Tey’s origins are obscure. A freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company by apprenticeship, he never assumed the livery. In 1587 he sub-let a house on Fish Street Hill owned by the London Bridge trustees, and five years later he extended this lease for 21 years. He may have practised as an attorney, as his 1602 marriage licence gave his address as Clement’s Inn.
In June 1602 lord treasurer Buckhurst appointed Tey, probably one of his household servants, as deputy alnager of London. The Crown claimed alnage of 4d. per broadcloth upon all domestic cloth, but in London the corporation collected similar dues; his appointment represented a challenge to the London aldermen, who complained of Tey’s ‘abuses’. He responded with Exchequer suits, which were still ongoing at the 1604 general election, when Buckhurst (now 1st earl of Dorset) recommended Tey for a seat at Arundel; he was returned on condition that he serve without wages.
Tey was a vociferous and opinionated MP, speaking chiefly but not exclusively upon matters relating to London and the cloth trade.
For all his activity in the 1604 session, Tey was unable to prevent the passage of a proviso in the Expiring Laws Continuance Act which waived the alnage on the cheapest Welsh cottons and relaxed the strict standards imposed on other Welsh cloth in 1601. Within a few months, Tey had discovered another requirement with which to plague the clothiers: a manufacturer’s seal specifying the length, breadth and weight of a cloth, stipulated under the 1552 Cloth Act, but long since fallen into disuse. His seizures provoked the London corporation into renewed sparring over the alnage in September 1604. In February 1605 Tey petitioned the aldermen about duty on imported canvas: the corporation’s response led Tey to pen an intemperate letter to recorder Sir Henry Montagu* censuring the corporation as ‘capable of nothing but for their own private profits’, and alleging that the aldermen had pocketed alnage fines of £5,000; the resulting Star Chamber case produced nothing but ill-will.
In the next parliamentary session Tey was named to the committee for the better execution of penal statutes (6 Nov. 1605), and another for the bill concerning debts owed to shopkeepers (18 Apr. 1606), but otherwise his sole concern during the session was the defence of the alnage patent, which came under attack from different directions: on 12 Feb. 1606 two bills received a first reading in the Commons: one, for the ‘making and searching of woollen [sic: linen] cloths’, promoted by Nicholas Fuller* on behalf of the London corporation, was perhaps designed to resolve the dispute with Tey over canvas, while the other, for the ‘true making of woollen cloths’, commended by lord chief justice Popham, was probably a revival of Tey’s draft bill which Speaker Phelips had rejected in 1604. The Londoners’ bill was rejected by the House on 7 May, while Tey’s, amended not entirely to his satisfaction, was sent to the Lords on 19 May, where it failed for lack of time.
Dorset’s servants surrendered their interest in the London alnage on 14 Aug. 1606, and thus played no part in the passage of the cloth bill in the next parliamentary session that autumn; in fact, Tey left no trace on the session at all, when he was involved in suing a runaway apprentice for embezzlement, whom he alleged had frequented ‘lewd houses and evil company’ in 1606, when he should have been in attendance on his master ‘at the Parliament House’. His prospects for advancement faded with Dorset’s death in 1608, and in the following year, when his father-in-law left £200 to his wife, it was with the proviso that ‘the same not to come to the hands of the said John Tey’.
Tey may have stayed away from Westminster at the start of the spring session of 1610. However, on 1 May he was summoned to give evidence on precedents for impositions, and ten days later his Arundel constituents complained that he was suing them for parliamentary wages, despite Dorset’s earlier promise that he would serve without payment. He first spoke in the House on 2 June, during a debate on the precise terms of the Great Contract, advising against compounding for the rights of the junior officers of the Board of Greencloth, lest their jobs be revived later; he also urged that
if we shall find ourselves able to give more [than] £100,000 per annum ... we might buy out a general statute of explanation of the king’s prerogative, so far as it might tend to the right and liberty of the subject in his body, lands, or goods.
In the subsidy debate of 13 June, Tey was one of many who argued against a vote of supply before the Great Contract and the grievances were settled; he also called for a fresh law to codify purveyance (a subject he returned to a month later), and warned that ‘if we should now return into our country with nothing for the good of the commonwealth, they would say that [we have] been all this while like children in catching butterflies’. When the same debate resumed on 11 July, he argued against adding any tenths and fifteenths to the one subsidy then proposed. Harking back to his former employment as alnager, when the duke of Lennox’s patent for alnage of new draperies was cited as a grievance on 5 July, he recommended that other patents bought out by Lennox should receive similar censure. In his final speech on 18 July, he attempted to defend Sir Edward Herbert* over a charge that he had insulted Speaker Phelips, insisting that
if he had been as Sir Edward Herbert, he would have complained to the House, first because Mr. Speaker said he would complain to the king before he had acquainted the House withal, and that he thought not fit any man should be evil thought of for his countenance, for then many might have cause to think somewhat of Mr. Speaker’s countenance.
On Phelips’ protest Tey explained that he meant no harm, ‘wherewith the House was satisfied’.
Nothing is known of Tey after 1610; he probably left Fish Street Hill shortly after the baptism of his son in 1603, and may have been the John Tey buried at St. Margaret’s, Westminster on 3 Jan. 1612. No will or administration has been found which might verify this possibility.