Thanks to the singularly fortunate survival of their voluminous letters and papers, the Pastons are the best known of all gentry families of late medieval England. An unrivalled source, these documents are a vivid record of their lives and times and supply much invaluable evidence about national and local politics. They also provide a unique wealth of biographical information about John Paston himself.
As gentry the Pastons were of very recent origin and, like many other parvenu families of the period, they owed their advancement to the law. John’s paternal grandfather, Clement Paston (d.1419), was a peasant, ‘a good pleyn husbond[man]’ according to one unfriendly source, which also alleged that his grandmother, Clement’s wife Beatrice Somerton (d.1409), was born a bondwoman. While undoubtedly non-gentle, the couple were far from the lowliest of the low. On the contrary, they belonged to the village elite at Paston in north-east Norfolk, as witnessed by their burial inside the parish church there rather than in a less prestigious plot in the churchyard outside. The Somertons were certainly distancing themselves from any servile antecedents by the early fifteenth century, as witnessed by the career of Beatrice’s brother, Geoffrey, a successful local attorney. Clement Paston was ambitious for his son William, whom he sent to school, and it appears that the childless Geoffrey Somerton funded much of the boy’s education. Probably something of a favourite of his uncle, William was to inherit much of Geoffrey’s property following his death in 1416.
Having studied at a grammar school, probably in Norwich, William followed his uncle’s footsteps by entering the law. He more than justified the investment made in him, for he rose far higher in that profession than Geoffrey Somerton and it was he who founded the Pastons’ fortunes. Having received his legal education at an inn of court in London (perhaps the Inner Temple, which John Paston later attended) he was an attorney in the court of common pleas by 1406. In the meantime, he began to acquire numerous offices and retainers in his native East Anglia and to serve in local government. Back at Westminster, he became a serjeant-at-law in about 1418 and a justice of the court of common pleas in the autumn of 1429. The very considerable income that the single-minded and ambitious William gained through his success in the law enabled him to invest significantly in land and he had accumulated estates worth about £250 p.a. by the early 1440s. Most of his acquisitions lay in the north-east of Norfolk, near to his very modest patrimony and the property that he had inherited from Geoffrey Somerton. While none of his manorial purchases lay in Paston itself, he accumulated as much land as he could in his home parish, in the hope of fulfilling what became one of the Pastons’ chief projects, the creation of a new manor there. Inevitably, William encountered opposition and rival claims when buying his estates, even in cases when the purchase was above board and his title good, although undoubtedly some of his acquisitions involved sharp practice on his part. As it happened, the most significant challenges arising from his dealings in the land market occurred after his death, meaning that it was his heir, the subject of this biography, who had to meet them.
Born in the autumn of 1421, John Paston was William’s eldest son by Agnes Berry, whom the judge had married in the previous year. The eldest daughter and coheir of a Hertfordshire knight, Agnes was William’s first and only spouse. Marrying at the relatively advanced age of 42 was probably a deliberate move on his part, in keeping with the rest of what we know of the hard and calculating William’s career. By waiting until he had achieved professional success and was of considerable means in his own right, he greatly increased his chances of making an advantageous match. His marriage also occurred after the deaths of his distinctly non-gentle parents, possibly a source of social embarrassment for a prospective bridegroom while they were still alive. Certainly, Agnes was a good catch: she was over 20 years William’s junior and at the prime age for childbearing; she also brought him three manors, Horwellbury in Hertfordshire, Stanstead in Suffolk and Marlingford in Norfolk. With the addition of her inheritance, his landed income probably rose to about £300 p.a. In terms of children at least, the marriage was a success, since besides John she bore William four other offspring, three sons and a daughter, who attained adulthood. Whether she had great affection for her much older husband is another matter, for she chose burial beside her father in the White Friars at Norwich rather than alongside William in the city’s cathedral. Alternatively, it is possible that her choice of burial place was dictated primarily by her desire to emphasize to posterity that she herself was a lady of good birth, even if she had married a man of lowly origin.
Educated at first in Norfolk, either within the Paston household or at a grammar school in Norwich, John attended Trinity Hall in Cambridge later in the same decade. Trinity Hall specialized in law and he had gained admission to the Inner Temple by 1440. The intention was that he should acquire the sort of knowledge invaluable for defending the interests of his newly landed family, rather than that he should practise the law professionally like his father. To better their chances of gaining full acceptance as gentry, the parvenu Pastons needed to demonstrate that they could live off their estates alone. The further to enhance family prestige, William made use of one or other of the many influential contacts he had made to secure a place for his son in the royal household, where at the age of 17 the young man began service as a yeoman of the King’s stable. He received a robe from the great wardrobe in 1438-9, 1439-40 and 1440-1, and Household accounts for the latter two years acknowledge his status as a ‘master in arts’, a distinction that few, if any of his non-clerical contemporaries in the royal establishment can have shared.
While serving in the Household, John married Margaret Mautby, the only surviving child of a Norfolk esquire from a well-established and respected family, and the heir to estates worth some £150 p.a.
Upon succeeding his father just over a year later, John did not gain full control of the Paston estates. When making his will in January 1444 William, no doubt mindful of his heir’s relative youth and inexperience and anxious to ensure that his younger children did not sink back down the social scale, was both generous to his widow and keen to set aside land for his other male offspring. For the rest of her life Agnes retained her three Berry manors, the Pastons’ house at Oxnead and the family holdings in and around Paston itself, probably worth about £100 p.a. in total. William provided for his second son Edmund by assigning him the manor of Snailwell in Cambridgeshire, and two youngest, William and Clement, by leaving them certain holdings in Norfolk. In terms of value, the properties reserved for John’s mother and brothers may have represented as much as half of the Paston estates. Even though Agnes’s interests were only temporary, they were as good as permanent as far as John was concerned since she comfortably outlived him. If relations between mother and son were somewhat strained, they were exacerbated by their falling out over a supposed nuncupative will – considerably more generous to John’s two youngest brothers than the written one – which she claimed that William had made on his deathbed. Furiously disputing her claim, John hastened to have the will of January 1444, of which both he and Agnes were executors, upheld. Although mother and son were afterwards able to establish a modus vivendi, it is possible that they were never fully reconciled. A further cause of tension was the failure to found a chantry that William had wished to see established in Norwich cathedral: John simply appropriated the cash set aside for that purpose, a striking act of ingratitude and lack of filial affection.
It was not long before John found himself facing threats to the integrity of the Paston estates. Before he died, William Paston had faced trouble over Oxnead from John Hauteyn, a former Carmelite friar whose family had once owned the manor. In assertion of his right to the property, Hauteyn had claimed that he had gained a release from his religious vows, with William countering that he had acquired that dispensation on false pretences. Hauteyn was still pursuing his claim in the law courts as late as mid 1450 although he appears to have abandoned it not long afterwards. Ultimately, he was no more than an irritant, and much more serious was a hostile claim to another Norfolk manor, East Beckham, which William had bought from Joan Mariot in the mid 1430s. The judge’s purchase had proved highly problematic, owing to the strong opposition he had encountered from Edmund Wynter I*, whose family had earlier held title to the manor. William had managed to gain physical possession of East Beckham in 1441 but immediately after his death Joan’s son, John Mariot, claimed it, possibly in connivance with Wynter. Wynter enjoyed the support of his son-in-law, John Heydon*, one of the arch villains of the Paston letters. Heydon’s involvement in the quarrel was probably the genesis of the well-known and abiding enmity between him and the Pastons. The extremely protracted and complicated dispute over East Beckham was still unresolved at John Paston’s death. Although finally able to complete their acquisition of the manor in the late 1460s, the unfortunate Pastons were by then in such financial straits that they were forced almost immediately to mortgage it to the lawyer Roger Townshend†, to whom title passed after they failed to redeem the mortgage.
The controversy over East Beckham was the first of the major land disputes that bedevilled John Paston throughout his career, controversies which threw into harsh light the central problem facing his family after his father’s death. While most of William’s purchases were legally sound, they were at the same time so recent that it was inevitable that they would provoke challenges. Even when highly speculative or fictional, hostile claims could result in years of trouble. Sometimes they might even lead to the permanent loss of property, especially if those making them were powerful or well connected. To add to the Pastons’ problems were their lowly antecedents. Understandably, they were extremely sensitive to the claim that they were mere ‘churls’, the offensive term that John Wymondham* (ironically of lowly origin himself, as indeed was another enemy, John Heydon) flung against Agnes and Margaret Paston when confronting them at Norwich in May 1448. He also called them ‘strong hores’ but no doubt the social slur hurt more than his crude and ungallant language. For the Pastons, this was not a matter of mere amour-propre; aspersions that challenged gentility could threaten liberty and property. During the last year of his life John spent several months in the Fleet prison in London, following allegations that he was of servile stock and therefore had no right to hold manors or exercise manorial lordship.
The East Beckham dispute was still in its relative infancy when in early 1448 Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, seized nearby Gresham, a manor purchased by William Paston in 1427 and set aside for the jointure of his daughter-in-law Margaret. Hungerford’s supposed title arose from his marriage to the female heir of the Moleyns family, lords of the manor in the fourteenth century, but his claim was completely spurious. Depending upon might rather than right, it is a particularly notorious example of the corruption of justice by a powerful courtier associated with the King’s chief minister, William de la Pole, marquess (soon duke) of Suffolk. Moleyns received strong encouragement for his unjust claim from John Heydon, a member of de la Pole’s following in East Anglia. In the autumn of 1448 Margaret Paston bravely took up residence at a house within the bounds of the manor, in order to collect rents and otherwise assert the Pastons’ rights there, but in the following January she and her servants were driven out by Moleyns’ men. Shortly afterwards, her husband petitioned Parliament about Moleyns’ actions,
The great quarrels over land that marked the latter part of Paston’s career, ensuring that it ended in grievous trouble and disappointment, arose from his controversial claim to the estates of the wealthy Sir John Fastolf. A veteran of the French wars and a relative of Margaret Paston, Sir John returned to his native Norfolk in 1454, having completed the building of his new castle at Caister near Great Yarmouth. At the beginning of the 1450s, Paston was just one of several lawyers and administrators in Fastolf’s service. Yet he rapidly became the most important member of the knight’s inner circle once Sir John had taken up residence at Caister. He became Fastolf’s protégé as well as chief adviser and Sir John may even have come to treat him as a surrogate son. Members of Fastolf’s staff like his chaplain, Thomas Howes, and secretary, William Worcestre, welcomed rather than resented the prominent position he came to occupy in their master’s counsels, appreciating as they did his ability to handle their frequently demanding and irascible employer. Howes was closely associated with Paston the mid 1450s. In June 1454 the two men received a royal grant of the keeping of the knight’s young relative, Thomas Fastolf† of Cowhaugh, Suffolk, and in the following year they were embroiled in litigation at the Exchequer with the courtier and de la Pole retainer, (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, over the same wardship. Paston and Howes were acting on behalf of Sir John, who had disputed it with Wentworth for a number of years, rather than on their own account, although Paston did entertain hopes of marrying the young man to one of his daughters.
By the mid 1450s the elderly Fastolf was struggling to remain fully in control of his own affairs, and by late 1457 he had entrusted Paston with the task of supervising the management of his estates. As Fastolf neared the end of his life, his extensive holdings attracted the covetous eyes of John Mowbray, 3rd duke of Norfolk, and other powerful figures. Allegedly, Mowbray had determined on gaining Caister as early as 1452 and, shortly before Fastolf’s death, he tried to persuade the knight either to sell him the reversion of that castle and lordship or to exchange it for the manor of South Walsham.
The first loss – albeit only temporary – was that of Caister itself. Within months of Edward IV’s accession in March 1461, the duke of Norfolk, emboldened by his association with the new Yorkist regime, sent his men to seize it. As it happened, Mowbray died suddenly in the following November, allowing the Pastons to recover possession, probably within a few months. Unhappily for Paston, in the meantime the King’s young brother-in-law, John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, seized Dedham in Essex, a former de la Pole manor but one that Sir John Fastolf had acquired entirely legitimately. Possibly it was with the hope of recovering his losses that at least partly inspired Paston to stand for election to Edward IV’s first Parliament as a knight of the shire for Norfolk; yet in doing so he became embroiled in a violent quarrel with the sheriff, Mowbray’s kinsman John Howard*, who strongly opposed his candidature. On a different front, Paston faced serious opposition from William Yelverton* and William Jenney*, both executors of Fastolf’s will of June 1459, so embroiling him in litigation in the secular and ecclesiastical law courts. Neither of them would accept his claim to the Fastolf lands, and he fell out with them soon after Sir John’s death. Another enemy was the ruffian Mowbray retainer, Gilbert Debenham I*, and during the early 1460s he, Yelverton and Jenney challenged Paston’s possession of Cotton and other Suffolk manors that had belonged to Fastolf. Owing to lawsuits that Jenney and one William Hogan (acting at Jenney’s behest) pursued against him at Westminster, Paston spent brief periods of confinement in the Marshalsea and Fleet prisons in London during 1462-4.
While Yelverton and Jenney proved a considerable nuisance, the gravest threat to Cotton came from John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, whose late father, William de la Pole, had sold it to Sir John Fastolf in 1434. In due course, it was lost to the duke and his formidable mother, Alice Chaucer, as were two other former Fastolf manors, Drayton and Hellesdon in Norfolk. The duke’s men seized Drayton and Hellesdon, both of which lay close to the de la Pole manor at Costessey, in mid October 1465. Paston’s eldest son, Sir John Paston, had taken up residence at Hellesdon in a vain attempt to defend it from de la Pole’s men, who rampaged through and devastated it. Just days before Hellesdon was lost, the younger Paston was caught up in a fracas in the vicinity of that manor where, it was later alleged, he and several of the Pastons’ servants encountered one Robert Redysdale (possibly a servant of the de la Poles) whom they pursued into a nearby river causing him to drown.
Dogged to the last, Paston made matters worse for himself through a lack of judgement and unwillingness to compromise with his opponents, whom unrealistically he hoped to defeat in the royal courts at Westminster. Ironically, in this respect his legal education appears to have blinkered him, ultimately proving more of a hindrance than a help. His predicament did nothing for his temper and at Christmas 1464 he quarrelled bitterly with his eldest son, banishing him, if only temporarily, from the Paston household. By now he was very short of money,
The rumours about their base origins that had continued to bedevil the Pastons were the cause of Paston’s imprisonment in the Fleet in 1465. He was taken into custody there following the laying of formal charges that he was a bondsman and therefore ineligible to hold manorial estates. It is likely that his accuser was the then Lord Scales, the King’s brother-in-law Anthony Wydeville, not least because Scales took the opportunity to seize Caister, which he then held for about six months, apparently with the encouragement of William Yelverton.
The matter of Sir John Fastolf’s will, which had so dominated Paston’s later years, remained unresolved until a settlement was reached under the auspices of Bishop Waynflete in 1470. The bishop, who now took on the role of the knight’s sole executor, was by no means a disinterested party, for he appropriated much of the Fastolf lands in order to endow Magdalen College, his own foundation at Oxford. He simply ignored the central purpose of Sir John’s will, the founding of a college at Caister; instead, the establishment of fellowships at Magdalen named in his honour would commemorate the knight. The settlement assigned Caister itself to the Pastons: while it was an extremely desirable property in its own right, it amounted to just a small part of what Paston had hoped to win.
Inevitably, Paston’s struggle to expand and then to retain his estates shaped his regional allegiances and involvement in local politics. It also compelled him to seek patrons and influenced his parliamentary career. Ironically, given that the Mowbrays would come to pose a serious threat to Caister, the dukes of Norfolk were frequently foremost among those lords whose patronage Paston sought, although with precious little result. Paston occasionally gave legal counsel to the 3rd duke of Norfolk, whom his father had also served and from whom he hoped for help during his quarrels with Lord Moleyns and servants of the de la Poles. The trouble that Paston suffered at the hands of Moleyns and members of the de la Pole affinity was what drove him to look to Norfolk. In the early 1450s Mowbray became an ally of the leading opponent of the Court, Richard, duke of York, who in turn was seen to represent the views of those old soldiers like Sir John Fastolf who were dismayed by English losses in France, failures for which they held William de la Pole to blame. Fastolf also had more personal reasons for opposing the de la Pole affinity in East Anglia, where he had recently clashed with Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, John Heydon and others of Suffolk’s men in connexion with the Bardolf inheritance in East Anglia.
For the Pastons it was unfortunate that de la Pole, not Mowbray, happened to head the dominant and most firmly established power structure in East Anglia. Voicing as they do the views of opponents of de la Pole and his affinity, the Paston letters offer a skewed picture of the politics of the region in the mid fifteenth century. Although the Mowbrays possessed substantial estates in Suffolk, they had previously exercised little political influence in East Anglia; if anyone was an interloper trying to upset the status quo it was Mowbray, not de la Pole. In spite of the death of the duke of Suffolk in 1450, the de la Pole affinity in the region was a far more cohesive force than that of Mowbray, as it demonstrated by rallying around his widowed duchess, Alice Chaucer. Norfolk wielded greatest influence when acting in association with the duke of York, rather than by himself. He added to his own problems in the battle for regional dominance since he was an extremely inept lord who was prone to fall out with his followers,
A no more reliable lord than Mowbray was the maverick courtier Thomas Daniell*, not least because Daniell allied himself with the duke of Norfolk in the first half of the 1450s as part of his own attempts to challenge de la Pole dominance in East Anglia. Paston’s efforts to secure the patronage of such a disreputable figure proved a mistake. In the late 1440s Daniell had ruthlessly swindled the hapless Henry Wodehouse, son and heir of John*, out of his inheritance in south-west Norfolk, so coming into conflict with his victim’s friends in the de la Pole affinity, notably Henry’s former brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tuddenham. While Paston had played no part in this disgraceful episode, his association with Daniell ensured for him the dangerous enmity of Tuddenham, just as Sir Thomas was clashing with Sir John Fastolf (ultimately Paston’s only reliable patron) over the Bardolf inheritance. Soon this association became even more undesirable, for in the spring of 1450 Daniell seized Braydeston, a manor in east Norfolk belonging to Margaret Paston’s relatives the Berneys. Bound by his ties of kinship with that family, in the resulting quarrel Paston sided with Osbert Mountford, stepfather of the young Berney heir, John Berney, rather than Daniell. Mountford also received help from friends in the de la Pole affinity, meaning that Paston found himself temporarily allied with the likes of John Heydon against his supposed patron. Daniell’s claim to Braydeston brought the Pastons’ relationship with him to breaking point and showed that they could hope for little from him. Worse still, in April 1452 Charles Nowell and five other servants of Daniell attacked Paston outside Norwich cathedral. During 1452-3, Paston was among those who complained to the authorities, again in association with members of the de la Pole affinity, about the activities of his erstwhile patron’s lawless followers.
Interwoven with the lawlessness and disturbed politics of mid fifteenth century East Anglia were the major upheavals then occurring nationally. Paston’s links with the 3rd duke of Norfolk (notwithstanding his troubles with that lord), his special ties with Sir John Fastolf and his general hostility towards the de la Pole affinity ensured that he did not much care for the Lancastrian government and was usually associated with the Yorkists. Indeed, he had a ‘Yorkist’ brother-in-law in Robert Poynings* who married his sister Elizabeth in 1458. Although not directly involved in the civil wars, Paston helped the duchess of York on at least one occasion during a period of high political tension, providing accommodation for her and her three youngest children at Fastolf’s house in Southwark in September 1460, while her husband was returning from Ireland. Shortly after the accession of Edward IV, Paston sent his own eldest son to the Yorkist Court, hoping that he could use a position there to lobby on behalf of the Pastons and their claim to the Fastolf lands. Although knighted in the spring of 1463, the young man struggled to establish himself in the Household, and it was not until later that decade that he came to frequent the King’s company and become a friend of Anthony Wydeville, in spite of Wydeville’s ill treatment of the Pastons in 1465. Closer to home, Paston also secured a place in the household of the young 4th duke of Norfolk for his second son, who in 1463-4 campaigned with Mowbray against the Lancastrians in northern England and north Wales. Evidently, the Pastons nursed hopes of receiving better ‘good lordship’ from the duke than they had from his father and predecessor, expectations that were dashed when Mowbray seized Caister just over three years after Paston’s death. It was their sufferings at the hands of Mowbray and failure to secure a powerful patron at Edward IV’s Court that prompted the previously ‘Yorkist’ Pastons to side with the Lancastrians in 1470 and Paston’s sons to fight for Henry VI at Barnet.
Previously, it was during periods of Yorkist ascendancy in national politics that Paston nurtured the greatest hopes of successfully defending his family’s interests and making good his claim to the Fastolf estates. When the duke of York first came to the fore in the affairs of the realm, Paston and others opposed to the associates and followers of the late duke of Suffolk in East Anglia saw it as an opportunity to get the better of their enemies. York visited the region in the autumn of 1450. While there, he sought to influence the election of the knights of the shire for Norfolk to the Parliament of that year, but neither his visit nor the oyer and terminer hearings held in East Anglia in 1450-1 achieved the result desired by Fastolf, Paston and other opponents of the de la Pole affinity. Assisted by Thomas, Lord Scales, and friends at Court, the de la Pole following was sufficiently resilient to weather the storm, while York, whose newly won influence at the centre of power proved short-lived, was in no position to sustain an interest in East Anglian affairs. York’s appointment as Protector of England in the spring of 1454 renewed the expectations of the Pastons and their friends, for it loosened the Household’s grip on the government and rendered Tuddenham, Heydon and other de la Pole men more vulnerable to attack. Again such hopes were short-lived, although just over a year later York’s victory at the battle of St. Albans provided fresh grounds for optimism. Following St. Albans, Paston was encouraged to consider standing for Parliament and Sir John Fastolf believed he had a better chance of winning a lawsuit he had brought against Sir Philip Wentworth, now seemingly in disgrace. Having borne the King’s standard to the battle, Wentworth had allegedly cast it aside while cravenly fleeing the field. Conversely, it was the Pastons and their friends who came under pressure later in the decade, after the Lancastrian establishment had largely regained control of events. At the end of 1458, for example, Tuddenham and Heydon were among those commissioned to arrest Paston, his brother William, Osbert Mountford and others for allegedly attacking the persons and property of the King’s lieges in Norfolk.
It is probably no coincidence that Paston entered Parliament during the same period of Yorkist ascendancy. As their letters show, the Pastons endeavoured to keep abreast of national politics, including parliamentary affairs, since an understanding of what was happening at the centre of power at a time of great instability was crucial for their wellbeing at a regional level. In all likelihood, Paston was already knowledgeable about parliamentary matters when he succeeded his father, not least because William Paston had served as a trier of petitions in the consecutive Parliaments of 1439 and 1442.
Paston’s first known dealings with Parliament occurred shortly after his father’s death. At some stage during that of 1445-6 he petitioned the Commons over Snailwell, the Cambridgeshire manor left to his younger brother Edmund in William Paston’s will. In spite of damage to the document, it is clearly that he was unjustly attempting to claim Snailwell for himself, apparently by exploiting a mistake made in the inquisition post mortem held for Judge Paston in Cambridgeshire. At this inquiry, held in late October 1444, the jury declared that the deceased’s heir was his 16-year old son ‘William’, even though the judge’s offspring of that name was his third son, born in 1436. The petition pointed out this error, stating that Paston was the judge’s eldest son, while at the same time omitting to mention that it was Edmund who should have succeeded to the Cambridgeshire property. The Commons sent it to the Upper House to consider but there is no record of the Lords’ deliberations on this matter. The inquisition post mortem also shows that John Paston had taken physical possession of Snailwell immediately after his father’s death. In late June 1445 (during the recess following the second session of the Parliament), however, the Crown committed its keeping to Edmund Paston, John Dam* and William Bakton during the minority of the ‘William’ named in the inquisition post mortem. It is puzzling to find Edmund as one of the temporary grantees of what was rightfully his, but possibly gaining custody was an interim measure until he and his associates could correct the erroneous finding and prove his claim.
Within a year of the dissolution of the Parliament of 1445, Paston attended the election of the knights of the shire for Norfolk to the succeeding assembly. The Parliament of 1447 met at Bury St. Edmunds, where the then chief opponent of the government and Court, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was arrested upon his arrival and died shortly afterwards. This Parliament probably contained a higher than usual number of Household men serving as knights of the shire,
After 1447, Paston did not attest another parliamentary election until 1450, but he took a keen interest in the consecutive Parliaments of 1449 (Feb.) and 1449-50, particularly the former, for which he prepared a petition, addressed to the King and Lords, about Lord Moleyns’ illegal seizure of Gresham.
Following the summons of the next Parliament just a few months later, Paston participated in the canvassing in Norfolk and he witnessed the election of the county’s knights of the shire. On 6 Oct. 1450, William Yelverton’s clerk William Wayte wrote to him with news of the activities of Richard, duke of York, who had assumed the role of chief opponent of the unpopular government and Court, and with his letter he enclosed a copy of the bill that the duke submitted to the King upon his return from Ireland. Wayte also gave Paston practical advice about obtaining the duke’s ‘good lordship’ and asked him to support complaints to York about the activities of Tuddenham and Heydon and their associates. Furthermore, he had suggested that Paston himself should stand for election alongside (Sir) Miles Stapleton*:
‘Syr, laboure ze for be knyth of the shire, and speke to my Mayster Stapulton also that he be yt’. It is impossible to tell whether Paston seriously considered standing, although he may well have wished to use a seat in Parliament to pursue further his grievances against Lord Moleyns, still in occupation of Gresham. If he did, he was perhaps dissuaded from doing so by a letter of 16 Oct. from the duke of Norfolk who had opportunistically allied himself with York. Norfolk’s missive was brief and to the point. He informed Paston that he and York, who was ‘labouring’ hard in East Anglia to ensure the return of men sympathetic to his cause, had decided whom they wished to sit for the county and commanded him to ‘make no laboure contrarie to oure desire’. Two days later, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, wrote to Paston, informing him that the dukes’ candidates were Sir William Chamberlain† and Henry Gray*. In the event, the electors were not prepared to let the two magnates have it all their own way: although they elected Gray they chose Stapleton, a connexion of the de la Poles, to sit alongside him. On the other hand, Stapleton was far from unacceptable to York, whom he appears to have waited upon at Norwich around the time of the election, or to Sir John Fastolf, who had considered proposing him for the shrievalty of Norfolk and Suffolk shortly before Parliament opened.
It was in preparation for the Parliament of 1450 that the dukes of York and Norfolk gathered supporters to accompany them to Westminster in force. On 22 Oct. Mowbray, writing from Framlingham, ordered Paston to ‘make you redy to awayte vpon vs at Yippiswich toward the parlement the viij day of Nouembre in youre best aray, with as many clenly people as ye may gete for oure worship at this tyme’.
It appears that Paston took less interest in the elections to the Parliament of 1453, for he did not attest the return of Norfolk’s knights of the shire to that assembly. Having won back Gresham, he had no pressing reason to take part and, in any case, a resurgent Court had summoned the Parliament, meaning that circumstances now favoured his regional opponents. He did however receive a letter referring to the Parliament soon after the opening of its last session on 14 Feb. 1454. The writer was the earl of Oxford’s servant Thomas Denys, then a prisoner in the Fleet as a result of his bitter quarrel with Thomas Ingham* of Norwich and his sons. In the letter, dated 20 Mar., Denys referred to a petition that one of those sons, Walter Ingham, had submitted to the Parliament: ‘a ful straunge acte is passid agayn me in the Higher Hous before the lordis, wherof I send you a copie, neuerthelesse I hope to God that it shal not passe in the Comoun Hous’. Enclosed with the letter was a copy of the petition, by which Walter complained that Denys’s men had ambushed and seriously injured him near Wivenhoe in Essex, an incident that had caused the earl to disown his servant. Denys wrote to Paston to seek his support, for he and John were on good terms. Following the death of Walter’s elder brother, Thomas Ingham junior, in late 1451 or early 1452, Paston had helped Denys to secure the hand in marriage of his widow, Agnes, but the couple had quickly fallen out with the Inghams, leading to litigation in the Chancery. In November 1452, there had occurred a rowdy confrontation between their friend, John Guybon, on the one side and Walter and his brother John Ingham and their supporters on the other, first in the rolls chapel and then outside on Chancery Lane. One of those attending evensong in the chapel at the time, Paston had also witnessed the fracas in the street and he had given evidence of what he had seen to the master of the rolls immediately afterwards. While declaring that the Inghams and Guybon had brandished daggers at each other, he had specifically stated that Denys had drawn neither dagger nor knife. Paston again proved a good friend to Denys in 1454. Upon receiving the imprisoned man’s letter, he appears to have obliged by interceding with the earl of Oxford, so earning Denys’s lasting gratitude.
Following the calling of the next Parliament in 1455, in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, Paston entertained thoughts of standing for election as a knight of the shire for Norfolk. Unfortunately, as was the case five years earlier, there were already candidates who enjoyed the backing of the Mowbrays. In a letter of 8 June, Eleanor, duchess of Norfolk, expressed her ‘desire’ that Paston would give his ‘voice’ to John Howard and Sir Roger Chamberlain* as the county’s MPs. Whether she was issuing an order or merely making a request is not altogether clear, but Paston remained in contention. Sixteen days later, the duke of Norfolk’s retainer John Jenney*, younger brother of William, wrote to Paston to inform him that he had ‘labored diuerse men’ on behalf of Chamberlain. They had told him that they would accept Chamberlain but not Howard, who at that time had neither livelihood nor ‘conversement’ in the shire, and that they would have Paston instead of Howard. Adding that he had informed the duke of Norfolk of this reaction to his canvassing, Jenney nevertheless suggested that Paston might consider seeking one of the seats for Norwich. He closed his letter with a cautionary remark reflecting the troubled times in which they lived: ‘Sum men hold it right straunge to be in this parlement, and me thenkith they be wyse men that soo doo.’ In spite of this note of caution, Paston was not deterred from the possibility of standing as a knight of the shire, for he wished to know how the duke of Norfolk would react to him as a candidate, a question he asked the servant of Jenney’s who had delivered the letter to put to his master. Responding to this question, Jenney wrote back just a day later, on 25 June. He informed Paston that the duke had said that, ‘in asmeche as Howard myght noght be’, he would write to the under sheriff that ‘the shire shulde have fre eleccion’, although with the intention that neither Sir Thomas Tuddenham nor any other follower of the late duke of Suffolk should gain a seat. At the end of his letter, Jenney described Howard’s violent reaction to the duke’s willingness to discard him (‘wode as a wilde bullok’ was his now frequently quoted phrase) and voiced his own opposition to the disappointed candidate. As far as he was concerned:
It is a evill precedent for the shire that a straunge man shulde be chosyn, and no wurshipp to my lord of Yorke nor to my lord of Norffolk to write for hym; for yf the jentilmen of the shire will suffre sech inconvenyens, in good feithe the shire shall noght be called of seche wurshipp as it hathe be.
In the event, Howard should have saved his temper, for when the county court met the 53 attestors witnessed the return of him and Chamberlain. Among the attestors was Paston, but it is impossible to say whether he had willingly decided not to stand himself. Given the duke of Norfolk’s inept leadership, it is likely that the influence Mowbray was able to wield in 1455 owed much to his association with the powerful duke of York. Significantly, the first three of the four knights heading the list of attestors – John Fastolf, William Chamberlain, Robert Conyers* and John Curson – were associated with York as well as the Mowbrays. Yet the initial reaction to Howard’s candidature shows that Norfolk (and indeed York) could not take the electorate for granted. The gentry of the shire, comprising the most significant part of that electorate, valued their own ‘wurshipp’, as well as representation by one of their own rather than an ‘outsider’. They would not simply do a magnate’s bidding without considering their own interests.
Soon after the Parliament opened, John Heydon and his associates accused Paston, Yelverton and ‘Mayster Alyngton’ of conspiring to have a bill presented to that assembly accusing Heydon, Tuddenham and the bishop of Norwich of treason, but Paston angrily dismissed this as ‘slawnderus noyse’ intended to discredit him and the other two men.
The following Parliament, that of 1459, met in very different political circumstances, since it was summoned for the purpose of attainting the duke of York and his allies. On 7 Dec. that year John Bokkyng, a former servant of Sir John Fastolf, wrote to Paston and two other executors of Fastolf’s will of June 1459, William Yelverton and Henry Filongley*, from its venue of Coventry. He reassured them that the chancellor and treasurer were their ‘good lords’ in all their ‘materes’, presumably relating to Fastolf’s lands. As it happened, the occupants of these two great offices of state were respectively their fellow executor William Waynflete and Filongley’s patron, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire. Bokkyng added that Parliament had yet to attend to the attainder and forfeiture of the Yorkists, and that there were ‘many and diuerse particuler billes put jnne but noon redde ner touchyng vs’. Whatever the feelings of Paston and Yelverton, the turn of political events certainly favoured Filongley. A Lancastrian in spite of his links with Fastolf, whose niece he had married, the latter benefited directly from the Act of Attainder, in the form of grants of manors confiscated from Richard, earl of Warwick, and Thomas Colt*. In the same letter Bokkyng also wrote that he was sending a ‘grete bille of tidinges’ of events at Coventry to William Worcestre, for him to show to them, and as a postscript added a list naming all those who were to suffer attainder.
After the Yorkists had regained control of the government in the summer of 1460, Paston appears to have gained election to the Parliament that opened in the following October, although for what constituency is unclear. With the exception of that for Norwich, which was represented by Edward Cutler* and John Burton II*, none of the returns for the county and boroughs of Norfolk to the Parliament of 1460 have survived. Some authorities state that Paston sat as one of the county’s knights of the shire but, while likely, this assumption remains unproven, not least because the sheriff at the time was Sir Philip Wentworth. One might wonder how willingly Sir Philip would have returned a personal opponent although, given the political circumstances, he probably had little choice. It is however possible that by this stage he had already left East Anglia for northern England, to join the Lancastrian army in which he fought at Towton, and that it was the under sheriff who presided over the election.
While it is impossible to prove that Paston sat for Norfolk in 1460, it was certainly for his native county that he gained election to the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, although not without considerable controversy. When the shire court met at Norwich on 15 June 1461 the presiding officer was the under sheriff William Prys. The sheriff was the recently knighted John Howard, but he was probably still in northern England, to where he had accompanied the new King to campaign against the Lancastrian diehards there. At the election the ‘grettyst voyse’ was for Paston, John Berney† and Henry Gray (son of the MP of 1450) and three days later Prys wrote to Paston to inform him that he intended to return him and Gray, although ‘[n]euir the latyr I haue a master’. As it happened, the election was for nothing because the difficult situation in the north obliged the King to postpone the Parliament to November. On 10 Aug., Howard himself presided over a fresh election at which the electors chose Paston and Berney, an outcome that he refused to accept because he wished to return Gray and Sir William Chamberlain. A violent altercation ensued, during which one of Howard’s servants struck Paston with a dagger, but the latter must have come to the shire-house prepared for trouble, for the ‘good dobelet’ he was wearing saved him from serious injury. Howard’s version of events has survived in a petition that he submitted to the Crown. According to his exaggerated and extremely partisan account, Paston, Berney and their supporters had disrupted several shire courts. Howard claimed that in June Berney and a mob of armed men had so threatened Prys that the under sheriff had fled the shire-house before any election was held, and that similar threats of violence had likewise prevented Prys from holding the next shire court on 13 July. As for the August election, Howard alleged that Paston had arrived at the court with some 1,000 men, many of them heavily armed and unqualified to take part in the proceedings, and had forced him to seal an election indenture confirming Paston and Berney as knights of the shire. Reacting to the quarrel, the King ordered both Howard and Paston to appear before him but the latter, no doubt fearing his opponent’s influence at court, delayed obeying the summons. He is also likely to have had very real concerns for his own safety, since Howard’s wife, Katherine, was said to have boasted that his life ‘yulde goe no penny’ if he encountered any of her husband’s men. Upon eventually arriving in London in mid October, he spent about a fortnight in the Fleet, the prison to which he was no stranger during the latter part of his career, as a punishment for his recalcitrance. In spite of Howard’s status as a Household man, the authorities were sufficiently even-handed not to take his petition at face value. It appears that he went to prison as well, since in early November Margaret Paston heard that the authorities had taken him into custody. Later that month Margaret informed her husband that Howard’s complaint against him and his supporters had caused uproar among the people of Norfolk. While allowing for exaggeration on her part, it seems clear that Paston and Berney were the candidates most favoured by the electorate. Once again, the electors of Norfolk had demonstrated a willingness to resist ducal control, for both Chamberlain (previously unsuccessful at the election of 1450) and Gray were associated with the Mowbrays, as indeed was Howard. Yet it is not certain that Paston and Berney were able to take up their seats. If the later practice of requiring MPs-elect to produce copies of their electoral indentures as accreditation already applied in 1461, they cannot have done so when Parliament opened at Westminster on 4 Nov. At that date they certainly did not have any such copies to hand, for Howard, whom Sir Thomas Montgomery† replaced as sheriff three days later, had not submitted a return into Chancery, prompting Paston to sue him in the Exchequer on 1 Dec. for dereliction of duty. If in fact Paston had gained entry to the Commons by this date, he spent little time there. Just 20 days later, the chancellor prorogued Parliament to 6 May 1462, when it reopened and then immediately dissolved. In the meantime, there was further trouble at the shire court held at Norwich on 28 Dec. A rumour that William Prys, now working under Montgomery, had received a writ to hold yet another election spread through the city. An angry crowd gathered outside the shire hall and Prys was obliged to make a hurried exit. No doubt with a view to quashing this rumour, the election of Paston and Berney was confirmed when the court reconvened in early January.
Whether or not he was actually able to take up his seat, Paston was in London throughout the winter of 1461-2, in order to try to secure probate for his controversial version of the will of Sir John Fastolf. He was also away from home when his wife wrote to him in January 1463, probably on the 19th, with news about the forthcoming election in Norfolk to the Parliament of that year. Margaret informed her husband that Sir Robert Conyers had just dined with her, and that her guest had shown her a letter he had received from the King. The letter directed Conyers to attend the King’s brother-in-law John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, at the county court at Norwich on 24 Jan., the date set for the election of Norfolk’s knights of the shire. Conyers also told her ‘that euery jentylman of Norffolk and Suffolk that arne of any repetacion hathe writyng frome the Kyng in lyke wysse as he had’, perhaps implying to Margaret that her husband was not considered as such. As it happened, the Parliament of 1463 did not open until 29 Apr., following two postponements, and the result of the election in Norfolk is unknown because the return has not survived.
Ironically, it is because his college never came into being that there are commemorations for Sir John Fastolf to this day. Had it been founded, it would have come to an end with the dissolution of the colleges and chantries in the later 1540s; but the old warrior is still remembered in services held in the chapel of Magdalen College, and as recently as 2007 a Fastolf Society was established in honour of all Magdalen’s legators.