Philips, Fabian

, author of several books relating to ancient customs and privileges in England, was the son of a gentleman, and born at Prestbury in Gloucestershire, Sept. 28, 1601. When he was very young, he spent some time in one of the inns of chancery; and thence translated himself to the Middle-temple, where he became learned in the law. In the civil war he continued loyal, having always been an assertor of the king’s prerogative; and was so zealously attached to Charles I. that, two days before the king was beheaded, he wrote a protestation against the intended murder, which he caused to be printed, and affixed to posts in all public places. He also published, in 1649, 4to, a pamphlet entitled “Veritas inconcussa; or King Charles I. no man of blood, but a martyr for his people:” which was reprinted in 1660, 8vo. In 1653, when the courts of justice at Westminster, especially the chancery, were voted down by Oliver’s parliament, he published “Considerations against the dissolving and taking them away:” for which he received the thanks of William Lenthall, esq. speaker of the late parliament, and of the keepers of the liberties of England. For some time, he was tilazer for London, Middlesex, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire; and spent much money in searching records, and writing in favour of the royal prerogative: yet he was but poorly rewarded by the place of one of the commissioners for regulating the law, worth 200l. per annum, which only lasted two years. After the restoration of | Charles II. when the bill for taking away the tenures was depending in parliament, he wrote and published a book, to shew the necessity of preserving them. Its title is “Tenenda non Tollenda: or, the Necessity of preserving Tenures in Capite, and by KnightVservice, which, according to their first institution, were, and are yet, a 'great part of the salus populi, &c, 1660,” 4to. In 1663 he published “The Antiquity, Legality, Reason, Duty, and Necessity of Prae-emption and Pourveyance for the King,” 4to and, afterwards, many other pieces upon subjects of a similar kind. He likewise assisted Dr. Bates in his “Elenchus Motuum;” especially in searching the records and offices for that work. He died Nov. 17, 1690, in his eighty-ninth year; and was buried near his wife, in the church of Twyford in Middlesex. He was a man well acquainted with records and antiquities; but his manner of writing is not close or well digested. He published various political pamphlets, and among them one in 1681, which, supposing him to have been sincere, proves his passion for royal prerogative to have been mu h superior to his sagacity and judgment: it is entitled “Ursa Major et Minor; shewing, that there is no such fear, as is factiously pretended, of popery and arbitrary power.” In the Archaeologia, vol. XIII. is an account of a ms. of his in the Harleian collection, entitled “An Expedient or meanes in want of money to pay the sea and land forces, or as many of them as shall be thought expedient without money in this year of an almost universal povertie of the English nation.” In Strype’s life of Whitgift (p. 89), is a notice of one Fabian Phillips, one of the council of the marches of Wales, who appears to have been an ancestor of our author. ¹