THROCKMORTON, John (c.1555-1615), of Lypiatt, Glos.

Throckmorton’s father, the youngest son of the patriarchal Sir George Throckmorton†, prospered as a Mercer and land speculator, but left his son to establish himself by marriage to a wealthy Gloucestershire widow.10 PROB 11/82, f. 249. The earlier marriages of two of his uncles into the aristocratic Gloucestershire families of Berkeley and Brydges may have helped Throckmorton to the match. Although the family’s Oxfordshire property passed to Robert Catesby, grandson to Throckmorton’s mother by her first marriage, Throckmorton himself may have inherited cash, so enabling him to buy out the heirs to the extensive Wye estates during the 1590s.11 M.A. Rudd, Hist. Recs. of Bisley with Lypiatt, 226. He also built the market-house at Stroud.12 VCH Glos. xi. 104. In 1599, and again after the Essex rising in 1601, Throckmorton came to the aid of Catesby,13 M. Dickins, Chastleton, 19, 20; HMC Var. iii. 109, 150. but despite this there is nothing to suggest that he shared his father’s Catholicism.

Throckmorton was returned for Gloucestershire to the last Elizabethan Parliament. Although not re-elected at the general election of1604 he was returned at a by-election during the first session in place of his relative Sir Richard Berkeley. He only appears once in the records of the first session, or possibly twice if, as the Journal has it, he was ordered four days before his return to consider a bill against witchcraft,14 CJ, i. 227a. of which his distant cousin Robert Throckmorton had been an alleged victim.15 G.L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New Eng. 310. No attempt seems to have been made to implicate him in the Gunpowder Plot, despite the involvement of Catesby and others of his kinsmen. The story that the plot was actually hatched at Lypiatt, and that Throckmorton lost it as a result, is of later invention.16 D. Jardine, ‘Remarks upon Letters of Thomas Winter and Lord Mounteagle’, Archaeologia, xxix. 88-90; R. Atkyns, Ancient and Present State of Glos. 368; A.L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, 190. When the House met again in 1606, he was appointed to consider a bill for weavers (24 Feb.) and two estate bills, one of them for his distant cousin, but probably near friend, William Throckmorton of Tortworth in Gloucestershire (8 May).17 CJ, i. 273a, 281b, 307a. William’s elder brother John, who died young, has sometimes been mistakenly identified as this Member. Throckmorton was among the first Members to take the oath of Allegiance in the fourth session,18 ‘Paulet 1610’, f. 15. but his only committee appointment was to consider another private bill (27 February).19 CJ, i. 397b.

Throckmorton sold Lypiatt and other manors to Thomas Stephens† for £4,550 in 1610,20 Rudd, 227. but in the same year he shared in a Gloucestershire Crown lease and four years later in a grant of lands.21 C66/1888/28; CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 241. He was buried at St. Martin-in-the-Fields and having died intestate administration was granted to his widow on 21 Mar. 1615.22 PROB 11/9, f. 10. His remaining lands, including the manor of Corse six miles north of Gloucester, eventually passed to his younger brother George, a Catholic who had settled in Oxfordshire.23 VCH Glos. viii. 276.