Family and Education

b. by 1508. m. Julian; 1da.1

Offices Held

Of King’s wardrobe by 1531, yeoman of wardrobe, of beds 1532, 1540, to Queen Anne Boleyn 1533, to Queen Catherine Parr 1545-6; warden, Leathersellers’ Co. 1544-5.2

Biography

The identification of the second Member for Buckinghamshire in the Parliament of 1529 presents a problem. On the single list of Members of that Parliament, an annotated copy of the Crown Office list originally compiled at its outset, the name of the Member concerned appears as ‘Edwardus Sooll’. The only known bearer of this name (in the form Edward Sole) was a London grocer with a possible family connexion in Kent. First heard of in 1510, when he paid 20s. for the board of Sir Robert Plumpton, a prisoner in the Compter, Sole appears two years later on a list of those who gave recognizances to the King for repayment of loans. Suits brought before the chancellor in the court of requests suggest that Sole trafficked in bonds and obligations for debt. One such plea between 1529 and 1532 shows him holding £200 worth of gold and silver in trust for Richard Lee, esquire, a Buckinghamshire man who had himself on several occasions stood surety for bonds of Sole’s; another, dating from after 1533, reveals that a debt of £1,148 owed by a grocer named William Staverton to the well-known financier Dominico Lomelyn had been made over by Lomelyn to Sole ‘in the course of merchandise’.3

Some undiscovered financial connexion apart, there appears to be no reason why Edward Sole of London should have been elected for Buckingham to the Parliament of 1529. Buckinghamshire was one of the counties included in the King’s demand that the election writs should be sent to him and not to the sheriff, the implication being that the King would either directly or indirectly nominate persons for election. This he could have done without difficulty at Buckingham, for that borough belonged to the infant Henry Carey whose wardship was either still in the hands of the crown or had been granted to his aunt Anne Boleyn. Thus the Members returned in 1529 may be confidently presumed to have been chosen by the King or the Queen-to-be, or by someone on their behalf: a connexion between them and Anne Boleyn is particularly to be looked for in view of their otherwise barely explicable supersession by Cromwell at the election for the Parliament of June 1536. Nothing which has come to light about Edward Sole would explain either his adoption in 1529 or his rejection in 1536, and that being so it becomes necessary to consider an alternative identification of the Member in question.4

Clearly this Member must have borne a name which was capable of being misread as ‘Sooll’ by the copyist of the list of Members. An examination of several such names has produced one (or perhaps two) which in turn satisfies the requirement that its bearer can be associated with those most immediately concerned with the Buckingham election of 1529. This name is ‘Powell’, which either in that form or as ‘Pooll’ could have misled the copyist into his error. Apart from its Welshness, it is not a name which makes for easy identification, and in this case the process is complicated by the probability (as will appear) that its bearer was generally known by another, namely, Lloyd or Floyd, one which—whether or not by coincidence—might itself have been converted into ‘Sooll’, especially if, as was customary, it was written ‘Flood’. It is thus an Edward Lloyd alias Powell who invites attention as a possible second Member for Buckingham in 1529.

An Edward Lloyd followed a career which can be either traced or surmised. In April 1531, as an officer of the King’s wardrobe, he received 17s.3d. in payment of the balance of his charges for storing ‘stuff’ of Wolsey’s, and two years later the keeper of the great wardrobe, Andrew Windsor, 1st Lord Windsor, was ordered to deliver certain articles for Queen Anne’s use to Lloyd as yeoman of her wardrobe. He probably remained a wardrobe official until his death: in 1545 he was listed as a member of Queen Catherine Parr’s household and it was as yeoman of her wardrobe that in May 1546 he appeared in the will of Charles Dymoke of Leamington Hastings, Warwickshire, who called him ‘cousin’ and appointed him supervisor. To his dependence in the early 1530s on Lord Windsor and Anne Boleyn, Lloyd may have added a connexion with Anne’s friend Henry Norris. Until his death in 1536 Norris was steward of the royal manor of Ewelme in Oxfordshire, and in the year after that Edmund Powell, later of Sandford, is mentioned as being under steward there. This Edmund Powell was the son of Maurice ap Hywel of ‘Guernon’, Cardiganshire, who may be plausibly identified with the ‘Maurice Flood or Lloyd of London, alias Maurice Walshman, late of Elsing, Norfolk, alias Maurice Appowell late of—, Oxfordshire, yeoman’ who had sued out a pardon on the accession of Henry VIII: whether the Maurice Lloyd who appears as a gentleman usher in the Household from 1526 was the same man, or a son and namesake, is not clear. If Edward Lloyd belonged to this family his pedigree would not only help to identify him with Edward Powell but would also suggest an association, albeit a slight one, with Norris.5

It is in the light of these connexions that Lloyd has a claim to be identified with the second Member for Buckingham. His departmental chief Windsor, who was himself returned as one of the knights for Buckinghamshire, may well have been in attendance on the King when the writ was received and have been involved in its execution, Anne Boleyn have been already in a position to favour him, and Henry Norris have extended to Lloyd the patronage which he was to bestow on Lloyd’s fellow-Member John Hasilwood. Calculated to procure him a seat in 1529, these connexions, or at least the last two of them, could have been counted upon to deprive him of it six-and-a-half years later. At the election of 1536 Cromwell’s nomination of two new Members at Buckingham, made concurrently with the King’s general request that those who had sat in the previous Parliament should be re-elected, is hardly to be explained save on the ground that the sitting Members were unacceptable, which both Lloyd and Hasilwood could well have appeared to be.6

Neither of them seems to have been otherwise penalized. In 1537 Lloyd received 21-year leases of two Pembrokeshire rectories and thereafter he pursued his household career until on 29 Apr. 1547, as Edward Lloyd of the Poultry, gentleman, he made a will which was proved on the following day. He asked to be buried in St. Mildred’s, Poultry, and left 3s.4d. for lights to burn before the altar there. His interest in the Pembrokeshire rectories was to pass to his daughter Joan, together with that in a messuage or tenement in the Poultry leased to him for ten years in September 1542 by the city of London. He provided for his wife out of the goods she had herself brought to the marriage and named as sole executrix his daughter, and as supervisors his nephew Randolph Lloyd and ‘my fellow’ John Roberts, presumably the so-named page of the wardrobe. Lloyd left 40s. to the Leathersellers’ Company which he had recently served as warden: nothing further is known of this aspect of his career but it is to be noted that his fellow-Member Hasilwood was also connected with the Company. There is nothing to indicate whether either played any role in the passage of two Acts relating to the leather industry (24 Hen. VIII, c.1, 27 Hen. VIII, c.14). Lloyd’s final bequest to his daughter as residuary legatee comprised the ‘plate, jewel’s [and] implements of household ware in my shop’.7

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: S. T. Bindoff

Notes

• 1. Presumed to be of age at election. PCC 33 Alen.
• 2. LP Hen. VIII, v, vi, x, xiii, xv, xvi, xx; PCC 10 Alen; W. H. Black, Co. Leathersellers, 64.
• 3. SP1/56, f. 6; PCC 44 Pynnyng; Plumpton Corresp. (Cam. Soc. iv), p. cxviii; LP Hen. VIII, i, ii; C1/578/19, 651/51, 659/32-33, 673/27-29, 802/35, 827/47, 899/30-31; Req.2/3/208, 50/6.
• 4. LP Hen. VIII, iv, v, x.
• 5. Ibid. i-vi, xii, xx; PCC 10 Alen; Vis. Oxon. (Harl. Soc. v), 287.
• 6. LP Hen. VIII, x.
• 7. Ibid. xiii; PCC 33 Alen; E101/424/12, pt. i; Black, 64, 87 seq.