MEUX (MEWYS), William (c.1579-1638), of Kingston, I. o. W.

The Meux family acquired Kingston by marriage in the late fourteenth century. VCH Hants, v. 250. Meux’s grandfather, William Mewes, had sat in the 1584 Parliament for Newtown, in which borough the family held property; but, in the words of Sir John Oglander*, his father was ‘the veriest clown (of a gentleman) that ever the Isle of Wight bred, ... destitute of learning, ... humanity and civility’, and possibly illiterate. Hants RO, 1629B/38/1; Oglander Mems. ed. W.H. Long, 7, 8, 90-91. Meux himself was nevertheless termed ‘as well a qualified gentleman as any’, and was returned for Newtown in 1604 in defiance of the 3rd earl of Southampton’s request for both nominations. He received only two appointments, to draft the subsidy bill (10 Feb. 1606), and for a bill committee headed by his father-in-law, Sir Francis Barrington, to enable the Essex squire Humphrey Mildmay to include certain entailed property in his wife’s jointure (20 Feb. 1610). CJ, i. 266b, 397b. Meux does not seem to have stood again.

After the death of his first wife Meux remained in close contact with the puritan Barrington circle, whose religious views he undoubtedly shared, marrying a relation of one of her in-laws, and entrusting his daughter to be raised in Lady Joan Barrington’s household at Hatfield Broad Oak. Barrington Letters, ed. A. Searle (Cam. Soc. ser. 4. xxviii), 87-88, 159, 215; J.T. Cliffe, Puritan Gentry, 68. In 1628 he declined to serve as deputy lieutenant and was among the Isle of Wight gentlemen who petitioned the king for the removal of the billeted Scottish regiment. SP16/101/17; Oglander Mems. 39, 54. He died on 27 Aug. 1638, leaving £10 to the poor of Kingston, where he asked to be buried. C142/786/58; Hants RO, 1638B/49/1. His unmarried daughter received £200, and a ‘faithful and diligent’ servant an annuity of £10 and his keep. His son, John†, his executor, created a baronet in 1641, sat for Newtown in the Short and Long Parliaments until disabled as a royalist. M.F. Keeler, Long Parl. 272.