Sir Raynold John Clarke of Colyton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sir Raynold John Clarke of Colyton (1519–1585), a 15× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his birth in Devonshire, his marriage to Lady Agnes Anne Massey, his son and heir John Joseph Clarke, and Tudor-era English context. Notable: titled English ancestor of the Tudor period seated at Colyton, Devon.

Sir Raynold John Clarke of Colyton was born in February of 1519 at Colyton, in the parish of Chumleigh, Devonshire, England, and passed from this life on the sixth day of April, 1585, in the same place where he had drawn his first breath sixty-six years before. His mother was recorded in the family papers as Marie A. Rasmussen. That Sir Raynold lived his full span within the bounds of a single Devonshire community speaks to the deeply rooted character of the West Country gentry of his age, whose houses, lands, and parish loyalties were often borne unbroken across many generations.

The England into which Sir Raynold was born was that of the young Henry VIII, still the Defender of the Faith and not yet broken from Rome; the England in which he died was the Protestant realm of Elizabeth, three years before the Spanish Armada would test her shores. His lifetime therefore spanned the whole of the English Reformation — the dissolution of the monasteries, the brief restorations and reversals under Edward and Mary, and the long Elizabethan settlement. Devonshire itself, with its harbours and seafaring tradition, was during these decades the cradle of England's emerging maritime power, the country of Drake, Raleigh, and the Hawkinses.

Sir Raynold was joined in marriage to Lady Agnes Anne Massey, also rendered in the records as Mayce or Macey, of Colyton, a union that brought together two families of the Devon county gentry. Of this marriage there is preserved the name of a son, John Joseph Clarke, who survived his father by some twenty-five years and died in 1610, carrying the line forward into the Jacobean age.

Sir Raynold John Clarke stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line as a 15× great-grandfather, an early Tudor-era progenitor of the Clarke branch from which descent flowed in time to the Hyten household.