SPETCHLEY, Robert

The Spetchleys originally hailed from Worcestershire, taking their name from the family home to the south-east of Worcester. Robert’s father, William, had been a county coroner under Henry IV and Henry V until dismissed in early 1417, ostensibly on the grounds of his age and ill health. This was probably a mere pretext, whether put forward by the authorities or by coroner himself, for Spetchley lived on to set his seal to the Worcestershire election indenture of 1420, and last served as a tax collector in the early months of Henry VI’s reign.6 CFR, xiv. 414; xv. 4; KB27/617, rex rot. 8; C242/9/11; CCR, 1413-19, p. 329; C219/12/4. The family’s landholdings were modest, but included, apart from the manor of Spetchley, property in Peopleton and Claines.7 VCH Worcs. iii. 524-5; iv. 147; CP40/745, rot. 114. Since Robert was evidently a younger son, the family seat passed to his elder brother, John, who by about 1454 had agreed its sale to the lawyer Thomas Lyttleton, a transaction completed five years later.8 CP25(1)/260/27/48, 50. Robert himself had been endowed by his father with some 200 acres in Peopleton.9 CP40/745, rot. 114.

In the absence of any expectations of a further inheritance, Robert appears to have made for himself a career in the law, but he signally failed to rise to any particular prominence. It is nevertheless probable that he owed his two elections for the Wiltshire borough of Devizes to his profession, and the loss of the Wiltshire returns for the Parliaments of 1439 and 1445 raises the possibility that the burgesses sought his services on further occasions. Traditionally, the men of Devizes had tended to return local men established in the cloth trade, but since the early 1430s they had increasingly called upon professional men of law to attend the Commons on their behalf. Thus, in 1437 Spetchley’s parliamentary colleague was a Westminster clerk with no discernible connexions with the Wiltshire town he represented, and his companion in 1442 was equally unencumbered by any personal ties in Devizes, although Henry Long* (unlike Spetchley) was at least of Wiltshire origin. Nevertheless, there is no suggestion that Robert’s candidature was anything other than welcome to the men of Devizes. His parliamentary sureties in 1437 were John Saundres, a man who would not long after hold the mayoralty of the town, and John Fauconer†, a former MP for the borough, while in 1442 the prominent Thomas Coventre II* himself guaranteed Spetchley’s attendance at Westminster.10 C219/15/1, 2; Wilts. Hist. Centre, Devizes, parish of St. Mary mss, 189/41.

Although even in June 1447 (when Spetchley stood surety at the Exchequer for Thomas Lyttleton and Robert Westcote, the newly appointed farmers of the alnage in Worcestershire) he was still styled ‘of Claines’,11 CFR, xviii. 49. by the end of the decade he had evidently set his sights further south, and established himself in the port of Bristol. By the end of 1451 he had entered the service of Thomas Doge*, then appointed escheator of Somerset and Dorset and formerly a fellow Member of the Parliament of 1442, when the two men may have become acquainted. If Doge discharged his office with credit, the same could not be said of Spetchley, who was indicted of various misdemeanours at the Dorchester sessions of January 1453, just three days before Doge was rewarded with an appointment as controller of customs at Poole. Among the charges against him were claims that in April 1452 he had wrongfully taken grain, goods and armaments belonging to the abbot of Glastonbury from Buckland, that three months later he had imprisoned the rector of Hawkchurch and extorted from him a fine of 71s. 8d., and that even as his term of office drew to a close in November 1452 he had entered the ‘Whitemyll’ at Shapwick (the property of Thomas Hussey I*), and had taken a purse containing 20d. from the miller. Perhaps most damaging was the accusation that ten days after Doge had left office Spetchley had threatened the abbot of Hyde’s farmer at Piddletrenthide, William Stoyte, claiming that the abbatial chapel had escheated to the Crown, and threatening to seize all the livestock and moveable goods in Stoyte’s care unless the hapless farmer would agree to pay 13s. 4d. towards a fine of 40s.12 KB9/273, nos. 87-88. By early 1454 Spetchley had been arrested as a ‘common extortioner’ and placed in the Marshalsea, but the offer of a general pardon in the aftermath of the first battle of St Albans allowed him to escape further punishment.13 C67/41, m. 19. While in Dorset he had also forged a connexion with the landowner and busy lawyer John Newburgh, who employed him as his receiver.14 CP40/780, rot. 284.

Spetchley nevertheless disappeared from public life at this point of the late 1450s, and may have retired to his native Worcestershire, where he is found attending the shire elections of 1467 and 1472. Late in life he married for a second time, perhaps in an ultimately futile bid to father a son. While his bride was probably older than the 36 years ascribed to her at the time of her brother’s death in 1500, the difference in their ages was clearly very substantial, and the match produced no issue. Robert’s heirs were thus the four daughters of his first marriage: Margaret, wife first of John Garrold and subsequently of the London notary John Long, and her sisters Elizabeth, Eleanor and Anne. The resulting litigation was complicated by the involvement of Sir Richard Beauchamp†, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, as one of Spetchley’s feoffees, and subsequently by the change of heart suffered by Elizabeth Spetchley, who – probably following her marriage to William Fisher – took her stepmother’s side against her sisters. Not long after her first husband’s death the stepmother, Margery, married the Worcestershire esquire Richard Acton, and their son Robert† went on to represent Southwark in three of Henry VIII’s Parliaments.15 C1/109/27; 138/51-52; 295/29; 314/36; C4/79/10, 93; 94/117; The Commons 1509-58, i. 291.