In two generations the Burghs were transformed from a minor Westmorland family into one of the principal gentry families of Shropshire. Our MP’s father came to the latter county as a result of the marriage of the daughter and heiress of his lord, the northern magnate, Thomas Neville, Lord Furnival, to John Talbot, later Lord Talbot and earl of Shrewsbury, and it was a combination of service to the Talbots and two excellent marriages that advanced the Burghs. Our MP’s godparents exemplify his father’s close connexion with the Talbots. His godfathers were John, Lord Talbot, himself, and Laurence Merbury, chancellor of Ireland under Talbot. However, it was not Talbot who ensured that the young Burgh prospered when, at the age of 16, he inherited the family patrimony.
Burgh’s proof of age was taken at Shrewsbury on 28 June 1435, only eight days after the issue of the writ for its taking.
Whether or not our MP was the soldier, in 1441 he emerged to a sudden prominence in the affairs of his native shire. In the summer of that year he was at Shrewsbury, when he appeared personally to defend an assize of novel disseisin for a messuage there sued against him by another of the county’s leading figures, Sir Richard Lacon*.
The formal division of the Clopton inheritance took place on 7 Feb. 1444, when an indenture was drawn up between the coheirs and Sir William Clopton’s feoffees, John Throckmorton I and William Wollashull*. The division was a curious one. Given the location of our MP’s estates, it might have been expected that he would be assigned Sir William’s Shropshire holdings. These, however, were settled on his wife’s sister, Agnes, and her second husband, Thomas Herbert*. Burgh and his wife took the lands in Warwickshire, principally the manor of Moor Hall, and Gloucestershire, centred on the manors of Radbroke and Clopton.
On 26 Oct. 1451 Burgh entered into an agreement for a marriage between his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, and Thomas Mytton* of Shrewsbury. The bargain, made with the groom’s grandfather, William Burley II*, and stepfather, Roger Eyton*, was at first sight an uneven one: a substanial jointure of £20 p.a. was to be settled on the couple by the groom’s family in return for a modest portion of 70 marks, less than a quarter of what might reasonably be asked for so large a jointure. Further, our MP was to have the keeping of the groom’s inheritance – a substantial estate in Shrewsbury – to support the couple until they should be old enough to live independently. That the match should have been made on terms so unfavourable to the groom’s family may have arisen in part from a disparity in social rank as borough elite married into county elite. But the bride’s prospects of inheritance are likely to have been another determining factor: our MP, after some 20 years of marriage, seems to have had only daughters, and, if this was so, the strong possibility that Elizabeth would fall coheir must have influenced negotiations for her marriage.
On 1 Mar. 1453 Burgh returned himself to Parliament. It may be that, in making the return, he attempted to disguise the breach of statute this represented: the indenture describes the MP as ‘Sir John Burgh, son and heir of Hugh Burgh of Wattlesborough’, no doubt with the intention of falsely distinguishing him from the sheriff. This implies that he had a particular reason for sitting in this assembly, but this motive is not revealed in the surviving evidence. He also showed an interest in the next parliamentary hustings, heading the attestors to the Parliament summoned in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans.
Although Burgh’s support for Lancaster did not go far enough to lead to his attainder in the first Parliament of the new reign, his standing suffered from the change of regime. He was excluded from the Shropshire commission of the peace, a mark of disfavour in the case of one of a shire’s wealthiest gentry, throughout the 1460s, and also from the ad hoc commissions of local government. In these circumstances, it is striking to find that he was pricked as sheriff of the county in 1463. The likely explanation is a shortage of suitable candidates – a consistent problem in the county – for all the other evidence suggests that he was compromised by his Lancastrian past. A Chancery petition reinforces this impression. It details his desperate measures to secure a husband for his illegitimate daughter, Anne. On 10 Mar. 1466 he seized a townsman of Shrewsbury, Degory Heyward, and imprisoned him at Wattlesborough, releasing him only when Heyward’s friends entered a bond in £200 that he would marry Anne. The marriage duly took place; none the less, after the deaths of our MP and his reluctant son-in-law, those who had joined Burgh in taking the bond (namely his sons-in-law, John Leighton and Thomas Mytton, and Laurence Roche, rector of Wem) sued upon it in the borough court of Shrewsbury, and Heyward’s sureties turned to the chancellor for redress.
A now lost letter, written by Burgh to his son-in-law, William Newport, at an unknown date in the 1460s, shows Burgh’s concern for a more conventional marriage to be contracted between a daughter of Sir Robert Harcourt* and John Newport, probably William’s son. He wrote that he ‘wolde be right glade to do that lieth in me’ to bring the match about, and it is easy to understand his enthusiasm. Harcourt was a prominent Yorkist, and our MP badly needed to build bridges with the new government.
In the late 1460s Burgh seems to have made a conscious effort to draw his affairs into order. On 16 Oct. 1468 he sued out a general pardon, and, three weeks later, he did something that he should have done long before. On 5 Nov. he appeared in person in the court of common pleas to negate the outlawry that had been proclaimed against him ten years before at the suit of the late duke of York, producing a pardon, specific to the outlawry, bearing the same date. He produced sureties, headed by his son-in-law, Leighton, and the Shropshire lawyer, John Salter, for his reappearance later in the term, when the pardon was allowed when the fact of the plaintiff’s death was certified into court. In the same term he had pardons allowed for other outlawries, most notably that at the suit of Margaret (d.1467), countess of Shrewsbury, for failure to answer an action of account as receiver of her late son, Viscount Lisle.
In March 1470 Burgh’s rehabilitation was completed by his nomination to the commission of array appointed in Shropshire to resist the rising of the duke of Clarence and the earl of Warwick.
Burgh’s widow was drawn into a lengthy dispute with the coheirs. With respect to our MP’s lands outside Shropshire, all of which had come to him through his first wife, there was no reason for dispute. They were to descend unencumbered to his coheirs by her, namely his daughters, Isabel, wife of Sir John Lingen, and Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Mytton, and his grandsons, John Newport and Thomas Leighton.
More complicated was the parallel dispute over Burgh’s goods. In another petition to the chancellor, Joan claimed that Thomas Mytton, acting on the pretext of a letter of sequestration, had forcibly taken from Wattlesborough many of the goods not only of our MP but also of her first husband. To recover them she had been obliged to give bonds in 100 marks each both to Mytton and Lingen, calling upon several burgesses of Shrewsbury to act as her sureties; Mytton and Lingen had then sued these sureties in the Shrewsbury borough court and the court of common pleas; and the defendants, as indemnity against condemnation, retained the recovered goods.
It is not known when Joan died. Her survival may, however, have been a factor in the long delay in dividing her late husband’s estate. The formal division did not take place until May 1501, when it was finally achieved by the drawing of lots at Ludlow. The Leightons took the manor of Wattlesborough and the bulk of the Shropshire estates with the manor of Clopton in Gloucestershire; the Lingens had most of the rest of the Shropshire estates with part of the Warwickshire lands of our MP’s first wife; the Newports’ portion consisted of lands in South Wales and Worcestershire; and the Myttons had the manor of Moor Hall in Warwickshire with land in North Wales. Curiously the division was not made on any thing like strictly geographical grounds: each of the four portions contained some Shropshire lands.