MELTON, Sir John (c.1588-1640), of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, and St Saviour, York, Yorks.

Because Melton made a career for himself in the northern counties and established his main residence at York, it has been assumed that he was somehow connected with an extinct Yorkshire gentry family, the Meltons of Aston.28Hunter, S. Yorks. ii. 162; J. Melton, Astrologaster, or the Figure-Caster ed. H. G. Dick (Augustan Reprint Soc. clxxiv), vi; ‘Sir John Melton’, Oxford DNB. Yet there is no evidence that his association with Yorkshire derived from anything other than the patronage of the northern magnates the earls of Northumberland. Melton was named after his grandfather, a ‘citizen and baker of London’, who was perhaps a descendant of the baker John Melton who had supplied the duke of Norfolk’s London household with bread in the 1480s.29PROB11/82, ff. 219v-220; A. Crawford, Yorkist Lord: John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, c.1425-85, 149. The future MP’s father, Evan Melton, had been appointed one of the grooms of the royal woodyard by 1590, and by 1600 he had been made yeoman of the woodyard – an office he retained under James I. He evidently spent much of his later life in and around Westminster.30E115/256/92; E115/259/136; E115/260/9; E115/261/112; E115/262/55; E115/264/94; PROB11/162, ff. 69v-70v; SP46/63, f. 1; Melton, Astrologaster, sig. A2. Melton’s uncle, who bequeathed John £300 in his will of 1612, had a very similar metropolitan background and connections.31PROB11/129, ff. 158v-159. It is therefore something of a mystery as to why Melton was born not in London but in the parish of Bampton, on the Devon-Somerset border, and referred to himself as a kinsman of another Devon-born gentleman, Hugh Potter*.32PROB11/185, ff. 229v, 230. Melton was not only born in the west country, but may also have been raised there, for he had friends in the region and could apparently adopt a ‘broad Somersetshire language’ at will.33Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: Melton to Potter, 27 July 1638; Melton, Astrologaster, 8.

While Melton was still in his late teens or early twenties he published A Sixe-folde Politician, which, by his own estimation, contained ‘many useful observations in state-business’ for the aspiring political actor. He took as his model statesman the Elizabethan grandee Sir William Cecil†, Lord Burghley. Among the gentlemen who wrote prefatory poems for Melton’s book were the poet and writing-master John Davies ‘gent.’ (not the prominent lawyer Sir John Davies†, as one authority has claimed), whose pupils included the future parliamentarian grandee Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland.34J. Melton, A Sixe-folde Politician (1609), 85-6, 180; Melton, Astrologaster ed. Dick, vi-viii; ‘John Davies (1564/5–1618)’, Oxford DNB. Melton’s second publication, in 1620, was Astrologaster, or The Figure-caster – a scathing attack upon astrology, which he described as ‘an art whereby cunning knaves cheat plain, honest men’, and ‘as pretty and quaint a deceit as that of the Romish religion’.35Melton, Astrologaster, 19, 22. In both his published works he displayed a pronounced hostility to Catholicism – yet with no hint that he favoured further reformation of the Church of England.36Melton, Sixe-folde Politician, 69-91; Astrologaster, 16, 19; Melton, Astrologaster ed. Dick, p. xi. He dedicated Astrologaster to his ‘very loving father’ and styled himself ‘your dutiful and ever loving son’.37Astrologaster, sigs. A2, A2v. However, Evan Melton, in his will of 1629, omitted any reference to John, his only son, and named his eldest daughter his executrix.38PROB11/162, ff. 69v-71.

In 1617, Melton entered the household of the Henry Percy, 3rd earl of Northumberland, as receiver of the earl’s northern estates and disburser of the privy purse – an office that he relinquished to Potter in 1632.39W. Suss. RO, PHA/586-592, 1292, 5723; The Household Pprs. of Henry Percy ed. G. R. Batho (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xciii), lii, 158. Although Melton was apparently based at the Percys’ Sussex residence of Petworth, his office gave him considerable influence in the north (he should not be confused with the ‘John Milton’, a deputy saltpetreman for Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland by the mid-1620s).40CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 349; 1628-9, pp. 86, 424; ‘Sir John Melton’, Oxford DNB. When Sir Thomas Wentworth† (the future earl of Strafford) was campaigning in 1625 for one of the Yorkshire county seats, he desired Melton’s ‘good means to all my Lord Northumberland’s freeholders for their prime voice’.41All Hallows, Tottenham par. reg.; Strafforde Letters, i. 27. It was thus through the earl of Northumberland that Melton became acquainted with the man who was to emerge as Yorkshire’s most powerful political figure during the personal rule of Charles I. In the early 1630s, Melton left the earl’s employ, and in mid-1632 he was appointed secretary to the council of the north – probably on the direct recommendation of Wentworth, the council’s president. A knighthood and a flurry of northern offices followed this appointment.42C231/5, pp. 88, 89; Coventry Docquets, 37, 183; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 200. His first residence on moving to York (the site of the council) was a house he rented from Thomas Fairfax†, 1st Baron Fairfax, in the parish of St Mary Bishophill Senior, where one of his daughters was baptised in 1633. Melton was apparently in regular correspondence at this time with Fairfax’s eldest son, the future parliamentarian general Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*.43St Mary Bishophill Senior, York par. reg.; Belvoir, PZ.4, f. 27.

Melton welcomed the ‘great height in power and jurisdiction’ that the council of the north had attained under Wentworth , and he was keen to defend conciliar authority – and ‘his Majesty’s most sacred prerogative’ on which it was based – against the common-law pretensions of the assize judges on the northern circuit.44Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P13/4, 33; HMC Cowper, ii. 23. In 1633, he complained to Secretary of state Sir John Coke† about disobedience to royal commands by ‘disaffected people, whereof we have too many people in this government’.45HMC Cowper, ii. 16. In a letter to Wentworth of May 1635, he welcomed the fact that the king had no need to summon Parliament for the foreseeable future and advised that Charles should do so only ‘when there is but a tacit necessity and while the current of his Majesty’s prerogative is strong and the people sensibly apprehending his power to subsist without a Parliament’. His desire to make the crown financially independent of Parliament as much as possible may help to explain the interest he took in improving the machinery for fining recusants in the northern counties.46Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P13/33, 41, 14/7, 25, 247, 15/342; Strafforde Letters, i. 418-19; ‘Sir John Melton’, Oxford DNB.

By 1636, Melton had become a member of the Newcastle Hostmen – the cartel of colliery-owners and coal-shippers that dominated the region’s economy.47Tyne and Wear Archives, GU.HO/1/1, p. 366. When the crown negotiated a deal with the Hostmen in 1638 for the purchase of coals on favourable terms, Melton was one of the parties to the agreement.48E214/49. His involvement in the River Tyne coal trade stemmed from his lease of several major coalmines – notably the colliery at Newburn, just west of Newcastle – from the 4th earl of Northumberland, who had succeeded his father Henry in 1634.49PROB11/185, f. 228. Unlike most of the leading Hostmen, Melton did not belong to Newcastle’s governing elite – and indeed, as a friend of Wentworth and Northumberland he was regarded as something of an interloper by the town’s coal-merchant princes. For his part, Melton encouraged efforts by James Hay, earl of Carlisle, a leading courtier, to challenge the commercial privileges claimed by the Newcastle common council.50Eg. 2597, f. 166.

The ill-feeling between Melton and the municipal elite took a more serious turn in the late 1630s, when several prominent Newcastle Hostmen complained to the privy council that coals shipped to London from Melton’s staithes on the Tyne were substandard. Melton denied this allegation, implying that it was borne of malice and a desire to force him out of business.51Alnwick, X.II.6, box 12, bdle. k: Melton to Hugh Potter, 22 June, 6, 12 July 1638; box 23B, bdle. v: same to same, 30 Nov., 7, 25 Dec. 1638, 18 Jan., 3, 8 Feb., 1 May 1639. And certainly by the late 1630s he was struggling to compete with his Newcastle rivals, for as he informed Potter he had lost over £2,000 trying to make the Newburn colliery profitable, and that it had become ‘so chargeable unto me, that my office [as secretary to the council] and all I have is little enough to supply it’. The coal trade, he concluded, was ‘a rotten business, which I wish I had never dealt withall’.52Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: same to same, 7 Dec. 1638, 8 Feb. 1639.

In addition to his duties as secretary to the council of the north, Melton continued to act as man-of-business for the Percys. He wrote regularly from York to Potter, the tenth earl’s northern steward, and was supportive of moves to mobilise the Percy tenantry in Northumberland during the first bishops’ war.53Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: same to same, 8 Feb. 1639. But he proved of greatest value to the earl not in ‘the Scottish business’ but as his northern electoral manager. The 4th earl was not only lord lieutenant of Northumberland, but also the king’s lord admiral – an office that he conceived gave him an interest in all the port boroughs. In the elections to the Short Parliament, therefore, Melton recommended the earl’s candidates to Scarborough and Hull, as well as to Beverley, where the Percys enjoyed a proprietorial interest.54Supra, ‘Beverley’, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’, ‘Scarborough’; Alnwick, X.II.6, box 12, bdle. k: same to same, 17 Jan., 27 Feb. 1640; box 23B, bdle. v: same to same, 6, 27 Mar. 1640. None of the Yorkshire boroughs proved receptive to his overtures, however, and the only Percy candidate who prevailed in the county – Sir Henry Vane II – owed his return for Hull to his father, Sir Henry Vane I*, the new secretary of state.55Supra, ‘Kingston-upon-Hull’. Melton professed much respect for Vane I and ‘could wish him much joy were it not to the displacing of an old and very good friend of mine [i.e. Coke]’.56Alnwick, X.II.6, box 12, bdle. k: same to same, 17 Jan. 1640. Melton himself stood for Newcastle, and both Northumberland and Wentworth wrote him letters of recommendation – although as he informed Potter, he resolved ‘either to stand or fall there upon my lord admiral’s letter only and the friends I have of my own [in] that town’.57Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: same to same, 6 Mar. 1640. However, the town’s municipal leaders – some of whom were ‘not in benign aspect’ towards Northumberland or Melton – proved too influential with the freemen, who returned two of the aldermen.58Supra, ‘Newcastle-upon-Tyne’; CSP Dom. 1640, p. 65.

The Scots’ victory at the battle of Newburn in August 1640 was a blow to Melton both politically and financially. As he informed Potter in September 1640: ‘God knows how great my distractions are. One half of my fortune being already swallowed up (if the Scots continue masters of Newcastle and Tynemouth) and my office here [at York], upon which depends all the rest, by reason of these troubles at present scarce affording me anything’.59Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: Melton to Potter, 4, 18 Sept. 1640. He prayed God to bless the king and his army and to give him success against his ‘rebellious’ Scottish subjects. Melton attended the king at York that autumn and was able to inform Charles of the earl of Northumberland’s imminent recovery from a persistent illness.60Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v: same to same, 4 Sept. 1640. In the elections to the Long Parliament, he revived his candidacy at Newcastle – standing once again on the recommendation of Northumberland – and in the changed political circumstances following the battle of Newburn the municipal elite now supported him in common opposition to the Scots. On election day, 14 October, Melton prevailed on a poll against the Newcastle puritan John Blakiston* and was duly returned by the town’s sheriff.61Supra, ‘Newcastle-upon-Tyne’. A Scottish commentator, attempting to make a virtue of necessity, described Melton as ‘an able man and it is thought may side with the better part [at Westminster]’.62Princeton Univ. Lib. C0938, no. 224, Nevay to Lady Loudoun, 14 Oct. 1640. But Blakiston’s supporters in Newcastle were not so sanguine and petitioned the Commons against Melton’s return.63CJ ii. 53a.

The committee of privileges was still debating the Newcastle election when Melton died on 16 December 1640, after many months of ill health.64Alnwick, X.II.6, box 23B, bdle. v, Melton to Potter, 27 Mar. 1640. He was buried at All Hallows, Tottenham three days later (19 December), despite his request to be interred ‘privately and decently, without ostentation’ in York Minster.65All Hallows, Tottenham par. reg.; PROB11/185, f. 230. In his will, he charged his estate with bequests totalling almost £7,000 and named Potter as his joint executor.66PROB11/185, ff. 227-30. His legatees included John Whittakers (described by one authority as a puritan minister), rector of St Saviour’s, and his ‘loving and true friend’ Phineas Hodson DD, the chancellor of York Minster.67PROB11/185, f. 229v; Marchant, Puritans, 126, 291-2. None of Melton’s immediate descendants sat in Parliament.