BORLASE, William (1620-65), of Gt. Marlow, Bucks.

The younger brother of Sir John Borlase*, this MP had very much followed in his brother’s footsteps. William had accompanied John when he went up to Oxford in 1635 and they had then proceeded together to the Inner Temple.13Al. Ox.; I. Temple database. John’s marriage to a daughter of Sir John Bankes† was also to be of importance to William, for in time he would marry another of the Bankes daughters. Their father, Sir William Borlase†, who had died in 1629 when all his children were still young, had made provision for William under the terms of the trusts he had created in 1628, but it was John who inherited the bulk of the family estates.14PROB11/156/475; VCH Bucks. iii. 80.

Borlase is not known to have played any part in the civil war. He was then still in his early twenties and, as a younger son, could not expect immediate promotion to any local offices. From 1646 he was serving as a Buckinghamshire justice of the peace and in 1649, in the wake of the regicide, he was nominated as an assessment commissioner.15A. and O. On the face of it, this suggests that Borlase was in tune with Parliament and with the republic, but his removal from the commission of the peace in the spring of 1652 shows that by then his loyalty to the commonwealth was considered suspect.16C231/6, p. 235. In March 1657 he and a number of other residents of Great Marlow wrote to their MP, Bulstrode Whitelocke*, concerning the repair of the local bridge.17Whitelocke, Diary, 459.

Borlase’s election to the 1659 Parliament as MP for Great Marlow represented the revival of Borlase influence in their local constituency.18Whitelocke, Diary, 504. Once elected, he played no known part in the proceedings of this Parliament. He retained this seat at the next two elections, but again he made little or no impact in those Parliaments. On his death in 1665, his only son, John, was still a minor, so the administration of the estates passed to Frances, the widow of Borlase’s stepbrother, Francis Hippesley.19Borlase, ‘Hist.’, 284. As John died unmarried in 1681, the family estates were then divided between Borlase’s three surviving daughters. His grandson, John Wallop, was raised to the peerage as Viscount Lymington in 1720 and was created earl of Portsmouth in 1743.20CP.