A soldier of obscure origin, Wolf came to settle in Suffolk through his marriage. According to William Worcestre, the fifteenth-century antiquary and topographer, he was of humble Welsh background, and was once a groom. Worcestre adds that he received his knighthood from the duke of Clarence at Paris (probably in February 1421), and later served in France as a household knight of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter.
Wolf had established himself in Suffolk, a county with which he had formed a connexion through his marriage, by 1424 at the latest. His residence there, the manor of Cotton, was one of several properties in which his wife, Katherine, had received a life interest by grant of her previous husband, William Wingfield. She also held a similar right to his manors at Dennington in the same county and Kimberley in Norfolk. After his marriage, Wolf controlled these former Wingfield manors in her right, and he must likewise have enjoyed the lands she had inherited from her father, a prominent London grocer of Suffolk origin who had invested in real property in East Anglia and elsewhere. Her share of her father’s estate consisted of property in Suffolk (a manor and advowson at Hintlesham), Middlesex (a manor in Stepney and 17 messuages in the parish of St. Mary Matfelon without Aldgate) and London (various shops and tenements in Fleet Street and elsewhere).
It was ‘of Cotton’ that Wolf featured in litigation of the first half of the 1420s, proceedings which show that he was a supporter of Sir John Howard* and his wife, Alice, in their quarrel with Sir Thomas Kerdiston*. In pleadings of early 1425, Kerdiston accused Wolf, Robert Tey† and others of having in the previous year joined Howard and his wife in trespassing on his manors of Bulcamp and Henham in Suffolk, properties the couple appear to have claimed in Alice’s right. Wolf, Tey and their associates responded by bringing an assize of novel disseisin against Kerdiston for dispossessing them of the same properties. Kerdiston’s suit was referred to a jury, but this was disbanded after the defendants alleged that he and his councillors had directed the under sheriff to select jurors favourable to him. In early 1426, however, a fresh jury found the Howards and Tey guilty, although Kerdiston declared that he did not wish to pursue his suit against Wolf and the other defendants.
Notwithstanding his East Anglian interests, Wolf must have spent an appreciable amount of time in London and its environs following his marriage. It appears that he was residing in Middlesex at the time of the subsidy of 1436,
In spite of his links with the capital and its environs, it was in East Anglia, particularly Suffolk, that Wolf pursued a career in local government, and it was for that county that he sat in Parliament. His role in the administration of Suffolk was far from nominal; between 1427 and 1431 it fell to him and two other j.p.s, Robert Cavendish and Sir Andrew Butler†, to run virtually all of the quarter sessions there.
Besides his duties as an MP, Wolf had other matters to contend with during the Parliament of 1429, for in this period he and his wife were quarrelling with the other heir to the Hadley estate, Katherine’s nephew, Sir John Pecche, over Hadley’s manor at Mile End, east of London. Some three months before the Parliament opened, they and Pecche exchanged recognizances for 500 marks and submitted their differences to the arbitration of the bishops of Ely and Norwich and the lawyers, William Cheyne and William Babington*. In due course, the arbitrators awarded both Katherine and her husband life interests in the manor, with remainder to Pecche and his heirs; a settlement later ratified by means of a formal conveyance in 1431.
Shortly after his first Parliament, Wolf returned to France as a member of Henry VI’s coronation expedition. On 20 Feb. 1430, three days before the assembly dissolved, he entered a contract with the Crown as captain of a force of three men-at-arms and nine archers (whose wages the Exchequer was to pay at the daily rate of 2s. to each man-at-arms and 6d. to each archer), and two months later he obtained letters of attorney prior to going abroad. The expedition mustered at Dover in early May, and on the 18th of that month two members of his small retinue, Richard Thwaytes of Yorkshire and Gilbert Kellet, were issued with letters of protection. The expedition was intended to last for a year from 1 May 1430, so it is likely that many captains and retinues returned home in the late spring of 1431 and did not attend Henry VI’s coronation in Paris the following December.
Two years later, Wolf stood for his second Parliament. He did so at a well attended shire court but there is no evidence of a contested election. Following the dissolution of the Parliament of 1433, he and Henry Drury*, his fellow knight of the shire, were commissioned to decide who in Suffolk should be entitled to reductions in a tax passed by that assembly. The problem of lawlessness was a concern for both of Wolf’s Parliaments, and in January 1434, again in their capacity as former MPs, he and Drury were commissioned to draw up a list of all those in the county who should swear an oath to keep the peace. The Parliament of 1433 was not the last national assembly that Wolf attended, since he received a summons as Suffolk’s representative to the great council of 1434. Probably the Crown chose those who, like him, had served it well in the past, but his summons must also have reflected the active role he played in the affairs of the county and his status as a resident knight there. He was undoubtedly one of Suffolk’s richer inhabitants (possibly owing some of his wealth to the spoils of war), since in February 1436 he was asked to contribute 100 marks to a loan the Crown was raising to equip an army for France. He continued to remain useful to the government in military affairs, for in the following July he was commissioned to raise crews for ships belonging either to himself or others, so that these vessels might supply the army which Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, led to relieve Calais later that summer. This commission indicates (although it does not prove for certain) that Wolf was a shipowner; yet if he was, no evidence relating to any of his ships has survived. Nine months later, the King’s council commissioned him and Sir Thomas Neville to provide ships for the defence of the sea.
Notwithstanding his distinguished record of serving the Crown at home and abroad, in the later 1430s Wolf found himself accused of high treason by John Belsham of Hadleigh. A notorious member of the lesser gentry of Suffolk, Belsham engaged in a long criminal career, perhaps partly because he enjoyed the protection of a powerful patron, the duke of Norfolk. Wolf was one of the Suffolk j.p.s who took indictments against him in April 1436 (for poisoning the son of a neighbouring landowner) and again in the following year. The latter indictment was for the murder at Hadleigh of Alice, the wife of one of Wolf’s own servants, Maurice Lowell. Following the killing, Sir William supported an appeal for murder which the Lowells’ son, John Morys (another of his servants), pursued against Belsham, and it appears that he also provided Maurice legal assistance. In July 1438 the suspected felon was committed to gaol at Bury St. Edmunds: he remained there until the following 8 Sept., when the duke of Norfolk appeared in person and forcibly removed him from custody. In the same autumn Belsham struck back at Wolf by making unspecified accusations of treason against him. On 11 Nov. Sir Henry Brounflete was commissioned to hear and determine the charges in the court of chivalry, and as a result Wolf was put under heavy financial surety in Chancery. No doubt infuriated by this turn of events, he seems to have urged the Suffolk j.p.s sitting at Henhowe in February 1439 to re-arrest Belsham. When brought before them he lost his temper, shouting that the ‘treacherous’ Wolf was responsible for his predicament and demanding the arrest of the MP’s servant, William Andrew. Andrew, also present at the sessions, replied by calling him a liar. Belsham reacted by drawing a knife, and he would have killed Andrew had not three of those present intervened. Some time later, Wolf and Maurice Lowell petitioned the King alleging that the accusations of treason were false; and in July 1439 the royal council appointed a commission headed by the lawyers John Cottesmore and John Fray† to investigate. Wolf’s petition stated that Belsham had murdered Lowell’s pregnant wife and William Sugge, the King’s constable in Hadleigh, adding that he had been indicted for both these crimes and appealed for murder by John Morys, and had committed many felonies and robberies in ‘divers’ parts of the realm. With regard to the treason charges, the petitioners alleged that Belsham had concocted them in response to their support for Morys’s appeal. They concluded by asking that Wolf should be cleared from such ‘false suggestions’, since he had always been a true liegeman and had served the King faithfully, both at home and overseas.
In the meantime, Wolf quarrelled with another Mowbray follower, Sir Robert Wingfield*, who assaulted him at the Ipswich shire-house in September 1436. As a result, Wingfield, who had earlier bound himself in 200 marks to keep the peace towards the King’s lieges in general and John Andrew III* in particular, found himself facing the judges of King’s bench. He pleaded self defence, saying that he had come to the shire-house as a bailor for John Broke, a suspected felon, and that Wolf, present as an associate of the presiding justice, the King’s serjeant, Thomas Fulthorpe, had accused him of maintenance and drawn his dagger against him. Unluckily for Wingfield, this plea was not accepted by a jury sitting in late 1440 and he forfeited his 200 marks.
Later that decade, Wolf lost his wife since Katherine died in March 1446. Neither of her marriages had produced any surviving issue and her share of the Hadley estate passed to William Pecche*, the son of her nephew, Sir John Pecche. The lands in which her first husband had awarded her a life interest passed to William Wingfield’s nearest heir, William de la Pole, by then marquess of Suffolk.