MEYRICK, Sir John (d. 1655), of Monkton, Pemb.

The Meyricks claimed descent from a thirteenth-century prince of Powys and the lords of Cedewain in what later became Montgomeryshire. Meyrick belonged to a cadet branch of the family that had moved from north Wales to his grandmother’s county of Pembrokeshire in the early Elizabethan period.27McGarvie, Meyricks of Bush, 7-10, 14-15; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘Gelly Meyrick’; HP Commons 1604-29, ‘Rowland Meyrick’. His father’s elder brother Sir Gelly Meyrick† entered the service of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, rising to become his principal man-of-business, steward of his extensive estates in south Wales and manager of his political and electoral interests in the region. Gelly and his brother Francis – Meyrick’s father – also campaigned under the earl in the wars against Spain and the Irish during the 1580s and 1590s.28McGarvie, Meyricks of Bush, 14-16; HP Commons 1558-1603; ‘Sir Gelly Meyrick’, Oxford DNB. At some point in the late 1590s, Francis was granted the lease of Essex’s property at Monkton, near Pembroke, which he made his principal residence.29McGarvie, Meyricks of Bush, 24-5. A leading actor in the earl’s ill-fated 1601 rebellion, Gelly was executed for treason; Francis, though suspected of involvement, suffered nothing worse than omission from the Pembrokeshire commission of peace.30McGarvie, Meyricks of Bush,

Meyrick inherited his father’s devotion to the Essex interest. Indeed, his attachment to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, the future parliamentarian general, would dominate his life and career. He served under Essex in the English forces in the Palatinate in 1620, and by late 1624 he was a captain in Essex’s regiment in the Dutch army, where he appears to have remained until the spring of 1627.31Add. 46188, ff. 29, 32, 105; SP14/174/49, f. 68; SP84/121, f. 277; A. Wilson, The History of Great Britain being the Life and Reign of King James the First (1653), 135-6. There is no evidence for the often-repeated assertion that he accompanied Essex on the 1625 expedition to Cadiz and was knighted shortly thereafter. He was certainly not a regular officer in the earl’s – or any other – regiment on this expedition, and he apparently had to wait until 1639-40 to receive his knighthood (he should not be confused with his London namesake, who had been knighted in 1614).32J. Glanville, A Voyage to Cadiz in 1625 ed. A.B. Grosart (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxxii), 122-3. In March 1627, Meyrick and his troop were among the English units shipped from the Netherlands to reinforce the army in Danish service under Sir Charles Morgan that was defending Bremen against the Imperialists.33Add. 46188, f. 105; ‘Sir Charles Morgan’, Oxford DNB. Having probably followed Morgan back to England in 1628, Meyrick was among a group of gentleman volunteers who joined Sir Charles’s regiment fighting the Spanish in the Low Countries in 1629. He was listed among Morgan’s soldiers who were wounded at the siege of Maastricht in August 1632.34H. Hexham, A Historicall Relation of the Famous Siege of the Busse (1630), 24-5; Hexham, A Iournall of the Taking in of Venlo, Roermont, Strale, the Memorable Seige of Mastricht (1633), 40; ‘Sir Charles Morgan’, Oxford DNB. The claim that he was ‘commissioned in Morgan’s regiment in Swedish service in 1630’ is apparently without foundation.35‘Sir John Meyrick’, Oxford DNB.

Meyrick’s activities and whereabouts during the period 1632-9 are a mystery. He resurfaces in the historical record in the spring of 1639, when he was commissioned as lieutenant-colonel of the earl of Essex’s foot regiment in the army raised to fight the Scottish Covenanters in the first bishops’ war.36E351/292. It was his services to the royal cause during this campaign that appear to have earned him his knighthood, for it was as ‘Sir’ John Meyrick that he was made a freeman of the Staffordshire borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme on 25 March 1640 and returned by its electors to the Short Parliament. He owed his election entirely to Essex – Staffordshire’s lord lieutenant – whose main seat in the county, Chartley, lay about 12 miles from the borough.37Supra, ‘Newcastle-under-Lyme; Pape, Newcastle-Under-Lyme, 303. Meyrick received no committee appointments in the Short Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. In contrast to Essex – who joined the Providence-Island grandees in plotting with the king’s Scottish enemies in the summer of 1640 – Meyrick served as a colonel of foot in the royal army during the second bishops’ war. But given his intimacy with Essex, it is likely that he was kept abreast of the conspirators’ proceedings – indeed, he and his regiment may well have figured prominently in their plans to suborn elements of the king’s army.38E351/293; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1242; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 45-7, 551.

Meyrick was returned for Newcastle-under-Lyme again in the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640.39Supra, ‘Newcastle-under-Lyme’. His duties as an army colonel probably occupied much of his time during 1640-1; he certainly contributed nothing of note on the floor of the House and was named to only 13 committees before the 1641 autumn recess – the great majority of them relating to supply and oversight of the kingdom’s armed forces and the disbandment of the royal army in northern England.40CJ ii. 34a, 66a, 75b, 131b, 139b, 152a, 172b, 188b, 212b, 240a, 257a, 259b, 276a. On 29 January 1641, he was added to the committee for drafting the charge against the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) in relation to the latter’s attempts to raise a Catholic-led army in south Wales against the king’s British enemies.41CJ ii. 75b; Adamson, Noble Revolt, 197. But this appointment aside, he showed no interest in Parliament’s campaign to reform the perceived abuses of the personal rule of Charles I and punish their authors. Late in June, Sir John Culpeper persuaded the House against sending Meyrick and Sir William Ogle* northwards to assist the lord general (Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland) with the disbandment process: ‘their two regiments being none of those who are to be disbanded’, argued Culpeper, ‘they might do us better service in the army by staying here than by going thither’.42Procs. LP v. 366. Meyrick’s first, and only, recorded speech in the House before the civil war came a month later, when he moved that a writ be issued to hold a by-election at Lichfield to replace the recently deceased Sir Walter Devereux – Essex’s illegitimate half-brother.43Procs. LP vi. 94.

Meyrick was among the officers recommended by Parliament’s recently established committee for Irish affairs early in November 1641 for employment in the forces intended to serve under Ireland’s lord lieutenant (the earl of Leicester).44D’Ewes (C), 77. His sole appointment at Westminster that autumn was to a committee set up on 15 November on an ordinance for putting the trained bands in a state of battle-readiness.45CJ ii. 316b. Remarkably for a man so little involved in the House’s affairs, he was nominated on 24 February 1642 to Parliament’s projected new executive for managing the war in Ireland, the Commission for Irish Affairs*.46CJ ii. 453b. His nomination was confirmed the next day (25 Feb.), when another of the earl of Essex’s circle, Sir Philip Stapilton, successfully moved that Meyrick sit on the ‘council of war’ in place of the Commons’ grandee John Hampden, who already had too many ‘great employments’.47CJ ii. 456a; PJ i. 468. Meyrick owed this signal appointment very largely to his connection with Essex – a leading member of the parliamentary leadership or ‘junto’ – although his own military experience would doubtless have eased his preferment. An active member of the commission, he remained a peripheral figure in the Commons itself, receiving appointment to only two minor ad hoc committees during the first six months of 1642 and contributing nothing to debate.48SP28/1D, ff. 437, 444, 449; CJ ii. 457a, 564b; PJ ii. 469; iii. 438.

The most important appointment of Meyrick’s political career came on 4 July 1642 with his inclusion on Parliament’s first major executive for domestic affairs, the Committee of Safety* (CS). The Commons’ contingent on this new bicameral body was made up almost exclusively of leading junto-men (John Pym, Denzil Holles, Hampden), hardliners (Henry Marten) and MPs with close connections to the earl of Essex (Meyrick, Stapilton), who would shortly be appointed, at the committee’s instigation, commander-in-chief of Parliament’s field army. Much of the committee’s work would relate to the pay and recruitment of Essex’s army (which Meyrick pledged to furnish with two horses), and it thus began life as a vehicle for those at Westminster determined to confront the king from a position of maximum military strength.49Supra, ‘Committee of Safety’; PJ iii. 471.

Meyrick’s military duties would have prevented him from playing a leading role on the Committee of Safety even supposing he had wished to do so. Late in July 1642, he was commissioned as a colonel of foot in Essex’s army and assigned the senior staff offices of sergeant-major-general – that is, commander of the lord general’s infantry – and president of the earl’s council of war.50SP28/1A, f. 256. Meyrick and his newly-raised regiment were sent by Essex in August to besiege the royalist garrison of Portsmouth under George Goring*, forcing its surrender early in September.51A Famous and Joyfull Victory Obtained by Sir John Merricks Regiment (1642); Whitelocke, Mems. i. 182. That autumn, Meyrick and his troops garrisoned Worcester for Parliament, thereby depriving Essex of one of his most trusted and experienced officers at the battle of Edgehill.52G. Davies, ‘The parliamentary army under the earl of Essex, 1642-5’, EHR xlix. 36. What had moved Meyrick to side with Parliament in the civil war – beyond, that is, his intense loyalty to Essex – is not known. There is little to suggest that he was an ardent puritan in 1642, and Richard Baxter was probably correct in listing him, with Essex and a number of his other senior officers, among the ‘moderate episcopal conformists’ in the Long Parliament.53R. Baxter, Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), 30. Meyrick’s subsequent patronage of the Pembrokeshire Congregationalist minister Peregrine Philips has been seen as evidence of his own ‘leaning to Independency’. But it probably reflects nothing more than a preference on his part for godly preaching and the paucity of choice in south Wales to satisfy that taste.54J. Phillips, ‘Haverfordwest in the civil war’, Arch. Cambr. ser. 6, xv. 16; Richards, Puritan Movement, 69; ‘Peregrine Philips’, Oxford DNB.

Meyrick had returned to Westminster by 9 November 1642, when he was named to a committee for raising horse to bolster Essex’s forces.55CJ ii. 841a. It would later be alleged that while Prince Rupert’s cavalry destroyed Holles’s regiment at Brentford on 11 November, Essex, Meyrick and other ‘chief commanders ... came to London to laze, smoke tobacco and drink sack, court compliment, vaunt and vapour of that they never did – and a potent enemy at hand in the field ... and no chief officer there to command’.56A. Wilbee, Plain Truth Without Feare or Flattery (1647), sig. B4v (E.516.7). Meyrick’s military reputation suffered further damage two days later (13 Nov.), when, as commander of Essex’s infantry at the battle of Turnham Green, he brought orders from the lord general to Hampden and Bulstrode Whitelocke* for recalling them and their troops from a flanking manoeuvre against the king’s army. Whitelocke asked his ‘familiar friend’ Meyrick ‘how this came to pass that they should be recalled and lose so great an advantage against the enemy, and ... he feared that some were false who had given this advice to the general’. Whitelocke (a lawyer with no military experience) was dismissive of Meyrick and the other ‘old soldiers of fortune’ around Essex who had urged caution. But Essex’s and his staff’s real mistake was in launching a flanking offensive in the first place, when it was clear even to Whitelocke that the London trained bands could not be trusted to hold the parliamentarian centre without support from the regular army.57Whitelocke, Diary, 140-1; Whitelocke, Mems. i. 190-3; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 59-60.

Resentment at Meyrick’s role in thwarting a more aggressive strategy at Turnham Green surfaced at Westminster the next day (14 Nov. 1642) and may well explain a report to the Commons on 15 November that he had been heard to say that “the House ... went too high”. What prompted this alleged outburst – which occurred at least a week before Turnham Green – is not clear.58Add. 18777, f. 57v; CJ ii. 851a. On being confronted with this report in the Commons on 17 November, Meyrick ‘denied that ever he spake or thought any such thing’, whereupon the House resolved that it continued to hold him in good esteem and desired that he ‘repair to his charge and continue the performance of it with the same care and affection to the service as he hath formerly done’.59Add. 31116, pp. 18-19; CJ ii. 853a. The matter did not end there, however, for the next day, Essex was obliged to give Meyrick’s office as sergeant-major-general to Philip Skippon* – one of the few officers to have emerged from Turnham Green with any credit. This enforced remodelling of his officer corps was evidently resented by Essex, who made his feelings on the matter plain by appointing Meyrick general of the ordinance instead.60Infra, ‘Philip Skippon’; SP28/3B, ff. 423-4; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 16. Essex was still smarting when he wrote to the Commons a few weeks later, relating ‘how much it troubled him’ that ‘two commanders under him [Meyrick and Colonel Ballard] and dearly esteemed by him had been lately scandalized concerning the business at Brentford’ and questioned in the House. In response, the Commons set up a committee for drafting a letter to the lord general explaining that Meyrick had been cleared by the House and Ballard had not been questioned in the first place.61Add. 18777, f. 78v; Add. 31116, p. 24; Harl. 164, f. 177v; CJ ii. 873a.

Meyrick spent much of 1643 in the field and received no appointments in the Commons and scant mention in the Journals before late September, when he and other officers in Essex’s army were thanked by the House for their ‘great services to the commonwealth’ in relieving Gloucester and at the first battle of Newbury.62CJ iii. 256b; LJ vi. 144b. Like the lord general, he was probably disturbed at the war-party grandees’ determination to bring the Scots into the civil war, which would constitute a major escalation of the conflict. Nevertheless, he attended the House on 16 October and took the Covenant.63CJ iii. 275b. He was named to four committees between mid-January and mid-April 1644, including that to prepare new rates of military pay (25 Mar.).64CJ iii. 362a, 437a, 439b, 455b. Despite – or perhaps because of – his closeness to Essex, his regiment was among those discarded in the re-organisation of the lord general’s army that the latter’s opponents pushed through the Houses during the early months of 1644.65Infra, ‘Robert Scawen’; ‘Zouche Tate’; Davies, ‘Parliamentary army’, 43. But having retained the rank of colonel and his office as general of the ordnance, he accompanied Essex on campaign and was a signatory to the letter that the lord general’s staff sent to Parliament late in June justifying their decision to march into the west county in defiance of contrary orders from the Committee of Both Kingdoms* (CBK).66Harl. 166, ff. 79v, 86v; LJ vi. 616b-617a. The lord general’s opponents in the Commons were so incensed by this act of insubordination that they reportedly wanted to impeach Stapilton and Meyrick or at least ‘lop them off from the earl of Essex his society’.67Add. 18981, f. 207; Mercurius Aulicus no. 29 (14-20 July 1644), 1089 (E.4.12). Surrounded by the king’s forces at Lostwithiel early in September and facing imminent surrender, Essex, Meyrick and other senior officers escaped by fishing boat to Plymouth.68Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, ii. 17-18. While Meyrick had been campaigning with the lord general in the west country, he and his fellow Essexians in south Wales had been outmanoeuvred by their local rivals – a faction with advocates at Westminster John White II* and Herbert Perrott* – and omitted from the parliamentary committee established in June 1644 for governing Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire.69LPL, Ms 679, p. 155; LJ vi. 585b; An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons (1644), 5 (E.51.1).

The lord general’s humiliation in Cornwall strengthened him and his followers in their hostility to the Committee of Both Kingdoms and its war-party backers. Writing to Essex’s ally Sir Samuel Luke* in November 1644, Meyrick referred to the CBK as ‘the malignant council’.70Luke Lttr. Bks. 396. Meyrick was among the lord general’s ‘special and most intimate friends’ who attended a late-night meeting at Essex House (where he had a room and adjoining ‘inner chamber’) early in December to determine whether it was would be possible to impeach Oliver Cromwell*. Stapilton and Holles ‘spake smartly to the business and ... would willingly have been upon the accusation of him’. But the Scots commissioners and Whitelocke urged caution, and the matter was dropped.71Whitelocke, Mems. i. 343-7; Whitelocke, Diary, 160-1; Add. 46189, f. 160.

Having resigned his place as general of the ordnance in October 1644, Meyrick’s military career was effectively over well before the Self-Denying Ordinance made it official in the spring of 1645.72Luke Lttr. Bks. 365. Two of the ten committees that claimed his services that year – which was apparently the busiest of his career in the Commons – related to new-modelling Parliament’s armies, but it is very unlikely that he contributed enthusiastically, if at all, to their proceedings.73CJ iv. 31b, 51a, 112a, 151b, 174a, 197a, 320b, 321a, 321b. The probable focus of his activities at Westminster, if his assignments in the House are any guide, was the supply and encouragement of his kinsman (and Essex’s former page) Major-general Rowland Laugharne and of Parliament’s other adherents in south Wales.74CJ iv. 151b, 197a, 320b, 321a, 321b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 503, 620; ‘Rowland Laugharne’, Oxford DNB; PROB11/292, f. 81. He received only two committee appointments in 1646, both of which concerned the management and supply of Parliament’s forces in Wales.75CJ iv. 572a, 634a. Granted leave on 24 July ‘for the recovery of his health’, he may have been too ill to participate more fully in the revival of Essex’s political fortunes in the spring and summer of 1646.76CJ iv. 627b. But in marked contrast to his patron, Meyrick had never shown much interest in parliamentary politics, and what little ambition he may have had in that direction was probably killed off entirely with the earl’s death in mid-September. At Essex’s lavish public funeral in October, Meyrick, Skippon and Stapilton were among the eight gentlemen who carried the earl’s armour on either side of his pall.77The True Mannor and Forme of the Proceeding to the Funerall (1646), 17 (E.360.1).

Meyrick was a likely beneficiary of the growing strength of the Presbyterian interest at Westminster from the autumn of 1646. In November, the Commons granted him £1,500 towards his arrears of army pay as the ‘discoverer’ of a delinquent’s estate – which sum the Committee for Compounding* paid him accordingly.78CJ iv. 726b; CCC 798. And on 1 January 1647, the Houses passed an ordinance granting him a further £1,000 from this same source in discharge of another portion of his arrears – although he had received only £300 of this money by the spring of 1649.79CJ v. 32a, 32b, 34b; LJ viii. 640a; CCAM 203. The state of his finances during the late 1640s may have been precarious, for a few weeks before he re-married in May 1647 – to the widow of a leading royalist – he borrowed the massive sum of £15,000 by statute staple.80LC4/202, f. 359.

The Presbyterian grandees secured the addition of Meyrick, along with several other leading opponents of the New Model army, to the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs* on 9 April 1647.81CJ v. 138a. This committee, which had emerged by early 1647 as Parliament’s principal executive body, was used by the Presbyterians to push through their plans for dismembering the army. But although Meyrick does not appear to have attended any of the committee’s meetings and seems to have been a peripheral figure, at most, in the Holles-Stapilton interest, the army’s radical friends in London identified him with the Presbyterian grandees as the leaders of ‘a haughty, traitorous party ... the Scottists of our kingdom ... who have run themselves by their wicked deeds against the king and commonwealth into a desperate condition and therefore endeavour ... to bring the land into a confusion and so to make our latter end worse than our beginning’.82SP21/26; Wilbee, Plain Truth, siga. A2v, A3, B4v. It was very probably Meyrick’s past association with Essex that aroused the suspicion of the Presbyterians’ enemies rather than his activities at Westminster, which were apparently negligible. Indeed, his second Commons’ appointment of 1647 – which proved to be the last of his parliamentary career – was to a committee set up on 21 July for investigating the Presbyterians’ military build-up in London.83CJ v. 253a.

Despite making no perceptible contribution to the Commons’ proceedings after the summer of 1647 and playing no part in the second civil war, Meyrick was among those MPs imprisoned by the army at Pride’s Purge in December 1648. Again, it was probably his reputation as a one of Essex’s former commanders rather than his own political conduct that earned him this treatment. Released from custody on 20 December, he returned to the margins of public life from where the army had found him.84Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1355, 1369; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 153-4. He suffered another and probably more painful misfortune in 1653, when Essex’s heir, Viscount Hereford, granted the lease of his Monkton property to another gentleman. Determined to resist the loss of his estate, Meyricke evicted the viscount’s new tenant ‘by force and arms’. The law suit that inevitably ensued had not been decided by the time of Meyrick’s death in August 1655.85C7/515/95; C8/105/164; McGarvie, Meyricks of Bush, 30-1. His place of burial is not known.

In his will, Meyrick bequeathed his landed estate to his only son Essex and portions to his (Sir John’s) two daughters and legacies totalling about £1,100. His supervisors included Rowland Laugharne, Richard Vaughan†, 2nd earl of Carbery – who had commanded the royalist forces in south Wales during the civil war – and Carbery’s brother-in-law and fellow royalist officer Sir Francis Lloyd*.86PROB11/292, ff. 80v-81; McGarvie, Meyricks of Bush, 31. Meyrick’s grandson John Meyrick† represented Pembroke and Cardigan in the early eighteenth century.87HP Commons 1690-1715.