LUTTRELL, Alexander (1622-42), of Dunster Castle, nr. Minehead, Som.

The Luttrells traced their ancestry back to Geoffrey Luttrell, an early thirteenth-century knight who by marriage acquired extensive estates in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Somerset. Geoffrey’s son, Andrew, had divided those lands between his two eldest sons with the second, Alexander, inheriting those in Somerset. Further manors were added in the later fourteenth century, including Dunster.4H.C. Maxwell Lyte, Dunster and its Lords 1066-1881 (1882), 45-6. Dunster Castle, originally built by William de Mohun, then became that branch’s principal seat. In 1633 Thomas Gerard thought that the ‘fair house built on the castle mount’ was ‘the greatest ornament of the place’.5T. Gerard, The Particular Description of the Co. of Som. ed. E.H. Bates (Som. Rec. Soc. xv), 20.

The head of the Somerset Luttrells from 1629 was this MP’s father, Thomas Luttrell. According to Sir William Brereton*, he was worth £2,000 a year.6W. Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. E. Hawkins (Chetham Soc. i), 171. Throughout the 1630s Thomas was an active and efficient local magistrate. In 1625 he had sat as the MP for Minehead, a constituency in which the Luttrell influence was always all-powerful and, had he wished, he could presumably been elected in either of the 1640 elections. He chose otherwise, in the latter case in order to make way for his father-in-law, Sir Francis Popham, and his eldest son and heir, Alexander. Since the latter had been only 15 years old when, three years earlier, he had matriculated from Lincoln College, Oxford, he was one of the youngest men to be elected in 1640.7Al. Ox.

The only certain fact about Alexander Luttrell’s time in the Long Parliament is that he took the Protestation on 3 May 1641.8CJ ii. 133b. Other possible references to him in the Journals are at least as likely to refer to his father. In February 1642 ‘Mr Luttrell’ was thanked and reimbursed by the Commons for supplies he had provided to the soldiers of Sir Charles Vasavour. The following month ‘Mr Lutterell’ wrote to John Pym* with information concerning reports about seditious comments made in Somerset.9CJ ii. 455a, 503a. It seems more plausible to assume that this was Thomas Luttrell, who was a justice of the peace and deputy lieutenant back in Somerset, rather than his son, who was presumably still at Westminster.

Within months Alexander Luttrell was dead. The order for a writ for a by-election at Minehead to fill the vacancy, issued on 3 June 1642, is the only indication as to the date of his death.10CJ ii. 604a. He had never married and so left no children.11Som. RO, DD/L(P), 38/100. His younger brother, George, therefore succeeded to the family estates when their father died two years later.