BROOKE, Sir Edward (c.1415-64), of Weycroft and Holditch, Devon and Lynch, Som. and Cooling castle, Kent.

Edward, born in or probably before 1415, was the eldest surviving son of the 14 or more children of Sir Thomas Brooke and his wife Joan, Lady Cobham. In his youth he was engaged in February 1430 to serve for a year as an esquire in the King’s expedition to France, taking with him another man-at-arms and six archers, and it was probably while he was overseas in the royal army that he was knighted, perhaps on the occasion of Henry VI’s coronation as king of France. E404/46/226. His knighting occurred at some point before the summer of 1432, by which date the company had returned home. Before he had left for France, his father and paternal grandmother, Joan, the wealthy widow of the older Sir Thomas Brooke†, had made arrangements for a settlement of land on Edward’s marriage to a woman called Margaret. Unfortunately, the settlement survives only as a lawyer’s draft proposal, which provides neither Margaret’s full name nor the location of the manors which the Brookes intended to give the couple in tail-male. Harl. Ch. 46 H 9 (the manors simply described as ‘A. B. and C’). The marriage took place before June 1432, when Sir Edward and his wife were party to a final concord concerning the manor of Petton in Bampton and other property in the same area of east Devon, which as they do not seem to have belonged to his family perhaps pertained to his wife’s. Harl. Ch. 46 H 21. It may be that Robert and Elizabeth Croos, who made the conveyance, were related to Margaret.

Three years later Brooke fell into serious trouble, in the first recorded incident of a lifetime of warlike arrays, and on 30 Nov. 1435 he was bound over in the sum of £80 before the chief justice of King’s bench to keep the peace towards one William Faryngdon. The status of those who appeared in court as his mainpernors, each providing bonds in £40, is worthy of remark: three earls (of Huntingdon, Northumberland and Oxford) presented themselves, together with Lord Fanhope, all four peers presumably being at Westminster to attend the Parliament then in session. KB27/698, rex rot. 29. The background to this case may have been Sir Edward’s indictment at Wells two months earlier on charges that, together with his father Sir Thomas and a family friend Sir Thomas Beauchamp* of Whitelackington, he had raised a body of 40 armed men with whom he had committed numerous insurrectionary acts at Lynch in North Petherton, Somerset. No aggrieved party was specified in the indictments and no cause of the disturbances was suggested. Sir Edward (whose place of residence was given as Lynch itself) was the only defendant for whom a judgement is recorded, this being acquittal. The fact that the indictments were heard by Sir William Bonville*, with whom the Brookes had long been at odds, may not be without significance. M. Cherry, ‘Crown and Political Community, Devon’ (Univ. of Wales, Swansea Ph.D. thesis, 1981), 241-4; KB9/227/1/78, 79. Yet for the time being Sir Edward’s aggression was channelled into more worthy paths. The following year he sailed for France again, in the force sent under the command of the duke of Gloucester to relieve Calais. His men were mustered prior to embarkation at Sandwich on 29 July 1436. CPR, 1429-36, p. 611.

It was not long after this second expedition overseas that Brooke married for the second time. On 6 Nov. 1436 he contracted to wed Lord Audley’s daughter Elizabeth before the following feast of the Purification, her father agreeing (under obligations of 1,000 marks) to pay him a total of £600 in instalments before Midsummer 1440. CCR, 1435-41, p. 101. From the large sum involved it is clear that Lord Audley was keen to secure the match – indeed, Brooke stood to inherit substantial estates in the West Country from his father and more in Kent and several other counties from his mother. It is curious, however, that neither of his parents nor his paternal grandmother was named as party to the agreement, and that no record of a landed settlement on the couple from the Brooke or Cobham estates is extant. Audley stood to gain much for his daughter and grandchildren. Yet from Brooke’s point of view there was little to be gained materially (apart from the money) for the bride was not an heiress, and even if her mother was the daughter of an earl, she had been shown in Parliament to be illegitimate. PROME, x. 461-3; Genealogist, n.s. xxviii. 62. It may be that at the time of the marriage Brooke’s father gave the couple his manor of ‘Blundeshay’ in Whitchurch Canonicorum in west Dorset (worth as much as £44 p.a.); at least, at an unknown date his feoffees transferred the property to Sir Edward and his new wife. C140/13/26. For the value of the estate: Feudal Aids, vi. 426.

The earlier disturbances around Brooke’s home at Lynch may have been linked with the emergence of Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, as a political force in the region, since the earl held property nearby and when Sir Edward next appeared in warlike array his activities were definitely directed against him. He was accused of breaking into the earl’s houses at Lynch on 13 May 1438, and causing damage assessed at £500. Although he was indicted a mere five days after the event, the earl’s suit did not come before the central courts until a year had elapsed, and thereafter it was inconclusively pursued by the Courtenay attorneys for a period of 18 years, continuing unresolved until Earl Thomas’s death. KB9/231/1/124-6; Cherry, 241-4; CP40/722, rot. 330d; 734, rot. 327. Note that Brooke continued to be called ‘of Lynch’: KB27/765, rex rot. 9. The dispute, whatever its origin, did not prevent the two protagonists from eventually forming a political alliance of major consequence. In Jan. 1443 the earl brokered a marriage between his ward Henry Bodrugan† and Brooke’s 15-year-old sister Margaret, although this came to nothing when Bodrugan asserted that she had been violated by one Laurence ‘of the chamber’: CP40/778, rot. 409. Despite his past misdemeanours, Brooke was appointed as a j.p. in Somerset in May 1439. His father Sir Thomas was named in association with him as a witness to transactions dated a month later, CCR, 1435-41, p. 282. but was evidently ailing and he died on 12 Aug. following. In accordance with a settlement of 1438 a substantial number of the Brooke estates were to be retained by Sir Edward’s mother, Lady Cobham, for her lifetime, C139/92/32, 97/6; CP25(1)/292/69/217; Harl. Ch. 50 E6. and she also had the difficult task of executing Sir Thomas’s will, which her children may well have contested. Her husband had expressed serious concern that they would not treat his ‘true servants’ properly, given the ‘evil will’ they had displayed towards them in the past. He had ruled that Sir Edward should only be permitted to act as an executor if Lady Cobham was amenable. Fifty Earliest English Wills (EETS lxxviii), 130.

Within weeks of his father’s death Sir Edward sought election to the Parliament summoned for 12 Nov. 1439 as a shire knight for Somerset. There, the Brookes held sizeable estates, and although their chief residence was at Holditch, on the border of Devon and Dorset, it was again for Somerset that he was returned for a second time, to the Parliament assembled in January 1442. After that parliamentary session he was not to enter the Commons again, for eight months after the dissolution of the Parliament his mother Lady Cobham died, and thereafter he was summoned to the Upper House. Within two weeks of his mother’s death on 24 Nov. the new Lord Cobham obtained a royal licence to enter all her castles, lordships and manors, on payment of 50 marks in the King’s chamber. C139/112/66; CPR, 1441-6, p. 140. The Cobham estates, which had eventually fallen to his mother in their entirety on the death of her stepfather Sir John Harpenden four years earlier, were situated in eight counties and worth at least £211 p.a. They included property in London (notably Cobham’s Inn in the parish of St. Dunstan in the East), and valuable holdings in Kent, such as Cooling castle and the manor of Cobham. C139/65/37, 86/28. Yet Brooke did not choose to make his home permanently in the south-east. He remained a j.p. in Somerset and Devon, and continued to reside principally at Holditch and the nearby castle at Weycroft. Weycroft castle and the manor of Cotley, Devon, were settled on him and his wife Elizabeth by his father’s feoffees in Mar. 1444: Harl. Ch. 48 B 10. However, on 22 Sept. 1443 he was in Kent among the lords who processed into Canterbury cathedral to watch John Stafford being enthroned as archbishop. Chron. John Stone, ed. Searle (Cambridge Antiq. Soc. octavo ser. xxxiv), 33-34.

As Lord Cobham, Brooke attended the Parliament of 1445, taking part in the ceremonies at the coronation of Margaret of Anjou held during its second session. Wishing to be suitably dressed for the occasion he agreed to pay one John Balle £20 for ‘browdering of diverse harnes and clothis’, and gave him a bond worth this amount which he had obtained from a man from Saffron Walden. The bond proved not to be sound so that Balle could not enforce it in the court of common pleas, and his widow later petitioned the King for redress against Cobham. The latter nevertheless held firm, saying that the bond was good, and that Balle had acquitted him in full. SC8/31/1531-2. Other litigation in this period concerned Cobham’s executorship of his parents’ wills, and on 6 Nov. 1446 he took out a royal pardon which referred specifically to this duty. C67/39, m. 22. Although there is no documented evidence for his attendance at the Parliaments of 1447 and February 1449 and for the first session of that of November 1449, there is no reason to believe that he was absent from the Lords on any of these occasions. Nor is there any indication that he again served overseas during the 1440s and 1450s. However, it seems likely that he was the person incorrectly named as ‘Sir Thomas Brooke’ on the list of the most prominent landowners of Cornwall and Devon to whom the King sent letters on 21 Jan. 1450 asking them to do whatever they could to preserve from assault Cherbourg and Lower Normandy ‘whiche ys nye to yow’, pending the dispatch of a royal army across the Channel, and to array their region for defence against invasion from France. Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, i. 510-12. Cobham was in London at least for the latter part of the second session of the Parliament of 1449-50, which assembled the following day, 22 Jan., and sat until 30 Mar., being among Henry VI’s ‘lordes both spirituell and temporell thenne beyng in Towne’, ordered by the King to come to his private chamber in the palace of Westminster on 17 Mar. They were to consider what should be done about the charges levied by the Commons against Henry’s chief minister, the duke of Suffolk. In their presence the duke denied all the accusations brought against him, and submitted himself to the judgement of King Henry. The Lords insisted that in the enrolled record of the Parliament it would be made clear that the sentence then passed on the duke (the relatively lenient one of exile), was passed by the King alone, and not by their advice or counsel. PROME, xii. 105.

Whatever Cobham’s views about Suffolk may have been, his attitude towards the most prominent magnates of the West Country is quite clear. The long history of confrontation between the Brookes and their neighbour Sir William Bonville (created Lord Bonville in 1449), over land and jurisdiction in south-east Devon – a rivalry which went back at least to the 1420s – continued in his own generation. Cobham had brushed seriously with Bonville’s friend William Bourgchier (husband of a coheiress to the Hankford estates) at Bampton in 1440, CP40/720, rot. 110d; 721, rot. 120. and in 1447 disagreements with Bonville himself had caused the latter to bring a writ of trespass against him in the King’s bench. Cherry, 279; KB27/743, rot. 45. A few years later their differences resulted in bloodshed, seemingly as a consequence of Bonville’s alliance with James Butler, earl of Wiltshire. The origins of Cobham’s enmity towards the earl and his men remain obscure yet there is no doubting the strong feelings they generated, which reached a crisis point in the autumn of 1450. The immediate quarrel focused on a dispute with Robert Cappes, an esquire retained by the earl, As sheriff, Cappes had earlier caused considerable trouble in Dorset in the clash between Butler and William Stafford*, and he had also been in disgrace in the spring of 1447, when he had fled abroad through fear of arrest on suspicion of high treason as a servant of the duke of Gloucester: CPR, 1446-52, pp. 44, 45. and was centred on Marshwood in west Dorset, near the Devon border. Initially, Cobham appears to have been on amicable terms with Cappes, for in June 1448 he and his wife leased to the esquire for life certain lands called ‘Gerens atte Hill’ in Marshwood. Harl. Ch. 46 H 23. Brooke’s post mortem, C140/13/26, refers to a grant of 21 Apr. but without noting the regnal year of Hen. VI in which it was made. Yet Cappes befriended one John de la Stabell alias Ducheman, a groom who worked in Cobham’s stables at Holditch. According to later indictments, de la Stabell was a thief, who in August 1447 stole from his master the silver buckles from his saddle harness, worth £10, and in March 1449 other goods worth £2; Cappes offered the groom shelter on 1 July 1450. Over-reacting to what appears to have been a minor matter, Cobham assembled a body of armed men on 24 Oct. following, with the intention of killing Cappes at Battiscombe, or so it was said, and, not succeeding on that occasion, he then encouraged his brother Peter Brooke to take a force some 40-strong from Holditch to ambush Cappes on 2 Jan. 1451. In the fray, which took place in a lane off the King’s road between ‘Colmorescrosse’ and ‘Harmeseys yate’, not far from Cappes’s home at Pilsdon, one of the latter’s servants was killed. It was alleged that Cobham aided and abetted the felons, who nine days later, on 11 Jan., were indicted at Dorchester at sessions of the peace presided over by Cappes’s lord the earl of Wiltshire. Cobham’s supporters retaliated swiftly: the very next day Cappes and the groom were indicted before the j.p.s sitting at Exeter and a few days later a royal commission was issued for their delivery from Exeter castle gaol. Swift action from Cobham’s enemies followed on 23 Jan., with a writ to the sheriff of Dorset for the forfeiture of his bond of 1435 to keep the peace. The following Trinity term witnessed a flurry of actions in the King’s bench arising from these indictments. Cappes and de la Stabell gave themselves up to the Marshalsea on 2 July, pleaded not guilty, and put themselves on juries, summoned for the next term. Among those standing bail on their behalf was the earl of Wiltshire’s retainer Henry Filongley*. At the same time Cobham brought an action for trespass against Cappes, Filongley and 11 other servants of the earl, while Cappes claimed damages of £300 for the assault. This Cobham firmly denied; while his co-defendants said they had acted in self-defence. KB27/761, rots. 7, 42, 50, rex rot. 1d; 765, rex rot. 3d; 767, rex rot. 3d; CPR, 1446-52, p. 434; KB145/6/29.

A draft survives of the ‘articles of the grete wronges, injuries, grevaunces and trespasses’ done to Cobham by the earl of Wiltshire and his servants. In this account, Cobham asserted that he had been peaceably at home in his manor house at Holditch when on 3 Jan. 1451 the earl had come with a force of 200 armed men, of whom Cappes was one, and besieged him for five hours as if it ‘had be in lande of werre’. They had broken into the local smithy and stolen ‘grete sleggys’, many iron bars, pikes and mattocks, intending to use them to mine the house, smashed down doors to the stables and barns, wasted and despoiled his corn, and seized trunks and sacks containing the things put ready for his removal to Weycroft. Furthermore, the earl had caused Cobham and his brother Peter to be wrongfully indicted for felony at Dorchester, charges intended to lead to the destruction of their ‘persones’ and the ‘corrupcion of thaire blode’. Harl. Ch. 46 H 26. Archaeologia Cantiana, xi. 102-3 wrongly dates this incident to 1460. In the Easter term of 1451 the earl had brought charges in the common pleas, asserting that the assault on 2 Jan. and threats to Cappes and another man had deprived him of their services in collecting his rents and keeping his parks of Cricklade and Marshwood for four months. He claimed damages of as much as £500. Dissatisfied with that court’s response, he followed this legal action by taking the charge to King’s bench in Michaelmas term. CP40/761, rot. 113d; KB27/762, rot. 284.

Meanwhile, throughout the summer of 1451 Cobham had been kept on the benches of both Somerset and Devon, but the temperature of his quarrel with the earl of Wiltshire rose dramatically early in September, when he joined forces with Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, in full military action against Wiltshire and his ally Bonville. P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 101, 102, 116; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 205-7. Both earls were sent orders to appear before the King’s Council, but to no avail. The story of the ensuing events from the point of view of Wiltshire and Bonville is given in the indictments presented against Devon and his friends at Ilchester on 11 Jan. 1452. It was alleged that Earl Thomas, Cobham and many others of the earl’s affinity (including Sir Hugh Courtenay* of Bocconoc, Thomas Wyse*, John Gibbes*, Thomas Holland* and Richard Strode*) had assembled a large force of between 5,000 and 6,000 men from Somerset, Devon and Dorset to rise in rebellion against the Crown. They gathered together on 15 Sept. at Taunton intending to murder Wiltshire and Bonville, moved that day to Bridgwater with five cartloads of guns and other arms and armour, came to Glastonbury, to the great terror of the townspeople, from whom they took victuals without paying for them, and then, ignoring the pleas of the bishop at Wells to keep the peace, drew up in war formation on a ‘mount’ near Bath. Wiltshire, true to character, fled, riding to join the King at Coventry on the 17th, and on the next day Cobham’s rampaging army plundered his properties, stealing weapons, goods and food. On Tuesday 21st the rebels laid siege to the castle at Taunton, intending to kill Bonville, who was holed up there. KB27/765, rex rot. 9. The siege of three days was ended by the arrival of Richard, duke of York, with a retinue of 2,000 men. A full account is given in R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 89-91, although Storey misdates Cobham’s brushes with Cappes to Oct. 1451 and Jan. 1452 (instead of Oct. 1450 and Jan. 1451), through a misreading of KB27/767, rex rot. 3d, and also dates the events of Sept. 1451 to a week later. According to one account, the King was angry at the widespread breach of the peace and summoned all involved to court, proceeding to lodge Wiltshire and Bonville in the castle at Berkhampstead, and Cobham in Wallingford castle. The royal summons was, however, ignored by York and Devon. Yet it remains unclear what actually happened to Cobham after the siege of Taunton was raised. As already noted, the indictments of the following January were aimed at his and Devon’s followers, not at those retained by their enemies, who had the King’s ear. And when next recorded he was not in prison at Wallingford; rather, he was in armour again, once more at the head of a sizeable army. On 17 Feb. 1452 the King sent him a letter saying that he had expected him to be ‘awayting upon us as other lordes’ after being called to come to ‘oure counsaille’ and do service as a true liegeman ‘considering the great untruth and disobedience that is purposed against our estate’, but that Cobham had wilfully absented himself. He charged him on his allegiance to come to the royal presence immediately. PPC, vi. 116. But at that very time troops were moving out from the earl of Devon’s seat at Tiverton to assemble in Yeovil and Ilminster. They then advanced to join their leader the earl, now firmly in league with the duke of York. Cherry, 283-4; KB9/15/1/23-25; 268/90, 94; KB27/771, rex rot. 96. Later indictments place Cobham in the company of these Courtenay men, and as York’s army moved towards London he was at the duke’s side.

The roots of Cobham’s attachment to York may be traced back several years, for he was the duke’s feudal tenant at Holditch, and in March 1446 had formally paid homage to him for the lordship of ‘Blundeshay’. Add. Ch. 15452; C140/13/26. At an unknown date he gave the duke’s receiver in the region, William Browning I*, a rent of £5 a year, perhaps as a personal annuity. A later history of the Lords Cobham makes much of Edward’s oath of undying allegiance to the duke (Add. 12514, ff. 64-65), but there is nothing in the indenture of 1446 to suggest that it was anything more than a legal formality. Of their personal relations nothing is recorded, yet there can be no doubt of Cobham’s commitment to his lord. He may have sought York’s help in his quarrel with the earl of Wiltshire (who in earlier years had served on York’s council but was now estranged from him), and was prepared to support York in his challenge to the duke of Somerset’s pervasive influence over the King. Now, at about ‘Shroftyde’ (22 Feb.) 1452, so it was later reported, York, Devon and Cobham ‘gadered a grete peple in destruccion of theire enemyes that were aboute the kyng’, and being refused entry to London by the citizens they crossed the Thames at Kingston bridge and moved to Dartford in Kent, An English Chron. 1377-1461, ed. Marx, 71. with an army said, implausibly, to number as many as 20,000 men. One account says they drew up their battle lines with York ‘in the middle ward’, Devon by ‘the south side’, and Cobham ‘at the water side’, their force being further strengthened with an ordnance of 3,000 gunners and seven ships. Nevertheless, when Henry VI and his own army arrived, York, seeing that the men of Kent had not rallied to him as promised, yielded to the King’s grace: he, Devon and Cobham ‘genuflectabant coram rege et proposuit dux suos articulos adversus ducem Somersetie quem accusavit in multis articulis de perdicione Normanie et Gasconie’. Having received the King’s assurances that Somerset would be placed in custody and committed to trial for his mismanagement of the duchy of Normandy, they disbanded their army. But the King had not made this undertaking in good faith, and Somerset appeared at his side the next day. The three leaders took oaths in St. Paul’s cathedral that they had never risen in insurrection against the King, yet only York was allowed to go free. John Benet’s Chron. 205-7; C.L. Kingsford, English Hististorical Literature, 298, 367-8. Furthermore, although a general pardon was offered to all who required one, and nearly 2,500 people purchased the pardon in the next 12 months, C67/40. among them Peter Brooke, Cobham’s brother, Ibid. m. 26. Peter died bef. Trin. 1456: CP40/782, rot. 412. neither Cobham nor Devon was permitted to obtain a copy. The weight of royal displeasure fell on these two lords, and on Cobham in particular. It looks as if he was put in prison almost immediately, although when in May John Wilkins of Stratford-upon-Avon stirred up a sizeable revolt in Kent, it was alleged that the rebels believed that Cobham would send them a ‘great sum of money’ to carry out their felonious plans, and that his brother would be their chief captain. Of interest too, in the light of the accusations of heresy made against Cobham’s father and grandfather in Henry V’s reign, the rebels were described as ‘sons of the devil and lollards’, who ‘proposed to hold all things in common, against the catholic law’. KB27/770, rex rot. 27; 774, rex rot. 35d; R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 218, 259 (from KB9/48/7).

Cobham was kept imprisoned in Berkhampstead castle for nearly three years, longer than Devon, who was formally charged with treason for his part in the rebellion and had to wait two years for his trial and subsequent acquittal by the lords. An indictment of the two of them for rising at Ilminster and Yeovil on 18 Feb. 1452 was taken by commissioners in Somerset; it bears a note that it was sent to Parliament in January 1454. Storey, 98, 101, 250; KB27/774, rex rot. 27; PROME, xii. 272-3; KB9/105/11. While Cobham was in prison, his enemies had free play in the law courts. In May 1452 his former groom John de la Stable pleaded his pardon in the King’s bench, and he and Robert Cappes were acquitted of the all charges against them. KB27/761, rex rot. 1d. The earl of Wiltshire stepped up his prosecution of Cobham and his men (indeed, he and his ally Bonville heard some of the indictments against them), and in Michaelmas term judgement was given in the common pleas in his favour, and he was awarded damages of 500 marks. Furthermore, at the assizes held in Dorset Cobham was found guilty as charged in the trespass against Cappes of January 1451, and damages were assessed at £200. CP40/762, rot. 284; KB27/761, rot. 50. He was outlawed both in Kent and Somerset. KB9/105/2/163. His followers fared better, by coming to the Westminster courts to plead their pardons in the course of the year 1452-3; his brother Peter gave himself up to the Marshalsea and presented his pardon in Hilary term 1453. CP40/765, rot. 407d; KB27/765, rex rot. 3d; 767, rex rot. 3d; 770, rex rots. 5, 31. While still un-pardoned, and in prison, Cobham was subjected to other serious accusations. When two approvers attributed the collapse of the Henry VI’s health in the summer of 1453 to necromancy, one of them confessed to casting a spell over a cloak belonging to the King on 28 July at Cobham’s instigation. Storey, 136; KB9/273/2, 7. Other rumours were also detrimental to his reputation. That autumn it was alleged that together with York and Devon he had obtained from Pope Nicholas V letters absolving them from the oath of submission they had taken to the King after Dartford. The pope, while denying any knowledge of such letters, formally revoked them. CPL, x. 152-3.

During the session of Parliament held at the end of February 1454 it was agreed that various Lords who had failed to attend in response to their summonses should be fined, according to their degree, but exception was made in the case of Lord Cobham, ‘beyng in pryson’. KB9/105/1/11; PROME, xii. 272-3. For his summons in Jan. 1453: Reps. Lords’ Cttees. iv. 933. The findings of the commission of oyer and terminer before which he had been indicted were sent to the Parliament, but he remained incarcerated. Because of his outlawry in Kent for divers high treasons and felonies, two of his manors in Essex were committed at farm to Thomas Leventhorpe† in October 1454; worse, in the following month the earl of Wiltshire’s man Henry Filongley was given keeping of all his estates in Devon, and a moiety of those in Somerset and Dorset. CFR, xix. 115-16. However, on 3 Dec. Cobham was permitted to come into King’s bench to plead a writ of error regarding his outlawry in Somerset, since, as he had been a prisoner in Berkhampstead castle when he had been put in exigent and outlawed he had been unable to appear in the county court to defend himself. The lords of the council bore witness that this was indeed the case. His outlawry was therefore revoked, and he was restored to law, although he was to remain in the custody of the marshal to answer the charges of treason brought against him. KB27/774, rex rot. 27. On 21 Feb. 1455 the Exchequer was to inspect the process of outlawry against him, to exonerate him and local officials from process. E159/231, Hil. rot. 14.

Precisely when Cobham was released from prison is not known, but it may have been before 10 Dec. 1454. According to one account he was at the duke of York’s side at the first battle of St. Albans in the following May. CP40/792, rot. 428d; C.A.J. Armstrong, ‘Politics and the Battle of St. Albans’, Bull. IHR, xxxiii. 27; J. Stow, Annales of Eng. ed. Howes, 398. If so, his experience of long imprisonment had evidently failed to convince him of the need to display overt loyalty to the monarch. Following the Yorkist victory he was sent a summons to the Parliament meeting on 9 July 1455, and while the Yorkists were still in control of the government he finally obtained a royal pardon, on the following 4 Oct. Reps. Lords’ Cttees. iv. 937; C67/41, m. 7. Cobham’s whereabouts in the next year or so are undocumented for the most part, although in June 1456 he was indicted before Chief Justice Fortescue* and his associates sitting at Maidstone for breach of the statute of liveries, it being alleged that on 26 Nov. 1455 he had distributed robes to five local tradesmen, none of whom were members of his household. KB27/808, rex rot. 36. Some rehabilitation is suggested by his appointment to a commission of array in Kent in September 1457, and on 29 Nov. that year he was required to attend a meeting of the great council, reconvened for 27 Jan. following. PPC, vi. 292.

In 1458 vigorous attempts were made to reconcile the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, and it is thought that Cobham was present in the ceremonial procession at the famous love-day held on 25 Mar., to witness the duke of York leading Queen Margaret by the hand out of St. Paul’s cathedral. Archaeologia Cantiana, xi. 102-3 – but without citing a source. Not long afterwards, on 3 July, his enemy the earl of Wiltshire came to the King’s bench to report that he had been satisfied of the damages of 500 marks awarded against Cobham six years earlier. CP40/762, rot. 284; 782, rot. 412. In order to pay the earl off Cobham had agreed that his daughter Elizabeth should marry the son and heir of Robert Tanfeld*, the queen’s receiver-general. He was prepared to invest heavily in the marriage, and settled on Elizabeth and her husband not only former Cobham family manors in Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire, but also two more in Somerset, which had formed part of his paternal inheritance. Tanfeld, on his part, had paid Cobham 100 marks on 20 Feb. 1458 and undertaken to pay him 600 marks more in due course. This he did on 2 July – the day before Cobham satisfied the earl of Wiltshire of the damages awarded against him. The marriage took place before September that year. CP40/790, cart. rot. d; Harl. Ch. 56 H 7; J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 273; CP40/832, rot. 124; VCH Beds. ii. 227; VCH Som. vi. 115; Some Som. Manors (Som. Rec. Soc. extra ser. 1931), 302; VCH Hunts. ii. 371.

Yet the uneasy peace was not to last. Cobham is not mentioned in official records in the two years which followed, while the earl of Wiltshire was treasurer of England. Nor is it known if he responded to the summons to attend the Parliament at Coventry, at which the principal Yorkist lords suffered attainder. What is certain is that, privately at least, he did not waver in his support for their leader and purpose. When the Yorkist earls landed in Kent in the summer of 1460, he hastened to join them with a force he had raised in the locality, and rode with them from Canterbury to London. There, he was deputed with the earl of Salisbury to hold the city and blockade the Lancastrian garrison in the Tower, while Warwick and March took their army to face the King’s at Northampton. Cobham and the sheriffs of London ‘went and laide grete ordenaunce a yenes the Toure on the towne syde’, while a similar offensive was launched from the other. Even so, it was not until 19 July, after Henry VI had been brought back to London by the triumphant Yorkists, that the defenders of the Tower relinquished possession. John Benet’s Chron. 226; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 73, 74.

It seems likely that Cobham attended the Parliament summoned for 7 Oct. 1460 and there witnessed the failure of the duke of York’s assertion of his claim to the throne. He was probably there too at the brief session held from 28 Jan. to 3 Feb. 1461 following the duke’s death at Wakefield, for his name appeared on a list recording those thought to be ready to fight against the Lancastrian army approaching from the north. Royal letters dated the day that session opened instructed him and other lords, headed by the earl of Arundel, to raise men from 12 southern counties to combat these ‘mysruled and outerageous people’ (Queen Margaret’s followers). Even so, there is no record that either he or Arundel were present on the losing side at the battle of St. Albans, or with the victors at Towton, and the movements of their forces are not revealed. C. Richmond, ‘Nobility and the Wars of the Roses: the Parlty. Session of Jan. 1461’, Parlty. Hist. xviii. 264, 268; PPC, vi. 307-8. After the accession of Edward IV, Cobham resumed his rightful place as a royal commissioner. At the start of the first Parliament of the reign he took on the responsible role of a trier of petitions, and in February 1462 he was placed on an important commission of oyer and terminer with jurisdiction over wide swathes of the country. He accompanied the royal army to Scotland in the following year. Three 15th Cent. Chrons. 157.

It was only on his return south that Cobham finally dealt with the backlog of proceedings against him in the law courts. He obtained a pardon (which shows that his usual place of residence was now Cooling castle, no longer Holditch or Lynch) on 20 May 1463, C67/45, m. 10. and presented it in King’s bench three days later, thereby bringing to an end the legal processes against him for abetting the perpetrators of the fracas of January 1451 and for the alleged breach of the statute of livery in 1455. KB27/808, rex rot. 36. Cobham took no further part in local government and died a year later, on 29 May 1464 (according to the inquisitions held in October). The heir to the barony of Cobham was his son John, said to be aged 18. Of landed settlements made in his lifetime surprisingly little is recorded, save that in December 1450 he had granted to his brother Reynold Brooke three East Anglian manors, worth about £17 p.a., and that he had provided his third wife, Joan, with jointure in his valuable manors of Weycroft castle and Holditch, as well as in substantial holdings in Somerset and Dorset. CFR, xx. 126-7; C140/13/26. Inqs. held in Norf. in Nov. found that he died on 9 May; those held in 1466 that he died on 6 June 1464.

Within six months of Lord Cobham’s death his widow, still of child-bearing age, married a royal esquire, Christopher Worsley, with whom on 8 Nov. 1464 she was pardoned her trespass in marrying without the King’s licence. CPR, 1461-7, p. 374. Somewhat tardily, in December 1467 the heir’s wardship and marriage were sold for 1,000 marks to the King’s uncle Sir Edward Neville, even though by then Lord John must have been on the verge of coming of age. CPR, 1467-77, p. 47. Nevertheless, he was not given formal licence to enter his estates until 24 Oct. 1471. CPR, 1467-77, p. 281. But he had been transacting business with regard to his estates in July 1471: Harl. Chs. 46 H 27, 28. Following the death of Worsley earlier that same year, C140/36/20. our MP’s widow married Robert Palmer, only to fall into ‘great variance’ with her stepson Lord John over possession of 13 manors in Devon, Dorset and Somerset and various properties in Bristol, which had belonged to his late father. The parties eventually submitted to the award of the King himself, being bound to do so on 23 June 1479 in obligations in the incredible sum of 50,000 marks. The King awarded on 12 Oct. that the Palmers should have the profits of the estates up to the previous Michaelmas, in accordance with a lease made to Joan and her former husband Worsley by Lord John, but a financial settlement was also made for the latter. CCR, 1476-85, no. 748. He was summoned to Parliament from 1472 until his death in 1512, in the meantime attending the coronation of Richard III, and, on behalf of Henry VII, defeating the Cornish rebels at Blackheath in 1497. CP, iii. 346.