ELIOT, SIR JOHN (1592-1632), English statesman, was born at Port Eliot, Cornwall, and educated at Exeter college, Oxford. He then studied law, and spent some years in travel on the continent before he entered parliament as M.P. for St. Ger mans in 1614. In 1618 he was knighted, and next year through the patronage of Buckingham he obtained the appointment of vice admiral of Devon, with large powers for the defence and control of the commerce of the county. In 1623 he succeeded by a clever but dangerous manoeuvre in entrapping the famous pirate John Nutt, who had for years infested the southern coast, inflicting immense damage upon English commerce. The pirate, having a powerful protector at court in Sir George Calvert, the secretary of State, was pardoned; while the vice-admiral was flung into the Marshalsea, and detained there nearly four months.
A few weeks after his release Eliot was elected member of parliament for Newport (Feb. 1624). On the 27th he delivered his first speech, in which he at once revealed his great powers as an orator, demanding boldly that the liberties and privileges of parliament, repudiated by James I. in the former parliament, should be secured. In the first parliament of Charles I., in 1625, he urged the enforcement of the laws against the Roman Catholics. Meanwhile he had continued the friend and supporter of Bucking ham, but the bad faith with which both he and the king continued to treat the parliament, alienated Eliot completely from the ad ministration. Distrust of his former friend developed into a con viction of his criminal ambition and treason to his country. Re turned in 1626 as member for St. Germans, Eliot found himself the leader of the House. He immediately demanded an inquiry into the disaster at Cadiz. On March 27 he made an open and daring attack upon Buckingham and his evil administration. He was not intimidated by the king's threatening intervention on the 29th, and persuaded the House to defer the actual grant of the subsidies and to present a remonstrance to the king, declaring its right to examine the conduct of ministers. On May 8, he was one of the managers who carried Buckingham's impeachment to the Lords, and on the loth he delivered the charges against him, comparing him in the course of his speech to Sejanus. Next day Eliot was sent to the Tower. On the Commons declining to pro ceed with business as long as Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges (who had been imprisoned with him) were in confinement, they were released, and parliament was dissolved on June 15. Eliot was dismissed from his office of vice-admiral of Devon, and in 1627 he was again imprisoned for refusing to pay a forced loan, but liberated shortly before the assembling of the parliament of 1628, to which he was returned as member for Cornwall. He joined in the resistance now organized to arbitrary taxation, was foremost in the promotion of the Petition of Right, continued his outspoken censure of Buckingham, and after the latter's assassination in August, led the attack in the session of 1629 on the ritualists and Arminians.
In February the question of the right of the king to levy ton nage and poundage came up for discussion ; and on the king order ing an adjournment of parliament, the speaker, Sir John Finch, was held down in the chair while Eliot's resolutions against illegal taxation and innovations in religion were read to the House by Holles (q.v.). In consequence, Eliot, with eight other members, was imprisoned on March 4, in the Tower. He refused to answer in his examination, relying on his privilege of parliament, and on Oct. 29 was removed to the Marshalsea. On Jan. 26, he appeared at the bar of the king's bench, with Holles and Valentine, to answer a charge of conspiracy to resist the king's order, and, re fusing to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court, he was fined £ 2,000 and ordered to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure and till he had made submission. This he steadfastly refused. Eliot's confinement in the Tower was exceptionally severe. Charles hated him as the prosecutor and bitter enemy of Bucking ham ; "an outlawed man," he described him, "desperate in mind and fortune." In prison Eliot wrote several works, his Negotium posterorum, an account of the parliament in 1625; The Monarchie of Man, a political treatise ; De jure majestatis, a Political Treatise of Gov ernTnent; and An Apology for Socrates, his own defence. In Oct. 1632 ill-health drove him to petition Charles for permission to go into the country, but leave could only be obtained at the price of submission and was finally refused. He died on Nov. 27, 163 2. When his son requested permission to move the body to Port Eliot, Charles returned the curt refusal : "Let Sir John Eliot be buried in the church of that parish where he died." The manner of Eliot's death had more effect, probably, than any other single incident in embittering and precipitating the dispute between king and parliament ; and the sacrifice of a man actuated origi nally by no antagonistic feeling against the monarchy or the church, is the surest condemnation of the king's policy and ad ministration.
Eliot married Rhadagund, daughter of Richard Gedie of Tre bursye in Cornwall, by whom he had five sons, from the youngest of whom Granville John Eliot, the present earl of St. Germans, is descended, and four daughters.
The Life of Sir J. Eliot, by J. Forster (1864) , is supplemented and corrected by Gardiner's History of England, vols. v.–vii., and the article in the Dict. of Nat. Biog., by the same author. Eliot's writings, together with his Letter-Book, have been edited by Dr. Grosart.