Francis Lyne was a London merchant who retired as a widower to Cheltenham in his seventies, where he lived at 6 (and then 5) Segrave Place (now 11, then 9, Pittville Lawn). He was born in Lisbon, Portugal on 27 December 1800, the second son of Joseph Lyne and his first wife Charlotte Angelica, daughter of François Arbouin, Portuguese Government minister), and was baptised at the British Factory Chaplaincy, Lisbon three months later, on 10 March 1801.

     Lyne built a career at a wine merchant with offices in Mark Lane in the City of London. In May 1835 he married Louise (Luiza) Genevieve, daughter of George Hanmer Leycester Esq., of White Place, Cookham, Berkshire, some sixteen years his junior; they lived at first at 8 Trinity Square in the City of London, and had four sons and three daughters. By 1839 there was ill feeling in the family when Lyne’s wife received a letter from her sister Harriet, wife of William Ward, Mayor of Maidenhead, stating that Lyne, still a wine merchant trading from Mark Lane, “was a person whose acquaintance … could not be desirable to anyone”. On seeing the letter Lyne demanded an apology from William Ward, or satisfaction by way of a duel, and Ward took the matter to court, after which Lyne’s accusation was withdrawn on the grounds that Ward had not known about the letter (St James’s Chronicle 24 January 1839). Two months later Lyne filed for insolvency and was in April 1839 declared bankrupt; his remaining lease on his residence in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square (“with a small cellar of Genuine Wines”) was offered for sale.

     Lyne remained in the house in Hunter Street, however, as this was where he was trading as a General Merchant in 1841 and in the same year his third son Augustus was born there, followed by other children; in 1851 he was still at Hunter Street as a Wine and General Merchant. His earlier embarrassments passed, by 1850 he was leading a campaign amongst London merchants for the Lord Mayor to establish a Tribunal of Commerce, allowing business disagreements to be settled without recourse to the law courts, along the lines of similar arrangements on the Continent; this was the year he published his Attorney’s own book. In 1851 he gained a considerable amount of publicity for his project when he published Tribunals of commerce, a letter, and became a member of a permanent committee of the Association for Establishing Tribunals of Commerce (with Lord Wharncliffe and others) to advocate the proposal. He was active in arguing for these commercial tribunals for many years, and maintained a steady stream of brief publications on the subject until 1882. In 1858 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

     Francis Lyne’s life was full of troubles beyond his efforts to establish tribunals of commerce. His second son was Joseph Leycester Lyne (1837-1908), who from the early 1860s became well known as a monk calling himself ‘Father Ignatius’, wished to revive monasticism in the Church of England.  He was ‘a charismatic preacher and flamboyant individual’ who spoke at meetings all around the country and was also a Zionist, supported British Israelism and was convinced that the Earth was flat (ODNB).  His activities were provocative, and his father Francis Lyne was forced to offer explanations and apologies for his son in the public press, while disagreeing with his fundamental philosophy. He and his eldest son, Francis Lyne, were also often mistaken in the press for “Father Ignatius”. The reputational and financial problems caused to him by his son continued for many years; both were typically regarded as in the grip of their own obsession.

     No stranger to legal argument, Francis Lyne became further mired in them in 1868. He lived then at 42 Eastbourne Terrace in London, and was at that time the landlord of 54 Montague Street in London, where he had to deal with Sir Nathaniel Haines’s attempts to remove his tenant’s property in payment of a debt.

     The Lynes lived at 1 Torriano Villas, Broadstairs, in Kent, in the mid 1870s, where his wife Louisa, after a long illness, died in July 1877. By the following year Lyne had arrived in Pittville, where he frequently wrote critical letters to the public press from his home, 6 (and then 5) Segrave Place in Pittville: some time before July 1878 he wrote castigating Dr Pusey for supporting and then abandoning his son. His son “Father Ignatius” spoke at meetings all around the country and each spring from 1878 held a Lenten Mission in Cheltenham. Although Charles Bell, the Rector of Cheltenham, tried to dissuade people from attending his meetings, large numbers nevertheless turned out to hear him. In September 1879 Lyne’s daughter Harriet Jemima was married at All Saints Church, Cheltenham, from her home in Segrave Place, to engineer Paul Ewens, of Selkirk Villas, Cheltenham, son of solicitor Creasy Ewens.

     Lyne also wrote a pamphlet on the ‘Bradlaugh Scandal’ in 1880: like Charles Dent Bell, with whom he corresponded about his son, he opposed Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist republican who was elected MP for Northampton in 1880 but did not take the oath of office until 1886. Like his pamphlet on the Bradlaugh affair several of Lyne’s publications have apparently not survived: in 1882 he published The New City of London Chamber of Commerce. Cui bono?, “a most eccentric production, extending to 115 pages, from the pen of Mr. Francis Lyne, now in his eighty-third year”, whose “trenchant chapters will amuse, and no doubt edify, those who have time to read them” (Bookseller 2 December). The reviewer continues of Lyne: “he hates the law, and has plied every law reformer with questions, letters, and suggestions directed to the bringing about of a commercial, instead of a legal, tribunal for the City.”

     In his later years Lyne conducted his various correspondences from his London house at 54 Montagu Street, where he died on 15 May 1888, at the age of eighty-seven; he was buried at Margate cemetery in Kent. His personal estate at death was sworn at £3,173. John Simpson/Alan Munden