Henry Coventry

The Honourable Henry Coventry (1619–1686) was an English politician, who was Secretary of State for the Northern Department between 1672 and 1674 and the Southern Department between 1674 and 1680.

Origins and education

Coventry was the third son by the second marriage of Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry, brother of Sir William Coventry, uncle of Sir John Coventry, and brother-in-law of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. He matriculated from Queen's College, Oxford in 1632 aged 14, and graduated then following year. Within a year he was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, continuing such until 1648. He graduated in both arts and law. He may have become Chancellor of the diocese of Llandaff as early as 1638. In 1640, he obtained leave to travel, and was abroad until just before the Restoration. He was thus absent from England during the civil wars.

Career

By 1654, he was a captain in the Dutch army, but in contact with Charles II in his exile. During part his time abroad, he was employed as royalist agent in Germany and Denmark, in company with Lord Wentworth, until the concert was dissolved by a violent quarrel, leading apparently to a duel. The notices of him at this date are very confused; Henry, his elder brother Francis, and his younger brother William being all attached to the exiled court and all commonly spoken of as Mr. Coventry. Before the Restoration Francis had ceased to take any active part in public affairs, and William had devoted himself more especially to the service of the Duke of York, whose secretary he continued to be while the duke held the office of Lord High Admiral.

In 1660, he returned to England with letters for Presbyterian leaders including Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who had been married to Henry's sister. At the same time he enjoyed the patronage of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, and remained a faithful friend of Clarendon to the end.^[1] In 1661, Henry became Member of Parliament (MP) for Droitwich. He remained in the service of the crown, and in September 1664 was sent as ambassador to Sweden, where he remained for the next two years, “accustoming himself to the northern ways of entertainment, and this grew upon him with age”. In 1667 he was sent, jointly with Lord Holles, as plenipotentiary to negotiate the treaty of peace with the Dutch, which, after the disgraceful summer, was finally concluded at Breda. During the negotiations he found time to write a heartfelt letter of condolence to his old friend Lord Clarendon on the death of his wife. In 1671 he was again sent on an embassy to Sweden, and in 1672 he was appointed Secretary of State for the Northern Department, transferring to the Southern Department in 1674. In this office he continued till 1680, when his health, which was shattered by frequent attacks of gout, compelled him to retire from public life.^[2]

During the Popish Plot while his colleague Williamson's nerve cracked under the strain, Coventry generally maintained his calm, although he was concerned at the public hysteria " the nation and the city are in as great a consternation as can be imagined."^[3] His cynical, sceptical nature, not unlike Charles II's, disinclined him to believe in the plot, and he was particularly sceptical of the notorious informer William Bedloe. He was one of the first to warn that any attempt to exclude the Duke of York from the succession might lead to civil war: "if that prince go into another place, it must cost you a standing army to bring him back."^[4]

His loyalty as a friend is demonstrated by his attitude to Clarendon : Coventry cancelled the prohibition on visits to Clarendon in his French exile by family members, and may have been working towards an eventual return when Clarendon died in 1674. It was Coventry who organised Clarendon's unofficial funeral in Westminster Abbey.^[5]

Reputation

According to Gilbert Burnet, “he was a man of wit and heat, of spirit and candour. He never gave bad advices; but when the king followed the ill advices which others gave, he thought himself bound to excuse if not to justify them. For this the Duke of York commended him much. He said in that he was a pattern to all good subjects, since he defended all the king's counsels in public, even when he had blamed them most in private with the king himself”. It is to his credit that after holding public office for nearly twenty years he had not accumulated any large fortune; and though no doubt in easy circumstances, he wrote of himself as feeling straitened by the loss of his official salary on 31 December 1680. He died in London on 7 December 1686. He was never married. Writing to Sir Robert Carr on 12 September 1676, and regretting his inability to fulfil some promise relative to a vacant post, he said: “Promises are like marriages; what we tie with our tongues we cannot untie with our teeth. I have been discreet enough as to the last, but frequently a fool as to the first.”

References

• Stuart Handley, ‘Coventry, Henry (1617/18–1686)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 , accessed 4 Jan 2009.

Attribution

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Coventry, Henry (1619-1686)". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.  Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

• Archival material relating to Henry Coventry listed at the UK National Archives