QUICKE, John (1602-77), of Newton St Cyres, Devon.

Before 1557, the Quickes migrated from Sandford, Somerset, but were established at Newton St Cyres, five miles north of Exeter, by mid-Tudor times.9Vivian, Vis. Devon, 854; C. Worthy, Devonshire Wills (Exeter, 1896), 2. John Quicke’s great-grandfather, Andrew Quicke, was buried in the church there, a sign of some social standing, but they were minor gentlemen, not aspiring to the title ‘esquire’.10PROB11/108/492. The Quickes held lands around Newton St Cyres, and even part shares in the manor of Venny Tedburn, but did not hold Newton St Cyres manor itself.11Devon RO, Z131/1/5; Z1/31/3/2; Z10/1/166. John Quicke’s father married Alice Sherland, of a family of comparable minor gentry status from a parish a few miles away, up the Creedy valley towards Barnstaple, but died in 1606, leaving John aged four years old. Upon the death of an elder brother, John Quicke (who rendered his name thus) became the heir of the estate, but his mother remarried, to John Short of Newton St Cyres.12Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507; Vivian, Devon, 854.

Quicke’s marriage to Juliana Underhill in 1625 came soon after the death of her father, a prosperous yeoman from a parish in the south of the county, near Kingsbridge. Lawrence Underhill was, to judge from his will, a pious man, convinced that after ‘departure of this wretched life’ he would be a ‘partaker of the celestial life’.13PROB11/146/64. He left his daughter £800, silver plate and gold rings, which she must have brought with her to Newton St Cyres, to embark on the settled life of the minor gentry. There is no evidence that John Quicke was named to any local government commissions before the civil war, and he probably devoted himself to farming and parochial public duties.

In August 1642 Quicke found himself in the eye of the storm as the county divided politically as civil war loomed. On 9 August, Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath, rode into Exeter on a mission from Charles I to secure the city for the king. The citizens were nervous, and James Tucker* was among the delegation sent out to meet Bath and to check that his retinue was unarmed before he was admitted to the city.14Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 138. The grand jury met the same day, and Quicke was among their number. The jurors composed a petition which they presented to Bath. They called upon him to intercede between king and Parliament to avoid civil war. The petition spoke in favour of Parliament as ‘the cheapest and best of remedies’ to the country’s political and religious problems.15Three Petitions presented by the Grand Inquest at the Assises (1642), 5 (E.112.14). The jurors found it astonishing that the disastrous examples of Germany, torn apart by the confessional struggles of the Thirty Years’ War, and Ireland, where Catholics had recently risen to overwhelm the Protestant populace, were not vivid enough to ‘appal men’s hearts from civil war’.16Three Petitions, 6. Equally the fate of the dispossessed Protestant royal family of Bohemia and the persecutions facing Protestant churches on the continent of Europe seemed strangely unable to unite the English people against the common enemy, the papists. Three days later, the grand jury was still in conference at Exeter castle, and drew up two further expressions of public anxiety. Framing their views as a presentment to the assize judges, the jurors spoke of the estrangement between king and Parliament as a ‘grievance of grievances’, denounced the king’s commission of array as a source of ‘extreme grievance and terror to us all’, feared war as a dissolution of the ancient government and deplored the withdrawal from public life of respected magistrates and those MPs who had deserted Parliament.17Three Petitions, 4. The remedy they apparently chiefly desired was the suppression of Catholicism and the relief of Protestants in Ireland. A third instrument to which the jurors put their hands was a letter to Devon parliament-men, urging them to heal the divisions between king and the two Houses.18Three Petitions, 7-8.

The strategy of Quicke and his colleagues had been to petition even-handedly and with moderation in favour of reconciliation, but the show of respect for Parliament and the denunciation of popery marks the petitions as essentially leaning towards a parliamentarian view of the troubles facing the country. Exeter soon became a parliamentarian garrison, until it surrendered to the king in September 1643. Quicke seems not to have taken up arms, nor was he named either to any parliamentarian committees or to the royalist commission of array. How he spent the civil war remains a mystery, but as Newton St Cyres was close to Exeter, he probably remained at home during the royalist occupation of the city, when times were difficult for friends of Parliament. When the Exeter area came once more under parliamentarian control, there was a period when local government came very close to collapse. No quarter sessions were held in the first half of 1646, and the first sessions of the year met in July at Crediton rather than Exeter, because of disease in the city.19Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. Crediton was even nearer to Newton St Cyres than Exeter was, and Quicke was probably in attendance. He was certainly identified as a supporter of the new order, and at the next quarter sessions, at Exeter in September, he was called upon to act as an arbitrator in a dispute which had come before the court. He was not in the commission of the peace at this point, and his participation is a measure of how willing the hard-pressed magistrates were to harness whatever support was available.20Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8, Mich. 1646.

In fact, Quicke’s nomination to the commission of the peace followed soon afterwards, early in 1647, doubtless because of the good reports sent of him to London from the Devon bench. He did not take his place among the justices at sessions, however, and made an impression first as a commissioner for assessments. With William Fry* he signed a letter of the Devon justices of the peace and committeemen of September 1647 reporting to the Speaker of the Commons on how they had met in response to a command to raise £8,000 for the garrison at Plymouth, and had endured the threats of the soldiers of Exeter garrison who clamoured for their arrears of pay.21Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507. A few months later, Quicke joined a group of 12 magistrates, including William Morice* and William Fry, which drew up a petition to the Commons in the name of thousands of Devon inhabitants. The context was a spate of petitions from the county leaders against the burden of taxation and the oppression of the military presence in the county.22S.K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County (Exeter, 1985), 8-12. Quicke and his colleagues complained of the disproportionately heavy tax burden suffered by their county, but stressed their willingness to pay their fair share as ‘equally freeborn Englishmen’. Lest they should be suspected of alienation from the ends of the tax levies, the military reconquest of Ireland, they concluded with a plea for help for the expeditionary force ‘for religion’s sake and for the cry of the martyred blood of so many thousand Protestants butchered and murdered by the cruel, bloody and rebellious Irish only because Protestants and Englishmen’.23Devon RO, QS rolls, Midsummer 1647, misplaced petition of Jan.-Feb. 1648.

In 1648, Quicke was active at quarter sessions and at meetings of the county committee in its various guises.24Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8, Easter 1648 He had helped frame the petition against heavy taxes as a justice and assessment commissioner, but on 4 August a meeting at Exeter of the core supporters of Parliament, including Arthur Upton*, Robert Shapcote*, William Morice and William Fry wrote to the Speaker to explain the difficulties they faced in establishing the county militia, in the face of military threats from the reviving royalists and from coastal invasion from Ireland. Quicke was one of those they requested should be asked to join them, and on 2 December, just days before the purge of the Parliament by the army, his name was duly published as a militia commissioner.25Bodl. Tanner 57 f. 173. Meanwhile, on 23 August, he was included among the committeemen in the third division of their number, as they reorganized themselves to secure effective territorial coverage of the county.26Add. 44058 ff.26v-27.

Quicke appeared at quarter sessions on 10 January 1649, apparently for the first time. The trial of Charles I was in progress at this time, and it was probably the outcome of the trial, the regicide, which convinced Quicke never to attend sessions again. He was named as a member of the quorum in the commission of the peace of 30 June 1649, and two commissions were issued from chancery in 1650 and 1651 for Quicke to take the oath as a justice, but he evidently declined the trust expected of him.27Devon RO, DQS 28/5; C231/6 pp. 200, 206. Unlike others, such as William Morice, who found the execution of the king abhorrent but who were prepared to collaborate with the commonwealth government, Quicke withdrew completely from official activity: his name cannot be found on any recognizance or other document of the court. Not until Easter 1654 did Quicke appear again at sessions; such a long withdrawal must surely suggest that he found the protectorate more acceptable than the earlier regimes of the interregnum.28Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9, Easter 1654.

Quicke’s election to the first protectorate Parliament thus came soon after his re-entry into public life. He was the last-named on the indenture for the county’s return of 11 Members under the terms of the Instrument of Government, and was doubtless the least distinguished both in terms of public experience and social standing. Whether he could overcome his scruples and serve in a Cromwellian Parliament was another matter. In October 1654 Thomas Gewen* named Quicke and Sir John Northcote* as local Presbyterians who still needed persuading to attend the House, and there is no evidence as to whether he ever attended his first and only Parliament.29Archaeologia xxiv. 140. He was at Exeter for the January 1655 quarter sessions, when as a parliament-man he ought to have been at Westminster, which indicates that if Quicke ever went to London it was only for sittings of the House before Christmas 1654.30Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9, Epiphany 1655. He proved more interested in local government than in Parliament. At the Easter 1655 sessions he was named with Sir John Davy and Thomas Bampfylde* as a scrutineer of county treasurers’ accounts going back to 1641, a full-scale if slow review of the county’s finances whose importance was confirmed in a further order the following year. Again acting with Thomas Bamfylde, he was at the summer sessions to audit the accounts of John Copleston*, a protectorian who had spent over £600 on renovating the judicial and governmental complex of buildings at Exeter castle.31Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9, Easter, Midsummer 1655, Easter 1656. In 1658, he was required to administer the oath to newly appointed Devon justices.32C231/6, p. 418.

Another associate of Quicke’s during the later 1650s was William Morice. Quicke’s step-brother was Amias Short, offspring of the marriage between Quicke’s mother and her second husband. The Oxford-educated Short, 15 years younger than Quicke, was serving as curate at Topsham, on the River Exe below Exeter during the civil wars. Short was a Presbyterian – as, doubtless, was John Quicke – and was ordained by the 7th London classis in 1647.33Calamy Revised, 440. Short’s father, John Short (Quicke’s stepfather) held the lease of an estate at Ashwater, in west Devon, and probably lived there continuously once Quicke claimed his Newton St Cyres estate on reaching his majority. John Short had been under-sheriff to his landlord, Sir Edward Carey, when Devon was under royalist control, and Amias Short had to intercede on his behalf with the commissioners for compounding.34CCC 1368. John Short settled the living of Ashwater on his son, naming Quicke and Morice, his distinguished neighbour, as trustees. They presented him to the living in 1657, but found themselves challenged by another claimant to the benefice, who produced an order from the commissioners for approbation of public preachers in his favour.35LPL, Comm. II/26; Add. 29319 f. 124.

Special commissioners, including Thomas Bampfylde, were appointed to cut through the impasse, but Quicke’s association with Morice cannot be detected in his conduct after 1660. Quicke stayed away from sessions once the protectorate had collapsed, making a return only after the secluded Members had been recalled. He served once more as a militia commissioner and as a commissioner for the poll tax of 1660. His last appearance on the Exeter bench came in January 1661, and he was dropped from all local government commissions thereafter.36Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9. He came back into the tax commission in 1672, but never into the commission of the peace. It was probably his son, John Quicke junior, who was a captain in the militia regiment of Sir Coplestone Bampfylde* and who subscribed the loyal Protestation and Address to Charles II in 1661.37Mercurius Publicus no. 21 (23-30 May 1661), 326. Quicke junior evidently retained some of his father’s loyalties, despite this; together with Thomas Reynell*, the son of Henry Hatsell* and a number of old puritans from the 1640s and 50s, he was in the 1670s named among trustees of property which included the living of the Exeter suburb of St Thomas. It was evidently an attempt to maintain a nonconformist presence in the ministry.38Devon RO, 2065M-4/T6-7; Z/1/1. Quicke senior died in 1677, and although many of his descendants served as sheriffs, deputy lieutenants and justices of the peace, none appears to have been returned to another Parliament.39Vivian, Devon, 854.