COTTON, William

From a new family in landed terms, Cotton was the eldest of three sons of Walter Cotton. Walter was a wealthy London mercer who acquired the manor of Landwade, previously held by other Londoners, with his brother Thomas in the early 1420s. In 1436, the Crown valued Walter’s income from lands in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere at £66 p.a. for the purposes of taxation.21 Beaven, i. 89, 97, 129, 135, 336; A.F. Sutton, Mercery of London, 145; W.M. Palmer, ‘Landwade and the Cotton Fam.’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. xxxviii. 4-5; VCH Cambs. x. 470-1; E179/240/268. He lived for nearly as long as his eldest son, thereby probably helping to shape William’s career by prompting the latter to seek a role away from East Anglia while waiting to come into his own.

Later a regular member of the quorum as a j.p., William may well have had a legal training as a young man. If he did have a background in the law, this would no doubt have made him a useful recruit to the royal bureaucracy, which he had joined as a clerk of the great wardrobe by the later 1420s. He remained with the wardrobe, in which he was at various times also a yeoman, collector of rents and ‘provisor’ of repairs,22 E101/408/13, 19, 21; 409/4, 6. and of which he became porter and keeper, for the rest of his life.

The background of Cotton’s first wife, Anne, is unknown but his second was Alice, one of the daughters and coheirs of John Abbot, a mercer and no doubt an acquaintance of his father. It appears that he gained no land through his second marriage, for in his will of 1444 Abbot gave him and Alice merely a reversionary interest in his property in London and Northamptonshire, which he left to his other daughter Elizabeth, the wife of Walter Mauncell.23 PCC 34 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 272-3). Cotton probably married Alice not long before November 1436, the date of a transaction whereby Walter Cotton settled his Suffolk manor of Exning on himself for life, with remainder to the couple and their issue.24 CPR, 1436-41, p. 31. By then Walter was the sole holder of Landwade, having outlived his brother Thomas, and he likewise settled that property on his eldest son in 1437.25 VCH Cambs. x. 471. In the following year, William’s parents transferred to him by means of a fine various lands in Cambridge and surrounding parishes.26 CP25(1)/30/98/51. In 1443 William and his younger brother, Walter, and their wives transferred seisin to the same feoffees: CP25(1)/30/98/67.

Among the feoffees of the Exning settlement were two important figures, Sir William Phelip†, chamberlain of the Household, and William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich. Cotton acted in return for Phelip, by then Lord Bardolf and perhaps his patron, standing surety when the latter received the keeping of estates in Cambridgeshire belonging to the honour of Richmond from the Crown in November 1437.27 CFR, xvii. 4. Other associates of Cotton’s in the later 1430s included Thomas Giffard, an esquire from Buckinghamshire and possibly a client of the earl of Ormond,28 CPR, 1436-41, p. 119; VCH Bucks. iv. 255; VCH Oxon. vi. 292. Sir John Radcliffe* and John Leventhorpe II*. He stood surety for both Radcliffe, an important military captain and East Anglian landowner, and Leventhorpe, a prominent duchy of Lancaster official, on each occasion for grants of wardship from the Crown that they had separately acquired.29 CFR, xvii. 70, 110.

It was also in the late 1430s that Cotton first became involved in the administration of Cambridgeshire. In March 1439 he joined the commission of the peace and in the following November he was elected as one of the knights of the shire for the county. The election occurred in the aftermath of great controversy and he and his fellow knight, William Allington II*, were not elected until 19 Nov., after Parliament had opened. A previous attempt to hold an election had failed because the then sheriff, Gilbert Hore*, a partisan of the most powerful local magnate, John, Lord Tiptoft†, withdrew from the shire court rather than return Cotton and Allington, the candidates backed by the young Sir James Butler or Ormond (later earl of Wiltshire), who was actively seeking to establish himself in the region. A private, and highly biased, report sent to Cardinal Beaufort sets out Tiptoft’s version for the aborting of the original election. It alleged that:

...iij wekys continualy be fore the said eleccion Laurence Cheyne[*], William Alyngton and William Cotton, with mony oder of Sir James Ormond his men, rydden and sent abowtyn to the commones of the shyre of Cambrigge, chargyng them to gyf her voces atte the eleccion of the knyghtes of the shire to suche men as they wold have, manasyng theym yef they did the contrary to be bete and sleyn whare they myght be takyn.

The report went on to accuse Ormond’s supporters and Sir Robert Cromwell, the cousin of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, of riding into Cambridge at the head of 50 armed men on the eve of the election and occupying all the inns in the streets leading up to the castle (the meeting place for the shire court). It added that the sheriff had departed from the castle on election day after Ormond and Cromwell – non resident in the shire when the writ for the election was issued and therefore disqualified from voting – had refused to do so themselves. Cotton may have supported Ormond out of loyalty to Lord Bardolf. The latter had his own causes for grievance against Tiptoft, to whom he had lost the keeping of the honour of Richmond estates in Cambridgeshire, just weeks after his own grant of November 1437. In 1440, Ormond, probably Bardolf’s appointee as steward or sub-lessee of these estates, complained that Tiptoft had assaulted and distrained him in connexion with them. As it happened, Tiptoft had likewise lost a farm from the Crown to Cotton and his friend Henry Filongley* (also one of Ormond’s closest associates) in the previous year, when the pair had outbid him for a grant of the keeping of the alien priory of Linton, Cambridgeshire.30 R. Virgoe, ‘Cambs. Election of 1439’, Bull. IHR, xlvi. 95-101; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 74n; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 467; CFR, xvii. 101-2. Following Tiptoft’s death in early 1443, Ormond must have been for a time the leading man in the shire, and Cotton was one of his feoffees for lands and an advowson in Fulbourn, again in Cambridgeshire.31 E326/5883; CAD, i. B3752. In spite of these animosities, Cotton served Tiptoft’s legal adviser, Nicholas Caldecote*, as a feoffee,32 C1/22/50. and he had become steward at Harston for Tiptoft’s widow by October 1443. The peer’s death must have taken much of the heat out of local politics, as no doubt did the apparent subsequent decision by Ormond to turn most of his attention to his west-country estates.33 Virgoe, 97n, 100. Later, in 1454, Tiptoft’s son and heir, the earl of Worcester, made Cotton a small grant of land at Fordham, a Cambridgeshire parish just north of Exning.34 Palmer, ‘Landwade’, 38.

By the 1440s, Cotton was playing a greater part than hitherto in the administration of his shire. A member of the quorum from his initial appointment as a j.p. in Cambridgeshire, he served on every subsequent commission of the peace in the county until his death. He was therefore one of the busier j.p.s, although he did not attend the quarter sessions after 1446.35 Bottomley, 182. In February 1442, a couple of months after taking part in the county election to Parliament, Cotton became a j.p. for the borough of Cambridge. By this stage, he was also the duchy of Lancaster’s under steward and bailiff in Cambridgeshire and played a role in the administration of part of the county where the King’s writ did not run, as bailiff of the liberty of the prior of Ely. It is not clear why he should have served as a j.p. in Huntingdonshire and not in Suffolk, where he was living for at least part of the time in the early 1450s – in 1452 he was pardoned as ‘of Exning’ – but he had become the bishop of Rochester’s steward in the latter county by 1440.36 C67/40, m. 3. In 1447 he had been pardoned as ‘of Landwade and Exning’: C67/39, m. 9.

In the meantime, Cotton’s career at Court flourished. By Michaelmas 1443 he was one of the King’s esquires,37 E101/409/11. by 1444 he was an usher of the chamber and by his death vice-chamberlain of the Household. From Michaelmas 1444, he was receiver-general of the King’s feoffees, and in March 1445 he succeeded Richard Alred as receiver-general (and ex officio attorney-general) of the duchy of Lancaster, thereby becoming a leading member of the duchy’s council. In the following July, he was appointed the queen’s receiver-general, another position of authority and influence, since by virtue of the office he was also treasurer of her household and one of the principal members of her council. One of his accounts as the queen’s receiver-general survives. Covering the year 1452-3, it shows that his fee for the office was £50 p.a. (along with an annual allowance of £10 for his own household and £4 for his expenses in riding between his home and London) and that he spent much time in the saddle. In May 1453, he rode from Landwade to Royston in Hertfordshire, and from there to Walsingham, where he stayed for eight days. The following August he rode backwards and forwards between Landwade and the queen’s Essex manor of Saffron Walden, to discuss the renewing of a rental with her officials there, and in January 1453 between Landwade, Windsor and London to deliver money for the private expenses of her chamber.38 A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 139, 155-208.

After entering the queen’s service, Cotton received from her the additional offices of keeper and ranger of Enfield park and parker of Walden in the south of England, all almost certainly sinecures. Elsewhere, by 1449-50, he was joint constable of Clitheroe castle in Lancashire, part of the duchy of Lancaster. He shared the office with another household esquire, Philip Wentworth, also his joint constable at another duchy property, Offton castle in Suffolk. During their possibly brief tenure at Clitheroe, one of the duchy’s auditors questioned the validity of their office, asserting that it had not existed in the past. Yet it would appear that this diligent official was mistaken, since there were constables of Clitheroe both before and after it was in the hands of the two esquires.39 Somerville, 499. Also in the same period, the Crown appointed Cotton steward for life at Badburgham and Bassingbourn, both part of the honour of Richmond in Cambridgeshire.

In December 1450, Cotton succeeded Sir Thomas Tuddenham* as keeper of the great wardrobe. John Paston* heard the news from one of his correspondents in early January: ‘Tudenham is owte of þe Kynges hows and Cotton is warderopper’.40 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 61. Shortly afterwards, Cotton encountered a setback, for the Parliament of 1450-1 passed its Act of Resumption, obliging him to surrender grants and fees worth £22 p.a. He did however receive an exemption with regard to a further £30-worth, and a new grant of February 1451 safeguarded his long-held offices of clerk and porter of the great wardrobe.41 E163/8/14; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 559-60. A year later, Cotton sued William Tame* and the other bailiffs of Cambridge in 1450-1 in the Exchequer. Through his suit, he sought a sum of £10 that the King had assigned to him from certain revenues of their borough, to repay him for expenses incurred as keeper of the great wardrobe. In their defence, Tame and his associates said that they had not paid Cotton because a statute of 1449 had already assigned the revenues in question to the King’s household. Cotton riposted that he was entitled to receive sums assigned for household expenses because the wardrobe was a household department. He won his case in Easter term 1452, when the barons of the Exchequer ordered the defendants to pay him the £10 in question, along with 10s. in damages and expenses.42 E13/145A, rots. 32d, 33d; PROME, xii. 87. In the following Trinity term, Cotton brought another Exchequer suit, this time against Sir Robert Ughtred*, the sheriff of Yorkshire in 1450-1. He claimed that the King had assigned to him £10 from the issues of two parks on the royal manor of Gilling in that county, again to repay him for expenses he had incurred as keeper, but that Ughtred had failed to honour the tally in question. Ughtred responded to Cotton’s bill by securing licence to treat with him out of court where, perhaps, the parties came to terms.43 E13/145A, rot. 61. Cotton surrendered the office of keeper of the great wardrobe in June 1453 while retaining those of clerk and porter in the same department. His successor as keeper was his friend, Henry Filongley. A year after surrendering the office, he petitioned the Crown to ensure that the Exchequer would permit him certain allowances in his accounts as keeper. The allowances in question concerned the liveries of the rich cloths of gold, velvet and other accoutrements that he had supplied the King’s uterine half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, at their creation as earls in November 1452 and their dubbing as knights in January 1453.44 E159/230, brevia Trin. rot. 3.

Upon coming into his own in the middle of the previous decade, Cotton cannot have had many spare moments to attend to personal affairs. In July 1446, when he was busy as his father’s executor, he acquired letters excusing him from further appointments to local office and from having to accept the potentially burdensome honour of knighthood,45 CPR, 1441-6, p. 419. although his name features among those appointed to an ad hoc commission in Lancashire the following month. In June 1449, he and his wife obtained a papal indult permitting them to keep a portable altar, and that July he took the precaution of taking out a royal pardon referring to him as the executor of the Cambridgeshire esquire, John Coo of Stetchworth, a parish lying near his own estates, as well as of his own late father.46 CPL, x. 200; C67/39, m. 9. He acquired another exemption from local office in late 1452,47 CPR, 1452-61, p. 27. after which date he did not serve on any further ad hoc commissions save for one of June 1453 arising from his Membership of his last Parliament and relating to the subsidy granted to the King by that assembly.

The Parliament of 1453 met in uniquely favourable circumstances to the King and his principal adviser, the duke of Somerset, and Cotton was just one of a significant number of courtiers returned to the Commons. It is possible that his Membership of his second Parliament had likewise been no coincidence, since it appears to have contained a larger than usual household element among its knights of the shire. The Parliament of 1447 met at Bury St. Edmunds, well away from London where the government’s chief opponent, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was popular. Furthermore, the duke’s arrest upon arriving at Bury and his death in captivity just days later provides the basis of the commonly held theory that the chief purpose for summoning the Parliament was to bring him down. Cotton’s three terms as an MP were not his sole experience of Parliament, since he also attended sessions of the Parliaments of 1449-50 at Winchester and Leicester on duchy of Lancaster business.48 Somerville, 399. Probably, this business arose from the discussions about Household finance that took place at those assemblies, although the duchy was not in a position to contribute much since it had already to bear the costs of the queen’s dower.49 Griffiths, 260-1, 321.

Whether or not Cotton owed his seats in the Parliaments of 1447 and 1453 to his connexion with the Lancastrian establishment, he was easily of sufficient means to meet the criteria expected of a knight of the shire. Apart from his offices and fees, by the end of his life he possessed at least five valuable manors, four in Cambridgeshire and one in Suffolk, and enjoyed an income from sheep-farming.50 PCC 5 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 37); CP40/730, rot. 210. His manors of Landwade and Exning were valued at 20 marks and £20 respectively at his son’s inquisition post mortem at the end of the century: CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 270, 301. His estates included significant acquisitions by which he augmented his inheritance, through both grant and purchase. In 1444, he obtained a grant from the King of a rent of 100s. charged on the hundred of Exning, part of the farm of the county of Suffolk, which four years later was bolstered by a grant of various jurisdictional privileges in that county and Cambridgeshire.51 CPR, 1441-6, p. 253. By the mid fifteenth century, he had acquired the manors of Ditton Camoys and Cheveley near Newmarket, estates formerly held by Richard Bruyn* and his wife, whom he had served as a feoffee since at least 1443.52 VCH Cambs. x. 47, 87. According to a subsidy assessment of 1451, Cotton enjoyed an annual income of 200 marks p.a. from his lands and the same amount in fees. Yet the greater part of these fees, £100 p.a., was for the position of keeper of the great wardrobe, the office he was to surrender in 1453.53 E179/81/103. During the following year, Cotton took the opportunity to augment his estates by exploiting his past association with his predecessor as receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster, Richard Alred, who had remained on the duchy’s council until his death in 1448. By mid 1452, Cotton and his feoffees, Sir Thomas Tuddenham, John Leventhorpe and Thomas Radcliffe, has obtained the reversion of Alred’s valuable manor of New Hall in Boreham, Essex, expectant on the decease of his widow, Agnes.54 PCC 35 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 278-9); CAD, iv. A6998, A7909.

In the event, Cotton never took possession of New Hall because he predeceased Agnes Alred,55 CAD, iv. A6165; v. A13118. being among those of the royal party killed at the battle of St. Albans on 22 May 1455. Whether he died actively fighting for the Lancastrian monarch in whose service he had so flourished or was merely cut down in the affray is a matter for speculation. In a letter dated three days later the Norfolk gentleman, John Crane, reported to his ‘cousin’, John Paston: ‘thre Lordes be dede, the Duke of Somerset, the Erle of Northombrelonde, and the Lord Clyfford, and as for any other men of name, I knowe noon saue only Quotton of Caumbrigeshire’.56 Paston Letters, ii. 116. Cotton may have escaped dying a violent death at an earlier date. During Hilary term 1455, he had brought a couple of lawsuits in the court of King’s bench, pleading that John Allington (son of his fellow MP of 1439) and others, intent on murder, had waylaid and assaulted him at Exning on 26 Sept. 1454.57 KB27/775, rot. 71. Although it is impossible to ascertain exactly what had happened, the incident might have had political connotations, since Allington was a Yorkist whom a Cambridge jury had indicted for conspiring against Henry VI in 1452.58 J.S. Roskell, ‘Wm. Allington of Bottisham’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. lii. 45; KB9/7/1. In January 1456, John formally became a retainer for life of the duke of York,59 Private Indentures (Cam. Miscellany xxxii), 161-2. and he later served as Edward IV’s first sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire.

The inquisitions post mortem held for Cotton in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk in the autumn of 1455 reported that Cotton had held no lands in chief in either shire on the day he died, so he must have settled his estates in such a way as to escape the escheators’ notice.60 C139/156/3; 162/25. In his will, dated 2 Oct. 1450,61 PCC 5 Stokton. he had directed that his son and heir, Thomas, said to have been about 17 years old in 1455, was to succeed to his manors at Landwade and Exning. He had left each of his younger sons an annuity of ten marks for life, drawn from the issues of his manors of Ditton Camoys and ‘Wikehil’, and directed his executors to sell his reversionary interest in New Hall, partly to help provide for his daughters’ marriages. (By early 1456, Thomas Ormond, brother of the MP’s onetime patron, had bought the reversion of the manor for no less than 825 marks.)62 CAD, iv. no. A7928. Cotton had appointed three executors, Thomas Radcliffe, William Nanseglos and John Sheldon, whose tasks included retrieving a debt owed to Cotton for expenses he had incurred on behalf of the wardrobe. One of these debts arose from a tally, assigned on the issues of Wiltshire, which the Exchequer had assigned to the late MP but which the sheriff of that county had refused to acknowledge.63 E13/146, rot. 72. Of the executors, Radcliffe was evidently Cotton’s feoffee of that name and Nanseglos was another royal servant who held lands at Exning, but Sheldon is unidentified. As the queen’s clerk of receipt, Nanseglos had been Cotton’s deputy as her receiver-general, and when he made his own will over 20 years later, he provided for a chantry, one of the purposes of which was to offer prayers for the soul of his former ‘master’.64 Palmer, ‘Landwade’, 38; Somerville, 209n, 608; PCC 29 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 220v-222). Cotton’s widow found a new husband in Thomas Chevele,65 C1/26/362. while his eldest son and heir married a daughter of Nicholas Sharpe, one of Queen Margaret’s auditors and the MP’s successor as receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster.66 Somerville, 399-400. According to visitation evidence, Thomas Cotton had a previous wife, Margery, the daughter of his father’s old associate, Philip Wentworth.67 Vis. Cambs. 21.