WRAY, William (1625-69), of Ashby cum Fenby, nr. Grimsby, Lincs., and The Strand, Westminster.

Wray was still a minor when he and his two younger brothers assaulted Colonel Matthew Boynton (son of Sir Matthew Boynton*) in February 1644 for criticising the Lincolnshire parliamentarian commander Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham.32CJ iii. 387b; Add. 18779, f. 61v; Add. 31116, p. 227. Wray was probably serving as a junior officer under Willoughby, who was his father’s brother-in-law. The Commons ordered that Wray and his brothers be sent for as delinquents, but there is no evidence that they obeyed this summons.33CJ iii. 387b. This episode may have prompted Wray’s decision to embark on a tour of the continent; and he was still ‘beyond the sea’ on 22 October 1645, when his father secured his return as a recruiter MP for Great Grimsby, where the Wrays were the leading local landowners.34Supra, ‘Great Grimsby’.

By about April 1646, ‘Captain’ Wray had fallen in with the exiled royalist poet Edmund Waller* and the diarist John Evelyn on their travels from Padua to Orléans. Evelyn claimed that Wray’s company was not welcome to the rest of the party because his father (who had died in February 1646) had been a leading parliamentarian. Nevertheless, Evelyn seems to have conceived a certain affection for Wray, describing him variously as ‘a good drinking gent’, ‘the mad captain’ and ‘the choleric cavalier’. This last sobriquet, and Wray’s passion for drinking and amorous adventure (he apparently fell ‘mightily’ in love in Geneva), suggests that he was not as committed to the cause of godly reformation as his father had been.35Evelyn Diary ed. de Beer, ii. 480, 484, 504, 513, 530, 534. Once at Orléans, Wray left Evelyn’s party and returned to England. He received his first and only Commons appointment in the Long Parliament on 23 July 1646, when he was named to committee to receive complaints against royalists residing in parliamentarian quarters.36CJ iv. 625b. On 30 December, he took the Covenant.37CJ v. 33b.

Wray seems to have attended the House only very occasionally. Declared absent at the call of the House on 9 October 1647, he may have resumed his seat by early May 1648, when he turned up at two meetings of the House Committee for the Eastern Association* – apparently in the company of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester and Sir Anthony Irby.38CJ v. 330a; SP28/251, unfol. (entries for 2, 10 May 1648). But whether the three men were acting together – and if so, to what purpose – is not clear. He was granted leave of absence on 10 June 1648 and was among 20 or so Members who were not excused for their absence at the call of the House on 26 September on suspicion that they were ‘doing ill services’ in their counties.39CJ v. 593a; vi. 34a.Worc. Coll. Oxf., Clarke MS CXIV, f. 88. However, his resulting fine of £20 was restored to him on 18 October after the Commons had accepted his reason for failing to attend its service.40CJ vi. 55a.

The fact that Wray was a brother-in-law of the Independent grandee Sir Henry Vane II was not enough to prevent his seclusion at Pride’s Purge, although the nature of the army’s objection to him is not clear.41A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62). He was likewise removed from the Lindsey bench (to which he had been added in March 1647 at the height of the Presbyterian ascendancy at Westminster) in July 1650, only to be restored the following year and then omitted again a few years later.42C231/6, pp. 81, 191, 223, 232, 267; C193/13/4, f. 57v. Apparently the Rump, like Evelyn, was in some confusion as to Wray’s true allegiance.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Wray was returned for Great Grimsby.43Supra, ‘Great Grimsby’. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and it is far from certain that he even attended the House. At local level, on the other hand, he seems to have been an active supporter of the Cromwellian regime, serving alongside Francis Clinton alias Fines*, Humphrey Walcott* and Original Peart* on the Lincolnshire militia commission that was appointed in 1655 to assist Major-general Edward Whalley* in levying the decimation tax and purging local government of malignants.44TSP iv. 185, 212. Wray’s motives in serving the protectorate during its most repressive phase are not clear.

In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Wray was returned again for Grimsby.45Supra, ‘Great Grimsby’. He received only two appointments in this Parliament, one of which was to a committee set up on 31 October 1656 for settling and maintaining the ministry.46CJ vii. 448b, 457b; Burton’s Diary, i. 285. He was returned for Grimsby a fourth time in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659 and was apparently entirely inactive at Westminster. It was in 1659 that Gervase Holles* – a native of Grimsby – compiled his list of Lincolnshire gentry who might be ‘serviceable’ to Charles II in the event of a royalist uprising, among whom he named Wray and Edward Ayscoghe* as ‘Presbyterians ... who have heretofore disserved his Majesty and pretend now to be better disposed, either out of a sense of what they have done ill, or hatred to the now governing faction’.47Eg. 2541, f. 362v; A. C. Wood, ‘A list of Lincs. royalists, 1659’, Lincs. Architectural and Arch. Soc. n.s. i. 217-18. On 23 February 1660, two days after the re-admission of the secluded Members, Wray resumed his seat in the Long Parliament, and on 15 March he was named to a committee to oversee the printing of the militia bill.48CJ vii. 849a, 878a.

Wray was returned for Grimsby yet again in the elections to the 1660 Convention and was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement.49HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Wray’; G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 338. He evidently welcomed the Restoration, signing the loyal address of the Lincolnshire gentry in June 1660.50The Humble Congratulation of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of Lincolne (1660). With the king anxious to conciliate moderate parliamentarians, Wray was knighted early in June and created a baronet a few weeks later and was subsequently discharged from paying the £1,095 creation fee.51C231/7, p. 42; CB. He also retained his place on the Lindsey bench. That autumn, the crown granted him lands in Lincolnshire that he and his mother had purchased in the name of Sir Henry Vane (one of the trustees of Sir Christopher Wray’s estate) and therefore, because of Vane’s exemption from the Act of Oblivion, rightfully forfeit to the king.52CSP Dom 1660-1, p. 328.

Wray died on 14 October 1669 and was buried at Ashby three days later.53Dalton, Wrays of Glentworth, ii. 83. In his will, he referred to an indenture made in September 1669 whereby he had assigned ‘divers’ manors and lands in Lincolnshire to several trustees in order to raise portions worth £6,000 for his younger daughters. Among his legatees were the Anglican ministers William Jackson and Theophilus Loddington.54PROB11/332, ff. 240-1; C3/284, f. 376. Wray’s eldest son Christopher represented Grimsby in the last three years of the Cavalier Parliament.55HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Christopher Wray’.