MAYNARD, William (1623-99), of Little Easton, Essex.

When he was returned as Member for Calne on 17 March 1640, Maynard was still nearly three months short of his seventeenth birthday.20C219/42, pt. ii, no. 64. The election of this peer’s son from Essex thus ostensibly owed everything to family interest and tradition. The influence of Sir Edward Bayntun*, a leading north Wiltshire gentleman then married to Maynard’s aunt, had secured the seat for his uncle Sir John Maynard I* in the previous Parliament, as it had before that at Chippenham for both Sir John and Maynard’s father.21‘John Maynard’, ‘Sir William Maynard’, ‘Calne’, HP Commons 1604-1629. In the 1630s, however, potential fissures had appeared between the two families. Bayntun had proved a notoriously unfaithful husband to Elizabeth Maynard, who died in 1635.22s.v. ‘Sir Edward Bayntun’. The first Baron Maynard (as he became in 1628) remembered his nephew Edward Bayntun* and his niece Elizabeth Bayntun when drafting his will in 1638, but not his brother-in-law. While Bayntun had become a figurehead of opposition to the crown in its unsuccessful efforts to address the depression in the local cloth industry, Lord Maynard was an explicitly loyal servant of the crown as joint lord lieutenant of Essex and a commissioner elsewhere in East Anglia. While Bayntun improbably made common cause with those who resisted royal religious policy, Lord Maynard was a friend of Archbishop William Laud and a devotee of the ‘beauty of holiness’ in his two private chapels.23PROB11/185/239; CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 446-7, 451-2; 1639-40, p. 561. If Bayntun was still lending support to the Maynards in 1640, then it may have been as a pay-off for earlier behaviour. Otherwise, it is conceivable that the latter had external support from the court or the bishop of Salisbury or independent local support from those who desired to perpetuate a connection with less controversial and better-placed advocates than Bayntun.

In spring 1640 there was no indication that the young Maynard diverged from his father’s opinions. Like his father, he had been a student at St John’s College, Cambridge; although his time there was brief, he probably imbibed the Arminian atmosphere for which it was then well known.24Al. Cant. Thereafter he may have travelled in France, as his former schoolmaster Alexander Maurice certainly did at some point between August 1638 and June 1640, supplied with funds from Lord Maynard.25PROB11/185/239.

There is no evidence of Maynard’s active participation in the proceedings of the Short Parliament, although he could conceivably have attended unobtrusively and passed on information to his father. This time his uncle did not sit. In the Lords his father promoted discussion of supply for the king and proposed a selection of controversial royal servants, including Laud and Sir Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, to assist in preparation for meeting MPs.26Procs. 1640, 76, 81.

Once the session was over, Lord Maynard faced a summer and autumn of escalating violence in his locality. On 24 June, on the eve of setting off to suppress disorders in Cambridge, he made a further codicil to his will, asking ‘that in case I shall happen to come to an untimely end in discharge of my duty in his Majesty’s service’ before his son reached his majority, the king ‘would be pleased to grant his wardship free’.27PROB11/185/239. Lord Maynard survived this and further riots, earning commendation from the privy council.28C181/4, f. 183v; CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 195, 301, 336, 500, 516-17, 622, 634, 653; 1640-1, p. 22; LJ iv. 100b.

It is not known whether he sought a seat for his son in the October elections. At Calne Maynards were replaced by Bayntun’s young son-in-law Hugh Rogers*. Since Lord Maynard died on 17 December, young William, who succeeded as second baron, had no further opportunity to sit in the Commons.29C142/615/114. His mother, whose jointure swallowed up much of his estate, duly obtained his wardship and in the summer of 1641 concluded marriage negotiations begun in his father’s lifetime. On his own telling, at first he seems to have been at least partly under the influence of his father-in-law, Sir Robert Banastre, who sided with the king once civil war broke out.30C10/42/1. In May 1643 the dowager Lady Maynard sought permission to take three of her daughters abroad, although she was in England in October, when she asked her godly kinsman Sir Thomas Barrington* for assistance in obtaining a reduction in assessment on her lands.31HMC 5th Rep. 84; HMC 7th Rep. 566. By this time Sir Robert Banastre’s failure to pay his daughter’s full portion had resulted in litigation.32LJ vi. 646b-647a.

Lord Maynard declined or ignored a summons from the king on 27 December 1643 to the Parliament at Oxford.33CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 508. Instead, on 10 July 1644, soon after his twenty-first birthday he took his seat in the Lords at Westminster.34LJ vi. 625a. Two days later he received his first committee appointment, and within a fortnight commenced using the chamber to advance his case against Banastre.35LJ vi. 629a, 646b-647a; vii. 420a, 489b, 503b, 630b; Whitelocke, Diary, 181, 184 . Prosecution of personal interest may have been an important factor in his decision to align himself against the royalists. It remained a notable feature of his life in the Lords as he later also pursued complaints against Lady Rich, and as he and his mother used parliamentary privilege to evade financial claims from his brother-in-law.36LJ vii. 666a; viii. 10b; ix. 138a, 144a, 145a, 145b, 161b, 162a; x. 316b.

However, despite his youth Maynard soon took on duties of a sensitive political nature. Having subscribed the Covenant on 30 September, in November he was one of the two peers named as commissioners to treat with the king.37LJ vii. 3a, 59a, 63a, 68a, 68b; Whitelocke, Diary, 155. He was subsequently named to a number of key parliamentary committees identified with raising money, implementing religious policy and proceeding against delinquents. In the early months of his service as a commissioner for compounding at Goldsmiths’ Hall (February to July 1647) he was a reasonably regular attender.38A. and O.; LJ viii. 656a; SP23/4, ff. 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 33, 34, 44, 47, 50, 54, 60, 72, 83, 94, 109, 114.

But, having stayed in London during the Presbyterian coup of July/August 1647, he was among the seven peers impeached by the Commons on 8 September.39CJ v. 296a, 296b. Like his uncle, Sir John Maynard, who had been elected MP for Lostwithiel only that January, he faced charges of high treason until the case against him and the others was finally dropped in June 1648.40CJ v. 372b, 373a 449a, 450b, 584a; LJ ix. 482a, 545b, 546b; x. 10a, 10b, 12a, 34a, 100b, 102b, 303b, 307b, 308a. Even then he seems to have remained under some suspicion: in July the steward of his house in Essex was arrested by soldiers.41LJ x. 375a, 375b. That a certain wariness was well founded is suggested by the fact that in November he used his right of patronage to the rectory at Easton to appoint Edward Rainbowe (consecrated bishop of Carlisle in 1664), who then conducted services using the proscribed Prayer Book.42LJ x. 593b; ‘Edward Rainbowe’, Oxford DNB.

Maynard was in the Lords on 2 January 1649 when those present unanimously voted against the trial of the king.43CJ vi. 109b. In pursuance of ongoing litigation, by this time complicated by the inheritance of the Bannastre estates by his infant son, he was subsequently prepared to take the Engagement.44CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 203, 496; 1650, p. 562; 1651, p. 205; 1651-2, p. 200; C10/42/1; CCAM 602. However, by the autumn of 1654, if not some time previously, he was corresponding with the future Charles II, while in the summer of 1655 a search of his country house found a sizeable haul of weapons evidently designed to sustain an uprising. Eventually arrested, he was released in August 1659.45CSP Dom. 1655, pp. 212, 220; 1658-9, p. 229; 1659-60, pp. 53, 67; CCSP ii. 404; iii. 4, 38, 239, 291, 310, 336, 340; TSP i. 728; iii. 79, 574; v. 273; Bodl. Rawl. A.59, f. 23; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, 104, 189-90, 269-70, 347.

Following the Restoration Maynard gained court and local office, and in 1662, 13 years after the death of his first wife, contracted an advantageous second marriage.46C181/7, f. 47; C231/7, p. 19; Essex QSOB ed. Allen, p. xxxvii; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 584; CP. His will, drafted in May 1698, displays a similar strain of piety to that of his father 60 years earlier. He specifically left to his heir John Ogilby’s lavishly illustrated 1660 Bible, together with a gilt chalice and patten, bought for his chapel at Waltons, and a Great Bible and Prayer Book belonging to the chapel at Easton Lodge, with a request for the continuation of their use in these respective locations. He also augmented the salary of the vicar of Thaxted, provided he ‘shall duly and diligently perform his function of preaching and reading divine scripture according to the laws and the religion of the Church of England now established’.47PROB11/450/384. When he died in 1699 he was succeeded as third baron by his elder surviving son, Banastre Maynard†, who had been elected to Parliament as a knight of the shire for Essex in 1663.48HP Commons 1660-1690.