MULSHO, Henry (c.1365-1425), of Geddington, Northants.

The pedigree of the Mulshos poses several problems. Probably originally from Moulsoe in Buckinghamshire, they had risen to prominence during the career of our MP’s father. Oxf. DNB, ‘Mulso fam.’. Confusion has arisen from the misdating of the father’s death. This error is perpetuated in The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 806. It has generally been ascribed to 1400 on the basis of a surviving monumental inscription, but this inscription is incomplete. Gaps have been left for the day and month of John’s death and, after ‘cccc’, for the year, and it is a reasonable surmise that the occasion for its inscription was not his death but that of his wife Joan on 9 May 1400. Mon. Brasses: Portfolio Plates of the Mon. Brass Soc. no. 93. Indeed, there can be no doubt that John lived on to about 1410 and continued his involvement in local government until the end of his life. In 1404 he was granted an annual allowance of wood and game from the royal park of Brigstock in consideration of his ‘great age’ and long service to the Crown: CPR, 1401-5, p. 422. He was also then serving as steward of the liberty of the abbot of Peterborough: Acct. Rolls Peterborough Abbey, 126. This has implications for the accepted descent of the family. It was not (as previously assumed) John’s son and namesake who assumed his place in local affairs after 1400, and this amendment removes the reason for believing that this younger John, progenitor of the Mulshos of Finedon (not far from Geddington), was the eldest son. In fact, the elder John’s heir was almost certainly Thomas, who represented Northamptonshire in the Parliament of 1417. A Chancery petition of about 1430 describes him as such, and he was the chief beneficiary of the division of the Mulsho lands in about 1410. C1/7/114. This, however, does not change our MP’s position in the pedigree: like the younger John, he was

a younger brother of Thomas, and his inheritance from his father appears to have been confined to the family property at Geddington. He may, however, also have had a small inheritance from his mother. In the mid 1430s his son and heir, another Thomas, claimed the manor of Potcote (in Cold Higham, Northamptonshire) as son and heir of Henry, son of Ellen, daughter and heiress of Robert Seymour of Hannington. If this pedigree is correct, then it must be assumed that the elder John had more than the two wives, Margaret and Joan, assigned to him in the traditional pedigree, and that our MP and Thomas were half-brothers. The date of Henry’s birth cannot be accurately determined. His brother John was old enough in 1390 to have been present, as usher of the household of Thomas Mowbray, earl of Norfolk, at the baptism in Calais of the earl’s son, John. If, as seems likely, John Mulsho was younger than our MP, the latter was probably born in about 1365. CP40/701, rot. 133; CIPM, xix. 336.

Henry followed his father into the service of the heir to the duchy of York, Edward, duke of Aumâle, for whom he offered mainprise in Chancery in 1397. CFR, xi. 239. No doubt this service explains his appointment as escheator in 1395, when still without lands of his own, and, more importantly, the gains he made from royal patronage during the turbulent last years of Richard II’s reign. As one of the King’s principal supporters the duke was well placed to secure such benefits for his men. Thus, on 4 Oct. 1397, our MP was joined with his friend, Thomas English, in a grant of the wardship and marriage of John Bayeaux (b.1390) of Covington (Huntingdonshire) (whom he married to his eldest daughter Eleanor), and in the following April he had the grant to himself on payment of 25 marks, very much less than it was worth. A month later he was given another opportunity to profit when nominated alnager in his native county. CFR, xi. 228, 231; CPR, 1396-9, p. 328. He held the wardship until Bayeaux proved his age in 1413: CIPM, xx. 129. In view of his later military career, it may be that he accompanied Richard II in the King’s ill-judged expedition to Ireland in the summer of 1399 (perhaps in Aumâle’s retinue), but, like his father, he was quick to accept the inevitability of the Lancastrian accession. Indeed, the events of 1399 did little to alter the pattern of the career of either father or son. There was no break in the father’s local administrative service, and on 8 July 1401 the two men joined with other tenants of the royal manor of Geddington in taking a lease of the manor at a rent of £36 p.a. for a term of three years from the previous Michaelmas. CFR, xii. 130.

Henry continued in the service of Aumâle, who, on the death of Edmund of Langley in August 1402 inherited the duchy of York; and by Michaelmas term 1404 he was acting as the new duke’s steward. He also served him further afield. Since 1396 the duke had been keeper of the Channel Islands, and by 8 June 1406, when our MP shared a royal grant of the wardship of the lands of a Jersey landholder, William Payn, he was the duke’s lieutenant on the largest of those islands. CPR, 1405-8, p. 197; 1413-16, p. 315. He also joined his master in a much more important office. On the following 1 Nov., after a brief period in which he had been compromised by accusations of treason, York was reappointed to the constableship of the Tower of London and, within a short period thereafter, he named Mulsho as his lieutenant. Our MP was not the duke’s first appointee. On 13 Dec. 1406 Sir Ralph Bracebridge held the office: J.H. Wylie, Hen. IV, ii. 481. This office was profitable but it was much more than a sinecure, involving considerable responsibilities and duties, and must have made significant demands on our MP’s time. It also entailed the surrender of his post on Jersey. This, at least, is the implication of the grant he made on 10 Aug. 1409, giving to Payn’s widow all his property on the island. In any event, our MP’s new responsibilities at the Tower do not appear to have been to his liking. Shortly before 4 Aug. 1411 he entered an arrangement with Simon Camp†, an esquire of the royal household, invoking the duke’s licence to sell him the lieutenancy. The heavy fine imposed on the purchasor in 1414 for allowing an important prisoner to escape suggests that our MP was on the right side of this bargain. CPR, 1408-13, p. 303; CCR, 1405-9, pp. 366-7, 524.

Mulsho’s offices help to explain why he is not recorded as playing any part in the affairs of his native county between the late 1390s and the sale of the lieutenancy to Camp. When he did come to do so it was but briefly. On 8 Oct. 1411 he was at Northampton to attest the county’s parliamentary election, but more important matters soon distracted his attention. Three months later, on 12 Jan., he sued letters of protection as serving in the garrison in the castle of Guînes, where the King’s second son, Thomas of Lancaster, was captain, and it may be assumed that he participated in Lancaster’s expedition of the following autumn. He again served under Thomas in the Agincourt campaign and continued his military career into the latter part of Henry V’s reign. By the early summer of 1421 he was lieutenant of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, the captain of the garrison at Harfleur, with his two sons, Thomas and Henry, serving under him. C219/10/6; C76/95, m. 19; E101/45/4, m. 3; 50/9.

Mulsho was back in England by 1 May 1422 when he was among those commissioned to arrest several local gentry involved in a violent dispute with the royal parker of Brigstock. This seems to have drawn him into the dispute. On 27 May he was required to find surety in Chancery to keep the peace towards a servant of Robert Scott*; and at the same time Scott himself offered surety that Sir John Beaufo† and John Brauncepath*, close kinsmen of those to be arrested, would keep the peace to the parker. The implication is that Mulsho had acted more strongly in the parker’s defence than he was warranted to do under the terms of the commission. Whatever the case, the matter was quickly resolved: our MP was released from surety on appearing in Chancery a few weeks later. CCR, 1422-9, pp. 259, 260. It is probably no more than coincidental that Scott had recently replaced our MP as lt. of the Tower. Thereafter, perhaps disillusioned with this experience of domestic politics, Mulsho prepared to return to France, suing out letters of protection on 25 July. Whether he had time to depart before Henry V’s death on 31 Aug. is doubtful: if he did, he appears to have returned to England before the King’s funeral cortège. This reached Dover on about 31 Oct.; two days earlier Mulsho had been elected to represent his native county in Parliament. It is possible that he was elected in absentia, but it is more likely that he had returned to England before the King’s body. DKR, xliv. 638; C219/13/1.

After his term as an MP, Mulsho began to play some small part in local affairs. Late in the parliamentary session writs had been issued for the election of a new verderer in the royal forest of Rockingham, and the choice fell on our MP. Soon afterwards, in July 1423, he stood surety for the young William, Lord Zouche, on the latter’s agreement to pay 1,000 marks to his guardian for the hand of the wealthy St. Maur heiress. C242/10/7; CCR, 1422-9, p. 75. Yet Mulsho was not to be content with a career in local politics. His had been a life of service and it was to remain so until the end. The death of the duke of York at Agincourt had deprived him of his early patron, but by the end of his life he had found another of equal or greater standing. Although, at the date of his election to Parliament, there is no evidence that he numbered among the servants of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, soon afterwards he is found holding an intimate place in Gloucester’s retinue. This, together with the duke’s pressing need for support in this Parliament, strongly implies that he, in common with several other of its Members, was elected as one of his adherents. Whatever the case here, the last years of Mulsho’s career were certainly dominated by active service to this new master. On 2 July 1423 he was present in the Exchequer to receive assignment of the duke’s annuity as Protector, and, in discharging the same task on several occasions between the following October and June 1424, he is described as the treasurer of the duke’s household. J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 71-72; E403/660, mm. 10-12; 663, mm. 1-5, 8, 10; 664, mm. 16, 18, 19, 21; 666, mm. 1-3, 6. He surrendered this post to accompany Gloucester on the ill-judged expedition to Hainault. The duke sailed from Dover to Calais on 16 Oct. 1424, but, since our MP sued out letters of protection on both the following day and 4 Nov., he probably sailed with the third and final contingent of the duke’s army, arriving in Calais on 13 Nov. and not returning to England until the following spring. DKR, xlviii. 232, 233.

Mulsho did not long survive his last campaign. He made his will on 1 June 1425, desiring burial in the north isle of the church of Geddington and bequeathing ‘an ymage of the Trinite’ to be placed before him there. Other bequests give an indication of his resources, which appear to have been relatively modest: he left £40 for the marriage of the younger of his two daughters, Anne, and made provision for the repayment of debts amounting to a modest £11, to the payment of £2 of which he had pledged ‘a cuppe ... gilted and therynne the armes of France diffrented with a barre’. To his two sons he bequeathed his armour. He also remembered his poor tenants at Geddington, providing that they should benefit from the sale of two of his finest horses. For executors he looked only to his immediate family, naming his wife, his elder son and his elder daughter. Reg. Chichele, ii. 371-2. He was dead by the following 14 June when orders issued from Chancery for his replacement as one of the verderers of Rockingham, but his will was not proved until 31 Aug. The resolution of his affairs drew his executors into much litigation. They were, for example, called upon to defend a plea of debt sued against them by the executors of William Swinburne† (d.1422), formerly captain of Marck castle, and it is likely that this action arose out of the mutual military service of the testators. CCR, 1422-9, pp. 170, 174; CP40/666, rot. 116; 669, rots. 157, 349; 670, rot. 197. More important, however, was a suit concerning his widow alone. On 8 Nov. 1425 Simon Kynnesman† sued a writ of formedon against her for the manor of Great Oxendon, some 12 miles to the west of Geddington. The dispute was resolved out of court in February 1431 when, on the intervention of Humphrey, earl of Stafford, lord of the nearby manor of Rothwell, the plaintiff abandoned his claim on payment of 20 marks. CP40/667, rot. 140; CCR, 1429-35, p. 109. It is a reasonable surmise from the pleading that our MP’s widow had inherited the manor since she appears to have held it in her own right rather than as Henry’s widow.

Mulsho’s son and heir, Thomas, had a career that stood in marked contrast to the distinguished one of his father. That career began promisingly enough with service under his father in the garrison of Harfleur, and he appears to have remained in France intermittently throughout the 1420s. E101/50/9; Actes de la Chancellerie d’Henri VI ed. le Cacheux, ii. 369. Thereafter, however, he was involved in a catalogue of crimes at home. At a view of frankpledge at Geddington on 30 Sept. 1440 he was indicted for a remarkable string of murders and rapes dating back to 1426. Connexions with the royal household served to protect him from the consequences of his criminality, and in the following January he was able to sue out a general pardon. Later, in May 1446, after a further indictment as an accessory to murder, he conveyed his late mother’s manor of Great Oxendon and his other lands to feoffees headed by the steward of the Household, William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, and including John Penycoke*, another prominent household man. CPR, 1436-41, p. 511; KB27/738, rex rot. 27; 746, rex rot. 19; KB9/252/2/20; CCR, 1441-7, p. 437. These associations make it likely that Thomas is to be identified with the owner of the balinger, George de Touke, used to convey Margaret of Anjou and her entourage to England in the previous year. Add. 23938, f. 18. However this may be, his immunity seems to have weakened in the late 1440s. He had been outlawed by December 1448 for ‘diverse orible Crimes’ and, at about the same time, he was involved in an affray at Westminster in which his brother-in-law, Thomas Cosyn of London, was killed. He was dead by 27 Nov. 1452 when his sister and heiress, Margaret, Cosyn’s widow, conveyed the family lands to feoffees including his first cousin, Thomas Mulsho of Newton. E207/16/1/22, 24; KB27/752, rots. 9d, 67; E159/229, commissiones rot. 2.