ARMYNE, Sir William (1562-1622), of Osgodby, Lenton, Lincs.

Armyne’s family had held manorial property in Lincolnshire since 1330, and represented the county in 1382 and 1385. His religious preferences can be gauged from the two prominent puritan clergymen, Tempest Wood and Hugh Tuke, whom he presented to livings. Tuke was tutor to Armyne’s second son, and was protected by him against episcopal discipline for refusing to wear the surplice or to baptize with the sign of the cross. C.W. Foster, State of the Church (Lincoln Rec. Soc. xxiii), 301, 319; C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Cent. Lincs. 94; J.W.F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, 113-14. When the enclosure riots spread into Lincolnshire from the Midlands in 1607, Armyne was warned by a correspondent at Staple Inn of the king’s displeasure at the excessive force used to repress the insurgents in Northamptonshire, and was urged to take care, ‘for all your countrymen’s eyes here ... as well in London as at home, are upon you’. Ten days later his first wife’s brother Ralph Eure† was able to assure him that the Privy Council was well pleased with his care in pacifying the tumults. DWL, Morrice ms M11, ff. 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16.

Armyne had represented Grantham in 1589, and probably stood again in 1620 at the instance of his ambitious son, already a baronet, who joined him as MP for Boston. Either Armyne or his son spoke on 23 Feb. 1621 in the debate on the contempt committed by Sir Francis Michell, one of the patentees for alehouses. CD 1621, vi. 5. He was appointed to just three committees, which were to hear complaints against the courts of justice (22 Feb.), marshal the grievances (2 May), and consider the naturalization bill of a Lincolnshire squire of German origin, Sir Daniel Deligne (16 May). Ibid. vi. 262; CJ, i. 602b, 621b; Denization and Naturalizations (Huguenot Soc. xviii), 41. He left no trace on the records of the winter sitting. On 22 Jan. 1622, shortly before the dissolution, he died intestate and was buried at Lenton. PROB 6/20, f. 167; Lincs. Peds. (Harl. Soc. 1), p. 41.