Sir John Popham was born in 1531 at Huntworth manor near Bridgwater, which his family had held since 1285. His father was Steward of the nearby Buckland Priory and bought the Priory’s estate on its dissolution in 1539. His early career was somewhat racy for he was reputed to have been briefly abducted as a boy by gypsies and, even after he trained for the law and became a barrister in London, he was said to have acted as a highwayman. Nevertheless he became Recorder of Bristol and its Member of Parliament for Bristol in 1571 and Speaker of the Commons in 1581. He served as a JP in Somerset from 1573 and an Assize judge from 1578. In 1579 he was appointed Solicitor-General in 1579 and Attorney-General in 1581. He became Lord Chief Justice for England in 1592 and a Privy Councillor in 1599 and was acting Lord Chancellor in the year of his death, 1607. Although he was prominent in the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and the Gunpowder Plotters, his interests were always wider than the law. He was an investor in a privateer, in settlements in Munster in Ireland and in Virginia, and in drainage projects in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, where a waterway still bears his name, ‘Popham’s Eau’. He was among the founders of Blundell’s School and built a mansion for his family in Wellington in Somerset, where he died in 1607.
