Huntingdonshire

One of the smallest of all English counties, Huntingdonshire bounded Cambridgeshire, with which it shared its sheriff and escheator, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the soke of Peterborough. Its geography was by no means uniform, for the gently rolling countryside in the Ouse valley to the south and the wolds in the west provided a real contrast to the fenland in the north-east. Outside the fens, the Ouse valley’s soils were considerably more fertile than the marginal agricultural land in the west. In the fens, where water meadows abounded, the grazing of cattle was important; in the west, corn and sheep farming predominated; in the Ouse valley, agriculture was a mixture of those activities. The fenland also had its own distinctive occupations like the gathering of reeds and rushes and the keeping of fisheries and turbaries. Huntingdon, the only parliamentary borough in the county, lay in the Ouse valley, as did the other small towns of St. Ives, Godmanchester and St. Neots. Owing to the proximity of St. Ives, which had an important annual fair, Huntingdon was never the sole centre for the county’s trade and it faced its share of economic difficulties. It was badly hit by the Black Death – said to have left one quarter of it uninhabited – and the various mills and sluices situated downstream were a frequent threat to its commercial activities.1 N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Beds., Hunts. and Soke of Peterborough, 353-4; M. Wickes, Hunts. 11, 15, 17, 43, 45; VCH Hunts. ii. 123; iii. 253-61.

The King’s interests in Huntingdonshire included the castle and honour of Huntingdon (although the castle had lost its defences and served solely as an administrative centre), the lordship of two of the county’s four hundreds, Toseland and Leightonstone, and the royal forests of Sapley and Weybridge. For most of the fifteenth century, however, the forests were in the hands of the keepers to whom the Crown had granted their keeping.2 VCH Hunts. ii. 130, 173, 256; iii. 2. Like Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire did not contain any especially significant duchy of Lancaster estates. Curiously, the two counties, otherwise administratively associated, fell under the responsibility of different duchy auditors. In 1399 Huntingdonshire fell within the ambit of the northern auditor and Cambridgeshire that of the southern, and they were likewise kept separate during a reorganization of the auditors’ areas of responsibility in the early 1420s. The main duchy interests in Huntingdonshire were the manors of Godmanchester and Glatton (including Holme, a subsidiary manor of the latter) and the fee farm of Huntingdon. Glatton was in the hands of ‘feoffees’ early in Henry VI’s reign, possibility as a security for a mortgage by which the Crown raised money for the war in France.3 Ibid. ii. 131, 287-8; iii. 178; R. Somerville, Duchy, 156, 180.

As with Cambridgeshire, a striking feature of late medieval Huntingdonshire was the lack of a clearly dominant great magnate, either lay or ecclesiastical.4 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 447. The greatest local landowner before the Reformation was the abbot of Ramsey, the head of one of the wealthiest religious houses in the country. He enjoyed various rights and franchises, including the banlieu of Ramsey, but his extensive estates lay mainly in north-east Huntingdonshire,5 VCH Hunts. ii. and iii. passim. and he appears not to have played a significant role in the county’s affairs. In the early years of Henry VI’s reign, there were fewer than a dozen noble families with lands in the county and nearly all of these holdings lay in its southern half.6 Feudal Aids, ii. 474-7. In terms of rank, Richard, duke of York, and Humphrey, earl of Stafford, were the most prominent lords, but John, Lord Tiptoft†, an important royal councillor, was the most active peer in Huntingdonshire in the first half of the reign. From his death in 1443 until the end of the reign, no other lord, not even his son and namesake, created earl of Worcester in 1449, had a similarly close involvement in local matters.

The names survive for 12 of Huntingdonshire’s knights of the shire in this period; that is, all bar those who sat in the Parliaments of 1455, 1459 and 1460. It is therefore possible that as many as 18 men represented the county in the reign of Henry VI, assuming that none of the unknown Members was one of the 12. Earlier, all but one of its known MPs of the period 1386-1421 owned some property in the county, and a majority of them resided there for most of the time.7 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 449. The period under review presents a similar picture. Only Thomas Tresham appears not to have resided in Huntingdonshire when first elected for the county, and only he appears not to have held lands there. As in Cambridgeshire, residence was evidently a matter of some importance for the electorate, even though, in the early fifteenth century, the freeholders of Huntingdonshire were prepared to ignore regulations concerning residential qualifications when it suited them, notably the Act of 1413 requiring electors as well as the elected to be residents.8 Ibid. Notwithstanding these earlier infringements, the issue of residence and the enforcement of these regulations came to the fore during the county’s election dispute of 1429. It is nevertheless unlikely that residence was the only issue at stake in the controversy of 1429, in which underlying divisions among the gentry and magnate rivalries may also have played some part. In any case, the electorate were prepared to return Tresham, probably a non-resident, to the Commons 20 years later.

Most of the 12, like their counterparts in Cambridgeshire, do not appear to have come from families long connected with Huntingdonshire, a county, like those of Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire, with a capacity to absorb newcomers. While Scott and the Styuecles came from old established families and the Wawetons were associated with the county for several generations, the others were either more recent arrivals or, like Hethe and Hunt in particular, of obscure or unknown antecedents. Almost all of the MPs had interests in other counties, whether through inheritance, marriage or purchase, and only Hethe seems not to have held any property elsewhere. Taylard was the son of a Bedfordshire man and held property there, as did Sir Thomas Waweton, Scott and Hunt, all of whom also represented that county in Parliament. Although Huntingdonshire shared a sheriff and escheator with Cambridgeshire, few of the MPs possessed a significant connexion with the latter county. Links with Bedfordshire were certainly stronger: it is worth noting that the main Huntingdonshire residences of nearly all of the MPs lay in the south and south-west, in that part of the county lying adjacent to Bedfordshire. Only the Styuecles and Taylard appear to have had a significant landed interest in Cambridgeshire, and just Taylard and John Styuecle served on its commission of the peace. Taylard came to spend much of his time in Cambridgeshire, his chosen burial place, after marrying a local woman. Similarly, Digby’s second marriage diverted the focus of his attention to Rutland but by then he was already beginning to disengage from Huntingdonshire, his principal area of activity in the late 1430s and the early 1440s.

Several of the more prominent MPs came from families with a tradition of parliamentary service. Most notable in this regard are the Styuecles and Wawetons, although Digby’s forebears included Robert Digby†, a knight of the shire for Leicestershire in 1373. His maternal grandfather, Sir James Bellers†, had sat for that county as well, as had his uncles, John† and James Bellers†. Stonham also had a parliamentary forebear, since his grandfather on his mother’s side, Sir William Burgate†, was a knight of the shire for Suffolk in four Parliaments. As far as his career as an MP for Huntingdonshire is concerned, Digby’s most important family connexion arose from his first marriage to Elizabeth Hunt, since he owed his role in the county’s politics to his association with her father, the celebrated parliamentarian and lawyer, Roger Hunt, and Hunt’s patron, the duke of Norfolk.

In spite of his obscure background, Hunt quickly rose to become one of the leading men of the shire. Most of the other MPs were either leading or middling members of the gentry of the county, for which the return of men of at least some substance was evidently the usual sine qua non. Huntingdonshire saw a more pronounced diminution in knightly numbers – a general phenomenon throughout the Lancastrian period – than did Cambridgeshire. Belted knights comprised a minority (under a third) of its Members in the period 1386-1421 but just two of the 12 of the period under review. Furthermore, if one discounts the ‘outsiders’ involved in the first, overturned election of 1429, Sir Nicholas Styuecle was the only knight to feature as an attestor in the county’s surviving returns to Parliament in Henry VI’s reign.9 Although Sir Thomas Waweton was one of those who participated in the initial election of 1429, he was then residing in Beds. On the other hand, Digby, Hunt, John Styuecle, Stonham, Tresham and William Waweton were certainly distrained for knighthood during their careers, indicating that they could support the status, as presumably could Scott. Knights or not, the pursuit of arms was still of significance for several of these men. Over a decade after representing Huntingdonshire in Parliament for the last time, for example, the Lancastrian Tresham received his knighthood immediately after the second civil war battle of St. Albans. It is likely that Sir Nicholas Styuecle also received the honour in the field, probably in France. The circumstances of Sir Thomas Waweton’s knighting are unknown although in 1419 he featured in a list of those in Bedfordshire deemed best qualified to perform military service in defence of the realm. Scott, another of the MPs with links with Bedfordshire, features in the same list, while Digby, Stonham, William Waweton and Wesenham all served the Lancastrian Crown on campaign in France. Like Tresham, Digby participated in the civil strife at home, meeting his end at Towton in 1461. (While not itself the scene of any battles, Huntingdonshire did not remain immune from the Wars of the Roses, since Margaret of Anjou’s army sacked Huntingdon as it marched south in early 1461.)10 VCH Hunts. ii. 123-4.

The four MPs for whom there is no evidence of any military activity were either lawyers or possible members of that profession. Hunt and Taylard were certainly men of law, although it is surprising that the former, a much more distinguished lawyer and administrator than the latter, never served on the quorum as a j.p., whether in Huntingdonshire or elsewhere. It is also likely that the obscure Hethe, who continuously served on the commission of the peace for Huntingdonshire as a member of the quorum for nearly two decades, was a lawyer, and conceivable that John Styuecle was the ‘Stucle’ admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1440.11 L.I. Adm. i. 8. But it is impossible to prove that the man admitted to that inn of court was John Styuecle, notwithstanding the assertion of The Commons 1386-1426, iv. 529, that he was a lawyer. Even if Taylard and Hunt were the only lawyers, they loomed large in the representation of Huntingdonshire, sitting in ten Parliaments between them. If Hethe and Styuecle were also members of that profession, one or more lawyers represented the county in as many as 13 of Henry VI’s Parliaments.

Of the lawyers and possible lawyers, Hunt and John Styuecle became the most significant landowners although the latter did not to come into possession of the estates he would inherit from Sir Nicholas Styuecle, perhaps his father, until some time after sitting in his last known Parliament. According to his inquisition post mortem, John enjoyed a landed income of no more than £40 p.a. at the end of his life, a considerable underestimate given that Sir Nicholas’s estates were valued at £133 p.a. for the subsidy of 1436. Hunt’s assessment for the same subsidy found that he possessed lands worth £68 per year but it is unlikely his holdings produced anything like that amount at the beginning of his parliamentary career. To supplement his landed income, he could look to his annuities and fees (including the £11 p.a. he received from the duke of Norfolk by the early 1430s), along with other unquantifiable but no doubt considerable legal earnings. As for the other MPs, it is probable that Stonham and Tresham were the wealthiest landowners and that Sir Thomas Waweton and Scott likewise possessed substantial holdings. Stonham’s estates were valued at £150 in 1436, an assessment not including lands then in his mother’s hands. Tresham’s inheritance was worth well in excess of £100 p.a. although he had yet to succeed his father when first returned for Huntingdonshire. By the end of his life, his estates in Northamptonshire alone were valued at just under £150 per year. In 1436 the Crown approached at least three of the wealthier MPs for loans to help pay for the war in France, seeking £40 from each of Hunt and Sir Nicholas Styuecle and £50 from Sir Thomas Waweton. On an apparently far lesser scale were William Waweton, Wesenham and Digby, all of whom were assessed at £40 for the purposes of the subsidy of 1436, although the interests that Digby’s mother (and perhaps his grandmother as well) enjoyed in his inheritance diminished his landed income at that date. It is also possible that Digby engaged in mercantile activity, so providing him with a potentially significant extra income. Wesenham certainly did not have to depend solely on his landed income, since as a member of the Household he enjoyed his share of royal largesse, particularly after Henry VI had attained his majority. In summary, most of the MPs were men of substance and comparatively high social standing although, as a group, probably not as wealthy as their counterparts in Cambridgeshire. Even though neither Hethe nor Taylard were landowners of any great consequence, the latter at least enjoyed the benefit of his legal earnings.

Given the general standing of the 12 as a group, it is no surprise to find that all of them served in local government. Yet such experience was by no means a requirement for prospective knights of the shire since only six of them had already begun their careers in the administration of the county before representing it in Parliament.12 Digby, Hethe, Taylard, Tresham, William Waweton and Wesenham. In neighbouring Cambridgeshire, by contrast, the great majority of the known knights of shire of this period held local government office there prior to embarking on their parliamentary careers. It might therefore appear that the electorate in Cambridgeshire attached more importance to returning MPs of at least some previous administrative experience than did their counterparts in Huntingdonshire, although it is also possible that there were fewer candidates of such administrative experience in the latter county prepared to stand for the Commons. None of the 12 returned himself to the Commons while sheriff but Hunt and Scott took up the office during their last and fifth Parliaments respectively. It is also worth noting that Scott represented Bedfordshire in 1420, while sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, and that Sir Thomas Waweton sat in his last Parliament as a knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire while sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Scott also combined the offices of MP and escheator, since he held the latter office when returned for Huntingdonshire for the fourth time. Sir Nicholas Styuecle took up office as escheator of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire shortly before the dissolution of his first Parliament and he was both MP and escheator for a few weeks in late 1435. Several of the 12 were both MPs and j.p.s for Huntingdonshire at the same time, although only Hethe and Taylard were already on the bench there when they began their parliamentary careers. In spite of his apparent non-residence, Tresham was a j.p. for Huntingdonshire when first elected for the county.

Employment of the MPs on Crown estates in the county was minimal and apparently confined to the royal forests of Weybridge and Sapley and the duchy of Lancaster. Scott served as verderer there, although he had relinquished that office some seven years before the accession of Henry VI. Stonham was surveyor of the same forests for at least a year in the late 1430s, by which stage he was well into his parliamentary career, but it is likely that he owed the appointment to their keeper, John, Lord Tiptoft, rather than the King himself. Digby, however, held his office of forester of Weybridge and Sapley by royal letters patent issued to him just over a year before he first represented Huntingdonshire in Parliament. Only Tresham served in the administration of the duchy of Lancaster in Huntingdonshire. In late 1443, some years before representing the county in the Commons, he took up the stewardship of the duchy estates there and in the counties of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, a position he exercised jointly with his father, William*, a prominent duchy official.

The Huntingdonshire survey for the period 1386-1421 found that the men who sat for the county in those years generally had remarkably little to do with the royal court.13 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 447. Yet an association with the Court may have been significant for the parliamentary careers of several of the MPs of the period under review. Given his modest estates and slight previous involvement in the public affairs of the county, Thomas Wesenham’s status as a trusted servant of the Household must have helped him to win a seat in the Parliament of 1437. His Household links are also likely to have played a part in his election to the Parliament of 1453, an assembly which met in favourable circumstances for the Court and government and in which he sat alongside a fellow Household man, Robert Stonham. It is likely that Stonham, who previously sat in the 1447 Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds (the scene of the arrest of the government’s chief opponent, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester), had joined the royal establishment decades earlier. Another of the King’s esquires, Thomas Tresham, gained election to the consecutive Parliaments of 1449 and 1449-50, sitting alongside Stonham in the second of these assemblies. The latter was re-elected in 1450, this time with John Styuecle, the other knight of the shire of 1447, in spite of opposition leading to an election dispute. In a certificate sent into Chancery, their supporters specifically stated that it was because they were esquires for the King’s body that a majority of the electors had chosen them. In short, during the first decade and a half or so of Henry VI’s personal rule there was a tendency for the county, freely or otherwise, to return men associated with the Crown. Had the county’s returns to the final three Parliaments of the reign survived, it might have been possible similarly to link them to the politics of the day. Given the circumstances of that of 1459, for instance, there is a fair chance that at least one (if not both) of the knights of the shire would have possessed links with the Court. Earlier in the reign, another of the MPs, Robert Scott, was closely associated with the Lancastrian establishment, having served as an esquire for the body under Henry IV, although it is unclear whether he was still formally a member of the Household when he sat for Huntingdonshire in 1425.

Like their counterparts in Cambridgeshire, the MPs were not prominent in central government. Hunt was by far the most engaged, serving (between his first two Parliaments) as the King’s attorney in the court of common pleas for 18 months in Henry IV’s reign. Three decades later, by which stage his parliamentary career had ended, he became a baron of the Exchequer. In part, he owed both appointments to the influence of the powerful bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort. Hunt also represented the Crown on an embassy to the Low Countries but, again, some years after last sitting in Parliament. Two of the 12 served in the central administration of the duchy of Lancaster, although this employment was not relevant to their careers as knights of the shire for Huntingdonshire during the period under review. Hunt was briefly deputy steward of the south parts of the duchy in Henry V’s reign, while Tresham was for some years chancellor of those duchy estates set aside to the use of Henry VI’s will, although not until his career as a knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire was over.

More relevant for the MPs’ parliamentary careers than participation in central government was the potential influence of members of the Lords. There is, however, no evidence that any of them served the abbots of Ramsey in an administrative capacity, perhaps partly because of the abbots’ apparent disengagement from the affairs of Huntingdonshire as a whole. As already observed, the main Huntingdonshire residences of all but one of the MPs were in the south and south-west of the county, while the abbots’ estates lay largely in its north-east.14 Excluded here is Tresham since he had no Hunts. residence. The residence of the exception, Wesenham, was situated in north-west Hunts., also away from the abbot’s main estates. Yet there was at least some contact between Ramsey abbey and the local gentry, since Hunt stood proxy for the abbot in the Parliaments in 1426 and 1439, as did John Styuecle and Stonham in that of 1447. Given the lack of dominance of a single magnate, it is not surprising that the MPs in general tended to have connexions with several lords or patrons during their careers. As one might expect, several of them had links with John, Lord Tiptoft. A connexion with such a figure was potentially significant, given his long attachment to the Lancastrian Crown, his service as a royal councillor from just after the beginning of Henry VI’s reign until his death and his stewardship of the royal household in the latter half of the 1420s and the early 1430s. Another MP, John Styuecle, won a retainer with Tiptoft’s son, the earl of Worcester, although not until after beginning his parliamentary career. It would appear that Sir Thomas Waweton, Hunt and Digby in particular were close to Tiptoft but they also had links with other lords. Waweton received retainers for life from Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, and Robert, Lord Willoughby. He also became a close associate of Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and he may have had ties with John Holand, earl of Huntingdon. Apart from his association – not always cordial – with Henry Beaufort, Hunt served Grey of Ruthin and Sir William Phelip† (subsequently Lord Bardolf) as an estate official and John Mowbray, 2nd duke of Norfolk, as a councillor. Early in his career, Scott accompanied Edward, duke of Aumâle, to Ireland as a retainer of that lord. He was also associated with Tiptoft but his main patron was the earl of Huntingdon. As a young man, Digby served in the retinue of the duke of Bedford in France. He was a retainer of Mowbray as well, and his connexion with Mowbray and Roger Hunt allowed him to play a more prominent part in the politics of Huntingdonshire than was justified by his modest landholdings there. It is nevertheless likely that his entry into Tiptoft’s service was of particular significance for his career as a knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire, where his election in 1439 probably represented an assertion of that patron’s local influence. William Waweton, who may have enjoyed many of the same connexions as his more prominent relative, Sir Thomas, was perhaps a retainer of Humphrey, earl of Stafford (duke of Buckingham from 1444), a landowner of some significance in Huntingdonshire.15 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 191, 193; VCH Hunts. ii. 325, 348; iii. 80, 173, 223.

From 1422 until the mid 1450s, and notably in the first half of the reign, those elected to represent Huntingdonshire usually possessed previous experience of Parliament although it is possible that all the missing Members of the last three Parliaments of the reign were newcomers to the Commons. All but two of the 12 sat for the county more than once during their parliamentary careers, some of which began well before 1422. While several of them first entered Parliament before the accession of Henry VI, there is no evidence that any of those still alive gained election to the Commons after the toppling of that King in 1461. Five of the MPs also sat for other constituencies, two of them (Digby and Tresham, both of whose main interests lay elsewhere) prior to sitting for Huntingdonshire. The only known occasion in which both MPs had not sat before was the Parliament of 1437, and in only three Parliaments, those of 1433, 1442 and 1447, was one of the MPs a newcomer. While the electorate no doubt appreciated the advantages of returning men of previous parliamentary experience, it does appear that prior to 1422 a small group of the more influential gentry had secured a grip on the representation of the county and retained it following the accession of Henry VI. Before 1437, all the Members of the previous Parliaments of the reign, except William Waweton, had begun their parliamentary careers before the accession of Henry VI. Hunt was easily the most experienced of the 12. Already a parliamentary veteran before 1422, he was returned to the Commons on no fewer than 18 occasions, sat for Huntingdonshire in 15 Parliaments, including the first nine assemblies of Henry VI’s reign, and was Speaker twice, in 1420 (when he sat for Bedfordshire) and 1433. Sir Thomas Waweton was also Speaker, in 1425. He was another veteran of the Commons, apparently beginning his parliamentary career in the late 1390s and sitting in a dozen Parliaments.16 But it is possible that Sir Thomas was not quite such an experienced parliamentarian. Although both VCH Hunts. ii. 357 and The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 789, state that he was the son of John Waweton†, a pardon he acquired in 1415 and a lawsuit he pursued against his kinsman William Waweton in the early 1440s show that he was actually the son and heir of Thomas Waweton esq.: C67/37, m. 28; CP40/716, rot. 318. This identification means that the elder man could have sat in some of the earlier Parls. of which Waweton is usually assumed to have been a Member. Sir Nicholas Styuecle, Stonham and Scott also first entered Parliament before 1422: all had long parliamentary careers and Styuecle represented Huntingdonshire in 12 Parliaments. Among the other MPs, William Waweton and John Styuecle were probably able to call upon the advice of their relatives (Sir Thomas Waweton and Sir Nicholas Styuecle) when they entered Parliament as novice Members in 1433 and 1447 respectively. Likewise, Thomas Tresham was the son of an experienced parliamentarian and followed his father in becoming Speaker, but, unlike William Waweton and John Styuecle, he had already sat for another constituency before representing Huntingdonshire. Digby was probably able to call upon his father-in-law, Roger Hunt, for advice, but he was not a newcomer to Parliament in 1439, having previously sat for Leicestershire. As for Hethe, Taylard and Wesenham, they did not have such relatives to call upon, but Taylard was a lawyer with administrative experience before entering Parliament, and Wesenham was already beginning his career in local government when first elected. In short, Huntingdonshire’s knights of the shire of this period were parliamentarians of greater experience than those in many other counties.

Elections took place at the county court in Huntingdon, on a Saturday on every occasion for which a return survives. There are extant electoral returns for Huntingdonshire for 17 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. Although those for 1439, 1445, 1455, 1459 and 1460 are now lost, Exchequer records supply the names of the MPs of 1439 and 1445.17 CFR, xvii. 140, 325. In accordance with the electoral statute of 1406, the attestors counter-sealed the sheriff’s indenture of return. The named attestors varied in number from election to election, from fewer than ten on some occasions to as many as 24 in 1433, but those so identified were not always synonymous with all the witnesses. For the first Parliament of 1449, the attestors comprised 12 named individuals and an unspecified number of ‘others’, and the indenture confirming the return of John Styuecle and Robert Stonham to the Commons in the wake of the troubled election to the Parliament of 1450 named just five of the attestors, who also included ‘other notable esquires, gentlemen and freeholders’. As a certificate arising from that election indicates, the total number of participants, of whom the attestors were just part, could be very sizeable. It asserted that well over 400 of those present had chosen Styuecle and Stonham, while just 70 had supported the rival candidate, Henry Gymber‡. Most of the MPs were not themselves regular attestors during the period under review although seven of them witnessed at least one election for the county under Henry VI.

The previous election dispute of 1429 began when the county court met at Huntingdon on 20 Aug. that year. The men elected were Stonham and William Waweton but 13 prominent landowners of the shire challenged this outcome at the next meeting of the court. The challengers, led by Sir Nicholas Styuecle, alleged that William’s relative, Sir Thomas Waweton, with the help of a gang of ‘outsiders’ from Bedfordshire, had obliged the sheriff to return the two men, even though William was a resident of that other county, with no lands or tenements in Huntingdonshire. Their protest was successful, for the county court reassembled on 17 Sept., just five days before the opening of Parliament, and elected Styuecle and Roger Hunt. The indenture drawn up on the day of the overturned August election bears out the substance of their complaint. Apart from Sir Thomas Waweton, it named six other attestors of whom five (including John Enderby* and John Ragon*) were indeed from Bedfordshire and the sixth, Sir William Mallory, came from Cambridgeshire. The fresh indenture of 17 Sept. named 17 attestors, among them the attorneys of the abbots of Ramsey and Thorney. It is possible that this dispute arose from another between the duke of Norfolk and earl of Huntingdon, which had led to an armed confrontation between their respective retainers in Bedfordshire in the late summer of 1428. Hunt was a retainer of the duke and Sir Thomas Waweton appears to have had links with the earl but this does not prove that either lord played a role in the election. Moreover, those who protested against the original return, particularly Sir Nicholas Styuecle, a wealthy landowner from an established county family, may have been primarily concerned with the intervention of outsiders in their affairs, rather than with any magnate quarrel.18 C219/14/1; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 164-7; J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 17-18n; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 482, 528. For the hypothesis that the dispute was the result of infighting among the gentry themselves: R.E. Archer, ‘The Mowbrays’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1984), 258-62. It is not possible to link the sheriff, Sir Walter de la Pole*, with any of the parties or to ascribe any partisan motives to him in relation to this affair, although he may not have been on the best of terms with Sir Nicholas. Earlier in the decade, he had faced legal action in the Exchequer on the part of Styuecle, for his failure during his previous term as sheriff to pay the wages due to the latter as one of Huntingdonshire’s knights of the shire in the Parliament of 1423. While the full circumstances of the election dispute of 1429 are unknowable, it is striking that the opponents of Stonham and William Waweton should have used the fact that their supporters came from Bedfordshire against them, given the readiness to overlook breaches of the residential qualification earlier in the century. One might posit a hardening of the observance of the rules, even though Thomas Tresham appears to have flouted them again two decades later, by gaining election to the successive Parliaments of 1449 and 1449-50 when he probably resided in Northamptonshire.

Stonham was also involved in the election dispute of 1450. When the county court met on 17 Oct., he and John Styuecle, both members of the upper gentry and esquires of Henry VI’s household, put themselves forward as candidates, but it closed in disarray after Henry Gymber, a minor lawyer, also sought election. Following Gymber’s challenge, Stonham, Styuecle and their supporters sent the government a certificate giving their version of what had happened. The certificate stated that on election day 124 named freeholders (one knight, eight esquires, ten gentlemen and 105 forty-shilling freeholders) and over 300 ‘good communers’ of the county had chosen the two Household men, but that Gymber’s supporters, about 70 unruly ‘freholders comoners’ whom ‘dyvers [unnamed] gentilmen of other shires’ had incited, had made a free election impossible. They also objected that Gymber was ineligible to sit as a knight of the shire because he was ‘not of gentell berth’, thereby not fulfilling a criterion laid down by statute as recently as 1445. A week after the contested election, the county court met again to confirm the return of Stonham and Styuecle in the presence of Sir Nicholas Styuecle, four other named attestors and ‘other esquires, gentlemen and freeholders’. Although the certificate was a partisan document, the complaint against Gymber was probably justified since, although he was a landowner of reasonably substantial means, he had only recently acquired his lands and was undoubtedly of obscure origin. The only one of the 12 to whom he came near approaching in terms of rank was the relatively obscure Henry Hethe. The numbers involved in the 1450 election were perhaps exceptional for a small county like Huntingdonshire, but it occurred at a time of political turmoil, in the aftermath of the duke of Suffolk’s fall and Cade’s revolt. It is striking that Gymber could have attracted as much support as he did, suggesting that he may have enjoyed the backing of a powerful patron. It is worth noting that the duke of York ‘laboured’ to ensure the election of men sympathetic with his views to the Parliament of 1450, that he spent time in East Anglia just before the elections and that the sheriff, John Harleston II*, was his servant, although it is impossible to prove that Gymber was one of his candidates.19 RP, v. 116; C219/16/1; J.G. Edwards, ‘Hunts. Parlty. Election of 1450’, in Essays Presented to B. Wilkinson ed. Sandquist and Powicke, 383-95; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 85; M. Keen, Eng. in the Late Middle Ages, 439. Whether or not Harleston tried to act in York’s interests while sheriff, there were occasions when other sheriffs made returns that accorded with their affiliation to the Lancastrian Court. The sheriff when Stonham gained election to the Parliament of 1447 was a fellow member of the Household, Sir John Chalers*, who also returned another royal servant, William Cotton*, to the same assembly as one of the knights of the shire for Cambridgeshire, the other county within his bailiwick. The political affiliations of Thomas Peyton, the sheriff at the time of the election of 1453, another assembly called in advantageous circumstances for the Court, are unknown, although both Huntingdonshire’s representatives in this assembly, Stonham and Wesenham, were Household men.

As is so often the case with medieval parliamentarians, there is very little information about the activities of Huntingdonshire’s representatives in the Commons following their election. It is nevertheless possible either to make a connexion between some of the business of the House and the two Speakers among them, Sir Thomas Waweton and Tresham. In 1425 the Commons presented a petition complaining about absentee clergy and the holding of livings in plurality and another highlighting the plight of suspect heretics who had endured a long incarceration without trial, concerns to which one might ascribe the influence of the lollard movement, for which Speaker Waweton may have had some sympathy. It is nevertheless impossible to ascertain whether he played any role in bringing the petitions before Parliament. He certainly took advantage of his office to bring before the Commons a petition to ensure a payment towards an annuity that the late earl of March had granted to him, and it is very likely that he was the author of another petition for the livery of dower to the earl’s widow. She duly obtained an assignment of the property in question, which included the source of Waweton’s annuity, the Rutland manor of Ryhall. As a Lancastrian partisan, Tresham was an obvious candidate for Speaker in the anti-Yorkist ‘Parliament of Devils’ of 1459. As such, he presided over the wholesale Act of Attainder convicting the duke of York and his allies. While the Act was its main business, Parliament also found time to alter the panel of feoffees of those duchy of Lancaster estates set aside to the use of Henry VI’s will (of which he was possibly still chancellor), to which he was now appointed.