ST JOHN, Sir Walter (1622-1708), of Battersea, Surr. and Lydiard Tregoze, Wilts.

Although he belonged to a prominent north Wiltshire family, long represented in Parliament and with powerful connections scattered over southern England, as the sixth son Walter’s prospects were initially overshadowed by those of his elder brothers, three of whom lived well into their twenties. No record of his education or early life has come to light. It is possible that he travelled or studied abroad; if so it was somewhere other than Leiden, the university attended by his brothers John (from 1637, followed by Franeker in 1638 and Padua in 1640) and Henry St John* (from 1645).26E. Peacock, Index to English-speaking students who have graduated at Leyden University (1883), 86; Album Studiosorum Franekerensis, 111; Studio di Padova, 152. His eldest brother Oliver’s marriage in the 1630s to a daughter of Horace Vere, Baron Vere, former governor in the Netherlands, would have extended the family’s foreign contacts.

The deaths of Oliver, leaving an infant heir, and of John and Edward, killed fighting for the king, prompted Sir John St John to make a will in July 1645 which made generous provision for his surviving sons, Walter and Henry. While Lydiard Tregoze was to descend with the baronetcy, the latter were to live at the family home at Battersea, with means to establish themselves independently.27PROB11/205/365. Sir John had always been close to his younger half-brother Sir Edward Hungerford*, the one-time parliamentary commander in Wiltshire, and in placing his sons near London must have anticipated that they would move in the Presbyterian circles to which his and Sir Edward’s religious sympathies most naturally directed them; the vicar of Battersea, his ‘good cousin’ Dr Thomas Temple, was a member of the Westminster Assembly and a frequent preacher before the Long Parliament.28VCH Wilts. ix. 87; Manning, Bray, Surr. iii. 340; Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 403. Sir John predeceased his half-brother by only a few weeks in the autumn of 1648, and the trusteeship of his estates which would doubtless have devolved principally on Sir Edward instead fell on Walter and the still under-age Henry. It was they who were responsible for an elaborate funeral which reflected Sir John’s considerable pride in his lineage, but which prompted a prosecution from the College of Arms.29CB. As administrator of the estate of his brother Edward, in 1649 Walter also had to deal with the Committee for Advance of Money* over obligations connected with the Oxford Engagement.30CAM 1004.

Probably in the year of his father’s death, and certainly by early 1650, Walter’s marriage to his kinswoman Johanna St John secured him a powerful patron in the person of his father-in-law, the newly-elevated lord chief justice, Oliver St John*. The alliance was enhanced with the subsequent marriage of Henry St John and Johanna’s younger sister Catherine.31Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 74, 87, 322. His sons-in-law, the judge told Oliver Cromwell*, were ‘both such as fear God’.32Noble, Mems. of House of Cromwell, ii. 31.

Commissioned on 20 August 1651 as a captain of horse raised in Surrey, St John fought at the battle of Worcester.33CSP Dom. 1651, p. 532; CCSP v. 28. Otherwise he and his wife settled down in the manor house at Battersea to exercise the piety and charity for which they became celebrated over the succeeding half century – a ‘Lord and Lady Bountiful’, ‘eminent for owning and practising religion’, according to Mary Rich, countess of Warwick, whose niece later married their eldest son.34Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 83. In 1651 St John gave £10 to set the local poor on work; two years later he and the vicar reviewed alehouse licences.35Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 75. He served on the Surrey commission of the peace from 1653, in August 1654 he was named to the commission of triers and ejectors, and in February 1656 he was nominated a visitor of Dulwich College.36HP Commons 1660-1690; A. and O.; Young, Hist. of Dulwich College, i. 141-2. These appointments indicate some degree of commitment to the protectorate, and perhaps rather more to the cause of godly reformation. However, he may have shared his father-in-law’s reservations about the course of politics.37‘Oliver St John (c.1598-1673)’, Oxford DNB. He certainly had kin of his own whose standing with the regime was more equivocal, yet with whom he maintained contact. An apparently lifelong closeness to his sister Anne (1614-96), who had married successively Sir Henry Lee (d. 1639) and, in 1644, Henry Wilmot* (created earl of Rochester by the exiled king in 1652), was reflected in St John’s presence at Ditchley, Oxfordshire, for the wedding of his nephew Sir Henry Lee* on 30 May 1655.38Wilts. RO, 3430/42; Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 217. The bride’s father was a Wiltshire man of complex political opinions, Sir John Danvers*, who had lately died at his Chelsea home across the river from Battersea and who in life was plausibly part of St John’s circle.39‘Sir John Danvers’, Oxford DNB. Both men combined local office around the capital with being assessment commissioners in their native county.40A. and O.

On the death of his nephew John in April 1656 St John succeeded to the baronetcy and the estates at Lydiard Tregoze as well as to the manors of Battersea and Wandsworth. He was evidently considered sufficiently reliable to be returned for a county seat with his brother-in-law Richard Grobham Howe* to the second protectorate Parliament which assembled that autumn. However, following the exclusions of fellow Wiltshire members Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*, Alexander Popham*, John Bulkeley* and (probably most pertinently in this case) Henry Hungerford* (half-brother of Sir Edward), it seems probable that St John took a cue from another Hungerford associate, Alexander Thistlethwayte*, and withdrew.41VCH Wilts. v. 152. Noted as absent at the roll call made on 31 December 1656, he was not excused.42Burton’s Diary, i. 288. There is no trace of his having taken part in the Parliament’s proceedings.

Sir Walter continued to hold public office, however. In November 1656 he was named a commissioner for the safety of the protector, although within the year he apparently made an offer of a present to Charles Stuart, perhaps through his sister the countess of Rochester.43A. and O.; CCSP iv. 167. On 20 July 1658 he joined the Wiltshire commission of the peace.44C231/6, p. 400. Judging by detailed lists kept by his wife of household items transferred from Battersea to Lydiard, from at least 1657 family members spent significant periods in the county.45Wilts. RO, 3430/19, 3430/20. In September 1658 Sir Walter was one of the apparently active local justices whose services the inhabitants of Marlborough hoped to enlist in a petition to the government requesting assistance in allocating compensation for the late town fire.46CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 142.

In this context St John’s election to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, where he again sat for the county and his brother Henry for Wootton Bassett, alongside their nephew Sir Henry Lee and their brother-in-law Francis St John, was less surprising than it might have been. All the same, it is striking to find him at the start of proceedings on 27 January 1659 named second after Secretary John Thurloe* among commissioners to administer the oath of allegiance to the protectorate.47CJ vii. 593a. As a former client of Oliver St John, Thurloe doubtless knew Sir Walter well, but any trust may have been misplaced. If fellow Wiltshire member Edmund Ludlowe II* is to be believed, St John was prepared to subvert his responsibility. Ludlowe recalled that, when during an encounter in Westminster Hall about 1 February he explained to Sir Walter his scruples about taking the oath, St John ‘desired me to meet him in the lobby the next morning, promising to carry me with him, which, said he, will create a belief in the House that I have given you the oath’. The deception was not perpetrated, since the next day, failing to locate St John, Ludlowe entered the House regardless.48Ludlow, Mems. ii. 52-3. At the least, it seems that Sir Walter’s position was evolving steadily away from support for the government and its ideals.

St John was named to only two committees in the Parliament, but although apparently inactive in February, thereafter he was not inconspicuous. On 8 March he and Francis Gerard* conducted Lislebone Long* to the Speaker’s chair in the indisposition of its usual incumbent.49CJ vii. 612a. On the 23rd he was a teller with Malmesbury MP Thomas Higgons* supporting the committee of privileges’ recommendation that the franchise in Clifton-Dartmouth be restricted to freemen, while on the 28th he endorsed the proposition (opposed by Sir George Boothe* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige*) for including faithful peers in the Other House, and treating it as a legitimate chamber.50CJ vii. 619a, 621b; Burton’s Diary, iv. p. 1xx. Nominated on 31 March to the committee preparing a bill for placing elections in Durham on the same basis as elsewhere, he had clearly established an interest in such matters, and was using it to promote a return to more traditional practices.51CJ vii. 622b. Membership of the committee for Irish affairs (1 April) offered an opportunity for influence in an area where his brother had an estate.52CJ vii. 623a.

As early as 25 March Sealed Knot member Sir Alan Brodrick, a kinsman of St John’s, reported to Edward Hyde* (a cousin of both) that ‘Sir Walter St John and his brother Harry have changed from passionate commonwealth’s-men to violent courtiers, as well as their brother-in-law Francis St John’.53CCSP iv. 167. The return of the Long Parliament deprived St John of an arena for advancing his new position, but through the spring and summer he evidently employed alternative means. Although his promise of financial assistance to the king had yet to be made good, Brodrick indicated that St John was part of a network supplying carefully planted royalist information when he told Hyde on 23 May that ‘Thurloe assures Sir Walter St John that he will never discover to Scott, the new secretary, the persons who gave intelligence from France and Flanders without their consents’.54CCSP iv. 209. Informed that the lord chief justice was advising Sir Walter to take measures to secure his land and hope for a general pardon, Hyde rejoiced (1/11 Aug.) that ‘[Oliver] St John begins to doubt the stability of his condition; his son-in-law may take a better course’.55CCSP iv. 282, 304. Meanwhile, the sudden death of Sir Henry Lee, another MP of whom the royalists hoped much, paradoxically drew Sir Walter further in to circles promoting the restoration of the monarchy as, with Sir Ralph Verney*, he fulfilled his responsibilities as his nephew’s executor and trustee.56Oxon. RO, Dil. XVIII/c.2, d.3a.

Squeezed out of contention for a county seat in elections to the Convention, St John stood for Great Bedwyn, where the manor once owned by the Hungerfords had come via Sir John Danvers to the Lees. Writing to a third party on 23 February the countess of Rochester for once demonstrated less than whole-hearted support, observing that ‘if my brother St John be not chosen, I shall rather have him disappointed than Sir Ralph Verney’.57Mems. of the Verney Fam. iii. 465. However, in the face of the Seymour family’s return to its pre-war prominence, neither was successful: in April a double return was decided in favour, as Edmund Verney noted, of ‘two persons … which were put in by my Lord of Hertford’.58Mems. of the Verney Fam. iii. 477; Dering Diaries and Pprs. 37. St John evidently could not throw off either suspicions that his loyalties lay with the old regime or the embarrassment of association with his father-in-law. It emerged at quarter sessions that he had been spoken of as ‘a rogue and a rebel, an anabaptist and a Quaker’ who ‘did deliver five bullets against the king at Worcester fight’ and had been accused of supporting the attempted rising of John Lambert* the previous year.59Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 79. Johanna St John told her steward on 2 May that, despite her provision of a maypole and drink at Lydiard to celebrate the king’s return, ‘they do here increase their lies and raise new every day’.60Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 80. In London Sir Walter wrote to Edward Hyde on ‘Joyful May Day’ pledging his allegiance, following it up with a ‘small acknowledgement’ and an apology for his presence on the wrong side at Worcester.61CCSP v. 2, 28. Lady St John considered this insufficient. Alarmed that he was ‘backward in kissing the king’s hand and going to my Lord Monck [George Monck*]’ she advised on 8 June that he ‘stay in town’ and make ‘his chief friends some presents’, ‘for his enemies watch [for] his coming down [as] an opportunity to do him a mischief’.62Wilts. RO, 3430/22.

By autumn 1660 St John had weathered the storm. Confirmed as a justice of the peace for both Surrey and Wiltshire, he was elected unopposed for Wootton Bassett in 1661. His subsequent political career was both modest and intermittent, perhaps partly because his instincts seem to have been for minimal government: in December 1660 he sought to reduce his obligation to the militia and in January 1662 he prayed that Parliament would not ‘undo the nation and themselves by great taxes’.63Wilts. RO, 3430/22; HP Commons 1660-1690. Sympathy for Presbyterianism in the 1670s and for Exclusion in the 1680s barred him temporarily from local office, but he was on good terms with the Hydes in the 1660s and was clearly not a natural rebel.64Wilts. RO, 3430/22; HP Commons 1660-1690. The latitudinarian bishop of Ely and Peterborough Simon Patrick, who had been his chaplain from 1657 and minister at Battersea from 1658, and who was greatly appreciative of their patronage, claimed that the St Johns had had no scruples about conforming to the episcopal church which he had taken pains to usher in locally.65Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 403; S. Patrick, The Hearts Ease, or a remedy against all troubles (1659), sigs. A2v-A3 (E.1801.1); Mensa Mystica, or a discourse concerning the sacrament of the Lords Supper (1660), sig. A3 (E.1752.1); Jewish Hypocrisie, a caveat to the present generation (1660), sig. A2 (E.1751.1). Robust alike when dealing with his steward and this tenants, Sir Walter believed in hierarchy. Castigating the former about 1660 for being too timorous, he thought that ‘the fearful complying spirit to be afraid of every man’ was a peculiarity of ‘Wiltshire air’. Now was not the time ‘for gentlemen to be subjected to every young vapouring fellow’: he hoped ‘to live to see Wiltshire in an other condition than to be governed by graziers sons as of late’.66Wilts RO, 3430/22.

St John’s final parliamentary service was in the 1690 Parliament, but he lived on to continue charitable work. In 1700 he endowed the school which still bears his name.67Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 84. He outlived his wife by three years, dying in July 1708.68Taylor, Our Lady of Batersey, 88, 220. His will left £200 in trust for apprenticeships for children at the school.69PROB11/503/49. He was survived by only two daughters and one son from his large family. His son Henry St John† had replaced him in the parliamentary seats of Wootton Bassett and Wiltshire, but did not share his exemplary piety; his grandson Henry St John†, later viscount Bolingbroke, was already launched on his brilliant political career.70HP Commons 1660-1690; HP Commons 1690-1715.