Family and Education

b. c.1515, 3rd s. of (Sir) John Blount, and bro. of Sir George and William. m. Joan, da. of (?Robert) Somerville of Edstone, Warws., 1s.2

Offices Held

Servant of Cromwell by 1537.3

Biography

Henry Blount was probably on the verge of his majority when in February 1536 his widowed mother petitioned Cromwell to provide him and his brother William with some of the monastic lands which rumour had it were to be taken by the King. There is no indication that the request was granted, but Blount’s absorption into the ranks of Cromwell’s followers is revealed by an order from the minister in 1537 that ‘Harry Blount’ should be paid 5 marks, and by his inclusion among those listed in the following year as ‘most meet to be daily waiters’ on Cromwell. Unlike his two elder brothers Blount was not recruited into the King’s household and apart from his Membership of the last Parliament of the reign his only further appearance in the public records seems to be as the ‘Mr. Blount’ who received £42 for conducting 220 men from Dudley and Warwick to the coast for the French campaign of 1543; the person so named to whom Queen Catherine Parr gave New Year gifts in 1544 and 1545 as a member of her household is more likely to have been his distant kinsman Robert Blount I.4

At the election to the Parliament of 1545 the sheriff reported that Bridgnorth had made no return, but an entry in the town’s leet book records that Henry Blount was elected in second place to Edward Hall I; no explanation has been found for the discrepancy. Blount had settled at Bewdley, where his brother George was steward, and it was doubtless with support from his brother, himself returned to this Parliament for Shropshire, that Blount was found the seat at nearby Bridgnorth.5

The date of Blount’s death has not been found but if his wife has been correctly identified she had taken a second husband, Edmund Colles^† of Leigh, Worcestershire, before 1560. Blount’s only son died without issue in 1608.6

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Alan Harding

Notes

• 1. Bridgnorth bor. mss 9(2), f. 558.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from that of elder brothers’. Joan, daughter of John Somerville of Edstone, given as Blount’s wife in Vis. Salop (Harl. Soc. xxviii), 54 does not appear in the Somerville pedigrees but she is more likely to have been a daughter of Robert Somerville (d. 1537) than of Robert’s son John whose own heir and namesake was born in 1560. Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 33; Dugdale, Warws. ii. 828; DNB (Somerville, John).
• 3. LP Hen. VIII, xiv; M. L. Robertson, ‘Cromwell’s servants’ (Univ. California Los Angeles Ph.D. thesis, 1975), 449.
• 4. LP Hen. VIII, x, xiii, xiv, xviii; E101/423/12, ff. 8, 12.
• 5. C219/18C/19v.
• 6. Vis. Worcs. (Harl. Soc. xxvii), 41; (xc), 25; PCC 28 Windebanck.