BALLE, Peter (1598-1680), of Mamhead, Devon, and the Middle Temple, London.

The ancestors of Peter Balle had lived at Mamhead since at least 1526 and were patrons of the church there from 1581.27Sig. Devon RO, 1392M/L1643/47. Peter Balle’s call to the bar in 1623 gave him the title ‘esquire’ by right. His father, Giles Balle, by contrast, who was alive in the early 1640s, remained to the end of his days as a mere ‘gent.’28Devon Protestation Returns, i. 254. Balle’s career began to flourish after his first term as a parliament-man had ended, and it was a career that was more deeply rooted in the London legal world rather than in Devon. By May 1636 he was acting as solicitor-general to the queen’s household, which put him in charge of maximising the queen’s revenue from her estates. This distinction in turn brought with it immediate eminence at the Middle Temple, where he was invited to sit as master of the bench.29MTR ii. 846. Two years later, the dramatist and versifier Robert Chamberlain, who had been educated at Exeter College at Balle’s expense, dedicated his collection of popular verse, Nocturnall Lucubrations, to his patron. Other members of the Balle family were the subjects of poems in the book, but Chamberlain’s world was that of literary London, not that of the Exe estuarine parishes.30R. Chamberlain, Nocturnall Lucubrations (1638), sig. A3; ‘Robert Chamberlain’, Oxford DNB; M. Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632-42 (Cambridge, 1984), 185, 189, 191-2. The high moral tone of Chamberlain’s work contains more than a suggestion that it held up a mirror to Balle’s own social outlook.

Despite Balle’s growing eminence in the metropolis, it was the city of Exeter which had first recognized his legal talent. After serving as retained counsel, Balle was in 1632 made recorder there. From the mid-1630s Balle attended the city’s law courts every year, enough times to be noted and commensurate with a busy London career.31Fisher, ‘Sir Peter Balle’, 90. He helped the Exeter corporation where he could, as in acting as counsel to the city merchants in their resistance to the claims of the London Merchant Adventurers that cloth to Spain should only be shipped from the capital.32CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 164. Balle’s influence in Devon was not confined to Exeter. He acted as counsel for the towns of Tiverton and Cullompton in the early 1630s, and was first entered in the Devon commission of the peace around 1634, to be confirmed in the appointment in 1636.33Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 12, 19, 27, 28, 57, 71. It was probably these legal services that brought Balle to the attention of Tiverton corporation and secured him the first seat for the borough when the return was sealed on 23 March 1640. By the time of his election he had advanced to become attorney-general and king’s counsel.

Balle’s function in the Short Parliament was to act as one of the managers of the government’s business. Towards the end of the assembly, when John Hampden was looking for a draft bill on probate, Balle was able to tell the House that it was with the master of the rolls.34Aston’s Diary, 66. He was named to no legislative committees, but made a significant impact on the informal records of the assembly. On 16 April, a debate took place on the double returns to that Parliament. The question was put about the validity of an election where the writ was directed to the sheriff for a city that was of itself a county, and where the mayor was returned. Exeter was just such a city, and Balle commented on the cases of John Lynne†, returned while mayor to the 1628 Parliament before the former became recorder, and Robert Walker who sat in that very Parliament during his mayoral year. Balle denied that such returns had been valid, asserting that the mayor had power by charter to take statutes and recognizances and to act in a judicial capacity but had no power to make a deputy to preside during his absence at Westminster. He was challenged by John Pym*, who agreed that it was by the terms of the charter whether a mayor could make a deputy, but if he could, and if he did not return himself but was returned by the sheriff, the election would be valid. The matter was referred to a committee.35Procs. Short Parl. 145. The citizens of Exeter were evidently taking heed of the debate and of Balle’s disobliging view of their privileges. On 24 April, the corporation authorized Walker and his fellow burgess, James Tucker, to retrieve the Exeter charters from Balle’s chambers at the Middle Temple, for Walker to peruse for himself. 36Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 102. Balle had things to say about three other west country elections under scrutiny. He supported the wider franchise at Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire and the confirmation of the return of Richard Harding and Charles Seymour.37Aston’s Diary, 146, 147. At the committee report on the election at Bere Alston in Devon, he expressed doubts about the election procedure there, and argued that the thorn in the flesh of the government, William Strode I, had to have been ‘positively elected’ and his return not compromised. A conditional election ‘is not a free election’.38Aston’s Diary, 151, 152. On the Gloucestershire election, where there was a clash between Sir Robert Tracy* and Nathaniel Stephens*, Balle confined himself to asserting the right of the Commons to hear and judge any cases of assault.39Aston’s Diary, 154.

In other pronouncements in this Parliament, Balle offered reformers no support. He judged petitions from Northumberland and Middlesex, brought in by Members from those counties (17 Apr.) as ‘unseasonable’ to be presented to the House, and moved they should be referred to committee. 40Procs. Short Parl. 157; Aston’s Diary, 11. During the debate on 18 April on the irregular dissolution of the Parliament of 1628/9, Balle did nothing to fan the flames of the Members’ indignation, suggesting coolly that Parliaments could be dissolved in a variety of ways.41Aston’s Diary, 17. On 22 April he again spoke to calm tempers, insisting that the king had not demanded a report on proceedings but merely expected one, and finding a distinction in meaning between these verbs. Furthermore, he conveyed a sense doubtless from the king that the Parliament was losing its way: ‘we have not yet spent our time well’.42Aston’s Diary, 27. The following day, he spoke against holding up the subsidy bill while the complex range of grievances was being marshalled into order, and detected only procedural flaws in proposals to confer with the Lords over supply to the king.43Aston’s Diary, 39, 40.

When after the conference between the Houses Sir Walter Erle and John Pym spoke against the right of the Lords to direct the Commons, Balle ‘justified the Lords’ and cited medieval statute for precedents that the Lords conferred with the Commons and then granted supply: ‘no breach of liberty’. Oliver St John challenged Balle’s set of precedents with his own.44Procs. Short Parl. 179; Aston’s Diary, 70, 71.

On religious matters, Balle was all for giving the king the benefit of the doubt. He saw no innovation in the king’s summons to Convocation, ‘neither form nor matter being new’, and on the recently issued Canons, he cautioned against rushing to judgment before the written legal instruments were perused carefully.45Aston’s Diary, 33, 52. In a rare admission of possible irregularity by the crown, Balle conceded on 29 April that while the king could issue Canons, there may have been some aspects of the case that departed from recent precedents.46Aston’s Diary, 92. On 30 April, in a debate on whether king’s counsel should be heard on Ship Money, Balle spoke, not as one of that body but as a Member, to move that Ship Money be referred to a committee.47Aston’s Diary, 105. He was adhering still to that line the day before Parliament was dissolved.48Aston’s Diary, 141.

Balle’s forthright defence of the crown and his equally robust refusal to support the chamber of Exeter in the election case probably cost him a place in the second Parliament of 1640. Instead he was feted at the Middle Temple, where in October he was elected the next Lent reader.49MTR ii. 900, 903. His standing as one of the ‘learned men and favourers of learning’ at that inn was confirmed when in January 1642 he was recorded as executor of the estate of one of a major benefactor of the Middle Temple.50MTR ii. 918. But on the 29th of that month, Balle also experienced an uncomfortable interrogation at the bar of the House of Commons. He was said by Thomas Lane* to have drafted the articles against the Five Members sought by Charles in his attempted coup a few weeks earlier. Balle was brought in for three periods of questioning. He denied ‘on the faith of a Christian’ that he had been involved, and when Speaker Lenthall pressed him on his response that he had heard only rumours, Balle declared himself ‘no inquisitor after news’. A report that Balle had thought it obvious that George Lord Digby* was responsible for the articles was dismissed by him as little more than a casual comment on Digby’s flight, but he did admit that he asked Sir Edward Herbert, the attorney general, ‘why would you do it without you were certain of the legality thereof?’ The attack moved on to Herbert, but in the minds of radical Members, Balle’s association with evil counsellors was confirmed.51PJ i. 216, 217, 220-3.

As an officeholder and adviser of the queen, Balle probably spent much of his time in London, even after the civil war had broken out in 1642. He was at a meeting at the Middle Temple as late as May 1643.52MTR ii. 929. His absence from Devon accounts for his non-appearance in the early commissions of array for that county, and was the stated, if somewhat contrived, reason for his dismissal as recorder of Exeter53Northants RO, FH133, unfol. The suggestion has recently been raised that Balle was knighted on 7 October 1642 rather than a year later.54Fisher, ‘Sir Peter Balle’, 90. An older antiquarian source holds that the knighthood was bestowed at Oxford in 1642, but Charles was in the field in October of that year. In support of a 1642 date, it has been suggested that Balle’s civil war patron George Goring* had joined the king by August 1642. But the contemporary catalogue of civil war knights, compiled by the meticulous William Dugdale, who ought to have known, confirms that Balle was honoured at Oxford on 7 Oct. 1643.55Merevale Hall, HT 2D/2/27. This suggests that between May and October that year, Balle made his way to Oxford from London. By November his chambers at the Middle Temple had been sequestered.56MTR ii. 933.

Balle can have remained in Oxford for only a short time before he appeared in Devon as a leading commissioner of array. His return to his native county was probably in November, and he appeared in Exeter to be reinstated as recorder ‘upon mature consideration’ by the corporation, by this time unequivocally under royalist control.57Devon RO, Exter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 153. Towards the end of the year, Balle, his kinsman Peter Sainthill* and Dr George Parry* were the leading figures in what was to remain the royalist committee directing the war effort in Devon, directing their efforts towards supplying the army besieging Plymouth, and labouring under the ‘extreme burdens’ of raising taxes in a lukewarm county.58Devon RO, 1392 M/L1643/47. All through 1644 and until the spring of 1645 Balle remained in Exeter, issuing warrants and supervising at a distance the royalist garrisons in places like Dartmouth. At the heart of their strategy was a reliance on the county trained bands. Their proposals to raise money in Dartmouth provoked objections from the governor, Edward Seymour*, but they faced him down to register their own protest at his detention of a ship which they claimed damaged the interests of Hugh Potter*.59Devon RO, 3799-3, warrant of 10 Jan. 1644, order of 15 June 1644; 1392 M/L1644/39; 1392 M/L1644/43.

From December 1644, the despatches of Balle and his colleagues to Seymour at Dartmouth became increasingly pessimistic as they wrote of the parliamentarian advance into the south west and questioned Seymour’s intention to give up his post.60Devon RO, 1392 M/L1644/58; 1392 M/L1644/10. Notoriety attached to Balle’s local reputation. Devon parliamentarian propaganda in 1645 represented him as roasting in hell, ‘bellowing and roaring out in grievous sort, and cursing the hour of his nativity, with his extorting, covetousness and cheating of the country’.61A True and Strange Relation (1645), 4 (E.311.12). This was a comment on Balle’s prominence. In April 1645, he, Sainthill and Parry visited Prince Charles at Bridgwater to offer advice on the conduct of the war in the south west. The Devon commissioners’ view, put forward by Sainthill, was that an army of 6,000 foot should be raised. 62Clarendon, Hist. iv. 20. A number of splits emerged in 1645 among the western royalists. Sir Richard Grenville persuaded Balle and other commissioners to let him raise a local militia against marauding parliamentarians from Lyme Regis, but when Sir John Berkeley* learned of this he countermanded the order, insisting that any Devon forces should take only the orders he issued as commander-in-chief.63T. Carte, A Colln. of Original Letters and Pprs. (Dublin, 1759), 99. More seriously for Balle personally was his decision to support Goring in his ambition to become overall commander in the south west. Goring tried to win the support of the commissioners for propositions to the prince that he should become his lieutenant general. Balle was evidently supportive of this encroachment on the authority of Lord Hopton (Sir Ralph Hopton*), although other commissioners resisted Goring’s lobbying.64Clarendon, Hist. iv. 23-5.

Links between Goring and Balle have been traced back to land transactions between the Gorings and Balle’s mother’s family, the Cookes of Gloucestershire, in the 1630s.65Fisher, ‘Sir Peter Balle’, 86. Whether, given the very different political outlooks between Balle’s cousin, Sir Robert Cooke*, and Balle himself, they explain the affinity between the two men is doubtful. Whatever the origins of their friendship, Balle was certainly devoted enough to Goring to name one of his sons after him.66Prince, Worthies (1701), 112. In the late summer of 1645, as the Exeter commissioners complained of the straits in which they found themselves, rumours were circulating among those disaffected from the royalist high command that Prince Charles was about to take ship for France. Sir Edward Hyde* claimed that Goring exploited the rumour for his own purposes. The prince himself set out to Exeter to dispel these stories, but those assembled there decided, when he arrived, that they would ask him to intercede between king and Parliament. Hyde and other privy counsellors managed to derail this approach to the prince, telling Goring that in the wider context of the war, this regional initiative would only convince Parliament that the king’s supporters were begging for terms. Hyde attributed to Berkeley the suppression of the plan, but regarded Balle as ‘very active and solicitous in that design’, a man whose ‘temper [was] not easily to be contained within modest and prudent grounds’. Hyde also claimed to know that Goring had ‘absolute power’ over Balle.67CCSP i. 273; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 84-5. Hyde distrusted Balle thereafter, with lasting consequences for Balle’s career.

In December 1645 more of Balle’s property in London was targeted by informers to the committees of penal taxation. Balle enjoyed the benefit of Exeter articles when the city surrendered, which tempered the assessment against him of £1,000 in May 1647.68CCAM 661. In May 1646, Balle once again lost his recordership to Edmund Prideaux I*, but thereafter his estate attracted less interference than that of his kinsman, Sainthill.69Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 175v; CCAM 661. Some of the leniency shown towards him may derive from his obliging attitude to Bulstrode Whitelocke* and John Lisle*, two eminent republican colleagues at the Middle Temple. In turn, there was no obstacle to Balle’s serving as treasurer of his inn in 1653-4, and he was involved in the arrangements to house the library of John Selden* there.70MTR ii. 976, 977; iii. 1021, 1052, 1090.

At the Restoration, Balle recovered his recordership of Exeter for the third time, and was restored to his offices under the dowager queen. In his capacity as solicitor to the queen, Balle had various dealings with Samuel Pepys† during the 1660s, the latter concluding that ‘old Sir P. Balle’ was ‘a good man’.71Pepys’s Diary, viii. 22. His position as king’s counsel was not renewed in 1660, however, nor did he advance materially in terms of office from his position in 1640. In 1665-6 he worked with George Monck*, by this time 1st duke of Albemarle and high steward of Exeter, to defend the jurisdictional rights of that city against encroachment by the assize courts.72Fisher, ‘Sir Peter Balle’, 101. Balle finally renounced the recordership in 1676 and died in 1680. His son, William, an astronomer and activist in the Royal Society, constructed an elaborate memorial to him in Mamhead church, which recorded how Sir Peter had ‘suffered the fate of loyalty’, and ‘at the return of Charles the 2nd (disobliging the great favourite) was only restored to his former places’.73Prince, Worthies (1701), 113. To Hyde was thus attributed what was seen by the Balle family as a strictly circumscribed rehabilitation. Sir Peter Balle’s grandson, Thomas Balle, sat for Exeter as a whig between 1734 and 1741, and with his death the family died out.74Hutchinson, Notable Middle Templars, 12; HP Commons, 1714-1754.