Staffordshire

Staffordshire, of some 750,000 acres, was the 18th largest of the 39 ancient counties of England, slightly larger than neighbouring Derbyshire. It was also of the middle rank in respect of wealth. In terms of the total of assessments made for the subsidy of 1451, it was 13th of the 29 counties for which figures are available.2 S.J. Payling, ‘County Parlty. Elections’, Parlty. Hist. xviii. 258. Like other Midland shires, its boundaries delineated a unit that was neither geographically nor politically distinct. Although, for some 30 miles, the river Dove forms its border with Derbyshire, for the most part its boundary does not follow physical features.3 M.J. Edwards, ‘Formation of Shires’ (Birmingham Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2008), 109. Aside from an area of high ground in the far north-east of the county, which marks the southern end of the Pennine Chain, the county lacks physical distinctiveness. Wealth and population were fairly evenly distributed within it, although the western half of the county, with the major towns of Stafford, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Wolverhampton, appears to have been more densely populated than the eastern one.4 I. Rowney, ‘Staffs. Political Community’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 6-7.

Politically the three principal influences in Staffordshire were the Crown, as lord of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tutbury (which straddled the county’s border with Derbyshire), the bishops of Coventry and Lichfield, and the great baronial family of Stafford. Of other leading baronial families, the Beauchamps (succeeded by the Nevilles), the Talbots and the Butlers (created earls of Wiltshire in 1449) all had minor holdings in the county, but played little part in its affairs.5 Ibid. 10. Of the lesser baronage, two families – the Tuchets and the Suttons – had their principal landholdings there, yet neither of them took a very active local role in this period.6 Members of another Staffs. family – the Ferrers of Chartley – are persistently described as peers in the secondary literature, but, although the head of the family was sometimes designated ‘Lord Ferrers’ in contemporary records, their writ of summons to the Lords had ended with the death of John, Lord Ferrers, in 1312: CP, v. 305-21. The Tuchets, Lords Audley, had their main residence at the castle of Heighley, three miles from Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the north of the county. For most of the period under review the head of the family was James, Lord Audley, who, having succeeded to the family estates in 1408, came of age in about 1419. He had a long and distinguished military career in France and then served as chamberlain of South Wales. These prolonged absences meant that he played little part in the affairs of his native county until the autumn of 1459 when he commanded the Lancastrian forces at the battle of Blore Heath, fought on the border between Staffordshire and Shropshire not far from Heighley. Elevated to the peerage in 1440, Sir John Sutton, who had significant landholdings in the south of the county around his castle at Dudley, was similarly largely inactive in his native shire. He too fought in France and then made his career as a courtier and diplomat.7 Rowney, 10-17; CP, i. 341; iv. 479-80. Their disengagement from local affairs served to accentuate the influence in the county of the bishops, the Staffords and the duchy.

The bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield had its administrative centre at Lichfield in the south-east of Staffordshire. After the death in 1447 of William Heyworth, a conscientious bishop who took no political role outside his diocese, three of the next four bishops were involved in central politics and had strong connexions with the ruling Lancastrian house. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there is no evidence that William Booth (1447-52), Reginald Boulers (1453-9) or John Halse (1459-90) sought to influence the county’s parliamentary representation.8 Rowney, 221-30. This left the duchy and the Staffords as the main potential influences on that representation. They had geographically distinct holdings within the county: the Stafford estates were concentrated in the west; and those of the duchy, which comprised the honour of Tutbury and the forest of Needwood, covered much of the eastern border, with an outpost at Newcastle-under-Lyme in the north-west.9 Ibid. 23-24, 50, 205; H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 194, 200. Under the first two Lancastrian Kings, the influence of the duchy had been in the ascendant. The death of Edmund, earl of Stafford, at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, and the long minority that followed meant that the influence of his family was largely in abeyance, and a significant proportion of the county’s MPs, particularly during the reign of Henry IV, were duchy retainers. There was, however, a different dispensation in the period under review here. Earl Edmund’s son, Humphrey, came of age at the beginning of Henry VI’s reign, and although his inheritance was burdened by the interests of his mother, Countess Anne, he held the bulk of the Staffordshire lands (although not the lordship of Stafford). By the time of her death in 1438, Humphrey’s local influence had been considerably augmented, for on the death of the long-serving steward of Tutbury and master forester of Needwood, Sir Nicholas Montgomery†, in 1435, the Crown had granted his offices to him. Thus, from the mid-1430s, the local influence of the Staffords and the duchy were united in the hands of one man, and his promotion to the dukedom of Buckingham in 1444 can only have enhanced his standing.10 Castor, 235, 253.

The structure of gentry society in the county is difficult to delineate confidently due to the loss of returns for the subsidies of 1412, 1435 and 1450. It seems, however, that Staffordshire lacked the clearly-defined gentry elites that characterized its neighbour Derbyshire and nearby Nottinghamshire. The return for the county made in 1434, in respect of the parliamentary oath not to maintain peace-breakers, named only five knights, one of whom, Sutton, was soon to be promoted to the peerage, and another, Sir John Gresley, was principally resident in Derbyshire. By contrast, as many as 67 esquires were named, to which are to be added the two MPs, Hugh Erdeswyk and Thomas Arblaster, who administered the oath. Of course, this group contained men over a broad social range, from wealthy esquires like Thomas Stanley of Elford to mere parochial gentry, yet the fact that so many were assigned the rank by the commissioners implies that gentry wealth was more evenly distributed than it was in many shires.11 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 399-400. Of the five knights, three (Aston, Sir John Bagot†, and Gresley) represented the county in Parl.

The names of Staffordshire’s MPs are known for 20 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. These 40 seats were taken by 20 individuals, who between them represented the county on only 49 recorded occasions. Remarkably, however, they had to their names at least 43 elections for other constituencies, increasing their average number of Parliaments to a high one of four and a half. In part, this reflects the unusually intense parliamentary careers of Robert Whitgreve and John Harper, who, between them, were elected on 26 occasions for Stafford before they were returned for Staffordshire. It is, however, notable that as many as seven other of the 20 MPs were also elected for another constituency: Cumberford, Lee and Mynors represented the county’s other borough, Newcastle-under-Lyme; Erdeswyk, John Gresley and Vernon sat for the neighbouring county of Derbyshire; and Humphrey Stafford, the neighbouring one of Worcestershire. Of the five who sat for both county and borough, all five sat for the borough first.

This overlap between Staffordshire’s representation and that of other constituencies was relatively new, apparent only from the accession of Henry IV. Of the 11 MPs elected to the last 11 Parliaments of Richard II’s reign, only Sir Robert Francis†, four times MP for Derbyshire before he was returned for Staffordshire, sat elsewhere; under the first two Lancastrian Kings as many as nine out of 17 did so. Equally significantly, it was not until 1420, when two former Newcastle-under-Lyme MPs, Mynors and Lee, were elected, that the county returned anyone who had previously sat for a borough.12 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 601-5.

The frequency with which the MPs represented other constituencies meant that several of them were notable parliamentarians. Whitgreve was elected to no fewer than 20 Parliaments over a period of nearly 40 years, although only in his last two Parliaments did he represent Staffordshire. Similarly, Harper had already sat in eight Parliaments before he represented Staffordshire in his last Parliament. Of those whose elections were confined to the county Hampton was the most notable, elected to seven Parliaments in a period of only 16 years. Two others were elected five times and again it is notable that their multiple elections came within a short period: Arblaster’s Parliaments fell within a period of 13 years and Lane’s in only five. By contrast, the only MP recorded as sitting for the county four times, John Stanley, did so over 25 years. Those with only a single Parliament to their name were comparatively rare. Eight of the 20 are recorded as sitting for Staffordshire only once, but four of these – Cumberford, Harper, Stafford and Vernon – were also returned for other constituencies.13 The other four were Delves, Mytton, Thomas Stanley and Swynnerton.

The brevity of the parliamentary careers of some of its most active MPs determined that immediate re-election was common. Nine of the 40 seats were filled by men who had sat for the county in the preceding Parliament. Hampton was returned to four successive assemblies and both Arblaster and Lane to three.14 There was, however, no instance of complete representative continuity to match the one such instance – the Parl. of 1390 (Nov.) – in the earlier period. In these circumstances, it is not surprising to find that, as in the earlier period of 1386-1421, the bulk of the county’s seats – 29 of 40 known seats – were taken by experienced MPs (including experience for other constituencies). On only two occasions – the Parliaments of 1422 and 1447 – was the county represented by two apparent novices.

The county’s MPs were principally drawn from its leading families. The families of Arblaster, Aston, Delves, Gresley, Stafford, Swynnerton and Vernon had all provided Staffordshire with one or more representatives in an earlier generation or generations. Of the other MPs the majority were from families, well established in the county, who had come to a new prominence in the lifetime of the MP, namely Cumberford, Egerton, Erdeswyk, Hampton, Lane and Mynors. Whitgreve falls into a similar category, although his family was from the borough of Stafford and is not known to have held land in the county at large before Robert’s remarkable career. Harper was also from the borough, but nothing is known of his family before his career and, by birth, he is the most obscure of Staffordshire’s MPs in Henry VI’s reign. The other MPs were recent imports into the county. Thomas Stanley was a younger son of the Stanleys of Lathom in Lancashire and came into the county by his marriage to the Arderne of Elford heiress. Her substantial estate then passed to his son John. Mytton, of a family of wealthy Shrewsbury burgesses, also owed his place in Staffordshire to his maternal inheritance: his mother was the daughter and heiress of Sir Adam Peshale† of Weston-under-Lizard, who had represented both Staffordshire and Shropshire in Parliament. The remaining MP, William Lee, was also an import. He was a representative of a junior branch of the family of Lee of Lea, near Crewe in Cheshire, and appears to have used the profits of his successful legal career to purchase an estate in Staffordshire.

Although Staffordshire was not a wealthy county, several of its MPs were men of considerable means, a reflection of the county’s tendency to elect substantial gentry with their main interests elsewhere. Three were of outstanding wealth. Very few gentry families could match the great wealth of the Vernons, who, at the end of the fifteenth century, were worth about £500 p.a., and William Vernon’s income, when he represented the county in 1455, was probably not far short of that sum. Humphrey Stafford was almost as rich. According to a valor of 1449, he had lands and annuities worth, before deductions, £420 p.a. Although he might not have been quite that wealthy when he represented the county in 1427, even by then his patrimony had been supplemented by the substantial Aylesbury inheritance of his wife, and it may be that, while a Staffordshire MP, he was worth about £300 p.a. When he last sat for the county in 1472, (Sir) John Stanley was also worth about that sum, his patrimony supplemented by the Stafford of Clifton Campville inheritance of his mother and the dower and jointure interests of his second wife in the Vampage lands. At the time of his first two elections – in 1447 and 1450 – he had only his mother’s lands, for his father was still alive.

Seven other of the MPs were also worth in excess of £100 p.a. or else the heirs to family estates worth at least that sum. Sir John Gresley’s father, Sir Thomas†, was assessed at £200 p.a. in the Derbyshire subsidy returns of 1435-6, and thus when Sir John represented Staffordshire in the 1420s his wealth as heir was potential rather than actual. Sir John’s own son, however, had inherited the family estate, albeit burdened by his stepmother, before he first represented Staffordshire in 1450. Aston was probably also worth about £200: his patrimony was enhanced by the Freville inheritance of his wife and an annuity of 40 marks from Anne, dowager countess of Stafford. Slightly less rich were Delves, whose income was estimated at 200 marks p.a. in a Chancery petition; Egerton, who, according to a marriage contract of 1443, had an income of £120 p.a.; Thomas Stanley; and John Hampton, if his wealth is reckoned at the end rather than the beginning of his parliamentary career.

The income of the other MPs is more difficult to assess, although there can be little doubt that they were all worth significantly less than £100. Erdeswyk, Lane and Mytton were distrained to take up knighthood, as also were the sons of Lee and Mynors, and it may thus be that all five of them were worth £40 p.a. or more. Arblaster’s patrimony was worth a modest 20 marks p.a., but the fees he enjoyed from the baronial Staffords probably gave him about £40 p.a. Swynnerton, once his wife had inherited the lands of another branch of that family, was probably worth about the same, although when he represented Staffordshire in 1455 his wife’s lands were in the hands of his mother-in-law. The other three MPs – Cumberford, Harper and Whitgreve – were lawyers whose landed income was certainly below £40 p.a., but who could draw on annuities and the fees of their profession. Whitgreve had an annuity of £30 from the Crown and ten marks from the duke of Buckingham, and Cumberford, as a filacer in the common pleas, benefited from both the profits of his office and fees as counsel. In origin, Harper was the most obscure of the MPs and he may have been the poorest. Yet his resources were not negligible: shortly before he was elected in 1431, his wife inherited the Staffordshire manor of Rushall and he already had possession of a small estate in southern England.15 Interestingly, Rushall had once been the residence of William Walsall, elected for the county nine times between 1365 and 1414 (Apr.).

All 20 MPs are known to have had landholdings outside Staffordshire at some point in their careers, although, if their holdings are measured only at the time they represented the county in Parliament, they are slightly less extensive. When Cumberford, Hampton and Swynnerton sat as MPs their landed interests appear to have been confined to the county. None the less, the other 17 had holdings, of greatly varying degrees of importance, in other shires. For Aston, the Gresleys, the Stanleys, Stafford and Vernon, these landholdings were substantial and worth as much or more than their Staffordshire lands, although, for others, they were attenuated and very peripheral to their main interests. Harper, for example, had three manors in Essex, Kent and Middlesex, but they had an annual value of no more than a few pounds. Reckoning the holdings of these 17 MPs when at their greatest extent during their careers as Staffordshire MPs, they extended into 16 English counties and two Welsh ones. Four of them – Delves, Egerton and the two Stanleys – had significant interests in Cheshire and, in this sense, Staffordshire provided an outlet for the parliamentary ambitions of the gentry of that un-enfranchised county.

Despite the wealth of some of its MPs, Staffordshire’s representation, as in most other counties, reflects the national decline in the number of knights. Between 1386 and the end of Henry IV’s reign, over 60% of the county’s seats were taken by knights; under Henry V this percentage was halved, in part at least due to the engagement of several local knights in the French war; and under Henry VI it halved again. Even this last statistic does not accurately reflect the true extent of the decline: knights filled four of the county’s 12 seats from 1422 to 1429, but to 12 successive Parliaments from 1431 to 1450 not a single knight was elected. This marked a nadir, for, in the sixteenth century, knights were once more to dominate the county’s representation. These very marked differences do not, however, reflect a major change in the nature of the county’s representation but simply the fluctuating number of knights available for return.

None the less, although knights were few among the 20 MPs of Henry VI’s reign, this is not to say that, as a body, they had little military experience. Just as the county’s MPs for the period 1386-1421 had included several soldiers of note, so too did those for the period under review. At least five of the 20 saw more than cursory service in the war in France, and three had military careers of distinction.16 In addition, Delves, Mynors and Thomas Stanley may have spent brief periods in France, and John Gresley was in the Calais garrison in the 1460s. Sir John Gresley, having fought at Agincourt, was lieutenant-general of Rouen in the 1430s; Stafford was a veteran of the 1421 campaign; and Arblaster held a captaincy, that of Dieppe, in the early 1420s, and served again in France in 1435.17 This service may have prevented him taking up his seat in Parl. He was elected on 15 Sept. 1435 for the Parl. set to begin on 10 Oct., but on 1 Oct. he contracted to serve in the defence of Calais. The expeditionary force mustered at Dover a few days later, and presumably Arblaster, who was later paid wages for the expedition, was absent in France during the parlty. session. The other two also had experience of more than one campaign: Aston may have been knighted at Agincourt and appears to have gone to France again in 1421, and Hampton served in 1415, 1417 and on the coronation expedition of 1430-2.18 Later, in the desperate circumstances of the fall of Normandy, Hampton was appointed capt. of Hammes in Picardy, but it may be that he did not take up the post. All of them acquired the bulk of their military experience before they represented the county in Parliament. Thus it can be said that as many as 17 of Staffordshire’s 40 seats were taken by men who could claim to be soldiers, a far higher proportion than in most other counties.

With respect to administrative service at home, the county’s MPs began their parliamentary careers with little such experience but ended their lives as experienced office-holders. Eighteen of the 20 held one of the major county offices – those of j.p., sheriff and escheator – in Staffordshire, and another, Humphrey Stafford, although not appointed in this county, was both sheriff and j.p. in others. Only Mynors did not hold one of these offices.

Thirteen of the 20 MPs were appointed to the Staffordshire bench at some point in their careers. Interestingly, all five of those who had been named to the bench before their first election for the county were lawyers, namely Cumberford, Harper, Lane, Lee and Whitgreve.19 Four of them had parlty. experience for one of the county’s boroughs before they were named to the bench. Four others – Arblaster, Erdeswyk, Hampton and Thomas Stanley – were appointed to the bench between their first and last elections for the county, and the rest – Aston, John Gresley, Mytton and Vernon – only after their last recorded elections for the county. The picture is slightly different if service as j.p.s elsewhere is considered, in that John Gresley and Vernon held the office in Derbyshire and Mytton in Shropshire when they were first elected for Staffordshire. None the less, the general picture is clear: save in the case of lawyers, appointment to the bench followed a first appearance in the Commons. Yet enough of the MPs were elevated to the bench during their parliamentary careers to ensure that as many as 16 of the 40 known seats were filled by serving Staffordshire j.p.s., including eight of the ten seats from 1439 to 1449 (Nov.).20 Two further seats were taken by former Staffs. j.p.s.: Delves in 1425 and Egerton in 1433. This was a significantly greater proportion than in the earlier period of 1386-1421, when only 13 or 14 of the county’s 54 seats were taken by j.p.s.21 The earlier survey gives the figure as 14, but this includes Sir Thomas Aston†, who may have been on the bench when elected to the 1406 Parliament but had been removed before it met. If, however, John Delves, whose name appears in the writ de expensis, rather than William Walsall, whose name is in the return, was one of the MPs in the Parl. of 1393, then the figure is again 14.

Nine of the 20 MPs served as sheriff of Staffordshire, most notably John Stanley, who held the office for as many as five terms between 1450 and 1475, and Delves, who was sheriff three times. Only three – Delves, Mytton and Swynnerton – are recorded as having held the office before their only recorded elections. Four further MPs – Aston, Egerton, Erdeswyk and John Stanley – were first appointed before their final elections for the county, and the two others (Sir John Gresley and Thomas Stanley) only after they had last sat for it. Thus, former sheriffs took as few as six of the 40 seats. Two of the nine held the shrievalty of other counties, (both after they had represented Staffordshire in Parliament),22 Stanley was appointed to the joint shrievalty of Warws. and Leics. and Mytton in Salop.and four of those who were not appointed in Staffordshire held the office elsewhere. Stafford was the most notable in this regard. He served three terms in the joint shrievalty of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and two in that of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, as well as briefly acting as Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick’s deputy in the hereditary shrievalty of Worcestershire. Curiously, he was appointed to his first term in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire when sitting for Staffordshire in the Parliament of 1427, and John Gresley provides a similar example: while MP for Staffordshire in 1453, he was pricked as the sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. There are, however, no examples of an MP representing Staffordshire while officiating as a sheriff to parallel the examples of John Delves† and Sir Thomas Gresley in the earlier period. Two other of the MPs held shrievalties in Wales: Arblaster, probably for the whole of his parliamentary career, was sheriff of the earl of Stafford’s lordship of Newport, and Hampton was sheriff of Merioneth when returned for Staffordshire in 1437.

Eight of the 20 MPs were appointed to the lesser office of escheator of Staffordshire. Of these eight, six – Delves, Harper, Lane, Lee, Vernon and Whitgreve – first served before they were elected to represent the county in Parliament; and this explains why as many as 11 of the 40 seats were taken by former escheators. Of the other two, John Gresley was appointed escheator while sitting in his first Parliament in 1450, and Swynnerton was appointed soon after his only Parliament. It is a curious feature of the earlier period that as many as four MPs sat for the county while escheator, with Aymer Lichfield† doing so twice.23 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 603. There is only one similar example for Henry VI’s reign. Lane, appointed as escheator on 24 Jan. 1426, was elected to Parliament on the following 14 Feb. and was thus in office as escheator throughout the Parliament.

As the examples of Stafford in 1427 and Gresley in 1453 show, there was occasionally a close correspondence between parliamentary service for Staffordshire and appointment to one of the major offices of county administration. Those two MPs were named to offices in other shires, but there are examples of appointments within Staffordshire itself. Aston was appointed to the bench there four weeks after the end of the 1429 Parliament; more strikingly, in December 1450, the two serving MPs, John Stanley and John Gresley, were pricked as sheriff and escheator respectively; and, in November 1468, Stanley was again named as sheriff a few months after the end of the 1467 Parliament. It is tempting to suppose that these men had used their time in Parliament to seek these appointments, but it might be more accurate to say that they had failed to use their time to avoid them. This possibility is implied by the fact that as many as six – Arblaster, Aston, Harper, Stafford, Thomas Stanley and Whitgreve – of the 20 MPs successfully sued out exemptions from office. All six, however, continued to be appointed to ad hoc commissions and the five who had been j.p.s remained as such after they had secured their exemptions. It is likely, therefore, that these grants were intended to protect the grantee from appointment to the offices of sheriff and escheator, which might prove financially burdensome.24 If, however, this was the case, it did not work for Stanley, for, having secured his exemption in Sept. 1438, he was pricked as sheriff two months later.

It appears to have been customary in the early Tudor period to elect one MP from the north of the county and another from the south.25 The Commons 1509-58, i. 186. There was, however, no such system in the first half of the fifteenth century. Occasionally the two MPs were from opposite ends of the county (as they were, for example, in the Parliaments of 1404 (Jan.), 1414 (Apr.), 1414 (Nov.), 1425 and 1442), but on no greater number of occasions than one might have expected from a purely random distribution. Even so, it was rare for near-neighbours to be returned together. Between 1386 and 1455 this happened only in respect of the Parliaments of 1388 (Feb.) and 1402. If any geographical determinants can be placed upon Staffordshire’s representation, the division was not between north and south but between east and west. On seven occasions (1390 (Jan. and Nov.), 1420, 1437, 1447, 1449 (Feb.) and 1455) the two MPs were drawn from opposite sides of the county. It would, however, be trite to conclude that this reflects an attempt to balance the interests of the duchy, the predominant landholder in the east, with those of the Staffords, whose lands lay in the west, not least because, in respect of the last four of these Parliaments, Duke Humphrey was steward of the duchy lands.

With respect to the form and conduct of Staffordshire’s parliamentary elections, the evidence is defective. Twenty-nine electoral indentures survive for the Parliaments between 1407 and 1478, and none thereafter until 1542. The variation in the number of attestors named is significantly less than in many other shires. No indenture names more than the 28 listed in that for the Parliament of 1478 and none fewer than the seven listed in the 1407 indenture. Of the 18 surviving indentures for Henry VI’s reign, the number of attestors varies between the eight named in 1447 to the 25 named in both 1450 and 1455. Clearly not all those present at any election were named and sometimes this is made explicit in the wording of the indenture. That of 1407 describes the election as having been made ‘tam de assensu’ of the sheriff and the named attestors ‘quam de assensu’ of the whole community of the county then present; and those of 1426 and 1427 by the attestors ‘ex assensu tocius comitatis’.26 C219/10/4; 13/4, 5.

Although the indentures name only a minority of those present, it is very likely that these included all the most prominent individuals. If this is the case, then it is clear that the elections were rarely attended by more than a handful of the leading men of the shire. Indeed, only ten of Staffordshire’s 20 MPs appear among the attestors, significantly lower than the equivalent figure in most other shires.27 Of the ten who did not attest in Staffs., two (Stafford and Vernon) did so in other shires; and of the ten who did attest in the county, Sir John Gresley also attested two Derbys. elections and Mynors one. Only Erdeswyk was regular in attendance, appearing in ten of the indentures between 1411 and 1450. Poor attendance at the Staffordshire hustings is also reflected in the comparative rarity with which knights, admittedly few in the county during this period, appeared among the attestors. No knights are named in 16 of the 29 indentures, and only one in a further nine. Only one documented election of the period 1407 to 1478 brought a significant number of the county’s leading gentry together, and that was held at Stafford castle on 28 Dec. 1441. The 24 attestors were headed by three knights (Aston, Sir John Gresley and Sir Philip Chetwynd), and nine esquires.28 C219/15/2.

There are surprisingly few examples of close kinship between electors and elected: in 1427 Sir Thomas Gresley headed the attestors to his son Sir John’s second election for the county, but there are no similar instances until George Stanley attested the election of his half-brother, (Sir) John, in 1467 and 1472. More interesting is the election of 1435 when William Lee appears second among the attestors to his own election, and it may be that an attempt was made to disguise the fact with his name spelt ‘Legh’ as attestor and ‘Lee’ as MP.29 C219/14/5. There is only one instance in Henry VI’s reign of a near kinship between the presiding sheriff and one of those elected: on 29 Oct. 1422 the sheriff, Sir Thomas Gresley, returned his son, Sir John.

The date on which the Staffordshire elections were held present a curious feature. Elections should have been held on the historic date of the county court, in other words, every election on the same day of the week. That day in Staffordshire was Thursday and, from the election to the Parliament of 1414 (Nov.) to that of 1478, all the county’s documented parliamentary elections, save one, were duly held on that day of the week. Earlier, however, there had been variation: the election to the Parliament of 1407 was held on a Saturday and those to the assemblies of 1411 and May 1413 were held on a Monday.30 C219/10/4, 6; 11/2. The election of 1453 provides an irregularity of another sort. It was not held until 8 Mar., two days after the Parliament had convened, presumably because the writ, issued on 20 Jan., had not arrived in time for the previous court on 8 Feb. The election to the Parliament of 1431 had been almost as tardy for it was not held until the day before Parliament assembled.31 C219/14/2; 16/2.

There are a few examples of Staffordshire’s MPs putting an election to Parliament to personal ends. When sitting for the county in 1431, Harper, no doubt through a personal intervention, secured the inclusion of a clause protecting his wife’s title to the manor of Rowley in a Commons’ petition for confirmation of common law judgments made before Henry IV’s accession. Egerton provides a less clear cut example, but it is a fair speculation that his candidature in 1429 was related to his position as a feoffee of Delves. The latter, very shortly before his death in April of that year, had enfeoffed Egerton and others of his lands, and the Crown had every reason to view this feoffment as a collusive attempt to deprive it of the wardship of Delves’s heir. Egerton must have been anxious to secure seisin, and it was perhaps to this end that he sought election to Parliament on 25 Aug. Two days later the details of the feoffment were set down before and accepted by a local jury; and on the following 1 Dec., towards the end of the Parliament’s first session, a writ ordered the removal of the King’s hands from the enfeoffed manors. Egerton’s fellow MP in this Parliament, Aston, may have pursued less self-interested aims there. On 28 Feb. 1430, five days after Parliament’s end, the Crown granted his immediate neighbours, the ‘good men’ of the town of Wolseley, pontage for the term of three years, the money raised to be spent under his supervision. It is not unlikely that Aston himself had lobbied for the grant. Lobbying as MP probably lay behind two further grants. While he was sitting in the 1439 Parliament, Arblaster secured royal acknowledgement of his right to a disputed wardship, and (Sir) John Stanley was an MP in the Parliament of 1467 when he and his son, Humphrey†, were jointly granted the office of ranger in the royal forest of Cannock.

These examples suggest that the men returned for Staffordshire saw parliamentary service as a means of serving themselves. More difficult to determine is how far they saw it as a means of serving their baronial superiors. Nearly all the MPs had connexions, of varying degrees of intensity, with the Staffords. Their dominance was such as to leave little room for the exercise of electoral patronage by any other family, and of the 20 MPs only Lane and Mynors had no documented links with them. This suggests two conclusions. Either it was nearly impossible to secure a seat without the support of the Staffords, and thus parliamentary service was an expression of service to the family, or such was the breadth of the family’s retinue within the shire that few potential MPs stood outside its orbit. The answer lies somewhere in between these two extremes, but nearer the latter than the former. For several of the MPs their connexion with Humphrey Stafford, the head of the family from his coming of age in 1423 to his death in 1460, was merely an enhancement of an independent standing. Aston, Delves, Egerton, Erdeswyk, Stafford, the Gresleys, the Stanleys and Vernon were leading gentry with independent claims to a seat for the county, and Hampton, as an important royal servant, had equal claims of another sort. The fact of their elections did not depend on Stafford patronage although the timing might be determined by a desire to serve the Stafford interest. Aston, for example, long on close terms with Anne, the dowager countess of Stafford, may have chosen to sit in 1429 to forward her dispute with the Crown over the division of the de Bohun inheritance; and in 1455 Vernon’s candidature may, in part, have been determined by the need of Duke Humphrey, having fought on the losing side at the first battle of St. Albans, for men of weight to defend his interests in the Commons.

For others, however, their place in the service of the Stafford family was essential to their place in local affairs. Arblaster provides the clearest example. Although from a well-established family, his inheritance was small and he would not have been returned five times had he not been one of Humphrey Stafford’s most intimate servants. Cumberford, Harper, Lee and Whitgreve, who all progressed from one of the county’s borough seats to representing Staffordshire itself, were also in the same case. It was almost unknown for a mere filacer to sit for a shire, yet Cumberford, retained as legal counsel by Duke Humphrey, was elected to the first Parliament of 1449; Whitgreve’s long service as a teller of the Exchequer was not enough to recommend him to a county seat and his close relationship with Duke Humphrey is explanation for his two elections in the 1440s; and the same argument can be made in the cases of Harper and Lee. The two remaining MPs, Mytton and Swynnerton, both from established gentry families, are more difficult to categorize, but the fact that they were both in the inner circle of the Stafford retinue (Swynnerton may have been Duke Humphrey’s godson) and were elected as comparatively young men suggests that the duke’s patronage was a factor in their elections.

In so far as Staffordshire’s elections were determined by the exercise of patronage that of the Stafford family was the principal factor in determining the county’s representation. The Crown’s influence, while not negligible, was secondary and to some extent mediated through the Stafford retinue. Two of the MPs had important places in royal service. Hampton was an usher of the royal chamber and an esquire for the King’s body at the time of his seven elections; and Whitgreve, when elected twice in the 1440s, was a long-serving teller of the Exchequer as well as receiver of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tutbury. Other serving duchy officers were also returned. Mynors was the duchy bailiff in the county when elected as a Staffordshire MP in 1420, 1431 and 1437; and while an MP in 1422 Sir John Gresley was master forester of the chase of Duffield Frith in Derbyshire. Arblaster, at the time of his last two Parliaments in the 1430s, was both an esquire of the royal household and then surveyor of the duchy chase of Needwood; and Cumberford, as MP in 1449 ((Nov.), was the duchy’s attorney in the court of common pleas having shortly before been employed as a justice in the duchy lordships in South Wales. Between them these men, while employed by the Crown, filled 15 of the 40 known seats during Henry VI’s reign, and it might be argued that the Crown exercised a very significant influence over the county’s representation. Yet this would be a misleading impression. For Arblaster and Cumberford their connexion with the Crown was mediated through Humphrey Stafford, and Whitgreve was at least as much a servant of Stafford as he was of the Crown. The Crown’s influence over elections was, as in other counties, indirect: a desire to serve the Crown motivated its servants to stand, and their place in the royal service enhanced their status in their search for a seat. Hampton provides an excellent exemplar here. Interestingly, his career has a parallel in the earlier period in that of William Walsall† of Rushall, whose multiple returns for the county were an expression of both his skill as a professional administrator and his place in the royal household.

A lack of evidence makes it difficult to be dogmatic about the part taken by Staffordshire’s MPs in the civil war of 1459-61. Given the close connexions many of them had with the Lancastrian duke of Buckingham, it might be expected that they would turn out for Henry VI, and, as far as the evidence goes, this appears to have been what happened. According to ‘Gregory’s chronicle’, both (Sir) John Gresley and John Stanley were among seven men knighted by the King before the battle of Blore Heath on 23 Sept. 1459, only two of whom survived the battle. Although the story is wrong in detail (the King was not present and Gresley was already a knight), there is a strong possibility that both participated in a battle fought not far distant from their lands.32 Hist. Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 204. Unfortunately this is the only evidence of the MPs in arms during 1459-61, but there is a strong possibility that three other MPs fought for Lancaster. In the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 Mytton was removed from the Shropshire bench; and it may be that he had been in Buckingham’s retinue at the battle. In December 1461 the Yorkists issued a commission for the arrest of Swynnerton, implying that he too had taken arms against them; and in 1462 Vernon, along with the attainted Lancastrian, (Sir) Edmund Mountfort*, was appealed for the murder of a servant of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. With respect to the five other of the county’s MPs who lived through at least part of the 1459-61 period, three (Arblaster, who died as an old man in about 1460, Hampton, a veteran of Henry V’s wars, and Thomas Stanley) were disqualified from fighting by age. The other two (Cumberford and Harper) were lawyers, who, although they are unlikely to have fought, offered the Lancastrian regime their administrative assistance. In December 1459 Harper was named as auditor of the forfeited estates of the earl of Warwick, and two months later Cumberford was one of those commissioned to seize the property of the attainted Yorkist, Sir William Oldhall*.

None the less, if the county was Lancastrian in sympathy, those sympathies may have been diminished by Duke Humphrey’s death at Northampton. One of the MPs, (Sir) John Gresley, certainly took this as his cue to abandon the Lancastrian house his family had served for so long. He represented Derbyshire in the Yorkist Parliament of October 1460 and, seemingly, fought in the Yorkist ranks at Towton and in the campaign to reduce the northern strongholds of the Lancastrians in the winter of 1462-3. The other MP supposedly knighted on the field of Blore Heath, John Stanley, also later fought for York, serving with Gresley in the 1462-3 campaign and later fighting for Edward IV at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. This admittedly limited evidence would tend to contradict the recent verdict of an historian of the county that its gentry, ‘suppressed latent Lancastrian sympathies and ignored all entreaties or contractual obligations to follow their patrons into action’.33 Rowney, 74. If there was any evidence to identify those who fought in Buckingham’s retinue at Northampton, this view would probably be proved manifestly false. Only with Buckingham’s death did support for Lancaster fade in the county.

The representation of Staffordshire presents some singular features in Henry VI’s reign. Remarkably, as many as nine of its 20 MPs represented other constituencies, compared, for example, with only four of 18 in Derbyshire, with which its representation partially overlapped. The contrast is instructive. In Derbyshire representation was dominated, to an unusual degree, by a small elite of only four families. Twenty of its 44 seats were taken by the Blounts, Cockaynes, Gresleys and Vernons. Staffordshire did not have so clearly defined an elite. Its wealth was more widely distributed, and this provided electoral opportunities for men who, although they had significant interests in the county, were principally identified with neighbouring ones. Thus it was that Gresley and Vernon, whose main residences lay in Derbyshire, and Stafford, who lived in Worcestershire, were elected. Yet the election of such men is only part of the reason for the overlap between the county’s representation and that of other constituencies. Of greater significance was the unusually close relationship between its representation and that of its boroughs. In Derbyshire under Henry VI none of its MPs were elected for a borough; in Staffordshire as many as five sat for either Newcastle-under-Lyme or Stafford. The explanation lies in the influence of the great family of Stafford. Although this was not all-encompassing, it was exercised over the elections of both county and boroughs. This enabled some of its servants to progress from a borough to a county seat in a way that would not have been possible in most shires. The election of Harper in 1431 and those of Cumberford and Whitgreve in the 1440s fall into this category.

A related expression of the differences in the representation of the two counties lies in the much greater prominence of lawyers among the Staffordshire MPs as compared to those for Derbyshire. The dominance of a parliamentary and social elite in the latter county left few vacancies for lawyers: in Henry VI’s reign only two lawyers, filling five seats, were returned. In the same period Staffordshire elected five, who took nearly a quarter of its seats. There may also be another reason for the distinctiveness of the county’s representation. Its gentry were not, it has been suggested for the Tudor period, ‘Parliament-minded’, and this apparent lack of enthusiasm for parliamentary service may already have been apparent under Henry VI. There is no evidence that any election was contested during that reign, and the hustings were generally poorly attended. This may reflect no more than the strength of the Stafford interest, but it may be that the exercise of this influence was facilitated by a general indifference to parliamentary service.34 The Commons 1509-58, i. 186; 1558-1603, i. 241.