GRIMSBY, William (c.1422-83), of Grimsby, Lincs.

The Grimsbys were one of the principal families of the borough from which they took their name, and had occasionally provided it with parliamentary representatives since 1332. Our MP was the first of the family to enjoy a career of more than local significance. He first appears in the records in July 1448 when he acted as his father’s attorney in the Grimsby borough court. N.E. Lincs., Grimsby bor. mss,. ct. rolls 1/101, 26 Hen. VI. A few months later he followed family tradition by representing his native borough in Parliament early in his adult life, but thereafter it was to the royal court rather than borough politics that he looked for advancement. The connexions which facilitated his entry into and subsequent rapid rise through the ranks of the royal household cannot be traced, and it may be that he owed his success as much to his own ability as to the active patronage of an established courtier. First found in association with the Household in February 1452, when he acted as a mainpernor in the Exchequer for Stephen Cote, a yeoman of the chamber, his rapid promotion thereafter was attended by a series of royal grants. In September following, as one of the six pages of the chamber, he was granted £40 in ready money to be shared with his fellows. Soon afterwards, in May 1454, he successfully petitioned the King and council for a corrody assigned upon the abbey of Gloucester. CFR, xviii. 235; E404/69/20; E403/793, m. 7; E28/84/21. In March 1455, significantly at a time when the King was resuming the reins of government from Richard, duke of York, he had a life grant of the receiver-generalship of royal mines in the West Country at a generous fee of £20 p.a., which, added to the 6d. a day he enjoyed as a yeoman of the Crown, gave him an income from office far in excess of his landed revenue (his father had been assessed at an income of only £5 p.a. in 1436). CPR, 1452-61, p. 218; E179/136/198.

The Yorkist victory at St. Albans on the following 22 May marked at most only a temporary setback to Grimsby’s advancement. Indeed, the burgesses of Grimsby thought it worthwhile returning him to the Parliament the Yorkists summoned in the immediate aftermath of their victory, and he was able to make himself sufficiently acceptable to the new regime to be appointed, while still an MP, to the Lincolnshire escheatorship. His West Country post was, however, lost. Unlike his 6d. a day as a yeoman of the Crown it was not exempted from the Act of Resumption of 1455-6, and in February 1456 the mines were committed to the duke of York, who no doubt appointed his own receiver-general. Bull.IHR, xlii. 217; PROME, xii. 417; CFR, xix. 150; CPR, 1452-61, p. 291. Nevertheless, compensation was quick to follow. The end of York’s second protectorate brought with it new grants beyond promotion to the office of esquire for the body. In May 1456 Grimsby was appointed to the sinecure post of water-bailiff of Calais, and on the following 15 Oct., ‘in consideration of good and unpaid services’, to the stewardship of the Lincolnshire manor of Burwell. Rot. Gasc. et Franc. ii. 337; E159/235, brevia Mich. rot. 22.

This last grant coincided with a much more important one. By 21 Oct. 1456 Grimsby was acting as treasurer of the King’s chamber. This marked the beginning of a shift in the focus of his career from Household to Exchequer. When James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, became treasurer of the Exchequer on 30 Oct. 1458 he appointed our MP as his under treasurer. Revealingly, this choice attracted the notice of the mayor of Southampton, Walter Clerk*, who wrote home from London on 2 Nov. that ‘one Grymesby that wasse Clerk of the Jowell the which made grete attendaunce about the Kynge in his Siknes’ was the new under treasurer. Letters of 15th and 16th Cents. (Soton. Rec. Soc. 1921), 18-19. Clerk is probably alluding here to the ‘Siknes’ that followed the King’s mental collapse in the late summer of 1453, by which date our MP was already employed in the royal chamber.

As under treasurer Grimsby was an important man, and the natural recipient of further grants of patronage from the King and others. On 20 May 1457 he had been granted the wardship and marriage of a minor duchy of Lancaster ward, John Malbysshe; and in December 1458 the earl of Wiltshire’s kinsman, Reynold Boulers, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, named him as his steward. Two more significant grants followed: in the spring of 1459 he was granted an annuity of 50 marks assigned on the duchy of Lancaster honour of Bolingbroke; and in the following August he received a licence, along with his master, Wiltshire, to export wool free of customs in compensation for £1,500 they had lent to the King for the expenses of the Household. DL37/25/7; 27/14; 28/29; Rowney, 437; Rot. Gasc. et Franc. ii. 345. This latter grant was a supplement to William’s other trading activities, for the records of Grimsby borough court show that he was trading in fish during the late 1450s. E. Gillett, Grimsby, 34-35. The flight of the Yorkists from Ludford in the following October opened up the possibility of even greater gains. On 5 Nov. 1459 the Lincolnshire electors returned William to represent them in the Coventry Parliament that was to attaint the Yorkist lords. He benefited accordingly. On 13 Dec., while Parliament was still in session, he was granted the wardship and marriage of John, son and heir of Peter St. Andrew of Gotham in Nottinghamshire, and soon after he gained directly from the confiscations that followed the attainders. In January 1460, ‘for his good service and labours with the King in the repression of the rebellion’, he was given for life a Yorkshire fishery forfeited by the duke of York himself, and in the following month the stewardship of the Lincolnshire lands of Sir Henry Retford of Castlethorpe, son of the Speaker of 1402, at a fee of £10 p.a. CFR, xix. 250; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 541-2, 591.

In the late 1450s, while no longer a young man, Grimsby added to the fruits of royal patronage the blessings of a profitable marriage, taking as his wife Anne Moton, who was many years his junior. She was a coheiress, although not one of a straightforward kind. On her father’s death in 1445 she, with her sister Elizabeth, stood as coheiresses-apparent to their grandfather, Sir Robert Moton. Sir Robert had, however, resolved to disregard both their natural rights and an entail in their favour in the interests of perpetuating his lineage in the male line through their uncle of the half-blood, William. With respect of the principal Moton manor, that of Peckleton in Leicestershire, he was successful, and of the ancient Moton lands only the small Oxfordshire manor of ‘Clare’ in Pyrton passed out of the male line. C1/22/114; Leics. Arch. Soc. xvii. 132; Nichols, iv (2), 869; VCH Oxon. viii. 151. Nevertheless, on his death in about 1457 Anne did divide with her sister the Moton share of the former Basset of Sapcote inheritance, which consisted of parts of manors in Castle Bytham, Little Bytham, Counthorpe and Careby in the south-west corner of Lincolnshire, and in Sapcote and Stoney Stanton in Leicestershire. This was not a particularly valuable estate – her sister’s moiety of it was valued at £20 p.a. in 1503 – but, in the context of the meagre Grimsby family patrimony, it was a very significant windfall. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 888, 966. One can only speculate on what enabled William who, in spite of his court connexions was of relatively lowly status outside the Court, to find such a desirable bride. The answer may lie in the earl of Wiltshire’s lands in the Motons’ native county of Leicestershire, or else, more probably, in the marriage of Anne’s mother, Margaret (d.1474), to an esquire of the Household, Thomas Everingham* of Newhall (Leicestershire). It is more than probable that William and Thomas were friends: in addition to their household service they had sat together in the Parliament of February 1449, and in October 1455 they acted together as feoffees for lands in Leicestershire. Wyggeston Hosp. Recs. ed. Thompson, no. 1036. What then more natural than that Everingham should have sponsored his stepdaughter’s mild disparagement to a rising courtier?

Not long after this marriage, however, the rising courtier was transformed into a penniless exile. So great were his gains from Lancastrian patronage that Grimsby had a strong incentive to remain loyal to the cause of Henry VI, at least until that cause was proved demonstrably hopeless. Hence he took up arms for the house of Lancaster at the battles of Wakefield and Towton, and he paid the penalty by being attainted in the first Parliament of the new reign. He was unable or unwilling to adapt to the changed political circumstances as he had been able to do in 1455. Indeed, the intimate place he had held in the service of the deposed King put a particular value on his head: on 6 Mar. 1461, as one of the leading Lancastrians, he was exempted from the proclaimed general pardon, and a £100 reward was promised to anyone who should put him to death. In the following month his arrest and the seizure of his goods was ordered. PROME, xiii. 42-44, 46-48; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 55-56; CPR, 1461-7, p. 28. In May 1462 his paternal estate in Grimsby and neighbouring vills, valued at only £6 p.a. in an inquisition of 1465, was granted in survivorship to two yeomen of Edward IV’s household, John Feriby† and John Sydburgh. E153/1156/2; CPR, 1461-7, p. 224. His wife’s lands were, however, spared. Although they had been forfeited on her husband’s attainder, in August 1464 they were re-granted to her. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 336-7; PROME, xiii. 317-18. No doubt his wife’s security provided a comfort to William in his exile.

It is not known what part, if any, Grimsby played in the Lancastrian campaigns in the north between Towton and final defeat at Hexham in May 1464, but he was one of Queen Margaret’s advisers when she made the treaty of alliance with Louis XI at Tours on 28 June 1462. C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 252. He spent most of the 1460s in her impoverished court at her father’s castle of Koeur near St. Mihiel-en-Bar, although, strangely, he seems to have returned to England before the Readeption. On 24 Mar. 1469 he was granted a general pardon by Edward IV. CPR, 1467-77, p. 152. Was he sent back as a spy or had he abandoned his Lancastrian allegiance? If the latter, his rapprochement with the Yorkists did not last long for he quickly found favour with the Readeption government. He was appointed to an ad hoc commission in October 1470, and on 27 Nov. was granted the joint keeping of the manor of Holywell and the lordship of Stretton for a period of seven years. It is a measure of the confusion then prevailing in central government that the same keeping was granted to another less than a week later. CFR, xx. 283. This disappointment did not deter him from fighting for Queen Margaret at the battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471 and he may only narrowly have survived the conflict. The chronicle generally attributed to John Warkworth mistakenly named him as one of those executed in its aftermath. J. Warkworth, Chron. Reign Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. x), 18.

Thereafter, like other former exiles, Grimsby lost no time in re-establishing himself under the restored Edward IV. Realism dictated to him that the Lancastrian cause was lost, and the restored King was aware that men of ability, whatever their antecedents, were not to be spurned. Hence, on 4 Dec. 1471, Grimsby successfully sued out his second pardon, and he was sufficiently rehabilitated to secure election for his native borough to the Parliament of the following October. C67/48, m. 32; C219/17/2. This provided him with the ideal opportunity to petition for the reversal of his attainder, a reversal the surviving grantee of 1462, John Sydburgh, had already attempted to forestall by suing out, in July 1472, an exemplification of the grant to him of William’s estates, on the grounds that the original letters had been lost. It did John no good. In the first session of Parliament, Grimsby successfully asked that these letters be declared void and that he be restored to his lands. His petition was expressed in terms of contrition: ‘youre seid Besecher is as sorofull and repentaunt as eny Creature may be, of all that he hath doon to the displeasure of youre Highnes’. CPR, 1467-77, p. 359; PROME, xiv. 41-43. The acceptance of its sentiments enabled Grimsby, in the later part of his career, to demonstrate that a contrite servant could serve one master as well as another.

This last part of an eventful career was spent in the service of William, Lord Hastings. By May 1475, as Hastings prepared to embark on the expedition to France, our MP was well enough established in that lord’s service to be nominated as one of his feoffees. Soon after he acted as one of Hastings’s clerks in the Exchequer in his lord’s capacity as one of chamberlains of Receipt there, and it may be that his knowledge of that great department first recommended him to his new lord. E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 95; E405/66, rot. 3. This close association with one so intimate with the King meant that he became once more the recipient of royal patronage. In November 1477 he was appointed controller of the London customs, and in the following May joint supervisor of all the King’s officers in that port. In this latter capacity he was paid 20 marks for surveying a galley to the royal profit. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 38, 101; E404/76/4/134; E405/80, rot. 50d. More importantly, by July 1478 he was acting as his lord’s deputy chamberlain in the Exchequer, an office he held for at least the last five years of his life and in which his son Henry, albeit briefly, succeeded him. The Hastings connexion also explains Grimsby’s appointment to the Leicestershire bench in March 1475. Significantly his name appears second on the list of the attestors to that county’s election on 1 Jan. 1478 when two of his lord’s retinue, Sir William Trussell† and William Moton†, were returned to the Parliament that attainted the duke of Clarence. Another aspect of his service to this lord was the deposition he made in the church of Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Leicestershire, on 11 Aug. 1478 to secure a papal dispensation for the lord’s heir to marry the Hungerford heiress. C219/17/3; CPL, xiii (2), 690. He remained in Hastings’s service until his death, which occurred shortly before 8 Feb. 1483 when writs of diem clausit extremum were issued for his Lincolnshire lands. These writs were probably delivered into the hand of his son Henry, who was then sitting as MP for Grimsby in the Parliament that had convened on the previous 20 Jan. CFR, xxi. 667, 719; Bull. IHR, xlii. 218. Given the fate that was soon to befall his master, his death was perhaps a timely one.

Late in his life Grimsby had married for a second time and entered into an arrangement that potentially compromised the interests of Henry as son and heir. By a fine levied in Hilary term 1479 his late wife’s inheritance was settled on one William Brette for a term of two years with remainder to our MP and his second wife, Margaret, to hold for their lives as Henry’s tenants. CP25(1)/294/77/125. Henry thus conceded to his stepmother a life estate in lands that should have come to him immediately on his father’s death. Brette’s interest implies that the bride was his kinswoman, and, if he was the London draper of that name, then the marriage came about through connexions made by our MP as customs’ collector in London. It is not known when Margaret died, but her survivial may help to explain Henry’s obscurity. However this may be, his career was a poor shadow of his father’s successful one. On his death in 1505 his sister, Anne, wife of Richard Vincent of Messingham (Lincolnshire), was his heir, but she was left with little to inherit, for Henry sold a significant part of the family lands to Robert Brudenell, a future c.j.c.p. PCC 34 Holgrave (PROB11/14, f. 265); C1/290/35.