Family and Education

Offices Held

Biography

William Ward, who may have come from a family which can be traced at Morpeth between 1366 and 1505, presumably owed his five elections there and his one at Carlisle to William, 3rd Lord Dacre, lord of Morpeth and warden of the west marches, which were administered from Carlisle. In the indenture for October 1553 Ward’s name was inserted in a different hand from that of the document. On the Crown Office lists for that Parliament and for November 1554 he was described as a gentleman, but he is almost certainly to be distinguished from the William Ward ‘armiger’ who had earlier sat for Lancaster.2

Ward may have been the William Ward to whom in 1561 Lord Dacre’s daughter Dorothy, widow of Sir Thomas Windsor, left a grey mare and £3 6s.8d. He was perhaps also the London gentleman who in 1548 and 1549 made three extensive purchases of church lands of which the second, made with Richard Venables, a serjeant-at-arms, included property in Bristo and Skelton, Cumberland, and Appleby, Westmorland; a further parcel of Skelton land was bought a few months later by Thomas Dalston of Carlisle and his kinsman William Denton, a Londoner of Cumberland origin who was to owe his parliamentary career to the patronage of Anthony Browne, Viscount Montagu and, by 1558, son-in-law of Lord Dacre.3

Ward was re-elected twice in the reign of Elizabeth before the death of Lord Dacre in November 1563. The date of his own death is unknown.

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: M. J. Taylor

Notes

• 1. Huntington Lib. Hastings mss Parl. pprs. supplies the christian name missing from the damaged indenture, C219/23/96; Hodgson, Northumb. ii(2), 531 gives the christian name as Robert.
• 2. Hodgson, ii(2), 492-5, 497-500, 505, 531; C219/21/115; Bodl. e Museo 17.
• 3. N. Country Wills, ii (Surtees Soc. cxxi), 32-34; CPR, 1548-9, pp. 47-50, 222, 324-9, 410-17; Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. lx. 77, 94; lxii. 147, 157.