John Giffard (died 1613)
[2] In 1539, when John was still a child, Thomas Giffard bought the site of Black Ladies Priory, a dissolved Benedictine nunnery near Brewood.
[3] Shortly after, the family moved into the house,[4] which Thomas had rebuilt as fine Tudor brick residence, set on a moated site, with fishponds.
At about the age of 16, John Giffard married Joyce Leveson, and their first child, Walter, was born about a year into the marriage.
Lichfield had been a parliamentary constituency in the Middle Ages, but had lost the right to elect MPs, only regaining it in 1547, after a gap of almost two hundred years.
Humiliated at Somerset's fall, he was one of the Privy Councillors who escaped from custody to recognise Mary as Queen during the succession crisis of summer 1553.
Giffard's senior colleague was Sir Philip Draycott, a friend of Paget who had shared his political fortunes.
[11] The returning officer at Stafford was the High Sheriff of Staffordshire, at that time Thomas Giffard himself, completing the indenture in Latin for his own son and brother-in-law.
He died only four years later, leaving John with very large holdings across the southern half of Staffordshire and in Derbyshire, although the focus remained Brewood parish, where the Giffards had their seat at Chillington.
With the family generally well-provided for, and the advantage still of youth, John's fortunes appeared assured, apart from the religious issue, which was to dog the Giffards for generations.
Both these offices required taking the Oath of Supremacy, swearing to accept the monarch as "the only supreme governor of this realm, and of all other her Highness's dominions and countries, as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal."
In trusting him with public office, the regime was clearly signalling its wish to co-opt John Giffard into the county's ruling elite.
Giffard promised to attend worship at the parish church, but Elizabeth herself noticed that he was not present,[citation needed] as he should have been according to the Act of Uniformity 1558, the other main pillar of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.
However, the main factor in mitigating Giffard's later treatment by the authorities was his son Gilbert's role in betraying the Babington Plot.
On his return to England, late in 1585, Giffard was arrested at Rye, East Sussex, and agreed to act as a double agent for Walsingham, taking the alias No.
He subsequently went absent without leave and was arrested by the forces of the Catholic League in a Paris brothel, together with an English prostitute and a man who claimed to be a retainer of the Earl of Essex.
Leveson had made a fortune not only from trade but also from leasing the property of St Peter's Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton:[14] in 1550, James's cousin John and Robert Brooke took on most of the college property at fixed low rents on perpetual leases – a ruse by the prebendaries to profit doubly from the dissolution of the institution.
