VAUX, William

The family of Vaux traced their connexion with Northamptonshire back to the reign of Henry III, but during the fourteenth century they resided at Bottisham in Cambridgeshire, acquired by marriage to the heiress of one of Edward I’s judges, Elias Beckingham. They played little part in public affairs during that century.2 Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, v. 277, 280-1; VCH Cambs. x. 199; Oxf. DNB, ‘Beckingham, Elias’. The most notable member of the fam. in the 14th cent., Sir John Vaux, was implicated in the murder in 1316 of Sir Thomas Murdak by his wife: P.R. Coss, The Lady in Med. Eng. 131-7; G. Baker, Northants., ii. 274. Thereafter, however, they were very significantly advanced due to the unforeseen consequences of a marriage contracted towards its end. In about 1370 our MP’s grandfather, another William, took as his wife the sister of William Thirning, long before the famous lawyer had risen to the heights of his profession. This match, which offered little promise of material gain to its future issue when it was contracted, later brought a substantial augmentation to the Vaux patrimony. Thirning, as befitting a c.j.c.p., purchased a number of estates, the principal of which was the manor of Great Harrowden bought in 1399 from the aristocratic priest, Thomas, Lord de la Warre.3 CP25(1)/179/91/78; Add. Ch. 22005. On his childless death in 1413 this manor, together with others at Lathbury and Stantonbury in Buckinghamshire, Clapham in Bedfordshire and Great Shelford in Cambridgeshire, descended to our MP, then a minor, subject to the life interest of Thirning’s widow Joan Braybrooke in a considerable part of them.4 There is no inq. post mortem for either Thirning or his wid., but her holdings in Northants. and Beds. are documented in returns to the 1428 tax on knights’ fees: Feudal Aids, i. 38; iv. 32, 33. In the Northants. return she is named Alice in error, and this has led to the mistaken conclusion that the judge left a daughter. A fine of 1410, by which she was granted a life interest in the Northants. lands, makes it clear that the widow is intended: CP25(1)/179/91/80. By fines levied in 1408 her husband’s property in Bucks. and Cambs. had been conveyed to feoffees headed by John Giffard*, Thomas Hayton and William Rothwell, the executors of the will of our MP’s father, no doubt to keep them out of wardship during our MP’s minority: CP25(1)/22/114/9; Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, v. 294. It is tempting to conclude that these lands came to his hands on his coming of age in about 1420, but the widow is known to have held the manor of Lathbury in 1433: VCH Bucks. iv. 373.

Unfortunately for the young William’s short-term material prospects, Joan survived until as late as 1439.5 Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, v. 294. Nor was she the only dowager to diminish his immediate expectations. His father had made a good marriage to the heiress of the manor of Wilby, only a few miles from Great Harrowden, for which the family seem also to have been indebted to Thirning.6 The heiress’s kinswoman, Emma Drakelowe, was the prioress of Harrold in Beds., of which the judge was a generous benefactor: ibid. 295-6. She took Thomas Chamber I* as her second husband and lived into the late 1440s, when her death brought to our MP, in addition to Wilby, manors at Napton-on-the-Hill in Warwickshire, Shangton in Leicestershire and Marcham in Berkshire.7 J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 155; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2546. It would, however, be wrong to emphasize the burden the survival of his mother and Joan Braybrooke represented to Vaux. Their longevity did not deprive him of lands his family had previously enjoyed and on their deaths they brought him an inheritance in seven counties more than sufficient to elevate him to the ranks of the greater gentry.

Vaux’s father was a lawyer, presumably again as a result of Thirning’s patronage, who enjoyed important connexions with, among others, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin. His ties with the latter were particularly close: in 1403 he was one of those licensed by the King to negotiate with Glendower concerning Grey’s ransom, and in April 1405 he was named as one of his attorneys.8 CPR, 1401-5, pp. 9, 241; 1405-8, pp. 155-6. His premature death shortly afterwards terminated a legal career which was gaining momentum – he had recently been added to the quorum of the peace in Buckinghamshire – and left our MP as no more than a child.9 The er. William died between 14 Aug., when he drew up an uninformative will, and 1 Sept., when it was proved: Reg. Repingdon, i (Lincoln Rec. Soc. lvii), 74-75. Nothing is known of the young William’s minority, but it is fair to assume that he remained with his mother and was thus brought up in the household of his stepfather. Chamber was a notable figure, combining a military career with a prominent role in Northamptonshire administration, and no doubt played a part in establishing his young stepson in the county’s affairs. But of even greater assistance to him is likely to have been his brother-in-law, the rising lawyer William Tresham*, who married his sister Isabel shortly after 1413. Indeed, it is probably not accidental that his first appearance in an active role is alongside Tresham in a land purchase of 1424.10 CP25(1)/179/93/15; CP40/658, rot. 299d, cart. rot. 3d.

From thenceforward Vaux makes regular appearances in the records. In about 1425 he was named as an executor by a local cleric, Walter Child, and, more significantly, in 1426 he was involved on the side of William, Lord Lovell, in a dispute over the manor of Quick in Saddleworth in the West Riding.11 CP40/658, rot. 299d; 669, rot. 384. In February 1429, with his stepfather, he stood mainpernor in Chancery for another of Northamptonshire’s magnates, William, Lord Zouche, in heavy securities to keep the peace to John Culpepper*. A year later it was Vaux’s turn to call upon the services of Tresham and Chamber in the arrangements for his sister Eleanor’s marriage to Thomas Giffard of Twyford in Buckinghamshire.12 CCR, 1422-9, p. 453; 1429-35, p. 44. This implies a connexion (or else it created one) with another of the county’s lawyers, Thomas Billing*, the husband of Thomas’s half-sister, Elizabeth. Soon after, Vaux’s talents seem to have secured recognition from a more important source: on 26 Feb. 1430 he or a namesake sued out letters of protection as about to depart in the King’s coronation expedition in the retinue of Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford.13 C76/112, m. 19. While Vaux is likely to have been the man who served in the coronation expedition under Stafford, he is unlikely to have been the namesake who pursued a much longer military career. This William Vaux served in the garrison at Avranches between 1430 and 1435 under William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, and in the early 1440s was successively in the garrisons at Granville and Tancarville: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25769/556; 25770/699; 25772/1041; 25776/1593; nouv. acq. fr. 8606/74. He is recorded as present at Granville on 27 Dec. 1441, the day before our MP was elected to Parliament; and while it is possible that our MP was elected in absentia, it is unlikely that he spent much of the 1430s and early 1440s in France while pursuing so active an administrative career at home. Among his companions in that retinue was William Lucy, heir to a substantial estate in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and elsewhere, and it is very likely that he was already the husband of Lucy’s sister. He presumably remained in France until the King returned in 1432. Once back in his native county he began his career in local administration, attesting three successive parliamentary elections between 1432 and 1435. It is more than coincidental that Tresham was elected on all three occasions and that Chamber, who conducted the election of 1433 as sheriff, was the other MP in 1435.14 C219/14/3-5. Similarly, it is also significant that the first of Vaux’s four prickings as sheriff came between the appointments of his stepfather in 1432 and 1438, and at the first prickings made after a Parliament in which both his stepfather and brother-in-law sat. There can be no doubt that the support of these two men was vital to his career in the period before he inherited the Thirning estates in their entirety in 1439.

The Thirning inheritance made Vaux a man of considerable account in his own right, but, at least for the next few years, he continued to act principally in association with his kin by marriage. On 1 Aug. 1441, in company with his father-in-law, Sir Walter Lucy, and Chamber, he headed the witnesses at Castle Ashby to an important deed by which the manor there was settled in jointure on Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and his new wife, Katherine, daughter of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland.15 Northants. RO, Compton mss. 229. On the following 28 Dec. he was elected to Parliament with Tresham in what appears to have been a contest (if we may judge from the large number of attestors named and the erasure of the second attestor’s name, perhaps because of his refusal to seal the indenture). It may be that opposition to Vaux’s election is the explanation for the difficulty he later had in securing his parliamentary wages. On 1 Dec. 1442 he brought an action in the Exchequer of pleas, claiming £14 against the county sheriff, Sir Thomas Green*, as the sum due to him; in the following Easter term he had a verdict in his favour on Green’s default.16 C219/15/2; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 372-3. On 6 Nov. 1444 Vaux was awarded repayment on favourable terms of the modest loan of ten marks he had extended to the Crown, and this suggests that he enjoyed royal favour, perhaps again through Tresham’s agency.17 CPR, 1441-6, p. 312. He did not, however, number among the many gentry in receipt of royal household robes at this date, and this is a little surprising in view of both Tresham’s place in the Household and the very close connexion his son was later to establish with the Lancastrian regime. Our MP’s services were to be confined exclusively to local administration. He was added to the county bench in 1445 and from 1450 he made regular appearances on ad hoc commissions. Although not elected to Parliament again, he continued to appear as an attestor. He was present at the elections of 19 Jan. 1447 and 23 Oct. 1449 when Tresham, as had become routine, was returned.18 C219/15/4, 7.

It was at about this date that Vaux inherited his mother’s property. She was alive as late as March 1445 when she and Chamber presented to the church of Wilby, but she appears to have been dead by 1449 when our MP had an action pending for close-breaking at the Drakelowe property of Shangton.19 Bridges, ii. 155; CP40/755, rots. 192, 390. During the prorogation of the Parliament of 1449-50 Vaux was again pricked as sheriff at a time of mounting crisis in both national and local politics. His term was to be an eventful one. He was allowed 20 marks for his expenses in dealing with the execution at Northampton castle of John Harries, the Yorkshire shipman who had confronted the King with treasonable words on 29 Apr. 1450.20 E159/228, brevia Hil. rot. 1. He was also responsible for the conduct of the election held at Northampton on 22 Oct. in the wake of the duke of York’s return from Ireland. In many counties the duke actively lobbied to secure the election of his own men, and Northamptonshire was one of them. A few weeks before the election was held his auditor came into the county ‘ad loquendum’ with Lords Lovell and Zouche, Henry Green* and our MP (misnamed John in the record) ‘pro suis amiciciis habendis in ellecione militum comitatus in eisdem comitatibus hoc anno’.21. K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in 15th Cent. 233n., quoting Egerton Roll 8783, m. 3; C219/16/1. In view of what is known of his later career Vaux is unlikely to have been particularly open to these blandishments, but Thomas Mulsho*, the duke’s leading retainer in the county, was returned. Of much greater personal significance to him was an event that occurred a month before this election, namely the murder of Tresham in a longstanding private vendetta. As sheriff, the initial responsibility of arresting the murderers lay at his feet, but, if a petition presented by his sister Isabel in the Parliament of 1450 is to be credited, he ‘in no wise dare’ do so.22 PROME, xii. 175-9. If, as seems probable, the perpetrators enjoyed the protection of Lord Grey of Ruthin, his reluctance is understandable, whatever his personal feelings may have been.

Vaux’s associations among the local gentry at this date are suggestive of his Lancastrian sympathies. In Hilary term 1450 he acted for his wife’s brother, Sir William Lucy, a committed Lancastrian, in an important final concord which ensured Lucy a life interest in the valuable inheritance of his childless wife, Elizabeth Percy. He was also closely associated with another wealthy landholder, Henry Green, an esquire of the royal household, for whom he acted as a feoffee.23 CP25(1)/293/72/351; Northants. RO, Stopford Sackville mss, 2000, 3954, 3958; CPR, 1452-61, p. 85. What is known of his actions is also consistent with such sympathies. Tantalizingly, on 2 Aug. 1451 he received assignment in the Exchequer on behalf of the keeper of the royal wardrobe, the only evidence of his own direct connexion with the household. Later, in October 1452, he served on the county grand jury before a powerful royal commission of inquiry, headed by the Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, which came to Peterborough as part of the campaign against the Dartford rebels of the previous February.24 E403/785, m. 11; KB9/94/1/12d.

It was at about this time that Vaux added to his estates by marriage to a Lincolnshire widow and heiress. Not only did she hold a widely dispersed estate in the county – the manors at Beelsby, Thorganby, Harlaxton and Horsington – by right of inheritance, but her late husband Pygot had granted her his manor of Doddington near Lincoln and all his other lands in fee. Since this grant broke the terms of an ancient entail her title was open to challenge, and she may have seen the well-connected Vaux as a protector against rival claimants. Their marriage had taken place by 5 Mar. 1453 when Vaux attested the Lincolnshire parliamentary election. Curiously, on the following 3 May writs of diem clausit extremum were issued in respect of his estates, and one can only speculate as to why an erroneous report of his death should have reached Chancery.25 C219/16/2; CFR, xix. 2. Undeterred, he continued to play a prominent part in local affairs. In the following November he was again nominated to the shrievalty in his native county and a month later he was added to the bench in Lindsey by virtue of his new wife’s estates. The protection of this property soon drew him into litigation. On 12 Feb. 1454 the parson of Doddington allegedly broke her close there and in the following Easter term members of the Langdale family were attached to reply to the couple for a trespass against her property at Beelsby.26 CP40/773, rot. 438; 779, rot. 533.

To the difficulties brought by Vaux’s new landed responsibilities were added the financial burdens placed upon him by his shrievalty. Soon after its conclusion both Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, and Richard Merston, treasurer of the King’s chamber, complained by separate bills in the Exchequer of pleas that Vaux owed them £20 and ten marks respectively from the issues of his bailiwick. His efforts to discharge these debts were not assisted by the detention of three tallies assigned on these issues by Philip Neel of London, against whom he later won damages.27 E13/145B, rots. 18, 21d; CP40/779, rot. 481; 783, rots. 516, 525d. Such inconveniences were, however, scarcely more than routine, and he and his son were soon to face the much greater problems of the partisan in a time of increasing political polarization. Although Vaux attested the Northamptonshire parliamentary election of 1455, at which two apparent supporters of the duke of York were elected, there can be no doubt that at this date (or shortly thereafter) he was firmly committed to the King’s cause. His son William’s marriage to one of Queen Margaret’s attendants leaves no doubt on this score, and raises the possibility that the son had been brought up in the queen’s court. On 22 Dec. 1456 the bride secured letters of denization as his wife, and thereafter the family counted among the leading gentry supporters of the increasingly militant Lancastrian regime.28 C219/16/3; CPR, 1452-61, p. 342. In June 1457, our MP was appointed to the shrievalty of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, counties in which he had played no previous role although he did hold lands in the former, and his son was nominated in the following November as escheator in Northamptonshire and Rutland. Further, the latter, as befitting his marriage, counted among the queen’s intimates: on 29 Nov. 1457 he and Thomas Seyntbarbe, an esquire of her household, appeared before Chief Justice Fortescue* at Westminster to acknowledge a debt of 1,000 marks to John, son and heir of Nicholas Radford*, barbarously murdered by the Courtenays, as surety for the foundation by her of a chantry at Exeter College, Oxford, to celebrate divine service for Nicholas’s soul.29 KB27/786, rot. 110d. These close ties with the regime were reinforced by Vaux’s continued involvement in the affairs of the Treshams. His nephew, Thomas Tresham*, one of the leading gentry courtiers, named him among his feoffees in 1458, and soon after Vaux was involved in arrangements to secure the jointure of Thomas’s mother (his sister) on her second marriage to Sir William Pecche*.30 C145/328/5; CAD, vi. C4128.

This support for the Lancastrian cause attracted the minor marks of favour to which the regime’s patronage was confined by financial restrictions. On 1 Apr. 1458, while still sheriff, Vaux sued out another general pardon and took the added precaution of securing a writ of non molestetis so that the pardon could be effectively pleaded. Later, in May 1459, the treasurer and barons of the Exchequer were ordered to allow him to account by oath for his last term as sheriff, answering only for those issues he had been able to collect.31 C67/42, m. 23; E159/234, brevia Hil. rot. 15 (ii)d; 235, brevia Trin. rot. 6d. Although he was duly named to the Lancastrian commission of array in December 1459 in both his native county and the parts of Lindsey, his enthusiasm for office had naturally declined by the end of his long career, and, two months later, on 8 Feb. 1460, he was rewarded with a grant of exemption from office for life.32 CPR, 1452-61, p. 579. This withdrawal from administrative duties gave Vaux time to set his private affairs in order and he embarked on an energetic round of litigation. Much of this arose out of continued difficulties with respect to his wife’s interests, which included trade as well as land. Her trading interests are implied in a suit against the abbot of Wellow for taking their boat worth five marks at nearby Grimsby and an earlier action against a shipman of that port for the wrongful detention of sea-coal.33 CP40/777, rot. 91; 792, rots. 32d, 58d. He also brought several actions on his own account, some for debt in significant sums. In 1459 he sued the prior of Ravenstone in Buckinghamshire for 50 marks, and in 1460 he claimed £100 each against a wealthy merchant, Richard Sapcote, and Sir John Melton*.34 CP40/792, rot. 57d; 798, rot. 85. It is doubtful whether he brought any of these to a satisfactory conclusion for he lived neither to see them through nor, fortunately for one of his Lancastrian sympathies, to witness the end of the intense conflict of 1459-61. Writs of diem clausit extremum were issued on 20 Nov. 1460 for his lands in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire and six days later for those in Cambridgeshire.35 CFR, xix. 282. The Lincs. writ was delayed until 22 July 1461: CFR, xx. 1. His will does not survive, but it appears from that of his gds., Nicholas, Lord Vaux, that he made provision for the foundation of a chantry in the church of Great Harrowden, a project Nicholas carried to completion: PCC 11 Bodfelde (PROB11/21, f. 82).

By Vaux’s death, however, the family’s future prospects had undergone a further transformation by another windfall inheritance to add to that which had come to them through Thirning. When Vaux had married one of the two daughters of Sir Walter Lucy in the 1420s or 1430s she still had at least one brother between her and a share of the Lucy lands and her mother’s Cornish inheritance. And yet demographic fortune was to smile on the Vauxs once more. The death of Sir William Lucy on the Lancastrian side at the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460 left our MP’s son coheir to a substantial estate, and one which later did much to justify the family’s promotion to the peerage. On the following 26 Aug., when the Yorkists were in control of government, the younger William and the other coheir, Walter Hopton, had licence to take seisin of this estate without suing livery or paying relief. Our MP’s son was benefiting here from Hopton’s service to the duke of York, and this signal mark of favour is not to be seen as marking a change in the family’s allegiance.36 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 552, 597-8. Indeed, the future prosperity promised by this windfall was seriously endangered by the intensity of this allegiance. Very soon after our MP’s death, his heir put himself beyond hope of further indulgence from the Yorkists by his armed support for Henry VI. He was among those attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, and this brought into the hands of the Crown not only his Lucy lands but also the Vaux patrimony. In the following year the lands were divided between three prominent Yorkists, Alfred Corneburgh†, Walter Devereux II*, Lord Ferrers, and Ralph Hastings†, with the last taking the bulk.37 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 35, 153, 195, 220, 369, 434, 456, 486. The loyalty of our MP’s son eventually cost him his life – he met his death at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 – but the family recovered and rose to greater heights during the lifetime of our MP’s grandson, Nicholas†. Brought up in the household of Margaret Beaufort, Nicholas secured the reversal of his father’s attainder in the Parliament of 1485. His second marriage to one of the two coheiresses of Northamptonshire’s wealthiest gentry family, the Greens of Green’s Norton, gave him the lands necessary to support the peerage granted him in 1523.38 PROME, xv. 162-4; CP, xii (2), 216-19.