The Life and Achievements of Sir John Popham 1531-1607Douglas Walthew Rice
“A huge, heavy, and ugly man,” as described by the 17th century Aubrey, Popham still arouses dubiety, even hostility. Today’s lawyers think of him as bloodthirsty and as a rogue. He was certainly a prominent and sometimes unscrupulous supporter of the redoubtable and subtle Queen of Elizabeth I and of her circumspect successor James I in times far more dangerous to the survival of England than we are wont to imagine. Successively Recorder and MP for Bristol, Assize Judge, Sergeant-at-Law, Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Speaker, Lord Chief Justice and Privy Councillor, Popham was even briefly in the last year of this life acting Lord Chancellor. He played a prominent role in the trials of Mary Queen of Scots, of recusant priests, of the Earl of Essex, of Sir Walter Raleigh, and of the Gunpowder Plotters. He was, formidably, a hanging (and quartering) Judge. And his judgments were sometimes grotesquely prejudiced. This is the executor and fellow-westcountryman from Somerset who, among all these activities and much else, at the request of Peter Blundell (who in his Will described him as his ‘deare Frende’) built Blundell’s great school house to house and teach 150 boys born or brought up in Tiverton or, if these were lacking, ‘Forreyners’—those from without the pale of Tiverton. The cost of this first fully purposely-designed school in England was eventually £3,400 (perhaps some £3.5M in our terms), the largest single undertaking in Peter Blundell’s Will, if only a small percentage of his huge total of nearly £40,000 in bequests. In short order Popham also negotiated the fellowships and scholarships at Balliol and Sidney Sussex which in the form of closed scholarships persisted until the 1970s. Popham represents very clearly and not very pleasantly the new 16th century Protestantism, a rugged, hard, and often bleak and greedy individualism, understandable perhaps in the dangers of the times, but nonetheless somewhat alarming and even unsavoury, both to us and doubtless to his contemporaries. The man, his multitudinous activities, and his period are brought to vivid and accurate life by Rice in an extraordinarily well-researched, well-presented and highly readable biography. This well-balanced account presents a great Elizabethan long overdue for proper assessment—which he now so excellently has. Rice pulls no punches, not even the aura of extra-dimensional terror which his unquiet memory induced in at least one small boy raised in Wellington in the 1930s. If in doubt of Popham’s estimate of his own significance, visit his magnificent tomb in Wellington Parish Church, a monument also to its time, and be grateful too for his major part in the foundation of Blundell’s School. But above all, read the book. It is a splendid piece of work and part of Blundell’s history. It is enthralling. To see a full description of this book, search our online database
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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001