Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire borders more counties than any other in England, namely nine (counting clockwise from the north, Rutland, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire). As one would expect in the Midlands, no very defined physical boundaries divides it from these neighbours, although the rivers Welland and Nene form part of its northern and eastern boundaries. To match this lack of geographical definition, topographical divisions within the county are undramatic, save from the clear distinction to be drawn between the relatively high ground of the Northamptonshire Heights in the west part of the county and the fens of the soke of Peterborough in the north-east.1 P.R. Brindle, ‘Politics and Society in Northants. 1649-1714’ (Leicester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1983), 2-3, 6. This relative homogeneity within the county borders might have served to foster a sense of community among its gentry, but other factors, aside from the lack of physical boundaries with the many counties that surrounded it, worked in the opposite direction. Not least among these was the county’s unusual lon and narrow shape. As many as 70 miles separates Aynho in its south-western corner from Borough Fen in its north-eastern one. In other words, Aynho was about the same distance from Borough Fen as Northampton was from Westminster.

Another distinguishing feature of the county was its wealth. Little of its acreage was unavailable for cultivation, and in assessments for the subsidy of 1450-1 (a tax on landed incomes above 40s. p.a.), it ranked fourth of the 29 counties for which figures are available, behind only the three largest counties – namely Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Devon. Since, in terms of size, it was only 22nd of the 37 counties, at about 640,000 acres less than 40% the size of Devon, it was rated even more highly on any measure of wealth per acre.2 S.J. Payling, ‘County Parlty. Elections’, Parlty. Hist. xviii. 258. This wealth, or at least its manifestation in the number of gentry estates, impressed the Tudor antiquary, John Leland, who noted, ‘Ther dwellith for the most part a gentilman in every village’, and the county retained this reputation as densely-settled with landed families into the nineteenth century.3 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 22, Brindle, 69-70; L. Stone and J.C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Élite? 43.

For much of our period, only one baronial family was resident in the county: the Zouches, who lived at Harringworth, very near the border with Rutland. Worth about £800 p.a., a significant part of which was drawn from lands in the West Country, the undistinguished William, Lord Zouche (d.1462), was head of the family throughout Henry VI’s reign.4 CP, xii (2), 944-5; H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in Eng. in 1436’, EHR, xlix. 617; CIPM, xx. 414-16, 419-20, 425, 427-39. From 1448, when Sir Richard Wydeville of Grafton Regis (on the Buckinghamshire border), nephew of the half-blood to Thomas Wydeville and the husband of the duke of Bedford’s widow, was raised to the peerage as Lord Rivers, there was another peer with a principal residence in the county, but he was largely absent at either court or Calais, and he played little traceable part in the county’s affairs in the 1450s.5 CP, xi. 20-21. A more significant presence were the Lovells, for most of this period in the person of William, Lord Lovell (d.1455) , assessed at as much as £1,000 p.a. in the 1436 subsidy. Although they seem to have abandoned the castle of Titchmarsh, in the far east of Northamptonshire, as their principal residence in the mid-fourteenth century, in favour of first Wardour in Wiltshire and then Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, they retained valuable holdings in the county.6 CP, viii. 221-3; M.E. Simon, ‘The Lovells of Titchmarsh’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1999), 98, 194-5, 201-3, 297. The Greys of Ruthin were also influential locally. They had significant estates in the south of the county, and although the principal interests of both Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin (d.1440), and his grandson and successor, Edmund, created earl of Kent in 1465, lay in Bedfordshire, they had important connexions with the Northamptonshire gentry.7 For their Northants. lands: Grey of Ruthin Valor ed. Jack, 66-78. In the north of the county lay the estates of the wealthy Benedictine abbey of Peterborough, another potential influence upon the county’s representation, and in about 1440 Ralph, Lord Cromwell’s acquisition of the valuable manor of Collyweston (near Peterborough) gave him interests in the county, albeit very secondary ones to his concerns in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.8 VCH Northants. ii. 552.

Yet, as far as the political geography of Northamptonshire is concerned, the holdings there of great lords, with their main interests elsewhere, were probably of greater significance than these lesser lords. Chief among them was Richard, duke of York, who held the castle of Fotheringhay in the north-east of the county. Although he had more important residences, particularly the castle of Ludlow in Shropshire, he was not infrequently at Fotheringhay, most notably in the autumn of 1450 and the spring of 1453.9 J.T. Rosenthal, ‘Estates and Finances of Richard, Duke of York’, in Studies in Med. and Renaissance Hist. ed. Bowsky, ii. 197-9; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 65, 85, 119-20. Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and (from 1444) duke of Buckingham, held the manor and hundred of Rothwell with the manor of Naseby in the north-west of the county together with that of Whiston in the south-east; and Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d.1439), had lands in the county’s western half from Yelvertoft in the north down to Pottersbury in the south.10 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 192, 204; A.F.J. Sinclair, ‘Beauchamp Earls of Warwick’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1988), 59, 359, 363.

The Crown was also a very significant landholder in the county. The castle and forest of Rockingham, the manors of Geddington, King’s Cliffe, Brigstock (all in the north-east), the castle of Moor End (in the south) and Kingsthorpe near Northampton were supplemented by the duchy of Lancaster manors of Daventry in the far west and Higham Ferrers in the east. In the period under review here, the two duchy manors were in feoffment for the performance of Henry V’s will and then, from 1443, for that of Henry VI. 11 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 339-40. Most of the remainder of this extensive estate formed part of the endowment of Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre, until her death in 1437, and was thereafter divided between various grantees and farmers. The most significant of these grants in terms of the county’s political geography was the appointment in March 1451 of the duke of York as steward and warden of the forest and constable of the castle of Rockingham.12 SC6/1092/21; CPR, 1401-5, pp. 271-2; 1405-8, p. 131; 1446-52, p. 413.

The county was the scene of a major battle of the civil war of 1459-61. On 10 July 1460, a Yorkist army, advancing from London, encountered a Lancastrian one, marching south-east from Coventry, on the banks of the river Nene near Northampton. The former quickly won the field, in part because of Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin’s treacherous defection from the Lancastrian ranks. 13 A. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 34-39; Northants. Past and Present, iii (1960), 21-25.

In the reign of Henry VI, few, if any, counties had a more distinguished group of MPs than Northamptonshire. It is tempting to attribute this to the county’s wealth, but, although the distinction of one of the MPs, Sir Thomas Green, lay in his great income, and of another, William Zouche, in his prospect of one, the importance of the others was political and professional rather than economic. Three of them were Speakers – William Tresham, Thomas, his son, and Thomas Thorpe (although the latter was sitting for Essex when Speaker in 1453) – another, Thomas Billing, was a future c.j.KB, and two others, William Catesby and Thorpe again, were senior Household men. Several other of the MPs had lesser claims to distinction: Henry Mulsho was treasurer of the household of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (or else was soon to be) when he sat for the county in 1422; Richard Buckland held the important office of treasurer of Calais as the county’s MP in 1425 and 1431; and John Dyve, albeit not until after he had represented the county, was attorney-general to Edward IV’s queen. Corporately a significantly more impressive group than Northamptonshire’s MPs in the preceding period, their prestige anticipated that of the ‘stars of the Elizabethan firmament’ who represented the county in the late sixteenth century.14 The Commons 1558-1603, i. 214.

The names of Northamptonshire’s MPs are known for 20 of the 22 Parliaments of the reign, leaving gaps for 1459 and 1460.15 Returns survive for 18 Parliaments, and MPs for those of 1439 and 1445 are identified in the tax commissions: CFR, xvii. 140, 146, 325, 332. The first of these gaps can, however, be filled with a fair degree of probability. That one of the MPs of 1459 was Thomas Tresham, can be inferred from his election to the Speakership, and the identity of the other, Thorpe, albeit less persuasively, from his membership of a committee which drafted the bill of attainder passed by the Parliament.16 Tresham is much more likely to have been elected for Northants. than any other constituency. His elections for Bucks. and Hunts. predated his inheritance of his patrimony, which lay mainly in Northants. Thorpe, who represented both Northants. and Essex, cannot have been elected for the latter county in 1459 as its MPs are known. In what follows it has been assumed that they were the Northants. MPs in 1459, although it is possible that Thorpe was sitting for a borough. Twenty-one men filled these seats, sitting between them for the county on 45 occasions (including the two doubtful cases of 1459).

If returns for other constituencies are included, the 21 MPs took 55 seats. As many as seven of them are recorded as representing another constituency or constituencies, compared with only four of 28 in the preceding period of 1386-1421. There was a variety of reasons for such elections. Dyve, returned for the Dorset borough of Dorchester in 1467, and Thorpe, for the Wiltshire one of Ludgershall in 1450, were pure carpetbaggers, but all the other returns are explicable in uncontentious terms. Billing was returned for London to the Parliament of February 1449 as the city’s common serjeant, and the elections of the others were justified by their landholdings in the counties they represented.17 Henry Green sat for Wilts. in 1442; Thomas Tresham for Hunts. and Bucks. in three Parls. in the late 1440s; Wake, for Som. in the Parl. of 1449 (Feb.); William Catesby, for Warws. in that of 1449 (Nov.); and Thorpe for Essex in 1453. Five of the seven were elected for other constituencies only after they had first represented Northamptonshire (although two of these – Catesby and Thorpe – went on to represent it again).

Another change between the two periods – 1386-1421 and 1422-61 – was an increase in the proportion of MPs who were returned only once. Of the 28 MPs elected between 1386 and 1421, only eight fall into this category; by contrast, of the 19 MPs who represented the county for the first time in Henry VI’s reign, as many as ten do (although three of these were returned for other constituencies). This higher percentage of single returns was, in part, the result of a lack of opportunity, arising from the virtual monopoly of one of the county’s seats by William Tresham, returned to 12 of the 16 Parliaments which met between 1423 and 1449 (Nov.), a far more impressive record than that of any of the MPs of the earlier period. Tresham’s repeated election ensured that the rise in the number of MPs returned only once was not matched by any marked decline in the percentage of the county’s seats taken by experienced MPs. Between 1386 and 1421 64% of these seats were filled by such MPs, compared with 60% in the period under review here, in other words, in both periods close to the prevailing national average. In no fewer than eight of the Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign two experienced MPs sat for the county, and from 1429 to 1439 12 of the 14 seats were taken by them. Only on four occasions – 1422, 1425, 1450 and 1455 – was the county represented by two novices, and it is instructive here that, on the latter two occasions, the elections were strongly influenced by political factors.

Despite the county’s wealth and the generally high-standing of its MPs in Henry VI’s reign, knights are conspicuous by their near-absence from their number. Only three of the 42 seats were filled by knights, compared with 16 out of 58 in the period 1386-1421, two out of ten from 1461 to 1504, and the much higher proportion of 14 out of 21 from 1509 to 1558. These changes were partly a function of the national fluctuations in the number of knights, a period of decline to the mid-fifteenth century followed by a sustained increase over the next century, but there also seems to have been, in the period under review here, a marked reluctance to sit on the part of many of the county’s resident knights. Of the 14 knights who attested parliamentary elections in Northamptonshire between 1407 and 1478, only three – Sir John Trussell†, Sir Thomas Green, and (Sir) William Catesby – are recorded among its MPs.

The paucity of knights among the MPs is surprising in view of their military experience: as many as 11 of them campaigned abroad, and four had noteworthy military careers. Two of these four – Henry Mulsho and Thomas Chamber – fought during the period of English success in France, and the other two – Mulsho’s nephew, Thomas, and William Zouche – during the declining years of the English occupation. Another, Buckland, had a long career in France, albeit as an administrator rather than as a soldier. For the others, however, experience of foreign war was brief. Wydeville served in the Irish expedition of 1399; and Sir Thomas Green took part in the French campaign of 1420. Later, Vaux and Wake served on the coronation expedition of 1430-2; Brauncepath probably fought on the Calais campaign of 1436; and Wake and Henry Green participated in John, duke of Somerset’s ill-fated expedition of 1443.

As in other counties, there was a high degree of overlap between the MPs and the personnel of the two major offices of county administration, those of sheriff and j.p. Nine of the 21 MPs served as sheriff of Northamptonshire (compared with 15 of 28 in the earlier period), and the figure would no doubt have been higher but for the tendency of the county’s sheriffs to serve multiple terms, with Wydeville serving six and William Catesby five. Although four of the nine held the office before their first elections for the county, only ten of the 42 seats were filled by former Northamptonshire sheriffs and only in the Parliament of 1437 was the county represented by two such.18 In addition, Thomas Tresham, who did not hold the office in Northants., was a former sheriff of Cambs. and Hunts. when elected for the county in 1453 and 1459 and was serving as sheriff in Surr. and Suss. when elected in 1459. As many as 17 of the 21 MPs served as j.p.s in the county as against only 13 of 28 in the 1386-1421 period. It is thus not surprising to find that a much higher proportion of the seats were taken by the county’s j.p.s in the period under review here, namely 23 of 42 compared with 14 of 58. Indeed, in seven of the 21 Parliaments in Henry VI’s reign – 1429, 1439, 1445, 1447, 1449 (Feb.), 1449 (Nov.) and 1453 – both seats were filled by the county’s serving j.p.s., compared with only two in the earlier period.

Another clear pattern emerges in respect of the relationship between the county’s MPs as a group and those who served in the joint escheatorship of Northamptonshire and Rutland, shared between the two counties from the late 1350s. A sharply declining proportion of the MPs held the office: in the period 1386-1421 15 of the 28 MPs did so, but the comparable figures for Henry VI’s reign are six out of 21, and, for the early Tudor period, two out of 13. Since the escheatorship was the least important of the three major offices of shire administration, this decline again implies a rise in the social status of the MPs as a group, as does the increasing proportion of the MPs who served in the more important office of j.p. This, however, is only part of the explanation, for the decline also reflects the growing dominance of the escheatorship by lawyers of a status insufficient to command election for a county.19 In this context, it is striking how many of the county’s escheators of the later part of Henry VI’s reign sat for distant borough seats: Robert Ingleton* for Appleby, Richard Danvers* for Shaftesbury and Horsham, John Baldwyn* for Midhurst, and John Eltenhed† and Philip Lewis† for Old Sarum. Taking the three major offices together, nine of the 21 MPs had held none of them when they were first elected for the county, but five of them – the two Catesbys, Henry Green, Thomas Tresham and Wydeville – had held two.20 Tresham could claim even greater experience, for, in addition to service as j.p. and escheator in Northants., he had also been sheriff of Cambs. and Hunts. and a j.p. in the latter county. It would thus be wrong to characterize the novice MPs as men of little administrative experience.

In the period 1386-1421 only three of the 28 MPs appear to have been lawyers and they – John Tyndale†, John† and Thomas Mulsho†, who filled seven seats between them – can only be tentatively identified as such.21 In The Commons 1386-1421, i. 534, only the two Mulshos have been identified as lawyers, but there can be little doubt that Tyndale was also one: not only did he act as parlty. proxy for the abbot of Peterborough, but he received a payment from the dean of Lincoln for counsel. Even allowing for increasing professionalism as legal education came to be formally organized around the inns of chancery and court in the early fifteenth century, the contrast with the later period is stark. Eight of the 21 MPs of Henry’s VI reign were lawyers under one definition or another. Two were legal men of distinction: Billing rose to the highest office of the common law, that of c.j.KB, and William Tresham was an apprentice-at-law who would certainly have progressed far in the profession had he not abandoned a legal for a political career. Another, Dyve, was Queen Elizabeth’s attorney-general in the 1460s. Tresham’s son, Thomas, and Thorpe, to judge from nominations to the quorum, may have spent time at the inns of court; and a stray reference shows that William Catesby attended Inner Temple, although nothing else in his career marks him out as lawyer. His father, John, and William Aldewyncle are firmly identified as men of law by the part they played in local society. Between them these eight men filled 23 of the 42 known seats for the county, a strikingly high percentage.

The prominence of lawyers among Northamptonshire’s MPs in this period partially explains why as few as eight of the 21 MPs came from families well-established among the county’s leading families (two Greens, two Mulshos, Seyton, Wake, Wydeville and Zouche). Five of these six families had provided the county with MPs in a previous generation or generations, most notably the Wydevilles, who took 11 seats from 1362 to 1390. Three others came from families established in the county for some time, but not among the first rank of its gentry, namely, Aldewyncle, Billing and Dyve (all three of whom were, interestingly, lawyers). Vaux falls between two stools: his family traced their connexion with Northamptonshire back to the reign of Henry III, but only moved there from Cambridgeshire when our MP inherited the manor of Great Harrowden. Four MPs were the sons of men who were the first of their families to acquire land in the county, namely Brauncepath, Chamber, John Catesby and Thomas Tresham, and another (William Catesby) the grandson. Only four were themselves immigrants, namely Buckland, Knightley, William Tresham and Thorpe, indicating a lower level of immigration than in the earlier period. Buckland and Thorpe both came into the county by purchase, but maintained their principal interests elsewhere in Calais and Essex respectively. Knightley and Tresham, by contrast, committed themselves to their new county: Knightley, from an ancient Staffordshire family, bought the manor of Fawsley in 1416 and immediately made Northamptonshire the centre of his interests; Tresham, from more humble origins, devoted the considerable profits of his career to the purchase of a large estate in the county. Both were the progenitors of long-lasting and prominent Northamptonshire families.

Despite the loss of subsidy returns for the county for 1435-6 and 1450-1, it is possible to provide reasonable estimates of the income of most of the MPs. Sir Thomas Green was comfortably the richest man to represent the county: in the subsidy returns of 1412 his father’s income had been put at a remarkable 700 marks p.a., greater than that of several baronial houses, and, despite the loss of income inherent in his mother’s survival until 1434, he was one of the wealthiest men to sit in the Commons of 1426. The next richest of Northamptonshire’s MPs, at least if his wealth is measured at the end of his parliamentary career, was William Tresham. He then enjoyed royal fees of about 310 marks p.a. together with a landed estate, acquired by purchase, which was worth about £150 p.a., although it must be borne in mind that at the beginning of his career, in 1423, he had only the income of a few early land purchases and the fees of a rising young lawyer. Sir Thomas Green’s cousin, Henry, would have been the third richest of the MPs but for the survival of his uncle’s widow, who, until after the end of his recorded parliamentary career, enjoyed an extravagant jointure interest in his patrimony. None the less, he was still worth more than £100 p.a., much of it derived from his valuable Wiltshire estates. At least five more MPs are also known to have been worth in excess of £100 p.a., namely Buckland, the two Catesbys, Thomas Tresham and Wydeville. Others, for whom income cannot be quantified with any accuracy, are likely to have had incomes comparable with these five when they represented the county in Parliament: the value of Thorpe’s lands, an estate, like Tresham’s, compiled entirely by purchase, is not known, but when he sat for the county he had a fee of 90 marks p.a. as treasurer’s remembrancer and the other perquisites of office are likely to have taken his income beyond £100 p.a.; Wake inherited from his father lands valued in the 1412 subsidy assessments at £60 p.a., and, with the addition of his grandmother’s lands and his wife’s inheritance, his own income was significantly higher; Vaux, as heir of the landed estate built up by Sir William Thirning, c.j.c.p., in four counties, can hardly have been worth less than £100 p.a.; and Seyton, with lands in five counties, was no doubt of similar income. To these wealthy MPs must be added Zouche, who, although when elected in 1455 had only the lands settled on him at his marriage by his father (conservatively valued at £55 p.a.), stood heir to a baronial estate worth some £800 p.a.

Yet although several of the MPs were wealthy, this did not mean that there were no opportunities for men, judged by income alone, of lesser consideration. Several came from below the second rank of the county’s gentry, men with annual incomes nearer £40 than £100 p.a., namely Brauncepath, Chamber, Knightley and the Mulshos. More interesting, however, is the return of men with comparatively attenuated resources. As remarked above, William Tresham was of modest means at the beginning of his parliamentary career, as was Billing, whose promotion to c.j.KB was then long in the future. Further, Dyve, although heir to lands valued at £55 p.a. in the 1412 tax assessments, was elected while both his parents lived, and Aldewyncle, although considered rich enough to qualify for distraint in 1439 and 1458, hailed from a family that appears to have held only a single manor. Significantly, all these men were lawyers, for whom, it seems, the ordinary qualifications for election did not apply.

All the MPs, save one, are known to have held lands in Northamptonshire at the time of their first election, and the exception, Zouche, is not a meaningful one, for he was heir-apparent to a considerable estate there. But only four – Aldewyncle, Billing, Dyve and Henry Mulsho – had lands confined to the county. Not surprisingly several held lands in neighbouring shires,22 The Catesbys and Chamber, for example, had lands in Warws., and Chamber, Sir Thomas Green, Seyton, the two Treshams, Vaux, Wake and Wydeville in Bucks. but, much less predictably, several had lands in the West Country. Zouche’s father settled upon him lands in Devon, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire; Wydeville acquired property in Somerset and Wiltshire through his first marriage; Wake’s wife was heiress to lands in Somerset; and Henry Green inherited a large estate in Wiltshire.

The widespread holdings of the MPs are reflected in their marriages. Of the 21 wives of the county’s MPs whose family origins can be identified, only six came from families whose principal interests lay in Northamptonshire, a further eight came from neighbouring shires, but others came from much further afield. The explanation for Wake’s marriage in the mid 1420s to an heiress from Somerset lies in his neighbour Thomas Wydeville’s marriage to her widowed mother; and both matches probably arose out of the bride’s kinship with the Northamptonshire baronial family of Lovell. Wydeville himself had acquired his interest in Somerset through his first marriage, to the daughter and coheir of Thomas Lyons of Ashton, a kinswoman of his grandfather Sir Richard Wydeville’s second wife, Elizabeth, daughter and heir of Sir John Lyons† of Warkworth in Northamptonshire. Henry Green’s marriage to a daughter of Poynings was a function of his inheritance in Wiltshire. Two others – Buckland and Knightley – took wives from their places of origin before acquiring interests in Northamptonshire. As a group the MPs were thus not closely related by marriage, although one marital connexion may have had an impact on the county’s representation. William Tresham was the husband of Vaux’s sister, and the brothers-in-law sat together as the county’s MPs in 1442.

The political tensions of the later part of Henry VI’s reign changed the nature of Northamptonshire’s representation. This is seen most clearly in the re-emergence of royal servants as the dominant group among its MPs. Crown retainers had rarely been returned for the county in the reign of Richard II; but Henry IV’s vigorous exploitation of the resources of the duchy of Lancaster to expand the royal retinue in the Midlands ensured that they were common among Northamptonshire’s representatives during the reigns of the first two Lancastrian Kings.23 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 532. But, as this retinue dwindled over time, with old retainers dying at a faster rate than new men were recruited, courtiers were much less prominent among the MPs during the first 25 years of Henry VI’s reign, a pattern repeated in other Midland shires. In the early years of the reign, only Knightley, in office as teller of the Exchequer when elected in 1423, and Buckland, returned in 1425 and 1431 when treasurer of Calais, were directly in royal employ.

Thereafter the repeated election of William Tresham, who began his career in royal service in the 1430s, maintained a connexion between the Crown and the county’s representatives, but it was not until the controversial Parliament of 1447 that Northamptonshire was represented by two royal servants. From thenceforth, however, royal servants regained their prominence among the MPs, a reflection not, as in the early years of Lancastrian rule, of the numerical strength of the royal affinity, but rather of the increasing politicization of representation in face of the widening divisions in national politics. Tresham’s colleague in 1447, Henry Green, was an esquire of the royal household, and in the next two assemblies his fellow MPs for the county were two royal servants more intimately connected with the Crown, William Catesby, in the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.), and Thorpe, in that of 1449 (Nov.). Interestingly, Catesby was returned, for Warwickshire, to this latter Parliament, and it is a reasonable surmise that he sought that seat to leave Northamptonshire for Thorpe. He was elected on 20 Oct., and three days later he came to Northampton to attest Thorpe’s return. The political circumstances of the elections of 1450 and 1455 were hardly conducive to the return of royal servants, but two Household men were returned for the county in 1453 (Catesby and William Tresham’s son, Thomas), and, if the county’s MPs have been correctly identified, in 1459, when it seems that Thorpe accompanied Thomas Tresham, who was to be elected Speaker.

Most of the MPs had connexions of one sort or another with the baronial families of Zouche and Lovell. Aldewyncle, Sir Thomas Green, and Wydeville were employed as feoffees by the Zouches; and Aldewyncle, Chamber, the two Catesbys and Henry Green, by the Lovells. Some of the connexions were closer. In the late 1440s Thomas Tresham married a daughter of Lord Zouche; in about 1471 (Sir) William Catesby’s son and heir-apparent married her half-sister; and in the meantime William Zouche had honoured Henry Green’s wife by asking her to stand as godmother to his son. Yet none of these connexions had a demonstrable impact on the service of any of them in the Commons. More important to the parliamentary careers of the MPs were associations with greater men, whose interests in Northamptonshire were only peripheral. Several of the MPs developed close links with the greatest peers of the land, as a function of either the lord’s landholdings in the county or the MP’s own interests outside it. Buckland, at the time of his two elections to Parliament, was a councillor of the King’s brother, John, duke of Bedford, and William Catesby was a trusted associate of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, for whom he acted as executor. During their parliamentary careers, two of the MPs had close connexions with Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick: Knightley leased from the earl the Northamptonshire manor of Preston Capes and held office under him as teller of the Exchequer, while his neighbour, John Catesby, was an annuitant of the earl and acted as his attorney in the Exchequer. A third, Wydeville, was steward of the earl’s manor of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, although he may not have acquired the office until after his last Parliament in 1426. In addition, Sir Thomas Green employed the earl among his feoffees, although there is no reason to suppose that this association was relevant to his election alongside Wydeville. The death of the earl in 1439 and of his son in 1446 ended the Beauchamps’ influence in the county, and it was not replaced by their successor, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, whose interests lay overwhelmingly in the north.

The Staffords were equally attractive to the local gentry as patrons, in the form of Anne, dowager-countess of Stafford (d.1438), and her son, Humphrey, earl of Stafford, and, from 1444, duke of Buckingham. Wydeville was steward of the dowager-countess’s Warwickshire estates, although, again, probably not until after the end of his parliamentary career; in 1430 she retained William Tresham at a fee of 40s., and by 1433 he was steward of Earl Humphrey’s manor of Rothwell; between 1430 and 1432 Tresham’s brother-in-law, Vaux, served in the earl’s retinue during the coronation expedition; and, in 1447-8, shortly before his first election to Parliament, William Catesby included Duke Humphrey among those to whom he gave gifts of fish. Later, a much closer association was formed when, in 1458, the duke, anxious to make a profitable marriage for a younger son, contracted his third son, John, to Henry Green’s young daughter and heiress-presumptive, Constance. Since, however, Green is not known to have sat in Parliament after 1447 and there is no evidence of any association between him and the duke before the marriage, this close tie has no relevance to his parliamentary career. Indeed, of all these connexions between the Northamptonshire MPs and the greater baronage only one can be used to explain an election to Parliament, and that is the return of the duke of York’s servant, Thomas Mulsho, in 1450, which is discussed below.

Despite the politicization of the county’s representatives in the latter part of Henry VI’s reign, only four of the 13 MPs who lived through whole or part of the civil war of 1459-61 were active partisans in that war. One of the MPs of 1450, Thomas Mulsho, may have died from injuries received at the battle of Northampton in the Yorkist cause; yet, even though York had a major residence in the county, he drew little support from the shire’s leading gentry, in so far as the MPs form a representative sample. The other three partisans were important gentry supporters of Lancaster. As one of Henry VI’s carvers, (Sir) William Catesby appears to have been present at Ludford Bridge, Northampton and Towton, although he was then able to make his peace with the new King. Another senior Lancastrian household official, Thomas Tresham, was less fortunate. Castigated by the Yorkists as one of the ‘solecytouriz and causerys’ of the first battle of St. Albans, he added to his notoriety in their eyes by serving as Speaker in the Parliament of 1459, in which they were attainted. He went to the fight at the second battle of St. Albans, where he was knighted, and Towton, where he was captured by the Yorkists. Attainted and imprisoned, he was executed ten years later after again falling into the hands of the Yorkists at the battle of Tewkesbury. Thorpe suffered a similar fate. Like Tresham, he was blamed by the Yorkists for precipitating the first battle of St. Albans. He was, according to a contemporary report, captured by the Yorkists at the battle of Northampton, and later, after escaping from prison to join the Lancastrian army as it marched towards London, he was taken and executed by Londoners.

For the reign of Henry VI, 17 election indentures survive, naming an average of just over 19 attestors. Every election was held at Northampton castle. One indenture stands out as exceptional: dated 28 Dec. 1441, it lists no fewer than 86 attestors when no other identifies more than 40. There is no reason to doubt that the sheriff generally troubled to name only a proportion of those present, occasionally making this implicit by adding at the end of the list some such phrase as ‘et multi plures alii’;24 E.g. C219/15/6. for the Parliament of 1442, by contrast, all, or a large proportion, of those present appear to have been named, perhaps because the sheriff, Sir Thomas Green, feared a challenge to the validity of the return. There is also another curiosity: the name of the second attestor has been erased in the two places it occurred in the original indenture. Two explanations suggest themselves: either he was removed at his own request, perhaps because he was unhappy at the election’s result, or he was himself returned and the sheriff had his name removed to avoid an MP attesting his own return. In any event, it is a reasonable conclusion that the election was contested, probably the only one of the reign to have been. This conclusion is supported by the fact that there was, uniquely for Henry VI’s reign, a documented dispute over the wages of a Northamptonshire MP, with Vaux successfully suing Green as sheriff for £14. Perhaps there had been opposition to his election, repeated when the unfortunate sheriff attempted to levy the wages.25 C219/15/2; E13/142, rot. 7d.

Only one piece of evidence survives to illustrate something of the reality behind the uninformative formality of the indentures. At or soon after Michaelmas 1450 Richard, duke of York, newly-returned from Ireland and anxious to secure the election of his men to the forthcoming Parliament, sent his auditor, Thomas Willoughby, into Northamptonshire to talk with William, Lord Zouche, William, Lord Lovell, Henry Green, and the sheriff, William Vaux, ‘pro suis amiciciis habendis in ellecione militum comitatus’. It may have been to ensure that these negotiations were not fruitless that the duke himself arrived at Fotheringhay on 17 Oct. and he may still have been there when the county election was convened five days later. Vaux duly returned Thomas Mulsho, probably the most committed of the duke’s supporters in the county, although it is hard to see why the obscure Seyton should have been elected with him. The indenture, unsurprisingly, gives no hint of the negotiations behind Mulsho’s election.26 Egerton Roll 8783, m. 3 (quoted in K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 233); Johnson, 85; C219/16/1.

It is tempting to suggest that when the sheriff contented himself with naming only a few of those present at the election, he chose only the most prominent among them, and thus that the indentures are a near-complete record of the attendance of the leading shire gentry. The Northamptonshire evidence, at least that drawn from the pre-1422 indentures, throws doubt on this assumption. The sureties for the attendance of the MPs, routinely named in the returns, were generally men of little account, but this was not the case in respect of several of the county’s early indentures. In 1407 the eight sureties were all county gentry, headed by a knight, Sir John Trussell, and including three future sheriffs, and yet only one of the eight is named among the 21 attestors. Similarly, in the indenture of 28 Nov. 1420, only one of the eight sureties was named among the 12 attestors, and among those excluded was a man as important as John Catesby. Such omissions were by no means routine (the indenture of 8 Nov. 1414, for example, names all eight sureties among its 27 attestors), but they do suggest either that the indentures are not a complete record of the men of substance present or that the sureties were chosen subsequent to the election. Only one indenture, either from before or after 1422, bears a record of how it was brought into Chancery: that of 1420 was delivered by one of the Northampton MPs, William Maltman†.27 C219/10/4; 11/4; 12/4.

All but three of the 21 MPs are recorded as attesting at least one election in the county. Of the three who are not, two – Buckland and Thorpe – had their principal interests elsewhere, and their absence merely serves to confirm their status as outsiders; the other, Zouche, was the eldest son of a peer and his career was short. At least three of the MPs also attested elections in other constituencies by virtue of their interests outside Northamptonshire.28 John Catesby, Vaux and Billing attested one election each in Warws., Lincs. and London respectively. Aldewyncle was the most frequent attender, a product of his long career as one of the county coroners, who ex officio attended shire courts. Of more interest are the ten appearances of Sir Thomas Green, comfortably the richest of the local gentry. He himself was returned only once, but, if he had little interest in sitting himself, he appears to have had an interest in who did.

In 1624 it was said to be the ‘ancient course’ of Northamptonshire’s representation that one of the MPs should be chosen from the west of the county and the other from the east.29 The Commons 1509-58, i. 155. The fact that the Tresham seat at Sywell was centrally placed and that a Tresham was returned to 14 of the 21 Parliaments serves to obscure any pattern for the reign of Henry VI. Even so, it is certain that the ‘ancient course’ of 1624, even assuming it ever existed as an electoral reality, post-dated the period under review here. On several occasions two MPs were elected from the same part of the county. In 1425 both MPs were from the west, namely from Ashby St. Ledgers and Edgcote, about 14 miles apart; in the following year they were even nearer-neighbours, the one from Grafton Regis in the far south of the county and the other from Green’s Norton, only six miles away. Further, it is unlikely that any attempt to ensure a geographical balance in representation within any county was workable in the fifteenth century. Communal aspiration in determining who sat for a county was insufficiently developed; individual motive remained the principal determinant of who was returned and militated against the selection of MPs on the basis of their place of residence.

The Northamptonshire evidence illustrates the variety of these personal motives. There, as elsewhere, election to Parliament was often a rite of passage for young lawyers destined for greater things, and this certainly applies to Billing and William Tresham, and, to a lesser extent, to Dyve, who achieved less. For Tresham, however, Parliament was something more: like very few other MPs he made what might be described as a career in the Commons: he exploited his repeated re-elections, not only to advance the private matters of himself and his clients, but to promote himself in the royal service. For Buckland, election in 1425 marked his acceptance among the elite of a county in which he had recently purchased a manor. The same could be argued for Thorpe, although he, unlike Buckland, showed no inclination to become involved in the county’s affairs. For William Catesby, anxious to make a career at court, election to Parliament was a means of singling himself out from other Household servants as worthy of promotion.

For others, the motive for securing election lay in forwarding a particular personal cause. Parliamentary petitions are often difficult to date precisely, but a petition of Buckland, urging the need for the repair of the defences of Calais, was probably presented in the Parliament of 1431, in which he represented Northamptonshire with his friend, Thomas Chamber. As treasurer of the town, he was seemingly anxious to forestall any personal recriminations for any future failure in its defensive fabric. To others election to Parliament was a means of serving royal interests as well as their own. Even before the first of his four nominations to the Speakership in 1439, William Tresham had received payments for such activity: he was paid for ‘labouring’ on the Crown’s behalf and engrossing several parliamentary grants to the King in the Parliament of 1435.30 E403/715, m. 9; 721, m. 10; J.S. Roskell, Speakers, 108-9. Sometimes that support was politically contentious. In January 1454 it was reported that William’s son, Thomas, then sitting for Northamptonshire, was among those Household men drawing up a bill, to be presented to the Lords when Parliament reassembled in the following month, for the establishment of a garrison at Windsor to guard the King and his son.31 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 296-7.

Northamptonshire was a prosperous county, and those who represented it were, in general, men of wealth and importance. Yet several of them had risen to that importance rather than been born to it, and it would be fair to say the county’s representation was dominated by the combination of a landed elite, most clearly personified in Zouche and the Greens, and a professional one, exemplified in William Tresham, Thorpe and Billing.