Family and Education

b. c.1579, 2nd s. of Charles Scott (d.1596) by Jane, da. of Sir Thomas Wyatt, of Allington Castle. educ. I. Temple June 1595.

Offices Held

?Clerk in the ordnance office bef. 1601.

Biography

Scott was the great-grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, whose sister was the mother of Sir Henry Lee, the high steward of New Woodstock, and probably the grandmother of Elizabeth, first wife of Lawrence Tanfield, the senior burgess for Woodstock in 1601. Scott was admitted to the Inner Temple at ‘Mr. Tanfield’s request’ in June 1595, a few months before the death of his father. Like John Lee, another of Sir Henry Lee’s relations, Scott may have obtained a post in the ordnance office. Either he or a namesake was a servant to the surveyor of the ordnance, Sir John Davis, and was involved with Davis in Essex’s rebellion. The burgess for Woodstock may also have been the man alleged in 1605 to have lampooned Sir Robert Cecil. He certainly had literary pretensions, dedicating to Sir Henry Lee a composition called The Model of Poesy and translating a religious work by a Huguenot poet. As ‘a sharer in his blood as well as in many his honourable favours’, he was privileged in 1611 to compose the inscription for the tomb of Sir Henry Lee, whose education he attributed to the Wyatts. Scott witnessed Lee’s will and sent a man to the funeral. Nothing is known of his subsequent career.

Vis. Kent. (Harl. Soc. xlii), 127; E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee, 20, 248, 268-9, 298, 305; PCC 37 Drake; HMC Hatfield, x. 100; xvi. 14-15; CSP Dom. 1598-1601, p. 549; APC, xxxi. 160.

Ref Volumes: 1558-1603

Author: Alan Harding

Notes