Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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Wikipedia
Vice Admiral Sir John Mennes (1 March 1599 – 18 February 1671) was an English naval officer who went on to be Comptroller of the Navy.
[edit] Career
Educated at his local grammar school in Sandwich and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Mennes went to sea and in 1620 saw action off Dominica fighting off Spanish warships.[1] In 1628 he was given command of the HMS Adventure and later he commanded the HMS Garland, HMS Red Lion, HMS Vanguard, HMS Convertine, HMS Nonsuch and HMS Victory.[1] In August 1641 he took Queen Henrietta Maria to safety in Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands and was knighted by King Charles I for doing so and in July 1642 he refused to accept the parliamentary takeover of the fleet.[1]
In 1643, once the King had lost the Navy, he transferred to the Army and became a general of artillery and in 1644 he became Governor of North Wales.[1] In 1650 he left England to join the exciled Court abroad.[1] Then in November 1661, following the restoration of the monarchy, he was appointed Comptroller of the Navy.[1] Samuel Pepys described him as ill at ease in this role.[2] He died in London in 1671 while still in the post of Comptroller.[1]
[edit] Family
In 1641 he married Jane Liddell.[1]
[edit] References
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Mennes, John |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | 1 March 1599 |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | 18 February 1671 |
| Place of death | |
Annotations
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(1599-71). Comptroller of the Navy 1660-71. He entered the navy as a youth….During 1635-9 he was continuously at sea, attaining the rank of Vice-Admiral, and later (1642) Rear-Admiral. He served in the army in the Scottish war and commanded a troop of horse for the king in the Civil War…..and during the ’50s acted as a royalist agent abroad. At the Restoration he was commissioned to the “Henry” in 1660, becoming Commander-in-chief in the Downs and Narrow Seas 1661-2. He had by this time won a reputation as a man of action, a witty conversationalist, a learned chemist who dabbled in medicine and a writer of amusing, if usually coarse, verse. But in Nov. 1661 he was made Comptroller and moved into a world of government finance and book-keeping in which he was a stranger and ill at ease.
From L&M Companion. Just part of the entry, more information for later in the diary.
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supplementary info:Sir John Mennes (1599-1671), Admiral
portrait available[1640 mid life].
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp03058&rNo=0&role=sitwas captain of Vanguard 1635.
http://battleshiphmsvanguard.homestead.com/Van2.html
history of the ship
known for :
many claiments to this wise saying but my guess it was from the a latin reader with Tacitus http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/tacitus118925.html
BREWER: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 459-460
… He that fights and runs away May live to fight another day; But he that is in battle
slain Can never rise to fight again.” Sir John Mennes: Musarum Delict -
Could anyone explain the problem with Sir John Minnes and Sam’s chamber he is going to lose(?)?
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Could anyone explain
This could be researched within the diary. I seem to remember that the Davis’s lived in that adjoining house. Perhaps when they left for Ireland, Sam took up a chamber that was doored to be part of either unit. He has been looking for history that says that his unit originally “owned” this chamber. Mennes comes in and wants the chamber and cites recent history of which unit it belongs to. Or thinks he has vague grounds to claim it, but Sam gives him firmer ground by remodeling in a way that cuts the light from Mennes’s unit.Sorry, I don’t have time to search and figure all this out, but I seem to remember that we have had a fair number of clues in the diary to date that might sort this out. There has been evidence of rooms with doors that allow them to be part of either of two adjoining units.
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The literary Mennes more carefully characterized
L&M’s claim that by the Restoration Mennes had “won a reputation as….a writer of amusing, if usually coarse, verse” was not universally shared. His Cavalier poetry published in the Interregnum was burlesque, no coarser than the satire of Ben Jonson’s “On the Famous Voyage” (Epigrammes, c. 1612), which uses the popular scatological imagery of the London waterworks to tell the tale of two Londoners who hire an open boat to row them up the sewage-clogged Fleet Ditch. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_1_44/ai_94130271
The most recent appreciation of Mennes’s literary life and work is *Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy* (Hardcover) by Timothy Raylor University of Delaware Press (September 1994)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874135230/sr=8-1/Abstracting from a review of it: In the [1620s and 1630s] Mennes was the main catalytic figure of a kind of fraternity or a literary drinking club,”The Order of the Fancy,” that exemplified a “a commitment to traditional concepts of order and an espousal of classicism, good-fellowship, and wit,” using burlesque and satire as subversive tools to advance the Stuart cause.
“A ‘drollery’ during the Interregnum came to mean ‘an anthology built around the verse of Mennes, Smith, and their circle’ (114). Several of the more famous titles are Musarum Deliciae (1655), Wit and Drollery (1656), and Wit Restor’d (1658)….[W]hile they were not exactly the parents of the octosyllabic doggerel style, they were perhaps its midwives: they gave it its distinctive tone, and they popularized it” (215). Some of the writers Raylor identifies as having inherited this legacy were Samuel Butler, George Etherege, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift.”
Patrick, K.E. “Review of Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy.” Early Modern Literary Studies 1.3 (1995): 13.1-11 .
http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/01-3/rev_pat1.html -
Has the bibliophile, songster Pepys not come across Mennes/Smith publications at Playford’s?
The Order of the Fancy ballad “‘The Blacksmith’” to be sung to a version of “Greensleeves,” “proved enormously popular, and — variously entitled “The Blacksmith” or “Which Nobody Can Deny” — all but supplanted the older version of “Greensleeves” through the latter part of the seventeenth-century….The version of the tune….[was] printed in John Playford’s Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion (1686). http://ett.arts.uwo.ca/rump/site/r151_180/r162/R162E.html
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Musarum Deliciae (1655),
Conteining severall select Pieces of Poetique Wit.[but NOT “He that fights and runs away, &c”] By Sr J. M[ennes] and Ja[mes] S[mith] The Second Edition, LONDON Printed by J.G.for Henry Herringman, and are to be sold at his Shop, at the Signe of the Anchor in the New Exchange, 1656. [online text] http://www.immortalia.com/html/books-and-manuscripts/1800-1899/1870s-reissue-of-musarum-deliciae-wit-restor-d-and-wits-recreations/musarum-deliciae.htm
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550. Wit and drollery joviall poems / corrected and much amended, with new additions, by Sir J.M[ennes]. … Sir W.D. … and the most refined wits of the age. is available in digital form via institutional subscribers to Early English Books Online
http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/New_Text/New_Texts_Jan2003_full.html
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WIT RESTOR’D In feverall Select POEMS Not formerly publifli’t
LONDON, Printed for R. Pollard, N. Brooks, and T. Dring, and are to be sold at the Old Exchange, and in Fleetstreet. 1658. [online text] http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924012980664/cu31924012980664_djvu.txt WIT RESTOR’D http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1600s/1640-68—1876_musarum_deliciae__wit_restored__and__wits_recreations_%28HC%29/1658_wit_restored.htm[Final link changed to Archive.org version, 5 Jan 2012. P.G.]
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Did Sir J Minnes ever marry and were there any off spring?
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Did Sir J Minnes ever marry and were there any off
spring?The L&M Companion entry concludes: “His wife died in July 1662, without leaving children, and does not appear in the diary. Pepys mentions his sister, Mary Hamond and her daughters. One of her daughters, Elizabeth, was Mennes’s executrix and inherited most of his personal property.”
The only archive appears to be personal
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/subjectView.asp?ID=P44250If you are interested in the family you could try the references in either DNB or ODNB; Cokayne, Doyle or the older editions of Burke’s Baronetage .. , Gentry etc. might provide some leads.
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Mennes, Sir John (1599-1671) Knight Admiral
Dictionary of national biography, Volume 37
References in the diary
- 1661
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Apr: 10
Sep: 1
Nov: 2, 8, 20
Dec: 7
- 1662
-
Jan: 5, 19
Feb: 28
May: 26
Jun: 3, 12, 16, 17, 27
Sep: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 25, 26
Oct: 7, 8, 17, 20, 21, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31
Nov: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 18, 21, 24
Dec: 1, 9, 10, 13, 15, 23, 24
- 1663
-
Jan: 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 22, 29
Feb: 2, 9, 11, 16, 21, 22, 27, 28
Mar: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 24
Apr: 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 20, 25
May: 1, 5, 6, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 31
Jun: 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 26, 29
Jul: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30
Aug: 17, 22, 27, 31
Sep: 2, 3, 21, 25, 28
Oct: 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20, 24
Nov: 2, 4, 14, 19
Dec: 5, 14, 15, 27, 29
- 1664
-
Jan: 7, 8, 11, 14, 15
Feb: 5, 28
Mar: 12, 26, 28, 29, 30
Apr: 2, 9, 13
May: 2, 23, 24
Jun: 2, 12, 17, 26
Jul: 9, 12, 14, 21, 22, 23, 25, 31
Aug: 1, 8, 11, 15
Sep: 11, 23
Oct: 3, 10, 24, 27
Nov: 4, 8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 21, 22, 28, 30
Dec: 2, 5, 10, 19, 22, 25, 27
- 1665
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Jan: 25, 27
Feb: 1, 6, 17, 20, 27
Mar: 6, 11, 12, 14
Apr: 1, 18, 29
May: 5, 17, 18
Jun: 7, 13, 26, 28
Jul: 3, 26
Aug: 10, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 24, 26, 29
Sep: 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26
Oct: 2, 11, 23, 28
Nov: 2, 26
Dec: 19, 20, 22, 26
- 1666
-
Jan: 2, 4, 12, 19, 28
Feb: 19, 21
Mar: 19
May: 25
Jun: 4, 6
Jul: 29, 31
Aug: 17, 20, 22, 26
Sep: 17, 25, 26, 27
Oct: 2, 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 16, 17, 23
Nov: 4, 8, 23, 24, 25, 26
Dec: 12, 16, 19, 24, 26
- 1667
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Jan: 3, 4, 20, 21, 22, 25
Feb: 15, 21, 22, 26, 28
Mar: 4, 16, 20, 24, 31
Apr: 1, 24
May: 3, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Jun: 10, 11, 14, 15, 27, 28
Jul: 1, 2, 6, 22
Aug: 6, 10, 15, 18, 22, 26, 27
Sep: 2, 23
Oct: 27
Nov: 21, 27, 28, 29, 30
Dec: 6, 8, 23
- 1668
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Jan: 2
Feb: 20
Mar: 2, 4, 5, 13, 25
Apr: 1, 5, 8, 25, 30
May: 19, 27
Jun: 1, 3, 29
Jul: 24, 31
Aug: 9, 20
Sep: 7, 10, 13, 23, 25
Oct: 13, 16, 24
Nov: 5, 13
Dec: 4, 7, 15, 18, 23
- 1669
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Jan: 4, 27