Sherley’s own London address is something of a puzzle. Letters were directed to him in 1623 both as “dwelling on London bridge at the Golden hoospyte,” and to Crooked Lane. His brother John had a shop on London Bridge; perhaps in early years they shared a dwelling among the fine merchants’ houses erected there. Crooked Lane was a winding artery in Candlewick Ward, the site of a noted Dutch tavern; this may have been where James Sherley maintained his business address. Like many others who had left the stench, noise, and possible plague of London, he later had a home in Clapham, Surrey, then a rural environment. He wrote Bradford of carrying his records there in 1636 when the plague was raging in London. It was from Clapham that Sherley was chosen to serve in the public capacities then filled by men of substance. He was a member of the Surrey committee for levying assessments for the militia. In confirmation of the strong religious tendency evident in his correspondence with Bradford, he was an elder in the Croydon Classis in Surrey, formed during a reorganization of the English Church along Presbyterian lines. The New England Company, erected to spread the Gospel to the Indians, included him among its members. Parliament made him one of a Surrey group appointed in 1652 to deal with the problem of supplying proper ministers and schoolmasters in the churches of his county. His son was granted the right to administer his will in Clapham in 1657.[33] Early in his business career Sherley very likely was connected with the Netherlands trade, for he was sufficiently friendly with Edward Pickering, Weston’s agent, who died in 1623, to be one of the executors of his will; in 1630 he wrote that he had spent nearly three months in Holland. In underwriting the Plymouth “Undertakers,” he perhaps was committed financially as deeply as he could afford, for he did not join the Massachusetts Bay Company. He did own ships in the New England trade, however, one of which was hired by Isaac Allerton. He had a share in the Ashley scheme in Maine and in voyages to Massachusetts Bay. The latter colony owed him money in 1648.[34]