POOLE, Henry (1590-1645), of Sapperton, Glos.

Henry Poole was the fifth generation of his family to hold Sapperton, ‘a brave sweet seat and gallant park’ as his country residence. The estate had been acquired by Richard Poole at the end of the fifteenth century, and both Henry’s father and grandfather had sat in Parliament.20Misc. Gen. et Her. 5th ser. iii. 206, 210; Symonds, Diary, 30. Henry himself followed a conventional enough gentry path through Oxford and the Middle Temple, and travelled abroad in 1620. A suggestion that he travelled abroad again in 1630, or that he was knighted, should be probably discounted; he is easily confused with Sir Henry Poole† of Kemble, Wiltshire.21PC2/43/401; Thorp, ‘Manor of Coates’, 220. Occupying the usual local offices appropriate for the head of a gentry family, Poole evinced an unwillingness to co-operate with the government of Charles I by refusing in 1627 to serve as a commissioner for the Forced Loan. He and John Dutton* were incarcerated in the Gatehouse prison, Westminster; an order for their release was signed only in January 1628.22APC 1627, pp. 125, 157, 374, 449; 1627-8, p. 217; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 59. He compounded for knighthood in 1631, was pricked as sheriff the following year, but in 1637 his opposition to Ship Money earned him a brief suspension from the commission of the peace.23E401/2450; PC2/43/479.

Poole was returned for Cirencester in the elections for the first Parliament of 1640, on his own substantial interest in the town, but as in his earlier periods of service at Westminster, made no impact at all on the records of the assembly. He seems contentedly to have given way to his brother-in-law, Sir Theobald Gorges, in the autumn when a new Parliament was summoned. In December 1641, Poole and a group of gentry who all later became royalists met at Cirencester to encourage subscriptions to a petition, almost certainly the one circulating in Gloucestershire in support of episcopacy.24Glos. RO, D1175: letter of 15 Dec. 1641 from Cirencester. In the immediate build-up to civil war, he was named in the king’s commission of array for Gloucestershire, issued at York in the summer of 1642. Poole was also in Parliament’s list of deputy lieutenants, when it was issued in August. In the latter, he was numbered with others such as Sir Robert Tracy* and John Dutton*, who became active royalists, and little can be judged from this about his political views, except that he was probably circumspect in his pronouncements. When Cirencester was besieged by Prince Rupert’s force in February 1643, the garden of Poole’s house in the town was commandeered by the parliamentarians as the site of a defensive battery. Unlike John George*, however, Poole was not considered among the parliamentarian activists, and he was probably passive during the military action and subsequent fall of the town to the king.25‘A particular relation of the action before Cyrencester’ (1643) in J. Washbourn, Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1825), 163.

There seems little evidence that Poole was particularly active as a royalist during the civil war. His estates had been mortgaged to Sir Richard Tracy of Stanway in 1637, so it seems unlikely that he was able to assist the king financially to any significant extent.26Thorp, ‘Manor of Coates’, 221. Nevertheless, his commitment to the king was real enough for Charles to stay at Sapperton in July 1644, and it is likely that it was there that Poole was promised a baronetcy. He was certainly using the title when he made his will a year later, but the grant seems never to have passed the seals.27Symonds, Diary, 30; PROB11/194/397. The will recited Poole’s complaint that Sir Robert Tracy had not made good his agreement to provide a portion of £2,500 on the marriage between Poole’s son and Tracy’s daughter; on the recovery of this sum depended Poole’s ability to allocate a portion for the future marriage of his own daughter.

According to the royalist, Richard Berkeley, Poole died on 4 August 1645.28Glos. RO, D/2700/QP 1/2. On 11 December, the parliamentarian county committee was asked to inventory his personal estate, and his son, William Poole, compounded for his royalism, claiming that he and his father were obliged to comply with the king’s party when it was dominant in Gloucestershire. Poole’s land transactions took some unravelling during the 1650s. Parliament had seized the lands because of the ‘delinquency’ of the Tracy family, and bestowed them on the city of Gloucester as reparations for civil war losses. It was later discovered that these were lands included in the mortgage to Sir Richard Tracy; by November 1650 Gloucester had decided to sell out its claim.29CCC 1050; A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Glos. (Woodbridge, 1997), 105. Henry Poole’s widow, Anne, came under suspicion for her sympathies towards Charles Stuart’s invading army of 1651, but William Poole died that year and ten years later, the mortgaged Poole estates were bought by Robert Atkyns*. By 1677, all the Poole lands were in his hands.30Thorp, ‘Manor of Coates’, 232-3.