At the beginning of the fifteenth century the Euers were one of the oldest and most well-established families in north-eastern England. The family ostentatiously traced their descent from a sister of John de Balliol, and still held the former Balliol barony of Stokesley in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Sir John Euer†, MP for Northumberland in the Parliament of October 1307, was executed as a rebel after the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, but, this setback aside, the family generally prospered. Our MP’s father, Sir Ralph, enjoyed a particularly notable career. He represented both Northumberland (twice) and Yorkshire (on three occasions) in the Commons, but his most important role was as a servant of successive bishops of Durham, culminating in his long tenure as Bishop Langley’s steward. He also added to the family estate by marriage. His second marriage around 1381 to Katherine, one of the daughters and coheiresses of William, Lord Aton, brought him the former Vescy lands, lying principally in the North Riding and including the manor of Old Malton which became the principal seat of the family in the early fifteenth century.
Sir William was already well established in northern society during his father’s lifetime. Before the end of the first decade of the century he had entered the household of Bishop Langley and around the same time his father arranged an extremely prestigious marriage for him, then aged 15, to Maud, one of the daughters of Henry, Lord Fitzhugh. The banns for the marriage had been called by the end of January 1411 and the ceremony presumably took place shortly afterwards.
With his father so active in the affairs of the palatinate, it was in the North Riding that Sir William first took an active role in local administrative affairs. In July 1420 he was named to the commission of the peace in the North Riding, and in the following April he was appointed to a loan commission there.
In the meantime, Euer had had his first experience of service in the Commons. On 2 Nov. 1422, at the first elections held after his father’s death, he was elected to represent Yorkshire as his father had done before him. It is a reasonable speculation that a factor in his election was the support of Fitzhugh. As an executor of Henry V and a member of the minority council, it was natural that Fitzhugh should have wanted his own men in the Commons, and he probably had a more personal reason. His tenure of the valuable forfeited lands of Henry, Lord Scope of Masham, which he had by Henry V’s grant, was threatened by Scrope’s brother, Sir John, a political ally of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. In 1422, with the apparent rise to pre-eminence in England of Duke Humphrey, this was a pressing concern for him, and his son-in-law was likely to be a useful ally in the Commons.
This was the prelude to a general assault on the bishop of Durham’s liberties. Euer was not the only local figure anxious that these should be curbed, and this more general resentment explains the events of the first months of 1433.
Meanwhile, Bishop Langley had been energetic in the defence of his privileges. Euer and his allies may have considered that the time was ripe to challenge the bishop’s authority, as for most of 1432 Langley, aged over 70 and ailing, had been languishing at his palace at Bishop’s Auckland. However, on 15 Apr. 1433 he travelled to London and looked to enlist the assistance of his influential friends on the King’s council. Armed with the ancient charters (most of which were forgeries), he began a robust defence of his rights. When Parliament opened on 8 July, he presented a petition outlining the grounds on which he exercised his palatinate jurisdiction and asked for all the returns of the February commission to be annulled and withdrawn from record in the Chancery. Euer presented a counter petition in the same assembly, claiming that the King had been disenfranchised through the lies of Langley’s predecessors as bishop (particularly Anthony Bek during Edward I’s reign), and asking that Langley’s entire exercise of his palatinate jurisdiction be revoked. The King, however, on the advice of his judges, ‘piously having compassion for the frailty of the bishop himself’ and in consideration of Langley’s long service to the Lancastrian dynasty, upheld the bishop’s rights and ordered the commission’s findings to be annulled.
Euer was now in an untenable position and he was left with little option but to seek a rapprochement with the bishop. In the autumn session of the Parliament of 1433 ‘certain knights’, presumably at Sir William’s instigation, approached Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and asked him to mediate between the two men. Again, however, no award was forthcoming, and Euer faced continued harassment in the palatinate courts. On 12 Aug. 1435 it was decided in the Durham chancery that the bishop could resume the disputed manor of Langley and was entitled to its profits from the time of the death of Sir Ralph Euer. In the following February Euer sued out a writ of error in the King’s bench against this judgement, but the King’s judges upheld the decision of the bishop’s court. Euer’s dispute with the bishop had met with complete defeat, and his resentment found expression in the threat of violence. In July 1437 Langley successfully asked the King to take heavy sureties from Euer who, he claimed, was threatening him with death. Resolution came only with the bishop’s death in the following November.
None the less, although Euer was undoubtedly damaged by the leading part he had taken in the unsuccessful attack on the bishop’s liberties, the Crown was not prepared to deprive itself of the services of one who had a contribution to make to the defence of the border. On 8 Nov. 1436 he was appointed sheriff of Northumberland, and a week later he indented to serve as captain of the castle of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Although his tenure of the captaincy was brief, he proved an active officer, granting safe-conducts and acting with other Northumberland gentry to secure the redress of border grievances.
The succession of Robert Neville, younger brother of the earl of Salisbury, to the bishopric of Durham, gave Euer an opportunity to regain his position in the palatinate. In May 1435 his younger brother, Robert, had been retained to serve the earl and the latter’s mother Joan, dowager countess of Westmorland; and the Euers built on this relationship to win a prominent place in the service of the new bishop. Robert succeeded Holden as the bishop’s steward, and in May 1438 Sir William was reappointed as a justice of the peace.
Euer’s enhanced status explains why he now became a beneficiary of royal patronage. In October 1438 the Crown appointed him steward of the extensive lordship of Holderness, recently come into the King’s hands by the death of Anne, dowager-countess of Stafford, although he served only for the few months before her son, Earl Humphrey, succeeded to his mother’s estate.
The ongoing dispute over the Hastings’ wardship may explain why Euer was anxious to secure election to the Parliament of January 1442. Once again he looked to secure one of the seats for Yorkshire, where despite his commitments in the palatinate and Northumberland he had remained active. His two previous elections imply that, even though his main interests lay elsewhere, he was an acceptable candidate, yet the election, in company with Sir Thomas Saville*, presents some unusual features which imply that it may have been contested. Remarkably, the indenture names as many as 451 attestors. No previous indenture for any county had named more. It is usually assumed that long indentures denote a contested election, and it may be that this was the case here. There is, however, no evidence to give a context to such a contest, and an alternative explanation is perhaps to be preferred. The point at issue may have been the mode of election rather than the identity of the elected. Until the electoral statute of 1429 it had been the unique tradition in Yorkshire that the indentures named only the attorneys of the more important suitors of the county court, and it may be that this difference in the mode of recording elections betokens one in the mode of election with the county having an unusually restricted franchise. If so, the wider county community may have sought to exploit the statute, which established the 40s. franchise, to break the monopoly of the greater suitors. On this reading, the long indenture of 1442 marks their victory. On 20 July 1442, that is, after the Parliament had concluded, the justices of assize in Yorkshire were commissioned to inquire into the electoral proceedings, but unfortunately their proceedings do not appear to survive.
Whatever the circumstances of his election, the Parliament of 1442 proved to be an event of great significance in Euer’s career. The defence of the sea and the protection of English merchants was a major concern of the Commons in this assembly. A petition asked for a force of eight capital ships and 14 smaller vessels, carrying a total of 2,260 men, to guard the English coast for six months in the second half of 1442 and a further eight in the following year, and asked for the appointment of eight captains to be chosen from ‘knyghts and worthy Swyers of the West, of the South, and of the North, so that no cuntre shuld be dispesid’. The government accepted the plan, albeit in a curtailed form, and in June Euer was one of four captains named to serve under the overall command of Sir Stephen Popham*. Interestingly, of those appointed only Sir John Passhele had not sat in the preceding Parliament (the other two captains were Miles Stapleton* and John Heron*). Popham indented to serve with 565 men, while the others agreed to serve with 1,695 men between them. The musters were originally to be taken at Winchelsea on 31 July, but there were delays. Euer was instructed to arrest shipping in Kingston-upon-Hull and Newcastle-upon-Tyne in June, and by the following month he had assembled all but 75 men of his agreed force of 547 and five vessels, despite the port of Hull being ‘desolate and utterly destitute of any shippes or other vessailes or maryners’. On 20 Aug. he left Hull for Great Yarmouth, where he remained for six days, before finally mustering at Southampton and setting sail for the open sea. By the end of October he and the 490 men of his retinue were back in Hull.
The 1442 expedition proved a costly and difficult affair for Euer and the other captains. As the mayor and aldermen of Hull made clear, the difficulties he had encountered in assembling his retinue and its shipping had led to ‘grete hevynesse, damage and costage of the said knyght’. Worse followed. On 19 May the Exchequer had made a prest of £1,910 15s. to Euer, Stapleton and Heron, and in Trinity term 1444 Euer and Stapleton were arraigned before the barons of the Exchequer and committed to the Fleet prison for failing to render account for the monies they had received for wages. In his defence Euer claimed that the prest had been delivered to all of them and that he should account only for his share, namely the sum of £636 18s. 4d. He was forced to petition the King for redress, and on 19 Dec. 1445 a privy seal writ finally instructed the barons to make fine and cease all process against him.
The remainder of the 1440s saw Euer continue to be involved in the administration of both Yorkshire and the palatinate of Durham. In November 1444 he was pricked as sheriff of Yorkshire, and despite his friendship with the Nevilles he found himself sued in the Exchequer of pleas by both the earl of Salisbury and the earl’s brother, William, Lord Fauconberg, for failure to honour tallies assigned on the county’s issues. It may have been the burdensome nature of his term of office that led him to sue out, on 29 Nov. 1448, letters patent exempting him from further service as sheriff and other local responsibilities.
Little evidence survives of Euer’s career during the 1450s, although it is evident that, as he advanced in years, he participated less and less in public affairs. In June 1450 Bishop Neville appointed a commission to inquire whether Euer had damaged the episcopal coal and iron mines by cutting through the ‘forbarres’, but there is nothing to suggest that this betokened any wider breakdown in his cordial relations with the bishop.
None the less, Booth’s close connexions to the court and the antagonism between the queen and the junior branch of the Neville family may have faced Euer with difficult choices as civil war approached. There are some indications that he repudiated his earlier service to the earl of Salisbury. In December 1459 he was appointed to the Lancastrian commission of array, and, more significantly, after the attainder of the Yorkist lords his son and heir, Ralph, was appointed receiver-general of Salisbury’s forfeited estates in Yorkshire.
Even so, the death of his eldest son on the losing side at Towton made it difficult for Sir William to adapt to the change of regime. On 13 May 1461 at York before the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Robert Danby, he and three of his surviving sons (Robert, Henry and William, later archdeacon of Salisbury) contracted to pay fines to Edward IV of as much £2,000 each. Yet these fines, no doubt intended to act as a suspended penalty, were quickly cancelled, and Sir William passed into retirement.
Sir William’s heir was his grandson, another William, the son of Ralph Euer by Eleanor, daughter of John, Lord Greystoke. He was almost certainly a minor when Sir William died, and it was not until 18 Aug. 1468 that he made a fine of £30 in the Durham chancery and was granted livery of his grandfather’s estates.