THROCKMORTON, Baynham (1629-81), of Clearwell, Newland, Glos.

The ancestors of Baynham Throckmorton had been settled in the Forest of Dean since around 1500.20VCH Glos. v. 132. The Baynhams had been a family of fluctuating religious enthusiasms. James Baynham had been executed as a Protestant martyr in April 1531, but two generations later, Sir Edward Baynham had participated in the Gunpowder conspiracy against the government of James I.21H.G. Nicholls, Personalities of the Forest of Dean (1863), 103-4. Clearwell manor had been settled by Thomas Baynham on his daughter, Cecily, wife of Sir Thomas Throckmorton (d. 1628) of Tortworth, on the other side of the Severn from the Forest. Sir Thomas’s son was Sir Baynham Throckmorton†, who aspired to a parliamentary seat before the civil wars. His lack of any relationship with George Berkeley, 8th Baron Berkeley may have kept the elder Throckmorton out in one or other of the 1640 elections.22Glos. RO, Smyth of Nibley MSS, vol. X, f. 100. Throckmorton senior was a leading Gloucestershire royalist in the first civil war. He protested to the Committee for Compounding* in March 1646 that he had taken the national covenant and had been in Gloucester and other parliamentarian towns since December 1645, and was fined £1,515, at one-sixth. This was reduced to one-tenth in 1647, when Throckmorton successfully pleaded that his estate had been in trust to meet debts since 1637. The estate was finally discharged from sequestration in 1653, only after some of his lands had been bought by a relation of Vincent Gookin*.23CCC 1149.

Baynham Throckmorton was still only in his twenties when the family estate was freed from the attentions of the compounding commissioners. He was married, but was yet to hold any office in local government. His election to the 1656 Parliament must have been on the family interest, but his success would have been unwelcome to the government, actively managed as those elections were by the major generals.24Mems. of the Fam. of Guise ed. G. Davies (Camden 3rd ser. xxviii), 129-30. Indeed, his name may have been confused by the anonymous compiler of a list of Members excluded from taking their seats by the government.25Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 156. Clement Throckmorton*, who was apparently kept out, was an innocuous figure returned from a borough where there was strong military presence and no history of determined antipathy to the protectorate. Baynham Throckmorton, by contrast, as the son of a cavalier, was exactly the kind of figure who would have raised suspicions. Whether he was or was not admitted to the House, Baynham Throckmorton cannot be identified with certainty as the ‘Mr Throckmorton’ mentioned in the Commons Journals. The only committees where he, rather than Clement, was likely to have been the Member concerned, were those dealing with the land purchases in Ireland by the borough of Gloucester. Even in these cases, there was no natural sympathy between a man with Throckmorton’s royalist background and the pugnaciously godly citizens of Gloucester. On 19 February 1657, therefore, it is likely to have been this Member, rather than Clement, who sat on the committee to draw up legislation to compensate the Gloucester citizens for their long-unfulfilled promises of land in Ireland, and on 30 March, he was perhaps the Member who was named to bring in a bill for confiscating lands in Ireland from rebels.26CJ vii. 494b, 515a. Throckmorton did not attend the second sitting in January 1658, but was kept informed of events by his friend, John Fitzjames*.27Alnwick, Northumberland 552, ff. 1v, 2v.

After the ending of this Parliament, Throckmorton waited until the Restoration, when his family history helped propel him into various offices that had been denied him during the 1650s. Having been knighted at Rochester by Charles II on the king’s triumphant progress from Dover to London, he became gentleman of the privy chamber by June 1660. In his locality, he became deputy constable in the Forest to Henry Somerset*, Lord Herbert of Raglan, of the Badminton interest, and was granted various offices relating to the activities of the free miners.28C.E. Hart, The Free Miners (Gloucester, 1953), 58. He sat in two further Parliaments, but had to wait for a by-election to take the Gloucestershire seat in 1664. He remained in debt after inheriting in 1664, because of the costs of recovering his estates after sequestration.29VCH Glos. v. 210-11. He intervened actively in the Forest of Dean, resettling the ‘cabiners’ there in the late 1670s; at the same time he promoted a more controllable local economy by contributing to the building of the Coleford market house.30VCH Glos. v. 132, 301. He made his will in July 1680, setting aside a sum of £4,240 to settle his debts, and left his property to his four daughters, none of whom were married at that time.31PROB11/369/213.