TRACY, Sir Robert (c.1593-1662), of Toddington, Glos.; later of Alderton and Fairford, Glos.

Tracy was descended from the sister of Edward the Confessor, whose portion included Toddington in the Cotswolds, and the family regularly sat for Gloucestershire from 1313. M.C.S. Hanbury-Tracy, ‘Toddington and the Tracys’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxxviii. 129-30, 140. Tracy’s father was elected in 1597, but as a follower of the 2nd earl of Essex he abandoned political ambition after 1601. CSP Dom. 1598-1601, p. 550. In 1615 Tracy married the daughter of another Essex supporter, Sir Thomas Littleton*. After rounding off his education with foreign travel, he represented the county in the third Jacobean Parliament. He made no recorded speeches, and his only committee was for a Sabbatarian bill (15 February). CJ, i. 523a. There is no evidence that he took any interest in the condemnation of the glass patent in which his uncle Sir Thomas Tracy* was involved. CD 1621, vii. 362. At the next county election, in 1624, the family interest went to Sir Thomas Estcourt*. In 1625 Tracy was rebuffed at Tewkesbury, nine miles from Toddington, despite his plea that, alone among the other Gloucestershire Members, he had made no overt opposition to its bridge bill in 1621. Glos. RO, D760/36. He again represented Gloucestershire in 1626, but left no trace on the parliamentary records, and was returned to the Short Parliament after a contest. W.B. Willcox, Glos. 35. Like his father, who was rewarded with an Irish peerage in 1643, he was a royalist in the Civil War, serving under arms at the capture of Cirencester and the siege of Gloucester, and paid £2,000 as composition for his delinquency. HMC 6th Rep. 90; CCC, 1676-7. He made his will on 3 May 1662, and was buried at Toddington eight days later. PROB 11/308, f. 302. A descendant sat as a Whig for Tewkesbury and Worcester in the mid-eighteenth century.