Admiral Robert Blake of Bridgwater was not only one of this country’s greatest naval heroes; he was also an influential politician and MP at one of the most tumultuous times in our history.
He was part of a family that had been in Somerset for several generations, eventually settling in Bridgwater, where Robert was born in either 1598 or 1599. Other than his education at Oxford, little is definitively known about his early life (partly because of the commonness of his name), but he did spend at least some of his career back in Bridgwater, owning property in the area.
Some aspects of Robert’s political career are equally obscure because of the confused and fluid nature of the English constitution in the 1640s and 1650s, during the conflicts between the Stuart Kings and Parliament, where identification of particular Parliaments and their members is often a matter of historical dispute.*
Blake first became an MP when elected as one of the two members for Bridgwater in April 1640. This was the so-called ‘Short Parliament’, which lasted only a few weeks before being dissolved by Charles I, and Blake is not recorded as actively participating in it.
He was not an MP when Charles was forced to call a new Parliament in November 1640, and while this ‘Long Parliament’ sat, and civil war broke out, Blake concentrated on his successful military efforts on the Parliamentary side, especially in and around Somerset. However, the crisis had led to a huge reduction in the membership of the Parliament, resulting in a swathe of by-elections in 1645-6 to replenish the Commons. Blake was elected again for Bridgwater in early 1646, though he was still heavily committed to the military then, especially the siege of Dunster Castle.
It is known that he was in Parliament around May/June as a fellow MP, Edmund Ludlow records entering the House with him “which I chose to do, as assuring myself, he having been faithful and active in the public service abroad that we should be as unanimous in the carrying it on within those doors.”
When not otherwise absent on military duty, Blake was active in Parliament and its committees in the following years, where he concentrated on matters of particular interest to him, such as military affairs and issues affecting Somerset and the West Country. His fame made him an influential MP, especially after the end of hostilities which ushered in further constitutional crises between the army and Parliament. Unsurprisingly, Blake eventually sided with the army, accepting Pride’s Purge of MPs in 1648 and resuming his seat in the ‘Rump Parliament’.
It was at this time that Blake, hitherto a land-based soldier in the army, began his naval career, being appointed by Parliament as one of the 3 ‘generals at sea’. Thereafter, he made his reputation at sea, even declining an offer by Cromwell in late 1649 of a very senior army post in Ireland. Parliament showered its hero with honours and rewards, including, in November 1651, election to the new ‘Council of State’ (a form of executive government from within Parliament).
When Cromwell finally dissolved the Rump Parliament in 1653, Blake was one of the 4 nominated Somerset Members sent to serve in the new ‘Nominated’ or ‘Barebones’ Parliament which sat for much that year, until removed by Cromwell and his allies, who then brought in a new constitution.
Blake was elected for the 1654 and 1656 ‘Protectorate’ Parliaments, the first for his usual seat of Bridgwater, but the latter for Taunton. However his naval commitments meant he never took his seat in either.
He died on 7 Aug 1657, on his flagship, George, as it entered Plymouth Sound. He had a state funeral and was buried in the Henry VII Westminster Abbey, but on the Restoration his body was disinterred and scattered. The Blake Museum in Bridgwater is a fitting tribute to his memory.
* The following is largely based on the not-yet-published parliamentary essay on Blake as an MP by the authoritative History of Parliament Trust (http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/), and I am very grateful to the Trust for permission to consult it for this article.
© JB Seatrobe (Barry K Winetrobe & Janet Seaton) 2018. A version of this article was published originally in the June 2018 issue of the Somerset Leveller, #38