With the Blounts and the Vernons, the Gresleys were among the principal gentry families of fifteenth-century Derbyshire. They had a record of service to the house of Lancaster that was notable even by the staunchly Lancastrian standards of that county. Our MP’s grandfather, Sir Thomas Gresley†, had rallied to the cause of Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399; both he and his son, Sir John, held duchy of Lancaster office in the county; and the latter also enjoyed a notable military career, culminating in appointment as lieutenant-general of Rouen. Moreover, our MP’s aunt, Joan, served as nurse to the infant Henry VI (although this appointment owed more to the connexions of her husband, Thomas Astley of Nailstone in Leicestershire than it did to those of her own family).
During his father’s brief tenure of the Gresley estates, John had already become embroiled in a dispute with the Vernons. In 1446 he and his brothers, Thomas and Nicholas, are alleged to have led a large group in an assault on a Vernon servant, John Gelden, at Netherseal near Drakelow. The manor of Netherseal had been settled by Sir Richard Vernon* on his eldest son, William*, and there can be no doubt that this assault was an episode in a dispute which appears to have involved the heirs rather than the heads of the two families. In Michaelmas term 1447 Gresley made a fine of as much as ten marks in the court of King’s bench to end the process against him on the indictment to which this allegation had given rise.
The death of Gresley’s father on 17 Jan. 1449 brought John an inheritance considerable enough to support a career in local government in two counties. Although it was encumbered by the dower interest of his stepmother, she showed herself ready to compromise his interests with her own: six weeks after her husband’s death, on 1 Mar., her feoffees leased to John the manors of Colton and Kingstone (Staffordshire) for 30 years at an annual rent £40, payable in the minster of St. Mary, Coventry.
Less happily, Gresley’s entry into the family estates corresponded with the re-opening of the family’s longstanding dispute with the abbey of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire. This can be traced back to the 1390s and was to continue into the late 1460s. In March 1449 and May 1450 royal commissions were issued for the arrest of Gresley and his brothers for offences against the abbot, who alleged that Gresley had secured false indictments against him, his monks and tenants. John, for his part, complained of malicious charges made against him before his ‘full dowtfull lorde’, Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, John, Viscount Beaumont, and Sir William Ferrers. These mutual recriminations, in which both parties looked to Buckingham for support, were not the prelude to an immediate settlement, and the dispute continued, albeit at a lesser intensity.
By this date Gresley had already begun his administrative career. Notwithstanding the commissions issued for his arrest, he was appointed to the Derbyshire bench in November 1449, and on the following 22 Oct. he was elected to represent Staffordshire in Parliament. Significantly, his fellow Member was his brother-in-law, John Stanley, and the indenture was attested by two other of his kinsmen by marriage, Sir Thomas Blount† and Hugh Wrottesley.
In view of the very serious disturbances which overtook Derbyshire in the spring of 1454, Sir John’s appointment to the shrievalty in November 1453 (during the lengthy prorogation of a Parliament of which he was a Member) was a particularly unfortunate one, both for him personally and for the maintenance of the peace in the county. Indeed, according to his own later petition, he had not taken up office until 8 Jan. 1454 and it may be that this delay was occasioned by local opposition.
A year later it was Gresley’s own dispute with the Vernons that occasioned the most serious breaches of the peace in Derbyshire. No details survive, but on 12 July 1455 he and (Sir) William Vernon’s brother, Roger, were summoned to appear before the royal council to answer for recent riotous assemblies.
According to the pardon of account of £100 awarded to him on 3 Mar. 1456, Gresley had incurred some exceptional costs during his troubled period as sheriff, ‘in assemblyng oure people’ of the counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to assist the duke of York during his judicial visitation of the region in the aftermath of the Elvaston raid, in labouring for seven days with 200 men, and in sending messengers to make proclamations and deliver letters of privy seal.
It is unlikely that Gresley’s removal from the commission of the peace in November 1458 was the result of suspect political sympathies. His erstwhile rival, (Sir) William Vernon, was removed at the same time, and their dismissal is more likely to be a government reaction to the dying embers of their quarrel. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Sir John maintained his family’s Lancastrian allegiance until 1460, for he was named to the commission of array in December 1459 and restored to the Derbyshire bench in the following March.
Nevertheless, if Gresley was committed enough to take up arms for Lancaster in 1459, he soon adapted himself to changing political realities. The deaths of Buckingham and Shrewsbury at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 severed the links that bound him to the family’s old Lancastrian allegiance. The first indication of his new sympathies is his election to the Yorkist Parliament of the following October, and there can be little doubt that his friendship with his fellow Derbyshire MP in that assembly, Walter Blount, simplified this apparent change of allegiance.
There can, in short, be no doubt that Gresley had the trust of the new King. His election on 10 Sept. 1461 to represent Staffordshire in the first Parliament of the reign and his appointment in 1462 to two royal commissions of arrest are unlikely nominations for someone whose sympathies were suspect.
Gresley’s good standing with the new regime is further evidenced by his association with some its leading local gentry supporters. In a fine levied in Easter term 1461 he is named as a remainderman in lands in Staffordshire together with William Harcourt† and Thomas Ferrers of Tamworth, retainers of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.
It is not therefore surprising that, in 1464, Gresley should have added appointment to the bench in Staffordshire to that in Derbyshire, and that soon after his family should have been quick to benefit from an important change in the local political landscape. The grant of the honour of Tutbury to the young George, duke of Clarence, introduced a new power into the north Midlands or, seen from the perspective of the leading local families, a new patron to be exploited. The Gresleys, with their large landholdings in the heartlands of the honour, were natural beneficiaries, and our MP’s son, Thomas, was duly appointed as deputy lieutenant of Duffield Frith and Needwood Chace.
It was unfortunate for Gresley that the benefits of the end of his family’s long dissension with his religious neighbours was more than outweighed by the opening of a quarrel with his former friends and neighbours, the Wolseleys. This is an object lesson in the problems caused to his neighbours by an ambitious gentleman anxious to create a residence matching his rising status. The origin of the quarrel lay in the enclosure by Ralph Wolseley* in the spring of 1465 of 1,000 acres in the lordship of Haywood near Colton to provide himself with a park. This, if later complaints are to be believed, deprived Gresley, his brother-in-law, (Sir) John Stanley, and John Hales, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, of rights of common pasture. A petition presented by Gresley, seemingly to the royal council, provides a vivid ex parte account of the dispute’s early stages. He claimed that ‘the first begynnyng’ of the quarrel was an assault ‘on good Fryday’ on his servant, William Sydall; and that this was the prelude to a campaign of intimidation against his servants and tenants sponsored by Wolseley’s father, Thomas, who, as a j.p., was able to thwart the execution of a warrant of the peace against the miscreants. No year is given for the assault on Sydall (although all else that is known of the dispute suggests it happened on 4 Apr. 1466), but the petition adds the significant detail that when it occurred both our MP and Wolseley were at Calais in the service of the town’s captain, the earl of Warwick. In their absence, or so it was claimed, Richard Bagot, one of the leading Staffordshire gentry, prevailed upon Thomas Wolseley and Gresley’s wife Anne to put the dispute to the arbitration of Ralph and Gresley on their return home. All this is said to have taken place without Gresley’s knowledge, and thus, when he did return to London from Calais, he still viewed his colleague as a friend. He was thus unprepared when the latter ‘of malice and evyll disposicion’ laboured to have him arrested and slandered his wife, alleging that she had led an assault on Thomas and other ‘suche behavynges not goodly nouther accordyng to be affermed on eny Gentilwoman’. Shortly thereafter, in the petition’s account, the disputants entered bonds to abide the arbitration of Walter Blount, now Lord Mountjoy, who as a friend of both parties was well qualified for such a role; yet, while this award was pending, Ralph had ‘vexed and sued’ more than 50 of Gresley’s men, ‘aswele by writes supplicacions as by prevy sealx’.
This petition, probably to be dated to the summer of 1466, prompted Ralph Wolseley to present the chancellor with a tale of woe of his own. He alleged that those who complained to have lost common pasture rights by his enclosure had agreed to take pasture in the equivalent acreage in another place; none the less, Gresley had broken down his fences. Further, he alleged that, when he had countered by suing Gresley at common law for trespass, his rival had conspired to have him, then absent in the King’s service in Calais, and his aged father indicted of felony.
Gresley’s claim to have been absent in Calais when he first became a victim of Wolseley’s enmity suggests that he had a closer relationship with the earl of Warwick than implied elsewhere in the sources. None the less, his connexions with neither Warwick nor Clarence were strong enough to draw him into their abortive rising in March 1470, at least if one may judge from his appointment to the commission of array in Staffordshire as the King set out in pursuit of the rebels. They were, however, sufficient to preserve his position in local affairs during the Readeption. Despite his removal from the Derbyshire commission of the peace, he was named to an important commission of inquiry in that county and he remained on the bench in Staffordshire.
Later, the growing influence in the east Midlands of William, Lord Hastings, provided Gresley with a new patron and thus with the opportunity to re-establish his place in local affairs. Their relationship quickly became a close one, far closer than he had ever enjoyed with Clarence. Before 1 June 1475 Gresley’s son and heir Thomas married Hastings’s niece, Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Ferrers of Tamworth, and the Gresleys soon reaped the benefits. Sir John was restored to the Staffordshire bench in 1475 (although, curiously, not to that in Derbyshire), and on 8 Dec. 1477 he entered a formal indenture of retainer with Hastings.
One can only speculate about Gresley’s attitude to Richard, duke of Gloucester’s ruthless disposal of Lord Hastings on 13 June 1483. Whatever it was, it did not prevent him attending Richard’s coronation on the following 6 July. Indeed, demonstrating the political adaptability which characterised his entire career, he soon found a place in the new King’s service. By 26 Apr. 1484 he numbered among the knights for the royal body: on that date he is described as such when the King, during one of his several periods of residence at Nottingham castle, granted him for life an annual rent of £40 from the issues of the honour of Tutbury.
In the course of so long and varied career, it is not surprising that Sir John established an extensive network of connexions among the gentry of the Midlands. Revealing here are the arrangements he himself entered into for the marriage of his heir to Anne Ferrers. On 1 June 1475 he conveyed his Leicestershire estates to nine feoffees, who were, in effect, trustees for the implementation of the marriage settlement. Three of them – Sir John Ferrers and Ferrers’s kinsmen, Henry Willoughby and John Aston – were clearly nominees of the bride’s family and a fourth, Sir Richard Bingham, was no doubt named in his professional capacity. For his own part Gresley turned to three leading Derbyshire gentry – Sir Nicholas Longford, Nicholas Montgomery and Ralph Shirley – together with Edward Hastings, a younger son of his lord, William, Lord Hastings, and a Staffordshire esquire, William Basset of Blore.
A later dispute in the family seems, at first sight, to throw an interesting light on the arrangements made by our MP for the future of the Gresley patrimony. The only children of Sir John’s grandson, Sir William Gresley, were four illegitimate sons. On his death in 1521 they, with the support of their mother and her husband, Sir John Savage the elder, contested the right of his brother and heir, George Gresley. The latter defended his position by citing the enfeoffment our MP had made in June 1475: he claimed that the feoffees were seised of the Gresley estates not simply to the use of our MP but to his use for life with successive remainders to the uses of Thomas Gresley, Anne Ferrers, and their male issue, and then of William, Lord Hastings, and his heirs. As a result no head of the family had had seisin of the lands since 1475 and that the fee simple, on the death of the feoffor’s grandson in 1521, resided in the hands of Sir Henry Willoughby as the last surviving feoffee. An entailed use, such as this settlement, would have been an unusually advanced conveyance for the 1470s, but, whether or not it was fraudulently cited by George against Sir William’s desire to provide generously for bastard children, it saved an ancient gentry estate from dismemberment. In 1525 Chancellor Wolsey’s award gave the mother an annual rent of 100 marks for her life and her four sons life annuities of £5 each.