Commonwealth. Nower resided in Bartholomew Lane, near the Exchange, in London; in 1670 a fire broke out there, in which Nower, with two of his children and two servants, perished. Administration of his effects was granted on 15 Aug. 1670 to his widow, Hester, who subsequently married Francis Turner.
His wife Hester was daughter of Isaac Bargrave, D.D., dean of Canterbury, by whom he was father of Beaupré Nower (or Nowers), afterwards fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
[Streatfield's Excerpta Cantiana; information from Mr. G. P. Nowers.]
NOYE or NOY, WILLIAM (1577–1634), attorney-general to Charles I, son of Edward Noye of Carnanton, Mawgan-in-Pyder, Cornwall, by Jane Crabbe, his wife, was born in 1577. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 27 April 1593, and was admitted on 24 Oct. 1594 a member of Lincoln's Inn. Leaving the university without a degree, he was called to the bar in 1602, was autumn reader in 1622, a bencher from 1618 until his death, and treasurer in 1632.
His rise in his profession was slow, and was not achieved without intense and unremitting application. ‘I moyle in law’ he early adopted as his anagram, and by such moyling he gradually acquired a knowledge, both intimate and extensive, of the abstruser branches of the law. He thus attracted the notice of Bacon, by whom he was recommended in 1614 for the post of official law reporter, as one ‘not overwrought with practice and yet learned, and diligent, and conversant in reports and records.’
Noye represented Grampound, Cornwall, in the first two parliaments of James I, 1604–11 and 1614. In subsequent parliaments he represented other constituencies in the same county, viz. Helston in 1621–2, Fowey in 1623–4, St. Ives in 1625–6, and Helston in 1628–9. He took at first the popular side, and led the attack on monopolies with skill and spirit in 1620–1. As counsel for Sir Walter Earl, one of the five knights committed for refusing to contribute to the forced loan of 1626, he argued, 22 Nov. 1627, the insufficiency of the return to their habeas corpus. On 16 April 1628 he replied to Attorney-general Heath in the argument on the liberty of the subject before the House of Lords, and he afterwards in the commons proposed a habeas corpus act. He also stoutly resisted, in the conference of 28 May following, the clause saving the royal prerogative appended by the lords to the Petition of Right. In the debate on tonnage and poundage of 12 Feb. 1628–9, he proposed the insertion in the grant of a clause expressly negativing the right of the king to levy those contributions by virtue of his prerogative.
It accordingly excited no little surprise when, on 27 Oct. 1631, Noye was appointed attorney-general. On being offered the post he is said to have bluntly asked what his wages were to be, and to have hesitated until it was pressed upon him with importunity. Once in office, the view he took of his duties is evinced by his witty translation of ‘Attornatus Domini Regis’ as ‘one that must serve the king's turn.’ One of his first official cares was to take order for the reverential use of St. Paul's Cathedral, which, by the negligence of the dean and chapter, had been suffered to become a public thoroughfare (Documents illustrating the History of St. Paul's Cathedral, Camden Soc. p. 131).
In the Star-chamber it fell to his lot to prosecute two members of his own inn, Henry Sherfield and William Prynne [q. v.] Sherfield, to show his zeal for the glory of God, had, in October 1629, defaced his image in a stained-glass window in St. Edmund's Church, Salisbury, of which city he was recorder. An information had been issued against him by Noye's predecessor, Attorney-general Heath, but it did not come on for hearing until February 1632–3, when the crown case was stated by Noye with equal moderation and cogency, and Sherfield was let off with the comparatively light penalty of a fine of 500l. and a public acknowledgment of error. In the autumn Noye was occupied with the revision of the ‘Declaration of Sports’ preparatory to its reissue, and in the supervision of the arrangements for a grand masque which the loyal gentlemen of the Inns of Court had determined by way of protest against Prynne's recently published ‘Histriomastix’ to present before the king and queen at Whitehall at the ensuing Candlemas. The pageant was followed by Prynne's trial in the Star-chamber, 13–17 Feb. 1633–4, in the conduct of which Noye manifested great zeal. On 7 May following he was an unsympathetic spectator of Prynne's sufferings in the Westminster pillory, and the puritans, not unnaturally, saw the hand of God in a vesical hæmorrhage by which he was seized on his return home (A Divine Tragedy lately acted, 1634, 4to, p. 44). When Prynne's ‘libellous’ letter to Laud brought him again into the Star-chamber, 18 June, Noye's zeal outran his discretion. Denouncing Prynne as past grace, he moved to deprive him of the privilege of attending divine service. Laud was shocked at so heathenish a proposal, and at
