Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/349

 holy fathers of the church had been obedient and content with the practice of the law on this point; which it was not to be presumed they would have been if they had believed or supposed that it was altogether contrary to the law of God; on the other hand they [the clergy] had no authority by their law to arraign any one of felony.’ The archbishop having interposed that they had sufficient authority, but without saying when or whence they derived it, Fyneux continued that ‘in the event of a clerk being arrested by the secular power and then committed to the spiritual court at the instance of the clergy, the spiritual court had no jurisdiction to decide the case, but had only power to do with him according to the intention and purpose for which he had been remitted to them.’ To this, the archbishop making no reply, the king said: ‘By the ordinance and sufferance of God … we intend to maintain the right of our crown, and of our temporal jurisdiction, as well in this point as in all other points, in as ample a manner as any of our progenitors have done before our time; and as for your decrees, we are well assured that you of the spirituality yourselves act expressly against the tenor of them, as has been well shown to you by some of our spiritual council, wherefore we will not comply with your desires more than our progenitors in times past have done.’ Shortly after this emphatic declaration, the assembly was dissolved. Fyneux's statement of the law on this occasion was referred to by Lord-chancellor Ellesmere in the case of the postnati in 1608 as a precedent in favour of the authority of the extra-judicial opinions of judges then beginning to be seriously impugned (Letters and Papers Henry VIII, For. and Dom. vol. ii. pt. i. 42;, Reformation, i. 34; , Reports (Croke), 185; , State Trials, ii. 666; , Reign of Henry VIII, i. 250). In 1522 Fyneux was elected into the fraternity of the Augustinian Eremites of Canterbury (Christ Church Letters, Camd. Soc. 95). There is evidence that he was living on 5 Feb. 1526–7; but he probably died or retired in that year (Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, vii. 338; Letters and Papers Henry VIII, For. and Dom. vol. iv. pt. ii. 1670, pt. iii. App. 3096). He was buried in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. By his will he was a donor to the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, and to Faversham Abbey. He died possessed of various estates in Kent, his principal seat being at Herne. He is also said to have owned the house which was subsequently known as New Inn, and to have leased it to the lawyers at a rent of 6l. per annum (, Kent, iii. 617;, Orig. p. 230). The following maxims, preserved in Sloane MS. 1523, are ascribed to him: ‘That no man thrived but he that lived as though he were the first man in the world, and his father were not before him. The prince's prerogative and the subject's privilege are solid felicities together, and but empty notions asunder. That people is beyond precedent free and beyond comparison happy who restraine not their sovereign's power to do them harm so far, as that he hath none left him to do them good.’ Fyneux married twice: first, Elizabeth, daughter of William Apulderfield; secondly, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Paston, and granddaughter of William Paston [q. v.], justice of the common pleas in the reign of Henry VI. By his first wife he had issue two daughters, of whom the elder, Jane, married John Roper, prothonotary of the king's bench and father of William Roper, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Thomas More, and of Sir John Roper, who was created Baron Teynham in 1616. This barony is still in existence. The only issue of Fyneux's second marriage was one son, William (d. 1557), whose granddaughter, Elizabeth, married Sir John Smythe of Ostenhanger or Westenhanger, Kent, father of Sir Thomas Smythe, who was created Viscount Strangford in the peerage of Ireland in 1628. A later descendant was created Baron Penshurst in the peerage of the United Kingdom in 1825. The title became extinct by the death of the eighth viscount on 9 Jan. 1869.

[Leland's Itinerary, vi. 6; Fuller's Worthies (Kent); Lloyd's State Worthies, i. 91–6; Foss's Lives of the Judges.] 