Boteler’s antecedents and early career are poorly documented. He was probably from a family of minor gentry established at Exhall, a few miles to the north of Coventry. This, at least, is the implication to be drawn from a lawsuit of 1468 when he claimed against the prior of Arbury the legal estate which John Boteler of Exhall had once had in the manor of Stockingford near Exhall.
Yet, as with most lawyers, Boteler’s career was slow to gather momentum. As early as 1440 he was active as an attorney in the Exchequer of pleas, but little is known of him in the decade that followed.
This connexion helps explain Boteler’s otherwise mysterious return to represent the Wiltshire borough of Great Bedwyn in the Parliament of February 1449. Sir Edward was closely associated with Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, the lord of that borough, and thus, not improbably, had a hand in Boteler’s election. In return, while sitting as an MP, Boteler was able to render Grey a small service. During the course of the Parliament, Queen Margaret, as lady of the honour of Leicester, ordered Grey to pay 100 marks to William Newby*, then sitting for Leicester, in compensation for an assault, and Boteler and another servant of Grey, Thomas Boughton*, bound themselves in payment of part of this sum.
No doubt, as a busy lawyer, Boteler might later have won further returns for distant boroughs, had not the enfranchisement of his native Coventry removed the need for him to search further afield. Although he is not known to have been returned for his native city before 1460, it is probable that he sat at least once in 1450s.
Four years later, on 4 Oct. 1455, Boteler was elected to replace Lyttleton as recorder. His strong ties with Coventry made him a more suitable appointment than his predecessor, who, promoted to the degree of serjeant-at-law in 1453, had more important matters to concern him than the city’s affairs. Indeed, the terms of the oath taken by the recorder on assuming office, with its promise to live in the city, implies that the authorities were more concerned to secure the services of one who would devote all his energies to the office rather than a lawyer of high standing with pressing business elsewhere.
Boteler’s influence can only have been strengthened soon after when he was added to the commission of the peace in Warwickshire in November 1457 with promotion to the quorum a year later. He was, in short, becoming one of the most important lawyers in the county, and as such he attracted the patronage of the leading local gentry. In Hilary term 1458, for example, he sued Edmund Mountfort* and his mother, Joan, widow of Sir William Mountfort*, for an arrears of four years in the payment of an annuity of two marks, presumably the retaining fee they owed him as their lawyer. Later, on 10 Dec. 1460, Elizabeth, widow of Sir Robert Moton*, allegedly retained him at Coventry ‘de consilio … in lege’ for life against her rival, Thomas Everingham*, at 40s. a year.
Boteler’s political sympathies in the civil war of 1459-61 are uncertain. The residence of the Lancastrian court in his home city in the late 1450s might have inclined him to Lancaster. Indeed, it may be that he was Coventry’s MP in the Parliament convened there in 1459, and on 20 Feb. 1460 he was among those gathered in St. Mary’s Hall to appoint the number of soldiers who, by virtue of a commission received by the mayor, were to be sent to fight against the Yorkists.
In any event, if Boteler had any attachment to Lancaster, he quickly put it behind him as his career prospered under the new King. He was restored to the county bench in July 1461 and from thenceforward was one of the most active of the justices.
In the meantime, presumably while representing Coventry (the returns are lost) in the Parliament of 1467, Boteler’s standing as an experienced lawyer and parliamentarian was recognized when his fellow Members of the Lower House chose him as one of their representatives to investigate complaints made against one of the governors of the Mint.
None the less, despite this impressive range of associates, the complexity of city affairs meant that Boteler’s duties as recorder remained his principal responsibility. In the mid 1460s the corporation of Coventry became involved in a dispute over the franchise of the duchy of Cornwall manor of Cheylesmore which, in its contention, lay within the city’s liberty. This involved Boteler in lengthy negotiations before the greatest in the land. In January 1464 he travelled with the city charters to the King at Northampton in an effort to prove this point, and a week later he again made the city’s case before the earl of Warwick and the two chief justices at Coventry. The matter was then adjourned to the following Easter term, when Boteler again appeared before the King, on this occasion in the Tower of London, when the city was rewarded with an interim judgement in its favour.
Later, Coventry’s citizens found themselves uncomfortably involved in the civil war of 1469-71. The victory of the northern rebels over a royalist army at Edgecote, near Banbury, on 26 July 1469 caused disquiet in the city, and Boteler was among those designated by the corporation to act as a captain of the ward of Much Park in case of attack. These fears were misplaced, but the war became a reality for the citizens in the spring of 1471. The earl of Warwick chose to rally his troops there against Edward IV’s invasion, and the citizens found themselves obliged to assist him. They spent £61 on the wages of 40 soldiers to serve Henry VI (presumably the soldiers provided for the earl to take to Barnet), to the cost of which Boteler contributed 5s., and made a loan of 100 marks to the earl, to which he contributed £1.
Boteler quickly put the difficulties of the Readeption behind him. His career flourished even more strongly in the 1470s than it had done in the 1460s. He began to appear routinely on county commissions and in the autumn of 1474 he was one of those chosen by the King to strengthen the commissions of the peace in Devon, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Worcestershire, part of an experiment in peace-keeping that was soon abandoned.
None the less, all was not prosperity. The latter part of Boteler’s long career was troubled by his dispute with another Coventry lawyer, William Bristowe, which, from small beginnings, became a serious problem. The two men had much in common and appear once to have been on friendly terms: in 1459, for example, Bristowe was a feoffee in a conveyance probably connected with the marriage of Boteler’s daughter to a local gentleman, John Hardwick.
This gave licence to the city to mobilize its legal machinery against the recalcitrant Bristowe. On 17 Dec. charges of close-breaking were laid against him before Boteler and others sitting as Coventry j.p.s.; and on 26 Mar. 1482 Bristowe was indicted, again before the local j.p.s., for impeding the chamberlain in the supervision of common pasture in the disputed land and expelling Boteler from his common pasture as long before as 1472. In addition, Boteler secured costs and damages of 28 marks against him in two assizes of novel disseisin heard in the city in February and July 1482.
Almost as soon as the city and the recorder’s dispute with Bristowe reached this unsatisfactory conclusion, Boteler was faced with a new problem. His previously harmonious and mutually-supportive relationship with the city authorities was sharply and mysteriously interrupted. He was reported by ‘credible persons’ as having said that, ‘he had as gret power as had the Mair: And also he wold a-Rest the Maire at the sessions sittyng on the bench’. In response, on 27 Jan. 1485, the ruling council of the 48 decreed that, as a punishment, his continued service as recorder should depend on the annual renewal of his office at Candlemas, and that he should lose precedence over the master of the Trinity guild in all ‘maner of Goynges’ save legal matters. On the following day he accepted these terms and the mayor and former mayors, recalling his ‘long Contynewaunce’ as recorder, formally re-granted him the office.
The rebuke of 1485 raises the general question of Boteler’s character. It is impossible to say whether the allegations of improper conduct made against him represent merely the ex parte complaints that even a relatively honest lawyer might expect to attract during the course of a long career, or whether there was a more sinister explanation. Bristowe’s petitions against him may perhaps be dismissed as special pleading, but there was at least one other complaint that he had exploited illegitimately his influence as recorder. At an unknown date Hugh Thornell complained to the chancellor that he had denied him bail in an action before the sheriffs’ court because the plaintiff was the recorder’s friend.
In short, there is nothing here to contradict the charge made in 1485 that Boteler was a man of overbearing temperament, and this gives credence to the accusations made against him by Laurence Saunders in a dispute over the city’s common pasture that ran in parallel with the dispute with Bristowe. In a petition presented to the council of the prince of Wales at Ludlow, Saunders, then one of the chamberlains (the officer responsible for supervising the common pasture), complained that Boteler, among other leading citizens, withheld half of the common lands from the community and that a favoured few, maintained by the recorder and mayor, ‘surcharged’ the pasture with excess sheep. When the chamberlains impounded these sheep, Boteler had the chamberlains imprisoned and then threatened Saunders that he would ‘curse the tyme that ever he sigh him and woolde make hem to wepe water with his yen’.
Whatever Boteler’s character, he was quick to recover from the blow to his dignity of 1485. Despite his age – when, at the end of that year, the city began its search for a new recorder he was described ‘of so grett febulnes’ – it was at about this time that he took a second wife, the widow of Thomas Warde of Kenilworth, who had been a yeoman of the Crown in the last years of Yorkist rule. As a couple they sued out a general pardon on 5 July 1486. Nor was he too old to travel. In the autumn of 1485 he delivered into the court of King’s bench a surety of the peace taken from a chaplain of the prior of Coventry.
By this date, in his will of the previous July, Boteler had already made provision for his burial in the cathedral, where his first wife lay. This will is, unfortunately, brief and unrevealing. It provides no suggestion that the testator was a man of wealth. Indeed, the two largest bequests were the 40s. each to be given to his two executors, Richard Cooke, the mayor, and John Haddon. The financial provision he made for his soul was very modest: the parish priest of St. Michael was to have an annuity of 2s. 8d. to offer prayers for seven years. All this suggests that more substantial arrangements had already been made, and later evidence shows that he endowed three sermons to be given annually in the church of St. Michael and his widow provided for the celebration of his obit there. His long career ended on 31 July 1489, when he was succeeded by his less distinguished son, William.
Boteler’s landholdings are poorly documented. There is nothing to show that he ever acquired the manorial property that would have qualified him as county rather than merely urban gentry. Most of his income must have come from fees. As recorder he had £10 p.a. from the corporation and guilds, and a similar fee probably attached to each of a series of stewardships he held on the estates of local landholders like Lord Zouche.