EURE, Sampson (c.1592-by 1659), of Gray’s Inn, Mdx., and Gatley Park, Aymestry, Herefs.

The Eure family was ancient, noble and had a record of membership of Parliament which stretched back to 1307, but Sampson Eure was the first to settle in Herefordshire. His father was a younger son of William, 2nd Baron Eure, and his uncle, Ralph Eure†, who became the 3rd baron, had been prominent at Gray’s Inn, where Sampson Eure in his turn became a leading member.28HP Commons 1604-1629. Eure was attorney-general in Wales and the marches for nearly 20 years, a post in the council in the marches that provided him with considerable standing as one of the top three officials of that court. He had an establishment at Ludlow by 1624, when he bought household linen and tableware for it, but by the spring of 1632 had his sights on the estate of Gatley, eight miles north west of Leominster.29Herefs. RO, F76/II/26, 27; IV/3, 11. He was assisted in his purchase from Sir William Croft by Sir Robert Harley*.30Herefs. RO, F76/IV/11. Croft was selling up his Herefordshire interests, but for the rest of the 1630s Eure consolidated his assets in the Leominster area.31Herefs. RO, F76/II, III. By 1635, he was willing to part with his post as Welsh attorney-general for money or preferment, but Eure’s career progress was slower than he had expected.32Whitelocke, Diary, 100, 106. He was ambitious for office, setting his sights in the 1630s on the position first of attorney of the wards, then king’s serjeant, or failing that, on the post of solicitor to one or other of the leading members of the royal family.33Strafforde Letters, i. 506, ii. 152; SP16/257/51. I (f. 88). There is no evidence to suggest the cast of Eure’s political outlook at this time; he associated with Harley on business matters in Herefordshire, and acted as a trustee for Sir William Armyne* in the 1630s.34Coventry Docquets, 698. Both these men were to appear on the opposite side from Eure in the civil war.

Eure is thought to have entered the Commons in 1621 by the intervention of his step-mother, Elin, Lady Eure, but he secured his seat at Leominster in the second Parliament of 1640 by the interest of his own that he had built up with his Gatley estate. He was not among the Members active in the first weeks of the assembly. Not until 26 February 1641 was he noticed by the clerk, and then only to have his permission to return to the country recorded.35CJ ii. 93a. He took the Protestation to defend the Protestant religion, the king’s person and the privileges of Parliament on 3 May, but on the 14th began to assume a higher profile. The Commons agreed to supply the king, on this occasion by means of a grant of £400,000 to pay off the armies in Scotland and Ireland, a tax that was to be a staging-post between the subsidy and the fixed quotas of the later monthly assessment.36M. Braddick, Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 1994), 127-8. The bill was put in the care of Eure and another serjeant-at-law, Richard Cresheld. On the 29th, Cresheld was called upon to chair a committee of the whole House, but excused himself on the grounds of deafness brought on by a heavy cold. Eure took the chair instead, as he did in subsequent meetings of the committee of the Whole House on this bill.37CJ ii. 147a, 161b, 162a; Procs. LP iv. 465, 648. On 5 June, he chaired a long meeting on the bill, when ‘many particulars were spoken unto and some things altered’.38Procs. LP iv. 739. It is clear that in moving the bill forward, Eure had the confidence of the House. On one occasion, when Eure came in late and took the chair from John Selden, there were expressions of relief all round, not least from Selden himself.39Procs. LP v. 68. He was master of the detail of the bill, reporting eight resolutions made by the House when in grand committee (14 June).40CJ ii. 175a; Procs. LP v. 132, 144. In July, he was deputed to ensure that his inn of court brought in its quota of personal taxation.41CJ ii. 199a.

Eure sat on a number of committees in 1641 which dealt with matters of lesser public concern. Among these were the bill for Coningsby’s hospital, Hereford, and the committee which attempted to resolved the inheritance dispute between Sir James Thynne* and his half-brother.42CJ ii. 160a, 217b. In the summer of 1641, Eure was knighted, a confirmation of the high esteem in which he was held at court, already evidenced in his promotion to king’s serjeant the previous year. His most eminent supporters during the ceremonies of initiation into the serjeantcy had been John Egerton, 1st earl of Bridgewater and president of the council in the marches and George Goring, Baron Goring: both prominent supporters of the king and neither sympathetic to the parliamentary opposition; but the support also of Francis Thorpe*, an enemy of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), cautions against exaggerating the political significance of these sponsors.43Baker, Serjeants-at-Law, 389, 440. Between the time of his knighthood and the end of the year, Eure moved into the background in Parliament. He was named to no committees between 20 July and 30 November, and on the latter day, he was identified with others as a pool from which reporters of a conference with the Lords on a loan from the City and the publication of names of leading Catholic recusants were to be drawn. In the event, Eure did not report.44CJ ii. 327b; D’Ewes (C), 217. On 10 December, he contributed essentially a point of legality to a committee discussion on a bill for pressing of soldiers.45D’Ewes (C), 262. On the 20th, he was appointed to work on a bill to disarm recusants, and the following day was co-opted to contribute further to the bill for £400,000, which had still not passed, and which was now required (since MPs were now gripped by news of the horrors of the Irish rebellion) to include extra clauses to encourage voluntary contributions for the relief of Protestants in Ireland.46CJ ii. 350a, 352a. It seems to have been the decision of Eure’s sub-committee that commissioners for the poll tax should also collect contributions for Ireland.47CJ ii. 352b; D’Ewes (C), 332. John Wylde seems to have moved in on pushing forward the bill for £400,000, to which Eure had contributed so much in the early stages.48PJ i. 412.

Like many from the marcher counties and south Wales, Eure was concerned at the perceived threat from Roman Catholics, and on two occasions in April and May 1642 contributed towards the processing of intelligence about written and verbal threats of disorder.49CJ ii. 514b, 554a; PJ ii. 267. But this was his last contribution towards Commons business. On 6 May, he was allowed to serve as counsel to the Lords, and was only mentioned again in the Commons journal as an absentee. He was included in the king’s commission of array for Herefordshire in the summer of 1642, but did not take up arms in the civil war. It was later certified by constables in his part of Herefordshire that Eure executed none of the writs that came to him from the king’s council.50Herefs. RO, F76/IV/9. By September, after armed hostilities had broken out, his absence was noted in the House, and in November he was sent for as a delinquent.51CJ ii. 750a, 845b. Eure may have been in Herefordshire, but the allegation by one of his enemies that he walked ‘in the streets every day’ suggests that he stayed in London, and simply withdrew from the Commons.52CJ ii. 955a; Add. 18777, f. 142. A fruitless order that he should attend was repeated in September 1643, but by January 1644 it was clear that he was waiting on the king in Oxford. At the opening of the royalist Oxford Parliament (22 Jan.), Eure was selected immediately as Speaker of the Commons, suggesting that this appointment had been planned for some time, although one report considered Geoffrey Palmer a more likely candidate for the office.53HEHL, HA8060; Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer no. 40 (16-24 Jan. 1644), 308 (E.30.3). In line with the traditions of choosing Speakers at Westminster, Eure’s legal experience recommended him to his colleagues and to the king.54Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer no. 41 (23-30 Jan. 1644), 314 (E.30.19). He signed the letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, suing for peace, and issued requests for loans to resist the Scottish army. He stayed in Oxford through the recesses of the Parliament there, until the city surrendered (24 June 1646).55Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573; NLW, Tredegar Park 749; SP23/192/549.

Eure submitted to the Westminster Parliament’s committee for Herefordshire and associated counties in August 1646, and was treated favourably by its members, probably because of his long association with Sir Robert Harley. The committee was evidently inclined to accept reports that Eure ‘demeaned himself fairly’ in Herefordshire, and he meekly sought to conform to the advice or directions of Edward Harley* the same month that the Herefordshire committee wrote its sympathetic report.56Herefs. RO, F76/III/106; F76/IV/8, 9; Add. 70005, unfol.: Eure to Edward Harley, 18 Aug. 1646. Eure’s petition to compound for his delinquency on the Oxford articles of surrender was accepted, and in December his fine of £185 was set at one tenth by the London Committee for Compounding. He petitioned on several occasions through 1647 for a reduction, claiming that his estate was entailed, and by February 1648 had succeeded in securing a revision downwards to £110.57SP23/192/554, 556, 557, 563, 567; CCC 1510-11. He later claimed that the solicitor to the Herefordshire committee surveyed the estate, ‘a mountainous and barren ground’, in September 1646 and pronounced it worth only £70 p.a. in a good year.58Herefs. RO, F76/IV/10/1; F76/III/99. Eure persisted in his professions of poverty and good affection towards Parliament into the early 1650s, and struggled to evade contributing a horse to the militia commissioners at the time of the emergency of 1651.59Herefs. RO, F76/IV/10/1, 24, 28, 29.

Eure drew up his will as early as January 1647, expressing a wish that £2,000 given to him by the king in April 1645 should be used for paying his debts. He hoped that his only son might be studious enough to attend Oxford University and Gray’s Inn, but left his executor to choose an alternative profession if studying proved inappropriate for him. Both these stipulations and the modest legacies he left to the Herefordshire poor, and to his friends, suggest that his complaints of straitened circumstances were not without foundation.60Herefs. RO, F76/IV/1. Eure was not among the 22 Herefordshire men rounded up and interned at Hereford in January 1656, further confirmation that he had withdrawn completely from political activity. He continued to practise law in the Leominster district, acting in 1656 on behalf of Henry Marten, who owned the manor of Leominster Foreign, but the fee of £2 5s he took for this was hardly the kind of money he was once used to earning.61Univ. of Leeds, Brotherton Lib. Marten Loder MSS, vol. ‘Thomas Deane Letters II’, f. 33; vol. ‘Manor of Leominster’, f. 20. He died some time in 1658 or 1659 before December, when probate of his estate was granted. He was probably buried at Aymestry in his adopted county, in accordance with his wishes.