Barre’s career is notable in an important respect. He was one of the few retainers of Richard, duke of York, to abandon their lord in the 1450s as the duke became increasingly alienated from the Lancastrian court. Given the strength of support for the duke in Barre’s native county of Herefordshire, his decision was an apparently bold one, contradicting his long association not only with the duke but also with such former friends as (Sir) Walter Devereux I*. If bold, however, it is also readily explicable as a response to the pressure of other relationships, which could not be reconciled with the duke’s growing militancy. Barre had strong family connexions with the Lancastrian hierarchy: John Talbot, 2nd earl of Shrewsbury, treasurer in the late 1450s, was his first cousin; his brother-in-law, (Sir) William Catesby*, was a knight for Henry VI’s body in the 1450s, and his nephew, Thomas Cornwall of Burford, had a place in the royal household and was to show himself to be a committed Lancastrian in the civil war of 1459-61.
The Barres, in origin citizens of Hereford resident at Barr’s Court, grew rich in the first part of the fourteenth century. Walter de la Barre (d.1302/3) and his son, Thomas, added to the family’s considerable holdings in the city by acquiring small parcels of land in 13 of the surrounding vills, most notably at Rotherwas in Dinedor, and slightly further afield at Little Marcle, where their social advance was marked by the acquisition of the advowson. Thomas acted decisively to preserve the family’s wealth in its male line after his eldest son, Walter† (MP for Hereford in the Parliament of March 1336), died leaving only a daughter. By final concords in 1339 he provided for his six surviving sons by dividing his lands between them, ensuring, by limiting a series of successive tail male estates to them in an order varying from share to share, both that his family would have the best possible chance of perpetuating itself in the male line and that the lands would tend to reunite in the hands of any line that survived.
Armed with these extensive properties, Sir Thomas was a considerable figure. A household knight under Richard II, he adapted easily to the Lancastrian usurpation of 1399 and enjoyed a long career in local administration. He sat in at least six Parliaments between 1386 and 1416, three each for Herefordshire and Hertfordshire, and served four terms as sheriff. He also contracted a very favourable match for his son, another Sir Thomas, to one of the sisters of Gilbert, Lord Talbot (d.1418). Our MP was born to this couple in his grandfather’s lifetime. On 31 Jan. 1412 he was baptised in the church of St. Mary at Rotherwas, his bright prospects made apparent to those assembled there in the identities of the priest at whose hands he received the sacrament, Robert Mascall, bishop of Hereford, and of his godparents, his uncle, John Talbot, Lord Furnival (afterwards earl of Shrewsbury), and Agnes Crophill, widow of Sir Walter Devereux† of Weobley.
On 1 May 1433 Barre’s proof of age was taken at Hereford, and he had seisin of the lands of his paternal grandfather.
Barre’s relationship with the young duke was to determine the course of his early career. He was soon active in his service. On 3 May 1436, on the latter’s appointment as King’s lieutenant in Normandy, he sued out letters of protection as departing there in his retinue, and he was probably in the army which landed at Honfleur on the following 7 June. If so, he was absent from home when his mother died two months later, and is likely to have remained in France until the duke’s return in November 1437.
Barre was a very surprising omission from those distrained to take up knighthood in Herefordshire in 1439.
Soon after, Barre was given greater reason to stay at home. The death of his father-in-law, Hotoft, at Easter 1443 significantly augmented his lands. His wife now inherited the manor of Knebworth with holdings in neighbouring vills (together valued at £36 in the inquisition post mortem of his daughter in 1489), a manor at Heston in Middlesex and lands in Stoughton and Burton in Leicestershire, with the office of bailiff of the fee of Winchester in Leicestershire and Warwickshire.
Rich, well connected and active, Barre made his profitable second marriage in this period. It is not known when his first wife died, only that she was dead by the autumn of 1447 when he was already the husband of Joan Rugge, a very wealthy heiress and widow.
The marriage had probably already taken place when Barre, on 21 Jan. 1447, was again elected to represent Herefordshire in Parliament in company with Devereux. Not improbably the two knights travelled in the duke of York’s retinue to the assembly’s unusual venue of Bury St. Edmunds, and both were among the witnesses to a charter sealed by the duke there on 28 Feb., 18 days after the Parliament had begun. Their attitude and that of their master to the dangerously contentious business of the Parliament – the court’s attack on the duke of Gloucester – is uncertain, but it was clearly not one of obvious hostility.
None the less, despite his new concerns in Gloucestershire, Barre’s career remained focused on his native Herefordshire. Although, in August 1450, he was commissioned to assess contributions to the parliamentary subsidy in the former county, the other ad hoc commissions to which he was appointed on either side of 1450 were in the latter. Further, in November 1448 he was again on the shrieval pricked list for Herefordshire, and he headed the attestors to both the county’s parliamentary elections in 1449. At about the same time – during the brief bishopric of Richard Beauchamp at Hereford -- he acted with the bishop’s chaplain in a dispute over the patronage of the church of Goodrich in the county.
On 26 May 1451, as sheriff, Barre sat on a commission to inquire into the value of the earldom of Pembroke, which had come back into royal hands on the death of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Other of the commissioners, notably Devereux, were servants of the duke of York, and this has led to the speculation that the inquiry was preparatory to a proposed grant of the earldom to the duke. If so, the hope was disappointed.
It was also as sheriff that, on the following 2 Aug., Barre troubled to attend the installation of the courtier cleric, Reynold Boulers, as bishop of Hereford. Boulers had been among the courtiers for whom, in the first session of the Parliament of 1450, the Commons had demanded banishment, and it may be that his appointment was unwelcome to York. It would, however, be premature to see Barre’s attendance as a sign of tension in his relationship with the duke, not least because at least one other of York’s leading local servants, Thomas Bromwich*, was also present.
Two important personal matters engaged Barre’s attention in the early 1450s. The childlessness of his second wife Joan posed a threat to his tenure of her inheritance should she predecease him. Yet any effort to insure him against that risk would be to the disinheritance, albeit only potential and temporary, of her daughter, Elizabeth, wife of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. It is surely more than coincidence that Elizabeth’s death in childbirth on 1 Sept. 1452 was the prelude to a settlement in our MP’s favour. By a final concord levied in the following November part of Joan’s patrimony – the manors of East Hanham and Upton Cheyney – was settled on Barre for life, with remainder to Joan and her heirs.
The chronology of that defection can only be tentatively reconstructed. Unlike Devereux and other of the duke’s men in Herefordshire, he stood aside from the Dartford rising in February 1452, and, on the following 27 Sept., he headed the county jury before royal justices sent to investigate the disturbances in the county.
The most likely supposition is that Barre’s defection came soon afterwards, a product of the dramatic local events that followed the end of the duke’s second protectorate. There was a major Yorkist rising in Herefordshire and the marches, culminating in August 1456 with a raid on Carmarthen castle and the brief imprisonment of its keeper, the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond. Against this background, Barre’s pricking as sheriff of Gloucestershire in November (despite the fact that he had ended his Herefordshire shrievalty only a year before) is a clear sign that he was no longer identifed with the Yorkist faction in the marches. His abandonment of earlier loyalties is an interesting indication of the pressures operating on leading gentry in the febrile atmosphere of the late 1450s. He, like others, had strong connexions within both the Yorkist and Lancastrian camps, and, as these camps drifted apart, he was faced with some very difficult choices. His service to the duke of York was balanced, and eventually outweighed, by other long associations. Chief among these was with the Talbots. His godfather, John, the first earl of Shrewsbury, had been killed at the battle of Castillon in 1453, but the association was maintained: in 1458 Barre was named as a feoffee for the marriage settlement of the second earl’s son, another John Talbot, and Katherine, daughter of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham.
Whatever the reason, in the late 1450s Barre quickly became one of the leading figures in the local Lancastrian faction. On 16 July 1457, with James, Lord Audley, he was commissioned to summon the county posse for the suppression of unlawful gatherings in Herefordshire.
Yet, even as Barre was being drawn into the county’s Lancastrian faction, he was forming a connexion of another kind. At some date shortly before 20 Jan. 1457, his daughter, Isabel, his heiress-presumptive and already the heir of her late mother, married Humphrey Stafford IV*.
Proof is lacking, but there seems every reason to suppose that Sir John was a member of the royal army that outfaced the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge on the night of 12 Oct. 1459. The following day the Herefordshire sheriff, his brother-in-law Catesby, convened a parliamentary election at Hereford, in response to writs of summons issued only four days before when the King had been at Leominster. The gathering was a surprising one in that several of those who had confronted each other in arms on the previous day now found themselves as representatives of rival factions in the county court. Remarkably, given the events of the night before, several Yorkists were present, most notably the duke’s receiver-general, John Milewater, and their purpose was probably to prevent the election of Lancastrian partisans. If so, they, unsurprisingly, failed. Barre was elected in company with his new friend, Fitzharry.
On 20 Dec., at the end of the Coventry Parliament, which attainted the Yorkist lords, Barre was named in company with Catesby on a commission of Lancastrian loyalists who were to hold revenues from the duke of York’s estates to the use of his duchess and her children. Thereafter Barre benefited from Lancastrian patronage. On 13 Feb. 1460 the Crown re-granted him the annuity of £20 that he had enjoyed from York’s now forfeited manor of Marden since 1433; and on the following 21 May he was awarded, for good service against the Yorkists, a further 20 marks p.a., assigned upon Richard, earl of Salisbury’s forfeited lordship of Ware (Hertfordshire). He was expected to earn these rewards: in April he had been commissioned to seize into royal hands the Welsh and marcher lordships belonging to York and Warwick, and, more significantly, he was one of the few of non-baronial rank charged with organizing resistance to the threatened Yorkist invasion.
The Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460 transformed both the military situation and the political climate, very much to Barre’s disadvantage. A month later, on 13 Aug., a commission was issued for his arrest (along with that of Fitzharry, John Chippenham and Thomas Breinton*, all three of whom were among his fellow defendants in the conspiracy action) for spreading false news contrary to statute.
Although, however, Sir John’s Yorkist connexions may have brought him a pardon, they did not bring him a quick rehabilitation. His defection might have been understandable, but it was not easily forgiven. He was excluded from public affairs during the first reign of Edward IV, and had a series of difficulties to overcome. He continued to be disturbed by the action of conspiracy sued by the Yorkists indicted in 1457, and the several actions of close-breaking he himself had pending in the mid 1460s may indicate that his lesser neighbours had taken advantage of his weakened position.
None the less, although excluded from public affairs, Barre was free to pursue his private affairs, and in 1467 he entered into arrangements contingent on the marriage of his illegitimate daughter to John Ashurst, agreeing to give the couple 50 marks for the purchase of land.
Soon afterwards Barre was drawn into litigation of a different but probably equally hopeless sort. On 17 Aug. 1469 his son-in-law, Stafford, whose reputation for extortion had won him great unpopularity, was killed by the men of Bridgwater. Three days later, according to an action sued by Barre in the following Trinity term, a large group of men, headed by a gentleman, Walter Trevet of Chilton Trevet, near Bridgwater, and a merchant of Bristol, John Compton, forcibly entered four of the dead man’s manors, then in the tenure of Barre, his brother-in-law, Catesby, and his servant, Henry Quarell. The probability is that they were feoffees to the use of Stafford’s wife, enfeoffed at the time of the marriage in the late 1450s.
It is not known what part Barre played during the Readeption. His restoration to the Herefordshire bench in December 1470 suggests that he was identified as a supporter, but the fact that Edward IV’s return did not damage him implies that that he was not an active one. His brother-in-law, Catesby, behaved with similar circumspection, and his kinsman, the young earl of Shrewsbury, soon moderated early support.
A major project of Barre’s last years was the foundation of a chantry in the church of St. Mary at Clehonger. His ancestor, Sir Richard Pembridge (d.1375), had built a chantry chapel there; Barre’s own plans represented either a refoundation, or an extension, of this chantry, for Sir Richard and his wife, Petronilla, were among those named in the lengthy bede roll of the new project.
There is only one significant reference to Barre from the last years of his long career. At an unknown date between 1 Jan. 1478 and 1 Dec. 1480, Barre, acting as steward of the Talbot lordship of Archenfield, rescued William Abrahall from the manor of Gillow, where he was being detained by a rival claimant to the property, John ap Guillium.
On 3 Feb. 1485 Barre’s widow made a will remarkable for the length and detail of its charitable bequests.
Joan died in the last months of Richard III’s reign,
The prosperity of Barre’s chantry foundation and the title of the descendants of his sisters had been potentially threatened in 1489. An elderly Herefordshire esquire, Roger Bodenham, sued Richard Boole, the first chaplain of that foundation, for part of the ancient Barre lands – a small property in Lyde ‘Muchegros’ – that had been settled by the fines of 150 years before. Bodenham claimed as the grandson of Walter de la Barre’s daughter, Isabel, who had been disinherited by these fines in favour of her uncles. With the death of our MP all the descendants of these uncles in the male line were extinct, and Bodenham could claim under the final remainder limited in these fines to the right heirs of Walter’s father. No verdict is recorded, but his action is unlikely to have been successful.