Family and Education

Offices Held

Biography

The junior Member for Warwick in the Parliament of 1542 was almost certainly the William Webbe of Warwick Castle who pastured 30 of the King’s stud mares on Sir Nicholas Strelley’s land in 1544-45. He was evidently of a family which served in the royal stable and which included both Robert Webbe, yeoman of the stud, who in 1531 was appointed keeper or mower of meadows in the lordship of Warwick and who held a lease from the town of the parsonage of St. Nicholas, and Henry Webbe, who attended Henry VIII’s funeral as an equerry of the stable. William Webbe’s most likely patron was Sir John Dudley, later Earl of Warwick and already joint constable of Warwick castle, whose younger brother Andrew Dudley was an equerry of the stable by 1544, but he may also have enjoyed the favour of Sir Thomas Wriothesley, bailiff of Warwick, whose deputy John Ray was an associate of Robert Webbe. Moreover, his fellow-Member Clement Throckmorton, a younger son in a locally influential family, was later to serve in the household of Queen Catherine Parr with a Henry Webbe. If, as seems likely, William Webbe is to be distinguished from an obscure resident of Long Lawford, Warwickshire, who made his will in February 1559, nothing further has come to light about him.2

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: S. M. Thorpe

Notes

• 1. C219/18B/101; OR gives the surname as ‘Webbere’.
• 2. LP Hen. VIII, v, xx; VCH Warws. viii. 475-7; Warwick accts. 1546-69, mm. iv, 7v, 11v, 28; SC6/Hen. VIII/3700, 3706, 3713; LC2/2, ff. 34, 36; 4/1, f. 21v; E179/69/27, 48; Lichfield consist. ct. wills 1559, f. 165.