BARTON, John (c.1614-84), of the Middle Temple, London.

The Barton family had been associated with the manor of Brigstock in Northamptonshire since the sixteenth century, but their position was fairly lowly until one John Barton (perhaps the MP’s grandfather) married a well-to-do widow from Lancashire.8Bridges, Northants. ii. 285-7. Of the next generation, Francis Barton was a barrister and master of the utter bar in the Middle Temple, and it was on his father’s recommendation (and into the same chambers) that the younger John Barton was admitted in August 1632.9MTR ii. 799. Barton studied at the Middle Temple for the rest of the decade, was mentioned as standing as manucaptor (or surety) on various occasions in 1634, and was called to the bar in May 1639. He was granted a new chamber in October 1640, but was fined for absence in May 1641 and nothing further is known of him for the next few years.10MTR ii. 822, 825, 827, 881, 898, 906. It seems unlikely that Barton was the ‘John Barton’ granted a pass by Parliament to travel between London and Oxford ‘about the affairs of the [Philip Herbert*, 4th] earl of Pembroke’ in April 1643.11CJ iii. 51a. At some point in the 1640s Barton married Joan Roscarrock, the younger daughter of a prominent Cornish family.12Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 401. The Roscarrocks had been royalists during the first civil war, and remained suspect thereafter; Barton’s brother-in-law, Charles Roscarrock, was one of those facing arrest in August 1651 as Charles Stuart’s army marched south from Scotland.13FSL, X.d.483(97); Cornw. RO, ME/3027. Barton reappears in June 1649, as a claimant against Roscarrock, who had apparently refused to pay £400 assigned to Barton’s wife under her father’s will, and disputes between the two men rumbled on during the next decade.14Maclean, Trigg Minor, iii. 61; C7/55/250.

It was not until the mid-1650s that Barton resumed his legal career, being admitted to the share of a chamber in the Middle Temple in February 1655, and he was allowed to lease the rest of it in June 1656.15MTR iii. 1074, 1094-5, 1099. Despite their on-going legal disagreements, it was probably through the Roscarrocks that Barton secured election for Fowey in the elections for Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament in January 1659. Barton’s involvement in this Parliament was sporadic. He was named to the committee of elections on 28 January, and in early February he twice spoke in debate.16CJ vii. 594b. On 8 February he argued that the division on the ‘recognition’ of Richard Cromwell should not be held prematurely, as ‘it is against a fundamental order that any man should have his liberty of speech taken from him’.17Burton’s Diary, iii. 150. Barton was speaking as a lawyer, rather than as an ally of the commonwealthsmen, and he was equally concerned to abide by established procedure on 12 February, when he argued against Thomas Gewen* and others who called for a large fine on the delinquent MP Robert Danvers alias Villiers* that ‘we ought to proceed upon persons’ rather than estates or property. ‘This House have always been tender of pecuniary mulcts’, he continued, and as ‘the offence was fourteen years since … [and] he has paid for his offence by his composition, I would not have him punished again’.18Burton’s Diary, iii. 250-1.

Barton was re-elected for Fowey in April 1660, and was again moderately active, but he did not sit in any later Parliaments. Instead, he concentrated on his legal career, becoming bencher and reader in the Middle Temple in 1662 and 1667 respectively, and serjeant-at-law in 1669.19MTR iii. 1158, 1180, 1192, 1197-8, 1201, 1209, 1220. Barton remarried in 1665.20London Mar. Lics. ed. Foster, 91. In later years he was financially compromised, however, and when he wrote his will in 1683, said that his new wife had been ‘contented to accept of much less than by our marriage agreement I was obliged to leave her’, adding that he now left her £700 ‘in lieu of our marriage agreement, and he also assigned £800 to clear a debt he had incurred purchasing houses in London.21PROB11/376/53. He was succeeded by his son, Charles Barton.