Mildmay has not been judged kindly by historians who, echoing Clarendon’s (Edward Hyde†) verdict that he was obsequious and ungrateful, have branded him ‘deplorable’, ‘unattractive’ and ‘unreliable’.
Mildmay was the younger son of Humphrey Mildmay, a minor Essex gentleman whose seat at Danbury lay about five miles south-west of Maldon. His family was astonishingly prolific - in Essex alone there were nine branches by the end of James’s reign
In December 1617 it was rumoured that Mildmay, then described by a newsletter writer as one of the king’s cupbearers, would buy the mastership of the Jewel House from Sir Henry Carey I* for £2,000 or £3,000.
Mildmay was elected to the 1621 Parliament for Maldon, probably at the request of the master of the Rolls, Sir Julius Caesar*, the borough’s high steward.
Following the ending of Parliament Mildmay was scheduled to participate in the forthcoming Accession Day tilt, but in the event the festivities were abandoned.
During the summer of 1623 Mildmay attempted to further the interests of his patron Buckingham, who was then in Spain. As lord high admiral, Buckingham, now a duke, claimed a share in the spoils which had been seized by ships of the East India Company at the capture of Hormuz in the previous year. Mildmay, whose father-in-law was then governor of the East India Company, hoped to use his influence to obtain £1,200 for his master, but his optimism proved unfounded, for at the end of July the king wrote to Buckingham that Mildmay had ‘hunted upon so cold a scent as thy best steward was forced to labour in it himself’. By this James meant that he had intervened personally, and as a result the Company was now prepared to let Buckingham have £2,000.
Mildmay’s brief fall from grace undoubtedly tarnished his reputation: John Chamberlain was probably not alone in revising his opinion of Mildmay as ‘a proper fine gentleman’.
Mildmay achieved a greater prominence in the 1624 Parliament than he had in 1621, contributing to several debates on breaking the treaty negotiations for a Spanish match and financing a war against Spain. Although he played only a minor role in the first of these (1-2 Mar.),
Mildmay returned to the question of financing a war with Spain on 19 March. The House was then reeling from the shock of the size of the king’s demand, which, even in its revised form, was for six subsidies and 12 fifteenths, around three-quarters of a million pounds. Mildmay, too, was staggered by the amount requested. ‘The name of so many subsidies’, he declared, was ‘enough to affright anybody that know[s] the want of the poor people’.
When the House reassembled on the 20th, Mildmay supported the recorder of London, Sir Heneage Finch, who pressed the House to vote three subsidies and three fifteenths, although Mildmay, according to most accounts, wanted to grant an additional three fifteenths. He assumed, incorrectly, that this would enable the king to assist the Dutch, unite the German Protestant princes, secure Ireland from the threat of invasion, strengthen the Navy and provide a sizeable arsenal of weaponry and munitions. In order to reassure his colleagues, many of whom clearly regarded him as little more than a spokesman for Buckingham, Mildmay again affirmed that he was speaking ‘not as a courtier, or in regard of his dependency, but as a lover of his country’.
Although Mildmay had perhaps disregarded the wishes of his patron during the debate of 2 Apr., he was not always so unmindful of the duke. On 27 Feb. he was appointed to the committee to defend Buckingham from the complaints of the Spanish ambassadors concerning the duke’s speech to both Houses three days earlier. Mildmay’s status as a dependant of Buckingham presumably also explains why, on 22 Apr., he drew his colleagues’ attention to a law suit in the Court of Wards involving a fellow Member, Sir George Manners*, a relative of the duke’s by marriage.
Personal and professional considerations coloured many of Mildmay’s committee appointments. As master of the Jewel House he was naturally ordered to help draft a message to the Lords regarding gold exports (12 Mar.), while his membership of the Company explains his nomination to the committee for examining a petition regarding the Virginia colony (26 April).
It is not known why Mildmay was named to committees concerned with confirming the foundation of the Charterhouse hospital (13 Mar.), draining Erith and Plumstead marshes in Kent (10 Apr.), the sale of university offices (12 Apr.), a decree in the Court of Requests (16 Apr.), increased fees in the Subpoena Office (22 Apr.) and the proposed enfranchisement of county Durham (25 March).
Following the end of the session, Mildmay was accused of having performed a disservice to the king in the House.
Mildmay’s outspoken attack in the Commons on England’s Catholic community may have been well received at Maldon where, supported by another letter of nomination from Sir Julius Caesar, he proved the popular choice for the second seat at the parliamentary election there in April 1625.
Mildmay was more active when Parliament reassembled at Oxford in August. There the king’s request for additional supply to set out the fleet (4 Aug.) ran into the objections of Sir Edward Coke and Sir Robert Phelips, who spearheaded an oblique attack on Buckingham (5 August). The privy councillors in the House, and those Members with other official posts or Court connections, attempted to head off the trouble on 6 August. Mildmay led the way, declaring that if the House was unwilling to vote additional subsidies it should find some other means of to satisfy the king’s wants, for the king of Spain had, through his money and arms, not only ‘deprived the king’s children’ of the Palatinate, but had fomented ‘a faction of papists and Arminians in this state little less dangerous than a foreign invasion’. Mildmay also attempted to persuade his colleagues to abandon their attack on Buckingham. While acknowledging that the duke was ‘faulty in some things’, he urged the House not to ‘object the worst’ but to remember the sterling work Buckingham had performed in both Spain and the last Parliament. Four days later, on 10 Aug., Mildmay responded to John Rolle’s criticism of the duke as lord admiral. Rolle claimed that there was little point in voting further money for the navy when ‘it cannot keep our own coasts from being infected by Turkish pirates’, but Mildmay retorted that this was unjustified, as ships had been assigned to protection duty.
Although Mildmay did his best to secure both the extra funding demanded by the king and to safeguard the reputation of his master, his speeches reveal an undercurrent of criticism and dissatisfaction. His admission that Buckingham was ‘faulty in some things’, coupled with his reference to the English Arminians, indicated a growing disenchantment, not with the direction of foreign affairs, but with the government’s religious policy. Indeed, on 6 Aug. he blamed the recent outbreak of plague on ‘our coldness in religion’. Furthermore, the king’s marriage to a French Catholic prompted him to suggest that the House should append to its earlier petition the demand that Charles ‘will, upon no instance, give any connivance to the papists’. Mildmay’s concerns led him to attend a joint conference with the Lords in the Painted Chamber on 9 Aug., at which Charles’s answers to the petition on religion were read out. These evidently reassured him, at least for the time being, as during the following day’s subsidy debate he argued that the king’s additional financial needs should now be met as he had ‘shown himself protector of the Gospel’.
Parliament was dissolved without granting further supply, however, prompting Charles and Buckingham to try to raise the money they needed by offering to pawn some of the Crown jewels to the Dutch. Mildmay, whose relations with the duke had apparently warmed after his most recent parliamentary performance, cautioned his master against ordering the jewels to be conveyed abroad without first seeking the advice of the Privy Council or a warrant under the Great Seal, as such irregular proceedings would serve to fuel the suspicions of Buckingham’s many enemies.
There is no evidence that Mildmay tried to obtain a seat at the 1626 general election. After Parliament met, however, he secured a letter of nomination from Buckingham, after the Member for Norwich, (Sir) John Suckling, plumped for Norfolk.
While Buckingham was battling for his political survival Mildmay was engaged in a lesser struggle of his own with the countess of Warwick regarding his wife’s inheritance. Following the death in 1624 of his father-in-law, William Halliday, Mildmay’s mother-in-law Susan had married Mildmay’s former ally in the Virginia Company, the earl of Warwick. By the terms of Halliday’s will, Susan was required to spend £14,000 on property for her eldest daughter Anne, Mildmay’s wife. To persuade her to act promptly she was subject to a penalty of £600 for the first year of non-payment and £800 for the second. However, although the Mildmays obtained numerous offers of suitable property Susan refused to accept them, ‘protracting the time and keeping the money in her hands, and taking causeless exception to the purchases so offered unto her, though they were lands of clear title and offered upon reasonable values’. She also declined to pay the penalties for which she was liable. By the time Mildmay left for Holland with Buckingham in November 1625 his patience was exhausted. After he preferred a bill in Chancery, the earl and countess were instructed in June 1626 to purchase for the Mildmays the Hampshire manors of Twyford and Marwell, worth £700 p.a., which had been offered for sale by Sir Francis Seymour*. Six months later the borough of Southampton welcomed their new neighbour, Mildmay, by admitting him to their freedom.
Mildmay was appointed a commissioner for the Forced Loan for Essex in October 1626, but either his duties at Court or a lack of enthusiasm meant that he proved inactive.
Once in Parliament, Mildmay proved equally useful to his colleagues. On 20 June he deployed his knowledge of Court gossip to devastating effect when he joined in the attack on (Sir) Edmund Sawyer, Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, who was accused of devising two new Books of Rates. Sawyer claimed that he had acted on the king’s command, but Mildmay retorted: ‘I see every projector fathers himself upon the king’s command. We at the Court believed that Sir Edmund Sawyer was the projector of this. We know the king cannot think of these things himself, but must be informed by such as these’.
Perhaps the most significant speech made by Mildmay during the 1628 session concerned the growth of recusancy and the rise of Arminianism. Delivered on 24 Mar., it suggests that Mildmay’s relationship with Buckingham had finally reached breaking point. Although Mildmay did not explicitly name the duke, his audience can have been left in little doubt about the intended target of his criticism. He started, innocently enough, by supporting Sir Nathaniel Rich, who observed that popery would not have grown so much had the petition presented to the king in 1625 been acted upon. He then delivered a coded attack on the lord admiral which began, perhaps somewhat pointedly, with a nautical metaphor: ‘Religion is the anchor of government, and the stay of kingdoms. If there be a new faction [of Arminians] they must have a head, and if they have a head, that head is like in times to have a great part of the kingdom’. He advised the House to consider ‘the temporal danger’ faced by the king,
Although no longer enamoured of Buckingham, Mildmay was haunted by the spectre of Protestant defeats on the Continent. Consequently he, like the duke, was anxious that the king should be given the wherewithal to pay for the wars against France and Spain. On 4 Apr. he urged the House to emulate its enemies, who had ‘joined hand and heart together’, by voting ‘real subsidies’ which would enable the king to provide sufficient naval forces to guard the Narrow Seas, guarantee English access to the Baltic and relieve the Huguenots of La Rochelle. He was especially concerned that failure to secure the seaways for commercial vessels would spell economic disaster. However, like many of his colleagues, Mildmay pulled his punches. He stressed the inability of the country to bear the full costs of war, and claimed that several of the king’s military aims were ‘not in our power’ to fund. Members were advised only to ‘insist on such a gift in general as may enable the king in some measure’, as this would satisfy Charles but not prove ‘burdensome to the country’.
Just as Mildmay found himself pulled in opposite directions when faced with the issue of war-funding, so too he was torn by the competing demands of the king for instant supply and the subject for redress of grievances. On 4 Apr. he seemed to make it clear which of these demands should take precedence when he recounted a story he had heard regarding the king of Sweden, who advised his Parliament ‘to consider the misery of their neighbour country, lest while the king struggled for his prerogative, and people for their liberties, both lose all’.
Mildmay paid little attention to legislation in 1628, and those committees to which he was nominated dealt mostly with issues which evidently concerned neither him nor his constituents. Their subjects were the lands of the 2nd earl of Devonshire (Sir William Cavendish I*, 21 Apr.); the naturalization of James Freese and the creation of a jointure by an under-age Lord Gerard (both 7 May); a decree in a Chancery case involving (Sir) Arnold Herbert* (10 May); and the debts of Lord Bergavenny (Sir Henry Neville II*, 17 May).
Mildmay received 20s. in 1628 from Maldon’s chamberlain for presenting the town with ‘a book which (amongst others) much concerned the good of this borough’, and at the start of the New Year he and his fellow Maldon burgess, Sir Arthur Herrys, were presented with gifts of sugar loaves and oysters.
As in 1628 Mildmay’s legislative interests were limited. An abiding concern for recusancy presumably explains Mildmay’s appointment to consider a bill to explain a clause in the 1606 Recusancy Act (28 Jan.), while the presence of several Members with estates in Essex on the committee for the bill to confirm the letters patent of the Somers’ Island Company (10 Feb.) perhaps explains his own inclusion. His only other legislative appointment concerned corruption, both in the presentation of ministers to benefices and in elections to university positions (23 February). His remaining committee nominations were to present the king with the petition of both Houses for a general fast (27 Jan.), and to consider two other petitions - one from a group of London merchants (9 Feb.) and the other directed against Lord Savile (Sir John Savile*, 16 February).
Following the dissolution Mildmay maintained close connections with Maldon, where by now he owned some property, intervening on its behalf in 1635 to obtain the support of the attorney-general, (Sir) John Bankes*, in a dispute with neighbouring Heybridge.