. Wilts. vi. 438-9 Given Hely’s record and background it is unsurprising that he was then nominated to committees to consider the security of the lord protector (7 Oct 1656), the conditions of long-term prisoners (26 Sept.), alehouse abuses (29 Sept.), and artificers’ wages (6 Oct.), but he was also named (22 Nov.) to prepare bills to secularise Gloucester cathedral by turning it into a corporation and to establish scholarships at the University of Cambridge, and also to consider the petition of the doctors of civil law.38CJ vii. 429a, 430a, 435a, 435b, 457a, 457b, 463b. When the bill for Oliver’s security was enacted, Hely was the last-named commissioner.39A. and O. Yet his usefulness at Westminster was apparently either short-lived or limited in scope. He left no trace in the Commons Journal between 2 December, when he was nominated to the finance committee sitting at Drury House, and the session’s dissolution in June 1657, and the only sign that he was present in the second session occurs in February 1658, when during a division he was mistaken for someone else.40Burton’s Diary, ii. 436.

Hely’s local prominence outlasted the Parliament, however. In February 1657 he became a Wiltshire justice of the peace, and in the next two years was named a commissioner for assessment and the militia, in which he held the rank of major in 1659.41C231/6, p. 359; C193/13/5, f. 117v; Wilts. RO, A1/160/2, pp. 153, 165; A. and O. Meanwhile, in Salisbury he served on the committee organising the teaching of a trade to workhouse children, and was deputed by the council in 1658 to go to London to represent their interests in a dispute.42Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, ff. 108, 111v. By 1660 he was warden of Heytesbury hospital.43VCH Wilts. iii. 340. In his absence in August 1659 he was chosen an alderman, but it was still as alderman-elect that in 1662 he was purged, with his 1650s associates, from the corporation.44Wilts. RO, G23/1/4, ff. 116, 134v.

Thereafter Hely’s life is even more obscure. In September 1665 an anonymous informant reported from Salisbury that Hely, living in Castle Street, ‘chief stickler and governor there, is a dangerous person, and is constantly abroad, a month at a time’; whenever he returned, ‘40 or 50 nonconformists flock to him for intelligence’.45CSP Dom 1664-5, p. 581. He was apparently still involved in local affairs in 1669, but then disappears from view over the next decade and more.46Wilts. RO, 251/24. One Richard Hilliard of Alderbury, perhaps his brother-in-law, was imprisoned for nonconformity in 1677.47Besse, Collection of Sufferings, ii. 44. In 1687 James Hely was described as a ‘strong dissenter’ with ‘a great interest’ in the city of Salisbury, while in 1688 he was listed as a potential new justice of the peace when James II’s advisers considered the repeal of the Test Acts.48G. Duckett, ‘Proposed repeal of the Test and Penal Statutes by King James the Second in 1688’, Wilts. Arch. Mag. xviii. 362, 371, 374. Bequests in his will, drawn up on 28 March 1694, included ‘my great bible with marginal notes’, the bible which had belonged to his (late) wife and £10 to a Mr Hancock to buy one for himself. There was mention of a son, William, two daughters (one designated executrix) and numerous grandchildren.49Wilts. RO, P4/1694/15. Despite the passage of time, it was as ‘Mr James Heely MP’ that he was entered in the burial register of St Edmund, Salisbury, three weeks later.50St Edmund, Salisbury, par. reg. No other family member is known to have sat in Parliament.