WHATTON, John

Heraldic evidence indicates that the Leicestershire Whattons were a junior branch of the ancient knightly family established at Whatton in south Nottinghamshire.1 The tomb of Robert Whatton (d.1546) in the church of Long Whatton bears the arms borne by the Nottinghamshire Whattons before their failure in the male line in the early 15th century: Vis. Notts. (Harl. Soc. iv), 190; J.T. Godfrey, Notes Notts. Churches: Bingham Hundred, 482; J. Nichols, Leics. iii (2), 1107. Two Whattons appear in the Leicestershire tax returns of 1436: Thomas, assessed on an annual income of £13, and John at an even more modest income of £6. They derived their income from property at, respectively, Mountsorrel and Long Whatton, lying only a few miles apart.2 E179/192/59. Thomas, a lawyer, was the more important of the two: appointed to the quorum of the Leicestershire bench in 1436, he was bailiff for Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, at Maxstoke in Warwickshire in the 1450s.3 E. Acheson, Leics. in 15th Cent. 256-7; Acct. Gt. Household Humphrey, 1st Duke of Buckingham (Cam. Soc. ser. 4, xxix), 11, 28, 49; Birmingham Archs., Misc. docs. Ms3062/Acc/1901-004/168326. John’s insignificance makes him an unlikely candidate for election to Parliament. It was presumably he who had been named to a minor Leicestershire commission of inquiry in 1422 and attested the county’s election in 1429, but nothing material is known of him.4 CPR, 1416-22, p. 423; C219/14/1. The most probable hypothesis is that the MP was either his son or Thomas’s.

This younger John was certainly advanced by Thomas’s connexions. Among the great families who employed the lawyer were the Beaumonts, substantial landholders in the vicinity of Long Whatton and Mountsorel. As early as July 1427 Thomas Whatton had acted as a mainpernor for Elizabeth, mother of John, Lord (and from 1440 Viscount) Beaumont; and in 1444 the viscount employed Thomas as an attorney in an important conveyance.5 CFR, xv. 174; HMC Hastings, i. 74. The future MP established a more intimate relationship with the viscount, although it is an interesting reflection on the limitations of the sources that we would be ignorant of this relationship save for the survival of the latter’s will made on 8 Feb. 1456. Beaumont made a generous bequest to our MP of £20, 20 cows and 2 bulls, and it is obvious that Whatton held a privileged place in his affinity.6 Add. Ch. 74926; E211/281. This makes sense of what little else is known of Whatton’s career. By 1447 he had joined other more substantial Leicestershire gentry, such as John Bellers*, as an esquire of the royal household, and he remained in receipt of Household robes until at least 1452.7 E101/409/16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. No doubt he owed his place there to the viscount, and the same can be said of his election to Parliament in 1459. He was too poor to have commanded election in his own right. Indeed, he was the least substantial man to represent Leicestershire in Henry VI’s reign. He was returned because his master, in the extraordinary political circumstances prevailing in the wake of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge, had particular motives for having his own men in the Commons. Beaumont, as the queen’s chief steward, had emerged as one of the leading Lancastrian lords and as such was anxious that the chief purpose of the Parliament, the attainder of the Yorkist leaders, was achieved. Whether he secured the return of the impecunious Whatton with the consent of the county electorate is doubtful. More than a hint of irregularity attached to the election. The leading gentry were conspicuous by their absence from the hustings on 1 Nov., and so humble were the 12 men named as attestors to the electoral indenture that the sheriff felt obliged to depart from the customary form of the returns by adding that they did have the annual freehold income of 40s. p.a. demanded by statute.8 C219/16/5; Acheson, 128-9.

This election, which took place on 1 Nov. 1459, marked a brief highpoint in Whatton’s career. Six days later, and 14 days before the Parliament was due to assemble at Coventry, he was named as escheator in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, presumably again as a servant of Beaumont.9 CFR, xix. 253. This appointment to county office was, however, his first and last. The transformation of the general political situation contingent upon the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460, and the death of Viscount Beaumont at that battle, effectively ended Whatton’s career. Although he lived at least as late as 1482, very little else can be discovered about him.10 In the early 1460s he appears occasionally as a defendant in the central courts: in 1462, for example, he had an action pending against him for a minor offence against the property of his neighbour William Dunham at Long Whatton, and in the following year he was sued for a small debt by William, Lord Hastings: CP40/806, rot. 7; 808, rot. 201d.

The records reveal a few details of Whatton’s private affairs. In April 1454 he found himself as a defendant in Chancery as a feoffee of his neighbour, Sir Simon Aleyn, a knight of remarkable obscurity, in lands in Long Whatton and neighbouring vills. Sir Simon’s heir, the equally obscure John Elnore, claimed that Whatton had failed in his duty to convey the lands to him.11 C1/24/111. Sir Simon is the only man for whom our MP is known to have acted as feoffee, and this serves to emphasize how relatively lowly was his standing in county society. His wife has not been identified, but he is known to have had at least two sons. On 12 May 1462 the eldest, Robert, sued out a pardon as ‘son and heir of John Whatton, esquire, lately escheator of Henry VI in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, alias Robert Whatton of Mountsorel, gentleman’. In November 1482 the elderly John appeared personally in the court of common pleas to acknowledge a small grant of land that he had made in favour of Robert’s younger brother, William.12 C67/45, m. 26; E159/239, brevia Easter rot. 17d; CP40/882, cart. rot. 2. The family survived in the main male line until 1589, when George Whatton left two daughters as his coheiresses, although its longevity did not result in a significant augmentation of its estates. John Whatton of Newark near Leicester, esquire of the body to Charles I, was of a junior branch.13 Leics. Village Notes ed. Farnham, iv. 302; Nichols, i (2), 597; iii (2), 912.