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

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

The troubled politics of the mid-fifteenth century are illuminated by the histories of leading gentry families just as much as they are by those of Neville, Stafford and other great aristocratic families. In one sense, lesser families offer a more subtle perspective in that, while great families were so central to politics that they could hardly avoid active involvement in the struggle between York and Lancaster, the leading gentry had the third option of neutrality. Those families that did commit themselves thus have a particular interest. Some, like the Yorkist Devereuxs or the Lancastrian Treshams, were consistent in their loyalty.  Others, however, transferred allegiance, whether through perceived self-interest, as a reaction (even a principled one) to political events or as a calculated gamble.  The story of the Blounts, one of a small coterie of gentry families that dominated Derbyshire politics, is particularly revealing in this regard. Their two changes of allegiance – in 1454 and 1484 – were examples of anticipating, rather than swimming with, the political tide. 

They were a family to whom commitment came naturally. In the early fifteenth-century they served the house of Lancaster with great distinction. Sir Walter Blount was killed at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 (according to some reports, acting as a decoy Henry IV); his son, Sir John Blount, a soldier notable enough to be promoted to the Order of the Garter, fell at the siege of Rouen in 1418; and Sir John’s brother and successor Sir Thomas, spent his best years in the service of Lancastrian arms in France. Sir Thomas’s eldest son, Walter, looked set to continue this tradition, entering the household of Henry VI in about 1440.

Soon, however, Walter, was to commit himself to the house of York with the same enthusiasm as his predecessors had supported Lancaster. The decisive moment came on 28 May 1454 with the famous sack of his manor of Elvaston.  This was a particularly acute example of the damaging interaction of local rivalries among the leading gentry with the crisis in national affairs. Sir Nicholas Longford of Longford, head of another family long connected with the house of Lancaster, led an armed band of 1,000 men to a raid on Elvaston. There they allegedly quartered tapestries charged with the Blount arms, justifying their action on the grounds that Blount ‘was gone to serve Traytours’.  They clearly believed that Blount had come to identify himself with the duke of York, who, the King mentally incapacitated, had become protector two months earlier.            

Whatever Blount’s prior connexion with the duke, the sack of Elvaston drove him further into the Yorkist camp. In the late 1450s he was serving both York and his ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, who, as captain of Calais, appointed him as his marshal there.  The outbreak of civil war in 1459 thus presented him with opportunities. Just as his grandfather, Sir Walter, had actively supported the Lancastrian usurpation of 1399, he fought for its end. He was in the Yorkist ranks in March 1461 at the decisive battle of Towton, where he was knighted.

Blount’s support for York brought him substantial rewards, not least a great marriage. In the aftermath of the earlier Yorkist victory at Northampton in the previous July, he had tried to win the hand of Elizabeth Butler, widow of one of the Lancastrian victims of that battle, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, but she repudiated him on the incontestable grounds that he ‘unequal and inferior to her in nobility and wealth’.  Fortunately for Blount, a widow of yet greater rank did not share her scruples. He soon married another of those widowed at Northampton, namely the King’s maternal aunt, Anne Neville (who was also Warwick’s aunt), dowager-duchess of Buckingham, the wealthiest widow in England.  It is hard to believe that Blount did not owe the match to royal patronage. With this marriage came a greater status: he served in the great office of treasurer and, in June 1465. was elevated to the peerage as Lord Mountjoy.

In the great crisis of Edward’s reign from 1469 to 1471, provoked by the King’s alienation from the earl of Warwick, Blount, after a brief period of equivocation, firmly committed himself to Edward. He fought for him in the victorious campaign of the spring of 1471, during which his son and heir, William, was killed at the battle of Barnet. In April 1472 he followed his uncle, Sir John, in having the honour of installation to the Order of the Garter.

On Blount’s death in 1474, effective headship on the family devolved on his son, James. Although land and title passed to James’s elder brother, John, it was James who was the most politically active, and it was James who took the lead in the next major event in the family’s history. At the beginning of his rule, Richard III confidently placed his trust in the Blounts, giving them a central role in the defence of Calais (with which the family had long been associated), In James’s case this trust proved spectacularly misplaced, for he soon dealt the new King a major blow. Among the captives at Hammes castle, of which James was lieutenant, was the militant Lancastrian, John de Vere, the attainted earl of Oxford, who had been imprisoned there since 1474. The two men must have known each other well, and, at some date shortly before 28 October 1484, Oxford persuaded James not only to release him but to join him in fleeing to join Henry of Richmond at the French court. The probability is that Blount, alienated by the deposition of Edward V, needed little persuasion to revert to the family’s Lancastrian loyalties. He was now wholly committed to Richmond. He landed with him at Milford Haven on 7 August. 1485 and fought at the battle of Bosworth two weeks later. Unsurprisingly, albeit not as mightily as his father had done after the change of regime in 1461, James prospered in the early years of Henry VII’s rule. Sadly, he died childless in 1492 at the height of his career.

Whether Lord Mountjoy shared James’s dramatic change of allegiance cannot be known.  It may be that James, as a younger brother, took the active role because his forfeiture, should Richmond have failed, would not endanger the family’s future. John may also have been restrained by a natural caution.  The striking and well-known provision of his will is suggestive: he advised his sons (the eldest of whom, William, was only seven) , ‘never to take the state of Baron upon them if they may leye it from them nor to desire to be grete about princes for it is daungeros’.  Given that between 1403 and 1471 three of his family, including his eldest brother, had met violent deaths serving ‘princes’, such caution is understandable. Yet this was to be balanced by the positives: the family had been advanced to the peerage by their service to the Yorkists, and, when he drew up his will, his brother’s support for Henry VII promised further promotion.  In any event, the new Lord Mountjoy disregarded his father’s well-meaning advice.  Most famous as a friend and patron of Erasmus, he made a very successful career at the court of the most dangerous of princes, Henry VIII.

S.J.P.

Further reading

H. Castor, ‘Sack of Elvaston’, Midland History, xix. 21-39.

For biographies of Sir Walter Blount (d.1403), Sir Thomas Blount (d.1456) and Walter Blount, Lord Mountjoy: The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 258-60, 262-5; 1422-61, iii.  382-91.  A biography of Sir James Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504.

Some three years after Lambert Simnel had taken up his post as Henry VII’s kitchen boy, another claimant to Henry VII’s crown appeared in Ireland. He was initially identified as Edward, earl of Warwick, son of the duke of Clarence, and subsequently as a bastard son of Richard III. Perkin Warbeck denied that he was either. By the end of 1491, he had decided to claim the identity of Richard of Shrewsbury, Edward IV’s younger son. 

For a period, this new pretender moved from European court to court: initially, to that of Charles VIII in France, then to that of his purported aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, at Malines in Flanders. At the English court itself, the supposed ‘Edward VI’ attracted a degree of support, and yet, in spite of suspicions and rumours, no invasion or uprising materialised in the spring of 1493.

‘As for the matier beyond See, be ye sure ye may slepe in rest for any trouble that shall be this yere or the next’, as the Norfolk gentleman William Paston reported to a correspondent.

In the first instance, this was indeed so, for Warbeck, attached to the entourage of the Archduke Maximilian, meandered around northwestern Europe, variously recognised as Richard of Shrewsbury by all but the English crown. Even in England, the pretender found support from a substantial number of former servants of the Yorkist royal family.

At the end of June 1495 Warbeck was ready to sail for England. His first intention may have been to land in East Anglia, but in the event his flotilla made landfall at Deal in Kent in the first days of July. It proved a disaster. The pretender was left to watch helpless from his ship as his vanguard of about 300 men was slaughtered by a far superior force brought up from Sandwich. Warbeck sailed for Ireland, but was eventually driven off by the Lord Deputy, Sir Edward Poynings. Whomsoever of his adherents Henry VII could get hold of, were condemned as pirates and unceremoniously hanged. Warbeck himself went into hiding. For two months, his whereabouts are unknown to us, although one man who clearly knew was King James IV of Scotland: on 20 November Warbeck rode into Stirling castle.   

James IV seems, if anything, to have been even more completely taken in by Warbeck than his counterparts on the continent. Less than two months after his arrival, the pretender was married to Katherine, daughter of George, earl of Huntly. The importance of this match has been somewhat overstated. Far from being a direct member of the royal family, Katherine was at best a distant relative of the King and more properly only a connexion by several remarriages. Nevertheless, the cogs of European diplomacy continued to turn.

In parallel, English and Scots continued preparations for open war. These dragged on for much of the summer before James IV finally crossed the English border on 21 September 1496. It was at best an inglorious expedition. Over a period of two days James IV’s troops pulled down a number of towers in the border region. Then, within a matter of hours, they pulled back to the safety of Scottish territory.

Henry VII was not to be rushed. Only after the Scots’ withdrawal did he convene a great council which made the financial grant required. In the first place. Money was to be raised in the form of a loan, pending a formal grant to taxation by Parliament, which followed in early 1497. Preparations for the war continued throughout the spring of 1497, but although Henry’s vanguard eventually advanced north, their effort was overtaken by events further south.

Even in February Henry VII’s forced loan of £40,000 was collected in the English shires. This was followed later in the spring by the taxation granted by Parliament – some £120,000. As far as it is possible to tell, it was an excessive tax rating imposed by John Oby, the provost of Glasney college, and tax collector at Penryn in Cornwall, that lit the touch paper. Before too long, Cornwall was in revolt, and the rebels marched east, led by a local blacksmith, Michael Joseph, ‘an Gof’, and a lawyer from a long-established local gentry family, Thomas Flamank. In Devon, they garnered little support. When they reached Exeter the citizens agreed to admit the rebel leaders, but in spite of threats of violence against the mayor, the rebels left the city untouched and instead marched on into Somerset.

Here, they found extensive support, restricted not merely to the county and its towns, but also into Wiltshire and Hampshire. Here, also, they acquired a noble leader in James Tuchet, lord Audley. Audley’s motives in joining the rebels are hard to fathom, but it has been suggested that a resentment of the royal preferment of John, Lord Cheyne, was to blame.  From the cathedral city of Wells, the rebels wrote to Warbeck in Scotland, inviting him to join, and indeed lead their cause. Then, the rebels split their army in two: one, lead by an Gof marched via Winchester towards Guildford, while the other, under Lord Audey, took a more northerly route via Wallingford to London.

At Ewelme, the King’s messengers located Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk.  In fact, they found him in bed. Or to be precise, sharing a bed with Lord Abergavenny, who hid from the messengers under the covers. De la Pole responded to the King’s orders to protect Staines Bridge with alacrity, and rode to join the army, but not before he had immobilised Abergavenny by taking his shoes.

The rebellion was brought to an end at Blackheath where the rebels were crushed by the King’s army. Many of the rebels nevertheless got away, and this – if indeed he had heard news of Blackheath – may have motivated Warbeck, who set sail on 6 July. Whether intentionally or as a result of stormy weather, he was initially driven to Ireland, but found a Spanish ship to take him to Cornwall. This, however, was intercepted by an English vessel. Informed by the English captain of Prince Arthur’s recent betrothal to Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish sailors were charged on their loyalty to give up Perkin Warbeck if they had him on board. The Spanish master kept a straight face and swore that he had never even heard of such a person: Warbeck, for his part, lay huddled up in an empty wine barrel in the ship’s prow. On 7 September, the ship landed at Whitesand Bay near Land’s End.

Warbeck’s own following had shrunk from its original size to barely 300 men, but his English sponsors were able to raise fresh troops, so it was at the head of some 3,000 armed followers that the pretender marched on Exeter. Initial developments seemed promising: when the sheriff of Cornwall raised the posse comitatus and attacked the rebel camp at Castle Kynnock near Bodmin the majority of his men deserted and joined the pretender. Similarly, the earl of Devon who had arrayed his retinue was forced to retreat into the walled city of Exeter before the approaching rebels.

Warbeck’s army, purportedly swollen to some 8,000 men, now marched on Exeter and laid siege to the city. On 17 September, attacked on the east and north gates were beaten back. The rebels renewed their attack on the following day. The earl of Devon and his son were caught asleep, and the assailants managed to batter their way into the city. But the earl of Devon and the citizens rallied, and the steep incline of the high street from the Exe bridge probably playing its part in driving back the attackers. Neither side could claim a victory, but a truce was agreed, under the terms of which the rebels would continue on their march east, if the earl of Devon would promise not to pursue them.

So the rebels marched on, and on 19 September 1497 reached Taunton. Here, they remained for two days executing a variety of military manoeuvres, but it was clear that the game was up. A royal army was approaching from the east, and behind them the earl of Devon, whatever he had previously promised, was bringing up his men in their rear. In the face of this, Warbeck and a small group of confidants fled from Taunton in the middle of the night.

For a day and a half Warbeck and his last few followers galloped through the English countryside until they reached the sanctuary of Beaulieu abbey. Here, Henry VII’s men caught up with them, and in return for their lives, they agreed to surrender to the King. In the first instance, Henry VII showed himself gracious. He kept the pretender in his entourage, and subsequently at his court, although he periodically exposed him to the scorn of the Londoners. Yet, within a year Warbeck attempted to escape. This, Henry could not allow.  Warbeck was consequently confined in the Tower in chains: his public exposure – in the stocks on a scaffold of empty wine barrels – became more taxing. And yet, he also became a target for fresh treason against Henry VII’s rule.

This time, the King had had enough. On 16 November 1499 Warbeck was put on trial in the palace of Westminster’s White Hall. The predictable sentence was that he should suffer the customary penalties of treason. Yet, apparently public opinion had preserved some affection for the pretender and opposed this gruesome punishment. So, on 23 November, Warbeck was led through the streets of London, a halter around his neck, and hanged on a small scaffold erected for this purpose at Tyburn. The Warbeck conspiracy was at an end.

H.W.K.

Further Reading:

Ian Arthurson, The Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy (Stroud, 1994)

On 9 August 1485 Henry Tudor, titular earl of Richmond, landed on the Welsh coast near Milford Haven with a small flotilla equipped with the aid of the French king, Charles VIII. In the days that followed, Henry’s small force gradually made its way inland, and on 15 August reached the English border near Shrewsbury. The invasion was not unexpected. Earlier in the summer King Richard III had established his headquarters at Nottingham, and at the end of July he had instructed the Chancellor, John Russell, bishop of Lincoln, who remained at Westminster, to send him the great seal of England, one of the principal tools of government which alone gave a written instrument the full authority of the Crown. Richard received the seal on 1 August, and entrusted it to the keeping of the master of the rolls, Thomas Barowe, a senior administrator whom he kept by his side throughout the dramatic days of that summer.

Confirmed news of Henry Tudor’s landing reached the King at Nottingham within two days of the event, on 11 August. Richard at once sprang into action and in the following days sent urgent messages summoning his supporters. Little of what else occupied the King in the final ten days of his reign is known: the final letter under the great seal was recorded on the patent roll on 9 August and concerned the confirmation to the priory of Lenton of a grant of Edward IV. And then, on 16 August, with Henry Tudor’s army already on English soil, Richard issued an elaborate pardon to an old adversary, John Morton, bishop of Ely.

Morton was a die-hard Lancastrian loyalist, who served as chancellor to the young prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster in the second half of the 1450s, and subsequently followed first Henry VI and later his queen, Margaret of Anjou, into their respective exiles. Following the extermination of the male line of the house of Lancaster after the battle of Tewkesbury, Morton accepted a pardon from Edward IV, who recognised his administrative skills, and in 1472 appointed him master of the rolls. Frequently employed on diplomatic missions, Morton was among the envoys who in 1475 negotiated the profitable treaty of Picquigny with the French, and he received his reward four years later, when he was elevated to the bishopric of Ely. 

By the end of Edward IV’s reign, he was perceived to be among the most influential of the King’s councillors, and as a consequence on 13 June 1483 he was arrested during a dramatic council meeting (immortalised by Shakespeare) alongside William, Lord Hastings, and Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York. Hastings was summarily executed without delay, but the two prelates were placed in the Tower. Handed over into the custody of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Morton regained his freedom and played his part in the duke’s rebellion in the autumn of 1483, and on the failure of that rising made good his escape into exile in Flanders. As might be expected, Morton was attainted in Richard III’s delayed Parliament in early 1484, but remained at liberty on the continent. Unable to lay hands on his eloquent and well-connected opponent, Richard III tried in vain to bring him to submission with the offer of a general pardon in December 1484. This, Morton rejected.

In the spring of 1485, Morton was at the papal curia in Rome, and he may still have been there when the events that would lead up to Richard’s death at Bosworth began to unfold. It may, however, be a measure of how far from a foregone conclusion Henry Tudor’s victory was, that Morton was apparently in contact with the nuclear court at Nottingham. While it is possible that the pardon of 16 August represented a final attempt by the King to drive a wedge between the earl of Richmond and his supporters, it is also possible that it had been prepared for some time. As C.S.L. Davies has pointed out, on 2 August, in one of the first acts after taking direct control of the great seal, Richard had issued pardons to a group of known associates of Morton’s, at least one of whom had acted as a go-between at the time of the earlier, abortive, offer of a pardon the previous December. Then, Morton had rejected the King’s offer. In July 1485, he may have accepted it. Certainly, he seems to have taken delivery of the letters of pardon, and would a few years later plead them in court.

Strikingly, the pardon offered to Morton in July 1485 went further than other general pardons. While, like them, it covered a broad range of offences, it placed particular emphasis on Morton’s legal rehabilitation and restoration following his attainder in the Parliament of January 1484. This restitution technically required a fresh act of Parliament, but in the absence of such an act, the King’s pardon simply set aside the provisions of the attainder. This, in turn, may hint at a degree of desperation on King Richard’s part: Morton was a problem that needed to be solved. It could not wait for a future Parliament.   

H.W.K.

Further reading:

C.S.L. Davies, ‘Bishop John Morton, the Holy See, and the Accession of Henry VII’, English Historical Review, cii (1987), 2-30.

Richard’s pardon to Morton is printed in Pardon Rolls of Richard III, 1484-85 ed. by Hannes Kleineke (List and Index Society 365, 2023)

By the time Henry VII overcame Richard III at the battle of Bosworth and claimed the English throne, changes of dynasty or even ruler followed an established pattern. Having successfully asserted a claim to the throne and secured some form of possession of the crown, frequently by armed might or an exhibition thereof, the new ruler summoned a Parliament to affirm his claim and negate those of any potential rivals. In this, the autumn of 1485 was no exception. On 15 September, less than a month after Bosworth, writs were issued summoning a Parliament to meet at Westminster on 7 November.

Clearly, it was imperative that the new King should have friends in this assembly: no previous 15th-century usurper had quite so flimsy a royal lineage as Henry VII, and by inference quite so tenuous a claim to the English throne. Moreover, England had suffered more than a quarter of a century of intermittent dynastic strife, and while some former adherents of Edward IV had been antagonised by Richard III and had thrown in their lot with Henry Tudor, it was far from clear how far he could rely on the full support of the Yorkist clientele, or even of what little remained of die-hard partisans of the defeated, depleted, and fragmented Lancastrian line. The House of Lords could be managed by denying summons to those peers too closely associated with Richard III, but the Commons were a different matter. The loss of the election returns for the Parliament of 1485 makes it impossible to be certain about the composition of more than a fraction of the membership of the Commons, but some inferences may be drawn from what is known. The lengths to which Henry and his advisers went to try and secure a compliant House of Commons are perhaps best demonstrated by the election as Speaker of the chancellor of the Exchequer, the King’s councillor Sir Thomas Lovell, a man who should have been technically disqualified from office by his attainder in the Parliament of 1485. Even so, the proceedings were to be characterised by arguments and disagreement, as the MPs for Colchester reported to their constituents.

One part of England where Henry VII enjoyed considerable support was the far south-west. Devon and Cornwall had only grudgingly come to terms with the accession of the house of York. Many of the leading gentry of the two counties had risen in arms for Henry VI during his brief Readeption in 1470-71, and many had also played their part in the duke of Buckingham’s rebellion against Richard III in 1483. Once the earl of Richmond had asserted himself as the focal point of the opposition to Richard III, a number of important south-westerners had joined him in exile on the continent. Among the most eminent of them was Sir Thomas Arundell of Lanherne. In a county which was almost unique in late medieval England in its lack of resident magnates, the Arundells of Lanherne stood out among their neighbours in wealth and status.

After the failure of the main line of the house of Lancaster, the Arundells had grudgingly come to terms with Edward IV’s rule, but even though Sir Thomas was among the men knighted on the eve of Richard III’s coronation, he joined Buckingham’s rising and before the end of the year had gone into exile. He was attainted by Parliament in 1484, and stripped of his lands which were granted to the King’s favourite Sir James Tyrell. Arundell returned with Henry VII two years later, and fought alongside him at Bosworth. As one of two leading Cornishmen in Henry’s inner circle, and a member of one of the great historic families of the county, Arundell would have been an obvious choice to seek election to Parliament in the autumn of 1485 as one of the knights of the shire for Cornwall.

It was not to be. By the second week of October, probably even before parliamentary elections could be held in Cornwall, Arundell was dead. It is possible that he had succumbed to wounds sustained in the fighting at Bosworth, but there may also be another explanation. In the weeks after Bosworth, England experienced the first outbreak of a new and frightening epidemic, the ‘Sweating Sickness’ or ‘English Sweat’ (sudor anglicus). Thought by some to have been a highly contagious viral infection (medical opinion remains divided), the sweating sickness, the symptoms of which included violent cold shivers, joint pains, a fever, accompanied by the characteristic intense sweating that gave the disease its name, and severe exhaustion, could kill a sufferer within a matter of hours.

The epidemic broke out in London in mid-September, and in a matter of weeks caused several thousand fatalities, many of them from the upper echelons of civic society. In October, the outbreak ended as suddenly as it had begun, although there would be repeated epidemics of the disease until the mid-16th century. Before his death, Arundell found time to make a will and asked to be buried initially in the parish church of Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire, before having his body transferred to the Franciscan friary at Dorchester in Dorset at a later date. It is possible that this provision was merely intended to give his executors time to make the requisite preparations for a suitably grand memorial in the friary, but it is equally possible that it owed everything to the need for a rapid burial of his body at a time of epidemic disease sweeping across the land.

Arundell was by no means an old man, and could have expected to play an important part in the politics of Henry VII’s reign, much as, and perhaps even more than, his ancestors and descendants had done and would do under earlier and later kings. As it was, not for the first and certainly not for the last time, a career full of promise was cut prematurely short by an epidemic. Southern England, but not his native Cornwall, was to have one last glimpse of Arundell as, some time after his death, his mother-in-law, the formidable Lady Joan Dynham, arranged for the transfer of his body to Dorchester in a splendid cortège decked out with a hundred shields of arms, and in an overland procession that lasted six days.

H.W.K.

Further reading:

J. R. Carlson and P.W. Hammond, ‘The English Sweating Sickness (1485-c.1551): A New Perspective on Disease Etiology’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, liv (1999), 23–54.

H. Kleineke, ‘The Reburial Expenses of Sri Thomas Arundell’, The Ricardian, xi (June 1998), 288-96.

For more on the impact of disease and epidemics on Parliament, head to the ‘Health and Medicine‘ link on our page. Follow the research of our 1461-1504 project at the ‘Commons in the Wars of the Roses‘ section of our blog.

Since 1 July 2016, European Union rules have given electronic signatures the same legal weight as their hand-written counterparts, and it is to be expected that these rules will in the near future be incorporated into English law, where the admissibility of an electronic signature is at present governed by the provisions of the Electronic Communications Act 2000.

There is a neat irony in this, since in the last years of Henry VIII England led the way in allowing for the authorization of government papers in the King’s absence. Like rulers elsewhere, the Kings of England had long used a variety of seals to add their authority to official documents. If the royal seal had originally travelled with the monarch, over the course of the medieval centuries an evolving bureaucracy saw first the Great Seal of the realm and subsequently also the King’s privy seal become stationary at Westminster. In the fifteenth century, it became increasingly common for the King to add his monogram to the impression of his signet, and ultimately to dispense entirely with the seal in favour of his signature. Thus, even the original acts of parliament of the Yorkist and Tudor kings received the formal royal assent by the monarch’s signature.

At the same time, the volume of papers the King was required to read and sign grew. Henry VII was an avid administrator and peruser of papers, but his son – in his own grandfather’s, Edward IV’s mould – rather less so. Particularly in his final years, Henry grew increasingly reluctant to sign documents in large numbers, a state of affairs which led to the introduction of the ‘dry stamp’, a stamp of the monarch’s signature which could be affixed to official papers. The documents in question were then recorded in a special register that was placed before the King for approval.

The dry stamp was placed in the care of the King’s favourite, Anthony Denny and his brother-in-law, John Gates, and was used by them to authenticate the will of the King. In view of the will’s implications for the succession, this proceeding caused much subsequent controversy, which continued into the reign of Elizabeth I when it was revived in the course of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy concerning a possible Stuart succession.

More general, also, the use of stamps in favour of signatures continued to be disparaged and mistrusted. In a speech in the House of Commons on 5 April 1624, the prominent lawyer and former Speaker Sir Edward Coke attacked the lord treasurer, the earl of Middlesex for allowing the use of a dry stamp of his signature on his official letters. Peter Mutton, the newly elected Member for the Caernarvon boroughs, rose to the treasurer’s defence, claiming that ‘he had heard before he was born [sic] that stamps were used here in this kingdom’. At this unfortunately phrased claim ‘the whole House laughed and hissed’, and Coke pressed his advantage home, addressing the hapless Mutton as ‘Sir Peter Stamp’.

HK

Further reading:

• Eric Ives, ‘Henry VIII’s will – a forensic conundrum’, The Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 779-804
• R.A. Houlbrooke, ‘Henry VIII’s Wills: A Comment’, The Historical Journal, 37 (1994), 891-99
• Suzannah Lipscombe, ‘Who Hijacked Henry VIII’s Will?’, BBC History Magazine, Dec. 2015 [http://www.historyextra.com/article/premium/who-hijacked-henry-viiis-will]
• John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (2005)

At the battle of Bosworth the last Plantagenet King, Richard III, met his death. For some leading parliamentarians who had taken up arms on his behalf it also marked the end, either immediately through death on the field, or in the days and months that followed Henry Tudor’s victory. For others, it proved a very serious setback from which recovery was nevertheless possible. For others who took the field for Tudor and survived, Bosworth saved or made their careers.

Apart from Richard himself, the foremost victim of Bosworth was his leading supporter among the nobility, John Howard, duke of Norfolk. Created duke by Richard in 1483, Howard had previously sat as an MP and attended the Lords after his elevation to the peerage in 1470. A lesser lord who fell fighting for Richard was Walter Devereux, Lords Ferrers of Chartley, a long-term supporter of the House of York. One of the knights of the shire for Herefordshire in the Parliament of 1460, he had the rare distinction of having also fought at Towton, the bloody battle by which the first Yorkist King, Edward IV, secured his newly-won throne. Like Howard, he suffered a posthumous loss of lands and title in the first Parliament of Henry VII’s reign. Fortunately for his family, his son John Devereux had known Henry since boyhood and was willing to accept the new King. Summoned to the Lords in 1487, John secured the reversal of his father’s attainder in the following Parliament of 1489.

Among those taken prisoner at Bosworth were the duke of Norfolk’s son, Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, and William Catesby. Before becoming earl, Thomas had twice sat in the Commons. Wounded at the battle, he spent three years in the Tower of London and forfeited his lands and title in Henry VII’s first Parliament. The recovery of the Howards was a good deal more tortuous than that of Devereux but Thomas was the ultimate survivor and, upon his release, dedicated himself to regaining lands and status through loyal service to the Tudors. Henry VIII made him duke of Norfolk – a new creation – following his famous defeat of the Scots at the battle of Flodden in 1513. His fellow prisoner, Catesby, the Speaker in Richard III’s only Parliament (1484), was not so fortunate. The only important figure to suffer death among those captured at Bosworth, he was beheaded three days later at Leicester and was attainted in the following Parliament. His son and heir George had managed to recover most of the Catesby estates by his own death in 1505, although the far greater prospects that his family might have hoped for had Richard III kept this throne were gone for ever.

Among Richard’s supporters who escaped the field was the diehard Humphrey Stafford, an MP for Worcestershire on several occasions in the mid-fifteenth century.. Stafford fled Bosworth with the chamberlain of Richard’s household, Francis, Viscount Lovell, with whom he found sanctuary in Colchester abbey. Eight months later, they broke out of sanctuary to raise rebellion against the Tudor monarch. Following the failure of this uprising, Stafford again managed to find sanctuary, this time in the abbot of Abingdon’s liberty at Culham, Oxfordshire. Here his luck ran out. Just two days later, on the night of 13 May 1486, a pursuing force dragged from his refuge and, in due course, he suffered death on the scaffold at Tyburn. Like the Howards, Devereux and Catesby, Stafford was attainted in Henry VII’s first Parliament, and his manors of Grafton and Upton Warren in Worcestershire were granted away to Sir Gilbert Talbot, one of their adversaries at Bosworth.

A younger son of the 2nd earl of Shrewsbury, Talbot had commanded Tudor’s right wing at Bosworth. He sat in three of Henry’s Parliaments before becoming the King’s lieutenant of Calais. He died possessed of a substantial landed estate in 1517. Among Talbot’s comrades in arms at Bosworth were Sir James Blount, Walter Hungerford and Humphrey Stanley. A former member of the Yorkist Household, Blount had already sat in the Commons for Derbyshire over a decade before the battle. Attainted in the Parliament of 1484 after deserting Richard III, he fled to France to join Tudor, who knighted him at Milford Haven when they returned in the following year. Like Talbot, he later sat in Henry’s Parliament of 1491.

The story of Hungerford, the youngest son of Robert, 3rd Lord Hungerford, and a member of a firmly Lancastrian family, is as dramatic as Stafford’s. Lord Robert was among those diehards who held out against Edward IV in northern England until his capture and execution in 1464, and Walter’s elder brother, Sir Thomas Hungerford, suffered death at the scaffold for treason in 1469. Notwithstanding these events, Walter subsequently entered the Commons while Edward was on the throne, although he found it necessary to obtain a general pardon at the accession of Richard III, who later ordered his arrest. Yet he managed to escape and make his way to Tudor. At Bosworth, he killed Sir Robert Brackenbury, lieutenant of the Tower of London, receiving a knighthood on field from Henry for his exploits. He returned to the Commons, again as an MP for Wiltshire, and served the first two Tudor monarchs as a councillor and diplomat.

Stanley, a younger son of a Staffordshire landowner, was likewise knighted at Bosworth by Tudor. Thereafter he joined the King’s household and, like his father before him, he was elected as a knight of the shire for Staffordshire in at least two Parliaments. No paragon of virtue, he gained election in 1495 even though he had procured the murder of his neighbour and fellow household man, William Chetwynd, in the previous year. In spite of such behaviour, he was awarded the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey following his death in 1505.

CM

Henry VII’s first Parliament assembled at Westminster on 7 November 1485, not much over two months after the decisive battle of Bosworth. Its businesss was naturally shaped by recent political events: the king’s tenuous title to the throne had to be fortified by parliamentary sanction, his supporters who had been attainted of treason under Edward IV and Richard III rehabilitated, the supporters of the dead Richard III attainted, and their possessions seized. In this it was not very different from the Parliaments that had opened the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III in 1461 and 1484. Uniquely for the late medieval period, we have the eye-witness account of two of the Members of the Commons, the representatives of the Essex town of Colchester who described what happened in the earliest known parliamentary diary. Not surprisingly, taxation was first on the agenda, and – as at all times – it proved contentious, and took several days to pass the Commons. Much time was spent in debate.

On 14 November there were arguments without conclusion. … On 16 November questions were moved for the common weal about the false persons who have ruled many days among us, and no conclusion. … On 25 November certain bills were read, and thereupon were arguments, and nothing passed that day.

the Colchester MPs recorded. Among the matters that came before the House were the quality of the coinage, the prohibition of the maintenance of private armies by the giving of liveries and badges, and the discontinuation of the court of requests. High politics nevertheless dominated the agenda, as a string of petitioners seeking restoration of their property trooped past over successive days.

If the Commons felt the new king’s hand heavy on their shoulder, they mostly hid it well. What was nevertheless left unsaid was that their chosen speaker, the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer Thomas Lovell, was a trusted adherent of the new monarch who was chosen speaker despite being an attainted traitor at the time of his election. Conversely, the list of those to be attainted for their opposition to Henry VII or their previous adherence to Richard III appears to have caused serious turmoil in the lower house. It had taken more than a month from the beginning of the parliamentary session to draw it up, but the Commons were, nevertheless, restive. ‘On 9 December the bill of attainder came in, and was sorely questioned’ the Colchester MPs wrote. It is tempting to suppose that it was Henry VII’s backdating of his reign to the day before Bosworth, that made traitors of any who had answered their lawful King’s summons to battle that particularly grated with the Commons, but of this the diarists gave no indication. Bills of attainder had come before Parliament on more than one occasion since 1459, and were routinely debated with vigour in the lower House. In any event, the Commons’ opposition was quick to crumble. Just a day later, the Colchester men recorded, ‘there passed the same bill of attainder’. Once this was done, the king was content. Later on the same day the Lords and Commons were dismissed to their homes for the Christmas recess.

HK