HELE, Sir Thomas, 1st bt. (c.1595-1670), of Flete Damarell, Holbeton, Devon.

The Heles were already prominent in south Devon in the thirteenth century and perhaps earlier.22Vis. Devonshire 1620 (Harl. Soc. vi), 145-6. Sir Thomas Hele’s father disinherited his eldest son, and died holding lands amounting to over 2,000 acres in 15 parishes in Devon and seven in Cornwall. Among his father’s executors was Sir Samuel Rolle*, a relative, and the Heles were also kinsmen of the Barons Mohun.23PROB11/144/565. Hele’s parliamentary career began in 1626 after he had established himself as an electoral patron at Plympton, and was well regarded by the government in 1627, when he was created a baronet, the usual fee being waived. He supported George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham in the Parliament of 1628, and was a reliable servant of the government during the personal rule of the king, his period as sheriff in 1635-6 being marked by no controversy during the first collections of Ship Money.24M.D. Gordon, ‘Collection of Ship-Money in the reign of Charles I’, TRHS ser. 3, iv. 157. He represented Plympton again in the Parliament of April 1640, as he had done in two Parliaments of the 1620s, after an election that was marked by an irregular return of a third candidate, Sir Richard Strode*.25CJ ii. 7a. He made no impression on the records of the assembly. He participated in the election at Exeter for the county in October, and signed the indenture as an elector. 26C219/43/1. The interest that Hele could mobilize at Plympton for his own candidacy there must have been considerable, but in the second election there that year, he was edged out by Sir Nicholas Slanning and the man-of-business of Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, Michael Oldisworth. When Slanning chose to sit for Penryn and Oldisworth for Salisbury, Hele was returned at the subsequent by-election.

Despite Hele’s record of support for the government as sheriff and as a favoured recipient of a baronetcy, his name appeared in 1640 on a list of those who had made no response to requests for contributions to fund the confrontation with the Scots Covenanters. This was interpreted by the privy council, rightly or wrongly, as an expression of a lack of sympathy with the king’s policies. Hele’s relative Sir Samuel Rolle was another non-responder, and Rolle was a critic of the king. That Hele’s name was accompanied in the list also by those of future royalists like Sir Edward Seymour, father of Edward Seymour*, and Peter Sainthill*, however, suggests merely that the government was sensitive to perceived slights, rather than that this was a studied act of recalcitrance.27Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 913. Once at Westminster, Hele made good his slowness to contribute, pledging £1,000 on 21 November, according to Sir Simonds D’Ewes*.28Procs. LP i. 228. On 15 December he made his first noted speech, in the hearings of charges against Lord Keeper John Finch†, although Hele’s remarks were recorded in so cryptic a way as to be quite obscure and hard to interpret.29Northcote Note Bk. 87.

He was not among the activists in the House during the Parliament’s opening months. Hele was named to his first committee only on 13 February 1641, on a bill to abolish superstition and idolatry.30CJ ii. 84b. This was the extent of his participation in the remedial legislation of 1641, apart from a nomination by John Pym, Member for Tavistock, to the committee investigating the activities of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford (2 Apr.).31CJ ii. 115b. More constructively, on 30 April he was called to the committee to draft instructions for the subsidy commissioners.32CJ ii. 130b. Hele took the Protestation on 3 May, but nothing further was heard of him until 30 June. On that day he was given leave of absence, once he had paid his poll tax contribution.33CJ ii. 132b, 194a. The conditional terms of his leave may suggest some suspicion towards Hele may have begun to form in the minds of the managers of the opposition to the king. He is next heard of some eight months later, when with Sir William Savile and John Manners*, 8th earl of Rutland, he was required (25 Feb. 1642) to act as a messenger to the king, who was at Dover, with the answer of both Houses in response to a royal statement on the militia.34PJ i. 428, 434. The purpose of the mission was to persuade the king to look favourably upon the Militia Ordinance, but he responded with a warning to Parliament against meddling in military matters. Whatever faith may have been invested in Hele by the members of the junto, he evidently felt he had no further part to play in the growing crisis, and on 7 March was again granted leave. In June he was named to the king’s commission of array for Devon.35Northants RO, FH133, unfol.

On 12 July, Hele’s case was considered by a Commons committee investigating Members’ absences. Hele’s excuse was that he was at home in distant Devon, and had not heard of the order requiring attendance. His relative, Sir Samuel Rolle, argued his case, but it was opposed by Hele’s neighbour, William Strode I, who held it to be a bad precedent to allow it to succeed.36PJ iii. 201, In the event, Hele’s excuse was accepted both by the committee and the House when it heard the report. He was given the opportunity of returning to Westminster without paying the fine of £100 imposed on other absentees, suggesting that both he and a majority of his colleagues in the Commons were not yet willing to burn their bridges with each other.37CJ ii. 666b. On 21 July, Hele brought into the House the petition of Dr Richard Dukeson, rector of St Clement Danes, London, imprisoned on 13 July for ‘shuffling and shifting answers’ to the charge that he had read to his parishioners the king’s most recent declaration.38CJ ii. 669b, 683b; PJ iii. 243; Al. Ox. sub Dukeson. Hele was successful in promoting Dukeson’s apology, and his advocacy, such as it was, of the clergyman’s contrition was the nearest Hele came to identifying himself in the House with the king’s cause. He must have withdrawn from the Commons some time after this intervention.

By the winter, after the outbreak and the first major battle of the civil war, Hele’s standing at Westminster had changed dramatically. On 12 November, he was ordered to be brought up from Devon in custody at his own expense.39CJ ii. 845b. He was by this time clearly regarded as firmly of the king’s party, as his appointment to the commission of array had implied nearly six months earlier. A post-Restoration commentator categorized Hele as among those gentry ‘of great estates and repute’ whose withdrawal from Westminster brought to the king’s cause ‘great credit for the justness of it’. How much Hele gave to the king in terms of men and money is not known.40D. Lloyd, Memoires (1665), 691. In February 1643 he acquired the colonelcy of a regiment. This was the trained band of tinners, the command of which Hele inherited from the Champernowne family. In the pressing circumstances of civil war, Hele was given authority to recruit to the regiment and expand it, but as the county was under the control of Parliament the opportunities for him to do so were strictly limited. Despite his prominence in the tinning districts of Devon, Hele and his associates evidently felt the need to do what they could to prevent challenges to his command. The agent of the Champernownes, Eustace Budgell, was sent to lobby Edward Walker, the king’s secretary at Oxford, not to allow any rival command of the tinners, which ‘would make a great clashing and distraction in the king’s service’.41Harl. 6804, f. 132, Harl. 6851, f. 127; S.K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local Administration, 1646-1670 (Exeter, 1985), 172, n. 133. At around the same time, Hele’s house was raided by the Plymouth parliamentarians, who seized 20 horses and took some prisoners.42A True and Perfect Relation of the Passages in Devonshire (1643), 3 (E.91.4). Hele’s rival for the command of the tinners was in fact Sir Nicholas Slanning, who incorporated Devon elements into his own regiment of Cornish tinners.43M. Stoyle, West Britons (Exeter, 2002), 205-6.

After the parliamentary order for his arrest, Hele was inevitably targeted by Westminster as a source of money. On 5 January 1643 as an individual known to have a great estate he was asked to ‘lend’ £200, which by 23 January was openly described by the Journal clerk as an assessment on him.44CJ ii. 916a, 939b; Add. 18777, ff. 116v, 131v. Evidence of his military career in Devon is rather slight, but it seems clear that after ceding the tinners’ regiment to Slanning, he went on to raise a cavalry regiment. He helped besiege Plymouth during 1643 and 1644.45A True Narration, 15; A Continuation of the True Narration, 8. After the Restoration, a number of Devon men claimed compensation for injuries sustained while serving under his command during the civil war.46Devon RO, QS 128/3/10; 128/14, 81, 141. In January 1644, Hele made his way to Oxford to take a seat in the king’s rival Parliament. On 22 January, the day the king addressed both Houses at Oxford, Hele was among those disabled by the Commons at Westminster from sitting further there.47CJ iii. 374a. On the 27th, he signed the letter to the Westminster Parliament’s lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, urging a peace treaty.48Names of the Lords and Commons Assembled (1644) 6 (E.32.3). He later denied that he played any part in the declaration from Oxford that pronounced members of both Houses at Westminster to be traitors.49CCC 1239. He had returned to Devon by mid-April, when Prince Maurice ordered Edward Seymour*, governor of Dartmouth, to deliver pistols to Hele for unspecified service.50HMC 15th Rep. vii. 72. The consignment may have been in preparation for a march by Hele to join Maurice before Lyme, or perhaps for Hele’s continuing service before Plymouth: it is impossible to determine which. But later that summer, Hele took his regiment as far as Lostwithiel in pursuit of Essex. In August, Hele joined in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the king when in Cornwall to release a force large enough to be able to relieve Seymour.51Mems. of Prince Rupert, iii. 14. In November he was at Exeter, and joined the royalist commissioners Peter Sainthill*, (Sir) Peter Balle* and (Sir) George Parry* in an invitation to the parliamentarian Devon gentry to enter a peace treaty with them.52Bodl. Nalson III, ff. 290-1. It seems likely that he remained in Exeter for the duration of the war, and his last recorded attendance at Devon quarter sessions there was at Easter 1645.53Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. He was able to plead the articles of surrender ratified on 9 April 1646 when the city capitulated to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s* army.54CCC 1239.

On 30 April, Hele petitioned the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee to be able to make his composition on the Exeter articles. He was simultaneously targeted by the other main committee of retributive taxation, the Committee for Advance of Money. In May he was assessed as having to pay £800, and in October issued a warrant for his arrest. The same month, the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee imposed a fine on him of £14,176 if he was to pay two-thirds of his income; or of £2,834 if he was to pay a tenth. Throughout 1647 he lived under threat of sequestration or arrest.55CCC 1239, CCAM 699. His friend, the poet Robert Herrick, addressed lines to him in 1648 that were clearly intended to be a supportive recognition of Hele’s sufferings during ‘the indignation of the times’:

Age shall not wrong thee; or one jot abate

Of thy both Great and everlasting fate.56Poetical Works of Robert Herrick ed. F.W. Moorman (Oxford, 1921), 280.

In May 1649, petitioning from parishioners in Cornwall introduced the possibility of a settlement of his continuing battle with the republican state. He offered to bestow two Devon impropriations and one Cornish one to augment parish livings, pleading that he was by this time over £5,000 in debt and unable to sell his patrimonial estate because his lands were entailed.57CCC 1239. Only in February 1651 did he finally secure a discharge from the agencies of penal taxation.58CCAM 669.

Hele was regarded as a supporter of the exiled monarchy during the rest of the 1650s. He was named as a leading royalist in 1651, although there is no evidence that he involved himself in the risings that were to accompany Charles Stuart’s entry into England.59HMC Portland, i. 584. In 1655 he was included among those sufficiently suspected of disloyalty to the Cromwellian protectorate to be required to submit bonds to Major-general John Disbrowe* for his good behaviour.60Add. 34012. After the return of the king, Hele recovered his local offices, but seems never again to have attended quarter sessions at Exeter.61Devon RO, QS order bks. 1/9, 1/10. Returned in 1661 for Okehampton probably on the interest of his Mohun relatives, he made little impact on the Parliament and in 1666 was sent for in custody, as he had been in 1642. Seven years after Hele’s death in 1670, the baronetcy became extinct. No direct descendant of Hele’s is known to have sat in Parliament, but a great-nephew was returned for Plympton in 1701.62HP Commons, 1660-90.