Napper was licensed in 1626 to travel for three years, but can have been abroad for only a few months, for in November of the following year he was admitted to the Middle Temple. He evidently enjoyed neither experience, leaving instructions in his will that his grandsons should not be educated beyond the seas, ‘and not much in London’.1 APC, 1625-6, p. 477; PROB 11/343, f. 75. Not long into his legal studies, he succeeded his father as Member for Wareham, but played a very minor role in the third Caroline Parliament, being named only to a committee for a naturalization bill (7 May 1628).2 CD 1628, iii. 300.
According to the 1st earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper†), Napper was ‘a good housekeeper, well-versed in all his country business’, but otherwise of limited ability, ‘and of a temper inclined to envy ... and to speak as ill as he could of the absent’.3 W.D. Christie, Life of Shaftesbury, i. app. 1, p. xvii. In May 1640 he was arrested and brought before the Privy Council for protesting at the removal of militiamen from Dorset to serve in the Second Bishops’ War.4 CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 55, 125. Returned for Weymouth to the Long Parliament, Napper sided with the king in the Civil War, and took his seat in the Oxford Parliament in 1644.5 Historical Collections ed. J. Rushworth, v. 573. Systematic plunder and delinquency fines failed to check the expansion of his estate, and his rental income rose by two-thirds between 1640 and 1653, latterly standing at over £2,000 p.a.6 Som. and Dorset N and Q, xiv. 1; CCC, 1061; Dorset RO, D84 (manorial). Napper drew up his will on 12 Nov. 1667, in which he acknowledged ‘from the bottom of my heart my sins and unrighteousness’. He died on 14 May 1673, and was buried with his ancestors at Minterne Magna. His son Nathaniel, the second baronet, who by contrast was a great traveller, sat for various Dorset boroughs in nine Parliaments between 1679 and 1705.7 PROB 11/343, f. 75; Hutchins, iv. 483; HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 127.