6
The Demeaning of Charles I: Hugh Pyne’s Dangerous Words
Few kings were so prickly about their honour, or more insistent on the dignity of kingship, than Charles I. Few monarchs had so extravagant a sense of their supremacy, yet such an unsure command of the love and respect of their subjects. One would not know, from recent accounts of his reign, that King Charles endured a barrage of popular derision, quite apart from attacks on the Duke of Buckingham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Queen Henrietta Maria. Long before the revolution, indeed from the very beginning of his reign, dozens of Charles I’s subjects spoke of him in ways that the authorities deemed dangerous, dishonourable, scandalous, disgraceful, disloyal, uncivil, seditious, or treasonous. He was said to be foolish, childish, and not fit to be king, though few of these outbursts have been examined by historians.1
Two chapters here are devoted to the demeaning of Charles I. Chapter 6 explores a case from the 1620s in which the elements of speech, law, evidence, and reportage can be examined in detail. Chapter 7 reviews a wider range of seditious talk from the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of the civil war. Both reveal sub-currents of animosity that diminished the authority of the second Stuart monarch.
The Words
King Charles had not yet been crowned when the private words of Hugh Pyne, a Somerset magistrate and Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, became matters of public consequence. Some time in the autumn of 1625, on the occasion of Charles I’s visit to the West Country, Hugh Pyne, esquire, asked a neighbour ‘whether he had seen the king at Hinton or no’. Given the answer ‘yes’, Pyne allegedly responded, ‘then hast thou seen as unwise a king as ever was, and so governed as never king was; for he is carried as a man would carry a child with an apple. Therefore I and divers more did refuse to do our duties unto him,’ adding ‘that he could have had him at his house, if he would, as well as Mr Poulett’ (who was providing hospitality for the king at Hinton St George). A short while later, in the course of the same royal visit, Pyne declared of King Charles, ‘he is to be carried any whither’, and then said aloud, ‘before God, he is no more fit to be king than Hickwright’, referring to ‘an old simple fellow who was then Mr Pyne’s shepherd’.2
To liken someone to ‘a child with an apple’ evoked the proverb that ‘if you show a child an apple he will cry for it’, and that a child, like a ‘witless worldling… doth esteem an apple more than his father’s inheritance’. To say such a thing about Charles I was demeaning to the Stuart monarchy and contemptuous of the fledgling king. To call him unfit was outrageous. Erasmus in De Libero Arbitrio had compared a child in pursuit of an apple to the freedom and weakness of the will, an observation that might invite both Calvinist and Arminian commentary.3 Hovering behind Hugh Pyne’s words lay the injunction of Ecclesiastes, ‘Curse not the king, no not in thy thought’, and perhaps the observation, ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child’.4 Although Charles I was 25 at the start of his reign—as old as Queen Elizabeth and much older than Henry VIII when they took the throne—a flavour of infantilism attached to this monarch. It could not help that till the end of his life King James referred to his son as ‘baby Charles’. It was not just a question of age, however, for a ‘child’ had limited mental capacity as well as slender years.
Hugh Pyne’s mouth brought him trouble, for he had bitten off more than he could chew. His words were reckless, certainly unwise, and arguably treasonous. But retribution did not come for more than a year and a half, when Pyne’s local, factional, and political enemies brought him within an inch of his life. From his arrest in the summer of 1627, to his discharge eight months later, Pyne’s case refocused attention on the law of treason, and produced a landmark determination on the criteria for treason by words.
As a gentleman lawyer, and one who had served the court, Pyne was well aware of the prohibitions against speaking ill of divinely sanctioned authority. Unlike humble artisans and haunters of alehouses, with less controllable passions, men of Pyne’s class were expected to govern their tongues, and, if they spoke rashly, in drunkenness or anger, their social position usually exempted them from examination. In the case of Hugh Pyne, a member of the elite though no friend of the central government, these inhibitions and privileges broke down.
It is worth paying attention to Pyne’s case because it illuminates some of the problems of subjecthood and citizenship in an era of sacred monarchy. It shows how individual critical capacities sat uncomfortably with formal assumptions about how political society should work. The case reveals not only strains in the politics of the 1620s, relating to the dominance of the Duke of Buckingham and the unpopularity of the forced loan, but also the dangers of commentary about the untested Charles I.
More than is common, the documentation in Pyne’s case allows us to eavesdrop on the world of private political discourse and to retrieve words and expressions that no one intended should be written down. The charges, letters, examinations, and depositions reveal how private utterance could become public testimony, and how chains of reportage reached official attention. They show too some of the legal and political manœuvring of a regime that was ever watchful for sedition, protective of the royal honour, and sensitive about the dignity of the crown. They also illuminate the mechanisms available to establish the truth of the matter, and the legal basis for punishing dangerous speech. Pyne’s case helped to clarify the distinction between felonious and treasonable utterance and speech that was simply scandalous, undutiful, or seditious.
‘The case of Hugh Pyne, esquire, upon an accusation of treason for words spoken in contempt of the king,’ appears in the seventeenth-century law reports and is featured in later compendia of State Trials. Pyne’s case forms a footnote to legal history, being cited in Hale’s History of the Pleas of the Crown, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, and Holdsworth’s History of English Law. He earns half a page in the 1982 Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, but there is no entry for Hugh Pyne in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, nor does he make more than fleeting appearances in modern historical scholarship on the 1620s.5
Thomas G. Barnes in his study of Somerset notes Pyne’s ‘animosity towards the king and Buckingham’, but finds him more interesting ‘as a type than as an individual’. Barnes calls him ‘pompous’, ‘waspish’, and ‘rambunctious’, and seems unsurprised that ‘Pyne’s loose talk brought him within the shadow of the gallows’.6 David Underdown in Revel, Riot and Rebellion notes Pyne’s imprisonment ‘for declaring that the king was ‘stript and governed by a company of upstarts’, and treats it as a sign of the rising ‘national political temperature’ of the 1620s. The phrase about being ‘stript’ by ‘upstarts’ was found not in the legal records but in the contemporary diary of Walter Yonge.7 Wilfrid Prest, discussing ‘the rise of the barristers’, also mentions ‘the outspoken Hugh Pyne’ and his public criticism of Charles I, quoting Pyne to say that King Charles was ‘as unfit to rule as his shepherd, being an innocent’, based again on Walter Yonge’s diary.8 Pyne also makes an appearance in Richard Cust’s book on the forced loan, as ‘a short-tempered and tactless lawyer’ guilty of ‘a spectacular display of defiance towards both the favourite and the king’, who was ‘eventually tried for treason’. Cust repeats some of the most outrageous words charged against Pyne, as well as the remark attributed to his son Arthur Pyne, ‘that there would be a commotion in this kingdom and that we should shortly be at one another’s throats’.9 Apart from these references, and very few more, Hugh Pyne is invisible in the English historical record. This chapter attempts to tell Pyne’s story, to reconstruct the circumstances of his verbal indiscretions, and to establish their significance and context.
The Man
Born c. 1570 to a legal and gentry family, Hugh Pyne was one of four sons and six daughters of John and Julian (nee Towse) Pyne of Curry Mallet, Somerset. He grew up within an extended kindred linking a dozen landed families in Somerset, Dorset, and Hampshire. His brothers were George, John, and Thomas Pyne, and his sisters Ann, Mary, Elizabeth, Dorothy, Margaret, and Frances. His parents were buried at Curry Mallet, where the monument Hugh Pyne provided them in his will still dominates the south aisle. A nineteenth-century pedigree of the Pyne family includes the coat of arms granted to Pyne of Curry Mallet and West Charlton, Somerset, in 1573.10
Pyne’s father had been a member of Lincoln’s Inn, and Hugh Pyne followed him there in the Armada year 1588 at the age of 18. He was called to the bar in 1596, and the following year married Mabel the daughter of Henry Staverton of Durley, Hampshire. (The marriage took place at Cum-nor, Oxfordshire, and Pyne later made bequests for the poor of that parish.) In his will, dated 1 October 1624, Hugh Pyne refers to his ‘most virtuous, loving, dutiful, dear, wise, and understandlingly religious wife’, who died in 1618. The marriage bore a son, Arthur Pyne, who was born at Micheldever, Hampshire, and a daughter, Christabell, born at Monckton, Dorset. When he wrote his will in 1624, Hugh Pyne was living at Cathanger in the parish of Fivehead, Somerset, about 10 miles north of Hinton St George. He named his son Arthur executor, leaving him leaseholds at Cathanger, Somerset, and Luton, Dorset. Also named were his daughter Christabell, married to the courtier Edmund Windham, and several more relations, including ‘my kinsman and servant Alexander Towse’ (from his mother’s family), to whom Pyne bequeathed ‘my best satin suit’. In a codicil dated 19 November 1628, two days before he died, Pyne provided additional legacies of £1,000 each to his son-in-law Edmund Windham and his granddaughter Mabel Windham. The will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 28 November 1628.11
Pyne’s legal career flourished under James I, and he rose to become counsel to Queen Anne of Denmark and a practitioner in Star Chamber. His work for the court gave him opportunities to observe Prince Charles before the young man became king. Pyne was a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn by 1613, a reader by 1616, and treasurer from 1624 to 1626. In 1610 he contributed to the refurbishment of the Inn chambers and chapel, and was a supervisor of works by Inigo Jones. In 1624 he was one of several members paying to display his coat of arms in the great west window of Lincoln’s Inn. He was evidently a prosperous and well-connected London lawyer, one of the leaders of his Inn and of his profession.12
Pyne also gained prominence as a country lawyer and county politician. He was a Justice of Peace for Dorset from 1614 to 1626, recorder for the borough of Weymouth from 1615 to 1628, JP for Somerset from 1616 to 1626, and acting custos rotulorum or chairman of the Somerset Quarter Sessions from 1622 to 1626.13 His lands and leases spanned both counties, though he paid his £20 subsidy as a resident of Somerset. In 1627, at the height of his troubles, observers described him as ‘a man of great estate, £2000 per annum at the least’, and he was able to make substantial bequests in his will.14
Hugh Pyne was also able to wield some influence in Charles I’s early parliaments. His son, Arthur Pyne, was a member for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis from 1624 to 1626, and his nephew John Pyne (1600— 1678) was first elected for Poole, Dorset, in 1625, beginning a parliamentary career that continued to 1653.
Making his will in October 1624, about the age of 54, Hugh Pyne was at the pinnacle of a distinguished career. His testament of faith suggests a moderate Puritanism within the mainstream predestinarian Protestantism of the Jacobean Church of England. Pyne wrote in his will of his ‘assurance by faith… at the last day to be established in all fullness of those unspeakable and unconscionable joys and blessed immortality, which are most undoubtedly prepared for all those that have desired to serve and fear and please’ Jesus Christ, and he called on his children ‘to live at perpetual peace and in all holy concord and unity’, remembering God’s mercies.15 In correspondence with Henry Sherfield, the godly recorder of Salisbury, with whom he had legal differences in the early 1620s, Pyne observed he was ‘bound as a Christian’ to seek ‘that perfect and Christianly reconciliation which God straightly requires’.16 Other associates of the mid-1620s included parliamentary Puritans and aristocrats such as Sir Nathaniel Rich, Sir Francis Barring-ton, and the Earl of Essex.17 Like other gentlemen and lawyers of his age, Pyne quoted as readily from the scriptures as from the classics.18
The Politics
Hugh Pyne’s scandalous and undutiful remarks had both local and national reverberations. The festering issues of the 1620s—the inordinate power of the Duke of Buckingham, the mustering and movement of soldiers for dubious military campaigns, collisions between the prerogative of the crown and the rights of the subject, and the legality and cost of the king’s forced loan—all impinged on the gentry of Dorset and Somerset. Charles had been king for less than a year before government finance and foreign policy split the political nation. Hugh Pyne took a stand on these issues, emerging as an upholder of law and a critic of the court. He was, in the government’s eyes, one of those ‘turbulent and ill-affected spirits’ given over to ‘mischievous’ and ‘malevolent’ designs who deserved to be punished.19
In the factional and ideological divisions of south Somerset, the Pynes took the one side, in alliance with Sir Robert Phelips, while their rivals, the more powerful Pouletts of Hinton St George, took the other. Hugh Pyne had high standing among the local magistracy, while John Poulett, with court connections, controlled the county lieutenancy. It was taken as a mark of royal favour when the new king visited Poulett at Hinton, and this in turn looked like a snub to Pyne and Phelips. It was that rivalry at the time of the king’s visit that provided the occasion and context for Hugh Pyne’s remarks.
John Poulett (1586–1649) was a devoted follower of the Duke of Buckingham, a reliable apologist for government policies, and an implacable local enemy of the Pynes. His grandfather, Sir Amias Paulet, an Elizabethan Privy Councillor, had been the gaoler of Mary Queen of Scots, his father, Sir Anthony, was governor of Jersey, and the family claimed kinship to the Marquess of Winchester. John Poulett sat in three Jacobean parliaments (developing a sharp rivalry with Sir Robert Phelips), and was deputy lieutenant of Somerset by 1624, with plentiful opportunities to clash with Hugh Pyne. A pedigree made for John Poulett’s younger brother Philip c. 1627–35 shows the noble and illustrious descent of the Pouletts with bloodlines back to Henry III.20 John Poulett worked hard to ingratiate himself with the court, telling Secretary Conway in September 1626 that he had ‘no other ambition in the world than to live in his majesty’s good opinion and memory’. He hosted the Huguenot leader Soubise, worked hard for the forced loan in Somerset, and subordinated his own interest in local forests to the financial needs of the king.21 News writers noted the king’s favour to Poulett, ‘of whose nobleness all men talk’.22
John Poulett’s rise coincided with Hugh Pyne’s fall. He was created Baron Poulett of Hinton St George on 23 June 1627, about the time when Pyne was arrested. Common report had it that ‘Mr Pyne’s trouble … is wrought by my Lord Poulett, son to the marquis, and the witnesses produced against him: one to be a blacksmith, whose alehouse heretofore he had put down; another a glazier, whom for debauchedness he had bound to his good behaviour. These accuse Mr. Pyne of words spoken at his table some two years since, concerning the king.’23 The gossipers misidentified Poulett as the son of a nobleman (William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester), but otherwise their interpretation was accurate: an outspoken godly magistrate faced retaliation from local enemies, both aristocratic and plebeian.
By the end of the year Pyne’s case had become a cause celebre, and people across the country were discussing his risky remarks about King Charles.24 A London news writer of 23 November 1627 mentioned: ‘Mr Pyne, a lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, committed for speaking some words, implying there must needs have been some defect in the chief managers of this [Isle of Rhé] enterprise. He is since bailed, but with very great bail [of £8,000]. It is doubted how he will speed, and whether his speeches, whatsoever they are, will not be tried, if they may be made capital.’25
The Devonshire diarist Walter Yonge noted: ‘Hugh Pyne the lawyer was committed to prison, some say to the Tower, for saying the king was stript and governed by a company of upstarts.’ Yonge revisited the case a few months later, recalling that Pyne was
accused to have said that the king was as unfit to rule as his shepherd, being an innocent, for which he lay committed until the next parliament. His accusers, as ‘twas said, the Lord Poulett, William Walrond, esquire, Sir John Stawell; and having answered before the Council, letters were sent down to examine further matter against him, and his adversaries, Sir John Stawell, William Walrond and others, to examine the business.26
Another West Country diarist, William Whiteway of Dorchester, wrote under December 1627, ‘at this time Mr Hugh Pyne was imprisoned in the Gatehouse at Westminster, for saying his shepherd would make as good a king as King Charles, but it was not proved and so he was soon released’.27
Poulett’s agents made a catalogue of Pyne’s indiscretions, which they made public in 1627. Back in 1622, they reported, when King James declared the recent Westminster assembly to be ‘only a convention and not a parliament’, Pyne warned fellow justices to take caution. ‘For, quoth he, if the king by his proclamation shall say I am no man, is he therefore to be believed, and will you be brought to believe that I am no man, when you yourselves knows the contrary?’ Later, when the new King Charles demanded the names of Somerset men most capable of making him a ‘loan’, Pyne warned one of the deputy lieutenants ‘that they should be called to answer what they had done therein the next parliament’. In 1626, when the Privy Council ordered a countywide muster of the Somerset trained bands, Pyne spoke against the cost of it, commenting: ‘the country is not thus to be charged upon men’s pleasures and fancies.’ When the deputy lieutenants displayed warrants to use county funds for the muster, Pyne asserted ‘that it was contrary to law’, warning ‘that when times served they should answer it’. Pyne spoke publicly from the bench at the Easter 1626 Quarter Sessions at Ilchester, describing certain payments to military officers as ‘extortion’ and instructing the grand jury ‘to make presentment of it’. And, rather than encouraging the county’s military service and discipline, as his duty surely required, Pyne had ‘animated’ at least one reluctant soldier ‘to make complaint and begin suits’ against crown officials, one of them John Poulett no less, with ‘prejudice to his majesty’s service’. Poulett’s own honour and dignity had been impugned when Pyne remarked, on the occasion of the Huguenot commander Benjamin de Rohan, seigneur de Soubise, lodging with Poulett in Somerset, ‘that his majesty [had] committed M. de Soubise to Mr Poulett’s custody, because he knew him to be a good gaoler’.28 Not surprisingly, Pyne was among those justices critical of the government who were removed from the Commission of the Peace in September 1626.29
Writing to the court on 24 September 1626 about the progress of the ‘benevolence’ (precursor to the forced loan), Poulett observed that Hugh Pyne and his associates did ‘as much as in them lay to burden or to disorder the business’. The Buckingham network went to work to pull Pyne down, and ‘Sir James Bagg was sent to the Lord Treasurer from the Duke to desire him that Hugh Pyne might be no more the deputy custos’. Pyne, Poulett informed Buckingham, was among those ‘popular men’ and ‘ill spirits’ who were ‘not well affected to his majesty’s service’.30 It was at this moment, and in these circumstances, that the Poulett faction presented their accounts of Pyne’s remarks regarding the character and capacities of the king. Their attack may simply have been intended to silence or discredit Pyne for his opposition to the loan, but they came close to having him hung, drawn, and quartered.
‘Pyne the lawyer… rages, I hear, like a mad dog’, wrote Poulett somewhat gloatingly to Secretary Nicholas on 27 November, ‘and though the words of such men are not more to be reckoned of than the barking of dogs and hurt as little, yet when they [are] grown too impudent they are fit to be corrected, that others may by their example be made more modest, which I wish should not be otherwise than by tying up of his tongue so that he be not suffered to plead in the king’s courts, which were a punishment to him who makes his living with his tongue … no less grievous than hanging’.31 The lawyer’s tongue built his career, but its transgressions were his undoing.
The Case
The case against Hugh Pyne developed all through 1627 and the dossier grew thicker as his enemies gathered their resources. Poulett was gathering ‘proofs’ and lining up witnesses ‘by whom those things will be affirmed’. One report came to Poulett’s notice, and thence to the Privy Council, by way of ‘one Henry Harding, an attorney, who meeting with one Cheek, a servant of Mr. Poulett, told him thus much purposely that he should tell his master of it’. Other informers included Sir Edward Rodney, Mr Emmanuel Sands, Mr William Walrond, Thomas Lambert, and William Collier, gentlemen and yeomen associated with Poulett’s circle. Some of these men also tried to obtain incriminating evidence from members of Pyne’s household.32
William Walrond, the Somerset justice who had reported Pyne’s remark that the muster payment warrants were illegal, added to Pyne’s problems when he wrote to Poulett on 12 June 1627 with further damaging accusations. Hugh Pyne’s son, Arthur, had said, apparently with his father’s approval, ‘that it can never be well with England until there be means made that the Duke’s head may be taken from his shoulders’. Walrond had this from William Collier, who heard it from his employer Mr Windham, who was Hugh Pyne’s kinsman and fellow justice. Walrond wondered whether this chain of hearsay evidence pointed to a ‘plot… in practice amongst them’. It was all grist to Poulett’s mill.33
Sponsored by Walrond and Poulett, and perhaps even prompted by them, William Collier came forth with Pyne’s words comparing King Charles to a child with an apple. ‘He said that the king was a simple king and a very foolish as ever was, for that he is governed as never king was, and that he was carried as a child would be carried with an apple, and therefore himself and divers of his faction did refuse to do their duties unto his majesty.’ Collier also reported Pyne to say ‘that the king well knows that Mr Poulett’s ancestors were good gaolers, and therefore he hath committed monsieur Sabesa (Soubise) unto him a prisoner’. For good measure, and further to stir the pot, Collier did the dirt on Hugh Pyne’s son, Arthur (until recently a member of parliament). Arthur Pyne allegedly said ‘that it was the basest part that ever Mr Poulett did for to insinuate himself into the favour of the Duke of Buckingham, who was the county’s greatest foe and like to be the undoer of this kingdom’. And Arthur Pyne had also said ‘that the votes in parliament was that there would be a commotion in the kingdom, and that we should shortly cut one another’s throats, by reason that the king was so governed as he was, assuring me that it would never be otherwise until the Duke’s head was set further from his shoulders’. William Collier also loyally reported his own subsequent exchange with his brother Richard, asking ‘whether the king were not a wise king’, to which Richard gave the correct answer, ‘yes, and a wise and temperate king’. George Morley, a locksmith, described being at Pyne’s house during the king’s visit to nearby Hinton, when Pyne asked him ‘what news he heard in the country’. When Morley replied the king was at Poulett’s house, Pyne answered: ‘I might have had him at my house as well as Mr Poulett if I would, for he is to be carried any where.’34
Thus was the case laid against Hugh Pyne, esquire, counsellor at law. Disturbed by reports of Pyne’s ‘malicious and undutiful speeches against his majesty’s royal person and dignity’, the Privy Council authorized a group of Somerset justices (including William Walrond) to conduct further examinations in this ‘matter so nearly and highly concerning the sacred person and honour of his majesty’. They particularly wanted to hear from one Sanders, John Frye, Joan Hawker, the daughter of Thomas Hawker, and Pyne’s kitchen boy.35
In late June 1627, coincident with Poulett’s ennoblement, Pyne’s case moved to the highest political levels. Courtiers, Privy Councillors, the favourite, and the king himself all took note of the matter. The Attorney General Sir Robert Heath and Sir Nicholas Hyde, chief justice of King’s Bench, examined the initial witnesses. The Earl of Manchester, Lord Privy Seal, wrote to Hyde on 26 June, mentioning the king’s interest in the examinations and asking ‘what your lordship conceives upon them and the matter’. The Duke of Buckingham referred Pyne’s business to Secretary Nicholas on 28 June 1627, commending it to his special care.36 King Charles had long wished that ‘seditious fellows might be made an example to others’, and Pyne’s case provided such an opportunity. The king would remain convinced for the rest of his reign that ‘malevolent persons’ (like Pyne) were seeking ‘to abate the powers of [his] crown’.37
Pyne was in for a difficult few months, as his legal income dried up and his public credit disintegrated. Removed from his county offices and held for examination, Pyne was ‘first committed to his chamber in Lincoln’s Inn, then to the Gatehouse’, and by the end of November 1627 he was in the King’s Bench prison.38 At the least he faced censure, and, if treason could be proved, he risked a gruesome execution and forfeiture of his estates.
Baron Poulett could not resist the opportunity further to damage his adversary, while displaying his own loyalty, by supplying more reports discrediting Pyne. On 29 October 1627 he wrote to Secretary Conway commending William Walrond as ‘a dutiful and affectionate servant to his majesty’, who wished to report ‘some confessions of words spoken in derogation of his majesty’s honour and virtues (to give them no worse phrase) which he conceives stands not with his duty to conceal’. Two humbler witnesses, the yeomen William Collier and the locksmith George Morley, came up from Somerset to give evidence, receiving generous payments ‘towards their charge and expense in the said attendance’. £20 was shared between these two and William’s brother Richard.39 Walrond, a Poulett ally and a lawyer, wrote on 14 November to inform the authorities
of some things more that George Morley will confess unto me since the messenger hath been with him, which is that Mr Pyne concluded with these words [about his majesty], ‘and therefore before God he is no fitter to be a king than Hickwright, which Hickwright I have heard is Mr Pyne’s shepherd and a natural fool’. I pray inform my Lord Conway of this, and Morley will confirm it on oath.40
Responding to this on 18 November, the Council ordered further examination of Hugh Pyne. Four days later, Lord Privy Seal Manchester instructed Lord Chief Justice Hyde to continue the offender’s detention. ‘My Lord, whatever your opinion shall be touching the height of the offence, yet since having spoken with the king I would wish your lordship to forbear taking any bail of Mr Pyne till you have spoken with my lords, and at the least put him upon the restraint of his own chamber till you shall hear more.’ The message hints at the king’s continuing interest in this case, and also the Lord Chief Justice’s doubts that the case could be sustained.41
Trusting, perhaps, in his own legal abilities and the weakness of the evidence against him, and frustrated by his continuing imprisonment, Hugh Pyne petitioned for a speedy hearing. He was, so he informed the Council, ‘unredeemably prejudiced in his reputation and living by the accusation and confederacy of ill disposed and unworthy persons’. Once vindicated, he implied, he might retaliate against the parties responsible for his malicious prosecution.42
Pyne’s counsel for Habeas Corpus were William Noy, John Bramston, John Selden, and Henry Calthorpe—a high-powered legal team if ever there was one. These were Pyne’s contemporaries and colleagues from the Inns of Court who shared his opposition to Buckingham and the forced loan; Noy, in particular, was Pyne’s bosom friend and travelling companion. Their pleading at Westminster on 22 November produced ‘wonderful applause, even of shouting and clapping of hands, which is unusual in that place’, observed a London news writer that week.43
Pyne’s lawyers introduced a series of ‘objections’ questioning the witnesses against him. Had not William Collier said that ‘I should have good luck if I were not put from my place before Christmas?’ Had he not said ‘two years since, that he was suspected by me for a spy’, and did he ‘not hate me’ for ‘being of counsel against him’ in a suit for debt? Had not Collier ‘reported things amiss of me’ in Easter term 1626 when Pyne had refused him counsel, and had he not threatened to ‘say somewhat against me because his mare was impounded by my servants?’ Had he not said, ‘since he came to town, that if I touch his credit he would say more than he hath already said?’ And why only now did he report the alleged treasonous words, when he had many previous opportunities in the past two years to declare them?44
A similar roasting was prepared for George Morley, who had previously enjoyed Pyne’s trust until suborned by Walrond and Poulett. Who was present ‘at the speaking of the words’, Pyne demanded, and who had prepared Morley’s written copy of his testimony? Did he ‘not solicit my servant Maune to testify against me? Whether he moved not Maune to serve Mr Walrond, and whether he did not promise him freedom from pressing, and whether he said not to him I should not stand long, and that Maune should stand by the favour of the Lord Poulett? Whether he did not tell Maune that he was to testify speeches by him heard to be spoken by me at Christmas was twelvemonth, and whether he had been in any time of that Christmas at my house or had speech with me?’45
Pyne did not explicitly deny the words alleged against him. Rather, his strategy was to discredit his accusers and to suggest that they had been influenced by pressure or enmity. In support of this strategy he introduced the testimony of two former servants, Hugh Maune and Richard Frankpitt.
Hugh Maune was willing to state that George Morley had come to his house one morning with a warrant, ‘in the presence of my wife … and demanded of me whether I were not afraid of pressing’ for military service. Maune answered, ‘I fear it not without a special warrant’, to which
Morley said that I might be afraid well enough, for its a troublesome time, but if thou wilt say what I will have thee say thou shalt never fear pressing so long as my Lord Poulett lives, and it shall be better for thee; but thou art of a stubborn nature and wilt never do thyself good, for thou dependest on thy master who hath and shall have troubles enough of his own.
On another occasion Morley threatened Maune that a pursuivant was after him for hunting deer, or ‘that the pursuivant came down to serve me for words which I had spoken or could speak concerning my master, whereto I answered that I never took notice of any words that my master spake, and then he said again I was of a stubborn nature and would never do myself good’.46
William Collier also tried to persuade Hugh Maune to turn against Pyne. He told Maune ‘that he could help me to a good master, naming Mr William Walrond whose service would be very beneficial’. Mentioning again the ‘fear of pressing’, a weapon notoriously threatened against opponents of the forced loan, Collier told Maune ‘that I should not fear of that, for Mr Walrond would discharge me though it cost him forty pounds’.47 Walrond and Poulett, Morley and Collier, were in close alliance and sought to turn Pyne’s household against him. They threatened legal entanglement, employment difficulties, and military impressment for those not willing to cooperate.
Finally, Richard Frankpitt, gentleman, a former servant to Hugh Pyne (who was to receive a gelding or colt in Pyne’s will), identified William Collier as ‘a tale-bearer between Mr Pyne and Mr Walrond, which was the cause of discontent between them’. Even before the king’s visit to Hinton, Pyne had suspected that Collier was ‘a spy and intelligencer between my lord [Poulett] and Mr Pyne’. Collier, according to Frankpitt, was a malcontent who ‘endeavoured… to draw him… with an ill opinion of Mr Pyne, and spake of Mr Pyne’s abusing Mr Poulett in words, and said Mr Pyne must take heed he went not so far lest Mr Poulett took advantage of it’. Collier, Frankpitt explained, was a servant to Edmund Windham, Pyne’s son-in-law, ‘and had by that means access to Mr Pyne’s house’. He abused this position by ‘carrying of tales to Mr Poulett’ as well as sowing dissension among Pyne’s servants. Like Hugh Maune, Richard Frankpitt was invited to change sides, ‘to serve Mr Poulett, promising him that he should be Mr Poulett’s steward or solicitor’. The Collier brothers had used their access to the household to report words spoken by Arthur Pyne, including his threat to ‘set fire on Mr Poulett’s house’. So why, Frankpitt asked, echoing Pyne’s own question, why until now had they ‘never spake of any words that Mr Pyne should utter touching the king or Duke?’ The evidence pointed not to Pyne’s criminality but to ‘the malice of the confederates and their practices in this business’.48
The Law
There seemed little doubt that Pyne had spoken most of the words reported of him. But was he guilty of treason? If treason was ‘the crime of violating or abating of majesty’ or ‘alienating the subjects’ affection from their sovereign’,49 then perhaps Pyne’s words made him a traitor. The crown asked the lawyers, ‘whether the words which Mr Hugh Pyne is accused to have spoken concerning the king, being legally and formally laid in an indictment of treason and proved to the jury, be good evidence to prove the offence to be treason or not?’50 It had to be shown not only that Pyne used the words alleged, as witnesses attested, but also that their utterance constituted treason. The law on this subject was unclear. The statute of 25 Edward III made it treason to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’ and to adhere to the king’s enemies, ‘giving to them aid and comfort’. But the statute acknowledged ‘divers opinions have been before this time, in what case treason shall be said’, and reserved final judgment to the king and parliament whether an offence ‘ought to be judged treason or other felony’.51
To ponder the problem, the crown commissioned a distinguished panel of judges, including Sir Nicholas Hyde, chief justice of King’s Bench, Sir Thomas Richardson, chief justice of Common Pleas, Sir John Walter, chief baron of the Exchequer, and justices Sir William Jones, Sir Henry Yelverton, Sir Thomas Trevor, and George Vernon, who debated the case at Sergeant’s Inn before the Attorney General, Sir Robert Heath.52 Many of these judges had been Pyne’s associates or colleagues at the Inns of Court, and their reluctance to see a fellow-lawyer condemned may have had some bearing on their decision.
The judges assigned to review the case examined legal precedents from the fifteenth century onward that showed a variety of outcomes. Traitors under Henry VI had been committed and condemned for saying ‘that the king was a natural fool, and… not a person able to rule the land’, and that it would have been better if he had never been born. Traitors under Edward IV and Richard III were hanged, drawn, and quartered for words that compassed the death of the king, their words being construed to constitute overt acts.53
Citing the statute of Edward III, the judges reported on 8 December 1627 that ‘it is treason to imagine the death of the king. But because the imagination of the heart can be known to none but God alone, the law requires some overt act, either by deed or word, to express it.’ It was up to a jury to determine the fact of the words, but the outcome of the case would depend upon the judges’ directions ‘upon the circumstances of the evidence’. It was the judges’ consensus in Pyne’s case that ‘the words themselves’, though ‘very foul’, are not treason, yet they are ‘a high misdemeanour and evidence for treason’. The words themselves, they repeated, ‘are not treason, yet they are good evidence to a jury to prove the intent to be treasonable’. The multiple copying of this judgment in state papers and elsewhere testifies to its landmark importance.54
As Attorney General Heath explained to Secretary Conway, the judges concluded that ‘no words of themselves make treason; but if a person be indicted for intending and compassing the death of the king, the words spoken may be laid down in the indictment as evidence of the fact, which matter of fact is properly belonging to the jurors to try’.55 Justice Croke’s report, repeated in State Trials, elaborated the conclusion
that the speaking of the words before mentioned, though they were as wicked as might be, was not treason. For they resolved, that unless it were by some particular statute, no words will be treason; for there is no treason at this day but by the statute of vicesimo quinto Edwardi tertii for imagining the death of the king, etc; and the indictment must be framed upon one of the points in that statute; and the words spoken here can be but evidence to discover the corrupt heart of him that spake them; but of themselves they are not treason, neither can any indictment be framed upon them.56
Even ‘to charge the king with a personal vice, as to say of him, that he is the greatest whoremonger or drunkard in the kingdom, is no treason’, according to some of the judges.57
Pyne was off the hook. His legal problems had not disappeared, but he was not going to die as a traitor. His words, contemporaries concluded, ‘cannot touch his life’. But Pyne still had to answer in person ‘in the Star Chamber, ore tenus’, and was ‘still in hold’ in December 1627. The case against him had collapsed, but it was not until 16 February 1628, after the end of Hilary law term, that he was fully discharged and set free.58
The Vindication
Within days of his release, Hugh Pyne was elected a member of parliament. On 27 February 1628 he was returned for the Dorset borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, where he had long served as Recorder, filling the seat most recently occupied by his son, Arthur Pyne. His election was part of a nationwide turn against Buckingham and the court, though it may have been engineered, in part, to secure him parliamentary immunities. Weymouth had a large borough electorate (with some seventy-seven freemen), but there is no record of an electoral contest. Pyne’s appearance at Westminster in March 1628, in company with other opponents of the forced loan, was a rebuff to the government and to Buckingham, and a remarkable vindication for someone recently accused of treason. Pyne’s notoriety must have preceded him into a chamber where several of the members were his former friends and colleagues. He was active in debate from April to June 1628, especially in discussion of the Petition of Right (which may be interpreted as a parliamentary effort to remedy a young king’s ignorance of legal history and constitutional theory).
Parliamentary diarists captured Pyne’s words at Westminster, though perhaps no more accurately than his private speech from Somerset. He spoke in favour of supply and in opposition to martial law. Speaking on 4 April 1628 he said, rather gnomically, ‘the king rather shows himself a man to us than a king, yet so much the more a king in being such a man’. Perhaps that was a way of dispelling the scandal of saying that the king was like a child. In a debate about parliamentary privilege on 25 April, Pyne remarked that, ‘if a man in the street should say he hopes the parliament will break within this two days, the contempt is enough to send for him’: this from someone who knew what it was to be sent for, to be held in custody for his words. In May he spoke several times on the Petition of Right, saying ‘this declares what the law is’. In his final speech on 5 June, after Coke had called the Duke of Buckingham ‘the chief and principal cause’ of all our miseries, Pyne remarked: ‘I think we can hardly tax the man in question without blaming a greater power.’ Who that ‘greater power’ was remained unsaid, but it was obviously Buckingham’s master, the king of England, who Pyne had earlier likened to a child with an apple.59
By the autumn of 1628 Pyne was ailing. The award of a commission ‘to Hugh Pyne, esq. touching Kings Sedgemoor’ on 12 September 1628 came too late to revive his legal practice.60 On 16 October he paid a fine of £10 to be discharged from his reading duties at Lincoln’s Inn. On 19 November, back at Cathanger, he made a codicil to his will. Hugh Pyne died at his home in Somerset on 21 November 1628, and was soon almost forgotten.61 Buckingham by this time had been assassinated, felled by Felton’s dagger, and some people wished King Charles himself dead.