DEBENHAM, Gilbert II (d.1500), of Little Wenham and Ipswich, Suff. and London and Southwark, Surr.

First elected to Parliament while still a young man, Debenham was the son and namesake of one of the most ruffianly gentry of fifteenth-century East Anglia. While frequently involved in his father’s wrongdoings he was never quite as lawless as the long-lived elder Gilbert, possibly because his career in the Yorkist household provided a useful outlet for his energies while he waited to succeed to his inheritance. In spite of serving Richard III as well as Edward IV, he was admitted to the household of Henry VII but ended his days in disgrace after becoming involved in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy.

The earliest known evidence relating to Debenham is the return recording his election to the Parliament of 1455 as an MP for Ipswich. Although not a typical burgess, he had relatives in that town where he and his father enjoyed considerable (and sometimes a malign) influence and where he himself acquired a house. KB27/844, rot. 83. In accordance with local practice, the electors at Ipswich chose him and his fellow MP, John Timperley, It is not clear whether the Timperley in question was John I* or John II*. some days before the drawing up of the official return. The return bears the date 1 July 1455 but the actual election took place on the previous 24 June. He entered the Commons as a freeman of Ipswich, which admitted him as a burgess on 27 June the same year. Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich bor. recs., composite roll, 1438-60, C/2/10/1/1, rot. 9d.

In spite of sitting in the Commons, Debenham did not begin his career in local government until several years after leaving Parliament. He is next heard of in 1458 when John de Vere, 12th earl of Oxford, sued him and his father in the court of King’s bench for assaulting and wounding one of the tenants of his manor at East Bergholt, a parish neighbouring Little Wenham. KB27/789, rot. 100d. The earl had already laid claim to one of the Debenham manors at Wenham at this date, and the Debenhams and de Veres subsequently quarrelled over Tattingstone, another manor in the same neighbourhood. The subject of this biography had occupied Tattingstone by the early 1460s but before the end of the decade it fell into the hands of the 13th earl of Oxford, also John de Vere. The manor had once belonged to the Holbrooks, the family of Debenham’s mother, but a lawyer, Thomas Fulthorpe, was in possession by the 1440s. Presumably using his own descent from the Holbrooks to make a spurious claim to the property, Debenham had sued Fulthorpe’s son, also Thomas, for making an entry on to Tattingstone in November 1464, but subsequently Fulthorpe had cut his losses by selling it to the earl. J. Ross, John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, 54-56. Relations between the Debenhams, who were normally associated with the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, and the de Veres deteriorated still further in subsequent years. Like the elder Gilbert, Debenham became a Mowbray retainer, although gaining a place in Edward IV’s household would in due course prove of far greater importance for his future career. Appointed clerk of the market for the Household only nine days after Edward had seized the throne, it is quite likely that he was an active supporter of the Yorkist rebels during the later years of Henry VI’s reign.

In August 1461 Debenham was returned to Edward’s first Parliament as a knight of the shire for Suffolk alongside another esquire with Mowbray connexions, Thomas Wingfield†. The election was well attended but there is no evidence of a contest as occurred in neighbouring Norfolk, where the sheriff, (Sir) John Howard*, opposed the candidacy of John Paston* and John Berney†. A first, abortive attempt by his under sheriff, William Prys, to hold an election there in June 1461 ended in disarray and there were further altercations in subsequent shire courts. In June, according to an extremely partisan account that Howard afterwards submitted to the Crown, Paston, Berney and a mob of their supporters had so threatened Prys that he had fled the shire-house with the assistance of Debenham, Wingfield and Richard Southwell*. KB145/7/1; H. Kleineke, ‘East-Anglian Elections’, in The Fifteenth Cent. X ed. Kleineke 172, 175. Like Debenham and Wingfield, the sheriff and Southwell had attachments with Mowbray and the duke of Norfolk was no friend of Paston, from whom he had recently seized Caister castle. On the following 27 Oct., just over a week before the Parliament opened at Westminster, Debenham himself was involved in an altercation at Norwich with Godfrey Joye of that city. According to a lawsuit he brought later in the decade, he had suffered a murderous assault at the hands of Joye and many other malefactors but whether the incident had a connexion with local politics or simply arose from a private quarrel is unknown. CP40/827, rot. 215.

Soon a trusted servant of Edward IV, Debenham was a knight by the summer of 1463 and served at the coronation banquet of Elizabeth Wydeville two years later. Coronation Elizabeth Wydevile ed. G. Smith, 23. The cloth (Sir) John Howard delivered to Debenham at the duke of Norfolk’s command on 24 May 1465 was probably for the MP to wear at the queen’s coronation two days later: ibid. 68; Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, i. 165. At the beginning of 1467 Edward rewarded Sir Gilbert, by then a knight of the chamber and a carver in the Household, with a licence to export 600 woollen cloths without paying customs or subsidies. Household Edw. IV, 263-4; CCR, 1461-8, p. 357. Debenham also features, as a carver and cupbearer, in the ordinances made for the Household just over a decade later. Household Edw. IV, 200. His Hduties as such meant that he necessarily spent a considerable amount of time at Court, and on several occasions in the mid 1460s, sometimes in association with others, he entered into bonds with London tradesmen, presumably in connexion with purchases from them. C241/249/32, 51; 250/21. In later years, moreover, he was sometimes referred to as ‘of London’ and on others as ‘of Southwark’. CPR, 1467-77, p. 560; CFR, xxi. no. 644; KB9/369/5.

During the summer of 1462 Debenham and his father were among those in East Anglia who helped to raise a fleet for Edward IV. He himself captained a ship named the Gylys of Hulle and he also received a commission to procure The Barge of Yarmouth for the King’s service. This brought him into conflict with Sir John Paston†, who was competing for the same commission. On one occasion he and Sir John encountered each other in London and exchanged ‘wordes’: it was afterwards said that he would have struck Paston had not Sir John Howard, who was also present, intervened. Paston Letters, ed. Davis, ii. 278-9, 371-2. At this date there was already bad feeling between the Debenhams and Pastons over the manor of Cotton in Suffolk. Paston’s father, John, claimed that his wealthy patron, Sir John Fastolf, had left him Cotton and the rest of his extensive East Anglian estates in his will but this claim was disputed by (Sir) William Yelverton* who, like the elder Paston, was one of Fastolf’s executors, and William Jenney*. In the autumn of September 1461 Jenney, an attorney for the executors, took it upon himself to sell Cotton to the elder Gilbert Debenham, who bought it as a residence for his son. Over the next few years the Pastons on the one hand and the Debenhams and Jenney on the other disputed possession of Cotton by entering and re-entering the manor, holding courts there and collecting rents from the unfortunate tenants. The quarrel soon widened to encompass Fritton, another manor from the Fastolf estate. Just as he had disputed Fastolf’s title to Fritton in previous decades, the elder Gilbert challenged the Pastons’ right to the property, upon which both he and Jenney entered to take rents and distrain livestock. Ibid. ii. 255-6, 370; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 182 ff; idem, ‘Litigation and Politics’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 61-62; KB27/815, rot. 84.

In the mid 1460s Debenham and his father were sent to the Marshalsea in London but it is not clear whether their imprisonment was connected with their quarrel with the Pastons or other, unrelated misdemeanours. KB27/815, rot. 84. (By this date the MP had already seen the inside of that prison, from which he had secured his release on bail in July 1463, having undertaken to keep the peace towards Elizabeth Cavendish). KB27/809, rex rot. 28d. While the Debenhams were in custody, John Paston and two of his tenants took the opportunity to file bills against them in King’s bench: in one Paston alleged that father and son had forcibly entered Fritton and assaulted him there in September 1462; in another John Rysyng, the Paston lessee of the manor, claimed that the Debenhams and ‘many malefactors and disturbers of the King’s peace’ had attacked him in August 1463, forcing him to take refuge in the bell tower of Fritton church; in the third Thomas Weasenham accused them of assaulting him and seizing his cattle at nearby Belton in October 1464. KB27/816, rots. 36, 82d. In September 1465 three of the Pastons’ servants entered Fritton with 60 men, prompting the Debenhams and their friends, who had been attending the quarter sessions at Beccles, to ride in similar force to nearby St. Olaves. Sir Gilbert and an advance party of 20 horsemen then approached the manor from St. Olaves, only to withdraw upon encountering several of the Pastons’ men. Paston Letters, i. 319-20. Later that month Margaret Paston succeeded in entering Cotton, which she entrusted to her son John Paston† to hold on her behalf. Debenham, who had enjoyed actual possession of the manor for some considerable time before her entry, reacted by raising 300 men. Notwithstanding his family’s differences with the duke of Norfolk over Caister, by now John was also a retainer of that lord, who was forced to intervene to prevent a dangerous confrontation within his affinity. He summoned the two men to his castle at Framlingham where he proposed that a neutral person should hold Cotton while he investigated its title. The Pastons declined to surrender possession of the manor but agreed not to collect any rents or hold courts there in the meantime, a compromise to which Debenham agreed, provided that it met with the approval of Yelverton and Jenney, from whom he had received a conveyance of the property. Ibid. 529-31.

In the end, neither the Debenhams nor Pastons could make good their claims to Cotton or Fritton: in October 1468 Yelverton and a number of Sir John Fastolf’s executors sold Fritton and other parts of his estate to the duke of Norfolk, and early in the following year another group of the knight’s executors and feoffees conveyed Cotton to John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. Mowbray did not retain his acquisitions for long, since in 1470 he surrendered them to the bishop of Winchester, William Waynflete, who by then had assumed the role of sole executor of Fastolf’s will, but de la Pole succeeded in keeping Cotton. C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 120-3. Although these developments rendered the quarrel between the Debenhams and Pastons pointless, the years of animosity between the two families make it unlikely that the MP and his family needed much persuading to turn out for the duke of Norfolk when he again made a bid for Caister castle, to which he laid siege in the late summer of 1469. Besides Debenham and his father, Mowbray’s besieging force of retainers and tenants also included three other Debenhams, probably the MP’s brothers or uncles. William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 189; Sayer, 309.

The loss of Cotton to the de la Poles was undoubtedly a blow to Debenham, still waiting to come into his own, although he did acquire certain holdings in Middlesex in his father’s lifetime. In terms of real property, his marriage promised much since his wife, Katherine, had extensive landed interests. The widow of William, Lord Zouche, she probably became his wife in the early spring of 1469, since they were pardoned for marrying without licence on 24 March. CPR, 1467-77, p. 152. She already possessed a jointure interest in two Zouche manors in Gloucestershire and in the autumn of 1469 she and Debenham were assigned her dower from the Zouche estates, worth some £110 p.a. and consisting of some nine manors and other lands situated elsewhere in south-west and southern England. Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, ii (Selden Soc. lxiv), 78; C140/33/38c. Unfortunately for Debenham, the marriage was short-lived because Katherine died in October 1471. She had not borne him any surviving children, so ending the interest he had enjoyed in her right in part of the Zouche lands. In the following April, however, the Crown granted the keeping of seven of the Zouche manors in the West Country to him and his father, to hold during the minority of John, her son by Lord Zouche, then only some 11 years of age. C140/30/53; 38/40; CPR, 1467-77, p. 373. Among these manors was that of Wynford Eagle in Dorset, formerly part of Katherine’s dower, and in 1475 Debenham sued Richard Vowell*, claiming that while escheator of that county Vowell had wrongfully seized £16 belonging to him at Wynford Eagle in early 1474. E13/161, rot. 23.

No doubt the grant was a grateful King’s reward to the Debenhams for their support during the Readeption. In the autumn of 1470 Debenham had gone into exile in the Low Countries with Edward IV, and the 13th earl of Oxford, a leading supporter of the Lancastrian King, had imprisoned his father. Sayer, 310; C1/71/2. Debenham returned to England with the other Yorkist exiles in March 1471. When their fleet arrived off Cromer on the north Norfolk coast, King Edward sent him and Sir Robert Chamberlain† ashore to see if it was safe to land. They returned with warnings that it was too dangerous to do so, probably because Oxford’s brother, Sir Thomas de Vere, had raised a force to resist Edward and his men, who eventually landed at Ravenspur on the Humber estuary. Arrivall of Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. i), 2. Probably Debenham took part in the subsequent military campaign by which Edward recovered his throne and defeated his enemies, although it is impossible to prove that he fought at either Barnet or Tewkesbury. Oxford, who escaped abroad after Barnet, was attainted in the Parliament of 1472 and forfeited his estates, which were granted to the duke of Gloucester. CPR, 1467-77, p. 297. Gloucester proved happy to give up some of these lands to others, and it was no doubt with his blessing that the Debenhams occupied the de Vere manor at Stutton, a few miles south-west of Little Wenham, for several years after the earl’s attainder. In 1476 the elder Gilbert recovered Tattingstone, also forfeited by the earl, by paying the King 260 marks for a grant of the property to him and his heirs. R. Horrox, Ric. III, 74; C145/327; CFR, xxi. no. 644; CPR, 1467-77, p. 590.

Within a year of returning home, Debenham was indicted for numerous offences he had allegedly committed in Suffolk, and in the same period he incurred the ill will of Alice de la Pole and her son John, duke of Suffolk, both of whom sued him for trespass in King’s bench. KB27/842, rex rot. 38; 843, rots. 32, 53; 844, rot. 59d; 845, rot. 3; 846, rots. 16, 32d. In spite of his lawless behaviour, he remained on the commission of the peace for his native county, on which the government had placed him after Edward IV recovered the throne, and continued to retain the trust of the King. It is possible that his association with the Court, and the influence he enjoyed as a result, that prompted him to seek election as a knight of the shire for Suffolk to the Parliament of 1472. He was, however, up against two other candidates, Sir Robert Chamberlain, a royal servant and a counsellor of the de la Poles, and (Sir) William Brandon†, a servant of the duke of Norfolk, and it was these men whom the sheriff, Sir John Wingfield† (elder brother of Thomas) returned. Once the Parliament had opened, however, Debenham renewed his challenge by suing Sir John, whose term had by then expired, in the Exchequer. By means of a bill of 16 Nov. 1472, he alleged that he had enjoyed the support of the majority of voices between him and Brandon and yet Sir John had unlawfully returned the latter. He therefore sought £100 in damages from the former sheriff for making a false return, in breach of a statute of 1445. In the following Hilary term, John Peverell and John Gravener began like suits in the Exchequer against Wingfield, evidently at the behest of Debenham. Gravener, a yeoman from East Bergholt, was certainly one of Sir Gilbert’s followers or dependants, being associated with the knight in more than episode of alleged wrongdoing. While the blow to his personal prestige in failing to secure election might have motivated Debenham to take action against Wingfield, it is very likely that the return was indeed irregular or fraudulent. R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 58-59; E13/158, rots. 62d, 67, 74; KB27/844, rot. 83; KB9/369/24, 25. In the event, none of the suits reached judgement, perhaps partly because Debenham also had other matters to occupy him in this period; one such matter was Tattingstone, the other Ireland.

During the first half of the 1470s Tattingstone was the subject of another quarrel, this time between the Debenhams and Sir Gilbert’s erstwhile associate in Parliament, Thomas Wingfield. The two men were already at odds with each other, whether over that manor or another matter, since the King had taken a bond for £1,000 from Wingfield in September 1470, as a security that he would keep the peace towards the MP. CCR, 1468-76, no. 572. A Chancery suit of 1475 reveals the dispute about Tattingstone. The plaintiff was Wingfield’s servant, Gilbert Nycoll of Ipswich. In his bill he referred to ‘divers controversies and debates’ between his master and Debenham over Tattingstone, and to a lawful distress he had taken on the manor at Wingfield’s command. Sir Gilbert had reacted to the levying of the distress by suing Nycoll for trespass in the borough court at Ipswich, where Debenham was ‘myghty man and greetly frended’ and Nycoll – or so he claimed to the chancellor – could receive no justice. C1/47/278.

The involvement of Debenham in Ireland arose from requests for military assistance that Edward IV had received from his loyal subjects there, to which the King responded by sending Sir Gilbert to the lordship as his personal envoy. While important in itself, the mission probably had a dual purpose, in so far as it gave an unruly royal retainer gainful employment away from home and his quarrels there. Debenham travelled to Ireland in late 1473 or early 1474, and when he returned home, probably in the spring of 1474, it was at the head of a delegation conveying the Irish parliament’s proposals for a general re-conquest of the lordship. To encourage the King to accept such an ambitious plan, the proposals emphasized Ireland’s potential as a source as wealth, but Edward was prepared only to meet the immediate military emergency. New Hist. Ire. ii. ed. Cosgrove, 490-1, 603-4; D. Bryan, Gerald Fitzgerald, 17-22, 274. In Dec. 1473 Debenham was issued with letters of protection as a member of the retinue of William, Lord Hastings, lt. of Calais (C76/157, m. 1), but his mission to Ire. must have precluded his crossing the Channel. He did so by appointing Debenham to the offices of chancellor of Ireland and steward of Meath for life and retaining him to serve in the lordship with 400 archers for a year. The chancellor exercised considerable authority, since his position was the second highest in the Irish administration, but in practical terms Debenham’s force of archers was far smaller than the 1,000 or more thought necessary by the Irish parliament. New Hist. Ire. ii. 604; C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, ii. 112. Having mustered with his retinue near Chester, he returned to Ireland in the autumn of 1474. E405/58, rot. 2d; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 467, 491. He was almost prevented from doing so, since shortly before his departure Robert Duplache, a London tailor whom he had failed to pay £100 for wool and other merchandise, secured his arrest in London. He was released after petitioning the chancellor. C131/242/6; CCR, 1468-76, no. 325; Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, ii. 75-82; C1/60/42; 66/198. There is little evidence of Debenham’s activities upon his return to Ireland although it seems that he campaigned in the south-east of the country. It is doubtful that he achieved much, since there was friction between him and Thomas Fitzgerald, 7th earl of Kildare, the deputy of the absentee viceroy of Ireland, George, duke of Clarence, probably because Kildare was reluctant to share military command with an English official. The Crown did send Debenham 230 men as reinforcements in the spring of 1475 but it is likely that this force was reduced before the end of the same year. He sailed back to England in early 1476. New Hist. Ire. ii. 604; Scofield, ii. 112.

Upon his return home, Debenham obtained a pardon for the outlawry he had incurred for failing to answer lawsuits in King’s bench. CPR, 1467-77, p. 560. During the later 1470s he was accused of maintaining a wrongful suit brought by his father in the borough court at Ipswich and of trespassing on property near the town in the elder Gilbert’s company. Both Debenhams also featured in a Chancery bill presented by Richard Clerk of Wenham, formerly the farmer of the Debenham manor of ‘Vaux’ in Little Wenham, against the bailiffs of Ipswich in 1480. By then a prisoner at Ipswich, Clerk said that the Debenhams had refused to acknowledge that he had paid the whole of his farm and had sent their servant John Gravener to apprehend him. Having held him at Wenham for 24 hours, they had brought him to Ipswich where the MP’s father had wrongfully sued him for a debt of £20 in the borough court and the bailiffs had committed him to the town’s gaol. C1/64/661; 66/218; CP40/861, rot. 466.

The action taken in Chancery by Clerk came late in the life of the elder Debenham who died in May 1481. Inquisitions post mortem for him were held in Norfolk and Suffolk in the following October and Sir Gilbert was finally permitted to enter his inheritance in early 1482. Apart from Tattingstone and the Debenham holdings at Little Wenham, it consisted of manors at Alburgh, Earsham and Flixton on the Norfolk-Suffolk boundary, another at Ipswich and three others situated in several parishes lying a few miles to the north of that town. C140/81/48; CFR, xxi. no. 630. He disposed of at least one of these manors before the end of the same decade, selling Flixton to James Hobart† in late 1487. Suff. RO (Ipswich), Iveagh (Phillips) mss, HD 1538/11, vol. 11, f. 74/1. The elder Gilbert’s will does not survive but he is known to have appointed his son as one of his executors. It is unlikely that the will was ever completely fulfilled, for in due course Sir Gilbert fell out with one of his co-executors, Benet Caldwell† of Ipswich. In a Chancery case he brought against Caldwell’s widow in about 1490 he claimed that her late husband had failed to account for sales of some of the elder Gilbert’s properties in Ipswich, Harwich and elsewhere and had misappropriated the income from one of his manors. She countered that Debenham had failed to honour an undertaking to dispose of £500 for the good of his father’s soul, even though he had taken possession of the greater part of the testator’s goods, including a sizeable collection of plate. She also alleged that he owed over £100 to the elder Gilbert’s estate for the farm of a salt-house at Ipswich. C1/91/36-38.

Within a couple of years of losing his father, Debenham also lost his royal patron. After Edward IV’s death in April 1483 he and other Household knights played a leading role in the funeral ceremonies which followed. Bearing a banner of St. Edward, he walked beside the royal bier as it was carried into Westminster Abbey and he was one of those who watched over the King’s body the night before its burial at Windsor. LP Ric. III and Hen. VII ed. Gairdner, i. 5, 8. Although dropped from the commission of the peace after the duke of Gloucester seized the throne in the following June, he quickly gained the trust of the new King. Having attended Richard III’s coronation in July, Coronation of Ric. III ed. Sutton and Hammond, 271. he was restored as a j.p. a few weeks later and became a knight of the body. Sayer, 318. In the following autumn he accompanied Sir John Howard, a leading supporter of the new regime whom Richard had created duke of Norfolk, on a tour of his ducal estates in Surrey and Sussex. Howard was still visiting these lands when a rebellion against Richard III broke out in Wales and south-east England, and Debenham may have helped him with the measures he took to secure London from the rebels in Kent. Howard Household Bks. ii. 458, 459; C.D. Ross, Ric. III, 116. A few months after the rising, Debenham took the precaution of obtaining a royal pardon, C67/51, m. 9. although it is unlikely that his loyalty was ever in doubt. In February 1484 he received an order to seize the estates of John Waller of Kent for the Crown. He was again in that county – perhaps on further policing duties – in the following summer, being present at Canterbury on 22 July, at a reckoning of certain arrears owed to Christ Church priory. Canterbury Cath. Archs., Dean and Chapter mss, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/C/405. In November the same year Debenham took possession of a house in Southwark belonging to his old adversary, (Sir) William Brandon, father of the rebels William and Thomas Brandon, and confiscated £100 in cash he found there. BL Harl. MS 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, ii. 109-10, 175; Horrox, Ric. III, 14, 285; KB9/369/5. During the winter of 1484-5 he and his nephews, Robert†, William and John Brewes, the sons of his sister Elizabeth by the late (Sir) Thomas Brewes*, received several commissions to arrest the political malcontent, Thomas Hansard. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 494, 543, 547. Although Robert Brewes was one of those who had rebelled in the autumn of 1483, he had obtained a royal pardon and made his peace with the King. CPR, 1476-85, p. 377. Debenham was also involved in defensive measures taken by Richard’s regime. In May and December 1484 he was appointed to commissions of array, and in the same December he and Philip Bothe were made responsible for guarding Harwich against any attack from the sea. BL Harl. MS 433, ii. 183. Apart from the security of the realm, Debenham had various pressing personal concerns to attend to in late 1484. By then William Dale, claiming descent from the Fulthorpes, was suing him for the manor of Tattingstone, CP40/890, rot. 152. and in November that year Robert Duplache came before the chancellor to declare that he had still not received satisfaction for his £100. The matter was referred to the justices sitting in Exchequer chamber because of the complicated legal points at issue. The judges laid down the respective rights of the recognisor (Debenham) and recognisee (Duplache), but whether Duplache was ever able to recover his debt is open to question. C131/81/17; Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, ii. 75-82.

Nothing is known about Debenham’s activities or whereabouts at the end of Richard III’s reign. His responsibilities at Harwich may have allowed him to avoid the battle of Bosworth, in which his stepson, John, Lord Zouche, fought for Richard. Unlike Zouche, he was not attainted after Henry VII took the throne but he was dropped from the commission of the peace following the accession of the first Tudor king. Zouche was obliged to find sureties to guarantee his future loyalty to Hen. VII: CCR, 1485-1500, no. 126. I. Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 96, wrongly claims that the MP was one of those sureties. He also lost the stewardship of Dinnington, a former Mowbray manor in Yorkshire, CPR, 1485-94, p. 42. Dinnington had been held in dower by Katherine, the widowed duchess of the 2nd Mowbray duke of Norfolk: Collection All Wills ed. Nichols, 267. It is not known whether Debenham owed his appointment as steward to her or to the Crown after her death in 1483. and the earl of Oxford, who had captained Henry’s vanguard at Bosworth, was able to regain Tattingstone. In November 1485 the court of King’s bench began to proceed with an indictment taken against him (but not pursued) in the previous reign. According to this, at the beginning of that year he and a band of followers, including John Gravener, had attacked and wounded Thomas Fastolf† at Ipswich, and then killed a servant of one of the town’s bailiffs when the local authorities had tried to intervene. KB9/369/23. Horrox, Ric. III, 278, incorrectly states that this indictment related to an attack on Fastolf’s property. In February 1486 a fresh indictment was brought against him for his entry on to Sir William Brandon’s property at Southwark but presumably both this and the earlier indictment were annulled by the general pardon he received in the following month. KB9/369/5; CPR, 1485-1500, p. 112. The pardon notwithstanding, he was not permitted any further part in local government, since he was not restored as a j.p. or appointed to ad hoc commissions. In the summer of 1487 Debenham was obliged to contribute £8 to the army which the King had commissioned the earl of Oxford to take to the north of England. Household Bks. ed. Collier, 496. Arthuson, 92, erroneously claims that he himself was recruited for the earl’s force. In spite of his relatively advanced age, he himself found an outlet for his energies in military service later that decade, for he campaigned in Flanders with Giles Daubeney†, Lord Daubeney, in the spring and early summer of 1489. Paston Letters, i. 667-9; M.J. Bennett, ‘Hen. VII and Northern Rising of 1487’, EHR, cv. 54n.

In due course Debenham won sufficient trust to gain admission to Henry VII’s household. He had become a knight of the body by February 1491, CPR, 1485-94, p. 334. when the King appointed him constable of Carrickfergus castle, one of the chief royal fortresses in Ireland, granted him the lordship of Carlingford and manor of ‘Ardmolghan’, and made him keeper and surveyor of all the mines in Ireland for seven years. He also received a grant from William, Marquess Berkeley, who assigned him a weir and island (‘Durbin Iland’) from his Irish estates. C1/130/15. His return to Ireland was an unhappy one. In reality, the output of such Irish mines as existed was minimal, New Hist. Ire. ii. 490. Although it is recorded that he ‘proved good’ a silver mine in the south of the country: Bryan, 21n. and while in County Wexford he was attacked and robbed. In search of justice, he submitted a bill to the Irish parliament, where those accused of the deed were attainted of felony. In spite of the parliament’s response, he had yet to recover his losses when he returned to England, probably some time in 1492. He arrived home so penniless that he was obliged to enter sanctuary to escape his creditors. Among those creditors was Philip Edwarde of London, whose mother, Isabel, had lent him £100, a sum which he had failed to repay before her death in December 1490. The loan was essentially a mortgage, since Debenham had conveyed one of his manors at Capel St. Mary, a parish neighbouring the Wenhams, to her and her feoffees as a security. Following her death, the property had passed to Philip, to hold until the debt was repaid. PCC 36 Milles (PROB11/8, f. 287). While in sanctuary Debenham petitioned the chancellor about his misfortunes in Ireland. In his bill, submitted in about 1492 and directed primarily against Robert Botiller of Waterford, he claimed that the goods stolen from him were worth £1,000 or more and that he had almost died of the wounds he had received in the attack. He also alleged that Botiller, to whom he had leased his island, had failed to pay no less than £100 which he owed in rent and accused him of protecting the assailants, who included many of Botiller’s kinsmen and one of his servants. C1/130/15; H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, Irish Parl. 193, 194n.

Debenham’s time in Ireland, Perkin Warbeck landed at Cork. The pretender arrived in the lordship in November 1491, Arthurson, 22. but it is not known whether Sir Gilbert encountered him there. It is possible that Debenham joined the Warbeck conspiracy after returning to England, where members of the Household had begun to plot against Henry VII. According to a subsequent indictment, in February 1493 he and a fellow Household knight, Sir Humphrey Savage†, had responded to a message from Warbeck by agreeing that he should join the pretender abroad and that Savage would further his cause at home. Following the betrayal of their conspiracy later that year, Debenham and Savage fled to the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, where they remained for the next five years or more. Ibid. 62, 74; W.A.J. Archbold, ‘Sir Wm. Stanley and Perkin Warbeck’, EHR, xiv. 533. Their confinement was not an uncomfortable one, since the King paid the abbey’s kitchener, William Graunte, a weekly allowance of £1 for their ‘mete and drynk’. At the beginning of 1495 the allowance was suspended, obliging Graunte to provide for them out of his own pocket, but it was restored to him several weeks later after he had petitioned the Crown. Arthurson, 151, 219-20. The Parliament of 1495 attainted Debenham for treason, PROME, xvi. 229-30. but he was spared the death sentence meted out to some of his co-conspirators. In October 1499 he received a general pardon but his attainder was not reversed in his lifetime. He died within a year of obtaining this pardon since the King’s knight, Sir William Tyler†, received £1 from the royal privy purse for his burial on 11 Sept. 1500. CPR, 1494-1509, p. 190; Excerpta Historica ed. Bentley, 124. Tyler’s role in his interment suggests that the MP had died in confinement, either still in sanctuary or as a prisoner elsewhere. Debenham died childless, meaning that his heir was his sister, Elizabeth Brewes. Responding to a petition she had submitted, in July 1501 the King granted her all Debenham’s lands for £500 and undertook to have his attainder reversed in the next Parliament. CPR, 1494-1509, pp. 238-9. Elizabeth was no longer alive when that assembly opened in January 1504, so the Act of Restitution passed was in favour of the MP’s nephew, her son Robert Brewes. PCC 17 Blamyr (PROB11/13, ff. 150v-151); CFR, xxii. no. 752; PROME, xvi. 400-3. Brewes did not receive immediate seisin of all of Debenham’s estates, since Sir William Tyler had obtained a grant for life of some of these lands and the widowed ‘Lady Anne Debenham’ was in possession of the Debenham manors in the Wenhams. CPR, 1494-1509, p. 351; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 357. The existence of Lady Anne suggests that Debenham had remarried after the death of his wife Katherine. If Anne was his second wife, it is possible that she was the daughter of the Isabel Edwarde who had lent him £100, since in her will of 1490 Isabel referred to the MP as her ‘son-in-law’. PCC 36 Milles.