QUARLES, William (1609-c.1666), of Enderby, Leics.

Quarles was descended from a long-established Norfolk family that had branched into London’s mercantile community during the Tudor period.13Blomefield, Norf. esp. vols. vii, ix; Vis. Norf. 1563, i. 301; Vis. London (Harl. Soc. cix-cx), 143-4; Oxford DNB, ‘Francis Quarles’. His great-grandfather had been a wealthy London draper and his grandfather a master of the Mercers’ Company, while his maternal great-grandfather, Sir George Bond, had served as lord mayor of the City.14Vis. London (Harl. Soc. cix-cx), 143-4; Nichols, Leics. iv. 166; Beaven, Aldermen of London, ii. 40, 47. Quarles’s father, George Quarles, had married into the Turpins, who had settled in Leicestershire in the fifteenth century and had represented the county on four occasions during the second half of the sixteenth century.15Nichols, Leics. iv. 166, 217, 218, 225; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘George Turpin’; ‘William Turpin’. Another branch of the Quarles family, headed by the wealthy London draper John Quarles, had also married into the Turpins in the early seventeenth century.16Leics. Marr. Lics. 337, 418; L. A. Parker, ‘The agrarian revolution at Cotesbach 1501-1612’, Trans. Leics. Arch. and Hist. Soc. xxiv. 57, 71. George Quarles was knighted in 1624 and by 1626 had acquired the manor of Enderby, near Leicester, as well as land in the forest of Leicester.17Add. Ch. 59664; Nichols, Leics. iv. 158; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 222. Among the witnesses to his will in 1634 were the godly Leicester preacher John Angell and the future parliamentarian, William Sherman.18PROB11/166, f. 51v; Oxford DNB, ‘John Angell’.

Quarles sided with Parliament in the civil war, and by the spring of 1645 he was aligned with Thomas Lord Grey of Groby* in his power-struggle with the Leicestershire and war-party grandee Sir Arthur Hesilrige*. A vote by the Lords in March to add some of Grey’s allies, including Quarlers, to the county committee was not consented to by the Commons.19CJ iv. 82a; LJ vii. 276a; D.R. Costa, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Development of the Civil War in England (to 1645)’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1988), 294-5. He was listed that year with Thomas Beaumont* and Thomas Pochin* among a group of Leicestershire parliamentarians – most of them Grey of Groby’s supporters – ‘of known integrity and abilities, who suffered both in their persons and estates for their affections to the public’.20Supra, ‘Thomas Beaumont’; ‘Thomas Lord Grey of Groby’; ‘Thomas Pochin’; An Examination of a Printed Pamphlet (1645), 5 (E.261.3); Nichols, Leics. iii. app. iv. 51. However, the county committeemen who backed Hesilrige claimed that Quarles, Beaumont and Pochin were such as they had (unspecified) ‘exceptions against’.21Supra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; An Examination Examined (1645), 14-15 (E.303.13). He seems to have played little, if any, part in local government under the Rump until the Commons resolved on 26 November 1652 to appoint him sheriff of Leicestershire – two previous appointees having been discharged.22CJ vii. 221b; Nichols, Leics. i. 461.

Despite – or perhaps because of – Quarles’s removal from the Leicestershire bench in 1655 (for reasons which are unclear), he was returned for the county in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656.23C231/6, p. 306. He was named to seven committees in this Parliament, including those for stating the public debt (1 Jan. 1657) and to consider a clause in the Humble Petition and Advice concerning the judicial functions of the proposed Cromwellian Other House (12 March).24CJ vii. 457a, 459a, 465a, 477b, 488b, 496b, 502a. This was his last appointment in the House, and he made no recorded contribution to debate. In February 1657 he had joined Beaumont, Pochin and William Stanley* in a letter to Leicester’s municipal leaders, urging them, ‘for the Gospel’s sake’, to support the efforts of the town’s godly minister William Barton to reconcile Presbyterians and Independents and to ‘agree in some way of discipline’ that would ensure ‘all such who are neither ignorant nor scandalous may be admitted to [receive the] sacrament, though differing in their judgements’.25Leicester Bor. Recs. iv. 437-8; Oxford DNB, ‘William Barton’.

Quarles was restored to the Leicestershire bench in 1660 and may have remained in office until his death. He made a brief and, it seems, partly nuncupative will in November 1666 in which he referred to his ‘lands, tenements and hereditaments’ and a bond due to him of about £2,000.26PROB11/326/27. He probably died shortly thereafter and was apparently residing in the parish of St Margaret’s Westminster at the time.27PROB11/327, f. 322v. However, his date and place of burial are not known. Having never married, he died without an heir, and therefore his estate was escheated by the crown. After the necessary legal proceedings, his estate passed to his kinsman Sir Thomas Dolman – MP for Reading in the Cavalier Parliament – whom Quarles had named in his will as his executor and primary beneficiary.28PROB11/326/27; PROB11/327, f. 322v-323; T51/37, p. 134; Cal. Treas. Bks. ii. 590; Nicholls, Leics. iv. 158, 161; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Thomas Dolman’.