Henry Lyte (botanist)

Henry Lyte (1529? – 16 October 1607) was an English botanist and antiquary. He is best known for two works, A niewe Herball (1578), which was a translation of the Cruydeboeck of Rembert Dodoens (Antwerp, 1564), and an antiquarian volume, The Light of Britayne (1588), both of which are dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I.

Henry Lyte was born at Lytes Cary Manor, Somerset, about 1529, and was the second and eldest surviving son of John Lyte, by his first wife, Edith Horsey, who died in 1566. Lyte became a student at Oxford about 1546, but it is not known whether he took a degree. Anthony à Wood writes of him: "After he had spent some years in logic and philosophy, and in other good learning, he travelled into foreign countries, and at length retired to his patrimony, where, by the advantage of a good foundation of literature made in the university and abroad, he became a most excellent scholar in several sorts of learning."

In 1558, John Lyte made over his property to Henry who managed the Somerset estate until his father's death in 1576, when his stepmother brought a writ of dower against him. Lyte seems to have served as sheriff, or perhaps only as under-sheriff, of Somerset during the reign of Mary I, and perhaps until the second year of Elizabeth (that is, 1559).

Lyte was married three times: in September 1546 to Agnes, daughter and heiress of John Kelloway of Collumpton, Devon, who died in 1564, and by whom he had five daughters; in July 1565 to Frances, daughter of John Tiptoft, citizen of London, who died in 1589, and by whom he had three sons and two daughters; and in 1591 to Dorothy, daughter of John Gover of Somerton, by whom he had two sons and a daughter. Lyte was a distant connection of antiquarian John Aubrey, who says that Henry Lyte "had a pretty good collection of plants for that age," though an extant list in the handwriting of Lyte'e second son and successor, Thomas, enumerates only various fruit trees.

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