LAKES, William.

This Member, who played no recorded part in the 1624 Parliament’s proceedings, has not been identified. His surname is given as ‘Lakes’ in surviving Crown Office lists, though the Return of Members, apparently citing another such list, adopted the variant spelling ‘Leakes’. The loss of the relevant election indenture prevents corroboration of either spelling.1C193/32/14; SP14/159/53-4; OR. As his fellow Member for St. Ives was the Cornish landowner Sir Francis Godolphin, who held the seat usually reserved for a representative of local interests, it seems likely that Lakes was nominated by the 4th marquess of Winchester, absentee lord of St. Ives’s principal manor, who controlled the remaining burgess-ship throughout the early seventeenth century. Certainly no-one of Lakes’s name has been identified as a resident of the St. Ives area or as an associate of local patrons such as the Godolphins and Killigrews. Neither, however, has a direct link between Lakes and Winchester been established. This raises the possibility that Lakes was put forward by one of the marquess’s relatives or clients, such as Sir Anthony Mayney, who sat for St. Ives in 1614 and probably supplied Sir William Parkhurst with his place there in 1625. In the mid-1620s Mayney’s close friends are known to have included a William ‘Lake’, and a man of that name was successively secretary to Sir Thomas Lake I* (by 1619) and Sir Richard Weston*, another of Mayney’s friends (by 1629). However, his movements in 1624 have not been established.2 C2/Jas.I/W23/16; PROB 11/124, ff. 360-1; 11/151, ff. 131v-2v; CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 39; 1628-9, p. 524. Other figures not known to have been linked to Mayney or Winchester but who were of appropriate status include William Lake, an Inner Temple lawyer who died in 1626, and William Lakes, a fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who has not been traced later than 1621. William Leake, son of the prominent Nottinghamshire landowner Sir Francis Leake, seems an unlikely candidate since he obtained a three-year travel permit in August 1624, while Parliament was technically in recess.3 I. Temple Admiss.; PROB 6/12, f. 50; J.R. Wardale, Clare Coll. 101-2; APC, 1623-5, p. 307.