Paul Wentworth a prominent English member of parliament

Member of Parliament

A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...

 in the reign of Elizabeth

Elizabeth I of England

Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...

, was a member of the Lillingstone Lovell

Lillingstone Lovell

Lillingstone Lovell is a village and civil parish about miles north of Buckingham in Aylesbury Vale the district of Buckinghamshire. The parish adjoins the Northamptonshire boundary and is about south of Towcester in that county. Lillingstone Lovell is about west of Milton Keynes...

 branch of the family.

His father Sir Nicholas Wentworth (d. 1557) was chief porter of Calais

Calais

Calais is a town in Northern France in the department of Pas-de-Calais, of which it is a sub-prefecture. Although Calais is by far the largest city in Pas-de-Calais, the department's capital is its third-largest city of Arras....

. Paul Wentworth was of puritan

Puritan

The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...

 sympathies, and he first came into notice by the freedom with which in 1566 he criticized Elizabeth's prohibition of discussion in parliament on the question of her successor.

Paul, who was probably the author of the famous puritan devotional book The Miscellanie, or Regestrie and Methodicall Directorie of Orizons (London, 1615), died in 1593. He became possessed of Burnham Abbey

Burnham Abbey

Burnham Abbey was founded as a house of Augustinian nuns in 1266 by Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, King of the Romans, who presented the community with the surrounding lands and the parish church of Burnham in Buckinghamshire...

 through his wife, to whose first husband, William Tyldesley, it had been granted at the dissolution of the monasteries

Dissolution of the Monasteries

The Dissolution of the Monasteries, sometimes referred to as the Suppression of the Monasteries, was the set of administrative and legal processes between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII disbanded monasteries, priories, convents and friaries in England, Wales and Ireland; appropriated their...

 by Henry VIII

Henry VIII of England

Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...

.

His brother Peter Wentworth

Peter Wentworth

Peter Wentworth was a prominent Puritan leader in the Parliament of England. He was the elder brother of Paul Wentworth, and first entered as member for Barnstaple in 1571. He later sat for the Cornish borough of Tregony in 1572, and for the town of Northampton in the parliaments of 1586–7, 1589,...

 was also a prominent Puritan. The position of both Paul and Peter Wentworth has been exaggerated. In reality, although they did contend for freedom of speech

Freedom of speech

Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...

(for which they were both imprisoned), neither had any impact. Graves refers to them as "standard bearers without an army" as they had no significant following.