DUCKE, Dr Arthur (1580-1648), of Wells and North Cadbury, Som., Chiswick, Mdx. and Aldersgate Street, London.

Civil lawyers were not numerous in early seventeenth-century England, but among them, Arthur Ducke was arguably pre-eminent. Anthony Wood thought him ‘a person of smooth language’ who was ‘an excellent civilian, and a tolerable poet, especially in his younger days, and well versed in histories, whether ecclesiastical or civil’.24Ath. Ox. iii. 258. Thomas Fuller mostly echoed that judgment, describing him as ‘one of most smooth language, but rough speech’.25Fuller, Hist. Worthies of Eng. i. 421. Among the close-knit ranks of the other civil lawyers, only Thomas Eden* and Sir John Lambe could be counted as serious rivals. By 1640 they had all become equally notorious as prominent enforcers of the king’s controversial ecclesiastical policies.

Ducke was a west countryman by birth. His family, which could trace their ancestry back only two generations but who were reputed to be ‘wealthy’, lived at Heavitree on the outskirts of Exeter.26Ath. Ox. iii. 257; Vivian, Vis. Devon, 309; Colby, ‘Duck’, 317. The MP’s mother was a sister of Nicholas Hayman†, MP for Totnes in 1586 and Dartmouth in 1593, and thus Hayman’s son, the poet Robert Hayman, described Ducke as his ‘cousin germain’.27Moore Smith, ‘Robert Hayman’, 24n; R. H[ayman], Quodlibets (1628), 15. Ducke’s elder brother, Nicholas, became a barrister and represented Exeter in the 1624 and 1625 Parliaments. Arthur followed a slightly different course. He used his time as a fellow of All Souls in Oxford to study civil law and, after taking the necessary degrees and travelling abroad, he practised in London as an ecclesiastical lawyer.

His appointment by Bishop James Montague as the chancellor of the diocese of Bath and Wells in 1616 marked him out as a rising star of his profession. Even more importantly, he succeeded Sir Henry Marten* as chancellor of the diocese of London in December 1624.28LMA, DL/C/22, f. 436; DL/C/342, f. 125. This made him the senior officer in the church courts overseeing the capital and several of the surrounding counties. He did so while retaining the Bath and Wells position, although his duties in London meant that he was now rarely able to officiate in person.29Stieg, Laud’s Laboratory, 173. Such work did not make him popular. In 1637, when Ducke conducted the episcopal visitation of Essex on behalf of the bishop of London, William Juxon, one local clergyman, Samuel Rogers, used the secrecy of his diary to characterise the visitation as ‘cursed’ and Ducke as a ‘base wretch’. Rogers prayed that the Lord would ‘uncloth these wolves of their sheepskins’.30The Diary of Samuel Rogers 1634-1638, ed. T. Webster and K. Shipps (C. of E. Rec. Soc. xi), 116. By then Ducke was widely viewed simply as the lackey of the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

Ducke had first got to know Laud well when the future archbishop had been the bishop of Bath and Wells between 1626 and 1628. This connection was reinforced when Laud was translated to the bishopric of London. Their relationship was sufficiently strong that in 1633 Ducke informed Laud about the personal insults uttered against him by ‘some separatists’.31Laud, Works, iii. 217. Once Laud had been promoted to become archbishop of Canterbury, Ducke continued to provide him with legal advice which usually helped underpin Laud’s assertive view of episcopal authority and rank. Thus, in July 1636 the solicitor-general, Sir Edward Littleton*, relied on Ducke to draft the text of the order-in-council confirming Laud’s right to hold a metropolitan visitation of the two universities.32CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 54, 60, 61. Two years later Ducke was one of the commissioners appointed by Laud to carry out his visitation of Merton College, Oxford.33CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 341; Laud, Works, v. 546. He supported the archbishop in Oxford in other ways as well. In 1635, when All Souls was raising money for the redecoration of its chapel, Ducke donated 100 marks to his old college.34Martin, Cat. 297.

Rightly or wrongly, the court of high commission was, in the minds of many, the principal instrument of religious enforcement used during the 1630s by the king and his archbishop. Ducke was added to it as a commissioner as part of the major expansion in its membership in December 1633.35CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 327. However, unlike most of the other new commissioners, this was for Ducke a working appointment. He and the handful of other civil lawyers serving on it, who included Eden and Lambe, processed much of day-to-day work of the court. For example, when Sir Arthur Hesilrige* was summoned to appear before it in 1635, Ducke, Lambe and Eden were asked to examine the petition from him in detail.36CSP Dom. 1635, p. 199. Much of this work was tiresomely routine, but from time to time, Ducke was unavoidably involved in some of the court’s most contentious cases, most controversially that of Henry Burton. Burton’s offence was to preach two sermons on 5 November 1636 attacking the bishops. As a preliminary move against him, Burton was summoned to Ducke’s house at Chiswick on 6 December for one-to-one questioning. Only thereafter was Burton formally proceeded against by the full court.37Procs. LP i. 671; W. Prynne, A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny (1641), 14.

Ducke’s legal work, whether in private practice or as a public official, made him extremely wealthy and over the years he accumulated much property. In the early years of their marriage, the Duckes had lived in London in Blackfriars and the preacher of St Anne’s, Blackfriars, the future Presbyterian William Gouge, became a close family friend.38Gouge, Funerall Sermon. Later they had a house in Aldersgate Street.39Strafforde Letters, i. 358. However, Ducke’s principal residence was at Chiswick, where he leased the prebendal manor from one of the canons of St Paul’s Cathedral.40Faulkner, Brentford, Ealing and Chiswick, 291-2. Since 1629 he had also held a lease on one of the canon’s houses within the precincts of Wells Cathedral.41HMC Wells, ii. 391; Wells Convocation Acts Bks. ii. 706; D.S. Bailey, The Canonical Houses of Wells (Gloucester, 1982), 56. Elsewhere in Somerset his wife had inherited some lands at Bruton from her father in 1625.42VCH Som. vii. 28-9. But Ducke’s most significant acquisition of land in Somerset was at North Cadbury, five miles to the south of Bruton. This was large enough to attract an assessment of £15 from the poll tax collectors in 1641.43Som. Protestation Returns, 203. He may also have owned land at Westonzoyland.44VCH Som. viii. 194. In 1639 Ducke was so prosperous that he was able to provide the king with a ‘loan’ of £2,000 for the military campaign against the Scottish Covenanters.45CSP Dom. 1639, p. 119.

Ducke had been elected in 1624 as MP for Minehead, almost certainly through the patronage of the then bishop of Bath and Wells, Arthur Lake. In March 1640 Ducke tried his chances there again and received sufficient support to be named in one of the two returns made by the Minehead electors. The problem of the double return was solved by the decision by Alexander Popham* to sit for Bath. On 18 April the Commons’ committee for elections confirmed Ducke and Francis Wyndham* as the two Minehead MP.46Aston’s Diary, 148. Other developments may then have hampered his participation in the Commons. On 6 May, the day after this Parliament was dissolved, Hugh Pollard* told 2nd Viscount Conway (Sir Edward Conway†) of a fight between ‘Beelzebub and Lucifer’, in which ‘Powis’ had beaten up an MP, ‘the Doctor’. Since the former was probably William Banbury alias Powis who had been involved in a case before the court of high commission, the latter may well have been Ducke. According to Pollard, this was ‘very ill for the Doctor, his eyes being almost beaten out and not able to guide him into the Parliament House, of which at last he was a worthy Member, till the day before it broke up’.47CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 122-3.

Ducke seems not to have stood anywhere in the elections for the Long Parliament later that year. His unpopularity was apparent in September 1640 when he attempted to hold a new visitation of the London diocese and quickly encountered widespread resistance. Throughout Essex and in London the hearings were held in conditions of near-riot.48HMC Montagu, 129; The Spirituall Courts epitomized (1641), 5; D. Cressy, England on Edge (Oxford, 2006), 158-9. Worse was to come. On 22 October he tried to hold hearings for the court of high commission at St Paul’s. This was broken up by a mob and Ducke was forced to flee for his life.49HMC Cowper, ii. 262; R. Quatermayne, Quatermayns Conquest over Canterburies Court (1642), 25-7; Cressy, England on Edge, 160. Popular resistance to Ducke was therefore a recent news story when the Long Parliament assembled. This would soon be exploited by his political enemies.

The wider attack on Laud and the bishops in the Long Parliament encouraged numerous petitioners with individual grievances to come forward. Many concerned cases which had been dealt with by high commission or by the London ecclesiastical courts and so often implicated Ducke.50HMC 4th Rep. 36, 50, 67. The first such case considered by the committee on religion as early as 21 November 1640, placed Ducke on the side of the anti-Laudians. Laud’s nephew, Edward Layfield, had notoriously installed a number of images in his church, All Hallows, Barking-by-the-Tower. The Commons was determined to proceed against Layfield, even though Ducke had already forced him to take the images down.51Procs. LP i. 239-40. More uncomfortable for Ducke was questioning by the Commons committee on 19 December about his interrogation of Henry Burton in 1636. Burton claimed that Ducke had ordered him to take the ex officio oath, but the latter asserted that he had merely asked about his willingness to take it.52Procs. LP i. 671. This made little difference and Ducke was among those officials censured by the Commons on 12 March 1641 for their roles in persecuting Burton.53CJ ii. 102b; Procs. LP ii. 725, 729-30.

On 25 January the Commons had agreed to reverse a decision taken in high commission over wage arrears due to the parish clerk of St Bartholomew-the-Great, and ordered several commissioners, including Ducke, to repay the legal costs of the defendants.54CJ ii. 72b. Two weeks later, the Lords ordered Ducke and Lambe to pay £100 as compensation to Mary Wheeler, whose late husband, as churchwarden of St Botolph’s, Colchester, had been prosecuted for refusing to install altar rails. Lambe and Ducke immediately protested, however, and the Lords agreed to investigate. Finding that neither Lambe nor Ducke had been present when the decision had been taken and that they had signed the order to implement it only as a formality, on 16 March the Lords rescinded the previous order.55LJ v. 158b, 186a-b; HMC 4th Rep. 51; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 458.

Perhaps Ducke’s most significant appearance before a Commons committee was on 3 March 1641, when he testified to the committee investigating the powers of high commission and star chamber. His defence of the former was forthright. A less confident advocate might have confined himself to arguing that the high commission’s jurisdiction rested on the Elizabethan Act of Supremacy, but Ducke claimed that it also derived from the royal prerogative. Moreover, under cross-examination, he volunteered the suggestion that, although it did not currently do so, the court would be entitled to hear civil cases.56Procs. LP ii. 615-17. These were hardly the sort of arguments to persuade MPs to reprieve it, although Parliament’s decision to proceed with its abolition removed the impetus for pursuing him over cases relating to it.

The coincidence that Ducke’s close colleague, the dean of the court of arches and fellow member of high commission, was Sir John Lambe and that the zealous Laudian bishop of Ely was Matthew Wren, gave plenty of scope to their critics for some very unsubtle zoomorphic jokes. By 1641 Ducke was featuring regularly in printed satires against the bishops and their associates, sometimes literally as a duck.57Spirituall Courts epitomized, titlepage; The Decoy Duck (1642). Another satire, written in verse with an accompanying woodcut, depicted the court of high commission as a ship, with Ducke as a lookout as it sailed towards the mouth of Hell.58T. Stirry, A Rot Amongst the Bishops (1641), sig. A3v-A4. He was well on his way to becoming a stock hate-figure.

When the death of Sir Henry Marten on 26 September 1641 created a vacancy as judge of the prerogative court of Canterbury, Laud appointed William Meyrick, but Ducke asserted a prior claim – a reversion granted to him by Laud earlier that year. On 23 October the House of Lords waived its ban on private petitions in order to accept Ducke’s petition against Meyrick.59HMC 4th Rep. 103; LJ iv. 402b, 406a. When questioned, Laud accepted that he had sealed a patent in Ducke’s favour the previous April, but insisted that he had never issued it and had later cancelled it.60LJ iv. 409a-b. On 9 November the Lords decided to reject Ducke’s petition, but gave him the option of pursuing the case in the law courts.61CJ ii. 309a; LJ v. 429b. If he did so, nothing came of it. This incident marked the final break between Ducke and his former patron. The reservations about Ducke’s ‘absence and default’, which had apparently led Laud not to appoint him, were compounded by a belief that he had tried to exploit the archbishop’s political weakness once he was a prisoner in the Tower. Laud considered Ducke’s actions were ‘one of the basest, and most ungrateful parts, that ever any man played’ and held Ducke directly responsible for causing the Lords to order on 23 October that he was not to exercise any of his functions as archbishop.62Laud, Works, iii. 450-1. The two issues were quite possibly linked, although the Lords’ order preceded its decision to hear Ducke’s petition later that same day.63LJ iv. 402b.

By now the courts of the diocese of London had either ceased to operate or would soon do so, but Ducke’s theoretical powers as chancellor were still enough to attract Parliament’s attention.64LMA, DL/C/130; DL/C/344. In July 1642 William Tutty petitioned the Commons alleging that Ducke had refused to institute him as the vicar of South Mimms. Unconvinced by Ducke’s explanation, on 3 August the Commons ordered him to proceed with Tutty’s institution.65CJ ii. 697b, 701b; HMC Portland, i. 47. Later that month the London volunteers who had been raised by Parliament passed close to Chiswick on their way west towards Uxbridge. Only interventions from their officers prevented them attacking Ducke’s house.66CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 372.

Once the fighting began, Ducke joined the king. On 12 November 1642 it was reported in Parliament that he was with the king’s army and that he had lent Charles £400. The Commons ordered that he be sent for as a delinquent and that the house at Chiswick be searched for arms.67Add. 18777, f. 56v; CJ ii. 845b. By December Ducke was probably with the court at Oxford. During that month he paid £1,200 to a servant of James Livingstone, the keeper of the privy purse, and £3,800 to William Ashburnham*, probably loans towards the royalist war effort. Unable to repay it, the king later promised the reversion of the honor of Grafton in Northamptonshire in lieu of this debt.68CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 251-2; VCH Northants, v. 23, 154-5. In August 1643 the king appointed him as one of his masters of request.69PC Regs. xii. p. 215; Select Cases in the Court of Requests, A.D. 1497-1569 ed. I.S. Leadam (Selden Soc. xii), p. cvii.

Two months previously, Parliament had taken further action against Ducke. On 21 June 1643 the Committee for Advance of Money fined him £2,000.70CAM 167. Then on 29 June the Commons ordered that the Committee for Sequestrations was to seize all Ducke’s goods and auction them off.71CJ iii. 149a-b. Laud’s trial, which commenced the following year, revived the use of Ducke’s previous conduct as a political weapon, but only once. When two churchwardens who had been prosecuted in the London church courts claimed that Ducke had heard their case under orders from Laud, the archbishop retorted that he could hardly produce Ducke as a witness to refute this.72Laud, Works, iv. 171-2.

Ducke was evidently living in Oxford by the spring of 1645, and when he made out his will on 1 April 1646 it was witnessed by several of the city’s residents, including Martin Aylworth of All Souls and Henry Tozer of Exeter College.73Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 268; PROB11/208/312. On the surrender of Oxford in July, Ducke returned to London. His wife died in the capital the following month and was buried in the church at Chiswick. William Gouge, by then a prominent member of the Westminster Assembly, preached the funeral sermon.74Gouge, Funerall Sermon. The following month Ducke applied to the Committee for Compounding to compound for his delinquency. On 17 December they assessed his estate at £20,000 and fixed his fine at £2,000.75CCC 1469. As ordered, he probably paid the first instalment by 16 January, but in the meantime he was still disputing the fine the Committee for Advance of Money had imposed on him in 1643.76CJ v. 56b, 86a; LJ ix. 27b; CAM 167.

On 2 September 1648 Charles I wrote to Parliament informing them he had designated Ducke and Sir Thomas Ryves as his legal advisors in their next round of negotiations, since ‘in this treaty there will be use of civil lawyers’.77LJ x. 495b. Neither House had a problem with these appointments.78LJ x. 494a; CJ vi. 10b, HMC Portland, i. 497. However, all that is known about Ducke’s role is that he was in attendance on the king at Newport for the opening session on 18 September.79Herts. RO, XIII.50, p. 4.

Ducke died on 16 December 1648, apparently during a church service. One source claims that this was at Chelsea, although that could well be a mistake for Chiswick, where he was certainly buried.80Smyth’s Obit. 27 Ducke’s will from 1646 divided his estates equally between his wife (now dead) and their two surviving daughters, Martha and Mary. He also made a large number of bequests, including £20 to Exeter College, £10 to All Souls and £20 to the almshouses which had been founded by his father at Heavitree. Other beneficiaries included his godson, Arthur Acland†, and his friends, John Ashburnham* and Sir John Glanville*.81PROB11/208/312. The younger daughter, Martha, later married, as her third husband, Sir Thomas Carew†, MP for Tiverton in the Cavalier Parliament. After the Restoration Ducke’s former house at Wells was leased by the cathedral chapter to one of his nephews, who then sublet it to Thomas White*.82Bailey, Canonical Houses of Wells, 57. Ducke also left an intellectual legacy. His major work on the history of Roman law throughout Europe since classical times, De Usu & Authoritate Iuris Civilis Romanorum, was published posthumously in 1653. Its contents reflected his pessimism about the future of civil law in England and by the time it appeared the prospects for a revival must have seemed even more remote. Yet the book won Ducke an international scholarly reputation and he was viewed as one of the great authorities on the subject well into the eighteenth century.