Henry Johnson (politician, died 1719)

Sir Henry Johnson (13 August 1661[1] – 29 September 1719) of The Gate House, Blackwall, Middlesex; Bradenham, Buckinghamshire; and Toddington, Bedfordshire was a British shipbuilder and a Member of Parliament for 30 years.

Bradenham Manor house

He was born the eldest son of Sir Henry Johnson, M.P., of Blackwall and Friston Hall, Suffolk by Mary, the daughter and heiress of William Lord of Melton, Kent. Henry senior was described as "the greatest shipbuilder and shipowner of his day".[2]

Johnson succeeded his father in 1683 and was knighted in March 1685. He served as one of the two members of Parliament for Aldeburgh from 1689 to 1719, his younger brother William, who died in 1718, being the other member for all but a year of that time.

Henry Johnson's first wife, whom he married 20 May 1686, was Anne Smithson, daughter and heiress of London haberdasher Hugh Smithson; they had one daughter, Anne, who married Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1672-1739) and had four children. On 11 March 1693, he married Martha Lovelace, soon to become the 8th Baroness Wentworth, daughter and heiress of John Lovelace, 3rd Baron Lovelace and his wife Martha Pye. The younger Martha was heiress to some of her father's property in Berkshire; through her grandmother Anne Lovelace (7th Baroness Wentworth; 1623–1697) to Water Eaton in Oxfordshire and Toddington in Bedfordshire and through her maternal grandfather Sir Edmund Pye, 1st Baronet to the Bradenham estate in Buckinghamshire.

Johnson died of gout at Bath on 29 September 1719 and was buried in the Wentworth vault at Toddington. He left his several estates to his granddaughters. One of them, Lady Anne Wentworth, married the Irish statesman and landowner William James Conolly.

He was succeeded as an MP by Walter Plumer after a by-election.