LEIGH, William (1424-84), of Isel, Cumb.

On 21 Dec. 1436 Sir William Leigh contracted his son William, as a 12-year old boy, in marriage to Isabel Bolde for the handsome portion of 350 marks. Cumbria RO, Carlisle, Mounsey-Heysham mss, DMH 10/1/3. His action saved the profits of the marriage for the family, since William was still a minor when his father died a little over a year later. The latter did not, however, act with the same foresight with respect to the family estates, and they came into royal wardship on his death. On 23 Aug. 1439 this wardship was granted to William’s maternal uncle, Hugh Lowther*, and James Kelom, who were probably the family’s nominees, at a farm to be agreed, but a leading local magnate, Thomas, Lord Dacre, intervened. He was the Leigh’s feudal overlord in respect of their valuable manor of Surlingham in Norfolk, and on the following 24 Nov. he sued out a grant of the wardship (saving the dower interest of William’s mother) at an annual farm of £47. Very soon after, on 5 Dec., this was increased to over £60 p.a., perhaps because of a counter offer from the original grantees. CFR, xvii. 110-11, 113-14, 115-16; SC6/1119/20. The young William then remained in Dacre’s custody until he came of age. His proof of age was taken at Penrith on 18 May 1445, with Lowther heading the witnesses, and on 6 June the relevant escheators were ordered to give him seisin. CIPM, xxvi. 334; CCR, 1441-7, p. 266.

Little is known of the early years of Leigh’s career. On 7 Nov. 1446 he offered mainprise for his kinsman, John Skelton II* in a royal lease of property in Armanthwaite, and on 21 Jan. 1449 he was among those who attested the election of Thomas Curwen* and Hugh Lowther to represent Cumberland in Parliament. CFR, xviii. 47-48; C219/15/6. It was not, however, until he joined the Percy retinue that his career began in earnest. On 26 Jan. 1452 he was retained for life on an annuity of ten marks by Henry, earl of Northumberland. Early in the following year, when the widow and heir of Sir Henry Threlkeld* agreed to put their quarrel to the arbitration of the earl’s younger son, Thomas, Lord Egremont, he was among an impressive gathering of the Percy retinue that witnessed their oath. P. Booth, ‘Landed Soc. in Cumb. and Westmld.’ (Leicester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1997), 70; HMC Le Fleming, 3-4. Later in the same year he was drawn into the serious disturbances that marked the escalation of the feud between the Percys and the Nevilles of Middleham. On 10 Aug. he was one of nine men, headed by Sir Ralph Percy, singled out by the Crown as a ‘greet sturrer and moever’ of riots in the north and ordered to obey royal commissioners headed by Sir William Lucy*. PPC, vi. 154-5. It is probable that, two weeks later, he was in the army led by Egremont which confronted the Nevilles at Heworth Moor near York. His name duly appeared (as ‘once of Cockermouth, esquire’) in the bill presented before jurors when the duke of York came to York at the head of a commission of oyer and terminer in the following June. Although, along with several other names, it has been struck out, the issue of process against Leigh implies that the jurors were held to have indicted him. KB9/149/1/89. In Easter term 1460 the sheriff of Yorks. was ordered to outlaw him for his failure to answer for riots in that county. Since he is here described as ‘once of Cockermouth, esquire’, just as he had been in the indictment of 1454, there can be no doubt that the order was process on that indictment: KB27/796, rex rot. 25.

It was at about this time that Leigh contracted a second marriage that was socially, although not materially, advantageous. At some date between early 1453 and Michaelmas term 1458 he married a daughter of Lord Dacre, in whose wardship he had been, and the widow of the heir to the Yorkshire barony of Scrope of Masham. Her first husband is said to have d. 18 Sept. 1452, the day after he made his will: Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 160n.; CP, xi. 569. According, however, to an action sued against his widow, as his executrix, and Leigh, as her husband, he was alive on 1 Feb. 1453: CP40/791, rot. 539. He was certainly dead by 14 Mar. 1454 when his yr. bro., Thomas, was described as their father’s heir: Test. Ebor. ii. 190. Since Margaret’s first husband had not lived to inherit from his father, she had no right to dower in the Scrope estates and her jointure was probably not extensive. None the less, this marriage to a daughter of a peer suggests that Leigh was a man of standing, and this was to be further apparent when the fortunes of the Percys recovered under the militant Lancastrian regime of the late 1450s.

On 13 Nov. 1459 Leigh was elected to represent Cumberland in company with (Sir) Thomas Curwen. Curiously, the election was conducted by the under sheriff, Richard Orser, rather than the sheriff, Sir John Pennington*, appointed six days before: C219/16/5. As leading Percy retainers they were obvious candidates for election to the Parliament which saw the attainder of the Yorkist lords. During the assembly he was added to the county bench, and on 21 Dec., the day after the dissolution, he was named to the commission of array in his native county. It would be strange if he was not in company with the Percy earl at the battles of Wakefield and Towton, and there can be little doubt that he was knighted at one of these battles. The Lancastrian defeat at Towton, where the earl of Northumberland met his death, put Leigh at hazard. When the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign met in November 1461, his attainder was clearly expected. His name appears on the largely-accurate list of the attainted in a contemporary chronicle. Letters and Pprs Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 778. Modern authorities have claimed that even worse befell him. On 28 Feb. 1462 the Exchequer was ordered to pay £100 to Robert Skelton† for the capture of ‘our Rebell’ Sir William Leigh; a chronicler tells us that, on the following day, Sir William Kennedy and two unnamed others were beheaded on Tower Hill. E404/72/1/113; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 157. This juxtaposition led Scofield to suggest that Leigh was one of the unnamed, and her suggestion has been uncritically repeated in later works. But Leigh avoided both execution and attainder. His name is one of several from the chronicler’s list that does not appear in the final Act of Attainder, and on 5 Feb., during the prorogation of Parliament, he was granted a general pardon. The payment made to Skelton for his capture as a rebel must refer to an earlier period, perhaps to the immediate aftermath of Towton. Indeed, by February 1462 the two men appear to have been on friendly terms. On 20 Feb., eight days before this payment was authorized, Skelton appeared personally before the King and council, along with others in favour with the new regime, including Richard Salkeld† and John Middleton†, to offer surety for Leigh’s pardon. C67/45, m. 47; C237/45/194.

None the less, although Leigh escaped the most serious consequences of his active support for the defeated side, he did not regain his place in local affairs until the restoration of the Percys. Not surprisingly, he was excluded from the commission of the peace and he makes very few appearances in the records for the 1460s. In Easter term 1462 he was one of many Cumberland and Westmorland gentry against whom William Tilliol alias Colville had actions of trespass pending. These actions probably arose out of widespread resistance to Colville’s efforts to make good a claim to the estates of Sir Peter Tilliol*. KB27/804, rot. 37d; 806, rot. 16d. Nothing else is known of Leigh until his appointment as sheriff of Cumberland on 5 Nov. 1469. A week or so earlier Henry Percy, son and heir of the earl killed at the battle of Towton, had been released from the Tower of London, where he had been imprisoned during the coup led by the earl of Warwick and the duke of Clarence, and it was clear that his restoration was only a matter of time. This would bring a major change to the politics of the north, with the Nevilles and Clarence losing the Percy lands they had been granted. Leigh’s pricking as sheriff and the appointment of his eldest son, Thomas, as escheator, may have been intended to aid the Percy restoration; and they were in office on 26 Mar. 1470 when Percy, restored to the earldom on the previous day after a new rising by Warwick and Clarence, was granted the custody of his own estates. A month later, Sir William was commissioned to seize all the property of the rebels in Cumberland and Westmorland. CPR, 1467-77, p. 219.

With the Percy earl restored to his proper place in northern affairs, Leigh was more active in Edward IV’s second reign than he had been in the first. In 1472 he was named to a commission of array; in 1473 he was restored to the Cumberland bench; and in the following November he was again named as sheriff. While sheriff, on 13 Aug. 1474, he was nominated as an arbiter in a dispute between John Pennington, who like him was a servant of Percy, and Sir John Huddleston, who was in the service of the new force in northern politics, Richard, duke of Gloucester. The feoffees Leigh himself chose, in the following January, for his manor of Surlingham can be interpreted as marking recognition on his part of these new political realities: Huddleston and two of his sons headed the feoffees, and they were joined by two members of the Dykes family, long connected with the Percys, and our MP’s kinsman, Robert Lowther. CCR, 1468-76, no. 1317; C141/6/15. The feoffment, however, probably had another more immediate family context. Before his death Leigh took, as a third wife, one of Huddleston’s daughters, and it is a reasonable speculation that the transaction was connected with this marriage to a bride who was many years his junior.

From the mid-1470s advancing age meant Sir William surrendered some of his responsibilities to his eldest son, Thomas, who replaced him on the Cumberland bench in May 1483. He died a year later. Inquisitions were held in Norfolk, where his manor there was returned as in the hands of the feoffees of 1475, and Cumberland, where the jurors mentioned only his lands in Stainton, which he had given to his brother Robert for life on 4 Dec. 1460. His heir was returned as his son Thomas, who, for a mysterious reason, was said to be only a year old. The Chancery did not act on this erroneous finding for no grant of wardship was made. Thomas died in 1493 and was succeeded by Sir William’s younger son, Robert. C141/6/15; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1026. His Huddleston widow married Richard III’s squire of the body, Edward Redmayne† of Levens in Westmorland, and lived on until as late as 1527. Leigh’s descendants continued the family’s tradition of parliamentary service in the Tudor period, but they failed in the main male line in the late sixteenth century. C142/46/70; The Commons 1509-58, ii. 508-9, 513-16; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xi. 123-4.