REYNOLDS, Cuthbert, of Watford, Herts. and the Inner Temple, London.

The parentage and background of this Member have not been traced. The earliest mention of him is in 1573, when he was admitted to the Inner Temple as of Watford. During the unusually long interval before he was called to the bar he seems to have been for some time in the service of the 2nd Earl and Countess of Bedford, who had a house at Watford, a connexion which would explain his return for Dartmouth in 1580. After the death of William Lyster in the previous year, Bedford had asked the mayor of Dartmouth for a blank indenture, on which Reynolds’ name was inserted. A ‘Mr. Reinoldes, esquier’ was one of four persons appointed in May 1591 to investigate the allegation that the liberties of Dartmouth lay outside the jurisdiction of the court of Admiralty. He did not sit in the House again until 1593, when the marriage tie between the Bedfords and the Earl of Cumberland probably secured his return for Appleby. He was presumably the Mr. ‘Reynold’ named to a minor committee 19 Mar. 1593.

It is likely that it was also through the Bedfords that Reynolds became involved, perhaps reluctantly, in the Earl of Lincoln’s unsuccessful attempts to establish, first by violence in 1588 and subsequently in the Star Chamber, his ownership of the Oxfordshire manor of Weston, then in the tenancy of James Croft. Lincoln claimed the property in the name of his wife, widow of William, son of Henry Norris, 1st Lord Norris, and daughter of the Countess of Bedford by her first marriage. Reynolds explained that he had been ‘of long time ... much bounden’ to the Countess and referred to the ‘love and duty’ he bore her.1Roberts thesis, 58; APC, xxi. 143; D’Ewes, 503; St. Ch. 5/C67/10; N. J. O’Conor, Godes Peace and the Queens, 53-84 passim.