NEVILLE, John

Although far from being the richest or most distinguished man to represent Lincolnshire during the reign of Henry VI, John Neville was, with the exception of Humphrey Bourgchier*, the best born. His father was the younger son of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d.1425), by his first wife, Margaret, daughter of Hugh Stafford, earl of Stafford; and his mother the great-grand-daughter and coheiress of William (d.1369), Lord Boteler of Wem (Shropshire). Moreover, his maternal grandmother was the formidable Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, who united the maternal and paternal lines of our MP’s ancestry by taking the earl of Westmorland as her second husband.2 CP, v. facing p. 320.

This elevated descent was not matched by Neville’s modest material expectations. As a younger son, unfavoured by his comital father, Sir Ralph Neville was entirely dependent on his wife’s lands for his place in local society, but the barony of Boteler was not a particularly valuable one. On its division in 1411 between Mary and her sister, Elizabeth, wife of John, Lord Greystoke, the principal manor of Wem went to the Greystokes, leaving her with the Staffordshire manor of Tyrley and the Warwickshire manors of Oversley and Marston Butler. This gave Sir Ralph an income assessed in the subsidy of 1436 at £81 p.a.3 CFR, xiii. 227-8; CCR, 1419-22, p. 140; E179/192/59. By this date their son’s prospects had been modestly improved by marriage. In the subsidy returns he was conservatively assessed at £20 p.a. on lands in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire which he held in right of his wife, the heiress of two branches of the ancient family of Newmarche. These comprised the manors of Althorpe in the Isle of Axholme and Womersley, some 15 miles to the north-west, in the West Riding, and enabled our MP to embark on an independent career well before he came into his maternal inheritance.4 E179/136/198; CP, ix. 543-8; R. Thoroton, Notts. ed. Throsby, i. 266; C140/83/26. His wife’s lands also explain why he was returned, in 1439, among the Lincolnshire men with an income sufficient, that is over £40 p.a., to qualify them for knighthood.5 E159/222, recorda Trin. rot. 27.

Unusually, Neville’s first local office was the shrievalty, an inversion of the established cursus honorum of local government to be explained by the increasing difficulty the Crown was encountering in filling that office in Lincolnshire. Oddly, too, nearly ten years were to pass after his appointment as sheriff before he was named on his first ad hoc commission. In the interim he makes only one significant appearance in the records: on 5 July 1448, by letters of privy seal, he was ordered on pain of £200 to appear before the royal council to answer for an assault on a local fletcher.6 CFR, xvii. 129 ; CPR, 1446-52, p. 238; E28/77/64.

Soon afterwards, on the following 13 Jan., Neville was elected to represent his adopted county in Parliament.7 Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. i. 75. His election is at first sight difficult to explain. No evidence survives of any association with the county’s leading families, and his known income was inferior to that typical of its MPs. The explanation probably lies outside the county in his connexion with the Household. In all likelihood he was the John Neville named in the Household lists of 1449-50 and 1450-1 and, although he does not appear thereafter, in a privy seal writ of 1454 he is styled the King’s ‘trusty and welbeloved’ esquire. This court connexion may also explain Neville’s second appointment to the shrievalty in November 1452. Like other Lincolnshire appointees since the mid 1440s, however, he refused to serve unless he was guaranteed against financial loss. His demand was granted. On 14 Mar. 1454 the King ordered the Exchequer not to charge him with the full farm but only with what he had been able to collect.8 E101/410/3, 6; E159/231, brevia Mich. rot. 8d. In February 1455 his appointment to the Lindsey bench meant he had held all the major local offices even though his income was entirely dependent upon his wife’s comparatively modest inheritance.9 CPR, 1452-61, p. 671.

Three years later, in 1458, this income was greatly increased by a series of deaths in quick succession: Neville’s mother died on 25 Jan., his father on 26 Feb. and his wife’s grandmother on 5 May. His parents’ deaths brought him the manors of Oversley, Marston Butler and Tyrley, which the sheriffs of Warwickshire and Staffordshire were ordered to deliver to him on 12 Sept. Soon after, on 16 Nov., he and his wife had licence to enter the Nottinghamshire manor of Whatton, held in chief, without the expense of suing livery out of the King’s hands.10 C139/168/21; CCR, 1454-61, p. 316; CPR, 1452-61, p. 461. Elizabeth, da. and h. of Sir Hugh Newmarche, long tenant of the manor of Whatton, had attempted to disinherit her gdda., our MP’s wife, of the manor in favour of her yr. s., Thomas Newmarche. That attempt was thwarted by one of her own feoffees, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk (d.1432), from whom our MP held his manor of Althorpe: Feudal Aids, iv. 133; Notts. IPM, v (Thoroton Soc. xvii), 46-47.

The puzzle of Neville’s career is that, once he had come into his full inheritance and was of a wealth comparable to that of the leading gentry families of his adopted county, he played a very much diminished role in local government. He was removed from the Lindsey bench on 22 Nov. 1458, a removal unlikely to have been a mark of royal disfavour since he had received his licence to enter Whatton only six days before. The only positive indication of his allegiance during the civil war of 1459-61 was his appointment to the Yorkist commission of arrest in October 1460 but since his Lancastrian cousin, John, Lord Neville, was also commissioned, little can be read into this.11 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 651, 671. Moreover, the fact that thereafter he played no further part in local government until his re-appointment to the Lindsey bench in 1478 strongly suggests he was distrusted by the Yorkist regime.12 He is not to be confused with John Neville, the Notts. j.p. and escheator of the 1460s, who was a yr. s.. of Thomas Neville of Rolleston.

In the context of Neville’s family connexions such distrust is not surprising. Lord Neville was killed at Towton and attainted, while John’s son-in-law, Sir William Gascoigne of Gawthorpe (son of Sir William*) was a Percy retainer and had fought on the Lancastrian side at the battle of Wakefield. Further, as a representative of the senior branch of the Nevilles of Raby, he was unlikely to find favour with the head of the rival junior branch, Richard, earl of Warwick. Lingering hostility between the two branches may explain why he had further problems over the troublesome manor of Whatton. At an unknown date, but almost certainly in the 1460s, he and his wife were disseised by Warwick’s brother, John, later marquess of Montagu. On his wife’s death our MP successfully re-entered only to be disseised again by Montagu’s widow, Isabel, in the early 1470s.13 C140/83/26. On Isabel’s death in May 1476 her 2nd husband, the knight of the body, (Sir) William Norris*, continued to take the profits `minus iuste’ until our MP’s death.

These troubles with the Nevilles of Middleham provide a likely explanation for the second marriage of our MP’s daughter and heiress-presumptive. After the death of her Gascoigne husband, she married, early in 1464, Sir James Haryngton† of Hornby (Lancashire), one of the earl of Warwick’s principal retainers. Yet, if our MP’s aim in making this marriage was to build bridges with his powerful kinsmen, his own second marriage, in the late 1460s, to the widow of one Percy retainer, Sir George Darell, and the daughter of another, Sir William Plumpton, was calculated to achieve the opposite.14 Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 337; iv (Surtees Soc. liii), 172n. Whatever the reason, the long last years of Neville’s career saw, aside from his belated restoration to the bench, his virtual exclusion from local administration. The few references to him hardly imply that his affairs were prospering. Aside from his continuing difficulties over the manor of Whatton, on 26 Nov. 1481 he was peremptorily summoned to appear before the council of the duchy of Lancaster at Westminster to explain why his servants had forcibly taken from a duchy bailiff certain cattle confiscated at Womersley as strays.15 DL42/19, f. 98.

Neville did not long survive this episode, dying on 17 Mar. 1482, leaving his daughter, Joan Haryngton, as his sole heiress. He died intestate and administration of his will was granted to his widow. His memorials are the church of Althorpe, which he was responsible for rebuilding, and an extant tomb, not, curiously, in this church but at Harewood, the home of his Gascoigne son-in-law.16 C140/83/26; Test. Ebor. iv. 172n.; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng: Lincs. (2nd edn.), 97-98; W.E. Hampton, Mems. Wars of the Roses, 222.