ST BARBE, John (c.1616-58), of Broadlands, Romsey, Hants.

John St Barbe’s family traced its ancestry to the Norman conquest, and had been resident in Somerset since at least the reign of Edward I. A sixteenth century younger son, William St Barbe, who was a gentleman of the privy chamber to Henry VIII, was granted the College of St Edmund in Salisbury.19Som. RO, DD/X/LSH; DD/SAS/HV61/36; J. Burke, Gen. and Herald. Dictionary of the Landed Gentry (1846), 1173; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 72. This led to a junior branch of the family becoming established in Wiltshire, especially at Whiteparish, where it gained some prominence.20PROB11/187/465 (George St Barbe); PROB11/191/300 (Edward St Barbe). The MP’s grandfather, Edward St Barbe (d. 1592), brother-in-law of Elizabeth I’s servant Sir Francis Walsingham†, came from the senior branch, still seated in Somerset, at Ashington near Yeovil, but he married into the Fleming family of Broadlands, Hampshire, and thereby acquired the manor of Romsey and other property in the New Forest.21Som. RO, DD/X/LSH; DD/SAS/HV61/36; VCH Hants, iv. 454. The MP’s father Henry St Barbe (d.1652) lived chiefly at Ashington, receiving appointments to Somerset commissions from the 1610s to the early 1630s, but may have moved to Hampshire in later life.22C181/2, f. 246; C181/3, f. 186v; C181/4, ff. 21, 172v. Broadlands was let ‘a long time’ until Michaelmas 1637, according to John Ashburnham*, whose wish to acquire a new lease of ‘the best land in all our country’ for his friend, the future secretary of state Edward Nicholas† made his ‘fingers itch’. Ashburnham had mistakenly thought that the landlord, who ‘hath it now in his own hands’, was ‘old Symbarbe [St Barbe] of Whiteparish, but it seems that it is he that lives in the New Forest, whom they say is an honest man’.23SP16/378, f. 90.

Henry St Barbe’s elder son Francis seems to have settled in Hampshire following an education at Oxford in civil law, while his younger son John, the future MP, was probably apprenticed in a high status trade prior to becoming a grocer in Southampton; William, apparently their short-lived brother, was apprenticed as a clothworker in London in 1630 to an East India merchant.24Al. Ox.; Southampton RO, SC3/1/1, f. 218; Recs. London Livery Cos. Online. Both Francis and John were named by Parliament in July 1642 among the Hampshire gentlemen charged with securing the county for the cause, and Francis was appointed an assessment and sequestration commissioner in 1643.25LJ v. 233b-234a; CJ ii. 686b; Northants. RO, FH133; A. and O. By July that year Francis was a captain in the Hampshire regiment of Richard Norton*, and in that capacity he was mortally wounded at the first battle of Newbury on 20 September. His company was taken over by John, who had conceivably been serving as his subordinate officer, and who continued in post until the regiment was disbanded in 1645.26King, Bor. and Par. Lymington, 258; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database.

On 5 July 1645 St Barbe was appointed governor of Southampton through the efforts of his colonel, a previous holder of the position.27CJ iv. 196b. The well-connected Edward Hooper* had been the front-runner for the post, but in the context of the county’s factional rivalries Norton, a war party activist, found him insufficiently zealous, and manoeuvred him into declining it. Norton viewed Hooper’s candidature as an affront to himself, claiming that most men ‘confess St Barbe to be a fitter man’, but that insufficient support had initially been forthcoming because ‘he is too near me, and now some of them had rather a stranger should have it than he, only out of this poor reason, lest Norton should say he got him in’.28Add. 24860, ff. 113, 125. St Barbe retained the position until at least 1648, but was replaced before 1651 by Peter Murford.29CSP Dom. 1645-7, pp. 55, 61, 77, 147, 351; 1648-9, pp. 208, 220; 1651, p. 317.

In December 1645 St Barbe, like Norton, was named an elder of the 2nd Presbyterian classis.30King, Bor. and Par. Lymington, 263. A continuing member of the county committee and regular nominee to local commissions in Hampshire, and an occasional nominee in Somerset, he was appointed a justice of the peace in the latter in July 1646 and in the former before 1650.31King, Bor. and Par. Lymington, 260; A. and O.; C231/6, p. 51; Add. 24860, ff. 134, 145. In October 1649 he was admitted as a burgess of Southampton.32Southampton RO, SC3/1/1, f. 218.

Following the death of his father in 1652, St Barbe presumably inherited most of the family estate. About this time he made what was probably a financially advantageous marriage to Grizel, daughter of John Pynsent of Combe, Surrey, and Ewelme, Oxfordshire, prothonotary of the court of common pleas.33Som. RO, DD/X/LSH; DD/SAS/HV61/36. In 1654 he was returned alongside Richard Norton to the first protectorate Parliament, as one of the knights of the shire for Hampshire. He made no recorded impression on its proceedings, and was not re-elected in 1656.

Nevertheless, perhaps because of his association with Norton, St Barbe retained influence in the county and beyond. In January 1656 he was co-opted on to the council of state committee for trade, a rare hint that his early commercial experience might have been formative, while in February 1657 he was appointed by the Commons to a commission to investigate a local Hampshire dispute.34CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 114; CJ vii. 491b. In August 1656 he was consulted by the Dorset gentleman John Fitzjames* on matters relating to ministers in Somerset, and in June 1658 the Council proposed that he be added to the commission for ejecting scandalous ministers in Hampshire.35Alnwick, Northumberland MS 551, f. 92; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 42. Before such a commission could be issued, however, St Barbe succumbed to illness. Sick when he drafted his will on 18 August, he soon died, and was buried at Romsey Abbey on 2 September, aged 42. The will revealed a gentleman of some substance: he left £1,000 and a little land to each of his three younger sons, and £500 to each of his four nieces; other beneficiaries included Dr Arthur Taylor, a Winchester physician, and the preacher at his funeral, who would receive £5 and a black gown.36Romsey, Hants, par. reg.; M.I. Romsey Abbey; PROB11/292/675. St Barbe’s eldest son Henry died in 1661, but a younger son, also called John St Barbe†, who married a daughter of Richard Norton, was made a baronet in 1663, and sat in Parliament in 1681.37CB; HP Commons 1660-1690. Another son, Edward, changed his name to Edward Pinsent after inheriting in 1668 the Oxfordshire estates of his grandfather John Pynsent, but also died young.38PROB11/328/413 (John Pinsent) ; I. Temple database (Edward Pinsent); HP Commons 1660-1690, s.v. ‘Sir William Pynsent’.