Henry Montagu, (c 1564–1642) was the first earl of Manchester, a judge and government official, born
in Boughton, Northamptonshire, and third surviving son of Sir Edward Montagu (c.1532–1602) . His grandfather Sir Edward Montagu was chief justice of king's bench and a governor to Edward VI. Henry was intended for the law, and after matriculating at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1583 entered the Middle Temple in 1585. He was called to the bar in 1592, and was elected autumn reader at the Middle Temple, 1606.
He was elected recorder of London and knighted (1603). His relations with the new king were usually sound, though James received ‘less satisfaction than wee expected’ from the firmly Calvinist Montagu's response to an urgent request to tighten regulation in London against recusants (1605). In 1616 was made Chief Justice of the King’s Bench (following Coke) in which office it fell to him to pass sentence on Sir Walter Raleigh (1618). He was appointed Lord High Treasurer (1620), being raised to the peerage as Baron Montagu of Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire, and Viscount Mandeville. He became President of the Council (1621), in which office he was continued by Charles I, who created him first Earl of Manchester (1626). In 1628 he became Lord Privy Seal and in 1635 a commissioner of the treasury. Although from the beginning of his public life (1601), when he first entered parliament, Manchester had inclined to the popular side in politics, be managed to retain to the end the favour of the king. He was a judge of the Star Chamber, and one of the most trusted councillors of Charles I. His loyalty, ability and honesty were warmly praised by Clarendon. In conjunction with Coventry, the lord keeper, he pronounced an opinion in favour of the legality of ship-money (1634). At heart Manchester was always an administrator, more concerned with dispensing justice, enforcing statute law and quickening the machinery of government than with the play of court politics. In his unspectacular way, he became a pillar of the privy council. Remarkably, between 1620 and 1641 he attended four in every five of its routine meetings as well as others concerned with policy, served on the bench in Star Chamber and attended its standing committees for trade and plantations and, briefly, for Ireland (1623-5).
Like other councillors of firmly protestant inclinations he welcomed the final collapse in 1634 of any prospect of a Spanish subsidy for Charles's growing English fleet, and helped Coventry and Coke in managing the preliminaries to levying ship money each year during the remainder of the personal rule. Always a moderate, he had little time for factious activity. Unlike Coventry and Laud he did not encourage the use of the forest courts to harass Lord Treasurer Portland (1634) and had earlier viewed the revival of the forest laws as being entirely in the interests of law and order, whereas his country brother Edward sensed a money-making exercise. His son Wat's conversion to Rome (1635) hit him hard, particularly when he realised that before Wat's letter reached him several copies were not only in circulation but, to his embarrassment, already in use as Catholic propaganda. Even so, he was determined to receive the news in silence, hurt as he was that Wat had failed to consult. Seven months later he felt impelled to respond 'lest those of your new profession should think, as some of them say, that a new lapsarian was more able by a few day's discipline to oppose our religion than an old father and a long professor was able to defend it'. He set out in detail the fundamentals of his protestant faith, grounded in Christ and renouncing ‘all men alike as inventors of our religion’, among them Luther, to whom Wat had particularly objected, and maintaining ‘only the apostolical doctrine of the ancient primitive and catholic Church’. He would not abandon Wat, but wanted him to return to the Church of England of his own accord. Before the end of 1636, however, he had become so depressed that the Countess of Leicester reported him ‘drunke everie Meall’. One of his rare absences from the council table was in 1637 when, in the king's presence, Laud bluntly attacked Catholic influence at court, evident in the recent wave of conversions among courtiers around the queen and exemplified by the pernicious influence of, among others, Wat Montagu.
He was married three times. First (1601) to Catherine, daughter of Sir William Spencer of Yarnton, Oxfordshire (d 1612). They had four sons (Edward, Walter, James and Henry) and two daughters. He married (c 1613) next Anne, daughter of William Wincot of Langham, Suffolk, widow of Sir Leonard Haliday, Lord Mayor of London 1605–6. She died childless (c 1618) his nthrid wife (1620) was Margaret (d 1653), daughter of John Crouch, Corneybury in Layston, Hertfordshire, widow of Allen Elvine, a London bookseller and John Hare, clerk of the court of wards. They had two sons (George and Sidney) and at least one daughter.
He was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward, Viscount Mandeville. He had spent heavily in establishing his station in life, without entirely realising the promise of earlier years, and died a man of respectable, rather than abundant, means. After disposing of his landed estate in Huntingdonshire and London among his older children, he was able to provide almost £5K pa for his widow and younger sons, with gifts of £2K to each of his two granddaughters. He fretted that it was not more. As his will shows, he never forgot what he regarded as his underprivileged beginnings as a younger brother, and seemed determined his children should not do so either. As late as 1616 his nose had reportedly been set ‘somewhat awrie’ by news that eldest brother, Edward, had at last got a male heir; and, in Clarendon's opinion, he came to care too much about advancing his fortune ‘by all ways which offered themselves’. Nevertheless, with ‘a faire portion of God's blessing’ on his labours, and ‘never gain[ing] anything by corruption, cavillation or oppression’, Montagu had prospered sufficiently by 1642 to show those of his posterity who cared to heed his words what might be achieved by conscientious service to king and country.
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