LE GROS (GROSS), Sir Charles (c.1596-1650), of Crostwight, Norf.

The Le Gros of Norfolk were an ancient, if undistinguished, family, with no history of parliamentary service more recent than the early fifteenth century.24Vis. Norf. 1563, 1589 and 1613, 185-6; Blomefield, Norf. xi. 9-11; W.T. Spurdens, ‘Particulars of the hundred of Tunstead’, Norf. Arch. iii. 90-1; Add. 19139, ff. 197v-198, 199v-200. By the seventeenth century their seat was at Crostwight in the north east of the county, although, confusingly, they also owned land at Crostwick, just to the north of Norwich. Except for some land at Bircham Tofts at the other end of the county which had been obtained through Sir Thomas Le Gros’s marriage, the rest of the estates were at Sloley and Smallburgh, close to Crostwight.25Blomefield, Norf. x. 287, xi. 9-11, 66; Spurden, ‘Tunstead’, 90n.

Charles received his early education locally, probably attending the school at Aylsham. In 1611 he then went up to Cambridge, to Caius (the natural choice of college for a native of Norfolk).26J. Venn, Biographical Hist. of Gonville and Caius College (Cambridge, 1897-1901), i. 211. After a period at Gray’s Inn, during which time he was knighted by the king, Le Gros completed his education by spending several years travelling on the continent.27GI Adm.; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 160; APC 1617-19, 274. His father had, in the meantime, died and his mother had married Nicholas Wingate. When his grandfather died in 1622, Le Gros acted as his executor.28PROB11/140/481; C142/427, no. 146; WARD7/74/169.

Le Gros must have married Muriel Knyvett before March 1621.29PROB11/140/481. This match gained for him useful connections among the Norfolk gentry. As well as being a granddaughter of the noted bibliophile, Sir Thomas Knyvett, Muriel was the daughter of Sir Thomas Knyvett who had sat for Aldeburgh in 1593 and Thetford in 1601, while her mother had been a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth. Sir Nathaniel Bacon† of Stiffkey, her other grandfather, was named by Le Gros’s grandfather in 1621 to name him as the overseer of his will. Bacon’s second wife, Dorothy, remembered her stepdaughter in her will of 1629, bequeathing her a mourning ring.30Vis. Norf. 1664, i. 120; PROB11/140/481; ‘The letters and will of Lady Dorothy Bacon’, ed. J. Key, Misc. (Norf. Rec. Soc. lvi.), 99, 102. Lady Le Gros’s brother thought her ‘the most complete gallant in the town’.31Knyvett Lttrs. 75. Le Gros’s marriage also strengthened existing connections with the Pastons (Erasmus Paston† was his great-grandfather; their seat at Oxnead was close to Sloley) for Sir William Paston was Muriel’s cousin.32The Corresp. of Lady Katherine Paston ed. R. Hughey (Norf. Rec. Soc. xiv.), 38, 99; Anecdotes and Traditions ed. W.J. Thomas (Cam. Soc. v.), 12. In 1638 Le Gros’s son, Thomas, accompanied Paston and Ralph Knevet (the cleric and poet, who may have been distantly related to the Knyvetts) on their visit to Italy.33The Note-bk. and Acct. Bk. of Nicholas Stone ed. W.L. Spiers (Walpole Soc. vii.), 167.

During the 1620s and 1630s Le Gros was much involved in local adminstration in Norfolk. From 1624 he sat on the commission of the peace.34C231/4, f. 168v; Mins. Norwich Ct. of Mayoralty 1632-1635, 59-60, 203-4; ‘Letters and will of Lady Dorothy Bacon’, 99. In 1626, as sheriff for the county, he was included on the commission to collect the Forced Loan.35List of Sheriffs, 89; Rye, State Pprs. 48-50. By then he was already captain of the Norfolk militia’s troop of lancers and thereby featured among the dedicatees of Ralph Knevet’s Stratiotikon, published in 1628; Knevet paid tribute to him as ‘fair knighthood's fairer ornament’.36Rye, State Pprs. 31; The Shorter Poems of Ralph Knevet ed. A.M. Charles (1966), 97-8. As a deputy lieutenant, he was also a dedicatee of John Cruso’s 1640 translation of the French abridgement by Henri, duc de Rohan, of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico.37J. C[ruso], The Complete Captain (Cambridge, 1640), sig. A2.

Among local commissions on which he sat was that created in 1636 to report on the complaints raised by Sir Roger North* against a planned waterway between Bury St Edmunds and the River Ouse. On that occasion he was nominated by Henry Lambe, the scheme’s promoter and, perhaps for that reason, he was among commissioners who signed the minority report recommending that it should proceed.38PC2/45, pp. 413-14, 435; CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 386. In what may be an indication of his religious sympathies, he was also appointed by Archbishop William Laud in early 1638 to the commission to report on the state of Bishop Matthew Wren’s private chapel at Norwich. Wren had expelled the local Walloon congregation, which had been using this chapel since Elizabeth’s reign and the commission discovered that the work required to return it to a condition which would satisfy the bishop would cost at least £200.39Bodl. Tanner 68, f. 311; The Walloons and their Church at Norwich ed. W.J.C. Moens (Huguenot Soc. i.), 277-8; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 356.

Le Gros’s previous success in the parliamentary elections at Orford, in 1626 and 1628, had probably been due to his links with Sir William Withypoll†. Both the sons of Cornwallis mothers, he and Withypoll were second cousins. Shortly after the dissolution of the last Parliament in 1629, Le Gros had returned the favour to him by standing bail (along with his cousin, Sir John Holland*) when Withypoll was charged with murder.40Knyvett Lttrs. 75. How far Withypoll’s absence abroad (to avoid his creditors) diminished his electoral influence is not clear and it may be that Le Gros now had to rely more on what influence his brother-in-law, Nathaniel Bacon of Friston (father of Thomas Bacon*), had in the area. Whoever his backer, Le Gros was elected at Orford on 21 March 1640 and again on 22 October with no obvious difficulties.

Complete inactivity appears to have characterised Le Gros’s service in the Short and Long Parliaments. He was probably absent most of the time from the latter, at least initially owing to serious ill-health. On 3 August 1641 Sir John Holland sought leave for him to go into the country.41CJ ii. 233a; Procs. LP, vi. 183. At some point during that year he visited Bath for treatment for what seems to have been a skin disease. That autumn he returned home to Norfolk, where he was treated by the famous Norwich physician, Thomas Browne.42M. MacKinnon, ‘An unpublished consultation letter of Sir Thomas Browne’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, xxvii. 503-11. The two men knew each other well and Le Gros had been one of the friends who had encouraged Browne to move to Norwich several years earlier.43Posthumous Works of the Learned Sir Thomas Browne (1712), p. iii. Browne later described Le Gros’s symptoms in detail:

…the scorbutic miasma continued to swell, and disfigured not only his legs with ulcers and spots, but the entire surface of his body with impetigo of some sort, accompanied by very troublesome itching.44MacKinnon, ‘Unpublished consultation letter’, 507, 509.

Over that winter those symptoms worsened. In late April 1642 Le Gros travelled to London and then on to Bath.45Knyvett Lttrs. 101. On 8 May Browne wrote to Samuel Bave, a fashionable doctor at Bath, to brief him on Le Gros’s condition, revealing that Le Gros was proving a difficult patient, because ‘in sleep, in food, in drink, he indulges most excessively; he is averse to exercise; yet at the same time he destroys himself with sadness.’46MacKinnon, ‘Unpublished consultation letter’, 508, 510.

On 12 September that year the Commons issued an order summoning him to attend.47CJ ii. 763a. This order was repeated in May 1643 with the threat that he would be fined £200 if he failed to comply. Six weeks later the Norfolk deputy lieutenants were empowered to impose this fine and in September 1643 it was increased to £400. Nothing was forthcoming, and on 18 November the Commons ordered the excise commissioners to pay £400 to Sir John Meldrum (one of the parliamentarian commanders in the north) on the security of its future payment.48CJ iii. 77b, 140a, 244a-b, 314b. Le Gros’s health problems eased somewhat in the summer of 1644 but he did not resume attendance at Westminster.49Knyvett Lttrs. 161. He was fined a further £200 by the Commons for non-attendance in December 1645. Had he been secluded in December 1648 at Pride’s Purge, which seems unlikely, it would have had little or no impact either on him or the House.50CJ iv. 390b; v. 330a, 543b; vi. 34b.

For Le Gros the priority during the 1640s had probably been to avoid involvement on either side, perhaps because of his ill-health. The king named him to the Norfolk commission of array in the summer of 1642.51Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. However, the following November, in a letter to Sir John Potts*, he gave the impression of being keen to assist Parliament, agreeing to lend £50 worth of plate to its cause and observing that, ‘it is an addition to what I suffer that I cannot be yet able to attend the public service’.52Bodl. Tanner 64, f. 84. Another difficulty was that his complicated personal finances linked him to several royalist supporters. In 1639 he, Augustine Holl and Edward Mileham had borrowed £400.53Suff. RO (Ipswich), HD11/52/2/167. By 1644 sequestration proceedings against Holl had raised suspicions that Le Gros and Mileham had cooperated with Holl to evade its full effects. There were claims that lands at Waxham and Horsey, supposedly leased to Le Gros and Mileham in 1640, had remained in Holl's control. The lands had passed to Holl's wife (a second cousin to Le Gros’s wife) from her father, Sir William Woodhouse†. Le Gros and Mileham went to law over the matter and in 1647 the Committee for Sequestrations accepted their version of events.54Add. 5508, f. 18; CCC 1341. Lands which Le Gros and Mileham, together with Thomas Hobart, had leased from Sir Miles Hobart† in 1635 as security for his debts also became entangled in the sequestration proceedings against Hobart.55CCC 2322, 2324-5. In 1647 efforts were made to recover £100 which he owed to another delinquent, Sir Thomas Glemham†, the former royalist governor of Oxford.56CCAM 637. Le Gros’s own estates remained untouched, although in November 1645, he was assessed to pay £1,500 by the Committee for Advance of Money*. Over the next two years he co-operated in paying £250.57CCAM 63, 633-4. Others of his family were royalists. His brother-in-law, Thomas Knyvett, in whose household his daughter was then living, was imprisoned by Parliament in 1643 after the capture of Lowestoft. When his son Thomas enlisted in 1644, it was almost certainly on the king’s side, and Thomas also assisted the rector of Swafield in Norfolk, Thomas Campbell, when he fell on hard times after his ejection by the parliamentarian commissioners.58Knyvett Lttrs. 114, 159-60; R.W. Ketton-Cremer, A Norf. Gallery (1947), 110.

Le Gros probably died early in 1650. In late May of that year, Thomas was described as his heir when he and others petitioned the Committee for Compounding about the land his father had held in trust from Sir Miles Hobart.59CCC 2322. It may well have been Le Gros’s death which prompted this move. Thomas was granted administration of his father’s estate on 29 July 1650. Because of obligations to Sir Charles as executor which had yet to expire, the grant was entered alongside the registered copy of the will of Thomas’s great-grandfather.60PROB11/140/481. When Thomas himself died, the family estates were passed successively to two of the sons of Sir Charles’s daughter, Catherine, who had married Richard Harman, eldest son of Richard Harman*. The survivor of these two, Charles Harman, took the name of Le Gros but it died out again in the following generation. Under him the Le Gros estates were sold to Sir Robert Walpole†.61Vis. Norf. 1664, i. 120; East Anglian Peds. ed. A. Campling (Norf. Rec. Soc. xiii.), 98; Add. 19139, ff. 199v-200; Blomefield, Norf. xi. 11.