WALTERS, George (1614-80), of Barnstaple and Whiddy Island, Durrus, co. Cork.

The family of Walters were husbandmen in north Devon. Morgan Walters, the MP’s father, was a freeman of Barnstaple. In 1630, Morgan Walters’s servants were brought before the mayor for illegal drinking and card-playing. The implicit neglect on Walters’s part may have been enough to ensure that after he had held the offices of collector and constable he made no further progress along the town’s cursus honorum.7N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 15; N. Devon RO, B1/3974. George, the eldest son, was born in Barnstaple in 1614. He was probably educated in the town, and by 1639 he appeared in lists of freemen there, alongside his father.8N. Devon RO, B1/1960. He was still in the town in 1642, when he assented to the Protestation sent down by Parliament.9Devon Protestation Returns, i. 123. Walters, though a freeman of Barnstaple, was never admitted to the common council or ever held civic office. He was evidently involved in trade, and in the early years of the civil war, when Barnstaple stood out resolutely for Parliament, was contracted to supply the Protestant garrison at Cork with provisions and clothing shipped from his home town.10SP18/129/114 (5). In June 1644, he was commissioned as a captain in the Plymouth regiment, a posting he held until July 1646, although there is no evidence from the garrison accounts that he was an active contributor to the earlier defence of that town during the civil war.11SP18/129/114 (5). A few years later, he felt able to remark that he scarcely knew his Devon relatives, suggesting that he did not return to Barnstaple between 1644 and the end of 1649.12Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 260.

Walters played no part in the committee structure of Devon following the surrender of the final important garrisons there to the New Model army in 1646. Pay amounting to £1289 8s. was owed to him after he left Plymouth, suggesting that he must have foregone any pay while he was in service. The debt owed Walters was rescheduled as an obligation payable by the Committee for Compounding at Goldsmiths’ Hall, but he only received £49 from that source. His arrears were then transferred as a charge on the trustees for the sales of bishops’ lands.13SP18/129/114 (5) By September 1649, Walters was in London, and decided to try to secure not episcopal lands, but dean and chapter lands for himself in north Devon. He wrote to the tenant, Sir Francis Fulford, a royalist who was compounding for his estate, with the intention of buying such lands in Braunton, using the entitlement of his arrears. He put it to Fulford that the latter’s own pre-emptive right to buy, as tenant, could be valuable to both of them. Walters promised Fulford a gift of plate if he decided not to buy but to declare an interest, in order to deter competitors.14Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 260. He was promised local assistance in this project by his brother, William Walters, who in 1651 took a shop in the Barnstaple fish shambles.15N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 67.

The deal seems not to have been clinched, to judge from Walters’s next move. He returned to Barnstaple around the start of 1650 and took a fresh military commission, this time with the rank of major, to recruit 500 men for the army in Ireland and to be responsible for transporting them there.16CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 284, 368, 523, 584, 592; SP46//102/71, ff. 130-1. These troops probably formed part of the regiment commanded first by Robert Tothill and then by Richard le Hunt, as Walters served as major of this regiment between August 1650 and the late summer of 1653, when the unit was disbanded.17Wanklyn, New Model Army, ii. 206. During this period Walters came into contact with Colonel Robert Phayre, a religious radical and Seeker, who was governor of Cork city. Walters himself was probably influenced by puritan thinking, if not millenarian fervour, as he gave his children the highly unusual biblical names of Zerabbabel and Mehetabel.18SP18/129/114(5); ‘Robert Phayre’, Oxford DNB; Bantry Estate Collection, BL/EP/B/115 (4). In June 1653, Walters was at a meeting of army officers in Dublin which considered the process of disbanding some regiments and resolved that those thus stood down should be allocated lands.19Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth, ii. 366. Perhaps out of a belief that no such award would come his way, Walters turned again to his specialism of recruiting and shipping soldiers. In July 1653, using Waterford as a base, he recruited ‘tories’ (disbanded Catholic soldiers) for the service of the Spanish government, then on good terms with the English regime.20CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 36. The venture was less than successful. There was resistance in the Waterford area to the project, some former officers protecting their men from being shipped.21TCD, Prendergast MSS, i. f. 155. The Spanish reneged on their payments to Walters, and imprisoned the master of the Waterford ship who had taken the soldiers to San Sebastian but refused to convey them further to be deployed against France. Oliver Cromwell’s* council seemed almost indifferent to these problems, simply passing on Walters’s petition to the Spanish ambassador.22CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 225; 1654, p. 42. He in turn reported that the idea of transporting the men into France from San Sebastian had never been approved by the Spanish government.23TSP i. 232.

The change of government from commonwealth to protectorate brought with it a shift away from rapprochement with Spain towards hostility. Walters could now present himself as a victim of the Spanish, and began to secure for himself a more sympathetic hearing from the English government. The lord protector’s council considered his petition in October 1655, and in February 1656 Walters asked for a grant to be allowed to import commodities free of duty.24CSP Dom. 1655, p. 372; 1655-6, pp. 179, 307. When this proposal fell on stony ground, he suggested for himself a grant of lands in Connaught or co. Clare, and in September 1656 the council recommended a land grant in Connaught worth over £4,000. By this time Walters was rolling up into his claim the arrears due to him from earlier service to the state, in Plymouth in the mid-1640s and at Barnstaple in 1650.25CSP Dom. 1656-7, pp. 61, 90, 109; SP18/129/114 (5). Before this award could be made good, however, Walters was arrested at Coventry in December on a writ from the court of admiralty taken out by one of his creditors. Further petitioning by Walters himself, and by his wife, inevitably followed.26SP18/131/56, CSP Dom 1656-7, pp. 224, 234, 276. The council investigated the prospects of an assignment of lands in Connaught, but the possibilities there seemed unpromising.27TCD, Prendergast MSS, i. f. 540.

Walters’s case was then briefly considered by the second protectorate Parliament, in June 1657. At first a bill was proposed, but under pressure of other business this instrument seems to have lapsed into a well-meaning order that the business should be referred back once again to the council.28CJ vii. 551a, 557b. On this occasion, perhaps out of sheer embarrassment at the duration of Walters’s predicament, the council acted. The out-going lord deputy of Ireland, Charles Fleetwood*, recommended a grant, and by January 1658 Walters was able to write to Henry Cromwell* that he had taken possession of an estate not in Connaught but at Bantry, in co. Cork, an estate seized after the 1641 rebellion. There, Whiddy Island in Bantry Bay became his home. Even so, Walters petitioned Henry Cromwell for arrears of rent there, which he claimed was the usual practice for land allotments in Ireland.29Henry Cromwell Corresp. 341-2, 349, 362; Bantry Estate Collection, BL/E/B/115 (1). This outcome came at the end of a long struggle, but was not enough to quell Walters’s entrepreneurial spirit. In the spring of 1658, as one of a syndicate of merchants, Walters invested in a ship, John Baptista, trading under licence between Holland and Barbados. By late August, disaster had again struck. John Baptista had been seized by the English warship, Marston Moor, and was taken under escort to Jamaica.30SP18/184/65; CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 123, 216, 226.

Evidently with a reputation as an agent or entrepreneur, Walters entered an agreement with Barnstaple corporation in August 1658 that he would try to recover for the town the sums they had advanced to various parties in the service of Parliament during the civil wars. Walters and his brother, by this time known as Captain William Walters, were to bear the costs of prosecution, and was to take as commission a quarter of everything he brought in.31N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 84. Walters was evidently intending to base himself in London, not in co. Cork, during the project. It is not known whether Walters was successful in this venture, but the arrangement was clearly the primary reason for the borough’s choice of Walters as its burgess in the 1659 Parliament, outweighing his standing as a Cromwellian soldier and native of the town. The first of the two seats went to Sir John Copleston, an individual with a similar military profile. It is quite possible that the parliamentary privilege of freedom for arrest would have appealed to Walters, given his continuing financial difficulties. He was named to two committees, on representative government in co. Durham (31 Mar.), and on the problems of disbanded soldiers in Lancashire (13 Apr.).32CJ vii. 622b, 638a. No speeches by Walters were recorded by Thomas Burton*. After the collapse of the brief regime of Richard Cromwell*, Walters went to the Spanish Netherlands in an attempt to pursue his ‘pretensions on the court of Spain for transportation of men’, allegedly using the Irish royalist, Father Peter Talbot, as a go-between.33HMC Ormonde, n.s. i. 329. Despite this, when Walters returned to military duties in the south west of Ireland shortly afterwards he became suspected by former Cromwellians, like Sir Charles Coote*, of being a committed supporter of the Rump.34SP18/203/60D.

Walters successfully weathered the restoration of the monarchy, possibly because of his association with Murrough O’Brien, Lord Inchiquin (now 1st earl of Inchiquin), with whom he had transacted when he was supplying Cork garrison during the early 1640s.35CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 112; SP18/129/114 (5). In March 1661, Walters was made governor of Bantry fort, and from this time was usually styled ‘colonel’. The following month his name appeared on a general pardon for past deeds during the 1640s and 50s.36CSP Ire. 1660-2, pp. 283, 318. He successfully fended off claimants to his estate, which he secured by an agreement with Arthur Annesley*, 1st earl of Anglesey, who was the main landowner on Whiddy Island.37CSP Ire. 1660-2, p. 241; 1669-70, Addenda 1625-70, p. 457; Bantry Estate Collection, BL/EP/B/115 (1). In 1665 Walters moved someone closer to the government than he was for the post of surveyor-general in Ireland. His obscurity allowed his proxy to assert, evidently without fear of contradiction, that Walters had always served the king ‘very eminently and in a great quality’.38CSP Ire. 1663-5, p. 674; 1669-70, Addenda 1625-70, p. 554. But Walters’s position was far from secure. He had been replaced as governor of Bantry in 1663, and thereafter had faced harassment by his successor, Captain Robert Manley, who entered on to Walters’s land and seized rents, denouncing him to James Butler, 1st duke of Ormond, as a ‘sequestrator [and] Rumper committee man’ and ‘a pitiful hatter’s son of Barnstaple’.39Bodl. Carte 60, ff. 110, 224, 228, 230; Carte 154, f. 68; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 275.

His Irish ambitions thwarted, Walters turned his attentions elsewhere. In April 1668, apparently from north Devon, Walters wrote his will, before setting off on a final adventure, to win back 637,000 pieces-of-eight owed him by the king of Spain. The sums he bequeathed, though compromised by the clause that they should be scaled down proportionally should his estate be too small to pay out, amounted to £27,000, which must have reflected Walters’s confidence that he would recover the debt owed him by the Spanish crown since 1653. He died in Madrid in April 1680, still in pursuit of his debt. After his death, his daughters began a suit in the Irish court of chancery to try to recover the estate at Bantry, which was held by Walters’s trustee. By the time he drafted his will, Walters had apparently become a friend of Dr Richard Par of Camberwell, Surrey, an Anglican clergyman with Irish connections, but far removed from the religious climate of the army in Ireland during the 1650s.40Bantry Estate Collection, BL/EP/B/115 (1-4). Walters is to be distinguished after 1660 from Major Robert Walters, an officer in the English army of Charles II. No other member of this family is known to have sat in Parliament.