ERISEY, James (1616-92), of Erisey, Grade, Cornw.

James Erisey was the eldest son of a Cornish gentleman whose forebears at the eponymous manor house near the Lizard peninsula were believed to extend back to the reign of Edward I.16Jnl. Royal Inst. Cornw. n.s. i. 62-3. Another James, the great-grandfather of this MP, was the Member for Mitchell in 1584. There seems some doubt as to whether he was the sea captain said to have commanded a ship in the West Indies expedition of Sir Francis Drake in 1585 and who subsequently played a part in the defeat of the Spanish Armada.17HP Commons, 1558-1603, ii. 88; Jnl. Royal. Inst. Cornw. n.s. i. 64. More certainly, he married a daughter of Thomas Carew of Antony to establish his family as clients of the Carews.18HP Commons, 1558-1603, ii. 88; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 135-6. Richard Erisey was summoned to Leiden by his uncle, Richard Carew† the antiquary, in 1605 and married Elizabeth Carew of Bickleigh near Tiverton in Devon in 1615, strengthening further the ties between the minor gentry family of Erisey and the much more distinguished house of Carew.19A. Duffin, Faction and Faith: Politics and Religion of the Cornish Gentry (Exeter, 1996), 27. James was their eldest son. He was educated at Lincoln’s Inn, and in 1642 followed his father in supporting the cause of Parliament, as did the Eriseys’ cousins, Alexander Carew* and John Carew*.

James Erisey was commissioned in the army of Parliament. He was probably in the army of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, in Cornwall in 1644. With the rank of captain, he had been captured by the royalists by 29 October 1644 and was proposed for an exchange of prisoners at Plymouth. As this was a parliamentarian garrison, and as the royalist captive with whom he was to be exchanged had to be brought to Plymouth for the hand-over from somewhere further east, it seems likely that Erisey had been a victim of the king’s successful western campaign which had culminated in the escape of Essex from Lostwithiel by boat to Plymouth in August.20CJ iii. 680b. From 1647, Erisey began to appear in the commissions for direct taxation issued by Parliament for Cornwall, and was among a small group of Cornishmen trusted by the council of state in the earliest months of the Rump Parliament.21CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 33. In July 1649 he was recommended by Sir Hardress Waller* for inclusion in the Cornish commission of the peace, and he had evidently been added to the county bench by early 1650, although it is unclear whether he served in that capacity.22CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 229; C193/13/3, f. 10. Erisey’s mother was a Devonian, but his standing in Devon had been reinforced further when in March 1649, Erisey married Mary Fortescue. It was probably this marriage that accounted for Erisey’s nominations to Devon committees from December that year. His father-in-law, Hugh Fortescue of Wear Giffard, had been named to the commission of the peace briefly by the king in 1642-3 before being dropped. He was subsequently appointed to parliamentarian tax committees during the remainder of the civil war before achieving a place as a Devon magistrate in 1647.23Vivian, Vis. Devon, 354; A. and O.; Devon RO, DQS 28/3, 28/5; M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1997), 249-50.

While Richard Erisey continued to live at Erisey, it is likely that his son maintained a house in Devon, either at Bickleigh or perhaps at Wear Giffard. James Erisey was appointed a militia captain in Devon but apparently not in Cornwall, but was added to the Devon and Cornwall commissions of the peace in 1653, on which he was maintained until 1659 or 1660. His appointment to this latter office in Devon seems to have purely nominal, as he cannot be shown to have attended quarter sessions meetings in Exeter on even one occasion during the interregnum.24Devon RO, Devon QS order bks. His summons to the Nominated Assembly in 1653 for Devon seems to have owed little to the Fortescue family. His father-in-law, Hugh Fortescue, although he considered Erisey among his ‘special friends’, probably died in 1650; Fortescue’s son, Arthur, Erisey’s ‘dear brother’, appeared only twice at Devon sessions.25PROB11/214/454. Another of Erisey’s brothers-in-law, Christopher Clobury, appeared in the Devon commission of the peace in 1653, at the same time as Erisey, but to judge from the volume of poems he published in 1659, and his absence from county government until after 1660, was evidently more a contemplative admirer of the gadfly George Wither than a political activist.26C. Clobery, Divine Glimpses of a Maiden Muse (1659); HLQ xxiii. 386-8.

Erisey was more likely to have been brought into the Nominated Assembly by his cousin, John Carew*, even though there is no evidence that Erisey shared the millenarianism of Carew and his friend, Thomas Harrison I*. He did very little in Parliament, it seems. He was named to the committee on petitions on 20 July 1653, but then did not attract the attention of the Journal clerk until 26 November, when he was granted leave of absence for six weeks.27CJ vii. 287a, 358a. The anonymous commentator on this Parliament classed Erisey with those ‘for a godly learned ministry’, code for those who wanted a settlement of the state church as against the radicals uninterested in state provision, which put him in the same camp as Francis Rous* and not aligned with John Carew or Thomas Harrison I. Erisey played no further part in this or any other Parliament.28TSP iii. 132.

Erisey remained in the commission of the peace and was named to local committees during the protectorate, but was not noticeably active. He was not among the commissioners who supported Major-general John Disbrowe* in either Devon or Cornwall.29TSP iv. 451,497. He lost his place in the Devon commission of the peace in March 1657, but in July 1659 the revived Rump Parliament added him to the militia commissioners in Cornwall. He lost all local office at the Restoration. He succeeded his father at Erisey in 1668, and to his stewardship must be attributed alterations and improvements to the house.30Jnl. Royal Inst. Cornw. n.s. i. 61, 66. His father had married for a second time, to Mary Ley of Westbury, Wiltshire. James’s half-brother, Richard Erisey, was an active manager of the Killigrew interest in the Helston by-election of October 1668: having married into the Killigrews, he was therefore strongly associated with the court interest. By contrast, there seems little doubt that James Erisey was a conservative puritan, sharing the outlook of many of the gentry of Devon and Cornwall. In 1675, He was the dedicatee of a book by Richard Burthogge, son of a former comrade-in-arms in Plymouth who bought Cornish crown lands with Henry Hatsell*. Burthogge’s tract attempted a proof of the reality of hell, and the author took it upon himself to ‘proclaim to all the world, that if truth could need a patron’, there was ‘none more eminently qualified’ than Erisey.31R. Burthogge, Causa Dei, or An Apology for God (1675), sig. A4, v, vi; ‘Richard Burthogge’, Oxford DNB. In 1692, a brother-in-law to whom he was close, Arthur Fortescue, gave bequests in his will to six ministers, all but one of whom had been ejected in 1662 and who could be described as moderate nonconformists. If there is any substance to a story that an Erisey was arrested during Monmouth’s rising and taken to the citadel at Plymouth before being released, it was probably James.32Jnl. Royal Inst. Cornw. n.s. i. 67. Certainly after 1688 for the last few years of his life he was brought back into local government. Erisey made his will in June 1692.33Cornw. RO, AP/E 468/1-2. He stipulated that if his wife predeceased him, he would favour his cousin, Richard Vivian of Merther with his moveable property. The absence of any mention of Erisey’s children calls into question the statement that it was James Erisey’s descendant who married the Hon. Charles Berkeley of Bruton Abbey, brother of John, 5th and last Baron Berkeley of Stratton.34Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 155.