Mountjoy Blount, 1st Earl of Newport

Mountjoy Blount, 1st Earl of Newport
The Earl of Newport: detail from a double portrait with Baron Goring by Sir Anthony van Dyck.
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Mountjoy Blount,1st Earl of Newport (c. 1597–1666), created Baron Mountjoy in the Irish peerage (1617), baron Mountjoy of Thurveston in the English peerage (1627) and Earl of Newport (1628) was appointed master of ordnance to Charles I of England (1634) and played an ambiguous part in the early years of the English Civil War.

Born around 1597, he was the natural son of Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire and his wife, Penelope; his father left him a large estate. He became a member of James I's court, who played in a masque before the king mounted by Viscount Doncaster at Essex House, 8 January 1620/1621, was among the entourage of the Earl of Carlisle, employed to offer excuses at the court of Louis XIII, for the passage of Prince Charles through Paris incognito on his way to Spain at the time of negotiations towards the ill-starred "Spanish Match".

In July 1627 he was created Earl of Newport in the Isle of Wight; Newport, as he now was, held a rear-admiral's command in the ineffective expedition to relieve La Rochelle in August 1628, for which he was petitioning for payment in the following years. His appointment as Master of Ordnance for his lifetime was granted 31 August 1634; as was expected in the seventeenth century, he derived a tidy fortune from the position. From his sale of gunpowder at exorbitant prices, through the Spanish ambassador, to supply the Spanish fleet attacking Dutch forces in September 1639, he pocketed £1000, and the King, £5000.

By his own account he bargained with the ambassador to land soldiers from the Spanish fleet at Dunkirk, at thirty shillings a head, though public neutrality had been enjoined by Charles. Although at Christmas 1639, Newport participated with the King in the extravagant masque on the theme of Philogenes, royal "lover of the People", with the return of the Long Parliament the next year, Newport by degrees joined the forces of opposition in the House of Lords.