Robert II 2 Lowseley, father of Alice

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Robert II Lowseley (1572–c.1625), a 12× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his Yorkshire birth, marriage to Elizabeth Mellynge, removal to London where he died about 1625, his daughter Alice, and Jacobean-era English context. Notable: among the deepest English ancestors documented in the Hyten paternal line, bridging the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.

Robert II Lowseley (1572–circa 1625) stands among the earliest documented forebears in the compiler's paternal-grandfather line, a 12× great-grandfather whose life traced the arc from the late Elizabethan age into the reign of James I. He was born in 1572 in Yorkshire, England, the great northern county whose dales, moors, and ancient market towns had long shaped a hardy and independent yeomanry. The Yorkshire of his birth was a region still adjusting to the religious settlements that had followed the upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century, and the parish registers begun in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell's injunctions were, by the time of Robert's birth, becoming the chief means by which families such as the Lowseleys entered the formal historical record.

Robert married Elizabeth Mellynge, and to this union was born at least one daughter of recorded descent, Alice Marchell Lowesley, who would later carry the family line forward and who herself died in 1639. Through Alice the Lowseley blood passed onward across the generations to the compiler's own forebears in the New World.

At some point in his life Robert removed from the Yorkshire country of his birth to the City of London, where he died about the year 1625. The London of those final years was a city of perhaps two hundred thousand souls, swelling rapidly with newcomers from the shires, its skyline still dominated by the old medieval Saint Paul's that would perish in the Great Fire of 1666. The year of Robert's death was itself a momentous one in English history, marking the passing of King James I and the accession of his ill-fated son Charles I, as well as a severe outbreak of plague within the capital — circumstances that framed, if they did not necessarily occasion, the close of Robert's life.

Robert II Lowseley was the compiler's 12× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.