biography text
This Member twice changed his name by private Act of Parliament: in 1727 from Brodnax to May, under the will of his mother’s cousin, Sir Thomas May, M.P. (d.1718), on succeeding to the May estates; and in 1738 to Knight on inheriting the estates of his father’s cousin, Elizabeth Knight, widow of William Woodward Knight and Bulstrode Peachey. On the second occasion one Member is alleged to have proposed ‘a general bill to enable that gentleman to take what name he pleased’.1Gent. Mag. 1781, p. 147. Returned, apparently as a Tory, for Canterbury in 1734, voting with the Opposition, he did not stand again. He died 26 Feb. 1781.