HYDE, Lawrence II (1593-1643), of The Close, Salisbury, Wilts. and Heale House, Woodford, Wilts.

At the age of 14 Hyde was granted special admission to the Middle Temple, where his father was then serving as reader. Although he did not go on to pursue a legal career, he took a degree at Magdalen College, Oxford. It was presumably through local family influence that he was returned to the last Jacobean Parliament for Hindon, ten miles west of his family’s seat at Heale. Hyde was named to two committees concerned with private bills, one for Beaminster manor in Dorset (13 Apr. 1624), and the other to reverse a Chancery decree submitted by Sir John Ryves concerning his estates in Dorset (21 April). CJ, i. 764b, 772a. Hyde may have owed the latter appointment to various connections: his uncle, Robert*, owned property in Dorset, and Hyde was presumably well acquainted with Ryves’ maternal kinsman, Sir Henry Mervyn*, who lived near Hindon. Hyde was re-elected for Hindon in 1628, but left no further trace in the parliamentary records.

In 1631 Hyde was fined £17 for failing to take up knighthood. E178/5702. At his father’s death in 1642 he inherited Heale, and was appointed to the Wiltshire magistracy. He died less than two years later, and was buried at Salisbury Cathedral on 3 Dec. 1643. No will has been found. He was succeeded by his only son, Robert, who failed to reach his majority; Heale then passed to Hyde’s younger brother, also Robert, a lawyer who sat for Salisbury in the Short and Long Parliaments before being disabled as a royalist sympathizer. SP23/192, pp. 814-21; Wilts. N and Q, vii. 117. Hyde’s widow, Katherine, continued to reside at Heale and succoured the future King Charles II there in October 1651 following his defeat at the battle of Worcester. VCH Wilts. vi. 224, Clarendon, Hist. of the Rebellion ed. W.D. Macray, v. 210-11. The family’s fortunes, including those of Hyde’s cousin Edward†, later 1st earl of Clarendon, revived rapidly following the Restoration. Robert Hyde was knighted and promoted to chief justice of Common Pleas, while another brother, Alexander, became bishop of Salisbury. Hyde’s eldest daughter, Amphillis, married John Lowe†; and the youngest, Helen, produced a grandson, Thomas Chafin†, who represented Poole in 1679. Cornelius Janssen’s portraits of Hyde and his first wife survive in a private collection at Little Durnford in Wiltshire. Wilts. N and Q, vi. 337, 385.