KYRLE, Walter (1598-1650), of the Middle Temple, London, Dymock, Glos. and Ross-on-Wye, Herefs.

The Kyrle family had been seated at Walford since at least the end of the fifteenth century, obtaining a grant of it in 1549.12Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 276, 280; Duncumb, Collections, i. 184. Walter Kyrle’s great-uncle, Thomas Kyrle, sat in the Commons for Chichester in 1571, and bought the estate of Much Marcle in 1574. Thomas Kyrle was a money-lender and lawyer in London, but his eldest brother’s family stayed at Walford, providing the county in successive generations with high sheriffs.13HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Thomas Kyrle’; Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 280. James Kyrle of Walford, Walter Kyrle’s elder brother, married a niece of John Hampden*. As a second son, Walter himself was sent to university and to the Middle Temple, where he was bound with his great-uncle, James Kyrle, in 1618. He was admitted to chambers there in 1621, and began to take pupils himself.14MTR ii. 625, 646, 656, 665, 668, 679, 680, 685, 687. He was called to the bar in 1625, and was fined on a number of occasions for absenting himself from readings at his inn.15MTR ii. 700, 701, 705, 712, 719, 726, 731, 738.

As a barrister, Kyrle specialised in taking pupils from Herefordshire and the surrounding region. Among the 17 he took in down to 1640 was his relative, James Pye, brother of Sir Walter Pye* and son of Sir Walter Pye I† of the Mynde. The elder Sir Walter was a client of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, and a Welsh judge, attorney of the court of wards and high steward of Leominster; the last-named post came to him through the king’s grant to Buckingham of Leominster manor in 1620. Pye was also an important figure in the Middle Temple, being treasurer in 1626. Kyrle must have owed his own modest career – and his repeated absences from functions at the inn – to Pye’s help, in an illustration of the hierarchy of patronage.16MTR ii. 712, 790, 794; Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 174, 280; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Walter Pye’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Walter Pye I’, ‘Walter Pye II’. Another Herefordshire pupil of Kyrle’s was James Scudamore of Ballingham, a relative and scion of a branch of an ancient county family. James Scudamore was later to provide newsletters of events in London during the civil war, including a graphic account of the turbulent events in the summer of 1647.17MTR ii. 794, 846; C115/99/7317; Hereford City Library, Webbs Collection, ‘County of Hereford Civil War’, pp. 82-107. Down to 1640, there was no sense of any political divide in Kyrle’s acceptance of these pupillages, nor was there any hint of later loyalties. Henry Herbert* of Coldbrook, Monmouthshire, for example, became an active parliamentarian in the civil war; Humphrey Coningsby*, a royalist in Herefordshire.18MTR ii. 824, 881. In 1635 Kyrle was again in trouble with the inn over an attendance question; his appearance in a star chamber case that year was probably as an attorney, or at least as one who knew the court well through the influence of his patron, Pye.19MTR ii. 835; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 491.

Kyrle was elected for Leominster to the first Parliament of 1640 on the combined interest of the Pyes and his own family. He is not known to have made any contribution to this assembly. On 21 October in the same year, he was elected again for the senior seat, ahead of Sir Sampson Eure*.20C219/43/1/202. It was not until June 1642 that he made his presence felt in the Commons in any way, promising at that time to contribute a horse for the defence of Parliament.21PJ iii. 472. It was his elder brother, James Kyrle, who was the chief promoter of an anti-episcopal petition from the county in 1641.22Brilliana Harley Letters, 121; J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 114, 122. In August 1641, however, Walter was appointed a magistrate and named as a commissioner for disarming recusants: the latter a significant responsibility in a county apprehensive about the intentions of the Catholic Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester.23Northants. RO, FH133; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 97-8. On the eve of civil war, Kyrle was in Hereford. At the summer sessions in Hereford in 1642, a crowd interrupted proceedings, crying up the king and cursing the ‘roundheads’. A minority of the justices, Walter Kyrle among them, had been identified as favouring Parliament, and they were forced to take refuge from the mob.24Harl. 7189, f. 241v. Walter Kyrle was accompanied on this occasion by his elder brother, James, who proved to be the most energetic of his family in the parliamentary cause. James Kyrle of Walford, as ‘Colonel Kyrle’, played an important military role in Herefordshire. This partly explains why as well as naming James and Walter Kyrle, the militia commission issued by Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, on 30 September also listed Sir John Kyrle (their first cousin, once removed) and his son, Francis.25HMC Portland, iii. 100.

There was probably another issue of patronage influencing Walter Kyrle’s political sympathies. He was steward of the Herefordshire lands of the earl of Essex, so may have been assumed to have been compliant with his employer; he was also steward of Goodrich, a manor of Anthony Grey, 9th earl of Kent, another peer who inclined to Parliament.26Add. 70005, f. 24 (3rd foliation); Herefs. RO, O 68/I/1. James Kyrle was busy in Herefordshire in 1642-3, involved in a confrontation - with mutual threats of tree-felling reprisals - with John Scudamore†, Viscount Scudamore [I], and reporting to his friend Sir Robert Harley* from Gloucester, a city ‘faithful to the cause’. He reported to Harley in January 1643 how he had heard that one of his cousins, ‘Captain’ (probably Francis) Kyrle had gone over to the enemy, but was trying not to believe the story. It is clear that James Kyrle was ahead of his own brother in his commitment to the war.27Add. 70106, ff. 5, 98; Bodl. Dugdale 19, f. 38.

While James Kyrle was busy denouncing the ‘scandalous’ and ‘miserable’ clergy of his county, and found himself belatedly cast out of the king’s commission of the peace, Walter Kyrle was yet to be named to any committee of the Commons, for the simple reason that he was at home.28Add. 70106, f. 7; Bodl. Dugdale 19, f. 19v. In July 1642, he had gone down to Ross-on-Wye, without leave. In September he had intended to return to Westminster, but was stayed by a message from Essex, which Kyrle seems to have taken as a signal to wait for an escort. The result was that he stayed put, and on 28 September 1643 was among a group of Members ordered to attend the House on pain of sequestration.29CJ iii. 256b; iv. 694a. His case came up again in January 1644, but still no action was taken against him.30CJ iii. 374a. In 1645, James Kyrle was busy issuing military commissions in Essex’s name, supported by Edward Harley*, probably in a countering move against the New Model’s recruitment, but then he died, Walter having been named as an overseer of his will.31Add. 70005, ff. 48, 55 (2nd foliation); Add. 70107, misc. 6. At the end of that year, Walter was still in Herefordshire, practising law and bemoaning ‘the miseries and trouble of the time’.32Add. 11047, f. 130.

In 1646, the demise of two of his closest allies weakened Kyrle’s stance of prolonged absenteeism from London. In February, the death of the redoubtable James Kyrle was a ‘sorrowful disturbance’ to him.33Add. 11047, f. 134. Despite this, he remained active and committed enough to the parliamentary cause to take a lease of a property confiscated from a royalist from the county sequestration committee. He was thrown from his horse in August, and was so bruised that a month later he refused even local journeys, but he let it be known in other quarters that he planned soon to visit London. He must have realised that the death of the earl of Essex (14 Sept. 1646) exposed him to the ill-will of those who were critical of his absence from Westminster.34Add. 11047, f. 143; Add. 70125, loose: Richard Wigmore to Edward Harley, 2 Oct. 1646. Kyrle was still busy in the role of steward to the Devereux Herefordshire estates in October, although some of his authority had evidently been usurped by another bailiff.35Add. 11047, f. 141; Add. 16178, f. 78v. But Sir Robert Harley soon found himself having to defend Kyrle in the House (15 Oct. 1646), and managed to stave off moves to have him disabled from sitting, throwing into his narrative the detail that Kyrle had suffered two days’ imprisonment at Ross at the hands of the royalists. Other Members, including Laurence Whitaker, found Kyrle’s lenient treatment, after an absence of four years, remarkable.36Add. 70005, f. 24 (3rd foliation); CJ iv. 694a, 694b; Add. 31116, p. 571. It would seem improbable that Kyrle ever went to Oxford with the king, illness notwithstanding, although his enemies in the army would interpret his absence from the House as an indication of crypto-royalism.37Duncumb, Collections, i. 186.

It is clear that Sir Robert Harley had protected Kyrle all along, but from October 1646, he finally attended the House. A week after Harley’s vindication of him, Kyrle was named to his first committee (23 Oct.), on the Herefordshire petition against John Birch*, which was promoted by the Harleys and their allies.38CJ iv. 703a. He sat on a committee entrusted with the sale of the lands of leading royalists including the earl of Worcester, seated in Monmouthshire, and in the following May was a natural choice for a committee working on the sale of Worcester’s lands in Gloucestershire. Before the end of the year (9 Dec.), Kyrle took the Covenant.39CJ iv. 710b; v. 7b, 162b. This was not the start of a late flowering of activism on his part. He was named to a committee on removing malignant clergy from their posts (22 Mar. 1647) and as a commissioner for the University of Oxford; his appointment on 11 May to a committee for bestowing lands on Sir Thomas Fairfax* in the company of both Sir Robert and Edward Harley was probably intended to bolster the opposition to the plan. But on 1 June he was given leave to go the country, and is unlikely ever to have returned. From then until December 1648 he was listed as absent, excused at calls of the House or granted further leave.40CJ v. 193b, 223a, 330a, 375a, 588a; vi. 34a.

Correspondents from Herefordshire, including Edward Harley and the county committeeman John Flackett*, addressed themselves to Kyrle in 1647 as to the other knights and burgesses from the county who were still left in the House, but he played no discernible active part in response.41Add. 70005, ff. 24 (3rd foliation), 30 (4th foliation); HMC Portland, iii. 146. Among the pressing concerns of both Members and local committeemen was the problem of soldiers billeted in the county, especially those in the regiment of John Birch. Kyrle seems to have been involved in the purchase of Hereford castle for the county, to the extent of being one of the MPs named as trustees, in April 1647. That month, when Birch was replaced as governor after his election to the House, his successor thanked Kyrle and the other Members for the city and county for entrusting him with his new responsibility.42Add. 70105, loose; Webb, Memorials, ii. 42; HMC Portland, iii. 155. When he was asked to go down to the country with Harley in December, he was almost certainly there already.43CJ v. 400b. Inevitably, his association with the Harleys tainted him in the eyes of the army. He was denounced in a condemnation of the family’s associates as ‘a great cavalier’ who had ‘kept correspondency with the enemy’s garrisons, and by raising monies and provision for them’.44Clarke Pprs. ii. 158.

Kyrle gave up his Middle Temple chambers in May 1648, and retired to the country. He signed a commission to make Edward Harley a colonel in six Herefordshire hundreds in June, and was still signing local committee orders in December, but his hand was distinctly shaky, suggesting that whether or not his political commitment was limited, poor health was behind his withdrawal.45MTR ii. 963; Add. 70006, f. 30; SP28/229, loose. Though he and Edward Harley were asked by the House to bring in tax arrears (25 Nov. 1648), he would doubtless have been secluded by the army at Pride’s Purge had he been present in the Commons on that day. Even though his name figured on one of the lists of those purged, he seems unlikely to have been at Westminster at the time.46A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). He was named to no more government commissions after 1648. He died in 1650. His son John entered his father’s inn in 1657, but found immortality in Herefordshire as the ‘Man of Ross’, that town’s most noted philanthropist. Inheriting an estate of about £600 a year from Walter Kyrle, the Man of Ross bestowed most of his fortune on civic improvements and was publicised by Alexander Pope, before dying a bachelor in 1724. The Kyrles’ house faced the south-east corner of the market in Ross, and John Kyrle had inscribed on it a design intended to proclaim ‘Love King Charles from the heart’.47MTR iii. 1107; Oxford DNB, ‘John Kyrle’.