SANDYS, Sir Miles (c.1601-1636), of Brimpsfield, Glos.

Sandys’s father, Sir William Sandys, was a younger son of Miles Sandys, clerk of the Crown in Queen’s Bench and an inveterate carpet-bagger in Elizabethan Parliaments. The latter was the brother of Edwin Sandys, archbishop of York, and consequently Sandys was the first cousin once removed of Sir Miles Sandys, 1st Bt.* Sandys matriculated at Hart Hall in 1616, but was placed under the tuition of Richard Astley, fellow of All Souls and chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, ‘by whose endeavours [he] became afterwards a complete gentleman’. He left university without taking a degree, although Anthony à Wood thought him ‘much deserving of one’.7 Ath. Ox. ii. 592; K. Fincham, ‘Oxford and the Early Stuart Polity’, Hist of Univ. of Oxford, iv. ed. N. Tyacke, 193. Sandys’s father purchased considerable property in Gloucestershire, including the manors of Miserden, Brimpsfield and Winstone, the latter of which (acquired in 1622) was five and three quarters miles from Cirencester. Brimpsfield, eight miles from Cirencester, was among the property settled on Sandys at his marriage.8 Rudder, Glos. 554; VCH Glos. vii. 143, xi. 50, 147. In 1625 Sandys was returned to Parliament for Cirencester, by which time his father was a member of the Gloucestershire bench and a deputy lieutenant,9 T. Rymer, Foedera, viii. pt. 2, p. 8; SP14/178/11. but he left no mark on the parliamentary records. Three years later Sir William Sandys repaid the corporation for electing his son by successfully lobbying Viscount Conway (Sir Edward Conway I*) to remove 300 soldiers that had been billeted on the town.10 CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 568; APC, 1627-8, p. 310.

During the early 1630s Sandys became, in his own words, ‘wholly addicted to study’. Eeager to show the fruits of his learning, but finding ‘divinity ... too deep for my capacity, geography too laborious, history so various, and so full fraught with uncertainties, that once begun, never at an end’, he began a study of the cardinal virtues with a treatise on prudence, published in two editions in 1634 and dedicated to Astley and Henry Sandys, whom he termed his ‘alter ego’. The latter was probably his brother-in-law and first cousin rather than the man of that name who, like Sandys himself, sat in Parliament in 1625. Described as ‘the first part of a small work’, and totalling 253 pages, the treatise was praised for its erudition by Wood who, however, was unable to locate any further instalments.11 M. Sandys, Prima Pars Parvi Opusculi (1634), ‘Epistle Dedicatory’; Ath. Ox. ii. 592. Sandys died intestate in 1636, administration of his estate being granted to his widow on 20 May. He was buried in the family vault at Miserden to which his eldest son succeeded in 1641. His brother William was returned for Evesham in 1640 but none of his descendants sat in Parliament.12 VCH Glos. xi. 50; E.S. Sandys, Hist. of the Fam. of Sandys, ii. ped. E.