[1] The Act for suppression of Chantries having been revived in the first year of Edward's reign, in March 1551 Mr. Chester reported to the Drapers that the repurchase of the lands and benefits of their obitts would amount to £1402.6s.
Chester was elected on 5 August 1553 to his first term as Master of the Company,[29] and (with the alteration of religious policy on the accession of Queen Mary) was for 1554–55 Sheriff of London with David Woodroffe as his colleague,[27] in the mayoralty of Sir John Lyon.
[30] Before giving Dr Rowland Taylor into the custody of the Sheriff of Essex, Chester intervened to allow him a leave-taking from his wife, and offered her his own house in which to await.
[33] Chester, a governor of Christ's Hospital, also took a sustained interest in the career of Edmund Campion, and sponsored him as a scholar to St John's College, Oxford.
[35] Although not named an officer or assistant in King Philip and Queen Mary's 1555 Charter to the Muscovy Company,[36] Chester was of the founding fellowship[37] under Sebastian Cabot as Governor and George Barne, William Garrard, Anthony Hussey[38] and John Southcote as Consuls.
He witnessed the exchange of royal gifts with the Russian ambassador in London in 1557, and afterwards with Judd, Hussey, Garrard and Barne sent report of the death of Richard Chancellor to George Killingworth and others in Russia by a mercantile fleet in which both ships sailed.
[42] Following the fall of Calais it fell necessary for Mary to license Chester and other Merchants of the Staple (including aldermen Judd, Offley, Woodroffe, Leigh and Lodge) to ship to Bruges in Flanders, and to pardon their disregard of the statutes during the previous year.
[43] At the onset of Elizabeth's reign Chester, now a very wealthy man, with various others participated in a loan of £30,000 to the Crown and was granted rights to receive interest at ten per cent.
[27] Chester and his Wardens brought to Chancery decree a claim concerning a twenty-year-old legacy in the Company's trust of 12,000 gold ducats, provision for the orphaned kin of a Welsh merchant in Seville.
[45] He was appointed a royal commissioner (1559 and 1562) to implement Acts of Parliament for uniformity of prayer,[46][47] to regulate the grievances of prisoners in the Ludgate,[48] and to restore the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown.
[50] Hussey's will (in which he further endowed Edmund Campion) shows his closeness to Chester, before whom his final codicil was declared in 1560, but his executors were Thomas Lodge and Benjamin Gonson.
[53] Amid these solemnities he was elected Lord Mayor (in succession to Sir William Hewett), assuming office towards the close of that year, and on 3 October his sons Thomas and John were admitted to freedom of the Drapers' Company by patrimony.
[54] In April 1561 obsequies were resumed when Dame Alice Hewett died and was buried at St Martin Orgar with an immense procession of mourners, heralds, the livery of the Clothworkers, and the aldermen with Chester the Lord Mayor in their midst.
[57] The commission upon uniformity of prayer, and for right religious observance and the reinstatement of deprived ministers, was renewed,[58] and Chester was appointed to another to investigate the counterfeiting of currency.
With Martin Bowes and William Garrard Chester led a royal commission to inquire into the petition of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor, at the time of his bankruptcy.
Their names recur in the grant of privileges by the Shah of Persia, communicated by Arthur Edwards from Astrakhan in 1566 and 1567 to Garrard and Chester as Governors of the Muscovy Company, then receiving its new Charter.
[1] In 1571 he was appointed to the special commission of oyer and terminer for the trial for high treason of John Felton, who had published the Papal bull of Regnans in Excelsis against Queen Elizabeth.
[74] A litigation noted in the King's Remembrancer, Barons' depositions, dated in the Hilary term of 16 Elizabeth (1574) refers to 'the goods of Sir William Chester deceased, late alderman of the city of London.
His mansion in Lombard Street, which he had leased to Richard Offley, was later sold to Sir George Barne (who died in 1593) by William Chester, his son and heir.