Edward Lewknor (died 1605)
Sir Edward Lewknor or Lewkenor (1542 – 19 September 1605) was a prominent member of the puritan gentry in East Anglia in the later Elizabethan period, and an important voice on religious matters in the English Parliament.
[5] His father grew up in the wardship of Robert Wroth (an associate of Thomas Cromwell and Richard Rich), who left directions in his will (1536) for the marriage of his ward to his daughter Dorothy.
[6] The elder Lewknor's career as a courtier benefited from the high favour in which King Edward VI held his brother-in-law Thomas Wroth, one of the Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, whose wife Mary was a daughter of Richard Rich.
At this time the Queen sought urgently to force Sir Thomas Wroth to return to England, but without success, and after three months in the Tower attended by his wife and one of his daughters Lewknor expired there in September 1556.
[14] This restored all their ancestral hereditaments excepting those held in use, possession or reversion by their father at the time of his treason and attainder, or any which either Mary or Elizabeth should have found cause to withhold.
This placed him firmly within the kinship of the central East Anglian gentry, and, so far as his immediate Jermyn and Heigham relations were concerned, with a group embodying the radical puritan interest in Suffolk.
Lewknor assumed this role naturally and energetically: the twin social pillars of the magistracy and ministry working together under the authority of this particular family group (which had a strong parliamentary presence) form the subject of an oft-quoted case-study by Professor Collinson.
[23] Speaker Higham's son Sir John Heigham (died 1626), however, with whom Lewknor had more to do, was a central patron of the puritan movement in East Anglia.
In 1585 he offered a petition concerning abuses in the ministry on behalf of the people of Sussex, simultaneously overseeing the formulation of an official prayer of thanksgiving to God for the great benefits bestowed upon the realm by Queen Elizabeth, to be used in Parliamentary proceedings.
In late 1586, in test or proof of this loyalty, he, Heigham and Jermyn were appointed with others to consider a means by which Mary, Queen of Scots might be brought to the execution of justice.
In 1589, when he sat for Maldon again, his mother Dorothy Lewknor died at Kingston Buci, making Edward sole executor responsible for her legacies.
He continued active in parliamentary business of various kinds, including the extended consideration of proposed bills for relief of the poor and prevention of idle beggars in November 1597.
Called home from Cambridge to Denham with a neighbour's son in 1605, to avoid a smallpox outbreak,[52] the friend brought the infection with him which, at the beginning of October 1605, claimed the lives of their mother and father on consecutive days.
The heraldry of the tomb includes as a canopy centrepiece a shield with many quarterings alluding to the ancestry of Lewkenor's great-grandfather, another Sir Edward (d. 1522),[59] both in his paternal descent from the Bardolph, Tregoz, Noel and D'Oyly, the Dallingridge and Echingham families, and in his maternal Camoys and De Braose inheritance through Elizabeth (Isabella) Radmylde.
Individual Lewkenor impalements for the marriages of Sir Edward's children are displayed on the transoms of the canopy, those at the eastern side being prepared for the two sons with the sinister pales left invitingly blank.
The Latin tomb inscription (no doubt written by his son Edward) refers to his loyal and valuable services for court, parliament and commonwealth, which earned him the approbation of all good men, and his work to introduce the preaching of the Gospel in Denham.
