PARKER, Nicholas

Any attempt to trace the background and early life of this MP is fraught with difficulty, in part because of his common name, shared by several contemporaries with East Anglian connexions. The heralds and antiquarians who sought to construct a Parker family pedigree offered creative and often contradictory lists of marriages, offspring and descendants, but none of them ventured to describe Nicholas’s origins or to speculate about his ancestry.8 For example Vis. Norf. 213. He may, however, have been related to the John Parker of Clare in Suffolk who was active during the first two decades of the fifteenth century and was probably employed in 1416-17 by Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, as his deputy for the collection of the fee farm of Dunwich.9 CFR, xii. 236; CCR, 1405-9, pp. 275, 287-8; CPR, 1408-13, p. 18; Bailiffs’ Minute Bk. of Dunwich (Suff. Rec. Soc. xxxiv), 93.

Circumstantial evidence also suggests that the MP fought in France, being perhaps the Nicholas Parker who comes to notice at Bordeaux castle in September 1442 as one of a small group of trusted retainers to whom the constable of Bordeaux, Sir Robert Clifton*, left bequests of money (in this case 66s. 8d.) on his deathbed.10 Norwich consist. ct. Reg. Wylbey, ff. 128v-9. Clifton had been a member of the household of the duke of Exeter, whom he served until the duke died in 1426, but there is no evidence that, unlike several other former Beaufort retainers, he then joined the East Anglian affinity of William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and chief minister to Henry VI. Yet his follower Parker may well have done so, for on 1 June 1446 a Nicholas Parker was singled out as the recipient, along with de la Pole, now marquess (and later duke) of Suffolk, and William Harleston (a member of his affinity) of a grant of confiscated property in Norfolk and Suffolk made by Henry VI. Most of the various messuages and tenements in Suffolk lay in or just outside the deanery of Dunwich, while those in Norfolk were in or near Bishop’s Lynn.11 CFR, xviii. 27-28. If, as seems likely, this Nicholas Parker went on to represent Dunwich in the Parliament of February 1449, there is a strong possibility that he owed his return to the duke, who had recently been awarded the fee farm of the borough by King Henry.

Whatever influence may have been deployed on his behalf, there can be little doubt that the Nicholas Parker who served as an MP for Dunwich was already established in the area. An outsider would hardly have attended the county elections held at Ipswich for the Parliament in which he was to sit, or have attested the return of the shire knights. Perhaps significantly, one of them, Philip Wentworth*, was a retainer of the duke of Suffolk.12 C219/15/6. Local property transactions are also suggestive, most notably two deeds of October 1452 whereby John Wolcy the younger conveyed holdings in Yoxford (near Dunwich) to a small group of trustees, including a Nicholas Parker whose place of residence is unspecified.13 WARD2/7/24/23; Suff. RO, Ipswich, Blois mss, HA 30/369/157. One of the others was William Tyrell I*, who had witnessed Sir Robert Clifton’s will in 1442 while on an embassy to France and was on close terms with the duke of Suffolk. Parker was later involved with Tyrell and other local landowners in conveyances of the manor of ‘Winchesters’ in Mendlesham (to the west of the county), which confirms that they knew each other well.14 Add. Ch. 10469; W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, iii. 218.

The identity of a third trustee, Edmund Thurston of Brundish (a few miles from Yoxford), is even more noteworthy, since Parker had almost certainly married his daughter, Margaret, by the time that Wolcy called upon their services. In his last will of 20 Sept. 1462, which was drawn up as a codicil to the testament that he made earlier on the same day, Thurston left the substantial sum of 80 marks (£53 6s. 8d.) to be shared equally between his grand-daughters Alice, Elizabeth and Isabel, Parker’s daughters by Margaret, who was then dead.15 The testamentum is Reg. Betyns, f. 89v, and the ultima voluntas Reg. Gelour, f. 178. It would appear that Thurston had no surviving male issue, as he had already arranged for the reversion of his two principal tenements to be sold to Henry Everard of Linstead Magna (also in the deanery of Dunwich).16 Reg. Gelour, f. 178. Since the tenements were to revert jointly to Everard and his wife Olive, who shared the same rather unusual name as Thurston’s wife, it may be that she was either the MP’s sister-in-law or another of his daughters.17 As the 18th-century antiquarian Anthony Norris believed: Rye mss, 3, vol. 3, p. 199; 4, vol. 2, p. 875. The heraldic glass at Alston Court in Nayland includes several shields bearing the Parker arms. One, allegedly dating from the early 16th cent., depicts Parker impaled by Everard. Parker, too, received a generous bequest, although the conditions attached to it suggest that Thurston nursed serious reservations about his readiness to honour these arrangements:

I wish that Nicholas Parker, who married Margaret, my daughter, should have the reversion of my tenement called ‘Saxhams’ after my decease, to hold to him and his heirs by Margaret, late his wife, on condition that he in no way disturbs or impedes my executors in the execution of my will, but assists them in all things when required by them. Furthermore, I request the said Nicholas to be always of especial comfort and help to Olive, my wife, in time of need, and when so required. But if the said Nicholas does not, later, comply with these conditions, then the tenement … is to be sold in its entirety by my executors and disposed of, according to their discretion, for the health of my soul.18 Reg. Gelour, f. 178v.

The fact that the last will, in which these provisions appear, was not proved until January 1478, almost 14 years after probate of the testament in September 1464, raises many unanswered questions, not least regarding Parker’s compliance. Yet whatever the reasons for this unusual delay they had little effect on Parker’s social standing, which improved considerably during the 1460s and 1470s.

The political landscape had, meanwhile, changed dramatically by October 1462, when Parker and Thurston released their title to John Wolcy’s property in Yoxford (acquired ten years earlier), to a new body of trustees. Among them Robert Vincent† of Dunwich, William Jenney*, a lawyer who had represented the same borough in the Parliament of 1450, and Sir John Heveningham enjoyed particular local influence.19 WARD2/7/24/5. These arrangements were necessary because their former co-trustee, William Tyrell, had been executed for treason in the previous February as one of the ‘ffeed men’ of John de Vere, earl of Oxford, accused of plotting with him to dethrone Edward IV. Three of the apprehended conspirators, Tyrell, John Montgomery* and John Clopton, were closely related by marriage, but, despite his personal association with Tyrell and Clopton (his fellow feoffee of the manor of ‘Winchesters’), Parker avoided any hint of suspicion. Wisely – or perhaps fortuitously – he opted instead to follow the lead of Montgomery’s younger brother, Sir Thomas Montgomery†, and make an accommodation with England’s new rulers. After serving Henry VI as warden of the mint and marshal of the hall, Sir Thomas had effected such a seamless transition from Lancaster to York as to earn his knighthood fighting for Edward IV at Towton.20 C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 231-4; HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 605-6. Now a knight of the King’s body, during the second of two consecutive terms as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, in 1462, he chose Parker to act as his deputy in Norfolk. It was no doubt in this capacity that the latter (described for the first time as a ‘gentleman’) served with Montgomery on a royal commission of July 1463 for the arrest of one Robert Wolston.21 KB145/7/3; CPR, 1461-7, p. 302.

Appointments of this kind furnished Parker with a valuable opportunity to broaden his connexions. At an unknown date, his fellow-commissioner, John Jermyn (d.1487), settled upon Parker, Sir John Heveningham, John Timperley II* and others property worth £10 a year in Withersdale, Suffolk, to hold in trust for him and his heirs. The three men were trustees of other Jermyn family holdings in Mendham, too, and seem to have been close.22 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 330; Metfield parish recs., FC 91/L1/26. Timperley proved a particularly useful associate, in part because of his influence as a retainer of successive dukes of Norfolk. Along with another of the Mowbrays’ leading adherents, the lawyer Richard Southwell*, he acted as a surety for Montgomery and Parker when, in March 1465, they obtained joint custody of the person, marriage and estates of Henry Pakenham, a ward of the Crown, at a farm of £20 a year.23 CFR, xx. 151-2. Henry’s father, Robert Pakenham, esquire, had died bef. Nov. 1464: ibid. 127. Henry’s paternal inheritance lay in and around Shropham in the south of Norfolk, but he also shared with his mother a title to extensive holdings in Staffordshire, including the advowson of Blymhill church.24 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 37; Norf. RO, Norwich city recs., Case 24H/1/3, rot. 3; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. new ser. iv. 179-80.

Although this act of royal patronage was small beer for Montgomery, especially as Henry was by then technically of age, it proved far more significant for Parker.25 Henry was said to have been born in the autumn of 1443 when proofs of age were taken in response to a writ of July 1466: C140/30/71. Through an opportunistic marriage to his ward’s widowed mother, Margaret, he made sure of a more permanent income from her Staffordshire estates, which were the subject of what was almost certainly a collusive lawsuit brought in 1472 against Nicholas, Margaret and Henry by a group of influential local landowners in the court of common pleas.26 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. new ser. iv. 179-80. Two of the plaintiffs, John Harcourt and the lawyer William Cumberford*, were prominent retainers and administrators of the dukes of Buckingham: C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 191, 208, 215, 219-20, 236. It seems likely that they intended to break an existing entail in favour of Henry and thus allow Parker to secure an unimpeachable title of his own. The need to provide Henry with appropriate compensation would explain an otherwise curious arrangement whereby Parker settled rents worth £10 a year upon the young man and his immediate heirs. The annuity came from some of the many holdings that he and his trustees, including John Jermyn the younger and the latter’s brother, Thomas, had by then acquired in and around the Norfolk manor of Honing.27 C141/3/34; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 37.

It is now impossible to discover exactly when Parker started to build up an estate of his own in Norfolk or how widespread his purchases may have been. He is first described as a resident of Honing in a deed of June 1467, by which point he had also begun to establish himself as a landowner in North Walsham.28 Norf. RO, Norf. Rec. Soc. mss, 3624, 13E1. Over the next 16 years, he embarked on a systematic campaign of territorial expansion, which extended to the nearby villages of Crostwight, Redlington and Witton.29 Norwich city recs., Case 25 I/2013; Bradfer-Lawrence mss, BL/O/L/24, 42; Norf. Feet of Fines ed. Rye, ii. 437. These activities may have provoked a quarrel with Norfolk’s most celebrated late medieval family, the Pastons. In May 1470 John Paston† informed his brother, Sir John†, that ‘I saw my modyr neuyr sorer meuyd wyth no mater in hyr lyue then she was when she red the byll that ye gaue me warnyng that Perker had attainyd an axyon ayenst yow and me, for she supposyth veryly that it is doon by myn oncyll William meanys, to make yow to sell your lond’.30 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. no. 341. His anxious request, ‘I pray yow se that I tak no hurt by Parker’, was repeated a year later, when he asked Sir John to ‘se that I be safe for Parker and Herry Colettys mater’.31 Ibid. no. 342. The troublemaker in question may have been Master Nicholas Parker, the notary public, clerk of the diocese of Norwich and principal registrar of the court of Arches, whose want of ‘indifference’ had irritated Sir John during his sojourn in the Fleet prison five years earlier.32 CPL, xii. 267; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1195. Parker was present in 1464 and 1466 when Sir John provided depositions at St. Paul’s and Lambeth Palace about the disputed will of Sir John Fastolf: Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 155, 158, 214, 228, 281. Master Nicholas lived and worked in London, and it is worth noting that, in February 1476, John Paston asked his brother to pay 30s. to ‘Parker of Fleet Street’.33 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. no. 369. However, since he may have wished to distinguish the notary from an adversary nearer home, the latter’s identity remains unclear, especially as the ‘oncyll William’ (William Paston†) mentioned here had his sights upon his nephews’ manor of Oxnead, which lay within a short distance of Honing. Parker’s choice of trustees also provides some intriguing clues in this regard, since Nicholas Ovy, who acted regularly on his behalf, was no friend to the Pastons, being an attorney for their sworn enemy, John de la Pole, second duke of Suffolk.34 Norwich city recs., Case 25 I/2013; Bradfer-Lawrence mss, BL/O/L/42. Ovy was also employed as an auditor and attorney at St. Giles’s hospital, Norwich, then a hotbed of de la Pole supporters, whose receiver-general, Peter Goos, and future master, John Smith, were also involved in Parker’s property transactions.35 Norwich city recs., Case 25 I/2013; C. Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul, 153, 156, 256-8. Whatever his relationship with the Pastons, Parker was clearly happy to maintain a connexion with the de la Poles that may by then have been over three decades old.

Like the Pastons and many other members of the Norfolk gentry, Parker seems also to have owned, or perhaps rented, a town house in Norwich, settling in a north-western suburb of the city known as Pockthorp, an area previously favoured by such eminent veterans of the Hundred Years’ War as Sir Thomas Erpingham and Sir John Fastolf. He had probably taken up residence by October 1483, when he served as a commissioner of gaol delivery in the city, and was certainly living there by the end of the decade.36 Norf. RO, Colman mss, COL 1/168. In his description of the church of St. James, Pockthorp, the antiquary Francis Blomefield noted the existence of a brass, now lost, eliciting prayers ‘for the Sowle of Nicholas Parker, on whose Sowle Jesus have Mercy, Amen’, which would suggest that he was at least an occasional parishioner.37 F. Blomefield, Norf. iv. 424.

It was through his association with the civic elite that Parker came to marry his third wife, Agnes, the widow of John Ebbys, a successful mercer who had served as sheriff of Norwich in 1484.38 Index Norwich City Officers (Norf. Rec. Soc. lii), 56. As befitted a man of his wealth and status, Ebbys had lived in some style in the parish of St. Michael at Plea in the commercial heart of the city, but he also owned ‘places’ in Pockthorp and other parts of Norwich, as well as a significant amount of property in the Suffolk township of Combes. His two children were still under age when he drew up his will in August 1485, naming Agnes as his executrix and settling upon her a quantity of plate and household goods, together with £20 ‘in ware and dettys equally deuyded’, a life interest in certain holdings in Combes and a title in fee simple to their Norwich home.39 Reg. Caston, ff. 278v-80. She was, by any reckoning, an attractive proposition for an elderly widower such as Parker, although their marriage brought with it a less welcome round of litigation that must have clouded his last years. At the time of his death, Ebbys had been embroiled in a lawsuit begun against him in the court of Chancery over his acquisition of an estate in Plumstead (near North Walsham), in which Parker and Agnes now appeared as defendants.40 C1/95/26. The petition against them must have been submitted between 1486 and 1493. Described as ‘of Honing, Norfolk, alias of Norwich, gentleman’, Parker also faced at least two actions for debt brought by the London mercers John Paret and Thomas Mylys in the court of common pleas, being eventually pardoned a sentence of outlawry incurred for his failure to appear in court.41 CPR, 1494-1509, p. 36.

Parker and Alice were married for just over a decade until his death in March 1497. His will, if he ever made one, does not survive, but we are vouchsafed a remarkable insight into his spiritual life in the form of an illuminated missal, which was commissioned by him, almost certainly in Norwich.42 Cambridge Univ. Lib., MS Ff.2.31; Western Illuminated MSS: Cat. of Colln. in Cambridge Univ. Lib. ed. Binski and Zutshi, no. 265. His obit has been added in contemporary handwriting to the calendar on 19 Mar. (‘obitus Nicholai Parker armigeri qui istum lirum [sic] fieri fecit anno domini etc nonagesimo septimo’), while the birth of a Mary Parker (‘nativitas Marie Parker’) is noted, unfortunately without a year, on 21 Oct., in a different late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century hand. Of particular interest is a striking two-thirds page miniature of the crucifixion, below which is depicted a smaller, more roughly executed cross of the patriarchal type associated with the celebrated rood at Bromholm priory in Norfolk, its ‘colours smudged probably through devotional use’.43 Western Illuminated MSS, no. 265, pl. LXXXIX; F. Wormald, ‘The Rood of Bromholm’, Jnl. Warburg Inst. 1 (1937), 31-45. Such a personal, and now comparatively unusual, aide memoire would have enabled the user to undertake a ‘virtual’ pilgrimage during his or her devotions, an exercise which would have been less necessary for Parker, given the short distance between Honing and Bromholm, unless he had grown too frail or sick to travel.44 E. Duffy, Marking the Hours, 39-41.

Parker was succeeded by his son, John, who must have been of age by 1479, when he shared custody with his father of land in North Walsham, and seems therefore to have been the child of an early and otherwise undocumented marriage.45 Bradfer Lawrence mss, BL/O/L/42. The Augustine Parker who acted as an attorney for the conveyance of this property was perhaps John’s brother. Agnes lived on until the latter part of 1505, having never remarried. But save for a terse reference to herself as ‘Agnes Parker wydue’, in her will of June that year, she made no mention at all of her last husband or any members of his family. Significantly, she requested burial next to the tomb of John Ebbys at St. Michael’s in Norwich rather than at Honing, and provided generously for the commemoration of Ebbys’ soul.46 Reg. Ryxe, ff. 226-7v.

Nicholas was, however, remembered by a small memorial brass in Honing parish church, which records the same date of death as that noted in his missal (19 Mar. 1497).47 A writ of diem clausit extremum was issued in Parker’s name on 24 Apr. 1497: CFR, xxii. no. 562. Although he must by then have been well over 70, he appears bareheaded, with long, flowing hair and clad in full armour, perhaps as a reminder of his younger days as a soldier, or simply to underscore his hard-won status as a member of the local gentry.48 J.S. Cotman, Engravings of Sepulchral Brasses in Norf. and Suff. (2nd edn.), i. 27, pl. XLIV; E.R. Suffling, English Church Brasses, 83, fig. 45. Significantly, again as in his missal, he is described as an esquire, a rank not customarily accorded to him in life. It appears from the brief note about this ‘grave-stone’ furnished by Blomefield that the arms of Boys, Erpingham, Gymingham and Repps, now all lost, once formed part of Parker’s original memorial. Since members of each of these families had previously been lords of the manor of Honing, we may assume that Parker was anxious to demonstrate a sense of continuity and proprietorship, even though he had never actually held this title.49 Blomefield, xi. 42-44, 46.