John Bankes

English lawyer and politician

Sir John Bankes (1589 – 28 December 1644) was an English lawyer and politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1624 and 1629. He was Attorney General and Chief Justice to Charles I during the English Civil War. Corfe Castle, his family seat was destroyed during a long siege, in which his wife Mary Hawtrey became known as Brave Dame Mary.

Bankes was of the Bankes family of Keswick, Cumberland. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford on 22 February 1605 aged 15. He entered Gray's Inn, where he was called to the bar in 1614. In about 1618 he married Mary Hawtrey, by whom he had eleven children, four sons and seven daughters. In 1624, he was elected Member of Parliament for Wootton Bassett. He was elected MP for Morpeth in 1626 and in 1628 and sat until 1629 when King Charles decided to rule without parliament for eleven years. He was a major participant in the legal debates surrounding the 1628 Petition of Right, especially concerning martial law for the trial and punishment of those engaged in rebellion.

Bankes purchased Corfe Castle with all its manors, rights, and privileges in 1635 from Lady Elizabeth Coke (née Hatton), widow of Sir Edward Coke, who had died in 1634.

A Wetherspoon pub in Keswick, Cumbria is named "The Chief Justice of the Common Pleas", this is due to the current building constructed in 1901 been built on land which was formally the site of a ‘workhouse’ founded in Sir John Bankes will (dated 1642). The current building which housed the towns magistrates’ court and police station until the year 2000, was built next to the towns main post office itself constructed ten years earlier around 1890.