♂Thomas Horton

Thomas Horton (about 1555 – about 1621) was a citizen and mercer^W of London, of a Cheshire family, whose first marriage bound him to the Culverwells, a London merchant family prominent in Puritan circles. Through the elder daughter of his second marriage he was the father-in-law of Roger Conant, the Devon-born salter remembered as the leader of the Old Planters^W who began Salem. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Sarah Horton (1598–1678).

Origins and first marriage

He was born about 1555. When the heralds’ visitation^W of London of 1633–35 recorded his son John, it named John as the third son of Thomas Horton of London, merchant, and gave Thomas’s father only as “----- Horton of Cowle in com. Chessh.”, most likely Coole in Cheshire.

By 1580 he had married Margaret Culverwell, a daughter of Lawrence Culverwell, a London cooper, and one of a large family of London merchants, several of them prominent in Puritan affairs under Elizabeth I. The couple lived in the parish of St James Garlickhithe, where their first four children were baptized between 1580 and 1584: Thomas, Lawrence, Elizabeth and Margaret Horton. A fifth child, John Horton, followed about 1586.

His wife’s family drew him in. Her uncle Richard Culverwell, a mercer, left “Thomas Horton and Margaret his wife” five pounds and each of their four children forty shillings in his will of 1 December 1584. In 1587 John Culverwell, a cooper of the same family, named Thomas Horton, mercer, among the overseers of his will, and in 1597 Richard’s widow left “my cosen Thomas Horton and his wife” a gold ring and remembered Lawrence Horton as her godson.

Second marriage and death

Thomas Horton and Katherine Satchfield were probably married in the late 1590s; she was his second wife, and their daughters Sarah and Parnell Horton were born about 1598 and 1600.

On 6 March 1615 “Thomas Horton of the parish of St. Martin in the Vyntrey, Citizen and Mercer of London” made his will; St Martin Vintry^W was the parish where his first wife’s uncle Nicholas Culverwell had been buried. He named “Catherine Horton my wellbeloved wife”, his sons Thomas and John, “my daughter Margaret Culverwell the wife of Richard Culverwell”, his brother William Horton and his sister Margaret Williamson, and left his younger daughters Sarah and Parnell fifty pounds apiece. The will was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W on 17 January 1620/1, so he died between those two dates.

Roger Conant and Sarah Horton were married at St Ann Blackfriars^W, London, on 11 November 1618. His two families stayed close after his death: his daughter Margaret’s husband, Richard Culverwell, became minister of St Margaret Moses, Friday Street; Parnell married James Wallis, the parish clerk there; and Katherine died in the Wallis house in 1627.

Notes

Identification

Robert Charles Anderson identified Thomas Horton as Sarah Horton’s father in 1993 (“The Conant Connection: Part One: Thomas Horton, London Merchant and Father-in-law of Roger Conant”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 147, pages 234–239), from his will, his widow’s will and burial, and the London parish registers. The second part of the article (volume 148, 1994) prints the Culverwell wills that name him and describes the family’s Puritan ties. His birth about 1555 and the Cheshire origin are Anderson’s estimates, built on the visitation pedigree; the date of his second marriage and the birth years of Sarah, Parnell and John are also estimates.

An earlier Thomas Horton, mercer

The will of Nicholas Culverwell, haberdasher, made on 22 October 1569, names “Thomas Horton of London, mercer” among its overseers, and Anderson takes him to be this man, already associated with the Culverwells a decade before he married Nicholas’s niece. A mercer trusted as an overseer in 1569 would have been born well before 1555, so either the birth estimate is too late or the overseer was an older man of the same name.