John Eliot

Sir John Eliot (11 April 1592 – 27 November 1632) was an English statesman who was serially imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he eventually died, by King Charles I for advocating the rights and privileges of Parliament.

Early life The son of Richard Eliot (1546 – 22 June 1609) and Bridget Carswell (c. 1542 – March 1617), he was born at Cuddenbeak, a farm on his father's Port Eliot estate in St Germans, Cornwall. He was baptised on 20 April at St German's Priory, immediately next to Port Eliot. The Eliot family were an old Devon family that had settled in Cornwall.

John Eliot was educated at Blundell's School, Tiverton, and matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 4 December 1607, and, leaving the university after three years, he studied law at one of the Inns of Court. He also spent some months travelling in France, Spain and Italy, in company, for part of the time, with young George Villiers, afterwards 1st Duke of Buckingham.

Parliamentary career Eliot was only twenty-two when he began his parliamentary career as Member of Parliament for St Germans (February 1624). On 27 February, he delivered his first speech, in which he at once revealed his great powers as an orator, demanding boldly that the liberties and privileges of Parliament, repudiated by James I in the former Parliament, should be secured. In the first Parliament of Charles I, in 1625, he urged the enforcement of the laws against the Roman Catholics. Meanwhile, he had continued the friend and supporter of Buckingham and greatly approved of the war with Spain. An Apology for Socrates, his own defence. Eliot married Radigund (or Rhadagund), (c. 1595 – June 1628), daughter of Richard Gedie of Trebursye in Cornwall, by whom he had five sons

General Granville Elliott (1713 - 59) spent much time and effort trying to prove that Richard Eliot had married Catherine Killigrew (1618 - 89), and had a child George Elliott born around 1636. However, documents survive that show that Richard died , i.e. a bachelor, and that, in 1656, Catherine was known as a spinster aged 38. It is likely, however, that George Elliott was the illegitimate son of Richard and Catherine. He was also progenitor of the Eliot military family.

Ancestors