PALMES, Sir Guy (1580-1653), of Ashwell, Rutland; Walcot, Northants. and Lindley, nr. Otley, Yorks.

Although the Palmes family had owned the manor of Ashwell, Rutland – their principal residence – since the 1510s, their ‘most ancient paternal inheritance’ lay in Yorkshire, where they had acquired the manor of Naburn, near York, in 1226. A member of the Palmes of Naburn had represented York in the Parliament of 1510. Palmes’s father had acquired, through marriage, lands in Hampshire and had represented the Yorkshire constituency of Knaresborough – not far from the family’s property at Lindley – in 1586.41HP Commons 1509-58, ‘Brian Palmes’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Francis Palmes’; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Guy Palmes’; CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 65; VCH Rutland, ii. 109; VCH Hants, iv. 104, 107.

Palmes was returned as a knight of the shire for Rutland in every Parliament called between 1614 and 1628, except that of 1626. An active Commons-man, he was prominent in the House’s efforts to reform abuses in the legal system and those associated with monopoly patents, and he was a dogged champion of parliamentary privilege of free speech. Although many of his Yorkshire kin were Catholics, he spoke repeatedly at Westminster in support of the strict enforcement of the recusancy laws, which he believed would lead to ‘the better checking the insolency of the papists and [to] the encouragement of the well-affected’.

In 1623, Palmes married one of his daughters to the eldest son of his Yorkshire neighbour William Malory*, who shared his ‘country’ political convictions. Palmes’s persistent hostility to the duke of Buckingham’s influence and interests resulted in his absence from the 1626 Parliament after he had been pricked for sheriff of Rutland.42HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Guy Palmes’. He was among the duke’s critics who was removed from the commission of peace in 1626-7, and he was listed as a refuser of the Forced Loan in Northamptonshire, where he had acquired property through his second marriage. However, he did not join Northamptonshire’s most determined opponents of the loan – a group centred upon Richard Knightley† and his puritan allies.43R. Cust, Forced Loan, 189, 233-4. Palmes was active during the personal rule of Charles I as a magistrate, a deputy lieutenant and as a commissioner of knighthood fines in Rutland.44HP Commons 1604-29. Prominent among his patrons during the personal rule was Ireland’s and northern England’s most powerful figure, Lord Deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future 1st earl of Strafford).45Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P13/107, 14/144, 15/182; HP Commons 1604-29.

Palmes was returned for Rutland again in the elections to the Short Parliament, while his eldest son Brian was elected for the Yorkshire borough of Aldborough. Palmes senior received only two appointments in this Parliament – to the committee for privileges, on 16 April, and to a small committee set up on 27 April, headed by John Pym, for preparing an address to the Lords claiming breach of the Commons’ privilege as a result of the peers’ resolution that voting supply should precede royal assurances for the redress of grievances.46CJ ii. 4a, 14a. He made only two recorded contributions to debate, neither of which was of any great consequence.47Aston’s Diary, 67, 87. As a deputy lieutenant for Rutland he helped to mobilise the county’s trained bands during the second bishops’ war.48HEHL, HA 10623-4.

Re-elected for Rutland that autumn, Palmes was named to 71 committees in the Long Parliament – all but 60 of which appointments fell between November 1640 and the 1641 autumn recess. The Commons acknowledged his standing as one of the fathers of the House by naming him in first place to the committee for privileges on 6 November.49CJ ii. 20b. And it was almost certainly his wealth of experience both as a Parliament-man and high sheriff that recommended him as chairman of a committee set up on 30 March 1641 on a bill for remedying the disorders associated with parliamentary elections.50CJ ii. 114a, 134b. Determined to uphold due process in electoral matters, he had refuted a motion by Pym in February for disenfranchising an errant returning officer, as ‘contrary to law and the usage of the realm’.51Procs. LP ii. 454.

A significant proportion of Palmes’s committee appointments in 1640-1 related to the reform of the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule. Thus he was named to committees for investigating and addressing, inter alia, the crown’s perceived breaches of parliamentary privileges in the late 1620s; monopolies; the collection of Ship Money, impositions and other ‘illegal taxes’; and the proceedings of the judiciary and of lord and deputy lieutenants during the 1630s.52CJ ii. 25b, 30a, 34b, 38a, 45b, 46b, 50b, 51b, 75a, 82a, 83a, 101a, 114a, 145a, 157a, 197b, 200a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iv. 21. As members of a committee set up on 7 December 1640 to examine the judges who had declared in the crown’s favour in the 1637 Ship Money case, he and Sir Miles Fleetwood questioned Judge George Croke and informed the House of his claim that Lord Keeper John Finch† had influenced his ruling.53CJ ii. 46b; CSP Dom. Add. 1625-49, p. 628. Palmes was unimpressed with the self-exculpatory speech that Finch made before the House on 21 December, declaring ‘that he heard nothing from him but rather in aggravation than extenuation of his offence’. When the matter came to a vote later that day, Palmes almost certainly sided with the majority in accusing Finch of high treason.54CJ ii. 55b; Northcote Note Bk. 95. In 1641, Palmes would be closely associated with legislation to prevent sheriffs bribing the judiciary.55CJ ii. 197b, 238b; Procs LP v. 635. That he was also hostile towards Laudian prelacy and the ecclesiastical policies pursued during the personal rule can be inferred from his appointment to committees during the opening session for the suppression of Catholics; for declaring the new Canons illegal; to prepare charges against Laud and his clerical abettors; and on bills for abolishing superstition and idolatry, disabling the clergy from exercising lay office and for the reform of abuses in ecclesiastical courts.56CJ ii. 24a, 24b, 52a, 73b, 84b, 91a, 99a, 119a, 128b, 136b, 184b; Procs. LP i. 582. His work in redressing the grievances of the personal rule can be said to have culminated in his appointment to a committee of both Houses set up on 28 June 1641 to confer about the Ten Propositions – and specifically measures for removing evil counsellors at court.57CJ ii. 190b.

But Palmes’s enthusiasm for the reformist cause seems to have waned when it came to the case of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford. He was named to only two committees concerning the earl’s prosecution.58CJ ii. 79b, 98a. Moreover, on 30 January 1641 he seconded a motion by the future royalist Sir John Strangways for greater disclosure of the prosecution’s case before the House voted on the articles against Strafford: ‘this being a matter of blood’.59Procs. LP ii. 321. Palmes was absent, probably intentionally, when the House voted on Strafford’s attainder bill on 21 April, and he was listed in one source among the earl’s well-wishers in the Commons.60Procs. LP iv. 51.

The raising, collection and disbursement of state revenue accounted for some of Palmes’s most important appointments in the Long Parliament. Besides securing nomination to committees concerning a City loan of £100,000 (Nov. 1640) and to treat with the commissioners for collecting tonnage and poundage (June 1641), he was named to successive bicameral commissions for disbursing the proceeds of the subsidies and assessment voted by Parliament in 1641 and 1642.61CJ ii. 31b, 165a; SR v. 78, 101, 167. A substantial proportion of the many hundreds of thousands of pounds collected by virtue of these subsidy and assessment acts went towards maintaining and paying off the king’s army in northern England. Palmes was among the active core of the first, and possibly the second, disbursement commission – a group that was dominated by members of the parliamentary leadership or those aligned with them.62SP28/1C, ff. 12, 15, 24, 26, 32, 42, 47. He may also have been involved, as a Commons committeeman, in parliamentary initiatives during the spring and summer of 1641 for disbanding the armies in the north while at the same time strengthening the kingdom’s military resources against the threat of foreign invasion and unrest at home.63CJ ii. 141b, 152a, 172b, 212b, 219b, 223a.

Not an especially vocal Member, Palmes made only one notable contribution on the floor of the House that summer – a report from the committee for privileges on 29 June 1641 concerning the Lords’ handling of a legal dispute over Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey’s claim to 14,000 acres of Lincolnshire fenland. Palmes and the committee conceived that the peers had breached the Commons’ privileges by effectively arrogating the hearing of this cause to themselves. The Commons agreed and set up a committee, to which Palmes was named, to investigate the matter further.64CJ ii. 147b, 191b-192a; Procs LP v. 404, 407.

There are signs by mid-July 1641 that Palmes was among those Commons-men who believed Parliament’s task in redressing the kingdom’s grievances had largely been accomplished and that it would be counter-productive to proceed too much further down the road of reform. A note of exasperation can be detected in his comments on 14 July when, during a debate concerning the prosecution of Sir William Fawnt in star chamber, he declared that it ‘was once a legal court, and if all the sentences that had passed there should be questioned again here there might be no end of it’.65Procs LP v. 638. But his remarks were not entirely those of a disinterested guardian of the House’s valuable time, for the man who had orchestrated Fawnt’s prosecution, and whose reputation stood to suffer by its investigation, was Palmes’s onetime political patron, the future royalist leader Henry Hastings, 5th earl of Huntingdon.66HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Sir Guy Palmes’; T. Cogswell, Home Divisions, 276-80. Even so, Palmes seems to have lost interest in or patience with the Commons’ proceedings by this point. His only appointment to a conference management team, on 22 July, related to business concerning the proposed adjournment of the two Houses.67CJ ii. 220a. On 6 August, he made another report from the committee for privileges – on this occasion, upholding the return of George Peard for Barnstaple – and, having been granted leave of absence on Arthur Goodwin’s motion on 20 August, he made no further recorded impression on the House’s proceedings until after the autumn recess.68CJ ii. 265b; Procs LP vi. 245.

Palmes received only seven committee appointments between late October 1641 and the outbreak of civil war the following summer. The three committees to which he was named during the final three months of 1641 reflected his familiar concerns with financial supply and preventing abuses in parliamentary elections.69CJ ii. 298a, 302a, 333a. On 16 December, he secured leave of absence for his Northamptonshire friend, the future royalist Sir Christopher Hatton, and on 18 December he was granted leave of absence himself and probably did not return to Westminster until mid-January 1642.70CJ ii. 349b; D’Ewes (C), 296; Procs. LP vi. 214. His involvement in Parliament’s ‘paper skirmishes’ with the king following the attempted arrest of the Five Members was largely confined, it seems, to membership of a committee established on 17 January for petitioning Charles in protest.71CJ ii. 384a. On 21 March, he took further leave of absence.72CJ ii. 490a.

Although his son Brian Palmes joined the king at York that spring and would serve as a royalist ordnance commissioner during the civil war, Palmes himself was deemed sufficiently trustworthy by the Houses to warrant appointment in April 1642 as a parliamentary deputy lieutenant for Rutland.73Supra, ‘Brian Palmes’; CJ ii. 508a; LJ iv. 694a. But his tally of just four committee appointments during the first eight months of 1642, with no significant contributions to debate, tells its own story – as does his appointment in July to the Rutland commission of array.74CJ ii. 384a, 461b, 544b, 563a; Northants. RO, FH133. No less revealing was his tellership with the future royalist Charles Price on 31 May in favour of nominating the London clergyman James Marsh to the Westminster Assembly. Palmes and Price defeated the somewhat more godly pairing of Denzil Holles and William Strode I by just one vote – although it would prove a hollow victory, for Parliament would remove Marsh from his church livings the following year as a delinquent.75CJ ii. 595b; Matthews, Walker Revised, 54. On 30 June, the House ordered Palmes to assist the lord lieutenant of Rutland in executing the Militia Ordinance in the county – and to this end he was granted leave of absence on the motion of Pym himself.76CJ ii. 645b; PJ iii. 154. But Palmes was still at Westminster on 17 July, when he secured leave of absence for Strafford’s cousin, the future Yorkshire royalist Sir George Wentworth II.77PJ iii. 92. If he attended his duty in Rutland, which is far from clear, he had returned to the House by 10 August, when he was ‘overawed’ by the ‘fiery spirits’ into giving his assent to the House’s resolution to live and die with the commander of Parliament’s newly-raised army, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.78PJ iii. 295.

Yet despite Palmes’s evident distaste at the prospect of war against the king, he remained at Westminster. Indeed, on 16 September 1642 he carried up to the Lords several Commons’ votes for impeaching three prominent royalist activists of high treason.79CJ ii. 768b; LJ v. 357b. That same day (16 Sept.), he was named to a committee for investigating those MPs who had assisted the king, so that the Commons could proceed against them as delinquents.80CJ ii. 769b. Palmes pleaded for the re-admission to the House of one such perceived delinquent, Geoffrey Palmer, but to no avail.81PJ iii. 359. At the end of September he pledged to contribute four horses to the war effort – bringing in three, valued at £32, the following month.82CJ ii. 787a; SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 113. His last appointment of 1642 was to a committee set up on 27 October for providing the City with an account of the battle of Edgehill.83CJ ii. 825a. Four days later (31 Oct.), he joined Sir Robert Pye I, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Edward Bagshawe, Thomas Sandes and Bulstrode Whitelocke in seconding a motion of Edmund Waller that Members should convene as a committee of the whole House to consider a peace treaty with the king.84Add. 18777, f. 47.

Palmes withdrew from the House at some point in November 1642, prompting a Commons’ order on 17 December that he and the Rutland royalist Baptist Noel* be taken into custody and brought up to Westminster.85CJ ii. 893b. But there is no evidence that Palmes had resumed his seat or made any form of submission to the House before his addition to a committee concerning the court of common pleas on 10 March 1643.86CJ ii. 997b. He made his continued support for a swift negotiated settlement evident on 7 April, serving as a teller with Waller in favour of accommodating the Lords by removing a clause in the instructions to Parliament’s treaty commissioners at Oxford for setting a time limit to further negotiations. The ‘violent men’, according to the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes, were generally against removing this clause, and it was they who won the division.87CJ iii. 34a; Harl. 164, ff. 359v-360. On 25 May, he was a majority teller with Francis Rous in favour of giving a reading to a draft letter to the king, vindicating Parliament’s handling of the war in Ireland. The ‘violent men of the House’, claimed D’Ewes, ‘would have had this reply to have been turned into a declaration to be published for the satisfaction of the kingdom, but not to have been sent to the king’ – and when they had failed in this stratagem, they had tried to suppress the draft altogether.88CJ iii. 102b; Harl. 164, f. 392v.

Palmes’s last recorded act in the House was to take the vow and covenant introduced early in June 1643 following the discovery of the Waller plot.89CJ iii. 118b, 120a. At some point over the next few months he abandoned Westminster – his remaining loyalty to Parliament perhaps extinguished by the prospect of its military alliance with the Scottish Covenanters – and on 28 September the Commons disabled him from sitting as an MP and ordered that his estate be sequestered for his ‘long and willful neglecting and deserting the service of the commonwealth in not attending, as he ought, in the House’.90CJ iii. 256a, 257a. Unabashed, Palmes attended the Oxford Parliament early in 1644 – although he arrived too late to sign its letter to the earl of Essex urging him to compose a peace.91Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 575.

Palmes ended the civil war in the royalist garrison at Newark – which surrendered in May 1646 – and compounded on the Newark articles. In his submissions to the Committee for Compounding*, in which he made no mention of having attended the Oxford Parliament, he claimed that ‘urgent occasions’ concerning his estate in Yorkshire had obliged him to depart the House in 1643; that ill health had prevented him from returning thereafter; that he had never been active in the royalist cause; and that he had attempted to obtain a pass to London from the Speaker in October 1645, but without success.92SP23/198, pp. 41-2, 49. He was fined at one half of his estate, which was reckoned at £3,905. In 1649, following allegations by William Purefoy I* that Palmes had undervalued his estate, he was fined a further £600.

It is not clear whether Palmes had discharged these various fines and cleared his estate from sequestration and debt before his death, apparently intestate, in the spring of 1653.93LC4/202, f. 353; CCC 1316. He was buried at Ashwell on 25 March of that year.94St Mary, Ashwell par. reg. His grandson represented the Yorkshire borough of Malton on numerous occasions between 1668 and 1710.95HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘William Palmes’.