Humphrey Bourgchier’s great marriage, as a mere younger son, is a measure of the influence of his family in the early 1450s. His bride, Joan Stanhope, as one of the two nieces of the childless Ralph, Lord Cromwell, was coheiress-presumptive to one of the greatest landed fortunes in England.
Humphrey’s marriage did much to determine the course of his career, not least his future allegiance to the Yorkists in the civil war of 1459-61. This allegiance arose in part out of his struggle, in alliance with his Neville brother-in-law, to acquire what they considered their rightful share of Cromwell’s lands. Under the terms of a codicil Cromwell added to his 1451 will in Michaelmas 1454, the greater part of these estates were diverted from his heirs to charitable purposes, principally the foundation of a collegiate church at Tattershall. Only his entailed lands were to go to the heirs, and then only on condition that they found security to his feoffees and executors not to impede them in the will’s implementation.
After Cromwell’s death on 4 Jan. 1456 the husbands of his nieces duly gave full vent to their anger at the partial disinheritance of their wives. Despite a statute staple in the hefty sum of £1,000 entered into by Humphrey’s father and uncle, Archbishop Thomas, to be forfeit if he hindered the will’s execution, Humphrey, with Neville, led the wholesale plunder of Cromwell’s goods from Tattershall and elsewhere and refused to yield his lands into the hands of the feoffees. A later executors’ account gives some measure of the scale of their loss: between January 1456 and Michaelmas 1459 Humphrey and Neville took more than £3,000 in profits of land to which they were not entitled, a loss to be reckoned in addition to goods worth more than £2,000 taken by them and others from Tattershall at the time of Cromwell’s funeral.
By the late 1450s Bourgchier’s strong Yorkist allegiance was becoming clear, a development no doubt aided by the fact that his mother was Richard, duke of York’s sister. He had already benefited from Yorkist patronage. On 14 Feb. 1456, towards the end of York’s second protectorate and while his father was treasurer and, more significantly, his uncle, Archbishop Thomas, chancellor, he and Neville had been granted the right to enter the Cromwell inheritance without the taking of inquisitions post mortem and the suing of livery. This grant allowed them tortiously to annex to themselves, albeit temporarily, a large part of these lands. Soon after, on 2 Mar., he was jointly appointed with his Neville brother-in-law to Cromwell’s former offices of constable of Nottingham castle, steward of Sherwood forest, and chamberlain of the Exchequer.
In the spring of 1458 Bourgchier’s closeness to York’s Neville allies was evidenced when he offered surety of the peace for a leading Neville adherent, (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I*, and acted as a mainpernor for Sir Thomas Neville’s brother, Sir John, in a dispute with Queen Margaret over the wardship of the daughter of (Sir) Edmund Ingoldisthorpe*. This Neville connexion serves to explain his appointment, in May 1458, to a commission, dominated by the Nevilles, to negotiate with the envoys of the duke of Burgundy.
When the Nevilles returned to power in July 1460 Humphrey no longer had any reason to avoid open opposition to Lancaster, the more so because the senior Bourgchiers, his father and uncle, the archbishop of Canterbury, had finally abandoned any pretence at neutrality. He was present with his father at the Neville victory at Northampton on 10 July, a battle in which his erstwhile rival, the earl of Shrewsbury, met his death.
Bourgchier’s service to the Yorkist cause on the battlefield and in Parliament was well rewarded. At about the time his father had been reappointed, on 28 July, to the treasurership of the Exchequer, he himself was appointed to the important Household office of treasurer of the chamber to the captive Henry VI, and, on 9 Nov., while sitting in Parliament, he was granted the wardship of the Lincolnshire estates once of the King’s half-brother Edmund, earl of Richmond, during the minority of his son Henry.
It was fortunate for the Bourgchiers that this defeat was swiftly reversed. Only the Nevilles gained more than they from royal patronage in the aftermath of Edward IV’s accession, and Humphrey, whose father was treasurer from July 1460 to April 1462, did not go without his share. On the first day of the reign, 4 Mar. 1461, he was restored to the Cromwell offices he had lost in December 1459; and on the following 27 June he was one of those created a knight in honour of the new King’s impending coronation. Ten days later he was granted, for the generous term of 20 years, the keeping of both the royal manor of Eltham in Kent, and, more importantly from the point of view of his local influence, some of the Lincolnshire estates of the Crown, including the castle of Somerton and the manor of Burwell, once held by Ralph, Lord Cromwell.
Humphrey also benefited from royal patronage in a less direct way. His high-standing place with the new King put him in a far better position than he had been in the late 1450s to drive a hard bargain with the late Lord Cromwell’s executors. Sir Thomas Neville’s death and his widow’s remarriage to the Lancastrian (Sir) Gervase Clifton* served as the pretext for a further division of the entailed lands. This was brought about through the mediation of the new chief justice of the King’s bench, Sir John Markham. In May 1462 Humphrey agreed to accept lands valued at 500 marks p.a. by independent auditors and ‘to be good lord’ to the beleaguered executors and feoffees. In the following September a new assignment was made to him with the apparent aim of consolidating his estates: he surrendered the outlying manors of Quinton (Gloucestershire) and Shalbourne (Berkshire), among those allotted to him in the late 1450s, in return for the remaining moiety of Tattershall. Even this, however, was not enough for Humphrey. Despite accepting Markham’s mediation, he demanded a further 100 marks p.a. of land beyond his share of 500 marks, and the executors reluctantly assigned to him the manors of Kirby Bellar (Leicestershire) and Stow Bedon (Norfolk). Later he was again to embarrass the executors by demanding 200 marks ‘for a brybe’ to quitclaim his rights to three manors sold to Sir Henry Pierrepont†.
Having bullied the executors into conceding more than they were empowered to give under the terms of the late Lord Cromwell’s will, Humphrey turned his attention to securing an interest in those lands assigned to Sir Gervase Clifton and Maud, the other coheiress. Clifton’s Lancastrian sympathies made him an easy target, and there are grounds for believing that it was Humphrey, acting in combination with the queen’s brother, Anthony Wydeville, Lord Scales, who instigated the accusations of treason brought against him in November 1465. If they were not the instigators, they were certainly the beneficiaries. Clifton, fearing indictment for treason and the consequent forfeiture of his interest in his wife’s estates, conveyed these lands, worth as much as 400 marks a year, to Scales for the lifetime of Maud; Scales then allowed Humphrey to take the profits in return for a life grant of the Norfolk manor of Stow Bedon and a grant in fee of the hundred of Freebridge.
While indulging in such private initiatives Humphrey was also adding to the rewards he already enjoyed from direct royal patronage. Throughout Edward IV’s first reign he was a valued royal servant, taking an active role in the campaign to reduce the Northumbrian castles in the winter of 1462-3, representing the King at the Canterbury convocation of July 1463 and occasionally appearing on the royal council.
This heavy royal investment in Humphrey’s loyalty was more than repaid during the crisis of 1469-71. It was his steward of Tattershall, one John Morling, who warned the King of the serious Lincolnshire rising against him in March 1470. That Morling sent the warning for security via a child suggests that his master was known to have no sympathy with the rebels.
There is unfortunately little evidence of Humphrey’s connexions in the county he represented in Parliament. His main residence was at Tattershall throughout Edward IV’s first reign, and after the attainder of the Beaumonts in 1461 and his own acquisition of the other moiety of Cromwell’s entailed lands in 1465 he became the principal baronial landholder in the county. Yet his level of activity there and in the east Midlands generally in no way reflected the extent of his estates in the area. In 1466-7 he served as alderman of the prestigious Boston guild of Corpus Christi and is known to have sat at least once as a j.p., at Boston in 1462. He was also active on the neighbouring Nottinghamshire bench, sitting at Nottingham in 1456 and 1464.
Plainly the evidence here is incomplete, both in respect of his activities and connexions, but it is equally clear that Humphrey’s role in central politics made a base nearer Westminster more appropriate. He was probably often at his uncle’s archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth for he is occasionally styled ‘of Lambeth’. This would explain his attestation of the Surrey election of 1460 and his appointment to the Surrey commission of the peace in August 1464. The fact that he sat as a Surrey j.p. on several occasions, usually at Southwark and in company with another uncle, Lord Berners, and that he may have attested a second Surrey election in 1467, suggests he spent most of the late 1460s in the environs of London rather than in Lincolnshire.
Humphrey is generally said to have died without issue, but he left a son, Ralph, who, along with his mother, Joan, was admitted to the Boston guild of Corpus Christi in 1470. Ralph, however, survived his father by only a few months. He was dead by 27 June 1471 when the offices his father had held in tail-male were granted to William, Lord Hastings.