WALKER, Robert (1597-1673), of Exeter, Devon.

The Walker family were property-owners in Exeter by the second half of the sixteenth century.16Devon Taxes, 109. Thomas Walker, Robert’s father, was estimated to be worth £70,000 in 1625.17HMC Cowper, i. 213. Even if that was an exaggeration, Walker senior was certainly one of Exeter’s most prominent citizens. He was rated second among the land-owning parishioners of wealthy St Mary Arches for payment of the traditional direct tax, the subsidy, and was able to make cash bequests of £6,900 when he drew up his will in 1628, among them legacies of £200 each for a grammar school and for the Exeter poor.18PROB11/156/265; R. Izacke, An Alphabetical Register of Divers Persons (1736), 163. By then, he held extensive estates in Cornwall, controlled the markets and fairs in Chudleigh in Devon, and enjoyed three substantial houses, two of them outside Exeter.19Exeter in the Seventeenth Century, 4; PROB11/156/265. Thomas Walker was highly regarded among the Exeter commercial and governmental oligarchy, serving as leader of the city’s French Company of merchant adventurers and as mayor for no fewer than three terms.20Cresswell, Exeter Churches, 96. Despite his dedication to his city and his willingness to shoulder the burden of office, Thomas Walker’s devotion was shown to have its limitations. In 1625, a plague year, Walker refused to take on the mayoralty, and was forced to it by privy council diktat. His protestation that he was no longer an Exeter property-owner, because he had made over his leases to his son, rang hollow in 1625, and any sceptics caring to read his will would have had their scepticism confirmed.21APC 1625-6, pp. 217, 312, 422; W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (Cambridge, Mass. 1975), 234. Thomas Walker’s abdication of responsibility helped establish the reputation of another Exeter patriarchal figure: Ignatius Jourdain†, who stayed in the city to direct the civic response to the infection.22F. Nicolls, Life and Death of Mr Ignatius Jurdain (1654), 14-15 (E.730.9). Whereas Jourdain and his family led the puritan faction on the Exeter common council, Walker’s family was conformist, with strong links with the cathedral hierarchy.

As a third son, Robert Walker was unlikely ever to inherit the bulk of his father’s fortune. He was left lands in and around Exeter, but his apprenticeship to Thomas Amye, whose son married Robert’s sister, was a rigorous initiation into the world of commerce, not a finishing school comparable with the spell at the inn of court common among the gentry. Robert Walker lived briefly in St Olave’s parish before returning to settle for the rest of his life in his native parish of St Mary Arches. He evinced no reluctance to conform to the government of Charles I, contributing like Thomas Walker to the Forced Loan in 1626-7, albeit a sum – £4 – a quarter that of his father.23Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, misc. rolls 75. Robert Walker’s early life and career developed along lines that were perfectly normative for a merchant’s younger son. Once free of his apprenticeship and introduced to the corporation of his native city, Walker married the daughter of a Dorchester merchant: a union which ended, childless, with her early death. His second marriage, in 1630, cemented him to the clerical hierarchy. Mary Cotton was a daughter of the cathedral precentor, and grand-daughter of a recent bishop of Exeter; his eldest son would in due course continue these associations by marrying into the family of Dr Joseph Hall, bishop from 1627 to 1641.24Vivian, Vis. Devon, 241; Cresswell, Exeter Churches, 104.

From the early 1630s, Walker began to be of consequence in discussions both in the guildhall and the council of the city’s French Company. In May 1632, Walker was part of a deputation to the privy council to argue for the value of trade with France, and while receiver of the city corporation in 1634 helped write a letter to Exeter College, Oxford turning down the college’s overtures for an endowment.25CSP Dom. 1631-33, p. 337; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 3v. He was an uncontroversial and successful sheriff who collected on the first Ship Money writ, and participated with James Tucker* in a delegation to the privy council to seek arbitration in the protracted irritable relationship between the dean and chapter of Exeter and the city corporation as they squabbled over rights of way and jurisdictions.26CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 521; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 72. He sat on a range of ad hoc committees of the chamber, on topics such as the city common brewhouse, its hospital, quay and cloth halls, and was prominent in building up the city’s gunpowder magazine.27Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 24v, 28, 30, 32, 82. In 1638, Walker was sent again to London, to negotiate plans to tackle abuses in the making of serges, doubtless an acknowledgment of his seniority in the French Company.28Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 71. His own business at that time was based almost entirely on the export of cloth to a range of ports in France or in Spanish territory, notably Rouen and Bilbao, with ships bringing back French and Spanish fabrics and a little wine from Bordeaux.29E190/950/7; 767/11. However prominent he may have been in debates about business, the scale of Walker’s commercial enterprises in the late 1630s was much more modest than his father’s business empire had been.

Walker’s civic career reached its natural apogee with his mayoral term, which began in September 1639. Exeter’s chroniclers noted his mayoralty as marked by an episode of plague at Taunton (echoes of Thomas Walker’s unfortunate experiences in 1625) to which the city responded by raising a fund and by banning fairs. Reforms were agreed on matters of civic precedence and admissions to the freedom of the city, but the order that items of business could be resolved by the chamber without the mayor’s consent suggests that Walker did not dominate the chamber. Gifts during his mayoralty to the Spanish ambassador and Thomas Coventry†, the lord keeper, suggest the loyalist, conformist tenor of the chamber on the eve of the summoning of Parliament.30Devon RO, 73/15; Exeter City Archives, Bk. C1/53. One of the annalists noted the rise of Anabaptists and sectaries during Walker’s term of office, but whether he was commenting on local or national developments is unclear.31Devon RO, 73/15. Certainly there was no repetition during his mayoralty of any show of disrespect for the established church of the kind that had landed Ignatius Jurdain and James Tucker in trouble with the privy council earlier in 1639.

Walker was chosen to represent Exeter in what was to become the Short Parliament while serving as mayor, and he went to Westminster with a reforming agenda. In July 1639, the chamber feared a challenge from the assize judges to the jurisdiction of the city’s justices over gaol delivery, and in April 1640, as the new Parliament opened, Walker sought authority to remove the city’s charters from the chambers of the recorder in the Middle Temple.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 90, 102. His colleague in this Parliament, Alderman James Tucker, was his immediate predecessor as mayor, and a much more active figure than Walker in overseas trade. With the failure of the Parliament, nothing came of Exeter’s hopes of it, and Walker returned to Exeter to serve out the remainder of his mayoralty. He was chosen again to serve in the second Parliament of that year, but the electors knew when choosing him that when the Members assembled again at Westminster Walker would have been succeeded as mayor.

On 10 November 1640 another committee of the common council was formed at Exeter to draw up an agenda for the city’s MPs to pursue. Walker may have been working on these civic issues for the first months of the Long Parliament. On 21 November, Walker and his fellow-burgess, Simon Snowe, offered £1,000 security against the loan Parliament was raising to support the king’s army facing the Scots in the north of England. It may have been Exeter’s guarantee, rather than their own, that Sir Simonds D’Ewes* recorded as tabled.33D’Ewes (N), 52. Not until 18 May 1641 did Walker attract the notice of the Journal clerks, as taking the Protestation. The same day some personal appeal of his was scheduled for discussion, but on 16 July he was given leave to go to the country.34CJ ii. 149a, 213b. By 24 August Walker was back in Exeter where he participated fully in council meetings until the end of the first recess of the Parliament. His absence from the meetings at Exeter Guildhall after mid-October suggests that he returned to Westminster, but he made visits to Exeter in December and again in March 1642.35Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 117v, 127, 132v, 133. In none of his stays at Westminster was he ever named to any parliamentary committees, but in July 1642 he and Snowe were ordered by the Commons to be questioned about their complicity in correspondence between elements of the Exeter common council and the king at York over the common council’s reluctance to proclaim the king’s denunciation of the Militia Ordinance. Walker’s response to the interrogation is unknown, and he may indeed have left London before his interlocutors had an opportunity to marshal their thoughts: he was certainly in Exeter again by 26 July.36CJ ii. 674a; PJ iii. 218-9; Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. f. 137v.

After the outbreak of civil war, Walker’s disappearances from the meetings at the Guildhall can less plausibly be attributed to his service in Parliament. In September Walker claimed allowances for 108 days’ service in Parliament after the recess of 1641, and on 18 October 1642 he brought in £733 which he told his colleagues had remained in his hands as Ship Money arrears since he was mayor.37Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 140v, 142. The chamber seemed well disposed to Walker’s claims for expenses, so was this gesture an unsuccessful attempt to sway the common council into supporting the king? It was certainly Walker’s last intervention in public affairs of the city; as Exeter allied itself with the parliamentary cause, he withdrew from the council chamber, and made no further appearances there until the autumn of 1643, by which time the city was in royalist hands.38Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, f. 150. In the meantime, the House of Commons showed it was in no doubt that Walker was hostile to its cause, twice ordering him to be brought up to London in custody, including in the writ the former MP John Lynne and the much more ambiguous Simon Snowe.39CJ ii. 699b, 845b, 888a. These demands brought a studied silence from Walker, to which the Commons responded first on 6 March 1643 by disabling him from sitting further in the House, and then on 15 May by ordering his disenfranchisement from Exeter corporation.40CJ ii. 991a; iii. 85b.

It is unclear where Walker spent the period of parliamentary rule in Exeter in the early part of the civil war, but he was soon back in the common council chamber once the royalists had secured the surrender of the city in September 1643. He attended meetings regularly between early October 1643 and April 1646, when the city again came under Parliament’s control.41Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 150, 175v. During the period of royalist control, Walker played an important bridging role between the military and the citizenry. He negotiated with the commissioners of array over the burden of maintaining soldiers in the city, and got them to chase up arrears of tithes from one of the city’s Devon rectories.42Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 154, 155. The inauguration of royalist rule in Exeter and Walker’s reinstatement came conveniently for him to resume a parliamentary career of a sort, at Oxford. Despite the Commons order of March 1643 which had terminated his membership of the House at Westminster, he turned up at the royalist Parliament in January 1644, and signed the letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, suing for peace.43A Copy of a Letter (Oxford, 1644), 5. He had returned to Exeter by 6 April, and claimed for 66 days’ attendance at Oxford.44Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 157, 157v. He was granted favourable terms of renewal on a lease of his father’s from the corporation in December 1645, and soon after was able to secure another lease for a relative, both marks of the council’s favour towards him.45Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. ff. 170v, 172v.

Walker’s ‘good war’ came to an end in April 1646, when the city surrendered to Parliament. As a commissioner for the capitulation, Walker used the articles drawn up at the surrender of 1643 as a model for the terms negotiated with the New Model army. Two months later he was dismissed from his aldermanship and from the common council.46Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii. 175v, 176v. As a royalist delinquent, he himself was subject to the terms of the Exeter Articles he had helped determine, and was fined £889 at one tenth of his estate.47CCC 1259. In May 1647, the Committee for Advance of Money assessed him at £500, but the Exeter Articles saved him from further trouble.48CCAM 820. During the 1650s he remained in the city, occasionally involving himself in petitions to the commonwealth’s council of state, identified by republicans and protectorians as a local royalist leader.49CSP Dom. 1651, p. 275; HMC Portland, i. 584. There is no evidence that he involved himself in plotting. Walker was restored to his place in Exeter city council in June 1660, and although ineligible to sit in the Convention, was returned to the Cavalier Parliament, in which he sat until his death, albeit with a low profile. He first drew up his will in 1663, but added various later codicils. He enjoyed an estate at Bridford in Devon and properties in Exeter and Cornwall, and left cash bequests of over £5,000 including to the common council of Exeter for the poor, although this bequest was by 1736 noted as embezzled.50PROB11/343/351; Izacke, Alphabetical Register, 165. Walker died on 23 August 1673 and was buried in the Exeter church where he had been baptised. His memorial recorded his loyalty to God, church and king.51Cresswell, Exeter Churches, 105.