ELTOFTES, John (d.1559), of the Inner Temple, London.

Eltoftes, a Catholic, was an Inner Temple lawyer sometimes employed by the family of the 2nd Earl of Cumberland. In 1559 he was returned for the fourth time for the Earl’s borough of Appleby. He died before the end of the Parliament, but no evidence has been found of a by-election to replace him. His will, dated 6 Mar., was proved 26 Apr. 1559. He committed his soul to God, ‘to our Lady Saint Mary, and to all the blessed company of heaven’, and asked to be buried in the choir of the Temple church; ‘dirge with mass and other divine service’ were to be said at his funeral. To ‘them of the Temple’ he left £4, and to his ‘very good lord the Lord Strange’, heir apparent to the 3rd Earl of Derby and son-in-law (since February 1555) to the 2nd Earl of Cumberland, all his ‘rings, dials copper and gilt, and all other things contained in a parchment subscribed with mine own hand in this wise, "To him to whom I have been most bounden, the good Lord Strange"’. One half of what remained after the deduction of bequests was to be laid out for the good of his soul and the souls of his parents and friends. His executor Anthony Stapleton, a relative, was to have the other half, including all Eltoftes’s books in the Inner Temple except those belonging to the Earl of Cumberland, ’locked, in a joined coffer in my study window’.

C142/33/122; Vis. Yorks. ed. Foster, 301; Yorks. Peds. (Harl. Soc. xciv), 175; North Country Wills (Surtees Soc. cxxi), 13 and n. An Edmund Eltoftes, probably a brother, was in Cumberland’s service (ex inf. Dr. R. T. Spence from Bolton mss 245, f. 1a.).