BUTTON, John II (c.1624-bef. 1664), of Buckland, nr. Lymington, Hants.

Button’s career, and indeed his whole life, was overshadowed by that of his father of the same name, whom he predeceased. The only son of John Button I* and his first wife, Eleanor South, Button II was admitted to the Inner Temple in May 1642.9I. Temple database. It is not clear how long he maintained his studies, since he was never called to the bar. Perhaps he served under his father in a military capacity when the latter was governor of Hurst Castle during the first civil war. In October 1646 he was made a freeman of Lymington, which was close to the family seat and for which Button senior was one of the MPs.10Hants. RO, 27M74/DBC2, f. 40v. Admitted also a burgess at Christchurch, another Hampshire constituency, in 1647 and 1648 Button ‘junior’ was appointed an assessment commissioner.11A. and O.

But his career in public life appears to have been interrupted by his father’s political Presbyterianism and exclusion from Parliament at Pride’s Purge. In 1649 Button junior was involved in business transactions in Hampshire.12Hants RO, 8M56/46. The following year he married in London Mary, a daughter of the prosperous Coventry MP William Jesson*, who had also been a victim of the purge.13St Bartholomew the Great, London, par. reg.; Berry, Pedigrees of Hants, 35. Still connected with his native county, in 1654 he was named in an indenture with his father’s close associate, the prominent parliamentarian John Hildesley*.14Hants RO, 5M50/1264.

Unlike his father, Button junior was nominated to local commissions between 1657 and January 1660. In the elections for the Parliament of 1659, Button was returned as one of the burgesses for Lymington, on the family interest.15Hants RO, 27M74/DBC2, f. 42v. He took no discernible part in the proceedings of the assembly, however.

After January 1660 Button disappears from view. He was apparently dead by the time his father drafted a will on 3 May 1663, and when his stepmother drafted hers in April 1666, she named her ‘daughter-in-law Mary Button, widow’ as her executrix.16Hants RO, A1666/016; PROB 11/324/184. Contrary to what has sometimes been suggested (including in the 1660-90 volumes of The History of Parliament), it was therefore John and Mary’s son, another John Button, who was heir to his grandfather. Admitted to the Inner Temple in June 1674, four years later he married Anne, daughter of his grandfather’s friend Henry Whithed† of Tytherley.17I. Temple database; Hants RO, 8M56/42/1; 5M50/2040-42. Elected twice to Parliament in 1679 as a Member for Lymington, he died in December that year.18Hants RO, 8M56/42/2, 8M56/43; HP Commons 1660-1690.