Family and Education

b. by 1468, 1st s. of Sir Henry Ferrers of Hambleton, Rutland and East Peckham, Kent by 2nd w. Margaret, da. and coh. of William Hextall of East Peckham and Gerrard’s Bromley, Staffs., wid. of William Whetenhall. m. settlement 1497, Constance (d.1551), da. and coh. of Nicholas Brome (d. 10 Oct. 1517) of Baddesley Clinton, 4s. 6da. suc. fa. 28 Dec. 1500. Kntd. 25 Sept. 1513.2

Offices Held

Esquire of the body by 1509; bailiff, manors of Snitterfield and Warwick, Warws. 1509-d.; sewer by 1511; j.p. Warws. 1511-d.; commr. subsidy 1512, 1514, 1515, 1523, 1524, musters 1522; other commissions 1519-d.; sheriff, Warws. and Leics. 1513-14, 1518-19, Worcs. 1528-35; steward, manor of Knowle, Warws. at d.3

Biography

Edward Ferrers’s father was a younger son of the family of Tamworth, Staffordshire, who made his career at court and in his second wife’s county of Kent, the shire for which he sat in Parliament and of which he was three times sheriff. His wife’s manor of Hextalls Court in East Peckham passed, however, on her death to her son by an earlier marriage, and although Edward Ferrers retained some interest in Kent—as late as 1506 he was described as of Peckham and he died holding lands in Brenchley and Hadloy—and inherited Hambleton in Rutland, it was on his wife’s estate at Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire that he was to settle. His father had evidently introduced him into the service of the crown and as early as September 1500 he was among the witnesses to the surrender of the great seal by the executors of Cardinal Morton. In 1509 he attended the funeral of Henry VII and two years later the infant Prince Henry’s. He had already received his first reward of the reign, the bailiwick of Warwick and Snitterfield and in the years that followed he was to obtain several grants of wardships. He was knighted at Tournai, having led a band of 100 men on the campaign, he attended the Greenwich banquet in 1517, and three years later he was a commissioner to oversee footmen at the Field of Cloth of Gold and afterwards served at the meeting with Charles V at Gravelines.4

Ferrers was concurrently establishing himself in the government of his adopted shire, only being employed elsewhere, apart from his activities as a courtier, in two searches of London in 1519 and 1524. He evidently proved his worth for in July 1528 he was chosen to serve out the shrieval term in Worcestershire of his fellow-courtier and Warwickshire landowner Sir William Compton; moreover, although he seems to have been a stranger to the shire, he was retained in the office until his death, an arrangement which if not unprecedented, for it had obtained under Compton himself, was certainly unusual. He was thus a sheriff in 1529 when returned as junior knight for his own shire of Warwickshire. This is the only occasion on which Ferrers, then in or approaching his sixties, is known to have sat, but he may have done so earlier, the names of the Warwickshire knights being unknown for the four previous Henrician Parliaments. Nothing is known of his role in the Commons and there is no indication that he shared the strong Catholic views of his fellow-knight Sir George Throckmorton, with whose father he had been associated as early as 1504. Outside the House he was involved as sheriff of Worcestershire in a dispute over election expenses with the knights for that shire, (Sir) John Russell I and Sir Gilbert Talbot. He evidently remained in favour until his death. On 24 June 1535 he wrote from Baddesley Clinton to thank Cromwell for the pains the minister had taken in a dispute between Ferrers’s son-in-law and one Mr. Wyott or Wyatt. He was then too ill to visit Cromwell himself but sent a message by a Mr. Wigston, presumably Roger Wigston, a Member for Coventry in this Parliament, who was soon to be involved in the electioneering following Ferrers’s death, of which the outcome is unknown.5

Ferrers died on 29 Aug. 1535 and was buried at Baddesley, where his wife later set up a window to his and her own memory. In the will which he had made on i o July and added to on 24 Aug., and which was later to be contested by his surviving sons, he listed lands in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Rutland, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, as well as some tenements beside London Wall. His wife was sole executrix and his overseers a serjeant-at-law, Sir Thomas Willoughby, his ‘cousin’ Thomas Marrow (the father of the Member of that name), and Thomas Holte. His eldest son had died in 1526 and the heir was his grandson, Edward Ferrers. Ferrers’s wife survived him by some 16 years and, according to the tenor of her will, the administration of her husband’s was committed in 1546 to Richard Mountney, one of his creditors.6

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: S. M. Thorpe

Notes

• 1. Did not serve for the full duration of the Parliament.
• 2. Date of birth estimated from age at fa.’s i.p.m., CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 681, 853. Dugdale, Warws. ii. 973; Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 5; CCR, 1485-1500, p. 213; VCH Warws. iv. 18.
• 3. LP Hen. VIII, i, iii-v, vii, viii, add.; Statutes, iii. 85, 114, 171.
• 4. Hasted, Kent, v. 100-1, 177, 286; CCR; 1500-9, pp. 21, 242; LP Hen. VIII, i-iii, viii.
• 5. LP Hen. VIII, iii, iv, vii, viii, add.; CCR, 1500-9, p. 158; E13/214/11d.
• 6. VCH Warws. iv. 18; PCC 27 Hogen, 29 Bucke; CPR, 1553, p. 413; Vis. Warws. 69; LP Hen. VIII, xiii.