PYM, Charles (c.1615-71), of Westminster

It was long ago pointed out that the date of Charles Pym’s birth is uncertain. When he married, in 1663, the licence gave his age as 35, which would have put his birth year at around 1628, but his mother died in 1620.15Keeler, Long Parl. 317-8; London Mar. Lics. ed. Foster, 1104; ‘John Pym’, Oxford DNB. The date offered tentatively here accords with the likely age at which he would have been admitted to Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn. The Pym estate of Brymore was in Cannington, Somerset, but Charles Pym probably spent much of his youth in and around Westminster. His elder brother Alexander was in London in August 1639, on the point of returning to the west country just as Charles was arriving in the capital, in the coach of ‘Sir Arthur’, perhaps Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, an associate of John Pym’s in colonizing ventures.16Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/1/7/1. Charles Pym is not known to have had any kind of political or public career until he was elected for Bere Alston, after Sir Hugh Pollarde was disabled from sitting any further in the Long Parliament, on 9 Dec. 1641.

Exactly when Pym was elected is not known, and the date given in one authority is that of Pollarde’s expulsion not his successor’s election.17HP Commons, 1660-90, iii. 306. He is first noted as being in the House on 10 March 1642, when he was named to a committee on buildings in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; his recent experience as a student at Lincoln’s Inn would have given the tyro parliament-man at least some local knowledge he could contribute.18CJ ii. 475a. On 5 April, he was one of a delegation from the Commons to the Lords to confer on information given about tumults and seditious pamphlets, and in this committee he was in company with a number of associates of his father, including Hesilrige, Sir John Bampfylde and William Strode I.19CJ ii. 512b. Nearly two weeks later (18 Apr.), Pym was called to a committee on the postal service, and on the 28th to a committee attended by Sir John Blakiston*, probably where the latter amplified reports from the north of England against the parliamentary leadership.20CJ ii. 533, 544b. Nothing further is heard of him until 9 September when he was given leave by the House to attend the earl of Essex, who was taking to the field as commander of Parliament’s main field army. Pym was not at this point in the army himself, however. He was present at the battle of Edgehill, but it is quite likely that he reported back to the House on it as a civilian in attendance, not as an army officer, as he does not figure in contemporary lists. His brother Alexander was already noted as holding a commission in the regiment of William Russell*, 5th earl of Bedford.21A Catalogue of the Names (1642), 13 (E.64.4).

Pym was back in the House on 15 December, to be named to a committee on a matter connected with the parliamentary army. The following day, a report was read in the House about the seizure of the high sheriff of Devon and other prominent Devon royalists, by parliamentarian soldiers, including ‘Captain Pym’, but this must surely have been Alexander.22CJ ii. 885a, 885b; Add. 18777, f. 47v. It was probably the elder of the two brothers whose arrears of army pay were referred to a committee of the House, on which their father served, on 8 March 1643, and again Alexander who was active in harassing royalists in Somerset in mid-April.23CJ ii. 994b, iii. 47b. Charles Pym’s service as a captain can only be traced with certainty from June 1643, from which time a series of warrants for his pay survives.24SP28/7/57, 404; 8/145, 9/111, 248, 10/248, 11/218, 12/141, 14/283, 15/152, 234, 17/146, 18/32, 19/73. He served in the regiment of Colonel John Dalbier, in Essex’s army, and would thus have seen action at Gainsborough (20 July 1643) and again at the first battle of Newbury (20 Sept.). It was doubtless for his conduct at Newbury that Pym was included among a group commended by the Speaker for their recent military service (28 Sept.).25CJ iii. 256b. Soon afterwards, he returned to Westminster, and took the Covenant on 16 October, as ‘Captain Charles Pym’.26CJ iii. 275b. On 14 Dec. he was prominent in the funeral at Westminster Abbey of his father.27CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 504.

During most of 1644, the pay warrants show that Pym was again in the field with his regiment, but he must have spent some time at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was called to the bar on 1 July. He kept lodgings at Westminster, from whence early in December he was moved on by the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which evidently needed the space.28CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 177.. By the spring of 1645, Pym and his comrades-in-arms had become superfluous to the military, as well as to the committee. When they were camped near Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, the governor of the garrison there, Sir Samuel Luke*, made it clear that only his men had the right to be quartered there, and plainly, if politely, asked them to move on.29Letter Bks. of Sir Samuel Luke, 216. By the end of April, Pym’s troop had been merged with another, and on 17 May, the Committee of Both Kingdoms recommended that Pym, Dalbier and others should receive pay when they were disbanded. This marked the end of Pym’s military career.30CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 411, 442, 497. There seems no evidence to support the claim that he served in Ireland.31CB iii. 281. As his men were being redeployed, Pym returned to Westminster, where on 18 April he was named to a committee on an ordinance for satisfying the debt of the state to the army treasurers Hill and Pennoyer; he himself was awarded the £4 per week allowance that Members who had suffered materially through the war could claim (3 June), and on 11 June he was included in a committee to examine allegations by Peregrine Pelham* against Sir Philip Stapilton*.32CJ iv. 115b, 161a, 172b.

Pym himself was a witness in this case, and it turned out to be his last known intervention in the Commons.33CJ iv. 174a. In January 1646, an ordinance to safeguard from John Pym’s creditors the resources for marriage portions for his younger children, including, of course, Charles, passed the Houses.34Som. RO, DD/BW/2/263. In May 1646, Charles Pym’s case for an award of arrears of army pay was referred to the Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom, and on 14 May 1647, the committee reported that he was owed in all £987.35CJ iv. 530a, v. 172b, 173a. An order to pay this amount was received sympathetically by the Lords when it was taken there by Sir Robert Pye I*, and the Committee for Advance of Money made at least a beginning of paying him out. None of this show of concern by the Houses enticed Pym back, however. He was absent at the call of the House on 9 October.36CJ v. 181a, b, 330a; CCAM 66. At the purge of the House by the army on 6 December 1648, Pym was one of the secluded Members, his own army service notwithstanding.37A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to attribute Pym’s alienation from events at Westminster to his earlier military contacts. He is likely to have been more sympathetic towards the Presbyterian grandee Stapilton than to the Independent MP Pelham, as he had been at Edgehill with Stapilton, and he was moving in other circles that favoured the Presbyterians. At the battle of Gainsborough, a significant part had been contributed for Parliament by Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham, who until 20 September 1643 was major-general of Lincolnshire under Essex.38Wednesday’s Mercury, or The Special Passagesno. 3 (25-28 July 1643), 22-3 (E.62.8); ‘Francis, 5th Baron Willoughby’, Oxford DNB. After Pym's disbandment, he was described as having been a captain of dragoons in the eastern associated counties, even though his service was more varied than that.39Elliot-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, i. 334.

Proof came in 1649 that Pym’s association with Willoughby had persisted all through the political eclipse of the peer, his flight to Holland to join the royalists in 1648 and his departure for the Caribbean to take up a commission as governor of Barbados for the exiled Charles Stuart.40CP. On 27 Sept. 1649, Pym was one of a party stopped at Gravesend on suspicion that they had no proper documentation for leaving the country, and that they were not headed to the West Indies, as they alleged, but elsewhere. They were probably thought by the council of state to be going to join the exiled king, but in fact they managed to make their way to Barbados, their intended destination, where they put themselves under Willoughby.41CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 322. Pym was selected by Willoughby to be a commissioner when the island surrendered to Sir George Ayscue (11 Jan. 1652).42CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1574-1660, p. 372; J. R. Powell, ‘Sir George Ayscue’s capture of Barbados in 1651’, Mariner’s Mirror, lix. 289; N.D. Davis, Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-2 (Georgetown, British Guiana, 1887), 244, 246, 255. His stay on the island probably ended with Willoughby’s, once the surrender articles were signed, and Pym was back in England by September, when the Committee for Advance of Money wrote to him about £54 he owed them for his purchase of property sequestered from the late James Stanley, 7th earl of Derby.43CCAM 67, 106; CCC 523, 581, 606, 611.

Pym seems not to have followed Willoughby into royalist plotting during the 1650s. He may, instead, have practised law, since he was well qualified to do so. In 1656, he was party to an annuity established in the interests of Thomas Sheffield, brother of Edmund, 2nd earl of Mulgrave.44Lincs. RO, Sheff/D/1/35. Pym had served with Thomas Sheffield in Essex’s horse, and one of the family, probably Thomas, had gone with him to Barbados.45SP28/8/149; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 322. No family link has been found between Pym and Sheffield, so either a professional interest or simply friendship must account for Pym’s involvement. No evidence has been found for the statement that he was granted a baronetcy by Richard Cromwell*.46‘John Pym’, Oxford DNB. He seems to have been politically completely inactive until early November 1659, when he and Robert Harley*, another of the army’s Presbyterians, passed on to the king’s agents an offer by Henry Cromwell* to serve him either as commander-in-chief in Ireland or as garrison commander of Portsmouth.47Mordaunt Letter-Bk. 96. This attempt to act as broker between the houses of Cromwell and Stuart was short-lived. In February 1660 Pym returned to Westminster as one of the Secluded Members of 1648. On 24 February he was among those tasked with producing the bill to make George Monck* commander-in-chief of the three kingdoms.48CJ vii. 850b. Five days later, (Sir) Edward Hyde* drafted a letter from the king to Pym which expressed the hope that the latter would express his affection for the monarch, and Pym quickly responded with a display of loyalty (16 Mar).49CCSP iv. 602. From this point Pym began to play a small part in local government for the first time, on commissions of sewers, the assessment and, more significantly perhaps, the militia. In May 1660 Pym lent his name to a roll call in Somerset of gentry loyal to the king.50SP29/1/74.

Pym was returned to the Convention both for Bossiney and Minehead, and chose the latter, where he had doubtless been elected on the interest of the Luttrell family, to which he was related by marriage. He was appointed by the king to the council for foreign plantations, doubtless on the strength of his brief experience with Willoughby in Barbados, although it seems unlikely that before November 1661 he held any colonial estates in his own right. In August 1662, Pym was asked to take an initiative on customs abuses in the Chesapeake, and by then he was a New World proprietor himself.51CSP Col. America and W. Indies, 1661-8, pp. 32, 106. Alexander Pym, Charles’s elder brother and John Pym’s heir, had died in November 1661, and Charles inherited not only the Brymore estate and associated holdings in Woolavington, Somerset, but also the Pym holding in Pagett’s Tribe, Bermuda, and Alexander’s Irish estate of 1,000 acres in Slane, co. Meath.52Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/2/2, ely3/3.

In 1663, 12 days after being knighted and a few months before being granted a baronetcy, Pym married a daughter of Sir Gilbert Gerard, thereby consolidating the relationship between the families which had found earlier expression in politics during the first years of the Long Parliament, and indeed before that in colonial activity. Sir John Heydon, governor of Bermuda during the 1660s, became Pym's brother-in-law and was a party to his marriage settlement.53Som. RO, DD/BW/2/282; DD/BR/ely/2/1/2; Lefroy, Memorials, ii. 358. After his marriage, Pym divided his time between Westminster, Hatton Garden in Middlesex and Harrow-on-the-Hill, home of the Gerards.54Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/1/11, ely/2/1/19, ely/3/5. He maintained friendly links with Willoughby, who had returned to the West Indies as governor of Barbados; Pym was asked by the family to ‘assist old Parham’, after the peer was drowned at sea in 1666.55Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/2/1/19. The Somerset estates were managed by Pym’s steward. By 1666, Pym was actively involved, at the London end, in a commercial scheme for whale fishing in Bermuda, and doubtless invested a share in the £1,000 capital with which the company embarked in business.56Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/2/1/1. His Bermuda estates produced tobacco, probably another modestly profitable enterprise.57Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/2/1/7. Pym seems never to have sought, or to have been offered, any lucrative executive post in government or a place in the commission of the peace. He drew up his will in March 1671, and a deed relating to his Bermuda property records that he died soon afterwards.58Som. RO, DD/BR/ely/2/2. He was party to the last of many leases he made of holdings on the Brymore estate on 7 June.59Som. RO, DD/BW/2/324. The date and place of his burial has not been discovered. His only son, Charles, was killed in a tavern brawl in 1688, and the baronetcy became extinct.60CB iii. 281. Pym’s estates then passed to his only daughter, wife of Sir Thomas Hales†, who sat in four Parliaments between 1704 and 1747.