MARTYN, Sir Nicholas (1593-1653), of Oxton, Kenton, Devon.

The Martyns were of ‘the inner circle of the oligarchy’ of Exeter by the 1530s, when Richard Martyn, great-grandfather of Sir Nicholas Martyn, was mayor.20W.T. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540-1640 (2nd. ed. 1975), 254, 287. The family traced its ancestry in Devon to the Norman Conquest, and was continuously represented in the Twenty-Four, Exeter’s governing body, between 1564 and 1635. Richard’s son, Nicholas, served two terms as mayor, in 1574 and 1585, and was twice governor of the city’s company of merchant adventurers.21Prince, Worthies (1701), 457; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 253, 287-8; Watson, House of Martin, 123-4. William, Sir Nicholas’s father, after an education at Oxford and the Middle Temple, became recorder of Exeter in 1605. He acquired the estate of Oxton in the parish of Kenton, south of Exeter, from the Hurst family, into which the Martyns had married.22MacCaffrey, Exeter, 255. William Martyn was the author of Youths Instruction (1612), which he dedicated to Nicholas, then around 19 years old. Another work of his, The Historie and Lives of the Kings of England (1615) was adorned with commendatory verses by his three sons to their father: the verse ‘to my most dear father’, by Nicholas, the eldest son, came first.23W. Martyn, The Historie and Lives of the Kings of England (1615). Any satisfaction, intellectual or paternal, that Martyn senior derived from this venture was quickly shattered when James I claimed to find material in it, relating to the Scots in general and to his family in particular, offensive. He ‘weathered out the king’s displeasure’ and was in due course restored to good standing in the royal estimation, but it was said that the unexpected displeasure of the monarch led to Martyn’s death in 1617.24Prince, Worthies (1701), 458.

In fact, William Martin made his will in 1610, suggesting that his health may have given him grounds for concern before he embarked on his literary ventures. He bequeathed interests in over 500 acres of land scattered across Devon, and left £900 for the jointures of his younger children.25PROB11/130, f. 135. The king’s displeasure at Martyn’s book did not poison his mind against his son. Nicholas Martyn was knighted at Newmarket in 1624, and took up the life of a country gentleman at Oxton. He was named to the commission of the peace from 1630, and to a wide range of other commissions issued from chancery. In 1639-40 he was a Ship Money sheriff, and reported to the privy council in February 1640 how he had struggled ‘with much ado’ to bring in the financial contributions from the parishes and hundreds.26CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 498. Some of them were refusing to pay, but Martyn seems to have worked conscientiously to provide accounts of his collections.27CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 345, 612. By June 1640, however, a note of exasperation had crept into his tone as he addressed the council.

Did their lordships know the difficulty and affronts I have had in collecting this little sum, as they may account it, I believe they would acknowledge it the greatest they have ever received.28CSP Dom. 1640, p. 352.

Martyn served as sheriff during the elections for both Parliaments of 1640, and was thus disqualified from standing as a candidate himself.

Martyn was nominated by Parliament as a deputy lieutenant for Devon during the build-up to civil war. His name is linked indirectly with the episode of the Five Members in January 1642. His daughter had married a London woollen-draper called Turner, and in a story recorded in 1690 it is said that it was to Turner’s house that the Five Members escaped after the king’s botched attempt at their arrest.29Harl. 6861, f. 11v. In the early summer, on 31 May, Martyn reported to the lord lieutenant, William Russell*, 5th earl of Bedford, that action was being taken in Devon to implement the Militia Ordinance.30LJ v. 94b. In November, he was active in mobilising the militia in mid-Devon, and with Sir John Northcote*, Sir Samuel Rolle* and Sir George Chudleigh was excepted by the king from a general pardon to the citizens of Exeter for their part in contributing to the parliamentary militia.31Som. RO, DD WO53/1/129; A Proclamation ... to the Inhabitants ... of Exceter (1642, 669. f.5. 99). Despite their first flush of enthusiasm for military action, the Devon deputy lieutenants were not zealous enemies of the king’s party. In late February 1643, Martyn, Northcote and Sir John Bampfylde* were parties to the treaty negotiations with the Cornish royalists, which was based on the assertion that both sides were contending ‘for the same religion, laws and liberties and for the safety of the same commonwealth’.32Som. RO, DD WO56/6/30. The unwillingness of the Devon men to pursue their military advantage over the Cornish provoked the war party activists at Westminster into sending down a delegation including Edmund Prideaux I* to talk Martyn and his colleagues out of their treaty.33Bodl. Nalson II, ff. 326, 342.

In September 1643, when Exeter surrendered to the royalists, pardons were granted by the king to gentry parliamentarians in the city for their treasons and other crimes against him. Martyn was one of these. 34M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction (Exeter, 1996), 202. He presumably withdrew to his estate at Oxton, and sat out the remaining term of the war. He was offered a pardon by the king in February 1644, so was probably considered pliable enough to be won over to the royalist cause.35Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 149. By contrast, however, Elizabeth, his wife, evidently sat fretfully under the royalist regime, and showed some of the spirit of resistance exemplified by Brilliana, wife of Sir Robert Harley*. Probably in 1644, she was accused of beating and abusing the constables of Kenton, and apparently rescued her servant from them after they had arrested him on the orders of the royalist commissioners of array. The county magistrates, of whom her husband until recently had been one, in turn ordered her arrest, although the final outcome of the episode is unclear.36A.H.A. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions from Queen Elizabeth to Queen Anne (1878), 134. It is certain that the Martyns remained on the side of Parliament.

Sir Nicholas was returned to the Long Parliament in June 1646 in a recruiter election held once Parliament was in secure control of the county. He evidently enjoyed a strong electoral interest in Devon, although its source remains unclear. He took the Covenant in the House on 26 August 1646, but is not recorded as having been active in the Commons before he was given leave to go the country on 12 October.37CJ iv. 653a, 690b. He was back in the House by 18 March 1647, when he was named to a committee to see through an ordinance on investing the authority of the great seal in a commission, but in April was given a further period of leave. He was not present at a call of the House on 9 October and was granted further leave early in December.38CJ v. 117b, 142a, 330a, 375b. On 23 December 1647 Martyn was asked to go to Devon to bring in assessments, but no more is heard of him until 24 April 1648, when another period of leave was granted him.39CJ v. 400b, 543b. One of two more permissions to leave in 1648 mentioned his departure in order to recover his health, so it could be that chronic illness to some extent explains the slightness of his contribution to the proceedings of Parliament.40CJ v. 628a, vi. 34b. On the other hand, when back in Devon he was well enough on 25 August 1648 to attend the newly reorganized county committee to draft a report to Speaker Lenthall on a royalist ship detained at Dartmouth.41Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 237; Add. 44058, ff. 26v-27.

Martyn was considered sufficiently active politically to be identified by the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee in November 1648 as one of three MPs who were to be told when a Totnes man compounded for his delinquency.42CCC 1878. His whereabouts in the confrontation between Parliament and army the following month were recorded by William Prynne* in one of his accounts of Colonel Thomas Pride’s* purge of the Houses. Martyn turned up at the Commons on Tuesday 12 December, nearly a week after the purge, evidently seeking to gain admission. He was turned away by soldiers, but his behaviour was an obvious gesture of solidarity with the secluded Members, and indicates that Martyn was not necessarily as apathetic as his behaviour since 1646 suggested.43W. Prynne, The Second Part of the Narrative (1648), 4 (E.477.19). He could not have remained in London for long, however, as he appeared at quarter sessions in Exeter in January 1649. His attendance was almost certainly a further gesture of defiance towards those in control at Westminster, rather than a show of support for the revolutionary events taking place in London.44Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. He never appeared at Westminster or at Devon quarter sessions again, despite being readmitted to the commission of the peace in 1650 after a year. He retired completely from public life and died in March 1653. His eldest son, William, inherited his father’s place as a justice of the peace at the restoration of the monarchy, only to die young in 1662. He was memorable only for the story that when he was on his death-bed the bell of his parish church tolled of its own accord.45Prince, Worthies (1701), 458. No descendant of Martyn is known to have sat in Parliament.