William Holles
Sir William Holles (or Hollyes) (1471?– 20 October, 1542) rose from apprenticeship to a mercer to become master warden of his company and Lord Mayor of London.[1]
He was the son of Thomas Holles of Stoke, Coventry.[2]
William invested his fortune in purchasing land mostly in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, but also in Staffordshire, Middlesex and Essex. This property portfolio passed down through several generations of the family and became the basis of the property owned by the Earl of Clare. He left the bulk of the estate to his grandson William (grandfather of John Holles, 1st Earl of Clare).
He was a Sheriff of London in 1528 and elected Lord Mayor of London in 1539.
He left £200 in his will to pay for the Coventry Cross which was built in 1544, and taken down in 1771.[3] A replica was unveiled in 1976.
Family
He married Elizabeth, daughter of George Scopham. Among their children was the second Sir William Holles (1509–91), who purchased Haughton Hall in Haughton, Nottinghamshire,[4] and married Anne, daughter of John Denzel, of Denzel, Cornwall.
References
- ↑ William Holles, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- ↑ Stoke at British History Online, in Victoria County History, County of Warwick Volume 8, 1969, p.98. Citing Sir William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire..., revised by William Thomas, 1730, refuting John Stow who took his father to be another William Holles, a baker in the City of London. Dictionary of National Biography follows Stow, as cited in Joseph Rodgers, Haughton: The rapid rise of the Holles family, The Scenery of Sherwood Forest with an Account of some Eminent People there, 1908; copy online at Nottinghamshire history website
- ↑ Coventry Cross at British History Online, in Victoria County History, County of Warwick Volume 8, 1969
- ↑ Thomas M Blagg, Haughton Hall, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, XXXV (1931); copy online at Nottinghamshire history website