GEORGE, John (1594-1678), of Baunton, Glos. and the Middle Temple.

The seat of the George family was Baunton, where they had lived for seven generations before John George was born. The antiquity of the Georges was commemorated in named plate of brass and silver handed down through the wills of family heads.13Glos. RO, P86/1/CH1/4; T. George, Pedigrees and History of the Families of George and Gorges (1903), 37. Lords of the manor in all but name from 1301, their fortunes rose when they acquired the title after the dissolution of Cirencester abbey in the mid-sixteenth century.14S. Rudder, Hist. and Antiquities of Cirencester (Cirencester 1780), 90. Two of the family served as bailiffs of Cirencester and one, Richard George†, entered Parliament for the town in 1601.15HP Commons 1558-1603. Robert George, John’s father, was receiver of the Gloucestershire estates of Anne, dowager countess of Warwick in 1599, and during the reign of James I his mother served Queen Anne’s household as usher to Princess Mary, who died in infancy.16J. Smith, Lives of the Berkeleys ed. Sir J. Maclean (3 vols. Gloucester, 1883-5), ii. 297; HMC 4th Rep. 316. Probably it was these contacts at court and with the peerage that brought George to the notice of Sir Henry Wotton†, and George joined Wotton’s retinue on his second embassy to Venice.17Wotton Letters, i. 144, ii. 127. This overseas employment was not lucrative enough to recompense George for the modest scale of his patrimony; on his return he read for the bar and was called at the Middle Temple, but by this time had succeeded to the estates of both his cousin and his father. He served in two Parliaments of the 1620s for Cirencester, and on these and subsequent elections was returned on his own substantial interest in the town.

It is claimed that George enjoyed the office of clerk of the wardrobe.18HP Commons 1660-90, ‘John George’. This office was granted to William George in 1626, and was re-granted to William and his son, John, in 1638, before it was surrendered in June 1639.19Glos. RO, AO15/4, pp. 50-1; BRL, 603503/419. William George, our MP’s brother, lived in Westminster, and our John George served as his executor in 1637, but was not the inheritor of his office.20PROB11/175/67. The John George, reader at New Inn (the inn of chancery affiliated to the Middle Temple) who requested to be excused further reading because he had been sworn clerk of the wardrobe, was thus likely to have been our man’s nephew.21MTR ii. 860. During the 1630s, George seems rather to have acted as a county magistrate and as agent to George and John Thorpe, water bailiffs of the Thames between Cirencester and Staines, whose grant of their office ran from November 1627.22CSP Dom. 1627-8, pp. 445-6. He was perhaps naturally in favour of the move in 1639 to transfer some future county quarter sessions meetings from Gloucester to Cirencester.23Glos. RO, GBR/H2/3, f. 3.

George’s election to the Short Parliament seems to have been uncontroversial, but he was soon embroiled in the complaints over the conduct of Sir Humphrey Tracy, sheriff and presiding officer at the election for Gloucestershire. The sheriff had allegedly manipulated proceedings on behalf of his kinsman, Sir Robert Tracy*. On 21 April, George guaranteed Sir Humphrey Tracy’s appearance before the House, and on his assurances the warrant to the serjeant-at-arms was dropped.24CJ ii. 7b. One week later, when the committee of privileges considered evidence against Tracy, it was reported that George had overawed intending voters for Nathaniel Stephens*, threatening Cirencester with a withdrawal of poor relief. This was presumably a reference to George’s dominance of the town’s hospital, a former bone of contention between him and the townspeople.25Aston’s Diary, 155; C2/Chas 1/G22/56. The allegation seems not to have been pursued. On 30 April, George spoke in favour of a new subsidy bill and revision of the book of rates for tonnage and poundage. On 1 May, when the case of William Beale, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, was debated – he had spoken dismissively of Parliaments compared with the king’s prerogative and had preached up Arminianism – George, like Sir Robert Cooke*, was in favour of working out the case against Beale before a summons was sent to him.26Aston’s Diary, 98, 114.

The cloud of allegation against George which had appeared in the Short Parliament grew larger in the next. On 27 November 1640, Sir Thomas Rowe brought in a complaint against George on behalf of Thomas Rich. Rich petitioned that under the patent of the Thames conservancy, George had collected oppressive fines under the pretext of nuisances on the Thames. On a motion of John Pym, George was given an opportunity to defend himself rather than face suspension, but Sir Simonds D’Ewes noted that he spoke ‘to little purpose’; his speech seems to have focussed on the patent as a royal grant.27Procs. LP i. 337, 342. On 30 November, George’s case was referred to the same committee appointed to consider the allegations against Serjeant Robert Hyde*.28Procs. LP i. 373; CJ ii. 39b. When Sir Francis Seymour reported from the committee (16 Dec.), it was resolved to broaden the brief of the committee, to include scrutiny of all patents regarding the Thames conservancy. Seymour was hostile to George, dwelling on allegedly oppressive letters he had written to one Edward Rich, but Denzil Holles conveyed the committee’s finding that though the patent was a monopoly and thus obnoxious, George had been an agent, not a patentee.29Procs. LP i. 621; CJ ii. 51. This seems to have been enough to enable George to escape further censure.

After a decent interval, on 2 March 1641, George was named to the committee to study the complaint of Sir Lewis Dyve† about the Bedfordshire election, but it was not until July that he was named to another, this time (ironically) on the abuses of the Merchant Adventurers’ monopoly on cloth.30CJ ii. 95a, 210b. In late December, he was named to a committee to consider an ‘obnoxious’ sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields, and was not at Cirencester on the 15th, when a group of county gentry met to circulate a petition in favour of episcopacy.31CJ ii. 356b; Glos. RO, D7115: letter 15 Dec. 1641 from Cirencester. At this stage, it would seem that his views were more attuned to those like Thomas Pury I*, deeply critical of the church hierarchy. In the emergency of January 1642, George was one of a small group of MPs required to consider petitions from London and the home counties. Pym conflated the essence of these into heads of a conference with the Lords, on the halt to reformation of the church, the spread of popery, delays in the relief of Ireland, and the need to put the kingdom into a state of military alert.32CJ ii. 394a. George and William Wheler* were despatched to ensure that the Ulster port of Carrickfergus was handed over to the Scots to appease them, in order to pre-empt any seizure of the town by a force acting solely in the interests of the king.33CJ ii. 401b, 402a; PJ i. 211.

In February 1642, George sat on committees to investigate ways of throwing open the export market for light cloth to Turkey (wresting the monopoly from the Turkey Company), and to introduce a bill to exonerate the Five Members and Lord Kimbolton (Edward Montagu I*, later 2nd earl of Manchester).34CJ ii. 429b, 436a. Again an interval of several months elapsed before George was active in committee again, but in July he was named to committees on the military preparations around Newcastle and for the impeachment of the lord mayor of London. In both these committees, he was in the company of Thomas Pury I, who may have helped stiffen George’s evidently fitful resolve.35CJ ii. 634a, 647b. But his committee appearance on 1 July was his last. Back in Gloucestershire, George was appointed a deputy lieutenant in 1642, but offered only a modest contribution, one horse, to the cause of king and Parliament on 11 June.36PJ iii. 476; LJ v. 201b. By November, however, after the outbreak of hostilities, his attitude seems to have hardened as he perceived the threat to Cirencester from the royalists. George and other deputy lieutenants complained to Speaker William Lenthall about the obstructions put in their way by a group of royalists in their task of executing the Militia Ordinance.37HMC Portland, i. 71. In the course of establishing a garrison of 300 dragoons, George wrote to John Smyth of Nibley, steward at Berkeley castle, and commented on the reluctance of the populace to contribute

I do not wonder at the mutinous language of the people, since it’s too apparent that the cold and dilatory proceeding of those who have been more specially employed and relied upon by the Parliament, the lord general and the lord lieutenant for the defence and safety of the country, have if not speedily prevented [it], exposed it to ruin and slavery.38Glos. RO, D7155: letters of 6 and 9 Dec. 1642, misdated 1641.

His own resolve was soon put to the test, as Cirencester was invested, first unsuccessfully, by the royalists. On 7 January 1643, George was credited with sending a lofty address to the besieging force

we ought ... to enjoy his majesty’s peace and the just rights and liberties of the subjects of England, according to the laws of the land; in defence whereof, and the true Protestant religion only, we stand to our arms and are resolved with God’s assistance to defend them with our estates and lives.39‘True relation of the late attempt made upon the town of Ciceter’ (1643) in J. Washbourn, Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Gloucester, 1825), 156.

On this occasion the townspeople were able to hold out, but were not so lucky in February. Guns had been stationed by the defenders in various quarters of the town, including in the garden of George’s house, but Prince Rupert’s troops overran the town after a fierce battle of 90 minutes, and the royalists claimed to have killed 300 of their enemy. ‘Dying men in the very fight cried out that Sir Robert Cooke*, Mr [Nathaniel] Stephens*, Mr George and their preachers had undone them’.40‘A particular relation of the action before Cyrencester’ (1643), Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis, 163-4, 172. George himself was one of the prisoners, and after a period of detention in Cirencester church, was led with his son in shackles to prison in Oxford.41‘A particular relation’, 170; ‘A relation of the taking of Ciceter’ (1643), Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis, 184; Clarendon, Hist. ii. 447.

Various debates took place in the Commons, the last on 1 August 1643, in which proposals were put forward to exchange George for a prisoner of similar social standing held by Parliament.42CJ iii. 138a, 142a, 159a, 189b; Harl. 165, ff. 114v, 120. None came to anything, but George’s worst moment in captivity was probably in May when Patrick Leven, earl of Forth [S] and lord general for the king, announced that if Nathaniel Fiennes I*, governor at Bristol, executed the royalist, Robert Yeomans, then the same fate would befall John George.43Seyer, Bristol Memoirs, 378. In those circumstances, it is unlikely that George was seen by the royalists at Oxford as anything other than as a committed parliamentarian. In July, George and Valentine Wauton* petitioned Sir Robert Harley* on behalf of Alexander Gregory, the Cirencester minister and their fellow-prisoner.44HMC Portland, i. 125. Soon afterwards, Wauton was released in an exchange. The townspeople of Cirencester abjectly petitioned the king for pardon after the disaster that befell their town, but George was not associated with them at that point.45Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis, 189-91. By January 1644, however, he had apparently attended the Oxford Parliament, and signed the eirenic letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex of that date.46Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. The final break with his former colleagues must have been the pardon for all offences which he received from the king on 30 March 1644.47Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 179. There was no rush to judgment about him at Westminster, however, and he escaped the attentions of either the Committee for Sequestrations or that for Compounding with Delinquents. It was not until 3 November 1646 that he was disabled from sitting in the House, and then with no description of his offence.48CJ iv. 712b.

George seems to have withdrawn from public life entirely between 1645 and 1656, when he re-entered the commission of the peace for Gloucestershire. In the meantime, he resumed his legal practice in London, becoming a bencher at his inn in 1651, and succeeding Nicholas Lechmere* as treasurer in 1659.49MTR iii. 1031, 1128. Back in Cirencester, he was engaged in various property transactions to consolidate his tenure of his estate, including a collusive action with Sir Humphrey Tracy, the controversial sheriff of 1640. His aim seems to have been a properly-organised disposal of his estate between his surviving children, which all came to nought when first his son and then his daughter died, in 1653 and 1656 respectively.50Glos. RO, P86/1/CH1/4: deeds of 22 June 1652, 6 July 1653, court proceedings, Trin. 1652; Vis. Glos. 1623, 249; Bigland, Collections ed. Frith i. 146. Elizabeth George had been his sole heir when she married in 1655 ‘according to the rites of the Church of England’, after having the same morning been married by the rubric of the Act of Parliament of 24 August 1653. As this act proscribed other forms of marriage as having no validity, there was an element of defiance involved.51Vis. Glos. 1623, 248; A. and O. ii. 716.

George was recalled to the militia commission by the revived Rump in 1659, and stood again for Cirencester in the Convention, losing to Henry Powle. Returned in 1661, he was interested in the Cavalier Parliament mostly in legal and sabbatarian matters. Relations between him and the Middle Temple cooled to the point of his giving up his chambers in 1664 over his refusal to undertake his duty of reading at the inn. His local standing did not suffer by this, and he was named to a series of county offices during the 1660s and 70s. With no children surviving him, he was obliged to make over his estates and property, including the ancestral plate, to his nephew in the summer of 1677. John George probably died in December of the following year, and was buried at Baunton on 6 January 1679.52HP Commons 1660-1690; Vis. Glos. 1623, 248. He left no direct descendants, and none other of his family sat again in Parliament.