mentions that he left Salisbury for Dublin on 16 Nov. 1724, and that the journey took him twenty-four days. On the death of Lord-chancellor West in November 1726, Wyndham's claims to the vacant place were strongly pressed by Boulter, who was the factotum of the party organised for the purpose of defeating Irish appointments being given to natives. The great seal was eventually given to Wyndham in accordance with his advice. In 1730, in the case of Kimberly, an attorney who had been sentenced to death for abduction, the chancellor overruled the claim, raised upon a technical plea, that the sentence should be quashed. In the following year, on 18 Sept., he was raised to the peerage as Baron Wyndham of Finglass, co. Dublin. He presided in six sessions of the Irish parliament as speaker of the House of Lords. On 20 Aug. 1735 he tells us that Dean Swift dined at his table. He acted as lord high steward at the trial of Henry Barry, lord Barry of Santry, for murder on 27 April 1739, and sentenced him to death. Wyndham was the first lord high steward so appointed in Ireland. He resigned the chancellorship on 7 Sept. 1739, and on 8 Sept. he sailed for England. He died in Wiltshire on 24 Nov. 1745, and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, where there is a white marble monument to him by Rysbrack on the south side of the west door. He was unmarried, and his title became extinct. He bequeathed some 2,500l. to the family foundation of Wadham, in the hall of which college a portrait of the Irish chancellor is hung. This portrait, executed in 1728, was engraved by Marshall.
[Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714; Gardiner's Reg. of Wadham College; Gent. Mag. 1745, p. 614; Harris's Salisbury Cathedral Epitaphs, 1825, p. 3; Miscellanea Geneal. et Herald. 2nd ser. iv. 36, 54, 77; G. E. C[okayne]'s Complete Peerage; Burke's Landed Gentry; Noble's Biogr. Hist. ii. 186; Letters of Hugh Boulter, D.D., 1770; O'Flanagan's Lives of the Lord Chancellors of Ireland, ii. 51.]
WYNDHAM, Sir WADHAM (1610–1668), judge, born in Somerset in 1610, was the ninth son of Sir John Wyndham (1558–1645) of Orchard-Wyndham by Joan, daughter of Sir Henry Portman of Orchard-Portman. He received his baptismal name from his grandmother Florence, daughter of John Wadham of Merrifield in Somerset; his grandfather was Sir John Wyndham, the first owner of Orchard-Wyndham [see under Wyndham, Thomas, 1510?–1553]. His elder brother, Sir Hugh [q. v.], is separately noticed. His eldest brother, John (d. 1649), of Orchard-Wyndham, was father of the first baronet and great-grandfather of Sir William Wyndham [q. v.] Being the grandson of Nicholas Wadham's sister, he was entered at Wadham College as a fellow-commoner in 1626 (caution money received on 30 April 1626, and returned in 1629), but he does not appear to have matriculated at the university in the usual manner. He was entered of Lincoln's Inn on 22 Oct. 1628, and was called to the bar on 17 May 1636. He soon secured a large practice, and in May 1655 he was one of George Coney's counsel, being retained for the defence with Sir Thomas Twysden and Sir John Maynard (1602–1690) [q. v.] Their line of argument was regarded as a defiance of the government, and they were all three, by Cromwell's orders, committed to the Tower, but were released upon their submitting a humble petition to the Protector, sacrificing the interests of their client, says Ludlow, rather than lose a few days' fees (Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 112; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1655, pp. 167, 179, 196). Not receiving the coif under Cromwell's government, Wyndham was one of the fourteen lawyers of eminence who were summoned to be serjeants a month after the Restoration, having been called upon in the first instance to consult with the judges at Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street, with respect to the proceedings against the regicides; in the further proceedings Wyndham was engaged as one of the counsel for the prosecution (State Trials, v. 1023).
At the end of the regicide trials he was on 24 Nov. 1660 promoted to be a judge of the king's bench, in which court he sat for eight years, receiving the customary honour of knighthood. During the whole of that time, according to the evidence of his contemporaries, he maintained a high character for learning and impartiality. His colleagues were Hyde, Twysden, and Kelyng, and their decisions were reported by Siderfin, Sir Thomas Raymond, and Sir Creswell Levinz. Siderfin says that Wyndham was of great discretion, especially in his calm and sedate temper upon the bench; Raymond calls him a good and prudent man, while Sir John Hawles, solicitor-general under William III, speaks of him as ‘the second best judge which sat in Westminster Hall since the king's restoration,’ the first being presumably Sir Matthew Hale [q. v.] (Remarks on Col. Algernon Sidney's Trial, 1683).
Sir Wadham died at his seat of Norrington on 24 Dec. 1668. He married, in 1645, Barbara, daughter of Sir George Clarke, knt., of Watford, who survived him many years, dying in 1704 at the age of seventy-eight. His eldest son John, father of Thomas, lord
