COVENTRY, John (c. 1612-52), of Barton Grange, Pitminster, Som.

John Coventry owed everything to the eminence of his father, Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry of Aylesborough, who from 1625 until his death in 1640 was Charles I’s long-serving lord keeper. Although the family had Oxfordshire origins, by the time John Coventry was born it had been settled at Croome d'Abitot near Pershore, Worcestershire, for 20 years. Lord Keeper Coventry's second wife, John Coventry's mother, was not from Worcestershire, however, and her London background introduced a third, metropolitan, dimension to add to her son's inheritance of county standing and the national connections which were a benefit of high political office. John Coventry was probably born in London, and was the second child of his parents’ marriage to receive the name John, after an elder sibling died shortly after birth in February 1611.23City of London, St Michael Paternoster Royal par. reg. Rather unusually for a gentleman from a west of England family, and not following his father's path to Oxford, Coventry was admitted to St John’s, Cambridge, and then in 1626 was specially admitted, perhaps on account of his youth, to the Inner Temple. In this latter move he was able to benefit from the lord keeper’s high standing as a member of the inn, and from his distinguished service as treasurer there. Coventry never attained anything approaching his father’s pre-eminence at the inn, nor indeed did his legal career as such develop beyond that common among the gentry, for whom service at quarter sessions was the best opportunity to deploy legal knowledge, but he kept in touch with his inn, and after his father’s death served as marshal of revels at the ‘grand Christmas’ festivities of its parliament, in 1640, 1641, 1650 and 1651.24CITR 257, 263, 293-4, 299-300.

Coventry’s uncertain future, as a younger son, was resolved when in 1634 he married Elizabeth Dodington, a co-heiress of John Colles, of Pitminster, Somerset. His new mother-in-law was the daughter of Humphrey Wyndham, of the Orchard Wyndham, St Decumans family, and a brother-in-law was William Portman of Orchard Portman. Coventry was thus catapulted into the leading ranks of the Somerset gentry, and there is every reason to believe that he used his advantages to good effect in carving a niche for himself. This was most evident at the county quarter sessions, at which he quickly became first, from January 1635, an unfailing attender and then in 1636 custos rotulorum.25C231/5 pp. 152, 211; QS Recs. Som. Charles I, ii. 224. Much of Coventry’s work on the bench was the usual mix of criminal law and administrative business, and as custos he acquired wide-ranging power and authority: for example, to determine the allocation of funds for county hospitals.26QS Recs. Som. Charles I, ii. 273.

As the personal rule of Charles I lengthened, Coventry was drawn into a leading supporting role for the maverick Sir Robert Phelips†, a great friend and supporter, whose daughter he may have been matched with unsuccessfully before his marriage with Elizabeth Dodington.27Bristol RO, AC/C 57/1-6; T.G. Barnes, Som. 1625-1640 (Cambridge, Mass. 1961), 33, 215n, 268, 283, 293, 296. In July 1635, after little over six months’ experience on the Somerset bench, Coventry brought to sessions an order from the lord lieutenant, the 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*), which had demanded that the justices assist the deputy lieutenants.28Barnes, Som. 268, quoting Som. RO, Phelips MSS, vol. B, ff. 252 et seq. His intention, with Phelips’s active backing, was clearly to marshal the justices’ opposition to what they saw as unwarranted interference. Although there is little to suggest that this incident was any more than a spat between the locally-powerful, it reveals Coventry to have been an ally of Phelips from his arrival in Somerset. In October 1635 it was at Barton, Coventry’s house, that Sir William Portman was told he would be sheriff of Somerset. Thomas Smyth of Ashton Court noted the closeness of Phelips and Coventry.29Bristol RO 30764/150. Like Phelips, Coventry was unhappy with the levy of Ship Money in Somerset, and supported the towns of Taunton and Bridgwater in their attempts to reallocate the tax burden.30CSP Dom. 1636-37, pp. 535, 537.

Phelips’s death in April 1638 concluded a period of internal county feuding which had been stimulated greatly by his own combative personality. As the decade drew to a close Coventry, Phelips’s ‘best friend’, was left to re-position himself among his remaining allies, which included Thomas Smyth I* of Ashton Court, who wrote in 1637 of Phelips and Coventry as his ‘bosom friends’, Ferdinando Gorges and Sir Ralph Hopton*.31Som. Enrolled Deeds ed. S.W. Bates Harbin (Som. Rec. Soc. li.), 273; Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 130, 132-3, 140.As the son of the serving lord keeper, Coventry can hardly be expected to have joined any nascent local opposition of the policies of Charles I. and at the start of the first bishops’ war, he was a generous contributor of £100 to the king’s cause, when other Somerset gentry were wary of, or even hostile to the project.32PC2/51 pp. 77-9; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 911. In January 1640 Coventry’s father, the first Baron Coventry, died, leaving John Coventry uncertain where he stood in relation to the mounting interest in a possible parliamentary election.33Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 150-1.

In the elections for the Short Parliament, Coventry considered standing with Hopton as knight of the shire for Somerset, and Alexander Popham* considered Coventry’s strength to lie with the electorate in the west of the county.34Bristol RO, 36074/ 133e. He then put his hand to a written agreement that he, Ralph Hopton and Thomas Smyth would not seek to ‘proceed any further in labouring for voice’.35Bristol RO, 36074/ 49. This seems to have been a tactic to lower the political temperature, and did not preclude him from standing. He shifted his attention to Ilchester, in association with Sir Ralph Hopton, where evidently there was much to play for.36Bristol RO, AC/C 58/2. Unsuccessful in this election, Coventry was nevertheless determined to find a seat in the autumn elections for the Long Parliament, when he and Thomas Smyth stood as knights of the shire for Somerset. Coventry also stood for the borough of Evesham. These were not propitious times for men as associated with the government of Charles I as Coventry was, and in Somerset he and Smyth lost to Sir John Poulett and Sir John Stawell, an old adversary of Sir Robert Phelips, Coventry’s former patron.37Cal. Corresp. Smyth Fam. 156, 166, 166-7. Coventry’s parliamentary ambitions were thwarted temporarily, by the uncertainties of uneasy personal relations between the Somerset gentry and by the tide of opposition in the country, as much as by any deficiencies of his own as a court candidate.

Coventry was still looking for a seat, and was able to fall back on his original political inheritance. In Evesham the elections were less clear-cut than in Somerset. On 4 September 1640 his elder brother, the second Lord Coventry, had been confirmed by the corporation of Evesham as high steward of the borough, and this helped him force a candidature against William Sandys and Serjeant Richard Cresheld, men both with better local credentials than John Coventry’s. 38Evesham Borough Records of the Seventeenth Century ed. S.K. Roberts (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xiv), 41. Coventry was elected on a narrow franchise, but the election of the three candidates was referred on 9 November to the committee of privileges. The following day, an order made it clear that it was Coventry’s case that would be heard by the committee.39C219/43/5/5/ 82; CJ ii. 22b, 26a. By the time the referral was considered, however, one of his rivals, William Sandys, had been declared, as a monopolist, unfit to sit in the House. Geoffrey Palmer* was told by Sandys that Coventry himself was behind Sandys’s removal.40Procs. LP i. 84. A writ for a new election was moved on 21 January 1641, and Coventry was elected beyond dispute on 2 February.41CJ ii. 71a.

Once at Westminster, Coventry adopted a conservative stance, opposing reform of the church and resisting challenges to the king’s ministers, but allowing himself to be named to committees, including those on pluralities (10 Mar. 1641) and usury (19 Mar.).42CJ ii. 101a, 108a. On 17 March, Sir Henry Mildmay spoke in the House approvingly of Coventry’s willingness in this debate to interrupt and oppose those pressing for reform of the church.43Procs. LP ii. 785. Added on 27 February to a committee to consider the grievances of ministers of religion, Coventry argued on 7 June 1641 that the abolition of episcopacy be postponed until the next session of Parliament.44CJ ii. 94a; Procs. LP v. 8. On a joint committee with the Lords (6 Mar.) to manage the trial of the earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), he was sceptical about the quality of evidence his accusers were able to muster, and it was hardly surprising that on 21 April his name should appear as a Straffordian, even though only two Somerset MPs joined him.45CJ ii. 98a; Procs. LP iv. 42, 51. He seemed opposed even to the popular measures of the ‘remedial legislation’, arguing on 31 May 1641 that the committee reviewing the court of star chamber was exceeding its brief in planning to abolish it.46Procs. LP iv. 655. He took the Protestation of 3 May, nevertheless.47CJ ii. 133a. By mid-June Sir Simonds D’Ewes, a fellow committeeman, noted wearily in his diary that Coventry’s request to go down to the country was granted readily, ‘most of us being willing to … drop him, being opposite to every good cause’.48Procs. LP v. 129, 142; CJ ii. 174b.

In August 1641, on his withdrawal from the House, Coventry divested himself of his place as custos and indeed his place on the Somerset bench.49C231/5 p. 481. This, coupled with his evident lack of sympathy with developments at Westminster, may have been the prelude to what he might have intended as a complete repudiation of public life. A massive petition in favour of episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer was orchestrated in Somerset by the marquess of Hertford (William Seymour†), 96 signatures being attached from Pitminster alone, and although Coventry’s name has not been identified on it, he was certainly in sympathy with its aims.50PA, Main Pprs. 15 Dec. 1641; LJ iv. 469. In January 1642, however, he was being associated with a possible planned rising in Somerset, and in March he and Sir John Stawell were ordered to attend a House nervous of their talk of side-taking between king and Parliament.51HMC Buccleuch, i. 295; CJ ii. 503a. In April he was once more given leave of absence, but he and a number of other Somerset supporters of the king were summoned back on 22 July to explain themselves. Coventry cannot have been surprised by the order of 12 August disabling him from sitting further.52CJ ii. 511b, 685b, 716b.

When war did break out he took a commission in the king’s forces, and was named to many local royalist commissions in aid of the king's war effort. His military commission necessitated a rapprochement with Stawell, the leading Somerset royalist, but an erstwhile enemy of the Phelips faction in the county. By the summer of 1643 this personal truce had broken down, and the king was forced personally to try to patch up the differences between the two men, which drew Somerset 'into factions'.53Clarendon, Hist. iii. 146n. Coventry's capacity for quarrelling seems to have been more than a trait accentuated by his association with the rebarbative Phelips: in January1645 it was reported to Giles Grene* that Coventry was involved in a dispute at Chard over who should be commander-in-chief of forces there.54CSP Dom. 1644-45, p. 251. During the waning fortunes of the king’s army after Naseby (14 June 1645), Coventry surrendered at Exeter in July 1646, and was allowed the terms of the surrender of the city. He took the covenant and the negative oath at Exeter, and was allowed to pay a fine of a tenth of his property.55CCC 1382.

At Exeter, Sir Thomas Fairfax* granted Coventry a pass to go overseas, but instead he seems to have stayed put, to suffer the unwelcome, continuing attentions of the Somerset county committee.56SP23/183 f. 470; CCC 73, 1382. In the summer of 1648, he petitioned Parliament for the lifting of the sequestration of the estates of the late Sir William Savile, as he stood to recover loans he had made Savile.57PA, Main Pprs. 15 July 1648. Against the background of the second civil war of 1648, however, the suspicions of the Derby House Committee were raised against his capacity for plotting. In July he was arrested in Surrey, and taken to Windsor castle as a ‘dangerous person’.58CSP Dom. 1648-49, pp. 132,134-5,185-6, 231, 239, 256. Most royalist suspects of the second rank, like Coventry, were not detained long, and he was certainly free by April 1650, when he was approached at Pitminster by Alexander Keynes, who was co-ordinating possible support for a royalist rising, which eventually became coherent enough to be called the Western Association. Nothing came of this, but after the battle of Worcester in September 1651 Coventry was enlisted by Henry Wilmot* in a meeting at Salisbury to help the escape of Charles Stuart. This was for Coventry as well as for Charles an ending. He died the following year, and was buried at Pitminster. Edward Hyde* was genuinely sorry to hear of his death and considered him ‘a person of great affection to the king, and well known and trusted among his friends’.59Bodl. Clarendon 43, f. 85. No will appears to have survived, but letters of administration were granted in 1653.60Pitminster par. reg.; PROB13/57. His only son, John Coventry†, achieved an unwelcome fame in 1670 when his nose was slit to the bone by courtly thugs for suggesting that the relationship between the king and Nell Gwyn may have included a carnal dimension.61HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Coventry’. John Coventry junior died unmarried.