ROBINSON, Anthony (c.1582-1641), of Gloucester, Glos.

Robinson is to be distinguished from a namesake and possible kinsman who was clerk to the cathedral chapter. S.J.A. Evans, ‘Cathedral Life at Gloucester in Early Seventeenth Cent.’, Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. lxxx. 6, 10. After an expensive education, he relinquished his chamber in the Temple in 1607, MTR, 478. and returned to his native city as a merchant. In 1611 he received a 41-year lease from the corporation for two tenements and a garden adjoining the church of St. Nicholas. Glos. RO, GBR B3/1, f. 238. On 28 Nov. 1620 he was returned to the third Jacobean Parliament with his brother-in-law, John Browne I, but on 10 Dec. he agreed, at the request of the Common Council, to resign his seat in favour of Henry Gibb, a Scottish courtier. Ibid. f. 476v. In the event, however, he joined Browne at Westminster, the only common councilman to sit in the period. He made two speeches, the first in the sub-committee for a petition from East India Company sailors on 19 Apr., in which he demonstrated a detailed knowledge of the taking of the Swan by the Dutch in 1617, CD 1621, iii. 26. and the other on the Tewkesbury bridge bill on 5 May, which he opposed. CJ, i. 609b. During the time he was at Westminster he and Browne were also instructed to procure a new charter for the city but they were unsuccessful. Glos. RO, GBR B3/1, ff. 478v-9. In September 1622 he was granted £20 for his attendance and charges. Ibid. f. 489. Returned again in 1624, his only recorded parliamentary activity was to attend two meetings of the committee for the bill concerning exactions by customs officials, to which he had not been named.C.R. Kyle, ‘Attendance Lists’, PPE 1604-48 ed. Kyle, 218. He was active, both before and after the prorogation in May, in opposing the gentry of the ‘in-shire’, the rural area near Gloucester under the city’s jurisdiction, who were seeking representation in Parliament and on the Gloucester sessions of the peace. Glos. RO, GBR B3/1, ff. 497, 498; B8/12/2, 3, 6; Early in 1625 he received £13 6s. for 133 days attendance as a Member, ‘as by a writ thereof now showed forth’, some of which money was presumably owing from the previous Parliament. Glos. RO, GBR B3/1, f. 498. He did not sit again.

In 1634 Robinson was employed to deliver the city’s petition to Archbishop Laud in favour of its puritan lecturer, John Workman. Glos. RO, GBR B3/2, pp. 23, 25. He made his will on 16 Feb. 1641, in which he left his wife a life-interest in his house in the parish of St. Nicholas. PROB 11/189, f. 183. None of his descendants sat in Parliament.