James Blount, 6th Baron Mountjoy, was a man defined by the tension between inherited rank and reduced circumstance. A Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Queen Mary and Lord Lieutenant of Dorset under Elizabeth, he squandered much of the family’s remaining fortune in the pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher’s stone – an obsession encouraged, paradoxically, by William Cecil himself in the hope of finding viable sources of alum and copperas.
He was also a patron of Protestant learning, and his tenure of the barony, while financially ruinous, produced two sons whose careers would define the Blount name in the Elizabethan age: the unfortunate 7th Baron and the distinguished 8th Baron and Earl of Devonshire.
Life
James Blount was born about 1533 in Devon – some sources specify Barnstaple, others Newport – the eldest son of Charles Blount, 5th Baron Mountjoy, and Anne Willoughby. He inherited the barony on his father’s death in October 1544, while still a child of eleven or twelve.
He was made a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Queen Mary on 29 September 1553, and under Queen Elizabeth served as Lord Lieutenant of Dorset from 1559. In 1572 he was one of the commissioners appointed to try Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, whose execution for treason that year ended the last serious Catholic challenge to the Elizabethan religious settlement.
Alchemy and Protestant patronage
Blount was associated with the circle around John Dee in the pursuit of alchemy and natural philosophy. Lord Burghley (William Cecil) encouraged him in the manufacture of alum and copperas between 1566 and 1572 – industries that relied on the same chemical processes pursued by those seeking the philosopher’s stone – and it was in these ventures that Blount consumed much of the estate’s already reduced resources, leaving his sons in straitened circumstances.
He had a reputation as a supporter of Protestantism, in line with both his father and grandfather. Henry Bennet lauded him in 1561 in connection with his patronage of the German astrologer and physician Eliseus Bomelius, and in the same year Jean Veron, a preacher at St Paul’s, dedicated to him an anti-papal tract.
Marriage and children
On 17 May 1558 James Blount married Catherine Leigh, daughter of Thomas Leigh of Durham St Oswald’s, Yorkshire. They had five children: William (7th Baron Mountjoy), Charles (8th Baron Mountjoy and 1st Earl of Devonshire), Christopher, Ann, and Edward.
James Blount died at Hook, near Okehampton, Devon, and the title passed to his eldest son William. The estate record gives 1582, following the principal modern accounts; some genealogical sources give 10 October 1581, and the discrepancy – possibly an old-style / new-style calendar matter – appears across otherwise reliable authorities.