HAMPDEN, Edmund (d.1471), of Dunton, Bucks. and Beckley, Oxon.

Edmund Hampden was a committed supporter of Henry VI who endured exile and death for the Lancastrian cause. He was a younger son of a well connected esquire who served in local government both before and after 1399 and was a friend of the influential Thomas Chaucer*. Twice a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire, the elder Edmund Hampden died a respected member of the gentry of the Thames valley, in spite of appearing to have had lollard sympathies. M. Jurkowski, ‘Lollard Bk. Producers’, in Text and Controversy ed. Barr and Hutchinson, 207-8. His eldest son and heir John sat for Buckinghamshire in at least four Parliaments and received summonses to great councils in 1434 and 1455, but John’s career was eclipsed by that of his younger brother. Like their half-brother, Thomas Stonor I*, John and the younger Edmund were brought up in a political and social circle dominated by Thomas Chaucer, and following Stonor’s death in 1431 they and other Chaucer associates would be entrusted with the upbringing of one of his daughters. CAD, i. C1229. Marriages for the Hampden brothers were contracted within the same circle, for their wives, both daughters of the Cornish esquire John Whalesborough, were nieces of the half-blood of Chaucer’s wife Maud. After Chaucer’s death in late 1434, the two brothers found new patrons in his daughter and heir Alice and her third husband, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. Edmund served the de la Poles as a retainer and feoffee, CCR, 1436-41, p. 166; 1441-7, p. 443; 1447-54, pp. 212, 214; CAD, iii. D547; CPR, 1452-61, p. 199; CP40/788, rot. 337. and on at least one occasion he was described as ‘late of Ewelme’, the Oxfordshire manor Alice had inherited from her father. CP40/769, rot. 112d. Presumably it was through his association with the de la Poles that Hampden stood surety in the late 1440s for the lawless William Tailboys*, for whom William de la Pole was a patron at court: CPR, 1446-52, pp. 201-2.

It would appear that Hampden had come of age by September 1425, Nothing is known about his earliest years. It is unlikely that he was the ‘Hampden’ attending Winchester College in the same year: Winchester Coll. muns. typescript list of commoners, comp. Leach, 21. when the Crown fined him, his elder brother and others for purchasing the manor and advowson of Dunton without licence. The purchase was for his benefit, since as a younger son he had not succeeded to lands of any significance. CPR, 1422-9, p. 315. He is said to have inherited property at Ashenden, Bucks.: VCH Bucks. iv. 6. In late August 1429 he took part in the election of his elder brother and Andrew Sperlyng* as knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire to the Parliament of that year. Although he and no fewer than 125 other attestors were present, The (different) totals given in The Commons 1386-1421, i. 277; iv. 422 are both incorrect. the sheriff Sir Thomas Waweton* chose to send into Chancery an indenture naming Sir John Cheyne I* and Walter Strickland I* as the men elected. A subsequent inquiry established that Waweton had made a false return, although it did not do so until after the dissolution of the Parliament. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 553; iv. 422; CPR, 1429-36, p. 39; E159/206, brevia Trin. rot. 4. Hampden had yet to marry Anne Whalesborough when the controversial election took place. Her first husband Sir William Moleyns had died at the siege of Orleans in May 1429, but she was still unattached in the following November when the Crown directed the escheators in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire to assign her dower from the Moleyns estates. CCR, 1429-35, p. 5. It is not known what Anne held by way of dower or jointure in these estates, spread across several southern English counties. Hampden may have held a significant amount of property in her right, although his landed income was assessed at just £20 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1436. CIPM, xxii. 451-5, 816; xxiii. 389-2; xxv. 257-60, 384-6; E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iv)d. Presumably it was through Anne that he became a j.p. in Berkshire, where he possessed no lands of his own. ` At first sight, a final concord of early 1459, whereby Robert Dingley* relinquished his reversionary interest in the manor of Stanford, Berks. to a group of men headed by Hampden, and to Hampden’s heirs, might suggest that the MP attempted to acquire property in that county; yet Stanford descended in the Dingley family later in the cent.: CP25(1)/13/86/22; VCH Berks. iv. 111. For his part, he awarded her an interest in his manor and advowson at Dunton. CPR, 1441-6, p. 138.

If not already a member of the royal Household at his marriage, Hampden had joined the royal establishment by the later 1430s, for it was as a ‘King’s esquire’ that he became surveyor, controller of works and keeper of the royal manor and park at Woodstock in July 1437. CPR, 1436-41, p. 70. This appointment followed the death of Henry IV’s widow Queen Joan, who had held Woodstock as part of her dower. Hampden’s connexions with the Chaucers are likely to have assisted him in bidding for it, since Thomas Chaucer had served Joan as keeper of the manor for over 20 years before his own death. His grant was soon discovered to run counter to the interests of John Golafre, another royal esquire and associate of the Chaucers, who had served as verderer of Woodstock since 1398. To safeguard those interests, the Crown issued a new grant in February 1438, through which the Woodstock offices and the position of parker of Beckley, held by Golafre since January the previous year, were reassigned to the two men in survivorship. For many years, Hampden did not exercise his responsibilities at Woodstock directly under the Crown, since after Queen Joan’s death the manor was in turn committed to the keeping of the King’s uncle Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and William de la Pole. The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 199, 201; VCH Oxon. xii. 432. A few months after receiving his initial grant of the Woodstock offices, Hampden obtained a grant of the Norfolk manor of East Beckham, a property seized by the Crown after it had become the subject of a bitter dispute between William Paston, j.c.p., and his fellow lawyer Edmund Wynter I*. The grant, dated 11 Nov. 1437, was for life but Hampden, probably acting in collusion with Wynter, surrendered it back to the King in February 1440. To compensate him for his loss Henry VI assigned him an annuity, again for life, of £20 drawn upon the issues of the royal lordship of Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 99, 386; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 91-93, 97. In March 1439 the Crown further rewarded Hampden, by then a marshal of the hall, by making him joint constable of Harlech. At the beginning of his reign, Henry V had appointed John Salghall sole constable of that Welsh castle, E101/69/3/347, 350. but now Salghall and Hampden were to hold the position together for their lives in survivorship, sharing a fee of 40 marks p.a. CPR, 1436-41, p. 245.

For Hampden at least, there is little doubt that the office at Harlech, which he was permitted to exercise by means of a deputy, was a sinecure; but he took on very real responsibilities when he was appointed escheator in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire a few months later. The appointment coincided with his election to the Parliament of 1439 as one of the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire, and his role in local government expanded still further when he became a j.p. of that county shortly after the assembly opened. Presumably he took an interest in the Parliament’s concerns about the financing of the King’s Household, an issue it attempted to resolve by setting aside the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall and part of the duchy of Lancaster for that purpose for the next five years. Ironically, this expedient created difficulties for him since it rendered invalid his annuity of £20 from Princes Risborough, a lordship belonging to the duchy of Cornwall. In May 1440, therefore, the annuity was again reassigned, this time to the revenues of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. By then it had fallen some eight months into arrears, making it necessary for him to secure a writ addressed to the sheriff of those counties for its payment. PROME, xi. 255-6; CPR, 1436-41, p. 405; CCR, 1435-41, p. 316.

At the end of 1440 Hampden and Henry Belknap entered a bond for £40 to Sir James Butler, the future earl of Wiltshire. SP46/183/28. Family ties are likely to explain Hampden’s association with Belknap, probably the youngest son of the late Hamon Belknap, Hampden’s maternal uncle and a member of the Chaucer circle. CIPM, xxiii. 233-5; SC8/23/1136, 1206; Stonor Letters, i (Cam. Soc. ser. 3, xxix), 124-5; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 289, 399, 430. In all likelihood, the bond related to an undertaking which Belknap had made to serve in France, since he was among those who mustered with Butler at Portsdown on 26 Mar. 1441, prior to crossing the Channel. No doubt Hampden’s role in the bond was simply that of a surety, given that he was not a member of Butler’s retinue. E101/53/33. There is no evidence that Hampden himself ever served in France in a military capacity, although later in the same decade he was considered sufficiently well versed in matters of chivalry to attend one of the parties in a trial by battle at Smithfield: PPC, vi. 55-56. In any case, he had plenty to occupy him at home in the early 1440s, for he was pricked as sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the autumn of 1441. Three years later Hampden did cross the Channel, as part of the large retinue that William de Pole, by then marquess of Suffolk, brought to France to escort the King’s bride, Margaret of Anjou, back to England. Hampden received daily wages of 18d. as a member of the expedition, and he was appointed one of Margaret’s ushers of the chamber. During the journey back to England, he was sent ahead of the main party, to bring Henry VI ‘good and joyful rumours’ about his consort. Add. 23938, f. 5. The King rewarded him with fresh letters patent relating to Beckley, where Suffolk held the position of steward and where he himself had exercised the role of parker alone since John Golafre’s death in February 1442. Issued on 6 Apr. 1445, three days before the new queen landed at Southampton, the letters granted to both him and his heirs the office of parker, with the right to take all deadwood and any trees or timber blown to the ground by the wind and to enjoy the use of a messuage within the park. Known as ‘le looge’, this messuage was perhaps his residence at Beckley, where he appears to have lived in the late 1440s and early 1450s. CPR, 1441-6, p. 328; C67/40, m. 12. Hampden’s association with the queen, whom he would also serve as carver, brought another grant his way in April 1446. In that month the King ordered that he and his wife should receive four pipes of Gascon wine annually from the royal cellars in London for their ‘good service’ to Margaret. CPR, 1441-6, p. 415; E159/223, brevia Mich. rot. 30. Both Hampden and his wife were among those who received gifts of jewels from Margaret in the second half of the 1440s, but the relevant accounts of the keeper of the queen’s jewels do not indicate whether Anne (referred to as ‘Lady Anne Moleyns’) held any particular office in her household: E101/409/14, 17; 410/2.

A further reward came to Hampden in the following month, when he and John Wenlock* received a grant in survivorship of the offices and Crown lands which Giles Thorndon then held in Ireland, contingent upon Thorndon’s death or retirement. Potentially the grant was very significant, for Thorndon was then treasurer of the lordship and constable of Dublin and Wicklow castles, but it was opposed by the King’s lieutenant in Ireland, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, as well as Thorndon himself. Talbot objected to it on the grounds that it was his right as lieutenant to appoint or dismiss officers of the Crown in the lordship, and in the following July Thorndon was confirmed in all his offices there. CPR, 1441-6, pp. 424, 457. For Hampden the loss of prospective sinecures in Ireland was cushioned by the grants he received in 1447. In February that year the King ordered that he should have £100 from the customs of Kingston-upon-Hull, Boston and Bristol in reward for his good service, but this generous gesture was somewhat diminished by the difficulty he encountered subsequently in trying to secure payment of his sum at the Exchequer. E404/63/25; E403/767, m. 4; 769, m. 4; 773, m. 16. In the following August he and Richard Bedford*, an auditor of the Exchequer, were granted the farm of the manor of Godington in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire (amounting to 15 marks p.a.) in survivorship, in lieu of a grant made to Bedford in 1439. CPR, 1436-41, p. 305; 1446-52, pp. 84-85. In October, he and Thomas Burneby, a fellow esquire of the Household, were assigned the shrievalty of Merioneth, likewise in place of an earlier grant to Burneby alone. The Merioneth grant was also in survivorship, although Hampden would surrender his interest in the shrievalty to another royal servant, Thomas Parker, a few years later. Finally, in November 1447, the King requested the Cistercian abbey of Dieulacres in Staffordshire to award Hampden a corrody at their religious house. CCR, 1447-54, p. 27.

Later that decade, Hampden was returned to two successive Parliaments, although this time as a knight of the shire for Oxfordshire. The sheriff who presided over both of that county’s elections in 1449 was John Penycoke*, a Household man who probably worked for the return of members of the Court interest. In the Parliament of February 1449 Hampden sat alongside John Pury*, another member of the Household; in that which opened in the following November his fellow MP was his nephew Thomas Stonor II*, the son-in-law of the King’s chief minister William de la Pole, by then duke of Suffolk. During the course of 1449 Hampden was knighted. Still an esquire when returned to the Parliament of 1449, he was a knight when re-elected to that of 1449-50. While the first was in session, he took the opportunity to acquire – jointly with John Weston – a lease of the manor of Woodperry, Oxfordshire, from the coheirs of Elizabeth Wilcotes. The lessors included William Catesby* and Thomas Palmer*, both husbands of two of those coheirs and, like Hampden, both MPs in the same Parliament. E40/5397; VCH Oxon. v. 286. Hampden must have had an uncomfortable time in the following Parliament of 1449-50, since it impeached his patron, the duke of Suffolk. Yet he succeeded in obtaining an exemption from the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament, so allowing him to retain his annuity of £20 from the issues of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire and his office at Beckley. As a Household man who had benefited richly from the King’s misguided largesse, he was also a target for the Court’s opponents. In the late summer of 1450, he was among the courtiers whom a Kent jury indicted for their alleged misdeeds, and when the next Parliament opened later that year the Commons named him as one of those whom the King should banish from his presence. C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 365; PROME, xii. 129, 142-3, 184-6. While the Parliament of 1450-1 was still sitting, Hampden appears temporarily to have fallen out with the widowed duchess of Suffolk, Alice Chaucer, over a dowry of 750 marks which Henry VI had awarded to the wife of the usher of the chamber Robert Whittingham II*. The King had prevailed upon the duchess to act as his pledge for the payment of the dowry and, in turn, she had persuaded Hampden and John Wenlock, now also a knight, to stand as sureties on her behalf. After his wife had not received any of the dowry within the time allotted for its payment, Whittingham had gone to law against Hampden and Wenlock, who had reacted by daily ‘labouring’ and ‘vexing’ the duchess for relief from their difficulties. To resolve the mess he had created, the King issued a writ in January 1451 ordering the Exchequer to content the Whittinghams of the 750 marks, either by direct payment or by assignment. E404/68/73. The differences between Hampden and Alice cannot have lasted for long, since later that year he and others of her councillors supported her in her quarrel with Drew Barantyn* and his own recent associate John Wenlock over the Oxfordshire manor of Nuneham Courtney. KB27/772, rex rot. 7.

The following Parliament met in very different circumstances, for by then the Court had recovered from the political crises of the late 1440s and early 1450s. Again elected as a knight of the shire for Oxfordshire, Hampden was just one of many Household men returned to the Commons in 1453. Apart from his duties as a MP, personal matters must have taken up a considerable amount of his time during the Parliament, since two suits brought against him in the court of common pleas came to pleadings in Easter term 1453. Both concerned debts, so he might have found comfort in the developing principle that Members of the Commons should enjoy freedom from arrest or imprisonment in the case of debt and certain other actions. The plaintiff in the first of these suits was John Bertram, the surviving executor of Henry IV’s half-brother, Thomas, duke of Exeter, who had died in 1426. Bertram sued Hampden over a debt of £1,000, pleading that in July 1438 the MP had entered a bond for that amount to him and his late co-executors, Sir William Phelip†, Thomas Walbere clerk, Richard Aghton and William Morley, as a security that he would pay them that sum at the following Christmas. According to Bertram, Hampden had failed to content them of this sum but, through his attorney, Hampden pleaded he should not have to pay it since Walbere had formally released him from all personal actions at law in February 1447. Following these pleadings, it transpired that Henry Filongley*, keeper of the writs in the common pleas, had custody of the release. He delivered it into court in late November 1453 and Bertram lost his case. Unfortunately, it is not known how Hampden had come to have dealings with the executors in the first place since the plea roll does not record the circumstances in which the bond was made. CP40/769, rot. 112d. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 213, confuses the plaintiff with his far more prominent namesake Sir John Bertram* (d.1450), who was certainly not one of Exeter’s executors. The second suit was brought by Sir Andrew Ogard* and Robert Whittingham II and related to a debt of 750 marks for which he had given them bonds five years earlier. Appearing in person in response to their plea, Hampden obtained licence to imparl and it would appear that the dispute was settled out of court. Again, the circumstances in which the debt arose are not recorded, but the sum involved suggests that it might have related to the dowry the King had awarded Whittingham’s wife. CP40/769, rot. 313. The propitious circumstances for the Court in which the Parliament of 1453 had opened proved short-lived, owing to the King’s mental collapse in the summer. By April 1455, when Hampden, his elder brother and other knights and esquires sympathetic to the Lancastrian government received summonses to a great council, the kingdom was in a state of heightened political tension. The council, which was to have opened in the following month, never met, for its summoning prompted Richard, duke of York, and his allies to take to arms and confront a hastily raised royal army at St. Albans. It is not known whether Hampden was with the King at the battle fought there on 21 May, although he took the precaution of securing a general pardon a few months after this Yorkist victory. PPC, vi. 340; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 160-1; C67/41, m. 4 (2 Nov. 1455). HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 413, asserts that Hampden sat for Oxon. in the Parl. of 1455, a most unlikely scenario given that this assembly was summoned by York in the wake of St. Albans.

Much of the evidence relating to Hampden in the later 1450s is concerned with private matters, for in this period he stood as a feoffee or witness on behalf of other landowners in Oxfordshire and elsewhere (among them another of the queen’s servants, Humphrey Whitgreve*), and as an executor of his elder brother, who died in February 1458. CCR, 1454-61, p. 133; CAD, iii. C3407; C1/26/427; CPR, 1452-61, p. 326; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Misc. 148; Northants. RO, Fitzwilliam (Milton) Chs. 675-6; Boarstall Cart. (Oxf. Historical Soc. lxxxviii), 224, 229; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Ferrers mss, DR3/542. In the following November he acquired from the Crown the wardship of Katherine, daughter and heir of Robert Boys of Norfolk, and before the end of the same year the Papal Curia issued him and his wife with an indult allowing them to keep a portable altar. CFR, xviii. 227; CPL, xi. 519. At the same time, however, he remained fully involved in public affairs. In spite of having obtained an exemption from office in early 1457, he continued to serve as a j.p. and ad hoc commissioner and, more significantly, he was appointed chamberlain of the household of the infant prince of Wales. The date of his appointment is not known, although he certainly held the office when he received a royal pardon in June 1458. C67/42, m. 17. As chamberlain, he was even more than hitherto closely associated with the queen, whose men dominated her son’s inner circle, and it was probably through her that he came into contact with Sir Thomas Courtenay, the eldest son and heir of the earl of Devon. In the autumn of 1455 Sir Thomas had taken the leading part in the brutal murder of Nicholas Radford*, a crime the earl was strongly suspected to have incited. The Courtenays escaped conviction for the murder, although in Michaelmas term 1457 they were obliged to provide Radford’s relative, John Radford*, with securities in the court of King’s bench, where Hampden appeared as one of Sir Thomas’s sureties. By now Sir Thomas, who succeeded to the earldom of Devon in February 1458, was married to the queen’s cousin Marie, daughter of Charles, count of Maine, an alliance that turned him into an unflinching supporter of the queen. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 783; KB27/786, rots. 118(i), 118(i)d, 118(ii), 118(ii)d, 119, 121, 121d, fines rot. 1d; Oxf. DNB, ‘Courtenay, Thomas, 13th earl of Devon’.

Like Courtenay, Hampden firmly identified with the Lancastrian cause in the latter years of Henry VI’s reign. His final Parliament was the partisan assembly of 1459 and he was placed on several anti-Yorkist commissions in the first half of the following year. During the Parliament an Act of Attainder was passed against the duke of York and his most prominent allies, and the Commons presented a petition to Henry VI naming 25 persons whom they condemned as ‘Robbers, Ravishers, Extortioners and Oppressours of youre Liege people’. The petition demanded the arrest of these individuals, among them Sir Robert Harcourt*, formerly a follower of the queen but now associated with York’s ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. PROME, xii. 500-2. Harcourt escaped immediate arrest, but on 4 June 1460 the government appointed commissioners for Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire to apprehend York’s supporters in those counties. A member of this commission, Hampden was one of a band of prominent royalists who entered Harcourt’s manor at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire a week later. They apprehended Sir Robert and placed him in custody, KB27/798, rot. 63; CP40/808, rots. 188, 342, 355. although Harcourt was to regain his liberty after the Yorkist victory at Northampton on 10 July. The battle of Northampton occurred while Hampden was in London, helping to defend the Tower against the Yorkist earl of Salisbury. Led by Thomas, Lord Scales, and Robert, Lord Hungerford and Moleyns, the husband of Hampden’s stepdaughter Eleanor Moleyns, the Lancastrian garrison opened fire with its cannon, killing some local residents and damaging property. Such an action proved a mistake, since it persuaded the city’s authorities to co-operate with Salisbury in a full-scale siege. Having begun to negotiate their surrender, the defenders of the Tower staged a mass breakout on the night of 19 July. Scales and others were caught and killed but Hungerford and Hampden were among those who got away. Griffiths, 863, 877. Following Northampton and the installation of a new government controlled by the Yorkists, Sir Robert Harcourt took the opportunity to begin a suit for trespass in King’s bench against Hampden and the others who had held him captive earlier in the year, among them Sir John Chalers* of Berkshire, Thomas Tresham*, John Pury, Everard Digby* and Edward Langford*. KB27/798, rot. 63. After Edw. IV’s accession Harcourt took further legal action, this time in the common pleas, against Langford and three other men: CP40/808, rots. 188, 342, 355.

After making good his escape from the besieged Tower of London, Hampden joined the queen and the prince of Wales, who after Northampton had fled first to Wales and then to Scotland. At the beginning of 1461 he marched south with an army she had raised in Scotland and northern England, and on 17 Feb. he fought at the second battle of St. Albans. Following this Lancastrian victory, she dispatched him, (Sir) Robert Whittingham II, (Sir) John Heron* and others to London to ascertain the loyalties of its citizens. While the queen’s envoys were in the City, the mayor issued a proclamation forbidding anyone to insult them: many Londoners can have had little liking for Hampden in particular, given the casualties he and his fellow defenders of the Tower had inflicted the previous summer. In the event, the queen was denied entry into the City, where on 4 Mar. 1461 York’s eldest son and heir took the throne as Edward IV. On the following 29 Mar. Hampden was in the Lancastrian army decisively defeated at Towton, after which he joined Henry VI, Queen Margaret and the prince of Wales in exile in Scotland. Later in the year, he accompanied the queen on a brief foray across the border, during which she and her troops besieged Carlisle and burnt its suburbs. C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 145, 147, 165; A. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 57; PROME, xiii. 42-44, 48-53; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 253.

Following the accession of Edward IV, the authorities seized Hampden’s estates, including those holdings in which he had awarded his wife a jointure interest and even the lands she held in jointure from her first marriage. Apart from Dunton, Hampden had held in his own right manors at Chearsley and Wingrave in Buckinghamshire, a fourth part of a manor at Weston Turville in the same county and a manor in Kirtlington, Oxfordshire, when Henry VI lost the throne, but it is not known when any of these properties had come into his hands. CIMisc. viii. 286-7. Until 1457 he had also possessed an interest (although possibly only as a feoffee) in a manor at Stanton Harcourt, by virtue of an eight-year lease granted by the heirs of William Wilcotes† in the spring of 1449. CAD, iii. A5397; VCH Oxon. v. 286. Left utterly bereft by the confiscation of her jointure lands, Anne Hampden was obliged to petition the new King for help. Edward IV responded on 27 June 1461 by ordering the Exchequer to allow her 20 marks from the seized lands for her sustenance until 11 Nov. the same year. If Anne was hoping for instant relief she did not get it, for she did not receive any of this sum until the following 26 Nov. E404/72/1/25; E403/824, m. 3. The Parliament of the new reign attainted her husband for having ‘rered were’ against the King, and for his part in the attack on Carlisle. PROME, xiii. 42-44, 48-53. At the beginning of 1462, the brothers Richard† and Thomas Croft† obtained a grant of lands and reversionary interests worth up to £50 p.a. from the MP’s confiscated estates. By then Hampden’s offices at Woodstock were already in the hands of Richard Croft, who subsequently held them jointly with Thomas. Anne Hampden suffered a further humiliation a few weeks later when the Crown placed her into the custody of the recently ennobled John Wenlock, now a leading Yorkist. On 15 Mar. Wenlock was appointed her ‘keeper and governor’ and awarded control of the lands Hampden had held in her right, for as long as they should remain in the King’s hands. On the same day Wenlock was likewise appointed custodian of her daughter Eleanor whose husband Lord Hungerford and Moleyns, as obdurate a rebel as Hampden, would be executed after the battle of Hexham in 1464. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 44, 84, 108, 181, 184, 343-4; Goodman, 64.

In the meantime, the exiled Hampden was busy in the service of Queen Margaret. In early March 1462, he visited Bordeaux, where he was entertained by Louis XI of France. The exact purpose of his mission is unclear, although it was perhaps partly intended to seek the support of the kings of Castile and Portugal, both descendants of John of Gaunt, for the Lancastrian cause. Hampden returned to the continent in the summer of 1463, as one of the small band of dedicated followers who accompanied Queen Margaret and the prince of Wales when they left Scotland for France. The court Margaret established for herself at Koeur, her father’s castle in the duchy of Bar, was far from luxurious and her entourage depended on her for their upkeep. Scofield, i. 241; Griffiths, 887-9; Oxf. DNB, ‘Margaret of Anjou’; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii. [781]. Within two years of Hampden’s departure for Koeur, the Croft brothers obtained another grant from the Yorkist Crown, this time of all the manors and lands he had held in his own right, to hold jointly for their lives in survivorship. CPR, 1461-7, p. 473. Through administrative error, the grant also included a manor at Wingrave belonging to Thomas Oxbridge, to whom it was not restored until 1469: CPR, 1467-77, p. 56; VCH Bucks. iii. 460. To safeguard this grant, issued on 22 Apr. 1465, they obtained an exemption from the general resumption enacted by the Parliament of 1467. PROME, xiii. 293-4.

Hampden remained in exile until he returned to England with Queen Margaret in April 1471. His return proved short-lived for he died fighting for Henry VI at Tewkesbury on 4 May. J. Warkworth, Chron. Reign Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. x), 18; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 233. Among those who had faced him on the battlefield was Sir Richard Croft† (the eldest of the three brothers) whom Tudor sources credit with the capture of the Lancastrian prince of Wales. Following the restoration of Edward IV, Sir Richard’s younger brothers again made sure of their possession of the Hampden lands, by securing an exemption from the Act of Resumption passed by the Parliament of 1472, a process no doubt eased by the fact that Richard Croft sat in that assembly as a knight of the shire for Oxfordshire. The Parliament of 1485 annulled Hampden’s attainder, but the adaptable Crofts were supporters of the first Tudor King and likewise obtained an exemption from the resumption passed by that assembly. Thomas Croft died in 1488 but his brother and associate survived until 1502. Oxf. DNB, ‘Croft, Sir Richard’, ‘Croft, Thomas’; PROME, xiv. 177-8; xv. 113-15, 245. Both men outlived Hampden’s widow, who died in 1487. Her will of 28 Feb. that year suggests that she remembered her first husband with more affection than the late MP, perhaps because of the hardships that his political partisanship had brought upon her after 1461. In the will, she styled herself ‘Dame Anne Moleyns’, sometime wife of William, ‘Lord Moleyns’. The will does not refer to Hampden, although Anne left bequests to her ‘cousin’ Eleanor Hampden (probably her great-niece of that name), and to John Hampden, one of her nephews by marriage. It is possible she spent much of her later years with her in-laws of Great Hampden, for she asked to be buried in that parish, should she die there, or in London if she died there. In the event, she must have died in London since she was buried in the Greyfriars’ church in the City. For the good of her soul, she set aside an annual salary of ten marks for the chaplain Robert Chambre, so that he might pray for her at Oxford. She named three executors, her daughter Eleanor, Lady Hungerford and Moleyns, the previously mentioned nephew John Hampden and Robert Chambre. Anne’s second marriage had failed to produce any children, so Hampden’s estates passed to the main line of his family after the life interests held by the Crofts had expired. William Hampden, a great-grandson of John Hampden II, died seised of the manors the MP had held at Dunton and Wingrave in 1525. PCC 1 Milles; CP, ix. 42; C142/45/59; G. Lipscomb, Bucks. ii. 233-4.