HALE, John (1614-91), of Bowringsleigh, West Alvington, Devon.

The Hale family lived at Caldecote or Codicote, near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, but their standing as proprietors rested on commerce in the City of London, not on ancestral land holdings. Thomas Hale married a Codicote woman, but his son, Richard, a London Grocer and already lord of the manor of King’s Walden, bought Codicote manor in 1604, and by so doing founded an important Hertfordshire dynasty.12Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 132; VCH Herts. iii. 218-9; Berry, Pedigrees Herts. 35. Richard Hale established Hertford grammar school, and his only son was high sheriff in 1621.13Berry, Pedigrees Herts. 35. Richard’s younger brother, John Hale, seems also to have lived in Codicote, but his son, also John Hale, was admitted to his uncle’s livery company, the Grocers. He acquired property at Harmer Green, to the east of Welwyn, and married the daughter of Humphrey Browne of Essex, who may have been a younger son of the family of Flambards, Cold Norton.14Vis. Herts. 1634, 61; Vis. Essex (Harl. Soc. xiii), 165. John Hale the Grocer lived in the parish of St Pancras, Soper Lane, in the heart of the City, and occupied a property he probably acquired from his cousin, William Hale. John Hale lived there from 1615 until his death in March 1621.15Hist. Gazetteer of London before the Great Fire ed. D. Keene, V. Harding (Cambridge, 1987), St Pancras Soper Lane; Regs. St Pancras, Soper Lane, 297.

St Pancras, Soper Lane was where John Hale, the subject of this biography, was baptised in March 1614. At his christening various Hale relatives stood godparents, including the wife of his father’s brother Edmund.16Regs. St Pancras, Soper Lane, 148. John Hale was probably brought up mostly in the City, where his father conducted business. Among his father’s apprentices was Increase Nowell, who emigrated in 1630 to become a first ruling elder of the church at Boston, Massachusetts.17PROB11/137/254; ‘Increase Nowell’, Oxford DNB. Nowell’s presence in the Hale household at St Pancras may suggest that John Hale senior espoused puritan views. Nothing is known of John Hale’s upbringing after his father’s death, which occurred days before John junior’s seventh birthday. John was left lands at Harmer Green, and in the parishes of Digswell and Welwyn, as well as his share (in his case, a third) of the third of his father’s estate, according to the custom of the City. He also inherited some of the profits from a stand of timber trees that belonged to his father.18PROB11/137/254. All these bequests should have been enough to deliver Hale an adequate income, without his needing to undertake commercial work.

Before he reached majority age, Hale married Anne Halswell. She was one of three daughters of Robert Halswell of Goathurst, Somerset, who in 1612 had married Grace Gilbert alias Webber, of West Alvington, in Devon. Halswell manor in Goathurst parish had been theirs since at least the thirteenth century.19VCH Som. vi. 48; Som. RO, DD/S/WH/287. Anne’s grandfather, Sir Nicholas, a deputy lieutenant and justice of the peace, had married into the Wallop family of Farleigh Wallop, Hampshire, a number of whose members had sat in Parliament.20Vis. Som.1623 (Harl. Soc. xi), 45; In the 1620s and 30s, there were close relations between the Halswells and another important Hampshire gentry family, the Pauletts.21PROB11/214/228. There was thus a significant discrepancy in social status between the mercantile Hales and the ancient gentry Halswells, but Robert Halswell was a younger son with no male heirs. His three daughters could each expect to inherit a part of his property, but also a third share of a small estate: Bowringsleigh in West Alvington, the home of their maternal grandfather, Nicholas Gilbert alias Webber.

As civil war broke out in England, Hale was an early recruit to the army of the 3rd earl of Essex, with the rank of captain.22Peacock, Army Lists, 51. On 12 August 1642, he was paid to provide mounts for himself and other officers in a horse troop. Recruitment of NCOs soon followed, as did pay for troopers and clothing, a pattern of generous and prompt funding at the outset of war that was to prove most untypical of the war as a whole.23SP28/1a/70, 73, 79, 147, 261. By August 1643, his troop was part of Col. John Middleton’s regiment.24SP28/9/207. Hale seems to have spent his early war service chiefly in Hertfordshire, suggesting that he had been living at Harmer Green before the war began.25The Impact of the First Civil War on Herts. 1642-7 ed. A. Thomson (Herts. Rec. Soc. xxiii), 130, 135, 136. In 1643 he helped raise contributions on Parliament’s ‘propositions’ for the war, which he then delivered to Col. Oliver Cromwell*.26SP28/9/390. Later that year he was in quarters at Uxbridge, Middlesex, and in 1644 was sent to Devon with Essex’s army in Col. James Sheffield’s horse regiment on the campaign that ended disastrously for Parliament at Lostwithiel in September.27SP28/11/72; SP28/19/119; Symonds, Diary, 73. He was among the soldiers who were allowed to march out of Cornwall after this defeat, and was promoted to major.28SP28/18/18; SP 28/19/151. Hale did not obtain a commission in the New Model army, and must have quit the military in 1645. Perhaps he was the ‘Captain Hayles’ whom the Lords would have preferred for the horse regiment instead of William Rainborowe.29Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 72, 76.

The movements of John Hale after demobilization are obscure. In June 1650, his son was baptised at his boyhood church of St Pancras, Soper Lane, but soon after this, and certainly by July 1651, he must have taken up residence at Bowringsleigh.30Regs. St Pancras, Soper Lane, 156; PROB11/258/412. There is no evidence that he played any part in local government in Devon until he was included in the commission of the peace by the lord protector’s council, in March 1654. He first attended quarter sessions at Exeter in the summer of that year, and attended regularly until the summer of 1659.31Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/9. In July, his name was on the printed order to raise money for the civil war damaged Exeter suburb of St Thomas, authorised by the Devon magistrates.32Bodl. Walker c.5, f. 352. Soon after that, he was elected to Parliament for Devon, the only one of the 11 knights of the shire not to have been born in the west country. Hale was named to three committees in the 1654 Parliament. On 22 November, he was included in the committee to investigate the national scandal of forged debentures of soldiers’ grants of land in lieu of pay, in which as an old soldier himself, he would surely have taken a close interest.33CJ vii. 388a. On 18 December, he was required to report from a sub-committee delegated by the committee of the Whole House on clause 31 of the proposed constitutional bill. This dealt with classes of person to be excluded from standing for Parliament. The clerk noted him in the Journal on this occasion as ‘Major Hale’, and used his former military rank when noting a few days later that he would be serving on the committee to legislate against purveyance.34CJ vii. 403b, 407b.

During the emergency period of 1655-6, and the regime of the major-generals, Hale was trusted enough by the major general of the south west, John Disbrowe*, to be allowed to hold the office of receiver of tithes for both Devon and Cornwall. After the Restoration of the monarchy, Hale was later able to testify before exchequer commissioners that he had cleared his accounts of all sums that passed through his hands between 1655 and 1659, when he gave up the office.35E113/6, unfol. In April 1655, he was among the Devon magistrates who signed the resolutions at quarter sessions in support of reforming the jury system. With his neighbour at West Alvington, William Bastard*, in May 1656 Hale returned lists of men from Coleridge and Stanborough hundreds they considered suitable as jurors.36Add. 44058, ff. 42v, 44v. As an officeholder handling significant revenues, and as an active magistrate, Hale might have expected a welcome from the protectoral government after he was elected once more to Parliament, in 1656. But with five other MPs from Devon, he was prevented by the protector’s council from taking his seat.37CJ vii. 425b. It was clearly because he was thought to be too sympathetic to the Presbyterians, not because he was suspected of royalist sympathies. Hale never overcame the obstacle to taking his seat, and played no part in the assembly.

In 1657, he was singled out by the government as one of the Devon justices thought to be too vigorous in their hostility towards the Quakers.38Add. 44058, f. 57v. The protector’s council was responding to representations from the Friends, who identified Hale and Bastard as their principal foes in the South Hams district of the county.39CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 156. In 1658 Hale consolidated his estate at Bowringsleigh by acquiring more land there.40Devon RO, 316M/TD A9-10. His socially conservative puritanism was evidently no disqualification in the eyes of the Dartmouth electors, who returned him for their borough to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659, but Hale made no impact on proceedings.41CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 406. They retained him for the Convention of 1660, where he sat on eight committees.42HP Commons 1660-90. When the Devon militia was re-organised in April to reflect the changed political climate, Hale was given his old rank of major, this time in the regiment of Sir William Courtney of Powderham, showing how he was politically acceptable to the Presbyterian Devonians who had supported George Monck* and William Morice* in the manoeuvrings towards the Restoration. Hale’s presence at quarter sessions, regular until the summer of 1659, tailed off afterwards, doubtless reflecting his own political uncertainty. He stayed away altogether until January 1662, then made sporadic appearances thereafter, being removed from the bench three times as a Presbyterian sympathiser. Ironically, in the light of his exclusion from the 1656 Parliament, he was described by the bishop of Exeter as ‘a great Oliverian’.43Devon and Cornw. N. and Q. xxi. 284. He may have been the ‘J.H.’ singled out by a balladeer as ‘an old rebel knave’ during the election of 1681.44Bagford Ballads ed. J.W. Ebsworth (repr. 2 vols, New York, 1968), 996. Hale died in September 1691.45HP Commons 1660-90.