Henry Jermyn, Earl of Saint Albans

Henry Jermyn, Earl of Saint Albans (born c. 1604—died Jan. 2, 1684, London) was a courtier, favourite of Henrietta Maria, queen of Charles I of England. It was rumoured, falsely, that he became her husband after the king’s execution (1649).

He entered Parliament in 1625. In Henrietta Maria’s household he was made vice chamberlain (1628), master of horse (1639), and lord chamberlain (1645), and he was raised to the peerage in 1643. He was implicated in the army plot of 1641, in which certain Royalists planned to intimidate Parliament by a show of force. Early in the English Civil Wars he fought for the king. As the king’s governor of Jersey (from January 1645), he took little interest in the island and later proposed the sale of the Channel Islands to France in return for military assistance for Charles I. He was created an earl just before the Restoration (April 27, 1660) and afterward received many government posts. He helped Charles II to negotiate the Treaty of Dover (1670), by which Charles and Louis XIV of France agreed to a coordinated assault on the Dutch. (He was excluded from the further negotiations through which Charles undertook to become a Catholic in exchange for French military assistance in the event of Protestant insurrection.)

In 1665 he obtained land near St. James’s Palace, Westminster, where Jermyn and St. Albans streets preserve his name. St. Albans was well-known as a gambler and a glutton; in the poem “Last Instructions to a Painter,” Andrew Marvell describes him as “full of soup and gold.” He died unmarried; the earldom became extinct, and the barony devolved on a nephew.