Robert Withington Whittington

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Robert Withington Whittington (1498–1535), a 14× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth and death in Pauntley, Gloucestershire, his marriage to Mary Hyett, his son Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: deep English ancestral roots in the Forest of Dean during the reign of Henry VIII.

Robert Withington Whittington (1498–1535) was born in Pauntley, in the Forest of Dean district of Gloucestershire, England, and died in that same parish at the age of thirty-seven. His life was bounded entirely by the wooded uplands and pastoral villages of western Gloucestershire, a region long associated with the Whittington name and famed in English memory as the country of Sir Richard Whittington, the late-medieval Lord Mayor of London. Pauntley itself had been the seat of the Whittington family for generations before Robert's birth, and his lifetime placed him squarely within that ancestral landscape.

The years through which Robert lived were among the most consequential in English history. Born late in the reign of Henry VII, he came of age under Henry VIII, and his death in 1535 fell at the very moment when the English Reformation was reshaping the religious and civil order of the realm. The Act of Supremacy had been passed only the year before his death, and the dissolution of the monasteries was beginning across Gloucestershire and the neighboring shires. Whether his family aligned with the old faith or the new is not recorded here, but the rural gentry of the Forest of Dean lived through these changes in immediate and personal ways.

Robert married Mary Hyett, and from this union came a son recorded in the family papers as Sir Thomas Whittington Moyle, who would carry the line forward into the later Tudor age. The honorific borne by his son suggests that the family retained standing among the propertied class of the county, consistent with the long-established Whittington presence at Pauntley.

Robert Withington Whittington was a fourteenth-great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, representing one of the deeper English roots preserved in this register." }