Humphrey Lynde

Sir Humphrey Lynde (1579–1636) was an English lay

Life

Lynde was the son of Cuthbert Linde or Lynde of Westminster. He was elected a queen's scholar at Westminster School; matriculated 14 January 1597 at Christ Church, Oxford, and graduated B.A. 7 July 1600. In 1601 he became a student at the Middle Temple, and succeeded to a family estate near Cobham, Surrey. In 1611, he acquired an estate at Clapham, but in April 1614, he was licensed to alienate 800 acres of his estate to John Hawsley. He moved to a mansion he built on the Thames at Twickenham Meadows, Middlesex, where several of his children were baptized. He was knighted by James I (29 October 1613), made a justice of the peace, and represented Brecknock in parliament February–June 1626 after Sir Walter Pye chose to sit instead for Herefordshire.

Lynde was a noted anti-Catholic. On 27 June 1623 a prominent debate on the claims of Rome was held at his London house.

He was well known to Simon Birckbek, and James Duport notices him in his Musæ Subsecivæ. Lynde died 8 June 1636, and was buried in Cobham parish church, 14 June. The funeral sermon, preached by his friend Damiel Featley (published 1638), contains a eulogy on his life and character.

Works

In 1623 Lynde published An Account of Bertram the Priest, with Observations concerning the Censures upon his Tract, "De Corpore et Sanguine Christi". This was intended as an introduction to a tract against

Lynde pursued his attacks on the Catholics in Via Devia, the Byway leading the Weak into unstable and dangerous Paths of Popish Error, London, 1630, and in reply to Floyd wrote A Case for the Spectacles, which William Laud refused to license (on the ground, according to William Prynne's Canterburies Doome, that Lynde was a layman); the work was not published in Lynde's lifetime. Lynde also supported a collection made by Thomas James of passages from Protestant writers 'pruned away by the Romish knife.'

After Lynde's death Featley prepared for the press Lynde's A Case for a Pair of Spectacles, the reply to Floyd, together with a defence of Lynde by Featley, entitled Stricture in Lyndomastigem by Way of Supplement to the Knight's Answer and Featley's Funeral Sermon. This work was reprinted, with the Via Tuta and Via Devia, in Blakeney's edition of

Family

He left three sons and six daughters. One, Humphrey Lynde, was a curate of Maidstone.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Lynde, Humphrey". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
• LYNDE, Sir Humphrey (1579-1636), of Twickenham, Mdx. and Sheer Lane, St. Dunstan-in-the-West, Mdx.; later of Cobham, Surr. and Denham, Bucks. Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, 2010