HUSSEY, William (c.1430-95), of Old Sleaford, Lincs.

William Hussey’s pedigree cannot be traced beyond any more remote antecedent than his father, who enjoyed a legal career of modest success. It was the father who established the family at Old Sleaford: in 1432 he purchased some 200 acres there and in neighbouring vills, probably as an addition to an earlier unrecorded acquisition. In the Kesteven subsidy returns of 1450-1 he was assessed on the respectable annual income of £10, and he played some part in local affairs. In 1432 he served briefly as customs collector in the port of Boston, and in May 1455 he was one of those commissioned in Kesteven to raise money for the defence of Calais. CP25(1)/145/157/35; E179/276/44; CFR, xvi. 53, 57, 74; PPC, vi. 243. Much more doubtful is the more exalted origins later claimed by our MP. Armorial bearings which once adorned the windows of the hall and chapel of Gray’s Inn and those of the nave of New Sleaford church show that he adopted the arms – or a cross vert – of a family that had been summoned to Parliament by personal summons in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Husseys of Harting in Sussex. The genealogical justification for the adoption of these arms has not been traced and it is probable that there was none. R.E.G. Cole, Hist. Doddington, 72.

Very little is known of Hussey’s early career. There is no record of his father after 1455, and it was probably at this date or soon afterwards that he came into his modest patrimony. By this time he was well on the way to completing an expensive education. The reference to Pembroke Hall in his will raises the possibility that he attended university, but, in the fifteenth century, such attendance was unusual for one destined for a career in the common law, and his more likely route to Gray’s Inn was through an inn of Chancery. If, as seems probable, he had a patron, such patronage has left no trace in the records. It was, however, no doubt helpful to him that his Lincolnshire neighbour, Richard Welby*, was a senior member of Gray’s Inn when, in the mid to late 1440s, William first became a student there. He makes only two appearances in the published records during the 1450s: on 20 July 1454 he stood as a mainpernor in Chancery on Richard Maryot’s appointment as alnager in Northamptonshire and Rutland, and on 20 Oct. 1455 he was in the London parish of St. Sepulchre to register a gift of chattels for enrolment on the close roll. CFR, xix. 63; CCR, 1454-61, p. 104. Much later our MP numbered among Maryot’s feoffees; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 724. Such activities are consistent with the career of a young lawyer approaching the end of his formal legal education, and it has been plausibly suggested that he made his first reading in Michaelmas term 1455. Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), p. xxxii.

The date of Hussey’s marriage is not known, but, since his eldest son was politically active as early as 1481, it is a fair inference that it took place at about the time he entered his patrimony in the late 1450s. This is certainly consistent with the presence of his bride’s brother, Thomas Berkeley, at Lincoln’s Inn in these years. Their common residence in London reinforced an existing local connexion. The Berkeleys, although they had their principal estates in Leicestershire, had very strong affiliations with south Lincolnshire. Two of the bride’s aunts had married into leading families of that region – Elizabeth to Sir John Bussy of Hougham and Joan to Sir Nicholas Bowet of Rippingale – and her sister Edith, probably after her own marriage, became the wife of Mauncer Marmyon of Ringsdone in Rippingale. Kinship with a network of such prominent local families meant that the marriage marked a significant social advance for him. Lincs. Peds. ed. Maddison, i (Harl. Soc. l), 128.

To the advantages of education and kinship, Hussey soon added the further one of sound political judgement: he supported the Yorkists during the civil war of 1459-61. This is the clear inference to be drawn from the three references to him in these years: early in 1460 he acted as a pledge for the payment of a fine in the court of King’s bench by Humphrey Bourgchier*, a committed Yorkist with significant landed interests in Lincolnshire; KB27/795, fines rot. on 28 Aug., when the Yorkists were in control of government after the battle of Northampton, he was nominated to the quorum of the peace in Kesteven; and on the same day he was elected to the Yorkist Parliament which met early in October. His return for the Sussex borough of Bramber, with which he had no prior or future connexion, may have been due to the patronage of its lord, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, who himself favoured the duke of York’s cause. Significantly Bourgchier, who was also elected to this assembly, was the duke’s nephew, and it was perhaps through Bourgchier that our MP came to Mowbray’s attention. This seems to have been the case with Richard Spert*, returned to the same Parliament in the indenture for New Shoreham, another of Mowbray’s Sussex boroughs, and Spert’s subsequent move to Lincolnshire and his friendship with our MP provide further reasons for supposing that the two elections were related. Hussey’s connexion with Mowbray may also explain his appointment in the first days of the new reign to a commission of arrest in Sussex, but, even if Mowbray was an active patron, that patronage was soon brought to an end by the duke’s death in the following November. In any event, its loss had no adverse impact on Hussey’s career. In March 1462 he received a considerable mark of royal favour with the grant to him in tail-male of the manor of Burton Pedwardine, late of the attainted Thomas Daniell* and ideally placed to supplement his property at nearby Sleaford. CPR, 1461-7, p. 182. In 1465 the manor was granted to John Harley in tail male, but that grant can never have taken effect: ibid. 479. So valuable a grant is a clear demonstration that our MP’s service to the new regime had been greater than implied in the surviving records, and that he was well connected. Bourgchier, elevated to the peerage early in 1461, was probably active in his promotion, but there is no direct evidence of an association between them after the mainprise of 1460.

Thereafter there is a slight hiatus in Hussey’s career. It was not until nearly ten years later that he won any further advancement. The intervening period was one of consolidation. In July 1462 he took the routine precaution of suing out a general pardon, and, probably in the Lent term of 1464, he completed his formal legal training by reading for the second time. C67/45, m. 24; Readings and Moots, p. xxxiii. As a j.p. of the quorum in Kesteven and an occasional ad hoc commissioner in Lincolnshire and neighbouring counties, he took an active part in local administration alongside the practice he maintained in the Westminster courts. A letter of 3 Dec. 1464 refers to his part in concluding an appeal pending in the court of King’s bench between Sir William Plumpton* and a merchant of Stamford, and in July 1466 he was named as an arbiter in bonds posted in the court of common pleas by two Northamptonshire men. Plumpton Letters (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, viii), 34; CP40/820, rot. 481. His local connexions and legal qualifications made him a natural choice when the electors of the recently-enfranchised borough of Grantham came to choose their MPs for the Parliament of June 1467. He put his attendance to good use, obtaining an exemption from the Act of Resumption in respect of the manor of Burton Pedwardine. PROME, xiii. 307. His appointment in April 1470 to the bench in Rutland, even though there is no evidence that he yet held any property in that county, implies that his career was ready to make further progress.

The Readeption proved a brief setback – Hussey was removed from the bench to which he had just been appointed – but he increased his stock by rallying to Edward IV on his return. Nothing is known of his activities during the Readeption save that, in Feb. 1471, he sued out a general pardon as ‘of Old Sleaford, gentleman’: C67/44, m. 3. As a trusted lawyer, he was dispatched by the Yorkist council in London to the King at Coventry in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Tewkesbury, a journey for which he later received 10s. in expenses. E405/53, rot. 4d; E403/844, m. 9. Edw. IV was at Coventry from 11 to 16 May 1471: Arrivall of Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. i), 31-34. A month later his loyalty and ability were recognized by his appointment to the office of attorney-general. This brought him a political and legal role at the centre of the realm’s affairs. In return, it demanded considerable personal energy. For example, in his first Michaelmas term in office he made separate journeys on royal business from London to Hertford, Windsor and Guildford, in addition to his main task of overseeing royal litigation in the central courts. On 19 Aug. 1472 he was summoned by virtue of his office to attend the Lords in Parliament, and on 23 June 1473 he was present in the parlour of the prior of Coventry when the great seal was delivered to the acting chancellor, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex. His service evidently proved satisfactory for his grant of the attorneyship was extended to one for life on 18 Oct. 1473, and less than year later he was named as the earl of Essex’s deputy as chief steward of the south parts of the duchy of Lancaster. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 292, 399; E405/54, rot. 3d; PROME, xiv. 177; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 942, 1164; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 431.

Hussey’s energy was well rewarded. In Easter term 1474 he received a payment of over £125 for his fees and rewards, and he periodically received lesser sums from the Exchequer for ‘good service’. In the following December he was granted the next nomination to the church of Oundle (Northamptonshire), which the late abbot of Peterborough had given to the King. E405/55, rot. 4d; 57, rot. 4, 4d; 58, rot. 2, 2d; CPR, 1467-77, p. 418. He used the influence which came with his position to supplement these rewards. In the summer of 1474, to protect his family’s title to the manor of Burton Pedwardine, he secured the annulment of the attainder of its former owner, Thomas Daniell, and a royal grant to Daniell of property in Ireland; in return, Daniel surrendered his family’s title to the manor, retaining a rent of ten marks which he quickly traded for a further grant of Irish lands. This arrangement was concluded in the last session of the long Parliament of 1472-5 (in which Hussey’s brother, Gilbert, represented Grantham) and required Hussey’s personal intervention with the Speaker, William Allington†, who, holding a personal grudge against Daniell, had been reluctant to see the attainder reversed. CCR, 1468-76, nos. 1437, 1474.

The preparations for the King’s great expedition to France promised further to enhance the role of the energetic attorney-general. Late in February 1475 he was named among the feoffees in the duchy of Lancaster estates set aside as provision for the royal family; on 12 May he was one of those to whom the royal chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, had licence to alienate property in preparation for the forthcoming expedition; and a month later his Lincolnshire neighbour, Sir Thomas Burgh†, another leading royal servant, chose him as a feoffee for the performance of his will. More importantly, he was named among the executors of the King’s will and as a councillor during the royal absence. PROME, xiv. 252-4, 436-47; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 516-17, 523; CIPM, Hen. VII, iii. 183; Excerpta Historica ed. Bentley, 368, 378-9; C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, ii. 125. Duties of a different sort demanded his attention after Edward IV’s return. In January 1476 he was one of the King’s men to whom William, Lord Berkeley, conveyed all his goods as part of the complex transactions designed to ensure the Mowbray lands would pass to the King’s younger son, and later in the same year he was party to two final concords intended to define the rights of the Mowbray widow to the King’s advantage. CCR, 1468-76, no. 1571; CP25(1)/294/76/113, 116; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 222, 452. In the meantime, as a member of the council of the duchy of Lancaster, he had undertaken an exhausting tour of the duchy’s Yorkshire estates and been rewarded with another valuable wardship. Coming together at York on 16 March 1476, the councillors visited Pickering, Knaresborough, Leeds, Pontefract, Snaith, Gringley and Tickhill in the space of a fortnight. DL5/1, ff. 89-112; Somerville, 250-1. On 5 May, soon after Hussey’s return to London, his efforts were recognized by a grant of the wardship and marriage of Agnes, daughter and heiress of Simon Blount of Mangotsfield in Gloucestershire, and, on her death soon afterwards, with that of her infant sister Margaret (b.1474). The latter was subsequently married to our MP’s son and heir. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 585, 599; 1467-77, p. 601; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 869.

Hussey’s addition to the bench in Sussex in the summer of 1476 (and soon after to those of other home counties) shows that nomination as a justice of assize on the home circuit had been added to his responsibilities, and he was soon to have a much more important duty to perform. As the King’s attorney-general he was involved in the legal process which ended in the death of the duke of Clarence. His role may not have been confined to the legal for there is some indirect evidence that he deployed his local influence in the interests of securing favourable MPs for Lincolnshire to the 1478 assembly. On 5 Jan. 1478 the election of two household men, Burgh and Robert Tailboys†, was attested by several local lawyers closely associated with the attorney- general: Leonard Thornburgh, Richard Welby†, Richard Spert, Thomas Wymbyssh and Robert Ingoldesby were all prominent among those employed by our MP in his private transactions. On 3 Mar. his part in Clarence’s downfall was rewarded by a life grant of the surveyorship of the dead duke’s estates and the stewardship of his Rutland lands. C219/17/3; CPR, 1476-85, p. 71. Less clearly a reward was the further legal promotion that soon followed. On the previous 14 Oct. he had been among those required to take upon them the order of serjeant-at-law on the following 9 June under the penalty of £1,000. Such an elevation was a mixed blessing: to be set against the lucrative monopoly serjeants enjoyed in the court of common pleas was the great cost of the elaborate creation ceremony and the likely promotion to the less profitable judicial bench. CCR, 1476-85, no. 177; Order of Serjts. at Law (Selden Soc. supp. ser. v), 164. For our MP there was the additional consideration of the surrender of the influential office of attorney-general. None the less, he and those called with him duly took up the honour on the appointed day.

It was in these years that Hussey began to amass the great wealth that funded the piecemeal purchase of an extensive estate. His major acquisitions appear to have come in two phases and the first was his seven years as attorney-general. Indeed, nearly half of the surviving Lincolnshire feet of fines for these years concern his land purchases. The first two were made at the expense of his near neighbour, William Slory: in 1473 Slory sold him only a few acres of meadowland in Old Sleaford, but in the following year he surrendered over 500 acres there and in surrounding vills. CP25(1)/145/162/28, 34; E405/59, rot. 1d. In 1474 Hussey also acquired some 500 acres of land in Uffington and Tallington, some miles to the south of Sleaford, from James Barre and his wife Christine, and two years later he bought the reversion of five messuages and five shops in Grantham expectant on the death of Alice Saltby. CP25(1)/145/162/35, 38. He also had to be content with a reversion in the case of a far larger acquisition he made at about the same time. In May 1476 he paid 100 marks in part payment of a total of 400 marks to the executors of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, for a manor in Boston with 1,000 acres, 200 acres of which were valuable meadow, and £16 rent in Boston, Skirbeck and Leake. This was a significantly discounted price because of the life interest of one of Cromwell’s coheirs, Maud, Lady Willoughby, and her survival until 1497 made it less than a bargain. Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, De L’Isle and Dudley mss, U1475/17/2, 3; CP25(1)/145/162/42. None the less, Hussey’s apparent determination to concentrate his purchases in south Lincolnshire meant that opportunities had to be taken where they could be found, and he again had to be content with a reversion in another major purchase recorded in a final concord of Hilary term 1477: the manors of Halton Holegate and Little Steeping, some miles to the north of Boston, were to come to him and his heirs on the death of John Stayndrop and Agnes, his wife. The scarcity of suitable estates in the south on the county probably explains why, in 1478, he had to look further afield, purchasing in fee a small manor at Horkstow in the far north of the county. This string of acquisitions was brought to a temporary conclusion late in the following year when he purchased a moiety of a manor in Whaplode, a few miles from Boston. CP25(1)/145/162/43, 51, 56.

After his creation as serjeant-at-law, Hussey had to wait very little time before elevation to the rank of King’s serjeant. He held that rank by the following Michaelmas term, and he continued to serve the Crown in much the same way as he had done as attorney-general. He remained, for example, very active on the duchy council. On 22 June 1478 he was present at a meeting at Pontefract, and in the following November he attended four meetings, although at the more convenient locations of Westminster and Blackfriars. Somerville, 431, erroneously states that he lost the deputy-stewardship in Apr. 1480. In fact, he was not replaced until his promotion to c.j.KB: DL28/5/11, f. 56v. A month later he may again have returned north for he was commissioned, with Burgh and Thomas Fitzwilliam II*, to survey three royal manors in Yorkshire. Not surprisingly the payment of four marks made to him by the Exchequer on 26 Jan. 1479 was said to be ‘for his assiduous labour and diligence about the King’s profit’, and in May 1480 he had a more substantial reward with the grant of yet another wardship and marriage, that of Thomas Boys of Wellingore near Lincoln, for the modest payment of 110 marks. The duchy council was not the only one on which he continued to sit. On 12 July 1480, at the manor of Old Temple in St. Andrew’s, Holborn, he and others, ‘being of the King’s councel’, heard certain variances pending in a long-running dispute involving Thomas Burgoyne*. CPR, 1476-85, p. 147; E403/848, m. 7; DL42/19, f.14v; DL28/5/11, ff. 30, 31, 44; CCR, 1476-85, no. 737.

Hussey’s administrative experience and personal service to Edward IV were sound recommendations for his accelerated promotion. In the following May he was elevated to the office of chief justice despite his lack of judicial experience. That promotion came over the heads of an existing j.KB, his friend, Guy Fairfax, and of two serjeants of greater seniority, William Jenney* and John Catesby, but such disregard for seniority was not uncommon in the selection of a chief justice. It was more unusual for one with so few years as a serjeant to be appointed, and in this respect Hussey’s promotion has much in common with that of two other noted chief justices, Robert Tresilian† and John Fortescue*. No doubt there was a political context to each of these appointments, but all three men were probably distinguished from their fellows by ability as well as connexion. Whether Hussey welcomed his quick promotion is another question, for he had had little time to profit from his serjeant’s monopoly of audience in the court of common pleas. On the other hand, nor had he had to serve a term in the less desirable capacity of puisne justice. The chief justice was more handsomely remunerated than his juniors, with fees from the Crown totalling £175 (including £20 p.a. as an assize justice) supplemented by a seventh of the fees paid by litigants for the sealing of writs of process. Even this was less than a serjeant could earn, but the higher office brought honour and an access to royal patronage beyond the reach of any mere serjeant. Hussey soon had an illustration of these rewards. On 12 June 1481, the day on which he had formal grant of his judicial fees, his son and heir, John, was named as his successor as surveyor of the lands late of the duke of Clarence in Lincolnshire, despite the fact that he was not yet of age. CPR, 1476-85, p. 281.

Some insight into Hussey’s character and his activities outside the court over which he presided is provided in surviving letters concerning the execution of the will of Ralph, Lord Cromwell. One, written by John Gigur, master of Cromwell’s college at Tattershall, to the principal executor, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, describes a dinner on 25 Aug. 1482 at Sleaford, presumably in our MP’s house, at which Gigur discussed with him matters of difference between the executors and one of the heirs, Lady Willoughby. Hussey appears as decisive and impatient. Gigur showed him a bill of instructions he had received from the bishop, only to be peremptorily told that all the matters contained therein had been concluded and that further discussion was unnecessary. None the less, the result of the dinner deliberations was favourable to the executors. A few days later Hussey rode to Tattershall, where he advised Lady Willoughby to settle her differences with them and offered to speed the process of settlement during the next law term. Gigur sagely suggested to the bishop that it would be politic to offer special thanks to the chief justice for his interventions. Magdalen Coll. Oxf. Misc. 367, ff. 5-6. Clearly Hussey commanded respect both in his person and in his position, as William Brandon†, an esquire of the royal household, discovered soon after. The esquire attempted to intervene on an indictment pending in the King’s bench against his uncle by regaling the court with the uncle’s distinguished service to the Crown; Hussey ordered him out of court on the threat of joining the accused in custody. A similar determination to uphold the authority of his court is evidenced in a much more important suit in 1486: in the case of (Sir) Humphrey Stafford III*, which raised the question of whether sanctuary gave protection to traitors, he resisted royal pressure to give a judicial opinion in advance of judgement on a matter already pending before the justices. At least one contemporary lawyer was profoundly impressed by Hussey: ‘The King hath none other such man to do him service in attendance about him for the Chief Justice is homo universalis’, wrote Thomas Danvers* in 1494. Ives, 238, 245-6; F.N. Macnamara, Mems. Danvers Fam. 162-3.

Another testimony to Hussey’s talents is the skill with which he negotiated the political turmoil which overtook the realm during his early years as chief justice. Whatever his private views about the means by which Richard III acquired the throne, there can be no doubt that he offered the new regime his tacit support and proved more than ready to exploit the new King’s desperate generosity. However uneasily it may have sat with his position as executor to Edward IV and to the two most prominent victims of the usurpation, Anthony, Earl Rivers, and William, Lord Hastings, he was among those present at the coronation of the usurper on 6 July 1483 and in the retinue with which the new King departed London a fortnight later. Test. Vetusta, i. 374; Excerpta Historica, 248; Coronation of Ric. III ed. Sutton and Hammond, 272, 360; C.D. Ross, Ric. III, 148. Handsome rewards quickly followed. In September 1483 he purchased the wardship and marriage of the daughter and heiress of a wealthy Yorkshire knight, Sir John Salvayn, albeit for the considerable sum of 1,000 marks. BL Harl. MS. 433, ii. 13-14. She was married to Hussey’s younger son, William: CPR, 1494-1509, pp. 501-2. On 3 March 1484 he secured royal licence to found a perpetual chantry in the parish church of Old Sleaford and to endow it with lands worth as much as £20 p.a.; the inclusion of the King and queen on the bede roll was no doubt a concession to the prevailing political realities. CPR, 1476-85, p. 385; BL Harl. MS. 433, i. 97. The church went out of use in the 16th cent.: S.M. Elsdon, Old Sleaford Revealed, 71. On the following 13 Apr. he was granted the custody of the valuable lands of Sir William Trussell† (d.1481) during minority, soon converted to a rent of £108 from these lands when they were found to be legally in the hands of others; BL Harl. MS. 433, i. 178, 186; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 391, 432; C140/78/83. and on 20 June he headed a syndicate of six which undertook to pay £1,000 for the wardship and marriage of Edward, son and heir of John, late earl of Wiltshire, to hold from the previous Michaelmas. BL Harl. MS. 433, i. 194; ii. 180; CPR, 1476-85, p. 498. Since only two days later the young earl had licence to enter his lands the syndicate’s profit resided mainly, if not exclusively, in contracting him in marriage to Margaret, da. of Edward Grey, Viscount Lisle: CPR, 1476-85, p. 515; R. Halstead, Succinct Gens. 209. These recorded grants, however, provide only a partial record of his gains. An undated list of lands granted by Richard III to his servants in tail-male implies that the chief justice had been granted manors in Boston and nearby Freiston together with the reversions of other south Lincolnshire manors at Uffington and Bourne and that of the Leicestershire manor of Enderby. These were said to be worth £209 p.a., for which Hussey owed the King the modest rent of little over £15. Since three of the manors, valued at £136 p.a., were granted only in reversion our MP must have derived a smaller profit; none the less, these grants, as no doubt they were designed to do, gave him a vested interest in the continuance of the Ricardian regime. BL Harl. MS. 433, i. 186; iii. 154. Further, they were out of all proportion to his known services to the new monarch. Although, on 14 Sept. 1484, presumably as a trusted member of the regime, he was one of those commissioned to negotiate with the Scottish delegates at Nottingham for a marriage between the heir to the Scottish throne and the King’s niece, Anne de la Pole, and at about the same time he advanced the King a loan of 250 marks, there is no other indication that he offered the usurper any other service beyond the purely judicial. LP Ric. III and Hen. VII ed. Gairdner, 67; E405/73, rot. 1, 1d.

This apparent circumspection meant that Hussey was not politically compromised by the investment Richard III had made in his loyalty. On 20 Sept. 1485, less than a month after the battle of Bosworth, he was re-granted his fees as chief justice; soon after he was among those authorized by Henry VII to test the rights of those claiming to owe service at his coronation; and on 12 Dec. he secured a general pardon. CPR, 1485-94, p. 13; English Coronation Recs. ed. Wickham Legg, 220-1; C67/53, m. 1. His career quickly resumed its accustomed pattern. Early in 1486 he joined his colleague, Guy Fairfax, in arbitrating a dispute between the priors of Charterhouse in Axholme and of Kirby Bellars, and after a few months the new King re-granted him the manor of Freiston during pleasure. Ives, 110; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 152; CPR, 1485-94, p. 111. He and his family soon had the opportunity to show that this trust was not misplaced: in the summer of 1487 his son and heir, John, who seems already to have found a place in the royal household, fought ex parte Regis at the battle of Stoke. Indeed, these last years of our MP’s career mark its apogee for he more than simply retained his high judicial office. He played a more active political role than he had done even as Edward IV’s attorney-general, becoming involved in Henry VII’s affairs outside the court of King’s bench. On 11 Dec. 1489 he was with the King in Chancery to hear Anne, countess of Warwick, acknowledge that she had ‘freely given ... without fear’ her castle of Warwick to the King; in the following summer he was nominated to an important diplomatic commission charged with the task of negotiating with King Charles of France and Duchess Anne of Brittany; and in February 1492 he was named in a new feoffment of the duchy of Lancaster estates. A year later he was among a group of the King’s trusted adherents added to the commissions of the peace in numerous counties, and in February 1494 a royal order required that he accompany the King on an autumn progress. CCR, 1485-1500, no. 474; Foedera ed. Rymer (Hague edn.), v (4), 33-34; PROME, xvi. 101-4; Sel. Cases Council Hen. VII (Selden Soc. lxxv), pp. xxiv-v, xxxii.

In the early years of Henry VII’s reign Hussey embarked on a second period of estate acquisition. Before 1487 he agreed to buy from another lawyer, Alfred Corneburgh†, the former Percy manors of ‘Dagenhams’ and ‘Cockerels’ in Essex, no doubt to serve as a convenient base for London. These were held of the queen’s manor of Havering atte Bower, and on 2 Mar. 1492 she confirmed his right in them, a confirmation repeated by the King three months later. In 1487 he added the manor of Sapperton near Grantham to his south Lincolnshire lands, but for further acquisitions he was obliged to look a little further afield to neighbouring Rutland. VCH Essex, vii. 66; SC2/172/36, rot. 23; CPR, 1485-94, p. 378; E210/830. There, the first of two major purchases, the manor of Woodhead in Bridge Casterton, led him into difficulties. In the 1460s it had been sold by John Browe* to Thomas Blount*, but the title conveyed was not a secure one for the property was bound by at least three earlier entails. Thus, after our MP purchased it in about 1486 from Thomas Blount’s younger son, Richard†, he was forced to invest in strengthening his title. In 1489 he gave one rival claimant 100 marks and a life annuity of £8 in return for a release, and soon after he paid another claimant £200. Not until after his death, with the payment of 50 marks by his son to Thomas West, Lord de la Warre, the heir under an entail of 1359, were all rival claims laid aside, and there can be little doubt that the property had been acquired at a considerable premium. VCH Rutland, ii. 232-3; CIPM, xiii, 57; C1/80/76; E326/5446, 5664-5, 5667, 6033, 10403, 10482, 11666, 11780. Less complex was his purchase of the reversion of the nearby manor of Pickworth. This too had been the subject of recent dispute, but the problems of title had been resolved by an earlier purchaser, Robert Danvers*, j.c.b. Our MP acquired it from another royal servant, David Malpes†, whose return for Stamford in 1489 had probably been engineered by him. VCH Rutland, ii. 266-7; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 207. The total value of Hussey’s many purchases is impossible to estimate with accuracy. However, in an indenture of July 1503 for the marriage of his grandson and heir, William, the family inheritance was valued at 700 marks p.a. CCR, 1500-9, no. 338. Part of this income was derived from the lands of the young William’s mother, Margaret Blount, but by far the greater part came from our MP’s purchases, which, on this evidence, must have been worth about 500 marks p.a. and, in capital value at 20 years’ purchase, some 10,000 marks. This is not to suggest that Hussey invested so great a sum as the latter figure – for several of his more important purchases were acquired as reversions – but it is testimony to the rewards available to a successful judge whose career was both political and legal.

The chief justice made his will on 15 Dec. 1494. PCC 32 Vox (PROB11/10, f. 256A). The will mentions no books, but at least one of those owned by our MP survives: Add. 16168, inscribed with his name on the flyleaf, is a lengthy collection of cases from the Year Bks. compiled late in the reign of Hen. VI. Its preamble and the provisions he made for his burial reveals an austere piety:

trusting stedfastily to be sayued by the Infinite merites of Cristes passion and the great mercy of god Which is not denyed to any cristen man that effectually desireth it and will foresake synne and trust by dedes of charitee as prayer and almes to be releued from peynes ffourthermore also seeing furst the casualties of this World I haue not doon soo large almes as I wold haue doon.

His ‘wretchid body’ was, if he should die in the capital, to be buried at the London Charterhouse, but, if he should die at home, then at the Gilbertine priory of Sempringham or the Benedictine abbey of Peterborough. He was to have ‘noo pompouse exequyes’, but on the same night and day as his death £20 was to be spent in dirges, masses and alms to poor people. His concern that he had not ‘doon soo large alms’ as he would have liked is reflected in the elaborate instructions he left for both the saying of masses for his soul (including a bequest of the large sum of 100 marks p.a. to endow prayers at his place of burial) and a program of charitable works in the neighbourhood of his estates. His executors were to establish a permanent fund of 40 marks from which loans were to be made to poor men unable to pay their rent or buy seed, the loans to be repaid when the borrower was able to make a profitable sale of his goods. More expensive was his endowment of a lecture in divinity in the common school of the university of Cambridge. For this he provided for the alienation in mortmain of lands worth 20 marks to the college of Pembroke Hall, a fellow of which was to have first refusal on the nomination as reader, and left complicated instructions for the saying of masses at the university for his soul and the welfare of his family. Hussey’s great career meant that he was easily able to invest so heavily in his soul’s health without seriously diminishing the resources available to provide for his wife and children. He bequeathed his widow the handsome sum of £1,000, half in money and half in plate, and he left 600 marks to the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth. Her portion seems to have been considerably augmented by her mother. According to a deed of 1506 she was married to Richard, son and heir-apparent of George Grey, earl of Kent, with a portion of 2,000 marks: CPR, 1494-1509, p. 512. Before our MP’s death her sister Mary had been married to William Willoughby, heir to the Lincolnshire barony of Willoughby of Eresby and gds. of one of our MP’s judicial colleagues, (Sir) William Jenney: CP, xii(2), 671; C142/11/25, 71. The task of carrying through these arrangements he entrusted to his widow, his eldest son and William Chubbes, a fellow of Pembroke Hall, as executors, and to Sir Reynold Bray† as supervisor. They were asked, in a concluding passage which echoes the preamble,

to be as I take theym my moost true frendis and to pray for me that it may pleas my lord god of his greate mercy and by the meritees of his moost bitter payne and glorious passion to delyuere me from those many and grete paynes which after his rightuenes ar due to me and to receyve me to his kyngdome with his electe children there euer to reigne with him in true felicite.

The precise date of Hussey’s death is uncertain. Writs of diem clausit extremum were first issued on 21 Aug. 1495 for the counties of Lincolnshire and Essex, and further writs for Middlesex (where nothing is known of his holdings) and Rutland were delayed until 2 Sept. and 30 Oct. respectively. Only two inquisitions survive – for Essex and Rutland – and they contradict the evidence of the writs by dating his death to 8 Sept. Curiously, however, in both documents the date of death is written over an erasure in a different ink from that of the rest of the text, and all that can be said with certainty is that he died either shortly before 21 Aug. or that the early writs were issued in error and that he survived into the following month. CFR, xxii. nos. 502, 528; C142/11/25, 71 (printed in CIPM Hen. VII, i. 166, 1209). His successor as c. j., John Fyneux†, was not named until 24 Nov. 1495, and probate of his will was delayed until 4 July 1496: Law Offs. 9; PCC 32 Vox. His widow outlived him by nine years. Her will, made on 6 Aug. 1503, very much reflects his own, containing many of the same phrases in its instructions concerning her funeral and masses for her soul. It confirms that he was buried in the monastery of Sempringham, for it was under his tomb there that she wished to be buried. She also followed her husband in remembering the university of Cambridge, providing for the maintenance of three scholars there for three years and bequeathing £20 to the library of Jesus College, where his executor and hers, William Chubbes, was master. As her other executors she named her eldest son and her brother, Sir Maurice Berkeley. PCC 22 Holgrave (PROB11/14, ff. 173v-174). She died shortly before 8 Nov. 1504: CFR, xxii. 805.

The death of the chief justice’s widow united the Hussey land in the hands of their eldest son, Sir John, who already before his father’s death had become well established at the royal court. His career was as brilliant as the judge’s and culminated in elevation to the peerage as Lord Hussey in 1529. It ended, however, in tragedy with execution and attainder for implication in the Pilgrimage of Grace. None the less, the Husseys, in their various branches, long remained prominent in Lincolnshire affairs.