EVELEIGH, Gilbert (1604-71), of Totnes, Devon.

The name Eveleigh was commonly encountered in Devon in this period. Gilbert Eveleigh’s family was from the Ottery St Mary district of east Devon, and was not anciently counted among the gentry. The heralds of the 1620s recognized only three armigerous generations before Eveleigh’s father.14Vivian, Vis. Devon, 336. The family became upwardly mobile when the marriage between Gilbert’s parents was contracted. Josias Eveleigh, who had pursued a commercial career in London before becoming a freeman draper of Exeter in 1596, married into the Yarde family of Bradley, near Newton Abbot.15Exeter Freemen, 106. Edward Yarde† had sat for Dartmouth in the Parliament of 1559, by dint of being the agent for the Devon estates of Francis Russell, 2nd earl of Bedford. Gilbert Eveleigh was the grandson of Edward Yarde’s half-brother, and was doubtless christened Gilbert in honour of his Yarde grandfather of that name.16HP Commons 1558-1603; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 829-30, 832. Nothing is known of Gilbert Eveleigh’s education. He practised law, but no record of his name has been found in the admissions registers to the inns of court. He was probably articled to an attorney in Devon, most likely in Exeter, the city of which his father was a freeman and where he was baptised, in the parish of St Martin.

By 1635, Eveleigh was established as town clerk at Totnes, and like his relative Edward Yarde, was in post through the approval of an earl of Bedford, in his case Francis Russell, the 4th earl.17Devon RO, 1579A/5/33-4. He may well in fact have been the earl’s steward, at least for Bedford’s properties in south Devon. Eveleigh held property of his own in the borough of Totnes, and in 1635 and 1638 was assessed at 12 shillings for Ship Money, on holdings in the ‘lower quarter’ there, the wealthier part of the town near the quay on the River Dart.18Devon RO, 1579A/8/11; 1579A/7/1/50-2. He himself was responsible for paying over the Ship Money collections to the high sheriff of Devon.19CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 229; 1637, p. 123. In October 1638, he reported to the mayor on how he had attempted to persuade the sheriff to relieve the town of some of its Ship Money burden, and how he had discovered anomalies in the rating procedures as between the boroughs and the hundreds of the county. He concluded, however, that any representations the mayor might make would be unlikely to succeed.20Devon RO, 1579A/8/9. In 1642, at the time that Parliament sent down its Protestation for signatures, Eveleigh was still living in Totnes, and made the required vow and affirmation without demur.21Devon Protestation Returns, i. 193. He seems not to have left Totnes during the upheavals of the civil war, and when the town came under the direction of the royalist garrison of Dartmouth, Eveleigh conformed instead of leaving. He was involved in April 1644 in the collection of a levy for the king’s army, and with a number of other leading citizens, he paid over sums in December that year to Lord Hopton (Sir Ralph Hopton*), the royalist general. Eveleigh’s own contribution, on the king’s propositions and to a total sum collected of £239, was £10.22Devon RO, 1579A/17/31, 1579A/17/30. It was doubtless for its willingness to support the king’s war effort in this way that Totnes received a royal pardon in September that year.23Devon RO, 1579A/17/31.

By January 1646, Totnes had been won back to Parliament with a show of force by the New Model army. Eveleigh remained in post as town clerk, but by January 1648 was subject to allegations about his conduct during the civil war. He was described as having exercised control over the movements of the populace in and out of Totnes, subject only to Hopton’s authority, and as having collected a fee for every pass he issued. He was said to have taken the royalist oath of loyalty that was imposed in south Devon, and to have procured pardons for some of the parliamentarians who surrendered at Exeter in 1643. All of this is perfectly plausible; less so is the allegation by the same informer that Eveleigh practised law in the king’s courts at Oxford.24CCAM 844. In any event, Eveleigh survived these suspicions, and kept not only his town clerkship, but his hereditary connection with the earls of Bedford. As steward of the estates of the 5th earl (William Russell), he presided at sittings of the Tavistock court leet, and was therefore a prominent figure in that town. In 1652 he was presented with a copy of the controversial book, The Wedding-Supper, by the author, Thomas Larkham, vicar of Tavistock, but two years later he had become ‘evil Eveleigh’ in the vicar’s eyes, after Larkham’s grandson had been prosecuted at the court leet for a minor infringement of the manorial laws.25Diary of Thomas Larkham, 1647-1669, 96, 99, 377. In October 1656 Eveleigh was instructed by the commissioners for the approbation of public preachers to withhold Larkham’s stipend.26Diary of Thomas Larkham, 137. Larkham recorded various other transactions with Eveleigh through the late 1650s, all by virtue of the lawyer’s standing as steward for Bedford, the patron of the living of Tavistock.27Diary of Thomas Larkham, 175, 186, 190, 208.

By this time, whatever suspicions may have attached to Eveleigh about his war-time allegiances seem to have dissipated. A relative, George Eveleigh of Ottery, was a suspect of Major-general John Disbrowe* in 1655, doubtless because of what was considered his lingering attachment to the cause of monarchy; but Gilbert Eveleigh purchased lands from him without any taint or suspicion attaching to the Totnes man.28Add. 34012; PROB11/339/125. It was in this period that he was able to buy the estate of his father’s at Holcombe, in Ottery, from a gentry vendor, suggesting that this was a time of prosperity for him.29PROB11/339/125. Eveleigh’s signature is to be found on recognizances among the Devon quarter sessions rolls in 1656, showing how significant he was in the law enforcement process in Totnes, and he was probably practising as an attorney on the western assize circuit.30ASSI 22/1; Devon RO, QS bundle, Easter 1656. In 1659, Eveleigh took legal advice from a celebrated former burgess for Totnes, Serjeant John Maynard*, on a civic office that he had evidently been asked to secure for one of the neighbouring gentry family of Savery. Eveleigh’s advice to the mayor, Thomas Brooking, was offered with his candid assurance that he was intending to ‘vindicate’ the mayor ‘against the affronts and abuses proffered ... and [for] maintenance of your privileges’.31Devon RO, 1579A/5/35. The letter demonstrates the authority in his own right with which Eveleigh pronounced on public affairs in Totnes; his election there to sit in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659 came as the culmination of nearly 25 years’ public service in the borough and district, and as a tacit acceptance of the continuing influence over the town by the earls of Bedford.

However well-qualified Eveleigh may have been to represent his adopted town, his parliamentary career turned out to be negligible as well as brief. He was called to no committees, and no record survives of any speech that he might have made. But his skills in political survival ensured that he weathered the Restoration of the monarchy. He kept his town clerkship, and in 1663 was even appointed by the exchequer to take the answers to its bills of those who had collected taxes locally under the commonwealth and protectorate.32E113/6, answer of Christopher Martin. He continued to pay his taxes in Totnes, and unlike his relative Nicholas Eveleigh of Exeter, suffered no scrutiny for anything he might have done before 1660.33SP29/449/90. It was probably in this period that he was elected mayor of Totnes on no fewer than three occasions, though the dates are uncertain. In 1667, he was named by the government as a commissioner into the condition of the Newfoundland fisheries. Eveleigh drew up his will in November 1671. Among his ‘loving friends’ was Servington Savery of Shilston, who in May 1647 had as an assize juror petitioned the judges with cautious and conservative requests for tax relief, but who in the 1680s was regarded as an enemy of the government of James II, deserving imprisonment in the fort at Plymouth.34LJ ix. 171-2; Add. 44058, f. 67. Eveleigh died shortly after making his will and was buried at Totnes on 12 December 1671. Only his three mayoral years were thought worthy of mention in the parish register. No descendant of his is known to have sat in subsequent Parliaments.