PHELIPPS, Edward (1613-80), of Montacute, Som.

The Phelipps family had originated in Corfe Mullen in east Dorset, but held lands from the priory of Montacute in Somerset before the sixteenth century.23Vis. Som. 1623, 85. The bulk of the Montacute estates (including the priory buildings) had come into the family’s possession by the late sixteenth century, and an ambitious new house was completed by Sir Edward Phelipps† at the turn of the century.24Gerard’s Description of Somerset, 1633 ed. E.H. Bates (Som. Rec. Soc. xv), 99. Sir Edward, who served as Speaker in the Parliament of 1604, and as master of the rolls to James I, was the founder of the family’s political fortunes. His son, Sir Robert, a key figure in the Parliaments of the 1620s, dominated Somerset politics in the 1630s. Edward Phelipps (who was born in 1613, the year before his grandfather’s death, and used this spelling of the name) was thus brought up in the shadow of his two eminent forebears, and had to cope with a less than welcome double legacy: an estate encumbered by debt, and a place at the head of the Phelipps faction, which traditionally opposed the Pouletts and Stawells in Somerset politics.25Signature: SP23/181, p. 310: 30 Apr. 1646.

Edward Phelipps’s marriage to a daughter of Sir Robert Pye (auditor of the exchequer of receipt), in 1632, was a direct result of his father’s financial crisis. Sir Robert Phelipps agreed to make over most of his estate to the bride and groom, in return for the payment of his creditors from Pye’s coffers, and this forced him to disinherit his daughters of their marriage portions, and to restrict the rights of his wife over her jointure lands.26Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 113-4. After Sir Robert’s death in 1638, Edward Phelipps was drawn into a bitter dispute with his mother, who called in her cousin, Thomas Smyth I*, and John Coventry*, as mediators.27Som. RO, DD/PH/224, f. 3; Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 137. In April 1640, Phelipps’s mother was still waiting for an agreement, and feared for the portions of her daughters; four months later, she bemoaned her son’s attitude, which, she claimed, showed no respect ‘to the honour of his dead father or his own reputation, which will infinitely suffer with all honest and good men’.28Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 157, 159. By the mid-1640s (when the family estates came under parliamentary sequestration) some sort of settlement had been reached, with Phelipps’s mother retaining lands worth £300 a year, the two sisters being allocated £900 for their marriage portions – an amount which cut deeply into Phelipps’s rental income, which was estimated to be less than £500 a year.29SP23/181, pp. 307-8. The only positive by-product of Phelipps’s defence of his father’s land settlement was his increasing attachment to his wife’s family: in the late 1630s he was a guest at Sir Robert Pye’s house at Westminster; and he was still on intimate terms with other members of the Pye family in the summer of 1640.30Som. RO, DD/PH/223, ff. 24, 26.

An equally difficult inheritance from his father was Edward Phelipps’s involvement in the faction-fights which had dominated Somerset politics since the mid-1620s. Sir Robert had fought off a hostile local alliance between Lord Poulett (John Poulett†) and Sir John Stawell* in the 1620s, and in 1637 he again crossed swords with Stawell and his ally, William Bassett*. Bassett, as sheriff of Somerset, used the collection of Ship Money in Tintinhull hundred to attack the Phelipps family, who claimed exemption from hundredal jurisdiction for their lands at Sock Dennis. Edward Phelipps, who held the estate as part of his marriage settlement, refused to pay Bassett’s levy, and in April 1637 the sheriff complained to the privy council.31Som. RO, DD/PH/223, f. 222; CSP Dom. 1637, pp. 18-19. For good measure, Stawell sent his own petition to the king in early May, complaining about Phelipps’s recalcitrance.32CSP Dom. 1637, p. 98. The council considered the dispute on 21 May, and, after ordering Phelipps to pay his rates independently of the hundred, told his father and Stawell to desist in their wrangling, or face punishment.33CSP Dom. 1637, p. 133. Despite this ruling, by the end of 1639 Phelipps had still not paid the rate due to Bassett.34CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 140-1. His refusal to pay should be seen as a continuation of the bad feeling which had grown up between the two men, not as a sign of Phelipps’s inherent opposition to the Caroline regime.

As with the Ship Money disputes, Phelipps’s involvement in the parliamentary elections of March and October 1640 reveals a concern for his own position in Somerset, rather an interest in national affairs. Phelipps’s greeted news of the Short Parliament with great enthusiasm, saying that ‘this sudden resolution for a Parliament hath begot much joy amongst all country people, and I hope we shall all reap the benefit of this meeting’, and he immediately started to plan how his links with his influential kinsmen, Thomas Smyth and John Coventry, could secure seats for the county or at Ilchester, a borough only four miles from Montacute, which had long been under the Phelipps’s control.35Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 150. By January 1640, Phelipps had attended the Coventry family at Durham House in London, and was in close contact with the Smyths.36Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 150-1. This lobbying seems to have paid off, as Phelipps was returned for Ilchester, in the company of another local landowner, Sir Henry Berkeley. Phelipps duly attended the Short Parliament, but took no recorded part in its proceedings, and his correspondence with Thomas Smyth was dominated not by politics but by his inheritance dispute and the difficulties of procuring luxury items in the capital.37Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 157-8.

The king’s decision to pursue a new war against the Scots without parliamentary approval caused grave concern in England. Phelipps, who had visited the Pye family in Buckinghamshire on his way back to Somerset, shared this sense of foreboding, writing that ‘the Scottish are the greater in number and much better ordered ... now things are in a desperate condition and there is no probable way but by prayer to bring this to a good end’.38Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 159-60. The defeat of the king in the summer of 1640 and the decision to call the Long Parliament brought renewed factionalism in Somerset. On 10 October 1640 Phelipps promised to support Smyth’s candidature for Ilchester, but feared his father’s old enemy, Lord Poulett, whose agent had ‘laboured these parts this sevennight and I hope to little purpose’. In the event, Smyth (who in the event stood for Bridgwater) was not returned, and Phelipps, a candidate at Ilchester, was ‘cast out for a wrangler ... though not fairly but by the knavery of two or three of my father’s condone back-friends’ – further evidence that Phelipps was suffering for his father’s earlier unpopularity with some local gentlemen.39Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 160-1, 167. Phelipps’s opportunity came early in the new year of 1641, when the election of one of the Ilchester MPs, Sir Henry Berkeley, was disallowed.40CJ ii. 85b. In a new contest, Phelipps replaced Berkeley, and travelled to Westminster to take the Protestation in May 1641. He apparently did very little in Parliament, although he signed the Protestation on 4 May 1641.41CJ ii. 134b. In October of that year, during the parliamentary recess, he was resident at Montacute, although Thomas Smyth implied that he would soon return to London.42Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 176. On the call of the House in July 1642, Phelipps remained absent without leave, along with a host of Somerset royalists.43CJ ii. 685b. Although Phelipps’s allegiances were fairly clear, the Commons gave him the benefit of the doubt, and admitted his excuse in October.44CJ ii. 798a. It was only when he signed the Oxford Parliament’s letter in January 1644 that Phelipps was finally disabled as an MP.45CJ iii. 389b.

During the first civil war, Phelipps aided the king in Somerset. In July 1643 he was one of the commissioners appointed by Sir Ralph Hopton* to manage the affairs of the county.46Som. RO, DD/PH/222, f. 75. He also served as a royalist j.p., a colonel of horse, and as governor of Ilchester; that is, until Parliament reasserted its control over the county in 1645.47Underdown, Somerset, 69-70. Thereafter Phelipps retreated to Exeter with his remaining forces, and when the city surrendered to Fairfax on 14 April 1646, he took the Covenant and Negative Oath and petitioned to be allowed to compound.48SP23/181, pp. 307, 311, 313. During their investigation, the Committee for Compounding found that Phelipps’s estate was heavily encumbered with his mother’s jointure and his sister’s portions, and that the local parliamentarians had already been at work, for ‘his personal estate is all seized and sold away by the [county] committee’.49SP23/181, pp. 307-8. His fine was set at two rates: £3,191 for a third part, and £1,276 for the tenth, and by December 1647 the Committee for Compounding had decided to impose the lower rate – possibly at the behest of his father-in-law, Sir Robert Pye, and other friends in Parliament.50SP23/181, pp. 307-8; CCC 1252. The same interest may also have secured Phelipps’s pardon, passed by ordinance on 3 January 1648, although this was far from being the end of his troubles.51LJ ix. 633b. Paying the fine had brought a new financial crisis, and in 1648 Phelipps was eager to sell off some of his lands. But Sir Robert Pye, who was jealous of his daughter’s jointure, was very reluctant to countenance such a move.52Som. RO, DD/PH/224, f. 64. The Committee for Advance of Money was also pursuing Phelipps: in January 1647 he was was assessed at £1,000, and proceedings were started in the following spring to sequester his estate for non-payment. He was only discharged, under the Exeter articles, in 1651.53CCAM 761.

The commonwealth government was understandably wary of Phelipps. Despite continuing scares about royalist plots, he was allowed to return to Somerset, but was restricted to living in Wells, on a bond of £2,000 for good behaviour, and with orders to appear before the council of state when summoned.54CSP Dom. 1650, p. 566. Phelipps took the Engagement in January 1651, but continued to toy with royalist groups.55Som. RO, DD/PH/224, f. 186. In March 1655 he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in Penruddock’s western rising, and a letter of intelligence intercepted by Secretary John Thurloe* suggests that Phelipps was indeed associated with a network of the king’s agents in the west country headed by the marquess of Hertford and Henry Seymour.56TSP ii. 308, 428. Phelipps was incarcerated in Ilchester gaol, but the sheriff of Somerset, Robert Hunt*, intervened on his behalf, taking him to his own house, ‘where he remained until the assizes’, presumably in greater comfort.57Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 69-70. Hunt was not Phelipps’s only friend in these proceedings – among his well-wishers were the lord chief justice, John Glynne*, who promised ‘to appear much in his behalf’, and there were hopes that Sir Robert Pye and even Oliver Cromwell* himself might intervene.58Som. RO, DD/PH/224, f. 208. This tipped the scales in the defendant’s favour. Phelipps was indicted for misprision of treason at the assizes in April, but the charge was not proved; the order to keep him in prison was soon overturned on Hunt’s request, and Major-general John Disbrowe* agreed to set Phelipps at liberty on bonds of good behaviour.59Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 70-1. In September 1655, Phelipps was at last given permission to return to Montacute.60Som. RO, DD/PH/224, f. 188.

At the Restoration, Phelipps re-emerged on the political stage. He was elected as knight of the shire for Somerset in 1661, and was an active member and a ‘country cavalier’ until the late 1670s.61HP Commons 1660-1690. Yet, as he complained in a petition to Charles II in 1660, the ‘severe persecutions and ruinous oppressions of the late rebellious usurpers’ had seriously impaired his estate.62Som. RO, DD/PH/224, f. 190. The situation had improved little by the time Phelipps drew up his will in January 1680, and although he was able to leave cash sums to three surviving younger sons and a grandson, there were provisions (which ultimately proved unnecessary) to sell off the patrimonial estates to pay the family’s debts.63PROB11/363/278. Phelipps was buried at Montacute, with great ceremony, and attended by representatives from the major Somerset families, on 17 February 1680.64Som. and Dorset N&Q, xxviii. 105-9; Al. Ox. His son and heir, Sir Edward Phelipps†, who served as Member for Ilchester in 1661 and 1685, went on to sit as knight of the shire for Somerset from 1690.