Nicholas Woodroffe

Sir Nicholas Woodroffe (Woodruff, Woodrofe, etc.) (c. 1530-1598) was a London merchant of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, who, through the English Reformation, rose in the Alderman class to become a Master Haberdasher, Lord Mayor of London and Member of Parliament for London. Through the complexities of his family's relationships, and the position and security which they afforded, he lived to establish his family among the armigerous houses of late Elizabethan Surrey.

Nicholas Woodroffe's father David (c.1503-1563) was born of a merchant family of Uffculme, Devon, who are supposed to have derived from the Woodroffes of Wolley in Royston, South Yorkshire. Admitted to the freedom of the Haberdashers in 1526, he married within the Company soon afterwards, and like his father-in-law John Hill, Haberdasher, became a Merchant of the Staple at Calais. Hill, 'whose ancestors were of the north,' had married Agnes Mowsdale, a goldsmith's daughter of London. Nicholas was born to David and Elizabeth Woodroffe around 1530, the eldest of at least four sons, who were in time outnumbered by their sisters. John Hill died in 1534, and his son Rafe, uncle of Nicholas Woodroffe, was admitted a freeman of the Haberdashers in 1541.

The role of the great Livery companies in City governance under the Court of Aldermen faced extraordinary challenges. The reform of the Guilds or Crafts had proceeded with many new Charters of Incorporation during Henry VIII's reign. In the 1540s heavy demands were made upon them for subsidies, loans and military recruitments by the Crown. The disentangling of their endowments vested in dissolved houses, almshouses, and chantries of benefactors brought both disruption and opportunity. As the anticipation of Protestant succession to the English throne unfolded and then reversed, the Lord Mayor and aldermen steered through violent alterations to maintain civic and commercial interests.

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