DYOT, Sir Richard (1589-1660), of Stafford, Sadler alias Robe Street, Lichfield, Staffs. and the Inner Temple, London.

The Dyott family had risen to prominence and had acquired formal gentry status, in the person of Dyot’s grandfather, John Dyott, who was probably Shakespeare’s ‘little John Doit of Staffordshire’ – one of Justice Shallow’s youthful companions at Clement’s Inn. Dyot’s father, Anthony Dyott†, had added considerably to the family’s estate in and around Lichfield and had represented the borough in the Parliaments of 1601, 1604 and 1614.44HP Commons 1604-1629. Like his father and grandfather, Richard Dyot trained as a lawyer. But it was his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Stafford alderman, Richard Dorington, that proved the making of his parliamentary career. Dyot almost certainly owed his electoral success at Stafford in 1621 to his father-in-law’s influence.45HP Commons 1604-1629. Dorington’s hand can also be detected in Dyot’s appointment as recorder of Stafford at some point in the early 1620s.46Wm. Salt. Lib. S.MS.369, pp. 160-1; Staffs. RO, D1323/E/1, ff. 193v, 200; HP Commons 1604-1629. Although Dyot went back to Lichfield in 1622 following the death of his father, he was returned for Stafford again in 1624. In neither Parliament did he cut a major figure. Indeed, the only distinctive feature of his early parliamentary career is the diaries he kept of the House’s proceedings.47Staffs. RO, D661/11/1/1, 2; HP Commons 1604-1629.

Dyot was returned to Parliament again in 1625, but on this occasion for Lichfield, where he had been appointed town steward.48Harwood, Lichfield, 345. Again, he was one of the less prominent Members. However, he achieved a certain notoriety with his defence of the Arminian cleric Richard Montagu, whose supposedly popish opinions and exalted view of the royal prerogative offended many in the Commons.49HP Commons, 1604-29. Dyot himself, although strongly anti-Catholic, shared Montagu’s dislike not only of the self-styled ‘godly’, but also of Calvinists more generally, whom he referred to as ‘doctrinal puritans’.50Staffs. RO, D661/11/1/7, pp. 85-6; W.R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts (1972), 215; N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism (Oxford, 1987), 140-2. Re-elected for Lichfield to the 1626 Parliament, he continued to court controversy – this time by defending George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, ‘in so high a strain’ (as John Pym* put it) that he was briefly excluded from the House for this perceived ‘affront’. Dyot represented Lichfield again in the 1628-9 Parliament, in which – doubtless mindful of his previous exclusion from the House – he spoke very little, and then only guardedly, in favour of Buckingham. However, he refuted the common-law argument favoured by opponents of the church courts that clergymen had freehold in their benefices and therefore could not be removed without a trial by jury. And although he deemed the Forced Loan and the billeting of troops upon civilians as illegal, he was optimistic that Charles would concede as much if Parliament did not push him on these issues.51HP Commons 1604-1629.

Dyot’s legal talents, and perhaps also his defence of royal policies as a Commons-man, were recognised by the crown with his appointment in 1628 as a judge of the council of the north.52CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 8; Reid, Council in the North, 498. Writing to the president of the council, Viscount Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford), in 1634, Dyot complained of ‘extreme zealots’ among the northern magistracy who had acted on ‘a specious and popular pretext’ to levy fines for not attending Sunday service upon recusants who had already compounded.53Sheffield City Archives, WWM/Str P13/231. He was evidently held in high esteem by Wentworth, who, as lord deputy of Ireland, knighted him at Dublin in 1635.54Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 203; HP Commons 1604-1629. Dyot’s career received a further boost in 1639 with his appointment as temporal chancellor to the bishop of Durham.55Staffs. RO, D661/1/732.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Dyot was returned for Lichfield once again, taking second place to Sir Walter Devereux.56Supra, ‘Lichfield’. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament, but in debate he made several attempts to counter criticism of the crown. When the king’s actions in dissolving Parliament in 1629 came under fire on 20 April, Dyot argued that ‘this power [of adjournment was] no more than he [Charles] and his father exercised without exception’.57CJ ii. 7; Aston’s Diary, 20. And on 29 April, in a debate on Laudian ‘innovations’ in religion, Dyot cited the 1559 Elizabethan injunctions in defence of the practice of placing the communion table (when it was not in use) ‘altarwise’ at the east end of the church.58Aston’s Diary, 90. One of his notebooks contains transcripts of several letters from a correspondent in the north who was highly critical of the ‘rebellious’ Scottish Covenanters – sentiments that Dyot himself almost certainly shared.59Staffs. RO, D661/11/1/5. But as an associate of Strafford and a likely Laudian sympathiser, he would have found the political tide running strongly against him in the aftermath of the second bishops’ war; and he either chose not to stand for election to the Long Parliament that autumn or was defeated in a contest.

At the outbreak of civil war, Dyot sided with the king, pledging to bring in £20 and to maintain a horse for three months upon the commission of array and helping to raise a troop of royalist horse at Lichfield under the command of his son and namesake.60Staffs. RO, D948/4/6/2; Harwood, Lichfield, 19. In all, four of his six sons took up arms for the king – his youngest son Michael losing his life defending Lichfield against the parliamentarians.61Shaw, Staffs. i. 335. Dyot’s decision to side with the king was almost inevitable given his religious sympathies and commitment to a strong personal monarchy. Having attended the king at Shrewsbury in September 1642 and then at Edgehill in October – as he later claimed, to present Lichfield’s excuses for declining to lend money and plate to the royal cause – he was captured by parliamentarian cavalry after the battle and imprisoned in Coventry for a few months.62Staffs. RO, D661/1/35; Edeswick, Survey of Staffs. ed. Harwood, 308; Harwood, Lichfield, 36, 37. He was involved in the defence of Lichfield Close against the parliamentarians in 1643 and again in 1646 and was one of the royalist commissioners who negotiated its surrender in July 1646.63Staffs. RO, D661/1/33; Articles for the Delivering up of Lichfield-Close (1646), 5 (E.345.2); Shaw, Staffs. i. 237; Harwood, Lichfield, 36, 38. His estate was subsequently sequestered despite his pleas that he had never borne arms against Parliament and had shown leniency towards imprisoned parliamentarians.64Staffs. RO, D661/1/33; CCC 89; Harwood, Lichfield, 38-9. The sequestration commissioners valued his landed estate at £250 a year – which was probably well short of what it was actually worth – and described his personal estate as ‘very inconsiderable’. His residence in Stafford, a ‘very fair stone house’, was totally destroyed in the war, while his house in Lichfield was ‘very much defaced’.65Staffs. RO, D661/1/33; Edeswick, Survey of Staffs. ed. Harwood, 154.

‘Since the end of the troubles’, Dyot would later claim, ‘he ... resolved entirely to devote himself to serve the Parliament of England with all fidelity and diligence’ – a commitment that included taking the Engagement (abjuring monarchy and Lords) under the Rump.66Staffs. RO, D661/1/35. For reasons that are unclear, he was not required to compound for his estate, although it took him until February 1652 to free himself from all sequestration proceedings.67SP20/10, unfol.; SP20/12, unfol.; CCC 547. When Major-general Charles Worsley* and the Staffordshire commissioners targeted him in 1655-6 for payment of the decimation tax, he referred them to his discharge from sequestration and to the fact that he had been allowed to serve as a master in chancery, extraordinary (how and by whose offices he had obtained this post is a mystery). He further claimed that he had publicly defended the protectoral government against all detractors, ‘not without good success with some’.68Staffs. RO, D661/1/29.

Dyot did not live to see the Restoration, dying on 8 March 1660.69Shaw, Staffs. i. 335. He was buried in St Mary’s, Lichfield on 12 March.70St Mary, Lichfield par. reg. In his will, he bequeathed £10 to be distributed among the city’s ‘poor housekeepers’ and £30 to the bailiffs and citizens of Lichfield, ‘the beloved place of my habitation (to which in love I owe much but am able to pay but little)’, for the purchase of ‘a brass engine for the quenching of houses that are on fire’. He also made numerous small bequests, expressing regret that he was unable, ‘as the case stands with me, to make larger expressions of my love and gratitiude to those to whom I am much obliged’.71Staffs. RO, P/C/11, Lichfield consistory ct. wills (Lichfield Peculiar), Sir Richard Dyot. His son Richard† represented Lichfield in the Cavalier Parliament.72HP Commons 1660-1690.