Giles Mompesson

Giles Mompesson (c. 1583 – 1663) was an English office holder and courtier who sat in the House of Commons between 1614 and 1621, when he was sentenced for corruption.

His name came to be regarded as a synonym for official corruption, because he used nepotism to gain positions for licensing businesses by which he pocketed the fees.

Sir Giles Overreach, the anti-hero of Philip Massinger's 1625 play A New Way to Pay Old Debts, is based on Mompesson.

He entered Hart Hall, Oxford in 1600, but left without a degree the next year for Lincoln's Inn; he later departed there without becoming a lawyer.

George Villiers became James I's favourite (and alleged lover), rising to the rank of Duke of Buckingham by 1616, and Mompesson was quick to use his family connections.

The fines that he could levy against inn-keepers out of compliance were left to his discretion, and the fees that he could charge to license an inn were similarly up to his own judgment.

In 1617, Mompesson proposed to Villiers and received a scheme to raise £10,000 in four years by selling decayed timber from royal estates.

Sir Edward Coke found that Mompesson had prosecuted over 3,320 inns and taverns on regulations dating back to Henry VIII.

Commons preferred charges to Lords, waiting sentencing, and Mompesson was ordered to attend every day and to be guarded by the Sergeant-at-Arms.

Mompesson was ordered to pay a £10,000 fine, lose his knighthood, and ride down the Strand facing backwards from his horse, and then be imprisoned for life.

[4] Mompesson was again using his family connections through his sister-in-law Barbara Villiers around 1631, this time employed as her agent managing an area of newly enclosed lands in her possession at the Forest of Dean.

Such enclosures and grants of former royal forest were commonly made to courtiers in return for substantial sums of money, as a means to bolster Charles I's finances independent of Parliament.

During riots aimed at destroying the enclosures and returning the lands to common in 1631, an effigy of the "odious projector" Sir Giles was thrown into the iron ore pits and buried as they were filled in by the rioters.