DORMER, John (1612-79), of Lee Grange, Quainton, Bucks. and Ripple, Worcs.

The Dormers of Lee Grange were a cadet branch of one of the leading Buckinghamshire families, with the senior branch being represented by the Dormers of Wing. This MP was a third cousin once removed of the senior member of the family, Robert Dormer, 1st earl of Carnarvon. As early as 1534 John Dormer’s great-grandfather, Peter Dormer, was leasing the manor of Shipton Lee at Quainton and these lands were acquired outright in 1622 by Sir Fleetwood Dormer.27VCH Bucks. iv. 95. John ‘Black Jack’ Dormer was the eldest of Sir Fleetwood’s four sons.28Vis. Bucks. 42. Educated at Oxford and at Lincoln’s Inn, he was called to the bar in 1636 and later practised as a barrister.29LI Black Bks. ii. 339. His marriage to a Worcestershire heiress, Katherine Woodward, meant that he gained control of a small estate at Ripple.30Vis. Worcs. 103; PROB11/171/158; Nash, Collections, ii. 295; VCH Worcs. iii. 491. This explains his later involvement in Worcestershire county politics. When his own father died in 1639, Dormer inherited the bulk of his father’s estates in Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire.31PROB11/179/267.

Little can be said about Dormer’s response to the outbreak of the civil war, although it is known he was among the first people in Worcestershire to provide Parliament with horses.32Diary of Henry Townshend ed. Willis Bund, ii. 78. At about the same time, the king nominated him as one of the commissioners of array for Buckinghamshire, presumably without effect.33Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. It was in Worcestershire, rather than in his native Buckinghamshire that he began to be appointed by Parliament to local office in 1644.34A. and O. Late in May 1645, Dormer and another gentleman relayed news to the Commons of the ‘great service’ done by Edward Massie* in storming the Worcestershire town of Evesham.35CJ iv. 156b. Dormer was therefore not an obvious candidate to succeed in the by-election at Buckingham in the spring of 1646 for the vacancy created by the expulsion and subsequent death of Sir Alexander Denton*. Nevertheless, Dormer was returned for the borough, apparently without a contest, and had taken his seat by 15 May.36Supra, ‘Buckingham’; CJ iv. 547a.

No sooner had Dormer taken his seat than he was granted leave to return to the country.37CJ iv. 547a. He had resumed his seat by 21 August 1646, when he was among a group of MPs temporarily added to the Committee for the Army in order to prepare an estimate of the accounts of the Scots’ forces in England.38CJ iv. 650b. On 26 August he took the Covenant.39CJ iv. 653a. Granted leave on 19 March 1647, he had returned to Westminster within two months, securing appointment on 11 May to a committee for settling an estate of £5,000 a year on the commander of the New Model army, Sir Thomas Fairfax*.40CJ v. 117b, 167a. Dormer’s appointment two days later (13 May) to a committee for recompensing another of the army’s friends, the earl of Mulgrave, would be his last in the House that year.41CJ v. 170b. His only mention in the Journal during 1648 was his assignment late in November with the future regicide Simon Mayne* to assist in the collection of Buckinghamshire’s assessment quota – this at a time when Parliament was keen to avert the threat of army intervention by satisfying the soldiers’ arrears of pay.42CJ vi. 87b.

Although Dormer was not among those secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, he was not admitted to the Rump until 22 February 1649, when he made his dissent to the 5 December vote on further negotiations with the king.43CJ vi. 148b. Just four days later he was appointed to take care of the bill to make the River Wey navigable between Guildford and the Thames.44CJ vi. 542a. He may well have resumed his seat specifically in order to promote this piece of legislation.45CJ vi. 577b. According to Samuel Hartlib, with whom he spoke early in 1653 of his role in the passage of the bill, Dormer believed that there were three ways to advance public welfare: better river navigation; improvements to land; and ‘transplanting the worst persons to become better in another soil’. He had apparently tried without success to get the 1653 poor relief bill amended to achieve the third goal and at the time he met Hartlib he was promoting another river navigation bill. He also told Hartlib of an acquaintance who had developed glass bee hives (this could have been John Wilkins) and he promised to give him details of how rats and mice could be eradicated from barns.46Sheffield Univ. Lib. Hartlib Pprs. 28/2/52A. His first appointment thereafter was to a committee set up on 9 August 1649 on an ordinance for suppressing ‘seditious and scandalous news’; and his nomination to committees thereafter was sporadic until a period of eight months or so from late 1650 when his name featured regularly in the Journal.47CJ vi. 276a. A further, if less concentrated, series of appointments commenced late in 1651 and continued until late 1652. His only committee nomination of 1653 (14 Apr.) came shortly before Parliament was dissolved by the army on 20 April.48CJ vii. 278a.

Although Dormer’s appointments in the Rump reveal no clear focus to his activity at Westminster, they are sufficiently numerous to refute the suggestion that his attendance was ‘brief’ and linked to his own private interests.49Worden, Rump Parl. 98-9. In fact, he was named to nearly 40 committees in the Rump, including the Committee for Plundered Ministers (and its executive partner for godly reform, the committee for regulating the universities) and the Committee for the Army.50CJ vi. 437a, 577b; vii. 61a. He also chaired three committees – or at least reported draft legislation from them – on the River Wey bills (26 Feb. 1651), to conscript 2,000 men for service in Ireland under Oliver Cromwell* (26 Mar.), and to complete the sale of fee farm rents (11 Mar. 1652).51CJ vi. 542a, 553b, 563a, 577b; vii. 104a, 108a. In the summer of 1652, he was named to two important committees that were set up in response to demands from the army for wholesale reform and were headed by Cromwell and his allies.52CJ vii. 164b, 171b. Dormer’s only known act of obvious self-interest under the Rump was to apply to the Committee for Compounding in January 1652 for grant of the estates of William Saunders, a lunatic convicted of recusancy who owned land at Welford in Northamptonshire.53CCC 2939.

Apart from a period in the mid-1650s when he was removed from the Buckinghamshire and Worcestershire commissions of the peace, Dormer retained his local offices throughout the 1650s. This suggests that he was willing to give some support to the protectorate. It is true that in June 1659 the royalist agent, Nicholas Armorer, received £100 from John Dormer of Lee Grange as a loan to assist the exiled Charles Stuart.54Stowe 142, f. 62. What is not clear, however, is whether this benefactor was this MP or his son, John junior. As it was the son who two years later was created a baronet, he is the more likely candidate.

After returning to Westminster following the restoration of the Rump in May 1659, Dormer was named to a further 20 committees – 19 between 21 May and 20 August and one on 7 October.55CJ vii. 661b, 665a, 665b, 670b, 682a, 684b, 689a, 690a, 691a, 694b, 717a, 717b, 720b, 726a, 728a, 734a, 758a, 761b, 763b, 793b. Again, no clear pattern emerges from these appointments beyond his commitment to the efficient management of the Rump’s finances and the supply and upkeep of its military forces. He resumed his seat following the Rump’s final restoration late in December 1659, and between early January 1660 and 15 February he was named to 16 committees, including those for drafting a new Engagement and on a bill ‘for disabling persons to elect, or be elected, to this present Parliament’.56CJ vii. 803a, 805a, 805b, 806a, 806b, 807a, 808b, 818a, 821a, 822a, 828b, 833b, 837a, 838b, 842a, 844a. Evidently regarded as a reliable and trusted administrator, he was included on 28 January on a new commission for managing the admiralty and navy.57CJ vii. 825b; A. and O. Similarly, on 1 February he was named to a six-man committee, headed by the restored Rump’s chief financial expert William White, ‘to take a view of all the respective treasuries belonging to this commonwealth ... and give an account thereof to the Parliament’.58CJ vii. 828b. The next day (2 Feb.) he was put in charge of a committee to investigate possible financial mismanagement of the post office by the late Edmund Prideaux I*.59CJ vii. 833b. Dormer was specifically tasked with amending a bill committed on 15 January for an Engagement to be subscribed by members of the next council of state. However, this would be his last appointment in the Rump; he apparently had no desire to serve the House, or perhaps even to attend his seat, following the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February.60CJ vii. 844a.

Dormer was returned for Buckingham again to the 1660 Convention, defeating an electoral challenge from Francis Ingoldsby*, but he apparently showed little enthusiasm for its proceedings, receiving appointment to only two committees.61HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘John Dormer’. When he died in 1679, he was buried in the parish church at Quainton, where a large monument was later erected to commemorate him, his father and his brother Fleetwood.62Pevsner, Bucks. 607-8. Dormer’s eldest son, John, who had received a baronetcy from Charles II in 1661, had predeceased him, so it was his grandson, Sir William, 2nd bt. who inherited his lands.63CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 37; Burke Dorm. and Extinct Baronetcies, 163. When in the 1690s mental illness prevented Sir William from managing his own affairs, control of those lands was granted to John’s other son, Robert†, who went on to become a judge in the court of common pleas. The male line of the Lee Grange branch died out on Robert Dormer’s death in 1726.64Lipscomb, Buckingham, i. 415; Burke Dorm. and Extinct Baronetcies, 163; VCH Bucks. iv. 95; HP Commons 1690-1715; ‘Robert Dormer’, Oxford DNB.