WHETNALS, William

The schedule attached to the 1447 election return for the knights of the shire for Wiltshire provides the first certain reference to Whetnals, who it lists as one of the burgesses returned for Cricklade to the Parliament of that year.3 C219/15/4. He cannot be identified with the ‘William Wetnale’ who in 1420 accompanied William, Lord Botreaux, to France as a man-at-arms: E101/49/34, m. 10. Given that this assembly appears to have contained a higher than usual number of royal servants, it seems safe to assume that he was the minor Household servant of that name who became a yeoman of the King’s cellar (otherwise yeoman of the bottles) at some date before March 1449.4 Although it is impossible to prove he was the William ‘Wetenhale’ who was an annuitant of Joan, the dowager queen of Hen. IV. This William, of King’s Cliffe, was assessed for the 1436 subsidy on the basis of his annuity, 20 marks p.a.: E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iii)d. Likewise, his fellow MP Thomas Child* was probably the man appointed yeoman of the King’s buckhounds ten months after the Parliament was dissolved. It was in March 1449 that the Crown granted William Whetnals of the cellar and another member of the royal establishment, John Northfolk, the office of sealing worsted cloth manufactured and sold in the county of Norfolk and the city of Norwich, to hold jointly for their lives in survivorship, either in person or through deputies. During the Parliament of 1449-50, the same William and other Household men received complete exemptions from the major Act of Resumption passed by that assembly.5 PROME, xii. 127. Later, in December 1451, the Crown granted Whetnals and Laurence Werham, under clerk of the King’s kitchens, the goods that Thomas Bull, clerk, had forfeited in a lawsuit at Westminster. Whetnals and Werham were likewise associated with each other in the following October when they were awarded goods worth £20, forfeited for felony by a yeoman from Buckinghamshire, ‘for the relevyng of thaire pouer degrees’, and so that they might the better render honest service to the King. Later, in July 1453, they obtained another grant, that of the keeping in survivorship of the artillery at Pontefract, the royal castle in Yorkshire.6 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 507, 559; 1452-61, p. 110; E404/69/49. Werham is misnamed ‘Henry’ in the grant of 1453. Whetnals was perhaps also the ‘William Wetnale’ who in Dec. 1449 was appointed searcher of ships in the port of Bristol: CFR, xviii. 146.

William Whetnals of the Household remained a yeoman of the cellar after November 1454, following the making of ordinances for the regulation of the royal establishment in the wake of the King’s mental collapse. Conceivably he transferred his services to the first Yorkist monarch, since in the spring of 1469 ‘William Whetnall’ and Simon Paxman, a groom of Edward IV’s household, received a payment from the Exchequer on behalf of the grooms and pages of the King’s hall. Just under two years later, a William Wettenhale of London, ‘gentleman’, stood surety at the Exchequer for Edward Hungerford† and Edward Basyng*, to whom the Crown had assigned the keeping of the Wiltshire manors of Corsham and Stratton St. Margaret.7 PPC, vi. 227; E405/50, m. 3; E13/150, rot. 60; CFR, xx. 293.

While there is no evidence that Whetnals was associated with Cricklade before 1447, it is possible that he was the William ‘Whetenall’ of Wiltshire, ‘gentleman’, who stood surety at the Exchequer for Henry Lochard four years later.8 CFR, xviii. 206. He should be distinguished from a namesake of London, a grocer and alderman who served as one of the sheriffs of the City in 1440-1. William of London purchased the manors of Walbury, Hassenbrook and Vange in Essex and acquired interests at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, through his marriage to a widow from that town. When he died in 1457, his heir was his son, another William, who had married a daughter of William Hextall*. Declared a lunatic in 1464, the younger William died four years later, leaving an infant son and heir of his own: CPR, 1429-36, p. 117; 1441-6, pp. 57-58; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 81-82; 1441-7, p. 55; 1468-76, no. 29; CAD, ii. A3652, 3570; PCC 16, 25 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 121-2, 205-6); C139/164/17; C140/29/47; CIMisc. viii. 351.