CLAY, John (d.1464), of Cheshunt, Herts.

Of obscure background, Clay achieved advancement as a soldier and a servant of the house of York. His military career gave him the means to invest in land and probably influenced his choice of wife, since his brother-in-law Sir John Astley, a renowned duellist, was likewise a soldier who became a committed Yorkist. Edw. IV’s French Expedition of 1475 ed. Barnard, 42-47. In common with two other veterans of the Hundred Years War, Sir William Oldhall* and Sir Andrew Ogard*, Clay acquired lands and a residence in Hertfordshire but probably did not originate from the county he represented in Parliament. It is possible that he was a northerner by birth since he is first heard of in July 1417, as a member of the retinue which Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, brought on Henry V’s second great expedition to France. E101/51/2.

In 1421, Clay was no more than a lowly man-at-arms based at Rouen. By the end of the decade, however, he possessed a retinue of his own and was captain of the fortress of St. Katherine’s just outside the city. Nouv. acq. fr. 62/11/8 ; 1482/57; 8605/92 ; fr. 25767/48; 25769/446, 461, 486; Pollard, 81. In the mid 1430s he was lieutenant of the garrison at Rouen bridge, initially under John, duke of Bedford, and then under Richard, duke of York, after Bedford’s death in September 1435. He became lieutenant of Rouen castle under John, Lord Talbot, in turn acting as York’s deputy, in 1437, and it is likely that he fought in at least some of the campaigns led by Talbot and York in the later 1430s and early 1440s. In the summer of 1440, however, Clay was in England, collecting money from the Exchequer for the wages of York’s troops, as he was again just under two years later. During the latter visit he may have helped recruit men for the army that Talbot, now earl of Shrewsbury, took to France in June 1442. The new army, of which he himself was a member, succeeded in taking Conches but a disgruntled soldiery and the onset of winter put paid to an attempt to capture Dieppe before the end of the year. E403/739, m. 16; E101/54/2; Pollard, 58-60.

By now, Clay was increasingly associated with York, the King’s lieutenant-general and governor of France and Normandy, and by the latter half of 1443 he had become treasurer of the duke’s household in France. Probably the ‘Jean Secalay’ who with York and others received Henry VI’s bride, Margaret of Anjou, on her entrance into Rouen in March 1445, Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. xi. 240; N. and Q. clxxxiv. 7-8. he participated in marriage negotiations on behalf of York soon afterwards. The duke was pursuing a grandiose match between his three-year-old son Edward (the future earl of March and Edward IV) and one of the daughters of the French king, Charles VII. Charles indicated that he was in favour of such an alliance and York responded by dispatching several ambassadors, among them ‘Jehan Declay, escuier, tresorier de la depense de mon hostel’, to bring matters to a conclusion. The embassy departed for the French court in June 1445 but in the end their mission came to nothing because York considered the suggested bride, the infant Madeleine, too young and Charles would not agree that her elder sister Jeanne should take her place. Wars of English, i. 83-86; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 84, 84n; Scofield, i. 9-10. Both HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 187, and Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. xi. 240 mistakenly state that the mission took place in 1455. In the following September York returned to England but Clay remained in France. During the later 1440s he was captain of Pont l’Eveque, Lisieux and Orbec, three garrisons lying in an arc south-east of Rouen, and bailli of the administrative district of Evreux, but is unclear whether he stayed in France until the bitter end. With the final defeat of the English in Normandy, he would have lost forever any estates he held there but he had already begun to invest in land in England. In the mid 1440s he and his feoffees, among them his fellow soldiers, Sir William Oldhall and Sir Edmund Mulsho*, acquired the manor of ‘Cressbroke’ in Cheshunt. He also purchased other properties in that parish, and it was as ‘of Cheshunt’ that he received a royal pardon in November 1455. Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. xi. 240; VCH Herts. iii. 451; R. Clutterbuck, Herts. ii. 104; PCC 6 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 41); C67/41, m. 21. By the mid 1450s, Clay possessed sufficient interests in Hertfordshire to stand for election to Parliament as one of the county’s knights of the shire. The Parliament of 1455 met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans (an engagement in which he may well have taken part) and he was one of a number of the duke of York’s retainers returned to the Commons. During the Parliament, he was again involved in marriage negotiations on York’s behalf. In November and December 1455, he and other representatives of the duke met with the emissaries of the dissident French duke of Alençon in London, to discuss a match between the young earl of March and one of Alençon’s daughters. P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 171.

There is no evidence of Clay’s activities between March 1456, when the Parliament was dissolved, and September 1460, save that in October 1459 he was with York’s army at Ludford Bridge. As a result, he was one of those attainted for treason in the Parliament of 1459. PROME, xii. 458-64. Following his attainder, the Crown granted his holdings at Cheshunt to Elizabeth, Lady Say, who held the chief manor in that parish for life by reason of a grant made jointly to her and her late husband John Norbury† by Henry IV. CPR, 1408-13, p. 404; 1452-61, pp. 537. Several royally appointed receivers took control of the remainder of his lands, and the Crown assigned the income from these estates towards repaying a loan to the Lancastrian loyalist, Thomas, Lord Richemount Grey, in May 1460. In June that year the sheriffs of 11 counties in southern England received the order to proclaim as traitors any who lent support to York or other attainted rebels, Clay included. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 547, 572, 597; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 409-10, 415-16. After the débâcle at Ludford the Yorkist leaders and their closest followers fled abroad. If Clay did accompany York to Ireland, he returned to England before his master. In mid September 1460, he and other servants of the duke and the earl of March arrived at the late Sir John Fastolf’s Southwark townhouse, to seek accommodation for the duchess of York and three of her younger children while she awaited her husband’s return. There they met the caretaker of the property, Christopher Hansson, who agreed that she could remain there until Michaelmas. As it happened, the duchess stayed for just over a week, since shortly after her arrival York landed at Chester and soon afterwards summoned her to join him at Hereford. Paston Letters, ii. 216-17. The Yorkists’ recovery of the political and military initiative in the summer of 1460 made possible the reversal of Clay’s attainder in the Parliament that opened in the following autumn, PROME, xii. 514-15. and before the end of the year he became victualler of the strategically important town of Calais, the control of which was so vital to the Yorkist cause. The Calais appointment probably meant that Clay was absent from England during the last few turbulent months of Henry VI’s reign. Yet while he remained victualler of Calais until the beginning of 1462 he returned home soon after the accession of Edward IV. Early in the new reign, he joined the royal household and received a knighthood. Perhaps swayed by his links with the Yorkist Crown, in May 1461 Anne, dowager duchess of Buckingham, appointed him one of her counsellors, with a retainer of £10 p.a. from the manor of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. Rawcliffe, 225.

In the following July Clay was placed on the commission of peace for Hertfordshire and in August he was appointed to an embassy to the duke of Burgundy. In the letters of appointment he was described as the ‘great steward of the household of the late duke of York’, presumably a position which he exercised under the widowed duchess, whom he also served as her chamberlain. He and his fellow ambassadors, John Wenlock*, Lord Wenlock, and Peter Taster, dean of St. Saviour’s, Bordeaux, were given several objectives. First, they were to negotiate a truce and commercial treaty with Burgundy; secondly, they were to try with the duke’s help to obtain a truce with France; finally and secretly, they were to propose a match between Edward IV and the duke’s niece, the Mademoiselle de Bourbon. The ambassadors, who crossed to Calais within a month of their appointment, met the duke of Burgundy at Valenciennes. In the end, their only real achievement was to confirm and strengthen the existing friendship between the Yorkists and Burgundy, for the marriage proposals came to nothing and, despite the duke’s help, attempts to seek a truce with France proved abortive. At Valenciennes the bishop of Arras entreated the English ambassadors and the duke to support a crusade called by Pope Pius II, but Clay and his associates refused to make any promises regarding a matter which was beyond their authority to discuss. The duke lavishly entertained the ambassadors throughout their stay. Before they left, he held a banquet in their honour at which Clay (wearing the Yorkist collar of suns and roses) and Wenlock sat on either side of him, and he sent them gifts of silver plate as they were preparing to depart. They returned to England via Calais, arriving back in London on 21 Nov. In spite of the limited success of their mission, Clay and Taster each received £82 in wages (£1 for every day they were away) and Wenlock twice that amount, and they were also allowed an additional £20 for their travelling expenses. C76/145, m. 24; Scofield, i. 191, 208, 211-13; E403/824, m. 2; J. de Waurin, Receuil de Croniques (Rolls Ser. xxxix), v. 412-14; Ross, 44, 84; Paston Letters, ii. 250-2; E403/825, m. 9.

Shortly after his return, Clay gained a further reward for his good service to the King and the late duke of York. By letters patent of December 1461, the Crown assigned him estates worth 200 marks in Essex and Cambridgeshire, and granted to him, his wife and their son the reversion of the chief manor of Cheshunt after the death of Elizabeth, Lady Say. The Essex and Cambridgeshire lands had belonged to the attainted Lancastrian, Thomas Ormond, whose manor at Swavesey in Cambidgeshire he was also to acquire, CPR, 1461-7, p. 92; VCH Cambs. ix. 382; PCC 6 Godyn. Initially, Swavesey went to Sir John Lovell: CPR, 1461-7, p. 87. and included the reversion of the manor of Newhall in Boreham, Essex. Newhall had belonged formerly to the duchy of Lancaster official, Richard Alrede, and Ormond had bought the reversion, which would vest on the death of Alrede’s widow, from the executors of William Cotton*. R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 398; CAD, iv. A6998, 7534, 7928; v. A13113, 13118; PCC 5 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 37).

In March 1462 the Milanese envoy Antonio della Torre reported that Clay was about to take part on another embassy, this time to the papacy. Della Torre must have been misinformed since in the spring and summer of that year the MP, who is not known to have gone overseas again after his return from Valenciennes, was engaged with his duties as a knight of the King’s chamber. CSP Milan, 107; E403/825, m. 8. During the winter of 1462-3 the by now elderly Sir John accompanied the King on his campaign against the Lancastrian rebels in northern England, a journey for which he was later awarded costs of £40, E403/832, m. 1; E404/72/4/21. and in November 1463 he was pricked as sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire. In the following January, he and Hugh Lyntone acquired the keeping of certain lands in Gosfield and other Essex parishes from the Crown. A few months later, on 5 May 1464, Clay visited the Exchequer on behalf of Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, and his wife, Jacquetta, to receive a payment due to her in dower as the widow of John, duke of Bedford. CFR, xx. 124; E403/832, m. 4. (Jacquetta’s dower lands included a share of the manor of Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire, part of the honour of Richmond: VCH Cambs. viii. 14. by the end of his life, Clay was receiving a substantial fee of £20 p.a. from this manor, PCC 6 Godyn. although it is not clear whether this was by grant of Jacquetta or the Crown.) He went to the Exchequer just four days after Edward IV had married the Wydevilles’ daughter. The King’s marriage only became public knowledge after Clay’s death but it is likely that the MP, a trusted Household knight, knew of the secret match. It was perhaps also during Clay’s shrievalty that he attended a feast given by the serjeants-at-law in London and helped to resolve a contretemps over precedence which arose when the seat of honour was allotted to the treasurer of England, instead of the mayor of London. Cal. Letter Bk. London, L, 7. According to the Letter Bk., the feast occurred on 7 Oct. 1463 but the mayor in question, Matthew Philip, was not elected to that office until 13 Oct. Clay died before he was able to complete his term as sheriff. According to the pipe roll, there was no sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire during the second half of that term, suggesting that he had become too incapacitated to fulfil his duties for some time before his death.

In his will, made on 8 Sept. 1464 and proved ten days later, Clay asked to be buried beside his daughter Joan, who had died in October 1453 and lay in the chancel of Cheshunt parish church. He provided generously for his wife, another Joan, whom he appointed his principal executor, by granting her control of his goods and chattels and awarding her a life interest in most of his lands at Cheshunt. Apart from the holdings at Cheshunt, his real estate consisted of the properties confiscated from Thomas Ormond, his annual fee of £20 from Bassingbourn and the reversion of the manor of Cheshunt after the death of the long-lived Lady Say. Clay directed that his son and namesake, a young man not far short of his majority, should take possession of either the manor of Swavesey or the annuity from Bassingbourn and all his lands in Essex when he came of age. He provided for his surviving daughter, Cecily, and her husband Robert Green† by settling upon them lands worth 20 marks p.a. and three inns at Waltham Cross in Cheshunt, and by bequeathing Green, a fellow Household man, six silver ‘bolle peces’ from his collection of plate. Clay’s widow was assisted by three co-executors, Green, Hugh atte Fenne* of the Exchequer and William Scott. Following the attainders of 1459, the Lancastrian government had made Fenne one of the receivers of Clay’s lands but this appointment had evidently not caused any animus between him and the MP. The last-named executor’s identity is unclear but he may have been William Scott of Essex rather than one of the more prominent Scotts of Smeeth, Kent. PCC 6 Godyn, 19 Dogett (PROB11/9, ff. 145-8); Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. xi. 239; CPR, 1452-61, p. 597; Paston Letters, i. 286-7; HP Biogs. 752.

In the end, neither Scott nor Fenne took up their duties as Clay’s executors and it fell to his widow, assisted by his son and Robert Green, to fulfil his will. CPR, 1461-7, p. 436; 1467-77, pp. 227, 253. Lady Say died in February 1465 but the King, ignoring his previous grant to the Clays, gave the manor that she had held in Cheshunt to his brother, George, duke of Clarence. C140/17/21; VCH Herts. iii. 446. The younger John Clay was a committed Yorkist like his father, and Edward IV knighted him on the field of Tewkesbury in 1471. Shortly before the MP’s death, the Pastons of Norfolk, seeking a husband for one of their daughters, had received information that the younger John Clay was the heir to estates worth 300 marks p.a. Yet if the younger John did marry, he found a bride from another family. He may have predeceased his mother, since he does not feature in her will of June 1477. This shows that her late husband did not lie as he had intended at Cheshunt because she sought burial beside him in the church of St. Benet at Paul’s Wharf, London. Joan Clay’s executors included her brother Sir John Astley and surviving daughter, Cecily, now married to her second husband, John Acton†, another Household servant of Edward IV. Her brother’s heir, Cecily died in possession of the Clay properties at Cheshunt in September 1480. In due course, these lands passed to her son Edward Green, who died in 1493. Edward’s successor was his sister, another Cecily, the wife of William Burbage. Paston Letters, i. 286-7; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, v. 105; PCC 30 Wattys; C140/76/54; VCH Herts. iii. 451; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 773-4.