Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lutwyche, Edward

1450840Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 34 — Lutwyche, Edward1893John Andrew Hamilton

LUTWYCHE, Sir EDWARD (d. 1709), judge, son and heir of William Lutwyche of Shropshire, was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in June 1661, and was elected an ancient of the inn in 1671. He became a serjeant-at-law on 23 Feb. 1683, and king's serjeant on 9 Feb. 1684, when he was also knighted. In October 1685 he was appointed chief justice of Chester, and was promoted to a judgeship of the common pleas 21 April 1686; but having in Sir Edward Hale's case supported the royal claims to grant dispensations from the penal laws, he lost his seat on the abdication of James II, was excepted out of the Act of Indemnity, and returned to the bar. He continued to practise till 1704. With other members of the bar at York assizes in April 1693 he refused the oaths tendered by the grand jury, and was fined 40s., but he was sufficiently in favour with the crown to be consulted by the treasury on certain crown rights (Redington, Treasury Papers, 1697–1701, p. 352). He prepared and published, in French and Latin, in 1704, ‘Reports of Cases in the Common Pleas,’ which were published in English after his death in 1718, in two editions, folio and octavo. He died in June 1709, and was buried in St. Bride's Church, London. His son Thomas [q. v.] is noticed separately. Lord Campbell (Lives of the Chief Justices, ii. 93) pronounces him to have been an ignorant lawyer and an incompetent judge. Bain's ‘Catalogue of Pictures in Serjeants' Inn’ mentions a print after a portrait of him by T. Murray.

[Foss's Judges of England; Bramston, p. 207; Luttrell's Diary, iii. 83; 2 Shower's Reports, 475; Parl. Hist. v. 334.]

J. A. H.