MOHUN, Reginald (c.1603-42), of Trewynnard, St Erth, Cornw.

On 20 April 1640, when the House of Commons considered the disputed election for the Cornish borough of Grampound, John Trevanion* was deemed ‘well returned’, while the cases of William Coryton* and ‘Mr Mohun’ were not resolved, and no decision had been made before the short-lived session was brought to an end two weeks later.8CJ ii. 7a. Although the election indentures for Trevanion and Coryton survive, there is no record of the return of Mohun, and as a result his identity is uncertain.9C219/42/21-2. It is probable that he was a senior member of the main branch of the Mohun family, which had enjoyed considerable influence over Grampound during the 1620s (and it is perhaps telling that in October 1640 Coryton was returned for the same borough alongside another Mohun relative, James Cambell*).10HP Commons 1604-1629. The family had relatively few adult males of sufficient seniority and experience to sit in the Short Parliament, and the most likely candidate is Reginald Mohun.

The Mohuns traced their ancestry to William de Mohun, who came to England with William the Conqueror, and the family were barons of Dunster in Somerset before settling in Cornwall in the fourteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century they owned a large estate in eastern Cornwall, centred on Boconnoc near Lostwithiel, and were among the most influential families in the county. Mohun’s irascible and spendthrift father, Sir Reginald, had seriously weakened the position of the family in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and initiated a damaging feud with his son and heir, John Mohun (later 1st Baron Mohun).11Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 323-5; Lysons, Magna Britannia, iii. 28, 183. Reginald Mohun, the eldest son by his father’s third marriage, appears to have been educated for a legal career, attending Oxford and the Middle Temple during the 1620s, and residing at the Inns of Court for at least 18 months, during which time he also sat for Lostwithiel in the Parliament of 1626.12Al. Ox.; MTR ii. 700, 712. In the same decade he became a pawn in the dispute between his father and his half-brother, although an Act of Parliament in 1624 had prevented the elder son from being disinherited altogether.13HP Commons 1604-1629. Mohun had apparently returned to Cornwall by the early 1630s. In September 1634, on his marriage to a daughter of the Devon landowner, Sir George Southcote, Mohun was granted three manors in Cornwall, and as a result in his father’s will he was bequeathed only 20 shillings – the same amount as his older half-brother.14CCC 1506; PROB11/182/593. It was probably at this time that Mohun left Boconnoc to establish his own household at Trewynnard in St Erth parish.15PROB6/18, f. 145v.

The death of Sir Reginald at the very end of 1639 appears to have encouraged Mohun to enter the public arena, resulting in his probable election for Grampound on 19 March 1640.16C219/42/21-2. He was not re-elected in October 1640, and may have already been suffering from ill health. Mohun and his wife had both died by the summer of 1642, and, in the absence of a will, on 15 August the administration was granted to his sister Bridget, wife of John Nicolls of Trewane, who was to have custody of the estate during the minority of the heir, Reginald.17PROB6/18, f. 145v; Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 325. The younger Reginald and his elder sister, Dorothy, who was seven in 1642, appear to have died soon afterwards, as by April 1646 their cousin, Warwick 2nd Baron Mohun, had inherited the estate in the absence of direct heirs – provoking other members of the family to petition Parliament with their rival claims, and thereby re-opening the divisions within the family.18Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 325; CCC 1506.