He was the third surviving son of Henry Dawkins I (1698–1744), a slave-owner,[5] sugar planter, and his wife, Elizabeth (1698–1737), daughter of Edward Pennant of Clarendon, chief justice of Jamaica and of Elizabet Moore.

[10][11] Dawkins's father on his death in 1744 bequeathed 25,000 acres of land and approximately £100,000 to his three surviving sons.

By c. 1750 he owned 20,000 acres in Jamaica (St Elizabeth, Clarendon and Vere) and of estates in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire.

[12] By 1809 he owned the total of 1,464 slaves on the estates of Parnassus, Folly, Old Plantation, Friendship and Suttons.

He served for a 24-year period with only short breaks (one caused by his defeat at Salisbury, near his estate at Standlynch, in 1768).

[14] According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, there is no record of Dawkins having spoken in the House of Commons.

[21] Dawkins had work done on the wings, by John Wood, the Younger, and on the portico by Nicholas Revett.

The sons were:[25] The daughters were:[25] Henry was the great-great-great-grandfather of the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins.

In 2010 Richard Dawkins wrote an obituary for his father, describing how John Dawkins had inherited Over Norton Park from a distant cousin and how the estate, in the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, had been in the family since the 1720s.