BOTELER, Henry II

Boteler’s antecedents and early career are poorly documented. He was probably from a family of minor gentry established at Exhall, a few miles to the north of Coventry. This, at least, is the implication to be drawn from a lawsuit of 1468 when he claimed against the prior of Arbury the legal estate which John Boteler of Exhall had once had in the manor of Stockingford near Exhall.6 KB27/829, rot. 81. His claim appears to have had no merit. John Boteler had only the interest of a life-tenant: Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2473; CPR, 1413-16, p. 29; W. Dugdale, Warws. ii. 770. As many others did in fifteenth-century England, he took advantage of a legal training to win a much more important position than justified by his birth. By the late 1430s he was already established as a local lawyer. On 8 Feb. 1437 he sued out a general pardon as ‘of Coventry, gentleman’, and in about 1438 he and another Coventry lawyer destined for better things, William Essex*, acted as arbiters between two local men.7 C1/29/457.

Yet, as with most lawyers, Boteler’s career was slow to gather momentum. As early as 1440 he was active as an attorney in the Exchequer of pleas, but little is known of him in the decade that followed.8 E13/141, rot. 2; Baker, i. 409. It was, however, in these years that he established an important connexion with Sir Edward Grey, who in right of his wife inherited the barony of Ferrers of Groby in 1445. He was in Sir Edward’s service by 1442, when he supported Grey’s servant, William Burgeys, then in acrimonious dispute with William Betley, one of the filacers of the court of King’s bench, over a large estate at Coventry.9 KB27/724, rot. 79d; 726, rot. 60d; 727, rot. 82; Carpenter, 402-3, 414-15. Thereafter, as Grey came to take an increasingly active part in Warwickshire affairs, principally in the environs of Coventry, Boteler became one of his principal men of business. In Trinity term 1447, for example, he acted for Grey and his wife in a conveyance of the disputed Warwickshire manor of Wolston, and, two years later, he appeared personally in the court of King’s bench with Grey to pursue an action there.10 Warws. Feet of Fines, 2630; KB27/754, rot. 105d.

This connexion helps explain Boteler’s otherwise mysterious return to represent the Wiltshire borough of Great Bedwyn in the Parliament of February 1449. Sir Edward was closely associated with Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, the lord of that borough, and thus, not improbably, had a hand in Boteler’s election. In return, while sitting as an MP, Boteler was able to render Grey a small service. During the course of the Parliament, Queen Margaret, as lady of the honour of Leicester, ordered Grey to pay 100 marks to William Newby*, then sitting for Leicester, in compensation for an assault, and Boteler and another servant of Grey, Thomas Boughton*, bound themselves in payment of part of this sum.11 Leicester Bor. Recs. ed. Bateson, ii. 256-7; CPR, 1446-52, p. 140; CP40/761, rot. 208d; 763, rot. 256d.

No doubt, as a busy lawyer, Boteler might later have won further returns for distant boroughs, had not the enfranchisement of his native Coventry removed the need for him to search further afield. Although he is not known to have been returned for his native city before 1460, it is probable that he sat at least once in 1450s.12 In HP Reg. ed. Wedgwood, 700, Boteler is identified as MP for Coventry in 1453 on a mistaken interpretation of Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, ii. 176. Another misinterpretation of the same letter identifies Thomas Lyttleton as probable MP for the city in the Parl. of 1450, to which it returned no MPs: VCH Warws. viii. 248. The identity is known of only one of Coventry’s MPs in the three Parliaments between its enfranchisement in 1451 and 1460, and, given Boteler’s regular return thereafter, it is possible that he sat in all three. He was, at all events, firmly established as a leading citizen by 1450, and played a part in securing enfranchisement. On 13 Oct. 1451 he was among the deputation, headed by the city’s recorder, Thomas Lyttleton, sent by the city authorities to London and there ‘by avyse of lerned Counsell to prouyde a charter suche as shal-be most profitabull and also most nesarie to this Cite’, a task they successfully accomplished.13 Coventry Leet Bk. 266.

Four years later, on 4 Oct. 1455, Boteler was elected to replace Lyttleton as recorder. His strong ties with Coventry made him a more suitable appointment than his predecessor, who, promoted to the degree of serjeant-at-law in 1453, had more important matters to concern him than the city’s affairs. Indeed, the terms of the oath taken by the recorder on assuming office, with its promise to live in the city, implies that the authorities were more concerned to secure the services of one who would devote all his energies to the office rather than a lawyer of high standing with pressing business elsewhere.14 For the recorder’s oath: Recs. Holy Trinity Coventry (Dugdale Soc. xix), 11-12. Boteler was thus an ideal candidate, and this helps to explain why it was more than 30 years before the corporation had to seek a replacement. An interesting indication of Boteler’s influence at this date, presumably contingent on his position as recorder, is provided by an action of debt he brought in 1462 against Robert Odyon, prior of the Carthusian house of St. Anne, just outside Coventry. He claimed that Odyon, when a monk at the order’s house at West Smithfield, had owed his ‘peaceful admission’ as prior to his intervention, and that on 20 May 1457 the new prior had rewarded him with an annuity, which he then failed to pay.15 CP40/805, rot. 136.

Boteler’s influence can only have been strengthened soon after when he was added to the commission of the peace in Warwickshire in November 1457 with promotion to the quorum a year later. He was, in short, becoming one of the most important lawyers in the county, and as such he attracted the patronage of the leading local gentry. In Hilary term 1458, for example, he sued Edmund Mountfort* and his mother, Joan, widow of Sir William Mountfort*, for an arrears of four years in the payment of an annuity of two marks, presumably the retaining fee they owed him as their lawyer. Later, on 10 Dec. 1460, Elizabeth, widow of Sir Robert Moton*, allegedly retained him at Coventry ‘de consilio … in lege’ for life against her rival, Thomas Everingham*, at 40s. a year.16 CP40/788, rot. 174; 823, rot. 126d. He also found clients, even more important than such senior local gentry as these, further afield. In the spring of 1459 he was with other counsellors of Alice, dowager-duchess of Suffolk, at Thatcham in Berkshire to fix the bounds of property disputed between John Pury* and the abbot of Reading, and thereafter he long continued to serve the de la Poles, even though they had no interests in his native county.17 C1/66/360.

Boteler’s political sympathies in the civil war of 1459-61 are uncertain. The residence of the Lancastrian court in his home city in the late 1450s might have inclined him to Lancaster. Indeed, it may be that he was Coventry’s MP in the Parliament convened there in 1459, and on 20 Feb. 1460 he was among those gathered in St. Mary’s Hall to appoint the number of soldiers who, by virtue of a commission received by the mayor, were to be sent to fight against the Yorkists.18 Coventry Leet Bk. 309-10. His removal from the Warwickshire bench when it was remodelled by the Yorkists in December 1460 also implies that he was connected with Lancaster. Yet he also had connexions, albeit indirect, with the Yorkists through Elizabeth Ferrers, widow of his early patron, Edward Grey (d.1457), who had taken as her second husband Sir John Bourgchier, attainted as a Yorkist in the Coventry Parliament of 1459, and also through the dowager-duchess of Suffolk, whose son, John, had married a daughter of the duke of York. Further, hostility to York is hardly consistent with his election to represent Coventry in the Parliament of October 1460.19 CP, v. 359-60; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 841; C219/16/6.

In any event, if Boteler had any attachment to Lancaster, he quickly put it behind him as his career prospered under the new King. He was restored to the county bench in July 1461 and from thenceforward was one of the most active of the justices.20 e.g. KB9/302/20; 317/63, 65-7; 334/116; CPR, 1461-7, p. 459. In addition, he assumed an ever-more active part in the county’s affairs beyond the bounds of Coventry. In May 1461, for example, William, Lord Zouche, named him as his steward of the manor of Weston-in-Arden, a few miles outside the city; soon after he acted as counsel for John Hugford† in Hugford’s dispute with Robert Catesby over the inheritance of Nicholas Metley*; and in 1466 he was named as an arbiter in the dispute between Robert’s nephew, (Sir) William Catesby*, and John Brome II* over property at Lapworth.21 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1144; E163/29/11, m. 5; CAD, iv. A8420, 9613. He also remained in the service of the de la Poles. He was still one of the dowager-duchess’s counsellors in the mid 1460s, and in July 1468 he appeared in Chancery on the family’s behalf to testify to the loss of the letters patent of 13 Mar. 1467 creating the duchess’s grandson as earl of Lincoln.22 Paston Letters, iv. 165; CPR, 1467-77, p. 96.

In the meantime, presumably while representing Coventry (the returns are lost) in the Parliament of 1467, Boteler’s standing as an experienced lawyer and parliamentarian was recognized when his fellow Members of the Lower House chose him as one of their representatives to investigate complaints made against one of the governors of the Mint.23 PROME, xiii. 386-9. He may also, at about this date, have formed an association with Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. On 16 Dec. 1468, alongside the earl’s chamberlain, Sir Walter Wrottesley, he witnessed a grant made by the earl to the collegiate church of St. Mary, Warwick.24 E326/4461. Later, in June 1470, he was a feoffee in the manor of Saxthorpe (Norfolk) for Edmund Grey, earl of Kent, when that manor was settled on the earl’s cousin, Humphrey Grey (d.1499), nephew of Boteler’s early patron, and Anne, daughter of William Feldyng*.25 HMC Lothian, 55; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 355; F. Blomefield, Norf. vi. 498.

None the less, despite this impressive range of associates, the complexity of city affairs meant that Boteler’s duties as recorder remained his principal responsibility. In the mid 1460s the corporation of Coventry became involved in a dispute over the franchise of the duchy of Cornwall manor of Cheylesmore which, in its contention, lay within the city’s liberty. This involved Boteler in lengthy negotiations before the greatest in the land. In January 1464 he travelled with the city charters to the King at Northampton in an effort to prove this point, and a week later he again made the city’s case before the earl of Warwick and the two chief justices at Coventry. The matter was then adjourned to the following Easter term, when Boteler again appeared before the King, on this occasion in the Tower of London, when the city was rewarded with an interim judgement in its favour.26 Coventry Leet Bk. 323-8.

Later, Coventry’s citizens found themselves uncomfortably involved in the civil war of 1469-71. The victory of the northern rebels over a royalist army at Edgecote, near Banbury, on 26 July 1469 caused disquiet in the city, and Boteler was among those designated by the corporation to act as a captain of the ward of Much Park in case of attack. These fears were misplaced, but the war became a reality for the citizens in the spring of 1471. The earl of Warwick chose to rally his troops there against Edward IV’s invasion, and the citizens found themselves obliged to assist him. They spent £61 on the wages of 40 soldiers to serve Henry VI (presumably the soldiers provided for the earl to take to Barnet), to the cost of which Boteler contributed 5s., and made a loan of 100 marks to the earl, to which he contributed £1.27 Ibid. 344, 362-4. The citizens may have had little choice in the rendering of this assistance; none the less, they found themselves in an uneasy position when Edward IV, returned from exile, offered the earl battle outside Coventry, and even more so when that King, secure once more on the throne after his victory at the battle of Tewkesbury, returned to the city. Now they were forced to pay for the aid they had offered Warwick, advancing the King a loan of 400 marks and paying a further £200 for the restoration of their liberties. No doubt Boteler, as one of the richest citizens, paid towards these new and heavy burdens. An ambiguous entry in the Leet Book suggests he contributed ten marks to the loan.28 Ibid. 367-70. It is not known what, if any, his political sympathies were during these dramatic events. Some of the leading citizens, notably Richard Braytoft*, are known to have actively favoured the earl of Warwick, but the evidence of Boteler’s association with the earl is insufficient to suggest that he was one of them. Indeed, his removal from the Warwickshire bench in December 1470 implies that he was not.29 CPR, 1467-77, p. 634.

Boteler quickly put the difficulties of the Readeption behind him. His career flourished even more strongly in the 1470s than it had done in the 1460s. He began to appear routinely on county commissions and in the autumn of 1474 he was one of those chosen by the King to strengthen the commissions of the peace in Devon, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Worcestershire, part of an experiment in peace-keeping that was soon abandoned.30 J.R. Lander, English J.P.s. 109-12. Further, while an MP in the Parliament of 1478 he was nominated by the King to examine the accounts of the auditors of the estates of Clarence, who awaited execution for treason.31 CPR, 1476-85, p. 64; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 166-7. Boteler had been one of the j.p.s before whom, on 15 Apr. 1477, a jury, intimidated by Clarence, had laid the false indictment of Ankaret, wid. of William Twyneho*, for the murder of Clarence’s wife: CPR, 1476-85, pp. 72-73; KB27/866, rex rot. 2; KB8/1/60. Her immediate execution heralded Clarence’s downfall. There is no reason to suppose that Boteler was sympathetic to this illegal act. He, like the jurors, was no doubt intimidated by the duke.

None the less, all was not prosperity. The latter part of Boteler’s long career was troubled by his dispute with another Coventry lawyer, William Bristowe, which, from small beginnings, became a serious problem. The two men had much in common and appear once to have been on friendly terms: in 1459, for example, Bristowe was a feoffee in a conveyance probably connected with the marriage of Boteler’s daughter to a local gentleman, John Hardwick.32 CCR, 1454-61, p. 381. But by the early 1470s they were at odds. In origin, their rivalry may not have been personal. The city authorities had their own dispute with Bristowe over common pasture, and initially Boteler was probably acting against him simply as their representative. Many years before William’s father, John, had enclosed part of the common pasture by the water of Whitley to the south of the city, and in 1469 the mayor led a group in the destruction of the enclosing hedges.33 M.D. Harris, ‘Laurence Saunders’, EHR, ix. 635; CP40/831, rot. 300. Boteler then, unwisely as it transpired, leased the disputed property from the city, and this, understandably, produced an adverse reaction on the part of his former friend. In April 1473, at least if an action brought by Boteler in the court of King’s bench is taken at face value, Bristowe entered his former close and depastured Boteler’s grass. Despite an award of July 1474 which went largely in favour of Bristowe, litigation continued and a new crisis erupted in 1481.34 KB27/855, rot. 55; 857, rot. 73; Coventry bor. archs. BA/F/10/16/1; Harvard Univ. Law School Lib., English deeds, 129. In the late autumn of that year Boteler and other of the city’s representatives spent five weeks in London seeking a settlement before the council of the prince of Wales, who, as earl of Chester, was lord of the city. The council’s efforts at arbitration foundered on Bristowe’s insistence that he would accept only a settlement at common law, and this in turn prompted the intervention of the King himself. He summoned the disputants to him at Southampton, and after Bristowe maintained his intransigence he wrote to the mayor and community on 7 Dec. assuring them of his support and condemning their rival.35 Coventry Leet Bk. 498-500.

This gave licence to the city to mobilize its legal machinery against the recalcitrant Bristowe. On 17 Dec. charges of close-breaking were laid against him before Boteler and others sitting as Coventry j.p.s.; and on 26 Mar. 1482 Bristowe was indicted, again before the local j.p.s., for impeding the chamberlain in the supervision of common pasture in the disputed land and expelling Boteler from his common pasture as long before as 1472. In addition, Boteler secured costs and damages of 28 marks against him in two assizes of novel disseisin heard in the city in February and July 1482.36 KB9/360/80; JUST1/1547, m. 1; KB27/886, rot. 2; 889, rot. 17. There must be more than a suspicion here that Boteler as recorder was using the powers of his office to discomfort his rival. It was in this light that Bristowe presented the matter to the chancellor in two petitions that probably predated the 1481 indictment. He asserted that, as recorder, Boteler had brought malicious actions of trespass against him in the mayor’s court to force him to release his right in the disputed lands.37 C1/63/146; 64/690. His defence lay in transferring the local cases against him into the superior court of King’s bench, and it is not clear how the dispute was finally resolved. The Crown, however, lost interest, and what remained of the dispute was played out in desultory litigation as Bristowe sought to overturn the verdicts in the assizes of novel disseisin and Boteler sought execution of the damages they had awarded him.38 KB27/886, rot. 8d; 889, rots. 12, 17, 17d, 25d.

Almost as soon as the city and the recorder’s dispute with Bristowe reached this unsatisfactory conclusion, Boteler was faced with a new problem. His previously harmonious and mutually-supportive relationship with the city authorities was sharply and mysteriously interrupted. He was reported by ‘credible persons’ as having said that, ‘he had as gret power as had the Mair: And also he wold a-Rest the Maire at the sessions sittyng on the bench’. In response, on 27 Jan. 1485, the ruling council of the 48 decreed that, as a punishment, his continued service as recorder should depend on the annual renewal of his office at Candlemas, and that he should lose precedence over the master of the Trinity guild in all ‘maner of Goynges’ save legal matters. On the following day he accepted these terms and the mayor and former mayors, recalling his ‘long Contynewaunce’ as recorder, formally re-granted him the office.39 Coventry Leet Bk. 520-1. This episode is open to varying interpretations. Assuming he was guilty, it is impossible to say whether he was asserting the general principle that his office was superior to that of the mayor or whether his comments arose out of a disagreement with the serving mayor, Henry Kebell. Alternatively, the elderly recorder may simply have exhausted the patience of the new generation in the city’s politics.40 Carpenter finds an explanation in the context of the dispute with Bristowe, who, high in favour with the new King, Ric. III, used his new influence to humiliate the recorder: Carpenter, 556. There is, however, no evidence that Bristowe enjoyed such favour, for he was not, as Carpenter wrongly believed, the King’s attorney in the ct. of c.p.: CP40/887, rot. 174 (where Bristowe is described as ‘an attorney in the King’s court’).

The rebuke of 1485 raises the general question of Boteler’s character. It is impossible to say whether the allegations of improper conduct made against him represent merely the ex parte complaints that even a relatively honest lawyer might expect to attract during the course of a long career, or whether there was a more sinister explanation. Bristowe’s petitions against him may perhaps be dismissed as special pleading, but there was at least one other complaint that he had exploited illegitimately his influence as recorder. At an unknown date Hugh Thornell complained to the chancellor that he had denied him bail in an action before the sheriffs’ court because the plaintiff was the recorder’s friend.41 C1/64/690; 450/15. Another incident also implies improper conduct on Boteler’s part. On 18 May 1467 one John Charite had been found murdered in Bayley Lane and a jury, sitting before the coroner, indicted five men of the murder, specifically describing two of them as dwelling in Boteler’s household and another as his servant. Yet when, a week later, a further indictment was taken before the city’s j.p.s., among whom was Boteler as recorder, no mention was made of the place of three of the alleged murderers in his service, and the principal of those indicted, his son-in-law, John Hardwick, was, no doubt in deliberate error, named Thomas. There seems little reason to doubt that the recorder had used his influence in the protection of his own men.42 KB9/317/19, 20d, 121, 123. In 1472 these indictments were said to have been the result of a conspiracy: KB27/844, rex rot. 31d.

In short, there is nothing here to contradict the charge made in 1485 that Boteler was a man of overbearing temperament, and this gives credence to the accusations made against him by Laurence Saunders in a dispute over the city’s common pasture that ran in parallel with the dispute with Bristowe. In a petition presented to the council of the prince of Wales at Ludlow, Saunders, then one of the chamberlains (the officer responsible for supervising the common pasture), complained that Boteler, among other leading citizens, withheld half of the common lands from the community and that a favoured few, maintained by the recorder and mayor, ‘surcharged’ the pasture with excess sheep. When the chamberlains impounded these sheep, Boteler had the chamberlains imprisoned and then threatened Saunders that he would ‘curse the tyme that ever he sigh him and woolde make hem to wepe water with his yen’.43 Harris, 640.

Whatever Boteler’s character, he was quick to recover from the blow to his dignity of 1485. Despite his age – when, at the end of that year, the city began its search for a new recorder he was described ‘of so grett febulnes’ – it was at about this time that he took a second wife, the widow of Thomas Warde of Kenilworth, who had been a yeoman of the Crown in the last years of Yorkist rule. As a couple they sued out a general pardon on 5 July 1486. Nor was he too old to travel. In the autumn of 1485 he delivered into the court of King’s bench a surety of the peace taken from a chaplain of the prior of Coventry.44 Coventry Leet Bk. 524; C67/53, m. 11; KB27/897, rex rot. 4. More interestingly, in May 1487 the city authorities, recent differences forgotten, rewarded him, specifically for the prominent part he had taken in resisting Bristowe’s pretensions: the corporation and city crafts undertook to provide a requiem in the cathedral church (that is, the priory church) for him and his wife in the same manner as was done for ‘dame Goodyfe’.45 Coventry bor. archs. BA/F/10/4/3.

By this date, in his will of the previous July, Boteler had already made provision for his burial in the cathedral, where his first wife lay. This will is, unfortunately, brief and unrevealing. It provides no suggestion that the testator was a man of wealth. Indeed, the two largest bequests were the 40s. each to be given to his two executors, Richard Cooke, the mayor, and John Haddon. The financial provision he made for his soul was very modest: the parish priest of St. Michael was to have an annuity of 2s. 8d. to offer prayers for seven years. All this suggests that more substantial arrangements had already been made, and later evidence shows that he endowed three sermons to be given annually in the church of St. Michael and his widow provided for the celebration of his obit there. His long career ended on 31 July 1489, when he was succeeded by his less distinguished son, William.46 PCC 30 Milles (PROB11/8, f. 243v); VCH Warws. viii. 326, 351; T.W. Whitley, Parlty. Repn. Coventry, 30-31; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 376.

Boteler’s landholdings are poorly documented. There is nothing to show that he ever acquired the manorial property that would have qualified him as county rather than merely urban gentry. Most of his income must have come from fees. As recorder he had £10 p.a. from the corporation and guilds, and a similar fee probably attached to each of a series of stewardships he held on the estates of local landholders like Lord Zouche.47 Coventry bor. archs. BA/B/16/463/1. To this were to be added the individual lesser but cumulatively greater fees he enjoyed as retained legal counsel. Most of these are known from legal records as the payers defaulted. Already mentioned are the actions of debt he sued against Prior Odyon, Edmund Mountfort and Elizabeth Moton, and there are several others to be added to these. In 1481 he had suits pending against Sir Simon Mountfort† for £20 6s. 8d. and Sir John Bourgchier for £22 as arrears of annuities of two marks and £2 respectively.48 CP40/878, rot. 466. Mountfort clearly forgave him for this suit, for, after Boteler’s 2nd marriage he granted the couple an annuity of 20s.: CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 760, 1169. Other evidence shows that from 1469 he also had an annuity of £1 from the wealthiest of the Derbyshire gentry, Henry Vernon†, and there can be no doubt that there were many undocumented others. Clearly he was a popular choice as a lawyer among landholders of the Midlands.49 S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 250. Yet, despite these wide-ranging contacts, Boteler’s career was, as far as the surviving record goes, largely confined by the city of Coventry and its environs.