Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/160

 most abstemious fashion, while exercising a generous bounty towards his poorer neighbours. During that period he ate neither fish nor flesh, and never drank wine. He died on 29 Oct. 1636, and was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate. He married Alice, daughter of Thomas White of Wallingwells in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, by his wife Anne Cecil, sister of the first Lord Burghley. By Alice, Welby had one daughter, Elizabeth, his sole heiress, who was married at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, on 13 July 1598 to Sir Christopher Hildyard of Winestead in Yorkshire. She was buried at Routh in the East Riding on 28 Nov. 1638. The family of Hildyard established at Flintham Hall, near Newark, are her descendants (, Landed Gentry, 1898, s.v. ‘Hildyard;’, Yorkshire Pedigrees, 1874, vol. ii. s.v. ‘Hildyard’).

A life so eccentric as that of Welby was the source of some notoriety, and in the year after his death a biography appeared entitled ‘The Phœnix of these late Times, or the Life of Mr. Henry Welby, Esq.’ (London, 1637, 4to). It contained commemorative verses by [q. v.], John Taylor the ‘Water Poet,’ Thomas Heywood, Thomas Nabbes, and others, and had prefixed a portrait of Welby as he appeared at the time of his death, engraved by William Marshall. Two editions, with no important differences, appeared in the same year.



WELCH or WELSH, JOHN (1570?–1622), presbyterian divine, son of the laird of Collieston or Colliston, in the parish of Dunscore, Dumfriesshire, and bordering Craigenputtock—which Carlyle (Jane Welsh Carlyle, p. 102) supposes to have been anciently included as moorland in the estate—was born about 1570. When young he displayed a rather unruly disposition, and, disliking the severe restraints of home, broke from parental control and joined a band of border reivers; but, discovering this adventurous life to be less pleasant and desirable than his youthful fancy had depicted it, he sought reconciliation with his father, and, with a view of studying for the church, he was presently sent to the university of Edinburgh, where he took the degree of M.A. in 1588. On 6 March 1589–90 he was nominated by the privy council one of three for maintaining the true religion in the Forest and Tweeddale, and was settled at Selkirk. In 1594 he was translated to Kirkcudbright, and on 29 March 1596 he was appointed one of the visitors for Nithsdale, Annandale, Lauderdale, Eskdale, and Ewesdale (, History, v. 420).

On 18 Dec. following, when occupying the pulpit of St. Giles's kirk, Edinburgh, shortly after the tumult of the presbyterians against the king, he took opportunity to preach against the king's conduct, ‘alleging that his majesty was possessed of a devil, and after the outputting of that devil there joined to his highness seven devils, quhilk was his majesty's council;’ and that as it was lawful for a son to bind a lunatic father, it was equally lawful ‘to his highness's subjects to bind his majesty, being in the like case’ (Reg. P. C. Scotl. v. 359). Failing to answer the charge of having justified the tumult, he was on 17 Jan. denounced a rebel (ib.); but, on the petition of the assembly in the following March he was, mainly through the intervention of Lord Ochiltree (, Memoirs, p. 133), relaxed from the horn and permitted to return to his charge.

By the assembly held at Montrose in March 1599–1600 Welch was again appointed one of the visitors for Nithsdale (, vi. 23), and in August of the same year he was transferred to the parish of Ayr as assistant to John Porterfield, on whose death in 1604 he was chosen to succeed him. Before this the preaching of Welch had begun to attract such crowds that the town council on 26 May 1603 resolved to build a new church. When Welch came to Ayr the town was noted for its feuds and riots, but by appearing boldly on the streets, clad in a steel cap, and intervening in disturbances, he speedily succeeded in effecting quite a reformation in public manners.

For having concurred in the meeting of the assembly held in Aberdeen in July 1605, contrary to the prohibition of the king, Welch, although he did not arrive in Aberdeen until two days after the assembly had been held, was along with John Forbes, the moderator, the first to be called before the privy council to answer for taking part in it, and, having declined to give his oath to answer such things as might be demanded of him in regard to the deliberations of the assembly, he was on 26 July ordained to be committed to ward in the castle of Blackness (Reg. P. C. Scotl. vii. 104), where it was stated they were ‘more straitly used than either jesuits or murderers’ (ib. p. 105). On 3 Oct. he and other ministers were summoned to appear before the council on the 24th, when they were found guilty, the council reserv-