TRUMBULL, William (c.1603-78), of Easthampstead Park, Berks.

There were in the seventeenth century three William Trumbulls in successive generations. The first, this MP’s father, had been one of the leading career diplomats of the early decades of the century, while the third, this MP’s son, would be an equally notable diplomat and a secretary of state during its final decades. The second never achieved as much, but he continued the family tradition of government service.

In 1662 Trumbull claimed that they were descended from ‘the ancient family of Trumbulls in the kingdom of Scotland’.25Vis. Berks. ii. 220-1. Their ancestry was probably more prosaic. His father was the younger son of a Yorkshire yeoman and had risen through service in the households of 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham (Charles Howard†) and Sir Thomas Edmondes†. William senior accompanied Edmondes as his secretary on his embassy to the archducal court of the Spanish Netherlands in 1604 and then remained on in Brussels as the English resident when Edmondes was posted to Paris in 1609. Trumbull continued to hold this key diplomatic post until 1625.

Trumbull senior was therefore almost continuously abroad throughout the childhood of his eldest son. The future MP received a particularly cosmopolitan upbringing, and in the expectation that he would follow a similar career, great stress was placed on his acquisition of foreign languages. In 1612, aged only about nine, he was sent to Paris, Louvain and then Sedan.26HMC Downshire, iii. 258, 320, 327-8, 333, 340, 341, 353, 357, 372, 416, 440; iv. 29. His tutor there reported that, ‘he is of great memory and for his age has a solid wit, very capable in everything and so the more danger if it be not well employed’, and it was said about this time that he had become ‘a very good Frenchman’.27HMC Downshire, iii. 416, 440. In 1614 he was admitted to the local Protestant Academy, where its founder, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, duc de Bouillon, and his wife Élizabeth de Nassau, daughter of William the Silent, seem to have followed his education there with interest.28HMC Downshire, iv. 68, 84-5; v. 261, 267, 363, 460, 502; vi. 6, 213, 281, 410, 565. All this gave William first-hand experience of the world of international Protestantism at its most elevated level and an insight into the plight of the beleaguered French Huguenots. In 1618 William spent time with his father in Brussels.29HMC Downshire, vi. 464-5, 478.

Following long-held plans, in July 1622 Trumbull arrived at Magdalen College, Oxford, carrying a letter of introduction from the archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot.30HMC Downshire, v. 11, 37; Add. 72424, ff. 7v, 11, 16. He spent the next six years there, completing his BA and MA, and learning Spanish and possibly Italian.31Add. 72424, ff. 16-141; Add. 72441, ff. 2-26; Al. Ox. By the summer of 1625 he expressed a preference for studying divinity, with a view to performing ‘the function of the ministry’, but that plan had been abandoned by September 1628.32Add. 72424, ff. 105, 128. His father’s only concern was that he would ‘profess some vacation in the commonweal that may be warrantable and becoming [for] your father’s son.’33Add. 72441, f. 27. Perhaps with that in mind, Trumbull briefly attended the Middle Temple.34M. Temple Admiss. i. 117; MTR ii. 702. Between the summer of 1629 and 1631 Trumbull travelled, mostly in the company of William Paget, 5th Baron Paget, in the United Provinces, where he met Frederick and Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Southern Netherlands, and France.35Add. 72424, ff. 142-171; Add. 72441, ff. 29-39, 52-3; Add. 72443, ff. 5, 8v-12. In late 1630, as he planned to visit Geneva, his thoughts of becoming a clergyman may have briefly revived; while in the republic, he and Paget enrolled in the Calvinist Académie.36Add. 72441, f. 52; Le Livre du Recteur ed. Stelling-Michaud, i. 179. Armed conflict prevented them going on to Italy.37Add. 72424, ff. 153v, 163v.

Since 1616 Trumbull’s father had been a clerk of the privy council, and as early as 1611, he had obtained a reversion to the office for his son.38HMC Downshire, iii. 169, 234. Recalled from Brussels in 1625, William senior took up his council office full-time. Enjoying the confidence of the new king, he became keeper of Easthampstead Walk in Windsor Forest and in 1629 Charles I granted him a lease on the royal hunting lodge there, Easthampstead Park.39Add. 72441, f. 25; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 42; VCH Berks. iii. 78-9. This gave the family their base in Berkshire.

Trumbull senior died in September 1635, leaving lands in Yorkshire to William and the lease of Easthampstead Park to his widow as a life interest.40PROB11/169/364. She soon agreed that her son could take over that lease and the grant was confirmed by the king in 1636.41Berks. RO, D/ED/F3; Coventry Docquets, 263. William’s reversion to the clerkship of the privy council had lapsed with the change of monarch, but, through Paget’s persuasive powers, he was granted a reversion of a clerkship of the signet.42Add. 72444, f. 134; Add. 72441, f. 57; Coventry Docquets, 195; Sainty, Officials of the Secretaries of State, 111. In January 1637 Trumbull was appointed by the king as a commissioner for maltsters.43CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 404. His court connections were strengthened by his first marriage in October 1638 to a daughter of Georg Rudolph Weckherlinge, the German-born administrator who had served as the expert linguist to successive secretaries of state.44Add. 72442, f. 16.

Trumbull’s lack of experience counted against him a decade later when the next vacancy in the signet office arose. A memorandum prepared for Charles I in about 1646 on possible candidates noted that, although Trumbull held a valid reversion, he had ‘never served his Majesty’.45CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 500. By then, that also carried the meaning that he had failed to support the king during the civil war: it seems Trumbull was a parliamentarian, albeit an inactive one. His father-in-law sided with Parliament, serving as the Committee for Both Kingdom’s secretary for foreign affairs from 1644, and Weckherlinge’s letters to Trumbull reporting on events in London seem to assume that his son-in-law shared his pro-parliamentarian sympathies.46Add. 72442. But Trumbull was not uncritical. In 1644 his main concern was the habit of parliamentarian forces of quartering their horses with him at Easthampstead.47Add. 72443, ff. 119-120, 130; Add. 72442, f. 94. He told his wife to cheer up ‘in the midst of all these wants and worldly troubles’.48Add. 72443, f. 123. On a visit to his Yorkshire estates at Northallerton in May 1646, he was shocked by how quartered parliamentarian troops had mistreated his tenants, and expected that ‘they will bring the curse of God on their army, and perhaps moulder away as well as the king’s’. In his view, ‘the miseries of those poor people … should move us to pity their sad condition.’49Add. 72443, f. 138.

Only in late 1645, once Parliament’s victory seemed assured, did Trumbull begin to take a direct interest in local politics. He asked his father-in-law to use his influence to get him appointed to the Berkshire county committee, although Weckherlinge expressed uncertainty as to how to go about this.50Add. 72442, f. 132. By the time Parliament began naming Trumbull as an assessment commissioner for Berkshire in 1647, he had already been added to the county bench.51A and O.; C231/6, p. 73. But not all local appointments were equally welcomed. On 17 November 1647 the Commons named him sheriff of Berkshire, despite lobbying against it by Weckherlinge and friends in the House led by Sir Robert Pye I* and Sir Walter Erle*.52CJ v. 360b. However, an approach by Weckherlinge to peers including the earls of Salisbury (William Cecil*), Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†) and Manchester (Edward Montagu†), and Dudley North, 3rd Baron North, secured a delay in the Lords, and in the end William Standen was appointed instead.53Add. 72442, ff. 166v, 171; CJ v. 425a; LJ ix. 669a. Meanwhile Trumbull had been playing something of a double game. In July 1647 he had visited the king in custody at Windsor and had kissed his hand, possibly in the vain hope of getting his signet office position.54Add. 72442, f. 161.

Under the Rump Trumbull continued to be included on the Berkshire assessment commissions and by then he was certainly serving as a justice of the peace.55CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 542; C231/7, p. 111. In 1650 he was asked by the council of state to investigate the felling of trees in Windsor Forest.56CSP Dom. 1650, p. 171. This record of local service meant that he could draw on significant support when he stood for the Berkshire seats in the elections for the second Protectoral Parliament. But whether that would have been enough, without the dubious tactics of the sheriff, William Strowde, to get him elected was a matter of considerable dispute, at the time and for several years afterwards. That controversy centred on Strowde’s behaviour during the initial poll between Trumbull and Henry Neville*. Whether this meant that Trumbull disliked Neville and his republican radicalism is less clear. There had been some talk of the pair combining forces and Strowde possibly viewed Trumbull as the candidate most likely to split Neville’s support.57A True and Perfect Relation of the Manner and Proceeding, held by the Sheriffe for the County of Berk (1656, E.891.8); CP40/2703, rot. 560 dorse; CJ vii. 599a.

Trumbull was one of the more obscure backbenchers in the 1656 Parliament. Some of his committee appointments were of obvious local relevance. His interest in the bill to preserve timber was natural enough in someone who lived in a former royal park on the edge of Windsor Forest.58CJ vii. 429b, 444b. The bill to fix the sheriff’s court in Wiltshire concerned an adjacent county.59CJ vii. 475a. He was also named to a couple of committees considering private estate bills.60CJ vii. 469a, 488a. Other pieces of legislation, such as the bills on recusants’ estates and on the repair of highways, were national issues with local implications.61CJ vii. 444a, 478a. But there are hints that he was comfortable in supporting the protectorate. He probably approved of the grant of land in Ireland to Theophilus Jones* and his inclusion on the committee to receive the doubts and scruples from Oliver Cromwell* about the Humble Petition and Advice might imply that he wanted the lord protector to accept its offer of the crown.62CJ vii. 491b, 521b. His appearance in the printed list of ‘kinglings’ supports that latter assumption.63Narrative of the Late Parliament (1657), 22 (E.935.5).

He was no more active in this Parliament when it reassembled in January 1658. His only known involvement in its proceedings during this brief second session was to be named to the committee on the bill against non-residence by the heads of house of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.64CJ vii. 581a. Of more immediate interest to him at this time was probably his attempt to get his eldest son, William†, elected as a fellow of All Souls, Oxford. Trumbull and Richard Hill* had recently petitioned Cromwell to complain that the elections of their sons had been blocked by the university visitors. The visitors had not objected to their suitability, but to the fact that resignations of the fellows they were replacing had not yet been announced.65CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 236-7, 278-9; Add. 72444, ff. 4-9. Trumbull’s appeal to the protector succeeded and William was allowed to take up his fellowship.

With the Restoration Trumbull finally obtained government office. By August 1660 he had become a clerk of the signet, a sinecure requiring minimal skills and bringing little influence.66CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 245; Pepys’s Diary, i. 212; Sainty, Officials of the Secretaries of State, 57, 111. Apparently satisfied, Trumbull then confined himself to entrenching his existing advantages. In late 1661 he secured the relaxation of conditions on his lease of Easthampstead Park, with an obligation to maintain deer there for the king to hunt commuted to a monetary payment.67CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 67, 173, 239; CTB i. 312. In 1664 he obtained a reversion to the signet office clerkships for his eldest son William†.68CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 579. The family finances, however, were far from secure and by the late 1660s his lands were already heavily mortgaged.69Add. 72444, ff. 116, 122, 128, 131. During these years Trumbull presumably conformed to the Church of England; in 1670 his second wife presented a silver paten to the local church at Easthampstead.70The Church Plate of Berks. ed. J.W. Walker and M.I. Walker (1927), 118. By 22 March 1678 Trumbull was reported to be ill and within days he was dead.71CSP Dom. 1678, pp. 61, 382-3. He was buried on 27 March in the chancel of the church at Easthampstead, close to the tombs of his first wife and two of their daughters.72Easthampstead par. reg. Relations between William junior, who inherited the estates, and his stepmother quickly soured.73PROB11/358/477. Before long she reminded him, with calculated bitterness, that, ‘when I married your father my land, money and goods was worth as much as your mother or wife brought to this family’.74Add. 72510, ff. 7, 16. Nonetheless, William was to have a glittering career.