NOEL, Baptist (1611-82), of Exton, Rutland

Noel’s family claimed descent from a companion of the Conqueror and had settled at Ellenhall, in Staffordshire, by the late eleventh century.20S. Erdeswick, A Survey of Staffs. 112-13; Vis. Leics. (Harl. Soc. ii), 113-14; E. Noel, Some Letters and Recs. of the Noel Fam. 1-2. His great-grandfather had used the profits of his office as a royal feodary to build an estate in Leicestershire and Rutland and had married the widow of a Rutland gentleman. He had served during the mid-sixteenth century both as sheriff and knight of the shire for Rutland.21HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Andrew Nowell’; Vis. Rutland (Harl. Soc. iii), 30; VCH Rutland, ii. 37, 38. Noel’s grandfather had married into another Rutland gentry family, the Haringtons, and his father, Sir Edward Noel – who had sat for the county in 1601 – had inherited or purchased portions of the Haringtons’ Rutland manors of Exton and Ridlington.22Vis. Leics. 3, 114; J. Wright, Rutland, 108; VCH Rutland, ii. 17, 93; Noel, Recs. of the Noel Fam. 7-9. In 1617 he was created Baron Noel of Ridlington.23CP. Sir Edward had married the heiress of the purchaser of the lordship of Exton, the wealthy London silk mercer Sir Baptist Hicks, created Viscount Campden in 1628, whose personal estate alone, at his death in 1629, was valued at £60,000. Having no direct male heir, his viscountcy devolved upon Sir Edward.24J. Wright, Rutland, 48; VCH Rutland, ii. 49, 129; Noel, Recs. of the Noel Fam. 10-13; CP. Through Hicks, the Noels also acquired an estate in Gloucestershire – including the manor of Chipping Campden, where he had lavished at least £29,000 erecting a ‘noble house’ – and his residence in Kensington, known as Campden House.25Rudder, New Hist. Glos. 319, 811; T. Faulkner, Hist. and Antiquities of Kensington, 415, 418.

Noel was one of the ‘young gallants’ at Charles I’s court and a notorious spendthrift. He is said to have lost £2,500 at tennis in a single day – which sum comprised most, possibly all, of the portion that the king had given him upon his first marriage in 1632.26T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Chas. I, ii. 219. Although his father was involved in collecting Ship Money in Rutland and his uncle Henry helped to raise troops for the king during the first bishops’ war, Noel himself played no considerable part in public affairs before 1640.27HMC 5th Rep. 402; SP16/462, f. 46; Eg. 2986, f. 81. Nevertheless, his interest as the son of a Rutland peer and major landowner was sufficient to secure his return for the county in the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640. He received only one appointment in this Parliament – to a committee on a bill concerning apparel – and made no recorded contributions to debate.28CJ ii. 8a. As a deputy lieutenant for Rutland he helped to mobilise the county’s trained bands during the second bishops’ war.29HEHL, HA 10623-4.

Noel was returned for Rutland again in the autumn of 1640 and would receive 21 committee nominations in the Long Parliament – all but one of them falling between November 1640 and May 1641. The majority of his appointments in the opening months of the Parliament were to committees concerned with reforming the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule or punishing their authors. Thus he was named to committees for investigating the crown’s perceived breach of parliamentary privilege in 1629, to consider the Commons’ request to examine peers in the prosecution of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, and to investigate the proceedings of lords and deputy lieutenants during the 1630s.30CJ ii. 25b, 39b, 44a, 44b, 50b, 52b, 55a, 56a. On 21 November, following the announcement of a City loan to help supply the armies in northern England, Noel gave his security for providing £1,000.31Procs. LP i. 228. Named to the committee set up that day (21 Nov.) to consider the state of the king’s army, he moved that ‘such as were nominated as were now absent might be put out of the committee, it being unfit [to receive nomination without being present]. They should be in the House’.32CJ ii. 34a; Procs. LP i. On 10 December, he moved that the Leicestershire deputy lieutenant Richard Halford be called to the bar of the House to make his submission for having publicly declared that Sir Arthur Hesilrige* was ‘a man who had more will than wit’ and that his election ‘was to the disparagement of the county’.33Procs. LP i. 553, 557; T. Cogswell, Home Divisions, 272. Once the new Canons had been voted illegal, 16 December, Noel moved that Members who had ‘either taken or given this new oath might be disabled to sit in the House’ – which motion, although ‘seconded by divers’, did not have time to take effect before the House rose.34Procs. LP i. 624. Noel was named to committees on 19 and 22 December for promoting a preaching ministry and to draw up a charge against the Laudian bishop of Ely, Matthew Wren.35CJ ii. 54b, 56a.

Granted leave of absence on 22 December 1640, Noel did not receive another Commons appointment until 26 January 1641, when he was included on a committee concerning the king’s controversial pardon of the condemned Catholic priest John Goodman.36CJ ii. 73a. That same day (26 Jan.), he informed the House that ‘divers popish books and superstitious trinkets’ had been seized at a house in Belton, Rutland, and that a suspected priest had fled the scene.37Procs. LP ii. 280. On 13 February, he was named to a committee on a bill for abolishing superstition and idolatry, and two days later (15 Feb.), he was appointed to the Commons’ delegation to attend the king and request his assent to the subsidy bill.38CJ ii. 84b, 85b. Noel’s addition on 18 February to a committee set up a month earlier for maintaining the king’s army was possibly linked to initiatives by Edward Hyde* and his friends to find money for the crown and thereby lessen Charles’s financial dependence on the parliamentary leadership.39Supra, ‘Edward Hyde’; CJ ii. 66a, 88a; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 6-7. A significant proportion of this committee’s members would either vote against Strafford’s attainder bill on 21 April 1641 or would side with the king in the civil war – and a number, among them Noel, would do both.40Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. Having taken the Protestation on 3 May, he was granted leave of absence two weeks later (18 May) and is not known to have attended the House again until early the following year.41CJ ii. 133a, 149a. On 14 February 1642, he was named to a committee of both Houses to present to Charles, for his royal assent, the bills for excluding the bishops from the Lords and for pressing troops for Ireland.42CJ ii. 430b. On the motion of Sir Guy Palmes, his fellow knight of the shire for Rutland, Noel was granted leave on 7 March and would make no further appearance in the Long Parliament.43CJ ii. 469a; PJ ii. 1.

The Noel family had emerged by late 1642 as active royalists, and Noel himself was probably one of the many men reportedly added by the king to the Northamptonshire bench in the summer of 1642.44Eg. 2986, f. 229; SP23/183, p. 119; Perfect Diurnall no. 9 (8-15 Aug. 1642), sig. K4v (E.239.8). On 17 December, the Commons voted that Noel and Palmes should be brought up in safe custody and that the Lords be moved to summon Noel’s father, Viscount Campden.45CJ ii. 893b; VCH Rutland, i. 188. By the time he succeeded his father – who died in the king’s headquarters at Oxford in March 1643 – Campden had raised ‘a brave troop of horse’ operating out of the royalist garrisons at Belvoir Castle and Newark.46J. Wright, Rutland, 108; HMC 8th Rep. ii. 59; HMC Portland, i. 99; Mercurius Aulicus no. 10 (5-11 Mar. 1643), 128. During 1643, he and his ‘Camdeners’ ranged the south and east midlands, capturing Stamford, clashing with local parliamentarian forces and plundering the houses of Sir William Armyne* and Sir Gilbert Pykeringe*, among others.47SP23/183, p. 119, 129-31; Bodl. Add. C.132, f. 67v; Mercurius Aulicus no. 13 (26 Mar.-2 Apr. 1643), 155 (E.96.5); no. 15 (9-16 Apr. 1643), 185-6 (E.99.22); HMC 7th Rep. 1, 555; CCC 940; LJ vii. 659b; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 224; VCH Rutland, i. 188, 191.

Campden attended the Oxford Parliament early in 1644 – although he arrived too late to sign its letter to the earl of Essex urging him to compose a peace – and reportedly refused to vote with those of his fellow royalist Parliament-men who wished to pronounce their former colleagues at Westminster traitors, ‘and being often pressed to vote, [he] desired the opinion of the judges to declare the law in that point’. It was at about this time – that is, March 1644 – that he sought and obtained a pass from Essex to surrender himself to the Westminster Parliament.48Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 574; Occurrences of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passsages in Parliament no. 16 (5-12 Apr. 1644), umpag. (E.42.17); SP23/183, pp. 57, 89, 93, 101, 105. Although Campden failed to act upon Essex’s pass, it was reported in August that he had put himself under Parliament’s protection.49A Diary, or an Exact Journall no. 14 (22-8 Aug. 1644), 111 (E.254.24); CJ iii. 605a. The razing of his house at Chipping Campden by its royalist garrison in May 1645, in order to prevent it falling into enemy hands, may well have deepened his estrangement from the king’s cause.50Clarendon, Hist. iv. 37-8. Nevertheless, it was from the royalist garrison at Belvoir that he wrote to the parliamentarian peer Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh in September 1645, requesting that he join with Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester in obtaining Parliament’s leave to come to London, with liberty thereafter to travel to Holland.51LJ vii. 579a; HMC 4th Rep. 272; SP23/183, pp. 98, 100. The Lords duly granted his request, but once in London he was taken into custody and confined to Campden House, Kensington.52LJ vii. 624a, 646b, 653a.

In October 1645, Noel was bailed by the Lords in order to begin composition proceedings, and in January 1646 he petitioned the Committee for Compounding, claiming that he had never executed the commission of array in Rutland and that he had been in arms against Parliament for only a brief period in mid-1643.53LJ vii. 660b; CCC, 939; SP23/183, pp. 127, 139. His fine was set initially at £19,558, which, in insisted, was more than the market value of his entire estate.54CJ v. 384b; LJ viii. 457b; HMC 6th Rep. 130. After numerous petitions to the committee, his fine was reduced in November 1647 to £9,000, but with the proviso that he maintain preaching ministers at his church livings of Langham, Rutland, and Hampstead, Middlesex.55SP23/183, pp. 62, 67; CCC, 939; CJ v. 384b. No sooner had this been settled than the Committee for Advance of Money demanded payment of £4,000 for which he had been assessed in 1644. After further negotiations his assessment was discharged in May 1648 for £100, ‘he being greatly indebted’.56CCAM, 401. Although he apparently remained aloof from all royalist conspiracy, he was brought before the council of state for interrogation early in 1651 and required to enter bond for £10,000 ‘not to do anything to the prejudice of the commonwealth and the government’.57CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 35, 75. In 1656, he was assessed at £160 a year for the decimation tax on his property in Rutland.58TSP iv. 512; J.T. Cliffe, ‘The Cromwellian decimation tax of 1655: the assessment lists’ (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. vii), 446. He was one of several prominent Cavaliers who were imprisoned by the protectorate in 1658 on suspicion (probably unfounded) of complicity in royalist plotting.59BL Verney ms mic. M636/16: Sir Justinian Isham to Sir Ralph Verney*, 27 Apr. 1658; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 226.

Campden was an active member of the Lords in the 1660 Convention.60HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘Baptist Noel, 3rd Viscount Campden’. That summer he joined other Rutland peers and gentry in a loyal address to the king and was appointed lord lieutenant of the county.61SP29/1/43, f. 83; Sainty, Lords Lieutenants 1660–1974, 58. In the Cavalier Parliament, he was a loyal supporter of the court and his kinsman by marriage, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby.62HP Lords 1660-1715, ‘Baptist Noel, 3rd Viscount Campden’; Add. 28053, ff. 193, 243; A. Swatland, The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II, 251, 266. On the occasion of Campden’s appointment as recorder of Stamford in 1676, the king acknowledged his ‘services and sufferings’ and declared ‘his value for his person and his esteem of his parts and qualifications [as] fitting that or greater employments’.63CSP Dom. 1676-7, p. 491.

Campden died in the autumn of 1682, and on 21 December he was buried at Exton, where a sumptuous memorial was erected, designed by Grinling Gibbons, at a cost of £1,000.64CP; Exton, Rutland par. reg.; H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in Eng. (3 vols., 1849), iii. 85; Noel, Recs. of the Noel Fam. 16. In his will, he left portions of £8,000 to his two unmarried daughters Bridget and Martha Penelope.65PROB11/371, f. 127. His personal estate was valued at £31,133.66PROB4/17225. Three of Campden’s sons sat for Rutland between 1661 and 1685; and his heir, who also represented Hampshire in the first Exclusion Parliament, was created 1st earl of Gainsborough in 1682.67HP Commons 1660-90, ‘Hon Baptist Noel’; ‘Hon. Edward Noel’; ‘Hon. Henry Noel’.