MEAUTYS, Henry (c.1585-by 1663), of St. Julian’s Hosp., St. Albans and Westmill, Herts.

Meautys was descended from a Frenchman who came to England to find employment at the court of Henry VII as an interpreter and spy. The family became established in Essex by the mid-sixteenth century, having acquired an ex-monastic estate at Stratford Langthorne, West Ham.8Lansd. 1217, f. 39v; Morant, Essex, i. 19; Private Corresp. of Jane, Lady Cornwallis ed. Braybrooke, p. xlviii; C142/173/47. Meautys’s father was still a minor when he inherited this property in 1576, but preferred to reside at St. Albans, where he leased St. Julian’s Hospital, a former leper colony, from his in-laws, the Coningsby family of North Mimms.9VCH Herts. ii. 427, 428. The Essex lands, rented out to Sir Edward Osborne*, were saddled with the repair of Bow Bridge, and it may have been to enforce the fulfilment of this responsibility that several warrants were issued by the judges of assize between 1614 and 1617. However, the Meautys family disputed their obligations, and the case was eventually referred to the Privy Council in 1623.10CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 486; APC, 1621-3, pp. 504-5; 1623-5, p. 69. Meautys himself inherited Stratford in around 1618, but never resided there, and after his father’s death he relocated from St. Albans to Westmill, 15 miles eastwards.11Cal. Assize Recs. Essex Indictments, Jas. I ed. J.S. Cockburn, 151, 167, 205; REQ 2/310/23; SP16/52/61.

Meautys was recommended by his brother’s employer, Sir Francis Bacon*, to succeed the deceased Robert Shute, as MP for St. Albans in the 1621 Parliament, joining Thomas, sitting for Cambridge, as another of Bacon’s nominees in the Commons.12HALS, OFF ACC 1162/159. He played no known part in the proceedings, and after Bacon’s disgrace is unlikely to have stood again. He sold the bulk of his holdings at Stratford in 1633 and entered his pedigree at the heralds’ visitation of Hertfordshire in the following year.13D. Lysons, Environs of London, iv. 248; Vis. Essex, 247. He was named to the latter county’s committee in 1643 and to the magistrates’ bench under the Commonwealth, but seems not to have taken up the commission. In 1652 he inherited Gorhambury, the mansion adjoining St. Albans that Bacon had left to Thomas Meautys, but immediately sold it for £10,000 to (Sir) Harbottle Grimston*, who had married the latter’s widow.14Herts. RO, Gorhambury ms 1/A/42; Clutterbuck, i. 93. Meautys drew up his will on 21 Sept. 1661, mentioning three young grandchildren, who were committed to the guardianship of a Surrey clergyman, Richard Roberts. What remained of his property in Essex was to be sold to pay debts and legacies. Roberts proved the will on 22 Sept. 1663.15PROB 11/312, f. 84. Nothing further is known of the family.