Of ancient pedigree, being descended from the Norman counts of Boulogne, the Fiennes family had been established in England since the Conquest, when John de Fiennes was made constable of Dover castle. One of their number, Faramus de Fiennes, was a cousin of King Stephen’s wife, Maud. A series of advantageous marriages gave the family lands in six counties in southern England, and their most important estates lay in Sussex, where Sir William Fiennes purchased the manor of Herstmonceux in the 1370s.
In 1415 the two brothers mustered in the company of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, for Henry V’s invasion of Normandy. James brought with him a small retinue of two men-at-arms and six archers, but there is no evidence that he matched Sir Roger’s achievements in the field.
James did return not to England with his brother immediately after Henry V’s death in 1422. Instead, he remained in Normandy taking custody of the castles of Torcy and St. Valery, only resigning the latter in June 1424. By the time of his return to England, he was in possession of the Kentish manor of Kemsing and Sele, settled on him by the terms of his father’s will, and was tenant for life of the Oxfordshire manors of Lynham and Ascote, by gift of his brother.
Following his return from France Fiennes began to assume some local responsibility in Kent and Sussex, with appointment in November 1433 to the commission of the peace in Kent. In September 1435 he attested the parliamentary election in Rochester and on 8 Nov. 1436 he was pricked sheriff of the county. By this time both he and his brother stood high in the King’s favour. On 28 Aug. 1437 he was granted an annuity of £40 from the royal manor of Headington, Oxfordshire, as well as the duchy of Lancaster manor of Monkecourt in Kent, only, on the following day, to give up his grant of Monkecourt as its value had not been specified in the letters patent. Yet he still had designs on Monkecourt, and on 13 Oct. induced John Hardwick, to whom it had been granted five years earlier, to surrender his own letters patent, and on the same day at the royal palace of Sheen secured from the King a grant of the manor for life. Fiennes was beginning to use his close access to the monarch to further his interests.
Despite his growing importance at court, Fiennes continued to be employed on public business in Kent and elsewhere. He was present at Canterbury when the King met Cardinal Beaufort on 5 Oct. 1439, and even attended the meeting of the Council on that occasion. The same month, or early in November he was elected as one of the knights of the shire for Kent and travelled to Westminster to attend the Parliament which began only a week after the end of his shrievalty in Sussex and Surrey.
The new year in 1443 saw him engaged in negotiations with the Yorkshire knight, Sir Brian Stapleton*, over the manor of Witley, Surrey, which Stapleton had been granted two years earlier with John Feriby*, then controller of the Household. On 13 Jan. Fiennes had been granted the reversion of the manor, but, in the kind of negotiations made possible by his intimacy with the King, on 8 Feb. Stapleton surrendered it to him, and in return, on the following day Fiennes transferred the constableship of Rochester castle to Stapleton.
In January 1445 Fiennes again secured election as one of the knights of the shire for Kent, and on 25 Feb., the day of the Parliament’s opening, he secured a grant of the ‘little counting house under the Exchequer’ in the palace of Westminster.
It is likely too that by the beginning of 1445 Fiennes was clearly identified with William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, now the most powerful figure at court and in the council. While Fiennes’s position in the Household had been established independently of Suffolk’s influence, they had been associated formally over the previous five years as the King’s feoffees for his duchy of Lancaster estates and collegiate foundations, and within the confines of the King’s chamber their desire to assist the King to fulfill his wishes brought the two men together, albeit not so closely as to lead either to an alliance by marriage or participation in the other’s private affairs.
While Parliament was in progress Fiennes had also found favour with the King’s friend, Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, who in May 1445 appointed him steward of all his lands in Kent and Sussex. He continued to hold this office after Duke Henry’s death in June the following year and for the duration of the minority of his daughter and heir. Furthermore, the King granted him the hereditary shrievalty of Worcestershire, which pertained to the earldom of Warwick, to keep until the heiress came of age.
On 14 Dec. 1446 writs were sent out for a Parliament to assemble at Cambridge on 10 Feb. 1447, only for new ones to be issued on 20 Jan. changing the meeting place to Bury St. Edmunds. Meanwhile, Fiennes’s own presence in the Commons had been decided on 2 Jan. when at Rochester he was once more elected, this time alongside his son-in-law, William Cromer*, as knight of the shire for Kent. Parliament met in a highly-charged atmosphere; if Henry VI was to leave the realm as planned, in order to meet Charles VII, then a regent would need to be appointed, and the natural choice, his uncle Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, was inimical to Suffolk and his allies at court and on the council. The Parliament proved a pivotal event in Fiennes’s career, transforming both his political importance and his reputation among contemporaries and later historians. Whether or not the Parliament had been called to facilitate the arrest and trial of Gloucester on charges of treason is unclear, but his arrest upon his arrival at Bury on 18 Feb. and death five days later doubtless dominated its proceedings and defined its purpose in the eyes of observers. Fiennes’s own role in the duke’s fall is ambiguous. A later Yorkist chronicle stated that he and Suffolk ‘hadde longe tyme ymagyned & conspired’ Gloucester’s death, and once the duke had been placed under arrest they ‘so excited and sturid the kynge agaynes hym that he myght neuer come to his answare, for they hade caste and ordeyned amonge thaym a prive conclusion the whiche as yette ys not comme to knowelage off the commyn peple’; while other, less partisan, authors also considered that Gloucester’s death allowed Suffolk and Fiennes to monopolize the King’s counsels.
In the following months Fiennes became increasingly linked in the popular imagination with Suffolk and the worsening situation in France. Certainly, Fiennes was close to Suffolk at this time; and as a member of the Council in May 1447 he endorsed the marquess’s protestation that the surrender of Maine was neither treasonable nor against the Crown’s dignity.
As the military and fiscal situation deteriorated throughout the following year, Fiennes was inextricably identified with the conduct of affairs at the centre. Little is known of his activities during the Parliament which assembled at Westminster in February 1449, although he was certainly summoned and attended its sessions.
The Commons, however, were determined to achieve two things during this Parliament: first, the impeachment of the duke of Suffolk and, second, an Act of Resumption. Both of these were achieved: Suffolk escaped being convicted of treason but was sent into exile for five years on 17 Mar. 1450, during the Parliament’s second session, while in its final session at Leicester an Act of Resumption was passed. In the same session, according to one chronicler, the Commons also demanded justice on Fiennes, Thomas Daniel* and others who were responsible for the loss of Normandy and ‘were causes of the dethe of the Duke of Glowcester’. Accordingly, the King appears to have considered removing Fiennes from the treasurership and his other offices, although if this was announced to the Commons it was certainly not carried through.
On 12 Apr., shortly before the new parliamentary session began at Leicester, Fiennes had made his will. It is unclear why he chose to do so at this point, but his concern for the disposal of his property, much of it coming from royal grant, may have been designed to counter the Commons’ demands for resumption. Two of his executors, John Fray†, the recently retired chief-baron of the Exchequer, and Richard Waller, were instructed to enfeoff their co-executor, his wife Emmeline, with his Kentish manors of Hever, Knole, Kemsing and Seal and Crowthorn. The manor of Mereworth was settled on his elder son, Sir William, as were all those lands he had by ‘the kynges lettres patentes’. If, however, the latter died without male heirs these properties were to revert to the Crown.
Popular opinion at this time was certain that Normandy had been lost, the King’s revenues diminished and lords of the blood royal excluded from Henry’s counsels through the machinations of a clique of household servants led by Suffolk and Fiennes. This was reflected in popular poems. ‘A Warning to King Henry’ stated:
So pore a kyng was never seene,
Nor richere lordes alle bydene;
The communes may no more.
The lorde Say biddeth holde hem downe.
That worthy dastarde of renowne,
He techithe a fals lore.
Political Poems and Songs ed. Wright, ii. 229-31.
On 14 Apr. a proclamation was read in London against the posting of seditious libels.
In late April or early May news reached the assembled Lords and Commons of the defeat of Sir Thomas Kyriel* at the battle of Formingny. On 2 May Suffolk was murdered on his way into exile and his body thrown onto the beach at Dover. As his corpse was taken through Kent, reaching Canterbury on the 22nd, the county appears to have risen in spontaneous and popular rebellion against the King’s ‘evil counsellors’. On 6 June the duke of Buckingham and the earls of Oxford, Devon and Arundel were commissioned to go ‘against the traitors and rebels in Kent and to punish and arrest the same’.
It looks as if at this critical hour Fiennes was abandoned by the King and the rest of the council. Arrested alongside him on 19 June were Lord Dudley, Thomas Daniel and John Trevelyan*. Yet although, according to one contemporary report, Daniel and two others were free to join the King at Windsor on 1 or 2 July, Fiennes remained in custody. Another account states that on 20 June the King had given a secret order for Fiennes to be released from the Tower, but he was prevented from leaving by the young duke of Exeter.
On 5-6 July, following a fiercely-fought battle on the Bridge, the rebels were ejected from the city and on the next day a general pardon was offered causing most of their host to disperse. Having been proclaimed a traitor, Cade himself was captured at Heathfield, Sussex, on 12 July, dying of his wounds in the process. The next day the heads of Fiennes and Cromer were removed from the Bridge and the former was buried, as he had requested, in the chapel of All Saints in the Greyfriars, London. His reputation survived him: ten days later soldiers returning from Normandy entered the chapel ‘where as þe the said lord Say was worthely buried and his heed leyd by him and his armes set on pelours aboute drewe and pulled down the same armes and them reversed’.
The contemporary perception of Fiennes as one of Henry VI’s foremost ‘evil counsellors’ was followed by later writers of the fifteenth century, as well as by historians. While his importance within the Household during the 1440s, and especially after the death of Gloucester in 1447, cannot be disputed, the characterization presented by commentators need not be accepted uncritically. Two main charges were leveled against him with regards to his activity at the centre of the government: first, that he was responsible for the surrender of Maine and the loss of Normandy, and second that he shared responsibility for Gloucester’s death. While there is little evidence that he was personally involved in the execution of French policy from the mid 1440s, and he did not accompany Suffolk to the negotiations at Tours in 1444, he, like Suffolk, had served in Normandy under Henry V and doubtless saw the preservation of that King’s legacy, both in England and France, as his principal duty. He may well, therefore, have supported Suffolk in his belief that the truce of Tours was the best way to preserve the Lancastrian interest in France and actively advanced the policy in the council. As Suffolk claimed in the Parliament of 1449-50, ‘so grete thinges coude not be doon nor brought aboute by hym self alone, onlesse that other persones had doon her parte and be pryvy therto aswell as he’.
Fiennes’s involvement in the death of the duke of Gloucester is more difficult to establish. His petitioning for and grant of Gloucester’s most important Kentish office, the wardenship of the Cinque Ports, the day after he died, as well his appointment as administrator of the duke’s goods and participation in the prosecution of his servants, point to him playing a central role in Duke Humphrey’s demise. By the beginning of 1450 he was commonly identified as one of those who had benefited directly from the duke’s death, even if he had not plotted it himself. Nevertheless, the assertion of ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’ that during his appearance at the London Guildhall on 4 July Fiennes ‘knowlachyd of the dethe of that notabylle and famos prynce the Duke of Glouceter’ must be dismissed as fantasy.
Although Fiennes was not named directly in any of the extant petitions issued by Cade in 1450, modern historians have also characterized his local influence as malign and corrupt: he was ‘pre-eminent amongst the group of parvenus intruding themselves into Kentish society’.
The third charge against him, regarding the allegedly unlawful means he used to accumulate estates and wealth in Kent, is more problematic. The royal grants of the manors of Monkecourt, Capel, Huntingfield, Shorne and Tracy, and property in Chelsfield helped bolster his position as one of the leading landowners in west Kent around Sevenoaks, and he acquired further property in the same area: in 1445 the manor of Mereworth, from William Manston*, and a year later, with Isle, land belonging to Ralph Legh*. Most important, he also purchased from Legh the valuable manor of Knole near Sevenoaks, which had come to Legh through marriage.
Fiennes left a widow, Emmeline, two sons and two surviving daughters. Emmeline suffered by association from her late husband’s reputation. Almost immediately upon his death she found her title to certain of the Fiennes estates under threat. Gervase Clifton* and the other remaining feoffees of the Septvance estates succeeded in recovering them from her possession, and so soon after his death as 24 July 1450 Humphrey Eveas retook possession of the property in Elmley. In October arbiters made an award dismissing her title to Panthurst.