Robert was born into an ancient and wealthy gentry family with estates in Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Northamptonshire and Cheshire. These widespread holdings are reflected in the circumstances of his birth. Although Warwickshire was the principal focus of the family’s interests, his mother was confined at their manor house at Dorfold in the Cheshire parish of Acton, the inheritance of his paternal grandmother; and it was a gentleman of that county, Robert Needham (father of the future judge, John Needham*), who stood as his godfather on his baptism in Acton church.
This relatively low valuation reflects the fact that Arderne’s wardship was then of greater potential than actual value. By settlements made in 1400, probably at the time of his parents’ marriage, and in 1414, nearly the whole of the Arderne inheritance had been settled in jointure, and his mother thus held the lands (or, at least, was entitled to do so) until her death early in 1435.
With the family estate thus further augmented by marriage, all seemed set fair for the young Robert to enjoy a prosperous and successful career. On coming of age, he was able to obtain livery of his estates with extraordinary expedition. On 5 Nov. 1433 writs for his proof of age were issued to the escheator of the county of his birth; the relevant inquisition was held two days later; and on 9 Nov. the escheator was ordered to give him livery. On 26 May 1435 another writ gave him seisin of his mother’s dower in that county, and his patrimony was united in his hands.
Yet even during this early period of apparent promise there were signs that all was not quite as it should have been. Arderne seems to have run up debts before coming of age. As early as about 1433, a wealthy Northamptonshire knight, Sir Walter Lucy, advanced him ‘in his gret necessite’ the sum of 100 marks, on the security of his manor of Upper Wick in Worcestershire. This mortgage was never redeemed. Further, on 6 Sept. 1434 Arderne entered into a statute merchant with his mother’s stepson, (Sir) Thomas Erdington*, for the payment of over 114 marks to Richard Michell of Worcester, administrator of the goods of Thomas Lygon, no doubt another of his creditors. Later, in May 1435 he quitclaimed property at Fladbury in Worcestershire to the prominent lawyer, John Throckmorton I*, and this perhaps marks the first of the land sales that were to characterize his disastrous career.
A feoffment made in the following December may represent an attempt by the friends and connexions of an irresponsible young man to prevent him ruining the fortunes of an ancient family. Arderne conveyed his Warwickshire manors to a very powerful group of feoffees, headed by the earl of Warwick and James Tuchet, Lord Audley, and including not only leading members of the Midlands gentry, such as Sir Richard Vernon*, Sir William Mountfort*, (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I* of Grafton and John Curson*, but others from further afield, like Sir Maurice Berkeley I* and the Herefordshire knight, Sir John Baskerville, Lord Audley’s brother-in-law.
However this may be, the first unmistakable signs of trouble are to be dated to a few years later. On 7 Oct. 1438, while he was still in office as sheriff, Arderne was indicted before the Staffordshire j.p.s as an accessory to the murder of a gentleman, Thomas Etton, at Hints, a few miles to the north of Castle Bromwich, in the previous July. There is no evidence to give context to this allegation, but such indictments were rarely laid against men whose affairs were prospering.
The acquisition of the Clodeshale lands had promised to raise the Ardernes to the front rank of Warwickshire society, but now the integrity of the expanded estate was seriously threatened. One factor in this reverse may have been Robert’s dispute with Erdington, which probably arose, at least in part, out of the marriage of Arderne’s mother, Sibyl, to Erdington’s father. Until her death in 1435 the two men seem to have been on cordial terms; thereafter, enmity was quick to develop. Judging from a later award, Sir Thomas retained some muniments relating to the Arderne property she had held in jointure and dower as surety for the performance of financial undertakings our MP had made to him. These undertakings probably arose from either money our MP had raised on his surety, such as the 114 marks paid to Lygon’s administrator, or else compensation due upon the apparent reduction of Sibyl’s entitlement. By 1440 the dispute was a serious one if an inference may be drawn from the standing of the arbiters named to conclude it: Sir Richard Vernon, Sir William Mountfort (two of the wealthiest gentry of the Midlands and both among our MP’s feoffees), and two senior lawyers, John Bowes* and John Harper*, were chosen by Erdington; and John Hampton II*, John Curson (another of his feoffees), and two other lawyers, John Vampage*, the King’s attorney-general, and William Cumberford*, were the equally important group nominated by Arderne. At Warwick on 25 May 1440 they awarded that Erdington should deliver all evidences concerning the manors to Arderne, who should in return surrender all relevant bonds and pay him 100 marks in four instalments of 25 marks spread over four years. This seemingly balanced settlement was later to falter on Arderne’s intransigence.
In the meantime, Arderne turned to royal letters of protection to stem the rising tide of litigation against him. On 7 May 1443 he obtained a protection for one year as staying in the Scottish marches in the company of Sir Henry Percy, captain of Berwick, but this served him only until 11 July when it was revoked on a certification that he tarried at Westminster. Undeterred, five days later he secured further letters as serving under Sir William Bonville*, seneschal of Aquitaine, but again this was revoked in the following November on the grounds that he remained at Castle Bromwich.
As if such troubles were not enough, Arderne added to his problems by both a refusal to honour the property sales he had already made and by vain attempts to pursue the most dubious (or, at least, ill-judged) of property claims. In May 1445 he was obliged to appear before (Sir) John Fortescue* to acknowledge for enrolment the indenture he had made with Danvers over the sale of Netherbury. Apparently frustrated by Danvers’s failure to pay the last 100 marks due for the manor, he had had a ‘spekynge’ with one of his creditors, Sir Walter Lucy, who was also anxious to purchase the manor. Danvers was understandably anxious to lay to rest any potential rival claim.
More ambitious, but with even less hope of success, was Arderne’s attempt to win the very considerable patrimony of the Golafres. In 1442 he sued the feoffees of the recently-deceased John Golafre*, headed by Thomas Brown, bishop of Norwich, claiming that his wife was heiress to these estates as John’s distant cousin and that the feoffees were bound to convey to her under the terms of his will, namely that the lands should pass to his next heirs. The claim was dubious, if not entirely spurious, for his wife was only one among several claimants as next heir. The chancellor dismissed the case and remitted Arderne to the common law, where he could hope to make little progress. Later, he supported the efforts of his wife’s cousin Mary and her husband John Spechesley, to make good Mary’s claim as heir, one that was superior to that of his own wife. He stood surety for a petition sued in Chancery by the couple, but this too failed and the bulk of Golafre’s property was sold to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, in 1448.
Arderne’s last effort to secure what he imagined to be his wife’s inheritance had much more damaging consequences. On 12 Nov. 1445, on the basis of a final concord levied 100 years before, he claimed the manors of Lark Stoke in Admington (Gloucestershire) and Woodcote in Bromsgrove (Worcestershire) against the two daughters and coheiresses of the soldier Sir William Byshoppeston*, who had died in the previous year, and their husbands, Thomas Palmer* and William Catesby*. Such men were formidable rivals – Palmer was a well-connected lawyer and Catesby a wealthy esquire of the royal household – but even in the most favourable circumstances it is unlikely that Elizabeth Arderne’s claim could have been made good. She was a descendant of Alice, daughter of Sir William’s grandfather Roger Byshoppeston by his first wife, while the coheiresses were the descendants of his son by his second, and the onus thus lay on the Ardernes to prove that part of the Byshoppeston estate had been settled away from the male line. They alleged that the two manors had been settled on Alice on her marriage to Elizabeth’s grandfather, Walter Clodeshale, but repeated and predictable failure of successive sheriffs to return the writs summoning the defendants prevented the weighing of the claim before a jury. All Arderne acquired by his claim was two more undesirable enemies.
At this date Arderne still had influence enough to secure a general pardon as protection against such indictments, and duly appeared in King’s bench on 8 July 1446 to plead his pardon. More interestingly, his connexions with the Beauchamp retinue remained strong enough for his inclusion among the jurors for the Warwickshire inquisition post mortem of Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, held at the county town on the following 23 Jan.
By then Arderne’s escalating difficulties had led to the further dismemberment of his estate, on this occasion to the benefit of the King’s attorney-general. On 10 Mar. 1447 Vampage, who had acted as an arbiter for him in 1440, took a bond from him in 200 marks; and a little under two years later, on 1 Jan. 1449, our MP granted him the manor of Nafford, once of the Golafres. In March 1450 (incidentally while the Parliament of which he was a Member was in session) he entered into a further bond in as much as £400, undertaking not only to assure the Vampages’ title to Nafford but also to purchase for them, within the term of seven years, lands worth another 20 marks p.a.
In this context of apparently accelerating decline, it is astonishing to find that, on 20 Oct. 1449, Arderne was elected to represent Warwickshire in company with one of his rivals for the Byshoppeston lands, William Catesby. On the available evidence, this episode is beyond convincing explanation. The indenture is irregular in that none of the 19 attestors were drawn from the higher ranks of the county gentry (indeed, they were headed by a burgess of Warwick, Nicholas Rody*), but it is hard to imagine that Arderne had influence enough to engineer his own return in face of opposition. The best available explanation is a reluctance on the part of others better qualified to sit in an assembly which met in an atmosphere of crisis, both military and financial, and one, moreover, summoned only two months after the dissolution of the last.
The last act of Arderne’s life was a tragic and puzzling one. He was implicated in the duke of York’s rising of 1452 and was the only man of rank to pay for his treason with his life. If later indictments are to be accepted he was guilty of a fourfold treason in the aftermath of the duke’s capitulation at Dartford: on 6 Mar. 1452 he joined with Sir William Oldhall*, the duke’s chamberlain, and others in plotting at Baynards Castle to raise insurrection in Wales, Shropshire, Kent and other unspecified counties to depose the King; on the following 12 Apr. he plotted rebellion at Westminster and elsewhere; eight days later at Ludlow he and others levied war against the King and procured the murder of Richard Fazakerley, a yeoman of the royal chamber; and early in May he was involved in the Kentish rising of John Wilkins, a saddler from Stratford-upon-Avon. He was indicted for the last of these offences before commissioners of oyer and terminer at Dartford on 13 May; and six days later a presentment was laid against him in the court of King’s bench for the alleged plot of 12 Apr.
What happened immediately afterwards is unknown, but it appears that Arderne was arrested at his home in Warwickshire. This, at least, is a reasonable inference from the later Exchequer assignment to two servants of the royal household for their expenses about the custody of our MP in Kenilworth castle, the conveyance of the prisoners from there to Hereford, and the purchase of fetters.
Arderne’s execution and the consequent forfeiture of his estates left the family’s affairs in disarray. The prospects for his son and heir, Walter, were not, however, as bleak as they would first appear. The bulk of his patrimony remained in the hands of the survivors of those his father had enfeoffed in 1435, and this may explain why it was not until late in 1453 that the Crown made any grants of the Arderne lands. On 29 Nov. the Clodeshale lands, which our MP had held by courtesy, were committed to two Warwickshire lawyers, Thomas Greswold and John Gamell, and the Arderne lands in Castle Bromwich, Curdworth and Minworth to Gamell and a much more prominent local man, Thomas Lyttleton, serjeant-at-law. Both leases were to run for seven years, but neither ran its course. On the following 4 Feb. annual rents were fixed, but only two days later writs issued out of Chancery for inquiry into the Arderne lands. If one may judge by the result, the purpose of these writs was to secure the restoration of our MP’s son and heir.