WELCOME, John (bef.1523-80), of the High Street, Lincoln.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1558-1603, ed. P.W. Hasler, 1981
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. bef. 1523, s. of John Welcome, freeman of Lincoln, by his w. Elizabeth. m. Anne (d.1590), da. of Gregory Ion of Barrow, 2s. 1da.

Offices Held

Alderman, Lincoln 1565-73, mayor 1568.

Biography

Described in the early Marian pardon roll as ‘yeoman’, Welcome advanced his status in city and county through the acquisition of property, some of it ex-monastic. On 27 Mar. 1571 he was appointed by the corporation ‘to be solicitor for the affairs of the city at Parliament, at 4s. a day’, and again, on 8 Jan. 1572, one of the two ‘solicitors’ to ride to London ‘to advance the city’s cause’ in a dispute about common rights. At the parliamentary election of May 1572 he was returned as Member for the city, but fell out of favour through disclosing to his fellow-Member the contents of a letter from the corporation to Robert Monson. Whether or not the affair was connected in some way with the 1572 contest for the succession to Monson as recorder, a contest in which Welcome’s father-in-law Gregory Ion unsuccessfully opposed Monson’s candidate Stephen Thymbleby, can only be surmised, but the results for Welcome were calamitous. Because of his ‘various offences of opprobrious language and factious proceedings’ he was on 16 Mar. 1573 displaced for ever from his aldermanship or from any other civic office.

He died on 26 July 1580, during the course of the 1572 Parliament, and was buried in his parish church of St. Mary Wigford, to which he bequeathed £10. Two-thirds of his lands ‘as well in Lincoln as in Lincolnshire’ went to his widow for life, with remainder to his daughter and second son, who were also to receive £500 each; the other third, with £400, he left to his elder son.

Lincs. Peds. (Harl. Soc. lii), 1059; Yorke, Union of Honour (1640), p. 51; CPR, 1553-4, pp. 122, 461; 1560-3, p. 552; 1563-6, p. 101; Lincoln AO. presentation deed index; HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 65; Lincoln min. bk.; J. W. F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, 72-3; PCC 38 Arundel.

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: D.O.

Notes

  • 1. Did not serve for the full duration of the Parliament.