BOUGHTON, Thomas (d.1460), of Kempston Hardwick, Beds. and Little Lawford, Warws.

Boughton hailed from Kempston Hardwick in Bedfordshire, where his family had been tenants of the Greys of Ruthin since the early fourteenth century. He began his career in the service of that family: a Chancery petition identifies him as one of the feoffees of Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, who died an old man in 1440. C1/17/81a, 1489/63. This connexion was the origin of his close attachment to Edward Grey, Reynold’s eldest son by his second wife, Joan (d.1448), daughter and heiress of Sir William Astley of Astley in Warwickshire. In 1427 Edward had married Elizabeth, grand-daughter and heiress-apparent of William, Lord Ferrers of Groby (d.1445), and hence stood to inherit, both through his mother and in right of his wife, a large estate in Warwickshire and Leicestershire. It is tempting to conclude that this prospect explains why our MP transferred his main interests to the former county, but there are chronological difficulties with such an interpretation. On the assumption that Boughton is to be identified with the attestor to the Warwickshire parliamentary election of 1427, he established himself there before Edward Grey was old enough to have done so. Further, in the 1436 subsidy returns for that county, again before Grey had become a force there, he was assessed on an annual income of £26. Even if this income was largely derived from his family lands in Bedfordshire, it is still significant that he should have been assessed in his adopted county. C219/13/5; E179/192/59. Grey himself was assessed in Warws. at £33 p.a., probably in respect of lands settled on him on his marriage, but not until 1440 is he found playing a part in the county’s affairs and not until the late 1440s (on the assumption that he had to wait until his mother’s death before acquiring her lands) did he acquire a significant property interest there.

All this implies that Boughton had become established in Warwickshire independently of Edward Grey, although one can only speculate on the reasons for the shift in his interests. None the less, Grey’s patronage was responsible for his advancement. It may, most notably, have enabled him to make a good marriage. In the autumn of 1440, if the match can be dated by the jointure settlement he made in her favour, he married the heiress-presumptive of a Warwickshire lawyer, who had been assessed on an annual income of £29 in the same returns. On 20 Sept. 1440 our MP’s feoffees, headed by John Enderby*, one of the most prominent retainers of the Greys of Ruthin, settled his lands in Kempston Hardwick and in neighbouring vills upon the couple. This probably represented a considerable part of the Boughton lands, but the potential sacrifice was justified by the bride’s prospects. By a deed dated 10 Aug. 1441, only eight days before her father’s death, these were given concrete form: her parental home, the manor of Little Lawford (in the parish of Newbold-on-Avon), was settled on her parents for their lives, with remainder in joint tail-male to her and our MP. Warws. RO, Ward-Broughton-Leigh mss, CR162/19, 121.

The course of Boughton’s early career may, in part, be explained by a legal training. There is no direct evidence to show that he was a lawyer and he was never named to the quorum of the peace; and yet there are strong indirect indications that he had a grounding in the law. The three stewardships he held in the 1440s and his nomination to several gaol delivery commissions in the 1450s are difficult to explain in any other terms, as is his receipt of a royal writ of dedimus potestatem for the registration of a charter and indenture on the close roll in 1450. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 187, 198. Moreover, he appears to have been more prosperous than can be explained by his known landholdings alone: not only did he have the resources to acquire an heiress wife and to give their daughter a marriage portion of over £200, but he also made a number of property purchases. Early in 1440 he bought some 250 acres of land in Silsoe and neighbouring vills, a few miles to the south of Kempston Hardwick; and actions he sued in the 1440s and early 1450s show that he held land at Northampton and Lilborne in Northamptonshire, Brandon in Warwickshire, and Morcott in Rutland, none of which holdings appear to have come to him by inheritance. CP25(1)/6/80/14; KB27/726, rot. 88; 734, rot. 15; 740, rot. 43; 748, rot. 62; 764, rot. 15; CP40/778, rot. 99. His close friendship with the rising Leicestershire lawyer, Richard Hotoft*, is also suggestive of a legal training. In June 1438, for example, his Bedfordshire neighbour, the abbot of Warden, entered into a bond of 40 marks to the two men to abide the arbitration of Enderby and others; and in the following year he acted as auditor of the accounts of Hotoft’s bailiffs. CP40/715, rot. 632d; CP40/738, rot. 494d; 753, rot. 103d.

Boughton and Hotoft also had in common an association with Edward Grey, who, even though he was yet to come into his wife’s estates, had begun to play an active part in Warwickshire affairs. It is no doubt more than coincidental that our MP should have both made a good marriage and started his administrative career as Grey became established as a significant influence there. Having served a term as escheator of Northamptonshire and Rutland in 1440-1, he was added to the Warwickshire bench in the spring of 1442. Even, however, at this early date in Boughton’s career, Grey was not his only patron, another indication that he had a legal training to recommend his service. In the late 1430s the young Sir James Butler, heir to the earldom of Ormond and already a substantial landholder, became a force to be reckoned with in those several counties in which he held property. Through his grandmother, Joan, Beauchamp, Lady of Abergavenny, he inherited lands in Warwickshire and a small, but well-established, affinity there. The first sign of our MP’s association with this affinity dates from Hilary term 1441, when he joined Butler’s councillor, Henry Filongley*, in offering mainprise in the court of King’s bench for Butler’s servant, Henry Brokesby, who had been appealed of murder. Not long afterwards this association was cemented when Butler named Boughton as steward of his manors of Newport Pagnell and Little Linford in neighbouring Buckinghamshire, assigning for him as his fee lands in Stoke near Coventry to an annual value of four marks. KB27/719, rot. 53d; Northants. RO, Finch Hatton mss, 454/1. Nor was this the only stewardship that came his way at about this time. By May 1443 he had become the duke of Norfolk’s steward at Caludon, and he may already have been acting in the same capacity for his neighbour, the priory of Monk’s Kirby, a dependency of the Carthusian monastery at Axholme in Lincolnshire. Shakespeare Centre Archs., Gregory of Stivichall mss, DR10/720; SC6/1039/18, 1107/7.

Grey, however, appears to have remained Boughton’s principal patron, and this led him into a troublesome dispute which illustrated the limitations of his master’s influence. In 1442 he was sued for embracery by William Betley, one of the filacers of the court of King’s bench. The latter was in dispute with Grey’s servant, William Burgeys, over a large estate at Coventry, and, if our MP was guilty, he was no doubt acting on Grey’s instructions. The result of the action, in which Betley claimed the massive sum of £1,000 against Boughton and others, does not appear, but it is certain that Grey had to abandon Burgeys in the face of the support Betley attracted from Henry Beauchamp, the new earl of Warwick. For Boughton the result was removal from the bench in the summer of 1445. KB27/726, rot. 60d; 727, rot. 82; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 402-3, 414-15. In parallel with this reverse, our MP was also inconvenienced by his role as a feoffee of Sir Edward’s father, Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin. In 1443 Edward’s mother, Joan Astley, sued him and others for failing to convey to her the manor of Burbage in Leicestershire, and the Crown responded by summoning our MP to answer. C1/1489/63; C244/39/150.

Not much is known of Boughton’s career in the late 1440s. In 1446 he was employed by Sir Robert Moton*, another associate of Grey, in the attempted disinheritance of his grand-daughters and common-law heiresses in favour of his son by his second marriage. On 23 Jan. 1447 he sat at Warwick as a juror in the inquisition post mortem of Henry Beauchamp, perhaps surprisingly in view of the earlier dissension between Beauchamp and his own master, Grey. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 23-24; CIPM, xxvi. 592. In April 1448 he witnessed an important feoffment made by William Catesby*; and in the following June he did the same for Thomas Ferrers, son and heir male of William, Lord Ferrers of Groby, an act which implies a lack of conflict between this branch of the family and Grey, the husband of the heir general. CAD, iv. A10347; Gregory mss, DR10/721.

More significant to him personally was a final concord of the following year by which he and his wife secured the surrender of the rights of Alice, wife of Giles Norton, to the manor of Little Lawford. This suggests that Boughton was already in possession of the manor despite the life interest of his mother-in-law and that there was a rival claim or claims which might later trouble him. Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2639. Other family matters concerned him early in 1450. On 1 Feb. he entered into a contract for the marriage of his daughter, Joan, to the son and heir of a Northamptonshire esquire, Thomas Seyton*, both of whom were only eight years old. The marriage arose out of a complex family relationship: our MP’s friend, William Feldyng*, was the husband of Seyton’s half-sister and had also shared with Seyton a common stepmother in Joan Bellers, mother of Everard Digby*. Proof is lacking, but it is likely that Feldyng was also (or else was soon to be) in the service of Edward Grey, now Lord Ferrers of Groby. Boughton was prepared to pay handsomely for the match: he undertook to pay a portion of either 325 or 365 marks (erasures in the surviving document leave the amount ambiguous), as much as 200 marks of which was to be paid on or before the day of the marriage, scheduled for the following 15 June. He also agreed to bear all the costs of the marriage celebrations save for the ‘weddyng clothes’ of the groom. In return, Seyton undertook to convey to our MP and others lands in Seaton and elsewhere in Rutland (said in an erasure to be worth 20 marks p.a.) so that Boughton might take the issues for the maintenance of the couple before the lands were settled on them and their male issue when the groom reached the age of 18. Seyton’s readiness to surrender immediately lands worth so much, even though his heir was many years short of his majority, may explain why Boughton was prepared to pay more for the match than was demanded by the standing of the Seytons. Finch Hatton mss, 635.

Restored to the Warwickshire bench in the spring of 1449, Boughton was at his most prominent in the early 1450s. In August 1452 he sat on the county grand jury before the powerful commission of inquiry that came to Warwickshire in the wake of the duke of York’s Dartford rising. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 580-1; KB9/268/5. More interestingly, four months later, he was named to an important local commission that marked an early episode in the great dispute over one of the main gentry inheritances in the county between Edmund Mountfort* and his nephew of the half-blood, Simon Mountfort†. The former had the support of the duke of Buckingham and our MP’s patrons, Lord Ferrers and the earl of Wiltshire, and the latter that of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. The commission was intended to return findings favourable to Edmund’s claim, and our MP’s presence among the commissioners clearly identified him with the faction headed by Buckingham. So too did his election to Parliament on the following 5 Mar. (only the day before the Commons were due to assemble at Reading) in company with another of Wiltshire’s associates, Henry Filongley. It was a marked departure from the established pattern of the county’s representation in that neither of the MPs was a retainer of the earl of Warwick. Indeed, there can be no doubt that the election result was determined not only by the prevailing tide in the county’s politics but also by the national resurgence of the royal court. Filongley was a prominent courtier and our MP was closely connected with the Lancastrian loyalists through his patrons. CPR, 1452-61, p. 58; C219/16/2. The earl was more successful in the county borough, represented by two of his associates: namely, Boughton’s friend, Hotoft, and Thomas Colt*.

The Parliament proved to be a long one, running through three sessions to Easter 1454. During the prorogation between July and February, Boughton returned to Warwickshire for he sat as a j.p. at Warwick on 2 Oct. and 7 Jan. KB9/276/36; KB27/789, rex rot. 29d. He later had some difficulty in collecting the wages owed to him for his service in the assembly. On 8 July 1455 he claimed £33 in wages and £10 in damages against the former sheriff, Sir Leonard Hastings*, in the Exchequer of pleas. This action appears not to have succeeded or, at least, did so only in part, for Boughton turned for redress to Hastings’s under sheriff, Thomas Stretton of Coventry. On 2 July 1456, at Little Lawford, he took a bond from Stretton in 17 marks for the fulfillment of complex conditions: the bond was to be paid if our MP claimed levy of £20 from the next sheriff, Thomas Berkeley†, and delivered Hastings exoneration of that sum. Later our MP sued Stretton on this obligation in the court of common pleas. The consequent pleading is of particular interest for it throws light on the ill-documented mechanism by which parliamentary wages were levied. The bond’s condition listed over 100 vills in the county together with the sums each owed as their contribution to Boughton’s outstanding wages, sums varying between 2d. and 20s. In view of the troubled condition of both national and Warwickshire politics at this date, it may be that the delay in levying these sums itself had a political dimension. Stretton was an annuitant of the Neville earl, and as such he may have had a motive for making difficulties in the payment of MPs returned against his lord’s interest. However this may be, it seems that Boughton finally secured what was owing to him: at the assizes at Warwick on 17 July 1458 he won costs and damages of 40s. on Stretton’s default, and his later acknowledgment implies that he was paid in full. Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 286-93, 378.

Boughton remained connected with the Lancastrian interest in the later years of his career. In Michaelmas term 1455 Lord Ferrers and his wife surrendered their interest in a valuable part of her inheritance to our MP and others, including Feldyng and Sir Thomas Fynderne*, both of whom were to die in the Lancastrian cause. The feoffees were intended to hold the lands for the jointure of Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, on her marriage to Lord Ferrers’s son, Sir John Grey, another who was to die for Lancaster. CP25(1)/293/72/398; C1/27/268. In December 1456 Boughton sat on the bench, presided over by Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, when felony indictments were heard against the earl of Warwick’s retainer, Simon Mountfort. KB9/284/53; Carpenter, 476-7. Such associations made him a natural appointee to the Lancastrian commission of array issued in 1459, but there is no evidence to show that he played an active role in the civil war of 1459-61. All that can be said is that he died during its course. He last appears in the records on 16 Dec. 1460, when, somewhat surprisingly, the Yorkists retained him on the commission of the peace. Equally puzzling, and for the same reason, is his nomination in the late 1450s by John Hugford†, a retainer of the earl of Warwick, to take evidence on his behalf in the long-running dispute over the lands of Nicholas Metley*. This is indicative of what one recent commentator has identified as the fluidity of Warwickshire politics during these years; and, as far as Boughton is concerned, it diminishes the temptation to identify him as one of the casualties of the civil war. C1/26/533; Carpenter, 480.

Notwithstanding local and national turmoil, the later years of Boughton’s career were largely concerned with private rather than public affairs. On 1 Aug. 1456 he conveyed his Bedfordshire manors of Silsoe and Kempston Hardwick with lands at Simpson in Buckinghamshire to feoffees headed by two lawyers, Feldyng and John Dyve*; and in the following April he made a conveyance of the manor of Little Lawford to another group of feoffees headed by the same two. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 23, 56-57; Ward-Broughton-Leigh mss, C162/124. The confidence he placed in Feldyng was returned in 1457 when William named him as one of the feoffees for implementation of his daughter’s marriage settlement: Shakespeare Centre Archs., Willoughby de Broke mss, DR98/89, 122A. These feoffees were presumably intended to stand seised for the implementation of his last will; and their legal expertise was likely to prove a useful resource in the face of a potential threat to his son’s inheritance of the Allesley estates, on which the family’s newfound prominence depended. In 1452 our MP had taken the trouble to secure a public instrument recording the testimony of one of those present in 1422 when Geoffrey Allesley had conveyed the manor of Little Lawford to feoffees from whom his wife claimed title. In the autumn of 1456 he took further measures to strengthen this title. In the name of his son and heir-apparent, Richard, who had fallen heir to the lands on his mother’s death two years before, he complained to the chancellor that certain unnamed persons, ‘neither wele ne godely disposed .... pupplyshyn and voysen in all the contrey’, where the lands lay, that they were not entailed to his son. He asked, ‘in cesyng of the seid sclaunderous’, that a writ of dedimus potestatem be directed to the abbots of Kenilworth and Combe, and two local lawyers, Feldyng and Thomas Bate*, to examine the matter. Accordingly, at an inquiry held before all four commissioners at Little Lawford on 20 Feb. 1457, Richard’s maternal grandmother, Eleanor, confessed that, ‘some variance and debate’ having arisen between herself and our MP, she had burnt the deed of entail (dated 1423) at the abbey of Combe, an act she had later come to regret. She gave a copy of the deed to Richard and, three weeks later, he duly sued an exemplification of the petition and proceedings under the great seal. Thus was the family’s title to the Allesley lands made more secure. C1/26/171; Ward-Broughton-Leigh mss, CR162/122, 123. Eleanor had a life interest in the manor of Little Lawford under the settlements of 1423 and 1441, but there can be little doubt that the Boughtons had held the property from her husband’s death. She had presumably surrendered her interest for an annuity, and it may be that it was a quarrel over payment that led her to burn the deed.

One further private matter engaged Boughton’s attention before his death. On 1 Apr. 1460 he granted several small parcels of land in the vicinity of Little Lawford to the perpetual vicar of the parish church of Newbold-on-Avon and several of his lesser neighbours, perhaps as an endowment for prayers for his soul. In any event, it was at that church that he was buried on his death either later in the same year or early in the next. His tomb, an alabaster slab with black incised lines, survives. He is portrayed in full armour with his feet resting on a chained and muzzled bear. Ward-Broughton-Leigh mss, CR162/27; Trans. Birmingham Arch. Soc. xlix. 41-42. His son, Richard, sat for Warwickshire in 1472 and enjoyed a more prominent career than his father. He is said to have died on his way to fight for Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. Richard’s son, William, was an esquire of the body to Henry VIII, and subsequent members of the family sat in Parliament as late as the eighteenth century. Carpenter, 551; Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. lxii), 163; The Commons 1509-58, i. 464; 1558-1603, i. 458-9; 1660-90, i. 692-3.