SAVILE, William (1599-1657), of Newton, Lincs.

Savile was descended from a junior branch of a family that had settled near Elland, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, by the mid-fifteenth century.23Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 397-8. His father, Gabriel Savile, had acquired the manor of Newton (which lay about ten miles west of Grantham) through his first wife and had made it his principal residence.24Lincs. Peds. 861. Although his estate was relatively modest in size (indeed part of it was held as a tenant of Sir William Armyne*), Gabriel Savile had prospered sufficiently at his death to bequeath his daughter 1,000 marks, or about £600, for her portion.25C142/389/98; PROB11/135, f. 316v. William received a gentleman’s education at Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn, but his only local office of any importance before the outbreak of civil war was that of a sewers commissioner.

In the spring of 1642, Savile helped collect contributions for the relief of distressed Protestants in Ireland, and he and his brother Thomas parted with £3 and £2 respectively in that cause.26SP28/193, pt. 2, ff. 8, 16. Thomas Savile was a leading signatory to the Lincolnshire declaration of late June ‘against all such as shall attempt to separate his Majesty from his great and faithful council of Parliament’. But the William Savile whose name was listed among the main body of the signatories was probably a namesake.27PA, Main Pprs. 4 July 1642. The Captain or Major Savile who was captured by the royalists at Grantham in March 1643 was almost certainly not William, as some authorities have claimed, but his brother Thomas, who was a junior officer in the Lincolnshire parliamentarian forces.28A.A. Garner, Col. Edward King (Grimsby, 1970), 48; Mercurius Aulicus no. 13 (26 Mar.-2 Apr. 1643), 155-6 (E.96.5); J. Lilburne, England’s Birthright Justified (1645), 18 (E.304.17); Lilburne, The Just Mans Justification (1646), 19-20 (E.340.12); Lincs. Peds. 861. There is no evidence that William Savile held military office. However, he may well have been the William Savile who, by October 1644, was a member of one of the local commissions set up under the Eastern Association – possibly that for removing ‘idle, ill-affected [to Parliament], scandalous and insolent clergy’.29Peterhouse Archives Camb. Misc. vol. 3, p. 62; ‘The royalist clergy of Lincs.’ ed. J.W.F. Hill, Lincs. Architectural and Arch. Soc. ii. 116-7. His reasons for siding with Parliament are obscure but were probably linked to his religious sympathies, for if his later career is any guide he was a man of godly convictions.

Savile was an active member of the Lincolnshire county committee and contributed to its work in settling godly ministers within the Eastern Association.30CJ iv. 270b; LJ vii. 575b; E. King, A Discovery of the Arbitrary, Tyrannicall and Illegal Actions of Some of the Committee of the County of Lincoln (1647), 3, 23 (E.373.3); Plundered Ministers of Lincs. ed. W. E. Foster (Guildford, 1900), 8, 83, 94. He was also closely involved in the committee’s protracted dispute with the Lincolnshire Presbyterian and localist agitator, Colonel Edward King, who alleged in 1646 that Savile, William Bury*, Thomas Lister* and several other committeeman had ignored the kingdom’s ‘fundamental laws’ by acting as his ‘accusers and prosecutors’ at Westminster and his ‘prosecutors and judges’ in the county.31King, Discovery, 1, 22, 23, 26-7. For his part, Savile signed several of the committee’s letters to Westminster, complaining of King’s contempt for parliamentary authority and rabble-rousing activities.32Bodl. Nalson VI, f. 72; Tanner 50, f. 478; Tanner 58, f. 39. Despite his opposition to King, Savile was probably a man of Presbyterian sympathies himself, which probably explains his removal from the Kesteven bench and omission from the Lincolnshire assessment commission in 1650.

Savile probably welcomed the establishment of the protectorate in 1653, and he seems to have supported the Cromwellian religious settlement, being named as one of Lincolnshire’s ejectors in August 1654. In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, he was returned for the eighth of Lincolnshire’s ten places.33Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. 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. Having been added to all three Lincolnshire commissions of the peace in March 1656, he was returned for the county again that summer in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament.34C231/6, p. 328. Of the ten successful candidates, Savile received the smallest number of votes on a poll.35Supra, ‘Lincolnshire’. However, while four of the successful candidates were allowed to take their seats, the remaining six, among them Savile, were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as enemies of the government.36CJ vii. 425b. Perhaps the most likely explanation for his exclusion is that he was accounted hostile to the rule of the major-generals.

Savile died in about November 1657, soon after making his will.37C22/829/42. His place and date of burial are not known. He had never married, and according to the deponents in a 1661 chancery suit involving his will he had left a personal estate worth over £1,000 and had assigned the bulk of his landed estate to his civil-war colleagues Francis Clinton alias Fines* and Humphrey Walcott* to hold in trust for his nephew William – the son of his deceased brother Thomas.38C22/829/42; Gibbons, Notes on Vis. of Lincs. 267. However, there is no evidence that this will was ever entered in probate. None of Savile’s immediate family sat in Parliament.