SPECCOT, John I (c.1641-78), of Penheale, Egloskerry, Cornw.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1660-1690, ed. B.D. Henning, 1983
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

1661 - Jan. 1678

Family and Education

b. c.1641, o.s. of Paul Speccot of Penheale by his 2nd w. Dorothy, da. of Christopher Wise of Totnes, Devon. educ. Christ Church, Oxf. matric. 3 Dec. 1657, aged 16. m. lic. 15 Feb. 1662, Honor, da. of John Eliot of Port Eliot, Cornw., 3s. 1da. suc. fa. 1644.1

Offices Held

J.p. Cornw. July 1660-70; commr. for assessment, Cornw. and Devon 1661-3, Cornw. 1664-d., Devon 1677-d., recusants Cornw. 1675.

Biography

Speccot’s family took their name from a Cornish manor where they had lived since the reign of Henry III, first representing the county in 1341. His father, who sat for various Cornish boroughs between 1624 and 1640, built ‘the noble manor-house of Penheale’ five miles from Newport, and acted as a royalist commissioner of array.2

Speccot was returned for Newport in 1661, presumably under age. He was appointed to only eight committees in the seventeen years he was in the House, including the committee of elections and privileges in three sessions. When the House reassembled after the New Year festivities of 1662, Speccot and Thomas Southcote complained that, during the course of a fracas with the Westminster watch, the constable had used them ‘in a reproachful manner’. He presumably opposed the Conventicles Act, as he was removed from the commission of the peace for Cornwall in 1670, and in 1676 Sir Richard Wiseman included him among the Cornish Presbyterians. Shaftesbury marked him ‘worthy’ in the following year, but he was buried at Egloskerry on 10 Jan. 1678.3

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Author: Gillian Hampson

Notes

  • 1. Vivian, Vis. Devon, 707; Vis. England and Wales Notes ed. Crisp, xiii. 124.
  • 2. W. P. Courtney, Parl. Rep. Cornw. 377; M. Coate, Cornw. in Gt. Civil War, 59.
  • 3. CJ, viii. 653; ix. 50, 255.