Sir John Maynard KS (1604 – 9 October 1690) was an English lawyer and politician, prominent under the reigns of Charles I, the Commonwealth, Charles II, James II and William III.Rigg, James McMullen
Origins and education Maynard was born in 1604 at the Abbey House, Tavistock, in Devon, the eldest son and heir of Alexander Maynard of Tavistock (4th son of John Maynard of Sherford in the parish of Brixton in DevonVivian, Lt.Col. J.L., (Ed.) The Visitations of the County of Devon: Comprising the Heralds' Visitations of 1531, 1564 & 1620, Exeter, 1895, p.561, pedigree of Maynard), a barrister of the Middle Temple, by his wife Honora Arscott, daughter of Arthur Arscott of Tetcott in Devon. The senior line of the Maynard family was seated at Sherford in the parish of Brixton in Devon. His name appears in the matriculation register of Exeter College, Oxford, under date 26 April 1621, which clashes unaccountably with the date of his admission to the degree of BA on 25 April 1621, given in the University Register of Degrees.
Barrister In 1619 he entered the Middle Temple; he was called to the Bar in November 1626, and was elected a bencher in 1648. A pupil of William Noy, afterwards Attorney General, a Devonian, and born in the law, he rapidly acquired a large practice, both on the Western circuit and at Westminster; he argued a reported case in the King's Bench in 1628 and was appointed Recorder of Plymouth in August 1640.
Parliamentarian He represented Totnes in both the Short Parliament of 1640 and the Long Parliament, and from the first took an active part in the business of the house. In December 1640 he was placed on the committee of scrutiny into the conduct of lords-lieutenant of counties, and on that for the discovery of the "prime promoters" of the new "canons ecclesiastical" passed in the recent irregular session of convocation. He was also one of the framers of the articles upon which Strafford was impeached, and one of the principal speakers at the trial. He threw himself with great zeal into the affair, and on the passing of the bill of attainder said joyfully to Sir John Bramston, "Now we have done our work. If we could not have effected this we could have done nothing".Brampston, p.75 A strong Presbyterian, he subscribed and administered to the house the protestation of 3 May 1641 in defence of the Protestant religion, and drafted the bill making subscription thereto obligatory on all subjects.
In the committee, which sat at Guildhall after the adjournment of the House of Commons which followed the king's attempt to arrest the five members (4 January 1641/2), he made an eloquent speech in defence of parliamentary privilege. In the following May he accepted a deputy-lieutenancy of militia under the parliament, and on 12 June 1643 was nominated a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines.Westminster Assembly Project accessed 20 June 2008 He took the covenant on 25 September following, and was one of the managers of the impeachment of William Laud in January–March 1643/4. With his friend Bulstrode Whitelocke, Maynard attended, by Essex's invitation, a meeting of the anti-Cromwellian faction, held at Essex House in December 1644, to discuss the expediency of taking public action against Cromwell as an 'incendiary.' The idea, which seems to have originated with the Lord Chancellor of Scotland Loudon, met with no favour from the English lawyers, and was in consequence abandoned.
A curious testimony to Maynard's reputation at this time is afforded by a grant made in his favour by parliament in October 1645 of the books and manuscripts of the late Lord Chief Justice Bankes, with liberty to seize them wherever he might find them. In the House of Commons he was heard with the profoundest respect, while he advocated the abolition of feudal wardships and other salutary legal reforms. He also prospered mightily in his profession, making in the course of the summer circuit of 1647 the unprecedentedly large sum of £700. As a politician he was a strict constitutionalist, protested against the first steps taken towards the deposition of the king, and on the adoption of that policy withdrew from the house as no longer a lawful assembly (November 1648).
State trials under the Commonwealth Nevertheless, on the establishment of the Commonwealth he did not scruple to take the engagement, and held a government brief at the trial of Major Faulconer for perjury in May 1653. Assigned by order of court to advise John Lilburne on his second trial in July 1653, Maynard at first feigned sickness. A repetition of the order, however, elicited from him some exceptions to the indictment which confounded the court and secured Lilburne's acquittal by the jury. The jury were afterwards interrogated by the council of state as to the grounds of their verdict, but refused to disclose them, and Maynard thus escaped censure, and on 9 February 1653/4 was called to the degree of serjeant-at-law.
In the following year his professional duty brought him into temporary collision with the government. One Cony, a city merchant, had been arrested by order of the council of state for non-payment of taxes, and Maynard, with Serjeants Thomas Twysden and Wadham Wyndham, moved on his behalf in the upper bench for a habeas corpus. Their argument on the return, 18 May 1655, amounted in effect to a direct attack on the government as a usurpation, and all three were forthwith, by order of Cromwell, committed to the Tower of London; they were released on making submission (25 May).
Continuing political preferment Maynard was among the commissioners appointed to collect the quota of the Spanish war tax of 1657 payable by Devon. Thomas Carlyle is in error in stating that he was a member of Cromwell's House of Lords. He sat in the House of Commons for Plymouth during the Second Protectorate Parliament, and on the debates on the designation to be given to the 'other' house argued strongly for the revival of the old name (4 February 1657/8). Burnet states, and it is extremely probable, that he was also in favour of the revival of monarchy. On 1 May 1658 he was appointed Protector's serjeant, in which capacity he followed the Protector's bier on the ensuing 23 November. On the accession of Richard Cromwell he was made solicitor-general, and in parliament, where he sat for Newtown, Isle of Wight, lent the whole weight of his authority as a constitutional lawyer to prop up the Protector's tottering government.
Education In 1658, Maynard was involved in the founding of two schools in Exeter, The Maynard School for girls and Hele's School for boys.Plympton St. Maurice History accessed 22 June 2008 He was also involved with the Grammar school at Totnes which, like The Maynard, was endowed with funds under the will of Elizeeus Hele, who left considerable property for charitable purposes (Maynard was one of the trustees of his will).Lewis, p. 327 The will was the subject of a court case held before Sir Edward Rhodes. In this case the Captain Edmond Lister petitioned parliament on behalf of his wife Joanne. The basis of the petition was that all the money had been left to charity although at the time the will was written Joanne was not born. Rhodes found that any monies left over from the charitable purposes should be given to Joanne Lister although the charitable purposes should continue.'House of Commons Journal Volume 7: 6 June 1657', Journal of the House of Commons: volume 7: 1651–1660 (1802), pp. 548–549. url. Date accessed: 22 June 2008.
The Restoration On Richard's abdication and the resuscitation of the Rump Parliament, Maynard took no part in parliamentary business until 21 February 1659/60, when he was placed on the committee for drafting the bill to constitute the new council of state. He reported the bill the same day, and was himself voted a member of the council on the 23rd. He sat for Bere Alston, Devon, in the Convention Parliament, was one of the first Serjeants called at the Restoration (22 June 1660), and soon afterwards (9 November) was advanced to the rank of king's serjeant and knighted (16 November). With his brother-serjeant, Sir John Glynne, he rode in the coronation procession, on 23 April 1661, behind the attorney and solicitor-general, much to the disgust of Samuel Pepys, who regarded him as a turncoat.
The reign of Charles II As king's serjeant, Maynard appeared for the crown at some of the state trials with which the new reign was inaugurated, among others that of Sir Henry Vane in Trinity term 1662. He represented Bere Alston in the Pensionary Parliament, 1661–1679, and sat for Plymouth during the rest of Charles II's reign. He was the principal manager of the abortive impeachment of Lord Mordaunt in 1666–67, and constituted himself counsel for the defence in the proceedings against Lord Clarendon in the following October. He appeared for the House of Lords in the king's bench on the return to Lord Shaftesbury's habeas corpus on 29 June 1677, and sustained its sufficiency on the ground that, though a general warrant for commitment to prison would be invalid if issued by any court but the House of Lords, the king's bench had no jurisdiction to declare it so when issued by that house. In 1678 he made a spirited but ineffectual attempt to secure the conviction of Lord Cornwallis for the brutal murder of a boy in St. James's Park. The severe censure which Lord Campbell passed upon him for his conduct of this case is based upon an entire misapprehension of the facts.
In the debate on Lord Danby's impeachment (December 1678) Maynard showed a regrettable disposition to strain the Treason Act 1351 (25 Edward III) to his disadvantage, maintaining that its scope might be enlarged by retrospective legislation, which caused Swift to denounce him, in a note to Burnet's Own Time, as 'a knave or a fool for all his law.' On constitutional questions he steered as a rule a wary and somewhat ambiguous course, professing equal solicitude for the royal prerogative and the power and privileges of parliament, acknowledging the existence of a dispensing power, without either defining its limits or admitting that it had none (10 February 1672/3), at one time resisting the king's attempts to adjourn parliament by message from the Speaker's chair (February 1677/8), and at another counselling acquiescence in his arbitrary rejection of a duly elected speaker (10–11 March 1678/1679).
Maynard opened the case against Edward Colman on 27 November 1678, and took part in most of the prosecutions arising out of the supposed Popish Plot, including the impeachment of Lord Stafford, in December 1680. Lord Campbell's interesting story of his slipping away to circuit without leave during the debate on the Exclusion Bill in the preceding November, 'upon which his son was instructed to inform him that if he did not return forthwith he should be sent for in custody, he being treated thus tenderly in respect of his having been long the Father of the House' is a sheer fabrication.
Maynard favoured the impeachment of Edward Fitzharris, declared its rejection by the House of Lords a breach of privilege (26 March 1681), and took part in the subsequent prosecution in the king's bench. In the action for false imprisonment during his mayoralty brought by Sir William Pritchard against the ex-sheriff Thomas Papillon on 6 November 1684, an incident in the conflict after the court took on the liberties of the City of London, Maynard conducted the defence with eminent skill and zeal, though a Jeffreys-ridden jury found a verdict for the plaintiff with £10,000 damages. Summoned to give evidence on behalf of Oates on his trial for perjury in May 1685, and questioned concerning the impeachment of Lord Stafford, Maynard pleaded total inability to swear to his memory in regard to that matter, and was dismissed by Jeffreys with a sneer at his supposed failing powers.
The reign of James II