Sir Henry Ashley, Jr., Kt., MP

DORSET 1563

Family and Education

• b. 2 Oct. 1519, son of Henry Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles by Radegund, daughter of Robert Gilbert of Witcombe, Somerset.
• m. by 1548, Catherine, daughter of Sir John Bassett of Umberleigh, Devon, 2 sons including Henry†.
• succeeded father 1 Mar. 1549.
• Knighted 2 Oct. 1553.[2]

Offices Held

• Deputy vice-admiral Dorset 1550-82;
• Commissioner of relief, Dorset 1550,
• Commissioner on piracy 1565;
• keeper of manor and forest of Holt 1555-66;
• Justice of the peace for
  • Dorset 1554-d.,
  • Wiltshire 1562,
  • rem. 1586/87;
• sheriff, Somerset and Dorset 1555-6, 1564-5;
• Deputy Lieutenant of Dorset 1577-d.[3]

Biography

The early career of Henry Ashley remains obscure. He was first elected to Parliament before he held any office, his patron at Shaftesbury evidently being Sir Thomas Arundell, lord of the borough and a friend of his father.[4]

Ashley succeeded to the family estates in 1549 and in the following year was appointed deputy vice-admiral of Dorset to Sir William Herbert, perhaps on Arundell’s recommendation. Much of his subsequent activity derived from this office. The ports were jealous of their liberties and resisted so far as they could the jurisdiction of the Admiralty. In 1551 the mayor of Melcombe was briefed—presumably by the town’s lawyers—on his answer to Henry Ashley, ‘naming himself vice-admiral’, who should be told that, even armed with proof of his appointment, ‘there is not place there, for him to sit in’. Poole likewise, and with more reason, claimed that their mayor ‘is and ever hath been admiral within the same town’. Ashley was nevertheless paid an annual fee of 20s. by Poole, and seems to have made the town his official headquarters.[5]

Ashley’s return to Mary’s third Parliament as first knight of the shire for Dorset is an electoral aberration which needs to be explained. It interrupted what would have been a series of five successive returns of Sir Giles Strangways II, a magnate with whom Ashley could not compete in wealth or standing. As Ashley’s fellow-knight, the aged Richard Phelips, similarly supplanted a comparable figure such as a Horsey or a Rogers, it is tempting to view the election as a piece of government intervention to exclude known opponents of its policy. Ashley’s brother-in-law, the strongly Catholic James Bassett, procured his own election to the same Parliament as a knight for the adjacent shire of Devon.

Ashley’s next, and last, appearance in the Commons was not to come until after the accession of Elizabeth, during whose reign he continued to be active, especially in the matter of local defence. He lived long enough to witness the coming of the Armada, dying at his home in Wimborne St. Giles on 27 Dec. 1588.[6]

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Helen Miller

Notes

• 1. Hatfield 207.
• 2. Date of birth given in Hutchins, Dorset , iii. 594-5; The Gen. n.s. ii. 221.
• 3. EHR, xxiii. 741; HCA 25/1 pt. 2; CPR, 1553, p. 352; APC, vii. 283; CSP Dom. 1547-80, pp. 571, 582; H. H. Leonard, ‘Knights and knighthood in Tudor Eng.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1970), 280-1.
• 4. PCC 1 Tashe.
• 5. Weymouth and Melcombe mss. Sherren pprs. 13, 26; Poole rec. bk. 2, title page; envelope 10.
• 6. C142/260/117; Som. and Dorset N. and Q. ii. 50