In the late 1620s, patronage at St. Mawes lay in the hands of two local gentlemen, Charles Trevanion* and (Sir) Francis Vyvyan*, and was employed periodically to benefit nominees of the lord chamberlain, the 3rd earl of Pembroke. Carr’s identity has not been definitively established, but the choice lies between two distant cousins connected with the king’s bedchamber, both of whom may have been allied to Pembroke. Both were also Scots naturalized in 1624. Whichever man sat in the 1626 Parliament, he left no mark on its proceedings.
Nothing is known of the early life of the William Carr who was appointed a groom of the bedchamber in November 1614 beyond the fact that he was the illegitimate nephew of James I’s favourite, the earl of Somerset, a stigma which presumably explains his omission from the family’s pedigrees. Carr’s admission to the bedchamber was allegedly intended as a snub to Somerset’s emerging rival, George Villiers, the future duke of Buckingham.
The alternative candidate, Sir William Kerr or Carr of Ancrum, would have secured election to Parliament through the influence of his father, Sir Robert Kerr, a bedchamber official to both Prince Henry and Prince Charles, who retained his post on the latter’s accession as king. On good terms with Somerset’s immediate family, in 1620 Sir Robert was accused of making unfavourable allusions to Buckingham, though his subsequent relations with the duke are uncertain. Following his schooling at Cambridge in the early 1620s and a ‘grand tour’ of France and Italy in 1624-5, Kerr may have entered Parliament in 1626, perhaps as a means of rounding off his education. However, nothing is known of his movements between late 1625, when he concluded his travels, and October 1627, when he was in Scotland preparing to join English forces at the Île de Ré. Evidence that Sir Robert might have approached Pembroke on his behalf in 1626 is also lacking.
Kerr’s subsequent life was full of incident. A semi-professional soldier during the late 1620s, he subsequently settled in Scotland, where he acquired the earldom of Lothian in 1631 following marriage to its heiress. As a result of his ennoblement, the inheritance of his father’s earldom of Ancrum, created two years later, was assigned to his younger half-brother. In 1638 Kerr emerged as a leading Covenanter, fighting against Charles I in the Bishops’ Wars, and enduring six months’ imprisonment by the king in 1643. He appears not to have taken up his Irish command in the 1640s, but played a prominent role as a negotiator after Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646. An opponent of the king’s policies rather than his person, Kerr was dispatched to London in 1648 to try to prevent the regicide, and as a Scottish secretary of state, he was a key figure in subsequent discussions with Charles II, though he opposed the disastrous invasion of England in 1651. Kerr’s exclusion from public life in Cromwellian Scotland was perpetuated after the Restoration by his refusal to sign the Abjuration oath rejecting the Covenant. The fine which he thereby incurred obliged him to sell his ancestral estates at Ancrum, and apart from his involvement in the 1670 Union discussions, he lived in retirement until his death five years later.