CAREW, Francis II (1602-1649), of Beddington, Surr.

In his early twenties Carew was thrice returned for Haslemere with his even younger cousin Poynings More as junior colleague, thanks to the influence of his maternal grandfather Sir George More, who owned the lordship of manor in which the borough was situated. VCH Surr. iii. 45-47. His namesake, Francis Carew II*, sat for Helston in the same three parliaments and, like this Member, received the Order of the Bath at Charles I’s coronation. However, neither man left any trace on the surviving records of the 1624 or 1625 Parliaments. One or other of them, as ‘Sir Fra[ncis] Cary’, was nominated on 4 Mar. 1626 to the committee for the bill against adultery and fornication. That same day ‘Sir Tho[mas] Cary’ was appointed to attend a conference with the Lords to discuss the Commons’ demand that the duke of Buckingham explain his conduct over the St. Peter of Le Havre. As Thomas Carey had already been named to this conference, it is probable that Sir Henry Carey II, this Member or his namesake, was intended. Procs. 1626, ii. 195-6. For the spelling of the surname see CJ, i. 830a-b.

Two years later Carew and Poynings More were returned together for Guildford. However, a second, rival indenture named Robert Parkhurst rather than Carew alongside More. Carew played no recorded part in the 1628 Parliament and it is Parkhurst’s name which appears in the Crown Office list. This may indicate that it was the latter who took the seat, but there is no evidence of an adjudication by the Commons. OR. In June 1628 Carew was appointed a gentleman of the privy chamber extraordinary. Two years later he and his fellow spendthrift More fled to France to escape their creditors. Sir Nicholas Carew, despite being left to deal with his son’s debts, tearful wife and angry mother-in-law, was not unsympathetic. In his first letter to his son he warned of the danger of pursuit by his creditors, and urged him

to be wary of your living there, and to live as privately as you can, yea though it were to the changing of your name and the cutting off your long hair, to alter your favour; also to be very wary how you accompany yourself with any priests or Jesuits or any fugitives.

Carew accepted the spiritual advice, assuring his father that he would ‘avoid the crafts and subtleties either of Jesuits or devils’, but wrote to his wife to send him a trunk full of expensive clothes, some of which she would have to buy. This request was too much to bear for the elder Carew, who complained to his son that it was ‘as though all Paris and France had not sufficient to furnish your proud and vain mind’. At the end of the year he wrote that nothing could be done about his son’s debts: his mother-in-law Lady Romney would not pay them, and his own lands were encumbered with jointures and entails. ‘I am very sorry I never could nor I think never shall know the certainty of your debts’. Carew was still in France in the summer of 1631, writing now to his father in French, but the birth of his son in June 1635 suggests that he must have returned home before the winter of 1634. Add. 29599, ff. 36-39, 42-44; Manning and Bray, Surr. ii. ped. facing p. 523.

Carew contested Bletchingley in the spring of 1640, leading to a double return, but was never allowed to sit in the Short Parliament. CJ, ii. 4b. During the Civil War the parliamentarians sequestered his estate, and he was assessed at £800 by the committee for advance of money after the death of his father in February 1644. The following month he sought to recover the family properties. He claimed that he had only attended the king in his capacity as a royal servant, never served in the army and had abandoned the royalist cause on the declaration of the Solemn League and Covenant in September 1643. He also stated that his only income before he had inherited his estates had been an annuity of £200; that the estate of £700 p.a. which he had just inherited from his father was charged with £4,000 in debts, and that he was himself still greatly indebted. The committee for compounding proposed a fine of £2,000 on the basis that his income was at least £1,000 p.a. and that, contrary to his assertion, he had served against Parliament. On 28 Nov. the Commons ordered that the sequestration of his lands should be lifted on payment of £1,000 within ten days, but £1,500 was still outstanding at his death. Carew was buried at Beddington on 9 Apr. 1649. His only son Nicholas, left to the guardianship of Carew Raleigh†, was involved in Booth’s rising in 1659, and was returned for Gatton in 1664. CCC, 841, 3253; CCAM, 335.