BROUGHTON, John (d.1458), of Broughton-in-Furness, Lancs.

The Broughtons had been established at Broughton-in-Furness since as early as the twelfth century, but, although of knightly rank, their history is obscure. Almost nothing is known of our MP’s father, Christopher, beyond the fact that he was alive in the early years of the fifteenth century. VCH Lancs. viii. 402; Cumbria RO, Whitehaven, Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 32/17. Our MP had succeeded him in the family estates – the manor of Broughton-in-Furness with property at nearby Ulverston and Little Urswick – by May 1428, when he was granted the lease of property in Skelton (Cumberland) in royal hands by the minority of John Denton (b.1420) with the marriage of the heir. CFR, xv. 227; xvi. 34; CIPM, xxiii. 4. Denton proved his age in June 1442: CIPM, xxv. 615. The likelihood is that he petitioned for the grant as a friend of the Dentons, and that his petition was successful because he already had important connexions. A chance reference attaches him even at this early stage of his career to the service of William, Lord Harington, a distinguished soldier and an influential figure in Furness. In Easter term 1429 our MP sued six jurors for taking bribes in an action of trespass pending between the Somerset esquire, Richard Cheddar*, as plaintiff and Harington and others as defendants, alleging, in a clear fiction designed to have the case heard in Westmorland, that the jurors, in a matter pending at distant Taunton, had received money and other gifts from Cheddar at Appleby. CP40/673, rot. 392.

Broughton’s connexions were no doubt helpful to him in the making of an excellent match into the family of his neighbours, the Copelands of Bolton, a few miles from Broughton. For her family: J. Nicolson and R. Burn, Westmld. and Cumb. ii. 24; VCH Lancs. viii. 330. Margaret Copeland was both widow and heiress. Her first husband had been a younger son, but on their marriage his father, Sir Richard Kirkby, had jointly settled on them lands in Dalton-in-Furness and neighbouring vills. VCH Lancs. viii. 394n. More importantly, she was heir to a significant inheritance, comprising the manors of Bolton in the Lancashire parish of Urswick together with, across the border in the south of Cumberland, the manor of Santon in the parish of Irton with property in Gosforth, Seaton and Bootle. Unfortunately from the couple’s point of view all these lands were, according to two fines levied in 1432, in the hands of the bride’s mother and paternal grandmother. Ibid. viii. 402n.; PL17/6, no. 63; CP25(1)/35/14/15. Curiously, in 1446 our MP was obliged to plead a pardon in the Exchequer for failure to appear before the subsidy commissioners in Northumb. ten years earlier, but there is no evidence that he had property there either from his wife or in his own right: E159/223, recorda Mich. rots. 37-38. Perhaps the subsidy commissioners had been under the misapprehension that he inherited the lands of the Copelands of Copeland: Hist. Northumb. xi. 217-21. It is not known when these widows died, but Broughton’s expectations were probably not long frustrated. Without the assumption that he soon came to hold the lands in Cumberland (where he seems to have inherited nothing from his father), his career in the 1430s is hard to explain. Although he began his public career in Lancashire – in 1431 he was a juror for the assessment of a subsidy and he later served briefly as a j.p. there – his most important appointments came to him in the neighbouring shire. It was there that he served as escheator in 1432, there that he was sworn to the peace two years later, and, most importantly, there that he was pricked as sheriff in 1435. Feudal Aids, iii. 92; CPR, 1429-36, p. 383.

This last appointment came at an unfortunate time for Broughton. Anglo-Scottish relations were at another of their periodic moments of crisis, and it is not hard to accept his later claim that, ‘propter frequentes accessus Scotorum’, he had not been able to come to the Exchequer to account. The difficulties this failure promised to bring him may explain the sudden interest he evinced in parliamentary affairs. On 24 Dec. 1436, soon after the end of his term, he attested the Lancashire election, and on the following 8 Jan. he secured his own election for Cumberland (in contravention of the electoral statutes). As this was his only election (and, for that matter, his only attestation) one must assume that he saw some particular value at that time in sitting in the Commons. And yet there must be some doubt about whether he attended. In Hilary term 1437, as Parliament began its session, he named three attorneys to render his shrieval account on the grounds of his continued detention in the north because of the Scottish threat. If this is to be taken at face value, he can only, at most, have attended the last few weeks of the Parliament. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 161-2; Lancs. Knights of the Shire (Chetham Soc. xcvi), 220; C219/15/1; E368/209, communia, presentaciones etc. Hil. rot. 6d.

It was also at about this date that Broughton fell into dispute, over an unknown matter, with his early patron, Lord Harington. According to a later Chancery petition, Sir William Haryngton, a kinsman and annuitant of the latter, sided with our MP in this quarrel and repudiated his annuity. Sir William, who died in February 1440, was said to have lived for five or six years after this incident, so the quarrel is probably to be dated to shortly before Broughton’s appointment as sheriff. C1/1/45. Relations seem, however, to have been quite quickly restored. A few years later, when our MP fell into another dispute, on this occasion with his neighbour, Sir John Pennington*, it was Harington, as their mutual lord, who resolved the quarrel. On 3 Oct. 1442 he returned an award of an unsophisticated type, simply specifying financial compensation for those who had suffered injury during the dispute. The one who suffered most appears to have been Christopher Copeland, a kinsman of Broughton’s wife, who was to receive six marks for injuries received at the hands of one of Pennington’s men. Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 47/19.

Later both Broughton and Pennington, their own differences resolved, were to find lordship more significant than Harington’s. In the late 1440s and early 1450s the Percy affinity came to assume a greater coherence under the active leadership of the earl of Northumberland’s younger son, Thomas (from 1449 Lord Egremont), and both men were drawn into its ambit. On 1 May 1447 they joined Thomas as trustees of the goods of our MP’s putative stepson, Roland Kirkby, and, while this is the earliest surviving evidence of our MP’s connexion with Percy, there can be no doubt that he was acting in the interests of that great family at the Cumberland election held on the previous 24 Jan. Serving his second term as sheriff, Broughton convened the hustings at which Percy men, William Martindale* and Sir John’s son, John Pennington*, were elected. WARD2/35/136/3; C219/15/4.

Broughton’s connexion with the Percys was the dominant theme of the last ten years of his career. Early in 1450 he relied on the intervention of Lord Egremont to settle a dispute with one of his own servants. He did not have cause to regret his choice: Egremont laid down that the servant was come to the hall of Broughton and there ‘lawly besek’ our MP ‘to be his gode master’, acknowledging himself to be at fault. E40/8559. The Percy connexion also explains the marriage made in the summer of 1452 of Broughton’s daughter, Isabel, widow of Hugh Salkeld of Rosgill in Westmorland, to Sir John Pennington’s grandson and heir, another John. The couple married betw. 4 July, when the bride had confirmation of her life interest in her late husband’s manor of Little Salkeld, and 12 Aug., when an annual rent of five marks was settled on the couple by the Pennington feoffees to hold from the death of Sir John Pennington: Pennington-Ramsden mss, D/Pen 47/21a, 32/18. In the following January he again appeared with Sir John in an impressive gathering of the Percy retinue, called to witness oaths to abide by Egremont’s arbitration sworn by Alice, widow of Sir Henry Threlkeld*, and her stepson, Lancelot Threlkeld. Soon thereafter he was called upon to support the Percys in a very different forum. It is probable that he was in the Percy army, led by Egremont, which confronted the Nevilles at Heworth Moor near York. His name duly appeared in the bill presented before jurors when Richard, duke of York, came to York at the head of a commission of oyer and terminer in the following June, although, along with several others, it has been struck out. Cumbria RO, Kendal, Le Fleming of Rydal mss, Box 92/93; KB9/149/89; P. Booth, ‘Men Behaving Badly?’, in The Fifteenth Cent. III ed. Clark, 115-16. By the time of Heworth he was in receipt of an annual fee of ten marks assigned upon the Percy honour of Cockermouth, but it is not known when this was granted: Booth, ‘Landed Soc. in Cumb. and Westmld.’ (Leicester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1997), 49n.

There was one context in which Broughton did not offer his support to his lords. He may, as sheriff, have helped secure the return of two Percy men to the Parliament of 1447, but he did not place himself in a position to offer such service again. On 4 Nov. 1448, shortly after his appointment to the Cumberland bench, he secured a life exemption from office, and he had more reason than most to value such a licence, having cause to resent two terms as sheriff of Cumberland, an office made more than usually burdensome by the Scottish threat, and nomination in 1440 to the relatively lowly office of tax collector in Lancashire. CPR, 1446-52, p. 248; CFR, xvii. 151; PL1/5, no. 54. He took full advantage: in the last ten years of his life a single nomination to a commission was the extent of his office-holding. After 1453 this quietude, however, extended beyond the holding of public office. Nothing is known of the last five years of his life, and it might speculatively be suggested that he had received some debilitating injury in the Percy service. It is curious that, in June 1458, when an award was made in a dispute local to Furness, his son, Thomas, acted as one of the arbiters. John was dead by 20 Nov. 1458, when writs of diem clausit extremum issued out of Chancery in respect of his lands in Cumberland. CAD, iv. A10386; CFR, xix. 212. His executors were his wid. and eldest son: CP40/794, rot. 290.

There is a puzzling reference to Broughton from soon after his death. On 5 Nov. 1459 an inquiry was held at York, before the earl of Northumberland, Lord Egremont and others, commissioned to seize the estates of the Yorkist lords defeated at Ludford. It is striking to find that the principal findings related to lands in which our MP had an interest. The jurors witnessed that, long before, William Chaunsey, baron of Skirpenbeck in Yorkshire, had granted his manors of Skirpenbeck to our MP’s father in fee, and received back a life interest at a nominal rent, saving the reversion to Broughton. Subsequently, in April 1398, Chaunsey had granted the same property to Ralph, earl of Westmorland, and others, to hold for 80 years at an annual rent of £40 p.a. The earl had then died seised as the last survivor of these feoffees, and his son, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, had entered the manors as his executor. Our MP had then himself entered, only to be unjustly expelled by the earl. Finally, on 10 Sept. 1459, only a month before the Yorkist defeat at Ludford Bridge, our MP’s son and heir, Thomas, removed the earl. C145/317/7, mm. 1-3; E327/239. In Dec. 1440 our MP had been a juror at the inq. post mortem held at Penrith on the death of the earl of Salisbury’s mother, Joan, but there is no other evidence to illustrate his personal relations with the Nevilles: CIPM, xxv. 517. These findings were obviously intended to prevent the Crown seizing the manors as Neville property. It is much less clear that they were intended to protect the legitimate interests of the Broughtons. There is no evidence to support the story told by the jurors, and there must be a suspicion that it was a fabrication designed by the Percys to reward Thomas for his family’s support. That support had continued after our MP’s death. Thomas, probably at the nomination of the Percy earl, was named to the Cumberland bench and commmission of array when the Lancastrians were firmly in control of government after Ludford Bridge, and his younger brother, Christopher, was among the attestors to the Lancashire election held in the wake of that victory. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 560, 663; Lancs. Knights of the Shire, 225.

Much later Thomas, with ultimately disastrous consequences, moved from the service of Percy to that of Richard, duke of Gloucester. After Richard made himself King, Thomas benefited mightily from royal patronage, receiving grants in tail-male of forfeited lands in Devon worth over £100 p.a. and a stewardship there worth a further 100 marks p.a. The desire to retain this bounty explains why he fought for his patron at the battle of Bosworth. Even then he could have saved himself: Henry VII pardoned him in August 1486 and added him to the Cumberland bench in the following spring. However, the Simnel rising was too much of a temptation. Both he and his younger brother, John, were in arms against the King at the battle of Stoke in 1487, and both were attainted. Thomas probably died in the battle, although a local tradition has him escaping and living out his days in obscurity. BL Harl. MS. 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, i. 136, 167; CPR, 1485-94, pp. 119, 484; PROME, xv. 361-2; M.J. Bennett, Lambert Simnel, 71, 101, 125-6. Thomas is said to have left a da. and h., Elizabeth, who married another Ricardian, William Thornburgh: Nicolson and Burn, i. 116; VCH Lancs. viii. 330n., 402n. The Broughton estates, however, were granted to the Stanleys, who held them until the 17th century: CPR, 1485-94, pp. 270-1; VCH Lancs. viii. 403. The lands of Thomas’s mother, the subject of dispute between him and his half-brother, Roland Kirkby, in 1469, passed back to the Copelands: E40/8794; C1/192/15.