Family and Education

b. by 1519, 1st surv. s. of Hugh Young of Bristol and Castle Combe, Wilts. by his w. Alice. m. c.1563,Joan, da. of John Wadlam of Merrifield, Som., wid. of Sir Giles Strangways of Melbury Sampford, 1s. 2da. suc. fa. 1534. Kntd. 1574.

Offices Held

Sewer of the chamber by 1546; collector of customs and subsidies, Bristol Mar. 1559; sheriff, Dorset 1569-70; j.p. Dorset, Som. from c.1573, ?Wilts. from c.1583; keeper, Castle Cary park, Som. and Meibury park, Dorset aft. 1563.1

Biography

There being a number of namesakes it is impossible to be certain that it was the same man who represented all the above constituencies. The matter has been decided on a balance of probabilities.

On this basis John Young appears as a Bristol man who succeeded his father before attaining his majority, and who obtained a post in the royal household by way of his service under Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who was high steward of Bristol. Later Young appears as a servant of Seymour’s successor, William Herbert^†, 1st Earl of Pembroke, who could have returned him for Devizes in 1559 and have obtained him his appointment as collector of customs at Bristol. Next, Young married the widow of an improvident gentleman, which must, nevertheless, have raised his social status and brought him a country estate. (Both Strangways and Young had voted against a government measure in the 1555 Parliament.) In the Parliament of 1563, Young represented the Cornish borough of West Looe and was appointed to the succession committee 31 Oct. 1566. His remaining recorded parliamentary activities, such as they were, were in the 1571 Parliament, to which he had been returned for the Pembroke borough of Old Sarum, though by this time the 2nd Earl of Pembroke had succeeded to the title. On 11 Apr., described in the journals as‘Mr. Young of Bristol’ he spoke up for the lesser merchants against an oligarchy attempting to promote a bill to restrict trading privileges to themselves. He disliked the subtle means whereby the statute was procured without ‘the consent of the ... commons’. He was appointed to the committee for the bill the next day. He intervened again, 21 Apr., this time on the subsidy, but any significance has been lost, for the anonymous journal notes only, at the very end of that vestigial chronicle:

Mr. John Young offered the house some speech and, licence being obtained, he said to this effect, that the burden of the subsidy and charge by loans off imposed by the prince upon us, and the charge of the richest and most noblest prince being considered, it were not amiss if it ...

Young died at Bristol 4 Sept. 1589, at the ‘Great House’ built by him on the site of a Carmelite friary. Queen Elizabeth was received there in 1574.2

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: P. W. Hasler

Notes

• 1. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. Trans. xv. 227-45; Vis. Dorset (Harl. Soc. xx), 86; CPR, 1558-60, pp. 49, 215; LP Hen. VIII, xxi. (1). p. 569; (2), p. 346; St. Ch. 5/Y1/9, 38.
• 2. Guildford Mus. Loseley 1331/2; CJ , i. 84; D’Ewes, 127, 160, 162, 178; Trinity, Dublin, anon. jnl. f. 36; C142/222/51; Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. Trans. xli. 121, 137.