VOYSEY, Andrew (c.1580-1653), of Dartmouth, Devon.

Little is known of the family background of Andrew Voysey. The Voyseys were minor gentry in Bovey Tracey, and the register of that parish continued to record their significant life events through the seventeenth century. Simon Voysey, Andrew’s father, at some point moved to Cullompton, and in 1653 Andrew still had property there. In 1642, one man of the name Voysey took the Protestation of Parliament: presumably a relative.11Devon Protestation Returns, i. 26. As for Andrew Voysey himself, he moved on to another district of Devon, to Dartmouth, where he must have secured an apprenticeship to one of the town’s merchants, quite possibly Robert Martin, one of whose daughters he married. By 1618 he was paying poor rates in Dartmouth, and by 1625 was with his brother-in-law, Roger Mathew*, one of the four highest rated individuals in the parish of St Saviour’s, and with the title ‘Mr’.12Devon RO, DD 61943, 62215. He was six years later than Mathew in setting his foot on the ladder of civic office that led to the mayoralty, suggesting that he may have been born in the early to mid-1580s.

His business career was typical of the Dartmouth leading merchants in being a mixture of trade with French and Spanish ports, complemented by a significant investment in the Newfoundland fisheries, by which fish and ‘train oil’ (whale and cod oil) were imported from the north Atlantic and re-shipped to the European markets. From France and Spain came miscellaneous cargoes; in 1636, for example, Voysey imported cork from southern Spain.13E190/950/1. He shared the anxiety general among the west country merchants about the depredations of pirates from north Africa, and between 1626 and 1628 was granted letters of marque for three ships, two of which were each 120 tons burthen.14CSP Dom. 1628-9, pp. 286, 291, 306. With Mathew, his father-in-law Martin and others he took the initiative in fortifying Dartmouth against the Spanish in 1626, requesting government assistance, the letters of marque intended for possible use against ships of other countries as well as against pirates.15Select Naval Documents ed. H.W. Hodges, E.A. Hughes (Cambridge, 1922), 43-4. During his mayoralty in 1626-7, Voysey led 22 other Dartmouth men in petitioning for exemption from the Forced Loan, which they calculated as equivalent to 40 subsidies, on the grounds of the loss of trade at the port caused by piracy.16SP16/61/17. Only months later, he wrote again to the privy council, security again a priority, as the exodus of population from the town in response to plague had left the town exposed to foreign enemies, France was by then added to Spain and the pirates as a threat. Voysey requested an order to compel the return of those staying in neighbouring parishes in the hope of avoiding the infection, and was soon sending intelligence to London of a large French fleet off the South Hams.17CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 217; SP16/7/35.

During the 1630s, Voysey developed his business interests and his standing in the Dartmouth civic community. He matched Mathew in his contribution to the rebuilding of St Saviour’s church in 1630-1, and in 1631 took a leading part in opposing trading monopolies from which merchants of Dartmouth and other western ports were excluded.18Devon RO, DD 62464. He opposed the charter to the Spanish Company, and led a delegation to London to oppose a Trinity House recommendation that foreign merchants be allowed to ship fish from western ports only in English vessels. While the Trinity House men, dominated by London interests, considered that the proposed restriction would stimulate English shipping, the westerners worried about the consequences to business itself of such a monopoly, fearing that trade would be lost because of inadequate overseas transport. Their concerns could hardly have been allayed by the poor turn-out of privy councillors, which denied them a hearing.19SP16/198/59; HMC 3rd Rep. 71. Despite the gloomy prognostications of Voysey and his colleagues, the trade of Dartmouth was not entirely depressed during the 1630s. Voysey seems to have taken a confident, not to say dismissive, view of his creditors, if the testimony of a plaintiff against him can be believed, and by the early 1640s he was trading to the Cape Verde islands and New England, a new route for him, taking out a policy of assurance in the sum of £1,000, against an investment in the voyage of £1,800. 20SP16/297/32; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 2.

Voysey was elected to the Short Parliament probably because his brother-in-law, Mathew, was ineligible as a serving mayor. He served on no committees, nor has any speech of his been recorded. After returning home, he claimed for 40 days’ service from the Dartmouth corporation.21Devon RO, DD 62692. His parliamentary service turned out not only to be brief but also was never to be repeated, as in the Long Parliament Mathew resumed his accustomed place as the borough’s representative, and Dartmouth looked beyond its boundaries for a successor to John Upton I*. In July 1641, Voysey lent his name to a petition of tinners and others who sought to protect the stannary courts against abolition, but in January 1642 was prominent in the petition to Parliament which identified popish plots both at home and in Ireland as the gravest threat to the borough and the kingdom. In the view of Voysey and his fellow-petitioners, the loss of confidence among London citizens caused by the political crisis threatened the economy of the south west, as London was the largest market for Newfoundland fish. Developing their argument of the inter-dependency of the economy on the one hand, and political and religious policy on the other, they called for the removal from the Lords of popish peers and bishops.22PA, Main Pprs. 25 Jan. 1642.

A petition of this tenor clearly inclined Dartmouth towards the parliamentarian side in the civil war. Voysey was probably in the majority among the merchant elite in Dartmouth in his support for Parliament. He lent money to the cause on the ‘public faith’ in August 1642, and that year also lent a further £100 towards the Adventure in Ireland.23Devon RO, DD 62709; SP63/297/284. Voysey contributed extensively towards the defence of Dartmouth and the Dart. He provided the wherewithal for two dragoons; he furnished one of his sons to set out as a trooper; his 400-ton ship Luke guarded the navigable Dart with a complement of 16 guns, and he billeted soldiers on their way to the skirmish at Modbury in December 1642.24Devon RO, DD 62707. He later claimed that he tried to mobilise the town against Prince Maurice’s advance in October 1643, but that he was ill and bound by engagements to a family ‘then in the enemy’s power’.25CCAM 566. By this he probably meant his brother-in-law, Roger Mathew, who went to the Oxford Parliament with Edward Seymour*. After claiming the benefits of the articles of surrender to Maurice, Voysey remained in Dartmouth during the royalist administration of the town. He later claimed he was badly treated at the surrender, being manhandled on to a ship and abused for refusing an oath. Whether or not this was true, his business activities resumed; Luke, evidently released from military duties, imported train oil again after the royalists took the town.26CCAM 566; Devon RO, 1392 M/L1643/45; 3799-3, list of ships in Dartmouth, Oct. 1643.

By July 1645, while Dartmouth was still under royalist control, the Committee for Advance of Money had identified Voysey as a royalist delinquent. The information against him seems to have emanated from the merchant shipping community, which was aware of the loss of Charles, the ship Voysey had set out for a transatlantic voyage, with its name that would now have seemed obviously partisan to some. Furthermore, from the autumn of 1645, while Dartmouth was still the king’s, Voysey served a third term as mayor, making him a suspect figure at Westminster.27CCAM 565-6. However, he had friends among the new Devon county committee, formed after the county and its boroughs had been brought under parliamentary control by the New Model army. In September 1646, the committeemen assured Westminster of Voysey’s loyalty and loans to Parliament, to the tune of £1,000. Sequestration proceedings against him were immediately dropped. 28CCAM 566.

In his final years, Voysey returned to trade and to rescuing something from the loss of Charles. He wrote in September 1648 to his son Robert, once the trooper Voysey had equipped for Parliament and now a merchant or agent in Madeira. Voysey complained of a lack of money, and of the need to sell the provisions, guns and hull of Charles. He advised his son to ‘Serve God ... and then God will bless all that you take in hand and if you fail to serve God, nothing will come to good that you do in this world nor for the world to come’.29Province and Ct. Recs. of Maine (Maine Historical Soc. i), 152-3. By October 1650, however, Robert Voysey had moved to Maine, where he was attempting to recover something from the capture of another of his father’s ships, Luke, perhaps the same that had once guarded the Dart for Parliament.30Province and Ct. Recs. of Maine, 153-4. In May 1653 Voysey made his will, which itemised his extensive interests in houses and gardens, but which gave no indication of how much cash he still enjoyed or the extent of his trading interests abroad. He died in Dartmouth a day or two later, and was buried at St Saviour’s on 22 May. After his death, a dispute over the will broke out between his eldest son, Andrew, and his third wife and the four other sons, over the terms of the marriage contract between Voysey and Welthian Kellond, the Totnes merchant’s daughter he had married in 1637.31C6/85/116. Two of Voysey’s sons continued as merchants. Robert was travelling to France in the late 1650s, and in July 1664 there were reports that William, the only child Voysey had with Welthian, had fallen into captivity near Corinth.32CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 550; HMC Finch, i. 325. No member of the family is known to have sat again in Parliament.