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

Peter starts with the received wisdom that, in the late 1450s, Coventry was militantly Lancastrian. Such a view had the endorsement of the greatest authority on the reign of Henry VI, Ralph Griffiths (who, incidentally, supervised Peter’s thesis on the Kentish gentry), who described its citizens as ‘fiercely loyal to the Lancastrians’ (R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, pp. 777-8). This conclusion has a persuasive context, which Peter sets out.  The city had close and historic ties with the Crown. The royal earldom of Chester, part of the endowment of the heir to the throne, was overlord of its southern half; and, when Crown and duchy of Lancaster were united on Henry IV’s accession in 1399, its proximity to the great duchy castle of Kenilworth brought it closer to the centre of the political nation.  In the late 1450s the increasing power of Queen Margaret, who held Kenilworth as part of her dower, brought these connexions into the most intense political focus. The court spent extended periods there, and the notorious Parliament of November 1459, which confiscated the lands of the Yorkist lords, was convened in the city’s Benedictine priory.  

This was the well-established picture Peter set out to re-examine. A small doubt had already been raised by Michael Hicks, who, in 2010, pointed out that the court’s residence in the city in the late 1450s was more intermittent than is generally supposed (M. Hicks, The Wars of the Roses, 126).  Peter took this doubt very much further.  Indeed, he entirely subverted the argument.  In his formulation the court’s periodic sojourns there, even if less prolonged than was once thought, eroded rather than strengthened the city’s ties with the house of Lancaster. He describes the tensions evident from the outset.  On 11 October 1456, during a great council in the city, there was ‘a gret affray’ between the followers of Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and the city’s watchmen in which two or three of the citizens were killed. By 1460 there are clear signs that the court had become an unwelcome visitor. Royal signet letters to the city authorities on 8 February of that year, cited reports that ‘diuers of thinhabitantes of oure Cite of Couentre haue …. vsed and had right vnfittyng langage ayenst oure estate and personne’ and in favour of the recently-attainted Yorkist lords, a curious circumstance in a city of unquestioned loyalty.  

The next evidence Peter cites is yet starker. On 17 February 1461, in signet letters in the name of the young prince of Wales and dated at St. Albans, where the Lancastrians had just defeated the  leading Yorkist lord, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the mayor and aldermen were peremptorily ordered to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable’ to three local Lancastrian loyalists, the King’s carver, Sir Edmund Mountfort, Sir Henry Everingham of Withybrook, only a few miles from the city, and William Elton, MP for the city in 1453. This reads, Peter suggests, as a desperate attempt to recall the city to its earlier Lancastrian allegiance. If so, it failed. When it was read before the ‘Comyns’ in St. Mary’s Hall, they were so ‘meved’ against its bearer, a priest in Everingham’s service, that they would, but for the mayor’s intervention, ‘A smytt of the prestes hed’.  Soon after, according to one chronicle, its erstwhile resident, Queen Margaret, singled out the city for punishment.  In this context, it is not surprising that the city authorities soon came to share the Yorkist sympathies of the ‘Comyns’. They provided £100 for soldiers to accompany Edward, earl of March, to London in the wake of Neville’s defeat at St. Albans, and a further £80 for 100 men to go with him to what proved to be the decisive battle of Towton.

To explain this support for the Yorkist cause in a city with long-standing Lancastrian connexions, Peter pointed not only to the tensions inherent in the court’s presence but also to influence of the earl of Warwick, whose castle of Warwick lay only ten miles away. It is instructive here that, in the crisis of 1469-71, the city appears to have sided, albeit rather equivocally, with the earl when he rose against Edward IV. Peter shows that, in the campaign of the spring of 1471 during which the earl met his death at the battle of Barnet, Coventry provided him with at least 40 soldiers and was fined by the restored Edward IV for its temerity in doing so. He might also have cited other evidence for the city’s support for the earl. Two of its leading citizens, Richard Braytoft, a former MP, and Robert Onley, were accused of complicity in the execution at Gosford Green, just outside the city, of the King’s father-in-law Earl Rivers, one of the principal victims of Warwick’s rising against Edward IV (TNA, KB27/836, rot. 61d). The reception accorded to Everingham’s priest may, therefore, have been an expression of the city’s support not for the Yorkist cause in general but for the earl of Warwick in particular. Even so, one thing is clear: Peter has shown that Coventry was not a Lancastrian stronghold, even in the late 1450s when its ties with the Lancastrian ruling house were, at least to outward appearances, at their closest.

S.J.P.

Further reading

P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 2011)

and Late-Medieval Bristol: Time, Space and Power (2024).

The Commons,1422-61, ed. L. Clark, iii. 497-9 (for Braytoft), iv. 235-8 (for Elton), 281-3 (for Everingham), v. 547-56 (for Mountfort).

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.

For leading landowning families ready to commit themselves to one side or the other, the Wars of the Roses offered both hazard and opportunity. In terms of the latter, that commitment needed to be whole-hearted, but not necessarily consistent. So frequent were the turns of the political tide, consistency was hard to reconcile with self-interest. Family connexions across the divides of national political division facilitated changes of allegiance, as did the readiness of the ascendant party to reconcile with all but the intractable. At certain moments there were significant shifts, notably in the wake of the attainder of the Yorkist lords in 1459 and the usurpation of Richard III in 1483. Some families, however, were consistent in their loyalty. One such was the Devereuxs of Weobley, who energetically supported the house of York from the 1430s until the death of Richard III at Bosworth.

Their service to York began well before the outbreak of civil war when one young man entered the service of another. In 1435 Richard, duke of York, recently come of age, appointed Walter Devereux as steward of his Welsh estates, perhaps on the recommendation of Walter’s father-in-law, the influential John Merbury, formerly justiciar of South Wales. Walter quickly became one of the duke’s most trusted servants, serving under him in France in the early 1440s, and he took plentiful advantage of the enhanced status that came with so close a connexion to so great man. He contracted two important marriages for his young children. Materially, the most important of these was that of his son and heir, another Walter, to Anne, the young daughter of Sir William Ferrers of Chartley in Staffordshire, in 1446. When Ferrers died in 1450, Anne was left sole heiress to an estate worth some £500 p.a., enough (at least when it fell into their hands in its entirety on the death of her mother in 1471) to raise the family to the ranks of the greatest gentry. Politically more important, however, was the marriage, in 1449, of his own daughter within the ducal network, to a Welsh esquire, William Herbert of Raglan, then at the beginning of a career that culminated in his elevation to the earldom of Pembroke.

In the 1450s Devereux and Herbert were the duke’s principal lieutenants in the marches as he moved into active opposition to the Crown.  Devereux led the Herefordshire part of York’s failed rising in 1452 and was accordingly indicted for treason. He was pardoned on personal supplication to the King, but four years later his Yorkist allegiance led him into greater difficulties. After a resurgent court party had once more driven York into the political wilderness, Devereux joined Herbert in an orgy of violence in the marches. Most seriously, on 10 August 1456, some 2,000 men, with Devereux and Herbert at their head, took Carmarthen castle, imprisoning its keeper, the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond. Devereux was imprisoned for seven months but eventually, in February 1458, he was acquitted of treason. 

Sir Walter’s death in the spring of 1459, when in his early fifties, spared him further trouble.  That lot fell to his son.  He was in the duke’s ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge in the following October, and, although he escaped attainder, he was fined 500 marks and was among those Yorkist partisans forced to abase themselves, in ‘schyrtys and halters’, before the King. Not surprisingly, he rallied to York when the duke returned from exile early in September 1460. On 4 October he and Herbert were elected to Parliament in which the duke dramatically claimed the throne, and he went on to fight at the battles of Mortimer’s Cross and Towton, where he was knighted.  With York’s son, Edward IV, now King, this loyalty brought him substantial rewards.  On 26 July 1461 he and Herbert were among the five new peers created in the interests of the new regime, and, to support his new rank, Devereux was granted forfeited Lancastrian estates worth over £250 p.a.

In the great crisis of the reign, although he appears not to have gone into exile with Edward IV, Devereux fought for him at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury in the spring of 1471. His military value was recognised a year later when he was accorded the singular honour of admission to the Order of the Garter. Fittingly, he fought on the French campaign of 1475 and then played a prominent role in the elaborate chivalric ritual that attended the reburial of the duke of York in the collegiate church at Fotheringhay in July 1476.  

This simple pattern of loyal service to the ruling house was to be complicated by events following Edward IV’s death in April 1483. However much Devereux may have disapproved of the deposition of the prince of Wales, upon whose council of the marches he had served, his gains from royal patronage depended on the continuation of Yorkist rule. Yet, on the other hand, he had, by a fortuitous route, personal connexions with Richard’s would-be supplanter, Henry Tudor.  In the wake of the battle of Edgecote in July 1469, the young Tudor, who had come to the field in the company of his guardian, the Herbert earl of Pembroke, was brought safely away by Devereux’s own former ward, Richard Corbet, who took the boy to Weobley and the custody of Devereux’s sister, the newly-widowed countess of Pembroke. Henry remained there until the Readeption.  Perhaps it was knowledge of this personal connexion that led Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, ready to rebel in Tudor’s favour in October 1483, to come to Devereux’s house at Weobley to rally aid.

If, however, Devereux was wavering in his support for Richard III, the duke’s endeavour was too desperate to attract his support, and soon afterwards he was given a new reason to support Richard.  Early in 1484 his nephew, the Herbert earl of Huntingdon, married the King’s bastard daughter, Katherine. This family connexion, combined with his family’s long-standing loyalty to the house of York, led him to fight for it one last time. While Corbet, now his son-in-law, was one of the first to join Tudor on his landing in early August 1485, Sir Walter was among those killed on the Ricardian side at Bosworth. Instructively, however, although he was duly attainted in the first Parliament of the new reign, the new King, perhaps because of his youthful experience at Weobley, allowed the family speedy rehabilitation. After Devereux’s son and heir, John, had proved his loyalty by fighting for him at the battle of Stoke in June 1487, the attainder was reversed.  The family won further promotion in Tudor England.  John’s great-grandson, another Walter, was made earl of Essex in 1572 and was the father of Elizabeth I’s ill-fated favourite, Robert. 

SJP

Further reading

For detailed discussions of the careers of the two Sir Walters, see: The Commons, 1422-61, iv. 121-39.  For those of Sir Walter (d.1402) and John Merbury (d.1438), see: The Commons, 1386-1421,  ii. 783-4; iii. 716-20; 1422-61, v. 448-50.

The tomb was probably commissioned by her husband, Sir William Lichfield, a veteran of Agincourt, whose friendship with her father had enabled him to marry above his birth rank. Although, however, one of the couple’s children died with her, Elizabeth, aged in her early thirties on her death in about 1422, left two young daughters as her coheiresses. Her inheritance was thus destined to pass through the female line for a second successive generation.

That descent, however, for reasons that are unclear, did not follow predictable lines.  One of her daughters survived to have a daughter of her own, and the Cornwall inheritance should eventually have passed to this daughter, Margaret, the wife of Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome (Herefordshire), but it did not. Instead, it came to Humphrey Blount, to whose memory, and that of his wife, Elizabeth Winnington, the second tomb was erected. He was a descendant of the Cornwalls in the female line, the great-nephew of Sir John, and was quickly and unexpectedly able to establish title after the death, in 1446, of Lichfield, who had lived at Kinlet, as tenant by the courtesy (a husband’s life interest in the lands of his deceased wife), since Elizabeth’s death. Blount, from the least wealthy of the two surviving branches of an ancient family, now found himself a man of account. He moved to Kinlet from his ancestral manor of Balterley in Staffordshire, and with this move came, both geographically and tenurially, significant new connexions. Kinlet was held of Richard, duke of York’s lordship of Cleobury Mortimer, and, in the civil war of 1459-61, Humphrey put his new gains at hazard by committing himself to the duke’s cause. He was in his ranks at the rout at Ludford Bridge, and his Yorkist credentials were further confirmed in the following autumn, when he was named as sheriff of Shropshire after Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton. This support explains his election for the Shropshire borough of Bridgnorth, about nine miles north of his home at Kinlet, to the first Parliament of the new reign. He no doubt sought the seat because he was excluded as sheriff from representing the county.

Blount’s active loyalty to the house of York was to be made further manifest in the crisis of 1470-1.  He fought for Edward IV at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, where he was knighted.  This, however marked the highpoint of his career.  At his death a few years later, he was only in his mid-fifties. By 6 September 1477, when he made his will, he had moved, perhaps due to ill-health, from Kinlet to Worcester. It was, however, at Kinlet that he was interred, and he bequeathed to the church there a velvet gown for the making of a cope and a gold chain to be sold for the support of a chaplain. 

Blount was survived by his wife, Elizabeth Winnington.  She had played an important part in his elevation, and her career is as interesting as his own. Her early marital life had been troubled.  In 1426, at the age of only four, she had been contracted in marriage to Richard, the ten-year-old son and heir-apparent of Sir John Delves, a match that represented an alliance between two leading Cheshire families. Sir John, however, died in 1429, and his friend, Ralph Egerton, saw this as a means of advancing one of his own daughters at the expense of the young Elizabeth.  He persuaded Richard to disavow his intended bride. Years of uncertainty followed before, in July 1439, William Heyworth, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, confirmed the validity of Richard’s marriage to Elizabeth.  The match, however, proved childless, with Richard dying in 1446. Lichfield died in the same month, enhancing Blount’s prospects and hence his qualifications as her suitor. For her part, Elizabeth had, as a result of her troubled marriage, a life interest in the caput honoris of the Delves family, the manor of Doddington. Her marriage to Blount, contracted soon afterwards, had obvious advantages for both bride and groom. 

Elizabeth was probably responsible for commissioning their fine tomb, for she survived her husband by some 25 years.  It is a commemoration not only of herself and her late husband, but also of their many children. The long side of the tomb appears to commemorate the three sons of the marriage, all of whom are mentioned in Sir Humphrey’s will, and the short side, at the effigies’ feet, their three daughters (the other two sides are blank).  This was a fitting to memorial to one who had elevated his family into the front rank of the Shropshire gentry, acquiring, seemingly against the odds, an inheritance to which his claim was far from unchallenged; and, early in the civil war of 1459-61, committing himself to what proved the winning side. He was unfortunate not to receive greater recognition from Edward IV.  He established a dynasty that survived at Kinlet in the male line until the death of a prominent parliamentarian, his great-grandson, Sir George, in 1581.  The most notable of the family, however, was George’s sister, Elizabeth, mistress of Henry VIII and mother of Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond.

Further reading

E. Norton, ‘The Depiction of Children on the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Tombs in Kinlet Church’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society 87 (2012), 35-46.

A biography of Sir Humphrey Blount will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504 and those of Sir John Cornwall, Sir William Lichfield and Sir George Blount are in The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 661-3; 1422-61, v. 275-8 and 1509-58, i. 445-7 respectively.

Political geography ensured that the town of Ludlow would, for good or ill, play some part in the great civil conflict that began when its lord, Richard, duke of York, moved into active opposition to the government of his cousin, Henry VI. The town was part of the great inheritance that came to the duke on the death of the last Mortimer earl of March in 1425, and, throughout his career, its castle was a favoured residence and a place of refuge in troubled times.  But his interest extended beyond the castle, for he showed a benevolent concern for the town beyond its walls. In the late 1430s he and his wife, Cecily Neville, were admitted to the Palmers’ guild, by far the largest and most prestigious of the town’s fraternities, and the period of his lordship coincided with the major rebuilding, begun in the early 1430s (although not completed until the early 1470s), of the town’s church, of St. Lawrence.  More significantly, in terms of the town’s institutional development, he acknowledged the right of the townsmen to a certain amount of administrative freedom.  In 1449 he allowed that the town councils of 12 and 25 had the right to govern the town in all matters, save those that belonged to his steward ‘in the holding of our courts’.

The escalating political tensions of the following decade, however, revealed a less welcome side to the town’s position as a centre of benevolent lordship. In early 1452, as the duke launched a campaign (the so-called ‘Dartford rising’) to remove the King’s chief minister, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, he rallied forces at Ludlow before marching to London, only to submit tamely in face of the King’s superior forces. This humiliation was followed by another in the summer when royal commissioners toured the duke’s estates to investigate the local disturbances that had attended the rising.  Coming to Ludlow in August, they took an indictment that implies that some radical and dangerous political ideas were circulating in the town. Two of its tradesmen were among those indicted for claiming that Henry VI had neither the ability nor the right to rule (‘non est habilis nec de potestate gubernare regnum .. nec illud regnum de recto regere debuisset’), and that he could be deposed by ‘a Parliament of the whole community of the realm (‘parliamenti tocius communitatis regni’) and another elected in his place (TNA, KB9/103/1, m. 15).  The rebels then gave active expression to their treasonable designs by participating in the murder of a yeoman of the Crown who had come to the town with a message for the duke.  There is no reason to suppose that the duke himself approved this conspiracy nor that it had the support of any of the leading townsmen, but it provides an indication of the strength of Yorkist feeling there.

The strength of that feeling was to be tested seven years later when the duke and his Nevilles allies, feeling themselves endangered by the militant regime of Henry VI’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, brought national conflict to its very gates.  On 12 October 1459 the Lancastrian army, nominally led by the King, confronted an inferior Yorkist force at the bridge over the River Teme on its southern edge. To avoid defeat, the Yorkist lords fled into exile under cover of darkness, the duke leaving his town to face the unhappy consequences. ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’, in its typically vivid style, describes them: ‘The mysrewle of the kyngys galentys at Ludlowe, whenn they hadde drokyn i-nowe of wyne that was in tavernys … robbyd the towne, and bare a-waye beddynge, clothe, and othyr stuffe, and defoulyd many wymmen’.

 These sufferings did not deflect the town from support for the house of York. According to the Burgundian chronicler, Jean de Wavrin, when the duke came there on his return from exile in September 1460, the townsmen were among the Shropshire men who went further than the duke himself had yet publicly gone by acclaiming him King. This loyalty was to bring the town considerable rewards when York’s son, Edward, took the Crown in the following March.  Its castle had been his childhood home, and he spent a week there in the autumn after his accession. The burgesses took the opportunity to lobby for the grant of a comprehensive new charter. That charter was granted on the following 7 December (while Parliament was in session), and the townsmen were given extensive powers of self-government under two bailiffs elected annually from among their ranks. With administrative privileges went financial ones. The townsmen were to hold at a favourable annual farm of 37 marks all the royal property in the town, save for the castle; to regulate the town’s trade through a guild merchant; and to levy a sales tax to maintain its bridges, gates and walls. Most important of all, however, at least from the aspect of parliamentary history, was the grant of representation: the burgesses were given the right to elect two MPs ‘of themselves or others’. This enfranchisement was an important mark of the town’s enhanced status.

The town’s importance was further enhanced in the second half of Edward’s reign.

In July 1471, to improve peace-keeping in the Welsh marches, the newly-restored King established a council there for his infant son, Edward, not yet a year old. Some 18 months later, in February 1473, this council was formalised and enlarged, and soon after the infant prince took up residence in the town, which remained his principal home for the rest of his father’s reign. The council came to exercise wide-ranging functions, supervising the administration of the principality of Wales and the marches. The town later became home to Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur, who lived there from the spring of 1493 until his death in April 1502. This, in the words of Ralph Griffiths, gave the town a ‘unique profile among England’s provincial centres’, and an importance far beyond its population of about 2,000.

S.J.P.

Further reading

R.A. Griffiths, ‘Ludlow During the Wars of the Roses’, in Ron Shoesmith and Andy Johnson (eds.), Ludlow Castle: Its History and Buildings (Hereford: Longstone Press, 2000), 57-68.

Simon Payling, ‘Making the most of a parhelion: the earl of March and the battle of Mortimer’s Cross’, History of Parliament, 3 February 2020.

Simon Payling, ‘The battle of Ludford Bridge’, History of Parliament, 10 October 2019.

To the parliamentary historian, the assembly summoned in the late spring of 1483 in the name of the young Edward V presents a problem. Unquestionably, it was a Parliament, summoned by letters under the new King’s seal, and in the best traditions of such assemblies, summoned, e.g., in May 1413 in the name of Henry V and in October 1422 in that of Henry VI. As was the case particularly in the latter instance, it was understood that the community of the realm should come together to make arrangements for the nominal rule of the monarch who for the foreseeable future would be a minor.  And yet, the circumstances of Edward V’s accession had perhaps more in common with those of Richard II in 1377, than with those of the infant Henry VI. Richard II had been ten years old when the deaths in quick succession of his father (Edward, the Black Price) and grandfather (King Edward III) had propelled him to the throne. Edward V, for his part, was twelve when his father died, and thus even close to achieving his majority than Richard had been.

As now became customary for royal children, in 1473 the young Edward had been established at his family home of Ludlow castle, there to be prepared for his future as heir to his father’s throne. It was also there, that on 14 April he received news of his father’s death, five days earlier, and it took a further ten days for him to set out to London, ostensibly to await his coronation. On the way, he met with his uncle, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who under the terms of Edward IV’s will had been appointed protector during his nephew’s minority. Gloucester for his part lost little time in separating the young King from his entourage, and it was surrounded by Gloucester and his servants that he was conducted to the Tower of London, the ancient royal palace to the east of the city.

The coronation had originally been planned for 4 May, the day of Edward’s arrival in London, but was now pushed back to 22 June. Parliament, for which writs of summons were issued on 13 May, was to assemble three days later, on 25 June. Edward V took up residence in the Tower on 19 May, and here he was joined, almost a month later, on 16 June, by his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, duke of York and Norfolk. In the mean time, elections were held up and down the country, in the normal fashion, usually in one or other of the four- or six-weekly county courts. By and large, we may assume, the local communities were unaware of the intense politicking at the centre that paved the way, on the very day when parliament should have opened, for Edward’s deposition and replacement by his uncle Richard. No formal letters of supersedeas were, it seems, issued and some of the representatives of counties and towns consequently made their way to Westminster, where they were to witness a very different spectacle from what they might have expected.

H.W.K.

While, during the Wars of the Roses, the political allegiances of individual noblemen are relatively easy to determine, those of individual towns are generally obscured. This is not surprising, for the notion of the corporate allegiance of a town is a difficult one.  While sometimes a few leading townsmen can be identified as active partisans of either York or Lancaster, that does not mean that they carried their fellow townsmen with them. Town authorities generally saw the safest course in giving their allegiance, outwardly at least, to whichever faction happened to be in charge. None the less, if commitment was not actively sought, it could not always be avoided. Towns in areas of strong Yorkist or Lancastrian lordship, or else on the route of campaigning armies, could find themselves drawn into conflict. Shrewsbury provides an instructive example.  Already the location of a major battle – when Henry IV defeated the Percys in 1403 – it was, geographically and politically, poorly placed to avoid involvement in the Wars of the Roses. Not only was it one of the major towns on the Welsh March (and, in the townsmen’s own characterization, ‘on off the keyes for the good ordre off the marches’) and a crossing point on the River Severn, it was also in the political orbit of Henry VI’s leading opponent, Richard, duke of York, whose great castle of Ludlow lay only 30 miles away. 

What this meant for the town was clearly illustrated in the early 1450s.  When York returned from Ireland in the autumn of 1450 to claim what he saw as his rightful place in Henry VI’s government, he passed through the town on his way to Westminster and was elaborately entertained by the borough authorities, who provided a pipe (about 100 gallons) of red wine.  Although so relatively modest a gift can hardly be interpreted as an endorsement of his opposition to the Lancastrian regime, the duke himself clearly believed that the town was a promising source of support.  On 3 February 1452 he wrote, from his castle of Ludlow, to his ‘right worshipful friends, the bailiffs, burgesses and commons of the good town of Shrewsbury’, outlining his grievances against the King’s chief minister, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset and asking the townsmen ‘to come to me with all diligence … with as many goodly and likely men as ye may’.  The townsmen responded: some 60 of them, headed by an alderman, Roger Eyton, were later indicted for armed insurrection against the King at Ludlow. If, however, is an early mark of the town’s Yorkist sympathies and its readiness to support rebellion, that readiness, perhaps diminished by the ignominious failure of the 1452 rising, was much less apparent when York again raised rebellion in the Marches in 1459.  The bailiffs’ accounts reveal a state of some confusion amongst the town’s leaders, as they dispatched emissaries to detect the movement of rival armies, but that confusion was resolved in favour of Lancaster  In the aftermath of the Yorkist defeat at nearby Ludford Bridge, the victorious Henry VI wrote to them thanking them for resisting the passage of the Yorkist Edward Bourgchier, younger son of Viscount Bourgchier, Clearly, at least a faction among the townsmen saw the value of maintaining allegiance to the ruling house, and that faction was still in the ascendant at the time of the battle of Northampton in the following July when the town sent 61 men to fight for Henry VI.

Yet, although the borough authorities were ready to support the ruling house in the first part of the civil war of 1459-61, some senior townsmen had a very different inclination. Chief among them was Eyton, who was in the duke’s ranks at Ludford Bridge, and then fled with him to Ireland, but there were others. An action sued in the court of King’s bench in the Hilary term 1460 implies the existence of a strong Yorkist faction: Edward, prince of Wales, and other Lancastrian lords sued an action of trespass against Eyton, John Horde, head of the town’s principal family, and three other prominent burgesses.  The subject of the action is unknown – it disappears from the plea rolls with the change of regime – but there can be little doubt that it arose from some event in the Ludford campaign.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that this Yorkist faction took control of the town after the Lancastrian defeat at Northampton. The duke of York, as he again made his way back from Ireland in the aftermath of that victory, was welcomed as he had been ten years earlier; and the town then spent £30 on dispatching 40 soldiers to fight for him in the campaign that led to his death on the field of Wakefield, a markedly greater sum than the £8 13s. 4d. spent on the troops it sent to fight for Lancaster at Northampton. Further, as the duke travelled north to his death, his son, Edward, earl of March, making ready for a campaign in the Marches, spent Christmas in Shrewsbury, receiving a payment of 40 marks from the town’s authorities for his ‘good lordship’. Although evidence is lacking, there can be little doubt that there was a Shrewsbury contingent at the earl’s victory at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, fought about 35 miles south of the town, in the following February, as there certainly was at the battle of Towton some eight weeks later. It is not known how much was spent on sending soldiers to that decisive battle, beyond 16s. 8d. spent on a banner, but £20 was expended on sending 40 soldiers to the new King when he was at Bristol in early September 1461. The bailiffs’ account for 1462-3 records larger payments, with as much as £68 5s. laid out on the wages of soldiers sent to the King in the north and 10s. on another banner, presumably displaying the town’s arms, to be borne before its contingent.

Thus Shrewsbury, in the civil war of 1459-61, conformed to a common pattern amongst towns, namely giving outward allegiance to the ruling house, but there can be little doubt that the sympathies of the townsmen lay with the house of York. In the aftermath of the Yorkist seizure of government in the summer of 1460, they supported York with much greater enthusiasm than they had supported Lancaster in the immediately preceding period.  Further, although the town as a corporation was to gain little from Edward IV’s accession (beyond the routine confirmation of its charters), the leaders of the Yorkist faction in the town were rewarded, most notably Eyton, who found a place in the new King’s household and was granted the constableship of the town’s royal castle.

SJP

Further reading:

For a discussion of the misattributed statue: D.R. Walker, ‘An Urban Community in the Welsh Borderland: Shrewsbury in the Fifteenth Century’, University of Wales, Swansea, Ph.D. thesis, 1981, pp. 412-17.

For biographies of Roger Eyton and John Horde with a general discussion of the town in Henry VI’s reign, see L. Clark (ed.), The House of Commons, 1422-61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Hugh Oldham (c.1450-1519), bishop of Exeter from 1505, has had a good press from historians. Described by the Exeter MP and chronicler, John Hooker alias Vowell (d. 1601), ‘as a great favourer and a friend both to learning and to learned men’, he was a major benefactor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the foundation of his friend, Richard Foxe, bishop of Winchester. Although Hooker was no advocate of Oldham’s own academic attainments, rather patronisingly remarking that he had ‘more zeal than knowledge and more devotion than learning’, he praised him for his friendliness. A curious action in the court of King’s bench in 1512 gives a rather contrasting picture of the bishop, albeit one, as an ex parte statement, on which little reliance is to be placed.  When the bishop’s servant, William Knot, came to Crediton to summon one of the clerks of the diocese, Edward Grigson, to appear in the consistory court, Grigson responded uncharitably, claiming that ‘the Bysshoppe  of exet[er] is the most extorcyoner and poller that is in Englond for he hath extorcyoner and polled both me and my Tenauntez and that he hath more poison in that grete fowle bely of hys then all the Bysshoppes in Englond’. A jury found for the bishop, and he was awarded the relatively modest sum of £8 in costs and damages.

The action was an innovative one.  Medieval statutes of scandalum magnatum, the first dating from 1275 and reenacted in almost the same terms in 1378 and 1389, had given peers and the King’s great officers protection against the circulation of defamatory rumours about them. The purpose was political: as the 1378 enactment put it, such rumours created ‘Debates and Discords’ whereby, in the hyperbolic language of such statutes, the realm might be brought to ‘quick Subversion and Destruction’.  Despite this alarming danger, the statutes were rarely used until the first years of the sixteenth century, when lawyers began to wonder whether their peerage clients might use the offence of scandalum magnatum as a civil plea to win damages against those who could be accused of speaking ill of them. Their first recorded effort proved a failure. In 1495 Sir Richard Croft sought to forward a land dispute with Richard, Lord Beauchamp, by bringing an action under a statute which penalised the fabricating of false deeds. Beauchamp’s response was to counter-sue for damages of £1,000 on the eccentric claim that the allegation he had fabricated false deeds was itself an offence under the scandalum magnatum statute of 1378. This claim, which, if successful, would have given peers extensive protection against litigation, was quickly dismissed by the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Thomas Bryan, who succinctly observed that the statutes of scandalum magnatum were ‘not made to oust men of their legitimate actions’.  Yet Bryan’s ruling did not preclude the use of the statutes to sue for scandalous words.  There were a series of such actions in the common-law courts in early years of the sixteenth century.  The most famous of these was brought by Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in the same year as Odiham’s, against his former servant, Thomas Lucas of Inner Temple, former solicitor-general to Henry VII, for allegedly saying that ‘he sett nott be the Duke two pens’ and that the duke ‘hath no more conseyens than a Dogg’.

It would, however, be mistaken to see these actions solely in terms of the exploitation of aristocratic privilege under arcane medieval statutes, for they can also be seem as part of a more general development. Church courts had enjoyed a monopoly over cases of defamation, and, as in those courts the plaintiff could gain no damages beyond the imposition of penance upon the defendant, this was unsatisfactory. These actions of scandalum magnatum were only one attempt to redress this deficiency, for, at about the same time as they emerged, the common-law began to provide a general remedy with plaintiffs able to sue for damages for reputational damage caused by defamatory words.  Scandalum magnatum certainly gave peers a legislative advantage, one that was later to be ruthlessly exploited by the future James II in the early 1680s, but lesser men also had a common-law remedy for slander.

Further reading

Article on Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

J.H. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1483-1558 (2003), pp. 781-2, 797-8.

J.C. Lassiter, ‘Defamation of Peers: the Rise and Decline of the Action of Scandalum Magnatum’, American Journal of Legal History, xxii (1978), pp. 216-36.

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)