PYE, Walter II (1610-1659), of The Mynde, Much Dewchurch, Herefs.

Pye was returned for Brecon following the decision of his father, the chief justice of the Brecon circuit, to opt to sit for Herefordshire. He was married a fortnight later, and left no trace of his activities on the records of the third Caroline Parliament. In 1635 he inherited substantial property from his father, but the burden of the purchases already set in train, the expense of his father’s funeral and the cost of providing for his sister’s portions seem to have been to much for the estate to bear and Pye was forced to sell £4,780 worth of land and timber in the late 1630s. Nevertheless he was still one of the wealthiest landowners in Herefordshire at the outbreak of the Civil War. G.R. Aylmer, King’s Servants, 210; Robinson, Hist. of Mansions and Manors of Herefs. 85.

He sat for Herefordshire in the Short Parliament and was in Rome in March 1642, where he engaged in political discussions with Cardinal Barberini.CCSP, i. 227. He returned from the Continent to raise a regiment for the king. He was said to have expended £20,000 in Charles’ cause and in 1646 he was fined £2,316 by Parliament for royalism. D. Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives (1668), p. 673; CCC, 1842. His children converted to Catholicism but Pye himself seems to have remained loyal to the Church of England and was described ‘equally a friend to the mitre and the Crown’ and ‘a great lover of ministers and consecrated men’. Burke, Commoners, i. 350; Lloyd, 673. He drew up his will on 23 Oct. 1659, but though he then described himself as ‘in perfect health’ he died a few weeks later and was buried in St. Clement Danes, the last of the senior branch of the family to sit in Parliament. His granddaughter brought the estate to her husband, Henry Gorges, who represented Herefordshire as a maverick Tory from 1698 to 1708. PROB 11/305, f. 88; R[obinson] ‘Mems. of the Fam. of Pye’, 133; HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 204.