Communicated hy Mr. James Way leu. 



315 



been plundered and sold by sequestrators, leaving him no more in 

 value than £40. His fine, in 1646, nominally of £1000, was made 

 out by his endowing two rectories and paying £150 in ready money. 



Sm John Penruddocke, of Compton Chamberlain, Knight, and 

 his son, John Penruddocke, Esq., of the same. The knight's 

 adherence to the royal cause was throughout the war of the most 

 pronounced character, sitting at the council board in Oxford, and 

 acting as the King's sheriff in Wiltshire ; though neither he nor 

 his son appear to have actually borne arms. When Oxford was 

 taken, Sir John was obliged to remain in that city through ill-health, 

 and he died in the summer of 1648. In the meanwhile his son had 

 already made his early surrender to the Parliament, viz., in the 

 summer of 1644, while the issue was still undecided, and in Novem- 

 ber, 1 645, took the Solemn League and Covenant in the presence 

 of John Conant, minister of Aldersgate Church, an action to which 

 the father would never have stooped, and for which it may well be 

 believed the son never forgave himself. Anxiety to wipe away the 

 stain of this transaction may have had something to do with the 

 desperation with which he afterwards engaged in the attempt to 

 unseat Cromwell in 1654. In his own behalf the son at once com- 

 pounded for his reversionary interest in the Wilts and Essex family 

 estates, represented by £300 a year, which his father allowed him 

 on his marriage with Arundel Freake, of which more presently. 



Sir John's Wiltshire estates comprised the manor of Compton 

 Chamberlain — Baynton, with lands and tenements in Compton 

 Chamberlain — Nicholas, West Grimstead, Barford St. Martin, Pit- 

 ton, and Wilton, and the impropriate rectories of Britford and 

 Compton Chamberlain. His other estates were in Essex (limited 

 after his own decease to his wife Johan, for her life), all to pass 

 eventually in tail to his son John. For these, independently of the 

 interests for which that son had already compounded, the father had 

 to pay £490, on 2nd August, 1649; at least the receipt is so dated, 

 though he had died in the previous year. 



Some restless action on the part of John the son is discoverable 

 by a letter from Humphrey Ditton, Richard Hill, and Robert Good, 



