HARCOURT, Sir Robert (1410-70), of Stanton Harcourt, Oxon and Ellenhall, Staffs.

The pedigree of the distinguished family of Harcourt has been convincingly traced back to the ninth century, and shows how the English line descended from the great Norman house, whose arms it adopted. It is nevertheless doubtful that this cadet branch came over with the Conquerer, since Harcourts are not recorded in England before the reign of Henry I. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. 1914, pp. 186-210. Having settled at Bosworth in Leicestershire and at Ellenhall in Staffordshire, they acquired their estate at Stanton in Oxfordshire in the late twelfth century. Thereafter, Stanton Harcourt passed down the generations, remaining the family’s principal seat for over 500 years. The first Harcourt to be closely involved in royal administration in Oxfordshire was Sir Robert’s grandfather, Sir Thomas† (c.1330-1417), who served as a knight of the shire in the Good Parliament of 1376, VCH Oxon. xii. 274-6. and through his marriage to a daughter of John, Lord Grey of Rotherfield, linked his family to the lesser nobility. Sir Thomas’s eventual heir was his younger son and namesake, who in 1406, probably on the occasion of his marriage to one of the many daughters of the Derbyshire landowner Sir Robert Francis, received in jointure with her the Harcourt manor of Bosworth, together with other landed holdings in Leicestershire. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xvi. 56; C138/48/64. Almost immediately after his father’s death in 1417, C138/26/28. the younger Sir Thomas faced a challenge to his title to Bosworth and Ellenhall from his kinsmen the Astleys of Warwickshire, in a revival of litigation begun several years earlier, The Astleys’ claim stemmed from the marriage of Sir Thomas Astley† (d.c.1400) to Elizabeth, da. and h. of Sir Richard Harcourt of Stanton Harcourt (er. bro. of Sir Thomas). They challenged the junior line of the Harcourts, which asserted that most of the inheritance was settled in tail-male: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xvii. 61, 64, 74; Peds. Plea Rolls ed Wrottesley, 92, 101, 132. but he himself did not live much longer: he died on 6 July 1420, leaving Robert, his ten-year-old son, as his heir. C138/48/64.

The value of Robert’s inheritance is uncertain. Evidence given at inquisitions post mortem suggests that the Staffordshire and Leicestershire holdings of the Harcourts were then worth about £40 p.a., but this was almost certainly an underestimate, and to judge from the sums of money Robert later claimed to compensate for the wastage of his inheritance at Stanton Harcourt during his minority, the profits of that Oxfordshire estate must have been considerable. His mother Joan, who already occupied Bosworth as her jointure, was now assigned dower elsewhere, which she was to retain for at least 40 years more, and she and four associates secured at the Exchequer on 16 Oct. 1420 a grant of Robert’s wardship and marriage, for which they agreed to pay 200 marks. CCR, 1419-22, pp. 90-91, 93; CFR, xiv. 355. However, the treasurer had been unaware that three weeks earlier, on 24 Sept., Henry V, then at Melun in France, had already bestowed the wardship on Sir John Wilcotes, one of the knights in his company. Accordingly, in the following May Joan’s letters patent were revoked in Sir John’s favour. CCR, 1419-22, p. 148; CPR, 1416-22, p. 362. Not deterred, she determined to keep her son by her side. Having persuaded Wilcotes’s wife to let the heir stay temporarily at her home, she refused to part with him, so that in the late 1420s Wilcotes’s executors, who included Sir John Blaket† and John Barton I*, were forced to demand that the ward be brought to Chancery on pain of a £200 fine. C1/7/113; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xvii. 97, 109-10. At about the same time the executors were challenged in their possession of the Harcourt manor of Ellenhall by Thomas Astley, who claimed the manor under an entail of 1377 by which its reversion after the older Sir Thomas Harcourt’s death had been settled on Astley’s parents (the latter’s niece and her husband), and their issue; and that he had been forcibly expelled by the younger Sir Thomas Harcourt, and then by virtue of the royal grant of wardship to Wilcotes. The court’s decision was to revoke the grant to Wilcotes and restore the manor to Astley, but when the parties failed to appear in Chancery in response to a summons dated 8 June 1429 the King’s attorney appealed to a jury. Peds. Plea Rolls, 343; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 127-9. For the excessive cost of this litigation, see Bodl. D.D. Harcourt mss, c. 1/1. The eventual outcome proved to be in Robert Harcourt’s favour. A fine made in Michaelmas term 1430 between Harcourt (still a minor) and Astley, settled the manor on our MP in tail-male, with successive remainders to his three brothers and to their uncle, Richard Harcourt of Saredon; only if the male line failed would it revert to Astley and his descendants. Even so, for a number of years from 1435 Astley’s widow sued Harcourt in the common pleas for dower at Ellenhall. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xi. 230-1; xvii. 150; CP40/726, rot. 470d.

Robert made proof of age at Stafford on 4 Feb. 1432, several months after he attained his majority, and before too long was calling himself ‘baron of Ellenhall’. C139/56/52; CCR, 1429-35, p. 148; CP40/696, rot. 335d. In the following spring (1433), while preparing to travel overseas, he put his estates in Oxfordshire and Staffordshire into the hands of feoffees, including his cousin (Sir) Thomas Erdington* and the lawyer William Fynderne*, CCR, 1429-35, pp. 241-3. and it was not until he returned home that he commenced litigation regarding the mismanagement of his patrimony during his nonage. In 1436 and 1437 he sued Sir John Wilcotes’s executors for wastes at Ellenhall and Stanton Harcourt, claiming damages of 2,000 marks for the wanton neglect of buildings and the sale of timber. The case was adjourned until Michaelmas 1439, but revived in 1443, when Harcourt’s claim at Ellenhall was reduced to 300 marks damages. It would appear that he failed ever to obtain compensation. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 133, 136-7, 150, 164-5; CP40/728, rot. 471.

Curiously, none of the people in control of Harcourt’s wardship – Wilcotes, his executors and Harcourt’s mother – seem to have arranged a marriage for him, or if they did this marriage has passed unrecorded. When he did marry, in 1440, he chose a bride from Lancashire rather than from one of the gentry families closer to home. As one of several daughters of Sir John Byron, Margaret could offer him little in the way of a dowry, but she had been twice widowed and both her previous husbands had been landowners in the north-west: her first marriage gave her an interest for life in property at Middleton, and her second holdings at Atherton. VCH Lancs. iii. 436; v. 165n; Lancs. Final Concords, iii. (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. l), 109; Harcourt mss, c. 39/1. Sir Robert was called ‘of Atherton’ in his pardon of 1458: C67/42, m. 12. He later brought pleas of trespass against a number of men residing there, including John Atherton, perhaps his stepson: CPR, 1467-77, pp. 382, 498. Atherton responded with a suit against Harcourt for failing to account as receiver of money due to him: PL15/30, rot. 7d. Harcourt settled on her jointure in his two-thirds of Stanton Harcourt (the other third was still held by his mother), entailing the manor in the same way as Ellenhall had been, except that the final remainder was to his own right heirs rather than to the Astleys; and he also arranged that after his death Margaret should have a life-interest in Ellenhall. CPR, 1436-41, p. 470; C140/38/53. The couple obtained a papal indult for a portable altar in July 1441. CPL, ix. 242. Harcourt made one other major acquisition of property before he died: the Staffordshire manors of Shareshill, Great and Little Saredon and Lache, and two parts of the manors of Coven and Brusford. These, once the estates of Sir William Shareshull† (d.1400), had come through marriage and not without considerable opposition into the hands of Harcourt’s paternal uncle, Richard. B.H. Putnam, Sir William Shareshull, 8-9, 12-13, app. 1. The latter died childless in the autumn of 1453, Peds. Plea Rolls, 391. and our MP swiftly took possession before 4 Sept. (when he placed the property into the hands of feoffees), even though his uncle’s widow retained an interest for a year or so longer, and there were a number of other claimants. C140/38/53; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. 1914, pp. 196, 198-9; VCH Staffs. v.175-7 (although this account mistakenly calls Sir Robert the great-nephew of Richard Harcourt).

Harcourt’s career had begun a few months after he made proof of age, when he attested the Staffordshire elections to the Parliament of 1432. It seems likely that he had engaged in military service abroad before then, although there is no specific record of such activity before April 1433, when he took out letters of attorney in preparation for his departure. C219/14/3; DKR, xlviii. 292. At some point in the next four years he was knighted, but this knighting had not happened by the spring of 1434, when he was listed among the gentry of both Staffordshire and Oxfordshire required to take the generally-administered oath against maintenance. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 393, 399. In October 1438 Sir Robert and his brother Richard entered recognizances in 100 marks to William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, for reasons which were not stated but possibly concerned further commitments to serve overseas. CCR, 1435-41, p. 233. This marked the beginning of a long, but not necessarily continuous, association between the Harcourts and the de la Poles which was to endure until the 1480s. It may have been with Suffolk’s assistance that another of the four Harcourt brothers, John, who had entered the service of the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, obtained in 1444 a royal pardon for the killing of a Lichfield man four years earlier, a felony which was now deemed to be manslaughter. CPR, 1441-6, p. 262. That same year Sir Robert accompanied the earl to France to escort Henry VI’s betrothed queen, Margaret of Anjou, to her new home in England, he and two yeomen in his retinue being assigned wages for six months. Add. 23938, ff. 5, 13d, although they may in fact have only served for 91 days: E404/69/176. For part of this period Harcourt was supposed to be fulfilling the duties of sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, to which office he was appointed that November. Deputies were assigned to take his place, but one of them died and collection of revenues fell seriously into arrear. Sir Robert ended his term owing considerable amounts at the Exchequer. Eventually, in February 1448, he was pardoned the sum of £46 due. E159/225, brevia Mich. rot. 2. On their journey from France a personal attachment had been formed between him and the queen, who in later years singled him out for her special attention. He was among those who received New Year’s gifts from Queen Margaret in 1447 and 1448, and although such gifts generally declined in number and value as the queen’s finances became increasingly straitened, in 1453 Harcourt’s infant son was among the very few people who received one: the boy was given a special livery collar ‘de tissewe’ decorated with silver ‘SS’. E101/409/17; A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 212-13, 227. Meanwhile, Harcourt had been appointed to the Oxfordshire bench, and perhaps mindful of his links with the royal court, the shire gentry elected him as one of their representatives in the Parliament summoned to meet at Bury St. Edmunds on 10 Feb. 1447. Six days before the Parl. met he and his wife took out a royal pardon: C67/39, m. 10.

So far there had been no hint in the public records that Sir Robert shared the violent temperament of his brother John, although it may be assumed that his experience of warfare in France had trained him well in the martial arts. Hitherto he had pursued his quarrels in the courts of law. Thus, in 1440 he had sued Sampson Erdeswyk† for taking goods of his worth £10 by force; three years later he accused another man of stealing his horse; and in 1447, while an MP, he brought suits against poachers on his estates. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 155, 166, 172. Yet when it came to the Harcourts’ infamous feud with the Staffords of Grafton, whose lands at Chebsey adjoined theirs at Ellenhall, the normal legal processes were ignored by both parties. The original cause of their disension was rumoured at the time to be due to ‘a nold debate that was be twene hem for takyng of a dystres’, and to have been exacerbated by the personal animosity to the Staffords expressed by Sir Robert’s mother. There survive two different versions of the dramatic events at Coventry on 22 May 1448: a graphic account in a contemporary letter, which makes it quite clear that both parties were equally culpable, and that the fight itself was triggered by sudden loss of temper in a highly-charged atmosphere of hostility; and the subsequent indictments presented in the King’s bench, which imply that the Harcourts made a premeditated assault on their enemies. Ibid. 186, 197-8; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, i. 73-75. The affray is described by R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 57-58. According to the former account, a letter sent to John, Viscount Beaumont, just six days after the event, (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I*, his eldest son, Richard, and a number of their servants were riding through Coventry on market day when they met Sir Robert Harcourt ‘comyng from hys moder towards hys yn’ along with his attendants. Sir Humphrey had already passed by when Richard came alongside Harcourt, and the two men immediately fell to blows. Harcourt struck Richard on the head with his sword, but not fatally, for the young man was able to return a thrust with his dagger. However, as he stumbled one of Harcourt’s followers stabbed him in the back, mortally. Sir Humphrey was also struck from behind when he rode back, so that he fell from his horse, and in the brawl which followed his servants killed two of Harcourt’s men. According to the correspondent the whole incident took no longer than ‘a Pater Noster while’.

The next day the local coroner indicted Sir Robert as principal in the murder of Richard Stafford. The inopportune death of the sheriff of Warwickshire, Thomas Porter*, just five days later, meant that the j.p.s could not sit until a new sheriff was appointed, but on 16 July certain of Harcourt’s servants were indicted before them at Warwick. It was alleged that they had assembled up to 60 malefactors, arming and arraying them by the procurement of Harcourt’s mother with the intention of murdering the Staffords. Sir Robert was placed under arrest, and for a time, possibly a year or more (although this is debateable), he was detained in Chester castle in the custody of (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*. At some point he applied to Henry VI for a stay in the legal proceedings, and as a consequence the chief justice was directed by a writ of privy seal to restrain the sheriff from taking the usual measures to bring him before a court of law. This, at least, is what Sir Humphrey Stafford believed and stated in a petition to the King. Stafford’s request that the chief justice should be instructed to proceed, E28/78/80. was granted on 22 Mar. 1449, and process in the King’s bench in the following Trinity term led to Harcourt’s outlawry on 30 June. At the same time, Sir Humphrey’s son and new heir, Humphrey Stafford III*, formally appealed Sir Robert and his mother and servants for the death of his brother. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 186. When Harcourt continued to evade the law (and quite clearly he was not a prisoner in Chester all this while, whatever he may have claimed later), the Staffords tired of waiting for satisfaction by judicial means. They assembled some 200 of their Warwickshire friends and tenants in Wychwood forest on 1 May 1450 and travelled by night to Stanton Harcourt, where they attacked Sir Robert and his servants while at their devotions in the parish church, trapping them in the bell-tower where they took refuge. In the course of a siege lasting six hours they allegedly fired more than 1,000 arrows at the trapped men, fatally wounding a Harcourt retainer. They threatened to burn the church down if Sir Robert refused to come out, and did indeed set fire to the room under the tower. However, Harcourt held out and his assailants had to abandon their attempt to avenge Richard Stafford. As they withdrew they left a trail of devastation behind them by looting Sir Robert’s house and farm buildings. Ibid. 207-8; KB9/266/51; KB27/766, rex rots. 3-4d.

Significantly, the Staffords had decided to take the law into their own hands on the very day that the duke of Suffolk was expected to begin his exile from England by sentence of the Parliament of 1449-50, and in fact the duke was murdered at sea as the siege of Stanton Harcourt was taking place. Humphrey Stafford, as a Member of the Parliament (currently in its third session, at Leicester), would have been fully informed about the sentence passed on Suffolk, and it must be assumed that he took it into account when he made his plans to strike at Sir Robert. It may well be that the duke, the King’s chief minister, had furthered Harcourt’s earlier attempts to evade justice, and that with him now rendered powerless the Staffords had no need to restrain their quest for vengeance through fear that Harcourt had a protector able to direct the Crown’s resources against them. Another, more immediate, trigger to the attack may have been the royal pardon granted to one of those indicted for the murder of Richard Stafford just a few days before. Yet the Staffords misjudged the situation. Despite Suffolk’s death, Harcourt still had considerable influence at the centre of government: in marked contrast to the lack of official action after the Coventry affray, no more than three weeks after the attack at Stanton Harcourt a commission of oyer and terminer was issued to bring the perpetrators to justice. Its members consisted largely of Suffolk’s former friends. Furthermore, on 25 May, Sir Robert was accorded a full pardon for any murders, felonies, insurrections and misdeeds he might have committed, and any consequent outlawries. One of his adversaries, Sir Humphrey Stafford, was murdered by Cade’s rebels in Kent shortly afterwards, leaving his heir to pursue the feud. The latter, Humphrey Stafford, and his protagonist Harcourt, got themselves elected, by different counties, to the Parliament summoned to meet on 6 Nov., but by then the political climate had changed, and two weeks later Stafford and his asociates were able to obtain pardons for all the crimes they had committed in Oxfordshire (that is, for their attack on Stanton Harcourt). CPR, 1446-52, pp. 324, 329, 386-7, 461-2. While Parliament was still in session, on 12 Feb. 1451, Sir Robert finally gave himself up for trial for the events of 1448, and was committed to the Marshalsea. Brought before the King’s bench he claimed error in the promulgation of the outlawry against him on 30 June 1449, since he had then been a prisoner at Chester and was thus unable to appear to answer the indictments. He was admitted to bail on the sureties of his brother Richard and two of his fellow Members of the Commons, both of whom were linked to him by marriage: Walter Blount*, the MP for Derbyshire, who had married his wife’s sister, and another of Blount’s brothers-in-law, Edward Langford*, sitting for Berkshire. A valuation of his estates was ordered, but the sheriffs returned that he possessed no landed holdings whatsoever, and he was granted bail again in the Easter term, this time presenting among his mainpernors William Vernon*, Blount’s colleague in the Commons. A third group of bailsmen, supporting Harcourt in the Trinity term, included his sister’s husband William Browning I*, then representing Dorset. Eventually, in January 1452, Sir Thomas Stanley returned to the King’s bench the testimony of a jury at Chester that Harcourt had indeed been in prison on the day in question, so the judges revoked his outlawry, though stated that he should answer to the appeal arraigned against him by Humphrey Stafford. Whether he ever did so remains uncertain. Stafford himself produced his pardon when charged with felony in his turn in the King’s bench at Michaelmas following; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 207-8. and Harcourt took out another pardon on 18 Nov. C67/40, m. 4.

Notwithstanding the processes against him in King’s bench, in the intervening period since 1450 Sir Robert had been regularly placed on commissions of gaol delivery and reappointed to the benches of both Oxfordshire and Berkshire. He evidently still enjoyed some favour at Court, where, as already noted, his little son had won the affection of Margaret of Anjou, and he was quite closely associated with the treasurer of the queen’s chamber, John Norris*, for whom he had acted as a feoffee for Norris’s purchase of the manor of Fulscot. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 407, 423, 476; C140/22/45. Harcourt’s s. and h. John is generally said to have married Norris’s da. Anne (Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. 1914, p. 186), but there is a strong possibility that she has been confused with another Anne, the Anne ‘Norris’ who died in possession of some of the Harcourt property in 1505 (CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 178). That Anne was not John’s widow, but rather the wid. of Sir William Harcourt (Sir Robert’s yr. bro.), who after Sir William’s death in 1472 had married (Sir) John Stanley II* (d.1476) and then as her 3rd husband John Norris’s s. and h. (Sir) William*: HMC Hastings, i. 26-27; PCC 9 Vox. Furthermore, he may have already established useful links with another member of the royal household, Sir John Chalers*, his co-feoffee of Fulscot, since at an unknown date his kinsman John Harcourt married one of Chalers’s daughters and coheirs. C140/25/28. It is a mystery as to who was the John Harcourt who married Anne Chalers at some point bef. 1467. Sir Robert’s s. and h., John (c.1450-1484), did marry a woman called Anne, who survived until at least Nov. 1487, and had possession of Stanton Harcourt after his death (CPR, 1476-85, p. 498; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 329), but if this was Anne Chalers her heir when she died in 1494 would have been Sir Robert’s gds. Robert (b.c.1468/72), and not, as in fact was the case, her da. Margery (b.c.1476): CIPM Hen. VII, i. 995; iii. 1118. It may be speculated that the John Harcourt in question was Sir Robert’s bro. of this name. It is worthy of remark that Harcourt attended the Oxfordshire elections of 8 Mar. 1453, when one of those returned was (Sir) Edmund Hampden*, a man steadfastly devoted to Margaret of Anjou; and significant that it was only at this stage that, on the following 6 July, he obtained a warrant to the Exchequer to pay him the sum of £15 18s. 6d. still owing for his service in 1444-5 in the queen’s entourage. E404/69/176.

Yet within a few years Harcourt’s political allegiance underwent a radical change and he became estranged from the royal court. This may have come about because of a growing association with Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, by whom he had been employed since Michaelmas 1451 or earlier as steward of his estates in Oxfordshire. HMC Var. i. 47-49. He received a fee of £2 p.a. from the earl’s manor of Spelsbury: Dillon mss, II/b/10. This association may also explain his appointment as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire in November 1455, at a time when the earl wielded authority as a member of the Council and ally of the duke of York, the victor of the battle of St. Albans who then assumed the Protectorship. There is nothing to demonstrate any display of partisanship from Harcourt as the factions hardened, yet at the time of the ‘loveday’ between Lancaster and York in the spring of 1458 he saw fit to sue for yet another pardon, and in the autumn he was removed from the bench. C67/42, m. 12. Little is recorded about Sir Robert’s personal affairs in the late 1450s, save for lawsuits which he brought in 1457. First, he and two of his brothers accused men from Wolverhampton of breaking into their property in the town, and then Sir Robert revived the old family quarrel with the Astleys with a plea for trespass in the King’s bench against Thomas Astley* of Pateshull. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 224; iv. 99. That his ties with the Court, and in particular with Margaret of Anjou, were severed well before Parliament met at Coventry in November 1459 (following the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge), is evident from Harcourt’s inclusion in a list of 25 persons named in a schedule annexed to a Commons’ petition. These individuals were said to have ‘ben notariely and universally thorough oute alle this your Realme famed and noysed, knowen and reputed severally, for open Robbers, Ravishers, Extortioners and Oppressours of youre Liege people’, and the Commons demanded that proclamation be made for their appearance before the chancellor within a month on pain of forfeiture, and that they be committed to prison without bail. The petition was granted. PROME, xii. 499-502. It had claimed that those so proscribed were maintained by persons of ‘grete myght’, which in Harcourt’s case probably meant the now attainted earl of Warwick.

A mandate was sent from the King’s bench to the sheriff of Berkshire on 12 Feb. 1460 ordering Harcourt’s arrest on charges of being an accessory to felonies and murders, but it seems that he evaded capture for the time being, although not necessarily by joining the Yorkist earls in Calais. On 4 June the government appointed commissioners to apprehend York’s supporters in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire, and a week later a band of prominent royalists entered Harcourt’s manor at Stanton Harcourt seized Sir Robert and held him prisoner for the next seven weeks, thus preventing him from joining the Yorkist earls on their march to the Midlands. Their victory against the King’s forces at Northampton on 10 July ensured his release and swift return to power in the locality. In the King’s bench in the Michaelmas term following he brought a plea of trespass against those who had allegedly held him captive. They included his sometime associates Sir John Chalers, Edward Langford and Sir Edmund Hampden, who had all remained loyal to Henry VI, as had the rest of those cited, most notable among them being the former Speaker Thomas Tresham*, John Pury* and Everard Digby*. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 613-14; KB27/795, rot. 29; 798, rot. 63; CP40/808, rots. 188, 342, 355. Immediately after the Yorkists had won control of the King, Sir Robert had been reappointed to the Oxfordshire bench, and assigned temporarily to the constableship of Wallingford castle. In September he was given the task of formally delivering from the castle gaol a large number of men from Berkshire and elsewhere who along with their leader, Thomas Roger*, had apparently been incarcerated there by the now deposed treasurer, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire. At elections conducted at Newbury on 24 Sept. Harcourt was returned together with Roger, whose sympathies undoubtedly also lay with the Yorkist lords, to represent Berkshire in the Parliament summoned to meet less than a fortnight later, even though he is not known to have held any property in the county. However, his seat at Stanton Harcourt was close to the county border and he was well known to the local gentry as a former sheriff. Besides acting as a feoffee of lands in Berkshire for John Norris, he had witnessed deeds there, e.g. CCR, 1447-54, p. 510. A few days earlier his younger brother, Richard, had been elected as a shire-knight for Oxfordshire. C219/16/6. During the parliamentary session Richard was appointed sheriff of the joint bailiwick, while a third brother, William, was made escheator of Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Quite clearly, the new regime had every confidence in the support of the Harcourts; and they in turn accepted the recognition of the duke of York as Henry VI’s next heir.

During the winter of 1460-1 it seems very likely that the Harcourt brothers took up arms on the side of York, although documentary evidence of their participation in the battles in the north and at St. Albans is lacking. On 11 May 1461, after Edward of York had seized the throne, Sir Robert and two of his brothers were associated with John, Lord Berners, in a commission to arrest and imprison rebels in the counties of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and on the next day Sir Robert was authorized to take into the new King’s hands the castles of Stafford and Eccleshall (close to his Staffordshire seat) together with all moveable goods which Henry VI, Margaret of Anjou and their son had abandoned anywhere in the locality. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 29, 34. For quite how long he continued to act as constable of Wallingford castle is unclear, but by a warrant of 13 Nov. following he was rewarded with £100 from duchy of Lancaster revenues for his ‘trewe devoir’ and diligent efforts in repairing and fortifying the castle, and for the wages of soldiers guarding it for King Edward. John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and his duchess Elizabeth (the King’s sister) had been officially granted the constableship on the previous 6 Aug., in a continuation of the de la Poles’ hereditary role. DL37/30/18; CPR, 1461-7, p. 42. John Harcourt, Sir Robert’s brother, was made sheriff of Staffordshire. Biographical details about John Harcourt ‘of Ranton’ appear in Staffs. Parlty. Hist. i (Wm. Salt Arch. Soc.), 248, although it is pure speculation that he sat in the Parl. of 1461.

In these circumstances and given Sir Robert’s evident standing in favour with Edward IV, it is difficult to interpret certain transactions undertaken by him in June 1462. Together with his brother Richard, their cousin (Sir) Thomas Erdington, and their brother-in-law William Browning I, he was bound over to pay the King just over 200 marks the following Easter, and the same amount at Christmas 1463. Browning was to be released from all liability in July 1463, and Erdington in February 1466, when Sir Robert’s brother William replaced Richard as party. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 300, 478. The purpose of the bonds was not stated. Perhaps they had something to do with King Edward’s military campaigns in the north of England, for Sir Robert joined in ‘hys jorny in to Scottlong’, at the close of 1462, Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 158. and his prowess in the field found recognition not long after. At an unknown date before the spring of 1463 he was made a Knight of the Garter, taking the stall in St. George’s chapel, Windsor, which had previously been occupied by Sir Thomas Kyriel* (beheaded in February 1461). Thus preferred above other more established and prominent royal servants, he was present with the King at the chapter held at Windsor on 22 Apr. Furthermore, a year later by warrant of 10 Apr. 1464 he was to be paid £300 for his ‘grete and laudable service’ both at the siege of Alnwick castle and in guarding it in the King’s name at his own expense. Harcourt was absent from the meeting of the Garter knights held later that month, as still engaged in the defence of the northern stongholds, although he returned home soon after. Reg. Order of the Garter ed. Anstis, i. 176, 178; G.F. Beltz, Mems. Order of the Garter, p. clxiii; E404/72/4/16. But full payment of the £300 was subject to delay: assignments in part payment were allowed in June 1464 and June 1469: E403/832, m. 6; 842, m. 8. That the government depended on his ability as a military commander is also clear from his appointment in May to a commission of array ‘for resistance of the King’s enemies’, since only a very few, eminent persons were so appointed, and he shared the task in his assigned area of central southern England with the Lords Grey of Ruthin, Berners and Wenlock* alone. He was pardoned on 15 Oct. for all offences committed in breach of the statutes of liveries and any fines or revenues due to the King. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 381, 391.

Harcourt owed his appointment as steward of Oxford university in 1466 to George Neville, archbishop of York, the chancellor of the university and at that time also chancellor of England; Registrum Cancellarii Oxoniensis, i (Oxf. Historical Soc. xciii), p. xxxviii. and a continued association with the archbishop’s brother, the earl of Warwick, may have lain behind his nomination to accompany Warwick on the important embassy to France which was put in train on 6 May 1467. The early years of the reign had witnessed tortuous and complicated diplomatic negotiations with Louis XI, not helped by the growing differences of opinion between Edward IV and the earl as to the most advantageous policy to pursue. While Edward encouraged moves to establish closer links with Burgundy, Castile and Brittany in an offensive alliance against France, Warwick favoured a treaty of friendship with the French king. Whether Harcourt had been included among the envoys to moderate the earl’s fervour, or whether Warwick relied on his support in pursuance of his own policy is now impossible to say. The English ambassadors sailed from Sandwich to Honfleur on 28 May, and were welcomed by King Louis with excessively valuable gifts. During their absence Edward IV made clear his displeasure with the Nevilles. Warwick’s brother was deprived of the great seal, and on their return to England on 23 June the envoys were kept waiting at Sandwich for safeconducts for the French delegates they had brought with them, and so only reached London on 1 July, the day Parliament was adjourned because of plague. That Harcourt’s reports of the negotiations proved valuable from the King’s point of view is suggested by the reward of £60 warranted to him two weeks later, C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 412-13, 425; E404/73/3/27. and when relations between the King and Warwick finally broke down there are no signs that he fell from royal favour. Sir Robert continued to be a j.p., gained appointment to a duchy of Lancaster stewardship in 1468, and at an unknown date secured with his wife an annuity of £40 from the royal lordships of Cookham and Bray. BL Harl. MS. 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, i. 199, 229. Likewise, his brother Sir Richard demonstrably stayed loyal to the King, and there is no sign of any falling out between them: the brothers were always closely associated in business transactions, CCR, 1454-61, pp. 133, 172; 1461-8, p. 92. and as party to the affairs of their neighbours in Oxfordshire. e.g. CCR, 1461-8, p. 379; 1468-76, no. 184, 252.

Yet in the case of Sir Robert, this participation proved somewhat limited, for despite his standing as a landowner of substance with important contacts at the court of Edward IV, in the 1460s he was rarely placed in positions of trust. Isolated instances may be noted: in 1463 he was a feoffee of a tenement in Deddington for its conveyance to St. George’s chapel, Windsor, where the Knights of the Garter met, and in 1464 he acted likewise regarding property in Essex, for William Fowler. St. George’s chapel, Windsor, recs. XV.32.39; CCR, 1461-8, p. 366. Fowler was a retainer of the earl of Warwick: C76/149, m. 20. His reputation can have hardly been enhanced by continued reports of criminal behaviour on the part of his followers. Two of his servants were to be arrested in the spring of 1462 and brought to King’s bench to answer for felonies, Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 123. and tenants on the manor of Carswell, Berkshire, petitioned the chancellor to complain that at his command some 60 men, armed with all manner of ‘terible wepons both invasive and defensive’, had assaulted them, stolen 200 of their sheep and left their property devastated ‘as it were in land of werre’. C1/27/421. The latter incident may have been connected with another petition of the early 1460s, presented by John Nowers (formerly Sir Robert’s bailsman) and Clemence his wife, for they too held property at Carswell. However, the Nowers’s petition specically concerned the advowson of the church at Tackley, which Harcourt had allegedly appropriated. Harcourt confirmed that Nowers had always received the issues of the local manor, but said that ‘for diverse grete labours and besynessez’ which he had done for him and his wife, and in return for his favour, they had promised ‘of their owne free wille’ that he should have the next presentation to the living. It may be that the quarrel was exacerbated by conflict arising from the marriage of Harcourt’s niece to Clemence’s son, William Bessels, which Nowers and his wife alleged to have been contracted against their wishes, in a deal negotiated between Sir Richard Harcourt and William Warbleton*. C1/28/212-15.

Harcourt met his death on 14 Nov. 1470, just a few weeks after Edward IV had fled the country and Warwick had engineered the Readeption of Henry VI. It was reported by an un-named ‘lordes sone’ that Sir Robert believed he had the good will ‘of the lordes after ther comyng in’, that is, of Warwick and his allies, and this may well have been the case in view of his apparently amicable relations with the earl and his brother Archbishop Neville. Indeed, some credence may be given to the suggestion that he had been one of the five Knights of the Garter present at Calais in July 1469 for the wedding of Warwick’s daughter and coheiress Isabel to the duke of Clarence. But if he did think that Warwick would look out for him he was naïve in his expectations, for the loss of Edward IV’s protection cost him his life : ‘wyth-in short tyme after here men kylled hym in his owyn place’. Sir Robert was murdered by his old enemies the Staffords of Grafton, who had waited more than 20 years for their revenge. Margaret Paston used his fate as a warning to her sons never to trust the promises of noblemen. Collection Ordinances and Regulations ed. Nichols, 98; M.A. Hicks, Warwick, 232; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 360-1. Under the current regime little could be done by Harcourt’s widow, Margaret, to bring his killers to justice, and it was not until after Edward IV’s return to England and victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury that, in July 1471, commissioners were sent to make inquiries about his estates and the identity of his heir. This was his eldest son John, then a year short of his majority. CPR, 1467-77, p. 287; C140/38/53. On 4 Aug. a jury at a coroner’s inquest into Sir Robert’s death testified that at about two o’clock in the afternoon of 14 Nov. William Stafford, the ‘bastard of Grafton’, had struck him in the head with a ‘wodeknyfe ... usque ad cerebrum’, of which wound he immediately died, while two of Stafford’s followers, using ‘bylles’, had delivered further blows which would have proved fatal had he not been already dead. That Michaelmas term, on 8 Nov., Margaret appealed in the King’s bench not only the three principals for causing the death of her husband, but also Humphrey and Thomas Stafford and some 150 others as accessories to the crime. In an appeal of murder the complainant could not appear by attorney, and Margaret showed admirable pertinacity in pursuing Sir Robert’s assailants by appearing personally in court at every law term for the next four years, waiting in vain for the principals to be arrested and brought to face trial. However, the Staffords were now protected in their turn against retribution, and in Michaelmas term 1475 Margaret, eventually worn down, withdrew from the prosecution. Perhaps there had been a settlement out of court. In the following year she released the Staffords from all legal actions. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 176-7, 189-90; vi (1), 96-97; Harcourt Pprs. ed. E.W. Harcourt, i. 70. One of the alleged assailants came before the King’s Bench in 1488, and was released from the Marshalsea after producing a pardon from Hen. VII: KB27/908, rex rot. 16.

Since she had been widowed Margaret had also had other important matters to deal with. In January 1471 she had arranged the marriage of her daughter, Elizabeth, to John, the son and heir of Richard Bracebridge of Kingsbury, paying £200 for the match, and securing for Elizabeth a settlement of jointure in the Bracebridge lands. Nottingham Univ. Lib. Middleton mss, Mi D 4558, 4558/1. C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 105, 107, argues that there was some disparagement here, but there is no sound reason to think so, as Elizabeth was not Harcourt’s only da. and she had four brothers, so her prospects were limited. Her son John strongly contested her rights not only to dower and jointure but also to ownership of jewels, goods and chattels at Stanton Harcourt. In March 1473 they agreed under bonds of 600 marks to abide by the award of Laurence Booth, bishop of Durham. This proved generous to Margaret, who was allotted her agreed jointure at Stanton Harcourt and Ellenhall and dower in all of Sir Robert’s other estates for life, and in addition the revenues of the Staffordshire manors he had inherited from his uncle for a term of 14 years, to pay for the marriages of her daughters. She was also to have half the moveable goods, from which she was to pay 100 marks towards Sir Robert’s debts. Harcourt mss, c. 1/3. John received licence to enter the rest of his patrimony that November, but Margaret had to bring him to court at Easter following to obtain possession of her dower portion of the Harcourt holdings in Leicestershire. She also brought successful actions against certain feoffees for dower from the former Shareshill manors in Staffordshire, and against one of her late husband’s kinsmen for property in Ellenhall. Other lawsuits begun in 1474 concerned the forcible abduction of one of her wards. CPR, 1467-77, p. 423; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 197-8, 200, 202-3. For security she placed all her lands in the hands of trustees in December that year, to hold for her lifetime. That those in high places still showed concern for her welfare is clear from the appearance of the bishops of Durham and Exeter among the witnesses to the transaction. Among Margaret’s feoffees was her son-in-law William Moton†, the Leicestershire landowner who had probably married her daughter before Harcourt’s death. CCR, 1468-76, no. 1359. Sir Robert had witnessed a transaction for Moton’s fa. in 1446: CCR, 1447-54, p. 24.

Like Moton, two of Harcourt’s sons, John and Robert, had by then been retained by the King’s friend William, Lord Hastings, W.H. Dunham jnr., Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 29n, 117, 120, 126. and John crossed to France in the royal train in 1475. It was probably he who was made bailiff of the honour of Wallingford for the prince of Wales in 1479. CPR, 1467-77, p. 515; SC6/1097/7, 8; 1302/1; SC8/344/E1304. It may have been he, too (rather than his bastard brother) who was receiver of ‘Spencerslands’ and ‘Sarysburyslandys’in seven counties (i.e. the Neville estates held jure uxoris by the late duke of Clarence), from Mich. 1479: B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 177, 295; CPR, 1476-85, p. 505. Note that his widow, Anne, was granted a rent of 20 marks from these same manors in Jan. 1485: CPR, 1476-85, p. 498. The description ‘of Whitney’ suggests that it was his bastard brother who was j.p. in Oxon. Jan. 1478-Dec. 1483 (last appointment 28 June 1483). Following Edward IV’s sudden death in April 1483, the execution of Hastings by Richard of Gloucester, and the latter’s seizure of the throne, John rose in rebellion. He was duly attainted in the Parliament of January 1484, and his estates subject to forfeiture. Although his mother, our MP’s widow, should not rightly have suffered loss from her possessions, the royal councillor, Francis, Lord Lovell, was granted the annuity of £40 from Cookham and Bray which she enjoyed for life. John died in the following June, apparently in exile with Henry Tudor, PROME, xv. 25-27; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 471, 478, 487 (corrected by BL Harl. MS. 433, i. 229); CIPM Hen. VII, i. 329. and his attainder was reversed in Henry’s first Parliament in 1485. PROME, xv. 102-5. When Sir Robert’s widow died shortly afterwards, in 1486, her grandson Robert†, aged 14, inherited the Harcourt estates. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1118. While still a young man, he was to represent Oxon. in two of the Parls. of the 1490s. Margaret was buried in the family chapel in St Michael’s church at Stanton Harcourt next to her late husband. Their altar tomb bears recumbent effigies, showing Sir Robert in a gorget of mail and plated armour, wearing the Garter on his left leg and over all the mantle of the Order. His head reclines on a helmet crested with a peacock; his feet rest on a lion. The figure of Margaret wearing the Garter above the elbow of her left arm, is one of only three known examples of female effigies decorated with the Order’s insignia. Harcourt Pprs. i. 40-42; VCH Oxon. xii. 292-3.