GLANVILLE, John (c.1586-1661), of Broad Hinton, Wilts. and Chancery Lane, London.

In 1630, John Glanville was an active counsel on the western assize circuit, but with a much higher profile in Bristol and Plymouth.26Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 14, 26. He was a rising legal star, and the son of a judge (as he later reminded the Commons), but he encountered personal hostility from Charles I when he was proposed for the serjeantcy in 1636. The king had encountered Glanville at a hearing between the bishop of Chichester and Lincoln’s Inn, in which the lawyer was both a witness and a counsel.27LI Black Bks. ii. 333. Glanville overcame this prejudice against him with the help of the queen and Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland.28Baker, Serjeants at Law, 39. Thus when he made the customary first speech in chancery after being admitted to the order of serjeant-at-law, there was more than merely ritualistic acknowledgement in what he had to say.

He was much bound to many honourable friends and some that he knew not of, and others that he knew for their labour and endeavour to bring him into the king’s favour, and protested of his faithfulness and diligence.29Baker, Serjeants at Law, 385.

As well as the earl of Holland, Glanville also enjoyed the favour of Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry†, Archbishop William Laud and the queen, who were his sponsors at his admission to Serjeants’ Inn.30Baker, Serjeants at Law, 440.

In 1640 Glanville had been recorder of Plymouth for twenty years and of Bristol for ten. His opinions on tricky legal cases before the courts of Bristol were preserved in a minute book. Some 17 of his judgments were considered weighty enough to be recorded in this way, and the subjects of them included inheritance, city property interests and bankruptcy.31Bristol Ref. Lib. Bristol MS 10160, pp. 3-9, 27, 33, 37, 40-2, 45. Among his first pronouncements must have been his view on the city’s prospects for recovering the castle, which he delivered in 1629; his last case was on 28 May 1641, so his connection with Bristol remained active after his election to Parliament.32Bristol RO, 04026/20 p. 326; Bristol Ref. Lib. Bristol MS 10160 p. 45. Glanville was returned for the city to sit in the first Parliament of 1640 by virtue of his senior legal office on the city’s behalf. The electorate was a narrow one of the mayor, aldermen and common council. Later in 1640 the city oligarchy had to respond to a petition from burgesses who sought a wider franchise, but Glanville was sent to Westminster with Humphrey Hooke without comment or a record of it in the council proceedings.33Bristol RO, 04264/3 f. 108.

Glanville was selected as Speaker of this Parliament. He was an uncontentious choice, and Edward Hyde* considered him

a man very equal to the work, very well acquainted with the proceedings in Parliament, of a quick conception, and of a ready and voluble expression, dexterous in disposing the House, and very acceptable to them.34Clarendon, Hist. i. 174.

In his speech on the opening day of this assembly (15 Apr.), he spoke uncontroversially and in the customary terms, describing the ancient constitution of king, Lords and Commons as ‘the highest state of majesty’. He implored the king to consider the interests of ‘religion, chivalry, justice, commerce and unity’, and requested the usual parliamentary privileges of freedom from arrest, freedom of speech and access to the king.35Procs. Short Parl. 126-30. This speech was published in 1641, when the political climate had heated up. The printed version shows evidence of editing in order to play down the elements of unanimity and deference to the king, prominent in Glanville’s speech when he delivered it.36The Speech of Sergeant Glanvill (1641, E.198.32); Procs. Short Parl. 295. The following day (16 Apr.), he promised to inform the House of what the king and the lord keeper had said in their speeches in the Lords, and on the 17th made his report, with the benefit of notes.37Procs. Short Parl. 145; Aston’s Diary, 6-7. What he had to report did not please all his auditors. John Pym was the first to remind the uneasy Commons that the Speaker was in his reporting role simply the ears of the House.38Aston’s Diary, 7.

On 4 May, however, in committee, when he was not in the chair, Glanville departed from the conventional and institutional part to which he had necessarily been assigned in this Parliament to launch an onslaught against Ship Money and especially the judicial verdict in favour of the king that had been pronounced in 1637. On 30 April, he had intervened somewhat testily to ask, with regard to that issue appearing on the Commons agenda, ‘that if we hold it not illegal why do we complain’.39Aston’s Diary, 100. On 4 May, however, his initial intention seems to have been to support the government, arguing ‘how very inconsiderable a sum twelve subsidies amounted to’, but he soon went far beyond his original brief.40Clarendon, Hist. i. 180. Glanville described the Ship Money judgment as ‘senseless’, a ‘damned and impious opinion’ that should not have been allowed to stand. A commentator noted how Glanville went further than any other Member had dared to do.41CSP Dom. 1640, p. 153; Procs. Short Parl. 195, 243; Aston’s Diary, 130-1. Glanville wanted Parliament to declare against the Ship Money verdict, because of its propaganda value; a declaration would ‘reach all’.42Aston’s Diary, 136. Unlike some critics of the government, he appreciated the symbolic nature of Ship Money as representing a range of grievances.43Aston’s Diary, 140. He also contributed his views on other grievances, including monopolies and encroachments on the Petition of Right. Glanville’s main point, that granting the king 12 subsidies was small enough price to pay for the continued existence of Parliament was lost, and the situation was rescued apparently by Hyde, with help from Glanville, who seems to have been an artless supporter of the court, not a trenchant critic of the king.44Clarendon, Hist. i. 180-1; Procs. Short Parl. 208-9; Aston’s Diary, 132.

The day after Glanville’s outburst in committee, the king summoned the Commons to the Lords, but Speaker Glanville pretended to be unwell.45CSP Dom. 1640, p. 116. An alternative and probably more plausible account has Glanville detained by the king in the Lords while Black Rod sent for his Commons colleagues.46Aston’s Diary, 144. Either way, he was evidently being singled out for close questioning before the Parliament was dissolved. Glanville’s reputation was not damaged by the premature dissolution; back in Bristol, in June the reforms of the court of orphans that he had planned were ordered by the corporation to be implemented.47Bristol RO, 04264/3, f. 103v. In May 1641, he was apparently called back to London when on circuit, but was active again in assizes in August.48CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 575; Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 217. He was passed over in elections for the Long Parliament, but was elected (5 June 1642) with John Taylor to replace Humphrey Hooke and Richard Longe, disabled from sitting as monopolists. Glanville’s appointment as king’s serjeant on 6 July 1640 may have been intended to buy him off, and that was certainly the effect of it in this Parliament. As a senior judge, he took no part in the Commons when he was returned again, but acted as a reporter between Lords and Commons and was effectively treated as a Member of the upper Chamber.

On 9 January 1641, Glanville brought bills to the Commons from the Lords on minor private matters.49Procs. LP ii. 153. A week later, he delivered a message on the taking of evidence in the trial of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†), and at some point later, left London. By April, however, he found himself returning to the capital as a witness in the trial. This was in that part of the proceedings, managed by Bulstrode Whitelocke*, concerned with Strafford’s alleged counselling the king to dismiss the Parliament of which Glanville had been Speaker. By 14 April, Glanville had resumed his activities as a messenger for the Lords.50Procs. LP ii. 208; iii. 376, 488, 490, 547, 552, 556. Underlining his dual status as witness and manager in the Strafford affair was the chance discovery by the clerk of the Commons, Henry Elsynge, of Glanville’s copy of the examination of Sir Henry Vane I*, lying about in the chamber. As this was highly sensitive, containing Vane’s report of Strafford’s ambiguous reference to an army that could be used to suppress opposition in either Ireland or England, there was bound to be at least the possibility of proceedings, but the matter was in the event dropped.51Procs. LP iv. 84-5.

On 5 May, Glanville was nominated as a clerk on behalf of the Lords to examine the alleged plot in the army.52Harl. 6424, ff. 62, 62v. In June he acted as a messenger from the Lords on this subject.53Procs. LP v. 132. He was a go-between in the Lords’ interests on another 19 occasions during 1641, but nothing of Glanville’s personal interests can be gleaned from the topics on which he reported or sought conferences.54Procs. LP v. 168, 174, 238, 245, 318, 384, 560; vi. 219, 237, 246, 314, 318, 332, 337; D’Ewes (C), 25, 130, 190, 191, 217, 231, 273, 282, 308, 320. On 20 December, the Commons learned that some London citizens had been examined before king’s counsel, including Glanville, on whether they had heard anyone say that there would shortly be bloodshed. The Commons appointed a committee to ask Glanville and the others whether this was true.55D’Ewes (C), 320; Nalson, Impartial Colln. ii. 763. On the 30th, just as the Commons were rising, Glanville brought a vote from the Lords unsympathetic to the House’s vote to set a guard.56D’Ewes (C), 368. Thereafter, Glanville disappeared from active participation in Parliament for a year, until he again brought a message from the Lords (23 Nov. 1642).57CJ ii. 861; LJ v. 455; Harl. 164, f. 123.

At the outbreak of the civil war, Glanville seems to have tried to keep out of the conflict, apparently declining to lend money to Parliament (31 Dec. 1642).58Add. 18777, f. 109. During the royalist occupation of Bristol, Glanville continued to act as recorder, and attended corporation meetings there on 9 August 1643.59Bristol RO, 04264/4, p. 34. Unlike his fellow MP, John Taylor, Glanville kept a much lower profile in the city and did not rush to join the king at Oxford. He seems thus to have been more a trimmer than a committed royalist. Even so, he was regarded by the king’s administration at Oxford as a reliable figure, since he was named to a number of local offices between October 1643 and June 1644. On 30 March 1644, he was granted a special pardon by the king, presumably for his earlier participation in the Westminster Parliament.60Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 191. It was this association with Oxford that brought upon him his arrest in Westminster Hall on 20 June 1644, after a Commons debate (which took place while he was walking around the hall) on whether he should be apprehended.61Harl. 166, f. 75v. Glanville was brought to the bar of the Commons, even though his offence was deserting the Lords, to which he was an assistant. He was then accused of joining with an assize judge to bring in indictments for treason against Westminster MPs, and was sent to the Tower. A message was sent to the Lords on 21 July, impeaching him and others of high treason.62Add. 31116, pp. 291, 302. His specific offence was that he and other royalist judges had condemned a man due to be exchanged as a prisoner, resulting in the man’s execution by Prince Maurice.63Harl. 166, f. 99v.

There seems to have been some sympathy for Glanville in the House. His own account (10 Jan. 1645) of his conduct in the war was that he had been carried prisoner by royalists to Oxford, but returned to his house at Broad Hinton and after some confusion obtained a pass from the earl of Essex to London, where he was arrested. Glanville also pleaded poverty, his estates in Wiltshire and Devon being far apart and under sequestration.64CCAM 408-9. Not until 25 September 1645 was he disabled from sitting in the Commons.65CJ iv. 285b. He claimed before the Committee for Advance of Money* that his losses amounted to £8,000 by war damage, and in January 1648 sought favourable treatment on the grounds that he had already been sequestered. On 22 January 1648 he was fined £2,320, at one tenth of his estate, and by February had paid half his fine. Bulstrode Whitelocke intervened on his behalf to secure his relief from prison and permission to compound.66Whitelocke, Diary, 219. His case dragged on, not least because one of his properties, Lamerton rectory, near Tavistock, was granted to a contentious Independent clergyman, Thomas Larkham, whose quarrels with neighbours who also had interests in the rectory persisted down to 1653. One of Glanville’s relations was a principal bête noire of Larkham’s, but Sir John Glanville had little or no involvement in the dispute.67CCAM 410-11; CCC 2683; A Strange Metamorphosis in Tavistock (1658) (E.940.2); Loan 9, sub 1653, July 1656.

Glanville was formally dismissed as ‘unfit’ from his post as recorder of Bristol by the corporation there (6 Jan. 1646). He was succeeded by the leading Independent, Edmund Prideaux I*.68Bristol RO, 04264/4 p. 131. He kept aloof from the royalist intrigues of the 1650s, and lived in the gatehouse of Broad Hinton, where he received the diarist John Evelyn in 1654.69Diary and Corresp. of John Evelyn ed. W. Bray (1908), 201. He told Evelyn he had burnt down the main house himself, in order to prevent the parliamentarians using it as a garrison. He seems to have tried to recover his career by petitioning the protectoral council in 1654, although his past offences were immediately recalled.70CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 1,17, 203. After the death of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell*, Glanville re-entered politics as MP for the Cornish borough of St Germans, presumably on his own interest as a landowner in the Plymouth area, and was also elected for Newport in the same county. He seems never to have taken his seat, however, and on 12 February 1659 he was expelled. His offence was his long involvement with the Committee for Advance of Money, and his case took up little of his fellow Members’ time. The writ for a new election in St Germans was moved by Thomas Kelsey.71CJ vii. 603a; Burton’s Diary, iii. 236, 256. At the Restoration, Glanville was suggested as a candidate by Lady Englefield, a local landowner, at Wootton Bassett, but he did not stand.72HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘Wootton Bassett’. He was restored to his position of king’s serjeant, but did not live long to enjoy it. He made his will on 27 July 1661, and died on 2 October. He was buried at Broad Hinton.73PROB11/306/314; Prince, Worthies (1701), 429.