LEY, Sir James (c.1552-1629), of Westbury and Heywood, Wilts., Clerkenwell, Mdx. and Lincoln’s Inn, London

Originally from Devon, Ley’s father, Henry was granted the royal manor and advowson of Teffont Evias, Wiltshire in 1545 as a reward for his service during the siege of Boulogne. VCH Wilts. xiii. 189; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxii. 89. Ley himself, the fourth surviving son, was probably born at Teffont in about 1552, and may have been entered at Winchester College before progressing to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1569. Wilts. RO, 366/1. That same year his father presented him to the living at Teffont - worth £60 p.a. - which he resigned in 1576 on being admitted a student at Lincoln’s Inn. T. Phillipps, Wilts. Institutiones, i. 224, 228; Aubrey, 404-5. Called to the bar in 1584, and made a bencher in 1600, he became a serjeant-at-law and a judge for the southern Welsh counties in 1603.

From the late 1590s Ley had begun to purchase burgages at Westbury, which allowed him and his elder brother, Matthew, to be returned for the borough in 1597 and 1604. VCH Wilts. vii. 185. At the start of the 1604 session, Ley was nominated to the committee for considering the right of Sir Thomas Shirley I to take his seat despite having been arrested for debt (27 March). He was also one of those appointed to interrogate the sheriff concerning the Buckinghamshire election (2 Apr.) and to attend a conference with the Lords and judges about this dispute (5 April). CJ, i. 155b, 161a, 166b. His other bill committees included the welfare of poor prisoners in gaol (31 Mar.) and the statutory confirmation of letters patent (18 May). Ibid. 160b, 213b.

On being sent to Ireland as chief justice of King’s Bench in the autumn of 1604, Ley relinquished his seat, being replaced at Westbury by another local landowner, Alexander Chocke I. CJ, i. 257a; Bowyer Diary, 188; J. Campbell, Lives of the Ch. Justices, i. 362. His Irish career was not without controversy, for having been appointed commissioner of the Great Seal in 1605 he was accused of hard usage in issuing mandates to enforce religious conformity, and in denying defendants copies of the indictments against them. R. Bagwell, Ire. under the Stuarts, i. 28; H. Pawlisch, ‘Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ire.’ (Univ. London Ph.D. thesis, 1981), p. 111. Although his colleagues initially supported Ley, Sir Patrick Barnewall, one of the principal defendants, persuaded them that recusancy as a statutory offence could not be dealt with by the prerogative power of mandates, whereupon the policy was duly abandoned in the autumn of 1607. According to Barnewall, Ley was ‘generally behated throughout the kingdom’, a situation which may have encouraged Ley to apply for leave to return to England two months later. However, illness prevented his departure until November 1608, when he was appointed attorney of the Court of Wards. Ball, 313; CSP Ire. 1603-6; p. 373; 1608-10, p. 116.

Ley returned to England in time to resume his seat at Westbury, vacated by Chocke’s death in 1607. CJ, i. 323b. He is recorded as having been named to a handful of bill committees during 1610. Two dealt with private estates - those belonging to William Essex of Berkshire (16 Feb.) and Sir Henry Crispe of Thanet, in Kent (12 Mar.) - while others concerned pluralism and non-residence (19 Feb.), and salt marshes in Norfolk and Suffolk (20 March). Ibid. 394b, 396b, 409b, 413a. On 27 Feb. 1610 Ley was named to the committee to consider the substance of Dr. Cowell’s Interpreter. Ibid. 400b. In 1614 Parliament Ley made way at Westbury for his son Henry, finding a seat for himself at nearby Bath, where he had no known connection with the corporation. He was named to a joint conference with the Lords regarding the bill to confirm the succession rights of the Elector Palatine’s children (14 Apr.), and to committees to search for precedents concerning the right of the attorney-general to sit in the Commons (8 Apr.), for the continuance of expiring laws (8 Apr.), to prevent the granting of false bail (16 Apr.), to confirm the foundation of London’s Charterhouse hospital (9 May), and to sell the estate of the late Sir Edward Apsley of Fletton, in Huntingdonshire (19 May). Procs. 1614 (Commons), 33, 35, 82, 91, 176, 289.

The profits from his attorneyship of the Court of Wards enabled Ley to complete the purchase of Westbury’s remaining burgages and build a mansion house at nearby Heywood. He was said to have offered £10,000 to succeed Sir Francis Bacon* as attorney-general, and in 1619 he purchased a baronetcy. Wilts. RO, 967/14; CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 64; SO3/6, unfol., July 1619; R. Lockyer, Buckingham, 41; W. Jones, Pols. and the Bench, 38. In January 1621 he returned himself to Parliament for Westbury, but within days he was appointed chief justice of the King’s Bench, and so once again relinquished his seat. Six months later, aged 70, he made an astute marriage to the 17-year-old niece of the royal favourite, George Villiers, marquess of Buckingham, to whom Ley owed his further advancement as lord treasurer in 1624, and as earl of Marlborough at the Coronation in 1626. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 338, 381, 387. By this time the youthful Sir Simonds D’Ewes† considered the 74-year-old Ley ‘a decrepit old man’, while John Chamberlain believed that he would soon vacate the office ‘either by reason of age or by some other defect’. Autobiog. of Sir Simonds D’Ewes ed. J.O. Halliwell, i. 160; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 338. However, it was not until July 1628 that Ley was replaced by another of Buckingham’s clients, Sir Richard Weston*. On surrendering the treasurer’s staff Ley gave ‘an infallible testimony of his being a good husband for the king’ by accepting £10,000 and the presidency of the Council rather than the £15,000 he had given for the office.HMC 4th Rep. 290.

Ley’s death, at his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn on 14 Mar. 1629, was ascribed by Milton to his anxiety over the dissolution of Parliament four days earlier. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. ‘Westbury’, 35. As Ley died intestate, the greater part of the 24 manors that he had accumulated in Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon was settled on his son and heir Henry, the second earl. His widow’s jointure estate lay near Ludgershall, Wiltshire, which enabled her second husband, William Ashburnham†, to represent that borough in both the Short and Long Parliaments. Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiv. 99. Ley is remembered by a large ornate monument in Westbury church, and by several legal writings, including A Learned Treatise concerning Wards and Liveries and Reports of Divers Resolutions in Law. Wilts. IPMs ed. G.S. and A.E. Fry (Brit. Rec. Soc. xxiii), 232; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxii. 86. While serving in Ireland in the 1600s, Ley collected material for three tracts which were never published, ‘The Annals of John Clynne, a Friar Minor of Kilkenny’, ‘Annals of the Priory of St. John, Kilkenny’, and ‘Annals of Multifarnham, Rosse and Clonnell’. Although ineffective at the Exchequer - his detractors contemptuously referred to him as Volpone - he was respected for his legal knowledge and, according to Fuller, was ‘a person of great gravity, ability and integrity’. T. Fuller, Worthies of Eng. iii. 328. A contemporary portrait of Ley is reproduced in Hoare’s History of Wiltshire. Hoare, Hist. Wilts. ‘Westbury’, 35 and facing.