Family and Education

b. by 1536, 1st s. of (Sir) Robert Throckmorton of Coughton by 1st w. Muriel, da. of Thomas, 5th Lord Berkeley. educ. M. Temple, adm. 20 Mar. 1555. m. by 14 Feb. 1556, Margaret, da. and coh. of William Whorwood of Putney, Surr., 3s. 5da. suc. fa. 12 Feb. 1581.1

Offices Held

J.p. Warws. 1564, rem. 1570.

Biography

It was to a quasi-hereditary knighthood of the shire that Thomas Throckmorton was elected in 1558; his grandfather Sir George had sat for Warwickshire in the Parliament of 1529 and his father Sir Robert three times between 1553 and 1555. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the writer of the election indenture should have styled him knight, an error which was only corrected after it had been repeated in the Crown Office list of Members. Then in his early twenties, Throckmorton had become a substantial landowner in his own county and elsewhere by his recent marriage to one of the two daughters of a former attorney-general; her wardship had passed in 1553 to (Sir) Henry Sidney, from whom it was presumably acquired by Sir Robert Throckmorton.2

Elected for the borough of Warwick to Elizabeth’s first Parliament and afterwards put on the county bench, Throckmorton later paid for his adherence to Catholicism by his exclusion from public life and the erosion of his wealth. He died on 13 Mar. 1615.3

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: S. M. Thorpe

Notes

• 1. Date of birth estimated from age at fa.’s i.p.m., C142/193/89; according to his MI erected c. 1688 he was 81 at death. Nash, Worcs. i. 453; Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 88.
• 2. C193/32/2; 219/25/119; on the copy of the Crown Office list in the Wm. Salt Lib. SMS 264, Throckmorton’s name was mistakenly marked with a circle, afterwards struck out in the same hand; CPR, 1553, p. 1.
• 3. A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, 190; C142/367/100.