Phelips, Sir Robert (1586?–1638), politician and landowner, was the elder son of Sir Edward

Phelips (c.1555–1614) and his first wife, Margaret (d. 1590), daughter of Robert Newdigate of Newdigate, Surrey. There is no record of his early education. He entered the Middle Temple in 1606 as son and heir apparent of Sir Edward, serjeant-at-law, but was never

called to the bar. He had already been knighted (with his father) at James I's coronation in

1603. From 1604 to 1611 he sat for East Looe, Cornwall, in James's first parliament, of

which his father was speaker. By 1613 he married Bridget, daughter of Sir Thomas Gorges

of Longford Castle, Wiltshire. In the parliament of 1614, he failed to win a county seat for

Somerset thanks to the organizational skill of another Somerset squire, John Poulett, who

became his inveterate enemy. Phelips scrambled to be returned for the Cornish seat of

Saltash. He was one of the more eloquent and aggressive MPs, attacking undertakers, demanding satisfaction of grievances before supply, and hotly pursuing Bishop Richard Neile

of Lincoln for his speech in the Lords which demeaned the Commons. He moved into the

first rank of the growing parliamentary opposition, and suffered for his prominence: by

James's command he was sacked as a JP and as custos rotulorum for Somerset (in which office he had succeeded his father two years before). Though restored to the commission

in 1616, he was never again custos.

While his father had secured for him the reversion of one of the three clerkships of the petty bag in chancery in 1613, and he later pursued (unsuccessfully) a mastership of

requests, Phelips does not appear to have held any central office. His ambition lay

elsewhere. The experience of the grand tour in 1613 promoted his inclusion in Sir John

Digby's 1615 embassy to Spain for negotiation of the Spanish match. His journal and papers

in his near-illegible hand (Somerset Archive and Record Service, DD/PH, family letters)

indicate his early distaste for the alliance. He carried that distaste to parliament in 1621,

when he sat for Bath, Somerset, and emerged as one of the half-dozen leaders of the new

and strident opposition. But only in the second session, after mistakenly perceiving the marquess of Buckingham's opposition to the alliance, did he attack it in the house and

subsequently in a paper entitled ‘A Discourse … betweene a counsellor of state and a country

gentleman’ (Somerset Archive and Record Service, DD/PH 227/16). Attacking Spain as the

paymaster of the Catholic powers against the elector palatine and as the destroyer of

English trade, he proposed withholding supply until there was a thorough preparation for

war in defence of the elector. In 1621 every targeted grievance of the Commons saw Phelips

in hot pursuit, leading the chase against monopolists, particularly Sir Giles Mompesson, and against Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon. He went after smaller game, notably the hapless

recusant lawyer, Edward Floyd (Flud)—giving point to S. R. Gardiner's disdainful ‘Gifted with

an elegant tongue, and with every virtue except discretion’ (Gardiner, History, 4.248). With parliament's dissolution Phelips was arrested on 1 January 1622; he remained in the Tower

until 10 August.

In the 1621 parliament Phelips had led in restoring the franchise of a number of ancient

boroughs, including Ilchester, Somerset, of which he was steward and in which he had considerable, though not ineluctable, influence; he meant to avoid another Saltash. In 1624

he carried one of the Somerset seats and had enough sway to put his friend and fellow

radical John Symes in the other. While the king wished to exclude Phelips, influence

stopped any attempt to bar him. The initial common cause joining Buckingham and the

opposition in carrying out war against Spain, the ‘blessed revolution’ (Cogswell, 139–65),

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deteriorated by the end of the parliament, and Phelips's mounting bellicosity, given edge by

the favourite's passing him over for ambassador to The Hague, cost him Buckingham's

indulgence. With the first parliament of Charles's reign in 1625, Phelips again won a county seat, though the other knight for Somerset was Sir John Stawell, protégé of John Poulett.

Stawell, no less inimical towards Phelips, was very young and impetuous and cut no figure in

the Commons. At Westminster and on adjournment at Oxford, Phelips was pre-eminently

the leader of the opposition, in full cry against Buckingham, insisting on withholding supply

until grievances were addressed, attacking impositions, and railing against court toleration

of Catholics. Gardiner concluded that ‘the history of the Parliament of 1625 is summed up in

the name of Phelips’, that at Oxford he ‘virtually assumed that unacknowledged leadership

which was all that the traditions of Parliament at that time permitted. It was Phelips who placed the true issue of want of confidence before the House’ (Gardiner, History, 4.432).

Like Sir Edward Coke and Sir Thomas Wentworth, Phelips was made sheriff (in his case of

Somerset) in November 1625 to disable him from sitting in the next parliament. He lost his

deputy lieutenancy and his militia colonelcy in 1625 for his opposition to the privy-seal loans.

He was put out of the Somerset commission of the peace in 1626 for his vehement

opposition to the free gift. The loss of these offices—on the delation of John Poulett,

according to Phelips—put him at considerable political disadvantage in the county in his rivalry with Poulett, whose star rose to the heights of a peerage (as Baron Poulett) as

Phelips's descended at court. In the two years of his eclipse before the next parliament,

Phelips responded to Poulett's challenge by reining in any tendency to court popularity, such

as might be considered dangerous by fellow members of the élite, or to trade on the fact

he was one of those to be ‘thought their countries only freindes’ (BL, Royal MS 17 A.xxxvii,

fols. 17–33) as the undertakers for draining King's Sedgmoor put it. In fact, while he might

have been expected to lead the opposition to that ambitious scheme, he was silent. Phelips

managed an advantageous exchange of his Neroche Forest property with the commissioners for its disafforestation and had the satisfaction of seeing the forest's keeper, Poulett,

lose his hunting there. During the forced loan of 1626–7 Phelips was much in London and

raised no voice against the loan in the county. He could not resist troubling the reform of

militia mustering, both in revenge for being excluded from militia matters and as a means to

annoy Poulett and his adherents. But his sallies were sufficiently oblique that they could be

dissembled by protestations of being wronged by his adversaries and merely defending the

just interests of his countrymen threatened by the deputy lieutenants' undue proceedings. In the process he maintained his constituency against the next county election.

Phelips's last election to parliament for Somerset, in February 1628, was at the cost of Sir

John Stawell and came upon another victory. Stawell had accused the sheriff of partiality

at the 1625 elections, had pressed one of his bailiffs as a soldier, and had slandered Phelips

and other JPs at quarter sessions. Phelips had prosecuted him in Star Chamber, and the

dismissal with heavy costs of Stawell's countersuit a couple of months before the new

election gave Phelips added satisfaction. Though somewhat overshadowed by both Wentworth's purposeful management of the debate on the petition of right and Sir John

Eliot's soaring rhetoric if not always clear policy direction in leadership of the opposition,

Phelips yet played a crucial role in the debates over lieutenancy and billeting in April 1628,

not only casting the question higher than it had been before but bringing to the issues a

convincing, principled, albeit pragmatic, realism.

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The 1629 session proved difficult for Phelips. John Pym's single-minded and

unprecedentedly vehement pursuit of Arminianism devalued the grand issues—foreign affairs, privileges, prerogative, taxation, the liberties of the subject—which were always

central in Phelips's politics. He now followed rather than led. Though he was ‘as intense’ in

his ‘religious alarm’ as Pym, he was ‘less settled in it’ (Russell, 407). Having distanced himself

from the hysteria with which the session ended, he was not arrested with Eliot and eight

other MPs the day after parliament adjourned.

With the advent of Charles I's personal rule Phelips's political ambit—but not his political

ambition—was limited to Somerset. He was certain there would be another parliament, and he sought supremacy in the county in order to assure the political base for his election. It

has been suggested that ‘Phelips in the 1630s perhaps served his county's interests more

effectively for the fact that he was able to use discretion about when it was expedient to

do so’ (Russell, 425). Expediency dictated Phelips's assiduous execution of various enclosure

and disafforestation schemes and of the Somerset commission for distraint of knighthood,

his vigorous implementation of the Book of Orders, and his strident support for the Book of

Sports (where he scored against both Poulett and the hapless chief justice Sir Thomas

Richardson). Expediency was overborne in 1636 in the matter of the militia, when Phelips adroitly manoeuvred Poulett into an abuse of his authority as chief deputy lieutenant,

resulting in Poulett's severe reprimand by the lord lieutenant and other privy councillors.

And with the 1634 writ of ship money, Phelips raised the first opposition to the tax in what

would be a sustained campaign to cripple it by disputing the rates for its collection. Where

Phelips led other county magnates followed, and by 1638 ship money was virtually

uncollectable in Somerset. Phelips's victory was complete, for he had become truly his

‘countries only freinde’, had defeated Poulett and Stawell at every juncture, and could

reasonably claim that those principles for which he had stood so prominently in the parliaments of the 1620s he had advanced in county governance in the 1630s.

Phelips's victory was short-lived. He died in 1638 and was buried on 13 April in the parish

church at Montacute, leaving his widow, Bridget, his sons Edward (1612/13–1680) and

Robert (1619–1707), and three daughters. He had been a poor manager of his estates and

had not advanced his fortune. He cleared his debts and settled Edward's inheritance by a

marriage alliance between Edward and Sir Walter Pye's daughter, Anne, that compromised Bridget's dower and deprived their three daughters of their portions. Sir Robert had not

lived long enough to see another parliament—or, for that matter, a revolution. Edward did,

being elected to both the Short and the Long parliaments for his father's pocket borough,

Ilchester. Disabled in 1644, Edward was a royalist colonel and governor of Bristol after it

fell to the king. There is little reason to suppose that had he lived Sir Robert's pilgrimage

would have been any different.

Thomas G. Barnes

Sources

Som. ARS, Phelips MSS, DD/PH · Som. ARS, Sandford MSS, DD/SF · quarter sessions order

books, Som. ARS, DD/SF · sessions rolls, Som. ARS, DD/SF · inquisition post mortem, TNA:

PRO, C 142/571/157 and 366/190 · TNA: PRO, PC2; SP14 and SP16 · S. R. Gardiner, ed.,

Parliamentary debates in 1610, CS, 81 (1862) · E. R. Foster, ed., Proceedings in parliament,

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1610, 2 vols. (1966) · M. Jansson, ed., Proceedings in parliament, 1614 (House of Commons) (1988), 172 · W. Notestein, F. H. Relf, and H. Simpson, eds., Commons debates, 1621, 7 vols. (1935) · M. Jansson and W. B. Bidwell, eds., Proceedings in parliament, 1625 (1987) · R. C. Johnson and others, eds., Commons debates, 1628, 6 vols. (1977–83) · W. Notestein and F. H. Relf, eds., Commons debates for 1629 (1921) · T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–1640: a county’s government during the personal rule (1961) · C. Russell, Parliaments and English politics, 1621–1629 (1979) · R. E. Ruigh, The parliament of 1624: politics and foreign policy (1971) · R. Zaller, The parliament of 1621: a study in constitutional conflict (1971) · S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the accession of James I to the outbreak of the civil war, 1603–1642, 10 vols. (1883–4) · E. de Villiers, ‘Parliamentary boroughs restored by the House of Commons, 1621–1641’, EngHR, 67 (1952), 175–202 · J. P. Ferris, ‘Phelips, Edward’, HoP, Commons, 1660–90 · T. Cogswell, The blessed revolution: English politics and the coming of war, 1621–1624 (1989) · S. W. Bates-Harbin, Members of parliament for the county of Somerset (1939), 135, 140

Archives

Som. ARS, corresp. and papers

Likenesses

attrib. H. G. Pot, oils, 1632, Montacute House, Somerset; on loan from NPG

Wealth at death

modest estate: IPM, TNA: PRO, C 142/571/157, 22 Aug 1638, in Taunton

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