FRANCKLYN, John (bef. 1592-1643), of Marlborough, Wilts.

Francklyns or Franklins had been freeholders in various parts of north Wiltshire since at least the late fourteenth century.5Wilts. N and Q i. 561; v. 111, 116; Marlborough par. regs. The MP’s father, William, who appears to have come from Sherston, a manor in the north west of the county held by the earls of Hertford, had by 1587 emerged as one of the ‘able men’ of Marlborough, a borough in the north-east where the Seymours also held sway. A woollen draper, he was taxed at £4 in the subsidy of that year and described as a gentleman in the borough records in 1603. Subsequently he was twice mayor, although he was never quite as prominent on the corporation as Philip Francklyn, described by John as a ‘cousin’.6Wilts RO, G22/1/107, pp. 9, 13, 36; PROB11/160/67; PROB11/196/534, 538; Wilts. N and Q i. 380-1.

John took the oath for the trained band in the town in October 1611.7Wilts RO, G22/1/107, pp. 88, 89. As the son of a burgess he was admitted free in December 1612, when he was presumably at least 21.8Wilts RO, G22/1/205/2, p. 88. He probably married Deborah soon afterwards for the baptism of their first child occurred in August 1614; their twelfth and last was baptised in October 1634.9Marlborough St Peter par. reg. The exact nature of John’s education is unknown, but he clearly undertook some kind of legal studies. Elected town clerk in December 1618, he kept the post for the remaining 25 years of his life, collecting an annual fee initially of 26s 8d and from 1637 of 40s. He occasionally discharged other borough offices; following the death of his father in May 1631 he also sat on the council in his own right.10Wilts RO, G22/1/205/2.

Francklyn appears to have been an influential and locally trusted, if otherwise sometimes controversial, figure. The corporation had a recorder in the person of Richard Digges†, who served as one of its MPs in all the Parliaments from 1604 to 1628, but while he continued to be paid for his counsel into the 1630s, much of the burden fell on Francklyn. The latter made regular trips to London to pursue borough business in the central law courts. Twice in the 1620s he was involved in activity which challenged government policy. In 1623 he was party to a decision to retain in the hands of the borough money collected for the recovery of the Rhine Palatinate and for the relief of French Protestants, and to employ it for the benefit of the local poor.11Waylen, Hist. Marlborough, 132. More seriously, in the spring of 1625 he and others were accused by the deputy lieutenants (led by Hertford’s brother, Sir Francis Seymour* of Marlborough Castle) of accepting bribes from those seeking to escape levies for the forces to be sent to the continent under Count Mansfeldt. Francklyn, who was apparently the most recalcitrant, was twice taken into custody and examined by the privy council, in London in May and in Oxford in August. Found guilty of abuses and contempt, he was ordered to make restitution and a formal apology at quarter sessions should the deputy lieutenants require it. The upshot is unknown, but the corporation was prepared to reimburse at least some of his expenses.12Wilts RO, G22/1/205/2; APC Mar. 1625-May 1626, pp. 54, 68, 76, 111, 130, 131; CSP Dom. 1625-6, pp. 28, 72-3.

It is not clear if he was the John Francklyn involved as purchaser or trustee in various local land transactions in the 1630s.13Coventry Docquets, 683, 695, 727. However, by 1640 he was probably a man of means. In May that year his eldest son William was admitted to the Middle Temple, while when he made his will in 1642 he contemplated leaving £1,200 between his four unmarried daughters and a further £400 to a younger son.14M. Temple Admiss. i. 138; PROB11/196/534, 538.

Edward Hyde*, himself a Wiltshireman, later recalled that Marlborough was ‘a town the most notoriously disaffected of all that county’.15Clarendon, Hist. ii. 403. Mounting discontent over the summer of 1640 with exactions of men and money for the war against the Scots may well explain the failure in October to re-elect to Parliament the outsider (William Carnaby*) and the nonentity (Francis Baskerville*) chosen in the spring. Instead, the freemen returned their town clerk and his erstwhile foe among the deputy lieutenants, Sir Francis Seymour, a Ship Money refuser. Francklyn secured many fewer voices than his experienced colleague, but he still garnered significantly more than any of his three rivals, whose initials only are known.16Wilts RO, G22/1/21, pp. 36-7.

Unlike Seymour, Francklyn was an inconspicuous Member of the Commons. It is possible that until Sir Francis was elevated to the Lords (as Baron Seymour of Trowbridge) in February 1641 Francklyn’s main role was to communicate the activities of the House to their constituents. He was apparently absent from Marlborough (and thus perhaps at Westminster) when lawyer Philip Smythe* was elected to replace Seymour, but thereafter he probably reverted to previous habit; the absence of chamberlains’ accounts for 1641 and 1642 makes this difficult to gauge.17Wilts RO, G22/1/21, p. 39. Unlike Smythe, he was a fortnight late in taking the Protestation (17 May 1641), and may have been busy in Wiltshire with the petition from Marlborough relayed to the Lords by Smythe on 6 May.18CJ ii. 133a, 137a, 148a; Procs. LP iv. 410, 412. He may have been the Francklyn named on 30 August to a committee to consider a petition from Hertfordshire freeholders.19CJ ii. 276a.

Otherwise, for over a year there was no mention of Francklyn in the Commons Journal, but there can be no doubting his commitment to the parliamentarian cause when civil war seemed imminent. On 10 June 1642 he promised to advance £50 for the defence and the following day was ordered to thank his fellow townsmen for their ‘forwardness’ in collecting £600 as a loan for the same purpose.20Bodl. Tanner 63, f. 59; CJ ii. 619b. A month later (11 July), perhaps as a result of lobbying on his or Smythe’s part, Francklyn and Sir Robert Pye I* were deputed to communicate to the assessment commissioners for Wiltshire the instruction that Marlborough should not be ‘prejudiced in their tax and payments’ because of its earlier enthusiasm.21CJ ii. 664b. Smythe and Francklyn were to be supplied with receipts for money which had already reached London (12 July).22CJ ii. 668b.

For several months Francklyn’s movements are again unclear. However, towards the end of the year, while Smythe remained in London, he was in Marlborough – on the orders of Parliament, according to his widow later – assisting a Scotsman, Ramsey, sent by Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, to establish a parliamentarian garrison there. He was thus among the defenders when the town was first surrounded and then attacked by royalist forces who began to arrive on 25 November. On 2 December Francklyn reported in a letter to Speaker William Lenthall* the town’s defiance of a call to surrender from George Digby*, Lord Digby and the local activists’ capture of royalists including Lord Seymour’s wife and daughter. Having reached Lenthall via Colonel John Hampden* at Windsor, the letter was read in the Commons on the 7th, prompting the issuing of orders for the town’s support.23CJ ii. 879a; Harl. 164, ff. 243b/244a; CCC 1539; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 403-4; Waylen, Hist. Marlborough, 157-9. But it was already too late. On the 5th the royalists mounted an assault and captured the town, wreaking considerable destruction and taking numerous prisoners, including the town clerk.24Clarendon, Hist. ii. 404-5; Waylen, Hist. Marlborough, 160-4.

There were those ready to rejoice over the fate of ‘the foolish fellow Francklyn, who they say hath brought all this calamity upon a place he hath been long in spoiling’ and condemn his ‘perverseness’ in refusing to allow the town to yield.25W. Chillingworth, The Petition of the most Substantial Inhabitants (1643), 17 (E.244.39). Retribution was extreme, even allowing for exaggeration in the account later given by his fellow prisoners. After a night in ‘a nasty stinking stable’ with no food, they were driven ‘like rogues and thieves tied together by the arms in the horse-way up to the knees in mire and dirt’ to royalist headquarters at Oxford. Once there Digby and Commissary Henry Wilmot* took Francklyn

and led him away from all the rest of the prisoners, to a tree and there swore deeply they would hang him like a damned rogue and traitor if he would not confess where his money was.

Thereafter he was delivered to the sadistic prison marshal Captain William Smith, handled roughly, put in particularly close confinement and tormented by carousing cavalier detainees.26Chillenden, Inhumanity of the Kings Prison-keeper, 2, 3, 10. With Valentine Wauton* and John George* on 15 April 1643 he signed a receipt for £100 sent by Parliament (probably on the initiative of a committee almost certainly chaired by Philip Smythe) to be distributed amongst poor prisoners at Oxford.27CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 649; CJ ii. 992a. According to his widow, in addition to £500 lost through plunder, he also personally spent £80 on his soldiers to prevent them from starving.28CCC 1539. Discussion in the House on 22 June and 8 July of possible exchanges to secure the Members’ release came to nothing in Francklyn’s case.29Harl. 165, ff. 114b, 120a. Regularly denied food and water, on 19 July he was reportedly ‘a dying’; by 4 August he was ‘dead by Smith’s cruelty’.30Chillenden, Inhumanity of the Kings Prison-keeper, 24-8.

Francklyn had made his will the previous September, ‘renouncing all worth and merit in my self and relying only on the merit of my Saviour Christ Jesus for the pardon of my sins and salvation of my soul’, and leaving his wife well provided for.31PROB11/196/534, 538. The war and the destruction of property in Marlborough had already made inroads into his income, however. On 7 October 1643 the Commons referred it to the Committee of the West to pay Deborah Francklyn a pension of £4 a week in recognition of her late husband’s ‘good affections ... to this great cause of liberty and religion’, until such time as a more permanent provision should be arranged.32CJ iv. 686b. But the pension failed to materialise and in 1644 the MP’s eldest son William, who had become a major in parliamentarian service and was probably the Captain Francklyn described in June 1643 as the only competent officer in the regiment of Sir Edward Hungerford*, was killed in action at Lincoln.33BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. Repeated orders were made in Parliament to pay to Mrs Francklyn arrears both of the pension and Major Francklyn’s pay (7 Oct. 1646, 7 May 1649, 19 Nov. 1651). It was only after an intervention by Oliver Cromwell* on 24 November 1651, following which an auditor calculated her arrears at £974, that some progress was made.34Harington’s Diary, 42; CJ vi. 202-4; vii. 37; CCC 1539-40. Mrs Francklyn, who claimed to have lost £40 a year in landed income as well as £300 a year from her husband’s professional practice, was alleged to have lost a further £780 in the disastrous fire which swept through Marlborough in 1653, but seems to have been comfortably circumstanced at the time she made her will in 1657.35Waylen, Hist. Marlborough, 517; PROB11/272/483. Her sole surviving son Richard, who had inherited his father’s ‘best bible’, petitioned again with his five sisters for arrears in May 1658.36CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 16. By that time he was rector of Bromham; displaced in 1660, he was episcopally ordained in 1663 and gained another living.37PROB11/196/534, 538; Al. Ox.; Calamy Revised, 212. No other close family member sat in Parliament.