S. Baring-Gould

Cornwall has no great cause to boast of William Noye as her son. He was undoubtedly a shrewd, subtle, and learned lawyer; but he was wholly without principle and consistency.

He was the son of Edward Noye, of Carnanton, in Mawgan parish, and grandson of William Noy, or Noye, of Pendrea, in Buryan. He was born at this latter place, it is asserted, in 1577. In 1593 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, and thence removed to Lincoln's Inn to study common law. He represented Grampound in Parliament 1603-14, Fowey 1623-5, S. Ives 1625-7, Helston 1627-31. In Parliament he proved himself an able and determined opponent to the encroachment of the Royal prerogative. Hals says: "In the beginning of the reyne of King Charles I he was specially famous for beinge one of the boldest and stoutest champions of the subjects' liberty in Parliament that the western parts of England afforded; which beinge observed by the Court party, Kinge Charles was advised by his Cabinet Councill that it wold be a prudent course to divert the force and power of Noye's skill, logick, and rhetorique another waye, by givinge him som Court preferment. Whereupon Kinge Charles made him his Attorney-General, 1631, by which expedient he was soon metamorphized from an asserter of the subjects' liberty and property to a most zealous and violent promoter of the despotick and arbitrary prerogative or monarchy of his Prince; soe that like the image of Janus at Rome, he looked forward and backward, and by means thereof greatly enriched himself.—Amongst other things, he is reflected upon by our chronologers for beinge the principal contriver of the ship-money tax, layd by Kinge Charles upon his subjects for settinge forth a navye, or fleet of shipps at sea, without the consent of Lords or Commons in Parliament, which moneys were raysed by writt of the sheriffs of all countys and commissioners, and for a long tyme brought into the exchequer twenty thousand pound per mensem, to the greate distast of the Parliament, the layety, and clergye, who declard against it as an unlawfull tax."

Noye's appointment as Attorney-General was on October 27th, 1631. He was not the only one who was a turncoat. Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards created Earl of Strafford, Sir Dudley Digges, and Littleton also apostatized. Wentworth, the most renowned of the set, after being one of the sturdiest of the reformers and boldest declaimers in the House of Commons—after suffering imprisonment for refusing to contribute to the forced loan—this eminent person, a gentleman of Yorkshire, who boasted his descent, by bastardy, from the royal line of the Plantagenets, out of a very ignoble rivalry and an ambition for rank and title (even his friends could discover no purer motives), sold himself body and soul to the Court. Sir Dudley Digges, though a spirited debater and a man of talent, had been known for some time to be without principle, and, upon being offered the post of Master of the Rolls, he closed at once with the bargain and turned round upon his former friends.

Noye and Littleton were both distinguished lawyers. Noye's Treatise of the Principall Grounds and Maximes of the Laws of this Kingdom has gone through numerous editions down to 1870. His Compleat Lawyer has also been republished frequently. Noye as Attorney-General, and Littleton as Solicitor-General, now used their wits and their knowledge to explain and stretch the prerogative, and they did this apparently without a blush at the recollection of their previous conduct when they had combated for the rights of Parliament and the liberties of the people.

S.^ir WILLIAM NOY Atturney Generall to King CHARLES the First

Among Howell's Familiar Letters is one to Sir Arthur Ingram at York. "Our greatest news here now is, that we have a new Attorney-General, which is news indeed, considering the humour of the man, how he hath been always ready to entertain any cause whereby he might clash with the Prerogative: but now Judg Richardson told him, his head full of Proclamations and Decrees, how to bring money into the Exchequer. He hath lately found out amongst the old records of the Tower some precedents for raising a tax called Ship-Money in all the Port-Towns when the kingdom is in danger. Whether we are in danger or no, at present 'twere presumption in me to judg."

That England needed a fleet to protect her could not be disputed. Howell admits as much. "One with half an eye may see we cannot be secure while such large fleets of men-of-war, both Spanish, French, Dutch, and Dunkirkers, some of them laden with ammunition, men, arms, and armies, do daily sail on our seas and confront the King's chambers (guns), while we have only three or four ships abroad to guard our coast and kingdom, and to preserve the fairest flower of the crown, the dominion of the Narrow Sea, which I hear the French Cardinal begins to question, and the Hollander lately would not vail to one of His Majesties ships that brought over the Duke of Lenox and my Lord Weston from Bullen (Boulogne); and indeed we are jeer'd abroad that we send no more ships to guard our seas."[20]

Dunkirk was peculiarly obnoxious, as it was a nest of pirates that fell on our small trading vessels, and even Algerines came with impunity to our coasts and carried off captives as slaves in Africa. The Dutch, taking advantage of the domestic broils in England, had greatly advanced their commerce, and were prepared to dispute with England the command of the Channel. They excluded English vessels from the northern fisheries, and went so far as to claim and to exercise the right of fishing along the English coasts. The Navy of France, moreover, was also rapidly augmented, under the fostering care of Richelieu.

Hitherto the ports on the coast had contributed towards the defence of the land and the protection of our shipping, but the inland towns had been exempted. This was not reasonable, and Charles resolved on imposing a general tax to provide England with a fleet. He had recourse to Noye instead of placing the matter before Parliament.

Noye, says Clarendon, "was wrought upon by degrees by the great persons that steered the public affairs to be an instrument in all their designs, turning his learning and industry to the discovery of sources of revenue, and to the justifying them when found—thinking that he could not give a clearer testimony that his knowledge of the law was greater than all other men's, than by making that law which all other men believed to be not so. So he moulded, framed, and pursued the odious and crying project of soap, and with his own hand drew and prepared the writ for ship-money, both which will be lasting monuments of his fame."

About the soap monopoly presently.

The first writ was issued by the Lords of the Council "for the assessing and levying of the ship-money against this next spring," on the 20th October, 1634. It was signed by the King, and was addressed to the mayor, commonalty and citizens of London, and to the sheriffs and good men in the said city and in the liberties thereof. They were commanded by the 1st March to provide one ship of war of 900 tons with 350 men at the least, one other ship of war of 800 tons and 260 men at the least, four other ships of war of 500 tons with 200 men in each, and another ship of war of 300 tons with 150 men. They were further ordered to supply those ships with guns, powder, and all necessary arms, with double tackling, provisions, and stores; as also to defray at their charges the men's wages for twenty-six weeks. The Common Council remonstrated, declaring that by their ancient liberties they ought to be free from any such burden; but the Privy Council rejected the remonstrance, and compelled submission.

At the beginning of the following year, 1635, the writs, after having been served along the sea-board, were sent to the inland counties, but from them money was asked in lieu of ships at the rate of £3300 for every ship, and the local magistrates were empowered to assess all the inhabitants for a contribution.

In spite of the resistance offered to the exaction of this tax in 1635 and the following year a fleet was raised, the Dutch fishing vessels were driven from the coast, and a number of English slaves were rescued from Moorish pirates.

Howell wrote to Mr. Philip Warwick in Paris:[21] "The greatest news we have here is that we have a gallant Fleet Royal ready to set to sea for the security of our Coasts and Commerce, and for the sovereignty of our seas. Hans (the Hanseatic League) said the King of England was asleep all the while, but now he is awake. Nor, do I hear, doth your French Cardinal tamper any longer with our King's title and right to the dominion of the Narrow Seas. These are brave fruits of the Ship-Money."

The King was still in great straits for money, and he turned for help to Noye. The Parliament had insisted on the suppression of monopolies, but Charles revived them by Noye's advice; and for the sum of £10,000 which they paid for their patent, and for a duty of £8 upon every ton of soap they should make, he granted to a company a charter according to it the exclusive privilege to make and to sell soap. The patent had a proviso in it permitting every soap-boiler then exercising his trade in England to become a member of the chartered company; and that precious turncoat, Noye, who devised the project, considered that in this way he had evaded the letter of the law, as the Act of Parliament forbidding monopolies had been directed against individuals and against some two or three monopolists favoured by the Court. These incorporated soap-boilers, as part of their bargains, received powers to appoint searchers; and they exercised a sort of inquisition over the trade. Such dealers as resisted their interference, or tried to make soap on their own account, were handed over to the tender mercies of the Star Chamber.

This precedent was followed by the creation of a similar company of starch-makers.

The King and Laud, who had been promised the primacy on the death of Archbishop Abbot, were embarked together on an evil course. Laud believed in the Divine Right of Kings, and he was a man totally devoid of suavity of manner and of breadth of mind. He would compel all men to think as he thought, and act as he chose. That wheat and tares should grow together till the harvest was a doctrine of the Gospel he could not comprehend, and his energies and power were directed towards the forcible uprooting of the tares in the field of the Church, and the tares were the heterodox Puritans. Between him and the King they would allow no liberty to men either in their bodies and goods, or in their souls and consciences. That there should be crabbed and crooked sticks Laud would not allow; all must be clean and straight as willow wands. To the civil despotism alone as exercised by Charles, the English people might possibly have submitted for some time longer, for the ship-money had produced the desired effect; but the scourge of Laud lashed them to fury. And Noye was the scourge Laud employed in the Star Chamber. Hammon Le Strange, in his Life of King Charles I, says that Noye became so servilely addicted to the King's prerogative, by ferreting out old penal statutes and devising new exactions, that he was the most pestilential vexation of the subject that the age produced.

When William Prynne, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, was brought (1634) before the Star Chamber to answer for his book Histrio-Mastix, or the Players' Scourge, it was Noye who filed information against him. Prynne attacked all plays, masques, and dances. The offence charged against him was this: "Although he knew that His Majesty's royal Queen, the Lords of the Council, etc. were in festivals oftentimes present spectators of some masques and dances, and many recreations that were tolerable and in themselves sinless, and so declared to be by a book printed in the time of His Majesty's royal father; yet Mr. Prynne, in his book, hath railed not only against stage-plays, comedies, dancings, and all other exercises of the people, and against all such as frequent or behold them; but further, in particular, against hunting, public festivals, Christmas-keeping, bond-fires, and May-poles; nay, even against the dressing up of houses with green ivy." He was further accused of directly casting aspersions upon the Queen, and of stirring up the people to discontent against the King, whom he had spoken of in "terms unfit for so sacred a person."

The whole tenor of the book, according to Noye, was not less against the Church of England than against these amusements, and their Sacred Majesties for countenancing them. "The music in the Church," said the Attorney-General, "the charitable terms he giveth it is, not to be a noise of men, but rather a bleating of bruit beasts; choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen, bark a counter-point as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a sort of bulls, grunt out a bass as it were a number of hogs ... also his general censure of all the bishops and of all the clergy; they scorn to feed the poor—these silk and satin divines. Very charitable terms upon those of the Church. Christmas, as it is kept, is a devil's Christmas—nay, he doth bestow a great number of pages to make men affect the name of Puritan, as though Christ were a Puritan, and so he saith in his Index."

The fact was Prynne was a narrow-minded, cantankerous fanatic, whose only idea of religion was of an acrid nature, and who looked upon all entertainments as wicked. He complained that forty thousand playbooks had been sold in London, and that there was no keen demand for printed sermons; that Ben Jonson's plays and poems had been published on better paper than Bibles.

Instead of treating Prynne, as a religious maniac, with good-humoured contempt, he was sentenced by the Star Chamber to pay £10,000, be branded on the forehead, have his nostril slit, and his ears cropped. This infamous sentence was executed, and then Prynne was sent to the Fleet, where he was to endure imprisonment till he retracted and apologized. So far from apologizing, he sent from the Fleet to Laud a stinging letter about the Star Chamber sentences, which letter Laud showed to the King, and then, by the King's command, showed it to Noye. Noye had Prynne forthwith brought to his chamber, exhibited the letter, and asked him whether he acknowledged his handwriting. Prynne replied that he could not tell unless he were allowed a close inspection of it. The letter being then placed in his hands, and Mr. Attorney Noye having retired to his closet for a pressing necessity, Prynne, when his back was turned, tore it to shreds and threw the scraps out of the window. Noye then brought Prynne again before the Star Chamber, but Laud now interfered, and urged that the matter of the insulting letter might not be pressed against him.

In 1636, as soon as he could get hold of ink and paper, this incorrigible pamphleteer published fresh attacks on the bishops, among others News from Ipswich, under the name of Matthew White. He was again dragged before the Star Chamber, and was fined £5000 and ordered to lose the rest of his ears, to be branded on both cheeks with "S. L." for "Seditious Libeller." Noye, however, had no part in this final persecution; nor did he live to see the results to the King of the course he had recommended and which had been pursued.

His health began to fail, and he went to Tunbridge Wells to drink the waters. They, however, did him no good, and he died on the 9th August, 1635, at the Wells, and was buried in New Brentford Church on the ensuing 11th August.

Howell, in a letter to Viscount Savage dated 1st October, 1635, wrote: "The old steward of your Courts, Master Attorney-General Noy, is lately dead, nor could Tunbridge Waters do him any good. Though he had good matter in his brain, he had, it seems, ill materials in his body, for his heart was shrivelled like a leather penny-purse when he was dissected, nor were his lungs found.

"Being such a Clerk in the Law, all the world wonders he left such an odd will, which is short and in Latin. The substance of it is, that he having bequeathed a few Legacies, and left his second son one hundred marks a year, and nine hundred pounds in money, enough to bring him up in his Father's Profession, he concludes: Reliqua meorum omnia primogenito meo Edwardo, dissipanda nec melius unquam (speravi) lego: I leave the rest of my goods to my firstborn Edward (mistake for Humphry), to be consum'd or scattered (for I never hoped better). A strange, and scarce a Christian Will, in my opinion, for it argues uncharitableness. Nor doth the world wonder lesse, that he should leave no Legacy to some of your Lordship's children, considering what deep obligations he had to your Lordship; for I am confident he had never bin Attorney-General else."

Hals tells this story of Noye: "The Attorney-General on a day havinge King Charles I and the principal officers and nobilitie of his court, at a dinner at his house in London, at which tyme the arch poet Ben Jonson, and others being at an inne, on the other side the street; and wantinge both meate and money for their subsistance, at that exigent resolved to trye an expedient, to gett his dinner from the Attorney-General's table, in order to which, by the landlord of the inne aforesaid, he sent a white timber plate or trencher to him, when the King was sate downe to table, whereon was inscribed these words:—

Which plate beinge presented by the Attorney-Generall to the Kinge, produced this effect; that Jonson had a good dish of venison sent him back by the bearer to his great content and satisfaction, on which aforesaid plate, by the King's direction, Jonson's rhymes were thus inverted or contradicted:—

William Noye anagram, I Moyle in law. He was the blowcoal incendiary or stirrer up of the occasion of the civill wars between Kinge Charles and his Parliament, by assertinge and setting up the King's prerogative to the highest pitch, as King James I had done before, beyond the laws of the land as aforesaid. And as counsill for the Kinge he prosecuted for Kinge Charles I the imprisoned members of the House of Commons, 1628, viz. Sir John Ellyot, Mr. Coryton and others."

Noye died in 1638. Hals adds: "He had the principal hand in the most oppressive expedients for raising money for the King, and seems not to have had the least notion of public spirit. He was, in a word, a man of an enlarged head and a contracted heart."

His portrait, formerly possessed by Davies Gilbert,[22] has been engraved in Polwhele's Biographical Sketches in Cornwall. The eldest son, Edward, was killed in a duel by Captain Byron in France in 1636, and then Carnanton passed to his brother Humphrey, a colonel in King Charles' army, and Commissioner of the Peace for the County of Cornwall. He married Hester, daughter of Henry Sandys, and sister and coheiress of George Lord Sandys of the Vine. He was as worthless a fellow as his elder brother Edward, and William Noye, the father, foresaw the ruin of the family estates to whichever of his sons they fell; for, in default of male issue, they were to go to Humphrey Noye, not Edward as Howell states. Humphrey by his bad conduct, riot and excess, lost all the estate left him by his father except Carnanton, and for many years lived on the charity of his friends and on dishonest tricks; for being a magistrate and generally chairman at the sessions, he took bribes to pervert judgment; acquitting felons, etc., till at last he was detected and struck out of the Commission. Hals says: "After which growinge scandalous for these and other misdemeanours, he was slighted by his former friends, and put to great hardships to get a subsistance necessary for the life of man (his creditors beinge upon mortgages in possession of his whole estate). However, it happened some time before his death, that upon puttinge his hand and seale with his creditors for conveying the manor of Amell and Trylly in Penwith to his son-in-lawe, Mr. Davies, on marrying with his daughter Katherine, he had by them pay'd him in cash £100 in consideration thereof. Soon after the receipt of which money he sicken'd and dyed at Thomas Wills' house in S. Colomb Towne, and left £80 in cash, about the yeare 1683; which was more money than he was possest of at one tyme for about twenty yeares before; and the last words that he was heard to speake, as his soule passed out of this life, was: 'Lord, where am I goinge now?'"

Humphrey Noye had two sons, but both predeceased him and died without issue. His daughter Hester married Henry Davies, of Buryan, and had by him a son, William, who left issue two daughters only.

Catherine, the second daughter, married in 1679 William Davies, of Bosworgy, who by her left issue John Davies of Ednovean, whose daughter Catherine married the Rev. Edward Giddy, whose son Davies Giddy assumed the name and arms of Gilbert.

The third daughter, Bridgeman, married John Willyams, of Roxworthy, but died childless. After her death Willyams married Dorothy, daughter of Peter Daye, gent., and by her had issue, and the family of Willyams to this day possesses Carnanton.

The arms of Noye are azure, three crosses crosslets, in bend, argent.