HOBART, John (1605-83), of Weybread, Suff. and St Giles, Norwich, Norf.

Hobart was descended from the elder Hobart line which disqualified itself for office because of recusancy. Hobart’s grandparents were Catholics and his father, Sir John Hobart, though a Protestant, owed his career as surveyor and man of business to the family connections of the prominent Catholic, Sir Thomas Cornwallis†. His mother was declared a recusant in 1609. Hobart’s father, who died comparatively young in 1613, was returned to the first Jacobean Parliament for Corfe Castle.25HP Commons 1604-1629. In his will he directed that Hobart should be educated by the advice and direction of his kinsman, Lord Burghley (William Cecil†), later 2nd earl of Exeter, and of his cousin Sir Henry Hobart. He was to be brought up ‘in the fear of God and good learning, especially in the common laws of the land’, in the hope that he would ‘thereby be better enabled to serve the church, his prince and county and to increase the poor fortunes that I shall leave him’.26PROB11/122, f. 46. Hobart entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1620.27LI Adm. Reg. i. 187. He subsequently settled at Weybread on the Suffolk-Norfolk border, where he bought land as early as 1633 and where he later occupied Weybread Hall.28Bodl. Tanner 98, f. 135; Copinger, Manors of Suff. iv. 99, 102. In the Suffolk election for the Long Parliament in 1640, his support was elicited for Henry North* by North's uncle, Henry North of Laxfield.29Bodl. Tanner 115, f. 131.

Hobart seems already to have been fascinated by politics. His kinsman, Robert Hobart, wrote regularly to him with news from London and, once the Long Parliament had assembled, those letters were filled with the latest parliamentary gossip.30Bodl. Tanner 67, f. 126; Tanner 65, ff. 95v, 154, 217, 234, 257, 276, 278; Tanner 66, f. 109. From 1642 his main source of such news became another of his regular correspondents, Josias Berners*.31Bodl. Tanner 66, ff. 234, 242, 246; Tanner 63, ff. 10, 18, 35. Hobart evidently also collected printed speeches by MPs, as he made notes on those which had supposedly been made in late 1640 and early 1641 by Lord George Digby*, Nathaniel Fiennes I*, Edward Bagshawe*, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd* and Viscount Falkland (Lucius Cary*).32Bodl. Tanner 65, ff. 201-202v.

Unsure of his loyalties at the beginning of the civil war, Hobart ‘deserted’ his family, much to the despair of his mother-in-law, Lady Felton, who accused him in November 1643 of being a ‘master of such wandering and slippery resolution’.33Bodl. Tanner 69, f. 108. To this, Hobart retorted that he would never needlessly endanger his family or his estates, but that he would try always to obey his conscience. He may however have been more willing to accept her advice that, if he needed to reconcile himself with Parliament, he should do so via her relative, William Bloys*.34Bodl. Tanner 69, f. 108v.

The outbreak of the war seems to have prompted Hobart’s move to Norwich. At the time of his election there in 1654 he was able to thank the city for providing ‘my safe protection in these twelve years of trouble’.35Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 114. (If he was seeking refuge from the war, he need not have worried, as north Suffolk saw no more fighting than Norwich.) In Norwich he lived in the parish of St Giles, where he built a ‘large brick house’ on Broad Street.36Bodl. Tanner 96, f. 12; Goodacre, ‘Notes from a Kirkpatrick manuscript’, 301. The question as to where he was permanently resident did however cause confusion. In the summer of 1643 he tried to avoid paying assessment in Suffolk on the grounds that he was no longer living at Weybread. This failed to convince the Suffolk assessment commissioners.37Bodl. Tanner 69, f. 92. Two years later, when attempts were made to levy a horse from him at Hoxne, the Suffolk county committee referred the question as to whether he was instead resident in Norfolk to the Eastern Association committee at Cambridge.38Bodl. Tanner 98, f. 73. What presumably strengthened his case by then was that he now held a public position in Norfolk, albeit the rather minor one of constable for the hundred of Happing on the north-east Norfolk coast.39Bodl. Tanner 96, f. 12. The gunpowder explosion during the disorder at Norwich in early May 1648 blew out the windows in Hobart’s house. Hobart was then absent in London (where he had lodgings in Fleet Street), but the mayor, Christopher Baret, asked the Speaker, William Lenthall*, to inform Hobart that he had provided shelter for Hobart’s wife and children in his own house.40Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 35; Ketton-Cremer, Norf. in Civil War, 344-5.

A ‘stranger’ to the city, in the sense that he was not a freeman, Hobart was elected to the first Protectorate Parliament on 12 July 1654 after a contest. In his speech accepting the nomination, he wistfully imagined that those who opposed his election had succeeded, so that thereby they ‘would have procured my writ of ease and restored me to that privacy which hath been so long so great a blessing to me’.41Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 114. His opponents were not quite so philosophical. Those who had supported one of the defeated candidates, Charles George Cock*, tried without success to get the result overturned by the council of state.42Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 16v.

Some uncertainty surrounds Hobart’s actual political views during the 1650s. What he said often seemed to associate him firmly with the commonwealthmen and some of his contemporaries after the Restoration seem to have taken this at face value. Viscount Yarmouth (Robert Paston†) would nickname him ‘Commonwealth Hobart’, while an anonymous lampoon called him ‘an old bitter traitor’.43The Whirlpool of Misadventures, ed. J. Agnew (Norf. Rec. Soc. lxxvi. 2012), 316; Bodl. Tanner 95, f. 121. But it has plausibly been suggested that Hobart’s role in the Protectoral Parliaments may have been much more ambiguous. He may have aped republican language in order to damn the protectorate without revealing his inner royalist leanings.44C.S. Egloff, ‘John Hobart of Norwich and the politics of the Cromwellian protectorate’, Norf. Arch. xlii. 38-56. The obvious danger with that approach, however, was that it could open him to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy.

After the 1654 Parliament assembled, Hobart was appointed to the privileges committee.45CJ vii. 366b. Along with most of the other Norfolk MPs, he refused to take the oath to recognise the lord protector’s authority and, unlike most of those MPs, he refused to relent on 12 September.46Burton’s Diary, i. pp. xxxv-xxxvi. A note he made at about this time reveals that he considered that what the lord protector was demanding was both an infringement of parliamentary privilege and a violation of the article in the Instrument of Government by which he had promised not to use the militia during parliamentary sessions without Parliament’s consent.47Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 149.

But Hobart cannot have held out much longer and on 25 September he was named to the committee on the bill to ensure that all MPs took the Recognition.48CJ vii. 370a. Among his other committee appointments were those to consider the size of the army and the navy (26 Sept.), the bill to reform the court of Chancery (5 Oct.), the relief of creditors and poor prisoners (25 Oct.), the draining of the Lincolnshire fens (31 Oct.), forged debentures (22 Nov.), sheriffs (4 Dec.) and combating blasphemous publications (12 Dec.).49CJ vii. 370b, 374b, 378b, 380a, 388a, 394b, 400a. He also sat on the committees that considered the petitions from 1st Lord Craven and Sir John Stawell*.50CJ vii. 381a. On 7 December he was among those MPs appointed to draft a bill to reform the government based on the votes the House had already passed.51CJ vii. 398a. Later, on 12 January 1655, he was included on the committee on the clause in that bill specifying that it could only be altered with the consent of both the lord protector and Parliament.52CJ vii. 415a. The following day he was among those MPs asked to consider the size of the revenue to be granted by this bill.53CJ vii. 415b.

One piece of business in this Parliament can be specifically linked to him. The civil lawyers were keen that the status of civil law should be clarified. They had hoped to use Charles George Cock as their contact at Westminster until his defeat at Norwich ruled that out. Evidently not bearing any grudge against his victorious opponent, Cock then asked Hobart to present the petition on their behalf and it was probably he who did so on 4 November 1654.54Bodl. Tanner 51, ff. 8-12. This would explain why Hobart was then added to the committee on the writs of habeas corpus and certiorari, as the petition had just been referred to it. He was also later included on the committee to consider the petitions from Oxford and Cambridge universities regarding civil law.55CJ vii. 382a, 407b.

In early August 1656 the deputy major-general for East Anglia, Hezekiah Haynes, informed the secretary of state, John Thurloe*, of his suspicions that Hobart was encouraging John Boatman, an ejected clergyman who had been preaching seditious sermons in the Norwich area.56TSP v. 297. As Haynes viewed Hobart as ‘a person as closely maligning the government and good men as any other in Norfolk’, he assured Thurloe that he was taking steps to prevent Hobart’s re-election at Norwich.57TSP v. 297, 311. Those efforts were unsuccessful. Hobart was elected, along with Barnard Church*, on 20 August 1656.

Hobart’s mood at this time was revealed in a private conversation with an army officer, John Balleston, who immediately passed the information on to Haynes.

Falling into discourse with the said Mr Hobart, I perceived him extreme heightened, expressing himself thus; that we were ruled by an arbitrary power, and not by any known law; and that he had suffered himself to be distrained for taxes; and that major generals and such new raised forces were needless people, the army being too great before.58TSP v. 370.

Hobart was then, unsurprisingly, among those MPs prevented from taking their seats on 17 September.59CJ vii. 425b. Hobart himself would claim that he was excluded because some had denounced him to the government as being ‘a man of no conscience’ and irreligious.60Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 16v. He signed the protest submitted by the excluded Members to Speaker Widdrington the following day.61Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 157; To all the Worthy Gentlemen ([1656], E.889.8). He also informed the mayor of Norwich on 23 September that

I am not suffered to represent you in Parliament. If those things which shall there be done prove to the glory of God and the peace and freedom of this our nation, I shall exceedingly rejoice by what instruments soever they be effected, if otherwise (which God of his mercy yet divert) I shall account it a great mercy in being neither actor nor spectator in them.62Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 168.

He nevertheless assured the mayor that he would continue to serve the Norwich corporation in any way he could.63Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 168.

Three years later, speaking in the next Parliament, Hobart implied that the exclusions in 1656 had undermined that Parliament's democratic legitimacy. Questioning the right of the Scottish and Irish MPs to sit at Westminster, he recalled how in 1656

100 English gentlemen who were elected and returned to sit in Parliament were kept out by open force, above 50 more out of conscience deserted the House and then the Irish and Scots, who were kept in, voted in themselves a perpetual right to sit as Members in the Parliament of England.64Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 36.

Hobart remained deeply sceptical of the validity of everything that the 1656 Parliament had done, not least the Humble Petition and Advice.

The decision to allow this Parliament to reassemble in early 1658 presented Hobart with a moral dilemma. By late November 1657 he was, via Josias Berners, consulting with some of the other excluded MPs as to whether, if permitted, they should take their seats.65Bodl. Tanner 52, ff. 214, 218. Hobart’s view was that they should not and he prepared a lengthy memorandum explaining why.66Bodl. Tanner 52, ff. 158-161, 219-222. Sticking to his principles, he boycotted this second session. Hobart remained at Norwich, while receiving reports from Berners about its proceedings.67Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 239. On hearing news of the dissolution in February 1658, he welcomed the ‘dawnings of truth’ on the part of the churches and the army. The former he believed had been ‘fooled under the specious pretence of liberty of conscience to betray the civil liberties of their own native country’. The army meanwhile had realised ‘how unworthy a thing it is to take pay to betray and enslave their country and that all this oppression for so many years is for nothing but to set up a single and inconsiderable family’.68Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 2.

Re-elected at Norwich to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, Hobart used his acceptance speech to present this as a vindication against his former critics in the city, and then expressed the hope that they could all live in harmony with each other.69Bodl. Tanner 51, ff. 16-18. Doubtless mindful of his duties at Westminster but perhaps also wishing to avoid becoming further involved in the corporation’s factional disputes, Hobart secured an agreement from the corporation that he would not be appointed to any civic office.70Norf. RO, Norwich assembly bk. 1642-68, f. 197. Yet his optimism was probably genuine enough. Now that Oliver Cromwell was dead, political change seemed a real possibility. Of course, the protectorate, in the person of Richard Cromwell, remained in place, so Hobart took his seat in the 1659 Parliament determined to harry it at every turn. His criticisms of any constitutional settlement based on a continuation of the Humble Petition and Advice would be unrelenting.

Hobart’s speech in the debate on the navy on 24 February 1659 set the tone. He saw little need for a large navy and even less point in entrusting it entirely to the hands of the inexperienced Richard Cromwell. He was equally unimpressed by the council of state, which he accused of having mismanaged relations with the Dutch and the war against Spain. ‘I have heard old gamesters say that it is good to change sometimes and not to set out too long a losing hand.’71Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 23. He also suggested that official assurances that no war was intended were disingenuous as everyone knew that there was likely to be a war in the Baltic.72Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 23v.

As for the Other House, he argued forcefully on 28 February on the need for a second chamber to stand between the Commons and the chief magistrate, although he did think that peers needed to be truly independent and that their power of veto should be limited.73Bodl. Tanner 51, ff. 25-26; Burton’s Diary, iii. 542-3. Not that this second chamber need be the Other House. In Hobart’s eyes, the Humble Petition now had no legal authority, which was why he was opposed to allowing the Scottish and Irish MPs to sit at Westminster.74Bodl. Tanner 51, ff. 32-33, 35-39; Burton’s Diary, iv. 103, 124, 203. He was still against transacting with the Other House on 28 March, considering it ‘insufficiently bounded’, as well as remaining troubled by the composition of the Commons.75Burton’s Diary, iv. 283.

Hobart was a teller with Henry Neville* on 2 April against issuing the declaration for a public fast, after the House decided not to debate the proviso declaring that this should not infringe their rights to limit the lord protector’s powers.76CJ vii. 626a. He was then among those who three days later continued to use this declaration as a pretext to dispute the status of the lord protector and the Other House.77Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 44; Burton’s Diary, iv. 345. Interestingly, when he added that many abroad expected England to return to episcopacy, implying that this would disappoint many, this puzzled the diarist, Thomas Burton*, who queried whether this was true of Hobart himself who was ‘known to be episcopal’.78Burton’s Diary, iv. 345. On 6 April he was named to the committee to consider how the Commons could transact business with the Other House.79CJ vii. 627a.

A fierce opponent of the major-generals, Hobart was one of those who on 12 April moved that William Boteler* should be disabled from civil or military office.80Burton’s Diary, iv. 404. He was then a member of the committee that prepared the impeachment articles against him.81CJ vii. 637a. In the decisive debate of 18 April, Hobart defended the right of the army officers to meet together without the consent of the lord protector and he argued that their grievances, such as the payment of their arrears, were equally reasonable.

It is not honourable, nor safe for you to disoblige your army which you cannot pay, nor without any leave spurn to drive them by your so sudden a disfavour into desperation who have been so faithful to you.82Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 46v.

But Hobart was playing a longer game. Implicitly inciting the army to act against Richard Cromwell increased the possibility that the whole constitutional settlement he hated so much might come crashing down.

With the restoration of the Rump in May 1659, there appear to have been moves to elect Hobart as one of the non-MPs to the council of state. His friend Berners, Sir Archibald Johnston* and Sir Robert Honywood* were added to the council by the Commons on 16 May.83CJ vii. 655a. But among Hobart’s papers there exists a petition against his election, pleading his own want of experience in affairs of state, the impairment of his health, the claims of others ‘more worthy’, and dissatisfaction among some, perhaps in Parliament and in the army, with his candidature.84Bodl. Tanner 51, f. 29. The Rump evidently agreed. On 24 January 1660 the Commons voted to add him to the assessment commissions for Norfolk and Suffolk.85CJ vii. 821b. He had meanwhile signed the Norfolk address for a free Parliament.86Address from Gentry of Norf. ed. Rye, 13. When such elections were held that spring, he may have voted for the royalist Sir Horatio Townshend* to become one of the Norfolk knights of the shire.87GL, Norf. poll bk. 1660, f. 28v.

In 1661 Hobart’s wife was convicted of manslaughter, having been found guilty of beating her servant girl with such severity that she died of her injuries. Hobart petitioned the king for a pardon on the grounds that his wife had been convicted on false testimony. Soon afterwards she deserted Hobart and was said to have sold the family silver; despite such scandal, the pair were eventually reconciled.88CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 566; Bodl. Tanner 286, f. 112. In 1671, just months after he had been appointed to that position, the dean of Norwich Cathedral, Herbert Astley, married Hobart’s only surviving daughter, Barbara.89Vis. Norf. 1664, 277; A.C. Miller, ‘Herbert Astley, dean of Norwich’, Norf. Arch. xxxviii (1983), 154. Hobart then moved into a house, the Brewery, in the cathedral close.90Parliamentary Survey of Dean and Chapter Properties in and around Norwich in 1649, ed. G.A. Metters (Norf. Rec. Soc. li. 1985), 112.

The Astleys were an unpopular couple, who prompted the undated anonymous lampoon that also satirised Hobart. According to it, Hobart was ‘a gamesome old lecher’ who walked at ‘a Spanish pace/With a stake in his arse’. It also skewered his apparent political inconsistency, presenting him as

…one that will go to the devil for gain
A well-timbered coxcombe but for his cross grain
A king’s man and churchman but knave i’th mai[n].91Bodl. Tanner 95, f. 121.

Hobart also still had some political influence. One of the Norwich MPs, Christopher Jay, had long been ill and there was speculation that Hobart might be his successor. When Jay died in 1677, however, Hobart decided not to stand, preferring instead to organise opposition to the election of William Paston† (later 2nd earl of Yarmouth).92Whirlpool of Misadventures, ed. Agnew, 185, 316, 317, 324; HP Commons, 1660-1690, ‘Norwich’. Writing of his son’s opponents shortly before the poll in February 1678, Viscount Yarmouth identified Hobart as the person ‘that governs their intrigues and cabals’.93Whirlpool of Misadventures, ed. Agnew, 317. But their preferred candidate, Mark Cockey, was easily defeated. Moreover, Hobart’s wife apparently defied him and supported Paston.94Whirlpool of Misadventures, ed. Agnew, 330.

Hobart died in 1683 on his 78th birthday, and was buried at Weybread.95Vis. Norf. 1563, ii. 71, 118. In his will he resigned his soul to God and his ‘vile body to Christian interment without vain ostentation or needless charge’. He bequeathed his books, excluding his manuscripts and pamphlets, to his son, Robert, in the hope that he would ‘preserve and transmit them in the family’.96PROB11/374/212. But Robert was already dead by the time Hobart died the following year.97Vis. Norf. 1563, ii. 71, 118. Hobart also left 20 ducats of gold to his kinsman, Sir John Hobart*, 3rd bt. ‘in recognition of his extraordinary favours’. Barbara Astley, who was appointed executrix, inherited his property at Norwich and Weybread.98PROB11/374/212. Her only surviving son, Hobart Astley, died in 1719 leaving no heirs.99Miller, ‘Herbert Astley’, 163; Vis. Norf. 1563, ii. 118.