Gervase Clifton, 1st Baron Clifton

He was educated at St Alban Hall, Oxford (1586), Gray's Inn (1588). In 1591, he became a Knight of the Shire of Huntingdonshire, settled in Leighton Bromswold and married Katherine, a daughter of Sir Henry Darcy (a previous Knight of the Shire) that year and was knighted by 1597. From 1597 to 1598, and also in 1601, Clifton was MP for Huntingdonshire.

In 1605, he sold his paternal estate of Barrington Court and moved his seat to Leighton Bromswold, County Huntingdon. In 1608, he was raised to the Peerage by writ of summons Baron Clifton, of Leighton Bromswold, County Huntingdon. This ancient form of creation by writ enabled the title to descend via female lines.^{[citation needed]}

On 30 December 1617, Lord Clifton was imprisoned in the Tower of London for threatening Sir Francis Bacon when the latter ordered a survey of Clifton's land. He was then prosecuted by the Star Chamber on 17 March 1618 and moved to Fleet Prison, where he stabbed himself to death the following October. His only son had died in 1602 as a result of wounds received from a bear, which had broken free during a bear-baiting show at Nottingham, and so Clifton's title passed to his daughter, Katherine.^{[citation needed]}

• History of Parliament
• Tudor Place^{[unreliable source]}
• Burke's Peerage & Gentry, 107th edition