Christopher Heydon

Sir Christopher Heydon (14 August 1561 – 1 January 1623) was an English soldier, politician, and writer on astrology, who was a Member of Parliament for Norfolk from 1588 to 1589. He quarrelled with his family over its estates in Norfolk.

Background

Born in Surrey, Heydon was the eldest son of Sir William Heydon (1540–1594) of Baconsthorpe, Norfolk, and his wife Anne, daughter of Sir William Woodhouse of Hickling, Norfolk. The family was powerful in Norfolk affairs, owning many manors and living at Baconsthorpe Castle, a large country house in North Norfolk.

Education Heydon was educated at Gresham's School, Holt and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he knew the young Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and after graduating BA in 1579 travelled widely on the continent.

In October 1600 Heydon challenged Sir John Townshend to a duel, but it was forbidden by the Privy Council.

Heydon also wrote but did not publish An Astrological Discourse with Mathematical Demonstrations (c. 1608), a further defence of astrology drawing on Kepler, with a short account of the 1603 conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. The manuscript passed to the astrologer Nicholas Fiske, whose attempts to publish it failed, but it appeared in an edited form in 1650, subsidised by Elias Ashmole, with a preface by William Lilly. He wrote a treatise on the comet of 1618 and described his own astronomical observations with instruments made by his friend Edward Wright.

Family Heydon married, first, Mirabel, daughter of the London alderman Sir Thomas Rivet, but she died at the age of twenty-two. Heydon built her a large and ornate tomb at Saxlingham, covered with hieroglyphs which he explained in a treatise now lost. The second son of this marriage was Sir John Heydon, a royalist ordnance officer. He married secondly Anne, daughter of John Dodge and widow of John Potts of Mannington, Norfolk, in or before 1599. She died in 1642.