suc. cos. 25 June 1652 as 6th Bar. EURE
First sat 6 Nov. 1660; last sat 16 Apr. 1672
MP Yorks. 1653; Yorks. (N. Riding) 1654, 1656; ‘Other House’ 1658, 1659
b. c.1620,1 1st surv. s. of Horatio Eure (bur. 9 Jan. 1637) of Easby, Yorks. (N. Riding), and Deborah, da. and coh. of John Brett, of Romney Marsh, Kent; bro. of Ralph Eure, 7th Bar. Eure. educ. adm. L. Inn 27 Feb. 1672. unm. suc. bro. 18 Aug. 1643. d. by 25 Oct.; will 15 Oct., pr. 25 Oct. 1672.2
Cllr. of state 1 Nov.–12 Dec. 1653; commr. security of the Protector, England and Wales 1656–8.3
Commr. assessment, Yorks. (N. Riding) 1647, 1648, 1649, 1657, 1660; commr. Yorks. 1650, 1652;4 commr. militia, Yorks. 1648, 1655, 1659, 1660.5 Commr. scandalous ministers, Yorks. (N. Riding) 1654;6 commr. sewers, Yorks. (N. Riding) 1664.7
Capt. coy. of ft. (Parl.) by 1643–1646;8 maj. coy. of militia ft. Yorks. 1648–9;9 capt. coy. of militia horse, Yorks. 1650–aft. 1651;10 col. regt. of militia horse, Yorks. by 1656–1660?11
Associated with: Easby, Yorks. (N. Riding).
The barony of Eure had first been granted to the soldier William Eure† in 1544 for his loyal military service in the constant border skirmishing with the Scots. This line of the Eures died out in 1652 with the death of William Eure†, 5th Baron Eure, while still a minor. The title then passed to George Eure, the grandson of Sir Francis Eure‡, the younger brother of Ralph Eure†, 3rd Baron Eure. George tried to claim the family estates in the parliamentary borough of Malton in the North Riding of Yorkshire, but they were granted to, and divided up by, the 5th baron’s female cousins.12 The 6th baron thus was left with a respected northern title but very little wealth to support it, and was one of the poorest peers in the Restoration House of Lords. His own estate, probably worth less than £250 p.a., consisted of the manor of Easby and a moiety of that of Little Ayton near Northallerton in the North Riding, which his grandfather Sir Francis Eure‡ had acquired from his elder brother the 3rd baron early in the seventeenth century.13 George Eure also had a reversionary interest in estates in Herefordshire, for his branch of the family had established itself in the legal profession in Wales. Sir Francis had been a chief justice of Chester and had acquired Gatley Park in Herefordshire, which had descended to his younger son, George Eure’s uncle Sir Sampson Eure‡, who had also served in a number of judicial and government posts in Wales in the years before he joined Charles I at Oxford and served as Speaker of the royalist Parliament.
Unlike his uncle Sir Sampson, George Eure served Parliament, and later the Cromwellian regime, devotedly from the early days of the Civil War. His succession to his second cousin’s prestigious northern title in June 1652 only increased his standing in that region. In the summer of 1653 he was selected to sit for Yorkshire in the short-lived Nominated Assembly and on 1 Nov. 1653 he was elected by his fellow Members, with 56 votes, to sit on the council of state. He attended almost two-thirds of the council’s meetings before the Nominated Assembly dissolved itself in December.14
Eure’s loyalty to Cromwell benefited him after the Protectorate was established. He was elected for the North Riding in the first Protectorate Parliament of 1654 and was again elected for the North Riding in the Parliament of 1656. In December 1657 he and his fellow Yorkshire peers Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, and Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount (later earl of) Fauconberg, were summoned by Cromwell to the ‘Other House’. Eure and Fauconberg were the only two members of the ‘old’ hereditary peerage who actually sat in that assembly, attending it on its first day, 20 Jan. 1658. A hostile commentator described Eure at this time as ‘a gentleman of Yorkshire, not very bulky or imperious for a lord’ and ascribed his selection to ‘the Protector being so well satisfied with his principles, and easiness … to be wrought up to do whatever their will and pleasure is, and to say, No, when they would have him’.15 Eure also sat in Richard Cromwell’s ‘Other House’ from late January to mid-March 1659 and continued to act as a militia commissioner and officer in Yorkshire after the army coup against the Protectorate in April.16
At the time of the Convention, Wharton, drawing up his list of potential members of the House, marked Eure as one of only six peers who had actually ‘sat in both houses’ (considering the Other House as a House of Lords) during the preceding twenty years. Despite this highly compromised past, Eure did not notably suffer at the Restoration and maintained his prominent place in the society and governance of the North Riding, continuing to be placed on the commissions of the peace for the region.17 He could count among his neighbours his fellow Cromwellians and members of the ‘Other House’ Fauconberg, now lord lieutenant of the North Riding, and his second cousin, Charles Howard, ennobled by Charles II in the coronation honours as earl of Carlisle. Such connections did not mitigate Eure’s greatest handicap: poverty. When Fauconberg sent to Whitehall a valuation of the estates of the nobility of his lieutenancy, with the view of assessing their contribution to the militia, Eure’s name was not even included.18 And despite his name and the family’s long establishment at Malton, Eure exercised no electoral influence in that parliamentary borough, which was controlled by his second cousins, who actually possessed the estate.19
Similarly, in the House of Lords he was one of the most constant attenders of the House for many years, yet he was never a leading figure or entrusted with political responsibilities. Perhaps at first trying to gauge the mood of the royal government to former Cromwellian collaborators, he waited until after the autumn adjournment of the Convention to take his seat in the House, sitting for the first time on 6 Nov. 1660, and being present for 78 per cent of the meetings of the House in the last two months of 1660. He maintained the same attendance rate in the Cavalier Parliament in the spring and summer of 1661 before the long adjournment. In early July Wharton forecast that Eure would oppose the claim of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, to the office of the great chamberlaincy. Eure left the House on 18 July and two days later registered his proxy with another former Cromwellian military leader, George Monck, duke of Albemarle, for the final ten days of the session.
From 20 Nov. 1661 Eure attended 87 per cent of the remaining meetings of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament until he was granted leave on 29 Apr. 1662 ‘to go into the country for some time’. He was named to a select committee on the bill concerning bankrupts on 13 Feb. 1662 and was placed on a further 14 select committees before his departure from the House. Most of these were for private bills dealing with the sale or settlement of estates or the payment of debts, but he was also placed on committees dealing with bills to improve Sedgemoor, to regulate the import of wool cards and madder, and to repair Dover harbour. On 10 Apr. 1662 he chaired the meeting of the committee for a bill on the manufacture of cloth, which he adjourned to the following Monday – his only recorded committee chairmanship.20 Considering his parliamentarian past, it is intriguing that he was appointed on 25 Apr. 1662 to the committee for the distribution of £60,000 to former royalist officers. On the very next day his military experience in the north was called on when he was named to the committee for the bill to prevent rapine on the northern borders.
Eure was concerned in another northern matter when on 15 Feb. 1662 he joined a delegation of peers from that region, led by Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, to the lord chancellor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, to assure him of their opposition to the bill for the re-establishment of the council of the North, ‘as believing it not for the service of the king or good of the country’.21 It was probably Eure’s Cromwellian past which led him to oppose the attempt of Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, to reclaim by legislation land in Lancashire which during the Protectorate he had conveyed by legal methods. Although Eure’s name does not appear among the signatories to the formal protest of 6 Feb. 1662 against the passage of the bill restoring Derby’s land, a later list drawn up by James Butler, earl of Brecknock (better known by his Irish, and later also English, title of duke of Ormond), of protesters and general opponents to Derby’s bill does include Eure’s name.22
Eure came to all but one of the meetings of the session of 1663 and was named to 23 select committees; on 18 July he was nominated to be one of the commissioners to assess his fellow peers for the purposes of the Temporalty Subsidy bill. In July 1663 Wharton listed him as one of those peers expected to support the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Clarendon. This forecast is one of the few surviving indicators of Eure’s stance in the House, of which he became an almost constant member. From this point until his death in 1672 he attended every session of Parliament – except for the short sessions of October 1665 and July 1667 – and his attendance in any one session never dropped below 84 per cent.
During his entire career, nominations to select committees on (largely) private legislation were by far his principal, if not his sole, recorded activity in the House. From the time of his first nomination on 13 Feb. 1662 until 20 Apr. 1671 he was named to 194 select committees in total. Yet it is noteworthy that such an assiduous and visible member of the House did not make more of an impact. He was never entrusted with managing conferences and his level of activity in the many committees to which he was named is unknown. He only appears once in the committee minute books as a chair, on 10 Apr. 1662, and again only once in the Journal as a reporter of a bill from a committee, on 4 Apr. 1670.23
From 1668 Eure did become more active in the House, or there is more evidence of it in the records. Already in the 1666–7 session he had been added, for the first time, to the committee for the Journal, and from December 1666 he began to sign pages of the manuscript drafts of the Journal approving their content on a regular basis. On 16 March 1668 he signed the protest against the House’s resolution to reverse the chancery decree in the case of Morley v. Elwes. Four days previously he had been placed on a committee to consider the relief to be granted to Thomas Skinner in the case of Skinner v. East India Company, and Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, later recorded that Eure was one of only nine peers who on 22 Feb. 1670 voted in the minority against the motion, strongly urged by the king, to have all records of the rancorous dispute between the Houses erased from the official Journal.24
Barely a month later, on 26 Mar. 1670, he subscribed to the protest against the passage of the second Conventicle Act, and on 8 Apr. 1670 he similarly dissented from the passage of the bill settling a duty on brandy. The protest against the Conventicle Act in particular suggests that he had ‘Presbyterian’ sympathies, held over from his earlier political career in Cromwell’s ‘godly’ parliaments. This may explain Wharton’s earlier forecast of Eure’s support for the impeachment of Clarendon. It may also explain Eure’s placement on 24 July 1663 on the committee for the bill to offer relief to those clergy who had been unable (or unwilling) to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity. The long and pious preamble of his will of 15 Oct. 1672 suggests that he was still a ‘hotter sort’ of Protestant at the end of his life. On 25 Feb. 1671 he successfully petitioned the House for the suspension of a suit in Chancery brought in by John Carnesew which aimed to prevent Eure from felling timber, in his widowed aunt’s name, on the Herefordshire manors of Leinthall Starkes and Gatley Hall, to which Carnesew claimed title.
Among many other notables with Yorkshire estates, including Fauconberg and Robert Bruce, earl of Ailesbury, Eure was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 27 Feb. 1672, on the recommendation of the Member for Aldborough and reader of Lincoln’s Inn, Sir Francis Goodricke‡. Eure did not live long thereafter to enjoy the honour, as he died in late October 1672. In his will he left approximately £300 to immediate family members and servants, and his executors were entrusted to pay off the arrears on his rented accommodation in London; he was apparently too poor to purchase a residence in the capital. He also bequeathed to his younger brother, executor and successor, Ralph Eure, who would become 7th Baron Eure, ‘my robes and coronation footcloth’, probably aware that the latter was even less able to afford such essential accoutrements of nobility than he had been himself.
C.G.D.L.- 1 TNA, C 142/558/89 (based on the age of his elder brother, 20, at time of their father’s death in 1637).
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/340.
- 3 A. and O. ii. 1039.
- 4 Ibid. i. 965, 1082; ii. 33, 297, 662, 1067, 1367.
- 5 Ibid. i. 1141, 1245; ii. 1323, 1446; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 78; A Perfect List of all such Persons … are now confirmed to be … Justices of the Peace (1660), 63.
- 6 A. and O. ii. 971.
- 7 TNA, C 181/7, p. 248.
- 8 CSP Dom. 1654, p. 164.
- 9 Ibid.
- 10 CSP Dom. 1650, p. 508; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 434.
- 11 CSP Dom. 1656–7, p. 120; CSP Dom. 1659–60, p. 16.
- 12 TNA, C 6/127, p. 42.
- 13 VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), ii. 228, 305.
- 14 CSP Dom. 1653–4, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii, 237.
- 15 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 504–19; Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 29.
- 16 HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 525–48; CSP Dom. 1659–60, p. 16; A. and O. ii. 1323.
- 17 A Perfect List of all such Persons, 63; TNA, C 181/7, pp. 17, 248, 617.
- 18 HMC Var. ii. 118–19.
- 19 HP Commons, 1660–90, i. 479.
- 20 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, p. 238.
- 21 Chatsworth, Cork mss, Misc Box 1, Burlington Diary, 17 Jan. and 15 Feb. 1662.
- 22 Add. 33589, ff. 220–1.
- 23 PA, HL/PO/CO/1//1, p. 238.
- 24 PA, HL/PO/JO/5, 12 Mar. 1668; Mapperton House, Sandwich mss, Journal, x. 196–204.