Sir William Lower (1570-1615).(Commons Sense)

History Today, March, 2004

The History of Parliament mainly concentrates on political careers, but there were many who sat in the House of Commons who possessed little political ambition. Some of them preferred less dangerous pursuits, for example the early seventeenth-century Cornish MP Sir William Lower.

Born around 1570, Lower was the eldest son of a wealthy Cornish gentleman. Little is known of his early life, though he attended Oxford University and the Middle Temple, and probably also travelled on the Continent. Always sociable, even boisterous by nature, he was expelled from the Middle Temple in 1591 for participating in a student riot. Unabashed at this abrupt termination of his legal studies, he joined in a similar escapade there a year later, bringing upon himself a...

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