GARRARD, George (1579-?1654), of the Charterhouse, Clerkenwell, Mdx.

Garrard was descended on both sides from prosperous London mercantile families; both his grandfathers had been lord mayor.20Vis. London 1568 (Harl. Soc. i), 5. Endowed both with academic ability, which underlay a 12-year fellowship at Merton College during a period when it produced notable diplomats and government officials, and with a respectable younger son’s portion, he went on to carve a career first, briefly, at court and then serving the highest ranking nobility.21Reg. Mertonensis 1567-1603, 327; 1603-1660, 60; PROB11/110/506. His wide circle of friends and associates also comprehended the celebrated literary circle which met at the Mermaid tavern, while sociability and facility in correspondence established him as a purveyor of news.22R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1986), 159, 194, 226, 276, 501, 518; Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McCLure (Philadelphia, 1939), ii. 430; HP Commons 1604-1629.

Patronage from various quarters – notably from Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of Southampton, and from his own Garrard or Gerard kin – accounts for his election to four of the five Parliaments of the 1620s. Ostensibly, his contribution to proceedings was confined to miscellaneous committee nominations, although characteristically he retained vivid impressions of the chamber and struck up further lasting friendships there.23Strafforde Letters, i. 178; HP Commons 1604-1629. Outside Parliament, and especially during its absence from 1629, the chief foci of his life were the households of the noblemen he served – first the residences of William Cecil*, 2nd earl of Salisbury, in the fashionable Strand at Westminster and at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, and later also the houses of Salisbury’s son-in-law Algernon Percy†, 4th earl of Northumberland, at Sion in Middlesex and at Petworth in Sussex.24J. Donne, Letters to several persons of honour (1651), 281, 285; Strafforde Letters, passim. He wrote in 1633 that he had settled in London ‘constantly’ from about November 1614, but there were regular trips to the country, and all his ‘lodgings’ offered opportunities to fraternise with courtiers and officeholders.25Strafforde Letters, i. 165. A bachelor until his mid-forties, despite John Donne’s encouragement to ‘get a fair widow’, when Garrard finally married in May 1625 it was to a spinster in service to the Cecils at Cranborne.26Donne, Letters, 284; London Marriage Lics. ed. Foster, 528; HMC Hatfield, xxii. 195. His wife died only ten months later, evidently in childbed, for she was buried on 8 March 1626 and their son George was baptised on the 19th.27St Andrew, Enfield par. reg. There was thus little disruption to Garrard’s round of staying with others: for instance, he was at Hatfield with his young son for at least eight weeks from December 1634, when the many fellow guests included not only the Northumberlands but also Sir Benjamin Rudyerd*, Sir Thomas Rowe* and members of the Howard family.28Early Stuart Household Accounts, ed. L.M. Munby (Herts. Rec. Soc. ii), 28-55.

Transition from the employ of Salisbury to that of Northumberland was probably seamless, just as the precise nature of that employment is unclear. It is plausible that Garrard took up his latter position on the marriage of the then Lord Percy to Lady Anne Cecil in January 1629; among the occasional vivid insights supplied by Northumberland into their close relations is of a guest who, prevented from bowling by wet weather, entertained himself by reading stories from a chronicle to the pregnant Lady Northumberland and her midwife.29CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 505. Garrard was listed by Percy among the creditors of his father Henry Percy, the 3rd earl, at his death in 1632, the amount – £500 – a pointer to his independent resources and to his standing in the family.30Household Papers of Henry Percy, 132, 166. However, Salisbury House remained his principal residence and he continued to do business for Salisbury into the mid-1630s.31Strafforde Letters, i. 227, 242; HMC Hatfield, xxii. 287. Never exclusive in his associations, he cultivated especially close ties also with chancellor of the exchequer Sir Francis Cottington, later Baron Cottington (‘a noble and free heart’ for whom he arranged a tenancy in another part of Salisbury House), bibliophile Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, and – somewhat more equivocally – William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury (‘I visit his Grace often at Lambeth’; ‘our friend, for so I will call him’).32Strafforde Letters, i. 207, 227, 267, 361, 523; SP16/298, f. 18; SP16/331, f. 26; CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 145. From December 1634 until at least May 1639 he sent monthly newsletters to Thomas Wentworth†, Viscount Wentworth, the lord deputy of Ireland, promising that ‘tho’ I am one, who stands far off from the secrets yet will I briefly and plainly deliver, what hath come to my knowledge’. He did so at Wentworth’s invitation, performing a vital service for a politician acutely aware of the hazards of absence from the king’s presence.33Strafforde Letters, i. 165, 174-ii. 352, passim.

Earlier in his career Garrard had aspired to public office and to the wardenship of Merton College, without success.34HP Commons 1604-1629. In January 1635 he told Wentworth that Cottington had promised to help him secure the reversion of the mastership of ‘Sutton’s Hospital’, otherwise known as the London Charterhouse, and asked the lord deputy if he would enlist Laud in support too.35Strafforde Letters, i. 361. As he explained later, he was ‘grow[ing] in years and would save something of my own fortune for my boy’. Since ‘London is a place I love best to live in, and could I settle in such a retiring place, I should hold myself very happy.36Strafforde Letters, i. 412. According to the statutes the place required a man who was not only unmarried but also ordained, so on 30 September Garrard was made deacon ‘in the face of the congregation at Petworth’. The presiding bishop, also the parson, was Richard Mountague of Chichester, whose Appello Caesarem (1625) had drawn a furious response at Westminster for its high churchmanship and its alleged disrespect to the political order. Garrard acknowledged to Wentworth that it was the ‘learned bishop (whose Name was so much tossed in Parliament in the Mouth of Mr [William] Prynne[*], and Sir Nathaniel Rich[†])’, but passed no comment on the nature of the controversy.37Strafforde Letters, i. 469. He had to wait a further two and a half years until in March 1638 he obtained his ultimate objective through the joint offices of Northumberland, Laud and the queen.38Strafforde Letters, ii. 57, 59, 150, 152-3; Hist. Acct. of Charter-House, 236. It is not clear to what extent he performed ecclesiastical functions in the meantime, although on his own account he and Conway were Northumberland’s ‘comforters’ as the latter struggled to cope with the death of his countess from smallpox late in 1637.39Strafforde Letters, ii. 142.

Like Northumberland, Garrard appears to have had little problem with the beautification of churches and chapels.40SP16/331, f. 26-28v. However, also like Northumberland, he was vehement in his opposition to what he saw as creeping Catholicism. Popery was ‘a growing evil’; it ‘certainly increaseth among us’, he informed Wentworth, ‘and will do still, as long as there is such access of all sorts of English to the Chapel in Somerset-House, utterly forbidden and punishable by the laws of the land’. He prayed for the bishops to ‘seek by all means to retard’ it, although he wanted them also to ‘punish by suspension and other ways those called puritan ministers’, for ‘I love neither of their opinions’.41Strafforde Letters, i. 426; ii. 57. When courtier Walter Montagu announced his conversion Garrard pronounced him ‘a schismatic for changing his religion’; ‘without repentence [he] will be damned for it in the world to come’.42Strafforde Letters, i. 490. On the other hand he equally deplored the defective Dutch education of young Sir Henry Vane II*, who ‘abstained two years from taking from the sacrament in England because he could get no body to administer it to him standing’; the major culprits, he had heard, were Nathaniel Rich and John Pym* – ‘God forgive them for it if they be guilty’.43Strafforde Letters, i. 463. More surprisingly for an ordained man, if less so for one who counted Northumberland his ‘dearly beloved friend’ and for one who may have resented the necessity to take orders, in April 1636 he viewed with distaste the pretensions of the clergy to political power

The clergy are so high here since the joining of the white sleeves with the white staff, that there is much talk of having a[s] secretary a bishop, Dr [Matthew] Wren, bishop of Norwich, and a[s] chancellor of the exchequer, Dr [John] Bancroft, bishop of Oxford; but this comes only from the young fry of the clergy, little credit is given to it, but it is observed they swarm mightily about the court.44Strafforde Letters, ii. 2.

Predictably, while recognising that the Scots had been required to accept a Prayer Book – ‘the beauke as they call it’ – which differed (by implication in a questionable way) from the English version, he deplored their rebellion (Nov. 1637); ‘I like them not, sure they are greater puritans than any we have in England’.45Strafforde Letters, ii. 129.

Garrard expressed similarly firm views on Parliament. ‘God send you a happy Parliament in Ireland’, he wrote to Wentworth in June 1634, ‘I wish as heartily to see an happy one in England’.46Strafforde Letters, i. 267. To achieve this required careful management. Approving Wentworth’s success in this regard he yearned that

our people here had been so instructed and taught. Distrust in so good and gracious a king, and conventicles in chambers in time of Parliament are abominable things, they produce nothing but confusion and factions.47Strafforde Letters, i. 360.

By May 1639, however, he found ‘all things much out of order’ in any case, perhaps partly arising from dissension between on the one hand Northumberland, whom he continued to attend during recurrent illnesses, and on the other Cottington and Secretary of State Sir Francis Windebanke*, with whom he dealt cordially over Charterhouse business.48Strafford Letters, ii. 168, 179-82, 351; SP16/415, f. 219. The fact that over the summer differences also opened up between Northumberland and Wentworth over policy toward Scotland may account for the apparent cessation of Garrard’s correspondence with the latter several months short of his return to England.49‘Algernon Percy, 10th earl of Northumberland’, Oxford DNB.

A combination of Northumberland’s bad health and his appointment in January 1640 as commander of the English forces in the north may have distracted him from any thoughts of electoral patronage and led Garrard to seek assistance elsewhere. Notwithstanding recent tensions it was almost certainly on Cottington’s interest that he was elected on 17 March to Parliament to serve for Hindon with court office-holder Sir Miles Fleetwood*.50C219/42, pt ii , no. 65; M.J. Havran, Caroline Courtier: the Life of Lord Cottington (1973), 145; ‘Francis Cottington, 1st Baron Cottington’, Oxford DNB. The borough, by now merely a village, had traditionally been nominated by the owner of the adjacent Fonthill Gifford estate, where Garrard had spent a month as Cottington’s guest in 1637.51‘Hindon’, HP Commons 1604-1629; Strafforde Letters, ii. 114. However, while Northumberland recovered sufficiently to participate in, and press unsuccessfully for the continuation of, what became the Short Parliament, Garrard made no visible contribution to proceedings.

Over the summer of 1640 Garrard remained in close touch with a still ailing Northumberland.52CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 268, 448; 1640-1, p. 112. A long sojourn at Hatfield was interrupted in mid-August by the necessity of returning to London to close his school when one of the pupils caught the plague, and followed in September by a trip collecting Charterhouse revenues in Essex and Cambridgeshire, not greatly affected by the ‘inconveniences’ of the northern war, as he reported. He had arrived at Sion when on 6 October he sent a bulletin on Northumberland to Conway, observing, ‘things are almost at the worst, and therefore I hope [for] a speedy amendment, except the Scots grow unreasonable in their demands. Then it will be a longer work’.53SP16/469, f. 96. It is unclear why, given his patrons, his record and his evident engagement with politics, Garrard did not gain a seat in the Long Parliament.

In the longer term Garrard escaped neither the repercussions of conflict nor the attention of Westminster. By 1643 Charterhouse rents had decreased to the extent that the governors decreed a fast every Wednesday evening as an economy measure.54Hist. Acct. of Charter-House, 229. By 13 January that year Garrard had been forced to petition Parliament for clarification of its contradictory orders regarding the expulsion or otherwise of one of his underlings.55LJ v. 559a; CJ ii. 917b. On 30 June he appealed to Sir Robert Harley*, who had been entrusted by Parliament with the protection of his brother-in-law Lord Conway’s goods in the aftermath of the latter’s implication in the plot by Edmund Waller* and others to seize London for the king. The previous day, while Garrard was at dinner at York House, the duchess of Buckingham’s house in the Strand, soldiers claiming warrant from the parliamentarian general Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, had arrived at his Charterhouse lodgings seeking illicit arms and money. On inspection, they had accepted the explanation that 46 chests in his possession contained books from Conway’s vast library, which had been there ever since the outbreak of the rebellion in Ireland, and departed. But, claimed Garrard, coming as it did after a fruitless search there for Cottington’s goods the previous August, ‘to have my lodgings thus searched, doth me no good in the eyes of my neighbours’. He requested that he be ‘not farther troubled, for keeping them in my custody, according to the trust reposed in me by my friend the Lord Conway’.56Add. 70105. Suspicions may have been well placed. A letter that November from the second Lady Northumberland to Conway (by this time at Oxford) suggests that Garrard was involved with his aristocratic friends in discreet manoeuvrings for peace at this period.57CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 497.

Garrard resigned from the Charterhouse, citing his age, some time before the appointment of his successor on 9 December 1650.58Hist. Acct. of Charter-House, 236. It is likely that he retired with his pension to Petworth, joining Conway.59‘Conway, Edward, 2nd Viscount Conway’, Oxford DNB. On 17 January 1655 his will was proved by his son and heir. In this brief document, drafted nearly nine years earlier, Garrard senior thanked God for ‘the constant and cheerful resolution ... established in me to live and die in the truly Reformed Protestant religion which I hope will be established by the king and Parliament in the Church of England’.60PROB11/243/122. George Garrard the younger made his own will at Petworth in August 1658, leaving a little over £100 to beneficiaries including several servants of the earl of Northumberland, the local minister, and ‘Mr Garratt the mercer’ (presumably from the London dynasty). He died within the next two years without having made any mark in public life.61PROB11/302/31, PROB11/302/45, PROB11/302/108.