WATERTON, Thomas (by 1526-75), of Walton and Sandal, Yorks.

Waterton was a well-connected country gentleman of middling status. His wife was the daughter by an earlier marriage of his stepmother Agnes, widow of Edward Restwold, who married Sir Thomas Waterton as her second husband. Another family, the Gargraves, were on close terms with the Watertons, Cotton Gargrave marrying Waterton’s daughter Anne.

Most of the references found to Waterton are concerned either with his local offices, or with his many land transactions, some of which led to litigation in the duchy of Lancaster court and in Chancery. Though classed as a favourer of the Elizabethan settlement in the bishops’ reports of 1564, Waterton’s religious outlook is obscure. A recent historian has described him as a crypto-Catholic. In 1569, the year of the northern rebellion, his estates in and around Sandal and Walton were assessed at £40, and he was required to provide two corselets and a number of arms and weapons for local defence.

He died on 5 Nov. 1575, leaving extensive property in Cawthorne, Heaton, Menstropp and elsewhere in Yorkshire, in addition to his main estates around Sandal. In his will, drawn up two days before he died, he asked to be buried in the church of Sandal Magna. The executors were his widow and their elder son Thomas, aged 23, who was a Catholic on the run in 1582.