BLOYS (BLOIS), William (1600-73), of Grundisburgh Hall and Ipswich, Suff.

The Bloys (or Blois) family had existed in Suffolk since at least the latter half of the fifteenth century and, when he compiled his own pedigree, William Bloys claimed a descent going back six generations. Sigars Hall at Grundisburgh had been in the family’s possession since 1553.20Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755/1, p. 108; Copinger, Manors of Suff. iii. 48; P. Bishop, Grundisburgh (Swavesey, 1992), 26. Bloys’s grandfather, William Bloyse, had been a portman at Ipswich and his father’s mercantile ventures, which had extended as far afield as Newfoundland, also operated from there.21Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/312/181; HA30/312/178; HA30/787, ff. 10a-125b; PROB11/139/121; Select Charters of Trading Co. ed. C.T. Carr (Selden Soc. xxviii.), 66; Bodl. Tanner 226, p. 75. According to Bloys’s calculations, the lands his grandfather had possessed had been worth £200 a year, those of his grandfather £500 and those of his father over £600.22Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, ff. 23a-24b. His attendance as a fellow commoner at Pembroke College, Cambridge, followed by time at Gray’s Inn, suggest that his increasingly affluent father destined him for life as a country gentleman, rather than as the merchant. This education and, still more, the wealth inherited on the death of his father made possible his marriage in 1624 to one of the daughters of a knight, the late Sir Thomas Wingfield.23Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, ff. 16a, 103a; Years later, on her epitaph, Bloys would make much of the fact that Cecily Wingfield was the great-granddaughter of a peer, Thomas Wentworth†, 1st Baron Wentworth, and, even more resonantly, also of Sir Anthony Wingfield†, the owner who had sold Sigars Hall to the Bloys family.24‘Some Suff. church notes’, 212. After their marriage, Bloys and his new wife settled at Sigars, which he renamed Grundisburgh Hall.25Bishop, Grundisburgh, 27.

There is no reason to think that Bloys directly involved himself in the family’s remaining shipping interests. Instead, he seems to have spent his time in scholarly pursuits. Several volumes survive of his extensive notes on the genealogy and heraldry of Suffolk, dating from the 1630s and later.26Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755/1-4; Soc. Antiq. MS 4, f. 179; MS 667; A Dictionary of Suff. Arms ed. J. Corder (Suff. Rec. Soc., viii); E. Farrer, ‘The Blois MSS’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch. xiv (1912), 147-226; J. Blatchly, The Topographers of Suff. (4th edn., 1981), 7. His friend and fellow antiquary, Matthias Candler, who was vicar at Coddenham about five miles from Grundisburgh, borrowed notes from him and thought him ‘a diligent and judicious observer of anything of worth’ on the subject of local heraldry.27Bodl. Tanner 226, pp. 40-70; Tanner 324, f. 72. Many years later, John Gibbon, then Bluemantle pursuivant, who had gleaned information from him, would also pay tribute to him as ‘the greatest armorialist, genealogist, and antiquary in those parts of England, and worthy of all credit and belief’.28J. Gibbon, Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam (1682), 150.

Confirmation that he was doing little else comes from his own hand. In 1632 he published Meditations upon the XLII Psalme ‘to absolve myself from any sinister abuse of that retired privacy which I have hitherto enjoyed’, preferring ‘to have my life embrightened by use, than consumed by the rust of ease’.29W. Bloys, Meditations upon the XLII Psalme (1632), sig. A2. This work of religious instruction probably had its roots in his family’s committed puritanism, expressing at length the same attitudes as his father, mother and sister, who had all left bequests in their wills to Samuel Ward, the outspoken town preacher of Ipswich.30Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/312/178; HA30/312/179; HA30/312/176; Wills from the Archdeaconry of Suff.: 1629-1636 ed. M.E. Allen and N.R. Evans (Boston, 1986), 213. His Calvinist outlook and an accompanying sense of guilt is apparent in his argument that some ways of spending one’s time are ‘commendable in themselves, so being rightly used, they may become helpful unto us, in making our calling and election sure’.31Bloys, Meditations, sig. A2v. Most of what he had to say was commonplace in such works of devotion. Inter alia, he opined that hunting (within reason) was useful as exercise and as practice for war and that drunkenness was especially prevalent among his contemporaries.32Bloys, Meditations, 50-4, 61-3. His comments on good kingship were no more original, conceiving of royal duties in terms of religious obligations. Acknowledging that ‘our anointed sovereign’ since the time when ‘that intolerable yoke of servile subjection unto Rome hath been cast off’ had been head of the church (a tradition he believed to be comparable to the ancient idea of the king as chief priest), he warned that ‘where much hath been given, there much will be required’.33Bloys, Meditations, 183. His ideal was summed up in the well-worn image of the king as ‘good shepherd’.34Bloys, Meditations, 184-5. All his arguments were supported by extensive marginal references to the appropriate classical and patristic authorities. Richard Sibbes, the preacher of Gray’s Inn, who published his own commentary on part of this psalm in 1635 and who alluded to Bloys as ‘a pious and studious gentleman of Gray’s Inn’ in his preface, evidently approved of Bloys’s work.35R. Sibbs, The Soules Conflict with it selfe (1635), sig. B2v.

In 1638, Bloys again launched into print. Again aimed at inspiring the reader to pursue a life of Protestant piety, Adam in his Innocencie differed from its predecessor in that it was a commentary not on a Biblical passage, but on the idea of gardens as symbols of the spiritual life.36W. Bloys, Adam in His Innocencie (1638). He admitted that ‘It may be thought a strange enterprise and unadvised choice, to undertake this new discovery; and to attempt a reformation in that, which hath been the instrument of two vices, vain ostentation and dull stupidity’.37Bloys, Adam, 2. To counter this objection he pointed out that, ‘It was the employment of Adam in the estate of innocency, to dress and keep the garden of Eden; which (in respect of fertility of the place) needed no husbandry; but that he might be a law to his posterity’.38Bloys, Adam, 3. The theme of gardens provided him with a lengthy series of ready-made conceits on which moral observations could be hung. Thus England had been before the Reformation ‘a garden of deliciousness unto the popes’ where ‘some of the most fruitful and godly were hewn down as unprofitable trees and cast into the fire’ but which, since the reign of Elizabeth, had been ‘the happy islands, where all things have flourished in excellent beauty and perfection’.39Bloys, Adam, 53-5. He strained all other possible angles on the subject in a similar fashion, although his enthusiasm for horticultural matters was patent.

In 1640, Bloys sold the family house in Ipswich for £310.40Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 23a. For that year’s Ship Money he was assessed at £1 13s 4d at Grundisburgh.41Suff. Ship-Money Returns, 152. His inactive life on his country estate soon ended, however. As a justice of the peace from mid-August 1641 he attended most of the meetings of the Suffolk quarter sessions at Woodbridge and occasionally those held at Ipswich.42C231/5, p. 468; Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/1, ff. 36, 47, 50v, 53v, 56v-57v, 62, 64, 67, 74v, 77, 80v, 81, 118. Once the civil war broke out, he committed himself fully to the cause of Parliament. He and his colleagues ignored the attempt by the king in October 1643 to terminate the commission of those Suffolk justices who supported Parliament.43Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 43. From 1642 onwards Bloys sat on the county committee for Suffolk and was a regular signatory of its warrants; he was also named to the other major committees for the county, including those for the sequestration of delinquents, the Eastern Association and the New Model ordinance.44Suff. ed. Everitt, 52, 60-1, 63-4, 131; SP28/243; SP28/176: accounts of Samuel Moody, f. 7v; Add. 40630, f. 144; Add. 5508, f. 134; Eg. 2647, f. 72. In June 1645 he was among local gentlemen appointed to control Landguard Fort.45Suff. ed. Everitt, 71. When Lady Felton tried to persuade her son-in-law, John Hobart*, to change sides in November 1643, she identified her ‘cousin Bloys’ as someone with the right contacts who might ease his acceptance into the ranks of the parliamentarians.46Bodl. Tanner 69, f. 108v; A.L. Browne, ‘Lady Elizabeth Felton and her daughters’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch. xxii. 171-2. Of particular significance was Bloys’s service on the Suffolk committee for scandalous ministers between 1644 and 1646. He attended all but one of the meetings held in the eastern half of the county.47Suff. Cttees. for Scandalous Ministers ed. Holmes, 25. This made him an appropriate choice in 1645 as one of the elders for the classis covering Ipswich and the hundreds of Colneis and Carlford. His fellow elders included Nathaniel Bacon* and Robert Dunkon*.48Shaw, Hist Eng. Church, ii. 424.

He did not shirk efforts to raise taxation. In December 1643 he and Nathaniel Bacon of Friston (father of Thomas Bacon*) were ordered by the county committee to expedite the paying in of money for the parliamentarian army to be raised by the Woodbridge division.49Suff. ed. Everitt, 43-4. He was collector for the hundreds of Carlford, Colneis and Threding in raising of the fourth instalment of the £400,000 levy and received sums totalling £169 15s 5d from the county assessments, mostly for the purchase of horses.50P. Fisher, For the...Committees for the County of Suffolke (1648), 19, 25, 28 (E.448.13). He himself had lent £50 17s 7d in plate to the collection for the public faith and later £14 for the supply of the Scots army.51Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 7a. By December 1646 he had paid £765 9s 6d in taxation and parliamentary contributions, a figure which he calculated had risen to £1,643 by the end of 1662.52Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, ff. 1a, 181a.

Some time in the later 1640s Bloys was appointed as colonel of one of the four infantry regiments raised by the Suffolk militia. Probably the only occasion on which he saw action was the parliamentarian siege of Colchester, to which these militia regiments were sent in June 1648. One of the fortifications built to protect the besieging army was named ‘Fort Bloyes’ in his honour. After the fall of Colchester in August 1648, these regiments were disbanded.53A Diary of the Siege of Colchester ([1648], 669.f.13.6); Bodl. Tanner 226, p. 75; ‘Ancient families’ ed. Haslewood, 135; Ive, ‘Local dimension of defence’, 230-3. The sergeant-major of his regiment, John Hodges of Woodbridge, subsequently married his sister, Abigail.54Add. 15520 , f. 12; ‘Some Suff. church notes’, 212.

The king’s execution in 1649 brought Bloys’s involvement in county affairs to an abrupt end. He turned up, as usual, at the Woodbridge quarter sessions on 10 January but thereafter he absented himself.55Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/1, f. 118. At first, the government optimistically continued to name him to the Suffolk commissions of the peace and assessment commissions and it was not until after 1652 that they acknowledged his unwillingness to co-operate by omitting him.56C193/13/3, f. 60v; The Names of the Justices (1650), 53 (E.1238.4); C193/13/4, f. 93v.

Meanwhile, Bloys’s longstanding connection with members of the Bacon family deepened. When in 1633 his wife’s sister Katherine Wingfield had married Francis Bacon*, she had transferred lands at Grundisburgh and Otley which she had received from her new husband into the control of Bloys for the use of her sister.57Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/312/28. In 1647 Bloys had married his eldest surviving son, William, to Martha, daughter of the late Sir Robert Brooke† of Cockfield Hall, Yoxford and sister of Thomas Bacon’s wife Elizabeth.58Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 22a; HA30/312/391; HA30/312/13; HA30/312/267; HA30/312/262. Bloys, Thomas Bacon and Francis Bacon were all involved in associated transactions.59Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/312/13; HD11/52/1/19. Complications with the Brooke inheritance were resolved by a deal by which Bloys collected the rents from Hinton Hall, which had been designated by Cooke to cover his daughters’ portions, in return for a moiety in the manor of Westhouse.60Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/312/267. In May 1651 Bloys and his family moved back to the family home at Ipswich, renting it for £100 a year from his brother-in-law Francis Bacon* who had purchased it at some point.61Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 16a; Add. 15520, f. 12v. Bloys borrowed £35 from Bacon in 1653 so that he could pay off a debt to his relative, Bartholomew Hall, as executor for Hall’s late father, Thomas Hall of Clopton.62  Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 144a-b; Wills of the Archdeaconry of Suff.: 1637-1640 ed. M.E. Allen and N.R. Evans (Boston, 1986), 280-1. In 1656 the pair would act together to bring a legal action against Sir John Jacob* alleging mismanagement in the handling of the estate of Sir Robert Wingfield, his infant grandson and their great-nephew.63Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/369/379/31; CB, ii. 17. Moreover, Bacon was staying at Bloys’s house in Ipswich in 1663 when he died.64Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 183a. Family pride may have prompted Bloys in 1654 to send his son Robert, a student at Cambridge, a copy of one of the several works by Francis Bacon†, Viscount St Alban, which could be described as his ‘Natural History’.65Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 21a.

Bloys took part in his first election as a candidate in July 1654 in the poll at Ipswich for the ten Suffolk seats. According to his own record of the result, he received 1,059 votes, making him one of only four of the candidates to secure a thousand votes or over.66Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755, ff. 140v; P. Pinckney, ‘The Suff. elections to the Protectorate Parliaments’ in Politics and People in Revolutionary Eng. ed. C. Jones, M. Newitt, S. Roberts (Oxford, 1986), 206. Setting out for Westminster on 31 August, he should have been in time for the opening of the new Parliament. About a week later he returned to Suffolk, but he was back in London by the second week of October and stayed there until mid-January 1655.67Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, ff. 150b-151a, 152b. Nothing is known of his activity at Westminster.

Again thanks to Bloys’s notes, the details of the results in the Suffolk parliamentary election of August 1656 have survived. By receiving 1,393 votes to his name, Bloys was one of only four individuals who had been returned in 1654 who were re-elected, and the only one in the top five places then to remain there, albeit only just.68Suff. RO (Ipswich), GC17/755, f. 140v. However, in the short term this availed him nothing because the council of officers included him among those it deemed unfit to take their seats.69CJ vii. 425b. The nine days he spent in London in September 1656 was probably aimed at getting the decision overturned rather than actually taking his seat.70Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 160b. He did do so in early 1658, when these exclusions were lifted, as he was then added to the committee to which the marriages bill had been referred (3 Feb.).71CJ vii. 591a.

By January 1660 Bloys was among those who signed the Suffolk petition for a free Parliament and with Robert Brooke† (his son’s brother-in-law) and Sir Henry Felton*, he presented it to George Monck* at St Albans.72Lttr. Agreed unto, and subscribed by, the Gentlemen, Ministers, Freeholders and Seamen of the Co. of Suff. (1659); Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA93/7/36; Suff. ed. Everitt, 128; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 332. He had to wait until the end of the year before being restored to the commission of the peace.73Bodl. Tanner 226, p. 189; C220/9/4, f. 82; Suff. RO (Ipswich), B105/2/4, ff. 133v, 141v, 148, 151, 191v; B105/2/5, ff. 40v, 47v, 54v-55, 69v, 84, 97v; C220/9/4, f. 82; C193/12/3, f. 96v. Bloys did not stand for the Convention but in 1661 he was returned for Ipswich with John Sicklemor*, causing one observer to complain that the town had shown insufficient loyalty to the king in its choices.74Add. 27396, f. 248. Whatever the justice of this, Bloys was willing to present the king with a New Year’s gift of £20 the following January.75Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 178b. His parliamentary profile was higher than his non-appearance in the committee lists and among the recorded speakers might suggest. Between May 1661 and February 1665 he made eight trips to London, totalling approximately nine months’ residence in the capital, for the purpose of attending Parliament. There then followed a gap of almost two years, during which he stayed at home in Suffolk, until December 1666 when the Commons sent out a messenger to demand of him why he was absent. Having paid £4 to cover the messenger’s expenses, he resumed his attendance. Between then and November 1670 he visited Westminster a further seven times, spending in total about eight months there.76Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, ff. 176b, 178b, 182b, 183b, 186b, 188b, 191b, 193b, 194b, 195b, 199b, 200b, 201b; CJ viii. 663b.

Bloys spent over £40 in 1667 on the erection of the monument to his parents and to his late wife in the chancel of the parish church at Grundisburgh.77Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, f. 193a; ‘Some Suff. church notes’, 211-12. When he drew up his will in February 1673, he asked to be buried there too. Having already established his eldest son, William, who had been knighted in 1661 and who was now the husband of Jane, daughter of Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston*, he now made provision for his three other surviving children.78Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/787, ff. 22a, 25b-29b; HD1618/2; Vis. Suff. 1664-1668, 138. In a codicil, he left ‘nine small manuscripts of antiquity tied together’ to his eldest son. His nephew, Charles, who was also to get his library, was to inherit other manuscripts and his commonplace books when he came of age. The remaining manuscripts went to his sister and executrix, Abigail Hodges.79Suff. RO (Ipswich), HA30/312/183. He died on 13 November 1673. His grandson, Charles Blois†, was created a baronet in 1686, and was elected to Parliament eight times after 1689.