PRATT, John (c.1599-1657), of Lutterworth, Leics.

Pratt’s father, of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, married into a family that had settled at Lutterworth – about 15 miles south of Leicester – by the early seventeenth century.13Nichols, Leics. iv. 128, 152; Vis. Leics. (Harl. Soc. ii), 85; Leics. Marr. Lics. 178. Pratt was living at Cotesbach, near Lutterworth, and was styled ‘yeoman’ in 1631, when he renewed his father’s lease of a cottage and garden within the manor of Lutterworth and some property in Westminster.14Warws. RO, CR 2017/D191. He succeeded his childless second brother in about 1644.15Nichols, Leics. iv. 152.

Pratt sided with the Leicestershire parliamentarians in the civil war and may have been the Captain Pratt who took part in an engagement against the royalist garrison at Ashby-de-la-Zouche.16Nichols, Leics. iii. app. iv. 48. His house in Leicester was plundered when the royalists stormed the town late in May 1645; and a few months later, as ‘John Pratt, gentleman’, he was included on a list of active members of the Leicestershire county committee, along with Thomas Lord Grey of Groby*, Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, Sir Martin Lister*, Francis Hacker*, Henry Smyth*, William Stanley*, John Swynfen* and Peter Temple*.17C7/434/102; An Examination Examined, 15; SP28/236, pt. 3, unfol. He was probably the Mr Pratt that Leicester corporation employed in 1646 to liaise with Grey of Groby at Westminster concerning the maintenance of a godly ministry in the town.18Leicester Bor. Recs. iv. 345-6. During the second civil war, he assisted Grey of Groby in securing Leicestershire for Parliament.19Add. 5508, f. 3; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 33; Tanner 57, f. 74.

Appointed to successive Leicestershire assessment commissions under the Rump, Pratt was active in local government during the early 1650s, and in March 1650 he was commissioned as a lieutenant-colonel of horse in the county militia.20SP28/161, pt. 3, unfol.; Bodl. Rawl. D.116, pp. 139-41; CSP Dom. 1650, p. 505. In December of that year, he and Thomas Beaumont* were among those entrusted by the council of state with ensuring that all arms and images of the late king were removed from public places in Leicester.21Leicester Bor. Recs. iv. 394-5. In 1651 or 1652 he headed a small delegation from Leicester corporation to present a petition to the Rump ‘against depopulation’.22Leicester Bor. Recs. iv. 412.

Pratt was selected by the council of officers to represent Leicestershire in the 1653 Nominated Parliament. He was one of nineteen, generally obscure, men who appear to have been nominated at a later stage than the majority of MPs, which may well indicate that they were chosen because some of the original nominees had been considered politically unreliable, or, more likely, because they had refused to sit.23Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 139-40. The marriages he contracted for his numerous offspring suggests that he was well connected among the Leicestershire godly – and indeed, among wider Puritan networks – and this may have been a factor in his nomination. One of his sons, for example, married first a daughter of the Yorkshire parliamentarian officer Christopher Copley (brother of Lionel Copley*), and secondly a daughter of the Copleys’ business partner, Thomas St Nicholas*. Similarly, two of his daughters married godly Leicestershire clergymen who were ejected after the Restoration.24Infra, ‘Thomas St Nicholas’; Nichols, Leics. iv. 152; Calamy Revised, 319, 459. Pratt received only one appointment in the Nominated Parliament – to a standing committee, set up on 20 July, to review the prison system.25CJ vii. 287b. Although he left no further trace on the records of this Parliament, he was still at Westminster in November, when Leicester’s town leaders wrote to him, as ‘our loving friend’, for advice on procuring a godly minister to serve as a parish incumbent in the town and master of Wyggeston’s Hospital. Pratt informed the corporation that ‘cases of all hospitals are now by a late order of the House referred to the committee for the poor, whither you may apply yourselves when a seasonable opportunity shall be offered’.26Leicester Bor. Recs. iv. 415-16. An anonymous pamphleteer listed Pratt among those members of the Nominated Parliament who favoured a publicly-maintained ministry – a claim supported by his appointment in August 1654 as a Cromwellian ejector for Leicestershire and Rutland.27Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 424.

In 1654, Pratt acquired land in Ireland, worth at least £300, from William Rainborowe – a former major in the New Model army and brother of Thomas Rainborowe*.28CSP Ire. Adv. 249. In the summer of that year he was one of at least seven candidates who stood for Leicestershire in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament. One observer discerned two parties on election day, with Pratt apparently joining Francis Hacker against what proved to be the prevailing interest headed by Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford, and Thomas Beaumont.29Supra, ‘Leicestershire’; The Faithful Scout, 192 (11-18 Aug. 1654), 1519 (E.233.5). He was probably the ‘Major John Pratt’ who received orders from the protectoral council in June 1655 to join Hacker, Robert Beake*, George Bellott*, William Purefoy I* and other militia commissioners in rounding up and imprisoning suspected royalist conspirators in the north midlands.30SP46/97, f. 152.

Pratt died on 16 May 1657 and was buried on 18 May at Lutterworth.31Nichols, Leics. iv. 258. In his will, he referred to his lands in Ireland and to his fee farm rents in Warwick worth £60 a year and made bequests to his younger children totalling £2,800.32PROB11/270, ff. 92v-93. How he had attained such wealth is a mystery. Pratt was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.