The Warbletons had held Sherfield-upon-Loddon in Hampshire and Warbleton in Sussex since the early thirteenth century. When William was born, Warbleton and Tandridge in Surrey were held in jointure by his aged great-grandmother Alice, widow of John Warbleton (d.1350) and of Walter de Burton (d.1368), the London goldsmith, and since she had outlived her son and grandson on her death in 1384 he was declared to be her heir.
Warbleton’s landed holdings in Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey were to be estimated to be worth £83 p.a. in the tax assessments of 1412, and by 1436 he had increased his annual income by a further £27, largely derived from property in Berkshire and Oxfordshire which came to him with his second marriage.
Even by the standards of the period Warbleton was highly litigious, and the rest of his very long life was punctuated by a steady succession of lawsuits in the court of common pleas and in Chancery. Some of these concerned his patrimony. During his minority the Crown had presented to the parish church at Warbleton, and although he served as patron in 1404, in 1413 he had to bring an action against Bishop Reade of Chichester and the then incumbent, William Prestwick, regarding his rights of advowson. The matter was apparently resolved in his favour, although it was Prestwick whom he formally presented a year later.
Warbleton’s first appointment as sheriff of Hampshire in 1411 coincided with the promotion of Sir John Pelham*, the King’s friend, as treasurer of England, but although he was acquainted with Pelham (and had earlier conveyed to him some land at Warbleton) there is no other hint that he enjoyed important connexions at Henry IV’s court. His term of office was followed immediately with another as escheator, but then for a period of 14 years, from November 1413, there was a gap in his official commitments in shire administration, most likely because of his almost continuous absence overseas on military service. He crossed the Channel in the summer of 1415 for Henry V’s invasion of Normandy (although in whose retinue is not known), mustered in the company of John, Lord Grey of Codnor, as a mounted man-at-arms in the major expedition of July 1417, and in February 1419 at Exmes castle he supervised the array of the force commanded by Thomas Montague, earl of Salisbury. He again returned to France, this time under the King’s personal command, in July 1421, and by May 1423 was once more serving under Salisbury, at Falaise. Warbleton evidently made some profits of war, for safe conducts were issued for a prisoner of his, Petit alias Eliot de Clarence, first to go to France in quest of his ransom in February 1427 and then to come back to England in October following, although he subsequently sold the prisoner on to Sir John Clifton.
Despite his long absence from local affairs, Warbleton was elected for Hampshire to the Parliament summoned to assemble in April 1425. Present at the shire court at Winchester to attest the parliamentary indenture was his friend, neighbour and kinsman William Brocas* of Beaurepaire, with whom he always remained on cordial terms.
Possibly while the Parliament of 1425 was in session, or very soon afterwards, Warbleton took as his second wife Margery, the wealthy widow of Sir Peter Bessels, who possessed an interest for life in the manor of Bessels Leigh and potentially much else besides. The marriage was to involve him in extensive litigation from then until his death nearly 45 years later, but in the short term it provided him with a residence in Berkshire, and thus qualified him for election by that county to the Parliament immediately following, which was summoned to assemble at Leicester in February 1426. Warbleton’s eagerness for a seat in the Commons is suggested by the fact that the electors in Hampshire also returned him – itself an indication of a breach of the statute of 1413 which required all those elected to be living in their constituencies on the date of the writ of summons. Which of the two shires paid his parliamentary expenses is not recorded. (Thereafter, he alternated between the two constituencies, and in 1434 he was listed as residing in both when it came to administering the oath against maintenance.)
At the end of the session of the Parliament of 1431 Warbleton was appointed to the Hampshire bench. Only recently Jack Sharp, the lollard, had started a revolt in Berkshire, and it was Warbleton who informed the Council, which issued a proclamation for the rebel’s arrest. On 19 May, on hearing that Sharp was in Oxford, Warbleton promptly sent his servants to inform the chancellor of the university and bailiffs of the town, charging them to seize him, which they duly did. No reward was offered for this initiative, so in November he petitioned the duke of Gloucester and his fellow councillors to remind them that his speedy actions had prevented a major uprising. As reimbursement for his costs, on 29 Nov. the Council sent a warrant to the Exchequer to pay him £20, a sum he eventually received on 16 Feb. following. This was not, however, the prelude to advancement. Warbleton again crossed to France in the spring of 1436, this time in the retinue of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, there to remain for at least two years. Back home he was once more shortlisted for the shrievalty in November 1441, but not pricked in the event.
Contrary to the purpose behind the ordinance which forbade the election of sheriffs to Parliament, Warbleton was appointed sheriff for a third term on 3 Dec. 1450, while his sixth Parliament was in session, and if assiduous in his attendance in the Commons he must have been absent from his bailiwick for at least three months before the dissolution at the end of the following May. During that period he made a loan to the Crown of £20. He was left out of pocket, for although John Gardener of Tisbury, Wiltshire, acknowledged that he owed Warbleton £100, the latter’s action in the Exchequer of pleas in 1454 to recover this sum proved unsuccessful.
Ever since his marriage to Margery Bessels, more than 30 years earlier, Warbleton had been engaged in litigation regarding her former husband’s estates. His first marriage had not produced a male heir, and he had settled on Margery and their male issue his manors of Sherfield and Chineham and property in Basingstoke. His daughter, Margaret, naturally resented being thus deprived of her inheritance by virtue of her mother’s jointure, but she was constrained on 6 Sept. 1429 to permit her stepmother to hold these properties for life, on pain of forfeiture of a bond in 1,000 marks made payable to Margery and to John Cottesmore, very shortly (on 15 Oct.) to be made j.c.p. This submission was formally acknowledged at Sherfield before Bishop Stafford of Bath and Wells, indicating the serious nature of the transaction.
Despite his readiness to pursue his rights through the law courts and to hound his debtors, Warbleton was capable of forming long-lasting friendships. Most important of these was the one he maintained with William Brocas, from 1414 until the latter’s death in 1456. Brocas made Warbleton overseer of his will, and left instructions that his unmarried daughters were only to take husbands approved by him.
Warbleton’s daughter, his only child, appears to have died before 1444, for he then began to make settlements of his lands on various of his other relations. The Warbleton manors of Sherfield and Chineham were granted in reversion after the deaths of himself and his wife to Henry Puttenham, the son of his paternal aunt, Margaret; and the Foxley manor of Finchampstead was entailed in 1447 to the advantage of members of his mother’s family, first on his uncle Richard de la Hay and Hay’s son Matthew, and then in 1452, after Matthew’s death, on the latter’s sister, Constance, and her husband Hugh Pakenham, in return for a payment of 20 marks p.a. to him and his wife for the rest of their lives.
Despite William Bessels’s youth Warbleton named him with his grandmother Margery as an executor of the will he wrote in his own hand at Sherfield on 10 July 1461, and six days later he settled on him and his wife Alice Harcourt a reversionary interest in Radcot and Grafton to fall in after his and Margery’s deaths.