KILLIGREW, Henry (c. 1598-1646), of Landrake and Ince Barton, St Stephen’s-by-Saltash, Cornw.

Henry Killigrew’s father was a distinguished Elizabethan diplomat, who sat for Cornish boroughs in four Parliaments under Mary and Elizabeth. Sir Henry Killigrew served in arms in France, fighting in an abortive attempt to protect the Huguenot interest at Rouen in 1562. He enjoyed an enduring and more successful career as an ambassador abroad. Killigrew served in Germany, France, Scotland and the Netherlands, defending the Protestant interest in Europe against Catholic encroachment. He was rewarded with office: a tellership of the exchequer which he nurtured for nearly 40 years. The Killigrews were of Arwennack, Falmouth, and Sir Henry is thought to have been born there, but in adulthood settled at Lothbury, London. Despite his metropolitan lifestyle, in 1573 Sir Henry acknowledged his family roots and acquired the manor of Landrake, near St Germans in his native county. He seems not to have died particularly wealthy, despite the revenue from the lucrative exchequer office.10Oxford DNB; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Sir Henry Killigrew’; A.C. Miller, Sir Henry Killigrew (Leicester, 1963), 169.

Sir Henry Killigrew married for the first time in 1565, and in time acquired sons-in-law, including Henry Neville†, who had acquired substantial parliamentary and political experience long before the subject of this biography was born. Killigrew’s second marriage, contracted in 1590, was to Jaél de Peigne, a French Huguenot, whose mother promised Killigrew 2,000 crowns as a dowry; the money remained unpaid in 1602.11PROB11/101, f. 207v. Jaél de Peigne was naturalized in 1601, with the help of Sir Thomas Windebanke, the queen’s secretary, and with the gracious approval of Queen Elizabeth herself.12CSP Dom. 1601-3, pp. 50, 51, 53-4. Sir Henry and Jaél Killigrew had three sons and a daughter before the diplomat died in March 1603. In his will, Killigrew provided for his widow and children from the adequate though limited resources of his Cornish property, principally Landrake. Henry, the second son, was brought up in London and educated at Oxford and Gray’s Inn. His elder brother, Joseph, died before 1617. After leaving Gray’s Inn, Henry Killigrew seems to have been employed at court on various diplomatic errands, though was never an accredited ambassador in his own right. He was well placed to pick up such commissions. Not only had his father been a leading diplomat; his much older brother-in-law Neville and Neville’s secretary, Ralph Winwood†, were on good terms with Jaél Killigrew.13HMC Buccleuch, i.36, 39. In 1619 he was in Brussels, taking orders from Sir Dudley Carleton, English ambassador at The Hague; in the 1630s he was to be found in Paris.14APC 1616-17, pp. 270; SP84/90, f. 129; HMC 8th Rep. pt. i (1881), 215; HMC Cowper, i.138; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 438; 1635-6, p. 353. He has to be distinguished in this period from his cousin and namesake from Arwennack, Captain Henry Killigrew, a military figure who died during the ill-fated Cadiz expedition of 1625.15Keeler, Long Parliament, 239. In the later 1630s, he was described as a servant of the king, but seems not to have held any office or substantive post either in the royal household or the wider government service.16CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 512.

Killigrew’s widowed mother was a pious, godly woman, who between 1610 and 1614 provided accommodation in London for the scholar, Isaac Casaubon. Sharing with Lady Killigrew a French Protestant background, Casaubon recorded in his diary his great respect for her, and detailed their various discussions, which were often conducted over meals.17Ephemerides Isaaci Casauboni ed. J. Russell (2 vols. Oxford, 1850), ii. 986, 993, 1004; M. Pattison, Isaac Casaubon (Oxford, 1892), 301, 304. In 1617, she married George Downham, bishop of Derry. He had dedicated a sermon he preached at St Mary Spital at Easter 1602 to Sir Henry Killigrew, who had presumably been Downham’s patron. She drew up her will while ill, the following year, though in the event she survived until the early 1630s.18CSP Dom. 1616-18, pp. 412, 489; G. Downame, Abrahams Tryall (1602); PROB11/161, f. 263. By 1622 Henry himself had married, into an Essex family. Jemima Waldegrave was the daughter of a zealous magistrate and puritan of Suffolk, Sir Nicholas Bacon, who sat in two Elizabethan Parliaments. Her first husband, Sir William Waldegrave, MP for Suffolk in 1597, died in 1613 when Henry Killigrew was only about 15 years old. When Jemima made her will in 1647, she still retained the surname of her first husband, and bestowed her property on various members of the Bacon and Waldegrave families, and none on any Killigrews.19PROB11/203, f. 378. The property she held in dower was the manor of Wormingford in Essex, which had come to her from her first marriage.20VCH Essex, x. 300. Killigrew must have lived at Wormingford or another Waldegrave property until the late 1630s, when he consolidated his inherited property in Cornwall. His father had bought a free tenancy of Trematon manor at the same time as his purchase of Landrake. Killigrew now amalgamated the Trematon holding with another on a peninsula of the St Germans or Lynher River, and in 1640 built an impressive brick residence, with a tower at each of its four corners. The appearance of Ince Barton, or Ince Castle as it later became known, may well reflect a wish on Henry Killigrew’s part to emulate styles of building he had seen on visits to France.21Keeler, Long Parliament, 239; S.K. Roberts, ‘The Early Hist. of Ince Castle, part I’, Devon and Cornw. Notes & Queries xxxvi (5), 173-4.

Killigrew’s move to Cornwall seems to have been a consequence of favour at court. He was in the early 1630s an associate of his first cousin, Sir William Killigrew†, in Lincolnshire fen drainage schemes. Commentators noted a Henry Killigrew among the group who from April 1633 took on a scheme to drain the ‘800 Fen’ or Lindsey Fen. This was Sir William’s brother, aged 20 in 1633, a student and writer who later became a clergyman and master of the Savoy hospital, and who quickly sold his share in the venture.22A Relation of the Proceedings and Causes of Complaint (1650), 6-7; The Picklock of the Old Fenne Project (1650), 2. But Henry Killigrew the future MP was also associated with fen draining. In 1633, Sir William Killigrew borrowed from him, probably in connexion with the fen drainage scheme. It was probably he whose lands at Morton Fen were invaded in 1641, and in 1642 Killigrew reported to the Commons the activities of rioters at Surfleet.23K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (1982), 113; CJ ii. 590a; PJ ii. 378. It is much more likely to have been he, rather than his scholar and playwright cousin, who was appointed a commissioner of sewers in 1639, and who was involved in transactions involving lands in the fens in 1640 with men like Sir Edward Heron, a Lincolnshire associate of the Killigrew drainage consortium.24CSP Dom. 1640, p. 358; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 53-4. Killigrew seems to have persuaded others to invest in the project, and his unproved will confirms that in 1644 he still had lands in the Lincolnshire fens.25Several Circumstances to prove that Mris. Jane Berkeley and Sir William Killigrew have Combined (1654), 1. Another figure linked to Henry Killigrew in various grants, both in the fen and in Nonsuch Great Park, Surrey, was George Kirke, master of the king’s robes, groom of the bedchamber and brother-in-law of Sir William Killigrew.26CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 453; Lindley, Fenland Riots, 46-7; J.P. Vander Motten, Sir William Killigrew (1606-1695): His Life and Dramatic Works (Ghent, 1980), 46.

In 1640, Killigrew’s new house at Ince was being built, and so both as courtier and newly arrived local proprietor he commended himself to the electors of West Looe, a borough not far from his estate. He was slow to make any impact on the House. His presence was not recorded by the clerk at all until May 1641 when he took the Protestation in the Commons. His son took it in St Stephen’s-by-Saltash parish, a further indication that Killigrew maintained a household there by that time.27CJ ii. 133a; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/79/27. It was not until the following January that Killigrew made his presence felt again. By then, the course of politics was becoming much more edgy. On 24 January 1642, Killgrew was part of a committee finely balanced between courtiers and critics of the king, charged with asking the king to put the defence of the kingdom into hands that Parliament trusted, a controversial formulation on the road that led eventually to the Militia Ordinance.28CJ ii. 394a; PJ i.161. A week later (2 Feb.), he acted for the first time as a teller in a motion on the punishment of Sir Edward Dering*. Dering’s offence was to have published an edition of his own speeches that swam against the anti-episcopal tide in the House; Killigrew was a teller in the losing side that sought to save him from incarceration in the Tower.29CJ ii. 411a.

Nearly two months elapsed before Killigrew contributed anything further to the work of the Commons, and this time he found himself in hot water. On 1 April, he spoke during a debate in a committee of the whole House on the angry reply recently delivered by the king to a message from the Commons. Charles had lambasted the MPs for what he judged to be their unwillingness ever to allow him to decline their proposals and summarily rejected the suggestion of a new militia. Killigrew voiced his own doubts about the legality of such a proposal and claimed that Parliament would not find its authority accepted in the country

We stood here upon slippery places, and before we imposed the militia upon the people or laid a tax on them, a knight and a burgess should do well to go into the country to see if they would consent and obey, lest we feel the weight of the major part of the people.30Verney, Notes, 171.

Mistaking for approval the hollow laughter which greeted his speech, Killigrew repeated his essential point several times, drawing down upon himself the wrath of opposition Members such as Sir Henry Vane II. Another Cornish Member, William Chadwell, contributed a speech more learned and more measured, but to much the same effect. Sir Simonds D’Ewes took a charitable if patronising view of Killigrew’s intervention, attributing his clumsiness to his being not ‘well skilled in the laws or records of this realm’.31PJ ii. 116-17. Killigrew was considered lucky to escape with what Speaker Lenthall described as ‘a sharp reprehension’, after the House divided on a motion to disable him from sitting. Killigrew’s enemies were, predictably, the king’s opponents, Sir Robert Cooke and Henry Marten; his sympathisers William Pierrepont, who had worked with him on a committee, and Killigrew’s Cornish neighbour, John Carew.32CJ ii. 507b.

On 14 May, Killigrew was given permission to visit Ireland. It is not known what his intentions were, but he seems in any case never to have gone. Five days after his visit was approved, he was still at Westminster, attracting notice as the only Member who stood out against the proposed assembly of divines.33CJ ii. 572a, 579a; PJ ii, 343. Despite his mother’s well-attested Calvinist piety, Killigrew was evidently unsympathetic to the puritanism dominant in the Long Parliament during its early years. On the same day, he spoke on the Declaration then being agreed by both Houses, a recapitulation of grievances. Killigrew is unlikely to have been speaking in support of a document so critical of the king.34PJ ii. 343; Verney, Notes, 178; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 691-703. On 27 May, he was able to tap into the residual support for the king, or rather the dislike among MPs of disloyal words spoken by the common people outside the House. During protests against the activities of the fen drainers in Lincolnshire, with which of course Killigrew was associated, a rioter had rashly asserted that there would no longer be a king in the fenlands soon. Self-interest and loyalty to the monarch coincided satisfactorily for Killigrew, who was given authority to bring the full force of the law to bear against the protesters.35CJ ii. 590a; PJ ii. 378. This was a rare victory for Killigrew; more usually he found himself swimming against majority opinion in the Commons, as on 3 June, when he tried to oppose parliamentary supervision of the sale of some crown jewels in Holland.36CJ ii. 602b; PJ iii. 6.

His tellership on 3 June was Killigrew’s last contribution to the work of the House. Although Edward Hyde* thought Killigrew’s final protest occurred after the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux) was appointed lord general of the parliamentary army (12 July), it seems more in keeping with the mood a month earlier. On 10 and 11 June MPs announced their intentions to bring in arms or plate on the Propositions in defence of king and Parliament. It was probably during these protracted expressions of support for Parliament that Killigrew stood up in his place and announced ‘he would provide a good horse and a good buff-coat, and a good pair of pistols, and then he doubted not that he should find a good cause’.37Clarendon, Hist. iv. 217. This was a clear indication that Killigrew would not be contributing to the cause that enthused his colleagues in the House. On 30 July, the horses of his cousin, Thomas Killigrew, who had been identified as in arms for the king, were seized and bestowed on him, probably in an attempt to make Henry a guarantor of Thomas’s good behaviour, but by then Henry was most likely already in the south west, having retired in the face of parliamentarian animosity.38CJ ii. 698a, 700b; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 180.

Killigrew became one of the leading members of the king’s party in Cornwall, and helped raise the army of Sir Ralph Hopton. He did not take a military commission himself, but as Hyde put it, those who held military rank ‘consulted with no man more’.39Clarendon, Hist. iv. 217. Killigrew was a commissioner of array, and later of sequestration, for the king in Cornwall, but he seems more to have been a counsellor of the royalists than an active committeeman. The record of his demeanour during the war, provided by Hyde, speaks of a testy individual, quick to find fault, and given to plain speaking, if not truculence; but a man who was physically courageous and devoted to the king’s cause. In August 1642 he joined the marquess of Hertford (William Seymour†) at Sherborne, but when Hertford pushed into Wales, remained with a group of officers and advisers that included Sir John Berkeley* and John Ashburnham*, which took a force into Cornwall via north Devon.40Bellum Civile, 10-11, 18. Killigrew was an associate of Sidney Godolphin* in the taking and then the rapid losing (22 Jan. 1643) of Saltash for the king, and was by then evidently a member of the royalist council of war.41Bellum Civile, 28, 31. He made his way from Cornwall to Oxford by January 1644, to play a part in the Oxford Parliament. There, he signed the letter to the earl of Essex, suing for peace, which suggests he was not always to be found among the diehard royalists.42The Names of the Lords and Commons Assembled (1646), 2; A Copy of a Letter from the Members (1644), 5 (E.32.3). He could not have stayed in Oxford long. In August 1644, he was at Liskeard, planning another attempt on Saltash.43Add. 15750, f. 21. Doubtless he based himself at his new house during intervals snatched from campaigning.

In November 1644, at Exeter, Killigrew apparently made a will. It made no mention of his wife, Jemima, from whom he was almost certainly estranged. The principal beneficiary was his first cousin, once removed, Jane Berkeley. She was the daughter of Henry’s first cousin, Elizabeth Killigrew (wife of Sir Maurice Berkeley of Bruton, Somerset), and the sister of the royalist commander, Sir John Berkeley*.44Archaeologia xviii. 99; Brown, Abstracts of Som. Wills, vi. 102, 103; Several Circumstances to prove that Mris. Jane Berkeley and Sir William Killigrew have combined (1654), 1. At some point in the early 1640s she took up residence with Killigrew, who acknowledged in his will that by means of her ‘virtuous conversation’ he had ‘been reclaimed from many vices to which both by nature and custom he was made subject’. Killigrew bequeathed to her his manor of Landrake and the new house at Ince, with his own son, Henry, as residuary beneficiary. There is a difficulty over the dating of this will, which was never proved in the normal way. Henry Killigrew junior, a major in the royalist army, was killed during a skirmish near Bridgwater in August 1644.45Clarendon, Hist. iii. 402, iv. 216. After that time, Killigrew’s only surviving child was Henry Hill alias Killigrew, born around 1630 of a relationship outside wedlock, and cared for after Killigrew’s death by Jane Berkeley, who was his guardian but not his mother.46Roberts. ‘Ince Castle Part III’, Devon and Cornw. Notes and Queries xxxvi (7), 239. Much was later made to hang on Killigrew’s testamentary intentions.

As the king’s cause began to recede after Naseby, Killigrew returned to Cornwall. He was active in trying to manage public opinion in favour of the king by playing on fears that the prince of Wales was about to depart the kingdom.47Bodl. Clarendon 26, f. 151. He played an important part as a mediator among the king’s Cornish party as it buckled under the stress of military defeat.48Clarendon, Hist. iv. 149. His own house at Ince was garrisoned for the king, but in March 1646 it was forced to surrender, after a brief skirmish, to Colonel Ralph Weldon*. By then Killigrew had retreated further west, and was with Sir John Arundell* when Pendennis Castle surrendered on 17 August 1646.49Colonell Weldens taking of Inch-House (1646, E.330.5). During the dismantling of the royalist garrison at Pendennis, after the treaty had been concluded, Killigrew discharged a loaded carbine which exploded and lodged shrapnel in his forehead. The wound was not serious enough to deter him from his plan to take ship to St Malo, but having arrived there he was told that the injury was severe. He did not recover, and died on 27 September. Killigrew had intended to join the exiled royalist community on Jersey; instead his body was taken to the island for burial. He was given an impressive funeral sermon at St Helier by Lionel Gatcombe, chaplain to the Pendennis garrison, who had evidently not yet been imprisoned.50HMC 2nd Rep. 161; Oxford DNB, sub Gatcombe.

The question of whether Killigrew was ever knighted seems incapable of being conclusively resolved. He does not appear among the knights created by the king during the civil war, nor in the standard modern listing.51Merevale Hall, Dugdale mss, HT 2D/27; Shaw, Knights of Eng. But it is only during the civil war that any knighthood could have been bestowed. Hyde, his friend and correspondent, consistently describes him as a knight, while his estranged wife, Jemima Killigrew, described herself as the wife of Sir Henry Killigrew deceased when she drafted her own will in July 1647.52Clarendon, Hist. iv. 215-17; PROB11/203, f. 378. Writing some eight years after Killigrew’s death, a creditor of his remarked on his having acquired the knighthood, so there is in fact evidence from a number of sources close to Killigrew that the honour was at least intended. Killigrew and the king were unlikely to have come into contact with each other after the former left Oxford in the summer of 1644, so the presumption must be that the knighthood was gazetted among the royalist grandees probably in 1645 or 1646, but was never personally bestowed or passed the seals.

The descent of Killigrew’s property was tortuous and hotly contested in the courts. His niece, Elizabeth Killigrew, daughter of his deceased elder brother, Sir Joseph, and wife of William Bassett*, had taken Killigrew to chancery in 1632 over the division of her father’s estate, claiming that Henry Killigrew had carved out an estate for himself in Landrake at her expense.53C3/395/103; Roberts, ‘Ince Castle Part I’, 174; ‘Ince Castle Part II’, Devon and Cornw. Notes and Queries xxxvi (6), 199. On that occasion, Killigrew was able successfully to resist his relatives’ claims, but the sequestration of his assets by Parliament after his death breathed new life into this failed litigation. The Bassetts briefly occupied Ince in 1646, but were themselves subject to penal taxation as royalists, and struggled to pay a huge fine on their own estates. In this round of a protracted series of disputes that lasted for decades, they eventually abandoned their claims to Ince, relinquishing management to the Cornish sequestration committee.54Roberts, ‘Ince Castle Part II’, 199. Henry Killigrew’s was one of the estates which the Rump Parliament decided to sell off, thus defining Killigrew as one of the ‘notorious’ delinquents.

In April 1649, while the Bassetts were still in contention, Jane Berkeley petitioned Goldsmiths’ Hall to be allowed to claim the inheritance promised her in Killigrew’s unproved will. This met with the disapproval of the county sequestrators, who considered Killigrew and a handful of other royalists as ‘oppressing and violent men against the honest party’.55CCC 246-7, 1984-5. Matters were complicated further by the protests of Richard Lygon, a cousin of Jane Berkeley’s, who had stood surety for a debt of Killigrew’s incurred before the civil war. Jane Berkeley and her cousin, Sir William Killigrew, the fen drainer, allied themselves with Edward Nosworthy† to deprive Lygon, who like the Killigrews claimed an interest in the Lindsey Level, of any means of recovering his money and to reduce him to a debtors’ gaol. The outcome of these dubious manoeuvrings was to ensure that Ince Barton passed to Nosworthy, a county committeeman and merchant who had taken Henry Hill alias Killigrew as apprentice. The Killigrews never recovered it.56Roberts, ‘Ince Castle Part III’, 239-40; Several Circumstances to prove that Mris. Jane Berkeley and Sir William Killigrew have combined, 4-5, 10-13; PROB11/308, f. 410.