William Chester (mayor)

Sir William Chester (1509–?c.1574) was one of the leading English Merchants of the Staple and Merchant Adventurers of the mid-16th century, five times Master of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, Lord Mayor of London in the year 1560-61 and Member of Parliament for the City of London. He should not be confused with his contemporary, William Chester, merchant of Bristol, M.P.

Born about 1509, William Chester was the second son of John Chester, citizen and Draper of London, and his second wife Joan, née Hill, sister of the London citizen and Haberdasher John Hill (died 1516). By his first marriage John Chester had a daughter Alice (Grene), living in 1542 a widow and nun. Joan had previously been married to Richard Welles, Mercer, who died in 1505, and she had a son Anthony Welles, living in 1513. John and Joan Chester had two sons, Nicholas and William. John died in 1513, his annual obit being kept by the Drapers on 26 May at St Thomas of Acon, and by 1515 Joan remarried to Sir John Milbourne, Master of the Drapers' Company in that year, who had been Sheriff of London in 1510 and became Lord Mayor in 1521. There were no children by the marriage of Sir John and Dame Joan Milbourne.

William was educated at Peterhouse College in the University of Cambridge, but did not proceed to a degree. On leaving the University he entered at once into trade as a draper and Merchant of the Staple. He was made free of the Drapers' Company by patrimony in 1529, and in the path set by his stepfather (who died in 1536, his obit being kept on 5 April at the Crutched Friars) he and his brother Nicholas built their position within it, appearing as Freemen Householders of the Company in the Chapterhouse list of 1537. A Warden in 1541, William Chester with Thomas Blower assisted William Roche (then Lord Mayor) in taking possession from Sir Edward North of the mansion of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, which had been purchased by the Drapers for their Company Hall following Cromwell's attainder.

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