CAREY, Henry (c. 1580-1666)

Henry Carey succeeded his father as 4th Baron Hunsdon on 17 Apr. 1617. The pre-1660 portion of this biography is based on HP Commons, 1604-29, iii. 423-3, which includes a full list of his many commissions pre-1642. From the time of his succession to the outbreak of the Civil War he maintained a prominent place in the administration of the many counties with which he was connected through his own family and that of his wife’s, serving in the local government – as a justice of the peace and a commissioner of oyer and terminer, gaol delivery, highways, sewers and even swans – in Sussex, Kent, Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Essex. He attached himself to George Villiers^†, marquess (later duke) of Buckingham by whose favour he was created Viscount Rochford ‘for services done or to be done’. He later protested to Buckingham that ‘I would willingly wade in blood at any time to manifest myself yours’. He was a commissioner to collect the forced loan in Hertfordshire in 1627 and, perhaps with this service in mind, Charles I created him earl of Dover in 1628. By 1630 he was still ‘very much indebted’ and hard pressed to make suitable portions for his daughters. He temporarily found some relief by making a financially advantageous second marriage, solemnized in July 1630, barely eight months after the death of his first wife, with Mary, widow and heiress of the wealthy former lord mayor of London, Sir William Cokayne. This match brought him houses on Broad Street in the heart of the London and at Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey, another south-eastern county where in the period just before the outbreak of Civil War he began to play some part in local administration.

Dover sided with the king in 1640-42 and the summer of 1642 had joined Charles I in his travels. He was impeached by the Commons in July for deserting Parliament and barred from further sitting in the House of Lords. Clarendon, Rebellion, ii. 186; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 344, 357; E. Peacock, Army Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers, 5, 8. He fought for the king at Edgehill in October, where his son and heir John Carey, styled Lord Rochford (later 2nd earl of Dover), fought on the opposing side. Clarendon, Rebellion,ii. 356. Throughout the remainder of the first Civil War Dover was with the king at Oxford, where he served in Charles I’s Parliament and council of war, and was commissioned to command a regiment of Oxford scholars and gentlemen. HMC 10th Rep. VI, 65; CSP Dom. Addenda. 1625-49, p. 662; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 464; HMC Portland, i. 266; Harl. 6802, pp. 99, 120, 129, 141, 152, 154, 163, 183, 196, 357; Harl. 6852, pp. 24, 37, 254, 264. He was in Oxford until its fall, after which the House of Lords made an order on 6 July 1646 that Dover could safely reside in the Cokayne houses in London and Surrey that he had acquired through his wife. These houses passed to his stepson and fellow royalist Charles Cokayne^‡, Viscount Cullen [I], after her death at the end of 1648. Adherence to the king’s party led to his near ruin, for in the early 1650s both he and Cullen had to sell property – Cullen his houses in Kingston-upon-Thames and London, and Dover the grand Hunsdon House, sold to William Willoughby, later 6th Baron Willoughby of Parham – in order to settle the compositions they reached with the parliamentary commissioners. VCH Herts. iii. 328; VCH Surr. iii. 502. He was also indicted at Hertfordshire assizes in 1653 for counterfeiting the coin of the Commonwealth, and it was undoubtedly to these reverses that he was referring when he claimed in 1660 that he had ‘suffered want and long and sharp imprisonment for the late king’, and that he was ‘so worn out by the late troubles as to be incapable of any favour’. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 340; HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 616.

Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, not surprisingly marked Dover as a ‘lord with the king’ when drawing up his list of potential members of the House of Lords in the Convention, but Dover could not sit in the House at all when it first reassembled on 25 Apr. 1660 because the order of 20 July 1642 barring those who had fled to Charles I was not revoked by the House until 4 May 1660. The House sent a letter to Dover on 18 May requesting his attendance and he took his seat in the House the following day. He went on to attend 38 per cent of the meetings of the Convention until its adjournment on 13 Sept., but he only attended six meetings of the Convention in the autumn months of 1660 after it resumed. He came to almost three-quarters of the sittings of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament between 8 May 1661 and the summer adjournment on 30 July. Yet even when attending the House so regularly, he did not take an active part in its proceedings. Wharton recorded that Dover apparently left the House before the vote on the lord great chamberlaincy on 11 July 1661. After Parliament resumed in the autumn Dover was recorded as sick at a call of the House on 25 Nov. 1661 and he did not appear until 2 Dec. and then came to only three more sittings until he stopped coming to the House entirely after 31 Jan. 1662. On 10 Apr. 1662 the house gave Dover leave to be absent, and on that same day the earl’s proxy was registered with Jerome Weston, 2nd earl of Portland, for the last few weeks of that session. He continued to be excused at successive calls of the House and he did not register another proxy until after Portland’s death, when, perhaps on 26 Nov. 1664, and certainly by 30 Dec., he entrusted it to John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater. PH, xxviii. 439. While he was attending the House in 1660-1 he was not nominated to a single select committee, perhaps a recognition by his peers of his great age, almost eighty years old.

Dover’s only discernible activity in Parliament after 1660 was his effort to save the estate of William Heveningham^‡ from the provisions of the legislation against the regicides. In 1655 Dover’s granddaughter had married Heveningham, one of the judges at Charles I’s trial, although not a signatory to the execution warrant, and at the Restoration this regicide was in danger of losing both his life and his estate, estimated to be worth £2,500 a year. The marriage most likely reflected the wishes of Dover’s son, Rochford, who had sided with Parliament and had sat in the House of Lords by a writ of acceleration as Lord Hunsdon from 1640 until it was abolished. Dover was nevertheless eager to have access to the income of the regicide’s estate, and on 5 Sept. 1660 the House moved to support both Dover and Hunsdon in their request to the king to show mercy to Heveningham, ‘in favour only to the preserving his blood from an attaint’. Dover does not appear to have been greatly concerned with saving Heveningham’s life, but he was concerned with the property, and he requested that the estate be granted outright to him in consideration of his services to the royalist cause. CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 312, 340. By May 1661 it was reported that Heveningham’s life and estate were to be spared by means of the efforts of Hunsdon and Dover, who were to divide £1,000 a year from his lands between them, although Dover himself claimed at about the same time that he should receive an initial £2,000 with an annuity of £800 thereafter. HMC 5th Rep. 171; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 50. Dover died in April 1666, probably intestate. He was buried at Hunsdon, the family manor he had sold in 1653.