DRAKE, Sir Francis, 2nd bt. (1617-62), of Werrington and Buckland Abbey, Buckland Monachorum, Devon.

This Member’s father, Sir Francis Drake, 1st baronet†, was a nephew of Sir Francis Drake†, the renowned Elizabethan admiral and navigator. The family was anciently settled in and around Tavistock, with the first references to them noted from the thirteenth century.15Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 1-10. The Drakes were beneficiaries of the dissolution of the monasteries, and by the time of Drake the admiral were the most important and gentry family in Buckland Monachorum, although they did not own the manor there.16Devon Taxes, 10. The family of Ellis Crymes* held that and the advowson, while the Drakes acquired the site of the monastery from the forebears of Sir Richard Grenville†.17Devon Monastic Lands: Calendar of Particulars for Grants 1536-1558 ed. J. Youings (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. n.s. i), 18-19, 79-81. Drake the 1st baronet was an active justice of the peace, deputy lieutenant and sheriff of Devon; among the varied range of tasks which fell to him was an investigation in 1631 into allegations of coin clipping at the house of Sir Richard Grenville†.18CSP Dom. 1631-33, p. 130. The 1st baronet was also an author, publishing an edition – which he dedicated to Charles I – of a contemporary account of his uncle’s exploits in the Caribbean, and a follow-up narrative of Drake’s circumnavigation. This was dedicated to Robert Rich†, 2nd earl of Warwick, advocate of a pugnacious Protestant foreign policy.19Sir Francis Drake Revived (1626); The World Encompassed (1628).

The 1st baronet’s second wife was Joan Strode, daughter of Sir William Strode† of Newnham. The Strodes were another staunchly Protestant family from south west Devon with parliamentary experience. Francis Drake was their first son. Among his relatives who were, or were to become MPs were his uncle, William Strode I*, and his cousins John Elford* and John Bampfylde*. From 1636 he was a brother-in-law of Ellis Crymes*. John Maynard* was a more distant kinsman. Drake seems to have been educated privately, apart from a period at the Inner Temple. During his childhood, his father enhanced the family’s landed wealth by purchasing the 350 acres of Werrington Park in 1619 from Thomas Gewen*. This added to an estate which already included Cornish properties, including Launceston Priory, Newhouse manor near Launceston and Brendon, in Week St Mary, totalling some 1400 acres.20Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 208. Drake senior died in 1637, but the wardship of Francis, at the time only just under full age, was granted to his mother.21Coventry Docquets, 460, 483; Devon RO, 346M/F721-2. She married John Trefusis – cousin of Nicholas Trefusis* and a future parliamentarian committeeman – in 1639, when a flurry of legal transactions conveyed the personalty at Buckland to Francis Drake, but retained his mother’s use of it for her lifetime.22346M/F723, 725-7. While these changes to the disposition of the family property were being effected, Drake seems to have travelled abroad, staying for a period in Italy.23CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 91; Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 261-2. He returned from his travels probably in 1640 – certainly by 19 November when as a voter he signed the indenture returning the Members for Bere Alston – and in January 1641 married Dorothy Pym, daughter of John Pym*, which gave him the means of an entry at the highest level into the politics of opposition to the king’s government. A few months later, Drake’s brother, Thomas, married, and the trustees included Pym, Ellis Crymes*, William Strode I* and John Bampfylde*.24Buller Pprs. 28-9; Devon RO, 346M/F731.

Despite the obvious potential for an active political career that these connections brought, Drake seems to have been slow to take any initiative in this direction, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he had no political ambitions. In January 1642, Dorothy Drake wrote to one of her brothers that there the only thing that would draw Drake to London would be election to Parliament, but that ‘he does no more desire it than I do’.25Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 288. Certainly he took the side of Parliament in the civil war, but there is uncertainty about the extent of his involvement in the military in its early years. He was at Buckland to take Parliament’s Protestation early in 1642, and after the civil war had broken out, was among the gentry neighbouring Plymouth to whom payments were made by the mayor, evidently in connection with the parliamentarian garrison there.26Devon Protestation Returns, ii. 385; SP28/128, pt. 19. Whether this necessarily implies a military commission seems doubtful. When Exeter surrendered to the royalists in September 1643, Drake was there, along with John Bampfylde*, Sir Samuel Rolle* and Sir Nicholas Martyn*.27Mercurius Aulicus no. 36 (3-9 Sept. 1643), 490 (E.67.25). The first two of these were soldiers, but Martyn never was, so it is possible that at this point Drake was simply a member of the Devon sequestration and assessment committees. He seems not to figure in the various officer lists for Plymouth. He may however have been the Francis Drake given a commission in the regiment of Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford, soon after the surrender of Exeter. If that was indeed Sir Francis, his was a short period of service. In March 1644 it was definitely he who was offered a pardon by the royalists, during a period after the fall of Exeter when the king’s counsellors in the west were extending an olive branch to many considered likely to accept that they had erred in supporting Parliament.28Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 156. To the disappointment of the royal advisers, Drake must have declined to sue for his pardon.

By late October 1644, the estate of Drake and his mother had been granted by the king as part of a settlement on Sir Richard Grenville†, who for a time used Werrington as his private residence.29Clarendon, Hist. iv. 66, 70. Thus expelled from their properties by the descendant of their one-time owners, the Drakes petitioned Haberdashers’ Hall, seat of the Committee for Advance of Money, where their relative, William Strode I, presided. They requested compensation for their sufferings for Parliament. On 13 May 1645, each was granted £100 by the committee, an award constructed to recognize the continued life interest in Buckland held by Drake’s mother, Joan Trefusis.30CJ iii. 680b; iv. 141a. A further grant of £4 a week each was made to them from the same source in July.31CJ iv. 226a. On 25 September, Drake was nominated high sheriff of Devon by the Commons, and the order was taken by Thomas Erle to the Lords for their approval. There the draft order languished, despite reminders from the lower House.32CJ iv. 285a, 294a, 321a. The problem lay with a fresh military commission – possibly actually the only one ever issued to Drake – which he had been given when Edward Massie* was forming his western brigade. This force was brought into being as a means of bringing the west under parliamentary control while the New Model was occupied in confronting the king’s army in the midlands.33Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 20. With Massie as its commander-in-chief, and the Committee of the West in political control, the western brigade was Presbyterian rather than Independent in orientation. Drake’s was a regiment of horse, not of foot as one authority has it, and it was recruited from elements of the former Plymouth town force which had been under the nominal command of Sir Edmund Fowell*.34Harl. 6861, f. 3v; The Moderate Messenger no. 1 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1646), 6 (E.320.5); HP Commons 1660-90, ii. 233. His command conflicted with the usual stipulation that high sheriffs should remain in their counties, but much later, on 15 May 1646, the Lords sent an order for the rule to be waived in Drake’s case.35CJ iv. 546b.

On 18 December, Drake’s horse ventured out of Plymouth and captured some cavalry of the opposing side. In January 1646, with three companies of the Plymouth regiment, he captured a bridge on the upper reaches of the Tamar.36A Diary or an Exact Journall no. 85 (25 Dec. 1645-1 Jan. 1646), 6 (E.314.5); The Moderate Messenger no. 1 (27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1646), 6 (E.320.5). In the same month, his own house was recovered from the royalists, while his troop ventured as far as Bishop’s Tawton, near Barnstaple. In February, Drake marched into north Cornwall.37Harl. 6861, f. 5; J. Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana (1646), 348 (E.348.1); The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 136 (20-27 Jan. 1646), 1093 (E.319.4); The Moderate Intelligencer no. 52 (26 Feb.-5 Mar. 1646), 324 (E.327.2). During these excursions, the London press lavished praise on him as ‘a phoenix sprung out of the ashes of that mirror of his time, old Sir Francis Drake’ and as an ‘active gentleman and true lover of his country’.38The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 136 (20-27 Jan. 1646), 1093 (E.319.4); no. 149 (12-19 May 1646), sig. P2ii (E.337.27). Availing himself of the dispensation extended to him during his shrieval year, in April he took his regiment towards Oxford, where it was to be deployed in maintaining security around the city.39Moderate Intelligencer no. 57 (2-9 Apr. 1646), 377 (E.332.3); The Weekly Account no. 15 (1-8 Apr. 1646), sig. P2 (E.330.32). This was to be his last service in arms. In June, he was elected to the Long Parliament in a ‘recruiter’ by-election for Bere Alston, a further curiosity for a serving sheriff.

Drake first made his mark on the records of the House on 9 December, six months after his election, when he took the Covenant with the Plymouth town clerk, Edmund Fowell*.40CJ v. 7b. It had been reported in October 1646 that the disbanding of Massie’s brigade had begun, and that Drake’s regiment had been the first to be discharged.41The Military Actions of Europe no. 1 (20-27 Oct. 1646), 3 (E.358.22). Presumably this operation and what remained of his obligations as sheriff accounted for his slow start as a Member, but he did nothing to make up for lost time after he had been given his quietus. On 18 January 1647, the case of his military accounts was referred to the Committee of Accounts, and various orders that his accounts should be certified and approved by the House were made in the spring of 1647.42CJ v. 56b, 152a, 171b; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 517. Nothing decisive seems to have emerged from these orders, and on 28 May Drake was given leave to go the country, and was excused attendance on two more occasions before the end of the year.43CJ v. 192b, 348b, 363b. He retreated to Devon, where for a while he was an active county committeeman. He was at Exeter when mutinous soldiers assaulted a magistrate, and joined in the committee’s appeal on 4 September to the House of Commons to authorise an additional levy so that arrears of pay could be awarded the troops.44Bodl. Tanner 58, f. 507. Less than a week later, back at Buckland, he was delivering letters to the corporation of nearby Newport in the interests of the borough’s MP, the Presbyterian Sir Philip Percivalle. Drake’s report to Percivalle provides a rare insight into his thinking; while he saw the hand of God in parliamentarian military victories in Ireland, he was pessimistic about the future at home: ‘the universal high discontent which I find everywhere appearing is a sad presage of further troubles’.45HMC Egmont, i. 462.

As Drake’s name is found on no Commons committee appointments, it seems reasonable to suppose that he never returned to Westminster during the confrontations between Presbyterians and Independents, City and army during 1647. In June 1648, he was required to go to Devon to help with the formation of a county militia. This order came in response to an initiative from parliamentarians in the Ilfracombe district of north Devon, and an ordinance was steered through both Houses to authorise the county force. At the same time, Sir Hardress Waller* was asked to withhold any further commissions to officers in his regiment of the New Model army, indicating clearly that this was a Presbyterian initiative. It seems probable that he was in fact already in Devon, and had been there ever since May the previous year.46CJ v. 606b. He and a number of other MPs for Devon constituencies – Robert Rolle, Arthur Upton, Robert Shapcote, William Morice, (Sir) John Bampfylde, Sir Nicholas Martyn, William Fry and (Sir) John Northcote – wrote gloomily to Speaker William Lenthall on 4 August about the prospects for establishing the new militia. They requested additional nominations to the county committee, and doubted the strength of their own grip on affairs: ‘we are not secure from intestine seditions’.47Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 173. The response of the Commons was to countermand the order withdrawing two regiments of the New Model from the south west, and to arrange that their pay should be drawn on the assessments collected from Devon and neighbouring counties.48CJ v. 663b. When the Devon committee re-organized itself into divisions in the interests of covering the whole county, Drake’s was the first name on the second of the committees named.49Add. 44058, ff. 26v-27. He was asked by the House on 25 November to go to Devon to help bring in the assessments from Devon in order to make these arrangements, but was doubtless already there.50CJ v. 87b.

Drake was almost certainly not in London when the army purged Parliament on 6 December. A ‘Drake’ without a forename appears on one of the contemporary lists, but this was Francis Drake*.51A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649, 669.f.13.22). In 1660, William Prynne collected names of those survivors of the Long Parliament who might be listed as secluded Members, and by that time Drake was happy to be included among their number, but there is no evidence from 1648 that suggests he was anywhere near Westminster during the purge.52W. Prynne, A Full Declaration (1660), 55 (E.1013.22). Although Drake was for a short period active in the county committee, he seems never to have attended quarter sessions at any stage in his life, although he was named to the commission of the peace in three separate periods. He seems not to have withdrawn his name from the commission or been expelled from it after the execution of the king and the declaration of the republic.

The 1650s were a time of contraction for the Buckland Drakes. In June 1650, Sir Francis sold Werrington Park to William Morice* for £4,750.53Devon RO, 346M/F735. A marriage contracted in 1649 between Drake’s sister and the royalist army officer Sir Hugh Wyndham came to the attention of the sequestration commissioners in Devon. Drake and his mother were detaining £2,000, money which it was claimed should have gone to Wyndham when he married Joan Drake. This reluctance by the Drakes to release the money to Wyndham has been interpreted as a sign of Sir Francis Drake’s opposition to his sister’s marriage. The involvement of the agencies of penal taxation seems to have come about through the intervention of a discoverer of concealed delinquents’ estates, probably Thomas Willughby*. Drake seems to have been unable to fend off the attentions of these outsiders, probably because his own political standing was negligible.54CCAM 1337; Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 376-81, 387-9. His sympathies in religion seem to have lain with the puritans, as he was reported to have favoured ministers at Yarcombe who entered the living at the expense of the clergy settled there before the civil war.55Bodl. Walker c.2, p. 365. He stayed aloof from the Cromwellian regimes, but the Lady Drake reported as active in 1659 in support of the Presbyterian/royalist rising of Sir George Boothe* was more likely to have been the wife of Sir John Drake of Ashe in east Devon.56Bodl. Clarendon 63, f. 88. By December of that year, however, Drake had thrown in his lot with the Presbyterians led by Sir Coplestone Bampfylde* and John Bampfylde*, who in January 1660 wrote to the Speaker identifying the recall of the secluded Members of 1648 as the best solution to the nation’s ills.57Som. RO, DD Baker 9/3/3.

In elections for the Convention of 1660, Drake was returned for his former seat, Bere Alston, and for Newport, a borough where he still retained an interest despite the sale of Werrington. He was double returned at Bere Alston, and so chose the Cornish borough.58‘Newport’, ‘Bere Alston’, HP Commons 1660-90. An obstacle to progress in his political career, his parliamentarian past, was expunged in August 1661 when he successfully sued for the pardon he had spurned in 1644.59Devon RO, 346M/F740. But only weeks after his election to the Cavalier Parliament in April 1661, his wife died, his own health failed and he played no part in that assembly. Drake died on 6 January 1662, and was buried at Buckland. He had no children, and made his nephew, Francis Drake, the heir to the baronetcy. The third baronet sat in eight parliaments from 1683 as a whig.60HP Commons 1660-90.