LISLE, William (c.1632-1716), of the Middle Temple, London, and Evenley, Northants.

Lisle’s great-grandfather, who claimed descent from the younger son of a Northumberland knight, had settled at Brackley by the Elizabethan period.19Baker, Northants. i. 612; HP Commons 1604-1629. His uncle, William Lisle†, MP for Brackley in 1604, moved the family’s principal residence to nearby Evenley in the early seventeenth century.20Baker, Northants. i. 574. As the owner of the vicarage and advowson of Brackley, he presented the future Laudian cleric Richard Sibthorpe to the living in 1622.21INDI/17002, f. 40v; Bridges, Northants. 150; CSP Dom. 1639, p. 442. Lisle’s father, although a member of the London Grocers’ Company, was a woollen draper, with property interests that included a share in The Fortune playhouse in Shoreditch.22SP19/21, f. 141v; C24/728/90; Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muns. of Alleyn’s Coll. ed. G.F. Warner (1881), 55. He had been appointed a London common councilman by 1643, was elected a warden of the grocer’s company in 1649 and was an active member of the Middlesex bench during the 1650s.23CCAM 151; List of the Wardens of the Grocers’ Company ed. W.W. Grantham (1907), 27; Mdx. Co. Recs. iii. 223, 276. A committed Presbyterian, he served alongside the godly diarist Nehemiah Wallington as one of the ruling elders of St Leonard, Eastcheap.24Register-booke of the Fourth Classis ed. C.E. Surman (Harl. Soc. reg. ser. lxxxii-lxxxiii), 2; P.S. Seaver, Wallington’s World (1985), 150, 229; T. Liu, Puritan London (c.1986), 63, 117, 231-2.

Lisle’s father and his uncle William sided with Parliament during the civil war.25SP28/172, pt. 3, unfol.; SP28/199, f. 229v; LJ v. 277a; vi. 137b, 496b; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘William Lisle’. Lisle himself, too young to participate in the war, probably spent much of the 1650s pursuing his studies to become a barrister. In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament he was returned for Brackley on 30 December 1659 – presumably on the interest of his uncle William.26C219/47, unfol. It is perhaps not surprising that he made no recorded contribution to this Parliament’s proceedings, given that on 11 February 1659 he was called to the bar and the following month his father, Tobias Lisle, died.27MTR iii. 1133; Obituary of Smyth ed. Ellis, 50. On 16 April, Lisle was granted leave of absence – and a few days later, Parliament was dissolved.28CJ vii. 640a.

In order to strengthen Lisle’s interest at Brackley ahead of the elections to the 1660 Convention, his uncle William drew up a will on 12 March, bequeathing £120 to the town’s poor, to be disposed of by the mayor on the advice of Lisle, whom William made his executor. His will also referred to a bond that Lisle and his mother had signed and which had been deposited with John Crewe I*, ‘Mr Horseman’ (probably Edward Horsman*) and another trustee, to ensure the payment of his various bequests and debts.29PROB11/316, f. 218v. On 13 March, it was reported from Brackley that all but six of the town’s voters favoured Lisle and Crewe’s son Thomas Crew*, and on election day they were duly returned for the borough.30Northants. RO, Ellesmere (Brackley) Ms 613; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Brackley’. Both Lisle and Crew were listed by Philip, 4th Baron Wharton as likely supporters of a Presbyterian church settlement.31G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 338. It may have been Lisle rather than his uncle who was added to the Northamptonshire bench in the early 1660s.32C220/9/4, f. 60v; C193/12/3, f. 73.

Lisle seems to have abandoned his legal career when, at some point in the early 1660s, he succeeded to his uncle’s estate at Evenley.33PROB11/316, ff. 218v-219; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘William Lisle’. He was returned for Brackley again to the first Exclusion Parliament in 1679, lost his seat at the next election that year and regained it in 1681. In a government list of Northamptonshire whigs drawn up in the early 1680s, he was described as ‘a violent man in Parliament’.34SP29/421/216, f. 110v; CSP Dom. 1682, p. 618. Although he was added, or restored, to the county bench at the beginning of William III’s reign, there is no evidence that he stood for Parliament again.35Northants. RO, FH2226; HP Commons, 1660-1690.

Lisle died on 12 July 1716 and was buried at Evenley on 19 July.36Vis. Northants. 123. In his will, he charged his estate with bequests totalling just over £2,000 and annuities of £50.37PROB11/553, f. 254. He was the last member of his family to sit in Parliament.