HEXTALL, William

Hextall came from an unusual background. His family, long established at Hextall near Stafford, numbered only among the minor gentry, yet by our MP’s time they had property in two widely separated counties, for they also held land at East Peckham in Kent.10 E. Hasted, Kent ed. Drake, v. 101. The identity of his father is unknown, but a deed of 1453 shows that his mother was named Isabel, and that, after his father’s death, she had married the local lawyer, Hugh Stanford*.11 Sutherland mss, D593/A/2/22/49. There can be little doubt that it was Stanford, receiver of the Staffordshire estates of HumphreyStafford, earl of Stafford, who introduced our MP to the service of the young earl. This in turn explains Hextall’s election, at the very outset of his career, to represent the Staffordshire borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in the Parliament of 1425.12 C219/13/3. Stanford had represented the borough in four of the five preceding Parliaments, and was probably happy to surrender the responsibility as a means of advancing his young stepson. He also passed on another responsibility. He had occasionally acted as an attorney in the Exchequer for local officers when they came to proffer their accounts, and in the mid-1420s Hextall began to do the same. In Michaelmas term 1426 he represented the escheator of Staffordshire, Richard Lane*, and the bailiffs of Stafford; and in the following Easter term he represented the bailiffs of Newcastle-under-Lyme.13 E159/203, Mich. rots. 1, 3, recorda Mich. rot. 1d, Easter rot. 8.

The first evidence of Hextall’s own service to Earl Humphrey dates from 12 Dec. 1426 when he was named as one of his attorneys to deliver seisin in an important feoffment.14 CCR, 1422-9, pp. 318-19. For the next ten years or so he made his career as one of the most active of the earl’s men in Staffordshire, as Stanford had done before him. He represented the earl’s borough of Stafford in Parliament on three occasions from 1431 to 1437 to add to his three elections for Newcastle-under-Lyme between 1425 and 1435. He also served for several years as under sheriff of the county in the early 1430s and then as escheator in 1435-6 (an office to which he was appointed while sitting as an MP in the Parliament of 1435). It was in this phase of his career that he contracted what came to be a favourable marriage, taking as his wife the young sister of John Bromley of Gerards Bromley (in the parish of Eccleshall). John’s childless death, at the age of only 22, on 7 Nov. 1427 brought a minor inheritance in Gerards Bromley, Winnington (in Mucklestone) and Ashley, all lying not far from William’s manor of Hextall, which was then still in his mother’s hands.15 C138/36/9; CIPM, xxii. 582, 678; xxiii. 155; CCR, 1422-9, p. 413; CFR, xv. 247.

In the late 1430s the geographical focus of Hextall’s career shifted from Staffordshire to Kent. One can only speculate why this should have been so. The move was facilitated by his own landholdings at East Peckham, only a few miles from the Stafford castle at Tonbridge, but it is not clear why either the earl should have transported one of his servants from one county to another or why Hextall should have considered such a move desirable. One possibility is that it resulted from a reordering of his own interests through a second marriage. His first wife was certainly dead by 30 June 1444, when her son by our MP, Humphrey, was returned as her heir, but she may then have been dead for some years.16 CIPM, xxvi. 239. Although Hextall’s second marriage to a wealthy widow cannot be precisely dated, it is possible that it occurred as early as the first months of 1438.17 The marriage had certainly been made by Hil. term 1446, when the couple were joint-plaintiffs: CP40/740, rot. 349d. But it may be that her second husband died as early as Nov. 1437 (he was both appointed and replaced as sheriff of Surr. and Suss. in that month). The match not only significantly augmented his resources but, more pertinently for the story of his career, extended his interests in the south-east. Joan’s first husband, Nicholas James, had been a wealthy London ironmonger and she had a jointure interest in his lands in Croydon and Southwark. Her second, Roger Ellingbridge, had been assessed in 1436 on an income of as much as £80 (on lands in Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Surrey and London).18 PCC 18 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff.138v-141); Surr. Hist. Centre, Woking, Loseley mss, LM/1719.

The lands in Surrey that Hextall’s marriage brought him are the best available explanation for his appointment, on 28 May 1438, as the earl of Stafford’s receiver in that county and Kent.19 Rawcliffe, 212. Thereafter he took no further part in the administrative affairs of Staffordshire, and his career was played out exclusively in these two south-eastern counties. In 1447 his younger brother, Thomas, who had moved south with him, was elected to represent the earl’s Surrey borough of Bletchingley, and he himself was elected to represent it in the next assembly of February 1449.20 C219/15/4, 6. Nevertheless, it was in Kent rather than Surrey that William spent much of his career. As early as November 1444 he was appointed as escheator in Kent and Middlesex, and from the spring of 1450 he was regularly appointed to Kentish ad hoc commissions. The first of these appointments came just before the outbreak of Cade’s rebellion. In the aftermath of that revolt, a number of prominent gentry in the county obtained royal pardons, Hextall among them, but this was a merely precautionary measure. Indeed, Hextall was active in suppressing later and lesser risings in the region. In May 1452, for example, he was named to a commission of oyer and terminer, headed by the earl of Shrewsbury and charged with investigating insurrections raised in Kent in support of the duke of York’s abortive Dartford rising. In the following year he was elected to represent the county in Parliament with his brothers Thomas and Henry among those who attested the election.21 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 340, 512-13, 577; C219/16/2.

While Hextall was an MP in this Parliament he entered into negotiations for the marriage of his young daughter Margaret to William Wetenale, the son and heir of the London alderman of the same name. Negotiations between the families began in November 1453 when the groom’s father employed the Stafford retainer Richard Bruyn* to promote a marriage between his son and Margaret Hextall, a service for which he was to be paid £20. The marriage then took place on the following 10 Feb. (four days before the start of the third and final session of Parliament), in the church of St. Mary Wolchurch. The terms of the marriage settlement are not recorded, but on 14 June 1454 Hextall’s feoffees settled certain of his Kentish property, including lands at East Peckham, on the couple in remainder expectant on the deaths of himself and his wife.22 C1/26/286; Loseley mss, LM/341/73.

Hextall was one of three men summoned from Kent to attend a great council at Leicester on 21 May 1455, and it is possible that he was present at the battle of St. Albans on the following day, where his master the duke of Buckingham was one of the leading Lancastrian commanders.23 PPC, vi. 341. Yet his career did not suffer from this Lancastrian defeat and the Yorkist protectorate that followed it. The appointment a week after the battle of Buckingham’s half-brother, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, as treasurer was to provide him with a new opportunity. In the following November (the same month as he was added to the bench in Kent) he was appointed as one of the tellers of the Exchequer.24 PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 228. None the less, despite this connexion with Buckingham’s half-brothers, Viscount Bourgchier and Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury (whom he served as a steward) – both of whom were to commit themselves to the Yorkist cause in the great crisis of 1459-61 – Hextall remained identified with Buckingham’s consistent support for Lancaster. Named to the three Lancastrian commissions of array in Kent between November 1459 and February 1460, on 8 May 1460 he was one of those assigned to muster the naval force of the Lancastrian admiral, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter.25 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 558, 561, 563, 607. These measures failed to prevent the landing of the Yorkist earls, Warwick, Salisbury and March, at Sandwich on 26 June, and the campaign that followed culminated on 10 July in the battle of Northampton, where Buckingham met his death.

The loss of Hextall’s master and the defeat of the Lancastrian cause both men espoused might have marked the end of our MP’s career, but he was able to adapt to the new dispensation. He was no doubt helped by the consideration that Buckingham’s widow, Duchess Anne, was the sister of the Yorkist earl of Salisbury, but probably more significant was his connexion with Viscount Bourgchier. Significantly, after a brief period as clerk of the Receipt, he was re-appointed as one of the tellers after the viscount had been reappointed to the treasurer-ship in July 1460, and continued as one of the tellers into the new reign. Yet it would be idle to pretend that he was as important a man as he had been while Buckingham lived. Indeed, he was replaced as a teller in March 1464, and he played little recorded part in public affairs thereafter.26 PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 228.

What is known of Hextall’s last years concerns his private affairs. In Easter term 1469 he paid the Crown £40 for the marriage and wardship of his infant grandson, William Wetenale, and it was probably at about the same time that the ward’s mother, his daughter, married Henry Ferrers, from a Staffordshire family of much greater standing than the Hextalls. That marriage had certainly been made by 24 Aug. 1470 when our MP named Ferrers among the feoffees of his lands in Kent.27 E405/50, rot. 5; Loseley mss, LM/342/18. He probably died soon after making this feoffment. Despite his long involvement in Kentish affairs, he chose to be buried in the parish church of Walsall in Staffordshire.28 F.W. Willmore, Hist. Walsall, 144.

Hextall’s estates were divided after his death. He set aside his property in Walsall, consisting of some 200 acres of land, for his brothers.29 C1/134/10. But the rest of his lands were divided between his infant grandson, William Wetenale, who inherited the lands in Kent, and his only surviving daughter, Joan, wife of her cousin, Sir John Bromley, who inherited the bulk of the Staffordshire lands.30 C140/29/47; U. Lambert, Bletchingley, 239; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 128-9. Her marriage to Bromley occurred as early as 18 Mar. 1453, when the groom had licence to settle his manor of Cholmondeston (Cheshire) on Joan in jointure: CHES2/125, m. 3d.