PYTTS, Edward (1606-72), of Kyre Park, Kyre Wyard, Worcs.

Kyre Park had been bought by Edward Pytts, the grandfather of the MP, in 1576: it had for over 200 years previously been in the hands of the Mortimer family. The purchase was financed by the profits of office in the law courts. Edward Pytts was filazer of common pleas from 1563, and his son, Sir James, held the same office for London, Middlesex, Huntingdonshire and Kent from 1604. Successive heads of the Pytts family quickly achieved county office as magistrates, and Edward Pytts's grandfather and father were sheriffs in 1612 and 1633 respectively. Sir James Pytts kept a memorandum book in which he wrote up an account of the Forced Loan of 1626-7, in which only £20 was collected and the number of refusers was too great to list, and recorded his involvement as a commissioner for the distraint of knighthood in Worcestershire in 1630. It was presumably Edward Pytts who inherited this book on his father’s death in 1640, and copied into it, perhaps even composed, some doggerel verse on ‘1640’ which denounced monopolists, the inflation of honours, papists at court, the depredations of Archbishop William Laud and the oppression of ‘the country’ by ‘the court’.23Worcs. Archives, 899:38/BA 1802.

Whatever prejudices this record of local administrative service may have aroused in Edward Pytts against the court of Charles I, he did not join his elders among the gentry, John Wylde* and Humphrey Salwey* (his neighbour) into the parliamentary camp on the outbreak of the civil war. Unlike Wylde and Salwey, he was no orthodox puritan, appointing to Collington on 19 July 1642 a clergyman who already held the living of Shawbury in Shropshire, and who was later ejected from there for delinquency.24Kyre Park Charters, 110-111; Walker Revised, 308. As one who had newly inherited the estates of an office-holding family, Pytts was a natural candidate for nomination to the king’s commission of array in the summer of 1642. His name was included in the second Worcestershire commission, on 23 July 1642, suggesting that he was not among the most eager royalists, but he volunteered a horse for the king’s service, and was called on to defend the county in September.25Northants RO, FH133, unfol.; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 96, 101, 116. On 18 March 1643, Pytts was at a meeting of the commissioners at Worcester town hall, when they composed a letter to Charles, explaining why they had not been effective in putting the commission of array into effect, and blaming Sir William Russell, the governor of Worcester.26Bodl. Rawl. D.918, f. 145. He attended four other meetings of the commissioners in Worcester during March, in which the main focus of attention was the rating disputes which had broken out in the county under the royalist war administration.27Bodl. Rawl. D.924, ff.148v, 150, 151, 152. Pytts himself was delegated to settle the objections of tax payers in his own area in April, and from July would have brought to bear on the task the authority of a third-generation magistrate.28Bodl. Rawl. D.924, f. 154v; MS Dugdale 19, f. 24.

From April 1643, Pytt’s attendances at the royalist council in Worcester tailed off, but in November 1643 he was entrusted with examining the accuracy of Russell’s accounts.29Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 134. The king retained sufficient confidence in his loyalty to confirm his place in the commission of the peace in March 1644, but Pytts never held military office except possibly the rank of captain in the royalist militia, despite the later allegations of a colonelcy by his political enemies.30Bodl. Dugdale 19 f. 66v; Add 5508, f. 190; CCAM 995. In August 1644 he and three other commissioners of array wrote to Prince Rupert to explain that the presence of the enemy near Worcester had inhibited them from raising further regiments.31Add. 18981, f. 223. By December 1644, Pytts was joining with Sir John Pakington* in working for a reduction in military taxation and an association between Worcestershire and neighbouring counties to spread the burden.32Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 160-1, 167. Despite his appearances among the commissioners of array, the parliamentarian leaders in Worcestershire were slow to give up hope that he would defect. He was named to parliamentary commissions of assessment and sequestration in 1643, and it was only in 1644 that his name was dropped.33A. and O. He seems in fact to have withdrawn from politics during the process that led from the successes of the parliamentarians in Worcestershire, through the establishment of the county committee at Evesham, to the surrender of Worcester in July 1646.

Pytts’s rehabilitation and route back to participation in public life was probably provided by Nicholas Lechmere*, his kinsman and friend. Lechmere was treasurer of the county sequestration committee, and first ensured that Pytts was able to enjoy his own estates, which had come under the control of the committee. By 29 November 1646, Pytts had paid £100 to Lechmere as part of his composition. Subsequently, in 1647, Pytts joined the ranks of the favoured few who were granted leases of sequestered property.34Add. 5508, ff. 190, 193v; SP28/138/part 16, accts. of N. Lechmere, p. 8. Pytts rejoined the county bench of magistrates in March 1648; in November he was asked by the assize court to adjudicate a rating dispute at Stockton, whose inhabitants had taken Lechmere as counsel.35Worcs. Archives, 899:38/BA 1802. The same year, he was questioned about his royalist past, but brushed off the allegations. In March 1650, Pytts stood godfather to one of Lechmere’s children, and in 1656, Pytts’s wife was given the same honour for another.36E.P. Shirley, Hanley and the House of Lechmere (1883), 24, 25. The association with Lechmere probably explains why persistent allegations of royalism against him, in December 1648, March 1650 and February 1652, were never acted upon.37CCC 3027; CCAM 995.

It was, in all probability, the influence of Lechmere which lay behind Pytts’s election to Parliament on all three occasions during the 1650s. With Lechmere, he was returned for the county on 12 July 1654.38C219/44 pt. 3. On 12 August, he was informed against by the former radical treasurer of the Herefordshire county committee, Miles Hill, for speaking against the Instrument of Government. Hill deposed that Pytts had said that ‘he would be hanged before he would be subject to any instrument in Parliament, when people had chosen him for liberties and he believed the instrument would come to nothing’.39CSP Dom. 1654, p. 297.

Whatever Hill’s motivation, it seems unlikely that any question concerning Pytts’s loyalty ever seriously troubled the government. He was in the House on 25 September 1654, when his first steps in parliamentary procedure were guided by Lechmere, first-named to the committee drafting the ordinance for ejecting scandalous ministers, to which Pytts was also nominated. This came 13 days after the Recognition had been imposed on Members who might have thought it worthwhile to challenge the legitimacy of the Instrument of Government: Pytts was evidently not among them.40CJ vii. 370a. On 5 October, Pytts was again named to a committee whose members were headed by Lechmere, although on the same day he was allowed enough freedom from his mentor to be named to the committee of privileges investigating complaints about elections for four Irish counties.41CJ vii. 373b, 374a. On the three other committees to which Pytts was named in this Parliament, on grain supplies, removing the dead letter of purveyance, and considering the case of William, 1st Baron Craven (none of them of much political importance), Pytts was accompanied either by Lechmere or by Sir Thomas Rous, another Worcestershire social conservative.42CJ vii. 374b, 381a, 407b. This was the sum of his contribution.

Pytts, Lechmere and Rous were again returned as knights of the shire in 1656, when they were joined by Major-general James Berry and John Nanfan.43Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 274. In this Parliament, Pytts was again named to a number of relatively minor committees, perhaps the most important of which were working on bills to improve the mechanisms for probate of wills (27 Oct.), and a bill for relief of imprisoned debtors (29 Oct.).44CJ vii. 446a, 447a. Pytts was listed as having voted in favour of crowning Cromwell, under the Humble Petition and Advice, on 25 March 1657.45Narrative of the Late Parliament (1657), 22 (E.935.5). On 3 April he was added to the committee which attended the lord protector to discuss his response to the Humble Petition and Advice; Sir Thomas Rous had played a more important part in that he was part of the original presenting delegation. With other Worcestershire colleagues, Lechmere, Berry and Colonel John Bridges, Rous and Pytts were part of the large delegation which on 9 April received the protector’s final answer, but there is no evidence that Pytts contributed anything significant during this dialogue.46CJ vii. 519b, 521b; ‘Sir Thomas Rous’ infra. It was a sign of Pytts’s social and religious conservatism that his only recorded act as a teller (23 May) was for the noes against a motion to release the Quaker, James Naylor, from prison for a month: the noes were successful.47CJ vii. 538b.

When writs for elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament were issued, on the old franchise, Pytts was returned for Bewdley, probably on the interest of Nicholas Lechmere, who had represented the town as a recruiter during the Long Parliament. Pytts’s only recorded activity in this assembly was on a committee, which included John Wylde, to consider the petition for equal representation between the city and county of Durham.48CJ vii. 622b. Pytts’s estates in Herefordshire gave him an interest in the county, and he sat for Leominster in the general election of 1660. If he was associated with Edward Harley*, it was because he had for over a decade been an ally of orthodox godly conservatives like Lechmere and Sir Thomas Rous; on the evidence, to describe him as an active Presbyterian or opponent of the Anglican church would be to overstate his commitment. In any case, he continued the pattern of lukewarm enthusiasm for parliamentary affairs he had evinced during the interregnum in the Convention. The county was his natural sphere of influence, and he maintained his place on the Worcestershire and Herefordshire bench of magistrates until his death on 3 November 1672.49HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Edward Pytts’.