KNOLLYS, Sir Francis I (1553-1648), of Abbey House, Reading, Berks.

By 1640 Knollys was a remarkable survivor from a previous age. If some MPs in the Long Parliament looked back nostalgically to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Knollys had already been well into middle age when the old queen had died and, as one of her cousins once removed (via the Boleyns), son of her treasurer of the household, brother-in-law of the earl of Leicester (Sir Robert Dudley†) and uncle to the 2nd earl of Essex, he had known her court at first hand. He had first been elected to Parliament in 1576 and since then had been elected a further seven times.

One result of the family’s extensive court connections had been that his father had been granted the lease on the manor of Battle at Reading by Queen Elizabeth in 1595 and, although only the sixth son, Sir Francis had inherited this on his father’s death the following year.41VCH Berks. iii. 367. The town had therefore become Sir Francis’s principal residence and he had become its most prominent resident. Even during the 1630s and into the 1640s he and his eldest son played active roles in the affairs of the Reading corporation.42Reading Recs. iii.-iv. This was one reason why in 1631 he was appointed by the privy council as one of the commissioners to investigate how the town had spent the charitable bequest which had been left to them by John Kendrick.43CSP Dom. 1631-2, pp. 44-5, 62, 171, 280; Reading Recs. iii. 92. He was present in August 1635 when the corporation agreed the town’s Ship Money assessment.44Reading Recs. iii. 288. Not that he approved of how Ship Money was being extended to the inland counties. When the Berkshire justices of the peace and other local officials met together at Reading in early 1637 to consider the latest demand, Knollys raised his voice in protest. He laid claim to naval experience himself, having many years before been a privateer against the Spanish under Drake, and he also cited his long familiarity with local tax collection, but his main argument was that the ship they had paid for the previous year was still available. In reporting this to the privy council, Sir Edmund Sawyer† assured them that he nevertheless thought that Knollys deserved to be forgiven.45CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 289-90; 1637, p. 60. The cordiality of his relations with the Reading corporation was apparent in 1636 when they agreed to grant him the plot of land they owned adjacent to St Lawrence’s Church, which Knollys then used to build a new aisle against the south wall to serve as a funeral chapel for his family.46Reading Recs. iii. 316, 323; C. Kerry, A Hist. of the Municipal Church of St Lawrence, Reading (1883), 18-20. As late as 1640 Knollys was still performing his duties as one of the Berkshire deputy lieutenants.47CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 230, 334; 1640, p. 489.

Knollys’s local influence was brought to bear on the Reading parliamentary elections in 1640. In the by-election held there in late April, some members of the corporation managed to challenge the attempt to elect candidates nominated by the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, and the 1st earl of Holland (Henry Rich†), thereby paving the way for the commonalty to elect Knollys and his son.48Reading Recs. iii. 493. As the Short Parliament then had less than a week still to run, neither got the chance to make a mark on its proceedings. That autumn the corporation re-elected them. The candidates they defeated included Tanfield Vachell*, the nephew and heir of Knollys’s late son-in-law, Sir Thomas Vachell.49Reading Recs. iii. 507. Knollys was already aged 87. He was easily the oldest Member of the Long Parliament.

Even allowing for the references that could refer to either the father or the son, it is clear that Sir Francis I was largely inactive in this Parliament, which given his great age is only understandable. What is actually more striking is that he played any part at all in its proceedings. In the spring of 1641, on either 3 or 13 May, he attended and took the Protestation.50CJ ii. 133a, 145a; Procs. LP iv. 358, 365. (His son took it on the other day.) On 10 June 1642 he promised that he and Sir Francis II would each provide Parliament with two horses.51PJ iii. 467. Even more impressively, he proposed a motion on 27 June, although this got nowhere and its subject is not known.52PJ iii. 136. It would seem that, like his son, he supported Parliament once the civil war broke out, perhaps, in part, because his daughter Letitia, widow of Sir Thomas Vachell, had married John Hampden* two years before. The Knollyses’ resolve to support Parliament probably strengthened further once their estates fell under royalist control when Reading was taken by the king’s army in November 1642. Knollys was probably present in the Commons on 27 March 1643 when his son alleged that the royalist governor of Reading, Sir Arthur Aston, was confiscating the rents from their tenants, as, according to Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, Sir Francis I was ‘then sitting amongst us’.53Harl. 164, f. 344v. His presence on that occasion is unlikely to have been accidental, heightening as it did the pathos of his son’s appeal for sympathy. He took the oath introduced in the wake of Waller’s plot on 8 June 1643.54CJ iii. 120a.

The death of Sir Francis II in May 1643 made these years all the more difficult for his father. To add to his distress, the parliamentarian re-capture of Reading that spring proved to be of short duration and his estates underwent a second period of royalist occupation between September 1643 and May 1644. On 6 April 1644 Sir Philip Stapilton* presented to the Commons a petition from Sir Francis and his son’s widow. This claimed that Lady Knollys had borrowed heavily in the as-yet-unfulfilled expectation that their lands would be re-captured and that they were now facing financial ruin. It was agreed by the Commons that they deserved an annuity of £500 and so MPs voted £10 per week to Sir Francis from the royal revenues of Surrey.55CJ iii. 451a; Harl. 166, f. 46. The fall of Reading to the parliamentarian army the following month was not the end of their problems, however. Two years later, in May 1646, the Commons heard allegations that the Berkshire sequestration committee was refusing to hand over to Knollys certain lands that belonged to him. The committee was ordered to let Knollys take possession of them.56CJ iv. 539b. As these may well have been the same lands about which Knollys had to petition the Commons on 17 July 1646, it would seem that the committee refused to comply. What Knollys wanted on that occasion was immediate possession of lands held by the lord treasurer, 1st Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†), to which he already had a reversion, plus the confirmation of his crown lease on Abbey House at the same rent as previously. The Commons again agreed and this time ordered that Sir Peter Wentworth* and Sir Anthony Irby* bring in a draft bill to enforce this.57CJ iv. 620a. That bill was ready by early September and over the following weeks, under the direction of his relative, Sir John Temple*, the bill made its way through both Houses, being finally approved on 27 October.58CJ iv. 662b, 664a, 667b, 687b, 689b, 691b; LJ viii. 521b, 547b, 548a-b. (Temple’s wife had been the sister of Knollys’s late son-in-law, Robert Hammond.) In February 1647 Knollys and Temple were among the intermediaries through whom the payments for the family of Colonel Robert Burghill were delivered.59CJ v. 80a.

In October 1647 Knollys was one of the MPs who were listed as being absent from Parliament, although, understandably enough, his absence was deemed to have been excused.60CJ v. 329a. By 5 May 1648 he was dead.61PROB11/204/208. The writ for a by-election at Reading to replace him was moved three days after that.62CJ v. 552b. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in the family chapel he had built in St Lawrence’s. As most of his estates had probably already passed to Sir Francis II before the latter’s death five years earlier, the main beneficiaries of Sir Francis I’s will were his daughter Elizabeth and her son, Robert Hammond*.63PROB11/204/208. Sir Francis’s great-great grandson, Francis Knollys†, would be the next member of the family to sit in Parliament, being elected for Reading in 1701. The male line died out in 1772.64C. Coates, The Hist. and Antiquities of Reading (1802), 231.