DOUGHTY, William (c.1578-1650), of Tuesday Market, King’s Lynn and East Dereham, Norf.

The Doughty family had been resident at Hanworth, six miles north west of North Walsham, since the fifteenth century.23W. Rye, Norf. Fams. (Norwich, 1911-13), 166; Vis. Norf. 1563, 1589 and 1613, 108; Blomefield, Norf. viii. 130. Doughty himself entered the service of the lawyer, Thomas Oxborough (grandfather of Lawrence Oxburgh alias Hewer*), who was recorder and MP for King’s Lynn and, as Oxborough’s servant, he received the freedom of the borough in 1604.24Cal. Lynn Freemen, 131. He soon established himself as a merchant operating from King’s Lynn, importing timber from Norway, coal from Scotland, pitch, sugar, raisins, rope, wheat, rye from Danzig, brown paper, Spanish salt and canvas.25King’s Lynn Port Bks. 1610-1614, ed. G.A. Metters (Norf. Rec. Soc. lxxiii.), 85, 122, 123, 153, 161, 165, 167, 174, 176, 179, 183, 201, 202. In his three decades as a King’s Lynn alderman, he was mayor four times and the town’s MP three times. When he completed his third term as mayor in September 1634, the recorder, Francis Parlett, praised him for having shown how ‘time, study [and] experience produce perfection’.26King’s Lynn Borough Archives, notebk. of Francis Parlett, f. 99v. Two months later Doughty was among members of the corporation who attended the meeting at which the various Norfolk towns discussed their response to the latest Ship Money writ.27Mins. Norwich Ct. of Mayoralty 1632-1635, 189.

Re-elected to Parliament for the third time on 13 March 1640, Doughty took the senior seat, but left no trace on the records of the Short Parliament.28King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, f. 52. Later that year he served as the mayor of King’s Lynn for a fourth time. He therefore presided over the Long Parliament election on 19 October and so, as the current mayor, was ineligible to stand for re-election. In January 1643 he was a member of the corporation’s committee to draft a reply to the order of the Commons demanding that they pay the customary allowance to their MPs.29HMC 11th Rep. III, 179.

Doughty resigned as an alderman in August 1645, although the corporation minutes indicated that his colleagues were reluctant to allow this.30King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, f. 169. He retired to East Dereham where he had owned property for some years. It is just possible that he was serving as a Norfolk justice of the peace in early 1649, but, if so, he had been removed from the commission by the spring of the following year.31Norf. QSOB, 20-1. By then, in any case, he was probably already seriously ill, as he drew up his will on 20 April 1650.32PROB11/214/586. Within months he was dead; he was buried at St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn, on 29 September.33St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn par. reg.

In his lengthy will, he left precise instructions for the division of his extensive properties at King’s Lynn and elsewhere between his five surviving children. Those instructions made it clear that his second wife, Dorothy, and his eldest son, Thomas, were estranged from the other children.34PROB11/214/586. His lands at Terrington and the rents on his lease of the Suffolk manor of Martley Hall were left by him to his eldest surviving daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Alexander Fraizer of Dores, the noted Scottish physician then in the service of the exiled Charles Stuart.35PROB11/214/586. (Fraizer, who later became a baronet, sat as the commissioner for Kincardineshire in the Scottish Parliament in 1669.) Doughty’s son, William (d.1687), subsequently founded Doughty’s Hospital in Norwich.36N. Goose and L. Moden, Hist. of Doughty’s Hosp. (Hatfield, 2010), 25-32.