SIR RALPH DUTTON 1ST BT.
Sir Ralph Dutton Bt. was the son of Sir Ralph Dutton Kt. (1601-1646), of Standish, and his wife Mary, the daughter of Sir William Duncombe. Ralph inherited the Sherborne estate on the death of his childless elder brother William in 1674/5, who had in turn inherited it from their uncle John ‘Crump’ Dutton (d.1656/7), so called on account of his suffering from a hunchback. It was Crump Dutton who had commission the striking Lodge Park at Sherborne, a sophisticated deer coursing grandstand and banqueting house, once thought to have been the work of Inigo Jones, but now believed to be by his sometime collaborator John Webb (1611-1672).

Ralph married twice; firstly Grizel, daughter of Sir Edward Poole of Kemble, Wiltshire, circa 1674, however she died in 1678, the year he was made a baronet, for the fee of £1100. In 1679 he married Mary, the heiress of Peter Barwick, physician to King Charles II. Sir Ralph was M.P. for Gloucestershire from 1679 until 1681 and again from in 1689 to 1698. Tragically Sir Ralph had inherited Crump Dutton’s love for gambling. His estate, presumably including his plate, was made over to his son in 1710 and he left Gloucestershire to live in Ireland where he died in 1721, succeeded in the baronetcy by his son John 2^nd Bt., uncle of James Lenox Naper/Dutton.