HOLMAN, Philip (1593-1669), of Warkworth, Northants.

The Holman family had settled at Godstone, Surrey, by the mid-sixteenth century.27Vis. Surr. 95-6; Manning, Bray, Surr. ii. 306-7. George Holman, Philip’s father, was a prosperous London grocer and a leading member of the East India and North West Passage companies.28A. Brown, Genesis of the U. S. 925. In his will of 1619, he appointed Philip his executor and bequeathed him the residue of his personal estate after the payment of legacies and debts.29PROB11/134, f. 53. From this will and those of his elder brothers Alexander and George, which were proved in 1618 and 1619 respectively, it is clear that Holman was his father’s eldest surviving son.30PROB11/130, f. 478; PROB11/133, f. 189v. There is no contemporary evidence for later claims that he, like his probable kinsman Michael Holman, was a London scrivener.31Ath. Ox. i. p. xxxvi; A. Beesley, Hist. of Banbury, 407-8, 481; Beaven, Aldermen of London, ii. 76.

Holman was described in the 1623 visitation of Surrey as of ‘Hertford castle near Hertford town’, which remained his principal abode until at least 1629.32Vis. Surr. 96; E115/184/80; E115/192/72; E115/207/113. Having married the daughter of a London Fishmonger in 1627, he then moved to the metropolitan parish of St Michael, Wood Street, where his three children were baptised in the early 1630s.33St Michael, Wood Street par reg. In 1629, he had purchased the manor of Warkworth in the south-west corner of Northamptonshire, close to the Oxfordshire town of Banbury, for £14,000, and this would become his principal residence.34Baker, Northants. i. 739. By 1633, he had also acquired the advowson of Marston St Lawrence, Northamptonshire, to which he presented that year the zealously puritan minister Charles Chauncy, who was a friend of the godly grandees William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele and John Crewe I*.35IND1/17002, f. 42v; Bridges, Northants. i. 182; Oxford DNB, ‘Charles Chauncy’; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 19. Following Chauncy’s decision in 1637 to emigrate to New England, Holman obliged Crewe (but not, it seems, Saye) by presenting the rather more ‘orthodox’, although still puritanical, minister and future Presbyterian polemicist, Francis Cheynell to the living.36IND1/17002, f. 42v; Oxford DNB, ‘Francis Cheynell’; Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts’, 20. Appointed sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1638, he landed in considerable trouble with the privy council for his perceived negligence in failing to collect the county’s Ship Money quota, and in October 1639 he appeared before the council and agreed to pay the county’s Ship Money arrears.37List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 94; CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 6, 378, 472, 495, 516; CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 16-17, 126, 185-6; PC2/50, p. 665.

Holman sided with Parliament in the civil war – a decision doubtless linked to his godly religious convictions – and was an active member of the Northamptonshire county committee.38SP28/199, f. 229v; SP28/238, ff. 54, 172; Bodl. Nalson IV, f. 123; Luke Letter Bks. 369, 527, 535, 557, 559, 616. In September 1643, Holman, Sir John Driden* and Richard Knightley* donated £100 between them to Parliament’s war chest.39SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol. The following month he was appointed to a Commons delegation to consult with Parliament’s commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, about installing a garrison in the Buckinghamshire town of Newport Pagnell.40CJ iii. 295a. He was probably the Philip Holman nominated by Isaac Penington* in 1651 for appointment as a London alderman, but was discharged on the grounds that he was not a freeman.41Beaven, Aldermen of London, i. 221. Although removed from the Northamptonshire bench in July 1652, he retained his place when the county’s assessment commission was renewed that November.42C231/6, p. 240.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, he was returned in second place, behind Richard Knightley, for Northamptonshire.43Supra, ‘Northamptonshire’. He probably owed his election to his considerable proprietorial interest in the county and to his likely alignment with Knightley in opposition to army influence in local affairs.44Infra, ‘Richard Knightley’. He made no recorded contribution to debate in this Parliament and received only one appointment, when he was named with Knightley and other Northamptonshire MPs to a committee set up on 12 April for preparing an impeachment against Major General William Boteler*.45CJ vii. 637a. Re-appointed to the county bench in March 1660, he retained his place as a magistrate after the Restoration, but does not appear to have sought re-election to Parliament.

Holman died in the summer of 1669 and was buried at Marston St Lawrence on 4 July of that year.46Baker, Northants. i. 740. In his will, he made bequests to his family, friends and servants amounting to almost £4,000. Among his legatees was the Presbyterian minister Samuel Well, who had been ejected from his living in Banbury in 1662.47PROB11/330, ff. 232-233v; Calamy Revised, 520. Holman’s cousin Robert had served as MP for Surrey in the first protectoral Parliament; his son Sir John Holman, 1st bt., sat for Banbury in the Cavalier Parliament and all three Exclusion Parliaments; and his son-in-law George Clerke (the son of a prominent London royalist during the civil war) represented Northamptonshire in the Cavalier Parliament.48Infra, ‘Robert Holman’; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Holman’; ‘George Clerke (Clarke)’.