HEIGHES, Henry (d.1561), of Binsted, Hants.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1558-1603, ed. P.W. Hasler, 1981
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

2nd s. of Edmund Heighes of South Hay. unm.

Offices Held

Servant of Anthony Browne, 1st Visct. Montagu.

Biography

Heighes’s family had owned the manor of South Hay at Binsted for at least 300 years, but Heighes entered the service of the Catholic Lord Montagu, whose religious views he shared. It was Montagu who brought Heighes into Parliament for the borough, on each occasion with William Denton, his steward. In January 1560 Montagu and Sir Thomas Chamberlain were appointed ambassadors to King Philip, and Heighes must have been in his master’s retinue, for he records that he made his will ‘at my going into Spain’. After many delays the party left Plymouth towards the end of February, reached the Spanish court at Toledo on 18 Mar. and set out for home at the end of June. Heighes died shortly after his return, his will being proved in March 1561. His sister Elizabeth received £20 from the profits of a parsonage at Alton, and the principal heir was his nephew Henry, who was appointed joint executor with Dr. Langdale, Montagu’s Catholic chaplain, who was asked to bring up the younger children. In a codicil added after his return from Spain, Heighes left £20 to Richard Cresswell, ‘as I had good land cheaply from his father’, and made Walter Cresswell an additional executor. Henry, the nephew, died in March 1595, still in possession of his uncle’s estates.

Vis. Hants (Harl. Soc. lxiv), 62; CPR, 1555-7, p. 329; VCH Hants, ii. 486, 487, 488; iii. 10; iv. 196; CSP For. 1559-60, 1560-1, passim; HMC Hatfield, i. 179; PCC 9 Loftes; C142/250/16.

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: M.R.P.

Notes