John Bankes
British judge 1589-1644
Sir John Bankes (1589 – 28 December 1644) was an English lawyer and politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1624 and 1629. He was Attorney General and Chief Justice to Charles I during the English Civil War. Corfe Castle, his family seat was destroyed during a long siege, in which his wife Mary Hawtrey became known as Brave Dame Mary.
Early life
Bankes was of the Bankes family of Keswick, Cumberland. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford on 22 February 1605 aged 15. He entered Gray's Inn, where he was called to the bar in 1614. In about 1618 he married Mary Hawtrey, by whom he had eleven children, four sons and seven daughters.
In 1624, he was elected Member of Parliament for Wootton Bassett. He was elected MP for Morpeth in 1626 and in 1628 and sat until 1629 when King Charles decided to rule without parliament for eleven years. He was a major participant in the legal debates surrounding the 1628 Petition of Right, especially concerning martial law for the trial and punishment of those engaged in rebellion.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Bankes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.