BOUNE, Gilbert (1586-1662), of Bugge Hall, High Pavement, St Mary, Nottingham, Notts.

Boune’s family had settled at Bakewell, Derbyshire, by the early fifteenth century, moving to Nottinghamshire when his grandfather Edward Boune – MP for Nottingham in 1558 – acquired lands at Hockerton by marriage.28Thoroton, Notts. iii. 126; HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Edward Boune’. Like his father and grandfather, Boune trained as a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was admitted in 1602. Very little is known about his early career. In 1624, he was appointed reader of Thavies Inn – one of the inns of chancery attached to Lincoln’s Inn – and was so neglectful of his duties that he escaped being fined in 1626 only by agreeing to serve another year.29LI Black Bks. ii. 266, 267. He was indebted to the tune of at least £1,100 by the early 1620s, and he seems to have sold part of his estate in Hockerton to pay off his many creditors.30C2/JASI/B29/39. Nevertheless, his practice was apparently flourishing by the mid-1630s, for in 1636 he was made a bencher at Lincoln’s Inn, and the following year he was appointed a serjeant-at-law.31LI Black Bks. ii. 339; Baker, Serjeants at Law, 440. His patrons at his creation as serjeant were none other than Archbishop William Laud and the Nottinghamshire magnate and future royalist general, William Cavendish†, 1st earl of Newcastle. Given his links with leading Caroline courtiers, it is perhaps significant that in 1637 he was involved (as a commissioner for depopulations) in prosecuting one of the leading opponents of the personal rule, William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele, in star chamber.32CSP Dom. 1637, p. 248.

Boune was a long time resident of Nottingham, where he owned a substantial residence on High Pavement. Having stood as a candidate for the town in the 1621 and 1624 elections, but without success, it was a case of third time lucky in the elections to the Short Parliament on 30 March 1640, where he took second place to Sir Charles Cavendish.33Supra, ‘Nottingham’; Nottingham Borough Recs. iv. 375, 387. He probably owed his return to his interest with the corporation, which he had advised on legal matters since at least 1633.34Notts. RO, CA 3415, p. 63; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 160, 185. He made what appears to have been a brief and uncontroversial contribution to the debate on ship money on 2 May 1640.35Aston’s Diary, 127. But otherwise, he left no mark upon the records of the Short Parliament. If he stood for Nottingham in the elections to the Long Parliament, he was rejected by the voters in favour of the godly local squire Gilbert Millington.36Supra, ‘Nottingham’.

In the early months of 1642, Boune emerged as one of the leading opponents of the nascent parliamentarian interest in Nottinghamshire. On 28 February, Francis Thornhagh* and Henry Ireton* presented a petition to the Commons, urging the king to return to Westminster, annexed to which was a protest ‘shewing the many obstructions caused by Serjeant Boune to hinder the said petition’.37CJ ii. 458b; To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty a Petition Presented to the Kings Majesty at York (1642, 669 f.6.6); Wood, Notts. 12. The House voted that Boune be sent for as a delinquent and put out of the Nottinghamshire commission of peace (which he was a few days later).38CJ ii. 458b; PJ i. 486; C231/5, p. 509. Released on bail early in May, he continued to be ‘a most active man in bringing prejudice upon those that adhere to the Parliament’, and at some point that autumn he was imprisoned by the Derbyshire parliamentarians.39CJ ii. 554b, 853a; Speciall Passages no. 6 (13-20 Sept. 1642), 42 (E.118.10). According to his son-in-law, the Nottinghamshire antiquary Robert Thoroton, Boune remained in prison at Derby for ‘a year or more’, and on returning to Nottingham sometime in 1643 he was ‘violently expelled’ from the town by the parliamentarian governor Colonel John Hutchinson*.40Oxford DNB, ‘Robert Thoroton’. A rather less dramatic account of these events states that Boune and his family were turned out of the town ‘upon suspicion of disaffection and for caution only, the town being but then weakly fortified’. Boune and his family took up residence with Thoroton at Car Colston, which lay roughly equidistant between parliamentarian Nottingham and the royalist garrison at Newark.41SP23/82, p. 427. In his absence, his house and goods in Nottingham were sequestered on intelligence that he had declared for the king and held correspondence with the royalist commissioners at Newark.42SP23/82, pp. 423-7, 430. Boune admitted to visiting Newark, and certainly his appointment as the town’s steward in 1645 suggests that he was on good terms with the garrison authorities.43SP23/82, p. 424; Brown, Hist. of Newark, ii. 260.

Nevertheless, Boune’s identification with the king’s party was not so complete that he was persona non grata with the region’s parliamentarian elite. In 1646, his house and goods on High Pavement were granted to John Mason*, the solicitor for sequestrations to the Nottingham parliamentary committee.44SP23/82, pp. 425, 441. Yet Boune referred to Mason four years later as his ‘good friend and cousin’, suggesting that Mason had been protecting Boune’s estate during his enforced absence.45PROB11/310, f. 252. Moreover, Boune nominated as supervisors of his will Colonel Hutchinson – the man who had allegedly ‘violently expelled’ him from Nottingham in 1643 – the recruiter MP for East Retford Edward Neville (for whom he did legal work), and the Lincolnshire Rumper Thomas Lister, whose main residence was at Coleby in Lincolnshire, where Boune also owned a country estate.46PROB11/310, f. 253; C6/133/156.

In 1647, Boune secured an order from the Committee for Sequestrations* lifting the sequestration on his estate in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire and restoring him to his chamber at Serjeants’ Inn on Fleet Street.47SP20/3, f. 192; SP23/82, p. 421. However, no final order for his discharge was made, and he was allowed to enjoy his estate in Lincolnshire only upon security.48CCC 2945, 2946. When he appealed his case to the barons of the exchequer in the early 1650s, Francis Thorpe* and John Wylde* apparently conceded that his estate should be discharged but forbore to do so ‘because they would not have him practice, he being ill-affected’.49SP23/82, p. 429; CCC 2945. In June 1654, Boune petitioned the protector for discharge of his sequestration but again to no effect.50CCC 2946.

Boune died in the spring of 1662 and was buried at St Bride’s, Fleet Street on 17 May 1662.51St Bride, Fleet Street par. reg. In his will, he left his property in Nottingham to his wife, his lands in Derbyshire to his heir John, his estate in Nottinghamshire to his second son Gilbert, and his Lincolnshire manors to Hutchinson and Neville to hold in trust for his wife and, upon her death, his son John. He also bequeathed portions of £200 apiece to his two younger daughters.52PROB11/310, f. 252. Thoroton used notes that Boune had made from the Domesday Book in compiling his Antiquities of Nottinghamshire, which was published in 1677.53Oxford DNB, ‘Robert Thoroton’. None of Boune’s immediate family sat in Parliament.