PACKER, Robert (1614-82), of Shellingford, Berks.

This MP came from a family of courtier bureaucrats, with his two grandfathers and his father all serving as clerks of the privy seal at various times. Moreover, his father, John Packer†, had combined his court offices with loyal service to George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, as his private secretary. It had been as a Buckingham client that Packer senior had been elected as MP for West Looe in 1628.19HP Commons 1604-1629. He had also benefited to the full financially in that heyday of court favour. From 1620, when he acquired the manor of Shellingford Newbury in the Vale of the White Horse, he had begun to use his substantial income to build up a family estate in Berkshire.20VCH Berks. iv. 476. More significantly, he also began to give much of the rest of his income away to a number of religious causes, such as financial support for preachers and the restoration of several churches. His credentials as a godly philanthropist were impeccable. Buckingham’s assassination in 1628 robbed him of his principal patron, but he retained his privy seal position throughout the 1630s and he remained well-connected at court.

Those connections helped assist in the final stage of his eldest son’s education. Packer’s brother-in-law William Hawkins was the solicitor to the 2nd earl of Leicester (Sir Robert Sydney†), who in 1637 was serving as the English ambassador extraordinary in Paris. Hawkins’s influence was used to obtain for Robert Packer a place in Leicester’s entourage. As Hawkins explained to the earl, young Packer was

about three and twenty years old, of a very civil behaviour lately come from the university, and one that doth much desire to see the fashions of Paris under so good a defence as your lordship’s service.21HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 133.

Seventeen years earlier John Packer had served as the ambassador to Denmark and a period of foreign travel was an obvious way to prepare Robert for a similar career, whether as a diplomat or as a court official back home. It certainly provided him with the chance to improve his French.22Berks. RO, D/EHy O1, ff. 357, 359. He joined Leicester in Paris in late December 1637.23HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 138, 140. He seems to have spent the next two years there, with occasional excursions to Tours.24HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 166, 167, 168, 175, 181; Berks. RO, D/EHy O1, ff. 357, 359. In agreeing to send him more money, his father told Hawkins

I understand not the account which he hath sent me, but I perceive by it, though his expense at Paris were high, yet his charges since his going from thence are not immoderate. I hope he will play the good husband and spend his time well, if he shun English company.25HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 170.

Packer left Paris in April 1640 to travel to Holland in the entourage of Edward and Philip, two of the younger brothers of Charles Louis, the elector palatine.26HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 246, 251, 254, 255. When exactly he returned to England is unclear.

In July 1639 Packer had written to his father expressing the hope that the reports of a peace treaty between the king and the Scottish Covenanters were accurate.27HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 169. John Packer had no doubt welcomed the news of that treaty, as he had earlier revealed his opposition to the king’s planned military campaign against the Scots by refusing to donate money towards it.28CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 511, 521-2. This is an early indication of his disapproval of the king’s policies and, once civil war had broken out, that disapproval would translate into strong support for Parliament. Robert took the same stance. By the mid-1640s father and son were among Parliament’s most visible supporters in Berkshire, most obviously in their capacities as members of the local assessment commission.29A. and O. Their Berkshire estates suffered much during the fighting, not least their manor at Donnington. The castle there was part of that property, but it was occupied by the royalist forces in 1642 and managed to hold out against repeated parliamentarian attacks until the royalist governor, Sir John Boys, finally surrendered in April 1646. The two battles of Newbury (Sept. 1643 and Oct. 1644) in the same vicinity also did not help.

Packer was elected as MP for Wallingford in the recruiter by-election late in 1646. He had taken his seat at Westminster by 9 December of that year when he took the Solemn League and Covenant.30CJ v. 7b. During the first half of 1647 he was named to a couple of committees, including that appointed on 11 May to identify the printer of some pro-royalist pamphlets, but on 27 May he was granted leave of absence.31CJ v. 125b, 167b, 188b. This may have been connected with the moves to disband the army, as there was still a strong military presence in Berkshire. This was presumably also why he was then included on the committee to consider the bill about soldiers crossing the lines of communication.32CJ v. 229a. The fact that he was again granted leave on 21 August and that he was still absent on 9 October may well indicate that he had sided with the Presbyterians during the political crisis of late July and early August 1647. However, the fact that he had been granted formal permission to be absent meant that the Commons dropped its attempt to fine him £20 for non-attendance.33CJ v. 281a, 330a, 337a. That December the Commons agreed to send him and Peregrine Hoby* to act as assessment commissioners in Berkshire.34CJ v. 400b. By the following summer his immediate concern seems to have been to lessen the impact of the military presence locally. On 1 June 1648 he and Sir Francis Pile* wrote to Sir Thomas Barnardiston* objecting to the proposal that a permanent garrison be created at Reading. They pointed out that there were already troops stationed at Windsor and Wallingford and argued that stationing them at Reading as well would only create ‘a great disturbance’. Their suggestion was that the local fortifications centred on the ruins of Reading Abbey should be slighted.35LJ x. 302b. In December 1648 Packer was among those MPs secluded in the army’s purge of the Commons. When he attempted to enter the House on 13 December, a week after the initial purge, he was turned away by soldiers.36A Vindication (1649), 29 (irregular pagination) (E.539.5); The Second Part of the Narrative (1648), 7 (E.477.19).

Packer’s father died just ten days after the king’s execution. At that point Robert inherited most of his estates, although his father’s land at Groombridge in Kent went instead to one of his younger brothers, Philip.37PROB11/210/288. Packer cooperated first with the republic and then with the protectorate, being included on the Berkshire assessment commissions in 1650 and 1657 and on the commission of the peace from 1653, but the depth of that cooperation is difficult to discern.38A. and O.; C231/6, p. 268 He probably avoided any involvement in national politics until the secluded MPs were re-admitted to the Long Parliament in February 1660. That he was then added to the committee on the forthcoming dissolution of Parliament after it was asked to draft the text of the new election writs does rather suggests he was one of those who by then favoured a swift end to that Parliament’s prolonged existence.39CJ vii. 855a. He was elected again for Wallingford later that year and represented the constituency for a third time in the Cavalier Parliament.40HP Commons 1660-1690. Although inactive in those Parliaments, he was considered a Presbyterian. Age or illness may have deterred him from standing again in 1679 or 1681 and he died in 1682. His only surviving child, John, succeeded him.41Berks. RO, D/A1/108/10; Le Neve, Monumenta, iii. 30. John’s son Robert Packer† and grandson Winchcomb Howard Packer† both sat in Parliament.42HP Commons 1690-1715; HP Commons 1715-1754.