John Chichester, 1st Baronet (of Raleigh)

Sir John Chichester, 1st Baronet ( April 23, 1623 - November 2, 1667 ) was an English nobleman and politician who was once elected as a member of the House of Commons .

John Chichester came from a branch of the family Chichester , an old family of the gentry of Devon . He was the eldest son of Sir Robert Chichester and his wife Mary Hill , making him a great-grandson of Sir John Chichester . His father owned the Raleigh estate near Barnstaple and other estates in north Devon, but died in 1627, making young John the heir to the estate. He studied at Exeter College , Oxford from 1638 to 1640 . At the beginning of the English Civil War he was raised as a royalist to baronet , of Raleigh in the County of Devon on August 4, 1641 , but in 1644 hundreds of soldiers of the parliamentary troops were billeted on his Raleigh estate. He spent long periods of time in exile in France and later claimed that his possessions had also been devastated by royalist soldiers. He did not hold any offices during the Commonwealth , but he succeeded in preventing him from being subject to high penalty taxes like other former royalists. Only at the beginning of the Stuart Restoration was he appointed Justice of the Peace in July 1660 and probably Deputy Lieutenant for Devon in August . In the general election in 1661 he was elected MP for Barnstaple, but during the so-called Cavalier Parliament he served on only three committees. In 1662 he was commissioned with Sir James Smyth to collect the excise duty in Devon, but in 1665 he was released from this task. In 1665 he was elected Barnstaple's recorder . On November 2, 1667, in a delirium, he probably killed a young woman who was presumably his lover and died of smallpox that evening .

Chichester's first marriage was on January 28, 1647, Elizabeth Rayney , a daughter of Sir John Rayney, 1st Baronet and his wife Catharine Style from Wrotham , Kent . After her death in November 1654, on July 18, 1655, he married Mary , the widow of the London merchant George Warcup . She was a daughter of Theodore Colly . With her he had at least three sons:

• Sir John Chichester, 2nd Baronet (around 1658–1680)
• Sir Arthur Chichester, 3rd Baronet (around 1662-1718)
• Henry Chichester

His heir was first his eldest son John, after his untimely death his second eldest son Arthur.

Web links

• JS Crossette: CHICHESTER, Sir John, 1st Bt. (1623-67), of Raleigh, no. Barnstaple, Devon and the Strand, Westminster. (History of Parliament online, Ref Volumes: 1660–1690)
• Sir John Chichester, 1st Bt. On thepeerage.com , accessed May 23, 2019.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Baronetage: CHICHESTER of Raleigh, Devon at Leigh Rayment's Peerage

predecessor	title	successor
New title created	Baronet, of Raleigh 1641-1667	John Chichester