Little is known of Tookie’s background. He apparently grew up at Wilton, two miles west of Salisbury, which he recalled in his will ‘as being the place where it pleased the Lord first to give me the sweet taste and relish of his words and gospel’.11 PROB 11/170, f. 199. He became a clothier in Salisbury, and in 1593 married the daughter of a city councillor.12 Wilts. RO, G23/1/264, f. 46; Salisbury Mar. Lics. 34. A decade elapsed before he joined the corporation himself, but thereafter he became one of its most diligent members, occupying numerous municipal offices in turn, including the mayoralty in 1610.13 Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, ff. 208v, 338v, 343, 352, 358v, 360v, 362, 378. In February 1611 he and his fellow councillor Richard Godfrey I* corresponded with lord chancellor Ellesmere (Thomas Egerton I†) over the terms of the city’s intended charter, and a year later he was sent to London to help in the negotiations, being authorized to pay all the necessary legal fees.14 Ibid. G23/1/223/12; G23/1/3, ff. 214, 239. Tookie was returned to Parliament in 1628, but is not recorded as having made any contribution to the work of the House, nor to have acted again to further Salisbury’s legal or property interests in London.
Tookie was also an active member of the vestry of St. Edmund’s, Salisbury, pressing for the appointment of the puritan Peter Thatcher as minister. He later complained to the bishop that Christmas lights had been set up in the cathedral.15Churchwardens’ Accts. of St. Edmund’s and St. Thomas’s, 173; Wilts. RO, G23/1/3, f. 369. However, he was clearly a conformist, as his daughter married a clergyman, while he himself married the widow of a cathedral canon as his second wife.
Tookie regularly attended Salisbury’s monthly council meetings until April 1635. In his will of 14 Oct. following he made small bequests to the churches of St. Edmund’s and Wilton, and settled the bulk of his assets upon his wife, who was named as executrix. On 20 Nov. he leased a tenement in Scot Lane, Salisbury, perhaps in order to pass his own house to his surviving heir, his second son John. He was buried at St. Edmund’s on 30 Dec. 1635. His memory was perpetuated by a trust for poor apprentices which he had established in 1624 from the proceeds of a property in Bellfounder Street. None of his descendants sat in Parliament.16 R.C. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. ‘Salisbury’, 333.