John Machell

John Machell (1637–1704) was for twenty years Member of Parliament for Horsham, Sussex, during the reigns of Charles II, James II and William III and Mary II. By the marriage of his daughter Isabella Machell (1670–1764) to Arthur Ingram, 3rd Viscount of Irvine, he became the grandfather of the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Viscounts of Irvine, and great-grandfather of the ninth, seated at Temple Newsam near Leeds, whose family inherited and augmented his valuable property of Hills house at Horsham, and continued the parliamentary tradition there. Family origins John Machell's father, Mathew Machell (c. 1605–1682), was a great-grandson of John Machell, Sheriff of London in 1555–56. Mathew's father John (1580–1647) married Jane, daughter of Sir Nicholas Woodroffe of Poyle, Surrey, in 1599, and, developing his London and East India Company commercial interests, and having established himself in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, remarried in 1624 to Lady Elizabeth Aungier of Great Tangley, near Wonersh, Surrey, daughter of Francis Aungier and his first wife Douglas Fitzgerald (sister to Gerald FitzGerald, 14th Earl of Kildare). Machell took up residence in Surrey. Lady Elizabeth had acquired Tangley by her first marriage, to Simon Carryll, by whom she had issue including a daughter Elizabeth. Carryll dying in c. 1619, she remarried to Richard Barne (1573–1620) (son of George Barne and Anne, daughter of Sir William Garrard), by whom she had a son and daughter before becoming Machell's wife. Her father, who was created first Baron of Longford in 1621, married Barne's sister Anne as his second wife. Although John Machell and Lady Elizabeth had no direct issue between them, the union of their lines occurred in the next generation, when in 1635 Mathew Machell, the third son of John, married his own step-sister Elizabeth Carryll at Wonersh. Mathew had been apprenticed a Goldsmith in London to the royal silversmith Edward Sewster, who died in 1628 granting the uncompleted term of service to his apprentice. Mathew and Elizabeth had three children, christened by Stephen Geree at Wonersh, of whom John Machell, born 1637, was the only one to survive infancy. His mother, who appears to have been a woman of serious religious character, died aged 23 of smallpox at or near Tangley at Easter 1639. John therefore became the only heir in blood of the Machell connection with the Carryll and Aungier families.