Henry Mainwaring

Henry Mainwaring (* 1587 near Ightfield , Shropshire ; † 1653 ) was an English naval officer , member of parliament and at times a pirate .

Life

Mainwaring came from a respected family. His father was Sir George Mainwaring , a judge and Member of Parliament for Shropshire, his mother Ann More (d. 1624). His maternal grandfather was the Vice Admiral of Sussex, Sir William More. Mainwaring studied from 1599 at Brasenose College of the University of Oxford with a bachelor's degree in 1602, continued his training as a lawyer in November 1604 at the Inner Temple, was temporarily a soldier - in 1611 he received the post of captain at St. Andrew's Castle, took this but not on - and went to sea. In 1612 he received an order from the Admiralty to take action against the pirate Peter Easton , who raised tributes from merchants in the Bristol Channel . He was supposed to accompany Sir Thomas Sherley to Persia, but the mission did not materialize because Spain did not allow passage through and suspected their actual destination would be the Caribbean. This failure caused him to turn to piracy against Spanish and French ships in the Mediterranean. He joined the pirates in their stronghold in Mamora (now Mehdia ) on the Berber coast. He was so successful that Spain tried in vain to bribe him to stop him. To equip his ships and hire crew, he went to Newfoundland in 1614 with eight ships, just like Easton did before . He looted, upgraded his ships and left Newfoundland in mid-September with 400 crew members, some of whom were volunteers, some of whom were pressed (one of every six on the fishing boats). He went back to the Mediterranean and plundered Portuguese, Spanish and French ships, including a French fish catcher with 10,000 dried fish caught off Newfoundland. The Spanish took advantage of his absence to conquer his base in Mamora. Like Easton, Mainwaring avoided Villefranche-sur-Mer and in 1615 struck a Spanish fleet. Due to increasing complaints from the French and Spaniards who reached James I, who was averse to piracy and saw peace with Spain and France endangered, he was given the choice in England in 1615 to give up piracy and be pardoned, or even from the English side to be pursued.

Mainwaring received his pardon on June 9, 1616, as he had not caused much damage and had even freed a fishing fleet from Newfoundland off Gibraltar from the hands of pirates. He returned to England and wrote a treatise on piracy, its beginnings and its fight in 1618, although he himself advised against pardons. On March 20, 1618 he was ennobled by the king. Plans to go to Venice as envoy, which annoyed the Spaniards, came to nothing in 1618/19. He was hired under Lord Zouche, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports , despite warnings in 1620 as Lieutenant of Dover and became a member of the Virginia Company . In 1621 he became a Member of the House of Commons for the constituency of Dover , which he remained until 1622. But he also made enemies in Cinq Portes, especially Zouche himself, who in 1623 demanded his replacement. This could be averted by the intercession of Prince Charles , but Zouche's successor, the Duke of Buckingham , made his removal from all positions in the Cinq Portes a condition of his inauguration. But he was captain of the flagship Prince Royal , which Prince Charles and Buckingham brought back from their courtship in Spain, and then a favorite of Buckingham. He was involved in many maritime expeditions under the patronage of Buckingham, 1626/27 in a commission of inquiry into the state of the Royal Navy and proposed the expansion of the shipyards in Portsmouth. In 1627 he became a member (Elder Brother) of Trinity House .

After the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, he ran into financial difficulties. In the same year his father died, as the second eldest son he left empty-handed when it came to inheritance. After trying in vain for the hand of a wealthy merchant widow in 1629, he married the daughter Fortune Gardiner (baptized 1607) of Sir Thomas Gardiner in 1630, who died in 1633. The marriage took place without the consent of the father, who therefore only gave up her dowry after Henry Mainwaring signed an annual pension of 100 pounds in land for the bride. They had a daughter Christian (1633 to 1639). In the 1630s he served in the Royal Navy, from 1637 to 1640 as Senior Captain in the Treasure Fleet. Even so, he remained in financial trouble and was persecuted by his creditors. His attempt to become a surveyor in the Royal Navy failed in 1638. He ended his maritime career in 1639 as Vice Admiral on the Henrietta Maria . During the Civil War in 1642 he lost his post as Master of Trinity House , which he had just received that same year, because of his sympathies for the royalists. He then joined the king in his headquarters in Oxford. In January 1643 he received the honorary title Doctor of Physic from the king . While the civil war raged on land, he was apparently not involved, but in early 1645 he was given command of a ship in the port of Pendennis , which was to bring Prince Charles into exile in an emergency, initially to the Isles of Scilly . In 1646 he accompanied Prince Charles to Jersey , even if he was on a different ship. He lived in poverty in exile in the Isles of Scilly and then in Jersey, where he made friends with the island chronicler Jean Chevalier. After the revolt of parts of the navy on the part of the king in 1648 he became captain of the Antelope , but did not take part in the maritime operations under Prince Rupert . In November 1651 he submitted to Parliament and returned to England completely impoverished. Mainwaring was buried on May 15, 1653 in St. Giles Church in Camberwell , where his wife is also buried.

In 1644 his encyclopedia for sailors was published with the approval of parliament. The book was written in Dover in the 1620s and was the first authoritative work on ship management.

Mainwaring was multilingual and was considered one of the leading seamen of its time.

His brother Sir Arthur Mainwaring (around 1580 to 1648) was a politician and courtier, at times a member of parliament.

literature

• George Ernest Mainwaring (Ed.): The life and works of Sir Henry Mainwaring , 2 volumes, Navy Records Society , Volume LIV, 1920; LVI, 1922. Volume 1, Archive.org ; Volume 2, Archive.org
• Mainwaring: Of the beginnings, practices and suppression of pirates , aka Discours of pirates , 1618
• Mainwaring: The seaman's dictionary, or an exposition. . . of all parts and things belonging to a ship , 1644
• Richard Whitbourne : A discourse and discovery of New-found-land , London, 1620
• Philip Gosse: The history of piracy , New York, 1934, pp. 116-128.
• GG Harris: Mainwaring, Sir Henry (1586 / 7-1653) , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online 2004

Web links

• E. Hunt: Mainwaring (Manwaring, Maynwaringe), Sir Henry , Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to Oxford Dict. Nat. Biogr. 2004 year of birth 1586 or 1587
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Harris, article Sir Henry Mainwaring in Dict. Nat. Biogr., 2004