TRELAWNY, Robert (1598-1644), of Plymouth and Weston Ham, Pennycross, Devon.

St Germans, in east Cornwall, was the home of the Trelawnys in the sixteenth century. The first to settle in Plymouth was probably John Trelawny, mayor in 1597-8 and 1611-12. His brother, Robert Trelawny, son of Robert, was apprenticed to a merchant in the seaport in 1578.11Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/89, f. 3. This was the MP’s father, who rose to serve three terms as mayor.12Worth, Hist. Plymouth, 84-5. Like the father of John Waddon*, who served with Trelawny in both Parliaments of 1640, the thrice-serving Mayor Trelawny was named among the Plymouth merchants incorporated in 1611 as a company trading with France.13Select Charters of Trading Companies, 1530-1707 ed. C.T. Carr (Selden Soc. v. 28), 65. He married Elizabeth Mayne, daughter of a freeman and tailor of Exeter.14Exeter Freemen, 85, 101, 109. Robert Trelawny was their eldest son, and was probably educated partly as an apprentice to his father and partly as a factor abroad, possibly in France or Spain. At any rate, absence from the town is the likely explanation for Trelawny’s late admission to the freedom of Plymouth, at the age of 28. He married Agnes Coga, whose parents came from Mevagissey. Agnes’s father died when she was young, and she was brought up by her relative, also Agnes, who married Charles Crooke, a merchant of Mevagissey and Plymouth. In 1621, the younger Agnes was left a house in Plymouth and a cash bequest of £300 by Charles Crooke, who also favoured the university, Exeter College and one of the parishes in Oxford with generous legacies. Within a year of her marriage to Trelawny, Agnes Coga had brought a small but valuable inheritance to their union.15Mevagissey par. reg.; PROB11/146/160; PROB11/137/591.

Trelawny’s father died in 1627, leaving relatively modest cash bequests of £250 but an estate estimated at 225 acres in and around Plymouth.16C142/751/167; Trelawny Pprs. 441-4. In 1629 Trelawny was granted letters of marque for a ship.17CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 153, 155. Unlike most if not all of the Plymouth merchants, Trelawny had shipping interests of his own, and was not simply content to trade in other men’s vessels. He named one of them after his wife, Agnes, and at least one, Samuel, after his first surviving son.18E190/1035/10. By 1638, he was one of the most successful merchants of Plymouth. That year, he exported cargoes of fish (both local pilchards and Newfoundland cod), Spanish iron and a small amount of French cloth to various ports in France and Spain. His exports left Plymouth in ten different ships that year, and were balanced by eleven imported cargoes in a wider range of ships mostly belonging to other ports. Wine, wheat and iron dominated the ships’ manifests.19E190/1035/10. By the end of the 1630s Trelawny was also well established in a colonial venture in Maine, which grew out of the trans-Atlantic trading links forged by the Plymouth mercantile community. The proprietor of Maine was Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had been governor of the fort at Plymouth until 1629.20‘Sir Ferdinando Gorges’, Oxford DNB. Trelawny was granted a crown patent with another Plymouth merchant, Moses Goodyear, for 1,500 acres, a grant which recognised the investment that the partners had already made before 1631.21Trelawny Pprs. 1. In January 1632 they appointed agents, and by April 1637 Trelawny was writing proprietorially and with confidence to Gorges, by this time governor-general of New England, of ‘my people’ and ‘my chief officer and minister’ in Maine.22Trelawny Pprs. 101-5.

Trelawny’s interest in Maine was primarily focused on the trading possibilities the colony offered. His ship Hercules took indentured servants to Maine from Plymouth and the surrounding parishes, and in 1639 stayed in Maine for half the year before hazarding the several months’ return voyage. Salt fish, presumably cod, and train (whale) oil were the principal cargoes brought back to Plymouth, but what was perceived as the diminishing size of the catch was a problem.23Trelawny Pprs. 111-2, 147, 155, 162, 181. Trelawny’s operations in Maine were an integral part of his shipping business, not conducted separately from his European trading schedule: in October, Hercules was carrying into Plymouth a cargo of Spanish iron, and the following month, Richmond, named after the seaport in Maine where Trelawny’s ships made landfall, brought in grain from France.24E190/1036/16. It is hard to calculate Trelawny’s wealth. He was certainly in a much bigger way of business than his father. In October 1640, he drew up a will, which was superseded in 1643. In the first will, augmented by a codicil of October 1641 he was able to leave cash legacies totalling nearly £10,000 to his wife and children, as well as lands in Maine, in St Johns, Cornwall and his property at Ham. His bequests to the poor at that time, such as the £20 left to the poor of Mevagissey, his mother’s parish, were generous.25Trelawny Pprs. 445-9. It seems likely that this fortune was accrued through his New England ventures rather than through the run-of-the-mill trade with France and Spain, which sustained most of the Plymouth merchants. In the 1641 subsidy, he was one of the 15 rated on lands rather than goods. On this very problematic index of wealth he was better off than his colleague John Waddon, but there were others paying on a higher rate, which must suggest that Trelawny’s was essentially new money.26E179/102/486.

Trelawny was returned to the two Parliaments in 1640 as a leading citizen of Plymouth. As well as a successful business career behind him he had also served his time in the government of the town. During his mayoral term, the king’s fleet had assembled in Plymouth Sound under the command of Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey, financed by a Ship Money levy but with no clear naval objectives in view.27Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/46, f. 13; Gardiner, Hist. England 1603-1642, vii. 383-5. There is nothing to suggest that Trelawny was critical of government policies during the 1630s. While he was an active participant in a dispute between the corporation and the government over the building of a new church in Plymouth, he was involved in settling it in 1635, when the king’s choice of minister prevailed.28Keeler, Long Parl. 363. He was made a deputy vice admiral around the time of his mayoralty, and when required to contribute to the Devon militia in 1639, he could afford to be generous.29CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 338-9. Unlike John Waddon, however, who was slow to make any impression on the Commons, Trelawny made an impression on the formal record of the House quite quickly. On 21 November 1640 Trelawny attacked the record of the customs farmer, Sir John Jacob*, who had to withdraw from the House as an alleged monopolist.30Procs. LP i. 236. Early the following month, (2 Dec.) he was named to the committee which enquired into the customs-related cases of Richard Chambers and Samuel Vassall*, and on the 21st his fellow Devonian and burgess for Ashburton, John Northcote*, recorded Trelawny as speaking out against the abuses by customs officers, which the Plymouth man estimated at £5-6,000. The remedy was placed in the hands of a committee drawn from all MPs for seaports.31CJ ii. 43a; Northcote Note Bk. 88.

Early in 1641, Trelawny was named to committees on the law relating to salt marshes and to prohibit the export of wool (27 Jan., 3 Feb.).32CJ ii. 73b, 77b. On 11 February he was among those considering the potential of a new customs levy to fund the king’s army in the north (the previous November Trelawny and John Waddon had offered £1000 on behalf of their town towards disbandment), and on 19 March he was included in the committee considering usury. All his committee nominations down to 3 May 1641, when Trelawny took the Protestation, were typical of those that might fall to the lot of a merchant burgess to consider.33CJ ii. 83a, 94a, 108a, 133a; Procs. LP i. 229. On 21 May it was noted that he ‘had the bill for Plymouth’, probably the bill to establish a second parish in the town as a response to the increase in population ‘so that the parish church is not capable of the inhabitants to hear divine service’.34CJ ii. 153b; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/372. The bill duly passed both Houses and became the basis of the subsequent administration of the church in Plymouth. On 29 June 1641, Trelawny wrote to his agent in Maine, John Winter, replying to a progress report on the building of a new ship for him at Richmond Island. He reported how ‘all things, thanks be to God, goes [sic] well in Parliament. Many plots and treasons have been discovered. The king is very gracious’. He hoped that religion would be settled peacefully and that the subject would be restored ‘to his ancient liberty and right of property’.35Trelawny Pprs. 272. An insight into the impact parliamentary service could make on domestic life is provided by Trelawny’s remark that he hoped to see his family within a few days, after a separation of nearly nine months. He was by late June planning the leave which on 8 July was granted him.36CJ ii. 202b.

When exactly it was that Trelawny returned to Westminster is in doubt. He was named with John Waddon on 31 December to examine letters intercepted in Plymouth and held by the mayor, which apparently provided evidence of traffic between English Catholics and Rome, but only Waddon was named to the resulting commission to administer the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to travellers through the port. This would suggest that he played no significant part in this episode, and was only named to the committee for form’s sake.37CJ ii. 364a; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/10. He was certainly in the House by 21 February 1642, when a committee on the scourge of piracy organised from Algiers was formed as a result of a petition from the merchant communities of Plymouth and Barnstaple.38CJ ii. 446a; PA, Main Pprs. n.d. 1641. Trelawny’s absence from Westminster for some time, perhaps over the period December 1641 to January 1642, may help explain the episode that cost him his seat. Against the politically electric atmosphere in Westminster following the king’s abortive attempt to arrest the Five Members, two informers, William Fletcher and Capt. Peter Andrewes, reported to a parliamentary Committee for Informations a conversation they had had with Trelawny. He was alleged to have said privately that Parliament had no right to set a guard around the Houses without the permission of the king, and that it was treasonous to Members to do so. In reporting from the committee, Laurence Whitaker, who sat for Okehampton, a seat not far from Plymouth, seemed to emphasise that both witnesses said that their encounter with Trelawny was casual, that he was merely reporting the views of others, that he was not much troubled in saying them and had said that the House had just received a gracious message from the king.39CJ ii. 473b; Clarendon, Hist. i. 587.

Their story corroborated Trelawny’s own narrative, to which he added the telling point that he had personally voted for a guard on Parliament, whatever his reporting of others’ opinions might have been. After an apology to the House, he withdrew to a committee chamber to await his peers’ verdict. Either his demeanour or his apology turned out to have fallen spectacularly short of what was required. Sir Robert Cooke* demanded his disablement, and Roger Mathew, burgess for Plymouth’s neighbour port of Dartmouth, called for him to be sent to the Tower. Sir Simonds D’Ewes agreed with Cooke.40PJ i. 17-18. Despite Sir Edward Hyde’s* later description of Trelawny as ‘a merchant of great reputation’, what is striking is the lack of any significant support forthcoming for him from the west country Members, and Mathew’s speech was probably fatal.41Clarendon, Hist. i. 587. Against D’Ewes’s counsel that there was no need for Trelawny to kneel at the bar to hear his fate, others insisted on it, so that on his knees in tears he had to hear the Speaker disable him from sitting in that Parliament, which Trelawny himself believed would last for many years.42PJ i. 17-18; Trelawny Pprs. 272. It is striking that he seems to have had few friends in the Commons. One of the diarists reported his offending comments as a cynical summary that ‘the king’s fears proceeded from Parliament and the Parliament’s fears proceeded from the king’.43PJ i. 20. Although he felt sorry for Trelawny, D’Ewes was sure he ‘knew him to be a man opposite almost to all goodness’.44PJ i. 17-18.

After this disgrace, Trelawny must have retired to Plymouth to resume his business career. As a crown grantee of the 1630s, an associate of the royalist Sir Ferdinando Gorges and now as a man who might have been forgiven for harbouring a grudge against an unforgiving Parliament, he had plenty of motives for turning towards the king’s camp in the civil war. But he was a member of a corporation that resolutely stood out for the parliamentary cause, and he was not given time to slip away to join one of the royalist regiments in the west country. On 17 October 1642 letters were read in the Commons from Plymouth and Saltash that announced the arrival of royalist soldiers in the area. The outlay on defensive fortifications put in hand by the Plymouth mayor was guaranteed reimbursement on the ‘Propositions’ and an assurance of support on the public faith was given. Trelawny brought the wrath of the House against him for refusing to lend on the grounds that he had lent already.45Bodl. Nalson XIII, f. 300. It was ordered that he should be brought up to London at his own cost.46CJ ii. 811a. John Waddon and the mayor of Plymouth provided Trelawny’s successor in the Plymouth seat, Sir John Yonge*, with a list of further grievances against him. These focused on the power he enjoyed in Plymouth over his ‘creatures and vassals’, so that he was able to dissuade citizens from lending to Parliament. Despite this indictment, the Plymouth men were content that Parliament should decide whether he should be allowed to return home.47Bodl. Nalson III, ff. 290-1.

In January 1643 Trelawny paid duty on cargo brought into Plymouth, proof that against the odds he carried on a commercial enterprise of sorts, although it must have been much reduced from its glory days of a decade previously.48E190/1036/8 Whether he had been able to return to Plymouth at this time is doubtful, and Parliament’s suspicions of him were confirmed in March when it was discovered that at Falmouth he had landed arms and supplies, including foodstuffs, for the use of the king’s army. Trelawny also sent plate as a more personal contribution.49CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 449. By the time that these cargoes were unloaded in Falmouth, Trelawny was incarcerated at Winchester House in Southwark, a bishop’s palace converted into a prison for royalists.50CJ iii. 14a. In August 1643 he drew up his will, describing himself as of Plymouth, but it was probably drafted while he remained under detention in the capital. He remained devoted to Plymouth, requesting burial there, re-affirming his promise to donate £200 towards building the new church and funding an annual sermon on his birthday to exhort ‘all people to works of piety and charity’. Other charitable stipulations included £20 for a maidservant (her virginal status emphasised by Trelawny) of five years’ blameless service, and £5 to an apprentice sailor. The lucky recipients were to be selected from the pool of the worthy eligible by drawing names from a hat. Every third year, Trelawny’s principal heir was to pay £25 to poor relatives and to provide 10 shillings to the Plymouth town clerk, in a ceremony to be overseen by the corporation. It is the wider spread of Trelawny’s charitable impulse that distinguishes this will from the one he had drafted in October 1640, together with the personal touches such as the birthday sermon and the triennial share-out marked by bell-ringing. The sums earmarked for his children remained of a similar scale, with money for a brother assured ‘so he do not clamour for any legacy given him by my father’s will’. His executors and trustees included his friend, the Exeter merchant Simon Snowe* and his cousin Hugh Potter*, who was in London when Trelawny made the will.51Supra, ‘Hugh Potter’. Snowe was a firm parliamentarian, Potter’s politics more ambiguous. The trustees were to ensure that Trelawny’s children ‘improve their portions, holding it unlawful to wrap their talent in a napkin’.52PROB11/192/25.

Trelawny died in 1644, and was buried on 2 March in the central City parish of St Mary Woolchurch, despite his wish to be interred in Plymouth. According to Hyde, he died ‘in prison for want of ordinary relief and refreshment’.53Clarendon, Hist. i. 587. His eldest son, Samuel, computed his father’s losses at £10,000 and after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 asked for a church lease in recompense for this and the destruction of the family house at Ham.54CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 303. Samuel Trelawny held no local government positions during the interregnum, but sat for Bossiney in the 1659 Parliament, for Camelford and Plymouth in the Convention and for Plymouth in the Parliament of 1661.