[74]
Sir George died in 1559, and was succeeded by another Walter Griffith, whose son and successor was the Sir Henry Griffith, who built the present House, who was born in 1558, and succeeded his father in 1574, when he was only 15 years old. In 1583 or 4, he married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Throckmorton, of Coughton, in Warwickshire, and his wife Margaret, daughter of William Whorwood, Attorney General to King Henry VIII. In 1584 Sir Henry Griffith was made a Justice of the Peace for the County of Staffordshire, and began to build a house by the Trent presumably at Wichnor. He was High Sheriff for Staffordshire in 1593-4, by which time he must have begun building at Burton Agnes, for over the door we see the date 1601, with the initials of himself and his wife, and the dates 1602 and 1603 appear on the heads of the rain water pipes, and also the Griffith crest and badge, the lady's head and griffin respectively. Sir Henry was on the Council of the North in 1599 and 1602,[1] was knighted by King James I at York in 1603,[2] in which year his son and heir, Henry, was born at Burton Agnes. In 1606 he was High Sheriff of Yorkshire.[3] Besides his son and heir he had by his wife Elizabeth two other sons, Walter, his eldest son who died, and Ralph, and two daughters Margaret and Frances.
Sir Henry Griffith died in 1620, and was succeeded by the second Sir Henry, the last of the Griffiths. He was created a baronet in 1627, and was Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1634, and Deputy Lieutenant of Yorkshire in 1638–9. He sided with the King in the first Civil War, surrendered to Fairfax three weeks after Marston Moor, took the National Covenant, and was very heavily fined by Parliament. At his death in 1654, Burton Agnes passed to the son of his sister Frances and Sir Matthew Boynton, from whom it has descended to the present owner.
