PERROT, Herbert (c.1617-1683), of Haroldston, Haroldston St Issells, Pemb., and Wellington, Herefs.

The Herefordshire Perrots were a minor gentry family that had settled at Moreton-on-Lugg, three miles north of Hereford, by the early sixteenth century.30Barnwell, Perrot Notes, 119; R.K. Turvey, ‘NLW roll 135: a seventeenth-century pedigree roll from Herefs.’, NLWJ xxx. 386, 388, 402. Perrot’s father, Robert Perrot, was the second son – but became the heir – of a freeman and merchant of Hereford who served as mayor of the city in 1589-90.31Turvey, ‘NLW roll 135’, 380; Duncumb, Collections, i. 367. Robert had been drawn during the 1610s or 1620s into the circle of his brothers and cousins in London: a mercantile network that looked for patronage and financial support to Lionel Cranfield†, created earl of Middlesex and appointed lord treasurer in 1621. Robert may well have owed his appointment as a clerk in the exchequer to Cranfield’s influence.32Turvey, ‘NLW roll 135’, 380-1.

The young Herbert Perrot’s prospects were transformed in 1637, when he inherited the Pembrokeshire estate – centred upon Haroldston near Haverfordwest – of the prominent Commons-man and godly Irish adventurer Sir James Perrott†, who died heirless.33HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir James Perrot’. Although considerable doubt has been cast on the claim of the Herefordshire Perrots to derive their ancestry from the more ancient and illustrious Pembrokeshire line of the family – a claim that Sir James evidently believed – it appears that the Moreton branch was indeed descended from the Perrotts of Haroldston.34Cases in the High Court of Chivalry 1634-1640 ed. R.P. Cust, A.J. Hopper (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 217-18; Barnwell, Perrot Notes, 14, 59, 122-3; Turvey, ‘NLW roll 135’, 386, 388-90, 400. Perrot’s inheritance interrupted his legal education and bore him away to Haroldston and a marriage to a Pembrokeshire heiress who brought him one-third of an estate in the far west of the county.35Jones, ‘Lloyd of Cilciffeth’, 32, 58-9. But he seems to have returned to London at least occasionally during the later 1630s, for he was probably the ‘Mr Perrott’ who was imprisoned late in 1639 as one of the ‘ringleaders and principal offenders’ in a student riot at Gray’s Inn.36PBG Inn, 337. In 1642, as heir to his bachelor uncle Francis Perrot – a London merchant, to whom he was ‘highly accountable for his breeding and education’ – he acquired the lands and tenements that Sir James had settled before his death upon Francis, thereby completing the transfer of the entire landed estate of the Pembrokeshire Perrotts to the Herefordshire Perrots.37PROB11/190, f. 303v; Barnwell, Perrot Notes, 215; Turvey, ‘NLW roll 135’, 391.

Perrot was among the group of Pembrokeshire gentry who signed a royalist ‘protestation’ in September 1643, pledging to preserve the county against attack by parliamentarian ships and Parliament’s troops at Pembroke.38SP16/497/148, f. 264; Phillips, Civil War in Wales, ii. 84-5; A. L. Leach, Civil War in Pemb. 58-9. By mid-1644, however, with the county now cleared of royalist forces, he was deemed sufficiently well-affected by Parliament to be nominated to its commission for associating the counties of south-west Wales.39A. and O. i. 443. In Pembrokeshire, he was associated with a parliamentarian faction headed by Roger Lort and his confederates that looked for support at Westminster to the Independents. It was allegedly Lort’s faction that tried to engineer Perrot’s return as a ‘recruiter’ for Pembrokeshire early in 1646, but without success.40LPL, Ms 679, pp. 155-6; L. Bowen, John Poyer, the Civil Wars in Pemb. and the British Revolutions (Cardiff, 2020), 66, 95. That Perrot’s allegiance to the parliamentarian cause during the civil war had been weak, or at least questionable, is suggested by an incident in Hereford in October 1646 in which he and his kinsman Isaac Bromwich attempted to prevent the captain of the watch from arresting the former royalist officer Henry Lingen†, with whom they were ‘drinking sack in a common inn’. During one such ‘drinking bout’, Perrott had allegedly ‘asked one present if he looked like a roundhead. The other, very amazed at his question, was silent, but Mr Parratt [sic] proceeded with this oath (God’s wounds), I am no roundhead, never was, neither ever will be one’.41Military Mem. of Col. John Birch (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, vii), 141, 142.

Having failed to secure a seat for Pembrokeshire, Perrot was unsuccessful again in the recruiter election at Hereford in November 1646.42Supra, ‘Hereford’. The following month, the man who had defeated Perrot in the Pembrokeshire election, Arthur Owen, wrote to the Committee of Accounts, accusing Perrot and two other nominees to the county’s sub-committee of accounts of defrauding the state.43SP28/260, f. 347. But whereas Owen aligned with Rowland Laugharne and other rebels in south Wales during the second civil war, Perrot was among those recommended by the future regicide Thomas Wogan* to Parliament in May 1648 for appointment as militia and sequestration commissioners in Pembrokeshire.44Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 64. Perrot retained his place as a Pembrokeshire magistrate and assessment commissioner throughout the late 1640s and the 1650s. He and Thomas Harrison I* lobbied the Rump in the spring of 1652 on behalf of Haverfordwest corporation, which was seeking a reduction in the town’s assessment contribution.45Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 101-2, 103, 104-5, 108-9. By April 1653, at the latest, he had been made a freeman of the town.46Cal. Recs. Haverfordwest, 137. On 30 May the council of state ordered his arrest and that of another gentleman after receiving information that a challenge (to fight a duel) had passed between them. Both men were released early in June on giving bonds of £1,000 and sureties of £500 apiece to lay aside their quarrel.47CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 363, 371, 476.

Perrott was returned for Weobley, in Herefordshire, to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659 on the interest of his royalist cousin Thomas Tomkins*.48Supra, ‘Weobley’. He received no appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. Defeated in the election at Weobley for the 1660 Convention, he successfully petitioned to have the result declared void – and in the subsequent by-election he was returned with Tomkins.49HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Weobley’. He retained his local offices at the Restoration, and in August 1660 he was knighted.50Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 231. But his parliamentarian past seems to have caught up with him in 1661-2, when he apparently opted not to stand for election to the Cavalier Parliament and was dropped as a Herefordshire deputy lieutenant.

At some point in the 1660s, Perrot became a patron and protector of the ejected Pembrokeshire minister Peregrine Philips, who had received his education at Haverfordwest and with the Harleys at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire. Philips emerged during the Restoration period as the leading Congregationalist minister in west and central Pembrokeshire. Nevertheless, Perrot seems to have remained entirely conformable to the Church of England.51E. Calamy, E. Calamy, A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers … who were Ejected and Silenced after the Restoration in 1660 (1727), ii. 841-4; Oxford DNB, ‘Peregrine Philips’. He returned to Parliament after winning a by-election at Haverfordwest in 1677 and was marked ‘worthy’ by the leader of the ‘country’ interest the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*).52HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Herbert Perrot’. He is not known to have stood again.

Perrot died on 1 August 1683 and was buried at Wellington, Herefordshire, where he had acquired a sizeable estate and established his main residence.53Robinson, Mansions and Manors, 287; Barnwell, Perrot Notes, 119, 210, 212, 216; Turvey, ‘NLW roll 135’, 392. In his will, in which he describes himself as ‘of Haroldston’, he bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his only surviving daughter (his only son, a clever satirist, having been murdered in 1678 in a London tavern brawl). He charged his estates with legacies totalling approximately £700 and an annuity of £200. His legatees included his ‘loving friend’ Peregrine Philips.54PROB11/374, ff. 39-41v; Barnwell, Perrot Notes, 209-16; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Herbert Perrot’. Perrot was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.