CLIFTON, Robert (d.1478), of Clifton, Notts.

The public career of Robert Clifton, head of one of the leading Nottinghamshire families for a quarter of a century, began even several years before he succeeded his father in the family’s valuable estates in 1453. As early as February 1441 he served with his father on a jury of attaint at Nottingham; a few weeks later he and his wife had a papal indult to have a portable altar; and he attested three of the county’s parliamentary elections in the 1440s. C260/144/18/20; CPL, ix. 238; C219/15/2, 4, 6. More unusually, for one yet to inherit, in November 1448 he was one of those named on the pricked list for the shrievalty, and, two years later, he was appointed to that important office at the same time as his illegitimate half-brother, Gervase Clifton, took it in Kent. At the end of his term he received the standard pardon of account of £80, and, more significantly, nomination to the county bench. On 5 Mar. 1453 his high standing in the county found further expression in his election to Parliament. C47/34/2/5; CFR, xviii. 186-7; E159/228, brevia Hil. rot. 4; C219/16/2. Remarkably, he held the three major offices of local government before the death of his father.

There are two reasons for what might be thought to be Clifton’s premature prominence. First, on his marriage in 1432, his father had settled the manor of Wilford on him and his wife, largely in remainder expectant on the death of Ralph Mackerell*. This remainder fell in 1436, giving our MP an annual income of £35 according to the tax returns of the same year, a sum which was further augmented in 1438 when his father settled on him property in the Lincolnshire vill of Claypole. Although, according to the tax returns of 1450, Robert’s annual income was only £38, the considerable underassessment characteristic of this tax implies that it was significantly greater and certainly sufficient, given his future expectations, to justify his role in local affairs. Nottingham Univ. Lib. Clifton mss, Cl D 898, 900-2; E179/159/84; 240/266; CP25(1)/145/158/36. Second, early in his career he had found a place in the royal service, and was in receipt of Household robes by 1447. E101/409/16. His name continues to appear on the list of those in receipt of Household robes until the failure of the lists in 1452: E101/410/9. It is probable that he owed his place there to the patronage of his brother-in-law, William Booth, the queen’s chancellor, who was elevated to the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfied in the same year as he himself came to court. Not surprisingly, given his early importance, Robert’s father’s death in December 1453 had little impact on his career. Nor was he much inconvenienced by the survival of his mother, for on 18 Apr. 1456 she quitclaimed to him her right in the manors of Hodsock, Wilford and Upper Broughton in Nottinghamshire and Melton in Yorkshire, although she presumably retained an interest in the family’s former residence at Clifton, abandoned in favour of Hodsock in the time of our MP’s father. Clifton mss, Cl D 757. She died intestate shortly before 8 Oct. 1467, when administration of her goods was entrusted to our MP’s brother John: Borthwick Inst., Univ. of York, York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 246.

Little is known about Clifton’s career in the late 1450s. In November 1455 he appeared before the Exchequer barons to sue (Sir) John Gresley* for £22 14s. 8d. in unpaid parliamentary wages, and two months later was rewarded with a judgement in his favour. Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 378-9; CP40/779, rot. 154d. Given his family connexions and Household service, it is not surprising that he was sufficiently trusted by the militant Lancastrian regime of the last years of the decade to be appointed to the shrievalty in the aftermath of the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge. As sheriff, he conducted the disputed Nottinghamshire election in the altered political circumstances of October 1460. Nevertheless, he subsequently had no difficulty adapting to the change of dynasty. He was knighted at the coronation of Edward IV, and in July 1461 his son and heir, another Gervase, was appointed to the stewardship of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tickhill. S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 161-5; Knights of Eng. ed. Shaw, i. 133; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 528. Sir Robert’s Yorkist credentials were further underlined at this time by the marriage of his widowed daughter, Isabel, to Thomas Blount*, one of the leading gentry supporters of the new regime in the Midlands. The loss of the loyalty of such men as our MP – leading county gentry with a record of personal service to Henry VI and from families traditionally attached to the house of Lancaster – was the practical consequence of the ineptitude of Lancastrian government.

In the late 1450s, before her marriage to Blount, Clifton had contracted Isabel to Thomas, son and heir apparent of John Browe*. This marriage had brought him the short-term advantage of a close association with a family of Yorkist sympathies, but Thomas did not long survive the marriage and our MP became involved in a prolonged dispute with his father. As part of the jointure settlement John Browe had instructed his feoffees to convey the manor of Woodhead in Rutland to the bride’s father and eldest brother to the intent that they settle the manor on the couple in tail-general with remainder to him and his heirs. This produced a disagreement on the groom’s death. In Easter term 1462 Browe, through the intermediary of a servant, appealed Sir Robert’s illegitimate half-brother, (Sir) Gervase Clifton, for robbery in the time of Henry VI, and in the following Michaelmas term Sir Robert replied by suing Browe for a debt of £400, presumably the sum in which the latter had bound himself for the execution of his part of the marriage contract. The result of the appeal has not been traced, but our MP’s suit resulted in Browe’s outlawry on 15 Apr. 1465. Meanwhile, the real points at issue in the dispute were being aired in the court of Chancery. According to a petition submitted by Browe between 1461 and 1465, Clifton had, on the death of the groom without issue, refused to fulfill the condition of the feoffment, that is to settle the manor of Woodhead on the bride with remainder to Browe. After Browe had presented three further petitions, our MP replied, late in 1467, that, after the groom’s death, his daughter had married Thomas Blount; that Blount had negotiated the purchase of the manor with Browe; and that, after the sale had been agreed, Browe caused a release he had formerly made to Clifton to be enrolled on the close roll with the intention that Clifton, after Isabel’s death, should stand seised to the use of the purchaser and his heirs. CP40/806, rot. 198; C1/28/367, 33/223, 39/34, 42/100-1. There is every reason to believe this account of events: the release, made on 25 Aug. 1457, is to be found on the close roll under the date 6 July 1467, a few days after the end of the first session of a Parliament in which both Browe and Blount sat. C54/319, m. 28d (the cal. wrongly gives the date of the release as 1465: CCR, 1461-8, p.439); the original is E326/9241.

On the previous 11 May 1467 Sir Robert had headed the list of some 360 attestors to what was another disputed Nottinghamshire election. Numbered among them was also a Lancashire esquire, Seth Worsley, who had no lands in the county and whose presence at the election can only be explained in terms of the intimate connexion with the Booths he shared with our MP. Clearly he was at Nottingham at the behest of Clifton, but to what end can only be a matter of speculation. C219/17/1. Shortly afterwards Sir Robert was appointed sheriff for the third time. On 28 Nov. 1467, soon after taking up the office, he was able to secure, in advance of his account, a pardon of £100 for the uncollectable revenues of his bailiwick. During his eventful term of office he was involved in a dispute with another of the greater gentry of the county, Sir Robert Strelley*. On 1 Sept. 1468, while he had an assize of novel disseisin pending against Strelley, William Babington* and Richard Willoughby* returned an award which gave him seisin of the disputed property in Lenton on condition that he make a compensatory payment of four marks. E403/839, m. 7; E404/73/3/70; C146/4665. Less happily for our MP, his shrievalty was disturbed by the violent quarrel between two of the leading Derbyshire landowners, Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, and Henry Vernon†. In December 1467 Grey’s servants murdered Vernon’s uncle, Roger, and the result was the issue of a powerful commission of oyer and terminer, headed by George, duke of Clarence. S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 138-9; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 119; KB9/13. Not only did the unfortunate Clifton have the difficult tasks of compiling juries to sit before the commissioners, when they sat at the end of April 1468, and executing the writs that arose out of indictments, but he also suffered a significant financial loss. His failure to execute a writ of outlawry against Bartholomew Damport, a household servant of Lord Grey indicted for the murder of Roger Vernon, resulted in a heavy fine of 50 marks. KB27/831, fines rot. 1d.

Clifton’s attitude to Henry VI’s restoration cannot be discerned, but he appears to have been largely unaffected by it. He was appointed to both commissions of the peace issued for Nottinghamshire during the Readeption, and in Michaelmas term 1470 he had two pleas pending in the court of common pleas, one as an executor of Sir Thomas Chaworth*, and the other as former sheriff. On 13 Dec. 1470 he received a royal licence as co-founder of a chantry in the church of Wollaton on behalf of his friend, Richard Willoughby, and in the following February he was one of the many who took advantage of the general pardon. CP40/837, rots. 10, 87, 87d; CPR, 1467-77, p. 231. Just as his career was unaffected by Edward IV’s temporary deposition so it was by his restoration, although advancing years meant that he, like his father had done before him, gradually surrendered his place in local affairs to his son and heir. No doubt he had settled property on Gervase on his marriage in 1456 – by 1458 Gervase appears to have been holding the family’s manor of Upper Broughton – and Gervase was appointed to the Nottinghamshire bench as early as 1466 and to the shrievalty in 1471. KB27/790, rot. 17. In 1466 he purchased 50 acres in Nottingham: CP25(1)/186/40/4; C1/10/111-12. He held the same office again, shortly before his father’s death, from November 1477, by which time, if not before, he had become an esquire of the King’s body. E404/76/4/119 (an esq. of the body by Nov. 1478). Sir Robert’s activity in the 1470s was more limited, although he did head the attestors to the Nottinghamshire election of 1472 and continued to appear on local commissions. C219/17/2.

By the 1470s Clifton’s principal concern was probably the establishment of a college at Clifton. As long before as 1349 his ancestor, Sir Gervase Clifton†, had obtained royal licence to endow a chantry of three chapains in the church there. Now, in October 1476, our MP paid the Crown £50 for a licence to change this chantry into a small college, adding to its original endowment an annual rent of £10 and dedicating it to the Holy Trinity. On the bede roll he remembered his late wife, Alice, William Booth, the late archbishop of York, and Seth Worsley. His brass at Clifton church commemorates him as ‘fundator trium capellanorum collegii in hac ecclesia’. Nor was this the extent of his charitable giving. His son’s will of 27 Apr. 1491 shows that Sir Robert gave certain lands he had purchased in Blyth to the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, which his ancestors, the Cressys, had founded there in the reign of King John. VCH Notts. ii. 148, 164-6; CPR, 1467-77, p. 600; Test. Ebor. iv (Surtees Soc. liii), 66. His brass was probably not laid until after his son Sir Gervase’s death in 1491: J. Denton, ‘The East-Midland Gentleman’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2006), 90-91.

As one of the leading Nottinghamshire gentry Clifton, not surprisingly, had important connexions with other prominent families of the shire. In 1440 he was one of the many who acted for the rising Nottinghamshire lawyer, Richard Bingham, in his purchase of the manor of Watnall Chaworth; in 1453 he was named as an executor of the will of John Cokfeld of Nuthall; and, in 1456, his son and heir married Alice, daughter of the wealthy esquire, Thomas Neville of Rolleston, and widow of Richard Thurland, the son of Nottingham’s richest merchant. CCR, 1441-7, p. 29; York registry wills, prob. reg. 2, f. 288; Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 334. In the following year he was one of an impressive group, headed by John, Viscount Beaumont, nominated by Richard Willoughby, as feoffees to perform his will, and in January 1459 he was named as an executor by the richest of the county’s knights, Sir Thomas Chaworth, for whom he was also a feoffee. Besides the generous sum of 40 marks, Chaworth bequeathed him ‘a newe boke of Inglisse, the which begynnyth with the lyffe of Seynt Albon and Amphiabell’, and it is clear that he placed particular trust in our MP to whom he had told ‘mony of the circumstaunce for the executyng and perfourmyng’ of the will. Later, when Richard Willoughby came to draw up his will in September 1469, he named both Sir Robert and his son, Gervase, among his executors. Nottingham Univ. Lib. Middleton mss, Mi D 4770; Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 227-8; York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 173. Few of the county’s landowners could claim a more extensive range of close associates among the leading men of the shire. But, although his lands were largely confined to the county, he also had important connexions outside it, principally through his wife’s ubiquitous family. In 1442, with Sir John Byron*, the husband of his wife’s sister, Henry Booth* and others, he entered into a bond for the marriage of Elizabeth Longley to Thomas, son of the Derbyshire esquire John Statham. CCR, 1441-7, p. 79. But his most important and closest connexion was with William Booth, archbishop of York from 1452. In the late 1450s he was several times employed by the archbishop in various acts of charitable patronage, most notably the foundation of a chantry in the parish church of Eccles in Lancashire. At least from his own point of view the relationship was a profitable one. His younger son, Robert, no doubt owed his promotion to the archdeaconry of the East Riding in March 1464 to the archbishop’s patronage. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 275, 512, 526; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 360, 442. For the career of our MP’s yr. son: Biog. Reg. Univ. Cambridge to 1500 ed. Emden, 143-4. In his will of 26 Aug. 1464 the archbishop named our MP as one of his executors and assigned him the sum of £40 for his trouble. It may be that Sir Robert gained in a less proper way from his role as executor. The fabric rolls of York Minster imply that it did not receive all that it was due under the terms of the will. They record that Clifton delivered to the Minster two reliquaries and a precious mitre, but there is no record of the receipt of a valuable staff left to it in the will. Historians Church of York ed. Raine, iii. 331-3, 376, 385; Fabric Rolls of York Minster (Surtees Soc. xxxv), 213, 222.

Before his death Clifton conveyed his manor and soke of Hodsock to his younger son, Archdeacon Robert, and other feoffees, but he did die seised of his other principal properties, the manors of Clifton and Wilford. He drew up his will on 1 Apr. 1478, only eight days before his death. It is a short and unrevealing document, requesting burial in Clifton church next to his wife and naming as his executors his son, Gervase, Oliver Blakwall, rector of Barton in Fabis, and one Thomas Orston. The testator’s place of burial (together with that of his mother, who died in 1467) shows that he returned the family residence to Clifton after his father, buried in the priory church of Blyth, had moved it north to Hodsock. York registry wills, prob. reg. 5, f. 124; Notts. IPM (Thoroton Soc. xvii), 81.

Clifton’s son and heir, Gervase, proved to be of even greater account than his father. In February 1477 he had added the receivership of the King’s lands in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to his stewardship of the honour of Tickhill. After being knighted at the coronation of Richard III, he gained substantially from royal patronage as a knight of that King’s body. Nevertheless, despite his intimacy with Richard III, he survived his deposition and continued to play a part in the affairs of his native county until his death in 1491. Coronation of Ric. III ed. Sutton and Hammond, 323; W.E. Hampton, Mems. Wars of the Roses, 144-5. He is not recorded as having served as an MP, and, while this is probably to be explained by the very partial survival of the returns for the second half of the fifteenth century, it is worth noting that, even though the Cliftons were one of the wealthiest gentry families in the Midlands, the three previous heads of the family, including our MP, are recorded as sitting in Parliament on only one occasion each. For the later history of the fam., which was promoted to the baronetage in 1611 and survived in the main male line until as late as 1869: Trans. Thoroton Soc. xxxvii. 32-40; Complete Baronetage ed. Cockayne, i. 19-21. Of later generations of the fam. who sat in Parliament the most notable was the 1st baronet, Sir Gervase: The Commons 1660-90, ii. 95-96.