Family and Education

bap. 23 Nov. 1623, 1st s. of Sir Adam Colclough, 1st. Bt. [I] of Tintern Abbey by Anne, da. of Sir Robert, Rich, master in Chancery. m. 5 June 1647, Frances, da. of Sir Francis Clarke of Hitcham, Bucks. and North Weston, Thame, Oxon., 1s. 1da. suc. fa. 4 Apr. 1637.1

Offices Held

Commr. for assessment, Berks. 1661-9, Staffs. 1661-3; j.p. Berks. 1662-d, commr. for recusants 1675.2

Biography

Colclough’s ancestors sat regularly for Newcastle from 1360 to 1407. But his great-grandfather obtained the site of the dissolved abbey of Tintern in Ireland from Henry VIII and made it the family’s principal seat. Colclough was apparently regarded as a parliamentary supporter in 1647, when his Irish estates, valued at £680 p.a., were sequestrated by Ormonde. He was probably living in England at the time, on a Berkshire manor leased from Lord Lucas, but nothing more is heard of him until the general election of 1661 when he was returned for Newcastle, the first of the family for two hundred years to sit for the borough. He owned property there, but he must have owed his election chiefly to his cousins, who were substantial townsmen. In a list of the Staffordshire gentry he is described as a stranger to the county, though ‘reported loyal and orthodox’ and ‘a sober man’, with an estate of £600 p.a. Lord Wharton listed him as a friend, to be managed by Sir Richard Onslow. In the first session of the Cavalier Parliament he was named to the committee for the corporations bill, but he served on only six others throughout. On 9 Oct. 1666 he was among those appointed to hear a petition from the Gloucestershire cloth-workers, but sat on no further committees after this session. In 1670 Bishop Ward included him in his list of justices for the Newbury division of Berkshire, but noted him as being in Ireland. He was one of the court dependents absent in 1675, and he was again listed as absent by Sir Richard Wiseman. Shaftesbury marked him ‘vile’ in 1677. During the last session he was among those to be sent for in custody. He did not stand again, and died at Tintern on 22 June 1684. The baronetcy became extinct in 1687, but later members of the family sat for Irish constituencies both before and after the Act of Union.3

Ref Volumes: 1660-1690

Author: A. M. Mimardière

Notes

• 1. Coll. Top. et Gen. v. 373.
• 2. Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. lvii), 30.
• 3. J. Ward, Stoke-on-Trent, 337-40; HMC Ormonde, ii. 107; CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 659; VCH Berks. iii. 320; Staffs. RO, D593/3/16/2/1; Staffs. Parl. Hist. (Wm. Salt Arch. Soc.), ii. 126; Staffs. Gentry (Staffs. Rec. Soc. ser. 4, ii), 8; Salisbury Cathedral Lib. Bp. Seth Ward, Liber Notitiae, f. 56.