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Ashton  of Scotland. Shortly after King David was made prisoner by John de Coupland, variously described as a Lancashire esquire and as a Northumberland gentleman, who was knighted when the king returned from France, but Ashton was still an esquire when, in 1385, he formed one of the retinue of John of Gaunt in his expedition to Spain. William de Ashton, doctor of laws, who was also with 'the serene prince, Lord John, king of Castile and Leon,' was his uncle.

[Baines's Lancashire; Rymer's Fœdera, vii. 490, xi. 28; Axon's Lancashire Gleanings.]  ASHTON or ASSHETON, THOMAS  (fl. 1446), alchemist, born in 1403, was the son and heir of Sir John de Ashton, of Ashton-under-Lyne [see ], who died in 1428. Permission was granted by Henry VI to Sir Thomas to transmute the precious metals, and on 7 April 1446 a special order was issued (Rot. Pat. 2, No. 14), encouraging two Lancashire knights, Ashton and Sir Edmund de Trafford, to pursue their experiments in alchemy, and forbidding any subject of the king to molest them. Sir Thomas married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Byron, by whom he had eleven children. The eldest son, John, was knighted before the battle of Northampton, 10 July 1460, and died in 1508.

[Fuller's Worthies (ed. Nicholls), i. 555; Biographia Britannica; Foster's Lancashire Pedigrees; Baines's History of Lancashire (ed. Harland), i. 133.]  ASHTON, THOMAS (d. 1578), schoolmaster, was educated at Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1559-60, and M.A. in 1563. He was elected a fellow of Trinity College in that university, entered into orders, and in 1562 was appointed the first head master of Shrewsbury school, which he raised to a high position; there being, while he presided over it, as many as 290 scholars at a time. Among his pupils were the illustrious Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Camden, in his 'Britannia,' remarks that 'Shrewsbury is inhabited both by Welsh and English, who speak each other's language; and among other things greatly to their praise is the grammar school founded by them, the best filled in all England, whose flourishing state is owing to provision made by its head master, the excellent and worthy Thomas Ashton.' At Whitsuntide 1568 a noble stage play, in which Ashton was the principal actor, was performed at Shrewsbury in connection with the school. It lasted all the holidays, and was attended by a large number of people, including several noblemen and many gentry residing in the neighbourhood. Soon afterwards, however, in the same year Ashton resigned the master-ship of the school. About October 1574 he was sent to Ireland to Walter, Earl of Essex, who despatched him to parley with Tyrlogh Lynogh, and subsequently employed him in confidential communications with the queen and the privy council of England. The same nobleman by will gave him 40l. a year for life, and he was one of the feoffees of the earl's estates. Ashton returned to England in 1575. One of his latest acts was to visit Shrewsbury, where he preached a farewell sermon to the inhabitants. The 'godlie Father,' as he is styled in a contemporary manuscript, then returned to Cambridge, in or near which town he died a fortnight later, in 1578.

[Camden's Britannia, ed. Gough, ii. 399; Owen and Blakeway's Shrewsbury, i. 353, 365, 384; The Devereux Earls of Essex, i. 77, 78, 88, 106, 107, ii. 485, 486; Murdin's State Papers, 776; Cooper's Athenæ Cantab. i. 396, 567; Carlisle's Grammar Schools, ii. 375.]  ASHTON, THOMAS, D.D. (1716–1775), divine, son of Dr. Ashton, usher of the Lancaster grammar school, was born in 1716. After being educated at Eton, he proceeded in 1733 to King's College, Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance of Horace Walpole. He is the 'Thomas Ashton, Esq., tutor to the Earl of Plymouth,' to whom Walpole addressed his Epistle from Florence (, Poems, iii. 75). In a letter to Richard West, dated 4 May 1742, Walpole speaks in high terms of Ashton's success in the pulpit: 'He has preached twice at Somerset Chapel. . . . I am sure you would approve his compositions, and admire them still more when you heard him deliver them' (Letters, ed. Cunningham, i. 161). In less than a month West was dead; and in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, dated 30 June 1742, Walpole encloses an elegy on his death by Ashton. For some time Ashton held the living of Aldingham, Lancashire; in May 1749 he was presented to the rectory of Sturminster Marshall in Dorsetshire; and in 1752 to the rectory of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate. Meanwhile his acquaintance with Walpole had come to an end. Writing to Sir Horace Mann on 25 July 1750, Walpole says: 'I believe you have often heard me mention a Mr. Ashton, a clergyman, who, in one word, has great preferments and owes everything upon earth to me. I have long had reason to complain of his behaviour; in short, my father is dead, and I can make no bishops. He has at last quite thrown off