MAYNARD, Sir JOHN (1602–1690), judge, son of Alexander Maynard of Tavistock and the Middle Temple, barrister-at-law, by Honora, daughter of Arthur Arscott of Tetcott, Devonshire, was born at the Abbey House, Tavistock, in 1602. His name appears in the matriculation register of Exeter College, Oxford, under date 26 April 1621, which clashes unaccountably with the date of his admission to the degree of B.A., 25 April 1621, given in the ‘University Register of Degrees.’ In 1619 he entered the Middle Temple; he was called to the bar in November 1626, and was elected a bencher in 1648. A pupil of William Noy [q. v.], afterwards attorney-general, a Devonian, and born in the law, he rapidly acquired a large practice, both on the Western circuit and at Westminster—he argued a reported case in the king's bench in 1628—and was appointed recorder of Plymouth in August 1640. He represented Totnes in both the Short parliament of 1640 and the Long parliament, and from the first took an active part in the business of the house. In December 1640 he was placed on the committee of scrutiny into the conduct of lords-lieutenant of counties, and on that for the discovery of the ‘prime promoters’ of the new ‘canons ecclesiastical’ passed in the recent irregular session of convocation. He was also one of the framers of the articles upon which Strafford was impeached, and one of the principal speakers at the trial. He threw himself with great zeal into the affair, and on the passing of the bill of attainder said joyfully to Sir John Bramston, ‘Now we have done our work. If we could not have effected this we could have done nothing.’ A strong presbyterian, he subscribed and administered to the house the protestation of 3 May 1641 in defence of the protestant religion, and drafted the bill making subscription thereto obligatory on all subjects. In the committee, which sat at Guildhall after the adjournment of the House of Commons which followed the king's attempt to arrest the five members (4 Jan. 1641–2), he made an eloquent speech in defence of parliamentary privilege. In the following May he accepted a deputy-lieutenancy of militia under the parliament, and on 12 June 1643 was nominated a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. He took the covenant on 25 Sept. following, and was one of the managers of the impeachment of Laud, January–March 1643–4. With his friend Bulstrode Whitelocke, Maynard attended, by Essex's invitation, a meeting of the anti-Cromwellian faction, held at Essex House in December 1644, to discuss the expediency of taking public action against Cromwell as an ‘incendiary.’ The idea, which seems to have originated with the Scottish Lord-chancellor Loudon, met with no favour from the English lawyers, and was in consequence abandoned. A curious testimony to Maynard's reputation at this time is afforded by a grant made in his favour by parliament in October 1645 of the books and manuscripts of the late Lord-chief-justice Bankes, with liberty to seize them wherever he might find them. In the House of Commons he was heard with the profoundest respect, while he advocated the abolition of feudal wardships and other salutary legal reforms. He also prospered mightily in his profession, making in the course of the summer circuit of 1647 the unprecedentedly large sum of 700l. As a politician he was a strict constitutionalist, protested against the first steps taken towards the deposition of the king, and on the adoption of that policy withdrew from the house as no longer a lawful assembly (November 1648). Nevertheless, on the establishment of the Commonwealth he did not scruple to take the engagement, and held a government brief at the trial of Major Faulconer for perjury in May 1653. Assigned by order of court to advise John Lilburne [q. v.] on his second trial in July 1653, Maynard at first feigned sickness. A repetition of the order, however, elicited from him some exceptions to the indictment which confounded the court and secured Lilburne's acquittal by the jury. The jury were afterwards interrogated by the council of state as to the grounds of their verdict, but refused to disclose them, and Maynard thus escaped censure, and on 9 Feb. 1653–4 was called to the degree of serjeant-at-law. In the following year his professional duty brought him into temporary collision with the government. One Cony, a city merchant, had been arrested by order of the council of state for non-payment of taxes, and Maynard, with Serjeants Thomas Twysden and Wadham Windham, moved on his behalf in the upper bench for a habeas corpus. Their argument on the return, 18 May 1655, amounted in effect to a direct attack on the government as a usurpation, and all three were forthwith, by order of Cromwell, committed to the Tower; they were released on making submission (25 May).
Maynard was among the commissioners appointed to collect the quota of the Spanish war tax of 1657 payable by Devonshire. Carlyle (Cromwell, Speech xvi.) is in error in stating that he was a member of Cromwell's House of Lords. He sat in the House of Commons for Plymouth during the parliament of 1656–8, and on the debates on the
