Family and Education

b. by 1521. m. lic. 18 June 1548, Elizabeth Payne, wid., 1s. 1da.1

Offices Held

Sec. to Robert Radcliffe, 1st Earl of Sussex, by 1542; steward, household of Henry Radcliffe, 2nd Earl of Sussex, by 1555.2

Biography

In view of his service to the earls of Sussex, who were great landowners in Essex, Henry Northey almost certainly came of one of the families of the name to be found in that shire, around Braintree and in Colchester. Nothing has been discovered of his education and he first appears as the 1st Earl of Sussex’s secretary in the earl’s will of 17 Oct. 1542 under which he was left, subject to certain charges, two Lancashire manors for 50 years and one of the earl’s gowns. He remained in the service of the 2nd Earl, of whose will of 27 July 1555 he was an executor, and it was evidently to his master, then the leading magnate in East Anglia, that he owed his return for Thetford to the Parliament of March 1553 in which the earl’s son Sir Thomas Radcliffe sat as knight of the shire for Norfolk.3

Having served the Radcliffes for two generations Northey may well have continued in the household of the 3rd Earl, his former parliamentary colleague, but all that has come to light of his later years is that by 1565 he had settled at Lambeth. By his will of 27 July 1569 he asked to be buried in Lambeth church ‘in the aisle wherein I commonly sit’ and left his house there to his wife for life with remainder to his son George. He also bequeathed George £160 out of the £280 due to him under the will of the 2nd Earl of Sussex, dividing the remaining £120 equally between his wife and his daughter Anne. He named his wife executrix and two London vintners, Andrew and Francis Morgan, overseers. The will was proved on 29 Oct. 1569.4

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Roger Virgoe

Notes

• 1. Date of birth estimated from first reference. Mar. Lic. Fac. Off. (Harl. Soc. xxiv), 13; PCC 21 Sheffelde.
• 2. PCC 1 Alen, 33 Wrastley.
• 3. Morant, Essex, i. 187; ii. 157; The Gen. iii. 172-3; Vis. London (Harl. Soc. xvii), 127; VCH Essex, ii. 502; London Rec. Soc. viii. 33
• 4. Lambeth Churchwardens’ Accts. (Surr. Rec. Soc. xl), 87, 89, 92; PCC 21 Sheffelde.