HOOKE, Humphrey (c.1580-1659), of Bristol.

Humphrey Hooke was born in East Street, Chichester, the second son of a merchant of that city. A member of what was presumably the same family was mayor in 1615, but it is unclear how Humphrey’s branch of the family relates to the family of Bramshott, Hampshire, whose pedigree was traced by the heralds in 1634. This family appears to have been of no great antiquity.20St Andrew, Chichester par. reg.: PROB11/290/248; PROB11/91/64; Vis. Sussex 1530, 1633-4 (Harl. Soc. liii), 162-3. Humphrey was apprenticed to John Ball of the Ironmongers’ Company of London, but afterwards, instead of taking up his craft in the City, left the country. He claimed later that his sojourn abroad was for more than two years, but he married the daughter of a wealthy Bristol merchant little more than a year after becoming free of the Ironmongers.21GL, 16977/1, p. 26; 16967/2, f. 7; Horfield par. reg. In 1607, Bristol corporation decreed that marriage to a freeman’s daughter would qualify a man to become a burgess, and Hooke was duly entered on the burgess roll that year.22Bristol RO, 04352/3, f. 185v; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 34. Hooke was evidently an energetic and entrepreneurial businessman. He was a member of the Newfoundland Company granted a charter by the king in 1610, and four years later he had become treasurer of the Society of Merchant Venturers, Bristol’s merchant elite.23CSP Dom. 1603-10, p. 604; D.W. Prowse, Hist. Newfoundland (1896), 93-102, 122. By 1628, he was one of the greatest of Bristol’s merchants, owning either on his own account or in partnership shipping of five hundred tons at least.24CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 288, 298, 300, 304, 306, 308, 309; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 98. Ships of his were successful in capturing prizes, one of which was reported as being worth £40,000 in 1630.25CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 564, 1629-31, 412; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 104-5, 109. In 1631, Hooke invested in Thomas James’s voyage to discover a north-west passage to India.26Recs. of Merchant Venturers ed. P.W. McGrath (Bristol Rec. Soc. xvii), 205. By the 1640s his trading interests extended from the Baltic to the Caribbean, via ports in Spain.27Bristol Deposition Bks. 1643-7, 47, 90-1.

Hooke’s progress along the cursus honorum of Bristol corporation was equally impressive, and he filled all the offices concerned with city charities and hospitals after 1623. In 1627 he fought an attempt by the Ironmongers’ Company to compel him to take the office of master or pay a fine. His arguments, backed by the corporation of his adopted city in a petition to Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Coventry†, were that he had left London permanently many years previously, had already held important civic office in Bristol and in the future must serve as mayor there. His offices could not be filled by deputies, and the most demanding of them was at the hospital, where ‘daily provision of the many fatherless ones doth wholly depend on the careful eye of the treasurer’.28GL, 16967/2, f. 7; Bristol City Lib. B10160, f. 163. The petition appears to have been successful, but the following year saw Hooke in more trouble, this time with the privy council, before which he was summoned for refusing to fit out two of his ships for the war with France.29CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 9. Here Hooke was in the company of other Bristolians, whose relationship with government and the City was never less than edgy, but the incident should not be taken as evidence of principled, sustained opposition to the king. As the second most prosperous port in the kingdom, Bristol was continually being re-appraised as a source of government revenue, and for its own part was regularly seeking measures of self-determination. In April 1631, after his mayoral term was over, Hooke went to London to try to reduce the city’s bill for purveyance, and in 1633 went up again to try to acquire admiralty jurisdiction. It was he who travelled to Whitehall in March 1636 to reduce the Ship Money burden.30Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 31, 40v, 66v. Civic interest and self-interest neatly converged in his leasing lands in the marshes from the corporation, on his promise of investing in the quay there, ‘so bleak a place in wind and weather’.31Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 87v. His promotion to alderman in 1632 was an acknowledgment of his sustained contribution to civic life.

In 1634, the Bristol merchants wrote to Secretary Nicholas (Edward Nicholas†) about how they had been troubled by vexatious legal proceedings for years, particularly arising from licences granted them by the king to export particular commodities. These would be challenged in the courts by government officials acting on information by informers. Such appears to have been the case of Hooke in the late 1630s, when depositions were sent to the attorney-general, Sir John Bankes†, alleging that when mayor, Hooke had prevented shipments of Welsh butter by day, but had connived at exports by night, to the detriment of the poor.32CSP Dom. 1634-5, pp. 177-8; Bodl. Bankes 55/85. A number of issues involving his interests came before the privy council at that time. One was a dispute between the Bristol and Exeter merchants over an imposition levied by the latter on trade with France.33PC2/48, p. 368 Another was a petition by the corporation against the oppressions of John, 1st Baron Mohun of Okehampton in his commission to discover illegal levies in the city.34PC2/48, p. 523, 545; CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 138, 168-9, 177; Adams’s Chronicle, 256. Yet another was a claim the Bristol merchants pursued in December 1638 for a reduction in customs duties on wines to take account of leakage.35PC2/49, p. 598. The privy council maintained its pressure on the city down to 1640 over its Ship Money payments, and as late as November 1640, the Bristol corporation petitioned the council to restrain butter exports.36PC2/51, p. 276; PC2/53, p. 48; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 108.

An insight into Hooke’s religious outlook is afforded by his support for Abel Lovering when the corporation elected a minister to serve Temple parish, in July 1639. He shared the opinion of Richard Longe*, a beautifier of his parish church in 1629, against Luke Hodges*, who did not vote, and Richard Aldworth*, Miles Jackson* and Joseph Jackson*, who voted for another candidate. Lovering went on to become an active royalist in 1642.37Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 91; A Declaration from the City of Bristoll (1642), 1 (E.83.13). A few months later, Hooke found himself taking a minority position over the appointment of a new chamberlain. A competition between William Chetwynd and Ralph Farmer for the post turned into a dispute over whether freeman status was an essential prerequisite for candidates, and whether the city was entitled to complete independence from the crown to make its own choice. Hooke backed Farmer, who was only admitted as a burgess after the contest had begun, and who provoked the wrath of the corporation by complaining to the king of the illegality of the election he lost. The dispute ended in the king's concession that the city should choose, and Chetwynd was confirmed in post.38Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 95v-97, 98v, 99; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 111. In February 1640, Hooke voted that the chamber should bear £120 of the Ship Money burden of £640, the majority voting for £140. The rest would be passed on to the taxpayers.39Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 100v; CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 406, 531.

On the eve of elections for the Short Parliament, Hooke was unafraid of opposing his colleagues in the corporation, and enjoyed the unquestioning support of the Merchant Venturers behind him. By 1640, he had served as master of the Merchant Venturers’ company for seven terms, six of them in the 1630s and five of them consecutively. After the Society’s success in winning a new charter for itself, in January 1640 Hooke and Richard Longe were active on behalf of the Merchant Venturers in their dispute with the searcher of the Bristol customs over duties on the privileged export commodity of calfskins.40Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 18; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 13; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 127. Hooke was thus a natural choice as one of the city’s MPs, elected on a narrow franchise with Recorder John Glanville. He made no recorded speeches in this assembly, and was named to only one committee, that on a bill about needle and steel wire manufacture.41CJ ii. 17b. Nevertheless, it is clear that much was expected of him from Bristol. The Merchant Venturers formed a committee to consider the ‘meet instruction’ they were to send Hooke and Glanville, and Hooke wrote to the corporation about ‘public grievances’, stimulating the formation on 27 April of a city committee in response.42Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 23; Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 102v. After his return to Bristol, Hooke was given £20 by the grateful corporation.43Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 20.

On 4 September, Hooke was one of a Merchant Venturers committee formed to negotiate with the privy council to remove the duty of 40s per tun of wine. This was the most persistent of the city’s current grievances, and lay in the king’s grant in 1638 to the Vintners’ Company of that imposition. The collection of the duty by the London company proved impracticable and oppressive, and Bristol merchants offered to compound for the duty, paying £500 a year to the Vintners in return for the duties. Their guarantees proved worthless, and in 1640 Hooke, Longe and Richard Aldworth complained to the Vintners of their difficulties in collecting from country wine retailers.44Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 29, 32; Recs. of Merchant Venturers ed McGrath, 222-4; When Hooke went up to the second Parliament of 1640, he again appeared to make little impression on the House, failing to be named to a single committee down to May 1642. But in July 1641, he was advising the Merchant Venturers on progress in the wine impositions business and – in February 1642 – over protecting the calfskins privileges.45Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, pp. 40, 50. From Bristol corporation he received letters about the attempts by shipping to bypass the port’s privileges in the wool trade by landing at Minehead, and was considered an appropriate choice in 1641 to view property at Pill on the River Avon, where city interests were threatened.46Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 110, 111. In other words, despite the wider political crisis engulfing the country, Hooke continued as a conscientious Member for Bristol, dealing with the city’s particular and local problems.

It was impossible to keep national and local issues separate, of course, and Bristol was naturally interested in matters of maritime defence, and viewed the rising in Ireland with particular alarm. On 13 January 1642, Hooke and Longe with the Plymouth MPs and Sir Edward Partheriche and John Rolle were required by the Commons to ask the lord admiral to investigate the case of four ships from Dunkirk carrying ordnance for Ireland.47PJ i. 57. Four days later, the Bristol MPs were asked to ensure that two ships were fitted out for Ireland from moneys paid into the House, increased later to three ships.48PJ i. 100, 396. But in the climate of attacks on monopolies, the Bristol merchants’ dealings with the London Vintners now recoiled in their faces. On 5 February, the cases of Hooke and Longe as wine monopolists emerged during the second reading of a bill against the Vintners’ Company. William Strode I argued that they should speak to try to clear themselves. In the event only Longe spoke, saying his name was used only in trust for city of Bristol as a corporation. Their case was referred to the monopolies committee chaired by George Peard, who as a burgess for another west country maritime corporation, Barnstaple, can not be assumed to have had any sympathy for the Bristolians.49PJ i. 281, 284. On 12 May, Hooke and Longe were disabled from sitting, not as monopolists, but as beneficiaries of the wine project.50CJ ii. 567b-568a; PJ ii. 310. The corporation awarded them £63 each in salaries and expenses for 309 days at Westminster.51Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 112.

In June, back in Bristol, Hooke offered to lend £200 towards the war effort against the Irish rebels, but his being named to the king’s commission of array the following month confirmed his support for the king. He did not find a place on the committee for the defence of the city, formed in August.52Bristol RO, 04264/3, ff. 120v, 123. By 19 October, he was distinctly cool towards the deputation from the Commons of Robert Reynolds and one of the MPs named Goodwin (perhaps Arthur), with Longe and other corporation leaders meeting them to explain why they could no longer oblige with a loan.53Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 127. Named as one of the original city committeemen to treat with the parliamentarian association of neighbouring counties, he soon withdrew himself, or was dropped. When in November Hooke was voted emissary to London with the city’s petition pleading for peace, the council’s voting evidence suggests that he did not have the confidence of future parliamentarians Luke Hodges, Richard Aldworth, Miles Jackson, or that of the royalist, Richard Longe.54Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 1, 5-6, 8. Nevertheless, the corporation was involved in a financial transaction involving Hooke and the parliamentarian commander, Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, in April 1643, suggesting that the merchant was by no means a doctrinaire royalist at this stage, and after the surrender of the city to Prince Rupert by Nathaniel Fiennes I*, in July, Hooke received a further £47 due to him for his former services as an MP in London .55Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 219. The council’s vote on £10,000 to the king (28 July) was a watershed, however. Hooke supported the gift; others, including Luke Hodges, voted nil. In August, Hooke signed a protestation not to bear arms against the king or contribute to the parliamentary cause.56Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 33, 37.

Once Bristol had become officially a royalist stronghold, unlike his fellow MP, John Taylor, Hooke made no attempt to join the king at Oxford. He continued instead as a leading light in the council, serving – unusually for Bristol – a second term as mayor from September 1643. During his period of office he personally lent the corporation £400, and approved a corporate advance to Sir John Winter, the Roman Catholic lieutenant of Henry Somerset, 1st marquess of Worcester, to fit out a ship, which can only have been used to harass the parliamentarian navy.57Bristol RO, 04026/22, pp. 287, 303. From the viewpoint of the Westminster Parliament even more culpable would have been Hooke’s arms purchases worth £260, let alone his advance to Sir John Penington, when it was known in London that the former admiral had been ordered by the king to bring over troops from Ireland.58Bristol RO, 04026/22, p. 304; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 16.

Yet from a different perspective, Hooke’s arms purchases were evidence of fractures among the royalists in the city, not solidarity. There were grievances among the citizens at the start of his mayoralty, and six months into it, he called a meeting of citizens which supported the Pill pilots’ refusal to conduct Irish ships up-river. Towards the end of his tenure, there were tensions between the civic elders that he led, and Prince Rupert. The prince’s wish to take the city militia with him on his march to the king probably lay behind Hooke’s re-arming plans.59Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 46; Latimer, Annals of Bristol, 191; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 475. Throughout 1644 and until at least the following spring, Hooke was negotiating with royalist commanders and commissioners of the neighbouring counties, and in November he promised two horses complete with armour, after taking an oath to defend Bristol against the king’s enemies.60Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 67, 75, 81, 82, 86, 90, 93. To the New Model army besieging the city in 1645, therefore, there were suggestions that Hooke might have been a man to do business with, and indeed he was.

Oliver Cromwell* wrote nearly five years later that Hooke did ‘something considerable’ to enable the city to be taken by Parliament, for which he was given indemnity for ‘life, liberty and estate’.61Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 212. The day before the storm of Bristol by the New Model army, there was a flurry of activity in the corporation, with as many as 15 votes taken on the membership of the council. Luke Hodges was reinstated. Hooke held aloof from the voting, with Richard Aldworth and Miles Jackson. Former MPs Richard Longe and John Taylor (who was to be killed the following day) did vote, so it is possible that somewhere in Hooke’s neutrality in this frantic local politicking lay his contribution to the cause of Parliament. On 6 October, he helped look over a petition to Lord General Sir Thomas Fairfax*, but he was expelled from the council by parliamentary ordinance just over two weeks later (28 Oct.). On 19 December, Major-general Philip Skippon* read the ordinance in the Council House.62Bristol RO, 04264/4, pp. 110, 119, 125; LJ vii. 664-5; A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 208.

Hooke took the Covenant, was left alone by the Bristol committee that included Luke Hodges and Dennis Hollister*, but was sequestered by the Gloucestershire county committee. The Committee for Compounding heard evidence of his support for whichever side possessed Bristol, and received his request to be allowed to compound on the Bristol articles of war. Only in 1649 was he fined, first at £669, and then at £125 on an estate of £625. This reflected an assessment of his wealth that was extremely favourable to him, probably because of Cromwell’s intervention, but Hooke was not free of the attentions of the compounding commissioners completely until late 1651.63CCC 1629-30. He was never restored to Bristol council, although his former colleagues continued to refer to him as Alderman Hooke. He continued to attend Merchant Venturers’ meetings until January 1659.64Bristol RO, 04026/24, p. 3; Soc. of Merchant Venturers, merchants’ hall bk. of procs. 1639-70, p. 293. He died two months later, leaving cash bequests of over £4,500 and six manors.65PROB11/290/248. His daughter, Dorothy, married Robert Aldworth*; his grandson, Sir Humphrey Hooke†, represented Bristol in Parliament between 1666 and 1677.66Bristol RO, 09459(3); HP Commons 1660-1690.