William Lok
gentleman usher, mercer, alderman, and sheriff of London
Sir William Lok (1480 – 24 August 1550) was a gentleman usher to Henry VIII and a mercer, alderman, and sheriff of London. He was the great-great-great-grandfather of the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704).
Family
William Lok was the second son of Thomas Lok, a London mercer, and the grandson of John Lok, also a mercer, who was Sheriff of London in 1461. His mother was Joan Wilcock (d. 1512), only daughter of one 'Mr Wilcock' of Rotherham, Yorkshire.
Career
Even before he was admitted to the Mercers' Company in 1507, Lok had already supplied cloth of gold and silver to Henry VIII. During the course of his visits as a mercer to the annual markets in Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom in the Low Countries, he collected intelligence which he passed on to the King and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.
In March 1527, he was granted 'exclusive licence to import silks, jewels, and mercery wares for court revels'. In addition to his trade as a mercer, Lok was involved in other business ventures, including the export of beer. In 1528 he supplied the royal ordnance with six hundred leather harnesses. In 1531 a ship travelling from Chios to London which had been hired by Lok and John Gresham was detained at Lisbon.
“William Lok” enters the record as gentleman usher, mercer, alderman, and sheriff of London. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, gentleman and usher can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15269820. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1480, 1550, 1632 and 1704.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Lok” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.