MAYNE, Simon (Symon) (1612-61), of Dinton Hall, Bucks.

Mayne was one of the more obscure men to have condemned Charles I, and accounts of his career have relied on his own self-serving description of his role in the regicide and on a number of later local traditions of dubious reliability. His family can be traced back to his great-great-grandfather, John Mayne, who lived at Wing, six miles to the north east of Aylesbury.18Vis. Bucks. 1634, 90. It was under the MP’s father, Simon senior, that they settled at Dinton. In 1604 Simon senior bought the manor of Dinton Hall from the Verneys.19VCH Bucks. ii. 274; Lipscomb, Buckingham, ii. 138. The dean and chapter of Rochester Cathedral owned land in the neighbouring parishes of Haddingham, Cuddingham and Kingsley, which they had leased for 180 years in 1559. At some stage the Maynes also acquired the remainder of that lease.20Sloane 856, ff. 23v-24. Simon Mayne senior died in 1617 when his only son was aged just five. Under the terms of his will, the lease on the lands at Haddingham and Cuddingham was bequeathed to his daughter, Colubery, for 15 years before being transferred to Simon junior. In other words, the future MP’s sister got the benefit of the rents while he was still a minor.21PROB11/130/279.

The long minority may have encouraged neglect. On coming of age in 1633 Mayne probably mortgaged the lands at Dinton and two years later he was accused of allowing the local vicarage to fall into disrepair.22Coventry Docquets, 636; CSP Dom. 1635, p. 347. Nevertheless, the assessment of £10 for the lands at Dinton in 1642 was probably a fair one, as the estate he had inherited was relatively modest and did not, of itself, make him one of the leading county figures.23SP28/148, f. 459; Bucks. Contributions for Ireland, 74. Early evidence of what may have been chronic health problems comes from 1637, when Mayne and his wife were given permission to eat flesh on fish days because of their ‘notorious sickness’.24Lowndes, ‘Dinton Hall’, 109.

Once the civil war had broken out, it did not take long for the parliamentarians of Buckinghamshire to identify Mayne as an indispensable supporter of their cause. As early as April 1643 Parliament appointed him to its sequestration commission within the county.25CJ iii. 43b. Given this, he is unlikely to have had any misgivings about handing over to Henry Marten* and the treasurers for sequestrations the rents he owed to the dean and chapter of Rochester.26CJ iii. 291a; Add. 5497, f. 91. (Marten was a kinsman, having married one of Mayne’s aunts.) Other local appointments followed, including membership of the county standing committee and the assessment commissions.27Luke Letter Bks. 341, 565; A. and O.; SP28/151: accts. of Thomas Scot, 1644-6, pp. 86, 90, 100, 122, 135, 319, 321, 330, 331. Mayne was notably energetic in all these roles, which was why he was later accused of being ‘a great committee-man, wherein he licked his fingers’.28The Mystery of the Good Old Cause Briefly unfolded (1660), 26 (E.1923.2). By the nineteenth century there would be a tradition that Oliver Cromwell* had stayed with Mayne at Dinton at some point during the civil war. Associated with this story was a sword at Dinton said to be that used by Cromwell at Naseby.29Lipscomb, Buckingham, ii. 155; W.H. Smith, Addenda to the Ædes Hartwellianæ (1864), 246-7; Lowndes, ‘Dinton Hall’, 101. Neither claim was well authenticated and the idea that Cromwell gave the sword to Mayne on a visit in the aftermath of Naseby is clearly wrong.30P. Gaunt, The Cromwellian Gazetteer (Gloucester, 1987), 10.

The by-election at Aylesbury in September 1645 followed the decision by the Commons to hold elections to fill vacant seats. The choice of Mayne for one of the two vacancies there can be explained by his status as one of the most high-profile parliamentarian supporters in the area. He was just the type of person the Commons wanted to recruit to their ranks.

He probably took his seat at Westminster for the first time on 29 October 1645 when he swore the Solemn League and Covenant.31CJ iv. 326a. However, it is clear that he made very little impact there. Apart from being added in December 1645 to the committee which had been appointed to examine certificates from the Committee of Accounts, his few appearances in the Journal before 1649 were related to local matters.32CJ iv. 376a. In December 1647 and November 1648 he was one of the Buckinghamshire MPs sent back to the county to encourage the collection of the assessments.33CJ iv. 400a, vi. 87b. Twice in the late summer of 1648 he asked for permission to go into the country, which is consistent with the impression that his main focus was still very much on Buckinghamshire.34CJ v. 651b, 677a. Ill health may also have limited his activity. He would later speak of his ‘natural infirmities’ and imply that he rarely spoke in debate.35A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts ed. W. Scott (1809-15), vii. 456. Yet what can be said is that, on the larger national issues, he was siding with the Independents, as he was one of those MPs who took refuge with the army following the Presbyterian coup at Westminster of late July 1647.36LJ ix. 385b; HMC Egmont, i. 440; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 755. His support was sufficiently clear that he was unaffected by the purge of the Commons in December 1648. He dissented from the 5 December vote on 25 December.37PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, p. 490; [W. Prynne], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660, E.1013.22), 21.

It is clear that Mayne was not a driving force behind the execution of the king, but it is less clear that he was as reluctant a regicide as he later asserted. For obvious reasons, he was keen in 1660 to play down his involvement. In his defence at his trial and in the account written about that time which clearly reflected his views, he claimed that others had manipulated him. His story was that he had wanted to have his name removed from the list of judges appointed to try the king, but that, when he had tried to speak in the Commons, Thomas Chaloner* had pulled him back into his seat and threatened to have his estates sequestered if he did not cooperate.38State Trials, v. 1217; Colln. of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vii. 456. Even more questionable was the clear inference in the 1660 account that, by pretending to be ill and going into hiding at the Golden Horseshoe tavern near the Old Bailey, Mayne had managed to avoid sitting in the high court of justice until the day on which the king was finally sentenced.39Colln. of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vii. 456. While it is possible that he did fain illness to miss some of the early meetings of the commissioners, he turned up for most of their meetings from 17 January 1649 and missed only two of the full sessions of the court.40Muddiman, Trial, 203-29. In any case, he could not deny that he had signed the death warrant. His later excuse would be that pressure from one of the other signatories persuaded him at the last moment to overcome his doubts.41Colln. of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vii. 456-7; State Trials, v. 1217.

It is just possible that Mayne avoided sitting in Parliament in the months immediately following the king’s execution, but it is much more likely that he was merely continuing his former habit of inactivity. There is no reason to think that he was reluctant to cooperate with the new republic, especially as he probably organised the distribution throughout Buckinghamshire of 30 copies of the Commons’ order of 17 February authorising justices of the peace to continue to act as before.42CSP Dom. 1651-2, p. 146; A. and O.; Printing for Parliament, 1641-1700 ed. S. Lambert (L. and I. Soc. xx), 159. That in August 1649 he paid his assessment contributions 14 weeks in arrears may simply have been because he was absent in London.43SP28/150, f. 356v. Indeed, if anything, he became more active in Parliament under the Rump, although only because his known involvement had been previously so negligible. He was named to a number of committees, including those for raising revenue for the army (18 Feb. 1650) and to assist the families of those soldiers killed serving in Scotland and Ireland (2 May 1651).44CJ vi. 284a, 368a, 469a, 569b; vii. 182b, 253b. He would later be accused of having been ‘a constant Rumper to the last’.45Mystery of the Good Old Cause, 26.

Mayne was removed from the Buckinghamshire commission of the peace in July 1653.46C231/6, p. 259. If he had fallen from favour, it is odd that no mention was made of it in his defence in 1660.47Colln. of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vii. 457. It is much more likely that he had refused to serve in protest against the dissolution of the Rump. His readmission to local office in 1656 followed soon after the marriage of his nephew Richard Beke* (the son of his step-brother) to one of Oliver Cromwell’s nieces, so it is possible that this connection to the protectoral family eased his political rehabilitation.48TSP iv. 583; C231/6, p. 344; A. and O. His claim to have assisted some royalist conspirators escape detection in about 1657 may have been little more than turning a blind eye to them rather than providing any actual assistance.49Colln. of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vii. 457. He appears to have sat in the restored Rump when it reassembled in May 1659, as he was named to one of its committees as early as 26 May and to another on 11 August.50CJ vii. 666a, 755a. He can also be assumed to have sat in the Rump in the early months of 1660 before the readmission of the secluded Members, as the council of state assigned him lodgings at Whitehall.51CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 348. He was thus no more visible in those sessions than he had been between 1645 and 1653.

The return of Charles II in May 1660 placed Mayne’s life in danger. Those who had signed the death warrant were now singled out for retribution. Mayne was included on the list of those whose arrest Parliament ordered and he was excluded by name from the Act of Oblivion.52LJ xi. 32b, 52b, 101b, 102a; CJ viii. 61a; SR. According to local tradition, he hid in an attic to avoid arrest at this time; the alleged hiding place was still being shown to visitors to Dinton Hall until it was removed by building work in 1857.53Lipscomb, Buckingham, ii. 156; Lowndes, ‘Dinton Hall’, 99. The truth is rather less romantic as he actually gave himself up almost immediately. On 13 June the Speaker, (Sir) Harbottle Grimston*, informed the Commons that Mayne had surrendered to the sergeant-at-arms.54CJ viii. 63b; Whitelocke, Diary, 606; Ludlow, Voyce, 160. He was transferred into the custody of the lieutenant of the Tower on 25 August.55J. Bayley, Hist. and Antiquities of the Tower of London (1821-5), ii. 623; The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg 1659-1661 ed. W.L. Sachse (Cam. Soc. 3rd ser. xci), 107. His wife meanwhile sought legal advice from Bulstrode Whitelocke* before petitioning the king on his behalf and it may have been in connection with this that the account explaining his conduct was prepared.56Whitelocke, Diary, 615; Colln. of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, vii. 456-7. Although written in the third person, there can be no doubt that it was based on Mayne’s own testimony. It did not help that his attempts to defend himself were confused throughout. Having been indicted along with the other regicides the previous day, he pleaded ‘not guilty’ at the Old Bailey on 10 October. However, at his trial six days later he tried to modify this plea. Under cross-examination, he admitted that the ‘not guilty’ plea was ‘not as to the matter of fact’ but because he had ‘no malice or ill intention to his majesty’. As he said himself, he was ‘an ignorant weak man in the law’.57State Trials, v. 1217. If nothing else, this feeble performance in the dock was at least consistent with his tale of timidity in 1649. These comments were treated as a revised plea of guilt and, combined with his decision to hand himself in voluntarily, saved him from the scaffold. He was sentenced instead to imprisonment for life.

The conditions under which he was kept in the Tower were hardly ones intended to promote long life and Mayne was not in the best of health to begin with. Like a number of other regicides imprisoned rather than executed, he died in custody within months of the trial. The cause of death was ‘gout, with fever and convulsion-fits’.58HMC 11th Rep. VII, 2; LJ xi. 381a. His body was removed to Dinton, where it was buried on 18 April 1661.59Noble, Lives of the English Regicides, ii. 66; Lowndes, ‘Dinton Hall’, 99. As a convicted traitor, his lands had already been forfeit to the crown.60E178/6148. The dean and chapter of Rochester had therefore petitioned the king to be granted his advowson for the living at Haddenham so that the income could be used to pay for the repairs to Rochester Cathedral. Instead it went to Sir Richard Lane.61CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 343, 344, 497; 1661-2, p. 489. Charles II then granted the remainder of the lease on the Rochester lands to the countess of Marlborough, the wife of William Ashburnham*.62Sloane 856, ff. 23v-24. For reasons that remain unclear, Mayne’s son Simon Mayne† was able to reacquire these lands.63VCH Bucks. ii. 271. He may simply have bought out the new owners. Or perhaps the crown had realised that it had little to gain from them, for Mayne owed £2,500 to creditors and the estates were estimated to be worth just £363 13s.64LR2/266, f. 4v. Later in the century, his cousin, Richard Beke*, was living with him at Dinton Hall.65Gaunt, Cromwellian Gazetteer, 10. Mayne’s former clerk, John Bigg, whom some believed had been Charles I’s executioner, became ‘the Dinton hermit’ and lived for the rest of his life in a local cave.66Lipscomb, Buckingham, ii. 155-6; Lowndes, ‘Dinton Hall’, 103-4. Simon junior sat as a whig MP for his father’s old constituency under William III and Anne.67HP Commons 1690-1715. When he died in 1727, his son, the fourth Simon Mayne in succession, sold the lands at Dinton.68Lipscomb, Buckingham, ii. 140. The son and biographer of the nineteenth-century actor, Charles Mayne Young (1777-1856), claimed that they were descended from the regicide.69J.C. Young, A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young (London and New York, 1871), 149, 274.