Sir Alexander Carew, 2nd Baronet

Sir Alexander Carew, 2nd Baronet (30 August 1609 – 23 December 1644), of Antony in Cornwall, was an English Member of Parliament executed for attempting to betray the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War.

Carew was the eldest son of Sir Richard Carew, 1st Baronet (c. 1580-1643). Both his father and his grandfather had been Knights of the Shire (Members of Parliament) for Cornwall, and Alexander was elected to the same office in the Long Parliament in 1640. On the outbreak of the Civil War, Carew declared for Parliament and, in Clarendon's words, "had, from the beginning of the Parliament concurred in all conclusions with the most violent, with as full a testimony of that zeal and fury, to which their confidence was applied, as any man". Although Cornwall and the rest of the south-west were generally under Royalist control in the opening stages of the war, the Mayor of the strategically vital port of Plymouth had seized it for Parliament, and Parliament entrusted its defence to a committee including Carew. Carew was made governor of St Nicholas's Island in Plymouth Sound, the keystone to the defence of the town. It was while held this post that his father died, on 14 March 1643, and he inherited the baronetcy.

After the Royal victory at Stratton (16 May 1643) and the capture of Bristol, Sir Alexander secretly contacted the commander of the Royal forces then besieging Exeter, offering to surrender Plymouth in return for a pardon for himself. The Royalists were willing enough but "he was so sottishly and dangerously wary of his own security, (having neither courage enough to obey his conscience, nor wicked enough to be prosperous against it), that he would not proceed until he was sufficiently assured that his pardon had passed the Great Seal of England" (Clarendon, quoted in Burke's Extinct Baronetage), and the delay left time for a disloyal servant to leak the plot to the Mayor and the rest of the Committee.

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