When the Tudor antiquarian, John Leland, visited the Shropshire church of Whitchurch in the 1530s, he saw the tomb of Sir Gilbert Talbot, a ‘knight of fame’, and noted, with apparent approval, that Talbot had brought the bones of his grandfather, the great soldier, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, from Castillon, where he had fallen in 1453, for reinternment in the church. Sir Gilbert did not have a career to compare with that of his famous ancestor; none the less, despite the disadvantage of being a younger son, he was a notable servant, as soldier, administrator, and diplomat, of three Kings, Edward IV and the first two Tudors. Such future success had appeared improbable in his boyhood. His father, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, had fallen in the Lancastrian cause in the battle of Northampton in July 1460, when Gilbert was about nine years old. Fortunately for the family, however, the new Yorkist King, Edward IV, was content for their lands to pass to Gilbert’s elder brother, another John, and, in the early 1470s, both brothers found places in Edward’s service, with the young Gilbert becoming one of the King’s cupbearers.

Gilbert’s career began in earnest with his elder brother’s death in June 1473 – in the mysterious words of Leland, ‘not without suspicion of poison’ – leaving as his heir a son, George, only five years old. This made Gilbert the effective head of the family during a long minority. As such, he led a retinue in the invasion of France in 1475, his first known military experience in what was to prove a long military career. He also advanced himself materially by marriage to a wealthy widow, as younger sons of leading families often did. In 1477 he married Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Scrope of Masham, and daughter of Ralph, Lord Greystoke, lord of the extensive lordship of Wem, about nine miles from the Talbot manor of Whitchurch.

Talbot’s prosperity was threatened by the deposition of Edward V.  He and the new King, Richard III, clearly distrusted each other. There was one obvious point of tension between them. Talbot’s stepson, Thomas, the new Lord Scrope of Masham, had been brought up in Richard’s household, and Talbot had every reason to consider this personal connexion a threat to his own wife’s interest in the Scrope lands. Probably more significant, however, was a more nebulous consideration. In constructing his title to the throne, the new King relied on the story of Edward IV’s alleged pre-contract with Gilbert’s paternal aunt, Eleanor, widow of Sir Thomas Butler of Sudeley (Gloucestershire). She had died in 1468, when Gilbert was only in his late teens, but there can be little doubt that the Talbots knew the truth (or otherwise) of the story. In this context, Gilbert can only have interpreted his removal from the Shropshire bench and the loss of his stewardship of the Talbot lordships of Blackmere and Whitchurch as evidence of the King’s hostility. 

His response was to return to his family’s earlier Lancastrian allegiance and enter communications with Henry Tudor. According to an admittedly rather doubtful source, The Song of Lady Bess, an early-modern narrative poem, there was a crucial meeting on 3 May 1485 at which he, alongside Tudor’s stepfather, Thomas, Lord Stanley, and others, firmly committed themselves to supporting Tudor. This story may be wrong in detail, but Talbot was certainly one of the first men of substance to join Henry after he landed at Milford Haven on the following 7 August. According to the Tudor chronicler, Polydore Vergil, he brought 500 men to Henry at Newport, about seven miles from the Talbot manor of Shifnal. He then went on to command the vanward of Henry’s army at the battle of Bosworth, where he was knighted.

Sir Gilbert’s reward was a place in the new King’s household, and, much more importantly, a grant of an inheritable estate in the valuable Worcestershire manor of Grafton.  These rewards were justified by further military service, both at home and abroad.

He fought for Henry at the battle of Stoke on 16 June 1487 and was there created a knight  banneret.  In June 1489 he was one of the commanders of the army, under the lieutenant of Calais, Giles Daubeney, Lord Daubeney, which repelled a Franco-Flemish force besieging the town of Diksmuide, some 50 miles to the east of the English garrison; and, in 1492, he joined with much of the political nation in the bloodless invasion of France. His military distinction was recognised in 1495 when he was admitted to the Order of the Garter, and he was again in arms in the autumn of 1497 to resist the unthreatening landing of Perkin Warbeck in Cornwall.  Later his status as soldier and courtier brought him an ambassadorial role. In February 1504 the King sent him to Rome to offer congratulations to the new Pope, Julius II, and to invest Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, with the Garter. The duke rewarded this service by commissioning Raphael, a native of Urbino, to paint an image of St. George adorned with the Garter, for presentation to his fellow Garter knight.

Not long after Sir Gilbert’s return from Rome, he was appointed as deputy-lieutenant of Calais, where he remained, on and off, for the remainder of his life.  As such, he took part in the 1513 invasion of France, commanded by his nephew, George, earl of Shrewsbury. A tantalising reference suggests that his service came at great personal cost. On 11 July it was reported that, during the siege of Thérouanne, some 30 miles south of Calais, the French artillery had done ‘great hurt’ to the besieging English camp. Talbot is said to have lost a leg and the chamberlain of the royal household, then Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, to have been killed. In respect of Somerset’s death, the report was wrong, but it is possible that Talbot, who relinquished his Calais office soon afterwards, was severely injured.

On his death in August 1517, Sir Gilbert had an elaborate funeral, costing about £175, equivalent to the annual income of a substantial gentry family, before internment at Whitchurch (his tomb was lost when the church collapsed in 1711, rather ironically the year after his manor house at Grafton burnt down). He died a very wealthy man, in part because of the rewards of royal service but also because of his own entrepreneurial spirit.  His second wife, the widow of a London alderman and mercer, Richard Gardener, gave him an entrée into an élite commercial world, and he became a major wool merchant.  In the inventory taken on his death, his most valuable possession single possession was the store of wool he had at Calais, appraised at as much as £1850. In the longer context of the history of the comital family of Talbot, his successful career and his consequent establishment of a robust junior branch had great significance.  In 1618 his great-great-grandson, George, succeeded his childless fourth cousin, Edward Talbot, as earl of Shrewsbury.

SJP

Election disputes were rare in late-medieval England. Indeed, it was not until the early fifteenth-century that any legal framework was established to define what constituted a dispute. Early parliamentary elections were regulated by custom not statute, and the understanding of what defined a valid and proper election was slow to develop. This unsatisfactory situation was remedied by a series of statutes passed between 1406 and 1445. These defined, amongst other things, the franchise (the famous 40s. freehold) and the proper form of a parliamentary return, and laid down penalties for sheriffs who acted against their terms. Much of what is known of disputed elections comes from litigation on these statutes. Such litigation was rare – very few elections were contested at the hustings, let alone disputed – but, when disputes did occur, they are often profoundly revealing of tensions within the county society. Since elections were rarely contested, contests reflected a failure of the compromises on which the smooth running of county society depended and represented, as Gerald Harriss has put it, ‘an opening for the serpent of division’ (G.L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation (Oxford, 2005), p. 172).

That metaphorical ‘serpent’ was active in Shropshire when electors assembled at Shrewsbury castle on 27 October 1485, two months after Henry Tudor’s victory at the battle of Bosworth, to elect two members to the first Parliament of the new reign. On the face of it, a contest appeared unlikely. Several of the county’s leading gentry had played a significant part in Tudor’s victory, and, with such apparent unity on the great question of national politics, it might have been expected that the two MPs would emerge without contention. This, however, did not prove to be the case, and the election pitted against each other the two Shropshire gentry who had most distinguished themselves for Tudor in the Bosworth campaign. Sir Gibert Talbot, uncle of the young George, earl of Shrewsbury, was one of the commanders of Tudor’s army, and Sir Richard Corbet of Moreton Corbet, at least on his own later claim, brought to the battle a contingent of as many as 800 men. Two months later, they had different roles to play: Talbot was the sheriff who conducted the election, and Corbet was a candidate for election. Now they found themselves on different sides. Corbet later sued Talbot for his supposed misconduct at the hustings. He alleged that, although he and another veteran of the Tudor side of Bosworth, Sir Thomas Leighton of Church Stretton, had been the choice of the electors, Talbot had made a false return, replacing his name with that of a lesser local figure, Sir Richard Ludlow of Stokesey.

The election illustrates how allegiances in national politics could be starkly contradicted at the local level. The common cause of Talbot and Corbet at Bosworth did not lessen their opposition in the tangled politics of the Welsh marches. In the days before Tudor landed at Milford Haven on 7 August, a conflict between Talbot’s friend, Sir Richard Croft of Croft (Herefordshire), and Corbet had broken into fatal violence. Three of Corbet’s Welsh servants were murdered by Croft’s men at Hopton castle, the property of Corbet’s mother. It is not unreasonable to suppose, given the insecurity of the times, that the three unlucky Welshmen were among a retinue recruited by Corbet in anticipation of Tudor’s landing. Since Croft was then treasurer of Richard III’s household as well as sheriff of Herefordshire, it might be assumed that his objection to this gathering was as a Ricardian partisan anxious to prevent recruitment for the Tudor’s cause. Yet this was very much not the case, for Croft, like many others, soon showed himself ready to abandon Richard III. There can, in short, be little doubt that the deaths at Hopton Castle had nothing to do with national politics but were an early manifestation of the personal hostility between Croft and Corbet.

It is thus not surprising that these local divisions complicated the election of 1485. The most likely scenario is that Croft, was determined to prevent his enemy’s election and called upon Talbot’s aid. Talbot responded by setting aside the poll and replacing Corbet with Ludlow, an inoffensive candidate from Croft’s point of view. By this act, he contributed to the growing rift between Croft and Corbet which again broke out in fatal violence as the two knights raised men to fight for the King when his throne was threatened by the rising of Lambert Simnel in 1487. Not until Corbet’s death in 1492 was the ‘serpent of division’ laid to rest.

SJP

Further reading
S.J. Payling and S. Cunningham, ‘From the Welsh Marches to the Royal Household: the Leominster Riots of 1487 and Uncertain Allegiances at the Heart of Henry VII’s Régime’, in The Fifteenth Century XX: Essays Presented to Rowena E. Archer, ed. L. Clark and J. Ross (Woodbridge, 2024)