WYLDE, Edmund (1618-95), of Droitwich and Kempsey, Worcs., Glazeley, Salop, The Grove, Houghton Conquest, Beds., Inner Temple and Bloomsbury, St Giles-in-the-Fields, Mdx.

Edmund Wylde was the son of a cadet branch of the family with an estate at Kempsey in Worcestershire, where much of their land was leased from the bishop of Worcester.18Worcs. Archives, b0091/BA 2636/51 no. 44011. The Kempsey Wyldes were cousins of the Wyldes of Droitwich, and were related also to the senior branch of the family which held the Commandery, in Sidbury, Worcester.19Vis. Worcs 1634 (Harl. Soc. xc), 105; Nash, Collections, ii. 330. Compared with the Wyldes of Droitwich or those of Worcester, Edmund Wylde's family went far afield for their marriage alliances. Edmund's father, Sir Edmund, was the son of a match between Thomas Wylde of Glazeley in Shropshire and one of the Cooke family of Fulwell Hatch, Essex, and Sir Edmund himself married the daughter of Sir Francis Clarke of Houghton Conquest in Bedfordshire. These far-flung family connections ensured that Edmund inherited property in at least three counties, but seems to have played less than a full part in the government of any of them. Edmund's father seems to have been more settled at Kempsey, and was high sheriff of Worcestershire before his death in 1620.20List of Sheriffs (List and Index ix), 159. Sir Edmund Wylde was a lover of the celebrated society figure, Venetia Stanley, and kept her picture, which later passed to John Wylde* before ending up in Droitwich council’s meeting room.21Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 232.

Although John Aubrey records Wylde’s birth as occurring in 1616, the balance of evidence firmly favours 1618 as the year. He attended the Inner Temple, the inn of his cousins George Wylde* and the eminent Serjeant John Wylde*. He was there during the civil war, and was called to the bar in 1644. During that year he killed a man in London, after a provocation, although he seems to have escaped judicial retribution. He evidently led a life among or near the demi-monde, witnessing a bet between royalists Sir Henry Blount and a Colonel Betridge as to which of them could bed girls the more speedily in a brothel.22Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 108-9; ii. 316. This was a markedly different outlook on life from that of his puritan cousin, and his connections with the Wyldes of Droitwich did not deflect the attentions of the Committee for Advance of Money, which in September 1643 allowed that his assessment for his twentieth should be levied on a tenant of his in Maldon, Essex. In August 1646 Wylde was assessed at £400, but was allowed some time to prove he had advanced sums for the parliamentary cause in the various places he had property.23 CCAM i. 239.

Wylde was only named on parliamentary committees in 1647, and then only for assessments in Worcestershire. He was evidently not regarded as a highly valuable supporter of Parliament. His election with Colonel Thomas Rainborowe* in January 1647 for Droitwich was a pairing of a visiting soldier with a gentleman with an interest in the town, since Wylde, along with his relatives George and John, enjoyed the hereditary title of burgess and a small stake in the salt bullaries there. Although the townsmen doubtless supported the election, which was held to replace the long-disabled Samuel Sandys and Endymion Porter, the real power behind the election must have been John Wylde, for whom a relative balancing an eminent soldier would have seemed an attractive way of securing his own interest in the borough. John Wylde was evidently willing to overlook the dubious past of his cousin in the interests of electoral hegemony, and offered Edmund a study at his Hampstead mansion for £8 a year.24Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 272. When Wylde and Rainborowe were elected, on, or a day or two before, 15 January, a commentator noted that Wylde had ‘lost much of his estate for adhering to Parliament’, but the only levies on him which seem documented were those of the parliamentary Committee for Advance of Money.25Perfect Occurrences no. 3 (15-22 Jan. 1647), 18 (E.372.3). He took the Covenant on 9 June, but seems to have played no further part in Parliament until the trial of the king.26CJ v. 203b. As he contracted plague that year while in the Inner Temple, sickness rather than political judgment or allegiance was the probable cause of a prolonged absence from Westminster.27Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 316. His admission to the House on 9 February 1649 was probably acknowledgement of his return after a brush with death.28CJ vi. 136b.

After the murder of Thomas Rainborowe, Edmund Wylde’s cousin, George Wylde, took the other Droitwich seat, on 7 December 1648. George was named to committees in the House on 16 and 23 December, but Edmund maintained his low profile in the chamber. He was, however, named to the high court of justice to try Charles I, and unlike his kinsman, John Wylde, did attend two of its meetings, on 17 and 25 January 1649.29PA, HL/PO/JO/10/14/11A. George was the first to identify himself with the new commonwealth government, on 29 January; and Edmund followed, on 9 February. On that day, he took the dissent to the vote of 5 December 1648, which had approved continued addresses to the king.30CJ vi. 136b. He was only appointed to committees from June1650, and then only occasionally, meriting ten appointments only from mid-1650 to February 1652. Most of these were not particularly important. They included the act for stating the accounts of field and garrison army officers; tracing the whereabouts of further hoards of the former royal family’s property; the petition of an associate of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, and informations against Gregory Clement*.31CJ vi. 524a, 576b; vii. 55b, 93a. Perhaps the most important committee to which he was named was that giving powers over discoveries of estates to the commissioners at Goldsmiths’ Hall.32CJ vi. 436b. None of these committees numbered fewer than 28 members, and Wylde had no special responsibility for any. He was named to the committee of 10 September 1651 to consider Oliver Cromwell’s* letter from Worcester simply because he was a local Member.33CJ vii. 15a.

On 14 December 1650, Wylde appeared as junior counsel after John Maynard* and John Hales in a learned disputation with counsel for the freemen of London before the lord mayor, aldermen and common council of the city. At issue was a demand by a group of freemen of the City, represented by the Leveller John Wildman and an Independent pamphleteer, John Price, that the franchise for elections of the lord mayor and sheriffs be extended to all freemen, and removed from the monopoly of the livery companies. Wylde appeared for the conservative livery companies, seeking to preserve their privileges. In the debates, his own contribution was minor. He seems to have argued ‘but to enforce what his brethren had said’, concentrating on the innovative aspects of the radicals’ proposals and the physical dangers of allowing the multitude a say in City elections.34London’s Liberties; or a Learned Argument of Law and Reason (1650), 34-5, 37-8 (E.620.7).

Wylde’s interest in Parliament seems to have petered out long before the expulsion in April 1653, and he played no further part in central politics until 1659, when he attended the House when the Rump was revived in May. Nevertheless, Wylde’s involvement in public life, more widely defined, continued through the 1650s. He became a patron of the poet Richard Lovelace, who had been formerly a royalist, but who may have been released from prison on the influence of Henry Marten*. This raises the intriguing possibility that Wylde was among the London-based cultural cognoscenti who were working for reconciliation through the creative arts.35Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 37; D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-1660 (Cambridge, 1999), 217-8. These literary interests might have begun many years earlier, as Wylde later claimed to have known Thomas May, the poet, playwright and historian sympathetic to Parliament and the republican cause. Wylde was also responsible for finding the polymath William Petty a place as surveyor in Ireland.36Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 56, 142. It was probably in the 1650s that he began to cohabit with Jane Smith, ‘Bouncing Pru’, to whom John Aubrey acknowledged a debt of gratitude for gaining access for him to Wylde’s largesse.37Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 230; Turner, 'A Talent for Friendship', 106. In September 1656, Wylde was felled by a ‘quartan ague’, which may have sapped his health for several years afterwards.38Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 316.

By the time the Rump re-assembled in 1659, Wylde had evidently acquired more experience, confidence and enthusiasm for the work of Parliament, because he was named to a number of significant committees in this period. He was of the committee to investigate charges against Colonel Philip Jones*, and to appoint Charles Fleetwood* commander-in-chief of the army.39CJ vii, 663a, 672b. Wylde seems to have interested himself in the relief of maimed soldiers and their payment, being named to committees on Colchester maimed soldiers, and their widows and children. His legal expertise would have been an asset here, and on the committee dealing with oaths to be tendered to judges.40CJ vii, 682a, 689b, 741b. With the fall of the Rump, Wylde’s formal political career came to an end, except for his period of service as a sheriff for Bedfordshire from November 1660. The timing of this appointment shows that he had no difficulty adapting to the restored monarchy, nor that the king's advisers had any qualms about his involvement with the regicide. Indeed, it is possible that his attendance as a commissioner on two days of the trial was overlooked. It was certainly the case that although he provided John Aubrey with a fund of anecdotes, this piece of his personal history was not one of them.

He seems to have been the principal heir of George Wylde, and reverted to the comfortable life of a London lawyer who scarcely needed to work. In the climate of scientific curiosity so much a feature of Restoration London, his natural inquisitiveness and clubbability found an outlet in the newly-chartered Royal Society, of which he was an early Fellow, from 1661. He conducted experiments – on medicinal remedies, on the photosynthesis of plants, on combustion, on paint, on tempering steel – and delighted in sharing the results with the fellowship.41Diary of Robert Hooke ... 1672-1680 ed. H.W. Robinson, W. Adams (1968), 13, 37, 206; Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg ed. A.R.Hall, M.B. Hall (13 vols. 1965-86), ii. 209. He was on hand to observe the Great Fire, and poked a stick into the cooked lead coffin of John Colet, long-dead dean of St. Paul’s, observing that the corpse ‘felt like brawn’.42Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 181. Wylde continued as a patron of notable men of talent, among them Sir Jonas Moore, FRS, and John Aubrey, who considered himself a client from 1672. By this time, Wylde was putting his flirtation with republicanism well into oblivion, recalling as shameful the threat to the Bodleian Library by parliamentarian soldiers in 1646, and bestowing a pension on Sir William Neale, by 1690 the oldest surviving field officer of Charles I.43Aubrey, Brief Lives, i. 251, ii. 93. He enjoyed estates in Essex, Bedfordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and – through George Wylde – in Norfolk, too. His collection of ‘phats’ (units of salt production) at Droitwich, had increased to over ten by the 1690s, by inheritance and by purchase from Serjeant John Wylde. He kept over £2,000 in his house, the ‘great square building’ in Bloomsbury, and left instructions that on his death a tomb costing no smaller an amount than £150 be constructed for him at Glazeley, where he wished to be buried near his grandfather. A hatchment of his coat of arms was to be erected on the outside of his Bloomsbury house for a year after his death. He died unmarried, on 15 Dec. 1695, and was buried at Glazeley on 7 Jan. 1696.44Register of Deuxhill and Glazeley ed. T.R. Horton (1906), 3. Wylde provided for his mistress, Jane Smith, and left most of his property to his kinsman, Robert Wylde of the Commandery in Worcester.45PROB11/435, f. 149.