William Bere was born into an old established Cornish family which by the mid fifteenth century had provided several MPs for south-western constituencies.
William probably trained in the law and although the details of his education are obscure he seems to have attracted the attention of the Westminster authorities, who from the autumn of 1439 appointed him to a string of commissions to combat the piracy rife in the south-west. In 1445 he was entrusted with the collection of a parliamentary subsidy in his native county, and around this time he became increasingly active as an attorney and surety in the royal courts as well as in the locality. At least in part, this increased activity resulted from the web of litigation surrounding the unlawful activities of the notorious Richard Tregoose* into which he had been drawn. Alongside other leading members of the Cornish gentry, including Sir John Arundell II* of Trerice, John* and Richard Tresithney* and his putative brother Thomas, Bere had apparently entered the fray on the side of Tregoose’s opponent Robert Borlase, and he and his associates were accused of seeking to secure Tregoose’s conviction on trumped up charges of cattle rustling, a conspiracy for which Tregoose sought damages of no less than £3,000.
If there was any truth in any of these accusations, they do not seem to have affected Bere’s standing in his community. In 1447 when one of the Cornish coroners, Robert Pyne of Ham (who had held this office since 1435), procured writs for his release from office on the multiple grounds of illness and preoccupation, Bere was chosen by the shire court to replace him.
By the early 1450s Bere had established a close link with the Reskymer family which he was to maintain for more than a decade. He served the head of the family, Ralph Reskymer, as a surety and feoffee and attested his deeds.
Bere’s election to Parliament as a knight of the shire in the summer of 1455 was a curious choice. His colleague was the royal esquire and experienced parliamentarian Thomas Bodulgate*, and Bere was by far the most insubstantial landowner to have been returned by the shire for some years. It is possible that he had established a reputation for his conscientious conduct as coroner and was regarded as a safe pair of hands in the evident political crisis which had not been resolved by the battle of St. Albans a few weeks earlier. Certainly, he was not short of supporters in the shire court. The sheriff, John Petit, had two years earlier witnessed the grant of lands by Ralph Reskymer to Bere, and the men who subsequently put their seals to the election indenture included, apart from Bere’s brother Thomas and his patron William Reskymer, a group of important men from Bere’s home town of Bodmin, led by James Flamank*, the mayor, and including other former mayors and leading burgesses like Thomas Luccomb* the elder, his son Thomas the younger, and John Pentyre.
Nothing is known of Bere’s activities in Parliament, but it is possible that he was among those members of the Commons who came out strongly in support of the renewed appointment of Richard, duke of York, as Protector during the King’s incapacity, for after York had been appointed and before the Commons rose for Christmas he was added to the Cornish bench. It seems likely that Bere was identified with the duke’s cause, for in 1459, as the conflict between the adherents of the queen, Margaret of Anjou, and those of Duke Richard grew increasingly acrimonious and the country drifted towards open civil war, he was dismissed from the bench. If his association with the Yorkist cause had proved deterimental to his career in the first instance, within two years it proved an asset when York’s son Edward, earl of March, ascended the throne as Edward IV in the spring of 1461. Bere became one of the new regime’s early supporters and was entrusted with the array of forces to secure the south-west for the young King. Further office followed four years later, when he was pricked sheriff of Cornwall, his brother Thomas serving as his under sheriff.