HANMER, John (1634-1701), of Hanmer, Flint, and Whittingham Hall, Fressingfield, Suff.

Hanmer spent his formative years on the continent, where his father, Sir Thomas Hanmer – a reluctant royalist officer who had quit Wales and the civil war in 1644 – found solace during the later 1640s and early 1650s. Having returned to Flintshire in 1651, Sir Thomas spent the remainder of the interregnum re-building his estate and establishing himself as one of his generation’s most innovative and influential horticulturalists. He exploited his links with the Independents in the 1640s, and his expertise as a plantsman, to cultivate a network of friends at the Cromwellian court that included Oliver St John* and Major-general John Lambert*.1Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer’; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 128. He and his family’s success in adapting to the new political climate was reflected in Hanmer’s nomination to the Denbighshire and Flintshire assessment commission in 1656 and in his return for Flint Boroughs to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in 1659. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament, however, and his only recorded contribution to its proceedings came during a debate on the Cromwellian Other House, on 22 February, when he moved that it should comprise those peers summoned by the protector and as many members of the old peerage ‘as are capable to be called in’ – subject in the case of both groups to approval by the Commons.2Burton’s Dairy, iii. 409. At some point during the late 1650s or early in 1660, he contributed £600 to the royal cause, for which he was rewarded at the Restoration with a knighthood, appointment as a gentleman of the privy chamber and inclusion on the list of knights of the proposed but never inaugurated order of the royal oak.3Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 123; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 231; Jenkins, ‘Wales and the Order of the Royal Oak’, 345.

Although Hanmer married an heiress and would inherit a sizeable estate in Flintshire as well as property in Gloucestershire and Suffolk, his extravagance meant that he suffered frequent outlawries and was hard pushed to avoid arrest for debt. When he was returned, on the court interest, for Evesham to the Cavalier Parliament in 1669, he was described as ‘a privy chamber man, vastly in debt’. Like his father, he was a member of the court faction at Westminster and was marked ‘doubly vile’ by the leader of the ‘country’ interest, the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*), in 1677. He made little impact as a knight of the shire for Flintshire in the Parliament of 1681, or as MP for Flint Boroughs in 1685 and 1689. In contrast to his father, he enjoyed soldiering and spent much of the 1680s and 1690s pursuing a military career in England and Ireland. Late in 1688, during the Glorious Revolution, he and his troops secured Hull for the Williamite cause; and in 1690 he commanded a regiment of foot at the battle of the Boyne. His distinguished service as a soldier in Ireland – which brought him a place on the Irish privy council and as an MP for Carlingford – was cut short by his death in the summer of 1701, possibly as a result of fighting a duel.4HP Commons 1660-1690; A. Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds (Glasgow, 1944-51), ii. 142-3, 147-8; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 126-31. He was buried at Hanmer on 12 August 1701.5Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 131. No will is recorded. His nephew Thomas Hanmer, who served as Speaker of the Commons in 1714-15, succeeded him as 4th (and last) baronet.6HP Commons 1690-1715, ‘Thomas Hanmer II’.