BARROWE, Maurice (c.1597-1666), of Westhorpe and Barningham, Suff.

The origins of the Barrowe family were in Lincolnshire.28Vis. Suff. 1561, 1577, 1612, 113. The link with Suffolk dated only from Maurice Barrowe’s great-grandfather, Thomas Barrow, who had received the manor of Newton from Henry VIII in 1543 and whose son, another Thomas, had married a daughter and coheir of Henry Bures of Acton. After Bures’s death in 1528, the Barrowes acquired interests in the manors of Acton, Wherstead, Morievies and Raydon. This brought them into contact with the Bacons of Redgrave, when in 1592 Sir Nicholas Bacon†, the heir of Lord Keeper Bacon (Nicholas Bacon†), married Bures’s granddaughter Anne Butts. Seven years later, the two families split these estates, with the Barrowes getting Raydon and Wherstead. Probably about this time William Barrowe acquired Westhorpe from the Bacons and this became his principal seat.29Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 8, 174, 242-3, 275-80, iii. 329, vi. 73, 120-1; Muskett, Suff. Manorial Fams. ii. 238-40; Layton, ‘Bacon and Bures’, 166-7; E.F. Hinderclay, ‘Westhorpe Hall’, E. Anglian Misc. (1914), 13-14, 16, 18, 20-1; F.H.S. Highwood, ‘Barrow of Westhorpe’, E. Anglian Misc. (1914), 36-7, 38, 40, 42-3, 44-5; R.F. Bullen, ‘Barrow of Westhorpe’, E. Anglian Misc. (1914), 56; A. Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry, 1540-1660 (Chicago and Cambridge, 1961), 91-2, 196-202. At least one member of the family had heterodox religious views. The Brownist, Henry Barrow, executed in 1593, was William Barrowe's younger brother.30Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Barrow’; The Writings of Henry Barrow, 1590-1591 ed. L.H. Carlson (1966).

Maurice Barrowe, the future Long Parliament MP, was an only son, born in the late 1590s to William Barrowe’s second wife. His father died while he was a student at Cambridge. He went on to Gray’s Inn, a body of which, years later, he esteemed sufficiently to present to its library a copy of the Genevan edition of the works of Josephus.31B.N. Lee, Early Printed Bk. Labels (1976), no. 95. In 1626, Barrowe married Mary, widow of Sir James Poyntz and daughter of Sir Richard Smythe.32St Stephen Coleman Street, London par. reg.; VCH Essex, vii. 116; Le Neve, Monumenta, i. 41-2; Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 276. Two years later he bought lands at Barningham from the Mason family and it was there that he was listed when, in 1630, he compounded for a knighthood.33Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 276; E178/7356, unfol. Smythe had died in 1628, leaving Leeds Castle to his son and when he too died in 1632, his estate passed to Mary Barrowe and her half-sister, Lady Elizabeth Thornhill. They quickly sold the castle to Sir Thomas Culpeper† of Hollingbourne and there were disputes with the Thornhills following Lady Elizabeth’s death, but the estates inherited by Mary Barrowe significantly augmented Barrowe’s already sizeable fortune.34J.J. Stocker, ‘Pedigree of Smythe of Ostenhanger, Kent’, Arch. Cant. xx. 78; D.A.H. Cleggett, Hist. of Leeds Castle (1990), 62-3; C6/1/17; C21/B4/2. Moreover, when his mother died in 1634, Barrowe also gained control what had been her jointure lands at Newton.35PROB6/15, f. 59; Copinger, Manors of Suff. i. 174. This made Barrowe, ‘a man of great estate’ according to Matthias Candler, the vicar of Coddenham, with an estimated income of £6,000 a year.36Bodl. Tanner 226, p. 43; Soc. Antiq. MS 667, p. 237. That was a huge sum by contemporary standards and, in due course, made him one of the wealthiest MPs in the Long Parliament. That wealth was meanwhile reflected in Barrowe’s assessments for Ship Money in 1639 which, in four parishes, came to £5 4s 9d.37Suff. Ship-Money Returns, 58, 64, 66, 112. The death of his cousin, Henry Shelton, in 1635 left Barrowe acting as guardian to Shelton’s three children and the son, Maurice Shelton, was eventually to be Barrowe’s own heir.38Highwood, ‘Barrow of Westhorpe’, E. Anglian Misc. (1914), 42.

Barrowe’s dealings with some members of the clergy during the 1630s were difficult. At Barningham the rector was Randolph Gilpin, who had been appointed to the living by a relative, Francis Gilpin, but the fact that their family had only recently arrived in the county may have created rivalry with Barrowe, himself a newcomer to the parish.39Oxford DNB, ‘Randolph Gilpin’; IND17002, f. 217v; Add. 19079, f. 81; Vis. Suff. 1664-8, 81. Barrowe attempted to accuse Gilpin of unfamiliarity with parochial customs. By 1637 he and other parishioners were engaged in cases against Gilpin in chancery, the court of requests, the court of arches and at common law. The points at issue involved the date on which tithes were to be paid, the location of the pulpit and lectern, the burial of one of Barrowe’s relatives in the chancel without permission from Gilpin, the delivery of hay and timber by Barrowe to Gilpin which had not been paid for and the Ship Money rating levied on Gilpin. Complaining that he was being persecuted, Gilpin petitioned the king for relief in October 1637. The privy council, with Archbishop William Laud presiding, decided in January 1638 that the cases involving the tithes and the church furnishings be left to chancery and the court of arches, and on the other matters gave rulings which favoured Gilpin.40CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 478-9; P C Regs. ii. pp. 531-3; C3/395/79; C2/CHAS I/B148/4; C33/171, f. 435v; C33/173, ff. 708, 746v; C22/594/57; C33/175, f. 216.

Doubtless intentionally, the same day the council also dealt with a complaint against Barrowe from the rector of Bardwell, Arthur Heron, who claimed that his income would be reduced because Barrowe planned to turn his own land there into a deer park. Given that Laud’s old college, St John’s Oxford, owned the advowson, Heron doubtless hoped to find favour, but assurances from Barrowe’s steward that there was no such plan led the council simply to fix what compensation should be paid should Barrowe change his mind.41PC Regs. ii. p. 533; Al. Cant, ii. 345. However, in June 1638 Barrowe was given permission to enclose 380 acres around Bardwell to create a deer park.42C66/2807, mm. 1-2. In contrast, Barrowe’s relations with John Mayer, whom he presented as rector of Raydon in 1631, were more cordial.43IND17002, f. 231. That same year Mayer, in dedicating to Barrowe part of an expanded edition of his volume of biblical exegesis, flattered him as ‘a continual lecture reading to others of your rank and quality’.44J. Mayer, A Commentarie upon the New Testament (1631), esp. sig. [A4a]; Oxford DNB, ‘John Mayer’.

The plight of his fellow Protestants in Ireland moved Barrowe to pay £100 to the first contribution for their relief in 1641.45P. Fisher, For the...Committees for the County of Suffolke (1648), 2 (E.448.13). Together with the sheriff of Suffolk and Sir William Spring*, he was ordered by the Commons in January 1642 to search the house of the prominent Catholic peeress, Elizabeth, Countess Rivers, for weapons.46CJ ii. 378b; PJ i. 73. When civil war broke out in England he continued to give assistance to Parliament. In February 1643 he was one of the seven Suffolk signatories of the Eastern Association and the following month he was appointed to the county sequestrations committee. In April 1643 he was among those named by 1st Baron Grey of Warke (Sir William Grey†) to be commissioners in Suffolk.47Suff. ed. Everitt, 40, 52. When the Suffolk county standing committee proposed a meeting at Cambridge in August 1643 so that the eastern counties could co-ordinate their response to the royalist advance, Barrowe was amongst those who wrote to get the support of the Essex county committee.48Suff. ed. Everitt, 79. Assessment collection was another of his activities, first on the additional committee for the county and then on the assessment commissions. Membership of the committee of the associated counties followed.49A. and O; SP28/243; Suff. ed. Everitt, 60.

Barrowe’s appointment as sheriff by Parliament at the end of 1643 leaves no doubt as to his perceived political reliability.50List of Sheriffs, 132; CJ iii. 354a; LJ vi. 384a; Harl. 165, f. 263v. The wartime disruption compromises shrieval records and obscures his activities. Some of the money he collected was paid to the parliamentary receiver-general of the royal revenues.51E352/427; CUL, MS Ee.III.10, pp. 9, 30, 31. It is possible that the burdens of this office restricted his role in other parts of county administration. His signature appears on the surviving warrants of the county committee from this period less frequently than those of others and this points to no more than on-and-off attendance at its meetings.52Eg. 2647, f. 72; SP28/243.; Suff. RO (Ipswich), HD36/2672/71: Suff. cttee. to bailiffs of Ipswich, 8 Jan. 1645. He did not escape all other commitments, however. In the spring of 1643, with Sir Thomas Barnardiston and Sir William Soame, he took a consignment of cash to be used for soldiers’ pay to Cambridge and later that year he supervised the collection of the fourth part of the £400,000 levy within the Blackbourn hundred.53SP28/176: accts. of Samuel Moody, ff. 7v, 13; Fisher, For the...Committees for the County of Suffolke (1648), 26. His signature appears on the warrant of July 1643 appointing Brampton Gurdon* to command one of the local militia companies.54Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA54/1/1: warrant, 7 July 1643. He was among the four members of the county committee given powers by the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†), the new major-general of the Eastern Association, in February 1644, to prevent the removal of horses from the county.55Suff. ed. Everitt, 68. Later that month he was included on the Suffolk committee for scandalous ministers, although he attended only two of the committee’s 21 sessions.56 Suff. Cttees. for Scandalous Ministers ed. Holmes, 25. A further doubt that he fully shared its goals is raised by his nomination in October 1645 of Robert Sugden as rector at Coney Weston, for by then the committee had probably already removed Sugden removed from his living at Benhall on the grounds of drunkenness, fornication with parishioners, compliance with the Laudian reforms and lack of enthusiasm for Parliament.57IND17002, f. 217v; Suff. Cttees. for Scandalous Ministers, 68-9; Walker Revised, 345. What can be said is that Barrowe disliked the breakdown in ecclesiastical discipline resulting from the outbreak of war. In November 1644, as sheriff, he headed the list of signatories in the letter sent by the Suffolk county committee to the Committee of Both Kingdoms arguing that the real danger in Suffolk was not the threat of a royalist attack but the upsurge in ‘antinomians and anabaptists’, which made the need for a new religious settlement by Parliament all the more urgent.58Univ. of Chicago, Bacon coll. 4552.

Plausibly Barrowe, who was still sheriff, chaired the meeting of the county committees of the Eastern Association at Bury St Edmunds on 30 January 1645 which drew up the protest to the Committee of Both Kingdoms against the New Model.59Suff. ed. Everitt, 84-9; Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 216-18. On the other hand, as a routine step, Parliament included him on the committee to implement the New Model ordinance in Suffolk.60A. and O.

The decision in September 1645 to fill the vacancy at Eye created by the disabling of Sir Frederick Cornwallis* gave Barrowe a chance to be elected to Parliament. Barrowe and Cornwallis were distantly related as Barrowe’s aunt had been the second wife of Sir Frederick's late uncle, Sir Charles Cornwallis. Despite a difference in political viewpoints, this connection may have assisted Barrowe in overcoming the dominant Cornwallis interest in the borough. It may also have helped that Sir Frederick was then absent, attending on the prince of Wales in the west country.

Barrowe had taken his seat in Parliament by 22 November 1645, when he was named to the committees on Cambridge University and on the Abingdon garrison.61CJ vi. 350b, 351a. On 31 December he took the Covenant, but by February 1646 there was the first indication of the ill-health that may explain his intermittent absences over the next two years.62CJ iv. 362a, 393a, 448a, 656b; v. 142b, 221a, 329a, 368b. What evidence there is of his parliamentary activity is clustered between August and October 1646, and even that was probably interrupted by a short break away from Westminster in about the first week of September.63CJ iv. 650b, 656b, 666b, 682b.

When, a year later, he again figured in the business before Parliament other than in another request to be absent, it was not for political reasons but as one of the bit players in the notoriously complex Poyntz inheritance case. He became embroiled in this because his wife’s first husband Sir James Morice alias Poyntz and his stepson Richard had before the latter’s death in 1643 held successive life interests in the Poyntz estate at North Ockenden in Essex. Subsequently there were a series of legal cases, principally between the reversionary heir Audrey, Lady Littleton (née Poyntz) and Sir James’s nephew, John Morice alias Poyntz, to establish who should inherit various Poyntz lands. The latter had inherited the unentailed manor of Chipping Ongar, but Barrowe challenged this in the court of wards and, by showing that it had been included in his wife’s jointure at her first marriage, got it transferred into his hands. Meanwhile Morice tried to overturn Lady Littleton’s inheritance of the entailed North Ockendon.64VCH Essex, iv. 161, vii. 111; C. T. Gatty, Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury (1921), i. 89-96; WARD9/102A, ff. 386-7. In September 1647 the House of Lords ruled that a copy of a private Elizabethan Act of Parliament produced by Morice to support his case was a forgery and sent those involved to prison.65LJ ix. 182b, 191a-b, 192b, 198a, 201b, 207a, 229b-230a, 230b, 245a, 266b, 280a, 288a, 292b, 293a-295a, 303b-304a, 317b, 326b-327a, 327b, 332b-333a, 346a, 348b, 399b, 435b, 437b-438b, 440a, 441a-442a, 448b. In November Lady Littleton joined with Barrowe to persuade the Lords that Morice’s associates had managed to plant other forgeries in the records of the court of wards.66LJ ix. 471b, 495a, 498b, 507b, 518b, 519b, 521a-b, 522b; VCH Essex, iv. 161. She and, following her death in May 1648, her son, (Sir) Thomas Littleton alias Poyntz*, continued to pursue Morice thereafter.67LJ x. 250b, 251b, 251a, 256b, 257a, 401b-402a, 449b, 460a-b, 486a, 487b; CB, ii. 204.

Barrowe’s continuing work as an assessment commissioner accounts for what else is recorded about his career at Westminster. In late September 1648 and again two months later he was among the Suffolk MPs asked to write to their colleagues back home to urge them to collect the assessment arrears.68CJ v. 400b; vi. 30b, 88a. But his time as a MP was terminated in December 1648 when he was among those secluded from the House.69A Vindication (1649), 29 (E.539.5). This marked the end of Barrowe’s political career at a national level and even at a local level his participation hereafter was minimal. It is likely to be at about this time that he was dropped from the commission of the peace. He was named to the Suffolk assessment commissions until 1652 but was omitted for the remainder of the decade.70A. and O. The 1650s seem to have been spent by him in quiet retirement at Barningham.71Soc. Antiq. MS 667, p. 242. In January 1660 he signed the county petition to George Monck* calling for a free Parliament and that March he was briefly reappointed to the Suffolk commission of the peace and the militia commission.72Suff. ed. Everitt, 128; A. and O.; Bodl. Tanner 226, p. 187; A Perfect List (1660), 51. Whether he resumed his seat in the Commons after the secluded Members were readmitted in February 1660 is not known.

Barrowe died on 11 May 1666 when he was said to be aged 69 and three months. He was buried in the Barrowe chapel in the church at Westhorpe and there, at a cost of £500, a monument was erected by Maurice Shelton in fulfilment of one of the conditions of his will.73Le Neve, Monumenta, iv. 64; PROB11/321/240; J. Blatchly and G. Fisher, ‘The intinerant Italian artist Diacinto Cawcy, and the genesis of the Barrow monument at Westhorpe’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch. xl. 443-54; A. Bowett, ‘New light on Diacinto Cawcy and the Barrow monument’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch. xlii. 424-33. It was Shelton who inherited most of Barrowe’s estates but neither he nor any of his descendants sat in Parliament.