Andrew NewportJP (baptised 30 November 1622 – 11 September 1699),[1] styled The Honourable from 1642, was an English Tory politician, courtier and royalist.
In 1660, following the English Restoration, Newport was called to the court as Esquire of the Body.[7] From 1667 to 1681 he served as comptroller of the Great Wardrobe[7] and was subsequently nominated a Commissioner of Customs in 1681, an office he held until 1685.[8] Newport entered the English House of Commons in a by-election in 1661, sitting for Montgomeryshire until 1679.[1] He was returned for Preston from 1685 until 1689[9] and then for Shrewsbury until 1698.[10]
Militarily, Newport held commission as Captain of a company of foot on the Portsmouth garrison from 1662 to 1673.[5][6]
Newport was a Custos Rotulorum of Montgomeryshire between January and December 1679.[11] He was again appointed in 1685, until 1687 and exercised this post a third time from 1691 until his death eight years later.[11] Newport represented the county also as Justice of the Peace and was Commissioner for Assessment of Salop and Montgomeryshire several times.[4]
Newport was one of a number of men unsuccessfully implicated by Jacobite conspirator Sir John Fenwick when prosecuted in 1695 prior to the latter's eventual execution in 1697, the allegation being that while Newport was absent from London he allowed his home in Berkeley Street to be used for meetings by two Jacobite noblemen.[6]
Death
Newport died unmarried and childless,[2] at Eyton-on-Severn, Shropshire, the home of his nephew, Lord Newport,[6] in 1699 aged 76, and was buried in the chancel at nearby Wroxeter church.[5] He left his estates and a £40,000 fortune to his younger nephew Thomas Newport.[6]
Literary reference
Andrew Newport has been speculatively identified with the Andrew Newport who nominally wrote Memoirs of a Cavalier (published 1720), a supposedly factual but possibly fictional account of experiences in the Thirty Years' War and Royalist campaigns in England by a Shropshire-born soldier. It was published by Daniel Defoe, strongly suspected to be the real author,[12] over 20 years after the death of this Andrew Newport, who was only ten years old in the year the account begins (1632). Although of age (twenty in 1642) to have served in the English Civil War, there is doubt in absence of record that Newport did and he appears in no list of royalists fined by parliament for delinquency, unlike his father and elder brother.[5]
^ abcBurke, John (1831). A General and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerages of England, Ireland, and Scotland. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. p. 396.
^Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 40. Oxford University Press. 2004. pp. 669–70. ISBN0-19-861390-3.Article by C.H. Firth, revised by Sean Kelsey
^ abcdHenning, Basil Duke (1983). The House of Commons, 1660-1690. Vol. I. London: Secker & Warburg. pp. 136–137. ISBN0-436-19274-8.
^ abcdOxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 40. p. 670.
