FOWELL, Edmund (c.1598-1664), of the Middle Temple and Harewood, Calstock, Cornw.

John Fowell, Edmund Fowell’s father, was a younger brother of Arthur Fowell, father of Sir Edmund. Thus Edmund and Sir Edmund Fowell* were first cousins.21Vivian, Vis. Devon, 369. John Fowell was a Plymouth man, who was town clerk and a counsellor at law, although in 1623 he told an investigation into fees that in fact he practised in the courts as a lawyer only rarely. 22Bodl. Tanner 287, f. 96. Much more significant was the work he undertook for Plymouth corporation. Edmund, his eldest son, was destined for a similar path. After an education at Oxford, he studied at the Middle Temple, where he was called to the bar in 1625. Even before he was called, Fowell was given a number of pupils from Devon to look after, including in 1621 John Elford*.23MTR ii. 640, 662, 667, 673, 688. A year after he first entered the Middle Temple, Fowell was made a freeman of Plymouth, and four months after he was called to the bar he was appointed town clerk in succession to his father. Fowell represented the town in cases before the privy council in the late 1620s and early 1630s, including the defence of the town’s charter in face of quo warranto proceedings, a dispute involving the Eastland Company and a case in star chamber.24Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, ff. 222, 229. Once he acquired civic office, his began to fine off attendances at the Middle Temple, and in 1635 his petition for new chambers met with the response that he needed to come back into commons there before his request could be processed.25MTR ii. 731, 738, 842.

Some of Fowell’s work for Plymouth corporation brought him into conflict with the government. He argued before the privy council in October 1628 that Plymouth should not again have to billet sick men or soldiers, following the epidemic that devastated the town after the return of the fleet sent to Cadiz by George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham.26CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 353. He attended the privy council board early in 1634 in connection with the government’s wish to allow foreign vessels to ship fish, complaining that Plymouth and Dartmouth had been unfairly singled out and that asking to be allowed home to attend assizes.27CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 404, 532. In May 1636 he was prominent in pursuing government aid for repairs to Plymouth harbour.28CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 452. Fowell also held the positions of coroner and clerk of the peace of Plymouth, which may simply have been additional duties for the town clerk, but which involved him in listing inns and alehouses and investigating deaths of seamen.29CSP Dom. 1635, pp. 445, 583-4.

Against the background of the deepening national political crisis of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Fowell continued to represent Plymouth in cases in which the town was usually implicitly critical of the Caroline regime. The town appears to have withheld payments of its fee farm rent to the prince of Wales, and rather than just pay up, the town council sent Fowell to plead or to justify its case.30Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 240. In January 1640, Fowell was sent yet again to the privy council, this time to complain about the patent that had been granted for planting Newfoundland, where alehouses had been set up and fishing equipment damaged by the patentees. Fowell represented the Newfoundland fishermen, merchants and shipowners who traded with Plymouth.31CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 363. In 1641, he was one of the leading actors in a petition from the town to the Devon magistrates that complained of ‘pressures and grievances’ including the depredations of Turks and Irish rebels, the threat from papists and the evils of ‘ill affected lords and bishops’.32PA, Main Pprs. 1641, n.d. This was of course a strongly parliamentarian manifesto, and when civil war broke out the town became an island of parliamentarianism surrounded by a sea of royalists and neutrals.

With Fowell’s growing responsibilities from the mid-1630s came rewards, in the form of leases of Plymouth corporation property.33Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/720/29. By the time civil war broke out therefore, he was bound very strongly both by ideology and by material considerations to the corporation which he served. It is inconceivable therefore that he was the Edmund Fowell esquire who was brought up from Plymouth as a prisoner to Parliament in November 1643.34CJ iii. 307a. On the contrary, that year his garden in Plymouth was requisitioned, doubtless with his approval, for the siting of defensive ordnance, and he was compensated by the corporation for billeting soldiers in his house.35Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 254v; SP28/128, pt. 20. He was a member of the committee in Plymouth supervising the town’s defences by September 1643, probably in fact from much earlier, and wrote to the Commons with reports of hostile shipping movements.36Bodl. Nalson III, f. 56. In November 1644, he was in London on Plymouth’s business, and by this time was recognised by the Committee for Advance of Money, chaired by William Strode I*, whose home was near Plymouth, as one who was owed money by the state for his outlay in the civil war.37CCAM 330. In November 1645, the committee in Plymouth wrote to the Cornish Presbyterian, John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes of Truro, a letter supporting his continued governorship of the town. Fowell was despatched as the messenger to Robartes to persuade him to stay on, and to solicit him to procure the money from Parliament that the garrison needed to pay the troops there; the following year it was Fowell who took Robartes his fee as high steward.38Bodl. Nalson V, f. 61; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 264.

Recruiter MP, 1646-8

In the summer or autumn of 1646, Fowell was returned to Parliament for Tavistock. There seems little doubt that he owed his seat to John Maynard*, recorder of Plymouth since 1640 and a powerful figure in the Commons by this time.39Supra, ‘Tavistock’. Like Robartes, Maynard was clearly identified with the Presbyterian group in Parliament, and was in support of Robartes and Sir John Bampfylde* as military commanders at Plymouth, as against the critical perspective adopted by Edmund Prideaux I. Maynard’s influence in Tavistock was strong. Soon after Fowell’s election to the Commons, he took up chambers at the Middle Temple again, where he and Maynard took a few Devon pupils and were associates in other activities at their inn.40MTR ii. 942, 943, 971. One of these pupils was Francis Glanville of Kilworthy, just outside Tavistock, and around this time, Fowell married Glanville’s sister. This brought him a tenancy of Harewood, an estate in the parish of Calstock, east Cornwall, which was to become his main residence. Fowell gave up the town clerkship of Plymouth in October 1647.

Fowell had taken his seat in the Commons by 29 October 1646, when with Maynard he was named to a committee working on an ordinance on the sensitive subject of balancing the interests of the public against the parliamentary privilege claimed by MPs, in cases of title or debt.41CJ iv. 708b. He took the Covenant on 9 December, and on 21 January 1647 sat on a committee that drew up instructions to judges before they rode the circuits.42CJ v. 7b, 60a. On 13 February he was granted leave of absence and was not noted in the House again until 12 May.43CJ v. 86a, 168b. On his return he was employed on the ordinance for raising £200,000 for the army by a loan, but was granted further leave on 19 July.44CJ v. 168b, 250a. Whether he availed himself immediately of this permission to leave Westminster seems doubtful. During the crisis of the summer of 1647, he was named to a number of parliamentary committees in the front line of the confrontations between Parliament, the army and the London crowd. On 22 July he was named to a committee investigating threats to the peace of the kingdom, after a reading of The Humble Petition of Citizens, which called for the king to return to London to meet with both Houses of Parliament.45CJ v. 254a; The Humble Petition of the Citizens, Commanders, Officers and Soldiers (1647, 669.f.11.47). A hostile mob burst into the Commons chamber on the 26th, and by the 30th, the Speaker and the Independents had fled to the army. Fowell remained behind. On the 31st he was required to write to the soldiery of Plymouth to explain that the garrison was now in the hands of the New Model army, and on the following day was named to a committee to augment the powers of the Presbyterian-dominated ‘committee of safety’, which had been set up in June to mobilise London against the army. He was called to a committee on 2 August to investigate an assault on a Devon colleague, Charles Vaghan*, and on the same day was one of four Presbyterian MPs charged with writing to Sir Thomas Fairfax* a narrative of complaint, touching on the arrest of Sir Samuel Luke*, the departure of the Speaker and the deaths of soldiers under Parliament’s command at the hands of New Model troops.46CJ v. 262a, 263a, 265a, 265b.

On 3 August, Fowell was instructed to bring in an ordinance empowering the customs and excise officers in Plymouth to advance £4,000 to the garrison governor for the soldiers’ arrears on the security of receipts for the assessment.47CJ v. 266a. On the 6th, the army entered London, and no more is heard in the Commons about Fowell until November: he was noted as absent at a call of the House on 9 October.48CJ v. 266a, 330a. It was at this point that he gave up the town clerkship of Plymouth, taking up places in the commissions of the peace both for Devon and Cornwall. He was again in the House on 6 November when he was called to a committee considering all aspects of promoting trade and reviewing restrictive practices. With his cousin and namesake, Sir Edmund Fowell, he was asked to investigate the king’s removal from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight (12 Nov.) and with Francis Thorpe was given charge of drafting an ordinance on reducing the costs to sheriffs of processing their accounts at the exchequer (17 Nov.).49CJ v. 352a, 357a, 362a. Back in Plymouth, the privations endured by the soldiers and townspeople had not lessened, and now £10,000 was to be advanced to them from assessments. Fowell was tasked with explaining what had been done (18 Nov.). It was probably in connection with the crisis at Plymouth that Fowell was granted six weeks’ leave on 30 November.50CJ v. 362b, 373a.

With a number of other Devon MPs he was required on 23 December to bring in assessments from that county, but he was probably already in the south west and was given more leave on 13 January 1648. But he was back at Westminster by the end of the month, when he was called to work on an ordinance indemnifying tenants against royalist landlords.51CJ v. 400b, 429b, 447b. In June and July Fowell was named to committees on taking the accounts of soldiers, to reimburse Col. William Herbert and to investigate the outbreak of an insurrection in Surrey. After another period of leave, when he probably returned to Devon to be allocated a place on the third of the county committees established in the re-organisation of 15 August, Fowell’s last recorded appearance in this Parliament was on 17 November, when he was added to a committee working on nullifying arrears of fee farm rents due to the crown: duties to which his own property at Calstock was presumably subject.52CJ v. 581b, 628a, 631b, 634b; vi. 34b, 78b; Add. 44058, ff. 26v-27.

Fowell may have been at Westminster when the army purged Parliament on 6 December. He figures as ‘Vowell younger’ on one of the lists of those secluded, but as he was only a few years younger than his cousin, Sir Edmund, this detail in itself is enough to undermine confidence in the source. He does not appear on William Prynne’s* own contemporary list, nor on the list Prynne published in 1660 of surviving secluded Members.53A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); W. Prynne, A Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1649), 28, 29 (E.539.5); W. Prynne, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members (1660, E.1013.22). In 1659 Thomas Burton* recorded Fowell as saying that ‘300 of us were hurried to prison’.54Burton’s Diary, iii. 214. The number is wrong, clearly, but the comment does suggest he was present. In 1659 Fowell recalled in the same speech that at some point after the purge he had been questioned by a parliamentary committee about his past voting record, but declined to co-operate. This must have been a hearing before the committee appointed on 5 March 1649 to consider readmissions to the House.55Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 217. On balance it seems that he did not attend the House on the day of the purge, but that he associated himself with the secluded Members and was sufficiently interested in being readmitted in March 1649 to present himself to the committee considering such applications.

Fowell disappeared from the commission of the peace in 1649 – whether he resigned or was removed is not known – but he was quickly restored to it the following year. He was valued still as a legal adviser in Plymouth, which called on him to pronounce on the purchase by the corporation of Sutton Pool, the port’s main harbour, which had been crown property.56Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 277. Nor did Fowell have any qualms about availing himself of the opportunity to purchase his own home, Harewood, for £555 when duchy of Cornwall estates were put up for sale. Gregory Clement* acted as an intermediary in the transaction.57E320/D 31; I. Gentles, ‘The Debentures Market and Military Purchases of Crown Land’ (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1969), 283. Fowell resumed commons at his inn of court, and acquired new chambers there at the expense of the sequestered royalist, Humphrey Coningsby*. He was a master of the bench there and in 1655 an auditor of the treasurer’s accounts. A frequent collaborator with Fowell as a bencher on Middle Temple committees in the second half of the 1650s was the Devon royalist, Sir Peter Balle*.58MTR iii. 1045, 1052, 1054, 1078, 1087, 1093, 1102, 1120, 1122. Dividing his time between London and south Devon, Fowell when at home was an associate of Christopher Ceely* in persecuting Quakers. As ‘Justice Vowell’ at quarter sessions, he allegedly declared that a Friend should be hanged for saying that Christ was the Word ‘and the Scriptures a true declaration of him’, hardly likely to have been what he meant, but evidence at least of the hostility that Devon Quakers harboured towards him.59The West Answering to the North (1657), 93, 162, 163, 166-7 (E.900.3).

Second protectorate Parliament, 1656-8

Fowell was returned to the 1656 Parliament for Devon, probably on the strength of his profile as a doughty combatant of the Quakers as well as his prominence in Devon legal circles. He was immediately elected to the committee for privileges (18 Sept.) and proved to be a vocal as well as an active Member of the House. On 23 September he was teller on the opposite side to Edmund Prideaux I when a motion to ban private petitions from discussion for a month was discussed, suggesting that at this point Fowell’s support for the government was still far from assured.60CJ vii. 424a, 427b. Legal topics naturally claimed his attention. He sat on committees to address abuses in wits of certiorari (25 Sept.), to review legislation from previous interregnum regimes (27 Sept.), to review the licensing laws applying to the drink trade (29 Sept.) and the laws on grain (7 Oct), the behaviour of attorneys and estate stewards (13 Oct.), vagrancy (16 Oct.), trade in general (20 Oct.), probate (27 Oct.), shipwrecks (28 Oct.) and the imprisonment of debtors (29 Oct.), all within the first two months of the opening of the Parliament.61CJ vii. 428a, 429b, 430a, 435b, 438a, 439b, 442a, 446a, 446b, 447a. He was given charge of the bill on vagrancy, and reported to the House on it on 31 October and 4 and 5 December.62CJ vii. 448a, 464b; Burton’s Diary, i. 21. Between the opening of the Parliament in September and the end of December 1656, Fowell was named to 31 committees, and on at least 17 of these he was a colleague of Thomas Bampfylde, who shared his Presbyterian religious outlook as well as his Devon background.

On the private bill to allow the patron and vicar of the living at Plymouth to let property at a rack-rent, Fowell was alive to the implications for other corporate bodies and wanted permissive powers for them (3 Dec.).63Burton’s Diary, i, 1. On the same day, at a reading of the bill for suppressing Catholic recusants, he wanted to ensure that recusants’ children be brought up in the Protestant religion.64Burton’s Diary, i, 7. Other religious topics that claimed his attention in this period were a bill to settle ministers’ maintenance (31 Oct.), the bill to allow the owners of benefices to enjoy their property undisturbed (3 Nov.), the bill to allow urban corporations to sponsor ministers of religion where no adequate maintenance existed (4 Nov.), and as examples of this approach to the problem, bills for ministers in Northampton and on the Isle of Wight (17 and 26 Dec.).65CJ vii. 448a, 449b, 450a, 469a, 475b. Despite his evident hostility towards Quakers, and theirs towards him, he was oddly silent on the case of James Naylor*, which preoccupied MPs in December 1656. He seems to have confined himself to a plea (17 Dec.) that a lawyer should pen the judgment on Naylor, because it would serve as an important precedent.66Burton’s Diary, i. 163. He was more animated when the menace of Quakers generally was addressed, agreeing with others (18 Dec.) that ‘it is high time to take a course with them. They deny all ministry and magistracy to be the word of God, &c.; affront all authority, and increase daily’.67Burton’s Diary, i. 169.

When Edward Whalley* brought in a bill to restrain further enclosures of common lands, a move that was evidently intended to help the poor, Fowell dismissed it (19 Dec.) as ‘the most mischievous bill that ever was offered to this House. It will wholly depopulate many, and destroy property.’68Burton’s Diary, i. 176. The House agreed with him, and the bill was swiftly rejected. He also opposed the traditional use of the parish brief to raise money for parishioners affected by disastrous fires, commending instead the new system of certification by magistrates and lord protector (22 Dec.).69Burton’s Diary, i. 201. On 23 December, he defended the inns of court against an increase in their tax assessment, arguing that those that lived there were poor students. Given that the inns also housed many affluent lawyers, such as himself, this was a rather specious argument, but it appealed to his colleagues in the House, and Fowell managed to deflect the weight of the assessment away from the inns and back on to the City.70Burton’s Diary, i. 209, 214. In debate on the 24th, his remarks suggested that he had been active in work on the probate bill over the last two months.71Burton’s Diary, i. 226.

When on Christmas Day, amid complaints by Members at how the day was being celebrated outside, Major-general John Disbrowe* brought in a bill to continue the decimation tax on royalists. Fowell spoke in support, but his remarks were well weighed, accepting that the tax was divisive and therefore urging his colleagues to avoid putting it to the vote, which would quantify the scale of the division.72Burton’s Diary, i. 241. The following day, the Naylor affair came back to bite MPs, when the lord protector questioned the authority by which they had sentenced Naylor without his consent. Fowell was confident that they could satisfy him, asserting that there were various precedents that could be cited (although they were from the old constitution, and he made no reference to the Instrument of Government), and remarking in passing that his view had been that Naylor should have been put to death for his crime.73Burton’s Diary, i. 250.

In the opening months of this Parliament, Fowell had shown himself to be one of the most assiduous of the legislators in the House. By January 1657, he had achieved sufficient standing among his peers to be given the task of chairing sessions of the House when it sat in grand committee on the excise bill: he himself had moved that the bill should be dealt with in that way.74CJ vii. 480a, 482b; Burton’s Diary, i. 323. He was called to the chair on 8 January by John Ashe, when John Parker I was excused. He took on the same task on other occasions (12, 27 Jan., 4 June); the House may have resorted more frequently to sessions of the whole House as an expedient response to the ill health of Speaker William Lenthall. 75Burton’s Diary, i. 324, 341; ii. 175. With Henry Hatsell he urged the adoption of the bill on fisheries (2 Jan.), advancing in particular the west country ports which had exported to Spain and which since the war with the Spanish now needed new mechanisms for selling their surplus catches abroad. As with many of these bills, it was slow to reach fruition, and by 30 May he was urging speed, lest the fish (and perhaps the bill) ‘will stink on our hands else’.76Burton’s Diary, i. 296; ii. 165. Also with local interests at heart Fowell worked on the bill to enable Exeter to reorganize the preaching ministry there (9 Feb.), and on 6 March reported on the bill for the ministry in Plymouth, of which he was evidently the prime architect.77CJ vii. 488a, 499b. Plymouth corporation paid him for two acts, and entertained him with Sir Francis Drake*.78Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 302. Fowell served on a number of committees dealing with petitions from individuals, and in all of these it was probably his legal expertise that was prized.79CJ vii. 484a, 485a, 488a, 490b, 494b, 496b, 504a, 505a, 505b, 507a, 513b.

On 23 April 1657, after Members had talked themselves into a standstill on how to proceed with the Humble Petition and Advice, it was Fowell who got things going again.80Burton’s Diary, ii. 10. Although Fowell had not been involved in the initial discussions on the new constitution in February and March, on three occasions in April he was called to committees that met with the lord protector to try to advance the question of the constitution, and suggested (23 Apr.) that fines be imposed on disqualified persons returned to Parliament rather than that they be weeded out by triers, but the idea did not stick.81CJ vii. 521a, 521b, 523b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 17. His contribution to debate on the state’s revenue appears to have been merely that of a lawyer trying to be helpful, rather than that of someone with fixed opinions on the Humble Petition (24 Apr., 30 Apr.) and he advocated the use of the exchequer as the safest place to receive and account for tax revenues, thus adopting a traditional approach to questions of receipt and audit.82Burton’s Diary, ii. 27, 33, 89, 93, 173. He looked askance at the clause in the Humble Petition prohibiting cavaliers from places of trust. Fowell pointed out (24 Apr.) that royalists were already seeking to avoid all offices in the community, and advocated limiting the ban to offices of profit, so as not to allow them to withdraw from public life as a separate caste.83Burton’s Diary, ii. 34.

Between 1 January 1657 and 26 June, when the session of this Parliament came to an end, Fowell was named to 38 committees. At least 17 of these were constituted to work on bills from the outset. Among the important public bills to which Fowell was an important contributor in 1657 was the excise bill, which took the full six months of sittings in 1657 to find its way to being engrossed. He took responsibility for seeing it through its stages and revisions.84CJ vii. 558b, 559a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 164, 255. Fowell was arguing as an expert on the excise when he advocated the continuation of a public debt of nearly £3,000 charged on it by the Long Parliament (15 May).85CJ vii. 534b. On the related topic of the customs, he was nearly voted to the chair of the grand committee, but was excused because of his leading role in the excise (1 June).86Burton’s Diary, ii. 167. He was in any case not simply in favour of maximising revenue. He wanted to see the duty on tin lowered, and spoke as a Member from a tin mining constituency when he pleaded that ‘the profit that the poor people get is out of the jaws of death and danger’.87Burton’s Diary, ii. 163-4. He was fully involved in all stages of the legislation to restrict building in the London suburbs by the imposition of fines, another bill which was nearly six months in gestation, and was willing that the lord protector, rather than the Parliament, should name the commissioners it authorized.88CJ vii. 491a, 531b, 555a, 565a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 155, 156, 160 One of those facing a swingeing penalty by this act was William Russell*, 5th earl of Bedford, and Fowell was sympathetic to a reduction of it as a response to Bedford’s church-building.89Burton’s Diary, ii. 181-2. On 16 June he was asked with Lislebone Long and the Exeter town clerk, Thomas Westlake, to bring in fresh clauses to a bill confirming acts and ordinances.90CJ vii. 558b. Other legislation claiming his attention included the bills for settling the postal service (29 May), on the criteria for public service (15 June), the attempt at a sumptuary law (17 June), and the bill for quantifying the public debt (19 June).91CJ vii. 542a, 557b, 559b, 563a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 155.

On 28 April, Fowell prevailed with Westlake to have read an ordinance on the court of admiralty, to the evident great reluctance of the Speaker.92Burton’s Diary, ii. 57. He supported Henry Hatsell (28 Apr.) in an attack on the knights of Windsor, who enjoyed the profits of extensive estates in Devon, and the following day expressed a lack of confidence in the new act on marriages.93Burton’s Diary, ii. 61, 70. It was Fowell who sought an early date for the vagrancy act to come into force, so it could be implemented against Quakers, but instead his colleagues voted in favour of a greater period of grace.94Burton’s Diary, ii. 114. On 25 May he raised the question of whether the Humble Petition and Advice would vitiate other legislation, if it had to go through the new Other House before engrossment, but on 27 May advocated the printing and publishing of the resolutions of the House on the Humble Petition, suggesting that he supported it.95Burton’s Diary, ii. 120, 136.

On the topic of the Hele charity, which absorbed a great deal of time in this Parliament, Fowell took the part of his patron, John Maynard*, who had been excluded from the Parliament, and criticized the parliamentary committee’s report as the destruction ‘of divers settlements, for privy uses, made by Serjeant Maynard, in order to a trust in him reposed’.96Burton’s Diary, ii. 170. On 6 June, he again acted as a proxy for Maynard, outlining the uses to which the charity funds were put and quoting Maynard’s warning that he would do his utmost to redress any wrong the committee perpetrated. Fowell was given another hearing ‘to matter of fact’, but the vote went in favour of the petitioner and the committee’s recommendations for a bill.97Burton’s Diary, ii. 182, 183, 185, 189.

As time before the adjournment began to slip away, Fowell increasingly appeared as a manager of the business before the House, tending to adopt positions that led away from rambling debate. Members wrestled with whether to adopt the ‘equality though not the illegality’ of Ship Money as a principle for laying the monthly assessment on the nation. Fowell took the point – ‘an ell of velvet and an ell of canvas may be measured by the same ell‘ – but was concerned at the implications for the parliamentary timetable of a full debate on the principle.98Burton’s Diary, ii. 214, 215. He was in favour of managing timber in the four counties of Ireland set aside for meeting soldiers’ arrears, rather than relying on the vagaries of discoveries of fraud. On 15 June he and the master of the rolls (William Lenthall) headed off a debate on the frequency of Parliaments that threatened to open up again the Humble Petition and Advice.99Burton’s Diary, ii. 252. He and Lord Chief Justice Glynne moved a reading of the explanatory Petition and Advice (24 June) two days before the ending of the session.100Burton’s Diary, ii. 303.

In the short session of this Parliament in the new year of 1658, Fowell was named to three committees: on precedents for an oath to be taken by the clerk of the House (21 Jan.), the bill for marriages, which he had earlier opposed; and a bill against absenteeism by university heads of houses (22 Jan.). On all three of these he was accompanied by John Maynard, who had by this time mended fences with the Cromwellian government.101CJ vii. 579a, 581a. It was Fowell who moved the second reading of the universities bill.102Burton’s Diary, ii. 338. On 4 February, his last contribution to this Parliament was a long speech, urging his colleagues to declare that the Other House was in fact the Lords, asserting that ‘the barons have always done you greatest service’ (citing Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex as a case in point), and rehearsing the fact that members of the Other House, ‘worthies’, had been called there as a reward by the lord protector: ‘they are lords’.103Burton’s Diary, ii. 448-50.

Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, 1659

When the traditional constituencies were restored in time for elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, Fowell was returned for Tavistock, where his electoral influence weighed heaviest. He was named to the committee of privileges (28 Jan. 1659) and six other committees during the life of the assembly. Two of these were concerned with the ministry in the north of England (5 Feb.) and the parliamentary representation of Durham (31 Mar.); only one had a west country flavour, the committee on preventing the state from sending prisoners to islands such as Jersey to evade the reach of habeas corpus (16 Mar).104CJ vii. 594b, 600b, 609a, 614b, 622b. The committee on the case of Samuel Vassall* (1 Apr.) was a revisiting of a topic addressed by Fowell and others in the previous Parliament.105CJ vii. 485a, 534b, 623a.

In this Parliament, Fowell proved himself to be as supportive of the government as he had been in the 1656 assembly. He moved that a message be sent to Westminster Hall to call all MPs in for the second reading of the bill of recognition of the new lord protector (7 Feb.) and tried to stifle a speech by Robert Reynolds against the bill.106Burton’s Diary, iii. 86, 195, 197, 205. On 11 February, again contradicting Reynolds, he spoke strongly in support of the protectorate, and of Richard Cromwell, arguing that those excluded from the 1656 Parliament entered a dialogue with the government and that many eventually entered the House. In contrast he outlined the events of December 1648, associating himself with the sufferers in the purge. He reminded his hearers that the Humble Petition was a statute and defects could be remedied by an elected Parliament, so ‘that we should never come under the tyranny of a commonwealth’.107Burton’s Diary, iii. 215; Schilling, thesis, 57.

Fowell antagonized the commonwealthsmen further by supporting the Other House against their sniping. Resuming the burden of his speech of 4 February 1658, he justified Oliver Cromwell’s selection of men of ‘valour and virtue’ for the second chamber (19 Feb.), noting how the late protector had not stooped ‘to make every lump of gilded earth a lord’. He repeated his earlier praise for the contribution of lords down the ages, and making an unambiguous statement: ‘There is a necessity for a House of Lords’.108Burton’s Diary, iii. 353-4; Add. 5138, p. 191. By the end of February he was declaring that just as the Other House was in reality a House of Lords – ‘they have only changed the names’ – so ‘the protector is king of England, to all intents and purposes whatsoever’.109Burton’s Diary, iii. 531, 533; Schilling, thesis, 134. John Maynard supported Fowell in this line, as he did when Fowell justified the postponement of assizes, ostensibly a concession to ‘people busy at plough and hedging’.110Burton’s Diary, iii. 327. Later in the Parliament, the pair worked in tandem to call for a fresh commission on fraudulent debentures (9 Apr.) and on irregularities in the election return for Tavistock (13 Apr.).111Burton’s Diary, iv. 385, 414.

Fowell also supported the protectorate by arguing in favour of the right of the Scots to retain their seats in the House, again a battle against the republicans. He sought to draw a distinction between the Scots, being ‘clear they ought to continue’, and the position of the Irish MPs, about whom he evidently felt less confident. He expressed his confidence in the powers of Parliaments to remedy all wrongs: ‘Parliaments can do miracles, make infants of full age, make bastards legitimate and aliens free born’, and could therefore easily entitle Scots to sit.112Burton’s Diary, iv. 116, 165, 233. In his attitudes towards social offenders he remained implacable, wishing a period in Newgate for an offender before the House and a whipping for the Quakers petitioning and lobbying in Westminster Hall.113Burton’s Diary, iv. 307, 440. These expressions of concern to shore up the social order must have been well received in Plymouth, which made a land grant to him in 1659.114Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/360/45.

After the collapse of Richard Cromwell’s government, Fowell returned home. He can hardly have welcomed the return of the Rump, of which he had been so critical during the protectorate, and took the side of the Plymouth mayor who had been arrested on the Speaker’s orders in September 1659. But it is clear that during the time of the rising by Sir George Boothe* he remained on the side of the government of the day.115Bodl. Nalson VIII, 70. His views had changed by January 1660, however, when with Thomas Bampfylde* and other Presbyterians he lent his name to the address to the Speaker from Exeter, calling for the return of the Members secluded in 1648.116Som. RO, DD Baker 9/3/3. After those Members were readmitted, the following month, Fowell seems not to have availed himself of the opportunity to join them in the House. In April 1660 Maynard and Fowell were returned to the Convention by the Plymouth corporation in a double return. Maynard was also elected for Exeter, leaving Fowell to see his own election declared void by the Commons on 9 June.117HP Commons, 1660-90.

This marked the end of Fowell’s public career. In 1661 he was still advising Plymouth corporation on the now contested rights over the harbour of Sutton Pool, along with two other prominent ex-parliamentarian Devon lawyers with civic and parliamentary experience, Thomas Westlake* and Thomas Gibbons*.118Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/133, ff. 10v, 11. He remained a trustee for the Hele charity which had so exercised the second protectorate Parliament, but by June 1663, had given up his active membership of the Middle Temple.119Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 81/H/3/38; MTR iii. 1175. Fowell made his will on 17 September 1663, making a sign because of incapacity owing to the palsy. Nothing was said of the house at Calstock - his purchase must have been declared invalid when the king returned – and in 1661 he and his wife disposed of extensive landed interests in Devon and Somerset, probably to meet the deficit in his finances. He nevertheless was able to bequeath a number of properties in and around Tavistock. He was buried at Calstock in 1664. His will took over five years to prove.120PROB11/329/520; Devon RO, 1262 M/T 1197. He is not known to have been followed into Parliament by any descendant.