William Tyrwhitt

William Tyrwhitt (died 1591) was an English landowner and politician who sat as Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon in March 1553 but took no further part in public life under Queen Elizabeth I because of his Roman Catholicism, for which he underwent spells of imprisonment.

[2] With centuries of service in local and national government, his family was long established in Lincolnshire and well connected,[1] his sister Ursula having married Edmund Sheffield, 1st Earl of Mulgrave.

Accused of dissuading friends from adopting Anglicanism, he was taken back into prison, this time in the Fleet, at the end of 1581.

Though allowed out to attend his father's funeral in Lincolnshire, it emerged that he had heard a mass while in the Fleet and had not therefore renounced Catholicism.

His will,[4] made two months earlier, asked for his body to be buried beside his father in All Saints church at Bigby and for lands to be sold, including the manor of Fillingham, in order to provide legacies for his children.