Thomas Paget, 3rd Baron Paget

Thomas Paget, 3rd Baron Paget (c.1544 – 1590) was an English peer, the second son of William Paget, 1st Baron Paget. He succeeded to the barony in 1568 at the death of his elder brother, Henry Paget, 2nd Baron Paget.^[1]

Family

Thomas Paget, born about 1544, was the second son of William Paget, 1st Baron Paget, and Anne Preston (d.1587), the daughter of Henry Preston.^[2] He had three brothers, Henry, Charles and Edward (died young), and six sisters, Etheldreda, who married Sir Christopher Allen; Eleanor, who married firstly, Jerome Palmer, esquire, and secondly, Sir Rowland Clarke; Grisold, who married firstly, Sir Thomas Rivett, and secondly, Sir William Waldegrave; Joan (or Jane), who married Thomas Kitson, son of Sir Thomas Kitson and Margaret Donnington; Dorothy, who married Sir Thomas Willoughby (d.1559); and Anne (d.1590), who married Sir Henry Lee.^[3]

Career

Paget matriculated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge on 27 May 1559, and in 1561 was admitted to the Middle Temple. He succeeded his elder brother, Henry Paget, 2nd Baron Paget in 1568, 'and (according to the decision of the House of Lords governing the succession of this title in 1770) succeeded his niece Elizabeth as the fourth holder of the Paget peerage in 1570, accordingly receiving a summons to parliament in 1571'.^[2]

He was a Roman Catholic opponent of Queen Elizabeth I. In the 1580s he was in Paris with his brother Charles Paget, and became embroiled in the Babington plot to kill the Queen and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. His activities were reported by Lewes Lewkenor, another Catholic exile, who wrote that Thomas Morgan,

drew wholly unto his faction the lord Paget, the bishop of Dunblane, a Scotchman of great credit and gravity; C. Paget, T. Throckmorton, Ralfe Liggons, and sundry other that esteem themselves to be of the better sort. Notwithstanding all which, so effectual and forcible were the means with which they practiced against him, that they got him to be imprisoned in Paris, laying to his charge, that he was an intelligencer for sir Frances Walsingham, a traitor to the service of the Queen his mistress, and from time to time a discoverer of her practices, and withal procured the Queen to conceive exceedingly ill of him, and taking the receivership of her dowry in France from him, to bestow the same upon the bishop of Ross.^[4]

Attainted

In 1589 he was attainted for allegedly plotting against the Queen, and his title was forfeited. He fled to Spain, where he died shortly afterwards. His son, William Paget, 4th Baron Paget of Beaudesert, a Protestant, was restored to the title in 1604.

Notes

References

• Banks, T.C. (1808). The Dormant and Extinct Baronage of England. II. London: T. Bensley. Retrieved 1 January 2014. 
• Chambers, E.K. (1936). Sir Henry Lee; An Elizabethan Portrait. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 
• Holmes, Peter (2004). "Paget, Thomas, fourth Baron Paget (c.1544–1590)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/21118.  (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) The first edition of this text is available as an article on Wikisource:  "Paget, Thomas". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 
• Jack, Sybil M. (2004). "Paget, William, first Baron Paget (1505/6–1563)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/21121.  (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

Further reading

• Anderson, Andrew H., 'The Books of Thomas, Lord Paget, (c.1544-1590)', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. V, 1972–76, pp. 226–42.