Derbyshire

In general, the Midland counties lack geographical definition, but Derbyshire provides a partial exception. The High Peak serves to divide it from its northern neighbour, Cheshire; and, in the medieval period, the forest of Charnwood in Leicestershire was a barrier of sorts to the south. Further, some three-quarters of its borders are delineated by rivers, principally the Erewash and Dove, which define boundaries with Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire respectively. Politically, however, the fifteenth-century county had a more divided aspect. Taking the boundary as the river Derwent, which runs down the middle of the county from north to south, the west was dominated by the duchy of Lancaster lordships of Tutbury and High Peak which straddled the county’s border with Staffordshire. There are thus grounds for conceiving western Derbyshire and eastern Staffordshire as forming a single political unit.2 H.R. Castor, ‘Sack of Elvaston’, Midland Hist. xix. 24; S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 12, 15. Further, the distribution of the residences of Derbyshire’s leading gentry both reflected and reinforced this connexion between the two counties.The families of Blount, Cockayne, Fitzherbert, Fraunceys, Gresley, de la Pole and Vernon, which all provided MPs in this period, had significant Staffordshire estates; and as many as five of the MPs had their main residences very near the border.3 De la Pole lived at Hartington, Cockayne at Ashbourne, Fitzherbert at Norbury, Gresley at Drakelow, and Meynell at Willington. Yet, for administrative purposes, that is, in respect of the offices of sheriff and escheator, the county was twinned with its eastern neighbour, Nottinghamshire, a county in which none of Derbyshire’s leading families held property.4 The only MP to have lands there was Babington.

This provides one context against which Derbyshire’s parliamentary representation is to be interpreted; another, for the period under review here, lies in the changing pattern of baronial landholding in the county.Before the elevation of the Blounts of Barton Blount to the peerage in 1465, the Greys of Codnor, near the border with Nottinghamshire, were the only resident baronial family. With the death of Richard, Lord Grey, in 1418, their best days were behind them, although they remained, until 1440, a significant influence in the county. Thereafter, however, this influence was almost entirely extinguished. In 1440, when a series of indictments were laid against him before royal commissioners, the lordship of Richard’s son, Henry, was discredited, and at his death in 1444 he left a son of only nine years old as his heir.5 S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 90-93, 195-8; CIPM, xxvi. 229-38. By then new barons (albeit non-resident ones) had risen to displace them. Between the early 1420s and the mid-1440s, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, created an extensive estate stretching down the eastern side of the county between the two Derbyshire manors he had inherited from his father and grandmother, namely West Hallam in the south and Dronfield in the north, and including the royal manor of Bolsover, the keeping of which had been granted to him in 1429.6 Payling, 95-96; Castor, 242; CFR, xv. 272; xviii. 11-12. In 1423 his wife brought him manors at Holmesfield near Dronfield and Elmton near Bolsover in the north-east; in 1429 he acquired, as a contested inheritance, the manors of South Wingfield, Crich and Tibshelf in the mid-east of the county; and in 1445 he purchased the manor of Breadsall near Derby: CIPM, xxii. 34; S.J. Payling, ‘Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and the Heriz Inheritance’, Nottingham Med. Studies, xxx. 71-86; Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), 1103. In the late 1430s he began to build a grand new manor-house at South Wingfield, only about five miles from the Grey castle at Codnor, and it is a reasonable speculation that it was this invasion of an area of traditional Grey influence that prompted his clash with Henry, Lord Grey, which ended in the latter’s indictment and humiliation in 1440.7 A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 450; Payling, Political Society, 195-8.

The influence of the Cromwells in Derbyshire was to be very transitory – Lord Cromwell’s estate was broken up on his death in 1456 – but the same cannot be said of that of the Talbots, who began to take a significant interest in the county’s affairs in the 1450s. In 1407 John, Lord Talbot, and (from 1442) earl of Shrewsbury, had acquired, through his marriage to the Furnival heiress, a large and compact estate centred on the south Yorkshire town of Sheffield and including four manors in north Derbyshire. In 1424 he added to these by purchasing the manor of Bubnell, but his much greater landholdings in the Welsh marches and near-continuous involvement in the war in France meant that he played no part in Derbyshire politics. His eldest son, however, took up periodic residence at Sheffield, and began to extend further the family’s local estate. By the time he succeeded to the earldom at his father’s death in 1453 he had acquired six further manors in north Derbyshire, and on his friend Cromwell’s death he purchased the manor-house at South Wingfield as a fitting residence in the county.8 A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 65, 412-13; Payling, Political Society, 98-99; C139/179/58.

The other baronial influence in the county in the second part of the period under review here was the result of office rather than land. On the death of Sir Nicholas Montgomery† in 1435, the Crown granted his offices of steward of the lordship and constable of the castle of Tutbury to Humphrey, earl of Stafford and (from 1444) duke of Buckingham, the dominant landholder in neighbouring Staffordshire. In 1438 Stafford added to his duchy offices that of master forester of Duffield Frith in the middle of Derbyshire, formerly of Sir John Cockayne.9 H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 253.

These lords – Grey, Cromwell, Talbot and Stafford – were all well placed to influence political affairs in Derbyshire and thus its parliamentary representation. Yet only for the declining Greys was the county the principal focus of their interests, and political society there was largely controlled not by the peerage but by a small group of gentry families. In the period under review here the four families of Vernon, Blount, Gresley and Cockayne (which, through internal dispute and a widow’s long survival, went into decline after Sir John’s death in 1438) were distinguished by their wealth. The heads of each of these families could rely on incomes of at least £200 p.a., and, in the case of the Vernons, considerably more (indeed, they may have been wealthier than the Greys). The pre-eminence of these four families are illustrated by the subsidy returns of 1435-6. Sir Thomas Blount†, Sir John Cockayne and Sir Thomas Gresley†, were all assessed at £200 p.a., and although no assessment was made for the Vernons other evidence shows that their wealth was greater still. No other of the county’s gentry were assessed above half that sum.10 E179/240/266.Very few gentry families could match the great wealth of the Vernons, who, at the end of the 15th century, were worth about £500 p.a.: Wright, 23. Gentry society in the county thus bore a strong resemblance to that in wealthier Nottinghamshire, save that the dominating elite was smaller and even more clearly delineated.

The county appears to have been particularly disturbed during the reign of Henry VI. Between 1434 and 1454 it attracted the visitation of three royal commissions of oyer and terminer in response to major incidents of disorder there. The second, issued in 1440, involved the crimes of Lord Grey, but the other two involved serious offences by the leading gentry. Both produced indictments against the MPs. In 1434 Barley was indicted for an assault on Thomas Foljambe, an episode in the violent dispute between the Foljambes and Sir Henry Pierrepont* which provoked the issue of the commission; Sir Richard Vernon, Cockayne, Booth, Curson, Makworth, de la Pole and Fraunceys were all indicted for offences against the statutes of livery, indictments probably encouraged by the commissioners in an effort to forestall further disorder. Twenty years later commissioners came to investigate a much more serious conflict in the county. On 28 May 1454 a series of lesser incidents culminated in the sack of Blount’s manor-house at Elvaston by a force allegedly numbering 1,000 men. Among the leaders of this mob were (Sir) William Vernon and Curson. This exceptional episode is yet to be adequately explained, but it probably owed much to Blount’s identification with the Yorkist cause in a county which still retained, albeit with growing remoteness, its traditional Lancastrian sympathies. However, in the context of other evidence of the intensity with which feuds were pursued in Derbyshire, most notably that between the Vernons and the Gresleys in the late 1440s and early 1450s, it also expressed a greater readiness on the part of the leading gentry to resort to violence than existed in most other counties.11 Wright, 126-38; KB9/11/15-17; Castor, ‘Sack of Elvaston’, 21-39.

Returns survive for Derbyshire for 20 of the 22 Parliaments which met during the reign of Henry VI, and the names of the MPs for the other two assemblies (1439 and 1445) are known from tax commissions.12 CFR, xvii. 140, 324. Eighteen men were elected, representing the county on 54 recorded occasions between them. Three of the MPs also sat for Staffordshire (Sir Richard Vernon, his son and heir, William, and John Gresley), not surprisingly given the links between the two counties, and one, Sir John Cockayne, for Warwickshire, all four being qualified to do so by their secondary residences in those counties. As these figures imply, brief parliamentary careers were comparatively rare: only four men were elected only once, a far lower proportion than in the preceding period, 1386-1421, when as many as 11 of the 31 known MPs appear only once (or 14 of 31 if elections for other shires are excluded).

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that some of our MPs should have had notable careers in the Commons. The longest belonged to a man whose parliamentary career began before 1422: Cockayne sat for Derbyshire on nine recorded occasions between 1395 and 1433 in addition to his two elections for Warwickshire. Of those new to the Commons in the period under review here, John Curson was the most prolific, sitting in seven Parliaments in a little over 20 years, closely followed by Walter Blount who, before his elevation to the peerage in 1465, sat in six assemblies as a county MP in only 13 years.13 His career may have been even more intense. The returns for the Parls. of 1461 and 1463 are lost, but in view of his strong Yorkist connexions it is probable that he represented Derbys. in one or both of them. But the most impressive parliamentary career belonged to Sir Richard Vernon. He was elected to only four Parliaments, but one of these was that of 1426, in which he was the first and last Derbyshire MP to serve as Speaker.

Blount’s career, with one return following another in quick succession, highlights the tendency for the same MP to be elected to successive assemblies. Indeed, immediate re-election was so common as to appear almost an act of policy, at least from 1439. To nine of the ten Parliaments between that date and 1459 one (although never both) of those elected had represented the county in the previous assembly; and both Curson and Blount were returned to three successive assemblies. This is in very marked contrast to what had gone before: there is no example of re-election in the county between 1391 and 1425, and, before Curson, none of three successive returns since Godfrey Foljambe† (1369-71). Obviously in such circumstances – frequent re-election and intense parliamentary careers – men without previous experience of Parliament were infrequently elected together. On only two occasions were both the elected Members new to Parliament, namely, in 1437 and 1447, and the latter represents something of a watershed in the county’s representation. Of those who sat for Derbyshire in or before 1445, only William Vernon also represented it thereafter.

As a group, the MPs reflect the general decline in the number of knights. In the period 1386-1421 belted knights had dominated the county’s parliamentary representation. On 11 of the 28 occasions for which the identity of the MPs is known, two knights were elected together, and on only three occasions was neither of the MPs a knight. This makes a stark contrast with the comparative figures for the period under review here. In only two of the 22 Parliaments was the county represented by two knights, and on as many as 16 occasions no knight was returned. Indeed, between the return of two knights in 1433 and Gresley’s election in 1460 every one of the MPs was below that rank. In part this decline reflects (as it does in other shires) the increasing disengagement of the county gentry from the war in France and a consequent reduction in opportunities to win the rank abroad, as Sir Richard Vernon had done in 1417. In some counties, like neighbouring Nottinghamshire, this meant that several MPs from wealthy families with a tradition of knighthood never assumed the honour. Derbyshire differed slightly in this respect. It was a poorer county with a smaller knightly elite, and the greatest families there continued to support the rank. The difference lay in their delay in doing so: Blount’s documented career in the Commons was over by the time he became a knight in 1461; and William Vernon had represented the county on three occasions before his knighthood in 1453.

The main point to make, however, is that in Derbyshire, as in other counties, a reduction in the number of knights among its MPs was not matched by a decline in their social status. It did not, for example, leave vacancies to be filled by lawyers anxious to promote the careers of their clients in Parliament. During the reign of Henry VI only two were elected: Henry Booth and Gerard Meynell, who filled between them five of the 44 seats. This was much the same proportion as in the previous period when knights had dominated the county’s representation. Between 1386 and 1421 three lawyers had been elected (one of whom was Booth), filling but four of the 56 known seats.

The personnel of the county’s representation closely mirrored its political structure. The great gentry families of Vernon, Blount, Gresley and Cockayne filled as many as 20 of Derbyshire’s 44 seats, and on only six occasions was neither of the MPs provided by them. The dominance of the group would have been greater if the Gresleys had not been more concerned with the affairs of Staffordshire, for whom (Sir) John and his father sat on five occasions from 1422 to 1461. The Vernons, the richest of the four, were the most active: either Sir Richard or one of his three sons was elected to represent the county in nine of the 18 Parliaments from 1422 to 1450, including to five out of six assemblies from 1432 to 1442.

Below this small elite, the other MPs were drawn from 11 families, nearly all from the second strata of county society. Wright lists 29 Derbyshire gentry families (excluding the four leading families) who either supported the rank of knighthood or were distrained to take it up between 1430 and 1509, and ten of these 11 families appear on that list.14 Wright, 4-5, 203-4. The exception is the Meynells of Willington, but since they represented a junior branch of an ancient knightly family, they too can be accounted of the same rank. None the less, there were large variations of wealth between them. The family of Fraunceys of Foremark, the Fitzherberts of Norbury, the Cursons of Kedleston and the de la Poles of Hartington were the wealthiest, all with annual incomes of 100 marks or more.15 Fitzherbert was assessed at only £20 in both 1435-6 and 1450-1, but other evidence shows this to have been a marked underestimate. The poorest were probably the Sacheverells: John Sacheverell’s income was assessed at only £10 in 1435-6 and twice that sum in 1450-1.16 E179/240/266; 91/73. As we shall see, he owed his election to the lordship of Lord Cromwell and would not, in normal circumstances, have been returned.

None of the 18 MPs had his principal landed interest outside Derbyshire, and only two of them were immigrants to the county. Both of these were younger sons of prominent gentry families, Booth from Lancashire and Thomas Babington from Nottinghamshire, and both married Derbyshire brides (although only Babington’s was an heiress). By contrast as many as eight of the MPs came from families which had represented the county in at least one previous generation. Indeed, a Fitzherbert had sat as early as 1298, a Gresley in 1300 and a Fraunceys in 1338, although it is curious to note that no Vernon, established at Haddon since the early thirteenth century, is known to have sat for Derbyshire before 1422.

Although Derbyshire’s representation was dominated by its leading families, there was a less close correlation between its MPs and the holders of the major administrative offices of sheriff and escheator than prevailed in most counties. Twinned with Nottinghamshire in respect of both these offices, it was the latter county that provided the greater proportion of the sheriffs. Only six of Derbyshire’s 18 MPs served in that office, compared with 14 out of 23 in Nottinghamshire, a wealthier county with a greater number of men qualified for the office.17 A similar pattern pertained in the period 1386-1421, when only seven MPs for Derbys. held the office compared with more than twice that number among those for Notts. As a result, only ten of Derbyshire’s 44 seats were filled by men who had already held the joint shrievalty, and it is striking that none of the MPs had held the office before their first election to represent the county.18 When Sir Richard Vernon, the only MP to hold another shrievalty, was elected in 1422, he had held office in Staffs. The picture, however, is not the same with regard to the lesser office of escheator. Here the gentry of the two counties were about equally represented. Thus a greater proportion of the 44 seats were taken by former escheators than by former sheriffs: 16 of the 44 seats were so filled, and three of the MPs had been escheator before their first election for the county.19 William Vernon, when elected to the Parls. of 1449 (Nov.) and 1450, had been escheator in Staffs. but not in Notts. and Derbys. When elected to his first Parliament in 1425, Makworth was escheator in Notts. and Derbys. Oddly, however, for reasons that were probably purely fortuitous, 15 of these elections of former escheators occurred before 1447. There was no twinning with Nottinghamshire in the case of the county bench. As many as 12 of the 18 MPs were named as j.p.s at some point in their careers; 19 of the 44 seats were filled by men who had already been named to the commission; and 15 of them by serving j.p.s in the county.20 This excludes Cockayne’s election in 1422 when he was a j.p. in Warws. but not Derbys. In the earlier period serving j.p.s filled 17 out of 56 seats.

Only two MPs were never appointed to any of the three major offices of county government, namely, Sacheverell, an insubstantial figure, and Richard Vernon, who died young. Of the remaining 16, as many as 11 had begun their parliamentary careers before they held any of these offices. Indeed, as many as 18 of the 44 seats were taken by men who had held none of the offices in Derbyshire, although this figure is reduced to 15 if office-holding in other counties is included. This conforms to the pattern common in other counties, with election to Parliament generally marking the beginning of an administrative career.

A correspondence can be discerned between a presence in the Commons and appointment to office, although this was less marked than in many other shires. Blount was first appointed to the county bench only eight days after the end of his second Parliament; and both Curson, in 1435, and Babington, in 1445, were named as escheator while serving as MPs. These examples are not sufficiently numerous to conclude that either the Crown saw the sitting MPs as a ready pool from which to draw officers or the MPs themselves systematically and successfully employed Commons’ service to seek appointment.

On these figures, election to Parliament generally came at the beginning of an administrative career, but a distinction needs to be made here between those MPs from within and those from outside the small elite of leading families. Comparative youth and inexperience was no bar to election in respect of the greatest of the shire’s gentry, for such men could command election even before they had entered the family estates, as did the three Vernon sons, Blount and Cockayne (who sat twice before his father’s death at the battle of Shrewsbury). For those outside this small elite, greater experience was generally needed to qualify for election. For many of them Parliament was the culmination rather than the beginning of their public careers. Booth, elected for the first time in 1420, had served as escheator as early as 1403; both Makworth and Babington had held the same office more than ten years before election; and Meynell had five years of experience on the quorum of the county bench before sitting in Parliament. The exception to this rule is Robert Eyre, who had not yet succeeded to his modest family patrimony when elected in 1459 and did not hold office in the county until 1472. However, as remarked below, his return was the product of exceptional circumstances, and it does not detract from the general pattern.

The growing disenchantment of the gentry with the French war as English fortunes declined can be documented among our MPs, although Derbyshire maintained a better military tradition than many others in the face of defeat. At least two of them saw military service in the great days of the war: Curson served under the Lords Grey of Codnor in 1415, 1417 and 1421; and Sir Richard Vernon mustered in the retinue of the earl of Norfolk for the 1417 campaign. Vernon’s friend, Cockayne, had participated in the duke of Clarence’s campaign of 1412, and Booth was old enough to have served in Ireland in the 1390s. All four of these men had begun their parliamentary careers before 1422 and were part of a larger group among the county’s MPs of that period who saw such military action, including two very distinguished soldiers in Sir Philip Leche† and Walter Blount’s father, Sir Thomas. Not surprisingly the record of the next generation was less impressive, but it was not negligible. The Vernons were particularly notable: both Richard Vernon and his younger brother, Fulk, served in France in the late 1420s and early 1430s, and the latter held office as captain of Hammes in the late 1440s when their father was treasurer of Calais. The Barleys were another family with a strong military tradition: Robert probably participated in both the coronation expedition of 1430-2 and the duke of Gloucester’s Calais campaign of 1436. In addition, Fraunceys spent the early part of his career serving under the duke of Bedford in France.

The traditional influence of the duchy of Lancaster in the county, together with the Lancastrian sympathies of Buckingham and Shrewsbury, should have inclined the Derbyshire gentry to the cause of Henry VI during the civil war of 1459-61. In so far as the MPs are representative, however, the county appears to have wavered between York and neutrality. Of the 18 MPs, only eight were alive during these years, and of these just three are known to have taken an active role. Walter Blount, the victim of the raid of 1454, was knighted on the Yorkist side at the decisive battle of Towton and went on to become a prominent servant of the new King. His friend and cousin, Gresley, also seems, at least by the time of the 1460 Parliament when the two men were elected together, to have been identified with the Yorkists, although, according to ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’, he had been one of seven men knighted on the Lancastrian side before the battle of Blore Heath in September 1459. Of the others, only William Vernon had difficulty in adapting to the new regime. His career never recovered, and his apparent involvement in the death of a servant of the earl of Warwick in either 1461 or 1462 implies that he had taken an active part on the Lancastrian side.

One of the most striking features of Derbyshire’s representation in the period 1386-1421 was the remarkably close affinity between the duchy of Lancaster, the dominant landholder in the county, and the county’s MPs. No fewer than 22 of the 31 MPs were the beneficiaries of duchy patronage; many of them rallied to the Lancastrian cause in the crisis of 1399 and the annuities paid to them were a significant drain on the duchy’s resources.

This close affinity is by no means so apparent in the period under review here. Henry VI’s government, in Derbyshire as in other counties of traditional allegiance to his house, allowed the great Lancastrian retinue to atrophy. This is not to say that the county gentry did not continue to benefit from duchy patronage. Indeed, the administration of the duchy at local level was dependent upon them, and the leading men of the shire continued to hold important offices, particularly prominent amongst whom were the Vernons. At first sight there was a correlation between election to Parliament and current tenure of duchy of Lancaster office. It may be that as many as 15 of the 44 seats were taken by such office-holders.21 This includes William Vernon’s three elections between 1447 and 1450, but it is not certain that he still held the surveyorship of the chase of Needwood (Staffs.) to which he had been appointed in 1436. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that the holding of duchy office was a strong determinant of election. Twelve of these elections are accounted for by the Vernons, Cockayne and Blount, men who could command election by their family’s standing alone. Similarly, it would be hard to argue that Curson, who represented Derbyshire seven times between 1423 and 1445, was elected in 1439 because he was then keeper of the duchy park of Shottle. Only in the case of Makworth, MP in the Parliaments of 1425 and 1431, does tenure of duchy office appear to have been a significant factor in determining individual elections. Coming from outside the leading county families, when elected to his first Parliament he was a parker in Duffield Frith; during the prorogation of this Parliament he was appointed to the much more important office of receiver of the duchy honour of Tutbury; and he still held that office when elected to his second Parliament. It is probably safe to conclude that he would not have been elected but for connexion with the duchy.

The expansion of the royal household in the wake of Henry VI’s minority provided another point of contact between the Crown and the Derbyshire gentry. Four of the MPs became esquires of the Household, namely Blount, Curson, Fulk Vernon and Fitzherbert. Although the first three, each elected while they had places in the Household, owed their return to their standing in the county, it is probable that Fitzherbert was elected to the Parliaments of 1447 and 1453, in both of which there was a strong Household presence, because of his royal service. Clearly the Crown did take some part in determining Derbyshire’s representation in Henry VI’s reign, but there can be no doubt that the connexion between it and the body of the county’s MPs was much weaker than it had been under the first two Lancastrian Kings.

The retreat of royal influence in determining Derbyshire’s representation provided new electoral opportunities for the local baronage. In the first part of the period under review here, the Greys of Codnor, as the only resident baronial family, had strong connexions with several of the county’s MPs. Booth had served them in the heyday of Lord Richard’s career, and was one of counsellors of Richard’s son, Henry, in the 1430s. The other lawyer who sat for the county, Meynell, acted as attorney of Henry’s elder brother, John, during John’s time in Ireland as King’s lieutenant there in the late 1420s, and later numbered among Henry’s annuitants. A much more substantial man, John Curson, was in Lord Richard’s retinue during the campaigns of 1415 and 1417 and went on to serve as Lord John’s receiver-general and chief steward of Lord Richard’s widow. Makworth may also to be accounted among Lord Henry’s affinity for in 1435 he stood alongside Curson as one of his sureties. From 1423 to 1439 these four Grey servants filled as many of 12 (or ten if Makworth is to be excluded) of the county’s 22 seats, and although they did not owe their election to their connexion with Grey alone there can be no doubt that the Greys had a significant influence over the county’s representation during these years.

Representation in the second part of this period reflects the growing local power of Cromwell and the Talbots. Curson, who abandoned Lord Grey’s service in about 1440, was closely connected with Cromwell when returned in 1442 and 1445, as was Babington, his fellow MP in the latter assembly. But Cromwell’s influence is more obviously apparent in the return of his former receiver, Sacheverell, to the two assemblies of 1449. Later John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, won the election of his two servants, Barley and Eyre, in 1459. None of these three men could have commanded election in normal circumstances. Less obvious is the influence of Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and duke of Buckingham, after his appointment to the stewardship of Tutbury. In 1440 he retained the ubiquitous Curson, but the retainer’s election to the next two Parliaments probably had more to do with his friendship with Cromwell and his own established position in the county than it did to Stafford. In the same year the earl retained Sir Richard Vernon, too powerful in the county to need any lordly support in ensuring his son William’s election with Curson two years later. In the early 1450s Stafford granted fees to Gresley and William Vernon, but again his lordship was not significant in their parliamentary careers in Derbyshire: Gresley was not elected until after the duke’s death and William’s elections all came before he was retained. This is not to say that the duke was of little account in the county – his role in concluding the dispute between Gresley and Vernon in 1455 shows that this was not so – or that his lordship was unimportant in the careers of his Derbyshire retainers. He seems, for example, to have been instrumental in securing Gresley’s election for Staffordshire in 1453 and Vernon’s for the same county two years later. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that his lordship informed Derbyshire’s parliamentary representation.

There can be no doubt that, by the late 1450s, Derbyshire was no longer the Lancastrian stronghold it had once been. Yet there was support enough for Lancaster to secure a favourable result at the election conducted by Fitzherbert in the immediate aftermath of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge. Here the election indenture, dated 8 Nov., is strikingly revealing. It was irregular in three ways: first, each of the 30 witnesses was, uniquely for a Derbyshire return of this period, assigned a place of residence; second, these attestors were almost exclusively drawn from the north of the county; third, none of the leading men of the shire was present. These attestors elected two servants of the earl of Shrewsbury, whose landed interests in Derbyshire lay in the north of the county as did that of the two successful candidates (with the exception of the Vernons, they were the only MPs from that part of the county in Henry VI’s reign). There can be little doubt that it was the earl’s influence that brought so many minor gentry south to Derby to secure the election of his men. It may be that the controversial nature of the forthcoming assembly deterred the candidature of more prominent gentry, notable by their absence from the indenture, and rendered this an easier task than it otherwise would have been.

Although the surviving indentures are rarely so obviously revealing, they provide the only glimpse of the election process at work and are worthy of detailed scrutiny for that reason. They show, for example, that the election of 1459 was not the first occasion in which the earl had shown an interest. His men had also been prominent at the previous election, held on 3 July 1455, when Barley was elected for the first time. Significantly, one of the attestors was Edmund Lovet*, who, 13 days later, was elected for Derby, and it is a reasonable inference that the earl, whose commitment to Henry VI’s cause was not then so strong as it was later to be, was anxious to be represented in the Commons after the equivocal role he had played in the campaign leading to the first battle of St. Albans.22 C219/16/3; Pollard, ‘The Talbots’, 72-75.

Other indentures provide hints as to what lay behind individual elections. One such is that of 16 Jan. 1449, which names 61 attestors, more than any other Derbyshire return of Henry VI’s reign. It is also unusual in other respects: none of the 61 attestors came from the county’s leading gentry and, even more unusually, they are not listed in order of rank. The preceding indenture, witnessing the election of 19 Jan. 1447, is also atypical in that it names 50 attestors, nearly all drawn from the ranks of the lesser gentry and below. Both indentures imply contested elections, and, given the open hostility he was later to excite, it is significant that Blount was returned on both occasions, his father being responsible for conducting the first election (the only occasion on which the sheriff as returning officer was so closely related to one of those elected, although in 1432 Sir Nicholas Montgomery returned his son-in-law, Curson).

No such ready explanation suggests itself for another curious indenture. The election held on 14 Dec. 1430 was witnessed by a return in which the names of those elected for both county and borough have been added in spaces left by the clerk. The clear implication is that the 13 named attestors, headed by Curson, witnessed a blank return.23 C219/14/2. In other instances the indenture is misleading. The return dated 25 June 1433 names only ten attestors to the election of two of the county’s leading men, Sir Richard Vernon and Cockayne, and implies that the election was a straightforward and uncontested affair. However, when a powerful commission of oyer and terminer came to Derby in the following spring, two grand juries made presentments relating to its conduct: the one indicted Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, for coming to the county town on the day before the election with 200 armed men with the intention of preventing free election; the other indicted Vernon and Cockayne for bringing 300 men to the election. Seemingly, there was a contest, but one that was concealed, probably deliberately, by the form of the return.24 C219/14/4; KB9/11/17.

The evidence of another indictment allows us to infer something about the conduct of an earlier Derbyshire election. An inquiry before the justices of assize shows that the Nottinghamshire election of 25 Aug. 1427, attested by only 12 lesser gentry and townsmen, was held without the statutory summons to the county suitors and before the writ of summons had been delivered to the sheriff; it is probable that the latter, Sir Thomas Gresley†, was guilty of the same breaches of statute in respect of the Derbyshire election held three days later for the indenture names only eight attestors, all of lesser or sub-gentry rank.25 C219/13/5; C245/36/16, 19; J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 15-16.

Even though the evidence of the indentures is generally difficult to interpret in respect of the influences underlying elections, the lists of attestors have much to tell us about the electoral body. The average number of witnesses named in the 20 surviving returns is only about 20, but it was a constantly fluctuating body representative of a much larger electorate. Nearly two-thirds of the 267 men who attested these elections appear in the role only once, and those who appear on more than a handful of occasions are in a very small minority. Only four occur on ten or more occasions, one of these being Booth, who attested 11 elections between 1413 and 1437. The number of 40s. freeholders in the county, in other words those qualified to vote under the terms of the statute of 1429-30, can be approximately estimated. The subsidy returns of 1450-1 name 199 men with incomes of 40s. p.a. or more, together with a further three unavailable for assessment; of these only 98 appear as attestors.26 E179/91/73. Moreover, only 23 of the 61 attestors named in the indenture of 16 Jan. 1449 appear among those assessed. This is consistent with other evidence demonstrating that the subsidy of 1450-1 was widely evaded, and, on these figures, it is fair to conclude that those assessed represent less than half the available electorate.

If, however, the named attestors represent only a relatively small proportion of those entitled to vote, in Derbyshire, as in other counties, they represent a wide cross-section of that electorate. The class from which the MPs themselves were drawn certainly did not dominate, at least in terms of numbers, the electoral body as reflected among the named attestors. Indeed, six of the 18 MPs never appeared as witnesses, including two of the greatest men to sit for the county, Blount and Gresley. Other prominent men appear only infrequently: William Vernon and his elder brother, Fulk, attested only one election each, as did Fitzherbert, and Cockayne, despite his long parliamentary career, appears as an attestor only twice. Of the greatest of the county’s gentry only Sir Richard Vernon can be described as a frequent attestor, witnessing five elections between 1421 and 1442. Further, no knight attested a return between Sir Richard’s last appearance and 1467, when his son, Sir William, headed the attestors to his own election.27 C219/17/1.

This is a unique example in the fifteenth-century Derbyshire returns of self-attestation, but there are several instances of a close tie of kinship between elected and attestor or attestors. Two elections are particularly notable in this regard: in 1459 four members of the numerous Eyre clan witnessed the election of Robert; and on 6 Dec. 1436 the return of Fulk Vernon was attested by his father and brother, Richard, and that of Robert Fraunceys by two of his kinsmen.28 C219/15/1.The appearance of the Eyres in 1459 highlights another informative aspect of the returns. Individuals may have only rarely witnessed more than a couple of indentures, but many families produced several attestors. Taking the 34 surviving indentures dating between 1407 and 1478, no fewer than 18 families (judged by surnames) produced five attestors or more. Most notable were the de la Poles, who, in their various branches, were represented by 13 members, and the Vernons, who were represented by nine. This illustrates not only the tendency for the head of a family to attest elections generation after generation, but it also demonstrates the clannishness of Derbyshire society as families proliferated into several branches.

Aside from those instances where it is possible to discern the operation of wider political forces in determining the results of election, as in 1459 and 1460, there are other cases where the influence of private concerns is equally marked. The best example in Derbyshire is the lawyer, Booth, who, although he was active in the county’s affairs for over 40 years, enjoyed a brief and intense parliamentary career spread over only seven. In the 1420s his position as feoffee and executor of Sir Philip Leche involved him in a serious dispute with the knight’s sisters and their husbands. As an MP in the Parliaments of 1420 and 1423 he presented petitions against his rivals, complaining of their violent conduct; and in his third Parliament, that of 1425, he had to defend a petition in which his rivals accused him of corruption. Although proof is lacking, it is probable that the ongoing dispute also explains his election and that of his ally, Cockayne, to the assembly of 1427. Thereafter Booth was not returned, his interest in Parliament seemingly extending no further than the protection of his own interests.

Booth was a newcomer to the shire and of modest wealth; and yet he was able to secure election when it suited him. This may be taken to imply that there was little competition for seats, at least in the 1420s. It would, however, be a mistake to suggest this as a general conclusion. The dominance of the county’s representation by its leading families suggests that they had a keen interest in the prestige attached to election to Parliament, and, if there was a lack of competition for seats, it was because this interest stifled the parliamentary aspirations of lesser men. Further, the disturbances at the election of 1433, together with the comparatively large number of attestors named in 1447 and January 1449, imply that any disagreement among the shire elite about who was to be returned endowed the hustings with interest for a broader constituency.