Blount, Mountjoy, 1st Earl of Newport (1597 -1666)

Mountjoy Blount was the illegitimate son of Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, and Penelope Devereux. He was created Baron Mountjoy in the Irish peerage (1617), and Baron Mountjoy of Thurveston in the English peerage (1627), and Earl of Newport in the Isle of Wight in July 1628. In 1634 he was appointed Master of Ordnance, from which he amassed a small fortune, selling gunpowder to the Spanish forces fighting the Dutch. In 1641 Blount became aware of a plot by Royalists to take London by surprise, seize the Tower, and rescue King Charles. He denounced the plot implicating Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, on whom a bill of attainder was served; he was subsequently executed. In 1626 he married Ann Boteler, daughter of John Boteler, 1st Baron Boteler of Bramfield, by whom he had eight children, three daughters and five sons. The three surviving sons, all of them mentally disabled, succeeded to the earldom, all in 1675. The third son died in 1679, at which the earldom became extinct.