BAMPFYLDE, John (c.1610-50), of Poltimore, Devon.

The first Bampfylde sat in Parliament in 1429, and this Member’s father was a stalwart in local government in Devon who sat in two Parliaments during the 1620s. John Bampfylde junior, the subject of this biography, spelled his surname thus.13Som. RO, DD WO 56/6/52-2. He followed his father to Oxford (though not to the same college) and the Middle Temple. At his inn of court, he was bound with John Maynard*.14MTR ii. 772. The strongly patrimonial flavour of Bampfylde’s upbringing as an elder son, with solid estates at Poltimore, makes it most unlikely that he was the man of his name who served as a professional soldier in Ireland in 1626.15CSP Ire. 1625-32, p. 146. He is more likely to have remained in Devon, preparing himself for the duties of head of the Bampfylde family, a responsibility that in fact was never to fall to him. While Bampfylde senior served as an active deputy lieutenant who became critical of the Caroline regime during the late 1630s, petitioning against the church’s new Canons, his son seems to have taken on no public duties at all until he was elected for Penryn to the second Parliament of 1640. Bampfylde senior welcomed the Long Parliament as an opportunity for reform, writing to Edward Seymour on 9 January 1641

For ever be this Parliament renowned for so great achievements, for we dream now of nothing more than a golden age.16Devon RO, Seymour mss, 3799-3, John Bampfylde to Edward Seymour.

But if his son viewed the Parliament in similar overblown terms, his political behaviour at Westminster did little to suggest it. Before January 1641, he had been named to only one committee, on preaching ministers, and his father indicated that in January all that was keeping him from a break away from London was a wish to see Sir John Northcote take his seat after the House had decided in favour of Ashburton’s standing as a parliamentary borough.17CJ ii. 54b; Devon RO, Seymour mss, 3799-3, John Bampfylde to Edward Seymour. The friendship and political association between Northcote and Bampfylde was to persist through the 1640s. Both men were given baronetcies by the king in July 1641, perhaps because of their lack of an association with radical reformers.

In January 1641, with John Upton* and William Strode I*, Bampfylde was named as a trustee in the marriage settlement of Dorothea, daughter of John Pym*, and Sir Francis Drake*.18Lady Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs of Sir Francis Drake (2 vols. 1911), i. 276. There is nothing to suggest that Bampfylde and Pym were political allies, however. Bampfylde shared nothing of Pym’s political indefatigability. His profile at Westminster was low. With a number of other Devon men he sat on a committee to enable the executors of the 2nd earl of Winchilsea (Thomas Finch†) to sell lands (27 Feb. 1641), took the Protestation on 27 May and was added to a committee on 10 July before taking leave on the 19th of that month.19CJ ii. 94a, 158b, 205b, 215b. He returned to Devon. At the Michaelmas 1641 meeting of quarter sessions there, it was ordered that constables were to search the houses of Roman Catholic recusants for arms, and to certify their findings to Bampfylde and Sir Samuel Rolle*.20Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. The background to this order was the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland, and when Bampfylde returned to Westminster it was to serve on a committee investigating delays in despatching an expeditionary force there (24 Jan. 1642).21CJ ii. 391a. He brought with him from Exeter the petitions both to king and Parliament that had been framed at Exeter quarter sessions and appealed for a settlement of their differences.22I. Palfrey, ‘The Royalist War Effort in Devon, 1642-6’ (Univ. of Birmingham MA thesis, 1985),10. A month later, Pym reported on letters that had been intercepted in Cornwall which purportedly revealed a plan by English Catholics to supply the rebel force of the 2nd earl of Antrim [I] in Ulster. Bampfylde was among those to whom the letters were referred. On 28 February, similar letters from France were given to Bampfylde, Edmund Prideaux I* and John Crewe* to open, and Bampfylde was part of a delegation charged with weaning Charles Stuart, prince of Wales from his Catholic entourage.23CJ ii. 453b, 457b, 460b.

On 5 March 1642, Bampfylde was added to the committee for the bill to abolish episcopacy, and on the 17th, acted for the first time as a teller in a division on customs rates. He voted in support of a motion on sugar imports which came from the committee chaired by the Dorset Member, Giles Grene. The vote was tied, and the Speaker used his casting vote against the motion. The same day, Bampfylde was recommended as a deputy lieutenant for Devon, but it was not until 28 May that Oliver Cromwell* brought back from the Lords their approval of his appointment.24CJ ii. 467b, 482b, 483b, 591b. Cromwell had been a teller opposing Bampfylde in the division on customs, but the two men served together on committees subsequently, dealing with grievances of the London common council and a conference with the Lords on tumults in London (28 Mar., 5 Apr.).25CJ ii. 482b, 483b, 500b, 512b. As the build-up to civil war quickened, Bampfylde’s appointment as a deputy lieutenant gave him reasons to return to Devon. On 4 June, he was required by the House to stay in Devon to implement the Militia Ordinance. On 4 July, with Northcote and others, he was ordered by the House to advance the Propositions of Parliament, and soon afterwards, he was summoning officers and men to musters of the militia at Exeter. In August, Robert Bennett* mustered a company before Bampfylde at Holsworthy, in west Devon, even as he was receiving congratulations from the assize grand jury on the efforts he, Northcote and Sir Samuel Rolle had made towards fostering peace.26CJ ii. 605b, 651a; Som. RO, DD WO 56/6/52-2; 56/6/52-3; Coate, ‘An original diary of Col. Robert Bennett’, 256; E.A. Andriette, Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot, 1971), 56. On 26 September, Bampfylde announced to the House that he had brought in £100 from his county in anticipation of the looming conflict.27CJ ii. 783b.

After civil war broke out, Bampfylde’s efforts in mustering the county militia enabled him to raise a regiment with himself at its head as colonel. In October, the London treasurers for the Propositions awarded him and John Waddon* £2,000 for the defence of Devon and Cornwall, allowing him to ‘beat up his drum and raise his regiment’, but Bampfylde was in the House to be named to seven committees in October and November.28CJ ii. 811b; Add. 18777, f. 26. The committee to receive reports from Members in the counties (28 Oct.) was an important one, called the committee for despatches, proposed by Sir Henry Vane I* and sitting in the inner court of wards. It was Bampfylde who moved to expel Capuchin friars from the country; he sat on the resulting committee (5 Nov.). Another of his significant committees was charged with examining the causes of the Parliament’s defeat at Brentford, outside London (12 Nov.).29Add. 18777, ff. 45, 46, 50v; CJ ii. 825a, 835b, 846b. With Edmund Prideaux I and Walter Yonge I he worked on a Declaration for encouraging the continued payment of tithes (17 Oct.).30Add. 18777, f. 30.

On 21 October, Bampfylde produced in the House a letter reporting how Devon and Exeter were becoming militarized, and in late November and December, Bampfylde was active in attempts to secure a commander for an army in the south west. The 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*) was first to be asked, by means of a conference with the Lords which Bampfylde organized (26 Nov.). By 13 December, this plan had been abandoned in favour of a commission to Denzil Holles*, and City support was sought by Bampfylde and leading west country MPs such as Pym, Edmund Prideaux I and Giles Grene. Bampfylde and Northcote were tasked with issuing Holles’s commission, but in the event he declined it.31Add. 18777, f. 37v; CJ ii. 865b, 886b, 895a. During these frustrations over personnel, Bampfylde was given arms to take to the south west on a ship he and Sir John Yonge* were to procure; and he was responsible for seeing through to fruition the ordinance on raising money for an army in the west, which he took to the Lords on 24 December.32Add. 18777, f. 73v; CJ ii. 900a, 901a, 932a. It was probably immediately after that that he returned to Exeter, where he gave the soldiers a rather ill-received gratuity of £20.33Coate, ‘An original diary of Col. Robert Bennett’, 256.

Bampfylde was in Devon between December 1642 and April 1643. In February 1643, with Northcote and Sir Samuel Rolle, he began to recruit soldiers in north Devon, variously estimated as a body of between 8-10,000 men.34A True Relation of the Late Victory (1643), 3-4 (E.91.25); Speciall Passages and Certain Informations no. 27 (7-14 Feb. 1643), 226 (E.89.17); Good Newes from Plymouth (1643, 669.f.6.111). They were successful in February 1643 in relieving the army of the 1st earl of Stamford (Henry Grey*) outside Plymouth, and seemed to have the initiative over Sir Ralph Hopton* in the western campaign.35A True and Perfect Relation (1643, E.91.4). It seemed outrageous to many at Westminster, therefore, when instead of pressing their advantage, in March the parliamentarians signed up to a peace treaty with the Cornish royalists.36Bodl. Nalson II, f. 326; Harl. 166, f. 333. Bampfylde was one of the signatories to it.37Som. RO, DD WO 56/6/30, 53/3/40. Bampfylde proved willing to be talked out of the treaty by critics in the Commons, and certified its breakdown when the royalists would not admit the legitimacy of the Parliament and its privileges.38Bodl. Nalson XIII, f. 269. It is clear that he was considered open to persuasion in the interests of healing the breaches of civil war. In January, Dean William Peterson of Exeter wrote to him because he believed Bampfylde would agree that both sides should ‘move further than in our own private wishes’.39Bodl. J. Walker, c. 4, f. 217. Peterson dropped the name of William Morice*, son of a former Exeter chancellor, into his appeal, clearly hoping that it would help his case with Bampfylde. In May, after the parliamentarians had suffered defeat at Stratton, morale was further damaged by the defection of James Chudleigh, son of a leading Devon supporter of Parliament. In his own apologia, Chudleigh named Bampfylde as one of two commissioners susceptible to treating with royalists.40Serjeant Major James Chudleigh his Declaration (1643), 4-5; A Continuation of Certaine Speciall and Remarkable Passages no. 47 (25 May-1 June 1643, E.104.26).

Early in September, Bampfylde and Sir Samuel Rolle were at Exeter, resisting the advance on the city by Prince Maurice.41Mercurius Aulicus 36th week (3-9 Sept. 1643), 490 (E.67.25). After the city fell, later that month, Bampfylde’s career as a field commander was over, but it was not until February 1644 that he was noted as back in the Commons, when he was added to a committee on issues arising from taking the Covenant, and to the parliamentary committee for Plymouth. He himself took the Covenant on 28 February.42CJ iii. 404b, 409b, 410b. He remained involved in military politics. He was on the committee to consider who should have command of the navy’s summer fleet (19 Mar.), and acted several times as an intermediary between the Commons and Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex. With Anthony Nicoll* he visited Essex to ask him only to restrict the issuing of passes through the lines of communication, and on 6 May brought him information on changes of personnel.43CJ iii. 431b, 442a, 481b. It was probably because of his friendly links with Essex that on 10 May he was given command of Plymouth fort and the offshore island of St Nicholas. This was not an appointment that covered the whole of Plymouth, still less the surrounding district. Command of Plymouth town and of Devon and Cornwall was at the same time as Bampfylde’s commission given to James Kerr or Carr, under Sir William Waller*.44CJ iii. 488b.

Bampfylde seems not to have hastened to Plymouth. He stayed at Westminster to help cement the grip of the Committee of the West on military developments in the south-western counties, mainly by ensuring that sources of revenue were properly channelled through the committee. On 27 August, he was active in ensuring that the excise commissioners were apprised of the allocation of £3,000 from their revenues to the Committee of the West.45CJ iii. 488b, 609b. His last committee appointment, in this phase of his parliamentary career, came on 4 September.46CJ iii. 618a. Thereafter, he took up his post at Plymouth. His time there was not a particularly happy one. In January 1645, he became drawn into a simmering but parochial dispute between a former mayor, Philip Francis, and Charles Vaghan*, the treasurer of the garrison. The following month, when the Committee of the West asked him to assist the mayor in distributing an allocation from the committee of £2,000 to the garrison, he refused, leaving John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes, governor since September after he and Essex had arrived in the town after the disaster of Lostwithiel, to appoint his own commissioners.47C. Vaughan, The Most True and Unanswerable Answer of Charles Vaughan (1645), 6-7 (E.258.29); R.N. Worth, ‘Siege Accounts of Plymouth’, Trans. Devonshire Assoc. xvii. 219-20.

As a local commander, Robartes enjoyed support in Plymouth, but at Westminster he was inevitably targeted by the terms of the Self-Denying Ordinance (3 Apr. 1645) and as the Independents moved into the ascendancy on the Committee of the West. Robartes was tainted with the failure of Lostwithiel, and on 9 May 1645, Edmund Prideaux I reported from the Committee of the West its opinion that the government of Plymouth should be vested in a committee, notwithstanding petitions from the townsmen to continue Robartes in post. Both Robartes and Bampfylde (equally affected by the Self-Denying Ordinance) were recalled, James Kerr was reinstated and John Waddon* was left to explain things to the Plymothians.48CJ iv. 136b, 137a. Perhaps as a gesture towards Bampfylde’s hurt pride, the House awarded him the pension of £4 per week granted those whose estates had been damaged by the royalists (24 June).49CJ iv. 185a. Back in London by 10 July, he was on that day named with others associated with military activity to a committee that pooled army interests outside the New Model, including the London militia and the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire association on the prospects of raising new forces.50CJ iv. 203a.

There is no doubt that Bampfylde shared the conservative puritanism of the majority of the Devon MPs in Parliament, which meant that he would have been sympathetic to the activities of the Westminster Assembly. On 25 July he was named to the committee advising the Assembly on its choice of lay elders in the proposed Presbyterian classes.51CJ iv. 218a. In the affair of Richard Barwis*, he is likely to have been less sympathetic to the anti-Scots client of the Independent grandees than his colleague, Edmund Prideaux I.52CJ iv. 226a. On 12 August, Bampfylde was on the opposing side to Prideaux in a division on whether to fine a London apprentice for political offences.53CJ iv. 238b. But on a number of developments in the late summer and autumn of 1645, there was a coming together of the potential Devon Presbyterian and Independent factions in the House. One was the early death of the firebrand William Strode I*, whose funeral Bampfylde helped organize with Prideaux (9 Sept.). The successes of the New Model in the south west turned the spotlight on the military and committee structure in place before its advance. There was an ordinance to strengthen the committee for Wiltshire, Dorset and Devon (2 Sept.), and Bampfylde was part of a delegation to Sir Thomas Fairfax* to represent to him the state of affairs in the west. On 29 September, he was part of a group sent home from Westminster to establish parliamentary rule.54CJ iv. 262a, 268b, 292a, b, 293a.

Bampfylde and Sir Samuel Rolle were the Devon men who wrote to the Speaker on 20 October to urge the New Model to greater achievements in Devon and Cornwall after the taking of Tiverton.55Bodl. Nalson IV, ff. 271-2. A month later, the question of filling parliamentary seats vacant through deaths and the expulsions of royalists was raised, but as John Ashe* reported to Speaker Lenthall, while Bampfylde and Rolle might have been keen to see the seats occupied, ‘if you send them writs they have more places than men to supply them’.56Bodl. Nalson V, f. 29. Bampfylde remained open to compromise, in the winter of 1645-6 procuring a pass for his kinsman, the royalist commander, Col. Joseph Bampfield; enabling him – with or without Sir John’s knowledge – to act in London as an agent for the king.57Colonel Joseph Bamfeild’s Apologie (1685), 12. Bampfylde must have divided his time between Westminster and Devon during this period. On 14 February 1646, he and other west countrymen were given instructions for their expedition home, but on 12 March the Devon county committee addressed their letter to him, and to Rolle, Charles Vaghan and Anthony Nicoll* at the House of Commons.58CJ iv. 440a; Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 805. In April, his own house at Poltimore was used as the venue for the treaty of Exeter, by which the city surrendered to Parliament.59The Treatie for the Surrendring of Exeter (1646, E.332.2).

Bampfylde was named as a commissioner for scandalous offences under the embryonic Presbyterian church structure (3 June), and with Prideaux was appointed to the committee on an ordinance to purge Oxford University (1 July). He continued to be involved in a number of committees dealing with the treatment of the friends and foes of Parliament (for example, recompensing those who had served Parliament and processing complaints against royalists), but was only named to six committees throughout the whole of 1646, hardly suggesting a high profile in the Commons.60CJ iv. 603a, 616a, 625a, 662a. Some of this apparent inactivity must have concealed his involvement in the parliamentary Committee for the West, however, and cannot be read as prima facie evidence of a political withdrawal.

During 1647, Bampfylde’s conduct in Parliament was at first glance that of a typical Presbyterian. In religious terms, he was named to work on an ordinance to remove royalist clergy from their livings (22 Mar.), invited the Plymouth Presbyterian minister George Hughes to preach before the Commons (28 Apr.) and at the end of the year was voted on to the Committee for Plundered Ministers.61CJ v. 119b, 155b, 184a, 407a. As tensions between Presbyterians and Independents grew, he was named to a very large committee on reforming the London militia (2 Apr.) and to the committee drafting what became the ordinance for indemnity. But on 27 May, Bampfylde secured leave to go home. He was back in the House by 2 August, when he was a teller against a motion that proposed to invite the king, then in the custody of the army, to London, where he would hear addresses from both Houses and the Scots commissioners. This was clearly a Presbyterian-inspired proposal, and the Presbyterian grandee Sir Philip Stapilton was a teller in favour of it.62CJ v. 264b; Keeler, Long Parl. 95. However, on 26 July, possibly while Bampfylde was still absent, the Commons had been forced in Presbyterian-inspired violence, and on the 30th, a number of Members had sought safety with the army. On 4 August, these Members explained their conduct in an order copied into the Lords’ Journal. Bampfylde was among them.63LJ ix. 385b. One can only speculate on why a man active in the Commons on 2 August should two days later set his name to a document complaining of intimidation and professing dependency on army protection.

Bampfylde was given leave again on 26 August, and was listed as absent on 9 October.64CJ v. 284a, 330a. While he was away from London, he joined in meetings of the Devon county committee at Exeter. Early in September he was among the committeemen who were jostled and threatened by soldiers in the city, discontented at their conditions and lack of pay.65Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507. When he returned to the Commons, it was again to act as teller in a motion on a declaration of Parliament against recent radical manifestoes emanating from the army. Bampfylde’s partner as teller was Harbert Morley, an Independent, but they were voting in favour of a publication against papers printed in the name of ‘the freeborn people of England’ which had reached them, and presumably all that divided Bampfylde and Morley from their opponents in the division were matters of timing and tactics, not the principle of an offensive against army radicals. The ‘Declaration’ voted on was presumably that issued on 25 November.66CJ v. 363b; Several Votes of the Commons (1647, E.416.31). Seen in this light, Bampfylde’s professed association with the army that August seems a temporary aberration, especially since his name appeared only in the Lords’ Journal list, and not in the other contemporary listing.67HMC Egmont, i. 440. As a former local commander, however, Bampfylde remained sympathetic to the concerns of soldiers. It was he who successfully took to the Lords in December an ordinance first to supply the garrison at Plymouth with funds advanced on future collections of the assessment in Devon, and then to disband it.68CJ v. 378ab.

In January 1648, Bampfylde appeared on a committee to consider civil war damage to houses, doubtless with a story to tell about his own, at Poltimore. His was the first name in the list for a committee on attempting to make more equitable the relative taxation burden on counties (15 Jan.), an issue which had arisen in Devon from the summer of 1647. A number of Devonians appeared on this committee, which was put in the hands of John Maynard. He was again given leave of absence on 15 February, but presumably before he left London he was included on a typically Presbyterian committee on observing the sabbath (23 Feb.).69CJ v. 425a, 434a, 464a, 471a. Further evidence of his Presbyterianism may be seen in Bampfylde’s approach to the militia. He was first-named to a committee on 4 May to settle the militia in the country. The ordinance was reported by John Bulkeley on 13 May, with a recommendation that the general characteristics of commissioners be identified before their names were considered. Bampfylde led support for this amendment into the lobby, but it was lost by 91 votes to 67.70CJ v. 550b, 558b. With the Presbyterian John Doddridge, Member for Barnstaple, he met the London common council on 26 May about disturbances outside Parliament ten days earlier: the London militia was evidently thought to hold the key to suppressing the riots. Again with Doddridge, he was set to work on an ordinance for a national militia (13 June) and on 19 June he was sent to Devon to settle the militia there.71CJ v. 562b, 574a, 597b, 606b.

This may have been Bampfylde’s final departure from the capital. He attended the county quarter sessions at Exeter that summer, and on 15 July joined Sir John Northcote and other committeemen to complain to Lenthall about defects in the ordinance for the Devon militia, which had been published on 7 June.72Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 163. He shared his colleagues’ gloomy view of security in Devon, warning Lenthall that the committee was ‘not secure from intestine seditions’.73Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 173. He was one of those who set about dividing the unwieldy Devon committee, being named to the first of the three new committees ahead of his associate, Northcote.74Add. 44058, f. 26v. Excused as absent from the House on 26 September, on 27 November Bampfylde was asked to go to Devon to bring in arrears of the assessment, but this was probably simply confirming that he was already in his home county.75CJ vi. 34b, 90a. Bampfylde was doubtless as alienated by the regicide as most of his Devon colleagues on the bench, but he may have turned up at sessions in January 1649. But after that nothing further is heard of his public activities, and he died on 24 April 1650, while both his parents were alive. In 1660, his son, Sir Coplestone Bampfylde*, became an energetic link between the Presbyterians and the king’s party on the road to restoration of the monarchy.