BATE, Thomas

Bate’s origins are a matter for speculation. There was a Bate family long established at Coventry, and, in view of our MP’s own connexions with that city, it is tempting to identify him as one of them.4 Early Recs. Med. Coventry ed. Coss, no. 480; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), no. 2013. Late in Hen. V’s reign William Bate was one of the masters of the barbers of Coventry: Coventry Leet Bk. ed. Harris, 224. Yet, in papal letters of 1442, his brother, John, is described as a kinsman of Cardinal Kemp, archbishop of York. Although this does not entirely preclude a Coventry origin, the Kemps hailed from distant Kent and it may be significant in this context that no Bates are named in the Warwickshire subsidy return of 1435-6.5 CPL, ix. 261; E179/192/59. A Thomas Bate of Sandhurst in Kent appears as a defaulting feoffee in a Chancery petition tentatively to be dated to the 1420s, but it would be pure speculation to identify him with the later MP: C1/9/322. Whatever the family’s geographical origins, Thomas and his two brothers, John and Walter, left their humble origins behind them, our MP through a legal career, the other two through the civil service and ecclesiastical preferment.6 For Walter’s career: Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, i. 129-30. John was the eldest of the three: he made his career as a clerk in Chancery, and, in August 1436, he was rewarded with a grant of the deanery of the collegiate church of Tamworth.7 CPR, 1429-36, p. 603. Assuming the family did not come from Coventry, it was this grant that brought Thomas into Warwickshire.

It is probable that the MP is to be identified with ‘Bate’ who entered Lincoln’s Inn between 1427 and 1434.8 Lincoln’s Inn, London, Black Bk. 1, f. 24v; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 279. His first certain appearance in the records, however, does not occur until 6 Mar. 1440, when, described as ‘of Tamworth, gentleman’, he stood surety on the occasion of a minor royal grant to his kinsman, the cardinal. In the following Trinity term, as ‘of London, gentleman’, he offered mainprise for his future wife, Isabel Cockayne, resident at Pooley near Tamworth, as she attempted to secure exoneration from waiver.9 CFR, xvii. 134; CP40/718, rot. 334. Marriage to a wealthy widow was frequently the method by which a young lawyer acquired a place in local society; and Thomas’s marriage to Isabel took place soon after he had come to her aid at law. The advantages of the match from his point of view are not difficult to see. She was not an heiress, but her first husband, a wealthy Derbyshire knight, had made extravagant provision for her. By settlements made between 1432 and 1438 Sir John Cockayne had settled upon her a life interest in all the substantial inheritance that had descended to him from his mother, namely the manors of Tissington, Ballidon, Harthill and Middleton in Derbyshire, Calton in Staffordshire, and Pooley in Warwickshire.10. Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), no. 1085; Warws. Fines of Fines, no. 2581; CP25(1)/292/69/211; C139/87/40. This clearly outweighed the disadvantage of the match, namely the unlikelihood of Isabel giving Bate a son and heir. As the mother of at least six children, the eldest of whom was nearly of age, she was probably past child-bearing.

It is hard to explain Bate’s marriage and his sudden emergence to prominence thereafter without assuming that he enjoyed active baronial patronage. Although there is no firm evidence to place him in the service of Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and (from 1444) duke of Buckingham, until 1446, his nomination to the quorum of the Warwickshire bench in November 1441 and his election to Parliament for the county on the following 25 Dec. are difficult to explain unless he was already in Stafford’s service.11 C219/15/2. This employment may have served to recommend him to the electors, but it did not persuade the county sheriff, Sir William Mountfort, to pay him for wages due to him for his attendance at Parliament. He had received nothing by July 1443 and successfully sued the defaulting sheriff in the Exchequer of pleas.12 Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 373.

Bate’s marriage led him into a predictable dispute with the heir to the Cockayne lands, namely his stepson, John. John had still been a minor at his father’s death, but, on coming of age, he was understandably discomforted by the generosity of the provision made for his mother. On 26 May 1443 a group of his servants, headed by a gentleman of Ashbourne, John Fowne, forcibly broke Bate’s close at Pooley and feloniously took over 500 sheep valued at £51. Worse allegedly soon followed: on 7 June Cockayne himself led an assault on his stepmother at Pooley. Such tactics were unlikely to further Cockayne’s cause. As a Warwickshire j.p. Bate was well placed to secure indictments against a man who was without countervailing influence in the county. On the following 18 June he was among five j.p.s. who took an indictment for assault against Cockayne, and, on 11 Jan. 1445, he was again present on the bench when Fowne and others were indicted for the alleged offences of May 1443.13 KB9/250, m. 45; 258, m. 4. He added to the pressure by suing civil actions, culminating in Trinity term 1445 when he secured a writ of outlawry against Cockayne and, with his wife, brought bills of trespass against Fowne, a prisoner in the Marshalsea, claiming damages of as much as £380.14 CP40/730, rot. 263; KB27/735, rot. 40; 737, rots. 78, 80, 80d. This was enough to bring his stepson to terms. On 16 Oct. 1446 the two parties entered into a complicated indenture: our MP and his wife conceded to Cockayne the manor of Ballidon in north Derbyshire in return for his surrender of the manor of Middleton for his mother’s life and his support in assizes sued against them by Cockayne’s half-sister, Alice, and her husband, Sir Ralph Shirley†, for that manor and the manor of Harthill.15 Wolley Ch. VI. 5; Derbys. Feet of Fines, p. viii.

Bate’s career prospered in the wake of the settlement of his dispute with Cockayne. On 23 Nov. 1446, described as ‘of Pooley, gentleman’, he offered mainprise before the barons of the Exchequer for a lease taken by a fellow lawyer, John Filoll*; and on the following day he joined with his wife in securing a general pardon.16 CFR, xviii. 59; C67/39, m. 5. More importantly, ten days later he had a joint royal grant of the office of ranger and bowbearer in the King’s forest of Cannock in Staffordshire, and, almost immediately, the joint grantee surrendered his right to him. Since other offices in the forest were in the hands of the duke of Buckingham’s men, there can be no doubt that our MP owed this grant to the duke.17 CPR, 1446-52, p. 544; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 448-9; I. Rowney, ‘Govt. and Patronage’, Midland Hist. viii. 51. Soon afterwards his connexion with Stafford was formalized by the grant of an annuity of 40s. assigned upon the duke’s manor of Atherstone in Warwickshire.18 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 219, 235. His place in Buckingham’s affinity probably explains his nomination as escheator of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and, while in office, his second election to Parliament on 10 Feb. 1449 in company with another lawyer employed by the duke, namely Richard Hotoft*.19 C219/15/6. There is a doubt about the identity of our MP’s colleague in this Parliament. The return and the comm. to distribute the tax allowance, dated on 1 Aug., name him as Hotoft, but the comm. to the tax collectors, dated 8 Aug. and the certification of the distribution name Edmund Mountfort with Bate: CFR, xviii. 122, 125; E179/192/74.

Bate’s election to a second Parliament compensated him for the failure of patronage to secure him an important local office a year earlier. In a letter dated 6 Mar. of an unspecified year (but almost certainly 1448) Queen Margaret, perhaps acting at the instance of Duke Humphrey, wrote to the mayor, bailiffs and commons of Coventry seeking Bate’s nomination as recorder there at the impending vacancy of that office, ‘aswel for his suffisiant of cunnyng and habilite thereto, as in especial for the humble instance and prayer of certein oure servants right negh attending aboute oure personne’.20 Letters Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 140. The year can be inferred from the succession of recorders in the Coventry Leet Bk. 157, 235, 283. Bate would appear to have been well qualified for the office. He had connexions in the city: in 1445 he had acted as parliamentary proxy for the prior of Coventry and he was later to act as administrator of the goods of William Sporiour, a Coventry fishmonger. He also had tenements there: in 1444, as one of those with property in Much Park Street, he had contributed 6s. 8d. to a loan of £100 made by the city to the Crown.21 SC10/50/2467; C1/26/176; Coventry Leet Bk. 212. In a suit of 1454 he is described as ‘of Coventry, gentleman’: CP40/775, rot. 367. However, neither this close local connexion nor the endorsement of Queen Margaret was sufficient to sway the authorities. In another local lawyer, Thomas Lyttleton, they had a candidate yet better qualified, and he was duly chosen at the view of frankpledge held at Easter 1448.22 Coventry Leet Bk. 235.

If the Coventry authorities were not anxious to acquire Bate’s services, their reservations were not shared by Richard Neville, who became earl of Warwick jure uxoris in 1449. In constructing a retinue in his new environment, it is not surprising that he should have looked favourably on one of the county’s leading men of law, and, on 20 Feb. 1451, he granted Bate a life annuity of five marks.23 SC6/1038/2. Our MP was now in receipt of a fee from the two greatest lords in the county, but, for a time at least, he remained more closely attached to Stafford than Neville. In Trinity term 1451, for example, he came in person into the court of King’s bench to secure writs of outlawry against William Charnels of Snarestone and many others of Leicestershire for close-breaking and assault at Bramcote: the manor of Bramcote was in dispute between Charnels and Thomas Burdet*, who had the duke’s active backing, and here our MP was acting in support of Burdet. On the following 23 Aug. he sat alongside Duke Humphrey at a session of the peace at Nuneaton when Sir Thomas Mallory* was indicted for the duke’s attempted murder.24 KB9/265/75; 761/34d. His nomination as escheator a few months later in Staffordshire was justified not by his standing in that county but by his place in the duke’s retinue; and the duke’s patronage no doubt also explains the royal grant to him on 4 May 1452 of the wages of 6d. a day due from the Cannock office, which he had lost by Act of Resumption.25 CPR, 1446-52, p. 544 (the grant was backdated to his loss of the office: CCR, 1447-54, p. 455). He was still active in Buckingham’s support early in the following year: with Sir William Birmingham, he acted on a royal commission to return Edmund Mountfort*, younger son of Sir William Mountfort, as heir to the greatest gentry inheritance in the county. This return had an obvious political dimension, for Edmund was favoured by Duke Humphrey, while the rival claimant, Edmund’s elder half-brother, Baldwin, was supported by the earl of Warwick.26 CPR, 1452-61, p. 58; C139/150/33; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 464. Soon after, on 20 Mar. 1453, our MP’s value to the duke found new expression in the grant of a further annuity of 40s. assigned, during ducal pleasure, upon the manor of Tysoe.27 SC6/1040/15, rot. 5d.

At about this time Bate’s career may have begun to move in another sphere, that of the Exchequer. On 12 Aug. 1453 he was commissioned alongside several Exchequer officials, headed by Thomas Thorpe*, one of the barons of the Exchequer, and another Warwickshire man, John Brome II*, to compel the payment of debts due to the Crown by the men of Merioneth, Caernarvon and Anglesey. Since he himself later named another Exchequer man, William Essex*, as one of his executors, he clearly had connexions there, presumably through the Neville earl, who had a title, albeit a disputed one, to one of the hereditary chamberlainships.28 CPR, 1452-61, p. 124. None the less, his milieu remained local affairs, and there the increasing polarization of Warwickshire politics, exacerbated by national divisions, must have created problems for him. The duke of Buckingham and the earl of Warwick became rivals, and there are signs that his relations with the former began to suffer. If any judgement can be made from the indictments taken at sessions of the peace at which Bate was present, he came to identify himself with the earl in preference to his old patron. In May 1453 he was one of two j.p.s. who heard an indictment against Edmund Mountfort for forcible entry into the Mountfort estates; and on 7 Jan. 1454 he was one of no fewer than nine j.p.s. present at sessions, presided over by Warwick himself, when an indictment was laid concerning the murder of one of Baldwin Mountfort’s servants.29 KB9/270A/74; 290/7; Carpenter, 467. More significant as an indication of our MP’s perceived loyalties is the fact that, by Michaelmas 1456, the duke was no longer paying the annuity assigned on the manor of Tysoe.30 SC6/1040/15, rot. 5d. Even so, these loyalties were not clear in this shifting and difficult situation. Late in 1456 the earl of Warwick, vulnerable as Lancastrian fortunes recovered, left for Calais; and Bate, despite the loss of his annuity, showed himself ready to return to his earlier allegiance. On 14 Dec. 1456 he sat on the county bench at Birmingham in company with the duke: indictments were returned against Baldwin’s son, Simon Mountfort†, for rape and abduction, and against John Shirwode, who also seems to have been a client of Neville, for murder.31 KB9/284/53; 285/49; Carpenter, 476-7. Bate, as a lawyer of the quorum, was a very regular attender at sessions, and hence it is not entirely satisfactory to judge his loyalties on the basis of the indictments taken before him.

Death spared Bate from having to make the choice between the duke and the earl. He made a long and detailed will on 24 June 1459 and was dead by the following 8 July.32 CPR, 1452-61, p. 508. The range of his bequests shows that he was a man of some wealth. He elected for burial in the choir of the church of Tamworth, providing 31 marks for chaplains to pray for his soul there and in the church of Polesworth for two years following his death. His largest bequest was to his wife: she was to have £100 in money together with all the jocalia and household utensils which she had brought to him at the time of their marriage. His two brothers, Dean John and Master Walter (d.1478), were to have 20 marks each. William Essex, one of the remembrancers of the Exchequer, was to have 100s. Despite his earlier dispute with his stepson, he remembered his wife’s children: John Cockayne was to have a palfrey and ‘langedebof’; John’s sister, Elizabeth, and her daughter, Anastasia, ten marks each; another sister, Beatrice, as much as £40 to her marriage; and each of their brothers, Reynold and William, five marks. Bate left small bequests to many local religious houses, including the Carmelite friary in Coventry and Benedictine priory at Nuneaton, where his sister, Alice, was a nun; and he also left six marks to the repair of certain local bridges.33 PCC 17 Stockton (PROB11/4, ff. 127v-128). As his executors he named his brother, Master Walter, and William Essex, to act under the supervision of his wife and other brother, Dean John.34 The executors were still active in the late 1460s, attempting to enforce payment from his debtors: CP40/810, rot. 326; 824, rot. 284d.