HERVEY, Francis (1611-1703), of Weston Favell, Northants. and the Middle Temple, London.

Hervey’s grandfather – a younger son of a duchy of Lancaster official from a Norfolk gentry family – had settled at Cotton End alias Cotes, in the parish of Hardingstone, near Northampton, by the middle years of Elizabeth I’s reign.24Vis Northants. 1564 and 1618-19, 26-7, 98-9; Bridges, Northants. i. 360-2; VCH Northants. iv. 256. His uncle, Sir Francis Harvey, had represented the Suffolk borough of Aldeburgh in the 1597 Parliament and had risen through the ranks of the legal profession, becoming a Middle Temple bencher, recorder of Northampton and Leicester, a serjeant-at-law and a justice of common pleas.25HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Francis Harvey II’; Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Francis Harvey’. Hervey’s father, also a younger son, had moved from Cotton End by 1624 to reside on the family’s property in the neighbouring parish of Weston Favell.26MTR ii. 511, 755; Northampton Public Lib. Deed 931; VCH Northants. iv. 109.

Hervey emulated his illustrious uncle by studying for a legal career at the Middle Temple and was bequeathed £300 in his father’s will ‘towards his maintenance in the inns of court’.27PROB11/165, f. 189. Also among his father’s legatees was the ‘grave and worthy’ puritan rector of Weston Favell, Robert Travell.28PROB11/165, f. 189v; Bridges, Northants. i. 469; J. Fielding, ‘Conformists, Puritans, and the Church Courts: the Diocese of Peterborough 1603-42’ (Birmingham Univ. PhD thesis, 1989), 26, 32, 63, 70, 148, 164. Called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1637, Hervey was granted chambers at the inn in 1642.29MTR 855, 921. He seems to have sided with Parliament during the civil war, donating plate and money worth £50 in September 1642 on the propositions for maintaining the parliamentarian army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.30SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol. By early 1646, Hervey was deputy to the parliamentarian grandee Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester as recorder of Northampton, whose predecessors in this office had included not only Hervey’s uncle but also his former father-in-law, the prominent royalist lawyer Richard Lane.31Northants. RO, Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 88. Hervey’s nephew, Martin Harvey of Weston Favell, was a commissioner of array and royalist army officer.32HMC Portland, i. 49; CCC 1128. And Hervey himself was on friendly terms with the prominent Northamptonshire royalist Sir Justinian Isham†, borrowing upwards of £500 from him in the early 1650s.33Northants. RO, IC/319, 322, 331.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Hervey was returned for Northampton, presumably on the corporation interest.34Bodl. Top. Northants. c.9, p. 93; Northampton Bor. Recs. ed. Cox, ii. 105-6, 496-7. Assuming that the clerk of the Commons was consistent in referring to Hervey as ‘Mr Harvey’ and to the Member for Bedfordshire John Hervy as ‘Colonel Harvey’, the Northampton MP can be assigned 11 committee appointments in the first session of this Parliament and served as a teller on four divisions.35Infra, ‘John Hervy’. On 27 October, he reported an amendment to a bill for repealing part of an act concerning corn and meal, even though he had not been nominated to the original drafting committee.36CJ vii. 446a. More revealingly, he was named to committees on 31 October and 4 November for ‘upholding and settling’ the ministry in England and Wales and for the maintenance of ministers in cities and towns.37CJ vii. 448b, 450a. By 3 December, he had been tasked by the House with bringing in a bill for the maintenance of ministers in Northampton, which was given its first reading on 9 December.38CJ vii. 463b, 466a; Burton’s Diary, i. 6, When the bill received its second reading on 17 December, Hervey affirmed that it represented ‘not only the general but the particular desire of the inhabitants’, whereupon it was referred to a committee of which he was made chairman. The House would pass the bill in February 1657 and send it to the protector for his consent.39CJ vii. 469a, 486b, 490a; Burton’s Diary, i. 159.

Hervey was among those Members declared absent at the call of the House on 31 December 1656, and he was named to only four committees in 1657, of which the most important was that set up on 17 May to consider how the protector’s office should be ‘bounded, limited and circumstantiated’ under the terms of the new protectoral settlement the Humble Petition and Advice.40Burton’s Diary, i. 285; CJ vii. 535a. The most significant of his four tellerships was that of 10 June, when he partnered Gobert Barrington in favour of setting the assessment rate on Ireland at £10,000 a month.41CJ vii. 485a, 545b, 554a, 560a. This division had come at the end of an acrimonious debate in which the opposing, and defeated tellers – both army officers with strong Irish interests – had urged a reduction in the rate, while some of their colleagues in the English army had demanded that it be increased above £10,000.42CJ vii. 554a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 208-12; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 285-6.

The clerk of the Commons does not seem to have distinguished between Hervey and the secluded Member Edmund Harvey II – who was admitted at the beginning of the second session, early in January 1658 – referring to both as ‘Mr Harvey’ or ‘Mr Hervey’. Thus the ‘Mr Harvey’ who was added to the committee for privileges on 21 January was probably Edmund rather than Francis.43CJ vii. 580a. The next day, 22 January, one of the two men – probably Hervey, given his legal expertise – moved for amendments to a bill for registering births, marriages and burials and was named first to the committee appointed to prepare this legislation.44CJ vii. 581a; Burton’s Diary, ii. 337. That same day (22 Jan.), after the House was informed that messengers ‘from the Lords’ (i.e. the Cromwellian Other House) were at the door, ‘Mr Harvey’ gave three reasons why ‘we cannot allow of a message from such an authority as a House of Lords’: first, the Engagement; second, the oath recognizing the protectoral settlement; and third, the Rump’s legislation abolishing the Lords. However, he continued, ‘I should freely concur if it were a message from the Other House’.45Burton’s Diary, ii. 341-2. On 3 February, the day before the House was dissolved, ‘Colonel Harvey’ and ‘Mr Hervey’ were added to a committee on a bill for uniting parishes in Huntingdon.46CJ vii. 591a.

Harvey was returned for Northampton again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, but this time made no recorded impression upon the House’s proceedings. Returned for the borough a third time in the elections to the 1660 Convention, he was unseated on petition in favour of the Presbyterian royalist, Sir John Norwich*. He was involved in another disputed return for the borough in the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661, in which he and James Langham* reportedly enjoyed the ‘the love and affection’ of the dissenting interest in the town. On this occasion he was allowed to sit for three weeks before his return was again declared void. Twice unseated, and apparently removed from municipal office in 1662 by the commissioners for corporations (despite taking the necessary oaths), he does not seem to have stood in any of several by-elections for Northampton to the Cavalier Parliament.47Northants. RO, FH3496; Northampton assembly bk. 3/2, p. 167; Fermor Hesketh Baker ms 712, unfol.; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Northampton’; ‘Francis Harvey’. It was probably as a nonconformist sympathizer that he was removed from the Northamptonshire bench after the passing of the second Conventicle Act in 1670.48C231/7, p. 374. By the 1670s, he was apparently in some financial difficulty, first mortgaging and then selling most of his estate in Weston Favell.49Northampton Public Lib. Deeds 943-57; Cole, Weston Favell, 11-12.

Hervey died in the spring of 1703 and was buried in the Temple Church on 30 April of that year.50Burials at the Temple Church, 31. No will is recorded. None of his descendants entered Parliament.