ERNLE, John (c.1620-97), of Whetham, Wilts.

The Ernles, who originated from Sussex, descended from the elder brother and namesake of the early Tudor chief justice, Sir John Ernley. Following their acquisition of property in Bishops Cannings and elsewhere in Wiltshire after the dissolution of the monasteries, for the rest of the sixteenth century they regularly took on public service in the county. However, the continuing impact of the ‘great debts’ of John Ernle† (d. 1572), a knight of the shire in the 1559 Parliament, and division of the patrimony by his heir Michael Ernle (d. 1594) to provide for the children of a second marriage, may have diminished their standing in the early years of the next century, while the longevity of successive heads of the family diluted opportunities for individuals.24Wilts. Arch. Mag. iii. 209-15; vi. 128-9; 'Sir John Ernley’ (c.1464-1520), Oxford DNB; HP Commons 1558-1603; Vis. Wilts. 1623, 55-7; Le Neve's Peds. 199-200; R.D. Merriman, 'Sir John Ernle – a confusion of identities', Mariner's Mirror xxxiii. 97-105. In November 1630 Michael’s eldest son, the seventeenth-century MP’s grandfather, Sir John Ernle (d. 1647), thanked Lord Chief Justice Lawrence Hyde for procuring his exemption from the office of sheriff that year.25CCSP i. 34 However he was active on the commission of the peace in the succeeding decade, and Edward Ernle of Ashlington and Itchilhampton, son of his half-brother, joined him in 1632.26Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 74, 104, 137; Coventry Docquets, 75. With Hyde and other leading Wiltshire gentlemen Sir John refused to contribute in 1639 to the loan to fund the bishops’ wars but, like Hyde and Edward Ernle, he was nominated as a commissioner of array in 1642.27Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 915; F.H. 133.

Details of the MP’s early life are lacking. There is no evidence that either he or his elder brother Robert (whose death date is unknown) followed their father, grandfather and great-grandfather to Lincoln’s Inn (where the MP’s son was later also entered), or their uncles Finamore and Thomas to Oxford; it is possible that, like Edward’s son Walter Ernle†, who attended Leiden University in 1645, they studied abroad.28LI Admiss. 171, 302; Al. Ox.; Index to English-Speaking Students who have Graduated at Leyden Univ. ed. E. Peacock (1883), 33. Their uncles Sir Ralph Hopton* (later 1st Baron Hopton) and Sir Michael Ernle were both royalist commanders; the latter died of consumption and wounds sustained when Shrewsbury, of which he was governor, fell to Parliament in February 1645.29Clarendon, Hist. iii. 491; P.R. Newman, Royalist Officers (New York, 1981), 118. Edward Ernle sat with the king’s sequestrators before submitting to the committee for compounding that November, although in so doing he protested that he had done so only to do good to his neighbours.30CCC 950. But John and his father (also John) seem to have kept aloof from the conflict. The first appearance in the record of John the younger, apart from that aged three in the 1623 visitation, was in March 1647, the year of his grandfather’s death, when he married.31Wilts. RO, 1720/791; Mariner's Mirror, xxxiii. 100. His bride was Susan, sister of Richard Grobham Howe* and John Grobham Howe*, who, having also kept their heads down during the wars, were in the process of establishing themselves in the administration of Wiltshire, where they had family links. John Ernle senior, faced with requests from the Hoptons for financial support and busy trying to collect his debts, seems to have lacked either the inclination or a sufficiently unblemished reputation to join them, but John junior was soon launched into public life.32Wilts. RO, 1720/791; CCC 2176; CCAM 860.

In January 1649 the justices of assize were authorised to administer the oath of justice of the peace to ‘John Earnly junior’.33C231/6, p. 231. Unlike his cousin Walter Ernle and brother-in-law Richard Grobham Howe, at no time in his intermittent years on the commission in the 1650s does he seem to have been a prominent member.34Wilts. RO, A1/160/1, A1/160/2. Although named in January 1650 and in the Liber Pacis of 1651-2, he was not mentioned in The Names of the Justices (1650) and he was one of those omitted by October 1653, probably in the purge of the previous month.35C193/13/3, f. 69; C193/13/4, f. 108v; Stowe 577, f. 58; The Names of the Justices. It was therefore probably through the promotion of kin and friends, and possibly as a representative of a strand of opinion unsympathetic to the views of the more radical men who by this time dominated affairs in Wiltshire that he was returned for the county to the first protectorate Parliament.

Once at Westminster Ernle had four committee nominations. With similarly-inclined fellow Wiltshire Members John Norden* and Edward Bayntun*, as well as John Grobham Howe and Alexander Thistlethwayte*, another county Member, Ernle was delegated to consider the ordinance for the regulation of ministers and schoolmasters (26 Sept.).36CJ vii. 370a. Unlike the godly Thistlethwayte, he was not made a commissioner under the subsequent act. Ernle was among the large numbers of MPs placed on the committees to prepare reform of the court of chancery (5 Oct.) and adjudicate on fen drainage (31 Oct.), and of the slightly smaller number dealing with public accounts (22 Nov.).37CJ vii. 374a, 380a, 388a. He made no recorded speeches and there is no indication of whether or not he attended the Parliament in the last two months of its sitting.

At some point Ernle became involved in activity promoting the restoration of the monarchy, although there is nothing to link him specifically with the rising in Wiltshire in spring 1655. In March 1657 ‘John Ernley esquire’, probably the former MP, but just possibly his father, was (again) omitted from the commission of the peace, along with others of suspect allegiance including Norden and William Yorke*, but Ernle ‘the younger’ was (re-)inserted with Yorke less than four months later; that June he was also named an assessment commissioner.38C231/6, pp. 363, 371. In company with Norden and other conservative figures like Francis Seymour*, 1st Baron Seymour, he was named in September 1658 by the inhabitants of Marlborough as a potential referee of their complaints against local distributors of relief collected for sufferers of a fire in the town.39CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 142. A commissioner for assessment in January 1660 and for the militia in March, Ernle was made a captain in the latter in April.40A. and O.; HP Commons 1660-90. According to Edmund Ludlowe II*, he had little difficulty in being elected with Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* to represent Wiltshire in the Convention.41Ludlow, Mems. ii. 254; Ludlow, Voyce, 104.

Thereafter Ernle’s public career took off steadily. Petitioning in 1660 for the reversion of a clerkship of the pells, he claimed to have expended his fortune in promoting the restoration of the monarchy, but the recommendation that year for his inclusion among knights of the proposed order of the Royal Oak estimated his landed income (albeit probably in reversion, given that his father lived on until 1684) at £1,000 a year.42CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 447; Hoare, Repertorium, 21. In 1661 he became a deputy lieutenant for his county, from 1662 he was prominent at quarter sessions and by April 1664 he had been knighted.43HP Commons 1660-1690; Wilts. RO, A/160/2, pp. 253 seq.; CJ viii. 543a; cf. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 241. Elected to Parliament for Cricklade in 1661, he had a seat in the Commons for much of the rest of his life, garnering a series of commissions and other employments culminating in the chancellorship of the exchequer. His son Sir John Ernle†, who predeceased him, was also a Member.44HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1714.