ST. AMAND (ST. ALMON), John (c.1593-1644), of Chancery Lane, London; later of Greenwich, Kent

St. Amand’s modest family background compelled him to earn his own living. After completing his education he found employment as a secretary to lord keeper Williams, bishop of Lincoln, who probably recommended him to the corporation of Stamford in 1624 after one of the borough’s Members, Sir George Goring, chose to represent Lewes instead. St. Amand may also have owed his seat to Goring, with whom he was later connected.5Danny Archives ed. J.A. Wooldridge, 71, 77. Although he took no recorded part in the Commons’ proceedings, St. Amand was returned a second time to the first Caroline Parliament, in which his only committee was as the last Member named to the bill for easing the requirements imposed on puritan clergy (27 June 1625).6Procs. 1625, p. 254.

Williams was dismissed from the keepership in September 1625, whereupon St. Amand probably lost his job. In September 1628 Goring awarded him an annuity of £40 charged on his estate.7Danny Archives, 77. The following year St. Amand was licensed, together with the dean of Lincoln, to accompany the young duke of Lennox on his tour of the Continent.8CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 67. See also APC, 1630-1, p. 52. He presumably acted as a tutor, for some years later he advised Lady Manners on the education of one of her granddaughters.9HMC Rutland, ii. 1. In 1637 St. Amand acquired a property in the London parish of St. Andrew Undershaft from one Thomas Symonds. His partners in this transaction were the clerk of the kitchen, Nicholas Pay, and one of the farmers of the duties on wines and currants, John Wolstenholme*.10Cal. of Docquets of Ld. Kpr. Coventry, 1625-40 ed. J. Broadway, R. Cust and S.K. Roberts, iii (L. and I. Soc. spec. ser. xxxvi), 706. Two years later Wolstenholme and his fellow customs farmers surrendered their farm to a new syndicate, one of whose members was St. Amand. This new body contracted to pay the Crown £7,500 p.a. for three years.11E214/464.

St. Amand remained on good terms with Goring and was one of the trustees for Lady Goring in a property settlement made in 1641.12Danny Archives, 71. A royalist during the Civil War, he seems to have been in parlous financial circumstances after the Restoration, when he petitioned for a grant of the rectory of Steyning in Sussex. Although the king expressed a sense of ‘his great loyalty and suffering’ and a wish to relieve him ‘in some proportion to his pressing wants’, the grant was not forthcoming, but he did receive a free gift of £200 ‘in consideration of his sad condition’.13CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 348, 378; CTB, i. 158, 398.

St. Amand lived at East Greenwich from at least 1647, and was buried there on 1 Aug. 1664, by which time he was in his seventieth year. His will reveals that his estate consisted only of an office in Ludlow, the arrears of an annuity on lands in Yorkshire and his claims on the customs farmers of Charles I. Such sums as could be raised he directed to be divided between his wife and seven surviving children. His son, James, represented St. Ives in 1685.14PROB 11/316, f. 387; Drake, 100.