The eldest son of his father’s second marriage, Edmund enjoyed a long and remarkable career in which a succession of high office in Henry VI’s household, political exile and a recovery of fortune ran in parallel with a major dispute with his kin of the half-blood over a substantial family inheritance. He first appears in the records in 1431, when he joined his parents in purchasing a small estate near the family home at Coleshill, an early indication perhaps of his father’s preference for him over his half-brothers.
The earl was the family’s patron both in France and at home, and soon after his death in April 1439 father and son seem to have abandoned military service, finding places in the royal household as it expanded in the early years of Henry VI’s majority. Edmund was in receipt of robes as a household esquire by 1441, and he quickly assumed an important place about the King. On 20 July 1444 he received a marked expression of favour, namely a grant for life of the manors of Solihull and Sheldon at the considerable annual rent of 50 marks. The grant was important because the manors lay in the immediate neighbourhood of Coleshill, and it must have been a disappointment to him that it was quickly repudiated. On the following 27 Sept. the manors were committed to a more senior household servant, (Sir) James Fiennes*, in another instance of the disordered way in which royal patronage was managed in these years.
Another result of Mountfort’s household service was his marriage to a wealthy widow. His bride was the daughter of a Yorkshire peer and the widow of a Northumberland knight, Sir Ralph Gray, and since there was no geographical context for the match it can only have come about through connexions made through the royal household. After Gray, who spent his career campaigning in the north and France, had died in the spring of 1443, his widow sought to recover the moneys he was owed by the Crown for his keepership of the castle of Roxburgh. It was probably to advance her claims that, in 1445, she found a place in the household of the new queen, Margaret of Anjou.
On 16 Jan. 1447 Mountfort, perhaps already married, was returned to Parliament for his native shire. This was a highly significant return. Sons were rarely elected to Parliament in the lifetimes of their fathers, still less when they were younger sons. Edmund’s election must, therefore, have been the product of special circumstances. It came when the court, headed by William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, was preparing to move against the King’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and was thus more than usually anxious to secure support in the Commons. Plainly, Edmund was elected because he was a household servant, but whether he went to Parliament with the ringing endorsement of his leading constituents must be doubtful. The election was conducted by another household man, Thomas Everingham*, and the indenture of return names as attestors only men of lesser gentry rank and below drawn almost largely from Solihull; leading gentry were notable by their absence.
Mountfort also appears to have represented the county in the next Parliament, and here again there was something unusual in the circumstances of his return for it was not he who was named as MP in the indenture. The sheriff, William Purefoy, certified into Chancery that on 10 Feb. 1449, only two days before Parliament was due to assemble, Thomas Bate* and Richard Hotoft* had been elected. The return is irregular in that, in common with the Leicestershire return for which the same sheriff was also responsible, it names no attestors. Further, Hotoft, a Leicestershire man, was a strange choice. He held no lands in Warwickshire save in the right of his wife, not generally a strong recommendation in the eyes of county electors, and he can only have secured election through his place in the Household. But if the electors were again ready to elect a household servant, Mountfort was a much more natural choice. Perhaps he was passed over by the electors because of some personal unpopularity connected with his election two years before, or else at the time of the hustings he was unavailable for election or perceived to be so. However this may be, there is every reason to suppose that the attestors’ preference for Hotoft, if such it was, was set aside in favour of Mountfort. On 1 Aug. 1449, two weeks after the conclusion of the assembly, Bate and Hotoft were named to the commission for the distribution of the allowance on the fifteenth and tenth it had granted; but when commissions were issued a week later to the tax collectors, the county’s MPs and ex officio the distributors of the allowance were named as Bate and Mountfort, and it is their names which appear in the audited account. The likely explanation is that on 1 Aug. the Chancery clerks were working from a list of MPs drawn up as the returns arrived in Chancery at the beginning of the Parliament; a week later, however, a new and better list of those who had actually attended the Commons was available.
This leads us to the major theme of Mountfort’s career, the dispute with his eldest half-brother, Sir Baldwin Mountfort, occasioned by the generous provision their father made for Edmund. It is understandable that Sir William should have wished to make respectable provision for the issue of his second wife, and as the richest member of the Warwickshire gentry he had the means to do so. Further, Sir Baldwin was well provided for by the Pecche inheritance, which had come to the family through his mother. None the less, even taking these considerations into account, the provision Sir William made for his second family went further than most contemporaries would have considered appropriate. The disinheritance was carried into effect by two final concords levied in Trinity term 1451. The two Staffordshire manors of Bescot and Aldridge and the Warwickshire manor of Monkspath were settled on Sir William for life, with remainders in tail first to Robert Mountfort and Mary, his wife, and then to Edmund. Even though this overturned a settlement made in 1425, giving Bescot to Sir Baldwin, the latter had no very substantial reason to resent the loss of these three manors. He could have had no expectation of inheriting one of them, that of Aldridge, the property of his stepmother, and Robert, as a younger son who had found a wife, had some claim to a reasonable provision.
Sir Baldwin could still look forward to inheriting his mother’s substantial estate, principally the Warwickshire manor of Hampton-in-Arden. Even so the sacrifice he was expected to make was far greater than that demanded of the vast majority of heirs. In short, he had much to complain about: the course of the dispute suggests that although he was prepared to accept the loss of Remenham he could not reconcile himself to the loss of Coleshill or Ilmington. Sir William must have been well aware of this. According to a later complaint, ‘in dyvers parliamentes’ he ‘laboured to have hadde auctorised, approved and affermed’ the fine of 1451 ‘to the fynall disheritson’ of his eldest son. This cannot be taken literally: no Parliament met between the levying of the fine and Sir William’s death. One need not doubt, however, that he took measures to protect the settlement. When he drew up his brief will on 22 Feb. 1452, he excluded his eldest son from the administration of his affairs, naming his wife and our MP as his sole executors.
The dispute began in earnest when Sir William died on 6 Dec. 1452 and was to dominate Warwickshire politics for the rest of the decade. His death did not bring Edmund an immediate windfall of land: under the terms of the 1451 fine his mother had a life interest in the three disputed manors, an interest which, by his will, Sir William had charged with a modest annuity of 20 marks payable to Edmund from the manor of Ilmington. This, however, hardly diminished his powerful interest in defending the settlement, and he worked closely with his mother in doing so. Five days after her husband’s death she strengthened their position by naming powerful feoffees in the manor of Remenham. Her choice reflects the high-standing of her son in the royal court: the feoffees were headed by the King himself, to whom was added the duke of Buckingham and his eldest son, Sir Humphrey, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, and two household knights, (Sir) Philip Wentworth* and Sir Richard Tunstall†.
Our MP’s influence and connexions are also apparent in the issue of a commission on 30 Dec. to Buckingham and others to inquire into Sir William’s Warwickshire lands, and the letters of denization granted to his mother three weeks later (she had been born in Brittany). On the following 27 Jan. Thomas Bate, a lawyer in Buckingham’s service, and the sheriff, Sir William Birmingham, sat as commissioners at Coleshill, and the jury assembled before them returned that the disputed manors of Coleshill and Ilmington were held under the terms of the fine of 1451.
None the less, disadvantaged as he was by Buckingham’s support for Edmund, Sir Baldwin was not without resources of his own. From 1451 he had been an annuitant of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and he found the earl ready to lend him active support.
If 1453 was a bad year for Edmund Mountfort, the early part of 1454 was yet worse. On 7 Jan. the earl of Warwick presided over a session of the peace at Warwick in which one of Edmund’s servants, a yeoman of Kenilworth, was indicted for the murder of one of Sir Baldwin’s men at Coleshill. Nearly two months later, on 23 Feb., Sir Baldwin pursued his advantage by suing out a special assize of novel disseisin in respect of the manors of Coleshill and Ilmington. The nomination among the commissioners of three of Warwick’s servants, namely Thomas Hugford*, Thomas Burdet* and Thomas Throckmorton*, posed an obvious threat to our MP.
Soon after this verdict Edmund and his mother found themselves facing a suit of a different type. In a petition to the chancellor, the prioress of Markyate in Bedfordshire complained that although she had farmed her convent’s churches of Coleshill and Kingsbury to them for a term of seven years from 12 Jan. 1453 at an annual rent of £29, no rent had been paid and, since that rent had been assigned upon the manor of Coleshill, she could expect none because Coleshill had been recovered against them ‘by a dewe mene of the lawe’.
Yet all was not lost for Edmund. To weigh against this series of setbacks, he had the continued support of the duke of Buckingham. Not only did the duke continue to harry Sir Baldwin and Simon by claiming damages £1,000 against them for close-breaking at Coleshill, but, much more importantly, his influence resulted in the reference of the dispute to arbitration at a time when the tide was running so fast against his client. The award, an imprecise record of which was preserved by the Warwickshire antiquary, William Dugdale, cannot be dated precisely, but a strong clue is given by the identity of the exalted panel of arbiters: they were Richard, duke of York, Warwick’s father, Richard, earl of Salisbury, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, and Buckingham’s half-brothers, Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry, Viscount Bourgchier. Such a panel could only have been chosen during one of York’s protectorates, and Worcester’s presence suggests that it was selected while he was treasurer of England, in other words, that the award was made during the first protectorate. It is probably to be seen as another instance of York’s efforts at peace-making at that time. If this is so the award’s terms show how far he was prepared to go to win the support of the powerful Buckingham. The arbiters awarded Coleshill to Edmund and Joan, with remainder to the Staffords (a clear indication that Buckingham’s support for Edmund was far from disinterested), and the less important manor of Ilmington to Sir Baldwin.
This division only made sense with reference to the interests of Buckingham: Coleshill was of particular interest to him because of its proximity to his castle of Maxstoke. Its assignment to Edmund suggests that the award was made after Sir Baldwin’s settlement of the manor on 26 July.
These considerations quickly became irrelevant. The award was too partial to bring a final settlement, nor, even had it been better conceived, would it have retained its relevance in the face of the ensuing political changes. After its making Edmund’s position was first strengthened by the King’s recovery only to worsen rapidly in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans on 22 May 1455. The growing political divide meant that the duke of York no longer had any reason to molify Buckingham, and Edmund was now bereft of effective allies. In Trinity term following the battle he and his mother found themselves facing actions of forcible entry and detinue of charters; and on 14 Nov., five days before York was reappointed as Protector, the record and process of the special assize was called into the court of common pleas, at Sir Baldwin’s request, for execution of judgement, an execution which would overturn the partial award.
Yet, with bewildering speed in the rapidly-fluctuating politics of the mid 1450s, Edmund’s fortunes rose once more into the ascendant. The end of York’s second protectorate, the earl of Warwick’s departure for Calais and the removal of the court to Coventry gave him a new advantage, much greater than that enjoyed by his opponents between 1453 and 1455. On 8 Dec. 1456 Sir Baldwin was obliged to make a declaration destructive of his own title and supportive of that of his half-brother: he asserted that he had continued in possession of Coleshill and Ilmington despite the feoffment of 26 July 1454 (and, incidentally, despite the award) and hence that the earl of Warwick had never had any interest in the manors. This meant that his opponents need no longer name the earl in subsequent actions. Three days later he granted Ilmington to Edmund, and quitclaimed Coleshill to Buckingham, Stafford and Wiltshire. But now Edmund was not merely content to take what his father had given him by the fine of 1451. On 18 Jan. 1457 the unfortunate Sir Baldwin was obliged to quitclaim other of their father’s manors at Kingsford, Ullenhall and Kingshurst to Stafford (Buckingham’s son), Sir Philip Wentworth, Sir Richard Tunstall and others connected with Buckingham and Edmund.
Edmund had now disposed of the claims of his elder half-brother, who seems, at about this date, to have escaped from his troubles by taking holy orders.
These facts raise the strong presumption that Edmund and his allies used illegitimate means to defeat their rivals. This presumption is given substance and definition by a declaration made by Sir Baldwin in 1471. It described how Buckingham and the earl of Wiltshire, ‘by myght and favour’ of Henry VI, had brought actions of forcible entry against himself and his son and ‘arted theyme to plete such matiers as to the seid late Duke, Eorle and Edmond liked, and theym tried agenst the seid Baldewyn and Symond, and afterward theire seid triall affermed by an atteynt’. Worse still, they compelled him to release his right after incarcerating him at Coventry and Maxstoke, and imprisoned Simon (perhaps on the indictment above) on his refusal to follow suit.
The actions cited in this petition can be traced in the plea rolls, and it is clear that they were, as Sir Baldwin claimed, collusively pleaded. In Trinity term 1458, when he appeared to answer our MP for forcible entry into Ilmington, he pleaded an entail made by final concord in 1314; Edmund decisively replied that the entail was invalid as neither of the parties to the fine had anything in the manor when it was levied, and that in any event the claims of Sir Baldwin were barred by the collateral warranty of his childless brother, John. In the same term, a Warwickshire jury came into King’s bench in an action sued against Sir Baldwin by Buckingham and Wiltshire for forcible entry into Coleshill; it found against Sir Baldwin’s claim that the manor had been entailed by deed. This verdict was confirmed in an action of attaint by a jury sitting at Coleshill on 4 Jan. 1459, on the same day as another jury returned a verdict in Edmund’s favour in the action over Ilmington.
The employment of such tactics serves to explain the continued unpopularity of Edmund’s claim to the disputed manors. In finding feoffees in these years he called upon the services of only one of the county’s gentry and that was Henry Filongley*, a courtier and servant of his ally, the earl of Wiltshire.
None the less, despite his apparent local unpopularity, Edmund was at the height of his fortunes as the 1450s ended. As national politics became so polarized as to make further serious conflict inevitable, his intimacy with the dominant court party made him a figure of importance, particularly because the court spent much of its time at Coventry. By November 1458 he had risen to the high Household office of King’s carver, and, on the following 27 Dec., he was granted a life annuity of 50 marks assigned upon the duchy of Lancaster manor of Long Bennington (Lincolnshire).
Such services meant Sir Edmund benefited substantially from the forfeitures of the Yorkist lords carried through by the Parliament of which he was a Member. In the last 11 days of the parliamentary session he was appointed to two important offices: he was named as receiver-general of great estates forfeited by the earl of Warwick, and granted for life the stewardship of the earl’s lands in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. These offices made him a man of immense importance, if not popularity, in his native shire, lacking only an extensive estate of his own. Had the Lancastrian regime lasted, royal patronage would no doubt have provided him with one. A start was made early in 1460: on 5 Feb., ‘for good service against the rebels’, he was granted in fee tail two manors in the vicinity of Coleshill, those of Bolehall and Shustoke forfeited by his kinsman, John, Lord Clinton. To these he quickly added the nearby manor of Sutton Coldfield, once of the earl of Warwick, although this was granted to him only at farm for a term of ten years.
This prosperity was, however, to be of short duration. The victorious return of the Yorkists in the following summer meant the loss of Sir Edmund’s grants and offices, and threatened his tenure of the manor of Coleshill and the other property claimed by the senior Mountfort line. There is little reason to doubt that immediately after the battle of Northampton on 10 July Sir Baldwin and Simon repossessed themselves of the disputed lands.
Oddly, although he was both attainted and in Scotland, Sir Edmund was the subject of actions in the common law courts in the early 1460s. In Easter term 1462 Alice, widow of one Henry Walron, appealed him, together with another Lancastrian, (Sir) William Vernon*, as accessories to the murder of her husband in Nottinghamshire. The plea roll gives no further details – the appeal, like so many others, was abandoned before it came to pleading – but it is a fair speculation that the murder took place as the Lancastrian army marched south after the battle of Wakefield. Since Walron had been a servant of the earl of Warwick, our MP had more than one reason to connive in his death. In the same term Simon Mountfort had an action pending against him for assaulting and imprisoning him at Kenilworth, and he and his servant, John Denbawde, were duly outlawed on 13 June 1463 for their failure to answer.
Sir Edmund, as one of the most active of the Lancastrian exiles, was then well outside the reach of the common law. In June 1462 he travelled with Queen Margaret to Tours for the conclusion of her treaty with the French King, Louis XI, to which he was one of six Lancastrian signatories exclusive of the queen herself. A year later he was in the queen’s company as she sailed from Bamburgh to Sluys to seek an interview with Philip, duke of Burgundy. He may then have been present, along with his ill-fated stepson, (Sir) Ralph Gray, at the battle at Hexham of 15 May 1464, which brought an effective end to Lancastrian campaigns in the north. He was wise enough to flee, eventually joining the court of the exiled queen at Koeur. His stepson fared far worse, suffering a brutal execution on the following 10 July.
Nothing else is known of Sir Edmund’s activities in the 1460s, but he did not return to England until the Readeption. He was probably back by early in 1471, and it was his presence (or prospective presence) that prompted Sir Baldwin, on 10 Jan., to make a formal declaration, in the presence of the prior of Maxstoke and others, that the conveyances he had made to Edmund and his feoffees in the late 1450s had been made ‘by compulcion’ and that the disputed manors were his by entail.
After this decisive setback to the queen’s cause, Sir Edmund finally bowed to the prevailing political wind. Little can be discovered about his activities, yet it is clear he remained in England awaiting the opportunity to reconcile himself to the restored Edward IV. Although there is no record of the reversal of his attainder on the Parliament roll for the King’s second reign, there can be no doubt (notwithstanding the fact that he sued out a reversal in 1485) that he was among the former household servants of Henry VI who secured such reversals in the long Parliament of 1472-5. There survives among the Mountfort archives a petition made to Edward IV by Sir Edmund, ‘nowe sory and repentant of that he hath offend ayenst your royal estate’, and asking for restoration; the petition was granted on condition that it did not prejudice the interests of Sir Simon. The general pardon granted to Sir Edmund on 4 Aug. 1474 suggests that he secured his reversal in the parliamentary session of the previous 6 June to 18 July.
Once restored, Sir Edmund was quick to re-establish his connexion with the Staffords. By 1475 he was steward of the household to the young Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, the grandson of his former patron, and in the following year the duke named him as one of his justices in the great Welsh lordship of Newport.
These feoffees were an impressive group and indicate how readily Sir Edmund had won the acceptance of the political community. They were headed by two knights of the royal body, Sir Humphrey Talbot†, a younger son of the first earl of Shrewsbury, and Sir Thomas Montgomery†, who was known to our MP through their mutual service in Henry VI’s household; to whom were added Sir Edmund’s old friend, Tunstall, who had become one of Edward IV’s councillors after the reversal of his attainder, the King’s attorney-general, William Hussey*, and a Stafford servant whose importance lay in the future, Reynold Bray†. By the end of the reign he had made a new feoffment to an equally impressive group, headed by John Morton, bishop of Ely, Francis, Lord Lovell, and (Sir) William Norris*. It was these feoffees who, on 10 Aug. 1482, demised the manor to a rising Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, Thomas Lovell†, to hold for a term of 20 years to our MP’s use. The probable purpose of these conveyances was to protect the manor from Sir Simon. An undated bond shows that their rival claims were put to arbitration with Norris acting for our MP and (Sir) Richard Harcourt*, William Berkeley† and John Brigges, serjeant-at-law, for Sir Simon. The presence of Norris among our MP’s feoffees in 1482 suggests that this award went in Sir Edmund’s favour.
Sir Edmund did not, however, have everything his own way as a returning exile. At some point during the chancellorship of Thomas Rotherham as bishop of Lincoln, that is, between 1475 and 1480, he found himself imprisoned in the counter, having been outlawed in Middlesex for fines due to the Crown from the time of Henry VI. He petitioned the chancellor, presumably successfully, for a writ of corpus cum causa on the grounds that his pardon covered the fines. It is unknown what lay behind this episode, but it is a reasonable surmise that Sir Simon was involved and that the imprisonment was another manifestation of the dispute.
This uneasy period ended with Richard III’s defeat at Bosworth. Sir Edmund’s earlier history made him a natural supporter of his supplanter, and, although he must have been approaching 70 years of age in 1485, he may have been with Henry Tudor at this decisive battle. He certainly had the immediate trust of the new monarch: in the first Parliament of the new reign he secured what seems to have been the second reversal of his attainder ‘for true service and allegiaunce to Henry VI’, and on 14 Nov. 1485, while this Parliament was in session, he was named as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire with a tally of reward of £90 as an inducement to serve.
Bedford’s patronage was responsible for the grant made to Sir Edmund at the end of the year of the stewardship of various lordships in Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire during the minority of the ill-fated Edward, earl of Warwick; as it was also for a grant made to him nearly five years later of the joint custody of the castle and cantred of Builth in Wales to hold during Bedford’s life.
After so striking and interesting a career it is disappointing that Sir Edmund’s will was largely concerned with comparatively mundane matters, although it is not without interest. He made it on 12 Mar. 1494, within days of his death, asking divine pardon ‘of my grete and manyfolde synnes and trespasses that I haue in all my lyfe committed contrary to the will and lawes of allmighty god’. He wanted to be buried in the lady chapel of the parish church of Henley-upon-Thames near Remenham in a tomb with the inscription proudly recording his service to the great: ‘Here lieth Syr Edmunde Mounteforde knyght somtyme councelor and kerver with the most blessed kyng henry the vjth and after chambyrlayne unto the high and myghty prynce Jasper duke of Bedford brother to the seid prince the seid kyng’. He bequeathed an annual rent of ten marks from his manor of Remenham as the salary of a priest to pray perpetually for his soul in the chapel as soon as royal licence could be had. Subject to this rent, the manor was to pass successively in tail to his servant John Preston and Norris. He instructed that all his goods in the ‘loggyng’ in Holborn he rented from the master of St. Bartholomew’s hospital be delivered into Preston’s hands. The will does not give the impression that he died a wealthy man. Indeed, his royal livery collar had been pledged to the abbot of Gloucester, and he left the sum of £5 for its redemption.