Sculptor based in Southwark, London. His grandfather, William Cure I (1514/15–1579), was brought over to England from Holland in c.1541 to work on Nonsuch Palace and by 1559 had obtained English citizenship and settled in Southwark with an English wife. The family workshop was carried on by one of his sons, Cornelius Cure (d. 1608/09), who became Master Mason in the Office of Works in 1596, a post he shared with his son, William II, from 1605. William, however, showed early signs of the tardiness that was to characterise his career. Charged with completing the tomb for Mary, Queen of Scots, in Westminster Abbey, begun by his late father in 1605/06, he allowed the commission to drag on until 1613. In 1619, a five-month absence caused him to lose the contract for building Whitehall Banqueting House, an absence Adam White has suggested may have been caused by the legal pressure he was under to complete three much-delayed Bedford family tombs in St Michael’s, Chenies, Buckinghamshire: those to the 2nd Earl; to Anne, Countess of Warwick (the 2nd Earl’s daughter); and to the 4th Earl (all 1617/18–c.1620). William Cure II’s other documented tombs are those to Sir Roger Aston, St Dunstan, Cranford, London (1611/12–1613) and to Bishop James Montagu, Bath Abbey (1618–19), this latter in collaboration with Nicholas Johnson. For the Great Gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Cure also carved (1614–15), on the outer face, a statue of Henry VIII, and on the inner face, statues of James I (carved with assistance from John Smythe), James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and James’s son Charles, Prince of Wales, the quality of their execution doing nothing to enhance Cure’s reputation, Bradley and Pevsner condemning the Henry VIII figure as ‘wretched’ and the other three as ‘of equally inferior craftsmanship’. Cure’s Queen Anne figure was considered by Katharine Esdaile (1946) to be so like that of the standing figure of Dame Elizabeth Montagu on the Sir John Jefferay Monument in Chiddingly parish church, East Sussex (installed 1612), that she declared with certainty that the latter was also by Cure. The Public Sculpture of Britain volume, Public Sculpture of Sussex, follows the writers of the ‘Chiddingly Church Guide’ (1995) in suggesting that, because of ‘considerable [unspecified] variations in the quality of the carvings’, other sculptors in addition to Cure may have worked on the monument. White, in his 1999 dictionary, rejects any attribution to Cure, while Llewellyn (2011) concludes that the authorship is uncertain, and Antram and Pevsner (2013) leave it unattributed.
Bibliography: N. Antram and N. Pevsner, Sussex: East (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2013, p. 308; S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, Cambridgeshire (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, (2014), 2015, p. 219; Chiddingly Parish Church Guide; K.A. Esdaile, English Monumental Sculpture Since the Renaissance, London, 1927, pp. 122–24; K.A. Esdaile, English Church Monuments 1510–1840, London, 1946, pp. 46, 82, 84, 106, pl. 4; N. Llewellyn, East Sussex Church Monuments 1530–1830 (Sussex Record Society, Vol. 93), Lewes, pp. 76–77; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 45–46; A. White, Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors (Walpole Society, vol. 61, 1999, pp. 1–162), pp. 44–47; A. White, Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors: Addenda and Corrigenda (Walpole Society, vol. 71, 2009, pp. 325–55), p. 335.
Terry Cavanagh, November 2025
