A One-Name Study for the BARNUM/BARNHAM Surname
Honywood, Sir Robert (1601–1686), diplomat and translator, was born on 3 August 1601 at Hollingbourne, Kent, the second of twenty children, and eldest surviving son, of Sir Robert Honywood of Petts Court, Charing, Kent, and Alice Barnham, daughter of Sir Martin Barnham of Hollingbourne. Robert Honywood the elder was knighted by Charles I at Canterbury on 15 June 1625. The younger Honywood received the same honour at Oakfields on 7 July 1627, when he is described as ‘servant to the Queen [Elizabeth] of Bohemia’ (Shaw, 192). Elizabeth refers to him as her steward and his duties evidently included staging entertainments for her household—Elizabeth mentions Honywood's participation in a production of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Scornful Lady—and carrying messages on Elizabeth's behalf to her friends and allies in England, including Charles I and Archbishop Laud. In a letter to Laud, Elizabeth describes Honywood as honest and faithful, and thus suitable to be trusted with confidential information (Letters, ed. Baker, 78; CSP dom., 1635–6, 338, 402, and 222). The appointment of Sir Charles Cotterell as steward to Elizabeth ‘[a]bout 1652’ (DNB) may indicate that by this date Honywood had left her service.
Honywood married Frances Vane (1614–1688), daughter of Sir Henry Vane, on 3 April 1631, at Shipbourne, Kent. The historian Edward Hasted says that they had sixteen children (BL, Add. MS 5480, fol. 69r), but only seven are recorded by name, four in Kent parish registers (Robert, Henry, Frances, and Edward). In her will, dated 26 January 1688, Frances Vane mentions three further children, Elizabeth, Ann, and Charles, all deceased. (Frances, her mother's executor, seems to have been the only one of the Honywood children to outlive the parents.) At least one of the children appears to have been born in the Netherlands, where Honywood is said to have owned three houses (CSP dom., 1635, 435).
Honywood's sympathies during the civil war are unclear. Through his father-in-law and brother-in-law, also named Sir Henry Vane, he had close connections with the parliamentary side; and he continued to correspond with the elder Vane even while the latter was serving as a parliamentary commissioner to Scotland in 1645. In a friendly letter to the elder Vane, dated 13 October 1645, Honywood appears to refer to Fairfax's forces as ‘our army’, and to foreign animadversions against parliament as an ‘ill office’ (CSP dom., 1645–7, 188–90). However, Honywood also maintained his links with Elizabeth of Bohemia, who records his presence, with his son Robert and brother-in-law Walter Vane, at The Hague in August 1655 (Letters, ed. Baker, 239). In the later 1650s he apparently served as a captain in one of the English cavalry regiments in the army of the states general, for in 1659, while on leave in England, he wrote to De Witt requesting that his company be transferred to his son, then on duty with the Dutch forces at Copenhagen (Rowen, 159). On 19 May 1659 he was appointed a member of the council of state, and in June 1659 Honywood, Algernon Sidney, Edward Montague, and Thomas Boone were chosen as plenipotentiaries to negotiate a peace between the kings of Sweden and Denmark. The English party arrived at Elsinore in July 1659 and remained in Denmark until after the Restoration. With Sidney, Honywood was among the signatories to the peace treaty signed between Sweden and Denmark, dated 27 May 1660. He returned to England in August 1660.
Honywood's involvement with the council of state evidently caused him some embarrassment with his erstwhile employer, the queen of Bohemia, to whom he wrote, probably in autumn 1660, to say that he had seen King Charles and received assurances ‘that he had nothing of objection against my person nor in relation to the employment I had been in, knowing well that I had followed my instructions, and beleeving that having lived so long in yr Mastys service, I could not in any thing be forward to disoblige yr family’ (BL, Add. MS 18744). Further distress ensued when his son Robert was attainted for treason in 1667, having refused to answer a proclamation recalling him from service with the Dutch forces against the English in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
In 1673 Honywood published The History of the Affairs of Europe in this Present Age, But More Particularly of the Republic of Venice, a translation of the storia della Repubblica di Venezia by the Venetian diplomat Giovanni Battista Nani (first published in 1662). In his dedicatory letter to Walter Vane (identified as ‘Colonel of His Majesties Holland-Regiment’), Honywood writes that he had begun this translation ‘in the Circumstances of an uncomfortable old Age and ruined Fortune, brought upon me, rather by publick Calamity than private Vice, or domestick Prodigality. And I undertook it to divert the melancholy hours, arising from the consideration of either’ (sig. A1r). There may have been a domestic political motivation in Honywood's choice of Nani's history of Venice. From the civil war period onwards, the government and institutions of Venice had been of especial interest to Englishmen of parliamentarian and oppositional sympathies, including Honywood's erstwhile colleague Algernon Sidney. Such men admired Venice as a mixed polity, in which the head of state ruled in collaboration with an enlightened aristocracy, and which had, uniquely among Italian states, successfully resisted tyranny. Interest in Venice seems to have been especially intense in the middle and later years of Charles II's reign: Honywood's translation is one of ten books on the government of the Serene Republic to have been published by Englishmen during this period (Fink, 125). Since Nani's history explicitly honours the institutions of Venice and celebrates liberty, it is probable that Honywood's translation would have carried anti-monarchical and possibly republican connotations in the fraught English politics of the 1670s.
Honywood died on 15 April 1686, and was buried at Charing church. By his will, dated 10 December 1672, he left all his possessions to his wife. She died on 17 February 1688 and was buried with her husband.
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