George Carleton

George Carleton (1529 – January 1590) was a lawyer, landowner and Member of Parliament with strong Puritan sympathies. It has been suggested that he was the secret author of the Marprelate tracts, and both he and his third wife were prosecuted for their involvement in the Marprelate controversy. Ordered to appear daily before the Privy Council in April 1589, he died in early 1590 before a decision in the proceedings against him had been reached.

Family George Carleton, born in 1529, was the second son of John Carleton of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, and Brightwell Baldwin, Oxfordshire, and Joyce Welbeck, the daughter of John Welbeck of Oxon Hoath, Kent. His maternal grandmother, Margaret Culpeper, was the aunt of Henry VIII's fifth wife, Katherine Howard.

The inscription on his father's monument states that he had four brothers, Anthony Carleton (grandfather of Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester); William (said to have been a priest); John (who died unmarried at Bologna); and Edward, and four sisters: Anne, who married Rowland Lytton; Katherine, who married Francis Blount, younger brother of James Blount, 6th Baron Mountjoy; and James Blount, 6th Baron Mountjoy, who by 1566 was thousands of pounds in debt. As a landowner in the Lincolnshire fens he pioneered the use of windmills, served as a commissioner for sewers, and was the first to have 'inned any marsh in Holland'.

He was also involved in financial transactions with his stepson by his second marriage, Sir Anthony Cope. In 1571 they entered into a recognizance in the amount of £1000, and in 1576 Carleton was granted the stewardship of the manor of Wollaston in Northamptonshire, which he appears to have obtained for Cope's benefit.

He married secondly, in 1561, Elizabeth Mohun (d.1587), widow of Edward Cope of Hanwell, Oxfordshire and daughter of Walter Mohun of Overstone, by whom he had a son, Castle Carleton, and a daughter, Elizabeth Carleton.

He married thirdly Elizabeth Hussey, the eldest daughter of Sir Robert Hussey (d.1546) of Linwood, Lincolnshire, and his second wife, Jane Stydolf, the daughter of Thomas Stydolf of Surrey. Her father was a younger brother of John Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford, while her paternal grandparents were William Hussey (d.1495), Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and Elizabeth Berkeley, the daughter of Thomas Berkeley of Wymondham, Leicestershire.

There were no children of his first and third marriages.