CAREY, John, Visct. Rochford (c.1608-1677), of Hunsdon, Herts. and Coningsborough, Yorks.

Carey was dubbed a knight of the Bath at the coronation of Charles I, and accorded the courtesy title Viscount Rochford at his father’s creation as earl of Dover in March 1628. Rochford, who was probably still technically under-age, did not stand at the general election to Charles’s third Parliament. However, following the tragic death of his first wife just a few weeks after their wedding, he was returned for Hertford, six miles from his home at Hunsdon, at a by-election in January 1629. His only recorded appointments were to attend the king with an address on Tunnage and Poundage on 2 Feb., and to a bill committee for confirming the Somers Island [Bermuda] Company charter (10 February).CJ, i. 935b, 928a. After the dissolution Rochford and his brother-in-law Oliver St. John II* indicated their sympathy with the king’s opponents by applying to the lieutenant of the Tower for permission to visit Sir John Eliot* in prison.CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 499. Rochford had certainly attained his majority by January 1630, when his father settled on him an annuity of £500, under the trusteeship of (Sir) Thomas Pelham*, Sir Thomas Walsingham II*, and John Hampden*.C78/477/4. His income was augmented soon afterwards by marriage to his own step-sister, and, in 1639, by his assertion of title to the manor and adjoining lands of Coningsborough in Yorkshire, which had been granted to his grandfather.CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 302; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. ix. 216-17.

Rochford was summoned, as Lord Hunsdon, to the House of Lords when the Long Parliament met, and under the guidance of Viscount Saye and Sele he took the parliamentary side in the Civil War.HMC Hatfield, xxiv. 277. As one of the handful of peers who remained at Westminster he served as Speaker of the upper House for a few days in August 1647.HMC Egmont, i. 441. Although threatened with impeachment, he continued to sit occasionally in the Lords until shortly before the king’s trial.CJ, iii. 559; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 577. The Hunsdon estate was made over to him during his father’s lifetime, but he sold it to William Willoughby† in 1653.VCH Herts. iii. 328. Having finally succeeded to the earldom of Dover in 1666, he died intestate on 26 May 1677, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He had no male offspring, and the barony of Hunsdon passed to a Catholic cousin, the great-grandson of Sir Edmund Carey*.Her. and Gen. iv. 41, 143. No later member of the family entered the Lower House.