TRACY, Sir Robert (1593-1662), of Fairford, Toddington and Alderton, Glos.

Sir Robert Tracy was the head of one of Gloucestershire’s oldest county families. His ancestors had acquired the manor of Toddington before the Conquest, and one of his forebears had been among the murderers of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in the reign of Henry II. In the reign of Henry VIII, this anticlerical streak ran so strong that after the death of one offending Tracy the king ordered the body exhumed and dispersed through the county.24D. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Glos. 1500-1800 (1992), 138. More recently, among his more illustrious kin, Sir Robert Tracy counted the Brydges of Sudeley Castle (his great-grandmother having been the daughter of Sir John Brydges, 1st Baron Chandos); and it was at Sudeley Castle that his grandfather, Sir John Tracy I, had been knighted by Elizabeth in 1574.25E. Dent, Annals of Winchcombe and Sudeley (1877), 223. The family had sat as knights of the shire for Gloucestershire since 1313; and Sir Robert’s father, Sir John II†, had been elected by the county in 1597. Sir John was alleged to have taken an active part in Essex’s rebellion of 1601; and, whatever the truth of the charge, seems to have relinquished any parliamentary ambitions after the failure of the coup d’état. 26CSP Dom. 1598-1601, p. 550.

Sir Robert Tracy was married in his mid-twenties to the daughter of a prosperous Worcestershire squire, who counted an Elizabethan lord chancellor, Sir Thomas Bromley†, among her forebears; and he seems to have spent the first few years of married life completing his education by travelling abroad. He sat in the 1621 Parliament as knight of the shire, but made no recorded speeches, and his only committee appointment was to consider a Sabbatarian bill. In 1624, the Tracy ‘interest’ went to support Sir Thomas Estcourt† in the county elections. Yet despite his wealth, and his family’s standing in the county, Tracy had a chequered career as an MP. In 1625, he sought election at Tewkesbury, some eight miles to the west of the family’s principal estate at Toddington, but was rejected by the borough for not supporting a local bill. He was returned to Westminster in 1626, once again as knight of the shire; but made no impact on the assembly. He attempted to retain the county seat in 1628, but was defeated by Nathaniel Stephens* of Eastington, a figure identified with the ‘godly’ and with interests of the cloth-working region of the county east of the Severn.27Rollison, Local Origins, 142-3.

Tracy’s defeat in 1628 seems to have left him with an abiding resentment against Stephens which resurfaced in March 1640, during the elections to the Short Parliament of April-May that year. In the somewhat prejudiced account of the Laudian, John Allibond, Tracy was the beneficiary of an agreement concocted by the leading county gentry, including John Dutton*, by which votes from the Cotswolds and the Vale would be shared between Tracy and Sir Robert Cooke*. Cooke’s own account of this agreement, written on 24 February, described how the plan had been undermined by ‘jealousies and unexpected canvassings’.28Glos. RO, D2510: Cooke to John Smyth, 24 Feb. 1640. On the day of the poll, 20 March, Tracy was absent through illness, the agreement collapsed, and a surprise appearance by Nathaniel Stephens was met with a decision by the sheriff to poll the following day. On this occasion, Tracy turned up, ‘though indisposed for travel’, and in a sneer at Stephens, thought to be the puppet of the clothing interest, declined to be ‘webbed and loomed’.29SP16/448, f. 79. The sheriff, a relative of Tracy’s, moved the election to Winchcombe, near Toddington, and after nearly four days of polling, Tracy was at last returned with Cooke, securing a majority of a hundred votes over Stephens. When the case was considered by the committee of privileges on 16 April after a petition by Stephens against the election, the result was first to summon the sheriff as a delinquent.30CJ ii. 4b. The sheriff’s conduct could not be proved to be either negligent or deeply partisan; and a counter-claim that Stephens’s supporters had tried to assert the franchise for a tenant on a lease for lives ensured the matter was dropped.31Aston’s Diary, 147, 153-6. In the Short Parliament’s proceedings themselves, Tracy seems to have made no contribution.

In February 1641, Tracy was added to commissioners appointed to investigate abuses in pressing soldiers and levying coat and conduct money, and later in the year was ordered to report on the collection for coat and conduct money to the lord lieutenant.32LJ iv. 165a, 300a. In 1642, Tracy and his septuagenarian father, Sir John, supported the king, and worked hard to rally the Cotswolds to the royalist cause. On 26 November, he sent £200 to the king, and despatched his third son to serve in the troop of Lord Chandos.33Dent, Annals, 257. He served in arms at the capture of Cirencester for the king on 2 February 1643, and at the siege of parliamentarian-held Gloucester in August later in the year.34HMC 6th Rep. 90; CCC 1675. His eldest son and heir, John (later 3rd Viscount Tracy), seems to have been the cornet of horse listed as having served in the king’s army in the second bishops’ war of 1640, and in 1641.35CSP Dom. 1640, p. 213; 1640-1, p. 529. Sir Robert Tracy surrendered to Colonel Edward Massie*, the parliamentarian governor of Gloucester, around 1645 and soon afterwards sought to make his peace with Parliament. He compounded for his delinquency on 27 February 1647 and after taking the oath of allegiance to the commonwealth on 19 March 1650, he was finally discharged under the terms of the Act of Pardon of 2 April 1652.36CCC 802, 1675-76; CCAM 58, 640; CJ iv. 591a. It was probably in an effort to help defray the costs of his royalism that he contemplated selling Fairford to Bulstrode Whitelocke*, whom he met to discuss the matter on 31 May 1650. Whitelocke found ‘the Lord Tracy was very civil’, but lacking time to go to view the estate decided against proceeding with the purchase.37Whitelocke, Diary, 258.

The elevation of Tracy’s father to the peerage on 12 January 1643 to an Irish viscountcy and barony was part of a series of creations by Charles I early in the war, made in the hope of encouraging support for the war effort. 38Mins. of Evidence: Tracy Peerage Case (1839-43), 11-12; quoted in CP; 47th Rep. of the Dep.-Kpr. of the Public Record Office, app. p. 120. Sir Robert Tracy succeeded to the viscountcy (and to his father’s Toddington estate) in 1647 or 1648, but his peerage was not recognized by Parliament, having been created after the removal of the great seal to the royalist court in May 1642. He had succeeded his father by February 1648, when he again came under suspicion at Westminster of abetting the royalist cause during the second civil war. He was in London in May and July 1650, when he received leave from the council of state to remain in the capital, having ‘fallen into [a] bloody flux’; and he was in London again, seemingly in better health, in the following November.39CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 253, 446; Whitelocke, Diary, 258. In December 1655, he was summoned before the Gloucestershire commissioners of Major-general John Disbrowe*, along with other royalist gentry.40Glos. RO, Smyth of Nibley vol. III, f. 71.

Tracy made his will on 3 May 1662, ‘somewhat diseased in body but trusting to be saved’ – one of the few clues to his religious outlook – and died at some point in the following week. He was buried at Toddington on 11 May. His viscountcy survived until 1797, when, on the death of the 8th viscount, it became extinct. After the Restoration, however, the family glory days as a major electoral influence in the county were over. The only one of his descendants to sit in the Commons was a mid-eighteenth-century MP for Tewkesbury and Worcester, who sat in the whig interest.41W.B. Willcox, Gloucestershire (1940), 35.