SCUDAMORE, James (1624-68), of Holme Lacy, Herefs.

The Scudamores of Holme Lacy were in pedigree junior to the family of John Scudamore* of Kentchurch, but were much more important politically. The fortunes of the Holme Lacy branch were elevated by John Scudamore† (d. 1571), who held office in the household of Henry VIII, and who sat for Herefordshire in 1529.11HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘John Scudamore’; Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 26. His grandson, John Scudamore†, sat in six Parliaments between 1571 and 1597 as knight of the shire, on each occasion conceding the first seat to Sir James Croft.12HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Scudamore’. He married very advantageously, to Mary Shelton, a lady of Queen Elizabeth’s privy chamber, one of a ‘trinity of ladies able to work miracles’ with the monarch. John Scudamore spent more time at court than in Herefordshire, but kept the family aloof from the feud between the Crofts and Coningsbys that marked politics in the county in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Losing their court positions on the death of the queen in 1603, Sir John and Lady Mary Scudamore retired to Herefordshire, to reaffirm the family’s standing among its leading governing dynasties.13Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 27-30. Their grandson, John Scudamore, the 1st viscount, was born into a cultured household, in which the astrologer Dr John Dee and the patron of learning, Sir Thomas Bodley, were welcome guests. The viscount was later regarded by Samuel Hartlib as ‘a great scholar’.14Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 31.

The first viscount, James Scudamore’s father, was married at 15 into an important Gloucestershire family of the Inshire district near Gloucester city, and developed a variety of intellectual pursuits including horticulture. His interests in gardening and cider-production, an enthusiasm he shared with Roger Bosworth*, were at least partly motivated by a belief in the value of the natural world as divine revelation. His religious thinking led him into a belief in the importance of externals in spiritual matters. A physical expression of his outlook was his restoration of the church at Abbey Dore in Herefordshire, undertaken in the spirit of the campaign by William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, to beautify churches – Scudamore was a friend of Laud’s. In politics, Scudamore was a client of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, with other Herefordshire gentry such as Sir Robert Harley* and Sir Walter Pye*, and defended the king’s favourite in the House in the 1628 Parliament, having denounced the Petition of Right.15HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Scudamore’; Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 145-7.

Scudamore’s support for the crown was rewarded in 1635 with the ambassadorship to France. James Scudamore accompanied both his parents on their journey to take up the post.16Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 54, 179. He was educated in Paris initially by a tutor recommended by Sir Henry Wotton† for his ‘judgment and fidelity and erudition’, and stayed on there after his father returned to England in 1639.17Smith, Wotton Letters, ii. 364, 464-5. Over the next year or so he was in the care of the Scudamores’ chaplain at Abbey Dore and a French tutor, who were instructed by Scudamore senior in the minutiae of James’s education, which included swordplay and dancing instruction as well as Latin and Greek. From Paris, Scudamore moved on to St John’s, Oxford, where he remained until the summer of 1641, leaving without taking his degree.18C115/24/7779-80; Arundel Castle Archives, ‘Howard Letters and Papers 1636-1822 II Various’: Viscount Scudamore to Dupont and Turner, 5 Sept., 23 Nov. 1639; Add. 11044, f. 86.

Scudamore was still under majority age when the writ for a by-election for Hereford was moved on the death of Richard Weaver*. Viscount Scudamore had been high steward of Hereford since 1631, but although this gave him a great deal of potential influence, it did not necessarily imply that the place of burgess was in his gift. Viscount Scudamore’s promotion of his son was evidently a deliberate act. James’s eighteenth birthday had to pass before he could be made a freeman of Hereford, a prerequisite for his election. Brilliana Harley of Brampton Bryan had entertained ambitions on behalf of her son, Edward Harley*, for the place, but she wrote to him to let him know she had withdrawn on learning of James Scudamore’s interest:

I sent to Hereford to let them know that I heard that my Lord Scudamore’s son would stand for the burgess-ship, and then I did not further desire it for you; but gave them many thanks for their good will to you and desired if my lord’s son did not stand, that then they would give you their voices, which they then promised they would.19Brilliana Harley Letters, 166.

But Scudamore did stand, and was returned on 26 July without a contest.20C219/43/1/201. It has been noted that as well as checking the electoral ambitions of the parliamentarian Harleys, Scudamore’s election did nothing to assist the emerging royalists, since Viscount Scudamore was inactive in politics in the build-up to civil war.21Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 225. Scudamore senior may have considered that his political interest may have had eirenic potential, or he may have seen James’s imminent attaining of majority age as an opportunity to consolidate his dynastic grip on Hereford. In the event, James Scudamore almost certainly never took his seat at Westminster. His father became a leader of the Herefordshire royalists, but damaged the royalist cause by embarking on a quarrel with Fitzwilliam Coningsby*. His uncle, Barnaby Scudamore, became sheriff and governor of Hereford. James Scudamore was kept away from the war and from Herefordshire. No military or civil commissions were ever issued to him.

Viscount Scudamore surrendered to Sir William Waller* at Hereford on 25 April 1643, and by 16 May was in custody in London. John Pym, Sir Henry Vane II, Sir Robert Harley and Oliver St John were the MPs delegated by the Commons to treat with him for a ransom.22CJ iii. 87b. Although James Scudamore was reported taken at Hereford with his father, he evidently did not follow him into confinement. He was listed by the House in January 1644 as having deserted Parliament and gone to the king’s quarters at Oxford.23Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 70; CJ iii. 374a. He attended the Oxford Parliament, where he had signed the letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex encouraging overtures for peace.24The Names of the Lords and Commons (1646), 5; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons (Oxford, 1643), 24. He received a pardon from the king in March 1644, wrongly addressed to ‘Sir’ James, presumably exonerating him from any association with the Westminster Parliament.25Bodl. Dugdale 19, f. 70v. The House proved in no mood to come to a speedy settlement with the captive viscount, and the Scudamores’ plight was not helped when John Wylde*, active in the Committee for Sequestrations, lost a box of the viscount’s papers soon after he had arrived in London.26FSL, V.b.3, f. 27. James Scudamore was reported to be in poor health, in November receiving a pass from Colonel Edward Massie* to stay with the king, ‘his doctor following the king he is forced to follow him also’.27FSL, V.b.2, f. 19. Only in January 1647 were the procedures for his composition set in motion, and in March his fine was set – at one tenth of his income – at £2,690. The following November, Scudamore requested that James be included in the settlement, as he was by this time abroad for his education, and had no money other than that allowed him by his father. This plea was accepted, and in September 1648 an ordinance for the Scudamores’ pardon was passed.28CCC 1643; C115/99/7300, 7302, 7307, 7308, 7309, 7311; CJ vi. 21b. A few days before the ordinance passed both Houses, James Scudamore and Jane Bennet were married. Perhaps the two events were linked.

After his marriage, Scudamore showed no signs of abandoning his bachelor lifestyle. In 1649, it was probably he who was granted a pass with the son of the royalist Sir Henry Slingsby* to go abroad, but he was probably incapable of plotting against the government.29CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 557. Even in December 1655, at the height of the security fears surrounding the protectorate, he was allowed to go to Paris.30CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 576, 578. He had gone there to escape the creditors who had financed his gambling; he had recently lost £1,300 in one evening. He was in Paris for over a year, where his friends deplored his riotous behaviour, but then moved on, to Padua, Venice, Egypt and Tripoli. He was nearly lost at sea, fought the Turks on Crete and nearly died of illness at Zakinthos.31KB27/1771, m. 584, 1780 m. 760; SP18/130/130, ff. 204-5; SP18/153, ff. 18-19, 153-4, 227-8; Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 160-1. He did not return until 1661, and thus played no part in royalist intrigue or political manoeuvring, either in London or in Herefordshire. When it was reported that he would stand at the 1661 general election, a Hereford elector articulated what must have been a widespread and justifiable reaction in the city: ‘I should be loath that man should sit at the helm of government, I must expect little good from him, that hath so great a neglect of himself.32Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 161.

Having extricated himself from ‘those unhappy briars I myself planted’, Scudamore as the eldest son of a viscount was assured an unchallenged place in Herefordshire government.33Atherton, Ambition and Failure, 161. He had to turn down a chance of elevation to the order of the Bath because of the cost, but this was no obstacle to his election to Parliament in 1661. His unsuccessful attempt to annul a conveyance made in 1657 to secure his gambling debts led to the Gaming Act of 1665. Scudamore served with the fleet in the second Dutch war, and played a regular part in Herefordshire local government when living at Cary Cradock, the house in Sellack reserved for the close family of the head of the Scudamore household.34HP Commons 1660-1690. He never came into his inheritance, dying before his father in 1668. He was buried at Holme Lacy, and a splendid memorial to him in the form of a full semi-reclining effigy was erected there.35Inventory of Hist. Monuments in Herefs. i. 146-7; Pevsner, Buildings of England: Herefordshire, plate 57b. He is not to be confused with James Scudamore of the Middle Temple, the viscount’s solicitor, who was a frequent correspondent with the families at Holme Lacy and Ballingham, and who sent home news of the forcing of the Houses in 1647; nor with James Scudamore of Llangarron, a late compounding royalist, whose estates were considered for sale by the state in 1652.36FSL, V.b.3, f. 27; C115/99/7317; CCC 33326, 3091; CJ vii. 199a, 202b.