Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Wyndham, Hugh
WYNDHAM, Sir HUGH (1603?–1684), judge, was the eighth son of Sir John Wyndham of Orchard-Wyndham in Somerset, and of Felbrigg in Norfolk, by his wife Joan, daughter of Sir Henry Portman, by whom he had nine sons and six daughters. Sir Wadham Wyndham [q. v.] was his younger brother. Hugh, born about 1603, entered Wadham College, Oxford, in 1622, and contributed a Latin poem to the ‘Camdeni Insignia,’ published at Oxford in 1624. He was admitted at Lincoln's Inn on 19 March 1622, and was called to the bar on 16 June 1629. He was created M.A. of Oxford by royal warrant on 2 Jan. 1643. He was made bencher of Lincoln's Inn in 1648, created serjeant-at-law by the parliament on 30 May 1654, and in June following was sent as temporary judge on the northern circuit.
In the summer of 1658 at the Lincoln assizes he used some vehement expressions against the clergy who refused the sacrament to any who desired it, and advised the people to withhold tithes from those ministers who denied it to any but the ignorant and scandalous. The result was that several ministers were presented in court for neglect of duty. Wyndham's decision in these prosecutions was petitioned against by the mayor of Boston and others in November 1658.
Wyndham's promotion to the bench was declared illegal at the Restoration, but he was reinstated as serjeant-at-law on 1 June, and as judge on 22 June 1660, and made baron of the exchequer on 20 June 1670, upon which he was knighted on the 28th. On 22 Jan. 1673 he was moved from the court of exchequer to that of the common pleas.
He died at Norwich while on circuit on 27 July 1684, and was buried in Silton church, Dorset. He married, first, Jane, daughter of Sir Thomas Wodehouse of Kimberley, Norfolk, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. Both sons and one daughter died young; his daughter Rachel married John, earl of Bristol. Wyndham married, secondly, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Minn of Woodcott, Surrey, and widow of Sir Henry Berkeley of Wimondham, Leicestershire; and, thirdly (in April 1675), Katherine, daughter of Thomas Fleming of North Stoneham, Hampshire, and widow of Sir Edward Hooper of Beveridge, Dorset. Only by his first wife had he any issue.
[Foss's Judges of England, vii. 195–7; Collinson's Somerset, iii. 489–90; Foster's Alumni; Gardiner's Reg. of Wadham College, p. 67; Addit. MS. 5829, fol. 74; Whitelocke's Memorials, pp. 591, 675, 681; Marriage Licences of the Archbishop of Canterbury at London (Harl. Soc. Publ. xxiv. 72); Marriage Allegations of the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Harl. Soc. Publ. xxiii. 239); Cal. State Papers, 1658–9, pp. 151, 194–5; P.C.C. 171, Hare.]