Wadham Wyndham

Sir Wadham Wyndham SL (29 October 1609 – 24 December 1668), English judge, was born at Orchard Wyndham, Somerset, the ninth son of Sir John Wyndham (1558–1645) of Orchard Wyndham, and his wife, Joan, daughter of Sir Henry Portman. He was named after his grandmother. Florence Wadham, sister of Nicholas Wadham.

Legal career

Educated at Wadham College, Oxford, he entered Lincoln's Inn on 22 October 1628, being called to the bar on 17 May 1636. He was made a serjeant-at-law by royal authority in October 1660, and took part in the prosecution of the regicides. On 24 November 1660 he was named a judge of the King’s Bench, being knighted by Charles II on 4 December 1660.

The Great Fire

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Sir Wadham Wyndham, along with his brother Sir Hugh Wyndham, was a judge at the Fire Court set up in 1667 to hear cases relating to property destroyed in the fire. The Court sat at Clifford's Inn and focused primarily on deciding who would pay for a property to be rebuilt, and cases were heard and a verdict usually given within a day. The judges worked for free, three to four days a week and without the Fire Court legal wrangles could have dragged on for months seriously delaying the rebuilding which was so necessary if London was to recover. As a reward for their efforts, the artist John Michael Wright (c. 1617-1694), was commissioned to paint portraits of all 22 judges that had sat in the Fire Court. While his brother's portrait remains part of the Guildhall Art Gallery collection, Sir Wadham's portrait was ironically destroyed by fire in The Blitz.

Family life

On 12 January 1647 he married Barbara (1627–1704), daughter of Sir George Clarke of Watford, Northamptonshire. They had eight sons (two of whom predeceased their father) and four daughters, born between 1648 and 1666.

By the late 1650s his successful practice at the bar enabled him to purchase two sizable estates in Wiltshire, Norrington and Dinton, as well as St Edmund’s College in Salisbury. He left these properties to his three eldest sons, John Wyndham, William Wyndham and Wadham Wyndham respectively, and so founded the three Wiltshire branches of the Wyndham family. The Wiltshire MP and topographer Henry Penruddocke Wyndham, and his bon vivant brother Colonel Wadham Wyndham, were his great-grandsons.

References

*"Oxford Dictionary of National Biography," 2004.
*Wyndham, the Hon H A, "A Family History, The Wyndhams of Somerset, Sussex and Wiltshire," 1950.

External links

* [http://holmesacourt.org/d8/i0000469.htm Holmes à Court Family Website.]
* [http://thepeerage.com/p17805.htm#i178045 The Peerage.com]
* [http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=16074 Victoria County History.]