KNEVETT, Ranulph.

This Member has not been identified. The detailed Knyvet pedigrees do not mention an Elizabethan Ralph or Ranulph. Possibly this Knyvet was related to the Sir Henry Knyvet who married a Killigrew widow and founded a short-lived family, Knyvet of Budock, Cornwall, about ten miles from Helston. The Killigrews would have been sufficiently influential at Helston to have Knyvet returned there. A less likely possibility (though Helston did return some Londoners) is a Randall Knevett, who made his will in December 1596, leaving 40s. for a ring to ‘Mistress Chrissett’, the testator’s ‘good friend attendant upon’ Lady Ralegh. No children are mentioned, but there were two stepchildren, a son and daughter of Randall’s wife Blanche. The only Knyvet or Knevett referred to in the will was a ‘kinsman’, John of Hairford or Hainford, Cheshire. No Cheshire place of this name appears in topographical dictionaries, and it is possible that Hainford, Norfolk is meant. This introduces a third possibility as the Helston MP, a Ralph Knyvet, ‘gentleman of Norfolk’, who wrote a pastoral, Rhodon and Iris, for the florists’ feast held at Norwich in May 1631. This was presumably the man who had a short time earlier produced Stratiotikon, or a Discourse of Military Discipline, with prefatory verses to Mr. Thomas Knyvet of Ashwellthorpe, ‘Auspicious be thy favours, like thy stars to mine and me’. In 1637 he wrote a funeral elegy on Lady Katherine Paston.1PCC 2 Cobham; Add. 19138, ff. 270-305 passim; Knyvett Letters (Norf. Rec. Soc. xx), 169.