RUMSEY, Walter (1583/4-1660), of Llanover, Mon., and Gray’s Inn, Mdx.

Rumsey’s family claimed descent from Sir Walter Romsey, ‘lord of Romsey’, Hampshire, during the reign of Edward III (this was possibly the Walter Romsey who held the manor of Romsey Horseys in 1299).28Bradney, Hist. Mon. i. 384; VCH Hants, iv. 459. Rumsey’s clergyman grandfather John Rumsey – whom various authorities have mis-identified as his father – settled at Usk, in Monmouthshire, after marrying a local gentlewoman in the mid-sixteenth century.29Bradney, Hist. Mon. i. 383; iii. 39; Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 132; Oxford DNB, ‘Walter Rumsey’; DWB, ‘Walter Rumsey’. Rumsey’s father, Walter, although never called to the bar, acquired sufficient legal knowledge to serve as portreeve and recorder of Usk in the 1580s – the second office by appointment of the lords of the borough, the earls of Pembroke – and as clerk of the peace and escheator for Monmouthshire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.30NLW, Badminton estate recs. Mss (manorial) 616, 1731; Mss (I)674, (I)675, (I)688, (I)1510, (I)1511; Clerks of the Counties ed. E. Stephens, 133; Prest, Rise of the Barristers, 389.

After establishing himself as a barrister at Gray’s Inn, Rumsey pursued a successful legal career as an attorney-general and, from 1631, judge on the south Wales legal circuit.31Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 132. He was described in his uncle Edward’s will of 1615 as ‘Walter Rumsey of the castle of Usk’ – probably in reference to his then office as deputy steward to the Pembroke lordship of Usk – and would continue to hold property in the town until at least the mid-1630s.32PROB11/125, f. 583v; NLW, Badminton estate recs. Mss (manorial) 1732, 1733; Ms (I)1473; C.H. Clark, Usk Past and Present, 57, 58, 59, 211, 213, 215. But by 1616 at the latest he was also being referred to as of nearby Llanover, where he had acquired an estate by marriage and where he would purchase further property in the 1620s.33NLW, Tredegar estate recs. Ms 23/13; T.G. Smart, Genealogy of the Descendants of the Prichards, 57-8. During the mid-1630s he was involved, like other senior figures at the inns of court, in helping to stage royal masques, and in that capacity he may have come to the attention (if he had not already done so) of the lord chamberlain to the king’s household, Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke.34PBG Inn, 322, 323, 326.

Rumsey was returned to the Short Parliament for Monmouthshire on 2 April 1640, taking the junior place behind Thomas Morgan. One of the parties to the election indenture was ‘William Herbert Esq.’, who may have been William Herbert II*, a younger son of the earl of Pembroke – and given Rumsey’s longstanding links with the Herberts it is possible that he owed his election, in part, to their patronage.35NLW, Tredegar estate recs. Ms 59/9. He received only one appointment in this Parliament – to a committee set up on 22 April to investigate the case of the puritan clergyman Peter Smart, who had been imprisoned during the personal rule of Charles I for defying the Laudian church authorities.36CJ ii. 8b. In a debate on 1 May concerning a bill for granting administrations, he argued that the draft legislation was defective in making no provision ‘for disposing the estate amongst the younger children’.37Aston’s Diary, 111. That same day, after John Pym had urged that the Laudian cleric William Beale (master of St John’s College, Cambridge) be summoned to answer for a controversial sermon he had given in 1635, Rumsey suggested that the vice-chancellor of Cambridge should be ordered to seal up Beale’s study and ‘bring his sermon with him’.38Aston’s Diary, 112-13. On 2 May he resumed his criticism of the bill for granting administrations, claiming that it contained ‘no care for parents that are poor’.39Aston’s Diary, 119 His name figured alongside those of John Glynne* and eight other lawyers on a list of what seems to have been those Parliament-men – about 45 in all – who were regarded as hostile to the court at the dissolution of the Short Parliament on 5 May.40SP16/472/55, f. 97; A.H. Dodd, ‘Welsh opposition lawyers in the Short Parliament’, BBCS xii. 106-7. But how Rumsey, a long-serving member of the judiciary and a future royalist, had merited this black mark against his name is a mystery.

According to the antiquary Anthony Wood, Rumsey ‘might have been chosen again to serve in the Long Parliament, but refused it’ and contented himself instead with serving as dean of the chapel at Gray’s Inn during 1640-1.41Ath. Ox. iii. 509; PBG Inn, 340. He apparently enjoyed the trust of the Commons, for on 7 February 1642 the House referred a petition to him and two other Monmouthshire JPs from a group of the county’s inhabitants – among them at least one of his kinswomen – who had been presented at the assizes for sermon-gadding in the absence of a preaching minister in their home parish.42CJ ii. 419a; PJ i. 302-3. He remained in London until at least late June 1642, which was the last occasion on which he attended a formal meeting at Gray’s Inn before November 1650.43PBG Inn, 349, 378.

Although Rumsey would be accused late in 1645 of having served as a commissioner of array for Monmouthshire, he was either not among those appointed to the original commission in the summer of 1642, or he was omitted when a new commission was issued in November.44Northants. RO, FH133; CCAM 661. He certainly did not figure prominently in the royalist war effort in that or any other county, nor was obliged to compound for his estate after the war. It was further alleged that he had fled to the royalist garrison at Hereford late in 1645, along with his fellow royalist judge David Jenkins.45CCAM 661. But although Jenkins’ name appeared in the list of prisoners when the city fell to Parliament on 18 December 1645, Rumsey’s did not.46LJ viii. 60a; Severall Letters from Colonell Morgan Governour of Gloucester, and Colonell Birch (1645), 5-6 (E.313.17). Nevertheless, Parliament removed him from the judiciary in 1645, and he was omitted from all local offices after the war.47Williams, Hist. Gt. Sessions in Wales, 132.

Rumsey’s retirement from public life allowed him to indulge his talent for composing and playing music and his interest in philosophy and horticulture. His greatest claim to fame as an ‘ingenious man’, to use Wood’s phrase, was as the inventor of the ‘provang’ – an instrument for cleaning the throat and stomach by inducing vomiting.48Ath. Ox. iii. 509; Aubrey’s Brief Lives ed. Clark, ii. 206-7; Oxford DNB, ‘Walter Rumsey’. In 1657 he published a pamphlet, which was reprinted in 1659 and 1664, extolling the benefits of his invention and the health-giving properties of tobacco and coffee.49Rumsey, Organon Salutis an Instrument to Cleanse the Stomach (1657). At the Restoration, either Rumsey or his grandson was included on the list of knights of the proposed but never inaugurated order of the royal oak.50Jenkins, ‘Wales and the Order of the Royal Oak’, 347-8. Rumsey died at some point during the last quarter of 1660 and was buried at Llanover.51Bradney, Hist. Mon. i. 383. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.