BYRD (BIRD), William (c.1561-1624), of London and Walthamstow, Essex

Byrd, a younger son of a modest gentry family, proved himself a precocious scholar at Oxford, where he proceeded to the rank of doctor of Civil Law and advocate.21Morant, Essex, ii. 596. He received a grant of arms in 1606.22Grantees of Arms ed. W.H. Rylands (Harl. Soc. lxvi), 24. His stepfather, William Woodhall, was registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and the ‘loving cousin’ of Sir Daniel Dunne*, and it was probably via this connection that Byrd was returned for Oxford University at a by-election to succeed the deceased Sir Thomas Crompton* as Dunne’s colleague in the first Jacobean Parliament.23H.F. Waters, Gen. Gleanings in Eng. 51-2. Byrd was named to three committees, to consider a bill for the herring industry (13 Mar. 1610), a private bill to confirm a Chancery decree (2 Apr.), and to draft a bill on excommunication (4 May).24CJ, i. 410a, 418a, 424b.

In 1611 Byrd joined Sir John Bennet* as a judge of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and in 1617 he succeeded Dunne as dean of the Arches, although (Sir) George Newman* had a patent for the reversion.25Chamberlain Letters, ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 105. For the rest of his life he was so busy in the various fields open to a civilian that, as he complained in a letter to Sir Edward Conway I*, he was able to visit his house in Walthamstow (a leasehold held in right of his wife) for only a few weeks in the year.26CSP Dom. 1623-5, p. 84. He was one of three masters in Chancery charged during the 1621 Parliament with ‘taking fees contrary to the statute’, but he seems to have suffered no loss of office or standing. According to the gossip John Chamberlain, Byrd was at his death ‘generally so well spoken of that his successor ... will have much ado to make it good’.27CD 1621, vi. 92; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 579. In his funeral sermon it was observed that he had seldom employed deputies, ‘saying, I will do what I may possible by myself; I (and not they) must answer if wrong be done. And when I shall be upon my deathbed, clamours will trouble me if any be injured’.28S. Price, Two Twins of Birth and Death (1624) STC 20334, pp. 39, 40, 42, 46. He died of a burning fever, ‘the disease of the time’, making a nuncupative will without preamble on 27 Aug. 1624, by which he left the lease of his London house to his wife, with whom he had no children.29PROB 11/144, f. 126. He was buried on 5 Sept. at Christ Church, Newgate.30Lansd. 984, f. 31.