EVERINGHAM, Henry

Henry Everingham is known, on the evidence of a pardon he sued out in 1456, to have originated from Birkin near Pontefract in the West Riding, and it is almost certain that he was one of the six younger sons of Sir John Everingham.3 On 15 Feb. 1456 he sued out a general pardon as ‘of Withybrook alias of Birkin’: C67/41, m. 9. According to the Yorks. visitation of 1563-4, Sir John had seven sons, all of whom were named in an entail of 1415: Vis. Yorks. (Harl. Soc. xvi), 115. He first appears in the records in December 1437 when he was serving at Alençon in the retinue of one of his kinsmen who was lieutenant there.4 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25774/1279. His military career appears, however, to have been brief, and it was to service in the royal household that he owed his advancement. On 28 Feb. 1447, when already a royal esquire, he was granted for life the manor of ‘Chamberlains’ in the hundred of Rochford (Essex), which had come into royal hands only five days before on the death of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. Two months later, he was granted the reversion, expectant on the death of a more senior household esquire, Robert Manfeld*, of the office of keeper and surveyor of the waters of the Humber, Ouse and other northern rivers. He also had a significant financial reward: on 11 June 1447 the receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster was ordered to pay him 100 marks for his good service in France and England.5 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 43, 47-48; DL37/15/80. He appears among those in receipt of Household robes from 1446 until the failure of the relevant accts. in 1452: E101/409/16, f. 36; 410/9, f. 45.

Despite these royal grants, it was neither in Essex nor in the north that Everingham settled. In 1446 his brother Thomas had married a rich Leicestershire widow and heiress, and soon afterwards our MP took as his wife a widow and heiress from neighbouring Warwickshire, albeit a less wealthy one. Thomas seems to have owed his marriage to John, Viscount Beaumont, an important figure at court and seemingly a distant kinsman of the Everinghams. The identity of our MP’s patron is less easy to infer, although Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, is the most likely candidate. On 29 Dec. 1450, soon after the marriage, the earl granted him an annual rent of ten marks assigned upon the lordship of Berkswell in Warwickshire, and, given their common northern origins, it is possible that he came to the county when Neville succeeded to the Beauchamp earldom in June 1449.6 SC6/1038/2.

Everingham’s marriage to Alice Botener established him among the Warwickshire gentry. From her father, a Coventry merchant, who had been assessed at £18 p.a. in the subsidy returns of 1436, she inherited the manor of Withybrook with property in nearby Coventry. Additionally, as a result of her first marriage, she had a life interest in the manor of Morfe in Staffordshire. By a final concord levied in November 1450 Withybrook was settled on the couple and their issue, with remainder to Alice’s right heirs (a settlement that was to the potential disinheritance of her daughter, Eleanor, who was probably already the wife of Robert, third son of Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin); and by another fine early in 1453 they conveyed her jointure lands into the hands of feoffees headed by the parson of Withybrook.7 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 122; E179/192/59; VCH Staffs. xx. 106; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2644; CP25(1)/293/72/372. Henry’s first forays into the politics of his new county are consistent with a place in Neville’s retinue. In January 1451 he was one of those who convicted a local lawyer for forging documents to land owned by the Archers, then still on friendly terms with the earl; and three years later he was on a jury which returned a verdict in favour of the earl’s annuitant, Baldwin Mountfort, in the dispute over the great inheritance of Sir William Mountfort*. In both instances, and most particularly in the second, the jurors favoured the party supported by Neville.8 KB27/753, rot. 39; 774, rot. 78d; Carpenter, 451, 474.

None the less, Everingham’s relationship with the earl did not survive Neville’s alienation from the royal court. Although the Act of Resumption seems to have deprived him of his early gains from royal patronage, our MP retained strong connexions with the Lancastrian elite. His kinswoman, Maud Everingham, had been appointed prioress of Nuneaton in 1448 at the recommendation of Queen Margaret, and in 1451 he joined his brother and Viscount Beaumont, then the King’s chamberlain, as feoffees of property there.9 Add. Chs. 48675, 48683. In Nov. 1450 the prioress named him and Robert Grey, husband of his stepdaughter, as feoffees in her property at Attleborough: Add. Ch. 48010. In 1454 he acted with the former as trustees for the settlement made on the marriage of Manfeld’s daughter, Eleanor, to John, son and heir apparent of the Warwickshire knight, Sir William Peyto‡. Later, in about 1457, he was named alongside a group of prominent Lancastrians, headed by John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, as feoffees of William Purefoy of Shalstone (Buckinghamshire) in the disputed manor of Dodford (Northamptonshire).10 CPR, 1452-61, p. 159; CP40/790, rot. 368d; S.J. Payling, ‘Imposter Pilgrim’, in The Fifteenth Cent. X ed. Kleineke, 35. As national politics became increasingly polarized later in that decade these associations took precedence over any loyalty he may have owed to Neville. Although he never attained the prominence in court circles enjoyed by Thomas Everingham, his nomination as escheator in Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1457 shows that he was trusted by the increasingly militant Lancastrian regime. He seems briefly to have made good his title to the surveyorship of the northern rivers after Manfeld’s death in April 1459 and on the following 5 Nov., as a more significant indication of his allegiances, he was returned for Warwickshire to the Coventry Parliament. His support received some modest reward: on 21 May 1460 the Crown confirmed him in the annuity assigned on the now-forfeit lordship of Berkswell.11 E13/159, rot. 39d; C219/16/5; CPR, 1452-61, p. 587.

In this context, it is not surprising that Everingham, like other members of his family, was active in the Lancastrian cause during the civil war of 1460-1. His eldest brother, Sir William, and his nephew, Richard Everingham, were named as accessories to the murder of her husband by Alice, countess of Salisbury, in the wake of the Yorkist defeat at Wakefield; his brother Thomas was knighted and killed, on the Lancastrian side, at the battle of Towton; and both Thomas and Richard were attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign.12 KB27/804, rot. 65; PROME, xiii. 42-44. Our MP escaped this punishment, but he too was in arms. A contemporary annal compiled at Coventry provides details of his activities during the early part of 1461. It shows that he was in the Lancastrian army at the battle of St. Albans on 17 Feb. and details two letters sent to the city from the field. The first, under the signet of the prince of Wales, peremptorily ordered the mayor and aldermen to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable in all that ye can and may’ to the activities there of our MP, (Sir) Edmund Mountfort*, the King’s carver who had been Everingham’s fellow Warwickhire MP in 1459, and William Elton*, another servant of the royal household. The second, brought to the city by a priest in Everingham’s service, was from our MP himself and addressed to the mayor, Edmund Brogreve:

Syr my maystre Syr harry Everyngham knyght comandys hym to yow and sendys yow worde that the ffelde ys wonnen wit vs on the north party And the kyng and the quene and the prynce byn togedur And my maystre wyllyth yow to sende hym worde that and he come to thys Cyte whedur he schalle come safe and be safe thereynne and so far to depart for and ye wylle undertake there for he wylle come to helpe to kepe the cyte when the northeryn men comyn downe to you fro the felde and entrete thayme to do yow favour.

Our MP’s letter met with a hostile reaction, at least, if the annal is to be relied upon. The mayor replied coldly that, ‘yf he wylle come on hys owne peryll he may’, and the ‘Comyns’, before whom the letter was read in St. Mary’s Hall, ‘were so meved ayens the preest and hys men’ that they would have beheaded them had not the mayor conveyed them out of the city.13 P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Soc. occ. pprs. l), 34. Seemingly the citizens’ fear of the depredations of her northern army outweighed any sympathy they may have felt for Queen Margaret’s cause, and it is probable that our MP did not make his proposed visit.

The references to Everingham as a knight in both these letters suggest that he was knighted at the battle. Yet in Michaelmas term 1462, as plaintiff in an action of trespass, he is described as an esquire and he does not appear in the legal records as a knight until the following Trinity term.14 KB27/806, rot. 3d; 809, rot. 7. If he is to be identified with the namesake who witnessed a Beverley deed, he was an esquire as late as 7 Feb. 1463: Yorks. Deeds, viii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. cii), 41n. It may be that he is mistakenly described in 1462; but another occasion for his dubbing, consistent with these legal records, can also be suggested, namely the sieges of the Lancastrian fortresses in the north during the winter of 1462-3. A contemporary list names Henry’s brother, Sir William, among those who supported the new King in this campaign, and it is possible that our MP joined his brother in an attempt to rehabilitate the family. His own earlier allegiance to the earl of Warwick, who played a leading part in the campaign, may have then recommended him as a candidate for knighthood.15 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 157.

If, however, Everingham sought to adapt himself to the new political dispensation by fighting for Edward IV, he did not do enough to prompt the resumption of his public career. He had credit enough in the autumn of 1468 to secure a general pardon, but he held no local office under the new King nor did he have any further connexion with the royal household.16 C67/46, m. 19. Throughout the 1460s nearly all his appearances in the records concern litigation in the central courts as he pursued his lesser neighbours for minor trespasses at Withybrook and Morfe.17 KB27/832, rot. 49; 833, rots. 45d, 46; CP40/813, rot. 202d; 832, rot. 308; 833, rots. 182, 273. He played little part in the affairs of his gentry neighbours, with the exception, perhaps indicatively, of those of another more prominent former Lancastrian household servant, William Feldyng*. Their friendship predated the change of regime. In 1457 our MP had witnessed an enfeoffment implementing the settlement made on the marriage of Feldyng’s daughter, Eleanor, to Richard Verney of Compton Murdack in Warwickshire, and in the late 1450s both men had been in receipt of fees from their mutual neighbour, the priory of Monks Kirby, a dependency of the Carthusian monastery at Axholme in Lincolnshire.18 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Willoughby de Broke mss, DR98/122; SC6/1107/7. The friendship continued when both men found themselves on the wrong side of the political divide in the 1460s. On 12 Sept. 1464 Everingham witnessed the settlement made on the marriage of William’s son and heir to Ellen Walsh, a Leicestershire heiress, and at about the same time he was named among the feoffees of Feldyng’s kinsman, John Purefoy. Their friendship may also have contributed to the marriage, made before 5 June 1470, of Feldyng’s daughter, Anne, to Humphrey Grey, the grandson of our MP’s wife.19 J. Nichols, Leics. iv (1), 368-9; CCR, 1468-76, no. 945; HMC Lothian, 55; F. Blomefield, Norf., vi. 498. Feldyng’s reconciliation to the Yorkist government did not survive the Readeption, and he died on the Lancastrian side at the battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471. There is no direct evidence to suggest that Everingham followed him in this commitment, but it is possible that he did. It is known only that he died between Hilary term 1471, when he had an action in the court of common pleas, and Michaelmas term 1472, when his widow suffered a recovery of a messuage in Coventry.20 CP40/838, rot. 49; 844, rot. 462. Perhaps he fell at Barnet, fighting for the earl of Warwick, or else, like Feldyng, at Tewkesbury. However this may be, his widow long survived him. In 1476 she dutifully provided for the celebration of masses in the church of the Friars Minor at Coventry for his soul and that of her other late husband, Lowe. She was alive as late as 1484 when she was vainly trying to obtain dower in her first husband’s Staffordshire manor of Oxley against John Sutton, Lord Dudley.21 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Gregory of Stivichall mss, DR10/389; CP40/882, rot. 327.