GYLES, Edmund (1626-86), of White Ladies Aston, Worcs.

The Gyles family were long-established yeomen at White Ladies Aston, a parish some five miles south west of Worcester. Edmund Gyles, who spelled his surname thus, was at least the fourth generation of his family to live there.16Signature: L. Inn Admiss. Bk. 7. f. 110; PROB11/351, f. 285. His grandfather, Edmund Gyles, presented manorial matters there at the view of frankpledge in 1578, and he and other close relatives were homagers of the courts baron from the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century.17Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/134/47592/1; 47593/5. It was a manor of the bishop of Worcester, and the Gyles family, like others there, held their estates by leases for three lives. Edmund Gyles, the MP’s father, and his brother, John, held moieties of their estate, which was itself half that which had descended from their grandfather, Richard Evitt. The pattern of holding on the manor suggests that copyhold estates were subject to partible inheritance.18Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/46/1; PROB11/351, f. 285. The Gyles family was the most prominent on the manor after that of Symonds; it was George Symonds who provided accommodation for Oliver Cromwell* when he composed his despatch to Parliament after the battle of Worcester.19Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/46/1; VCH Worcs. iii. 560. The MP’s father seemed disinclined to social aspirations: Edmund Gyles ‘yeoman’ was his disclaimer when the herald visited Worcestershire in 1634, and when he composed his will 40 years later, describing himself as ‘gentleman’, provided a brief pedigree which recorded yeoman roots in White Ladies Aston.20Vis. Worcs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. xc), 107.

Edmund Gyles the MP was the first of his family to move beyond these narrow confines, and it was his time at Oxford, where he attended school, and Lincoln’s Inn in London, which exposed him to wider influences.21PROB11/351, f. 285. When he was admitted to the Inn on 2 May 1648, his sole ‘manucaptor’ or sponsor was John Churchill†, former deputy registrar of chancery, who kept out of the civil war and instead built up a flourishing practice at the bar of that court.22L. Inn, Admiss. Bk. 7. f. 76v; HP Commons 1660-90, ii. 69-70. A year later, in May 1649, Gyles was granted rooms in part of a chamber, on the petition of John Colt.23L. Inn, Red Bk. i. f. 225v. Gyles was evidently an able scholar, and was called to the bar on 7 June 1654. It was undoubtedly also in his favour that his metropolitan contacts enabled him to make a marriage in 1652 with the distinguished Essex puritan/parliamentarian family of Barrington. Joan Barrington was the daughter of Sir John Barrington, recruiter MP for Newtown, Isle of Wight, who survived Pride’s Purge but never attended the Rump. Whether this could be described as a beneficial marriage financially is doubtful, however, as Sir John was in the Fleet prison for debt the year after his daughter’s marriage to Gyles.24‘Sir John Barrington’, supra. But the sponsorship of Churchill and the social standing of the Barringtons must have combined to enhance Gyles’s prospects; a hostile observer noted that his marriage was to a kinswoman of Oliver Cromwell*. (In fact, Joan Gyles was first cousin once removed to the lord protector.) 25A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1657), 17 (E.935.5); Barrington Lttrs. 26, 27. In an ordinance of 11 August 1654 Gyles was named (with some irony, since his father-in-law was languishing in the Fleet) as a judge of poor prisoners, and in November 1655 he landed the plum job of master in chancery.26A. and O.; Hardy, Principal Officers of Chancery, 92. Not only the influence of Churchill, but also that of the Eden family of Essex, related to the Barringtons, is detectable here. Gyles petitioned for Thomas Eden to have chambers at Lincoln’s Inn in June 1655, and different branches of the Edens supplied two masters of chancery before 1640 and in 1657.27L. Inn, Red Bk. i. f. 244; Barrington Lttrs. 254; Hardy, Principal Officers of Chancery, 90, 92.

There was little in this new world of Gyles’s to suggest that he would carry much weight in Worcestershire, except that he had with a relative and a legal contact bought the manor of White Ladies Aston in 1648.28Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/134/47594; Nash, Collections, i. 50. In the city of Worcester, however, Gyles did have some standing, as his father had been a member of the committee established after its fall to Parliament in 1646. Edmund Gyles senior took accounts of parishes, soldiers and committeemen in 1646 and 1647. In 1648 he was named to a committee charged with selling the leaden steeple of the cathedral in order to repair and enhance Worcester churches.29Worcester Cathedral Lib. mss D247, D224a, D225, D303. Lacking any interest of his own in Worcester, it was nevertheless true that Edmund Gyles was by 1656 the most important practising lawyer in the county after John Wylde* and Nicholas Lechmere*. After 1653, Wylde was not elected again, except for Droitwich in 1659, and Lechmere had taken his county seat. Gyles could have come to the attention of either of these men, but it is more likely that in the city of Worcester he benefited from the support of Wylde, who remained recorder despite the coolness of the lord protector towards him. Lechmere was deputy recorder, so supported by these two, and with the blessing of the Worcester committee, his candidature was unopposed. A fellow member in 1656 was William Collins, another Worcester committeeman, whose origins, like those of Gyles, lay outside the city. Their being returned was an indication that the traditional pattern of Worcester parliamentary elections, in which citizens who had worked up through the cursus honorum of the city chamber were selected by their peers, was in ruins. The royalist Henry Townshend noted without comment the election of ‘one Mr Giles a young lawyer’.30Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s.xxv), 274.

Gyles was named to eight committees in the second protectorate Parliament. The most important of these was probably the first to which he was nominated, on 25 September 1656, on the subject of reform of the laws regarding debt, with particular reference to the fate of those imprisoned for debt.31CJ vii. 428a. This had already been demonstrated as an interest of his, in his appointment by the 1654 ordinance to a judgeship on debt matters, and there was the Barrington family experience of the debt laws to give his views conviction through close personal involvement. He evidently played a leading leading role in this committee, since it was he who reported a bill on the subject on 29 October. It was rejected, however, and the new committee which was asked to take over the topic included 35 new members, swamping the small group of six which Gyles had led.32CJ vii. 447a. No act on poor prisoners or debtors was ever completed in that Parliament. In April 1657 he was one of a committee of 57 members asked to bring in a bill for the reform of chancery, but the leader of it was the much more eminent Bulstrode Whitelocke*. His committee appointments otherwise were of local interest only, such as that established to secure the interests of Gloucester men who had invested in Irish lands (19 Feb. 1657); or were concerned with routine economic matters such as the promotion of timber growing (27 Sept. 1656) and the regulation of corn (7 Oct.). None were likely to enhance Gyles’s standing in Parliament.33CJ vii. 429b, 435b, 452a, 494a.

Gyles was not returned again, his seat in 1659 going to Thomas Street. This election marked something of a fight back by the chamber of Worcester, or at least by the citizens, against the committee. Gyles retained his mastership in chancery, but not for long. With the restoration of the king, Gyles’s background, as the son of a committeeman and the client of lawyers like Wylde and Lechmere, whose own futures looked very uncertain, counted against him. He lost office quite early, in June 1660, and never recovered it. He also lost his place in the commission of the peace, and the manor of White Ladies Aston reverted to the bishop of Worcester. If that were not all bad enough, rents he had bought with his wife’s marriage portion in Gloucestershire were lost, and Col. Lygon of Madresfield reneged on a mortgage agreement Gyles had tried to clinch.34Hardy, Principal Officers of Chancery, 92; PROB11/386, f. 40. The family was confined once again to White Ladies Aston, where they kept the estates they leased from the bishop.35Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/4, ff. 138-9. Their survival came not without a price. Gyles’s father, the old committeeman, fell out with the bishop over a seat he had provided for himself in White Ladies Aston church. He requested that his funeral should proceed directly from his house to his burial place without a service in the church.36PROB11/351, f. 285. When Edmund Gyles came to make his own will four years after his father’s death, and looked back over his career, the arrangements he made were naturally tinged with regret. He made provision for sale of his estate ‘so as my dear wife who hath lived in straits in my life time (by reason of the loss of my place and lands I purchased) may not labour under a worse condition after my decease’. He died at White Ladies Aston in September 1686, having made his nephew, Giles Hooper, his heir. 37PROB11/386, f. 40; White Ladies Aston par. reg.; Worcs. Archives, 009:1/BA 2636/4, ff. 138-9.