Sir John Wynn of Gwydir(1553–1627)

John Wynn was born at Gwydir Castle in the Conwy Valley in 1553, eldest of the eleven children of Maurice Wynn ap John ap Maredudd, the rising gentry laird who had rebuilt Gwydir under Henry VIII, and Jane Bulkeley of Beaumaris. The Wynns of Gwydir descended in the male line from Owain Gwynedd through a series of north-Welsh patronymic lines that had consolidated under the Wynn surname in the late Tudor period. John was raised at Gwydir, was schooled at Furnivall's Inn and at the Inner Temple in London (the standard education for a Welsh gentleman's heir of his generation), and on his father's death in 1580 succeeded to the Gwydir estate at twenty-seven.

He held the Gwydir estate and the wider Wynn political interest in North Wales for the next forty-seven years to his death. He served as High Sheriff of Caernarfonshire (the senior shrievalty office of the county) seven times across his career, sat as MP for Caernarfonshire in three Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments (1586, 1589, 1601), was appointed a member of the Council in the Marches of Wales (the senior executive body governing Wales under the Tudor settlement) by Elizabeth I in 1601 and confirmed by James I in 1604, and was created the first Baronet of Gwydir by James I in June 1611 in the first batch of the newly-instituted baronetcy creations.

Under his stewardship Gwydir became the leading political house of late-Tudor and early-Stuart North Wales. He extended the family estates across Caernarfonshire, Denbighshire and Merionethshire through systematic land purchase and through marriage alliances with the Bulkeley, Mostyn and Williams families, established the substantial Wynn lead-mining interest in the Snowdonia foothills, and built around Gwydir the Wynn Chapel at Llanrwst (1633-34, completed by his son), one of the finest Jacobean ecclesiastical buildings in North Wales.

In the last decade of his life he composed the prose work for which his name is universally remembered: The History of the Gwydir Family. The manuscript, completed around 1614 to 1619, is a substantial chronicle of the Wynn line from their twelfth-century Owain Gwynedd descent through the late-medieval North Welsh political milieu to his own generation, written in a clear and unselfconscious Elizabethan English prose unusual for a Welsh-speaking author of his period. The History was passed in manuscript through the Wynn family until first published by the family antiquary Daines Barrington in 1770, was re-edited by the antiquary J. Ballinger in 1927, and remains in continuous Welsh-history use as one of the foundational documentary sources for the late-Tudor and early-Stuart political-and-social life of North Wales. He died at Gwydir on the first of March 1627 in his seventy-fourth year and was buried at the parish church of Llanrwst beside the small Wynn Chapel that his sons would complete the next year. The Wynn name in modern Welsh historical writing carries the weight of the History of the Gwydir Family.