CLARKE, Samuel (1617-50), of St Olave parish, Exeter.

Samuel Clarke’s father was made free of the city of Exeter in 1606 after having served an apprenticeship as a merchant.9Exeter Freemen, 113. Christopher Clarke had not been apprenticed to his father or made free by patrimony, suggesting that he may have been the first of his immediate family to achieve the freedom. He was fortunate in his apprenticeship. His master, John Chaple, belonged to a family that provided three mayors to the city between 1540 and 1640.10W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (1975), 254. Christopher Clarke settled in St Olave’s parish, where his master lived, and by 1629 he was among the highest rated taxpayers assessed on goods.11Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 4, 9. He made good progress along the city’s cursus honorum, becoming bailiff in 1616, treasurer in 1638 and sheriff the following year.12Izacke, Memorials (1731), 54, 146, 155. Samuel Clarke was a younger son born to him, and although he was in due course made free of the city ahead of his brother Christopher junior, he was slow to involve himself in civic affairs, suggesting that in fact he was the third son. Samuel instead focused his efforts on developing a mercantile career. In 1638 he had a modest business, exporting the dominant product of Exeter, Devon cloths of various kinds. But whereas a leading merchant such as James Tucker* sent 51 cargoes overseas that year in 11 ships, Clarke sent only seven in two ships, an indication of quite how small a player he still was, being barely of majority age.13E190/950/7. In the 1641 subsidy roll, Samuel Clarke paid tax on £4 in goods as against his father’s £9 in lands.14E179/245/12. Of greater importance to Clarke’s standing in Exeter than even his business career was his marriage in 1638 to Sarah Jourdain, daughter of the city’s leading puritan layman, Ignatius Jourdain†. This marriage was an indication that the Clarkes were part of the faction in the city government whose sympathies lay with critics of the king. Other than the Clarkes and Jourdain himself, this group extended to include James Tucker and another son-in-law of Jourdain, Richard Sweete*.

Clarke’s father became mayor of Exeter in September 1642. Under his direction the city was fortified, courtesies extended to Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, the parliamentarian general, and Edmund Prideaux I* was invited to become recorder. By the time Clarke left office, Exeter had surrendered to the king, Sir John Berkeley* installed as governor for the king and Prideaux’s grant of office cancelled.15Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii; Archives Bk. C1/53. Clarke’s professed loyalty to both king and Parliament in December 1642 was doubtless sincere, and even after the royalist take-over he continued to attend council meetings, indicating that he was not among the most militant of parliamentarians.16M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 66, 224, 226. Samuel’s civil war career was more obscure. Contrary to the assertion of a modern authority, he was not among the eight members of the committee of safety appointed in August 1642 by the Exeter chamber.17Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction, 96; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 139v. Nevertheless, his first involvement in the parliamentarian cause came soon afterwards: he was appointed during his father’s mayoralty and with his father in January 1643 to the first committee empowering the raising of money in Devon and Exeter. He was active enough in this service later to frame a credible application to Parliament for reimbursement of expenses.18CJ v. 141b. He is not to be confused with Major Samuel Clarke, in 1646 of the regiment of Philip Skippon*, who was charged in 1650 with arranging the transportation of Scots prisoners to Virginia and who went on to a military command in Flanders under the protectorate.19CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 376; 1650, p. 346; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 681, 683-5, 687. Clarke the future Parliament-man never took a military commission. In July 1644 he and four other Exonians were entrusted by Parliament with forming a committee in order to impose the Covenant on Exeter and to raise taxes there for Parliament, but he must by this time have been away from the royalist-controlled city, in London. He was certainly there by April 1644, because he petitioned the House of Commons on behalf of his father and a number of other merchants loyal to Parliament whose goods had been seized by the cavaliers from their ships.20CSP Dom. 1644, p. 128; CJ iii. 465b.

Clarke only returned to Exeter in the wake of the surrender of the city on 13 April 1646 to Oliver Cromwell* and the New Model army. He was admitted to the common council some time soon after the parliamentarians assumed control, being named to some committees of the chamber from 20 August. He made his first appearance in the chamber on 25 August, and turned up regularly thereafter.21Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 179, 180, 181. By 8 August, he was a spokesman of the conservative puritans in Exeter, who wrote to associates in London of the outrages perpetrated in Exeter by the soldiers of the garrison under Robert Hammond*. Two of these letters found their way into Gangraena, the denunciation in print of the Independents by the controversialist clergyman, Thomas Edwards. Clarke and others of the Exeter committee catalogued the soldiers’ affronts to the citizens’ efforts to ban unlicensed preaching and their defiance of both lay and clerical authority in the city, which culminated in their setting in the stocks of a disgraced minister.22T. Edwards, The Third Part of Gangraena (1646), 41-5 (E.368.5).

Clarke’s election to the House of Commons on 15 December was not noted in the council act book, but his experience as an emissary to Westminster on behalf of the embattled Exeter parliamentarians, his family background, rooted in Exeter civic politics on the side of Parliament, and most recently his opposition to the local military presence were what recommended him to those who managed the process. Clarke did not rush to claim his seat. On 17 December he was named to a city chamber committee tasked with petitioning Parliament to reduce the assessment in the light of Exeter’s heavy civil war losses. He was still attending the chamber meetings until 26 January 1647, but had left for London by 9 February. Only on the 24th of that month did he take the Covenant.23Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 188v, 192v; CJ v. 97a. On 4 March he was named to his first Commons committee, which recognized his interests in commercial affairs. He was added to the Committee for Foreign Plantations, which was calling into question the patent enjoyed by James Hay, 2nd earl of Carlisle, for Barbados. He was presumably in the House on 2 April, when he was included in a large committee charged with drafting an ordinance for the management of the London militia, a Presbyterian-driven scheme that would have challenged the authority of the New Model. The concept of local control over city militias was doubtless one of which Clarke approved, to judge from events in Exeter in 1646 and again in May 1648, when the citizens resisted the second entry of the New Model into the city.24CJ v. 132b.

On 14 April, the losses and debts incurred by Clarke in 1643 were referred to the Committee of the West, and that summer he was awarded £2,000 from the fine imposed on Sir John Hele†, with a promise of more to follow.25CJ v. 141b, 231b. A week later his name appeared among additions to a committee working on ways to satisfy poor people who had contributed to the parliamentary war effort on the ‘public faith’, which chimed with both his own concerns and those of the city of Exeter.26CJ v. 148a. He must have stayed in London through the ‘forcing of the Houses’ episode in the summer of 1647 and did not flee to the army. Clarke was named to committees required retrospectively to invalidate the proceedings of Parliament between the Presbyterian-inspired forcing and the re-imposition of the status quo ante by the Independents backed by the army (18, 20 Aug.), and this may have proved distasteful to him, as he had consistently revealed himself to be resistant to high tax levels and army authority.27CJ v. 278a, 279b. On 8 September he obtained leave to go to the country, and later told the Exeter corporation that the 26th of that month was his last day in Parliament. He was back in the Exeter chamber by the 28th, when he was appointed to a city committee to review the oaths of freemen and officers.28CJ v. 296a; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 210, ix. f. 35v. His departure from London may have been unexpected by the city councillors, because early that month they had resolved to find an agent in London who would ‘follow the public affairs of this city’ to recover billeting money and free the engagements of city and citizens.29Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 208. Clarke’s return could hardly have aided that process, so his secession must be attributed to his own political antipathy to events at Westminster, and it was probably the resurgence of Independency that he disliked most.

Thereafter, Clarke attended most common council meetings in Exeter, and never returned to the House, as far as can be ascertained. He was granted further leave of absence by the Commons on 3 November 1647, 24 April and 26 September 1648, and it seems improbable that he was doing more than writing to the Speaker to make excuses. On 23 December 1647 he was apparently sent to Devon to gather in the assessment, but he was there already and did nothing to help his colleagues.30CJ v. 330a, 348b, 400b, 548b; vi. 34b. He made himself useful in Exeter instead, discussing with the widow of a sequestered cavalier army officer a legacy left to the city, and reviewing the wills of benefactors more generally.31Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 211, ix. f. 3v; CCAM 968, 973. More ambitiously, in mid-March 1648 the city set its hand to a scheme for funding the clerical ministry there, and Clarke was named to the council committee asked to produce an ordinance of the chamber. Whether Parliament was to be asked to validate this local scheme is uncertain, but the citizens certainly appealed to Westminster when the troops of Sir Hardress Waller* imposed themselves on Exeter in May. Clarke was present at the meetings which resolved that Parliament should be petitioned so that the soldiers be removed, and that all contact between the city government and Waller should be in writing.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 10v, 13v, 14; Letter 401.

The city chamber kept open the avenues of communication to Parliament. On 26 October 1648, Clarke was asked to take to Westminster a petition about the maintenance of Exeter’s ministers, and it is possible that he did so, although his stay in London must have been brief.33Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 23. His name appears on a contemporary list of those secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December.34A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). The council was shocked into governmental paralysis by the trial and execution of the king, but Clarke attended meetings on 24 April and 5 June 1649. These were his last appearances in the Exeter council chamber, and on 16 August he was awarded £55 10s for his ‘charge’ in parliamentary service for the city between 28 January 1646 and 26 September the following year.35Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 31v, 35v. He must thereafter have travelled to Ireland, perhaps even with Cromwell’s military expedition that summer. In 1642 Clarke had invested £100 as an ‘adventurer’ in Ireland, and he was later awarded £300 in debentures, which would eventually be laid out in lands in co. Tipperary.36J.P. Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1875), 436; Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 179. He may have gone to Ireland in the hope of securing his investment, perhaps by playing a role in organising supplies for the army; he was certainly not a soldier. Even for a non-combatant, Ireland in the early months of the reconquest was a not a healthy place to be. In the Exeter council chamber in November 1650, Clarke was reported dead, and in August 1653 Clarke’s brother, Christopher Clarke junior, testified that Samuel had died in Ireland, never having benefited from his investment.37CSP Ire. Adv. p. 265. His widow petitioned the lord protector’s council in June 1654, probably about this estate.38CSP Dom. 1654, p. 223. None of Clarke’s descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.