One of several families in north-eastern Wales who claimed descent from Tudur Trevor, prince of Powys, the senior branch of the Trevor family were settled at Brynkinallt near Chirk, Denbighshire from medieval times until the death of master of the Rolls Sir John Trevor† without male heirs in 1717. A younger son acquired Trevalyn by marriage at the end of the fifteenth century, and his descendant John Trevor made his fortune in the service of Sir Richard Sackville†, under-treasurer of the Exchequer in the 1560s. Trevor continued to serve the latter’s son Lord Buckhurst (Thomas Sackville†, later 1st earl of Dorset) until his death in 1589, marrying one of his master’s relations and renting a town house from Buckhurst in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street.
The next generation of the Trevor family maintained some contacts with the Sackvilles - Dorset appointed Sir Richard† and Thomas Trevor* as trustees for one of his daughters at his death in 1608 - but from the 1590s their chief patron was lord admiral Howard. Trevor himself had presumably joined the admiral’s household by 1593, when he was returned to the Commons for Reigate, a Howard borough. He joined his master’s secretariat by 1596, and was appointed surveyor of the Navy in December 1598.
The most important part of Trevor’s role as surveyor was the provision of stores to build and maintain the Crown’s ships. In theory all bills were supposed to be approved in advance by Trevor, Mansell, Sir Henry Palmer, the comptroller, and Sir Peter Buck, the clerk of the Navy. However, at the Navy inquiry in 1608 Palmer glumly admitted that ‘he stood as a cypher and so did often sign both books and bill over-carelessly’, while Buck was too junior to be able to withstand sustained pressure from both Trevor and Mansell.
While Trevor established his own supply system, the Navy’s existing victuallers were more than happy to offer him a share of their profits. Captains and victuallers, who jointly benefited from the long-established practice of ‘dead pays’, whereby both wages and victuals were supplied for non-existent mariners who sometimes constituted over a quarter of a ship’s crew, naturally showed their appreciation to Trevor and Mansell, who signed their bills. Meanwhile, pursers and boatswains fitting their ships out found that matters proceeded more smoothly if they offered Trevor a gratuity.
The most blatant form of corruption which Trevor practised was the outright appropriation of supplies for his private use. The Navy’s painter, John de Critz, complained that Trevor never allowed him to exercise his office, preferring to use instead Paul Isaacson, who had painted his house and ship free of charge.
The multiplicity, ingenuity and scale of the frauds perpetrated by Mansell and Trevor came to light in 1608-9, during the inquiry into the Navy chaired by lord privy seal Northampton, whose desire for financial retrenchment outweighed family loyalty to his uncle, the lord admiral. Nottingham and his subordinates fought back when the commission made its report, and the king refused to take any action against the officers but merely lectured them about their duty. While his colleagues remained in office until 1618, Trevor disposed of the surveyorship to Capt. Richard Bingley in 1611, pleading ‘disability of his body and health’. The real reasons behind Trevor’s action remain obscure, and it is difficult to see why he should have voluntarily surrendered an office which must have yielded him well in excess of £1,000 a year; perhaps Northampton, who returned to the subject of naval reform in 1613, applied pressure behind the scenes by threatening to revoke some of Trevor’s other patents.
Trevor’s resignation of the surveyorship in 1611 was not a fatal blow to his finances, as he secured a number of other offices in the first year of James’s reign, when the stock of the Howard family was at its highest. By far the most lucrative was the farm of the duty on sea coals, which he shared (in the first instance) with Sir William Ryder, Sir Marmaduke Darrell* and Sir Thomas Bludder. The venture probably yielded Trevor as much as £1,500 a year during the 1620s, but it was by no means a guaranteed success at its inception: the consortium took over only after the farm had been abandoned by its previous holder and rejected by the London merchants, and succeeded largely because of the phenomenal growth of the coal trade and the rigorous approach the farmers took to exacting deductions from their rent for various exemptions allowed for certain categories of shipment.
As with so much else, Trevor owed his early parliamentary interest to Nottingham, sitting by turns for the Howard boroughs of Reigate and Bletchingley. Regularly nominated to bill committees, he was sufficiently well known to rate a mention in one version of the ‘Parliament Fart’ poem, but he evidently did not speak in the House during the six sessions of 1604-14. As might be expected, many of the committees to which he was named during these sessions can be related to his interests. His patron featured in several: the naturalization bill for Nottingham’s Scottish second wife, (2 Apr. 1604); another to confirm the earl as one of the trustees for the jointure estate of Nottingham’s daughter Lady Kildare, whose husband Lord Cobham (Henry Brooke alias Cobham†) had been attainted for his part in the Main Plot of 1603 (30 May 1604); two more for the restitution of Thomas, earl of Arundel and Lord William Howard (2 Apr., 15 May 1604).
Nottingham’s resignation of the Admiralty to the marquess of Buckingham at the beginning of 1619 had relatively little effect upon Trevor’s career, which was by then well established, but the loss of parliamentary patronage did cause him some problems. His return for two Cornish seats during the 1620s is not easy to explain, as, unlike his brother Thomas, he had no direct links with the duchy of Cornwall and was not included on either of the official nomination lists in 1621 or 1624; nor were the two boroughs for which he was returned particularly close to the estates of his nephew Charles Trevanion*. His likeliest Cornish patron at Bodmin in 1621 was Sir Robert Killigrew*, another of Nottingham’s entourage on the Madrid embassy of 1605; while at East Looe he was doubtless nominated by the borough recorder Sir Reginald Mohun*, who was Trevanion’s cousin.
More through accident than design, Trevor played a more significant part in the Commons in 1621 than hitherto. On 26 Feb. he moved to hear counsel for the alehouse licensing patentee Sir Robert Maxwell, who was, like himself, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. He was later cited in the depositions against lord chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*), for having given a bribe of £100 to procure a Chancery decree. On 24 May, at the second reading of a bill to amend the Dilapidations’ Act of 1571, Thomas Crewe protested that the measure was intended solely to resolve this particular lawsuit, and insisted that it ‘will not reach to do any good for the future, for there is scarce one lease in England which is of that nature’; the bill was thrown out after Sir Edward Coke condemned it as ‘prejudicial to the church and colleges’.
With the plague raging in London, Trevor and his son Sir John II both appear to have missed the Westminster sitting of the 1625 Parliament; they were given liberty to sit in the House at Oxford on 4 Aug., before taking the corporate communion arranged for latecomers on the following day. One of them was subsequently named to attend a conference with the Lords to debate a petition complaining about recent examples of lax enforcement of the recusancy laws (8 August).