Nottinghamshire. His eldest brother, Sir Charles Smith, was elevated to the peerage in 1643 as Baron Carrington of Wootton Wawen in Warwickshire and Viscount Carrington of Barreford in Connaught (G. E. C[okayne], Complete Peerage, ii. 167).
He was brought up a Roman catholic, his earlier education being entrusted to a kinsman. At a later date he was sent abroad to Germany to complete his studies. He always had a strong disposition for a military life, and ventured to return home without leave, to urge his relatives to permit him to follow his bent. His projects, however, were received with no favour, and he was sent to resume his studies in the Spanish Netherlands. He soon joined the Spanish army which was defending Flanders against the French and Dutch. He distinguished himself by several deeds of daring; but hearing of the Scottish disturbances, he resolved to return to England and offer his services to Charles I. He received a lieutenant's commission, and was victorious in a skirmish with the Scots at Stapleford in the neighbourhood of the Tees. After the conclusion of the treaty of Ripon, on 28 Oct. 1640, he retired to his mother's house at Ashby Folville in Leicestershire. When the English civil war broke out he joined the royalists and was made a captain-lieutenant under Lord John Stewart (d. 1644) [q. v.] On 9 Aug. 1642 he disarmed the people of Kilsby in Northamptonshire, who had declared for parliament, and on 23 Sept. he took part in the fight at Powick Bridge. At Edgehill his troop was in Lord Grandison's regiment, on the left wing. In the battle the royal standard-bearer, Sir Edmund Verney [q. v.], was killed and the standard taken. Smith, with two others, recovered it. For this service he was knighted on the field, being, it is said, the last knight banneret created in England. He also received a troop of his own, and was appointed by Lord Grandison major of his regiment. Being sent into the south, he was taken prisoner on 13 Dec. by Waller in Winchester Castle, and did not obtain his liberty till the September following. On his release he proceeded to Oxford, and was made lieutenant-colonel of Lord Herbert of Raglan's regiment of horse [see Somerset, Edward, second Marquis of Worcester]. In 1644 he was despatched to the western army, as major-general of the horse under Lord John Stewart. On 29 March the royalists under Patrick Ruthven, earl of Forth [q. v.], engaged the parliamentarians under Waller at Cheriton in Hampshire. The rashness of Henry Bard (afterwards Viscount Bellamont) [q. v.] involved the royalist cavalry in a premature engagement. Smith was mortally wounded, and the dismay occasioned by his fall is said to have hastened his companions' retreat. He died the next day, and was buried on the south side of the choir in Christ Church, Oxford. An elegy on him appears in Sir Francis Wortley's ‘Characters and Elegies,’ London, 1646, 4to.
[The fullest biography is in Edward Walsingham's Britannicæ Virtutis Imago, 1644, Oxford; but it is too eulogistic to be altogether trustworthy, and it differs in many instances from other contemporary accounts. Other authorities are Ludlow's Memoirs, ed. 1751, Edinburgh, i. 42, 95; Lloyd's Memoires, ed. 1668, p. 658; Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, vi. 85, viii. 15, 16; Nugent's Memoirs of Hampden, ii. 298–300; Gardiner's Great Civil War, i. 49–50, 326; Colvile's Worthies of Warwickshire, p. 699; Le Neve's Monumenta Anglicana, i. 213.]
SMITH, JOHN (1618–1652), Cambridge Platonist, was born at Achurch, near Oundle in Northamptonshire, in 1618. Of his parents his biographer only states that they had ‘long been childless and were grown aged.’ In 1636 he was entered as a pensioner at Emmanuel College, at that time the leading puritan foundation in the university. He proceeded B.A. in 1640, M.A. in 1644; and in the latter year (11 June) was transferred by the Earl of Manchester, along with seven other members of his college, to Queens' College, ‘they having bine examined and approved by the Assembly of Divines sitting in Westminster … as fitt to be fellowes’ (Searle, Hist. of Queens' College, p. 548). His college tutor at Emmanuel was Benjamin Whichcote [q. v.] (afterwards provost of King's College), who not only directed his studies, but aided him with his purse. At Queens' College he lectured with marked success on ‘mathematics,’ although it is doubtful whether the term implied anything more than arithmetic. His chief reputation, however, was acquired as one of the rising school of Cambridge Platonists. John Worthington [q. v.] assigns him the praise of being both δίκαιος and ἀγαθός, i.e. of being not only just and upright in his conversation, but also genuinely good at heart, and doubts whether more to admire his learning or his humility. Smith died of consumption on 7 Aug. 1652, and was buried in his college chapel. Although only in his thirty-fifth year, he had already become known as a ‘living library,’ his acquirements being chiefly in theology and the oriental languages. His papers were handed by his executor, Samuel Cradock, fellow of Emmanuel, to Worthington, who published such of them as were ‘homogeneal and related to the same discourse,’ under the title of
