CEELY, Christopher (1606-70), of Plymouth.

The Ceely family was established in the commercial life of Plymouth by the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Christopher Ceely’s grandfather, also Christopher, was active in the corporation when Sir Francis Drake† confronted the Spanish Armada.16Plymouth and W Devon Record Office, typescript, A. Norman, ‘Who’s Who in Sixteenth Century Plymouth’. Thomas Ceely, our Member’s father, was mayor twice, in 1624-5 and on the eve of the civil war, in 1641-2.17Worth, Hist. Plymouth (1890), 214. During his first year in that office, Charles I visited Plymouth and Ceely must have received him.18J. Yonge, ‘Plimouth Memoirs’, Trans. Plymouth Institution, v. 531. Thomas Ceely was trading to France by 1611 and was granted letters of marque in 1628, to allow his ship, Return of Plymouth, to engage in hostile actions at sea against other vessels.19Select Charters of Trading Companies, 1530-1707 ed. C.T. Carr (Selden Soc. v. 28), 65; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 307. During his second mayoralty, Thomas Ceely sent up to the Commons a number of reports about the rebellion in Ireland and the depredations of pirates from Algiers and Turkey.20PJ ii. 3; iii. 243. He seems to have been reluctant to read the proclamations of the king on the eve of the civil war.21PJ iii. 243.

Christopher Ceely followed his father and grandfather into a mercantile career in the town. He was made a freeman of Plymouth in 1632, and by 1637 he was established as an overseas merchant in his own right. Like all the merchants, he shipped a variety of goods in a number of different vessels, without being a ship-owner himself. In 1637-8 he exported locally-caught pilchards to Bordeaux, shipped iron from Bilbao to Nantes and imported wine, spirits, vinegar and prunes, in nine different ships. Only three of these ships were from Plymouth.22E190/1035/10. He was wealthy enough to invest in a slate quarry at St Germans, Cornwall, in 1639.23Cornw. RO, AD1283/2. To judge from this evidence, Ceely was in quite a prosperous way of business before the civil war, but he was not one of Plymouth’s merchant princes, such as Robert Trelawny*. Whereas Ceely was assessed on £3 in goods in the subsidy, Trelawny had to pay on £7 in land.24E179/102/486.

In 1641 Ceely was among the petitioners to Parliament from Plymouth who described themselves as merchants in the New England and Newfoundland trade. They feared the depredations of Turkish pirates and the Irish rebels, but also deplored ‘pressures and grievances’ in church and state, and called for ‘ill-affected lords and bishops’ to be removed from the Upper House.25PA, Main Pprs. 1641 n.d. Ceely was one of the two receivers (or treasurers) of Plymouth when the civil war broke out, and for a number of years in the 1640s sat on the common council of the town with his father.26Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48. Like his father, Ceely was evidently better disposed towards Parliament than to the king in the build-up to civil war. Early in 1642, he had no difficulty in giving his assent to Parliament’s Protestation when it was sent down to Plymouth.27Devon Protestation Returns, 390. In tandem with the office of receiver, a crucial one as the town prepared to defend itself against attack, he was appointed in March 1643 by the deputy lieutenants of Devon, including Sir John Northcote*, as head collector of the assessment voted by Parliament, in the south-western hundreds of Devon. The Plymouth district was, in Ceely’s later words, ‘the seat of war’, and the tax revenues he collected were in 1643 handed over to Philip Francis, the disputatious mayor.28E113/6, answer of Christopher Ceely; The Most True and Unanswerable Answer of Charles Vaghan (1645, E.258.29); The Answer of Philip Francis, Merchant (1645). Ceely was despatched to Parliament in February 1643 by the townsmen to plead for the relief of free quarter, by which the garrison was billeted on Plymouth. As a result of his mission, the town was granted £2,000 for grain and foodstuffs, and William Marlott* was contracted to ship the grain from Shoreham to the south west. Ceely and George Kekewich* were given over £1,000 to take back to Plymouth.29E113/6, answer of Christopher Ceely.

By January 1644, a committee for the defence of Plymouth had been established, and Ceely’s name is found regularly in its accounts. In common with other merchants of the town, who were able to maintain some maritime business activity during the siege, Ceely acted as contractor to the garrison. He supplied the soldiers with over 2,000 yards of the Spanish cloth called dowlas, and between March and August 1644, lent or gave the garrison over £160 in money.30R.N. Worth, ‘Siege of Plymouth’, Trans. Plymouth Institution, v. 303; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/168. In January 1645, both Christopher Ceely and his father defended Peter Kekewich, a contractor to the garrison, against allegations in print that he had profited exorbitantly from his contracts. The case against Kekewich had been framed by former mayor Philip Francis. Francis and Ceely had already clashed, according to the latter’s later testimony, when he refused to hand over to Francis money collected as contributions to the parliamentary cause.31Most True and Unanswerable Answer, 6-7; E113/6, answer of Christopher Ceely.

In May 1645, Ceely’s father was one of the five commissioners who commanded the town, the garrison and the island fort after the recall of John, 2nd Baron Robartes and Sir John Bampfylde*.32CJ iv. 136b, 137a. Ceely himself was appointed a sub-commissioner of the excise when it was introduced to the town by the victorious parliamentarians in 1645-6. Once again, we have only his personal testimony, delivered to a court of law after 1660 when he had every reason to emphasise or exaggerate his reluctance to serve. His later protestations that he found the office distasteful and was not active in it do not carry conviction.33E113/6, answer of Christopher Ceely. His year of mayoral office was less easy to dismiss as insignificant. The years 1646-8 were troubled ones for the Plymouth garrison, which like others, was hard-pressed by the lack of pay for the soldiers. The governor, Colonel Ralph Weldon*, offered his resignation to Parliament over this issue in July 1647, on hearing from Ceely, who as mayor was evidently in better communication with the Commons, that a Plymouth petition had not yet been read in the House.34Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 427. If this was a tactic intended to pacify the soldiers, it was singularly unsuccessful. On 6 August, Ceely and Timothy Alsop* were among those from Plymouth who reported a mutiny in the garrison over the 17 weeks of pay that now had accrued. The petitioners hoped that the Parliament would regard them ‘as on those who can no longer help themselves’, representing a town that had ‘spent itself to skin and bone in the kingdom’s cause’.35Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 448. The orders passed during Ceely’s mayoralty aimed at improved auditing procedures and a better managed orphanage have to be viewed against this background of unrest in the town, rather than seen as prima facie evidence of any reforming zeal on Ceely’s part.36Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48, ff. 103v, 104.

He had been joined by the outbreak of the civil war on the Plymouth common council by his brother, Oliver Ceely.37Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48, f. 99. Another brother, Thomas Ceely, was the minister of Lapford, Devon, and in 1648 signed The Joint-Testimonie of the Ministers of Devon, a Presbyterian statement.38Calamy Revised, 554. This manifesto was inspired by George Hughes, the minister of Plymouth. Thomas Ceely, their father, was a friend of Hughes’s predecessor, Alexander Grosse; Christopher himself was described as a ‘grave magistrate’, who provided the later puritan writer, John Quick, with historical information.39DWL, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, p. 402. Christopher Ceely was sympathetic to the conservative, puritan preaching ministry, and was as mayor the first to sign up to an agreement in Plymouth to fund a weekly lecturer.40Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/360/37. Outside Plymouth corporation and garrison, Ceely was an active member of the Devon standing committee in the period 1646 to 1649. He admitted after 1660 to attending meetings in Exeter, and other committeemen reported later how he had been active in appointing agents for sequestrations.41E113/6, answers of Christopher Ceely, Philip Musgrave. In December 1647, he signed a certificate of the accounts of Henry Hatsell*, who had spent five years as an officer in Plymouth garrison.42SP28/227, Hatsell’s accounts.

However sympathetic Ceely may have been towards Presbyterian forms of Protestantism, and therefore cool towards the varieties of Independency and sectarianism harboured in the New Model army, he remained firmly on the side of Parliament rather than the king during the second civil war of 1648. In May, he and Timothy Alsop wrote anxiously to Parliament of the feared consequences of any withdrawal of soldiers from the region, and advocated a listing of supporters of Parliament for service in a local defence force. The Plymouth men were confident that a sufficient number of cavalry could be raised in their town.43Devon RO, Exeter City MSS, DD 42081. When the Devon committee was reorganised into territorial divisions in September, Ceely was included in the body that covered Plymouth and the South Hams district.44Add. 44058, ff. 26v-27. He was probably the Ceely instructed in November to act as a committeeman in Cornwall.45CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 329. While as a conservative he is unlikely to have welcomed the execution of the king, he was not sufficiently repelled by it to withdraw from his public activities. He was at the committee for Devon in May 1649, and continued to be active on this body and the Plymouth common council through the period of the commonwealth.46SP28/227 (Devon), f. 9. In October 1651, he and Alsop were two of a committee of five common councillors instructed to chase up subscriptions for the maintenance of clergy in the town, and the following month both Ceely brothers signed a town council fiat confirming that previous orders, made under the monarchy and during the civil wars, remained valid.47Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48, ff. 105, 106.

Ceely transferred his allegiance with no apparent difficulty to the Cromwellian protectorate, and was made a commissioner for trying and ejecting ministers, under the ordinance of the lord protector’s council of August 1654. This appointment suggests that he was viewed as potentially helpful to the Cromwellian government. His election to the first protectorate Parliament was therefore uncontroversial, as the corporation would have viewed him and his fellow burgess, the town clerk William Yeo, as among the most reliable representatives they could choose. Ceely appears to have sat on only three committees in this Parliament: one on 3 November on the petition of the royalist peer, William Craven, 1st Baron Craven, and two on 12 December. With Yeo, he deliberated, doubtless unsympathetically, on the publications of John Biddle, the Socinian. The House ordered that Biddle be sent for as a delinquent and that his books be burned by the hangman. Ceely was also named again with Yeo to the committee on the wider but related question of enumerating ‘damnable heresies’ to be proscribed in the state’s religious code.48CJ vii. 381a, 399b, 400a. Plymouth’s Parliament-men were later paid £45 each for their service in this assembly.49Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 290v.

Back in Plymouth, Ceely served a second term of office as mayor, in 1655-6. In the summer of 1656, Plymouth faced a crisis provoked by the town’s growing population, ‘being a port town’, as the common council put it. The corporation had incurred significant debts, and as mayor, Ceely supported an order to levy fines on changes of lives inserted into the leases of town property.50Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48, f. 110. More controversially, he found himself anathematized as ‘an old persecutor’ by George Fox and the Quakers.51G. Fox, The West Answering to the North (1657) 93 (E.900.3). He was said to have imprisoned 30 Baptists in a round-up during his first mayoralty back in the mid-1640s, and in December 1655 was reported personally to have manhandled a Quaker woman before having her tied to a horse and driven from town.52Fox, West Answering to the North, 93, 157-63, 168-9. In 1659, he was again returned to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament but made even less impact than during his first attendance at Westminster. On 11 March he was allowed to leave the Parliament to recuperate from illness, and the assembly was dissolved a few weeks later.53CJ vii. 613a. He was awarded a little over £28 by the corporation for his services.54Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/133, f. 4v.

When Charles II came to his throne, through the good offices of west Devon men like George Monck* and William Morice*, Ceely appeared secure. He continued to attend Plymouth corporation meetings, and served as auditor of the town’s accounts in 1661-2.55Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/48, f. 111; 1/133, f. 12. In January 1662 he appeared before exchequer commissioners at Exeter to provide a full account of his activities as a committeeman from 1642. His testimony emphasised his reluctance to serve, the brevity of his time in certain offices such as sub-commissioner of excise and the illegitimacy of some of the writs he had received at the start of the civil war. He might have expected, and perhaps was given, a sympathetic hearing by his interlocutors, among them Thomas Westlake*.56E113/6, answer of Christopher Ceely. However, the visit to Plymouth by commissioners under the Act for Corporations of 1661 represented a non-negotiable challenge to his security in office. In August 1662 they interviewed individual members of the corporation, and put to them the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and a declaration that the solemn league and covenant was unlawful. Ceely, his brother Oliver and the town clerk, William Yeo, took the oaths but would not subscribe the declaration against the covenant. As a result of their refusals, they forfeited not only their positions of seniority but their very membership of the corporation, ‘as if they had been naturally dead’.57Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/46, f. 16v.

This terminated Ceely’s public career. He lived for another eight years. In his will he left small bequests to the ministers of Plymouth, suggesting that in fact he was more willing to accommodate himself to church and state after 1660 than the confrontation of August 1662 might have suggested. Apart from £1,000 left in trust for one of his sons, the majority of his bequests were parcels of land rather than cash, suggesting that his business had suffered during the troubles of 1640-60. What appeared as a property dispute between himself and William Jennens† was left in his will to be arbitrated by others, and was probably infected by the political and religious animosity that marked Plymouth public life during the Restoration period. None of Ceely’s descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.58PROB11/333/66.