Sir Thomas was sovereign in the little kingdom that was the Temple household and estate, until 1624 when he effectively surrendered much of it. He tried to cling to this position even after he handed Stowe to his son and heir. As patriarch it was Thomas who had overall authority. Any authority exercised either by his wife Hester or by other members of the family was delegated by him. According to the religious teaching of the time, all wives thus had bestowed upon them the authority to lead the household. By the 1620s it was widely accepted that whereas a married woman would normally require the implicit or explicit consent of her husband she could enter into a contract independently in cases of necessity.

The practical application of this doctrine and the assertion of power were another matter than authority or legal rights and one which conduct books did not generally address and legal rules could not control. The evidence suggests that Hester Temple had both power and influence inside and outside household and estate circles. There is little evidence that either Hester or her daughters’ movements and activities were circumscribed spatially and otherwise in the way apparent at, for example, Wollaton, Nottinghamshire in the previous reign. There are strong hints that Sir Thomas tried to exercise some control over his daughter Meg's propensity to engage in ‘business’ but, if he did so, he failed. It is impossible to tell whether this freedom was a feature of the social standing or the excess of the respective households, of family tradition, of personality, of a change through time or of the available documentation. Hester, however, does not appear ever to have followed Henry Smith's dictum of 1591 that a wife be not a street wife, like Tamar, nor a field wife, like Dinah, but a housewife ‘to show that a good wife keeps her house’. This resulted in part from the authority delegated to her by her husband but in part from her own strong personality and considerable abilities, which were recognized (though not always admired) not only by her spouse but also by members of the family and network.