TUCKER, James (d. 1643), of Exeter and Exminster, Devon.

James Tucker was born in Lyme Regis in Dorset, where his father was a merchant. His father, Walter, had been born in Membury, east Devon, and outlived his more eminent son to bequeath modest legacies to the church and the poor there.9PROB11/193/10. James Tucker’s entrance to the civic life of Exeter was heralded by his marriage in 1618 to Elizabeth Bellamy. Her first husband had been an Exeter freeman, but, more importantly, her father, Geoffrey Waltham, had been mayor in 1613.10Izacke, Remarkable Antiquities, 146. Waltham was of a minor gentry family settled at Exminster for at least three generations before him. He had married Catherine Duck, sister to Nicholas Duck†, recorder of Exeter 1617-28, so Tucker’s marriage began as his wife’s uncle entered upon his recordership. The Tuckers lived in St Mary Arches parish, a central and desirable Exeter address where many of the merchant community were to be found. Tucker and his wife were the sole heirs of Geoffrey Waltham in 1626, and by 1629, Tucker himself was substantial enough to be rated in the subsidy for £10 in goods, the second highest rating in his parish.11PROB11/149/170; Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 9.

The basis of Tucker’s wealth was mercantile trade. He was typical of the Exeter merchant elite in his concentration on cloth exports. In 1638-9, he exported at least 51 cargoes in 11 ships. One of these consignments was of paper and one of sherry, but the rest were packs of Devon cloth: bays and ‘dunsters’ from North Devon and Exmoor, serge ‘perpetuanas’ and above all the Devon ‘dozens’ and the so-called ‘cottons’ of south Somerset.12E190/950/7; W.B. Stephens, Seventeenth-Century Exeter (Exeter, 1958), 4-5. These cargoes were almost all bound for the ports of western France, carried on ships that others owned, but which brought back import cargoes for Tucker to sell: grain, glass, paper and a range of speciality fabrics that the Devon cloth producers did not manufacture. Tucker also maintained business interests in Spain: in the mid-1630s his eldest son, also called James, worked as his factor in Bilbao, receiving cargoes of fish and other foods brought in ships from North Devon and Ireland.13C6/108/168. The dominant side of Tucker’s business was in exports. Compared with the other merchants who represented Exeter in Parliament during this period, Tucker was the most important businessman by a significant margin. In 1634 he gave evidence on behalf of the Exeter company of merchants trading to France against a Devonian interloper who encroached on their trade without having secured the essential qualification of freedom of the city of Exeter.14CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 420. In the second half of the 1630s he held office in the French Company of Exeter, the city’s leading society of overseas merchants. Tucker’s rising tax rating reflected his achievements in business: his former assessment of £10 in goods was by 1641 £12 in lands.15E179/245/12.

Tucker progressed steadily along the cursus honorum of civic office. Bailiff twice and then sheriff in 1633-4, he was also active in various civic committees. In the year following his shrievalty, he was part of a group charged with petitioning the privy council ‘about the business of the shipping’, a reference to the first Ship Money writ.16Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, f. 18. This writ drew in as taxable the surrounding Devon hinterland, which broke with precedent and evidently raised concerns in Exeter as well as for the sheriff of the separate jurisdiction of Devon.17M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1997), 199-201. With Robert Walker*, in 1635 Tucker was a member of the steering group for the proposed civic brewhouse, which must be viewed in the context of a puritan-driven reform programme visible in various English towns of the period.18Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 28; P. Clark, The English Alehouse (1983), 175-6. In the case of Exeter, the most celebrated civic leader associated with this reforming outlook was Ignatius Jourdain†, Tucker’s neighbour in St Mary Arches.

Tucker was also active on ad hoc committees set up by the city chamber to progress purely commercial matters such as the provision of a lime-kiln by the city, and settling local duties payable at Exeter quay.19Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 18, 92v. The troubled relationship between the cathedral and the civic authorities absorbed some of Tucker’s time and energy during the 1630s. In 1638, before his mayoralty began, he and Robert Walker journeyed to London to further their case against the dean and chapter.20Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 72. This dispute was rooted in the rival jurisdictions of civic chamber and cathedral over the liberties of the city, and in a squabble about a new churchyard planned for the former industrial area of Friernhay, in the north west quarter of Exeter. A series of uneasy truces was arranged between the bodies, during one of which Tucker was involved in mutually beneficial land exchanges by cathedral and city council.21Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 68v. It cannot be shown that doctrinal or liturgical matters played any part in what were essentially territorial disputes.

In 1638-9, Tucker served his mayoral term of office. Samuel Izacke, town clerk and memorialist, recorded as memorable a number of developments during the year that contributed to improving the quality of life in Exeter, at least for the propertied citizens. These included the planting of trees and fences and the removal of offending slaughter-houses from within the city walls. Concern for the poor and the maintenance of social order lay behind the allowances for prisoners’ subsistence and minor work schemes. Preventing bailiffs from delivering writs of dubious legality under the pretext of stannary law adumbrated the thinking behind the stannary act of 1641. During Tucker’s mayoralty, the bishop of Exeter, Dr Joseph Hall, was asked to re-consecrate a hospital chapel, suggesting a thaw in cathedral-city relations, while the gift to Francis Russell†, 4th earl of Bedford, was a gesture to a powerful patron with whom relations had sometimes been difficult. On the other hand, the continuing campaign by the chamber of despatching agents to London to work for the city’s liberties and the throwing down of fences erected by the chancellor of the diocese, as a response to his alleged encroachments, showed how Tucker and his colleagues were above all motivated by a need to uphold the city’s corporate authority.22Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Bk. C1/53, f. 52v; Act Bk. viii. ff. 79, 79v.

Izacke omitted from his account the most notorious incident of Tucker’s mayoralty. During a reading in the cathedral of the king’s proclamation on the protests in Scotland against his religious policy, Tucker, Thomas Crossing and Ignatius Jourdain listened with their heads covered while the rest of the congregation sat hatless. Given the recent poor relations between the authorities in Exeter, it is unsurprising that they were reported to the privy council, and equally unremarkable that the privy council took their gesture as a serious and intentional one. On 7 April 1639, the three were summoned before the council, but on the 26th, after hearing a petition from the three men and the personal testimony before them of the Exeter chamberlain, the privy councillors were relaxed enough to commute the command to appear before them personally to a show of apology before the bishop of Exeter. But on 12 May, Tucker and Crossing, in ignorance of the concession, appeared in London to explain to the privy council how their disrespect was unintentional and caused chiefly by the cold, against which they had kept on their hats. Their account evidently convinced the councillors who heard them, and in the cases of Tucker and Crossing there seems no reason to doubt their sincerity. Had they intended a puritan gesture of sympathy with the defiant Scots, they nullified its significance completely by their subsequent behaviour. Only the case of Jourdain remains a little suspicious. Through his earlier parliamentary career he had acquired a reputation for puritan vigour well beyond Exeter, and the privy council insisted on some response from him. But a year later Jourdain died, so his pleas of ‘great age and infirmities’ were probably, if conveniently, sincere.23PC2/50 pp. 244, 294, 348; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Letters 381; CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 53, 160, 409.

After his mayoralty ended in October 1639, Tucker was named an alderman. This honour was bestowed on him after a common council order to enable the dignity to be bestowed on any mayor in the year after his mayoralty, by an alteration in the rules governing civic precedence.24Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, f. 91v. His election to Parliament on 17 March 1640 was thus as the most recently retired mayor of the city. An eighteenth-century source suggests that Tucker was replaced by Simon Snowe* before the Parliament opened. There is no obvious contemporary source for this assertion, and Tucker was certainly in London on 24 April as an MP. He is not known to have participated in debate or in committees in this Parliament, but he was active in pursuing the narrow interest of the city of Exeter. ‘Charters’ belonging to the city (doubtless the charters of incorporation but also perhaps other supporting documents) were in the Middle Temple office of the new recorder, Sir Peter Ball*, and the chamber gave the two Members the necessary authority to retrieve them. 25B. Willis, Notitia Parliamentaria (2 vols. 1715-16), ii. 273; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, f. 102. No more came of this matter than of any other business before this abortive assembly, however, and Tucker returned to Exeter. In July he was involved in surveying a possible new course of the River Exe down at Exe Bridge. The esteem in which he was held by his colleagues is suggested in their award to him of the customary £6 13s 4d, in lieu of the traditional right to nominate a freeman, despite grumbles over whether the chamber could justify it.26Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 105v, 107.

Tucker was not returned to the second Parliament of 1640, for reasons that are unclear. It was not because he was marginalized in the civic chamber. On 10 November, he was named to the city committee charged with meeting weekly to prepare the heads of grievances for consideration by Parliament. In January 1641, he was made alderman of the more prosperous south ward instead of the east, and was named a commissioner to administer the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to suspected papists taken in the city. In August he took the parliamentary Protestation in his own parish. In October, he was required to review the city’s rights to petty customs at the quay in the light of recent parliamentary legislation.27Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, ff. 111, 113v, 122v; St Mary Arches par. reg. In the build-up to civil war, it was inevitable that a man of his wealth and seniority should have been part of the wary reception committee in August 1642 for Henry Bourchier, 5th earl of Bath. The citizens were briefed to receive Bath with the usual courtesies only if he came unarmed.28Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 138. As the threat of war came nearer to Exeter, Tucker contributed to efforts to spare the city the worst likely horrors of the conflict; he was named to a committee charged with improving Exeter’s defences and raising money for poor relief.29Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 143v. He continued to attend council meetings after the war broke out, and after Exeter declared for Parliament.

Among the indicators of Tucker’s support for Parliament are his investment in 1642 of £300 in the Irish Adventure, and his bond for £100 given to the committee for Exeter in June 1643, of which he was a member. He may have seen the Irish Adventure as just another investment opportunity, as in November 1642 he made over his stake to his son.30CSP Ire. Adv. 164; Bottingheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 193; J.P. Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1875), 436; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Letters 391. He was above all a devoted Exonian, and when Exeter surrendered to the king on 7 September 1643, Tucker continued to attend the council. His son’s house was ransacked, either at this surrender or in 1646 when Parliament resumed control of the city.31C6/108/168. We do not know whether the house of Tucker senior was subject to the same indignity. Whether he would have adapted to the royalist regime over the two and a half years it was to control Exeter is hard to assess. It was probably mortal illness that kept him away from council meetings after 25 September, his last recorded appearance. Tucker died shortly afterwards and was buried on 12 October 1643 at St Mary Arches. His will was proved at the royalist court of probate at Oxford; the royalist memorialist, Izacke, later recorded his gift of £100 to the city and passed over in silence his involvement in Exeter’s defiance of the king.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 150; Book C1/53, f. 52v. None of his descendants is known to have sat in other Parliaments.