FIENNES, Hon. James (c.1602-74), of Broughton Castle, Oxon.

Fiennes was descended from a Boulonnais baron, Enguerrand, who married an English heiress and was killed at Acre in 1189. One of the family sat for Sussex in 1429, but they migrated to Oxfordshire and acquired a peerage soon afterwards. Fiennes’s father, nicknamed ‘Old Subtlety’, headed the local resistance to ship-money and was one of the most prominent parliamentary peers in the Civil War. Although an Independent in religion, he made strenuous efforts for a peaceful settlement in 1648. Fiennes, who had ‘always been reputed an honest Cavalier and a quiet man’, did not sit after Pride’s Purge, and like his father retired from active politics during the Interregnum, although his brother Nathaniel became a staunch Cromwellian. He was among those who presented the Oxfordshire address for a free Parliament in February 1660, and was returned for the county a few weeks later. He made no recorded speeches and sat on only three unimportant committees in the Convention. Father and son both sued out their pardons, and in September Fiennes petitioned the King to refuse his assent to the bill to restore the Flintshire estates of the Earl of Derby, part of which had been acquired by his son-in-law. Fiennes probably did not stand in 1661. In the Lords he was an opponent of Clarendon, whom he succeeded as lord lieutenant. He died on 15 Mar. 1674 and was buried at Broughton, the last of the family to sit in the Lower House.3The Gen. n.s. xii. 149-50; A. Wood, Athenae Oxon. iii. 550; Keeler, 176-7; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 361; 1660-1, p. 291; E. T. Rogers, Protests of the Lords, i. 36; A. Beesley, Hist. Banbury, 475.