FRANKLAND, William (c.1573-1640), of Great Thirkleby, nr. Thirsk, Yorks.; formerly of Rye, Stanstead Abbots, Herts.

Frankland was descended from a Hertfordshire yeoman family, of which a junior branch, in the person of his grandfather, had settled at Fewston, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, during the Elizabethan period.27Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 243; Knaresborough Wills ed. F. Collins (Surt. Soc. civ), 165-6. His family’s fortunes were founded on the industry of his great-uncle, William Frankland senior, a successful London clothworker, who had prospered sufficiently by the early years of Elizabeth’s reign to purchase several manors in Hertfordshire and the Yorkshire manors of Great Thirkleby and of Blubberhouses, near Fewston.28PROB11/59, f. 151v; Dugdale’s Vis. Yorks. ii. 243; VCH Herts. iii. 368, 370-1, 417, 437, 474; VCH N. Riding, ii. 57; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘William Frankland’.

Faced with the prospect of a meagre inheritance, William Frankland junior (the future MP) embarked on a career in the law and was living by 1606 at Barnard’s Inn, London. In that year, however, his fortunes improved considerably, when, on his marriage to a daughter of the Hertfordshire knight Sir Henry Boteler, his uncle Hugh Frankland – who had inherited some of William Frankland senior’s properties – assigned to him the manors of Thirkleby and Islebeck, near Thirsk, and most of his lands in Hertfordshire and Essex.29Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/DD94, box 23, parcel 3 (Indenture 19 May 1606). Frankland initially resided in Hertfordshire, but between 1619 and 1624 he sold most of his properties in the south while augmenting his estate in Yorkshire and established his main residence at Thirkleby.30C54/2547/4; C113/226; N. Yorks. RO, ZPN 3/3, Frankland of Thirkleby mss; Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/DD94, box 25, parcel 2; VCH Herts. iii. 371, 474.

Frankland’s standing in the Thirsk area was confirmed in 1628 with his return for the borough to the third Caroline Parliament. The speed with which he attained such an honour may have owed something to the approval of his influential neighbour Thomas Belasyse†, Lord Fauconberg, who had stood with his mother Lady Belasyse as godparents to Frankland’s youngest son Thomas in 1625. Among the other gentlefolk who had agreed to stand as godparents to Frankland’s children were Sir John Boteler†, Sir Ralph Coningsby†, the future parliamentarians Sir Thomas Dacres* and Sir Richard Lucy*, the courtier Endymion Porter*, ‘Lady Manners’ (perhaps a relative of the duke of Buckingham’s wife) and Lady Jane Ley, wife of Sir James Ley (created 1st earl of Marlborough in 1626), who served as lord treasurer during the mid-1620s.31Leeds Univ. Lib. YAS/DD94, box 5, p. 3 Several of these figures, notably Endymion Porter and the countess of Marlborough, and possibly Lady Manners, had close connections with the duke of Buckingham’s circle. Whether Frankland, too, was associated with the duke during the 1620s is not known. It is also noteworthy that the Frankland godparents included few, if any, men and women of strongly puritan views. This perhaps reflected Frankland’s own piety, which may have been somewhat conservative in nature. It is probably no coincidence that his closest acquaintance among the Yorkshire gentry was Lord Fauconberg, himself a rather lukewarm Protestant with strong Catholic connections.

That Lord Fauconberg was in some sort Frankland’s patron is clear from his willingness in 1632 to arrange a match between Frankland’s eldest son Henry and a daughter of Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*, later 2nd Baron Fairfax and parliamentarian general. Fauconberg wrote to Sir Ferdinando’s father, Thomas 1st Baron Fairfax† of Denton, urging him to think seriously about an alliance with the Franklands

I perceive his estate will be about £800 per annum. I did but give a touch upon portion, and I perceived that he [William Frankland] had, in [the case of] a good family, offered £1,500. I pray you be pleased to think upon it, for it is a clear estate and a pretty gentleman and not good to let pass so good a fortune.32Bodl. Fairfax 31, f. 21.

Sir Ferdinando Fairfax was certainly enthusiastic about the match, assuring his father that ‘the family is very ancient, the estate good and the owner of it honest to deal with and able to do a son, or friend, many real benefits’. In his eagerness to form an alliance with Frankland’s ‘good’ estate, Sir Ferdinando apparently overlooked the fact that his proposed son-in-law, far from being of a ‘very ancient’ gentry family, was the grandson of a Yorkshire yeoman.33Bodl. Fairfax 31, ff. 38, 49. But though apparently favoured by both families, the match was never concluded, probably because of a disagreement over the terms of the marriage settlement.

Frankland was an active member of the North Riding bench, working closely during the 1630s with his fellow magistrates Henry Belasyse*, Thomas Heblethwayte* and John Wastell*.34N. Yorks. RO, ZAG 282, Bell of Thirsk mss (mic. 1704); N. Riding QS Recs. ed. J.C. Atkinson (N. Riding Rec. Soc. iv), 12, 186. By 1635, he had been commissioned a captain in the trained band regiment of Viscount Fairfax of Gilling (Thomas Fairfax II†); his fellow captains included Sir John Bourchier* and Henry Darley*.35Add. 28082, f. 80v. Frankland’s eldest son Henry was knighted at Dublin by Lord Deputy Wentworth (Sir Thomas Wentworth†, the future earl of Strafford) in 1636; and in 1637, Sir William Pennyman* recommended Frankland to Wentworth for a colonelcy in the trained bands.36Sheffield Archives, WWM/Str P17/324; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 204. Wentworth preferred another candidate, however, possibly because of Frankland’s close association with Lord Fauconberg, who was among the lord deputy’s leading opponents in Yorkshire.

In the elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640, Frankland was returned for Thirsk, together with Fauconberg’s son John Belasyse.37Supra, ‘Thirsk’. Frankland received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate. His inactivity at Westminster contrasts with the concern he showed in Yorkshire at the heavy burdens imposed by the bishops’ wars. In July and August, he signed petitions from the county’s ‘disaffected’ gentry to the king, in which they complained about the cost of military charges and pleaded poverty in the face of royal efforts to mobilise the trained bands against the Scots.38Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 1214-15, 1231. He was not among the signatories to the third such petition, of mid-September, in which the petitioners reiterated the demand made by a group of dissident English peers that Charles should summon a Parliament. However, on 5 October, he signed the Yorkshire county indenture returning two of the summer’s leading petitioners, Ferdinando Lord Fairfax and Henry Belasyse, to the Long Parliament.39C219/43/3/89.

His health declining by the autumn of 1640, Frankland apparently made no effort to retain his seat at Thirsk, and early in October he was replaced by John Belasyse’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Ingram.40Supra, ‘Thirsk’. Frankland died the following month and was buried at Thirkleby on 30 November.41Thirkleby par. reg. In his will, in which he made no reference to his landed estate, he left his personal estate to his daughter Frances and her husband, the godly East Riding knight Sir Hugh Bethell.42Borthwick, Wills in York Registry, Bulmer deanery, May 1641 bdle; Cliffe, Yorks. 267. Although most of Frankland’s friends, including Lord Fauconberg and his sons Henry and John Belasyse, would become royalists, Frankland’s eldest son Henry sided with Parliament in the civil war.43Cliffe, Yorks. 359. Frankland’s descendants represented Thirsk for more than a century after the Restoration.44Carroll, ‘Yorks’, 252.