BURRELEY, John

The paternity and provenance of the man (or men) who represented Chippenham and Bath in 1450 and 1455 have not been established, and only fragmentary details of his (or their) career (or careers) can be assembled with any certainty. On balance, it seems likely that the Chippenham and Bath MPs were the same individual, a man who owed his returns to the patronage of the royal household. That John Burreley had joined the ranks of Henry VI’s yeomen of the chamber by the accounting year 1446-7, when he is first known to have received the customary annual livery.2 E101/409/16, 410/1, 3, 6, 9; E361/6, rot. 50.

Burreley’s first election to the Commons in 1450 occurred against a backdrop of military disaster in France and popular unrest in England. By the summer of that year the last English possessions in Normandy had been lost, much of southern England was in open rebellion, and a number of present and past royal officers were slaughtered by the insurgents. Although the risings were rapidly crushed, the atmosphere in the south, where the remnants of the defeated forces from Normandy continued to arrive, was volatile.3 Parl. Rolls of Med. Eng. xii. 159-60. In September Henry VI’s kinsman, Richard, duke of York, forced his way into the King’s presence and presented him with demands for reform. Such reforms would, it was thought, loom large in the business of the Parliament which was summoned on 5 Sept. to assemble two months later, and all sides took steps to ensure the return of their supporters. Retainers and sympathizers of the duke of York and his principal allies, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, secured a substantial number of seats in the regions where their masters held sway. The court for its part also sought the return of pliable Members to the lower House, and among the men so elected was Burreley, who was provided with a seat at Chippenham, a borough controlled by the reliably loyal Lords Hungerford.

In the event, the court’s precautions in seeking the return of its own men to the Commons proved justified, for York’s supporters put forward several bills directed against the dead duke of Suffolk and his widow, the duke of Somerset and a number of other courtiers. It is not known what part Burreley played in the deliberations, but it is likely that he opposed these measures which in the event were blunted by the King himself.4 Ibid. xii. 164-7. Nor is it known in what way, if any, the King’s incapacity from the late summer of 1453 affected individual members of the Household like Burreley. One of the results of this incapacity was the institution of new household ordinances, designed to reduce the size of the monarch’s establishment, a reform long advocated by the opponents of the court. In the event, Burreley was among the 23 yeomen of the Crown to survive the cull,5 PPC, vi. 222. and it is possible that his return to the Parliament of 1455 was directly connected with his continuing membership of the Household. It is not certain by what means he secured a seat for the city of Bath, a community that normally favoured local candidates, but it is possible that the King’s former secretary, Bishop Bekynton of Bath and Wells, played a part. Among the Parliament’s business was a renewed Act of Resumption, and it seems that Burreley, alongside a fellow yeoman of the Crown, William Grimsby*, took it upon himself to procure an exemption of the yeomen’s daily wages from the council acting for the incapacitated King.6 SC8/28/1379.

Burreley continued in Henry VI’s service at least until the radical change of the Household’s membership enforced in the wake of the Yorkist victory at Northampton in the late summer of 1460, but he is not heard of for certain thereafter.