Lewis Disney Ffytche

Lewis Disney Fytche (9 October 1738 – 1822), originally Lewis Disney, often known after his marriage as Disney Fytche, was an English radical and landowner.

The son of John Disney of Lincoln, he was brother of John Disney the Unitarian. He owned Flintham Hall in Nottinghamshire, a family property. He also inherited Swinderby, in Lincolnshire. The eldest son, he received in the end the bulk of his father's property. Flintham Hall was from a grandmother.

Disney married Elizabeth, daughter of William Fytche, on 16 September 1775. He changed his name, to Lewis Disney Fytche, by Royal Sign Manual eleven days later, for reasons connected with property holdings. Around this time he bought Syerston, Nottinghamshire, from Lord George Manners-Sutton. He became captain in the 21st Regiment of Foot, and served in the American War of Independence. He was promoted major in 1780.

Fytche had the radical John Cartwright as a first cousin, on his mother's side. He supported the reform petition at the Essex country meeting at Chelmsford on 24 January 1780. That year he joined the Society for Constitutional Information. He attended the meeting of 28 February 1782 at the Moot Hall, Mansfield on parliamentary abuses, and the Thatched House Tavern reform meeting of 18 May 1782. His brother John was an associate of Christopher Wyvill and Capel Lofft.

In 1782 Fytche brought a court case over the Essex church living of Woodham Walter, in the gift of his wife and vacant by the death of Foote Gower, and his conditional presentation to it of John Eyre, against Robert Lowth as the Bishop of London. Having won the case in the Common Pleas, where Lord Loughborough ruled that the imposed bond of resignation was valid, he saw the result overturned narrowly in the House of Lords.

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