Sir William Plumpton’s career is unusually well documented because of the fortuitous survival of transcripts of letters written to him in the 1460s and 1470s and of a series of deeds relating to his affairs.
Nonetheless, the West Riding was to remain the area of the family’s main concern, and it was into another of the prominent families there that the young William was married. On 20 Jan. 1416 his father contracted him to Elizabeth Stapleton, the ties of neighbourhood between the two families being reinforced by a mutual connexion with John, duke of Bedford. The bargain was a favourable one for the Plumptons and indicates the enhanced status the Foljambe lands had brought them: Elizabeth came with a large portion of 370 marks, for which Sir Robert undertook to settle lands in Kinoulton worth 40 marks p.a. on the couple and their issue. It was also agreed that the Stapletons should have the custody of the young couple, but this arrangement was soon overtaken by demands of feudal law.
In 1425 William entered into an almost unencumbered inheritance. His paternal grandmother’s death two years before had removed the last dowager with a charge upon the Plumpton lands, and although Margaret Rempston lived on until 1454 her interest in the Foljambe lands seems to have been confined to the Derbyshire manors of Ockbrook and Edensor. Nor, under the terms of his father’s will, did the demands of wider family provision place a serious drain on our MP’s resources. His two younger brothers were reasonably provided for with life annuities of 20 marks each, but the four unmarried women of the family, William’s sisters and aunts, were to have the ungenerous portions of only 40 marks each.
The deaths of both his father and father-in-law in the French wars did not deter William from a period of military service shortly after coming of age. On 27 Jan. 1427 he sued out letters of general attorney as about to depart for France and he is later found, as his father had been, in the retinue of the duke of Bedford. He probably owed his place there to Rempston, who was one of the duke’s chamberlains before his capture at the battle of Patay in 1429, where perhaps Plumpton also fought.
In November 1435 Plumpton entered into the first of a long series of marriage agreements for his expanding family. His infant daughter, Katherine, was contracted to William Zouche*, eldest son and heir of William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth, with his patron, the earl of Northumberland, acting as one of the guarantors for Katherine’s jointure.
Plumpton’s administrative career gathered pace at the end of the 1430s. His place in the service of the earl of Northumberland, a royal councillor, explains why, probably in the autumn of 1438, he was appointed to an office his father had held before him, the stewardship of Knaresborough (initially in company with the controller of the royal household, John Feriby*, who died in 1441). Later in the same year his local authority was further enhanced by nomination to the bench of the West Riding.
It is unlikely that Plumpton would have acted in this way without powerful backing, and it is clear that the dispute over tolls had already been drawn into a wider one between his master, the earl of Northumberland, and the archbishop over rival spheres of influence in Yorkshire. As the dispute continued he and the earl grew closer together. On 20 Feb. 1442 the earl named him as the steward of all his Yorkshire estates, perhaps to facilitate the raising of the Percy tenants against Kemp. Plumpton’s appointment was certainly followed by an escalation of the dispute. On 10 May 1443 Kemp complained to the King that large assemblies of rioters had attacked his manors and were now threatening his palace at Southwell in Nottinghamshire, and on the following day Plumpton and other Percy men were peremptorily summoned on pain of £1,000 to appear before the royal council on 31 May. This conciliar intervention diminished the tensions, but the dispute was only terminated when Kemp was translated to Canterbury in 1452.
Plumpton’s violent conduct may explain his removal from the West Riding commission of the peace in November 1443, but this was a minor setback which had little impact on his local standing.
Plumpton’s high standing at this date is also evidenced by the marriage he made for his eldest son, Robert (b.1431) in the summer of 1446: the bride was Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of Thomas, Lord Clifford.
In the early 1450s Plumpton either demonstrated a certain carelessness in his private affairs or else, for reasons that are unclear, had real financial difficulties. In 1450 writs were pending in Middlesex for his arrest to answer a Londoner, John Wigmore, for a debt of as much as £100, and on 29 Mar. 1451 he was outlawed in the London hustings for failure to answer three wealthy citizens, Thomas Morstead, William Horn and John Bedford, for debt and damages of £110. Although personally humiliating, however, his outlawry occasioned him little difficulty. Indeed, he was still labouring under its disability when pricked as sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the following year. Not until towards the end of his term of office did he take the trouble to put himself back on the right side of the law. In October 1453 he obtained a writ of error, and in the following month Bedford appeared in the court of common pleas to acknowledge himself satisfied of the debt and damages.
If this delay was caused by financial troubles on Plumpton’s part, these were relieved by two events. The death of Margaret Rempston in April 1454 brought him the Foljambe manors of Ockbrook and Edensor, which she had held in dower.
It was also at about this time that Sir William either entered into a marriage of his own or subsequently claimed to have done so. In July 1472 the parish clerk of Knaresborough remembered that this match had taken place in the parish church there on a Friday between Easter and Pentecost about 21 years before, in the presence of a handful of witnesses, who were urged to secrecy by the groom. It is difficult to explain this perceived need for secrecy. There may have been an element of social derogation in the match from Plumpton’s point of view, but hardly in sufficient degree to occasion scandal. Nor is it likely that the secrecy was designed to deprive the bride of her potential dower rights: in the late 1450s he is said to have enjoined his domestic chaplain to avow the match publicly should he be killed on the military campaign he was about to undertake. The difficulty in finding an explanation for this apparent secrecy suggests that the depositions of 1472 were a fabrication. Joan Wintringham was probably simply Plumpton’s long-term mistress, only acknowledged as his wife when he had determined to settle his estates on his son by her.
Matters of more public and immediate concern were to call Plumpton’s attention in the mid 1450s. Although there is no record of his involvement in the clashes between the Percys and the Nevilles in 1453-4, his service to the Percy earl explains why, on 16 Apr. 1455, he was one of those summoned for the West Riding to the controversial great council, the call of which provoked the Yorkist lords into rebellion. It is probable that he was in the earl’s retinue at the first battle of St. Albans and that he witnessed there his master’s death and that of Thomas, Lord Clifford. He may have paid a price, albeit a small one, for his participation: on 18 June, with the duke of York in control of government, he was granted a pardon of account from his shrievalty of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire of only £30, a sum significantly lower than was generally granted for that office. In the following year he accompanied the new earl of Northumberland on a raid into Scotland.
Violence of a more private kind dominated Plumpton’s career in the late 1450s. He became involved in a murderous quarrel with the Pierreponts, former rivals of the Foljambes and one of the leading Nottinghamshire families, over property in Mansfield Woodhouse.
With neither side holding the initiative, on 10 Feb. 1459 the disputants put their quarrel to a panel of arbiters indicative of their different political allegiances. Plumpton chose his neighbour in north Derbyshire, (Sir) William Vernon*, William Babington* and the lawyer Richard Neel*, all of whom were Lancastrian in sympathy or by connexion; and his rival, Henry Pierrepont†, son of the murdered man, turned to three supporters of the house of York, Sir John Melton* (brother of the murdered man’s widow), John Stanhope* and the lawyer, Richard Illingworth*. The nomination as umpire of one of the leading partisans of the Lancastrian regime, John, Viscount Beaumont, was no doubt welcome to our MP, but, more interestingly, it suggests that the award had powerful sponsors and was perhaps part of a wider effort on the part of the government to resolve local disputes. These efforts, if such they were, were soon overtaken by the outbreak of civil war, and Plumpton took an active role, rendering loyal support to the Percy earl and the house of Lancaster. Subsequent litigation provides some details of his activities. In a Chancery petition presented in about 1466, Robert Percy of Scotton near Knaresborough, who had fought for Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, at the battle of Blore Heath on 23 Sept. 1459, claimed that Plumpton had despatched his men to raid his property in the immediate aftermath of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge three weeks later. Worse, after Percy was taken at the battle of Wakefield on the following 30 Dec., our MP, in arms on the victorious side, laboured to have ‘his hede stryken of’ and plundered his lands of livestock and goods worth in excess of 100 marks.
The other charges laid against Plumpton concern his acts as one of the leading knights of the Lancastrian army. Later he was one of the many retainers of the earl of Northumberland appealed by the countess of Salisbury as accessories to the murder of her husband at Wakefield, and sued by his executors for taking livestock worth a massive £560 from Middleham and elsewhere.
It is not clear what exactly befell Sir William in the immediate aftermath of that battle, but it is probable that he was captured with other prominent Lancastrians at Cockermouth as he attempted to reach Scotland, and that he was brought before the new King at Newcastle on 1 May.
Plumpton’s private enemies were less generous. On 8 Oct. 1461, before the Kesteven j.p.s at Stamford, he was indicted for his actions there in the previous February, and in Easter term 1462 he was appealed by the countess of Salisbury as an accessory to her husband’s murder. On 31 May he and another of those appealed, his son-in-law, Sir George Darell, entered into two bonds in £1,000 and 1,000 marks to the appellor to abide her arbitration. No evidence survives of her decision and it is curious that there is no reference to the matter of the appeal in the surviving Plumpton letters.
Although Plumpton was able to ride the worst of the storm in the immediate aftermath of Edward IV’s accession, he continued to face difficulties into the mid 1460s. There appears to have been a major raid on his property in August 1463: he later complained before the barons of the Exchequer that the then sheriff of Yorkshire, (Sir) Robert Constable*, had taken livestock and goods worth as much as £300 from Plumpton.
The insecurity of these years prompted Plumpton to take more active measures to adapt to the new political dispensation. An earlier narrative of his career claimed that these efforts were remarkably successful. It was said that, in the mid 1460s, he regained his office as steward of the lordship of Spofforth, then in the hands of the young George, duke of Clarence, as royal grantee, and was appointed as deputy to the earl of Warwick in the stewardship of Knaresborough.
In the short term these marriages were very much to Plumpton’s political and financial advantage. In the long term, however, they led to grave difficulties for his heirs-male. Whatever may have been his intentions when he entered into these arrangements, they later took on the appearance of a deliberate fraud. There can be no doubt that the two lawyers were not made aware of the existence (or, at least, the prospect of the future legitimacy) of Plumpton’s son by his then unacknowledged second wife, and it may be that Sir William was guilty of serious subterfuge in marrying his daughters as though they would inherit. Yet this judgement may rest too heavily on a knowledge of later events. Long after our MP’s death a deed, entailing the Plumpton lands in tail-male and dated to 1453, was produced to support the claim of the heir male, but this was probably a forgery.
Plumpton’s actions here were probably more hastily opportunistic rather than simply dishonest, political and financial troubles forcing him to realize the asset represented by his grand-daughters’s marriages without thought for the future consequences. However this may be, matters were soon to be complicated when, while he was still receiving instalments of the payment due from this sale, the fact of his second marriage was publicly acknowledged. His hand may have been forced by the ecclesiastical authorities, but it is much more likely that he himself instigated the proceedings to secure the acknowledgement of his son’s legitimacy. On 26 Jan. 1468 he appeared in the cathedral church of York to explain his cohabitation with Joan Wintringham, and on the following 13 Feb. he produced witnesses as to the fact of his marriage to her.
The restoration of the Percy earl of Northumberland in March 1470 offered Plumpton new opportunities. When the earl was appointed to our MP’s former office of stewardship of Knaresborough in June 1471, he named him as his deputy.
For reasons that are unclear this good fortune did not last. In another of the reverses which typified his long career, Plumpton was one of several removed from the West Riding bench in November 1475, and it is probable that this was the result of a more serious reverse, his displacement by another Percy man, William Gascoigne, in the deputy stewardship of Knaresborough. His political stock certainly seems to have been declining at this date: in the same month he was peremptorily ordered by the duchy council to desist from his enclosures at Plumpton as against forest law, and in the following March he was summoned before the council to account for his actions.
Plumpton responded to these setbacks by urging upon his long-suffering Westminster agent, Godfrey Green, a campaign of furious political lobbying. In return Green found it necessary gently to remind him of the ways of the political world. His well-known letter, probably to be dated to November 1477, can be read as an excuse for inaction on the part of a servant who lacked commitment to his master’s cause, but it is better understood as the exasperated explanation of one whose perception was superior to that of his hasty master. With reference to the stewardship of Knaresborough he wrote that, as the Percy earl will ‘haue no deputie but such as shall please him’, to attempt to move him otherwise, even through the King, would ‘turne to none effect but hurt’; accusations of misgovernance against Gascoigne before the royal council were similarly useless for the general consideration that ‘in euery law the saying of a mans enemies is chalengeable, and rather taken a saying of malice then of treuthe’ and the particular one that they would be seen as ‘a disworship to my lo[rd] of Northumberland, that hath the cheif rule there vnder the king’.
While Green’s valiant efforts proved sufficient to win his master’s restoration to the commission of the peace, Plumpton played little recorded part in local affairs during the last years of his life. His main concern was rather a private one, the undoing of the arrangements he had entered into on his grand-daughters’ marriages and the deflection of his entire inheritance to his son. To this end, in the autumn of 1475 he conveyed all his lands to a group of his intimates headed by his friend Richard Andrewes, dean of York, and they duly made re-conveyance to him for life with remainder to Robert in tail-general, saving the life interests of Joan Wintringham in the manor of Grassington and other property and of his bastard sons, William and Robert, in part of the manor of Ockbrook.
At this point Plumpton sought to further his son’s cause by marrying him to Agnes, sister of his rival, William Gascoigne. Despite their quarrel the two men, as servants of the earl of Northumberland, were natural allies, and our MP was probably moved by the consideration that Gascoigne, as the husband of the earl’s sister, would have the power to call on the support of that great lord in the likely event of a dispute with the heirs general. For Gascoigne the match offered the chance to marry his sister cheaply. Had there been no doubt that the Plumpton lands would pass to the groom in their entirety his marriage would have commanded a large portion; Gascoigne was able to obtain it for a modest £100. This figure, together with the £20 jointure eventually agreed on, were the subject of sustained negotiation. As early as April 1476 Plumpton’s illegitimate son, Robert, reported to his father ‘the matter betwixt my brother Robart and Mr Gascoines sister me think is to long in makeing up, for in long tarrying comes mekell letting’. Not until 13 July 1477 was the contract drawn up.
Plumpton’s last years saw further efforts on his son’s behalf. On 1 May 1478 he granted Robert all his goods; and in the following Hilary term he brought his own action against Sotehill for an alleged failure to find surety for payment of the portion.
This, however, marked only an early exchange of what, for the Plumptons, was to be a long and damaging dispute. An award returned in September 1483 by Richard III himself proposed a more equitable division which took into account both the undertakings our MP had entered into on the marriages of his grand-daughters and the ancient entails in tail-general which bound the Foljambe inheritance. The award gave the heirs general the bulk of the Foljambe lands in Derbyshire and the manors of Grassington and Steeton, together valued at 224 marks p.a. This would have left the Plumptons with an estate of comparable size to that which they had possessed before the marriage of our MP’s parents, the valuable manor of Kinoulton compensating them for the loss of two of their Yorkshire properties. That this was not the end of the dispute was largely due to the corrupt intervention of a royal minister, Richard Empson†, without the lands to support his rank, in 1497.
Although Sir William’s machinations proved seriously damaging to the family’s interests, it may be that a combination of political and financial insecurity left him little choice but to act as he did. Aside from the other pressures upon him, his finances were strained by the great cost of marrying his seven daughters by his first wife. It is significant that his eldest daughter – contracted as early as 1435 to the heir of the barony of Zouche – made a far better match than her sisters, who were all married within narrow local confines and some of whom had a long wait for husbands. Contracts survive in transcript for most of these matches, although unfortunately not for the first, and it is a fair estimate that between 1435 and 1468, when his daughter Joan married his neighbour, Thomas Middleton of Stockeld, they cost him in excess of £1,000.