Family and Education

1st. s. of Hugh Weldon of Horsleydown, Surr. m. Isabel, da. of one Beake of Haddenham, Bucks., 2s. 3da.2

Offices Held

?Surveyor of the dresser by 1544-45 or later.3

Biography

Edward Weldon is apt to be confused with an uncle and namesake who served in the Household but who seems to have died in or shortly after 1541. It was presumably the younger man who was surveyor of the dresser during the mid 1540s.4

Weldon was certainly associated with another uncle, Thomas Weldon of Cookham, Berkshire, also of the Household, who sat for Berkshire in 1542 and became high steward of Windsor in April 1548, and to whose influence he may well have owed his own election to the Parliament of 1547. He was returned with Richard Ward I, another household officer, with whose family the Weldons had long been close. The land purchase which established Edward Weldon as a landowner near Windsor was that of the manor of Shottesbrook, for which he and his uncle Thomas paid £963 to the court of augmentations in 1548. It included the site of the late college of St. John the Baptist, whose church was henceforth to serve as the parish church of Shottesbrook, as well as the rectories of Ashampstead and Basildon, and lands at Cookham and in the London parish of St. Edmund, Lombard Street. At an unknown date, Weldon also acquired the manor of Cresswell, near Bray, where he was living when he made his will.5

The probate copy of Weldon’s will is dated 1 Oct. 1552, but as he added a codicil on 12 May 1551 and died on 25 May, this must be an error, probably for 1550. He commended his soul to the Trinity, ‘firmly believing that at the last and general day of judgement I shall rise in my flesh and receive and have everlasting life’, but he left the place and manner of his burial to the executors. His wife Isabel was given the lease of Cresswell for 20 years, on condition that she provided for their sons Thomas and Edward until they became 15 and also for their daughters Joan, Cecily and Edith. She was then left two thirds of Shottesbrook and its adjacent property for 21 years and required, if she were with child, to give it £100 on its coming of age. She and Richard Randall of the Inner Temple were named executors of the will but Randall’s name was struck out in the codicil, to which, however, he was a witness. The will was not proved until 1555, by which time Isabel and Randall were married, but the custody and marriage of Weldon’s heir was granted on 20 June 1552 to Thomas Weldon, who had been appointed overseer. Weldon was replaced in the final session (1552) of the Parliament of 1547 by Thomas Little, a neighbour of his at Bray.6

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: T. F.T. Baker

Notes

• 1. Did not serve for the full duration of the Parliament.
• 2. Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. lvi), 139-40; PCC 31 More.
• 3. LP Hen VIII, xx.
• 4. R. C. Braddock, ‘R. household, 1540-60’ (Northwestern Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1971), 133-4, with additional information from Dr. Braddock; Hasted, Kent. ii. 411; Vis. Northants. (Hal. soc. lxxxvii), 234-8.
• 5. CPR, 1547-8, pp. 404-5.
• 6. PCC 31 More; C142/93/4; LP Hen. VIII, xv; CPR, 1550-3, p. 227.