BASTARD, William (1616-64), of Gerston, West Alvington, Devon.

The name of Bastard was an ancient one in Devon, as the seventeenth-century heralds recognized, even though they had difficulty tracing every link in the family’s pedigree. A Bastard lived at Efford, near Plymouth, in the reign of William I, and other places associated with the family in the South Hams district of Devon were Greenway and Addeston. William Bastard’s grandfather lived at Duloe, in east Cornwall near Looe, a property that the family still held when William was a child.12Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 20; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 49. The most eminent member of the family in William Bastard’s lifetime was his uncle and namesake, the lawyer William Bastard† of Gerston and the Middle Temple. William Bastard took briefs from the corporations of Dartmouth and Totnes, and sat in the Parliaments of 1597 and 1601 for the former borough. He was active in the Devon commission of the peace, and was familiar to the corporation of Exeter.13M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1997), 31, 175, 228; HMC Exeter, 324. Despite his prominence in the district he was a third son; the head of the family, his older brother John Bastard, was living at Gerston by 1619.14Vis. Devon 1620 (Harl. Soc. vi), 19; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 74/309/9. Gerston was a house that overlooked a creek of the Kingsbridge estuary, and was evidently spacious enough to allow living room for both brothers. William Bastard seems in 1618 to have settled his property, which included the manor of Buckland-in-the-Moor, a Cornish rectory and extensive lands in the South Hams, on his older brother. His motive was that John Bastard and his children would provide ‘aid and comfort’ to him in old age.15Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 74/9/2/14.

The younger William Bastard was therefore born into a family prominent in South Devon – even if it enjoyed few if any family links to other parts of the county – and to a father who left public activity to his younger brother. John Bastard had married Alice Reynell, of another gentry family established near Kingsbridge, and lived privately at Gerston as a minor gentleman. Nothing is known of William Bastard’s childhood upbringing or his education, but his marriage settlement was constructed when he was only 17. It was a marriage typical of his family in that it was to another South Hams family, that of Hele of Gnaton.16Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 74/450/7. In preparation for this marriage, the older William Bastard adjusted the family settlement so that his own property would descend to William junior, but almost immediately after the two families had concluded the settlement, John Bastard died.17Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 74/9/2/16. Another flurry of legal activity followed, around firstly the wardship of William, his under-age heir, and then around the death of William senior. Not only the decade but an important chapter in the family’s fortunes was reaching an end on the death in 1639 of William, a patriarch who had lived, as he himself noted, longer than any of his ancestors.

Using legal terminology to describe his nephew as ‘cousin’ (meaning consanguineous, next-of-kin), William left the bulk of his property to the younger William, who by this bequest had by May 1639 had inherited all the estates of the Bastards, only months after finally escaping the clutches of the court of wards and liveries.18PROB11/180/65; Coventry Docquets, 351. The lawyer’s will revealed Gerston to be a godly Protestant household, and old William Bastard himself to be of a puritan outlook. He requested a brief funeral in daylight, eschewing the fashion for night-time burials, and without ‘feasting, banqueting, excessive quaffing and beastly drinking, which I ever hated’. Importantly, however, he wanted his funeral sermon preached by a minister who was ‘orderly submitting himself to the government of the church’, a clear indication of his conservative and conformist religious outlook. His late brother, John, had been a supporter of a puritan minister at Kingsbridge, and there is no reason to suppose that William Bastard the younger ever deviated from these religious precepts during the 1640s and 50s.19I.W. Gowers, ‘Puritanism in the County of Devon between 1570 and 1641’ (Exeter Univ. MA thesis, 1970), 218.

It was probably support for the religious policies of Parliament that drew William Bastard into the parliamentarian camp during the civil war. From October 1642 he was at Plymouth garrison, commissioned as a captain, and was for a time also stationed at nearby Stonehouse.20SP28/128 pt. 19, accts. of Philip Francis, ff. 2,3. While he was holed up in Plymouth, his estate at Gerston suffered total sequestration by the royalists, so that even a hostile commentator acknowledged that his wife and children were hard put to it to subsist.21HMC 15th Rep. vii. 85. This experience can only have hardened Bastard’s commitment to Parliament, but he played no known part in any commissions of government before the civil war, nor was he named to any wartime committees by the parliamentarians. Only after the Parliament had secured the county was he brought into the government of Devon. He was appointed high sheriff in December 1646, presumably on the nomination of the county committee whose members would have known Bastard as a godly captain at the defiant Plymouth garrison.

Unlike a number of the sheriffs appointed by Parliament in 1646, Bastard was a genuine supporter of the cause, and wrote to neighbouring gentry in the South Hams in March 1647 urging them to take the Covenant so they could act as justices. By their reluctance to come forward, Bastard wrote, ‘the public service is retarded and many grievances of the people unredressed’.22Add. 44058, ff. 23v-24. In September, he faced a mutiny by soldiers in Exeter. One of the committeeman processing with Bastard to the sessions meeting in the city was manhandled by the soldiers, who threatened to kidnap him, and Bastard had forcibly to intervene. Bastard and his colleagues attributed the unrest to the high taxes and lack of pay for the soldiers, and assured Speaker Lenthall that although they resented what they considered an unreasonably high tax burden they would continue to levy it as a remedy for the discontent.23Bodl. Tanner 58 f. 507. Bastard himself was soon named as a justice of the peace and a commissioner for taxes and the militia, probably in response to a desperate letter to Speaker William Lenthall from the committee at Exeter, calling for Bastard and 11 others to be added to their number.24Bodl. Tanner 57 f. 173. In August 1648 he was allocated to the third committee into which the committeemen divided themselves ‘so the burthen may not lie all at once and that none of us may be troubled but once in three weeks’.25Add. 44058, ff. 26v-7.

As a magistrate, Bastard was noticeable at the quarter sessions meetings in Exeter only for a brief period, between 1650 (when he attended three of the four sessions) and 1654, when he came to one or two sessions each year.26Devon RO, Devon QS order bks. 1640-51, 1652-61; QS rolls. To judge from this pattern of attendance, he was a committed supporter of the commonwealth. He was more consistently active out of sessions, in his home district of the South Hams. His willingness in 1649 to press the claims of wounded former comrades in arms from Plymouth suggests that his militancy may partly at least have been shaped by his own experiences as a soldier, which were once more drawn upon when he was commissioned in the Devon militia in 1650.27Devon RO, QS order bk. 1640-51, Epiphany 1649; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 507. Bastard was a reliable agent of the new republic in his home district, but was certainly not one of the workhorses of the Devon bench, still less a county leader. His commitment to godly rule survived the dissolution of the Rump, but he was no religious radical and adapted readily to the Cromwellian protectorate. When he was returned in July 1654 to the first protectorate Parliament, he would have appeared to the electors as a dependable magistrate and a representative of a familiar gentry house.

Bastard’s profile in Parliament was very modest. He was named only to one committee, that charged with reviewing the ordinance on scandalous ministers which the protector’s council had passed earlier that summer.28CJ vii. 370a. He himself had been named an ejector in that ordinance, and it is likely that a church settlement based on an ordained ministry and appointments to traditional benefices was of genuine interest to him. He returned to Devon to resume his local government activity in his own district, and signed orders in April 1655 which imposed a measure of order on the haphazard ways in which assize and quarter sessions juries were selected. These reforms included a resolution that none should be returned as jurors ‘who have aided the late king etc. and continue their affections unto that interest’.29Add. 44058, ff. 42v-44.

Plymouth and the South Hams were visited by Quaker controversialists in 1656, and West Alvington was the scene of a bitter disputation between the minister, Francis Fullwood and the itinerant Quaker emissary, Thomas Salthouse. The exchanges took place in the house of a West Alvington gentleman, Edmund Pollexfen, who was sympathetic towards the Friends, but in November 1657 when the Quakers petitioned the lord protector’s council about their hard usage at the hands of magistrates, William Bastard was singled out by them as hostile to the sect.30The Wounds of an Enemie in the House of a Friend (1656); [F. Fullwood], A True Relation of a Dispute (1656) T. Salthouse, The Hidden Things of Esau brought to Light (1657); CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 156. As the 1650s drew to a close, he clinched a marriage alliance with the Bampfylde family of Poltimore. His eldest son, William Bastard†, married Grace, daughter of Sir John Bampfylde*.31Vivian, Vis. Devon, 50; HP Commons, 1660-1690; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 74/79/2-3; 74/311/15, 18; 312/5. This broke with the tradition of the Bastard family marrying into families in their district of Devon- the Bampfyldes were seated near Exeter – but the two families shared an Erastian puritanism that by the last years of the interregnum can best be described as Presbyterian, and also a vigorous hostility to Quakers.

The links with the Bampfyldes and with west Devon magistrates like William Morice* placed Bastard in a favourable position at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Although he kept a back seat in local government, he did not forfeit his place in the commission of the peace. He was regarded with hostility by the new bishop of Exeter, Seth Ward, who wrote to Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon to complain how he was surrounded in his diocese by enemies of the church. Bastard was anathematized as ‘very bad’ in a list mainly of Presbyterian justices.32Devon and Cornw. N and Q, xxi. 284. But this was in January 1664; the following month, Bastard died and was buried in his native parish. His eldest son, William†, sat for Bere Alston in the two Parliaments of 1679 as a whig.33HP Commons, 1660-1690.