AGLIONBY, Edward II (1520-?91), of Temple Balsall, Warws. and London.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Mar. 1553
? 1559

Family and Education

b. 1520, s. of Richard Aglionby of Carlisle, Cumb. educ. Eton c.1532; King’s, Camb. scholar 1536, fellow 1539-48, BA 1540, MA 1544; incorp. Oxf. 1566. m. (1) bef. 29 Mar. 1554, Catherine, da. of Roger Wigston of Wolston, Warws., wid. of Thomas Warren and Giles Forster (d.1549), of Balsall, at least 1s. 1da. all pres. d.v.p.; ?(2) Mary.2

Offices Held

J.p.q. Warws. 1561-?d.; recorder, Warwick Aug. 1572-Sept. 1587, Stratford-on-Avon c.1578-86, Coventry 1581-c.88; dep. custos rot. Warws. by 1575.3

Biography

The Members for Carlisle are given on the list for the Parliament of 1547, in its revised form dating from the close of 1551, as Edward Eglionby senior and Edward Eglionby junior. The first was doubtless the ‘Edward Eglonby armiger’ elected in 1547 with Thomas Dalston, and the second the Member by-elected in place of Dalston, who died on 22 July 1550. For the older Aglionby this was to be the end of a career in the Commons which had begun in 1529, whereas for the younger it marked the beginning of one which was to last until 1571: he was to be re-elected to the next Parliament and may have sat in Elizabeth’s first one (when the christian name is lost) before doing so in her third. What is less clear is how the two Members were related. Foster made them father and son but this cannot be reconciled with school and college registers, which show the younger one’s father to have been Richard Aglionby of Carlisle: he may thus have been either a nephew or a cousin of his older namesake. There is still, however, a residual problem of chronology: if he was the Edward Aglionby who in 1556 or 1557 was licensed to grant a yearly rent of 16s.6d. to his son Bernard, he must have married earlier than his birthdate of 1520 would seem to allow, and the possibility of a mistaken identity cannot be excluded.4

Aglionby’s political affiliation admits of no such doubt. A contemporary at Cambridge of William Cecil, he wrote a Latin letter to ‘his right worshipful friend Mr. Cecil with my Lord Protector’s grace’ in which he conveyed the salutations of ‘dominus meus Lisleus’. The letter, which is dated 3 Dec. but without a year, must belong to either 1547 or 1548, and the Viscount Lisle mentioned be John Dudley, first surviving son of the then Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland. This Lord Lisle, who bore that title from February 1547 until October 1551, when on his father’s elevation to the dukedom he became Earl of Warwick, was doubtless instrumental in Aglionby’s by-election for Carlisle in 1551 and re-election there to the Parliament of March 1553. It is not clear whether Aglionby followed Warwick in the attempt to exclude Mary from the throne; in June 1554 he sued out a pardon, but the death of Warwick and the eclipse of the Dudley interest account for the intermission in Aglionby’s Membership until Elizabeth came to the throne.5

It may have been his service with Lisle which had introduced Aglionby to Warwickshire, but his establishment there probably followed his marriage to Catherine Wigston, who brought with her half her former husband’s manor of Balsall. It was as of Temple Balsall and London that Aglionby was thereafter known, and from July 1553 he had different members of the Dudley family as lords of the manor there. On the eve of the crisis of 1553 he joined with Henry Higford of Solihull (a relative of the Wigstons) in buying a number of Warwickshire properties for £1,679, and it was presumably with the management of these that he occupied himself until he was able to return to public affairs. He may also have been sustained by the scholarly bent which had found expression in his translation of A notable and marvellous epistle of the famous Doctor Matthew Gribalde, professor of the law in the university of Padua(1550), and by the faith in the supremacy of the human conscience which he was to expound in a famous passage from an Elizabethan parliamentary debate. His later career as a justice of the peace and recorder of three Warwickshire boroughs was to be spread over three decades, although a slight doubt attaches to 1591 as the year of his death.6

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Alan Davidson

Notes

  • 1. Did not serve for the full duration of the Parliament; Hatfield 207.
  • 2. DNB giving date of birth. Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 38; Dugdale, Warws. i. 205; CPR, 1555-7, p. 431; VCH Warws. iv. 151; PCC 43 Populwell, 72 Sainberbe. M. McKisack, Med. Hist. Tudor Age, 34 wrongly describes Aglionby as of the Middle Temple.
  • 3. Stowe 570, f. 15v; Black Bk. Warwick, ed. Kemp, 86 seq.; Mins. Stratford-upon-Avon (Dugdale Soc. v), iii. 161; P. Poole, Coventry, 369; VCH Warws. viii. 249n.
  • 4. J. Foster, MPs, 22; CPR, 1555-7, p. 431.
  • 5. Lansd. 2(28), f. 72; CPR, 1553-4, pp. 416-17.
  • 6. CPR, 1553, pp. 235-9; VCH Warws. iv. 88.