STRODE, Richard

No conclusive evidence of Richard Strode’s parentage has come to light, but he may have been a son of the John Strode who in 1421 and 1422 was appointed a tax collector in the county of Devon. Richard trained in the law and in 1434 was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn.7 Baker, ii. 1476: L.Inn Adm. i. 7. His absence from his native county, along with his father’s survival, explains his omission from the list of gentry called upon to take the general oath against maintenance in that year (a process hampered in the county of Devon by the timing of the royal writs ordering the exercise). Certainly, the Strodes were of some substance in their county. On the basis of his income, Richard’s putative father, John, was distrained to take up knighthood in 1430, and Richard would be similarly fined in 1439, by which time he had come into his inheritance. The Strode estates included the Devon manors of Newnham and Dunstone (in Yealmpton) and landholdings at Hurdwick and Loughtor.8 Genealogist, n.s. xxiv. 270; C1/28/269; CP40/800, rot. 84d. The full annual value of this property is uncertain, but it probably exceeded £100 p.a., for Richard’s widow would later claim some £40 p.a. as her dower.9 CP40/830, rot. 179. While there is no evidence to show whether Strode ever played any part in public life within Plympton Erle, his standing in the borough and its hinterland was clearly sufficient to qualify him for election to Parliament by the burgesses in 1437. Equally, his candidature may be thought to have been agreeable to Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, the lord of Plympton, from whom Strode held part of his lands.10 CP40/820, rot. 506.

His return to the Commons aside, Strode now also began to play a modest part in local administration. In the autumn of 1439 he was appointed to a royal commission to inquire into the testamentary provisions made by Master Roger Bolter, the precentor of Exeter cathedral, and a year later he was among the prominent jurors empanelled to take the inquisition post mortem for Margaret, duchess of Clarence,11 C139/101/73. while in January 1442 he was present at the Devon county elections at Exeter castle. Nevertheless, it appears that Strode also maintained his contacts among the lawyers and judges of the royal courts at Westminster. A particular bond tied him to the Fortescue family, a branch of whom were the Strodes’ near neighbours at Ermington. In the autumn of 1443 Strode was allowed to style himself one of the servants of the chief justice, John Fortescue*, whose widowed sister-in-law he would marry in his final years. Perhaps in the course of transacting business at Westminster or in the Holborn district, on 31 Oct. 1442 Strode found himself in the London parish of St. Martin Ludgate, when he was stabbed in the back with a dagger by a Welsh knight from Caernarvon, Sir Nicholas Conway. The circumstances of the incident remain obscure, but it may in some way have been connected with Conway’s overdue appearance in the King’s bench. Strode for his part survived the four-finger-deep wound he had sustained, and lived to demand damages of £1,000 from his assailant.12 KB146/6/22/1; CPR, 1436-41, p. 398.

Early in 1447 Strode was returned to Parliament by the burgesses of Plympton Erle for a second time. By the time the sheriff’s indenture recording the names of the knights of the shire was sealed on 31 Jan. it was known that Parliament, which had originally been summoned to Cambridge, was instead to meet at the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. A number of boroughs struggled to find candidates willing to travel to provincial Suffolk, and the re-election of Strode after an interval of ten years, along with the obscure carpenter Philip Sturt* and in place of men like John Selman* and John Serle alias Silverlock* (who between them had dominated the representation of the town since the early 1430s), suggests that at Plympton, likewise, willing and affordable representatives were in short supply. Nothing is known of Strode’s contribution, if any, to the deliberations of the assembly that was overshadowed by the arrest and death of the duke of Gloucester.

Within two years, events on the wider political stage were to take an even more dramatic turn. In the wake of the loss of Normandy to Charles VII the parliamentary Commons grew restless, and in early 1450 secured the dismissal and banishment of the King’s principal minister, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Strode did not sit in the Parliament that brought about the duke’s fall, although he was present at the Devon shire elections at Exeter in the autumn of 1449 and set his seal to the sheriff’s indenture. Worse was to follow, as in mid 1450 parts of the country rose in open rebellion against Henry VI and his servants, but by the end of the year order had been restored. As the crisis took its course, the King’s kinsman, Richard, duke of York, had increasingly positioned himself as a figurehead for those critical of the royal court, and before long he came into open conflict with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who had returned from France to take Suffolk’s place at the King’s side.

Strode’s lord, the earl of Devon, allied himself with York in his opposition to the court party, which included his long-standing rival, the recently ennobled Lord Bonville*, and the latter’s principal supporter at court, James Butler, the equally newly minted earl of Wiltshire. In the late summer of 1451 Devon resolved to take action and began to rally his armed retainers. In spite of a summons to appear before the King’s council, Courtenay marched his army into Somerset and by 22 Sept. had reached Taunton. In subsequent days the force continued on via Bridgwater, Glastonbury, Wells and Bath to reach the earl of Wiltshire’s manor of Lackham on the 24th. Butler had been warned of Courtenay’s approach, and had fled to the King at Coventry, so his would be assailants had to content themselves with ransacking his and his tenants’ property for several days. Bonville made use of this distraction to slip past his enemy and take possession of Taunton castle, to which the earl of Devon now laid siege. Whether or not York had been privy to his ally’s plans, he chose for the time being to posture as the upholder of the law. His arrival in Taunton brought the siege to an end, while the earl of Devon and Lord Bonville were persuaded formally to come to terms.

Early in the new year, however, York and Devon were once more on the move, this time on the duke’s initiative and with a view to challenging the court directly. In the first days of February York’s retainers were being mustered in the Welsh marches, while in the south-west the earl of Devon’s men were likewise once more in armed rebellion. On this occasion, the disturbances in Devon and Somerset were rapidly put down by Bonville, while York and Devon themselves were arrested at Blackheath on 1 Mar.13 R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 89-91, 96-99. Strode was among the leaders of the earl of Devon’s army in the autumn of 1451, and was indicted at the Ilchester sessions of January 1451. Perhaps as a direct result, he seems to have avoided taking any part in the Dartford campaign, and his name was struck out of the list of men indicted for this fresh uprising. In August 1452 he cleared himself of the charges laid against him in January by purchasing one of the general pardons readily on offer after the arrest of the rebellious lords.14 M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 284; KB9/15/1/24; KB27/765, rex rot. 9; C67/40, m. 17. Strode’s name appears on the original comm. of inquiry into the risings of Feb. 1452, but is crossed out and does not recur among the list of the guilty given in an endorsement.

Following the dramatic events of 1452, Strode appears to have settled down to the management of his estates, and withdrew from public life. He is not known ever again to have held office, and does not appear to have taken any part in the fresh violence in the south-west sparked off by the earl of Devon in 1455. Following the death of the former chief justice of Ireland, Henry Fortescue, towards the end of the 1450s he married the lawyer’s widow, Margaret, scion of an important Exeter family. For a few years, some of the couple’s energy at least was absorbed by the settlement of the outstanding affairs of the dead judge, who had named his widow as his executrix.15 CP40/808, rot. 59d. There were also other quarrels: in particular, a long-running dispute with William Selman* over property at Loughtor that the latter had originally claimed in the 1430s in the right of his wife, Joan Beauchamp, flared up again in 1461, when Selman accused Strode of battering down his door and windows and breaking them into small pieces.16 CP40/718, rot. 115d; 800, rot. 148; 802, rot. 156. The dispute was probably brought to an end by Selman’s death soon after, but Strode himself did not survive him for long, since he died on 20 May 1464.17 Strode’s inq. post mortem (C140/22/54) has been lost since the 18th century, but the date of his death is apparent from C140/22/48.

Strode’s death left his son and heir, William, a minor, and his custody was fiercely disputed between two of his father’s feudal overlords, Humphrey Stafford IV*, Lord Stafford of Southwick, who had been endowed with many of the estates of the earldom of Devon by Edward IV, and John Gibbes† of Fenton.18 CP40/820, rot. 506. The King also intervened to settle the dispute in Stafford’s favour by a formal royal grant of the young man’s custody in April 1467.19 CPR, 1467-77, p. 23. The quarrel was in any case a futile one, for both William (who was said to be 20 and more in early 1466) and his probable younger brother Richard junior had come of age by early 1469 when they undertook the execution of their father’s will. Strode’s second wife, Margaret, also survived him, but relations with her stepsons were fraught, and she was forced to bring a series of suits against them to gain control of her dower.20 C140/22/48; CP40/820, rot. 277; 826, rot. 38d; 830, rot. 179; C1/28/269. Although William Strode’s wealth was eventually much enhanced by his share in the inheritance of the wealthy Joan Rugge, widow of Robert Greyndore* and Sir John Barre*, neither he nor his brother Richard is known to have sat in the Commons, and it was thus left to their sixteenth-century descendants to renew the family’s parliamentary traditions.21 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 7; The Commons 1509-58, iii. 399-401.