Oliver St John

Oliver St John (c. 1598 - December 31, 1673), was an English statesman and judge.

The son of another Oliver St John, he belonged to the senior branch of an ancient family. There were two branches: the St Johns of Bletso in Bedfordshire, and the St Johns of Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire, both descendants of the St Johns of Staunton St John in Oxfordshire. Oliver St John was the great-grandson of Oliver St John, who had been created Baron St John of Bletso in 1559, and a distant cousin of the 4th Baron who was created earl of Bolingbroke in 1624, and who took an active part on the parliamentary side of the English Civil War, being killed at the Battle of Edgehill.

Oliver was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1626. He appears to have got into trouble with the court in connection with a seditious publication, and to have associated himself with the future popular leaders John Pym and Lord Saye. In 1638 he defended John Hampden on his refusal to pay Ship Money, on which occasion he made a notable speech. In the same year he married, as his second wife, Elizabeth Cromwell, a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, to whom his first wife also had been distantly related. The marriage led to an intimate friendship with Cromwell.

St John was member for Totnes in both the Short and the Long Parliament, where he acted in close alliance with Hampden and Pym, especially in opposition to the impost of Ship Money. In 1641, with a view of securing his support, the king appointed St John solicitor-general. This did not prevent him taking an active role in the impeachment of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, and in preparing the bills brought forward by the popular party in the House of Commons; as a result, he was dismissed from office in 1643. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he became recognized as one of the parliamentary leaders. In the quarrel between the parliament and the army in 1647 he sided with the latter, and throughout this period he enjoyed Cromwell's confidence.

In 1648 St John was appointed chief justice of the common pleas; and from then on he devoted himself to his judicial duties. He refused to act as one of the commissioners for the trial of King Charles I, and had no hand in Pride's Purge, nor in the constitution of the Commonwealth. In 1651 he went to the Hague as one of the envoys to negotiate a union between England and the Netherlands, a mission in which he entirely failed; but in the same year he successfully conducted a similar negotiation with Scotland. After the Restoration he published an account of his past conduct (The Case of Oliver St John, 1660), and this apologia enabled him to escape any worse retribution than exclusion from public office. He retired to his country house in Northamptonshire till 1662, when he went to live abroad.

By his first wife St John had two sons and two daughters. His daughter Johanna married Sir Walter St John of Lydiard Tregoze and was the grandmother of Viscount Bolingbroke, By his second wife he had two children, and after her death he married, in 1645, Elizabeth, daughter of Daniel Oxenbridge.

See the above-mentioned Case of Oliver St John (London, 1660), and St John's Speech to the Lords, Jan. 7th, 1640, concerning Ship-money (London, 1640). See also:

• Mark Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, vol. ii. (2 vols, London, 178-7)
• Anthony à Wood, Fasti Oxoniensis, edited by P Bliss (4 vols., London, 1813)
• Edward Foss, The Judges of England, yol.vi. (9 vols., London, 1848)
• SR Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (3 vols, London, 1886 1891), and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (3 vols., London, 1894-1901)
• Lord Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (7 vols, Oxford, 1839)
• Thurloe State Papers (7 vols, London, 1742)
• Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs, edited by CH Firth (2 vols, Oxford, 1894)
• Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches
• Dictionary of National Biography

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