GAMUL, Francis (1606-54), of Bridge Street, St Mary-on-the-Hill, Chester, Cheshire.

The Gamulls had settled in Buerton in south-eastern Cheshire by the late fifteenth century, having made the short move across the county border from the Staffordshire hamlet of Knighton, where they had resided since at least 1296.27Earwaker, St Mary-on-the-Hill, 258, 261; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Thomas Gamull’; A. N. Prestige, Gamull: Sir Francis Gamull Defender of Chester and his Family (Amesbury, 2001), 57, 61. Gamul’s grandfather, Edmund, married the widow of a Chester alderman and advanced through the corporation hierarchy to become mayor of the city in 1585. Gamul’s father, Thomas, received a gentleman’s education at Oxford and the Inner Temple, before joining his father on Chester’s aldermanic bench. His legal training (he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple) and the Gamull family’s standing in Chester secured his return for the borough in 1601 and 1606 – in which year he was appointed the city’s recorder.28HP Commons 1558-1603; HP Commons 1604-29. Gamul’s uncle, William Gamull†, was another influential figure in civic government and represented Chester in the 1626 Parliament.29HP Commons 1604-29.

Gamul followed in his father’s footsteps, attending the Inner Temple – although not going on to pursue a legal career – and becoming a Chester alderman in 1631. His early years as a senior officeholder were marred, however, by a long-running legal dispute over the highly lucrative rights of ‘grist and mulcture’ belonging to the six Dee mills in Chester, which Gamul leased from the crown and were a ‘great part of his inheritance’.30Harl. 2081, ff. 38-92, 158v-159; Harl. 2083, ff. 2-91, 137-56, 173-203, 208; Cal. Chester City Mins. ed. Groombridge, 172-3, 193; CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 380, 513-14; 1634-5, pp. 226, 488; 1637, pp. 455-6; VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 2, 36. His determination to protect his interest in the Dee mills inspired his first known venture into parliamentary electoral politics. During the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Gamul and his ‘friends’ became convinced that one of the corporation’s nominees, the recorder Robert Brerewood*, intended to use his influence as an MP ‘to loosen the causey’ – that is, to demolish the weir, or causeway, that sustained the head of water needed to power Gamul’s mills. But when they then began canvassing support in the city to have Gamul elected in Brerewood’s place, Gamul’s father-in-law, Sir Richard Grosvenor, and other gentlemen intervened and ensured that Gamul and his friends ‘received so good satisfaction ... that they desisted and agreed to choose the recorder’. In the elections to the Long Parliament that autumn, Brerewood apparently chose not to stand, and on 2 November the city returned Gamul in his stead, with Sir Thomas Smithe retaining the senior place.31Supra, ‘Chester’. Gamul may well have had the backing of the corporation, but as the leaseholder of Dee mills and the owner of numerous properties in and about the city he also possessed a considerable proprietorial interest in his own right.32Shropshire RO, 567, Box 47: indenture, 2 Nov. 1640.

Although Gamul was apparently conscientious in upholding the corporation’s interests at Westminster, he received not a single committee appointment in the Long Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.33Cheshire RO, DCC/14/35, 61, 65, 93. In fact, he made no impression upon the Commons’ records at all in 1641 beyond taking the Protestation in May.34CJ ii. 133b. In a letter to Grosvenor that same month, he offered a relatively dispassionate assessment of Parliament’s proceedings, although there are hints that he had little liking for the Scots or the prospect of further reformation in religion: ‘many [MPs] are more zealous against bishops. I spare not to say they will destroy that order’.35Harl. 2081, ff. 93-4; Harl. 2083, f. 218. Indeed, in the spring of 1641, Sir Thomas Aston*, having presented a pro-episcopacy petition from Cheshire to the Lords in February, consulted Gamul, Smithe and Peter Venables* about presenting another petition in the name of the county, this time denouncing a root-and-branch petition purportedly from Cheshire, but probably the work of London anti-episcopal polemicists.36Add. 36913, ff. 64, 73v; P. Lake, ‘Puritans, popularity and petitions’, in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain ed. T. Cogswell, R. Cust, P. Lake (Cambridge, 2002), 265-6; J.R. Mawdesley, ‘Clerical Politics in Lancs. and Cheshire during the Reign of Charles I, 1625-49’ (Sheffield Univ. PhD thesis, 2014), 173-4.

Gamul’s religious loyalties, whatever their precise complexion, were the product of a deep piety. He attended sermons religiously, making copious notes, and averred that ‘it is a greater sin to hear sermons and make no use of them than not to hear them’.37Prestige, Gamull, 15. He was also on very close terms with the episcopalian cleric and controversialist Peter du Moulin, who seems to given religious instruction to several of his daughters.38Harl. 2081, f. 93; ‘Peter du Moulin’, Oxford DNB. Gamul’s likely hostility to puritanism was matched by an aversion to Catholicism. He professed to ‘abhor that hypocritical religion of popery’; and in August 1641, he was appointed a commissioner for disarming recusants in Chester.39Prestige, Gamull, 18; LJ iv. 385a.

Gamul’s episcopalian sympathies probably helped to draw him into the king’s camp in 1642 – although the process seems to have been a relatively slow one, for he remained at Westminster longer than most royalist MPs and certainly did not abandon his seat before the end of June as one authority has claimed.40CJ ii. 524a, 730a; PJ ii. 160, 163; Cheshire RO, DCC/14/35, 61, 65, 93; Morrill, Cheshire, 44. In his absence, he was appointed a commissioner of array for Cheshire and Chester.41Northants. RO, FH133; Cheshire RO, DLT/B11, pp. 76, 85; ZP/Cowper/2, f. 4. On 20 August, it was demanded of him by the House whether he would make any contribution on the propositions for maintaining Parliament’s army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, to which he answered in the negative – whereupon (so one piece of royalist propaganda later claimed) he was told that ‘if he left not the town speedily he should be committed to the Tower or knocked on the head by the soldiers’.42CJ ii. 730a; The Declaration of the Lords and Commons of Parliament Assembled at Oxford (1644), 13 (E.38.3). It must have been shortly after this brave act of defiance that he left Westminster and returned to Cheshire. On 24 November, the House voted that he be brought under guard to Westminster to answer for his neglect of its service.43CJ ii. 862a. But by this time he was safely ensconced in royalist-held Chester.

Gamul was one of Chester’s most ardent royalists, and by June 1643 he commanded a regiment of foot that the corporation, with his help, had raised for the city’s defence.44Harl. 2125, f. 135; Cheshire RO, ZML/2/288. It was on active service with this regiment that Gamul’s son Captain Thomas Gamul was killed in 1644.45Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/1, p. 237. Gamul and Sir Thomas Smithe both attended the Oxford Parliament that year, signing its letter to the earl of Essex on 27 January 1644 requesting that he arrange a peace treaty.46Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. Such was Gamul’s loyalty to the king that in February the Oxford Parliament recommended him to Charles as governor of Chester in place of Sir Nicholas Byron, who had been captured by the parliamentarians.47Add. 18981, f. 53; Harl. 2135, f. 46. Charles wrote to Rupert, informing him that ‘in case you shall think fit to make him governor of our said city of Chester, we shall very well approve of your choice, so great a confidence we have of his good affection and fidelity’.48Harl. 2135, f. 52. However, in a letter to Rupert that same day, Secretary of State George Lord Digby* confided that the king had been ‘induced’ to recommend Gamul as governor only for form’s sake to keep the Oxford Parliament and Gamul happy.49Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 375-6. When Rupert visited Chester in March, he seems to have put John Byron†, 1st Baron Byron, in temporary command in the city and then appointed William Legge as governor in May.50Harl. 2125, f. 142v; Harl. 2135, ff. 27, 30, 37, 48, 70; A. M. Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester during the civil wars and Interregnum’, in Crisis and Order in English Towns ed. P. Clark, P. Slack (1972), 212.

Perhaps by way of recompense for being passed over as governor of Chester, Gamul was knighted and created a baronet in April 1644, and by June he had been made the city’s lieutenant-governor.51Harl. 2135, f. 19; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 217; CB; Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 432. When the king visited Chester in September 1645, he lodged in Gamul’s house on Bridge Street.52Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/1, p. 237. Gamul’s determination to hold Chester for the king to the bitter end did serious damage to his popularity among the inhabitants, especially as the parliamentarian noose around the city tightened towards the end of the war.53Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 282, 408, 492; CCC 1874; VCH Cheshire, v. pt. 1, 118. Although Gamul was the choice of the senior aldermen in the mayoral elections of 1644 and 1645, he was passed over by the freemen on both occasions in favour of Charles Walley* and Robert Harvey (who refused the mayoralty, whereupon Walley was prevailed upon to serve a second term).54Cheshire RO, ZAF/27/2-4, 12-14; Luke Letter Bks. 360; Johnson, ‘Politics in Chester’, 212-14. After the city’s surrender in February 1646, Gamul was among the royalists that Parliament ordered to be purged from the corporation.55LJ viii. 506.

What became of Gamul in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Chester is not known. According to one authority, he took refuge in the royalist garrison at Harlech in north Wales – though that, too, surrendered early in 1647.56P.R. Newman, Royalist Officers in England and Wales (New York, 1981), 149. Having fled the British mainland by November 1648, possibly after taking up arms again for the king in the second civil war, he petitioned to compound in January 1649.57CCC 1874. His fine was set at a third of his estate – that is, £940 – but by the summer of 1650 he had abandoned composition proceedings for active service on the Isle of Man (still a royalist stronghold) in support of Charles II.58Shropshire RO, 567, Box 47: Gamul to Charles II, c.July 1650. He was a member of the royalist council of war that convened in Lancashire in August 1651; and in the aftermath of the army’s victory at Worcester the following month, he once again fled overseas.59HMC Portland, i. 614; HMC 6th Rep. 435. After this, his second – possibly third – bout of armed resistance to Parliament, his name was included in the 1652 act for the sale of forfeited estates.60CJ vii. 196a; A. and O. ii. 623. Gamul found the prospect of seemingly permanent exile too hard to stomach, however, and he petitioned the council of state for a pass to return to England, which was granted in October 1653.61CSP Dom. 1653-4, pp. 194, 438. For the remainder of his life he spent considerable time and ink trying to put his personal affairs back in order – a task that apparently included engaging the services of the leading London men-of-business John Rushworth* and John Wildman*, who specialised in buying forfeited estates from the treason trustees as attorneys for the original owners or their agents.62Shropshire RO, 567, Box 47: Gamul to W. Plimley, 10 Jan. 1654; 22 June 1654; 5, 9, 12, 19, 23 July [1654]; 9, 13, 16 Aug. [1654].

Gamul died in the autumn of 1654 and was buried in the Gamull family vault in St Mary-on-the-Hill, Chester, on 27 November 1654.63Earwaker, St Mary-on-the-Hill, 260. He had made a will on 2 October 1649 in which he had declared himself ‘a true Protestant of the Church of England as practised in 1640’.64Shropshire RO, 567, Box 47: copy will of Sir Francis Gamul. But for some reason this will was never proved; and on 12 December 1660, the administration of his estate was granted to his daughter Sidney.65PROB6/36, f. 138; Cheshire RO, ‘Inventory’ [recte interrogatories in a consistory court case rel. to the will] of Sir Francis Gamul, 1661. None of his immediate family sat in Parliament.