Stafford

Stafford obtained its first charter in 1206, with the burgesses holding their privileges for the modest annual fee farm of five marks payable to the Crown. Little is known of the borough’s form of government save that by 1233 it was headed by two bailiffs elected annually on the feast of All Saints, and, under an extension of the borough’s privileges in 1261, these bailiffs were assisted by an elected coroner. By 1476 there was also a governing council of 25, from whom, under the terms of a royal ordinance of 1501, the bailiffs were chosen, but it is not known when this council was instituted.1 CChR, i. 71-72; iii. 278-9; H.A. Merewether and A.J. Stephens, Hist. Bors. and Municipal Corporations, ii. 1065; VCH Staffs. vi. 222-3. Beyond the confirmation of their charters in 1400, 1414, 1440 and 1478, the bailiffs and burgesses received only one grant of royal patronage in the fifteenth century. In 1412 they were licensed to hold a fair annually on 3 May to supplement the fairs they had long held in June and September.2 CPR, 1399-1401, p. 174; 1413-16, p. 170; 1476-85, p. 63; J.W. Bradley, Stafford Chs. 65-66; CChR, ii. 36; v. 446; VCH Staffs. vi. 214, 222.

Although Stafford was a royal borough, the local lordship of the great baronial family of Stafford was far more important there than that of the Crown. High on a hill above the town, the family’s castle, rebuilt almost from new in the third quarter of the fourteenth century by Ralph Stafford, earl of Stafford, was both a visual and material manifestation of the family’s local pre-eminence. In the period 1386-1421 this pre-eminence had meant little, for from the death of Hugh, the second earl, in 1386, the family had had an adult head for only about six years before the coming of age of the second earl’s grandson, Humphey, at the beginning of the period under review here. Although his castle at Stafford was in the hands of his mother, the dowager-countess Anne, until her death in 1438, and was, in any event, only a secondary residence for the family, Humphrey, created duke of Buckingham in 1444, was throughout the period a natural patron for the townsmen.3 A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 432-5; CP, xii (1), 179-81; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 66 Indeed, their connexions with the baronial family made its MPs men of greater importance than they would otherwise have been, for their town was, judged by the standards of county towns such as Worcester and Shrewsbury, a meagre one.

The identity of the borough’s MPs is known for 18 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. Remarkably, these 36 seats were filled by only 13 individuals, in marked contrast to the county’s other borough, Newcastle-under-Lyme, which returned 24 men in the same period. Since as many as six of Stafford’s MPs (Ashby, Atkinson, Clerk, Garnett, and the two Prestons) are recorded as sitting for the borough only once, this continuity of representation was achieved through the repeated returns of a few men, notably Harper and Robert Whitgreve. The latter’s parliamentary career was one of the most intense of the fifteenth century. He was elected for the borough to 18 of the 20 Parliaments for which the identity of Stafford’s MPs is known between 1411 and 1442, including all 15 between 1420 and 1442. Since the returns are lost for 1439 and he was elected for Staffordshire in 1445, it is almost certain that he sat in 17 consecutive assemblies. Harper’s parliamentary career is impressive when compared with any other than that of Whitgreve. He sat for Stafford in eight of the ten Parliaments that met between 1419 and 1429, and in seven of these he was Whitgreve’s companion. Their dominance of the borough’s representation could be taken to mean that there was little enthusiasm for parliamentary service among local burgesses happy to see the representative burden lifted from them.

In total the 13 MPs sat for the borough on 45 recorded occasions. This, however, was not the extent of their parliamentary experience, for four of them represented other constituencies too. Harper, along with Robert Whitgreve, was elected for the county after multiple returns for the county town, in his case once compared with Whitgreve’s twice. Hextall, on three occasions, and Bruyn, on one, sat for the other Staffordshire borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and Hextall was also elected, some years later, for the Surrey borough of Bletchingley and the county of Kent. This increases the total known returns of the 13 MPs to 54, or over four Parliaments per MP. This high level of continuity in the borough’s representation produced as many as 19 instances of immediate re-election, and in four Parliaments – those of 1425, 1429, 1432 and 1455 – it was represented by the two men who had served for it in the previous assembly. Twenty-seven of the 36 known seats were taken by men with previous parliamentary experience, and to only two Parliaments – those of 1447 and 1449 (Nov.) – did Stafford seemingly return two parliamentary novices (although allowance must be made here for the loss of the returns for the Parliaments of 1439 and 1445). A high level of continuity is also evident in the period from 1386 to 1421, when in only a single Parliament was the borough represented by two apparent novices, and it seems to have been a characteristic of the borough’s representation from the beginnings of its parliamentary history. Hugh Snell†, for example, had sat for Stafford in 13 Parliaments between 1337 and 1377, and there are other examples of men returned several times within a short period, notably the wool merchant, John le Rotour†, elected six times between 1337 and 1344.4 Staffs. Parlty. Hist. i (Wm. Salt Arch. Soc.), 74.

In Henry VI’s reign Stafford’s representation was still dominated by men who had their origins in the borough, and this explains why, among the 13, there were three pairs of near kinsmen. The Whitgreves and Prestons were father and son, and the Barbers, sons of another of the borough’s MPs, Thomas Barber†, were brothers.5 Three successive generations of the Barbers represented the borough, for Humphrey Barber†, MP in 1495, was John’s son. These six, together with Ashby, Clerk and Garnett, were almost certainly born in Stafford. Of the other four, three – Hextall, Bruyn and Harper – seem to have hailed from families resident nearby. Hextall was from a gentry family of Hextall, only three miles from the town (a family which, rather anomalously, also had property in Kent); Bruyn came from the diocese of Lichfield; and Harper, judging from the fact that he began his career as an attorney at the Staffordshire assizes, was also born in the county if not the town. The obscure Atkinson is the only one to whom no certain origins can be assigned.

Against this background, it is surprising to find that only four of the 13 are recorded as holding office within the borough (the equivalent figure for the period 1386-1421 is eight of 19). William Preston I was bailiff for at least five annual terms, and John Barber, Garnett and Robert Whitgreve all served at least once. This low level of overlap between parliamentary representation and borough office is to be explained, in part, by the difficulty of reconstructing from disparate evidence a list of all those who served as bailiffs of Stafford during the fifteenth century, or of identifying even one man who held the office of coroner there.6 For a list of the borough’s known bailiffs: Bradley, 203-4. The identity of no coroner is known before 1602: VCH Staffs. vi. 224. If any judgement may be made on so small a sample and with evidence so incomplete, appointment as bailiff tended to come after election to Parliament. Both Barber and Garnett were appointed after the end of their parliamentary careers, and Whitgreve had already represented the borough in many Parliaments before he was elected again while serving as bailiff in 1429. A contrary example is provided by Preston, who had served two terms as bailiff before his first recorded election in 1426.

Failures of evidence are, however, only one reason why so few of the MPs are recorded as bailiffs. It is also a reflection of the fact that several of the MPs, although they were native to, or had strong affiliations with, Stafford, were too important to concern themselves closely or protractedly with the borough’s affairs. Their wide-ranging interests are reflected in the positions they held elsewhere, even when they sat for the borough. The lawyer Bruyn, for example, when elected twice in the 1440s, was a j.p. in Kent and a filacer of the court of common pleas; Harper was serving as escheator of Staffordshire while sitting as MP for the borough in 1429, as was Robert Whitgreve when elected in both 1435 and 1442; and Hextall was under sheriff of Staffordshire when MP for Stafford in 1431 and 1432. Such men, Whitgreve aside, were remote candidates as bailiffs.

When the office-holding record of the MPs is considered collectively, it is clear how untypical they were of a group of mere burgesses, for as many as six of the 13 held royal office outside the borough. Three are recorded as under sheriff. Both Hextall and William Preston I held the office in Staffordshire (and the latter, because his sheriff, Humphrey Haughton†, died in office, even served a brief term as acting sheriff in 1420), and Hextall was serving when he represented the borough in 1432. Bruyn had been under sheriff in London, an office that was the preserve of lawyers active in the Westminster courts, before he sat for the borough in the 1440s. Since, however, only a very partial list can be made of the under sheriffs, it is likely that they were not the only three, for both Harper and Robert Whitgreve have career profiles typical of those who held that office. Four served as escheators in Staffordshire, John Barber and Hextall doing so only once, but Harper and Robert Whitgreve serving three and five terms respectively. Indeed, in November 1427 the latter was named to the office while sitting as MP for the borough. Of these four only Barber was appointed before his first recorded election for Stafford, although as many as 12 of the boroughs seats were taken by serving or former escheators.

Four of the MPs held office as j.p.s. Both Harper and Robert Whitgreve were named in Staffordshire, but in Harper’s case not until after the last of his elections for the borough (albeit very soon after), and in Whitgreve’s after the 17th of his 18 borough elections. Bruyn and Hextall were named in their adopted county of Kent, although, in Hextall’s case, not until nearly 20 years after he sat for Stafford. Only one of the MPs, Roger Clerk, appears to have been a coroner, serving in Staffordshire, but that identification can only be a tentative one. The impression from these figures is that for three of the MPs – Harper, Hextall and Robert Whitgreve – election for the borough stood at the beginning of, and by implication paved the way for, notable administrative careers.

The evidence does not allow a trade to be assigned to any of the MPs who might be described as pure burgesses. Five of Stafford’s MPs can, however, be categorized as lawyers. Bruyn was already a lawyer of some standing when elected for Stafford, having been not only under sheriff of London but also, since the 1420s, an associate justice of assize and a filacer in the common pleas; and Harper, active as an attorney at the Staffordshire assizes and in the central courts as a young man in the 1410s, had by the 1420s been admitted to either the Inner or Middle Temple. These two men were lawyers by any definition. The other three – Clerk, Hextall and Robert Whitgreve – are identified as lawyers largely by the pattern of their careers. According to a seventeenth-century antiquary, Whitgreve was ‘bred up in the study of the municipall laws’, and in the early 1430s he was an itinerant justice for Earl Humphrey in the lordship of Newport. Hextall was named to two gaol delivery commissions, which were largely staffed by lawyers, and Clerk was, after he represented the borough, clerk of the peace and coroner in Staffordshire. If they are counted as lawyers, as on balance they should be, then lawyers filled 23 of the borough’s 36 known seats, including, remarkably, 22 of 24 between 1422 and 1442. This forms a very marked contrast with the early part of the 1386-1421 period, for it was not until 1411, with Robert Whitegreve’s first election, that anyone with a legal background was returned.7 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 612.

Given the local dominance of the great family of Stafford, the connexions between Earl (and later Duke) Humphrey must take pride of place in any discussion of the influences determining the borough’s representation. From one perspective, he exercised a near monopoly over the borough’s representation in that nearly all the borough’s seats were filled by men connected to him in one way or another. Thirty of the 36 seats were filled by such men, and, in respect of the five MPs who cannot, on the available evidence, be connected to him – Atkinson, Garnett, the two Prestons and Humphrey Whitgreve – the possibility cannot be discounted that better evidence would reveal such a link. Further, six of the 13 MPs – William Barber, Bruyn, Clerk, Harper, Hextall and Robert Whitgreve – are recorded as holding formal positions in the administration of his family estates, taking 24 of the town’s 36 known seats, including 23 of 24 between 1422 and 1442.

Yet this picture of total dominance needs to be modified. In respect of the prominence of the earl’s officials among the town’s MPs, so apparent in the first 20 years of Henry VI’s reign, it is worth observing that the correlation is rarely exact between the tenure of office as a Stafford official and parliamentary service for the borough. William Barber was clerk of Duke Humphrey’s household when an MP in the 1450s (as he may also have been when an MP in 1433), but in the case of the other five, they are not recorded as holding office until after they had already represented the borough. Harper, for example, sat for Stafford in eight Parliaments from 1419 to 1429, but it was not until July 1428 that he was appointed as steward and receiver of the lordship of Stafford, then in the hands of the future duke’s mother. Thereafter he held several offices in the duke’s administration, including that of auditor-general in the 1440s and 1450s. Similarly, it was not until Hextall had sat for the borough three times that, in May 1437, he was appointed as the receiver for Earl Humphrey in Kent and Surrey; Robert Whitgreve had already been a Stafford MP more than a dozen times when, in 1432, he is recorded as serving as the earl’s parker at Stafford; Bruyn was not appointed as Duke Humphrey’s steward in Kent until shortly after sitting for the borough for the second and last time; and Clerk’s single election came four years before he was appointed clerk of the earl’s Staffordshire courts.

No doubt better evidence would give a slightly different perspective. A more complete list of the staff of the administration of Stafford estates would, in all likelihood, show that some of these MPs held office earlier, and perhaps that other of the MPs were Stafford officials even though they are not recorded as such. None the less, the officers of the Stafford administration are well enough documented to justify the conclusion that several of the town’s MPs began their parliamentary service before they entered the Stafford retinue (or, at least, before they had advanced sufficiently within it to secure office). Further, even leaving this aside, it would be wrong to conclude that, even in the case of the MPs most closely associated with Earl Humphrey, they owed their election to his active management. As Rawcliffe has remarked, had the Staffords exercised such management, each minority in the family ‘would have seen a dramatic change’ in the borough’s representation.8 Rawcliffe, 82. Yet, even though the head of the family was a minor for most of the period from 1386 to 1423, when Earl Humphrey came of age no such change is apparent.

It should also be emphasized that the most important of the borough’s MPs, although the patronage of the Stafford family mattered a great deal to them, did not owe their careers to that patronage alone. Harper and Robert Whitgreve, who took so many of the seats, were both first elected for the borough during Earl Humphrey’s minority, and were defined, even at the time they represented the borough, by other associations at least as much as they were by the services they rendered to that great family. Notably, at the time of all but his first two elections to Parliament, Whitgreve was one of the tellers of the Exchequer, an onerous role that demanded more of his time than his service to the Staffords.

This raises the question of the Crown’s influence over the borough’s representation. The career of Robert Whitgreve’s younger son, Humphrey, is instructive here. He followed his father into royal service but not, seemingly, into that of the Staffords. When he represented the borough in the successive Parliaments of 1449 (Nov.) and 1450, he was a yeoman of the King’s chamber, and he went on to form so close an attachment to Queen Margaret that he followed her into exile after the battle of Towton. In the case of both Whitgreves their places in royal service were probably incidental to their elections to Parliament, but the explanation of the election of another putative royal servant, Robert Atkinson, in 1447 is not so readily explained. There is no evidence to connect him with Stafford, and the unusual circumstances of the Parliament, intended as the forum for the court’s attack on Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, raises the possibility that the MP is to be identified with the man who was yeoman of the ewery for the King’s mouth in the 1430s. The identification is an uncertain one and would not even be worth suggesting outside the context of the high proportion of royal servants elected to this Parliament. It could, at least equally, be that the MP was an obscure Stafford man elected because of the difficulty of finding willing candidates to sit in a Parliament that promised to be controversial. The fact that the borough returned no other carpet-baggers in this period supports this suggestion. If, however, the MP was the household man, it suggests active royal intervention in a Stafford parliamentary election.

Unfortunately, the parliamentary returns reveal nothing about the influences operating on the town’s representation or even much about the electoral process there. There are no separate borough indentures for any Parliament before 1472 and no separate list of borough attestors in any county return before 1467.9 As a result, only one of the 13 MPs, Humphrey Whitgreve, appears as an attestor to a Stafford election. The names of the MPs before 1467 were given on the endorsement of the electoral writ and, on occasion, also in the county indenture. Here there was a change in diplomatic in the indenture of 1431. Before that date the names of the Stafford MPs were given in the county indentures in respect of only the Parliaments of 1407 and 1414 (Nov.), but from 1431 until 1442 their names invariably appeared there. The earlier practice was resumed in the indentures for the Parliaments of 1447, 1449 (Feb.) and 1449 (Nov.), but all the county and borough MPs are named together in respect of the three surviving indentures of the 1450s.

These combined indentures imply that the MPs for both Staffordshire boroughs were elected at the same time and by the same electors who returned the county MPs, but it is certain that this was not so. The compiler of the indenture occasionally gives a hint that more than one electoral body was involved. In the 1407 indenture the two bailiffs of Stafford are named as the last two attestors, and in that of 1433 three of the attestors are described as burgesses of Stafford.10 C219/10/4; 14/4. Other returns imply separate elections in another way. On the dorse of the electoral writ for 1426 and in the 1450 county indenture the names of the MPs for both Stafford and Newcastle-under-Lyme have been added in blanks left in the original drafts, suggesting that their identity was unknown to the sheriff when he held the county election.11 C219/13/4; 16/1. This evidence is important for it shows the later indentures which have separate lists of borough attestors represent innovations in diplomatic rather than practice.

As many as eight of the borough’s 13 MPs appear as attestors to the Staffordshire elections. Of these – John Barber, Bruyn, Hextall and William Preston II – are recorded as attesting only one election, but Clerk and William Preston I are named on three occasions each, Robert Whitgreve on four and Harper on five. It is probably no more than coincidence that on four occasions one of those elected for the borough is found among the attestors to the county election: Robert Whitgreve in 1423 and 1427, William Preston II in 1449 (Nov.) and John Barber in 1455.

As remarked earlier, it would be wrong to conclude that active management produced the dominance of the borough’s representation in Henry VI’s reign by servants of the earl of Stafford. There are, however, two instances in which the returns show signs of amendment. On the dorse of the writ for the Parliament of 1422 Harper’s name has been written over an erasure, and in that for the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.) ‘Richard’ has been written over ‘John’ before ‘Bruyn’.12 C219/13/1; 15/6. These are perhaps to be ascribed to mere inadvertence. In the first case, it may be that Harper, who had already been elected by the borough on several occasions, was late in making himself available for election; and in the second the mistake over Bruyn’s Christian name may have arisen from the scribe’s unfamiliarity with it. None the less, later in the century there is clear evidence that the borough’s elections were open to external interference. In 1467 the name of John Harper’s son, Richard†, was written over an erasure in a new different hand in both the indenture and on the dorse of writ.13 C219/17/1. This too might be attributed to casual error, but there can be no doubt about the irregularity of the borough’s return to the Parliament of 1487. The sheriff, Sir Henry Willoughby, returned two men associated with himself, William Trussell† and Henry Lisle†. This marked a departure from the pattern of representation that had prevailed in the period under review here, for neither of the MPs had any connexion with the borough, and the election result was challenged. On 28 Jan. 1488, two months after the end of the Parliament, Sir Hugh Peshale†, who, with his home at Hopton just outside Stafford, was better qualified to represent the borough than either of those returned, claimed the statutory penalty of £100 against the sheriff for a false return. He claimed that the bailiff and burgesses had elected him on 29 Oct. 1487 but that the sheriff had falsely returned Trussell. No verdict is recorded, but it is likely that Willoughby was guilty.14 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 564; E13/172, rot. 31; I. Rowney, ‘Staffs. Political Community’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 169-70.

Willoughby’s intervention seems to have resulted from purely personal motives and it would be unwise to draw firm conclusions from this election about the changing pattern of the borough’s representation. Yet the thwarted candidature of Peshale, together with the election in 1478 of Thomas Gresley† and John Egerton†, heirs to two substantial inheritances, strongly implies that the leading local gentry were, by the end of the fifteenth century, willing to take a seat for Stafford in a way they had not been earlier. This social inflation in the standing of the borough’s MPs is apparent in the mid-Tudor period, when the Stafford MPs included both a younger son and an illegitimate brother of Henry, Lord Stafford.15 The Commons 1509-58, i. 188-9. It thus appears that Henry VI’s reign was the last period when the borough’s representation was dominated by men who, although they had connexions and employment outside the borough, were at least periodically resident there. This, in turn, marked a change from the fourteenth century, when the borough’s representation was in the hands of local tradesmen.