DEVEREUX, Walter II

A combination of an advantageous early marriage and service to the house of York won Devereux promotion to the peerage. He was one of the few men known to have fought both at the battle of Towton in 1461, when the house of York laid firm hands on the Crown, and that of Bosworth in 1485, when Yorkist rule came to an end. He also had another curious claim to fame in that he knew as many as four Kings of England as boys. His father’s prominent place in the retinue of the Richard, duke of York, ensured that he was acquainted with both Edward IV and Richard III from their earliest years; he was one of the councillors of the ill-fated prince of Wales (the future Edward V) in the 1470s; and, in 1469-70, he played host to Henry Tudor, the ward of his sister, at Weobley.

As a young man, Devereux benefited from the success of his father’s career in the form of a profitable marriage. By the autumn of 1446, soon after his father had returned from years of military service in France, the young Walter had been contracted in marriage to Anne, only child of Sir William Ferrers of Chartley. A generous settlement was made in the couple’s favour: her father settled the manors of Keyston and Southoe in Huntingdonshire on them and their issue, to which our MP’s father added the manors of Market Rasen (Lincolnshire), Arnold (Nottinghamshire), Cottesbache (Leicestershire) and Hyde (Bedfordshire).7 CP, v. 320-1; CPR, 1446-52, p. 19; 1446-52, p. 19; Longleat House, Wilts., Devereux pprs. DE/I/8. From the point of view of our MP’s material prospects, even better soon followed. Ferrers died on 9 June 1450, leaving Anne as his sole heiress and with only a single manor, that of Taynton in Gloucestershire, settled away from her in tail-male. This brought Walter a considerable windfall. The Ferrers of Chartley lands were assessed to the subsidy of 1435-6 at an annual value of £460, far greater than the value of the Devereux patrimony.8 C139/151/50; H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land’, EHR, xlix. 617. Although it was to be many years before this gain was realized in its entirety – for Ferrers’ widow had a life interest in a considerable part of it – the marriage marked a very significant advance for the Devereux family.9 CP25(1)/293/70/297; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 204-6; C139/151/50.

Before this gain could be realized, however, Walter and his father had an immediate difficulty to overcome. The bride was below the canonical age of consent at her father’s death, and the Crown thus had a claim not only to her wardship but also to her marriage. Initially it appeared that such a claim would be made. Eleven days after her father’s death, before the holding of any inquisitions into the Ferrers lands, the Crown entrusted their keeping to Ferrers’ friend, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, to hold during Anne’s minority. Sudeley would no doubt have liked to add the girl’s marriage to his grant, and it was thus very important to the Devereux family that, in the relevant inquisitions, the jurors should return her as Walter’s wife. This they duly did, and the Crown showed itself ready to treat the young couple favourably. Sudeley had a new grant, for the minority, of those Ferrers lands not in the widow’s hands at a modest annual rent of £40, but, as a married woman, the heiress’s minority came to an end at the age of only 14. The couple may not even have had to wait that long. On 17 Mar. 1453 they were granted livery of those lands her father had died seised without the need to prove the bride’s age, and three days later they entered into the manor of Chartley, her family’s caput honoris, together with other property in Oxfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Berkshire and London.10 CFR, xviii. 159, 188-9; CPR, 1452-61, p. 49; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 384-6; E159/231, brevia Mich. rot. 11(ii).

The indulgence shown to Devereux here is significant in the context of his father’s treasonable activities, for the elder Walter had played a major part in the duke of York’s rising in 1452. The family were shown further leniency a couple of months later, when, in June, our MP was entrusted with the wardship of the lands of a royal ward, Thomas, son and heir of Edmund Cornwall of Ashton (Herefordshire), despite an earlier grant of the same to the ward’s kinsman, namesake and self-proclaimed feudal overlord, Thomas Cornwall of Burford (Shropshire), an esquire of the royal household. He was to hold the lands as his father sought to secure title as Edmund’s feoffee.11 CFR, xix. 30, 32, 33, 36-37; C139/150/38; E159/231, recorda Hil. rot. 5; C44/33/20. It appears that the Crown had hopes of winning our MP and his father away from their allegiance to the duke of York.

Early in 1455 Devereux and his wife were called upon to find undertakings that they would not disturb her mother in possession of the lands she held for life. On 13 Feb. a notarial instrument was witnessed in the vestry of the low chapel of St. Stephen, Westminster, by which the couple covenanted to protect the interest of her mother’s feoffees even if, as she proposed to do, Elizabeth should enter a religious house. By a final concord levied in the following Easter term the mother’s life estate in her jointure and dower was confirmed. Perhaps she sought this new security because she feared her son-in-law’s intentions, but she may have done so, as the instrument implies, simply to protect her lands if she were to become a nun.12 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 49-50; CP25(1)/293/72/394.

In another regard, however, Devereux did show himself ready to pursue his wife’s interests with vigour. Late in his life her father had laid claim, as heir under an entail of 1320, to the important manor of Tong in Shropshire, which had descended to the powerful Derbyshire knight, Sir Richard Vernon*, from Vernon’s great-uncle, Sir Fulk Pembridge†. In February 1450, with a trial pending at common law, their rival claims went to the arbitration of Sir John Talbot and Lord Sudeley, who confirmed Vernon’s title, but this was not the end of the matter. In an inquisition taken after Vernon’s death in 1451, a jury returned that he had died seised ‘per intrusionem’ to the disseisin of the heirs in tail, Anne Devereux and her kinsman, Richard, son and heir of George Longville†. Either this finding itself was the product of the lobbying of the Devereuxs, or it encouraged Walter to claim against Vernon’s son and heir, (Sir) William Vernon*. In Easter term 1454 he and his wife joined Longville in suing for the manor, but, before the justices of assize at Shrewsbury in July 1456, they defaulted, perhaps in return for some compensatory payment from Vernon.13 C. Rawcliffe, ‘The Great Lord as Peacekeeper’, in Law and Social Change in British Hist. ed. Guy and Beale, 54; E159/235, brevia Mich. rot. 21d; C139/145/8; CCR, 1454-61, p. 165; CP40/773, rot. 318.

Weightier matters were soon to occupy the young Devereux. Despite the Crown’s apparent efforts to seduce them from their Yorkist allegiance, in the late 1450s he supported his father in a series of disorders in the marches that were far more serious than those of 1452. The particular local rivalries that provoked these disturbances are uncertain, but as in 1452 the violence of the duke of York’s servants in the county arose, in part at least, out of developments in the national politics. After the end of his brief second protectorate in 1456, the duke found himself once more in the political wilderness. In Herefordshire this had a destabilising effect, exacerbating divisions among the county’s gentry, and provoking violent disturbances. These were initiated early in March 1456 when Walter Vaughan of Bredwardine, half-brother of Sir William Herbert*, was murdered in Hereford by a townsman, Thomas Glover. Anxious for immediate vengeance, a Yorkist gang headed by Herbert and the younger Devereux entered the city on 15 Mar., intimidated the local j.p.s into taking an indictment of murder against six citizens, the most important of whom was a dyer, John Glover, no doubt a kinsman of the murderer, and then promptly hanged the indicted. More alarmingly from the government’s point of view, in the following August Devereux joined his father and Herbert in taking Carmarthen castle, and imprisoning its keeper (the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond), before marching to Aberystwyth, where they held sessions as if they were the lawfully constituted authority. These actions represented a violent reassertion of the duke of York’s weakening lordship, for he had been appointed as constable of these two castles in the aftermath of his victory at St. Albans, but had failed to secure control.14 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 779-80; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 179-80; KB27/784, rex rot. 6.

For Devereux, the consequences of these acts of open treason were, initially at least, severe (although not as severe as they were for his father). Early in April 1457 various treason and other indictments were laid against both men and their local allies before royal commissioners at Hereford, headed by two of the leading Lancastrian lords, Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, and John, earl of Shrewsbury. Soon after our MP found himself confined to the Marshalsea: on 13 May, in company with 14 other Herefordshire Yorkists, he was obliged to post a recognizance in the massive sum of 5,000 marks to William Brandon†, marshal of the Marshalsea, and John Wingfield†, that he and others committed with him would be true prisoners there. Six weeks later he again appeared in the court to plead not guilty to an appeal of murder filed by the unfortunate John Glover’s widow. He was not again certainly at liberty until the following quindene of Michaelmas, when his father was among those who offered surety that he would answer her appeal. A few months later, on 3 Feb. 1458, a Herefordshire jury came into King’s bench to acquit him and many others on the indictments.15 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 222-3; KB27/784, rot. 85, rex rot. 6. On the day before his acquittal, Devereux, as if to assert his continued allegiance to the duke of York, entered bonds to Alice, dowager duchess of Suffolk, in respect of the marriage of the duke’s daughter to Alice’s son John, duke of Suffolk: CAD, iv. A6338, 6341.

Given the seriousness of the charges laid against him, an imprisonment of six months was a modest punishment, yet Devereux may have viewed it as harsh. Whatever really happened in Herefordshire in 1456, the indictments made against the Yorkists gave only a Lancastrian narrative of the disturbances. It was widely rumoured that some of the indictments were false, and this sense of injustice is echoed in the legal records. In Michaelmas term 1457, on regaining his liberty, Devereux claimed damages of £1,000 in King’s bench against a local Lancastrian, Henry Oldcastle*, for the illegal maintenance of the appeal of Glover’s widow, and he later sued several others for conspiracy. More significantly, only five days after his acquittal, the leaders of the two rival factions in the county entered into mutual bonds in £1,000 to abide the arbitration of the King’s former confessor, John Stanbury, bishop of Hereford, and the earl of Shrewsbury, then treasurer, in respect of the indictments.16 KB146/6/36/1; Devereux pprs. DE/I/15. Despite the strong Lancastrian sympathies of the arbiters, this probably represented a genuine attempt to restore peace in the locality, but changing circumstances militated against it achieving that aim.

Devereux’s fortunes began to recover later in the same year. On 1 Oct. 1458 he secured the assurance of a general pardon against any further royal suits arising from the events of 1456. It may have been in connexion with this pardon that, at the end of the same month, together with his father and two of their adherents, John Lingen and Thomas Monnington†, he entered three bonds, in a total of 130 marks, to the chief justice, (Sir) John Fortescue*.17 Devereux pprs. DE/I/16; KB27/790, rot. 83. In the following Hilary term Agnes Glover defaulted on her appeal against him, and he went on the offensive in the courts against his local opponents, including Sir John Barre, Thomas Fitzharry, Otto Cornwall* and Thomas Breinton, suing them for trespass and conspiracy in respect of the 1457 indictments.18 KB27/791, rot. 19d; 792, fines rot. 1d; KB27/798, rot. 40d. According to royal letters of privy seal of 10 Feb. 1459, for the issue of an order to the plaintiffs to cease the action, the ‘conspiracy’ consisted of no more than attendance at the sessions at which the indictments were made: PSO1/20/167. Unfortunately the action never came to pleading, although it persisted into the early 1460s: KB27/810, rot. 50d. On the following 4 May he appeared personally in the court to plead his pardon of the previous autumn against the King’s suit in respect of the abandoned appeal.19 KB27/784, rot. 85.

Much more important, however, was the death of Devereux’s father in April 1459, which made him a much richer man. Intriguingly, there was a long delay before any inquisitions were taken in respect of his patrimony. Writs of diem clausit extremum for inquiry into his father’s lands in six counties and London were issued between 27 and 30 Apr., but nothing was done until 12 Oct., the very day on which the Yorkist lords, with our MP in their company, disastrously confronted the King at Ludford Bridge. Three inquisitions were held between then and 5 Nov.; and all three returned that the father held no lands at his death, presumably because the juries, even though they do not appear to have been provided with details of the feoffments, accepted that all his lands were in the hands of feoffees.20 CFR, xix. 213; C139/176/22. This finding was very much to the advantage of Devereux, protecting his patrimony from forfeiture, and this suggests that it was the impending campaign of the autumn of 1459 (and the possibility of a Yorkist defeat) that prompted him so belatedly to sue execution of the writs. If so, that insurance proved to be sorely needed. After the rout at Ludford Bridge, Devereux was one of only three prominent Yorkists who are known to have chosen surrender over flight. According to the subsequent Act of Attainder, after the field had been ignominiously vacated by the duke of York, Devereux, in company with Richard, Lord Grey of Powis, and Sir Henry Retford of Castlethorpe (Lincolnshire), appeared before the King and were granted their lives, ‘reservyng to youre Roiall Mageste, al manere of forfaitures’.21 PROME, xii. 461-2.

When Parliament met at Coventry five weeks later, the Commons, in which Lancastrian supporters predominated, were anxious to enforce this reservation. The King, however, exempted the three men from the Act.22 Ibid. One Yorkist chronicler erroneously included his name among the attainted: English Chron. 1377-1461 ed. Marx, 81. This royal generosity appears to have come at a price. In the words of ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’, ‘many men bothe knyghtys and squyers come wythe Syr Water Deverose in hyr schyrtys and halters in hyr hondys, fallynge by-fore the kynge, and all hadde grace and marcy bothe of lyffe and lym’. The chronology of the chronicle is here unclear, but the author represents this surrender as taking place after Henry had responded favourably to an intervention by Cecily, duchess of York, on behalf of the rebels. This intervention is assigned no precise date, but it appears to have occurred soon after 6 Dec., when, as another source shows, she arrived in Coventry.23 Hist. Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 206-7; PROME, xii. 450. Devereux may have had a personal connexion with the duchess for, probably in the 1460s, he was steward of her estates in Herefs.: D.A.L. Morgan, ‘King’s Affinity’, TRHS, 5th ser. xxiii. 6. Even if this story is rejected, there can be no doubt that Devereux only protected his lands through his purse. On 20 Dec., the last day of the Parliament, he entered into two bonds to the King: the first, in the sum of 500 marks, as a fine for his presence at Ludford; the second, in 1,000 marks, as a surety for appearance in the Exchequer on the following 2 Feb. Ten days later, the Crown granted the fine to the duke of Buckingham, who on 22 Feb. took a bond in 1,000 marks from Devereux for the payment of 350 marks that remained unpaid. Such was the cost of the pardon granted him to preserve his estates from forfeiture and for the general pardon that was granted to him on 20 Mar.24 E159/236, recorda Hil. rot. 26; CCR, 1454-61, p. 444; CPR, 1452-61, p. 552; Devereux pprs. DE/I/17. Although 350 marks was still outstanding on 17 May 1460, a writ of privy seal dated 16 Feb. 1468 ordered the Exchequer to cease process against Devereux (on the recognizances of 1459-60) because he had paid Buckingham the full 500 marks: CCR, 1454-61, p. 446; E159/236, recorda Hil. rots. 26, 28d.

Devereux may have wished he had taken his chance in exile with the duke of York in Ireland. His decision not to do so is surprising. Perhaps he was constrained by an awareness of both what he had to lose as head of the family and the calculation that hitherto Yorkist rebels had not been treated with the full rigour of the law. It is also possible that he relied on the intercession of Bishop Stanbury, with whom his father had been on friendly terms. However this may be, the penalties imposed upon him after his surrender were enough to persuade him that the time for compromise and equivocation was passed. As soon as hope dawned again for York, he returned to his master’s colours. On 17 Aug. 1460, five weeks after the invading Yorkists had defeated the Lancastrians at the battle of Northampton, the new government commissioned him and his brother-in-law, Herbert, to subdue rebellion in Wales. No doubt both men greeted their lord as, having returned from his exile in Ireland early in September, he made his way through the Welsh marches before arriving in London on 9 Oct. Indeed, it is likely that they accompanied him, for on 4 Oct. they had been elected to represent Herefordshire in the Parliament scheduled to assemble two days before the duke’s arrival in the city.25 PPC, vi. 304-5; H.T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses (1998 edn.), 71-72; C219/16/6. The election was conducted by our MP’s brother-in-law, (Sir) James Baskerville. Only four attestors, all obscure men, are named in the indenture.

After the dramatic first session of the Parliament ended on 1 Dec., Devereux returned to the marches instead of going north with the duke of York. He thus fought not at the terrible Yorkist defeat at the battle of Wakefield, where the duke met his death, but rather, in the first days of February, at the earl of March’s victory at Mortimer’s Cross, near Leominster. He then travelled with the earl to London, and on 3 Mar. 1461 at Baynard’s Castle he was among those who proclaimed him King. On the following 29 Mar., he was knighted when in the Yorkist ranks at the decisive battle of Towton.26 William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 204; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 777; W.A. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 13. Early in the new reign Devereux had a small reward for this service: on 20 July he was granted for life the King’s brewhouse, called ‘le Walsshman’, in Fleet Street, a supplement to property he already held in right of his wife in that London neighbourhood.27 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 126-7; E. Williams, Early Holborn, 798. Earlier, on 18 Nov. 1460, during the first sesion of Parl., he had shared with his friends, Herbert and Roger Vaughan of Tretower, a lease of the fishery of the weirs of Monmouth for a term of 12 years, ousting the former lessee, Barre: DL37/53/136. This was, however, as nothing against the further social promotion that soon came his way. On 26 July additional writs of summons were issued for the first Parliament of the new reign, originally summoned in May for a meeting in July but now prorogued until November. These summonses marked a considerable augmentation of the baronage in the interests of the new regime. Five new barons were summoned, among whom was our MP, as ‘Walter Devereux of Ferrers’ and his Herbert brother-in-law.28 J.E. Powell and K. Wallis, House of Lords, 508, give the figure as six, but one of those they name, Humphrey Bourgchier*, had first been summoned to the last session of the previous Parl.: John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 229. It could be argued that his summons was jure uxoris, but no Ferrers of Chartley had been summoned since 1311: Powell and Wallis, 509-10.

In the period between this summons to the Lords and the assembly of Parliament, Devereux and Herbert played an important part in reducing Lancastrian resistance in Wales and the marches. On 12 Aug. they were commissioned to receive submissive rebels and to array a force to assemble at Hereford four weeks later. According to a letter written at Bristol the day after the force had been due to assemble, the two new lords ‘ben gone afore to clense the countreye’, that is, Wales, as the King prepared to lead a campaign for the reduction of the Welsh castles still in Lancastrian hands. In the event, however, that campaign was left to the two lords, who at the end of September took the surrender of the Lancastrian stronghold at Pembroke castle, commanded by (Sir) John Skydemore*. They then travelled north, defeating a Lancastrian force commanded by Jasper Tudor at Twt Hill, just outside the walls of Caernarvon.29 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 45, 98; Orig. Letters ed. Ellis, i. 15-16; C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 202; PROME, xiii. 46.

Devereux was probably back at Westminster by 4 Nov. to take his place in the Lords in the first Parliament of the new reign. He was certainly present for at least part of the parliamentary session. In discharge of a promise they had made to Skydemore on the surrender of Pembroke, he and Herbert gave evidence of the terms on which he had surrendered and so prevented the passage of a bill of attainder against that Lancastrian captain.30 PROME, xiv. 65-68. Yet while he was ready to see his fellow Herefordshire knight spared the penalty of attainder, he himself was to gain significantly from the attainders of this Parliament. Whether he had the income to support his new rank was doubtful, at least for as long as the bulk of his wife’s estates remained in the hands of her mother. But the attainders put the new King in a position to remedy this deficiency in the case of his new creations. On 20 Feb. 1462, while Parliament was still in session, the new Lord Ferrers was granted, in tail-male, forfeited Lancastrian estates worth as much as £252 p.a. (together with the reversion of another manor expectant on the death of William Aldewyncle*, which occurred in 1463).31 CPR, 1461-7, p. 153. The values are taken from the grant and they appear plausible with one exception. The Tresham manor of Lyveden (Northants.), which Ferrers was to have on Aldewyncle’s death, was valued at an implausible 100 marks p.a.: C66/496, m. 1.

This estate was both a reward for service and an endowment for Devereux’s new rank. In this he had nothing to complain about, but, in their location, he may have considered his new lands less than ideal. Sir William Vaux’s moiety of the Herefordshire lordship of Richard’s Castle and three Gloucestershire manors forfeited by James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, were situated so as to strength his position locally, but most of his new properties lay much further afield in Rutland, Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Northamptonshire. The grant thus added to the dispersed nature of his hereditary estate derived from his father and wife. Further, if he was given to jealously, he may have wondered why his rewards, although by no means insignificant, paled beside those given to Lord Herbert, with whom his career had run in parallel. In the early uncertain years of Edward IV’s reign these rewards were hard earned. According to ‘Benet’s Chronicle’, in early February 1462 the King sent John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, Ferrers and Herbert into Essex, where they arrested, as rebels, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, and three of his sons. In the following December Ferrers participated in the campaign to reduce the northern strongholds of the Lancastrians, and by May 1463 he numbered among the King’s councillors.32 John Benet’s Chron. 232; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 157; HMC 5th Rep. 590. But it was, as before, in Wales and on the march that the new Lord Ferrers was to discharge his principal responsibilities in the maintenance of Yorkist rule. On 18 June 1463 he was appointed for life as captain of the strategically-important castle at Aberysywyth, which he and Herbert had seized in the very different circumstances of the summer of 1456, and five days later he was commissioned to pardon surrendering rebels in Wales. On 26 Oct. 1464 these powers were optimistically extended to include the garrison holding Harlech castle, the last Lancastrian stronghold that did not fall until August 1468.33 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 270, 280, 355.

As the tide of Lancastrian resistance began to ebb, the problem facing the new King’s grantees was not earning their rewards but keeping them. All had reason to fear that the attainted Lancastrians, whose estates they held, might recover sufficient favour to lobby successfully for the restoration of their lands, or, indeed, that the Crown might simply resume the grants it had made in the name of economy. This possibility was brought home strongly by the Act of Resumption of 1465. Ferrers was among those who secured a specific exemption (to add to the exemption the Act provided for the grantees of forfeited Lancastrian property) – on 17 Mar. 1465 he personally delivered his proviso to the clerk of Parliament in the Parliament Chamber – but all must have realized that exemption could end.34 PROME, xiii. 154; C49/60/18. Grantees could insure themselves against such an eventuality by selling the lands they held to those who had forfeited them. This Ferrers did in the spring of 1465 in respect of the manors of Sywell and Lyveden in Northamptonshire and Broughton in Buckinghamshire, once the property of (Sir) Thomas Tresham*. On 13 May he conveyed the manors to Tresham’s nominees in return for an unspecified sum, part of the 2,000 marks that Tresham claimed to have spent by 1467, in buying back his lands.35 Worcs. Archs., Hampton (Pakington) mss, 705:349/12946/495218-20; PROME, xiii. 350-2.

For Ferrers such precautions were probably premature, for his gains from royal patronage were not yet exhausted. In March 1466 the Crown made a new grant to him (on the more favourable terms of tail-general rather than tail-male) of all the lands he had been awarded in 1462, the Tresham estates apart, together with additions, presumably as compensation for what he had sold to Tresham. The most significant of the new lands were the Lincolnshire manors of Bamburgh and Elkington, forfeited by (Sir) William Tailboys*.36 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 486-7. Later, he was fully exempted from a further Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1467-8; and on 30 May 1468 he was granted the custody of all lands late of Sir Richard Corbet (d.1467) in royal hands by minority of the heir, Richard Corbet†, together with his marriage. In respect of the custody this grant was not valuable – the heir was nearly of age and most of his inheritance was in his mother’s hands – but, given the great wealth of his heiress mother, his marriage was a worthwhile prize. Ferrers took advantage by marrying the ward to one of his daughters.37 PROME, xiii. 273-4; C49/61/40; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 95-96; Vis. Salop (Harl. Soc. xxviii), 136.

None the less, for all these grants of patronage, there are some grounds for thinking that his financial position was not robust. At first sight, it is odd that in the midst of this apparent prosperity he should, on 14 Apr. 1467, have laid in pledge 12 silver dishes to Bishop Stanbury to raise the modest sum of £40; and it is likely that the sale of the Tresham lands was as much to raise cash as it was to insure against resumption. This evidence is little enough, but it gains added significance in the context of indications from the 1470s that he was financially compromised. Further, such difficulties are not as surprising as they might first appear. Certainly he made worthwhile gains from the King’s patronage; yet his rewards were probably insufficient in themselves to support his new rank. At least while his mother-in-law continued to hold the bulk of the Ferrers inheritance, he counted among the poorer peers at a time when, as a newcomer to the rank, he was probably under a greater pressure to spend on display than those already established.

Such speculation aside, it is surprising that in the crisis of 1469, when the earl of Warwick’s alienation from Edward IV produced rebellion, Ferrers was not with his brother-in-law, the recently-created earl of Pembroke, at the battle of Edgcote on 26 July 1469. In the aftermath of that defeat, at which the earl met his death, Edward IV found himself detained by Warwick at Middleham. During this brief period Ferrers continued to serve on the royal council in London: on 7 Sept. he was at a council meeting at Blackfriars and five days later he was again present when the council deputed him to go to South Wales to resist the King’s enemies.38 M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 50; C81/1381/31; 1547/7-8; CPR, 1467-77, p. 172. As with the other councillors, however, he remained loyal to the King, who reasserted his rule in mid October. Fresh arrangements were immediately made for the governance of Wales and the marches. Ferrers may have seen this as an opportunity. However much he may have regretted his brother-in-law’s loss, the new earl of Pembroke’s minority created a power vacuum that Ferrers might reasonably expect, at least in part, to fill. Indeed, it was natural that the boy’s uncle should, to some degree, assume the local mantle of the Herberts.

The King may have taken the same view. On 15 Nov. 1469 Ferrers’ sister, the dowager-countess of Pembroke, was granted the custody of her young son and the Herbert estates. On the following day Ferrers’ claims as the political heir of the first earl of Pembroke were recognized by a royal grant of the keeping of the Stafford marcher lordships of Hay, Huntington and Brecon to hold during the minority of Henry, duke of Buckingham (a custody formerly held by the first earl). Thus, when, in the late autumn of 1469, the government of Wales was reconstituted around the King’s young and untried brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who was appointed chief justice of both North and South Wales, Ferrers could expect to exercise a very considerable influence while Gloucester grew into the role formerly played by the victim of Edgcote.39 C81/828/2930; CPR, 1467-77, p. 175; Hicks, 56. Ferrers was also concerned with another problem created by the first earl of Pembroke’s death, namely the fate of his two important wards, Henry Tudor and Henry Percy, heirs to the earldoms of Richmond and Northumberland respectively. On 27 Oct. 1469 he was present in the palace of Westminster when Percy took an oath of loyalty to Edward IV, and he was one of four influential men who entered into a bond in £3,000 on Percy’s behalf. His readiness to do so was probably due to the proposed marriage between his niece, Maud Herbert, and Percy.40 CCR, 1468-76, 403-4; Hicks, 58-59. But it was with the fate of the other (and, as it transpired) far more important ward that Ferrers was more closely concerned. Tudor, who, it seems, had been at Edgcote, had been brought safely away from the field by Ferrers’ own ward, Richard Corbet, or, at least, so Corbet claimed much later. In the circumstances in which that claim was made, the beginning of Tudor’s reign, it was politic to say that the boy had been delivered to the custody of his uncle, Jasper Tudor, then supposedly at Hereford, rather than to Ferrers at Weobley.41 H. Owen and J.B. Blakeway, Hist. Shrewsbury, i. 248; A.E. Corbet, Fam. Corbet, 256. Other evidence, however, shows that, in the aftermath of Edgcote, Tudor was in Ferrers’ household, in the custody of the widowed countess of Pembroke. On 31 Oct. there was a conference at the Bell Inn in Fleet Street attended by Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, and her husband, Sir Henry Stafford, ‘to haue a comynicacion with the lord Ferys and my lady of Pembroke Counsell’ for the boy’s wardship. This did not result in his surrender to his mother, and he remained in the countess’s custody at Weobley until the Readeption, when, in October 1470, he was handed over to Jasper Tudor.42 Hicks, 57; M.K. Jones, ‘Ric. III and Lady Margaret Beaufort’, in Ric. III: Loyalty, Lordship and Law ed. Hammond, 27.

Ferrers played an active part in the two years of campaigning that followed Edgcote. On 14 Apr. 1470 he was in the royal company when it came to Exeter in vain pursuit of the rebel army of the earl of Warwick and duke of Clarence. It is not known whether, when the King carelessly let power slip from his hands in the following autumn, Ferrers accompanied him into exile, but the Readeption government removed him from the Herefordshire bench, a sign that he was considered an irreconcilable Edwardian. Predictably, he was among the lords who entered London on 11 Apr. 1471 with the returned and victorious Edward, and it may be inferred that he fought at the battle of Barnet three days later. On 26 Apr. he was commissioned to array the men of Herefordshire and Shropshire, and it is likely that he brought these troops to the field of Tewkesbury on 4 May, when his brother, John, was one of several Herefordshire men knighted.43 H. Kleineke, ‘Gerhard von Wesel’s Newsletter’, Ricardian, xx. 78; CPR, 1476-85, p. 284; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 594.

With Edward IV restored, an important personal matter came to concern Ferrers, namely the death of his wife’s mother, Elizabeth, on 28 May 1471. This promised a significant augmentation of his wealth, but one that depended upon royal indulgence. His wife had died just over two years earlier; and her death meant that he had no title by courtesy of England to the considerable part of the Ferrers of Chartley inheritance that had remained in his mother-in-law’s hands.44 On the day she is said to have died - 9 Jan. 1469 – Ferrers was sitting as a j.p. at Hereford: KB27/833, rex rot. 1d. The date of her death may, however, be unreliable as it is provided by an inq. of as late as 1502: CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 549. Under the rules of common law, it should have passed into royal wardship during the minority of his son and heir, John, who was only about seven years old. This, however, did not happen. When, in the following November, an inquisition post mortem was belatedly held in respect of Elizabeth’s lands in Northamptonshire, she was returned as dying seised of no property there, and there is no record of the taking of inquisitions in the other counties in which she held land. In short, no attempt was made to enforce royal rights, and Ferrers took her extensive lands for his own.45 C140/36/5.

With this new wealth, his career prospered in the early 1470s. Just as in the wake of Edward’s first accession, he found himself prominently involved in suppressing the remains of Lancastrian resistance in Wales. On 27 Aug. 1471 he was empowered to raise forces in South Wales and the marches, and to pardon surrendering rebels. Eight months later, his long military endeavours were honoured: on 24 Apr. 1472, at Garter celebrations presided over by the King himself, he was nominated a Knight of that distinguished Order in place of Sir Robert Harcourt*. Soon afterwards he was constituted as one of the King’s justices itinerant in the duchy of Lancaster lordships in South Wales.46 CPR, 1467-77, p. 289; A. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 84; Evans, 115-16; Reg. Order of the Garter ed. Anstis, i. 185; DL37/41/6. Beyond these military and administrative duties on behalf of the Crown, he was also employed by others. The surviving papers of the family preserve two appointments that came to him at this period: in July 1471 the chapter of the cathedral church of St. David’s named him as their procurator to levy the rents and other dues of three of its churches, and, more significantly, a month later the duke of Clarence appointed him as steward of his Welsh lordship of Elfael.47 Devereux pprs. DE/I/24, 25. These are chance survivals – the medieval papers of the family are incomplete – and no doubt several other similar appointments came his way.

The early 1470s may have marked the high point of Ferrers’ influence and standing. The point is an arguable one, but, viewed from the perspective of the late 1470s, the further reorganization of the government of Wales in the marches in 1473 appears to have diminished his local power. In the 1460s he had been the principal lieutenant in the region of his brother-in-law, Herbert, in the suppression of Lancastrian resistance in Wales; on Herbert’s death, he assumed the leadership of the Herbert connexion; but after Edward IV had decided to establish a ruling council in the Welsh marches with the young prince of Wales as its titular head, he was left as one councillor among many on a council under the effective leadership of the prince’s uncle, Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers. This is not, of course, to say he was excluded. In February 1473 he was named among the prince’s ‘tutors and councillors … with full power to administer his possessions’. Soon after, as part of the King’s efforts to restore order to the marches, he presided over three sessions of the peace at Hereford (in company with Earl Rivers, on two occasions), taking a long series of indictments from a high-ranking jury headed by five knights, including his brother, Sir John Devereux.48 CPR, 1467-77, p. 366; Evans, 116-17; KB27/853, rex rot. 3; KB9/334/85, 86. Even so, as the Wydevilles under Rivers’ leadership came increasingly to dominate the prince’s council, Ferrers’ influence probably declined.49 D.E. Lowe, ‘Patronage and Politics’, Bull. Bd. Celtic Studies, xxix. 546.

The apparent revocation of a grant may be taken as an early sign of this decline. On 28 July 1470 Ferrers had been given, for life, two of the first earl of Pembroke’s lesser offices, the shrievalty of Caernarvon and the master forestership of Snowdon. Yet the grant either never took effect or was superseded in favour of Earl Rivers, who was named to both offices on 20 Aug. 1473. Ferrers may also have lost to Rivers his manor of Richard’s Castle, forfeited by William Vaux and granted to him in 1462. On 11 Feb. 1474 all the Vaux lands, with the specified exception only of property in Cornwall, were committed to Rivers in tail-male.50 Ibid. 289; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 212, 421-2; SC6/1181/4, m. 16. None the less, although the reorganization of Welsh government promised to diminish his local position, Ferrers’ personal standing within the Yorkist hierarchy was unaffected. He retained a high standing in the eyes of Edward IV. On 25 Oct. 1474, for example, he shared with the queen’s chamberlain, Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre, and the King’s chaplain, Master William Dudley, a grant of the collation to the next vacant prebend in the King’s college of St. George in Windsor castle. This grant was of little financial value, but in view of the King’s ambitious plans for the college it identified Ferrers with his intimates.51 CPR, 1467-77, p. 469. More directly revealing of the King’s friendship for him is the honourable and prominent role he played in the elaborate ritual that attended the reburial of the King’s father in the collegiate church at Fotheringhay in July 1476. Mounted on a black courser, draped with a black cloth decorated with the royal arms, Ferrers was led to the choir of the church, where the courser was delivered to the deacon, and he himself proceeded to the altar to offer up the harness the duke had once used. This was the culmination of an established part of such burial ceremonies – the offering of the deceased’s knightly accoutrements – and, in the representative language of the ceremony, the rider was the dead man.52 A.F. Sutton, L. Visser-Fuchs and P.W. Hammond, Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 10, 19, 27, 49n. That Ferrers was chosen for such a role reflected the service of himself and his father to the late duke. In the previous summer, with most of the nobility, Ferrers had taken part in the King’s great expedition to France, bringing a retinue of 20 men-at-arms and 200 archers, and was present at the conference at Saint-Christ in Vermandois on 13 Aug. 1475 when the King allowed himself to be bought off by Louis XI.53 E405/60, rot. 1; 61, rot. 1d; Edw. IV’s French Expedition of 1475 ed. Barnard, 27. Soon afterwards he again benefited from royal patronage, perhaps in compensation for his loss of Richard’s Castle.54 He may also have lost the manor of Tilton in Leics., caput honoris of the Digbys. Everard Digby† had accompanied Edward IV into exile in 1470 and been rewarded with the reversal of the family’s attainder in 1472: PROME, xiv. 51-52. On 31 Jan. 1476 he was granted in tail-male the manor of Wigston (Leicestershire), forfeited by the earl of Oxford, and re-granted the brewhouse in Fleet Street.55 CPR, 1467-77, p. 565. The re-grant of ‘le Walsshman’ suggests that he had lost it during the Readeption.

Ferrers’ domestic affairs in the mid and late 1470s are unusually well documented in that contracts survive for the marriages of two of his daughters and for his own second marriage. He put himself to considerable expense to marry these daughters into families of greater gentry connected with Edward IV’s household. On 20 June 1474 he entered into an indenture with William Berkeley† of Beverstone in Gloucestershire for the marriage of his daughter, Katherine, to Berkeley’s young son and heir, John. In offering as much as 800 marks as a portion he may have overstretched himself. The sum should have been paid in full by November 1477, but by the spring of 1480, 225 marks remained outstanding. Ferrers was obliged to place a charge on part of his late wife’s property for its payment.56 Glos. Archs., Penley Milward and Bailey mss, D2078/Box 48/5; C241/158/119. Straightened financial circumstances may explain why when he came to marry another of his daughters only seven months after entering into his contract with Berkeley, he did so more cheaply. On 16 Jan. 1475 he contracted his daughter Anne to Thomas, grandson and heir-apparent of (Sir) Thomas Tyrell*, undertaking to pay the more modest sum of 400 marks. Generously, in his will of the following 16 May, Sir Thomas reduced this to 300 marks, conditional on prompt payment, perhaps because he believed Ferrers to be financially compromised.57 C147/114; PCC 31 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 238). Indeed, there is other evidence suggesting that he was in debt at this time. On 23 May 1475 he entered in a bond in £120 at South Lambeth to Thomas Bourgchier, cardinal-archbishop of Canterbury, a bond on which he was successfully sued in 1484. Four weeks later, on 18 June 1475 his brother, Sir John, and other of his intimates, including William Wykes*, entered into a statute staple at Westminster to London mercers for nearly £300, and this too was not paid, at least not on its due day.58 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. vi (i), 154; C241/257/28.

Debt may also explain why Ferrers took the unusual step of selling the marriage of his son and heir, John, to the King. Such an arrangement had several advantages from his point of view. Had he himself contracted a socially-appropriate marriage for his heir, he would have had to commit himself to the settlement of a jointure, perhaps sacrificing present income that he could ill afford. To this general difficulty faced by all fathers with heirs to contract in marriage, Ferrers also had a particular one. Any private negotiation for his son’s marriage was likely to throw into relief the questionable terms on which he held that part of the Ferrers of Chartley inheritance that had not descended to his first wife in her lifetime. He held those lands only because the King had abrogated royal rights, but, on coming of age, the son would inherit as his mother’s heir. That day was not far off, and it was likely that a potential father-in-law for his son would ask that, when it came, the son should have his legal due. It appears that Devereux’s finances were not robust enough to contemplate such a loss. From his point of view, it was easier to sell the marriage, albeit at a discount, to an indulgent King. Here the King was being doubly generous: not only had he set aside his claim to the wardship of the Ferrers lands, but he now showed himself ready to pay for the marriage he might reasonably have claimed as pertaining to a royal ward. The sale had been made by Michaelmas term 1478 when Ferrers received payments of £350 in part payment of an unspecified larger sum. The total was at least £576 17s. 5d.59 E405/66, rots. 1, 5; E404/76/4/134, 136. John was married to Edw. IV’s kinswoman, Cecily, gdda. of Henry Bourgchier (d.1483), earl of Essex. The date of the marriage is unknown, although the couple’s son and heir was born in the late 1480s: CP, v. 325-6.

Ferrers may also have had another motive for this sale, namely, a desire to avoid entering any arrangements that might limit his freedom in negotiating his own second marriage. This marriage came after 13 years as a widower and was a curious one. Men of his rank rarely took mercantile brides, and it is thus noteworthy that he should have married Joan, widow of Thomas Ilam, a London mercer.60 For Ilam: A.F. Sutton, A Merchant Fam. Of Coventry, London and Calais, 61-62, 68n. His motive may, in part, have been financial, with the context for the match provided by his associations in London. He seems to have maintained a residence there: he had property in Fleet Street, both from his first wife and by royal grant, and in 1475 he had joined other influential parishioners of the church of St. Bride there in founding a guild.61 CPR, 1467-77, p. 553. This notwithstanding, the marriage was still an unusual one, as were the terms on which it was made. By an indenture drawn up on 1 Jan. 1482 between himself and his bride he undertook to provide her, as a jointure, with lands worth as much as 300 marks. These lands were to include the Devereuxs’ caput honoris, the manor of Weobley, and their potential long-term loss posed a very serious threat to the interests of his son and heir. Not surprisingly, therefore, the indenture included the provision that John, within six months of reaching his majority, was to confirm the estate of feoffees nominated to hold the jointure lands to his stepmother’s use. Nor was this massive jointure only to the heir’s loss, for it devalued the investment the Crown had made in his marriage. Oddly, the contract says nothing of what the bride was to gift for so generous a settlement, but it must be assumed that she brought Ferrers significant reserves of cash from her first husband’s trading activities.62 Devereux pprs. DE/I/27; J. Biancalana, Fee Tail and Common Recovery, 428-9.

It is possible that Ferrers had trading interests of his own. This would give an additional context to the marriage, and explain several other apparently anomalous references to him. On 15 June 1472, for example, he had secured from the King a safe-conduct for a 100-ton French ship, called La Marye, to trade with England. Later, in 1479 and 1481, his servant, Robert Harding, sued out royal licences to export horses, presumably on his master’s behalf.63 C76/156, m. 16; 162, m. 2; 165, m. 14. Trading interests may also help to explain his dispute with (Sir) John Young*, a London alderman and grocer, who was mayor of the Calais staple in the late 1470s. In his will of November 1481 Young reported that there had been ‘a grete and grevours trouble’ between himself and ‘my lord Ferrers’. This had been resolved to the extent that Ferrers was now his ‘veray gode lorde’, trusted enough, oddly in respect of what had gone before, to be named as one of his executors, but the quarrel had cost the alderman much, forcing him to sell valuable plate that he had set aside for the implementation of an earlier will.64 Logge Reg. of PCC Wills ed. Boatwright, Habberjam and Hammond, i. 8-9, 124-5.

Now relieved of financial concerns, Ferrers used some of his wife’s money to extend his property interests in London. Late in 1482 he contracted to pay the London goldsmith Miles Adys £450 for the settlement on himself and Joan of a large number of tenements in the parishes of St. John Zachary, St. Mary Staining and St. Anne in the ward of Aldersgate. After his death Joan mortgaged this property to her son-in-law, John Shaa†, another goldsmith, only for Adys to claim a continued interest on the grounds that Ferrers had not paid the full price.65 C4/7/34; Corp. London RO, husting rolls, hr 218/8, 9. But for this evidence of his personal and domestic affairs in the 1470s there would be little to say of Ferrers. This is consistent with the conclusion that his political standing declined in the late 1470s. Decline, if such it was, was probably related to the political eclipse of his nephew, the second earl of Pembroke. The earl did not possess either the ability or close personal relationship with Edward IV that had enabled his father’s career to flourish so mightily. His violent dispute with his kinsmen, the Vaughans of Tretower, was the pretext for his humiliation. This dispute had been causing the Crown concern as early as February 1474, when Ferrers was included on a commission of array and arrest against five lesser members of the families of Herbert and Vaughan.66 CPR, 1467-77, p. 429. Despite this intervention, however, trouble escalated, and Ferrers was too closely involved in the affairs of his sister’s family to avoid taking sides.67 In June 1475, for example, he entered bonds for the payment of the portion of his niece, Mary Herbert, on her marriage to Thomas, son and heir-apparent of William, Lord Berkeley: Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. 564. He also nominated his nephew, the earl, for election to the Garter on several occasions: Reg. Order of the Garter, i. 190, 194, 195. Early in 1476 he provided sureties that the earl and his ally, Sir John Morgan, would keep the peace towards Thomas ap Roger Vaughan and appear before the royal council. Three years later, in March 1479, when the King went so far as to prohibit the earl entering Wales, Ferrers and his sister offered surety, each on pain of £1,000, that he would abide by this prohibition. This was a prelude to the hapless earl’s demotion: in the following month he was replaced as justiciar and chamberlain of South Wales, and in July he was deprived of the earldom of Pembroke and inadequately compensated with that of Huntingdon.68 C244/120/10, 45-6; 127/16; Med. Legal Recs. ed. Hunnisett and Post, 439-40, 445; T.B. Pugh, ‘Hen. VII and the English Nobility’, in The Tudor Nobility ed. Bernard, 60. Ferrers can hardly have welcomed the harsh treatment meted out to his nephew, and it may be that he himself suffered some loss. He was still in office as constable of Aberystwyth at Michaelmas 1474, but within four years he was replaced by Robert Corbet.69 R.A. Griffiths, Principality of Wales, i. 238; SC6/1225/4, 7.

This is not to say that Ferrers became a marginal figure. Only that, in part at least because of the fall of his nephew, he was not as important a component of the council of the prince of Wales, dominated by Earl Rivers and his family, as his local estates and long service to the house of York entitled to him to be. Nor, it should be noted, is there anything to indicate animosity between him and the Wydevilles, at whose door one modern commentator has lain the blame for the earl’s demotion.70 M.A. Hicks, ‘Changing Role of the Wydevilles’, in Patronage, Pedigree and Power ed. Ross, 80-81. As far as the admittedly limited evidence goes, he was on good terms with them. In October 1478 he was named alongside Earl Rivers as a feoffee in a Hertfordshire manor by Rivers’ kinsman, James Haute; and in May 1481 he nominated Rivers’ brother, Sir Edward Wydeville, and nephew, Sir Richard Grey, for election to the Garter.71 Herts. Archs., Smyth mss, DE/Si/41492; VCH Herts. ii. 307-8; Reg. Order of the Garter, i. 210.

In any event, Ferrers remained very much part of the Yorkist establishment. On 16 Jan. 1478, for example, he was named as a trier of petitions (albeit of only the lesser, namely Gascon, variety) in the controversial Parliament that condemned Clarence; three months later he attended the Garter knights’ observance of the feast of St. George; and in the summer he was among an impressive group who travelled to the Leicestershire church of Ashby de la Zouche to give evidence in support of the validity of the marriage of Edward, son and heir-apparent of the King’s chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, to Mary Hungerford, the heiress to Hungerford, Moleyns and Botreaux.72 PROME, xiv. 350; Hicks, Clarence, 148-9; Reg. Order of the Garter, i. 202; CPL, xiii (2), 690-1. More interestingly, early in 1481 he and his feoffees alienated, with royal licence, the advowson of Sutton Courtenay to the dean and canons of the King’s free chapel of St George, Windsor. Edward IV’s new chapel there, begun in 1473, was intended as a monument to the Yorkist dynasty, and it is instructive that Ferrers showed himself ready to increase its endowment, albeit with something he held only on the uncertain terms of a royal grant.73 CPR, 1476-85, pp. 226, 242; MSS of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor ed. Dalton, 56; C. Ross, Edw. IV, 275-6. After Edward IV’s death on 9 Apr. 1483, Ferrers took a formal hand in his obsequies, albeit not as the central figure he had been on the re-interment of the duke of York in 1476. The part he had taken on that occasion was played by Sir William Parr†, controller of the late King’s household, but it was Ferrers and John Audley alias Tuchet*, Lord Audley, who received Parr at the door of the choir of the King’s rebuilt chapel of St. George and led him to the altar.74 LP Ric. III and Hen. VII ed. Gairdner, i. 6, 10.

There is, regrettably, no evidence to show how Ferrers, as a longstanding servant of the house of York, viewed the dramatic events of the next few months, which saw the deflection of the Crown from the son to the brother of Edward IV. He was certainly not openly hostile – for he was among those who attended Richard III’s coronation in July 1483 – yet there is one tantalizing indication that some at least thought him a likely opponent of the new King.75 Coronation of Ric. III ed. Sutton and Hammond, 270. According to the Croyland chronicler, the duke of Buckingham, ready to engage in rebellion in October 1483, ‘apud Webley, domum Walteri Devereux, domini de Ferrers, una cum … episcope Eliensi caeterisque consiliariis suis morabatur’. This account is supported by an early sixteenth-century document that preserves traditions then current in the Stafford family: the author claims that the duke travelled from his castle at Brecon to Weobley, where he spent as long as a week and departed only after what appears to have been, from his point of view, an unsatisfactory meeting with the local gentry. They clearly refused to support him.76 Croyland Chron. ed. Pronay and Cox, 164; Owen and Blakeway, i. 241; R. Horrox, Ric. III, 163-4.

This begs the question of Ferrers’ role. The duke’s presence at Weobley implies that he believed, wrongly as it transpired, that Ferrers was ready to support his rebellion.77 In 1481 Ferrers had been named among Buckingham’s feoffees, and in 1482 he named the duke among the many feoffees for the surety of his 2nd wife’s jointure: CPR, 1476-85, p. 257; Devereux pprs. DE/I/27. These, however, were routine associations, and there is no evidence that the two men enjoyed a close relationship. One consideration certainly made him a potential supporter. The duke’s aim is thought to have been to put the young Henry Tudor on the throne, and Ferrers had his own connexion with Tudor. His sister, Anne, who still lived, had been a surrogate mother to the young Henry when he was in the wardship of her husband, the first earl of Pembroke, in the 1460s, and, as remarked earlier, the boy Henry spent time at Weobley in 1469 and 1470. Interestingly, at least one of Ferrers’ associates rebelled with Buckingham: (Sir) William Berkeley, the father of one of his sons-in-law, was attainted for his part in the rebellion and joined Tudor in Brittany. Indeed, it may even be that Buckingham came to Weobley on a promise of Ferrers’ help, a promise on which he subsequently reneged, perhaps when he realized that the duke was unable to rally local gentry to his cause. Such speculation aside, however, it is clear that Ferrers offered the unfortunate duke no active support. Had he done so, it is unlikely that Buckingham would have fallen into Richard III’s hands in the vicinity of Weobley.78 Coronation of Ric. III, 334, implausibly suggests that he sheltered Buckingham after the revolt’s failure. In any event, even if Ferrers was genuinely tempted into rebellion, there were potent considerations to stay his hand. His relationship with Henry Tudor as a boy may have promised him advantage should Tudor win the throne, but he also had much to lose. With Tudor would have come the dispossessed Lancastrians and the loss of the estates he had been granted in the 1460s.

Ferrers may have been compromised, in the new King’s eyes, by the duke’s ill-fated resort to Weobley. Yet his record of service to the house of York and his importance in an area where Tudor might, with reasonable hope, look for support, made him a man who could not be ignored. He soon became a recipient of the new King’s patronage. On 8 Mar. 1484 he was granted the office of master forester and keeper of the duchy of Lancaster chase of Enfield and keeper of the park, offices with total annual fees of about £15.79 DL42/20, f. 22v; BL Harl. MS 433, i. 131; iii. 205. More significantly, on the following 12 Aug. he was given for life the valuable lordship and manor of Chesthunt in Hertfordshire, once part of the earldom of Richmond, to hold free of rent from the previous Michaelmas. This grant formalized an earlier arrangement, for on 26 Mar. the farmers of the lordship had been ordered to pay all the issues to him. Indeed, Ferrers’ interest in Hertfordshire predated this. As early as June 1481 he had been named to a commission to survey the lordship of Chesthunt, and on 26 July 1483 he had been added to the Hertfordshire bench (even though he is not known to have had lands there).80 CPR, 1476-85, pp. 288, 513; BL Harl. MS 433, i. 204; ii. 122. This suggests that he had an interest in Chesthunt even in Edward IV’s reign, perhaps as the King’s steward. No other grants to him are recorded on the patent roll, but a contemporary register of Richard III’s grants records that Ferrers did receive more. His grant of Chesthunt also included that of the reversion of the manors at nearby Waltham and Maidcroft (said to be worth £80 10s. p.a., from which the Crown reserved an annual rent of only £6). He also had an annuity of 100 marks assigned upon the earldom of March together with the stewardship of that earldom’s lordship of Maelienydd.81 BL Harl. MS 433, i. p. xxxi; ii. 206; iii. 146.

These grants, although by no means negligible, are not enough in themselves to explain why Ferrers should have been prepared to fight for Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. Another factor may have been the recovery of his Herbert nephew’s fortunes, most clearly manifest in the earl’s marriage to the King’s bastard daughter, Katherine, early in 1484, and with it the promise of a reconstruction of Welsh government on the Herbert-dominated model of the 1460s. On the other hand, some of Ferrers’ extended family were quick to embrace the Tudor cause. His son-in-law, Richard Corbet, was one of the first to join Henry on his landing, and (Sir) William Berkeley was in Tudor’s retinue in Brittany. Further, Ferrers had himself been given some cause, albeit slight, for resentment against the King: on 7 May 1485 he had been required to find surety of the peace in the large sum of £1,000 to the abbot of Waltham Holy Cross in the course of an ill-documented dispute over property in Chesthunt. All this might be taken to lead some slight credence to the story, in a near-contemporary poem, that Ferrers was in contact with Tudor in advance of his landing. This story, although clearly wrong in detail (it places him among the lords in exile with Tudor), may reflect a contemporary tradition that he was considered a potential supporter of the man he had known as a youth. As such, he may even have known of Henry’s plan to marry a sister of the earl of Huntingdon, that is, his niece.82 Horrox, 208, 295-6; Edw. IV’s French Expedition, 27, 120; CCR, 1476-85, 1423; Bp. Percy’s Folio MS ed. Hales and Furnivall, Ballads and Romances, iii. 349. Yet in the end his longstanding loyalty to the house of York proved too strong. He was among those killed on the Ricardian side at Bosworth on 22 Aug. 1485 (according to the Croyland chronicler in ‘furore bellico’), and he was attainted in the first Parliament of Henry VII.83 Croyland Chron. 182; PROME, xv. 105-13.

His attainder did not cast a long shadow over the family. Rather surprisingly, his kinsman, William Devereux, was named as constable of Aberystwyth only a month after the battle.84 CPR, 1485-94, p. 6; Griffiths, Principality of Wales, i. 239. More importantly, his son and heir, John, had not long to wait for restoration. In this he was perhaps aided by the fact that Henry VII had known him as a boy when both were at Weobley in 1469-70. He was also assisted by a legal consideration. Since our MP had only enjoyed a life estate in the extensive lands of his first wife, these were not considered forfeit, and on 4 Mar. 1486 John had royal licence to enter without the legal formality of proving his age.85 CPR, 1485-94, p. 61. Curiously, however, despite this grant, on 10 Nov. 1486 Hen. VII appointed his servant, Hugh Erdeswyk, to the stewardship of the Ferrers lands in Staffs.: ibid. p. 32. John soon vindicated the new King’s decision to treat him generously. He was in the royalist ranks at the battle of Stoke in June 1487, and was further rewarded with a summons to the subsequent Parliament as ‘Devereux of Ferrers’. Unsurprisingly, in the next assembly, that of 1489, his petition for the reversal of his father’s attainder was successful. 86 CP, v. 325; Goodman, 102, 105; PROME, xvi. 19-21. The family’s future was assured, although his own material circumstances remained compromised until his death in 1501 by the survival of his stepmother. She was alive as late as 1521, having survived, in a striking illustration of her desirability as a wealthy widow, four husbands – Ilam, Ferrers, Sir Thomas Vaughan (d.1494) of Tretower, the old adversary of the Herberts, and Edward Blount (d.1499) of Sodington, Worcestershire – and she may have gone on to survive her fifth, Thomas Poyntz.87 CP, v. 324-5; CFR, xxii. 476; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 324, 549; C1/244/91-2; Glos. Archs. Hale mss, D1086/T2/25. Both Blount and Poyntz were esquires for the body to Hen. VII. The inheritance was eventually reunited in the hands of our MP’s grandson, another Walter, who, as chamberlain of South Wales in the 1520s and 1530s, enjoyed the sort of political prominence that had never quite come to our MP. He was created Viscount Hereford in 1550.88 CP, v. 326-8.