Sir George Chudleigh, 1st Baronet (c. 1578 – 15 January 1658), of Ashton, Devon, was an English landowner and politician, who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1601 and 1625.

[1] His father was a friend of Thomas Cavendish and Sir Walter Raleigh, who mortgaged his estates to fund a raid on Spanish colonies in the Pacific; like many others, it ended in disaster, and he died at sea in 1589.

[2] Although she inherited valuable lands from her father, his wife Elizabeth had to sell the family estates at Chudleigh, and spent years in legal proceedings with the few survivors of the expedition.

), Thomas (1622-1668), Alice (1624-1664) and Mary (1608-1651) Chudleigh attended New College, Oxford, graduating on 26 November 1596, aged 18; while foreign travel was then considered part of a gentleman's education, there is no record of him doing so.

Intended to support the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War, they proved expensive failures, and only his assassination in August 1628 saved Buckingham from being impeached by Parliament.

The fleets were based in Devon and Cornwall, who were forced to feed, house and equip the sailors; Chudleigh's strenuous objections on behalf of his friends and neighbors made him unpopular with Charles I.

Although more moderate than either, Sir George also shared their concern at the rise of the Durham House Group within the Church of England, which threatened the Jacobean religious settlement.

[8] He set out his reasons in A declaration published in the county of Devon by that grand ambo-dexter, Sir George Chudleigh; this argued that while he opposed arbitrary measures, "the destruction of a kingdom cannot be the way to save it".