WOLLEY, William (1609-77), of Cumberworth and Well, Lincs.

Wolley’s family, which was apparently of Dorset extraction, had settled at Cumberworth by the end of the sixteenth century.22Lincs. Peds. 1102. His father was styled a yeoman for most of his life, but by the early 1630s, when he was fined £12 10s for distraint of knighthood, he had clearly entered the ranks of Lincolnshire’s gentry.23Cumberworth par. reg.; E407/35, f. 114v. He was described as a gentleman at his burial in 1638, and his personal estate was valued at £647.24Cumberworth par. reg.; Lincs. RO, INV/147/196. The family’s rising status was reflected in Wolley’s admission to St John’s college, Cambridge, in 1627. But it was only in the exceptional circumstances of the civil-war period that he was appointed to county office, and he was certainly the first of his line to sit in Parliament.

Wolley sided with Parliament during the civil war, although his reasons for doing so are not now apparent. By October 1643, he and another future MP, Francis Mussenden, had been commissioned by the Lincolnshire parliamentarian commander Francis Willoughby, 5th Baron Willoughby of Parham (from whom the Wolleys’ held part of their estate) as financial agents for his regiment.25SP28/11, f. 9; C142/567/95. In July 1644, the Commons added Wolley to the Lincolnshire sequestration committee, and by that August, at the latest, he was a member of the county committee.26CJ iii. 548b; J. Lilburne, England’s Birthright Justified (1645), 17 (E.304.17).

As a committeeman and a leading figure in Lord Willoughby’s sequestration machinery, Wolley became involved in the county committee’s quarrel during the mid-1640s with the Lincolnshire Presbyterian and localist agitator Colonel Edward King, who had launched a bitter attack upon Willoughby and his agents in 1643.27C. Holmes, ‘Col. King and Lincs. politics, 1642-6’, HJ xvi. 465. Wolley and other ‘gentlemen of quality’ on the presented articles to the Commons in August 1644, accusing King of acting in a ‘tyrannical and arbitrary’ manner and of imprisoning and feuding with ‘such as in whom the power of religion is most eminent’.28J. Lilburne, The Just Mans Justification (1646), 3, 8, 19-20 (E.340.12). Colonel King hit back in 1646, publishing a lengthy denunciation of the committee’s proceedings, which included an allegation that Wolley and Mussenden had frustrated the collection of assessments for the army.29Holmes, ‘Col. King’, pp. 479-80; E. King, A Discovery of the Arbitrary, Tyrannical and Illegal Actions of Some of the Committee of the County of Lincoln (1647), 6 (E.373.3). In fact, Wolley seems to have been one of the more conscientious members of the Lincolnshire assessment commission.30E113/9 (deposition of Robert Marshall*); SP28/161, unfol; SP28/198, f. 129. In response, Wolley signed several of the county committee’s letters to Westminster, complaining of King’s rabble-rousing activities and his contempt for parliamentary authority.31Bodl. Nalson VI, f. 72; Tanner 50, f. 478; Tanner 58, f. 39.

Wolley was among the most active of the Lindsey magistrates during the later 1640s and continued to attend quarter sessions meetings under the Rump.32Lincs. RO, 2-AMC/6/C/4/2; LQS/A/1/11, nos. 1-5, 26, 31, 38-9, 40-5, 104-9; LQS/A/1/12, nos. 30-6, 39, 47, 69, 71, 72, 83-92, 110-13, 119; LQS/A/1/13, nos. 7, 13, 57-8, 184. One of his closest colleagues on the bench was, once again, Francis Mussenden. Wolley’s progress along the county’s cursus honorum may have been matched by an improvement in his financial fortunes, for in about 1650, he purchased the capital messuage of Well, worth £140 a year – a property that he made his principal residence.33C7/275/89.

Wolley continued to serve in local office under the protectorate, and in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654 he was returned for the seventh of Lincolnshire’s ten places. He probably owed his return to the strength of his interest as one of the county’s most prominent parliamentarians. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. In the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, he was returned for Lincolnshire again, coming eighth on a poll with 514 votes.34Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. However, while four of the successful candidates were allowed to take their seats, the remaining six, among them Wolley, were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as enemies of the government.35CJ vii. 425b. Perhaps the most likely explanation for his exclusion is that he was accounted hostile to the rule of the major-generals.

Wolley seems to have forfeited the trust not only of the protectoral government but also that of the restored Rump. Like Mussenden, he was dropped from the Midland circuit oyer and terminer commission in June 1659 and omitted from the militia commission the following month. Again, it is difficult to pinpoint the nature of his offence, although his career profile from 1659 suggests that he may have had Presbyterian or even royalist sympathies. He signed the loyal address of the Lincolnshire gentry in June 1660; he retained his place on the Lindsey bench in 1660 and was restored as an oyer and terminer commissioner; and during the early 1660s he was noted by the Quakers as a persecuting magistrate.36The Humble Congratulation of the Nobility and Gentry of the County of Lincolne (1660); Lincs. RO, 2-BRACE/3/20, pp. 2005, 2033. Yet he seems to have fallen from favour again in 1667, when he was removed from the bench and the oyer and terminer commission.

Wolley apparently spent the remainder of his life in quiet retirement. He died in the summer of 1677 and was buried at Well on 8 July.37Well bishop’s transcript. In his will, he made a bequest of £3 6s for making ‘decent seats’ in Well parish church, which suggests that he was a committed member of the parochial congregation. His legatees included the civil-war parliamentarians Sir Henry and Sir Drayner Massingberd.38PROB11/354, f. 352v. None of Wolley’s immediate family sat in Parliament.