ST. JOHN, OLIVER (c. I 59--1 1i b statesman and judge, was the son of Oliver St. John of Cayshoe, Bedford shire, and great-grandson of the first Lord St. John of Bletso in 1559, and a distant cousin of the 4th baron who was created earl of Bolingbroke in 1624, and who took an active part on the parlia mentary side in the Civil War, being killed at the battle of Edge hill. Oliver was educated at Queens' college, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1626. He appears to have got into trouble with the court in connection with a seditious publication, and to have associated himself with the future popular leaders John Pym and Lord Saye. In 1638, in a notable speech, he defended Hampden on his refusal to pay Ship Money. In the same year he married, as his second wife, Elizabeth Cromwell, a cousin of Oliver Crom well, to whom his first wife also had been distantly related. The marriage led to an intimate friendship with Cromwell. St. John was member for Totnes in both the Short and the Long Parlia ment, where he acted in close alliance with Hampden and Pym, especially in opposition to the impost of Ship Money (q.v.). In 1641, with a view of securing his support, the king appointed St. John solicitor-general. None the less he took an active part in promoting the impeachment of Strafford and in preparing the bills brought forward by the popular party in the Commons, and was dismissed from office in 1643. On the outbreak of the Civil War,
he became recognized as one of the parliamentary leaders. In the quarrel between the parliament and the army in 1647 he sided with the latter, and throughout enjoyed Cromwell's confidence.
In 1648 St. John was appointed chief justice of the common pleas. He refused to act as one of the commissioners for the trial of Charles. He had no hand in Pride's Purge, nor in the constitu tion of the Commonwealth. In 1651 he went to The Hague on an unsuccessful mission to negotiate a union between England and Holland, but in the same year he successfully conducted a similar negotiation with Scotland. After the Restoration he pub lished an account of his past conduct (The Case of Oliver St. John, 166o), which saved him from any more severe vengeance than exclusion from public office. He retired to his country house in Northamptonshire till 1662, when he went to live abroad. He died on Dec. 31, 1673.
See the above-mentioned Case of Oliver St. John (166o), and St. John's Speech to the Lords, Jan. 7th, 1640, concerning Ship-money (1640). See also Mark Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, vol. ii. (2 vols., 1787) and C. H. Firth's art. in Diet. of Nat. Biog., vol. I. (1897).