styled 1626-39 Ld. Leppington; suc. fa. 12 Apr. 1639 as 2nd earl of MONMOUTH
First sat 13 Apr. 1640; first sat after 1660, 7 May 1670; last sat 28 May 1661
MP Camelford 1621, Beverley 3 Mar. 1624, Tregony 1625, St Mawes 1626, Grampound 1628
bap. 27 Jan. 1596, 1st s. of Sir Robert Carey† (later earl of Monmouth) and Elizabeth, da. of Sir Hugh Trevanion, kt. of Caerhayes, Cornw.; bro. of Thomas Carey‡. educ. privately (tutor, Henry Burton); Exeter, Oxf. 1611 (BA 1614); travelled abroad (Low Countries, France, Italy) 1614-16. m. c. 26 Feb. 1620, Martha (d. 10 Apr. 1677), da. of Sir Lionel Cranfield†, later earl of Middlesex, of Wood Street, London and Chelsea, Mdx. 2s. d.v.p., 8 da. (4 d.v.p.). KB 3 Nov. 1616. d. 13 June 1661; will 21 July 1659, pr. 20 June 1661.1
Commr. array, Herts 1642.
Associated with: Long Acre, Westminster; Rickmansworth, Herts. (to c.1652);2 Kenilworth Castle, Warws. (to c.1650).
Likenesses: miniature by Samuel Cooper, 1649, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; line engraving by William Faithorne (after S. Cooper), 1656, NPG D22870; oil on canvas (portrait of 1st earl Monmouth with his family), attrib. Paul van Somer, c. 1617, NPG 5426.
Sir Henry Carey was the heir of Sir Robert Carey†, himself the youngest of ten sons born to Henry Carey†, Baron Hunsdon, Elizabeth I’s first cousin and a favoured courtier. Sir Robert was made chamberlain to the prince of Wales in 1617 and was created Baron Carey of Leppington in 1622, with a grant of land in the East Riding of Yorkshire and a lease of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. At the coronation of Charles I, Carey of Leppington was made earl of Monmouth and soon after he purchased the park and mansion of Rickmansworth on the Middlesex-Hertfordshire border.3
From 1603 Sir Robert’s eldest son Henry was raised in the atmosphere of James I’s court, but his formative years appear to have been those spent travelling abroad, where he developed the fluency in French and Italian that was to be important for his future career. He took up residence at Kenilworth Castle in 1625, when the lease to his father was finally confirmed, and began to take part in local government and society by serving on the commissions of the peace for the areas where his family had their principal residences and landholdings – Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex.
Sir Henry, styled Lord Leppington from 1626, sat in the last Parliaments of James I and those of the first years of Charles I for a variety of Cornish boroughs, reflecting the Cornish background of his mother. In the Commons he often opposed Charles Stuart, both as prince and king, and his favourite George Villiers†, duke of Buckingham.4 He took his seat in the Lords in April 1640 but was impeached by the Commons on 16 June 1642 for joining the king at York.5 Although he was made a commissioner of array for Hertfordshire, Monmouth did not take an active role in the Civil War, except for his battle with Parliament to maintain control over his rights in Kenilworth, a 60-year lease of which had been bestowed on him in November 1641.6
According to Anthony Wood, Monmouth was ‘noted for a person skilled in the modern languages, and a general scholar; the fruit whereof he found in the troublesome times of rebellion where by a forced retiredness he was capacitated to exercise himself in studies’.7 Indeed, he is largely known a translator of historical works from the Italian, and Wood attributed to him ten published volumes of translations, some of them substantial. Monmouth’s contemporaries held his efforts in high esteem, or at least his publishers relied on his reputation in trying to sell their editions of his works. In a posthumous 1663 edition of his History of the Wars of Italy from 1613 to 1644, translated from the original of Pietro Capriata, the publisher in his epistle to the reader wrote of ‘the ever to be honoured Henry, earl of Monmouth’ who ‘made so many excellent Italian pieces speak English with an industry seldom found in the nobility of our nation’, and concludes that ‘the translation cannot be ill rendered, because the earl of Monmouth did it, who was master both of the English and Italian tongues’.
Although probably still working on his translation of Priorato’s History of France (which was left unfinished at the time of his death), Monmouth re-entered political life at the Restoration with some enthusiasm. He attended almost two-thirds of the sittings of the Convention from his first sitting there on 7 May 1660, only three days after the decision to readmit those peers who had supported the king in early 1642. He was, however, seldom appointed to committees, apart from the large sessional committees for privileges and petitions, and appears to have been largely inactive in the House. On 15 and 16 June 1660, however, he was the leading witness against Robert Danvers, whom the House had summoned and hoped to try as the 2nd Viscount Purbeck, a title Danvers himself rejected. Monmouth claimed that Purbeck had said ‘that it was a very commendable and just action to put the last king to death’ and ‘that rather than the late king should want one to cut off his head, he would do it himself’. Another witness testified that Danvers’s son had said many blasphemous things, such as denying the immortality of the soul and scoffing at the idea of the last judgment, to the earl’s sister, Lady Philadelphia Wharton, widow of Sir Thomas Wharton‡, in Monmouth’s London residence in Queen Street.8 Lady Philadelphia’s son, and Monmouth’s nephew, Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, may have been involved in some way in introducing a noted radical like Danvers into the house of the orthodox Monmouth, who in his will insisted on his funeral service being conducted ‘by some orthodoxical minister of the Church of England according to the book of common prayer’.
Monmouth barely attended two sittings in the House in late May 1661 before he died on 13 June. He still appeared in the House’s records posthumously: four days after his death, on 17 June, it was reported to the House that Leonard Robinson had illegally entered into and taken possession of land in Yorkshire belonging to Monmouth and a number of other northern peers and this breach of privilege was taken up by the committee for privileges in July 1661.9 In his will Monmouth desired to be buried among his parents and deceased daughters in the parish church of Rickmansworth, where he also requested a monument to be erected. However, he appears to have sold his last holdings in that manor in 1655, some four years before the will was composed.10 He bequeathed to his wife and surviving daughters £600 and his remaining property in Westminster, Lincolnshire, and the East Riding. Monmouth died without male heirs, both his sons and his grandson having predeceased him, so at his death the earldom of Monmouth became extinct. In March 1662 the crown granted to three of his surviving daughters the lease of the manor and castle of Kenilworth, ignoring the petitions for it from John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt.11 The title itself was revived two years after the earl’s death and granted to Charles II’s illegitimate son James Scott, who became duke of Monmouth.
C.G.D.L.- 1 TNA, PROB 11/304.
- 2 VCH Herts. ii. 377.
- 3 VCH Herts. ii. 377.
- 4 HP Commons, 1604-29, iii. 437.
- 5 CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 357-8; HMC 5th Rep. 27.
- 6 CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 155-6; HMC 6th Rep. 173, 179, 181.
- 7 Ath. Ox. iii. 516.
- 8 HMC 5th Rep. 154.
- 9 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 64-65.
- 10 VCH Herts. ii. 377.
- 11 CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 487; 1661-2, pp. 125, 326; CTB, i. 361.