son of Lewknor Bosvile and nephew of Sir Ralph Bosvile of Bradbourne, who had been knighted by James I. Hasted’s account is that Bradbourne passed from Sir Ralph’s son, Leonard, who died childless, to his sister Margaret, as his heir; that Margaret carried it in marriage to Sir William Boswell, whom she survived, and that she, dying without issue in 1692 at the age of eighty-eight, left the manor and estate to ‘her kinsman, William Bosvile, esq.’.⁶
   To the story of the Bradbourne inheritance, already complicated by the marriage of a Bosvile to a Boswell, the late Sir John Dunlop, Sevenoaks’ most recent historian, gives a new slant.⁷  Briefly, he says that Leonard, Sir Ralph’s son and heir, was sickly and. his father, wishing to prolong the line and favouring for this purpose James, the son of William and Margaret Boswell, sought to bar the entail and make James the heir. His plan aroused strong opposition in the family and a fierce dispute ensued in which Lewknor and his son, ‘another Leonard Bosvile, usually called of "Ash" to distinguish him, fought for their inheritance’, in which battle they found support from a third brother of Sir Ralph’s, Dr Bosvile.
   If Leonard was known as ‘of Ash’ during this quarrel, it must have continued in the family long after 

Sir Ralph’s time; he seems to have died well over thirty years before Leonard came to Ash. In any case, the dispute would have been overtaken by events, since Sir Ralph’s sickly son and James Boswell both died in Margaret’s lifetime. So, too, did Leonard of Ash and it was his son William who eventually succeeded.
   William, it is said, went to Bradbourne in 1682, when he would have been a boy of twelve or thirteen years of age. His father had died three years previously and, as appears from his will, Leonard had at that time been entitled in reversion to all the estates of which Dame Margaret Bosvile was tenant for life and which must have included Bradbourne. That reversion he left to William upon his attaining the age of twenty-four and, in the meantime, to his widow, Jane.⁸
   Conveniently for William, old Lady Boswell died in the year before he achieved the age appointed by his father’s will. He lived for many years at Bradbourne in his own right but, after his wife’s death in 1728,⁹ removed to a small cottage on the estate where he remained in seclusion. Either he or his son, Henry Bosvile, rebuilt the mansion house of Bradbourne; certainly it was the son who constructed the series of ornamental lakes in the grounds. This Henry