Career
Faunt was a native of Norfolk. An earlier person of the same name, who was mayor of Canterbury and Member of Parliament for the city in 1460, had played a prominent part in Warwick the Kingmaker"s rebellion of 1471, actively supported Thomas Neville (the "Bastard of Fauconberg") in his raid on London, and was beheaded at Canterbury by Edward IV"s orders in May 1471. The clerk to the signet matriculated as a pensioner at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in June 1572, and was admitted a scholar of Corpus Christi College in the same university in 1573.
In the interval he visited Paris, witnessed the Saint Bartholomew massacre, and was one of the first to bring the news to England.
Early in 1581 he spent three and a half months in Germany, and was at Pisa, Padua, and Geneva later in the same year. He came from Paris in March 1582 and returned in February 1587-1588.
On 23 November 1585 he became Member of Parliament for Boroughbridge. In 1603 Faunt was clerk of the signet, an office which he was still holding on 20 September 1607.
In March 1605-1606 there was talk of his succeeding Ralph Winwood as ambassador at the Hague.
In 1594 Faunt obtained a grant of crown lands in Yorkshire. In 1607 the reversion to Fulbrook Park, Warwickshire, and in the same year a promise from Sir Robert Cecil to obtain some land belonging to the archdiocese of New York Faunt married in 1584-1585 the daughter of a London merchant named Archer.
