Baptist (‘Bab’) May (1628/9-1698), MP

John Greenhill (Salisbury 1649 – London 1676). Oil painting on canvas (oval), Baptist (‘Bab’) May (1628/9-1698), MP by John Greenhill (Salisbury 1649 – London 1676), inscribed above, roughly: Mr .BAPTIST..MAY...1662; later, neat inscription, mid-left: Mr BAPTIST MAY 1662. An oval head- and-shoulders portrait of a man, turned to the left, gazing at the spectator, wearing a rich brown velvet coat, and white stock; long dark brown wig. Painting inscribed on left hand side Mr Baptist May'. Baptist May (1628/9-1698), Keeper of the Privy Purse to Charles II (1665-85), and Ranger of Windsor Great Park (1671-97). He was the son of Charles I’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Humphrey May, whose daughter Isabella was the mother of the 1st Earl of Bristol, by his second wife, Judith (bap.1598-†1661), daughter of Sir William Poley (1562-1629), and, as he told Bishop Burnet, had been “bred about the King [Charles II] since he was a child”. His real celebrity - or notoriety - derives from his having been, like William Chiffinch, “indispensable to the King in his private pleasures” (D.N.B.) or, as Pepys puts it more succinctly, “court pimp”. He also kept a fine stud. More commendable was his taste for, and collection of, pictures, one of which was Lely’s portrait of Moll Davis playing a guitar. He was successively M.P. for Midhurst and Thetford, but his political influence, either in Parliament or with the King, seems to have been nil. From 1665 onwards, he and the poet Abraham Cowley were in partnership with Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, to develop St. James’s Square and the land around it – an involvement commemorated to this day by the name of Babmaes Street (formerly Mews). He was unmarried, but had at least one natural son, Charles, whom he remembered in his will – probably by Dorothy Broke, of the family of Nacton Hall, Suffolk. Ickworth, Suffolk (Accredited Museum)