John Coventry

Who was John Coventry?

Sir John Coventry was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1667 and 1682.

Coventry was son of John Coventry, the second son of lord keeper Thomas Coventry. Between 1655 and 1659, he travelled in the continent with his tutor the poet Edward Sherburne. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford in 1660 and was made a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Charles II, the following year.

In 1667, he went with his uncle Henry Coventry to the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Breda, ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War. That year and in the following parliaments of 1678, 1679 and 1681, he was elected for Weymouth. He followed Lord Ashley in politics, and was a fairly active member.

On 21 December 1670, owing to a jest made by Coventry in the House of Commons on the subject of the King's amours, Sir Thomas Sandys, an officer of the guards, with other accomplices, by the order of Monmouth, and with the approval of the king himself, waylaid him as he was returning home to Suffolk Street and slit his nose to the bone. The outrage created an extraordinary sensation in the Commons, and in consequence Parliament passed an Act ‘to prevent malicious maiming and wounding’, a measure known as the "Coventry Act" was passed, declaring assaults accompanied by personal mutilation a felony without benefit of clergy, an Act not repealed until 1828.