WARD, William I.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

Offices Held

Biography

William Ward, styled ‘armiger’, was returned for Lancaster to the Parliament of 1547 at a by-election held after the death of Stephen Vaughan on 25 Dec. 1549. During the last session of the Parliament he obtained a writ of privilege out of Chancery without first securing a warrant for it from the House of Commons and on 22 Feb. 1552 his misdemeanour was referred by the House to four Members, Sir Robert Bowes, Sir Nicholas Hare, Sir John Mason and Richard Morgan, although with what result is not known. Ward had presumably been the nominee at Lancaster of Sir William Paget, then chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. He may have been the man of that name employed to write accounts for the duchy at some time between 1525 and 1547, and either he or a namesake was by 1567 a servant of the Paget family, becoming receiver-general to Thomas, 4th Lord Paget, by 1572 and remaining in the family’s service at least until 1596. All that has been discovered of the receiver-general’s personal history is that he had a nephew Richard who was a member of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1593. The name is a common one in Staffordshire, William Paget’s adopted shire, and elsewhere. On 19 Dec. 1541 one William Ward of Monks Heath, Cheshire, gentleman, who gave his age as 47 or thereabouts, made a deposition in the dispute over the division of the property of Lawrence Starkey, who had sat for Lancaster in the Parliament of 1529, and in 1568 a namesake received a lease for 21 years of lands in Carnforth and Ashton, Lancashire. There is nothing to suggest that Ward was, or was connected with, the William Ward who sat for Morpeth and Carlisle.2

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: A. D.K. Hawkyard

Notes

  • 1. Did not serve for the full duration of the Parliament; Hatfield 207.
  • 2. CJ, i. 18; Somerville, Duchy, i. 460; NRA 0010, pp. 169-248 passim; Lichfield Wills (Brit. Rec. Soc. Ltd. Index Lib. vii), 112; J. B. Watson, ‘Lancs. gentry 1529-58’ (London Univ. MA thesis, 1959), 542, 544, 568-9; Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, lxxiii. 206; CPR, 1566-9, p. 380.