William Coryton

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William Coryton, (1580 – 1651), politician, was the eldest son of Peter Coryton of Coryton and Newton Ferrars, Devon, and his wife, Joan, daughter of John Wreye of Milton, Cornwall. Nothing is known of his early years and he did not attend university. He married Elizabeth (d. 1656), daughter of Sir John Chichester de Raleigh and Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Dennis; they had four sons and seven daughters.

Coryton was a critical figure in the west-country political network of the Herbert earls of Pembroke, and was vice-warden of the stannaries, deputy lieutenant, and custos rotulorum of Cornwall. He sat in all parliamentary sessions between 1624 and 1629, usually being returned for Cornwall. There he was a leading member of the Pembroke interest and linked to Sir John Eliot and the earl of Warwick. A bitter opponent of Buckingham, he opposed Arminianism in the church and favoured war with Spain. Believing in the conciliar and legislative authority of parliament, he espoused traditional concepts of purging evil counsellors but under Charles I came to put pressure upon the constitutional notion that the king could do no wrong. In parliament in 1624 he sought, while supporting war, to link supply to redress of grievances. In 1625 he addressed both financial and religious issues. In 1626 he helped assemble the Pembroke faction, attacked Buckingham, and wanted redress before supply. He was a leading opponent of the forced loan, arguing its illegality in a treatise, ‘A relation of so much as passed between the lords of the council and Mr Coryton at the council table’. He respected the royal prerogative but appealed tellingly to statute and Magna Carta. Having challenged the council to try him, he was the ringleader in the Five Knights' case and was committed to the Fleet prison in July 1627. His stand over the loan caused the loss of his county offices and vice-wardenship, thanks to Buckingham's influence. The stannary appointment went to John, later Lord Mohun, friend of the duke's local agent and Coryton's enemy Sir James Bagg.

In the elections of 1628 Coryton traded on local factionalism and his fame as a loan refuser. Released from prison, in the Commons he again attacked Buckingham and supported due process legislation (eventually the petition of right), becoming distrustful and confrontational towards the king. A prominent speaker in 1629, he attacked Arminianism and accused the king of protecting evil advisers. Part of the demonstration in the house on 2 March, he was arrested and interrogated with Eliot and others. In consummate fashion he pleaded a lapse of memory about events in the Commons, but offered information about the Eliot group's plans. Like the others he entered a plea of parliamentary privilege when charged in Star Chamber, but in May submitted to the king and was released, the earl of Pembroke probably interceding. Coryton was therefore not one of those, including Eliot and Selden, who fought a constitutional battle in the courts in 1629–30. Pembroke effected his reinstatement to the stannaries, where his administration was controversial.

Arrested in 1637 on a charge of false imprisonment in a case apparently deriving from Pembroke business interests, Coryton was later released. He was elected to the Short and Long parliaments, but expelled from the latter after being found guilty of falsifying returns. He again lost the vice-wardenship and the deputy lieutenancy of Cornwall as well as the stewardship of the duchy. A gentleman of the privy chamber, Coryton was a royalist colonel in the first civil war, raising a regiment in Cornwall. By 1645–6 he was negotiating with Hugh Peters for local royalist composition, surely in the process securing his own estates. He changed sides and assisted the parliamentarian reduction of the county, eventually compounding in 1647. He died on 1 May 1651 and was buried in the church of St Mellion near Plymouth. His wife survived him by five years. His son John was a royalist colonel, created baronet after the Restoration.

Coryton was politically sophisticated, capable of pragmatism and sharp practice as well as principled dissent—not the stuff of which martyrs are made. His life was a microcosm of the early seventeenth-century English political world in its troubled complexity, with tensions between establishment and dissent, politics and ideology, centre and locality, loyalty to monarchy and suspicion of Charles I, and royalism and parliamentary power.