Courtenay Pole

Sir Courtenay Pole, 2nd Baronet (before February 17, 1619 , † around April 10, 1695 ) was an English nobleman , military man and politician who was once elected as a member of the House of Commons .

origin

Courtenay Pole came from the Pole family , which had belonged to the gentry of Devon since the 15th century at the latest . He was baptized on February 17, 1619 as the second son of John Pole and his wife Elizabeth How. He studied at Lincoln's Inn in London in 1635 .

Military in the English Civil War

During the English Civil War from 1642 onwards, Courtenay and his older brother William joined the royal troops, although the Pole family was puritanical and their father fought on the side of Parliament . As a result, Shute House , a family estate, was looted and badly damaged when the Lyme parliamentary garrison went down . The damage is said to have been £ 5000. In return, royalist troops destroyed Colcombe Castle , her father's seat, in 1644 . Courtenay Pole himself fought as a captain in Sir John Hele's regiment from 1643 until he surrendered in Exeter in 1646 . After the Civil War was decided in Parliament's favor, Pole, a landless younger son, was sentenced to a relatively modest fine of £ 20. While his father retired near London after the Civil War, Pole apparently took over the management of the family estates in Devon after the death of his older brother in early 1649. At the death of his father in 1658 he inherited his possessions and the nobility title Baronet , of Shute House in the County of Devon, which had been awarded to this in 1628.

Politicians during the Stuart Restoration

After the Stuart Restoration , Pole became Justice of the Peace in Devon in July 1660 and Justice of the Peace in Dorset in 1661 . From July 1660 he was also Deputy Lieutenant of Devon. In the general election in 1661 he was able to prevail in Borough Honiton against Sir William Waller , the candidate of Sir William Courtenay . In the so-called Cavalalier Parliament , which sat in several session periods for a total of seventeen years, Pole was an active member who not only campaigned for the interests of Honiton, the then center of lace manufacture in England. Above all, he pushed through the introduction of a stove tax , which was finally approved by the House of Lords . Because of this unpopular tax, he was mocked as Sir Chimney Pool ( English Chimney for chimney ). Despite these services for the court party , Pole was not rewarded with any offices. There were also numerous lawsuits and disputes in his Irish holdings in County Meath , which his father had acquired. Since he ultimately received little support from the English administration under Lord Lieutenant James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde , he finally exchanged the goods in Ireland for properties in England, the value of which was much lower. Nevertheless, he continued to support the court party on a regular basis, for which he was secretly paid an exceptionally generous pension. As a wealthy landowner, he was able to convert a large part of the Shute estate into a hunting park in the 1670s . In the general election in February 1679 and in the subsequent elections, he apparently did not run, allegedly because he feared that he would not be elected in any place where there were chimneys. However, he was still in the favor of King Charles II. Although he was no longer a Justice of the Peace in Dorset since 1674, he continued to serve on several local committees. From 1681 to 1682 he served as the sheriff of Devon, where he rigorously implemented government orders. In the general election of 1685, his eldest son John Pole was elected MP for Lyme Regis. In the same year Pole Recorder was made by Honiton.

Shapcott family coat of arms in Shute Church commemorating Courtenay Pole's wedding to Ureth Shapcote

Last years and death

During the reign of James II from 1685, he refused to repeal the Penal Laws and the Test Acts . Probably for this reason he was deposed as recorder in 1687 and as justice of the peace in July 1688. He then loaned his horses to the troops of William of Orange who had landed in Devon for free during the Glorious Revolution . After that, as an old and sick man, he largely withdrew from politics. He was buried in Shute Church on April 13, 1695 .

Family and offspring

Pole had before 1649 Ureth (also Urith ) Shapcote , a daughter of the lawyer Thomas Shapcote from Exeter married. She brought a dowry of £ 4,000 into the marriage. He had several children with her, including

• Penelope Pole (after 1649 – before 1686) ∞ Francis Robartes
• Sir John Pole, 3rd Baronet (1649–1708)
• Jane Pole (around 1654–1710) ∞ Sir Coplestone Bamfylde, 2nd Baronet

Web links

• Sir Courtenay Pole, 2nd Bt on thepeerage.com , accessed November 8, 2017.
• John. P. Ferris: POLE, Sir Courtenay, 2nd Bt. (1619-95), of Shute, Devon. (History of Parliament Online, Ref Volumes: 1660–1690)

predecessor	Office	successor
John Pole	Pole Baronet, of Shute House 1658–1695	John Pole