YONGE, Walter I (1579-1649), of Colyton, Axmouth and Upton Hellions, Devon.

The Yonge family left Berkshire for Devon during the reign of Henry VII. They settled in the east Devon town of Axminster, and Walter Yonge’s grandfather was the first to live in Colyton.23Vis. Devonshire 1620 (Harl. Soc. vi), 325-6. The notion that the family produced a scion who sat for Bristol in 1361 seems conjectural.24Yonge, Diary ed. Roberts (Cam. Soc. xli), p. x. The family’s advance towards gentry status was initially fuelled by trade. Yonge’s father, John Yonge of Colyton, was described as a merchant in 1588, when he was one of eight Devon men who were granted a royal charter to fit out an expedition to Guinea.25R. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations ed. J. Beeching (2006), 253. By the time he drew up his will in 1610, John Yonge had sold out of his overseas trading interests, but the wealth he had acquired was evident in his collection of gold and silver utensils, ‘all which several parcels of plate was of my own buying which I had of mine own in the life time of my father’.26PROB11/120/328. This social mobility was consolidated by the acquisition of landed estates, through a family policy of active intervention in the land market. John Yonge acquired Upton Hellions, a manor in the Creedy valley near Crediton and outside the family’s home district of east Devon. Walter Yonge himself continued the strategy of his father, purchasing lands both in and around Colyton and further afield.27Polwhele, Devonshire, ii. 309, Pole, Collns. 124, 125, 134, 176, 200, 221, 224.

Walter Yonge (who spelled his name thus) was educated at Magdalen, a superior Oxford college, and at the Middle Temple, where he was bound with two west country men, including Richard Reynell†, a neighbour at Upton Hellions.28Sig: Antony House, Carew-Pole PC/G4/9/9. Although Yonge is said to have been called to the bar, perhaps because of his interest in legal matters, there seems no evidence that this was so.29Yonge, Diary ed. Roberts, p. x; Oxford DNB. In 1601 he married Jane Periam, the daughter of the wealthy Alderman John Periam, mayor of Exeter in 1587 and 1598. At his death in 1618, Periam left extensive property interests to his daughter, in Exeter and elsewhere, including the George Inn at Chard, Somerset, as well as leaving Walter Yonge himself a farm in his own right. 30PROB11/132/381. Like the Yonges, Periam was unusual among the Devon merchants in his enthusiasm for exploiting new overseas markets.31W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (2nd ed. 1975), 171-2, 253, 260, 288; HP Commons, 1558-1603, iii. 208. After the death of his father and father-in-law, Walter Yonge continued to pursue this interest, investing in the Dorchester Company, a venture led by the puritan minister of Dorchester, John White, with the aim of settling territory in Massachusetts. It was White’s idea to buy up property to invest in the company, and the rectory of Beer and Seaton, part of John Yonge’s estate, was bought by them in 1630 for £1400. The rectory had passed as dowry to William Fry*, when he married Walter Yonge’s sister in 1610.32Rose-Troup, John White, 263, 458. The Dorchester Company failed, however, and there seems no reason to believe that Yonge continued to seek further investment opportunities overseas.

John White’s Dorchester venture was strongly puritan, and Yonge fully shared the socially conservative values of its founders and directors. In 1621, he implemented his father’s bequest of a rent-charge in Axminster for the benefit of the poor there, and in 1625 added £40 to an existing charity at Crediton.33Reports of Charity Commissioners, Devon (Axminster) (1820), 5; (Crediton) (1824), 71. He became a Devon justice of the peace in 1622, and attended Devon quarter sessions meetings regularly down to the time of his election to Parliament, but was never one of the most assiduous members of the bench.34Devon RO, QS order bks. 1/6-8. Between 1604 and 1628, Yonge began to keep a diary, which consisted of annals of local, national and international events. Little can be gleaned from it about Yonge himself, except that he paid particular attention to religious policy, noting in 1622 a report that puritan justices such as himself were to be put out of commission and a rumour that a toleration was to be extended to Roman Catholics.35Yonge, Diary ed. Roberts, 50, 64. He recorded news from court – relayed to him by better-connected neighbours such as Edmund Prideaux I* – and providential incidents such as the lightning strike which killed a group of fast-breakers. In 1627 he was involved in fortifying the maritime township of Seaton against the Spanish, and recorded the punishment of imprisonment meted to Sir Walter Erle* for not paying the Forced Loan.36Yonge, Diary ed. Roberts, 66, 96, 106, 109-10. During the 1630s, Yonge was busy as a magistrate out of sessions. His name regularly occurred in the records of the western assize circuit, to provide further confirmation that he was not a barrister. Unlike John Maynard* and George Peard*, who both practised at the western circuit bar, Yonge simply acted as a justice out of sessions, regularly partnering his neighbour, Sir John Pole†.37Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 37, 44, 92, 99, 100, 171, 267. From this period dates Yonge’s codification of statute law for the use of justices out of sessions, which was to find publication fifteen years later as A Vade Mecum or Table.38W. Young, A Vade Mecum or Table (1643, ?recte 1642), sig. B. While he never held a commission in one of Devon’s militia regiments, he was in effect a senior figure in local militia administration when he served as county quartermaster-general in the mid-1630s.

Yonge found a place in the second Parliament of 1640 by virtue of his prominence as a godly gentleman in east Devon, naturally sympathetic to the opposition or junto group, not through any earlier demonstrable activism in national political events. He had taken his place in the House by 16 December. He seems to have made few interventions that were recorded, and until 10 July 1641, when he was granted leave to go home, sat on 15 committees, a modest total. Between January and March 1641, Yonge sat on five committees with John Upton I, like him a godly investor in overseas expansion schemes in previous decades.39CJ ii. 73b, 75a, 94a, 95b, 101a. A number of his early committee appointments were concerned with reform of the church. These included a committee to prepare votes on the Canons of 1640 (16 Dec.), the committee on prosecuting William Piers, bishop of Bath and Wells (29 Jan. 1641), and those on bills against idolatry (13 Feb.) and pluralities (10 Mar.).40CJ ii. 52a, 75a, 84b, 101a. Other significant committees included that on the bill for annual Parliaments (30 Dec. 1640), the bill on converting cultivated land into pasture (25 Feb. 1641), and committees concerned with confirming the subsidy and establishing customs rates (16, 18 Mar.).41CJ ii. 60a, 92b, 105b, 107a. On 15 March, Yonge brought to the House the concerns of the Devon subsidymen that they had left it too late to begin their work, and that the statute prevented them from raising the subsidy from clergy with estates over 20 shillings. The House provided him with reassurances on both scores.42D’Ewes (N), 485-6. Yonge took the Protestation on 27 May, weeks later than most Members. As the previous notice of him occurs in the Journal record for 18 March, it could well be that he had been ill. On 20 July he was given leave, and did not return until December 1641, when he seems to have spoken in favour of continuing Sir Henry Vane I* in his post as navy treasurer.43D’Ewes (C), 313. His appearance at the Michaelmas 1641 Devon quarter sessions suggests that his absence was not occasioned by ill health, but by local business of either a private or public nature.44Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8.

The brother-in-law of Yonge’s son, Sir John Yonge, was William Strode I*, but no strong relationship at Westminster between the elder Yonge and Strode can be discerned. From 1642 onwards, however, a significant partner in Yonge’s committee activities was his barrister nephew, Roger Hill II*. Legal matters were a significant theme in Yonge’s committee workload. He was named to committees on clarifying the law as it applied to salt marshes (27 Jan. 1641), a committee reviewing statutes in general (a committee of lawyers) (3 Mar.) and another revising laws against Catholic priests (26 Feb. 1642).45CJ ii. 73b, 95b, 456b. He was regarded as a legal authority, doubtless because of his work on codifying the laws for the benefit of magistrates, a public-spirited endeavour recognized as such in a House where so many Members appeared in the commissions of the peace for their counties. On 26 May, the committee for printing, chaired by John White, ordered Yonge’s work to be printed on its own authority. Yonge explained to his readers that the impetus for this publication was to correct an earlier version printed at Cambridge with ‘so many faults’ that a fresh start was required. The volume was published in London and is dated 1643, although a separate title page, incorporated at page 57, carries the subtitle An Epitome of Master Stamford’s Pleas of the Crowne, is dated 1642 and seems to suggest plans for an alternative version of the book. Sir William Stamford’s Les Plees del Coron (1557) was a standard title known to a previous generation of users. Yonge also began work on a volume of parliamentary precedents, which he called ‘Elencus Parliamentorum’. The manuscript volume bears his name and the date 1647. It draws heavily on the fourth part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, by Sir Edward Coke†, which first appeared in print in 1644. Yonge noted many things in the Long Parliament which he took to be precedents. He seems to have continued to have made entries in the volume until his death, because it notes the terminal year of the reign of Charles I, but more than one hand appears in the book, which was never printed.46Bodl. Eng. hist. g. 19.

Between 20 January and 25 March 1642, Yonge was named to three committees, including on the better maintenance of the parochial ministry (25 Mar.), but then was granted more leave of absence (2 Apr.).47CJ ii. 387a, 456b, 496b, 508b. Back in the House by 7 May, he was named to a further ten committees to the end of 1642, a modest number. These were nearly all concerned with addressing the growing political crisis. On 7 May, he was concerned with the bill to devote fines towards the campaign to suppress the Irish rebellion; two committees on the implications of the king’s commission of array (27 May, 25 July); a similar reactive committee on the king’s recent regulation of the commission of the peace and the shrievalty (23 Aug.) and another on protecting the wardships of those who had declared support for Parliament (29 Aug.).48CJ ii. 563a, 588a, 689b, 734a, 741b. On 13 June 1642 Yonge pledged £100 towards the cause of Parliament, as did his eldest son, Sir John, and on 19 August he was added to the Committee of Navy and Customs.49Antony House, Carew Pole PC/G4/9/21; PJ iii. 476; CJ ii. 728a. After the outbreak of civil war, Yonge’s committee appointments dwindled to an average of one a month in the last four months of the year, the most significant probably being to the body that received reports from members in their regions (28 Oct.).50CJ ii. 762b, 811a, 825a, 851a.

From September 1642, Yonge began to keep a parliamentary journal, which eventually extended to four manuscript volumes.51Add. 18777-80. They provide as much detailed information on events and reports in the Commons as the diaries of Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, but are unrevealing as to Yonge’s own thoughts and fears. Yonge’s purpose in keeping the diary was evidently to provide an objective account of what he heard and saw in the Commons, rigidly excluding references to self. He even referred to himself in the third person, ‘Mr Yonge’, when he noted a committee to which he had been called, so his diary is in this respect in sharp contrast to D’Ewes's continuous self-reflection.52Add. 18777, f. 30. Yonge’s diaries are particularly full on west country matters, and recorded the slow progress and many false starts in establishing a political structure to support a parliamentarian army in the south west. Yonge began his parliamentary diary in similar style to his pre-war annals, which noted events which struck the author as important. Reports brought in from various parts of the country found emphasis in 1642-3, but Yonge soon began to record speeches, sometimes passages of proceedings in the House unnoticed by other diarists, on occasion reporting fragments of the actual words spoken. His relatively modest parliamentary workload enabled him to become a careful observer of events in the Commons, and it may be more than a coincidence that the journal of Yonge’s nephew, Roger Hill II, ceases on 28 July 1642, while Yonge’s begins on 19 September. As Hill became busier, he may have handed over the self-allotted task of diarising to his older kinsman.

There can be no question of Yonge’s loyalty to Parliament during the civil war. The £100 he pledged to the cause in June 1642 on the propositions of Parliament was probably a separate sum to the £100 he gave between 25 August and 11 December 1643 specifically for the relief of Plymouth, already besieged by the royalists.53SP28/128, pt. 24. Yonge’s house at Stedcombe was garrisoned for Parliament by Sir Walter Erle, and when it fell in April 1644 to Prince Maurice after a siege, the royalist press reported that among the prisoners-of-war was a ‘seditious lecturer’.54Mercurius Aulicus, 14th week (to 6 Apr. 1644), 920-1 (E.43.18); 17th week (to 27 Apr. 1644), 955 (E.47.14). Among other trophies was a volume of Yonge’s diaries, which he had left there before leaving for London, and which was annotated by the officer who seized it.55Add. 35331, f. 1. There is no basis for the assertion that Walter Yonge took a post during the civil war as a navy victualler. Quite apart from the inherent improbability of the head of a county gentry family involving himself in a position where trade links, especially in London, were vital, he was too visible in the Commons Journal – and too conscientious a diarist – to have been able to undertake the duties of a victualler, away from the House.56DNB; J. Hutchinson, Notable Middle Templars (1902), 269; Oxford DNB; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 553. He seems to have been in the Commons without significant leave between January 1643 and July 1644. For this reason, it is also most unlikely that he journeyed north with the commissioners to Scotland, as one authority has it.57Oxford DNB. His diary records that ‘Walter Yonge’ made such a journey on 20 July 1643. The commissioners were still in Scotland in October, but Yonge was named to another committee in the House on 24 July, and made an entry in his diary on 3 August. The member of the delegation to Edinburgh, and indeed the navy victualler from March 1644, was not Yonge, nor his grandson of the same name, who was too youthful, but was almost certainly Walter Yonge’s second son, another Walter.58Add. 18778, ff. 7, 7b; CJ iii. 179b. He had trained at the Inner Temple, and had married Alice Grene, daughter of the powerful parliamentary naval figure, Giles Grene*.59Vivian, Vis. Devon, 840; Add. 18779, f. 76. This patronage would have secured Walter Yonge junior his post in the victualling office.

In 1643, 13 of the 22 committee appointments of Walter Yonge I were with Roger Hill II. With Hill and Edmund Prideaux I, he was tasked with producing an ordinance to postpone assizes (17 Feb. 1643), and with Hill alone he was given charge of producing an association in response to a request from some Devon gentry.60CJ ii. 968b, 979b; iii. 20a. This emerged from the visit of Antony Nicoll* and Edmund Prideaux I to Devon to stiffen the resolve of the county's wavering parliamentarians, such as John Northcote*. As a result of one of Prideaux’s despatches from Exeter, Yonge was asked (4 Apr.) to write a letter of encouragement to Captain James Chudleigh, son of the Devon military leader, Sir George Chudleigh, who had redeemed his involvement in the army plot of 1641 by useful service for Parliament in his home county.61CJ iii. 29a. Away from west country affairs, Yonge was named to the committee preparing the case against Archbishop William Laud and Bishop Matthew Wren (3 May) and with Prideaux was one of the committee of eight working on a belated scheme for questioning Henry Wilmot*, who had gone off to a senior command in the king’s army.62CJ iii. 105a. On 3 June he was named to a committee for removing difficulties in the justice system caused by the exceptional circumstances of civil war.63CJ iii. 113b. On 6 June 1643 Yonge took the new vow and covenant, and the following day was named to the Westminster Assembly, further evidence of the esteem in which he was held by his parliamentary colleagues as a godly, pious and senior figure among them. Probably because of this appointment, Yonge was excused from attending the committee of accounts chaired by John Trenchard, which hoped to support Sir William Waller’s* projected west country force through diverting confiscated revenues of the starch monopoly.64CJ iii. 116b, 125b. Nevertheless, he was appointed to a committee on promulgating the new vow and covenant through the kingdom (24 June) and was one of four, including his nephew, Roger Hill II, called to draft a clause in an additional ordinance for sequestrations (3 July).65CJ iii. 152b.

Of the eight committees to which Yonge was named between August and December 1643, three were on public finance: on sequestering the property of delinquent MPs (28 Aug.), on collecting revenues generally (28 Sept.) and on the potential for drawing in revenue from crown property (11 Nov.).66CJ iii. 220a, 257b, 307b. West country matters claimed his attention in a committee on relieving Exeter and the west (3 Aug.).67CJ iii. 192b. This body, which included his son, Sir John Yonge, was another attempt to send a credible force to challenge the royalist gains in the south-western peninsula. Yonge’s seniority is suggested by his inclusion in committees on the future arrangements for the great seal (9 Oct.) and on establishing a new council of war from among MPs (17 Oct.).68CJ iii. 269a, 278b. Seniority and a recognition that he was learned in the law, and had published his learning, may also account for his inclusion in a body of eight members, including his allies Roger Hill II and Edmund Prideaux I, required to save antiquities and manuscripts in royal and royalist properties fallen to Parliament.69CJ iii. 298b.

During 1644, Yonge’s activity in Parliament dropped, if committee appointments are any guide. There were only eight of these, though some were significant. In May and June he was named to committees with a legal focus, on fresh legislation for the prerogative court of Canterbury, where wills were proved (25 June) and on the legal technicalities of writs of error (30 May, 28 June).70CJ iii. 510a, 541b, 544a. The problem of funding Waller’s army to the south west still exercised Members, and a new committee of 27 February 1644 was called to wrestle with it.71CJ iii. 409b. Nothing was achieved before the lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex marched to disaster at Lostwithiel in August. On 9 March, Yonge was included among the witnesses from the Commons who could be called upon to give evidence at the trial of Archbishop Laud, and on 22 July he was included in the body that was to manage the impeachments of four judges, including John Glanville*, whose case was later given to Yonge in particular.72CJ iii. 422a, 567b; iv. 662a, 662b. The absence of any mention of Yonge in the Journal between early March and the end of May is possibly directly connected with the sacking of his house at Stedcombe in April. This disaster seems not to have made him eager for a more vigorous prosecution of the war. The committee of 24 July on turning ordinances into laws was predicated on a successful outcome to peace negotiations with the king. The committee was balanced in terms of Presbyterian and Independent membership, and care of it was given to Yonge, as was a clause concerning the court of wards, which found its way into the proposals put to the king at Uxbridge in November.73CJ iii. 569a, 647b; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 277.

Yonge was without doubt on the Presbyterian side in the factional rancour which marked parliamentary politics from 1644. Not only was he a member of the Westminster Assembly; he also took an active interest in moral legislation such as the ordinance for suppressing vice (29 Jan. 1645) and was named to the committee preparing the ordinance to regulate admission to the Lord’s Supper, in the context of the proposed English national Presbyterian church.74CJ iv. 35b, 114b. Yonge was to remain associated with this project; in April 1646 he was named to a committee on settling the national ministry, regulating livings and rationalizing parishes, and was named a commissioner for judging scandalous offences under the ordinance of 3 June 1646.75CJ iv. 562b; A. and O. Another of Yonge’s sustained interests was the printing of the bible in Greek, a scholarly venture led in the Commons by John Selden.76CJ iv. 9a, 695a. The year 1645 saw no increase in Yonge’s parliamentary profile, but with his son, Sir John, on 3 June he was awarded the £4 a week given to Members whose estates had been subject to plunder by the enemy. On 16 October he was added to the privileges committee.77CJ iv. 311a.

On 19 August 1645, Yonge was named to the committee to work on an ordinance for selling off the estates of papists and delinquents. Nearly a year later, Robert Reynolds reported final amendments to the ordinance. Yonge was included as a commissioner for the sales, but declined the service, and was excused (23 July 1646).78CJ iv.246a, 625a. He evidently lacked any appetite for divisive or punitive legislation, although he may have been better disposed towards local initiatives in this area, being named to a committee to work on instructions for county committees to ‘discover’ the estates of royalist delinquents (29 Oct.).79CJ iv. 708a. He retained an interest in social and religious regulation. He was asked with John Maynard to draft an ordinance for settling ministers in prison (28 Oct.), and to consider fresh ways of ‘setting the poor on work’, an interest both men shared as either a donor or a trustee of charities.80CJ iv. 707b. Yonge was once again asked to consider the future of great seal arrangements (3 Nov.) and was included in the committee to add clauses to the new ordinance on this (18 Mar. 1647).81CJ iv. 714a, v. 117b. This was to be the last reference to his presence in the House.

Yonge had probably left London by the late spring of 1647, departing before the turmoil of the summer in City and both Houses. He had probably become alienated from the political process at Westminster. By the autumn that year, he was active in the Devon county committee, and was present at the meeting at Exeter with his son, Sir John, on 4 September, disrupted by ‘mutinous soldiers’. The committee wrote to Speaker Lenthall to complain about the excessive tax burden on the county, which they claimed bore too great a proportion of the national whole.82Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507. Two weeks later, Walter and Sir John Yonge wrote in similar vein again to Lenthall, this time presenting the plight of east Devon. The impact on the surrounding country of garrisons at Axminster and Honiton was evidently heavy, and a special levy had been raised for the nearby Dorset garrison of Lyme. To add to this, the country districts ‘by plundering on both sides were almost ruined’. Axminster town and seven gentry houses nearby had been fired by parliamentarian soldiers after Prince Maurice had departed; plague had struck Axminster and Colyton; trade had collapsed in the district for a whole year; Yonge’s home town of Colyton had been severely damaged by fire, and the three towns in the area were unable to meet their obligations to relieve the poor. The Yonges’ proposed remedy for these disasters was, as in the case of the county as a whole, the object of their recent advocacy, relief from the burden of the monthly assessment.83Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 524.

Yonge was excused at calls of the House on 9 October 1647 and 24 April and 26 September 1648.84CJ v. 329b, 543b, vi. 34b. Although he had recovered his place in the Devon commission of the peace by 1647, and resumed acting as a magistrate out of sessions, he is not known to have attended quarter sessions meetings at Exeter during his last years.85Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 267. He played no part in national politics after August 1648, when he was named to the third Devon committee after it was reorganized. Among his colleagues on this body were Sir Edmund Fowell*, William Fry, William Morice*, John Doddridge*, John Waddon*, Robert Shapcote*, William Bastard* and Christopher Ceely*.86Add. 44058, f. 26v. Yonge must surely have been appalled by the trial and execution of the king, but his response is unrecorded. Whatever his feelings may have been, they did not impel him towards resigning his place in the commission of the peace, however, as he signed a recognizance in July 1649.87Devon RO, QS rolls, Epiphany 1650. He had first drawn up his very brief will on 14 March 1646, but revisited it, apparently without making any changes, on 14 April 1649.88PROB11/211/259. It merely confirmed that Yonge’s lease of Grendon Farm, Woodbury, was to descend to Sir John. Yonge died some seven months after this, and was buried at Colyton on 26 November. Sir John Yonge accommodated himself to the Cromwellian regime, and Walter Yonge’s grandson, Walter Yonge II, sat for Honiton in 1659.