MAYNARD, John (1604-90), of Tavistock, the Middle Temple and Gunnersbury, Mdx.

John Maynard was the first of his family to sit in Parliament, and was notable for his longevity and his service in no fewer than eleven Parliaments. Historians confuse him with Sir John Maynard*, and he is credited with being a serjeant-at-law long before he achieved that honour in 1654 and a knight years before he was made one by Charles II in 1660.41D.A. Orr, Treason and the State (Cambridge, 2002), 187; Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 228; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 448; J. Fitzgibbons, Cromwell’s House of Lords (Woodbridge, 2018), 266. He was one of many MPs galvanized by the spirit of reform in 1641, and during that period found a notoriety as the prosecutor of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, that he found impossible to shake off. Despite his assiduous record as a member of the Long Parliament, in which he was named to 348 committees before Pride’s Purge, Maynard found that his successful career as a barrister provided a ready means of avoiding being cornered politically. A peace party man for whom a treaty with the king remained the elusive prize during the civil war, it was his undoubted skills at the bar that helped bring together Maynard and successive republican governments in partnership. Lacking inherited wealth or secure patronage, he created an electoral interest of his own in Exeter and Plymouth by his skilful deployment of charitable resources for which he had become a trustee during the 1630s.

Background and early career

The Maynards were a Devon family of minor gentry status. They were settled in Sherford, a parish east of Kingsbridge in the South Hams, for at least three generations before Alexander Maynard acquired an estate in Tavistock.42Vivian, Vis. Devon, 561. Alexander, John Maynard’s father, was a fourth son, who was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1587.43MTR i. 291. Alexander maintained a presence at the Middle Temple, and during the 1620s a number of Devon gentry sons were bound with him there, among them Thomas Wise* and Francis Buller I*.44MTR ii. 678, 681, 701, 719, 720. He did not neglect the affairs of his native county. He was active on the Devon bench of magistrates by the mid-1620s, and by 1630 was acting as retained counsel for Plymouth corporation.45Devon RO, Devon QS order bk. 1/6; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, f. 221v. Alexander’s estate in Tavistock, rated at £10 in lands for the purposes of the subsidy, gave him a prominence in that town. He was evidently a godly Protestant, who supported the ministry there of George Hughes (later to move to Plymouth), but it was his wife, John Maynard’s mother, who in 1638 was granted the opportunity of presenting Hughes to the living by Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, who owned the advowson.46E179/102/486; E. Calamy, An Account of the Ministers (1713), 223; Calamy, A Continuation of the Account (1727), 253; Calamy Revised, 281. According to one commentator, it was Alexander Maynard who kept Tavistock’s ‘sons of wickedness’ under control in the same way that Ignatius Jourdain† did in Exeter.47DWL, John Quick, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, 500, 503.

John Maynard was thus brought up in the household of a regionally powerful legal figure with a reputation for godliness, and his early career was heavily influenced by his parental legacy. It was almost inevitable that, after studying at Exeter College, Oxford, where he took his degree, he should have been bound with his father at the Middle Temple. It was in this period that he first became friendly with Bulstrode Whitelocke*, later a regular collaborator both at law and in politics.48Whitelocke, Diary, 49, 86n. Called to the bar in 1626, Maynard continued the tradition of providing a point of contact for newcomers from his native region. Among his pupils or associates at the inn down to 1640 were John Elford*, John Bampfylde*, George Peard* and William Say*, all of whom became colleagues in the Long Parliament.49MTR ii. 714, 722, 730, 772, 842, 891. Like his father, Maynard built up a professional reputation both in the west country and in London. The London practice was established first. According to the Oxford antiquary, Anthony Wood, who took a distinctly ambivalent view of Maynard, he owed his rise to the patronage of Charles I’s attorney-general, William Noy.50Ath. Ox. iv. 292. By 1627 Maynard was appearing regularly in the court of king’s bench as either prosecuting or defence counsel. At least 16 cases in which he appeared between 1627 and 1640 were thought worthy of inclusion by George Croke† in his volume of Law Reports for the reign of Charles I.51G. Croke, Reports ... Charles the First (4th ed. 1793), 145, 321, 384, 387, 404, 436, 509, 510, 518, 532, 543, 547, 552, 554, 586, 594. The frequency of these notices must suggest that by 1640 Maynard was a counsel sought after by clients for his energy and legal ingenuity. Only one of these cases seems to have brought Maynard into conflict with the government, and then only obliquely: the case of 1639 when he and Peard appeared for some London merchants gaoled by the lord mayor for refusing to enter recognizances after they had been summoned to the appear before the privy council.52Croke, Reports ... Charles the First, 552. In May that year, however, Maynard was directly in conflict with the privy council on a personal matter, after government-licensed saltpetremen had invaded his father’s property in Tavistock, causing Alexander more distress, so he said, than the 4,000 discharged soldiers who had roamed the district in 1625 after the disastrous expedition to Cadiz.53CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 116, 262.

By the late 1630s, Maynard was also developing his reputation in the west country, as he appeared as counsel on the western assize circuit. In March 1637, at the Cornwall assizes, an appeal to the court by Maynard, acting for a parish, secured an order to the Cornish magistrates in a case involving liability for the poor. He continued to take cases on the western circuit long after achieving prominence in Parliament, and the judicial orders resulting from his appearances show that he was highly effective as an advocate.54Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 122, 216, 217, 220, 224, 232. The corporation of Exeter took him on in December 1638 as a retained counsel.55Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, ff. 82v, 83. His appointment there may or may not have owed a little to the fact that since 1636, Maynard had been the most prominent trustee of the estate of Elize (or Eliseus) Hele of Exeter, a trust which had significant implications for welfare provision in the city and elsewhere, and which was to provide a motif running through the rest of Maynard’s life and career.56PROB11/170/62; CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 6. Within a year of his official association with Exeter, the corporation was in hopeful correspondence with Maynard over the windfall they were anticipating from the Hele trust.57Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, f. 94. Civic ordinances and small instalments of Hele’s charity money formed the subjects of regular correspondence between Maynard and the Exeter chamber well into the period of the civil war.58Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. viii, ff. 107, 110v, 115v, 135, 151. The corporation of Plymouth, too, was persuaded of Maynard’s value. There, he succeeded John Glanville* as recorder. Glanville resigned his office to Maynard in August 1640 with a friendly and gracious commendation of the younger man.59Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/103, 1/359/71. Both men were from the Tavistock area, but just as importantly, the transfer of the office must surely have been with the approval of the earl of Bedford, proprietor of Tavistock and high steward of Plymouth.

Short Parliament, 1640

Maynard was evidently keen to enter Parliament in 1640, and was returned both at Totnes and Newport in the elections held for the two Parliaments which met that year. Either he or his father was also thought to be a likely contender for a seat at Tavistock.60Antony House, Carew-Pole BC 26/18/10. It is not necessary to invoke the patronage of the earl of Bedford to explain his success. Maynard had built up an interest of his own in Newport, apparent from pre-1640 property transactions and from early in the life of the Long Parliament, when Sir Samuel Rolle*, seeking a seat, thought that a letter to Maynard would be enough to smooth his way in there.61Buller Pprs. 31; Cornw. RO, WW/278, WW/327/7, WW/123/2. In Totnes, one seat went to Oliver St John*, a known client of Bedford, but Maynard had some interest of his own there, too, as his cousin was a leading member of the corporation.62‘Christopher Maynard’, supra. In the event, Maynard chose the Devon borough over the Cornish one on both occasions.63CJ ii. 4b, 47a. He was elected to the important privileges committee of the Short Parliament, and was a vocal arbiter of a number of contested elections. In the case of Great Bedwyn, he argued for a wide franchise (21 Apr.), and insisted on the importance of correct procedure by the sheriff as returning officer in the case of Lincolnshire (24 Apr.). When the confused election at Bere Alston, in his own county, was reviewed, he steered diplomatically away from an attack on Sir Nicholas Slanning*, who had crudely bribed an unqualified elector, by pointing out that such an inducement would not invalidate another person’s election.64Aston’s Diary, 47, 147, 150.

Maynard took the chair at the committee which investigated the king’s levy of Ship Money. He laid out the ground work for the drafting of an order on the subject, spoke on the history of the controversial tax and summarized the issue at stake as being whether or not a threat to the safety of the kingdom could excuse a tax without the consent of Parliament.65Procs. Short Parl. 184; Aston’s Diary, 99, 100. He was put in charge of assembling the evidence in the cases of the merchants Bates and Samuel Vassall*, who had suffered under the regime of the king’s personal rule. In all his recorded interventions in this Parliament, Maynard never strayed from a legalistic mode of expression, and it was apparent from the start that he commanded the attention of the House as a rising lawyer of some reputation. Among the more technical legal subjects that claimed his attention in this Parliament were conveyancing of property by those under age (23 Apr.) and the reform of probate law (1 May). On this latter point, he wanted to ensure that the liabilities of estates should fall on heirs not executors, perhaps with his experience as a trustee of the Hele estates in mind.66Aston’s Diary, 23, 45-6, 111. He was given charge of a bill on occupancy, the process by which ownership over previously unowned property was established.67CJ ii. 10a, 17a.

The Long Parliament up to the Strafford’s trial, 1640-1

All in all, Maynard’s debut as a parliamentarian was highly successful in terms of the significant impact he made, and his return to Westminster in the second election of the year was virtually guaranteed. Again he was elected to the privileges committee (6 Nov.), and this time was given the chair of it.68CJ ii. 20b. Over the next year, until mid-November 1641, Maynard reported to the House at least 16 times on disputed elections.69CJ ii. 22a, 23a, 29a, 30a, 31a, 47a, 51b, 58a, 78b, 86a, 95b, 173a, 311a. These reports represented merely a fraction of the business before the committee. In March 1641, as he applied to the House for release from the chairmanship, Maynard told the House that 130 petitions had been lodged, of which 110 had been heard.70Procs LP ii. 652. His leadership of this committee gave Maynard a position of great influence in the Commons. A Member in a disputed election case would, as did Sir John Bramston, for example, or Bulstrode Whitelocke, apply himself to Maynard as his ‘friend and good acquaintance’.71Autobiography of Sir John Bramston (Cam. Soc. xxxii), 160; Whitelocke, Diary, 123. In debate on one of the earliest of these cases, that of Great Marlow, Maynard contradicted Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, who in a curious foreshadowing of Thomas Rainborowe* in 1647, had asserted that the poorest man should have a voice in elections. In Maynard’s view, which was surely correct, the poor were not entitled to any vote.72Procs. LP i. 187.

As in the previous Parliament, Maynard offered authoritative pronouncements on procedural matters at elections, insisting that due notice had to be given for them to be held (8 Dec.).73Procs. LP i. 515. He asserted the cardinal legal principle in franchise disputes to be the general rule that ‘Liberty by prescription cannot be lost but by grant it may’.74Procs. LP i. 570. This rule was applied to disputed elections such as at Great Marlow, but it was also used to recover the franchise for boroughs which had lost it. There can be no doubt that it was Maynard, in the chair of the privileges committee – rather than John Pym*, as a modern commentator has proposed – who sponsored the restoration of the Devon towns of Ashburton and Honiton as parliamentary boroughs on the grounds that they had sent Members to Parliament in the thirteenth century.75Procs LP i. 316; CJ ii. 36b; H.J. Hanham, ‘Ashburton as a parliamentary borough’, Trans. Devonshire Assoc. xcviii. 211. It could not be assumed that he would support the rights of boroughs in all aspects, however; on 23 December he contradicted Sir John Culpeper*, who had claimed an exemption from the subsidy for the Cinque Ports on the basis of their charters. Maynard agreed that their charters exempted them from certain demands of the king, but not from parliamentary taxation.76Northcote Note Bk. 108.

Notwithstanding the lofty legalistic tone which he habitually adopted, Maynard had clearly emerged as a critic of the government by November 1640, and was much in evidence in a range of activities. Between the opening of the Parliament and the end of December 1641 he was named to 65 committees, not including conferences with the Lords. He called for monopolists to be haled before Parliament as delinquents (20 Nov.), and attacked the high court of chivalry as an unnecessary rival of ample common law jurisdiction over matters such as duels (19 Feb).77Procs. LP i. 209; ii. 491; CJ ii. 34b In his attack on this court, over which Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel, presided as earl marshal, he joined other prominent common lawyers such as Whitelocke, Edward Hyde and Geoffrey Palmer who conferred on their campaign to strike it down.78Whitelocke, Mems. i. 147. In his speech against the court of chivalry, Maynard acknowledged the jurisdiction of church courts over defamation, which suggests that there were limits to his personal antipathy towards the church hierarchy, or at least a cautious, lawyerly approach to church jurisdiction. On the growing threat of popery, complained of in petitions from Maynard’s towns of Tavistock and Plymouth, he suggested, after he had been called to the committee on the subject, the conservative remedy of a more rigorous application of the existing recusancy laws rather than fresh legislation.79Northcote Note Bk. 26; CJ ii. 39a; PA, Main Pprs. [1641]. In any case, his schedule at the privileges committee must have allowed him little or no time for developing an expertise on religious reform, especially since the case of the earl of Strafford, soon came to occupy much of his time.

Maynard was first named on 19 November to a committee on Strafford’s case, a body charged with searching records on attainder for precedents.80CJ ii. 31b. On the 28th, Maynard was named to a joint committee with the Lords; at the subsequent conference on the 30th, he took the lead in arguing successfully for the terms on which Members of the Commons should participate in the examination of witnesses. As he said to his Commons colleagues, to fix these terms would be vital to the trial’s success; without them, ‘we may fail’.81CJ ii. 39a; Procs. LP i. 373, 375, 383; Northcote Note Bk. 15. He was able to report back to his own House the agreement that a trial would be conducted by the principles of common law, that Strafford’s questioners from the lower House would not need to supply the Lords with written notice of their questions and that precedents would only need to be produced by the Lords if they challenged the procedure followed by the Commons. It is clear that it was Maynard’s confident mastery of his brief that enabled him to satisfy his interlocutors in the Lords, and it was probably his handling of himself on 30 November which allowed him to claim a leading part in Strafford’s trial.82Procs. LP i. 375, 384. He must also have enjoyed the approval of the earl of Bedford, whose Commons associates were so evident in the reform programme of 1641.

In the first three months of 1641 Maynard was named to a number of committees in preparation for the trial of Strafford.83CJ ii. 64a, 72a, 76a, 88b, 92a, 93a, 93b, 98a. On 22 February 1641, Maynard and John Glynne were the only Commons speakers at a conference with the Lords on the trial, Maynard dilating on the distinction between matters of law and those of fact and on defining the role of counsel.84Two Diaries of the Long Parl. 8; Procs. LP ii. 512. On 24 March, the third day of Strafford’s trial, Maynard led with the first two charges against the earl after reading through the entire catalogue of articles. It was evident from Maynard’s presentation that the prosecution was intent on building its case to show that Strafford was guilty of a cumulative treason: ‘a charge ... not ended or expired by one single act but a trade envied by this lord of Strafford ever since the king’s favour hath been bestowed upon him’.85Mr Maynards Speech before Both Houses (1641), 2 (E.196.45); Two Diaries of the Long Parl. 113; Procs. LP iii. 92-4, 99. Maynard’s opening speech was published, apparently to his chagrin, but the timing suggests a well-timed leak, an attempt to win the support of Londoners for the trial.86CJ ii. 116a. Officially, Maynard shared with Whitelocke and John Glynne* the title of assistant to the solicitor-general during the trial, but for much of the trial he took the leading part, to Strafford’s discomposure. Not only did he read out the detailed articles, but also examined Strafford on his responses. On the fourth day of the trial, for example, Maynard’s charge was that Strafford had said that Ireland was a conquered nation and that the king could do as he pleased there. Strafford defended himself on the grounds that he meant that charters in Ireland were void because of the oppressions of Irish councillors, but Maynard refused to budge from his interpretation that Strafford had dispensed with the laws as a conqueror. After these exchanges the earl declared himself too weak to continue.87Procs. LP iii. 120; iv. 63.

It was a strategy in Strafford’s defence of himself to focus on the specifics of the individual charges and ask where in them lay the treason. Maynard’s equally calculated response was to retort that they illustrated how the earl had subverted the fundamental laws.88Procs. LP iii. 248, 255, 284, 285, 288, 296. D’Ewes was impressed at how Maynard got the better of these exchanges, how typically he answered Strafford ‘excellently and fully’, with a ‘sudden and very full answer’ (31 Mar.).89Procs. LP iii. 248, 251. Maynard was robust in his handling of the defendant, declaring on 26 March that ‘there is a fire which these words are but the smoke of, which is the malice of his heart’; dismissing Strafford’s replies as ‘of no weight’ (1 Apr.) and his sickness plea as a delaying tactic (9 Apr.).90Two Diaries of the Long Parl. 31; Procs. LP iii. 284, 285, 288, 473n. Strafford’s unlawful encroachments on the property of the king’s subjects in Ireland and England were a thread that ran through many of Maynard’s articles; in his hands the earl’s rough handling of trade in tobacco and flax became ‘an overthrow of the fundamental right of the subject in matter of property’.91Procs. LP iii. 250, 251, 256-7, 259, 284, 285, 288, 296. He was able to deflect a line of questioning by citing the national emergency. When Strafford challenged Whitelocke’s presentation of four articles together (5 Apr.), Maynard sharply reproved him for trying to tell prosecution counsel how to manage their own evidence, and launched into the assertion that ‘if his treasonable designs had taken effect we had all been reduced to one calamity and there would then have been no difference between a peer and a commoner’.92Procs. LP iii. 375. When John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, wanted Strafford to be asked which kingdom he had in mind when he advised that the king had an Irish army that could be sued to subdue ‘this kingdom’ – a key issue in the trial was whether England or Scotland was meant – a bullish Maynard brushed aside any doubt: ‘To doubt of these words were to doubt whether the kingdom were this kingdom or no’.93Two Diaries of the Long Parl. 36.

Maynard’s impatience was an attempt to conceal the dwindling credibility of the trial. He had invested a great deal of himself in it, having taken responsibility for managing Articles 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 25, 26 and 27 against the earl. When the bill of attainder was introduced into the Commons (10 Apr.) as an alternative means of getting rid of Strafford, Maynard counselled caution, lest ‘one way does not cross another’.94Procs. LP iii. 512. As the attainder bill gathered momentum, Maynard and his colleagues at the trial were left to pursue the course they had instigated, and to claim that the trial and attainder bill were not in competition.95Procs. LP iii. 567, 573, 574; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 588; iv. 224. By 16 April, he was anxious about the outcome of the trial, but even after the attainder bill had passed its third reading in the Commons (21 Apr.), Maynard continued to rake over points that had been aired much earlier in proceedings.96Procs. LP iv. 86. He had by this time also played a leading part in six conferences with the Lords over the trial.97CJ ii. 39b, 76a, 88b, 92a, 98a, 120b, 121a, 122a. Strafford himself was said to have complained that Maynard and Glynne ‘used him like advocates’, while Whitelocke and Palmer treated him like a gentleman.98Whitelocke, Mems. i. 124. There is no doubt that Maynard was delighted with the destruction of Strafford regardless of the means. After the attainder bill was passed, he told Sir John Bramston ‘with great joy ... now we have done our work; if we could not have effected this we could have done nothing’.99Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, 75. Technically, it was the attainder bill rather than the trial that sealed Strafford’s fate, but the impression that there was ‘in legal murder none so deeply read’ as Maynard persisted thereafter.100The Works of the Right Honourable the Late Earls of Rochester and Roscommon (1707), 5.

Champion of the common law, Apr.-Aug. 1641

The Strafford trial occupied most of Maynard’s time during March 1641, but on either side of that he was vocal in a range of reform initiatives. The usual register he adopted in his speeches was that of the champion of the common law, doughtily defending Englishmen’s property against encroachments. This informed his attack (15 Dec. 1640) on the king’s new church Canons, in which he compared the higher clergy’s attempt to foist the Canons on the nation to bids by popes to extend their own power. Both popes and the popishly inclined higher clergy manipulated canonical power to ‘meddle with property as if we did owe it to them’.101Procs. LP i. 604, 610. Maynard was one of the group of MPs who took the Commons’ votes on the Canons to the House of Lords in April 1641.102CJ ii. 130b. During the ten-hour debate on the root and branch petition on 8 February 1641, Maynard provided ‘many reasons’ why it should be referred to a committee with a view to action on it.103Procs. LP ii. 392. He provided legal reasons to show that John Bastwick, banished to the Scillies in the 1630s, had been subjected to ultra vires [beyond the powers] force by the bishops (25 Feb.), and was named to the committee for the bill to punish members of the Convocation of 1640.104Procs. LP ii. 553; CJ ii. 129a. However, with John Selden and John Whistler he urged on 22 April that the universities should be exempted from the act barring clergy from secular employments, a further indication of his cautious approach to clerical jurisdiction and authority.105Procs. LP iv. 59. This show of wary respect did not extend to prerogative courts. It was Maynard that was responsible for drafting the bill to abolish the stannary courts in Devon and Cornwall, a move popular with many involved in the tin industry in the south west, including William Strode I*. The heavily amended bill was pushed through by Maynard on 26 April.106CJ ii. 128a; Procs LP iv. 95; Antony House, Carew-Pole BO/23/59, p. 177. It must have been around this time that he was consulted for an opinion on the definition of mines-royal, the rights in silver mines claimed by the crown.107T. Bushell, A Just and True Remonstrance of his Majestie’s Mines-Royall (1641), 9.

Maynard gave up the chairmanship of the privileges committee to prosecute Strafford, but was once again in the chair by 11 June.108Procs. LP ii. 652; CJ ii. 173a. He doubtless judged the temporary loss of an important political position a worthwhile gamble, if it led to his gaining a reputation for effective advocacy on behalf of the Commons. Even before the start of the Strafford trial, Maynard was working on the impeachment articles against Archbishop William Laud, and during the proceedings against the earl, announced to the Commons that Laud and Francis Cottington†, Baron Cottington, were ‘confederated’ to Strafford in his crimes.109Procs. LP iii. 512. It was surely Maynard’s drafting skills that made him useful in the making of the Protestation of 3 May. Conceived as the basis of a re-grouping in the event of a sudden dissolution of Parliament after the exposure of a plot to seize the Tower of London, the protestation was the fruit of the labour of many anti-Straffordian figures in both Houses. While sole authorship cannot be attributed to Maynard, it was he who reported the text that day, and after taking the protestation himself, then reported the preamble to it. The subsequent bill to ensure that the text was distributed widely to secure the assent of the people was put in Maynard’s hands, and he led the delegation to the Lords on the subject on 4 May.110CJ ii. 132b, 133a, 133b, 134b, 136a; Procs. LP iv. 193, 194.

Maynard continued to be a leading legal voice on behalf of the ‘junto’ in the aftermath of the Strafford case and the army plots. He went to the Lords on behalf of the lower House as counsel to urge the prosecution of figures such as Cottington, implicated in the plots (26 May); served on the committee considering the prosecution of William Piers, bishop of Bath and Wells (4 June) and a fresh committee to maintain the momentum building against Laud (5 June).111CJ ii. 156b, 166b, 168b. Moves against Laud were the backdrop to the conference with the Lords two days later, when Maynard led for the Commons on the illegality of the Canons, tracing their history since 1634. After his friend Whitelocke had read the Commons votes against the Canons, Maynard held forth to show how the Canons served to ‘meddle with the right of kings and liberties and proprieties of the subjects’, reprising arguments he had advanced six months earlier.112Procs. LP v. 9; Two Diaries of Long Parl. 120; 139, n. 149. He was later (27 July) asked to draft a bill on the unlawfulness of the Canons.113CJ ii. 226b. On 28 June he was added to the emergency committee set up in response to the discovery of the army plots, and on 24 July he moved to re-open hearings into the conspiracies, offering his opinion on the value of letters before the House as evidence. Analysis of the plots informed the debate on a bill for regulating the militia.114CJ ii. 190b, 223a; Procs. LP vi. 83, 84.

With a group of seven including Whitelocke, Glynne, Hyde and Edmund Prideaux I, Maynard was asked to prepare a bill on the coinage in precious metals (8 June).115CJ ii. 170b. This was an unusual assignment for Maynard in the period April to August 1641 in that it was not primarily about the justice system. More typically, he was active in debates on the abolition of the courts of star chamber and of high commission, helping to manage a conference with the Lords on the subject (26 June).116CJ ii. 189b, 191a; Procs. LP v. 413, 421, 422, 638. Bills on both these subjects reached fruition with royal assent. He was named to the committee on the impeachment of bishops (30 July), a Commons response to the Lords’ reluctance to encroach on episcopal authority. He also sat on the committee to consider how the kingdom was to be governed during the king’s absence in Scotland; he was a manager of conferences with the Lords on both these topics.117CJ ii. 227a, 230b, 243b, 251b. But he seems to have played no part in the promotion of parliamentary ordinances as an alternative to acts given the royal assent, and on 7 August cast doubt on whether purveyance, the levy imposed by the king for supplying the royal household, could be removed by act of Parliament, since it was for the necessary subsistence of the monarch.118Procs. LP vi. 274.

Devon and Westminster, Aug. 1641-Oct. 1642

After 11 August, Maynard left Westminster to resume his legal practice as a counsellor on the western assize circuit.119Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 216, 217, 220. His early departure before Parliament went into recess on 9 September might be taken as an indication that he was still wedded to his legal career, or might be read as the first sign that he was not willing to follow wherever Pym and other leading radicals might lead, especially since the death in May of the 4th earl of Bedford had removed an obvious bellwether for him. Either way, it is a reminder that contrary to modern assertions that he was by this time a serjeant-at-law, he was in fact still a mere barrister, with a long wait ahead of him before he achieved legal high office.120Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies, 228. It was not until 26 October that Maynard was again noticed by the Journal clerks, but he was on that day included as a manager of a conference with the Lords on removing the bishops from that House, and a few days later reported on the Gatton election, indicating that he still held the confidence of the House as chair of the privileges committee.121CJ ii. 295b, 303b. A speech of his on the Grand Remonstrance (22 Nov.) recorded his support for the majority view that an appeal to the people was justified: ‘We may declare to the people, for if we should do nothing till ‘tis ordained, we should sit still. We only petition for approbation of counsellors’.122Verney, Notes, 125.

In the last months of 1641, Maynard continued to work on the removal of the bishops from the Lords and their impeachments.123CJ ii. 314b, 333a. With his fellow burgess for Totnes, Oliver St John (now solicitor-general under the king’s concessions to the Bedford House reformers), he was required to bring in a bill for disarming recusants. Against the background of heightened anxiety over the reach of popery in England following the rebellion in Ireland, translating into a wave of persecution of Catholics, Maynard was a leading figure in the examination of a number of convicted priests. He reported to the Commons following their interrogation (11 Dec.), was one of the three managers of a conference with the Lords on the subject, and appealed to the peers to support the Commons in an attempt to exclude the further intercessions on behalf of the priests by the French ambassador, an obvious proxy for the queen.124CJ ii. 330b, 337b, 339a, 341a, 341b, 342a. Maynard was evidently as caught up in the anti-popery mood as any of the junto leaders, and his anxiety was heightened further by the attempt of the king on 4 January 1642 to arrest five Members of the Commons and one of the Lords. On the following day, the last before an adjournment until the 11th, Maynard contributed a speech on the crisis which was rushed into print presumably with Parliament’s approval.

Maynard attributed the ills of the kingdom entirely to the absence of Parliaments during the 1630s. He lauded Parliaments as ‘expert in all the sciences; of good government either of a church or commonwealth’, thus underscoring his own work on regulating clerical authority.125Master Meynard His Speech (1642), 2 (E.200.6). He developed the conceit of Parliament as a looking-glass which provided not only a mirror for the state to view itself in, but also a means by which the king’s tyrannical advisers could delineate the shape of their own oppressive behaviour. The covetous and idle clergy, who taught false doctrine, failed to preach and intruded into secular jurisdictions should look into the glass to seek a cure. Oppressive legal officers should do the same.126Master Meynard His Speech, 2-3. Maynard listed the usual enemies of Parliament – monopolists, Jesuits, Arminian clergy and lay Catholics – as traitors before defending parliamentary rights and privileges specifically. His particular concern was to defend the privilege of freedom of voting without fear of retribution from the crown. He characterised the attempt on the Five Members and one peer as a breach of privilege because to be held account after free debate was contrary to the privileges the king had earlier confirmed. If not held a breach, then whoever spoke in Parliament would be constantly in danger from great persons such as lords and bishops pretending to embody the king’s interests. If the studies and trunks of Members were repeatedly broken open no-one would in future would involve themselves in public life. Maynard ended with a call for a declaration in print of parliamentary privilege.127Master Meynard His Speech, 4-6. The voice of Maynard in this speech was more accessible than the one that came across to the diarists of 1640-1, shorn of legal complexity and casuistry. It was of obvious propaganda value, helping pave the way for the Declaration published the same day as Maynard spoke and also for the more comprehensive Declaration published on 17 January, but the speech probably genuinely catches the mood of urgency and anxiety which Maynard shared with a majority in the Commons at this point.128S. Lambert, Printing for Parliament (L. and I. xx), 5-6. His contribution must have enhanced his standing with the parliamentary leadership and helped secure his position on a number of committees composing messages and statements to the king after he had left London.129CJ ii. 388a, 400a, 406a.

In the first two months of 1642 Maynard was named to 13 committees, and seemed to be on the threshold of a busy schedule in the Commons. As an aspect of the drive to subdue popery at home and abroad, the conduct of the punitive expedition to Ireland was crucial. Maynard was added to the new committee for the navy (which would evolve in August into the Committee of Navy and Customs) and to another on the delays in sending troops to Ireland, and on 24 January he was sent with Orlando Bridgeman* and Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire* to urge Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester and lord lieutenant of Ireland, to despatch the soldiers milling around Chester speedily across the Irish Sea.130CJ ii. 391a, 402b; PJ i. 144. He drafted a declaration that assisting the rebels was treasonous (25 Jan.) and the same day brought into the House an ordinance (probably his first) for transporting supplies to Ireland for the army, which incorporated that démarche.131PJ i. 163, 170. Later that year, Maynard was among the first to invest money in the Irish Adventure on a pledge of a land grant. Many years later he was to complain that he had never been allocated his estate in Ireland.132CSP Ire. Adv. p. 78; Burton’s Diary, iv. 246. Yet despite his support for the campaign to quell the Irish revolt and his willingness to countenance legislation without the king, there were signs that his support for Pym and the other parliamentary leaders was not unqualified. He opposed William Strode I’s call for the laws enjoining attendance at parish churches to be suspended (22 Jan.), and when the Commons voted (1 Feb.) that those who advised the king on his answer to the House on 29 January were malignants, Maynard pointed out that advising the king to deny bills did not make the adviser an enemy to the state: hardly helpful to the parliamentary leadership. When Giles Grene brought in an ordinance against wine monopolists, Maynard took exception to it.133PJ i. 141, 250, 280.

With no sign of the political crisis abating after the king left the capital, Maynard and John Glynne, regular collaborators since the Strafford trial, were the leading figures in a committee charged with considering ways of dispersing the huge crowds that now thronged the streets of Westminster (5 Feb.).134CJ ii. 415a, PJ i. 286. Also with Glynne (and St John) he was tasked with preparing the legal case for impeachments of the bishops; and was named to committees on suppressing innovations in the liturgy and confiscating episcopal assets (17, 22 Feb).135CJ ii. 431a, 437b, 448b. But then comes an abrupt interruption to Maynard’s parliamentary career. No further report of him in the House is made until 27 September, and then only to consider his own message that he was sick. It was not until 19 October that he can reliably be said to have returned, amounting to an absence of eight months.136CJ ii. 784b, 814a. It is clear that he was not ill all through that period. In March and July 1642 he was back on the western circuit again, successfully pleading for clients in Wiltshire.137Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 224, 232. Apart from one nomination to the commission for oyer and terminer at Exeter in 1641, he held no local offices and played no part in the turbulent Devon assizes in the summer of 1642. He seems deliberately to have avoided being drawn into the tensions in the spring and summer that built up to the civil war, and the king’s party was evidently hopeful of winning his loyalty, to judge from his inclusion in the commission of array for Devon and not in Parliament’s militia ordinance.

Reluctant parliamentarian, Oct. 1642-Aug. 1643

In the autumn Maynard decided to throw in his lot with Parliament. He returned to Westminster in mid-October, and involved himself immediately in the project to put Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, lord warden of the stannaries, at the head of a parliamentarian army in the west. It was probably Maynard who drew up Pembroke’s commission (19 Oct.), and he helped manage a conference with the Lords on the proposal.138CJ ii. 814a, 815a, 815b. The implication is that Maynard had found a new patron, and saw Pembroke as a more acceptable alternative to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, as a commander, even though nothing came of the idea to promote Pembroke from his only military position of governor of the Isle of Wight. Eventually Maynard’s absence from the Commons during a period of momentous choices caught up with him. On 2 November he was obliged to declare himself in favour of the commission to Essex as lord general, and committed himself to Parliament’s cause by pledging a contribution to its funds. He promised a very modest sum (for a lawyer) of £40, which might have seemed to some a poor token of his enthusiasm.139CJ ii. 832a; PJ iii. 479. Between his return to the House and the end of 1642 he was named to ten committees. A number of these were directly on the parliamentarian war effort, among them the committee on raising cavalry (9 Nov.), the propositions for a war loan from the City (12 Nov.), the attempt to prevent supplies reaching Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the conference with the Lords on reports from the deputy lieutenants of Kent (24 Nov.).140CJ ii. 841a, 845b, 856b, 861b.

On 26 November, letters arrived in the House from the south west, where armed conflict had broken out in the Plymouth district. Maynard was one of the managers of the resulting conference with the Lords, requested by Sir John Bampfylde*.141CJ ii. 865b. A few days later, Maynard’s loyalties were put to the test when it was reported that his house in Devon – probably his father’s at Tavistock – had been destroyed by the soldiers of the royalist commander, Sir Ralph Hopton*. Six girls were reported to have been raped there, and of the house itself there was ‘nothing left but the bare walls and one door’.142Add. 31116, pp. 25-6; Harl. 164, f. 175v. Maynard’s report of the outrage fuelled an attack on the earl of Essex by Henry Marten* and Thomas Hoyle* for his slowness, and Maynard was given leave to go to Devon, where he remained until early in January 1643.143Harl. 164, f. 243; CJ ii. 877b. It seems possible that the ‘Mr Maynard’ who was a prisoner of the royalists in Cornwall until his release in April 1643 was his father.144CJ iii. 33b. Before this incident, John Maynard’s name was associated by commentators with those who sought to make peace with the king, but the destruction of his Devon house must surely have been a powerful deterrent to his defecting to the royalist party.145T. R., A Second Complaint (1643), sig. A2i. In the event he was back in Westminster by 3 January 1643, and was named to 46 Commons committees that year.

Despite the trauma that had fallen his family in Devon, Maynard’s political outlook was not transformed on his return to the political fray. The earlier suggestions that he favoured a cautious approach to church reform proved an accurate guide to his thinking. On 20 January he spoke to urge that bishops should not be abolished until another system of church government was put in place. He predicted that a new dispensation would not be achieved quickly, given that some reformers were in favour of a Presbyterian church polity, while others preferred more congregational autonomy. Ever mindful of property rights, Maynard reminded the House that without the jurisdiction of the church courts there could be no ordinations, excommunications, institutions of clergy in livings or tithes. Even Sir Simonds D’Ewes, in favour of peace and usually an admirer of Maynard as ‘able’ and ‘honest’, had to demur from this conservative and pessimistic assessment.146Harl. 164, ff. 279, 279v, 301v. His preferred policy was evidently to intensify the persecution of Catholics while impeaching as many of the bishops as was necessary, leaving church jurisdictions standing.147CJ ii. 913a; iii. 68a.

Maynard was sympathetic to the efforts to maintain channels of communication with the king, with a view to a peace settlement. In January he was active in a conference with the Lords on messages to and from the king, and in working on the propositions which were eventually put before the king as the Oxford treaty. Maynard’s involvement was in the proposals for restoring justices of the peace and securing the privileges of Parliament against any repetition of the events of 4 January 1642.148CJ ii. 918b, 921b, 941a; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 265. Thanks to Maynard, clauses in the propositions to the king that attempted a new definition of treason, to include raising forces without the permission of king or Parliament, were dropped; he argued successfully that it was dangerous for MPs to ‘ensnare themselves with any more treasons than there were already in force’.149Harl. 164, f. 335v. In mid-April, when truces and treaties dominated debate, he was involved in committees both for overseeing the general peace treaty with the king, and the local one between the warring sides in Devon and Cornwall.150CJ ii. 921b, 50b. Maynard was not afraid to contradict the war party – D’Ewes’s ‘fiery spirits’ – who insisted that the king should disband his army before a treaty be concluded. Maynard argued that this would make a cessation impossible, since Parliament had its army close at hand, would thus enjoy the advantage of a ready re-mobilization if required, and therefore made the king’s acceptance of these terms impossible for him.151Harl. 164, f. 301v. He seems to have been fearful of a greater military retaliation by the king for any victory Parliament might achieve.152Harl. 164, f. 331. In other speeches which marked out Maynard as an opponent of the radicals, he criticized William Strode I for his characterization of some MPs as ‘unfit materials’ and with Whitelocke opposed the bill for sequestrations (27 Feb., 7 Mar.), on the grounds that it would drive away Parliament’s friends and because the ordinance would be repeatedly challenged in the lower courts.153Harl. 164, ff. 293, 308, 315v.

Less than a year after his very public pursuit of Strafford, Maynard had become identified as an opponent of the war in England, but he remained supportive of efforts to subdue the Irish. He emerged as the dominant figure on a committee considering how to extract payment from those who had signed up to the Irish Adventure on Parliament’s propositions, but had failed to make good their promises. By February these arrears had reached £40,000. He chaired what became known as the committee for adventurers for Ireland, reported from it and with Edmund Prideaux I was required to bring in a bill on the problem (3 Mar.), which completed its Commons stages on 8 April, but was then held up in the Lords.154CJ ii. 973b, 984a, 988a; iii. 14b, 27a, 36a, 53b; Harl. 164, f. 309v. With Robert Reynolds, Harbottle Grimston and Sir John Clotworthy he was asked to bring in a bill to raise £200,000 for the army in Ireland. His objections to the principle of sequestration being imposed on the English did not extend to the Irish, as the money was to be raised by confiscations from Irish rebels.155CJ iii. 11a. On 22 May he was tasked with drafting a fresh ordinance on Ireland and the following week was named to a new committee for Irish affairs which enjoyed extensive autonomy.156CJ iii. 96b, 109b.

By mid-1643 the king’s removal of the great seal was making the mechanics of Parliament’s rival government difficult. With his regular co-adjutors John Glynne, John Wylde and Bulstrode Whitelocke, Maynard was named to a committee to address the problem (19 May). He needed no persuading that the issue was important, but opposed making a rival great seal on the grounds that it was an ‘inseparable flower of the crown’; in his eyes the only point in making a new broad seal would be as a means of making a new king.157Harl. 164, ff. 388v, 389. The plan to make a new seal went ahead nevertheless, under the chairmanship of Sir Robert Harley.158CJ iii. 155b. Maynard was equally sceptical over the impact of the plot associated with Edmund Waller*. He and D’Ewes thought that the ‘fiery spirits’ in the Commons deliberately exaggerated its danger, and was as outraged by the profaning of the sabbath when Waller was arrested as by the perils posed by the plot. When the new vow and covenant, explicitly a response to Waller’s conspiracy, was introduced into the Commons as a test for all Members, Maynard was conspicuously sceptical, requesting more time to consider the text before he took the vow. He did so after two days’ reflection.159Harl. 164, ff. 97v, 210v; CJ iii. 118b, 120a.

On the day Maynard took the new vow and covenant, Pym announced that in the examinations of suspects in Waller’s plot, unjust aspersions had been cast upon a number of those in favour of peace, including Maynard, leaving everyone to infer that they would have been the conspirators’ contacts in the Commons had the plot succeeded.160Harl. 164, f. 97v; P. Crawford, Denzil Holles (1979), 91. This pattern was repeated in the summer. On 5 August, Maynard dismissed the pointed remarks by radicals that not all had taken the new vow as a diversion from debating a treaty; during the debate later in the day on peace propositions, Maynard was shouted down by the war party. Two days later a rumour, contrived by the radicals in D’Ewes’s eyes, spread that an Irish army was poised to invade England, with Sir John Evelyn of Wiltshire and Maynard on its hit list.161Harl. 165, ff. 138v, 143, 145v; Crawford, Denzil Holles, 94. Nor did messages from Oxford strengthen Maynard and his beleaguered peace party men. With these rumours circulating, and tumultuous scenes in the Westminster streets, word came of a royal proclamation declaring Parliament incapable of negotiating with the king, leading Maynard anxiously to assert parliamentary liberties: ‘The king cannot disable us, if we be a Parliament, the king cannot disable us’.162Add. 18778, f. 12.

The Westminster Assembly and Laud, Aug. 1643-4

While he was deliberating on the new Covenant, Maynard was appointed as a lay delegate of Parliament to the Westminster Assembly, evidently for his legal expertise as well as for his godliness and any sympathy he might have harboured towards moves in the direction of a Presbyterian church settlement; he was in the company of other leading lawyer-MPs such as Selden, Whitelocke, Prideaux, Glynne, St John and Wylde.163CJ iii. 119b. This appointment did not make him immediately receptive to the Solemn League and Covenant. He did not cavil at the removal of prelacy demanded by clause II of the Covenant, but thought abolition would bring with it legal difficulties for the clergy. Any entering holy orders before a new church government had been established would have problems in squaring the oath of loyalty they took now, with whatever dispensation would follow, and the result would be to ‘bind men not to take the ministry upon them’. Furthermore Maynard struggled with the word ‘extirpation’ in clause II, as it would be applied to prelacy. He argued that episcopacy might to the Scots be unlawful, but the English might prefer to ‘mitigate’ episcopacy rather than abolish it; and what if it was decided to reduce prelacy to the form of the early church, or to a degree of religious toleration? Though Maynard played with these libertarian concepts for the sake of his argument, the real sticking point in his mind was one that led in the opposite direction. He doubted whether Parliament could swear to the ‘extirpation’ without the consent of the king.164Add. 18778, ff. 28v, 29.

In the event it was this kind of hesitancy that led Maynard on 30 September to request more time to consider the Covenant. Doubts presumably settled or at least subdued in his mind, he took it on 3 October.165CJ iii. 259b, 262a. The impact of the laymen on the Westminster Assembly is hard to assess, particularly in the case of Maynard, who shared his name with a minister member. References to prayers at the assembly being taken by ‘Mr Maynard’ can safely be ascribed to his namesake, but it is possible that the figure active in the assembly in 1645 and 1646 may have been the MP.166Minutes ... of the Westminster Assembly ed. A.F. Mitchell and J. Struthers (1874), 3, 132, 202, 257, 388. One of them made a long speech in March 1646 on jurisdictions, urging the members to set aside their differences: ‘You seem to dig a sawpit, wherein both parties fight together, and never be reconciled’.167Minutes ... of the Westminster Assembly, 426, 428-9. The tone of the whole speech could just as well be that of the Presbyterian punctilious lawyer as it could be that of the Presbyterian casuistical divine.

With St John and Whitelocke, Maynard was asked to manage the prosecution of Sir Robert Berkeley, one of the Ship Money judges (20 May 1643). The trial was a natural corollary to that of Strafford, and Maynard had himself argued in 1641 that Strafford’s paying heed to Berkeley’s false judgments was no defence. Proceedings were postponed at various times during the spring and summer, and Maynard had to tell the Lords of the Commons’ failure to timetable it, only to be told himself by the peers a few days later that there was not a quorum in the Lords ready to proceed. The trial finally began on 8 September; Maynard led for the prosecution, and only charged Berkeley with judging ultra vires in the Ship Money trial of John Hampden*.168LJ vi. 209a, 211a; Orr, Treason and the State, 94. He was found guilty and was fined £20,000.169CJ iii. 93a, 155b, 193a, 223b, 229a, 232b; Oxford DNB. Even worse delays attended the trial of Laud, for which Maynard had been named a manager early in 1641. On 3 May 1643 he was named to the committee to prepare the proofs, but it was not until 3 January 1644 that he and Wylde were put in charge of the committee to manage the evidence. The trial began on 12 March, and on the second day, Maynard led vigorously for the prosecution. Laud complained that Maynard conducted himself as though the defendant ‘were the most violent man for all illegal ways’.170Laud, Works, iv. 69. In common with the other prosecuting counsel, Maynard plundered the archbishop’s diary for incriminating evidence, leading on days 2-7, 11-12 of the 20-day proceedings. Maynard also spoke in the Lords on 11 September, when final legal points were heard.171CJ iii. 68a, 357b, 628a, 633b, 682b, 734b; iv. 7a; Laud, Works, iv. 153, 213, 240, 384.

Maynard remained committed to the reform programme of 1641 long after the war had opened up political dimensions for which he had no sympathy. The abolition of the court of wards was one of these reform projects, a typically protracted process which interested him over a number of years. In July 1643 he was named to the committee for removing the court, chaired by Selden; the following year fresh committees were appointed to receive the court’s revenue and to wind up its business (27 Feb., 9 Mar. 1644).172CJ iii. 179b, 409b, 422b. He was included in a small committee under the chairmanship of Robert Reynolds which took up the subject again later in 1644 (14 Oct.), and on 4 March 1645 Maynard was given charge of a committee on the legal aspects of wardships during the process of abolition.173CJ iii. 663a; iv. 69b, 70a. Down to the end of October 1646 there were four further committees on managing the practical implications of abolition, and Maynard was the manager of most of them.174CJ iv. 279b, 302a, 551b, 710a. He was also interested in limited moves towards reforming technical aspects of common law procedures, in which his legal expertise was valued. In 1643-44 among these were the reforms of the office of custos brevium and of writs of error.175CJ iii. 371a, 511a, 544a. It was doubtless the plea by Roger Kilvert that he had no access to a writ of error in his litigation against a fellow trader that provoked Maynard to denounce him ‘very violently’ in June 1644.176Harl. 166, f. 75v; LJ vi. 573a.

By the end of 1643, Maynard was widely identified as a leading peace party activist, and so it is unsurprising that when letters from Sir Henry Anderson*, a defector to the king’s party at Oxford, were read in the House (8 Nov.), Maynard’s name was mentioned by him as someone likely to be sympathetic to peace moves.177Harl. 165, f. 225. In 1644 he was named to 68 committees, so was hardly slackening his pace of activity in the Commons, but he regularly opposed initiatives that were aimed at a more vigorous prosecution of the war against the king. He continued to speak out against the principle of sequestration, at least when applied in England (16 Sept. 1643), although he is known to have attended at least one meeting of the Committee for Sequestrations.178Harl. 165, f. 193v; SP20/1, f. 180v. Maynard invoked the principle of parliamentary privilege to defend James Cambell* against seizure of his property by men of the Eastern Association (22 April), and spoke out against the reference to the Committee for Advance of Money, a committee led by the war party man, William Strode I, of William Jesson* of Coventry.179Harl. 166, f. 65. He denounced the ordinance from the Lords which would have set up the Committee of Both Kingdoms (3 Feb. 1644), and when Edmund Prideaux I brought in the ordinance to continue that body (6 May) supported the rival ordinance from the Lords, sponsored by Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford. This offended the Commons by naming Members of the Lower House, thus encroaching on the Commons prerogative, and Maynard was a teller in the division on 7 May that saw Stamford’s initiative rejected by 12 votes. William Strode I successfully re-introduced the measure of February, once again opposed by Maynard, Reynolds, Holles and Whitelocke.180CJ iii. 483b; LJ vi. 542; Harl. 166, ff. 6v, 64v; M.P. Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the Long Parliament’ (D.Phil thesis, Oxf. Univ. 1973), 97, 99, 100.

Early in 1644, Maynard drafted and reported on an ordinance to prevent the export of grain, dairy and other products, a law which in its aim of protecting trade and manufacture being lost to foreign competitors prefigured the Rump’s Navigation Act.181CJ iii. 359b, 404b; Add. 31116, p. 239. In March he was named to a committee on better observing the Lord’s Day; just under a year later he and John Wylde were given charge of an ordinance for suppressing sexual and other behavioural offences.182CJ iii. 440b; iv. 35b. These are examples of Maynard’s willingness to take responsibility for ordinances with a social and economic theme, but there is little doubt that he wished to see the legislative process returned to its wonted channels. He took on the reviving of a bill from earlier in the Parliament to compel subscribers to the Irish Adventure to pay up (8 Apr.), with a view to turning it into an ordinance, but in July 1644 was one of a committee of 11 considering what ordinances would be fit to convert to ‘laws’, meaning acts after a settlement with the king.183CJ iii. 452b, 453a, 569a. The following month, Maynard was named to the committee to draw up peace propositions, and in October took the lead on drafting a proposal on the validity of the great seal after a settlement.184CJ iii. 594a, 664b, 665a.

Maynard saw no contradiction between these periodic attempts to blow upon the slumbering embers of peace propositions on the one hand, and his activities in potentially divisive high-profile events such the trial of Laud, on the other. On 16 January 1644, he spoke before the peers to show how Laud’s failure to respond to the articles preferred against him in 1641 were an evident indication of his guilt. On four days in March, Maynard presented and managed eight articles against the former archbishop, and with the same robustness that had characterized his prosecution of Strafford scornfully rebutted Laud’s plea of a faulty memory. The trial was in another sense an echo of Maynard’s tactics of 1641, since the prelate’s demand to know which of the charges against him constituted treason, and which did not, met with the rejoinder from him that all of them amounted to treason.185W. Prynne, Canterburie’s Doome (1645), 24, 45, 49, 50, 51; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 773, 774, 779. Even while striking down Laud, Maynard acted to maintain the machinery for granting probate that had lain in the prerogative court of Canterbury, making no attempt to reform or re-cast it. He brought in the ordinance to make Sir Nathaniel Brent judge in that court, and saw the legislation through the Commons, as if to underscore the dictum he enunciated during Laud’s trial that ‘Nothing can be more fundamental than that which bends jurisdiction’.186H. Parker, Reformation in Courts and Cases Testamentary (1650), 1 (E.616.5); CJ iii. 490b, 491a, 541b, 651a, 669a, 677b; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke lxxxi, quoted in Orr, Treason and the State, 72.

Searching for settlement, Nov. 1644-1646

By late 1643, Maynard had quit the chair of the privileges committee, ceding it to another conservative Presbyterian, Sir Robert Harley.187CJ iii. 694a. This was probably simply a symptom of the growing amount of work he was undertaking in other areas, notably on the trials and other legal matters. His interest in adjudicating on disciplinary cases relating to the conduct of Members of the House can be seen as an extension of his strong chairmanship of the privileges committee. One such case was that of the apparent libertine, John Griffith II*, who had claimed to have slept with Lady Herbert and to have procured her sexual services for the king’s nephew, the prince elector.188Add. 31116, p. 405. Maynard was in charge of the committee that had Griffith arrested, and argued successfully for an ordinance to put him on trial for his life (5 Apr. 1645). After the usual delays, the proceedings were frustrated terminally when Griffith escaped from Newgate.189Harl. 166, f. 198v; CJ iii. 713a; iv. 34b, 84a, 87a, 101a. In sharp contrast with his hawkish attitude towards offenders of this kind – and against religious deviants such as antinomians – Maynard was notably and understandably soft on those who had dealings with the king, speaking against articles of martial law – a jurisdiction about which he was doubtless dubious – which appointed death for those who consorted with the royalists without authority.190Harl. 166, f. 98; Add. 18778, f. 39. Attempts in 1643 to penalise Members who had deserted the Houses for the king’s cause met with the same response from Maynard as the sequestration ordinance had. He raised legal objections to the principle of property confiscations, focusing on the implications for security of title.191Add. 18778, f. 60v.

It was because he was a leading peace party man, a Westminster Assembly member, a prominent lawyer and an opponent of the ‘fiery spirits’ of some standing and duration that Maynard was of interest to the leaders of the Scots Covenanters when they began to make overtures to elements at Westminster opposed to the war party. Direct evidence of his own attitude towards the Scots is hard to detect, as Anglo-Scots relations were not an obvious interest of his, but his sympathy, or at least his receptiveness, towards them might have been inferred by the Scots from his general political stance in 1644. In December of that year, according to Whitelocke’s account, the two Middle Templars were asked to attend a meeting of Essex’s leading Commons supporters. When Maynard and Whitelocke arrived, they learned that they had been summoned at the explicit request of the Scots commissioners. They heard the lord chancellor of Scotland, John Campbell, 1st earl of Loudoun [S] put the case that Oliver Cromwell* was an incendiary they would do well to be rid of. Neither Englishman must privately have dissented from that view, but both pointed to a lack of proof.192Whitelocke, Mems. 343-7; Whitelocke, Diary, 160-1. Maynard opined cautiously and unexceptionably that ‘Lieutenant-general Cromwell is a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons and with some of the House of Peers likewise’.193Whitelocke, Mems. 347. Whitelocke thought that after this inconclusive exchange, Cromwell must have been told about the meeting, to explain the latter’s more respectful demeanour towards both lawyers. The episode is probably best seen as one of a number of meetings the Scots held with groups such as these senior English lawyers, who might earlier have been considered hostile to them, and was unlikely to have been as pivotal as Whitelocke considered it to be.

Despite his antipathy towards the fiery spirits, by this time coalesced into the grouping known as the Independents, Maynard became involved in military politics for the first time from late 1644 onwards, and in 1645 aspects of the war effort made up a significant proportion of the 56 committees to which he was named that year. He was called to the committee to identify whether the dispute between Cromwell and Edward Montagu†, 2nd earl of Manchester, involved a breach of parliamentary privilege (4 Dec. 1644) and was one of the group of eight Members who were asked to draft what became known as the Self-Denying Ordinance, following the momentous debate on 9 December.194CJ iii. 714a, 718b. On 13 January 1645 he, Lawrence Whitaker and Thomas Lane were asked to draft an ordinance to establish a ‘new model’ for an army, and it was Maynard who reported their progress four days later, when it was then referred to the consideration of the whole House. What emerged was a copy of the kind of plan that had been adopted when earlier armies had been set up, not a blueprint for a radically new structure. On 14 February, he was added to the Committee of the West, and played a part in committees with the Lords that thrashed out the details of the officer establishment of the New Model army.195CJ iv. 18a, 24a, 42b, 49a, 77a, 88a, 95b; M. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979), 37. In the spring, with three others who were all Independents, Maynard’s was the minority political voice in a body charged with drafting an ordinance for the reform of the management of the navy.196CJ iv. 102b. Maynard’s motives in all this were hardly likely to have arisen from a new-found militarism or radical zeal. He would have shared the view of Zouche Tate* about reform as a response to the ascendancy of the sins of pride and so on, and must have recognized the potential of the military overhaul for bringing the war to an end. His rather late inclusion in the Committee of the West is evidence of his continuing interest in the affairs of his native region.

Maynard’s continued interest in a peace treaty with the king is evident in his involvement in preparing instructions for the commissioners at Uxbridge. These fruitless negotiations, led by the Scots by whom Maynard had been consulted in December, drew upon the legal expertise of men like Maynard and Selden, whose credentials were already established through their involvement in the Westminster Assembly. Maynard helped draft instructions for the commissioners that urged maintaining the war against the Irish rebels (15 Feb.) and advised them on how to include Parliament in their reporting back.197CJ iv. 50b, 51a. The meetings at Uxbridge quickly ended in failure, and in the spring of 1645 Maynard’s energies were once again harnessed to military reform, in the shape of the navy ordinance and in May the moves to make Edward Massie* commander-in-chief of a brigade in the west. Just as Maynard had in 1642 worked for a military dispensation for the west under Pembroke, separate from Essex’s army, so now he was a promoter of Massie’s western brigade, detached from the New Model’s main command (though subject to the military authority of Sir Thomas Fairfax*), taking responsibility for the ordinance which brought it into being (23 May).198CJ iv. 152b; Add. 18780, f. 9v. He also supported another brigade, that of Major-general Richard Browne II* about Oxford, becoming a subscriber to that association (17 Apr.).199Add. 18780, f. 197v; CJ iv. 160a. Confirmation of Maynard’s sympathies towards the superseded army commanders, despite his participation in the creation of new ones, came with his authorship of an ordinance to consider their past services and the value Parliament placed on them (2 Apr.).200CJ iv. 96b, 97a.

In October 1644, John Lisle* and the Independents had requested the Speaker that writs might be moved for new elections: according to D’Ewes ahead of a treaty with the king that would in their view produce an electorate seeking to ‘overthrow all that was done’.201Harl. 166, f. 149. Maynard successfully opposed this initiative. In August 1645, in the more optimistic aftermath of Naseby, fresh elections were again under discussion. Speaking during a debate on whether to issue new writs for a by-election at Southwark, Maynard again opposed the granting of writs. With his experience of chairing the privileges committee uppermost in his mind, though with some exaggeration, he reminded his hearers that in the early months of this Parliament disputed elections had been so numerous as to suggest the ‘manner of a civil war’.202Add. 18780, f. 97v. He conceded that the people had ‘justice and right’ to demand a writ, but emphasised the dangers of premature electioneering. He dealt with fears that after a peace the king would restore the Members of Parliament disabled from sitting further, denying that it was within the power of either Parliament or king to do so. Religious sects were increasing in strength and number, he argued, and elections before peace would encourage sectarian meddling and threaten the commonwealth. Parliament, as supreme court of equity, had the right to suspend an election, overriding local interests in the interest of the greater good. In the current political climate, no elections would be free: ‘It cannot be a free election where are any armies’.203Add. 18780, ff. 97v, 107. The House was unpersuaded, and the writ was moved on 21 August.204CJ iv. 249a.

Maynard was surely correct in regarding the summer of 1645 as too early to be holding parliamentary elections. Quite apart from the uncertainties over any settlement with the king, the atmosphere in Parliament itself was febrile, owing not a little to the so-called Savile affair. In a highly complex and protracted saga, Thomas Savile†, 2nd Baron Savile, implicated Denzil Holles* and Bulstrode Whitelocke in underhand dealings with the king at Oxford, which threatened to betray the parliamentary cause. A letter from George Lord Digby* to a royalist commander was intercepted by Edward Massie, casting a further lurid light on the affair. On 4 June, after being laid before the Commons, this letter was referred to a committee, and a week later another committee on the same subject was formed. Whitelocke defended himself against the allegations in respect of his part in the narrative on 4 July, and a further committee was named after he had sat down. Maynard was a member of all these bodies, and robustly defended his friend Whitelocke.205CJ iv. 167a, 172b, 195a; Whitelocke, Diary, 171; Add. 18780, f. 61v; P. Crawford, ‘The Savile Affair’, EHR xc. 76-93. Lest the king’s party should make capital out of these divisions, Parliament made the most of the capture at Naseby of the king’s cabinet of private correspondence, and Maynard was involved in committees to see the printed edition of it distributed to the country, including to the south west.206CJ iv. 187a; Add. 18780, f. 97v. The conspicuous support he offered Whitelocke was not extended to Alderman John Fowke, the London merchant and Independent who was imprisoned for alleged dishonesty. In his lack of sympathy for Fowke, Maynard found an unlikely ally in his fellow-Devonian, William Strode I.207Add. 18780, f. 89.

The pace of Maynard’s activities in 1645 was sustained into 1646. In the latter year he was named to 50 committees. A number of these concerned the church. He was interested in schemes to extend the preaching ministry, subject to the structures under debate in the Westminster Assembly, though he was unquestionably in favour of Erastian solutions to problems of polity, seeing all schemes as subject to the authority of Parliament. He was named to committees on the ministry in the north of England (3 Apr. 1645), on filling vacant Cambridge fellowships (17 Oct.), re-organization of churches in Gloucester (22 Dec.), repairing churches (4 Nov. 1646) and on how to settle a preaching ministry nationally in England (7 Apr., 11 Nov. 1646).208CJ iv. 97b, 312a, 381b, 502a, 719b, 714b, 719b. His interest in supplying ministers to prisons, on which he was asked with Walter Yonge I to draft an ordinance (28 Oct. 1646), sprang at least partly from his long-standing trusteeship of the Hele charities in Devon, and foreshadowed his later sponsorship of workhouses in Devon.209CJ iv. 707b. A number of his appointments exemplified his advocacy of religious discipline under the control of Parliament: he was added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers to consider a case of blasphemy (19 Apr. 1645) and to committees on scandalous writings on church government (20 Sept.) and on excluding individuals from the Lord’s Supper (8 Oct.). On 3 September 1645, he made a speech on exclusion from the sacrament, and when in June 1646, legislation on this latter topic was completed, it is unsurprising that Maynard was named a commissioner to oversee its implementation.210CJ iv. 116b, 280a, 300b, 562b; Harl. 166, f. 260v.

Maynard continued to be supportive of the Westminster Assembly. In August 1645, he and Selden were asked to write an ordinance to prohibit the sale of bibles printed abroad except by licence from the Assembly; just over a year later he was named to the committee chaired by Selden on printing the bible and the translation of the Old Testament in Greek.211CJ iv. 248a, 695a. He was named to committees to defend the Assembly from ‘scandalous’ criticisms of it in print, including that of the minority ‘dissenting brethren’ (20 Sept., 11 Dec. 1645).212CJ iv. 280a, 373a. When the ordinance on church discipline was voted on (10 Oct. 1645), Maynard was a teller for putting the question; when the motion was carried by three votes, there was a further division, doubtless to Maynard’s satisfaction, in favour of subjecting any changes in the disciplinary structure to parliamentary approval.213CJ iv. 303b. He was probably one of the more measured critics of the Assembly when conflict arose between the divines and Parliament, as in April 1646.214CJ iv. 511a; Harington’s Diary, 19. Although in the early phases of this Parliament he had been reluctant to attack the office of bishop, even while he prosecuted the occupants of the office, his acceptance of a role in the Westminster Assembly was clear evidence that by mid-1643 he was willing to countenance an alternative system. Therefore he harboured no objection in principle to the ordinance brought in on 29 September 1646 by John Glynne, which would confiscate the offices and property of the church hierarchy. After debate in a committee of the whole House, the work of abolition was divided. Maynard was named to the committee of five given charge of producing an ordinance on removing deans and chapters, while he himself took away the ordinance on the bishops to clarify the legal implications of a sale; the debate had thrown up the problem of the doubtful tenure of episcopal land if the office of bishop were not abolished explicitly.215CJ iv. 678a; Harington’s Diary, 39.

Declining influence, Dec. 1645-Jan 1648

His busy schedule notwithstanding, during 1646 there were signs that Maynard’s political influence in the Commons was waning. On 7 December 1645, he had spoken in negative terms about the propositions being thrashed out, evidently unwilling to go along with the pretence that the king might accept them. The principle that London militiamen should only leave the City on a military sortie after the settlement if each had given his personal assent found a place in the propositions, but Maynard spoke against the principle of popular consent and was openly sceptical about whether the idea could work. A proposal that towns that had stood out for Parliament should all have their pre-war liberties restored, with the king needing to seek parliamentary consent for every new burgess or corporation he named was referred to a committee with Maynard a member, and seems never to have emerged again.216CJ iv. 369a; Add. 18780, f. 178; Gardiner, English Constitutional Docs. 304-5. In connection with the 19 propositions that were eventually sent to the king at Newcastle on 13 July, he was named to six committees. A number of these (30 Jan., 18, 26 Mar., 22 June) were general procedural committees, concerned with procedure and protocol.217CJ iv. 423a, 478b, 491a, 584b. More pointedly, he was included in the committee that faced down City attempts to establish a separate line of communication to the king (11 July), but only the committee set to work on the clause that proposed to invalidate all the king’s orders passed under the great seal since it left Westminster (30 June) chimed with his expertise and interests.218CJ iv. 592b, 615b. The propositions included a proposed list of commissioners, including his associates, Holles and Glynne, who had by this time emerged as leading members of the Presbyterian interest. He might earlier in the war have expected to find his own name among them.

Nor was his authority in military affairs developing. Although Maynard had actively encouraged the formation of Massie’s western brigade, it was Fairfax’s New Model that was successful in pushing into the south western peninsula after Bristol fell in September 1645. Maynard was nominated to the committee on restructuring the civic government of Bristol, in which the Committee of the West played a part (24 Oct. 1645). On 20 March 1646, Maynard was responsible for the ordinance which sought to raise £20,000 for Massie’s brigade on the security of the excise, and saw it through both Houses. But by this time, reports of indiscipline in the brigade, including abuses of civilians, were reaching the Committee of the West and the Commons.219CJ iv. 481a, b; R.K.G. Temple, ‘The Massey Brigade in the West’, Som. and Dorset N and Q, xxxi. 440. Maynard seems not to have played a significant part in the Committee of the West, nor in the committees at Plymouth or for Devon. He was still recorder of Plymouth, however, and was treated as a visiting dignitary there, as the office demanded.220Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, ff. 264v, 267. Totnes extended the same honour to him in 1645, so regardless of the ascendancy of the Independents and their allies in the New Model, he retained a powerful local standing, based on his legal authority and office.

As Massie’s brigade became both supernumerary and an embarrassment to Parliament during 1646, Maynard seems to have adjusted his priorities towards the more lucrative strands of his career, and rode the western circuit once again as a counsel that summer. In August, he was identified by the government as a prosecutor of the royalist Sir John Stawell*.221Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 244. Again, it was probably self-interest that lay behind his involvement in fen drainage. In 1641 he had been added to a committee on the scheme of Robert Bertie, 1st earl of Lindsey, and early in August 1645 was named to a committee on a petition from Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. On the 15th of that month, D’Ewes recorded that Maynard brought into the Commons an ordinance on fen drainage, and on 28 April 1646 was named to another committee on drainage in six counties. D’Ewes disapproved of these schemes, viewing them as having been irredeemably tainted during the king’s personal rule. Quite how Maynard came to be drawn into the projects has not been discovered, but a likely link may well have been through legal proceedings against the heirs of the Cornish royalist Henry Killigrew*. Killigrew had a significant stake in fen drainage, remote though it was from his home. His estate eventually came, by means of complex and extensive litigation, into the hands of Edward Nosworthy†, whose son was to marry Maynard’s daughter in 1665.222CJ ii. 192a, iv. 229a, 525a; Harl. 166, f. 253. By 1645, royalists were already identifying Maynard as one of those Westminster MPs who ‘love their own quiet and their wealth’, and in October 1647, he admitted to making £700 at the summer assize courts: a greater sum, a shocked and envious Whitelocke thought, than anyone had ever made on the circuits before.223J. Taylor, The Causes of Diseases and Distempers (1645), 3 (E.305.20); Whitelocke, Mems. 219.

Confirmation of Maynard’s declining profile at Westminster comes from his total committee appointments: 50 in 1646, only 26 in 1647, and 14 in 1648. In 1647 he was given charge of drafting an ordinance to compel demobilized soldiers to return to their counties of origin (4 May), was first named to a committee on providing relief for maimed soldiers and orphans (28 May) and on 4 June was one of 11 lawyers required to improve the ordinance for the indemnity of soldiers and others who had acted during the civil war in Parliament’s interests.224CJ v. 162a, 190b, 198b. As tensions between Parliament and the army heightened during 1647, Maynard played a part in ensuring the Houses made the best of their case. He was asked to bring in a new self-denying ordinance (10 June), which increased the authority of the accounts committee, and restated the privileges of Parliament (10 June). He was one of a group of Commons men requested to join with the Lords to produce a declaration of what Parliament had achieved and what were its future plans (14 June). On 19 June he voted late in a division on a City request that soldiers to be discharged from service should be listed, voting against putting the question.225CJ v. 205a, 210a, 217a. It was under pressure from the army that disputed elections to Parliament were once again given an airing. Maynard and Harley, as consecutive chairmen of the privileges committee, were asked to report all cases that had been determined (21 June). Sir John Bramston’s case at Bodmin was one where the outcome remained contested. Maynard was forced to admit he had given his notes to Sir Guy Palmes*, who had deserted the House in 1643. Under pressure from the friends of the army to provide a better account, a grateful Maynard was released from further obligation by Bramston, and the matter died.226Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, 161; CJ v. 218b, 233a. Maynard was one of a trio writing to Fairfax about the fate of the Eleven Members (23 June), thus exposing himself as an apologist for Parliament vis-à-vis the army, and counselled his friend Whitelocke to leave Westminster lest there should be a revival by the army of the allegations in the Savile affair.227CJ v. 221a; Whitelocke, Diary, 195.

On 22 July, Maynard, John Venn and William Stephens were asked to bring in an ordinance to restore management of the London militia to its former commissioners. He then left the capital for the summer assizes, thus neatly avoiding having to take a stance during the ‘forcing of the Houses’ by elements of the London crowd. He was back by 1 October, when he was included in Selden’s committee on formulating a declaration on the violence. He soon found himself chairing the hearings of a Commons committee set up in response to an appeal by the irrepressible John Lilburne against his imprisonment in the Tower by the Lords. Maynard managed to report to the House once on this (18 Dec.) but unsurprisingly the case dragged on until July 1648, and was in any case only a small part of Lilburne’s protracted struggle against authority.228CJ v. 334a, 339b, 387b, 391b, 641b. From prison, he had two pamphlets printed that were addressed to Maynard as a representative of Parliament. An ad hominem tone only appeared when he complimented Maynard on the depth and breadth of his legal learning, but negated any pleasure the lawyer might have derived from this by reminding him that it was by his legal practice that ‘you have got a great part of your estate, and by the destruction whereof you are not worth a groat in all the world’.229The Grand Plea of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1647), 5 (E.411.21); The Additionall Plea of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1647, E.412.11).

Searching for peace, Jan.-Dec. 1648

On 3 January 1648, Maynard made an important speech during the debate of making no further addresses to the king. In his view, the crucial issue was not whether addresses should not be made, but whether at this time it was politic to do so. He was against any strategy that seemed ‘to lay the king aside’. ‘I will fight to maintain a law, but never to get a law’ was Maynard’s way of rejecting a new constitution subject to army rule. Against Richard Salwey*, who reminded MPs that when the civil war started, various expedients of government had to be adopted, Maynard did not accept that those circumstances still prevailed. He thought it was Parliament’s duty to continue to try to treat with the king, because it had been summoned purposefully to be of counsel with the king, and its duty towards the people was to relieve them of burdens of taxation. As usual, Maynard was quick to infer damaging social consequences from policy changes.

If the argument (some have gone upon) hold, that there was another government, before that of kings etc. so husbandmen was before gentlemen, and they before Lords etc. and so we must come to the Levellers doctrine.230‘Boys Diary’, 155-6.

None of this was well received by Oliver Cromwell*, who according to a newspaper account, began to ‘spit fire’ and laid his hand on his sword. A week later, it was noted that, in the House of Lords, Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, and Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, rehearsed the same arguments as Maynard had done.231Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. R3ii (E.422.17); no. 19 (18-25 Jan. 1648), sig. T2 (E.423.21). As if to make good his expressed concern for Parliament’s popular standing, the following day Maynard was included in the committee on the grievances of the people, including in the areas of law and trade; and on 15 January he took charge of an ordinance to make more equal between the counties the burden of direct taxation. This was a complaint which had been articulated by the Devon MPs and committeemen since 1645, and Devonians were well represented on the drafting committee.232CJ v. 417a, 434a.

After assisting St John in preparations for the trials of prominent royalists such as Stawell, Sir Lewis Dyve* and Judge David Jenkins, Maynard was off again to attend to his legal practice, and was absent from the House for nearly three months between the end of February and mid-May 1648. He had maintained his link with Exeter as the city’s retained counsel, and was supportive of the Exeter chamber’s attempts to rid themselves of the soldiers of Sir Hardress Waller*.233CJ v. 434a, 437b, 473a. The legal commissions he took on behalf of the state made Maynard a suspect figure among the royalists, despite his January speech. The journalist Marchamont Nedham thought him self-interested and compromised by his links with Independents, thinking presumably of such figures as John Wylde*. This impression was only confirmed in September, when the army officer Edmund Rolfe was tried for a botched attempt on the king’s life. Wylde was judge, and Maynard was assigned to Rolfe as his counsel. After an address to the jury by Wylde, who dwelt on Rolfe’s ‘service for the state’, the defendant was acquitted.234Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 14 (27 June-4 July 1648), sig. 02iii (E.450.27); no. 24 (5-12 Sept. 1648), sig. Hh (E.462.34); The Humble Petition of Edmund Rolph (1648, 669.f.13.12).

As his speech in January 1648 made clear, Maynard would be to the last a seeker after an accommodation with the king, and towards the end of June he was part of the delegation to the Lords to agree on what would be the approach towards the negotiations at Newport. With Robert Reynolds he was asked on 14 August to bring in ordinance to secure the interests of the Irish Adventurers, a group with which he evidently continued to identify.235CJ v. 614a, 670a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1164. This was to be the last substantive piece of legislation with which he was entrusted in this Parliament. He was absent at a call of the House on 26 September, but was back a month later to support the Treaty of Newport. He was named to committees to process the king’s assent to propositions at Newport into bills and to make the Covenant palatable to him (27 October). When William Prynne* denounced the army’s Remonstrance, Maynard supported him, but still failed to impress Nedham, who reported how Maynard ‘talked as if he had taken fees on both sides ... looking both ways with his squint-eyed rhetoric’.236CJ vi. 34b, 62b, 63a, 77a; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 35 (21-28 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbb2 (E.473.35). On 5 December, he was one of a group of seven who made a last-minute attempt to turn away the wrath of the army.237CJ vi. 93b. The following day, Maynard was inevitably among those purged by Thomas Pride and his soldiers. A decade later, he recalled how he was nearly taken to gaol, but for some confusion among the solders as to his political standing.238A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); Burton’s Diary, iii. 184.

Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-57

As Maynard’s stock in Parliament began to slump in 1648, he seems to have turned to his client corporations in Devon. Despite his revulsion from the trial and execution of the king, he did not withdraw completely from public life. He avoided the Westminster Hall courts in the second half of 1648 and the start of 1649.239Oxford DNB. But he kept his place as recorder of Plymouth, which presented him with silver flagons in 1650 and entertained him regularly throughout the decade.240Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/132, ff. 273, 277v, 280, 285v, 287v, 290v, 302, 302v. Exeter, too, treated him to gifts of wine and tobacco.241Devon RO, Exeter City Archive, Act Bk. ix, f. 77v. Maynard bound himself more closely to both corporations in 1648 by bestowing on them judicious instalments from the Hele bequest, of which he had by this time been a trustee for 16 years.242Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix, f. 21v; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/416. And he was ready to turn out for the republic on important political occasions. Not much more than six months after the regicide, Maynard and William Yeo* welcomed Alexander Rigby I* to Plymouth when he came there on the summer assize circuit.243Bodl. Tanner 56, f. 89. Maynard remained in demand as a counsel in the London courts. The City fathers chose Maynard, Wylde and Matthew Hale* to represent them in the court of aldermen and common council against the claim of the freemen for annual elections. This was a brief which Maynard would have relished, instinctively opposed as he was to any extension of popular power. He claimed he appeared only to uphold the traditions of the City, and offered a rather menacing view of the potentialities of the law.

I see laws are edged tools; those that understand them, make good use of them; and those that do not understand them will find that they are sharp and will cut; we all know that there were bishops and kings by the common law, and Magna Charta, and yet they are changed and justly changed by the Parliament.244London’s Liberties (1650), 1,13, 14, 24, 36, 38 (E.620.7).

Another high-profile case in which Maynard appeared was that of his former interlocutor, John Lilburne. When Lilburne appeared at the Old Bailey in July 1653, Maynard was assigned to him as counsel.245Perfect Diurnall no. 188 (11-18 July 1653), 2853 (E.215.25). Not everyone was lucky enough to obtain his services. When in 1651 the Presbyterian minister, Christopher Love, sought his help when on trial for his life, Maynard sent word that he was too busy to involve himself.246The Whole Triall of Christopher Love (1660), 94, 117; Perfect Diurnall no. 82 (30 June-7 July 1651), 1140 (E.786.14). From a more radical perspective, the sectary John Rogers considered Maynard ‘corrupt’ for pleading the case of a cavalier’s right to present a ‘malignant’ to a parish living.247J. Rogers, Ohel or Bethshemesh. A Tabernacle for the Sun (1653), 220.

It may well have been through the influence of Bulstrode Whitelocke that Maynard at last found a senior legal appointment, as a serjeant-at-law, under the Cromwellian protectorate. The writ to admit him to the order of serjeants was issued in February 1654, and at the ceremony he was flanked according to tradition by supporters: in Maynard’s case by his brother-in-law Robert Henley and by William Russell*, 5th earl of Bedford, and James Howard, 3rd earl of Suffolk: neither of the earls was of any political consequence at the time.248Baker, Serjeants at Law, 190, 442. It was not long before Maynard provoked the wrath of the lord protector. The London merchant, George Cony, having refused to pay customs on silk, was imprisoned. His counsel secured his release on a writ of habeas corpus, pleading technical defects in the original writ of imprisonment. He was then re-committed on a fresh writ, which explicitly alleged Cony’s offending against ordinances of December 1653 and September 1654. The case was heard on 28 May 1655, and Cony’s counsel, including Maynard, argued that the ordinances were invalid, thus implying that the Instrument of Government itself was invalid. Maynard, Twysden and Wyndham were brought before the protector’s council and on their refusal to retract their arguments were sent to the Tower for words tending to sedition (18 May 1655). 249Gardiner, Hist. Commonwealth and Protectorate, iii. 299-301; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 168. Some royalist observers hoped that Maynard’s imprisonment might provoke resentment in the City, while others believed that Maynard would not have acted as he did unless he had calculated the benefit to interests hostile to Cromwell, perhaps alluding to the resurgent Presbyterian interest, which had challenged the protector and his constitution in the first protectorate Parliament. More cynically, one exiled cavalier found it hard to believe that Maynard ‘for a fee would hazard loss of money or liberty ... his conscience never yet put him to that stress’.250Nicholas Pprs. ii. 331, 334, 336. It was reported that at the council meeting, an angry Cromwell told Maynard and the others that if they wanted Magna Carta they should each put on ‘a helmet and troop’ for it, implying that the lawyers failed to recognize the price in life and treasure which had been paid for the security the protectorate provided. In the event, Maynard showed no intention of becoming a martyr of any kind, quickly petitioned for his release and was a free man by 17 June.251Nicholas Pprs. ii. 346, 353, CSP Dom. 1655, p. 179.

Against this background, it is perhaps surprising that a year later Maynard should have sought a seat in the second protectorate Parliament. It is not at all remarkable, however, that he should have been returned by Plymouth, where he had by this time a considerable standing as a long-serving and valued recorder, and perfectly understandable that he should have been excluded by the protector’s council from taking his seat.252CJ vii. 425b. His offensive legal judgment of the previous year is enough to explain his exclusion. He later said he sent twice to the council to demand that the MPs should be restored.253Burton’s Diary, ii. 462.

Important business of his was in any case discussed in the first sitting of this Parliament, his absence notwithstanding. On 19 January 1657, he attended a committee on a petition from Captain Edmund Lister, who had recently married Eliseus Hele’s grand-daughter. Maynard was allowed to keep his hat on during the committee hearing, because he was an MP, albeit an excluded one.254Burton’s Diary, i. 366. The petition brought into question the right of the original donor to deprive his heirs of their patrimonial inheritance. When the report reached the House on 6 June 1657, the entire basis of the Hele charity was discussed. Even while the case was sub judice, Maynard had begun to establish significant projects from the resources of the trust, notably the grant to Exeter in March 1657 of Bovey mills, to fund a hospital in the cathedral close. After declaring himself solely a trustee, without further interest, Maynard submitted a list of at least nine projects that were planned for the money. The House agreed with the committee on the subject that any resources not already allocated should be bestowed on Edmund and Joan Lister.255CJ vii. 548a-549a. It remains unclear as to what, if anything, the Listers gained by their petition, but the judgment encouraged Maynard to establish further major settlements of the Hele estates, upon Exeter corporation, the Devon magistrates and Plymouth corporation, between September and December 1658.256Further Report of the Charity Commissioners (1821), 210, 252, 255; Further Report ... (1822), 65. The effect was to bind Maynard still closer to these regional bodies which had long provided an important, if secondary, context for his public activities.

Protector’s Serjeant, 1658-9

Maynard was rehabilitated in the eyes of the lord protector and council by January 1658, to judge from his return to Parliament that month. He was named to committees on the marriage bill and on absenteeism among university heads of houses (22 Jan.).257CJ vii. 581a. Characteristically, he urged that the marriage bill should include a stipulation that an annual list of marriages in each parish should be sent to county sessions, as registration was ‘a great necessity to prove descents and the like, which is the foundation of property’.258Burton’s Diary, ii. 337-8. On the question of recognizing the Other House, Maynard came out unequivocally in favour of the title House of Lords, declaring himself unable to think of an alternative and moving that that should be the title (4 Feb.).259Burton’s Diary, ii. 458, 462. He stressed the potential of the second chamber as a check on the House: specifically on its capacity for rushing through legislation.

You know what has been done here in a morning. You know my meaning: a law made in a morning. This Parliament did pass more in one month than the best student in England can read in a year.260Burton’s Diary, ii. 461.

His brief but significant impact on this Parliament, despite its inauspicious beginnings, did nothing to alienate Maynard further from the government. On the contrary, he was elevated to lord protector’s serjeant on 1 May 1658, and shortly afterwards prosecuted Sir Henry Slingesby* for having plotted to betray Hull to the supporters of Charles Stuart: Slingesby was found guilty and executed.261The Severall Tryalls of Sir Henry Slingsby (1658), 6; Mercurius Politicus no. 418 (27 May-3 June 1658), [572] (E.753.1). In this capacity he also attended the committee for obstructions in June and was asked to find a way of lifting the burden from his widow of John Lilburne’s unpaid fines, his last involvement with that turbulent character.262CSP Dom. 1658-9, pp. 67, 261. Outside his capacity as a lawyer for the state, in 1658 he offered encouraging advice to clergy of Richard Baxter’s ecumenical stamp contemplating a scheme to support university students.263Baxter Corresp. i. 334. As an important state personage, he walked in Protector Oliver’s funeral procession on 23 November, and the new protector, Richard Cromwell*, was employing him as a legal adviser on government business by January 1659.264Burton’s Diary, ii. 526; PRO31/17/33, p. 401.

As protector’s serjeant, Maynard enjoyed a very different reputation in government circles at the start of 1659 than he had done in 1656. A sceptical commentator later identified the short protectorate of Richard Cromwell as a time when Maynard ‘obtained wealth as he pleased’.265Ath. Ox. iv. 293. His elevation accounts for his success in elections for the third protectorate Parliament in no fewer than three boroughs. The borough he eventually (2 Mar. 1659) chose to serve, Newtown, Isle of Wight, was one where he had no known electoral interest, the other two being west country towns of the kind that Maynard was assiduous in courting.266CJ vii. 609b. Despite his undoubted closeness to the government at this point as a senior law officer, it is important to correct the statement that in 1658-9 he was solicitor-general: he never in fact held this post.267HP Commons 1660-90; CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 261; Sainty, Law Officers, 63. In the Parliament of 1659 he was named to nine committees. The most important of these were the committees of privileges (28 Jan.), on Irish affairs (1 Apr.) and on transacting with the Other House.268CJ vii. 594b, 623b, 627a. Others included the committee to investigate the Welsh ‘propagation’ commissioners of 1650-53 (5 Feb.) where he had no sympathy for those under scrutiny: ‘it seems the sheep are committed to the wolf’.269Burton’s Diary, iii. 83. Maynard was a vocal contributor to proceedings, always supportive of parliamentary authority and privilege. He urged a settling of the matters surrounding Lewis Audley* (2 Feb.) by parliamentary committee instead of by a jury in a court: ‘vindicate your privileges, lest from twenty you come to twelve’.270Burton’s Diary, iii. 41.

On the constitutional questions relating to the authority of the lord protector and the constitution, Maynard was a robust opponent of the republicans, challenging Sir Arthur Hesilrige early in proceedings (1 Apr.) and openly hoping (7, 8 Feb.) that he would have less to say for himself.271Burton’s Diary, iii. 32, 117, 141; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 448. This set the precedent for later friction between Maynard and Hesilrige.272Burton’s Diary, iii. 230, 278, 289, 326-7, iv. 17. Maynard discounted narratives of the past as irrelevant to the present situation. In making this point during a long speech on 9 February, he provided his own retrospective view on what the civil wars had been about. Before the war started there had been ‘oppressions’, in which delinquents had been protected by the government. Justice against these delinquents was denied, and arms had been taken up by the king’s evil counsellors further to protect them. Thus emerged the issues of control over the military, veto over the king’s officers and policies and questions of ‘tender consciences’, which sustained the war but did not start it: ‘I would rather have been a cavalier a thousand times’ than start the war on these grounds, Maynard asserted.273Burton’s Diary, iii. 181-2; Schilling thesis, 51-2. He dismissed republican arguments that the forcible dissolution of the Rump Parliament invalidated subsequent constitutional arrangements, alluding to the earlier disruptions of Parliament, including the one in December 1648 that had affected him personally. In Maynard’s book, the Humble Petition and Advice was as good a law as any ‘in ’48, ’49 and ’50, and since’.274Burton’s Diary, iii. 184. They needed to obey the lord protector, as they had sworn to: ‘I cannot distinguish between myself as a burgess and as a Christian’.275Burton’s Diary, iii. 184-5.

On a number of electoral cases that came before the House, Maynard brought to bear his legal qualifications and long experience as chairman of the privileges committee in the Long Parliament. His opinions were always delivered robustly and were intended to brook no contradiction. A double return was ‘undoubtedly a misdemeanour in the sheriff’ (1 Feb.); electors who knowingly returned candidates disabled from sitting could not be guilty of any offence (12 Feb.); in contradiction to the privileges committee opinion that the Petersfield election was void because not enough notice was given to the electors, if the electors turned up then notice had evidently been given (19 Feb.).276Burton’s Diary, ii. 25; iii. 256, 348. In the case of John Sadler*, whose right to sit had been brought into question, Maynard said that he was only elected by his own say-so, since no return could be found. Sadler tried to argue that boroughs could make returns without the sheriff; Maynard flatly contradicted him: ‘I were a mad man if I should knowingly offer aught in this House for law, that is not so’.277Burton’s Diary, iii. 561-2. Before the Parliament was out, he pronounced in the case of the election in his home town of Tavistock (for which he was never elected), blaming irregularities upon the sheriff, John Blackmore*, a Cromwellian knight, and demanding he be fined.278Burton’s Diary, iv. 414. His intervention in this affair was doubtless to protect his client and junior partner at the Middle Temple, the former Plymouth town clerk, Edmund Fowell*, whom he had already defended against Sir Henry Vane II for Fowell’s unwise comparison between the lord protector and a king.279Burton’s Diary, iii. 534. Around the time of this debate, Fowell sponsored the call to the Middle Temple bar of Maynard’s son, admitted ‘as a favour’.280MTR ii. 1134.

Maynard’s impatience to set aside the constitutional wrangling which so dominated this Parliament was sometimes evident. He spoke on 24 February to urge an anti-Dutch foreign policy. He allowed that many Dutch wished well to England, but considered that trade was their ‘great Diana’, blinding them to the value of an alliance with England. He asserted that the Dutch had supplied ships to the Spanish, and stood behind Spain in Cromwell’s war against that country. He thought that the Dutch used proxies for their interests in the Baltic, and wanted a robust English naval presence there, under the direct control of the executive: ‘If you go weak and creeping, and begging, you are like to do little good’.281Burton’s Diary, iii. 461-3. This was a speech which would have gladdened hearts in the west country, whose ports depended on trade with the Spanish. In home affairs, his impatience found expression in his plea for laws in the area of religion: against Ranters and Quakers, predictably from one with such highly conservative instincts. But he also urged reform of the Cromwellian church settlement, to restrain the activities of the Triers, who appointed to church livings. These he saw as having achieved more ‘than the pope or bishops ever did, to take away men’s advowsons’.282Burton’s Diary, iv. 73, 74.

These indications by Maynard of topics upon which the Parliament might have more profitably expended its energies were often delivered as asides during his own contributions to the stalemated debates on the constitution. He was at his most confident, naturally, when legalities were in question. Against republican questioning of the Humble Petition and Advice, he pointed out that to pick and choose among laws would invalidate land sales, among other things, and indeed bring into question the legality of the Parliament: ‘Till you declare it no law, I shall understand it a law’.283Burton’s Diary, iii. 571; Schilling thesis, 144-6. Against William Morice*, who said that no lawyers in the House thought the Humble and Petition and Advice a law, he retorted that it was ‘as much a law as any that have been made of late’.284Burton’s Diary, iv. 99. As the republican canard that the Humble Petition and Advice was not valid came around again on 28 March, Maynard’s language became less temperate: if it were not a law, 112 laws were vitiated and ‘half one hundred thousand’ were bastards.285Burton’s Diary, iv. 290-1. Maynard was also robust in his defence of the right of Scottish MPs (deemed to be supporters of the protectorate) to sit in the Commons. On 11 March, in another lengthy speech, he asserted that removing the Scots would undermine Parliament’s legitimacy, as ‘if you turn them out, do you not judge the Act of Union is not a law?’286Burton’s Diary, iv.129-30; Schilling thesis, 210-2; Bodl. Clarendon 60, f. 224.

On the status of the Other House, Maynard had made it clear in the last Parliament that he believed it was in effect the House of Lords. He sought to exculpate the pre-1649 House of Lords from the charge that it been ‘dangerous’, as the Rump’s destructive act had branded it. The Lord had opposed the enemies of the Commons, and the House could not have done without the peers’ support.287Burton’s Diary, iii. 359. A year before, in February 1658, Maynard had indeed declared the Other House to be the Lords’ House. In 1659, in opposing the republicans, he was put to it to clarify what he meant. On 28 February he called for a systematic review of the membership of the Other House, including the hereditary principle, and on 4 March he seemed exasperated at the ‘winding’ of the debate, acknowledging that the House sought to ‘turn out the old nobility’.288Burton’s Diary, iii. 545, iv. 19. But he thought that ‘transacting’ with the Other House had no implications for the old peers, who he thought would be uninterested in returning to Westminster. As the pressure on parliamentary time mounted, he wanted the question to be put that the House would transact with the Other House now in existence, raising the fear that any other wording could vote in the old peers and their heirs.289Burton’s Diary, iii. 574, iv. 73. Again, Maynard found it hard to control his temper when progress was blocked by factionalism, protesting in the lobby ‘with just indignation, that he thought C[harles] Stuart had more friends in the House than the protector’.290Bodl. Clarendon 60, f. 248. By 8 April, however, Maynard sought to downplay the issue of heredity: ‘I do not believe that the saving of the rights of the old peers signifies anything. They will be brought in, in time’.291Burton’s Diary, iv. 376; Derbs. RO, D258/10/9/2, f. 31v.

What really mattered to Maynard was to secure a vote to agree to formal transactions between the two Houses – ‘if you transact not, your business is at a stand’ – and in the twists and turns of these debates he acted as one sympathetic to Richard Cromwell’s government, and increasingly as a manager of its business in the Commons.292Burton’s Diary, iv. 281; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 118. This impression is reinforced by the number of occasions Maynard moved an adjournment or made a procedural point, usually in support of the Speaker.293Burton’s Diary, iii. 432-3, 440. Certainly royalist observers saw him as one of the most effective spokesmen of the ‘court party’, reporting in March that ‘the protector’s friends remain confident in the authority of Serjeant Maynard’, not least in his ability to marshal ‘the other gentlemen of the long robe’ behind the government, and there was general agreement that he was ‘a faithful servant to his highness’.294Bodl. Clarendon 60, ff. 209, 224, 248. Maynard’s closeness to the protectoral party can also be seen in a letter from Sir Anthony Morgan* to Henry Cromwell* of 29 March, in which he describes a private meeting to discuss the extent to which soldiers could be prosecuted by the Irish civil courts, attended by Maynard, Glynne, William Pierrepont*, Lord Broghill (Roger Boyle*) and Sir Charles Coote*.295Henry Cromwell’s Corresp. 490. The personal relationship between Maynard and Richard Cromwell is less clear, but in late February, according to Sir John Gell*, Maynard went further than most by asserting that ‘the protector is king as to all intents and purposes’.296Schilling thesis, 135.

Later career and assessment

Despite his close connection with the Cromwellian regime, after the collapse of the protectorate Maynard kept his serjeantcy, and under the revived Rump was included among the judges sent on circuit in June 1659.297CJ vii. 686b. On 18 January 1660, he was recommended by the Rump for appointment as a judge in upper bench, but the post went to Robert Nicholas*, and he had to remain content to be a commonwealth’s serjeant.298CJ vii. 814a. He came back into the Commons with the secluded Members in February, and between then and the final dissolution of the Long Parliament was named to 15 committees. He took the lead part in bringing in the bill to establish a council of state (21 Feb.), and when elections for it were held two days later, found a place on it, his being the last name on the list.299CJ vii. 847a, 847b, 849a, b. He was asked to draft the legislation reforming earlier structures for managing the army, and to write the proclamation which deferred the start of the assize circuits.300CJ vii. 847a, 848b, 853a, b. On 10 March he was given care of amending a clause in the militia bill that required local commissioners to acknowledge that the war of Parliament against the king’s forces was lawful, and in the last few days the House sat worked with Prynne and Edward Harley to expunge orders enjoining the taking of the Engagement.301CJ vii. 871a, 872b.

At the time of the elections for the Convention, the royalists still considered Maynard an ‘inveterate’ Presbyterian, and it was hoped that Maynard would be one of those sent to greet Charles II on his arrival at Dover, and thus become an example of a Presbyterian subdued by the king’s majesty.302Clar. SP iii. 732; Crawford, Denzil Holles, 190. In the double-returned elections for the Convention, Maynard found seats at Plymouth and Exeter, serving for the former until the Exeter dispute was settled, then switching to that borough. Judicious investments from the Hele charities had been bestowed upon both places, and in the early 1660s Maynard chose trustees who in the two boroughs kept alive the puritan political tradition from the interregnum, including at Exeter Simon Snowe*, Thomas Bampfylde* and Thomas Westlake*; in Plymouth Edmund Fowell*, Henry Hatsell*, Timothy Alsop* and Christopher Ceely*.303Devon RO, Exeter City Archive, Act Bk. x, f. 127v, 128; D1/44/1; Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 81/H/3/38. At Plymouth he was one of the group of civic leaders who presented plate to the king.304Plymouth and W. Devon RO, 1/133, f. 6v.

Public recognition that the monarchy had taken Maynard to its bosom came in November 1660 with his knighthood and confirmation that he was to be a king’s serjeant. His interest at Bere Ferrers ensured his return for Bere Alston in 1661, and he regularly attended that Parliament, ‘so long as attendance did not conflict with his professional engagements’.305HP Commons 1660-90. Maynard’s proprietorship of Bere Ferrers was turned to lucrative advantage in 1665 when with William Ashbournham*, Sir Hugh Pollard* and John Lord Berkeley (Sir John Berkeley*), all former royalists, he was granted a lease of all mineral rights there.306Devon RO, 155M/T/1. Noted as a court dependant in 1664, he was a firm friend of Edward Hyde, now 1st earl of Clarendon, after his fall in 1667, and was regarded as a friend by the Exclusionists. Nearly half a century after the original donor had died, the Hele charities proved a politically potent tool still, being implicated in a 1667 bill he sponsored for committing remand prisoners to workhouses and in his election for Plymouth in 1679. He was able to respond to William III’s congratulations on his longevity with the apt rejoinder: ‘I had like to have outlived the law itself if your highness had not come over’.307HP Commons 1660-90. But he had to endure occasional uncomfortable reminders of his past, indeed until the last year of his life, when a man told him he deserved to be hanged for murdering Strafford.308HP Commons 1690-1715, iv. 778.

Maynard’s legal brilliance was recognized by both friends and foes, but his readiness to prosecute for successive state regimes under Parliament, republic and protectorate must have told against his achieving the highest judicial office. His contemporaries in the 1640s and 50s found it harder to reconcile than he did himself his consistent interest in – on the one hand – a reformed monarchical government, as he pursued it in 1641, together with the determined pursuit of a settlement with the king, and – on the other – a readiness to accept the state’s brief for high profile prosecutions, which so often seemed mercenary.