Family and Education

b. c.1559, 1st s. of John Remington of Garrowby, Yorks. educ. Peterhouse, Camb. 1576; Furnival’s Inn; L. Inn 1581. m. June 1599, Eleanor (d.1618), da. of John Cotgreve of Stubbs, Cheshire, wid. of Sir Richard Pexall of Beaurepaire and Sir John Savage of Rocksavage, Cheshire, s.p.1 suc. fa. 1572, aged 13;2 kntd. 27 June 1596.3 d. by 30 Aug. 1610.

Offices Held

Vol. Cadiz expedition 1596.

J.p. Hants 1599-1601;4 v.-pres. Connaught 1604-7, Munster 1607-8.5

Member, Irish Soc. at d.6

Biography

Remington’s grandfather bought the Garrowby estate in the East Riding in 1547.7 Orphaned at the age of 13, Remington was carefully educated by his guardian, but he probably left Lincoln’s Inn after two years, when he was fined by the benchers for refusal to contribute to the expenses of the reader’s feast.8 After selling Garrowby to his uncle, Archdeacon Remington, in 1598, he was said to be ‘commonly resident in or about the City of London’.9 Knighted by Essex on the Cadiz expedition, he was suspected of complicity in his patron’s rising in 1601 and was removed from the Hampshire bench, to which he had been appointed following his marriage to a wealthy widow.10 This match brought him no domestic comfort and involved him in expensive litigation.11

Remington was probably brought to the notice of the earl of Northampton, the lord warden of the Cinque Ports, by the Irish peer Lord Clanricarde, who had married Essex’s widow and settled on her property in West Kent. A connection with an ‘arch-Papist’ like Clanricarde, however, was an electoral disadvantage in the Cinque Ports, and his nomination at New Romney was initially rejected, and only grudgingly accorded as an act of courtesy to the lord warden.12 Throughout the 1604 session, Remington’s only committee appointment was to consider the bill to regulate the manufacture of starch (20 June 1604).13 Later in the year Clanricarde sent him to Connaught as his vice-president, and consequently Remington missed the next two sessions of Parliament. During his absence, his wife was forced to turn to lord chamberlain Suffolk for help in a dispute with her former kinsman by marriage, Sir Pexall Brocas, who claimed compensation for the felling of some trees.14 Having ‘very worthily discharged the trust and expectation that was reposed in him’, Remington was given leave in the summer or autumn of 1607 to return to England ‘as his private estate much required it’.15 He evidently returned to Ireland in 1608, where he served briefly as vice-president of Munster before relinquishing the post to Sir Richard Moryson* who, like him, was a former student of Peterhouse.

Remington attended the fourth session of Parliament, in which, together with Humphrey May and John Brace, he examined complaints against the Council in the Marches from the four English border counties (26 Mar. 1610). He was also among those appointed to consider a bill to allow female heirs to be named in entails (16 April).16 A few weeks later he presented ‘two great Irish dogs’ to Prince Henry.17

A member of the Irish Society, Remington bought ‘a strong castle’ and 2,000 acres in Donegal in the spring of 1610.18 However, he was never able to enjoy his new lands, for by 3 Aug. he was so ‘sick and weak in body’ that he drew up his will. He bequeathed £100 to the daughter of (Sir) William Barne†, his ‘especial friend’ and executor, ‘for her great pains about me in my time of sickness’. Other cash bequests totalled only £240, and he explained that he was leaving nothing to his wife because of ‘her unkindness and irrespective demeanor towards me’. His lands in England and Ireland were divided between his nephew, Robert Remington of Lund, Yorkshire and a younger son of Barne. The overseers were Lady Clanricarde’s cousin, Sir Thomas Walsingham I*, and Barne’s brother-in-law, Sir Miles Sandys* (1st bt.). Remington was dead by 30 Aug., when the lord warden of the Cinque Ports recommended a replacement. No other member of the family sat in Parliament.19

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Authors: Peter Lefevre / Andrew Thrush

Notes

• 1. ‘The Remingtons of Craven, Yorks.’, The Gen. n.s. xxvii. 134; VCH Hants, iv. 166; Vis. Cheshire (Harl. Soc. xviii), 204; Al. Cant.; LI Admiss.
• 2. C142/160/39.
• 3. S. and E. Usherwood, Counter-Armada, 1596, p. 148.
• 4. C231/1, ff. 73v, 103v.
• 5. CSP Ire. 1606-8, p. xxxix; 1608-10, p. 74.
• 6. T.K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, 364.
• 7. The Gen. n.s. xxvii. 134.
• 8. LI Black Bks. i. 427.
• 9. Yorks. Feet of Fines (Yorks. Rec. Soc. viii), 112; REQ 2/263/3.
• 10. HMC Hatfield, xi. 96.
• 11. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 76; C2/Jas.I/C28/6; PROB 11/117, f. 142.
• 12. J. Glanville, Reps. (1775), p. 16; E. Kent Archives Cent. NR/Aep/41-2.
• 13. CJ, i. 243b.
• 14. VCH Hants, iv. 143, 166; HMC Hatfield, xviii. 43.
• 15. CSP Ire. 1606-8, p. 204; SP63/222/157.
• 16. CJ, i. 414b, 418a.
• 17. SP14/57/87, payment of 30 Apr. 1610.
• 18. CSP Carew, 1603-23, pp. 231, 406; T.W. Moody, ‘Ulster Plantation Pprs. 1608-13,’ Analecta Hibernica, viii. 224.
• 19. PROB 11/117, ff. 141-2.