MYRYWETHER, John

Myrywether’s parentage has not been established, but it is probable that he was descended from a family with long traditions of service to the house of Lancaster: a namesake and putative kinsman had been Henry IV’s feodary of the duchy of Lancaster not long after the King’s usurpation, and had been killed fighting for him at Shrewsbury in 1403.5 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 568, 589; DL42/15, f. 175v. The MP must be distinguished from a contemporary, a cloth trader from Berks., who attested the parlty. elections in that county in 1447 and 1449, and died in the mid-1450s, survived by his w. Agnes: C219/15/4, 6, 7; C1/24/25; CCR, 1454-61, p. 292. John himself had entered Henry VI’s household by the early 1440s: by March 1442 he was styled ‘of the household’, and within a few years he was attached to one of the offices of the King’s domus providencie, probably from the outset as serjeant of the scullery.6 CPR, 1441-6, p. 43; PPC, vi. 230. In 1444 Myrywether was among the Household servants seconded to serve the new queen, Margaret of Anjou, on her journey from France (a drawn-out enterprise that dragged on into the following spring),7 Add. 23938, f. 15; E404/62/143. but on his return he resumed his duties about the King. He seems at this date to have resided normally at Westminster, where he possessed a house in Tothill Street,8 Westminster Abbey muns. 17780; KB9/298/47. and where he played a modest part in local affairs, periodically serving on local juries, and in 1447-8 holding office as a constable of the town.9 KB9/242/11; 256/29, 32; 259/65; 996/42; 1050/74. Nor were the rewards of his service to the King exceptionally generous: in March 1442 he shared the forfeited goods of the convicted traitor Adam Symmes with 28 other members of the monarch’s establishment, but in the aftermath of the French expedition of 1444-5 he had to wait for over a year for payment of the wages owing to him.10 CPR, 1441-6, p. 43; E404/62/143. He may nevertheless have been regarded as an able administrator, for he was among the Household servants confirmed in post in 1454, when the administration formed during Henry VI’s incapacity by the duke of York as Protector set about reducing the size and cost of the King’s establishment.11 PPC, vi. 230.

There is little evidence of Myrywether’s personal contacts: in 1450 he stood surety at the Exchequer for the Suffolk esquire William Hopton, and a few years later he served as one of the feoffees of John Scoryer, a fellow member of the Household.12 CFR, xviii, p. 159; Guildhall Lib., London, Bp. of London’s mss, 11765, ff. 106-7. He married late in life, eventually contracting a match to the widow of the wealthy Middlesex landowner John Shorditch. It is not clear how the match came about, as the bride had been widowed for several years, but it is possible that Myrywether’s connexions with Queen Margaret’s household played a part, for Maud Shorditch’s son, Robert, was married to the daughter of Robert Tanfeld*, the queen’s attorney-general. Whatever the truth of the matter, the marriage was clearly highly profitable for Myrywether, for John Shorditch’s estates had been worth in excess of £40 p.a., and the dower portion which his widow brought to her second husband included the Middlesex manor of Ickenham as well as other lands in the county. By comparison, Myrywether’s own holdings at Westminster and Knightsbridge (where some of his portable property was said to have been stolen in 1442) paled into insignificance.13 E179/239/90, m. 1; Hennessy, 227; KB9/241/41.

The exact circumstances of the Middlesex elections to the Coventry Parliament of 1459 are obscure, but in the light of Myrywether’s modest social station there can be little doubt that it was his Household office that secured his return to the highly partisan assembly, in place of one of his more prominent neighbours who normally claimed a monopoly on the county seats. His colleague was a less remarkable choice, the experienced parliamentarian and former Speaker Thomas Charlton*, the leading lay landowner in Middlesex. It is uncertain what part, if any, either of the Middlesex MPs played in the Commons’ deliberations, but the degree to which both were regarded as politically reliable is emphasized by their inclusion that December in a commission to array the men of the county to fend off an expected invasion by the Yorkist lords in Calais.

When the invasion eventually came in the summer of 1460, the court’s forces were roundly defeated at Northampton and the new administration, formally established in the name of Henry VI who remained on the throne, set about the replacement of many of the personnel of the Household. Among those to escape this cull was once again Myrywether. It is not clear to what circumstance he owed his reprieve, but it may be significant that his parliamentary companion of 1459, Charlton, was appointed controller of the King’s household. Yet, whereas Charlton was also re-elected to the Parliament that assembled at Westminster in October, Myrywether had to make way for Charlton’s more important kinsman Thomas Frowyk II*. Nevertheless, he continued in the royal household even after the deposition of Henry VI, the King whom he had served for all of his adult life, and the accession of Edward IV.

In the first instance, the new King had little choice but to rely on his predecessor’s servants if he wished to retain some men of experience in his establishment, but as the early months of the reign went by he gradually began to pension some of them off.14 It is not clear whether there was any political dimension to the purported raids on the Westminster houses of Myrywether and his stepson Robert Shorditch by the Kensington yeoman Edward Hale in Dec. 1461: KB9/298/47. In October 1461 Edward provided Myrywether to a corrody in the abbey of Hyde, but this provision was evidently rejected by the house, as just two months later he was assigned a similar corrody at the Dorset abbey of Cerne.15 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 102, 103. If he gained admittance on this second occasion, he did not live to enjoy the benefits for long, for he was dead by the following May, when his widow, Maud, alone presented to the rectory of Ickenham.16 Hennessy, 227. She went on to marry a third time, taking as her last husband another royal servant, Richard Willy (d.1471), one of Edward IV’s yeomen of the Crown and the keeper of the Westminster residence of the prince of Wales, and survived into the later 1470s.17 C49/56/59; C67/44, m. 7; 48, m. 7; C140/17/31; CCR, 1468-76, no. 776; PSO1/34/1782B, 1783; SC6/816/6, m. 7; 8, m. 8; 1291/3/1/12, 13, 20; 3/3/9, 10; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 16, 111.