FERRIS, Richard (1580-1649), of Barnstaple.

On both sides of his family, Richard Ferris was of Barnstaple stock. His father, Philip Ferris, a merchant, was a deputy receiver of the borough in 1600.12Keeler, Long Parl. 175. Richard Ferris probably acquired his mercantile training in Barnstaple, but may have left the town to be readmitted in 1607. He would have acquired freedom of the town initially through inheritance, as his father was a freeman. By 1611, he was established enough in the town in his own right to be admitted to the company of merchants trading into France. A few years later, Ferris was sufficiently prominent among the west country Iberian merchants to be selected as assistant consul in Lisbon, a posting which was at least a year in duration.13HMC Buccleuch, i. 180.

In August 1629, Ferris became a capital burgess in the town, and began a rapid ascent to the highest offices in the corporation. Later in the year of his admission he was party to the appointment of a salaried town physician, and served as an assessor for the martial rates of the town.14N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 11. Barnstaple jealously guarded its right to control and drill its own trained band, and at some point in the 1630s Ferris was himself its captain, an officer elected by the capital burgesses.15N. Devon RO, B1/3305. After serving as a juror for fines and amerciaments in the town court, then as bridgewarden, Ferris was elected mayor in 1632. A number of the issues that fell to him to address during his mayoralty would have confronted any mayor, because they were responses to demands from London. Among these were the collection for the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and the crackdown on eating meat in Lent, both initiatives driven by the privy council. On the other hand, Ferris showed enterprise in his concern for a united front against piracy, and when a fleet setting out for Virginia and Newfoundland left the district short of bread and threatened by unacceptable price rises, Ferris led the way in undertaking to send to Cornwall for grain supplies.16Keeler, Long Parl. 175; N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 19. Throughout the 1630s Ferris was a leading figure in the town, but always in the shadow to an extent of John Delbridge†, whose puritan commitment was total, whose colonial activities were widespread and whose local initiatives included rebuilding the quay.17HP Commons, 1604-29; N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 27. Delbridge was both father-in-law and protector of Martin Blake, minister of Barnstaple, who was offered consistent support by Ferris through the 1630s and 40s.18J.F. Chanter, Life and Times of Martin Blake (1910), 109-11; PROB11/211/20.

Through the 1630s and until 1641, Ferris held at least one valuable tenement on the quay at Barnstaple, centre of the town’s trade life.19N. Devon RO, B1/3971, 339. But his wealth lay not in property in Barnstaple but in overseas trade, in which he had extensive interests that were not confined to France and the Iberian Peninsula. In 1634, for example, Ferris, his father-in-law Richard Beaple and four others bought a barque in France and fitted her out for the Newfoundland trade in cod fishing. The former owner, sailing on the voyage as a mariner, turned pirate and seized the ship until it was detained by the authorities in southern Ireland. Ferris’s company petitioned the court of admiralty for restitution, but the piracy had taken place only after a voyage to Newfoundland and from there to Cadiz.20CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 495. Ferris seems never to have involved himself in any opposition to the government of Charles I. Unlike the family of George Peard*, he never figured on lists of those failing to pay Ship Money. In 1637 he welcomed both the visit to the town of Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath, and the appointment of the privy councillor, Edward Sackville†, 4th earl of Dorset, as high steward.21N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 34; N. Devon RO, B1/612.

To the Short Parliament the mayor, aldermen and burgesses decided to send George Peard, the most vocal critic in the town of the government, and Thomas Mathews, son-in-law of Delbridge, who had died in 1639. At the election for the second Parliament to meet in 1640, the mayor and burgesses decided to override the choice by calling of voices of Peard and Mathews, and promoted Ferris as a much more senior figure than Mathews, both in terms of civic seniority and of mercantile importance. Mathews refused to accept this outcome, so Ferris went to Westminster pursued by a petition from Barnstaple that called for his election to be declared void.22Gribble, Memorials of Barnstaple, 349. He enjoyed a period of grace before his case was considered, however, and on 3 May 1641 took the Protestation. He probably sat on no committees before 1641, although it is possible that he was the ‘Mr Perryn’ identified by the clerk of the Journal as receiving nominations to committees in November 1640 on Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on the shortage of preaching ministers in the kingdom and on the bill for annual Parliaments. There was no-one answering to the name Perryn in the House at the time, and Ferris’s name seems nearest to it in sound.23CJ ii. 52a, 54b, 60a; Keeler, Long Parl. 175, n. 98. The privileges committee pronounced on 6 August that Peard’s election had been good but that Ferris’s was void.24CJ ii. 133a, 239b. A new writ was ordered, but no return survives and there is no longer any local record of a by-election at Barnstaple in 1641.

It is in fact doubtful whether a by-election was held or whether Ferris ever went back to Westminster. Certainly by the eve of the civil war he was much in evidence in Barnstaple. Early in August he provided a musket for the watch, approved the appointment of a professional soldier to drill the town’s trained band, and in October offered £25 to the town stock to build defences (George Peard offered £50).25N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, pp. 35, 37, 39. As the war deepened and widened, he approved a fresh rate to continue with the defensive works, consented to the de-regulating of town property leases so that they could be short and thus more productive of revenue, which again was to be invested in town defences, and put his name to an order that those who had promised to contribute to the town, but then reneged on their commitment, would be stigmatized as ‘adversaries of the king and Parliament, the liberties of the subject and professed enemies to the good and welfare of the town’.26N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, pp. 40, 42, 43. In 1643 he himself contributed a further £50 to the cause, which was the parliamentary cause, the fiction of ‘king and Parliament’ notwithstanding.

It has been alleged that Ferris attended the king’s rival Parliament at Oxford in January 1644, but there seems no direct record of this, beyond the reference in the Journal in 1646 to his having been disabled from sitting.27Keeler, Long Parl. 175. To have gone to Oxford would have been a reversal of the defensive support for Parliament suggested by his public record. After the royalists established their garrison in Barnstaple, little is gleaned of Ferris’s activities, but he kept his place on the common council and in January 1645 complied with the demand by the governor, Sir Allen Apsley†, that a new captain of the trained band be chosen.28N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 54. In 1646 he bent with the prevailing wind again, as the New Model army recovered the town, but played no part in the county committees set up in the wake of Parliament’s victories in the west. On 13 May, a warrant was issued to fill both Barnstaple seats, Ferris described as disabled from sitting, but this seems a garbled account of events in 1641 rather than an order arising from any later activities of his.29CJ iv. 543a. In October 1646, he signed a petition to Sir John Bampfylde* in support of the moderate puritan vicar, Martin Blake, who was soon to encounter the opposition of interregnum committeemen more sympathetic to gathered churches than he could ever be. Ferris’s name appeared that year on a list of Members who had absented themselves from Westminster. His name appeared in a catch-all category of those ‘employed in his majesty’s service, or absent with leave or by sickness’, next to the name of George Hartnoll of Tiverton, another long-term absentee.30The Names of the Lords and Commons (1646), 6.

In October 1646, Ferris was appointed to a second term as mayor. In the wider political context, of a parliamentarian town recently rescued from an unwelcome royalist incursion, this would have been a most unlikely honour to be heaped on a former Oxford Parliament man. Among the tasks to fall to him in his second mayoralty was a survey of town lands for raising money towards recovering the town’s debts. He approved a new committee of 14 to consider the governance of the town, but he himself was not among them. He had drawn up his will on 19 June 1646, before his mayoral term and ‘in reasonable good health’, but he was clearly winding down.31N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, pp. 55, 56; PROB11/211/20. Ferris died in 1649, complaining that much of his estate was ‘in other men’s hands and beyond the seas’.32PROB11/211/20. Even so, he left bequests of £5,245, including provision for a school. By October 1652 this legacy was being applied for the remuneration of the schoolmaster.33N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 68. His handsome memorial in Barnstaple church advised those seeking to learn about Ferris to ‘read the school by him endowed, t’advance Arts ’bove our monster teeming ignorance’.34Chanter, Lit. Hist. Barnstaple, 22. None of his descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.