Portalyn’s origins are unknown, but they may have lain at Porta Halen in the Despenser lordship of Glamorgan. This would explain how the family came into the service of the Beauchamps, for in November 1423 Isabel Despenser married Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. In that year our MP’s putative father, Edmund, was retained by the Beauchamp earl.
The deaths of both the earl and countess of Warwick in 1439, leaving a minor as their heir, was no doubt a setback for the young Portalyn, but the affinity maintained its coherence. Portalyn joined with some of its leading members in raising the ransom of another, Sir William Peyto‡, captured by the French at Dieppe during the ill-starred expedition of 1443; and ousting the prior of the alien priory of Goldcliffe, the advowson of which had been granted to Tewkesbury abbey by Henry VI in furtherance of Countess Isabel’s will.
The duke’s patronage was no doubt beneficial to Portalyn in another respect, namely that of finding a bride wealthy enough to balance his own lack of inherited means. He accomplished this in 1445, contracting a match with the heiress of a significant estate in London and beneficiary of settlements made upon her by two previous husbands. Both these husbands had been filacers of the court of common pleas, and it may be that Portalyn’s connexion with the legal profession was a factor in the marriage. However this may be, their married life began in controversy. On 6 Sept. 1445, as Alice made her way from the chapel of the Virgin Mary at Muswell ‘where she had been in pilgrimage’, she was allegedly seized at Highgate by William Gargrave at the head of a group of 40 felons, largely drawn from the prisoners of King’s bench. Gargrave is probably to be identified with the grandson of John Gargrave*, marshal of the Marshalsea, for this would explain how he was able to put himself at the head of a band of prisoners. Their unfortunate victim was then taken to a priest, forewarned and ready to marry her to her abductor. On her refusal to say the words of matrimony, Gargrave ‘manassed hure hydously to dye’ and she reluctantly surrendered her resistance. How she subsequently made her escape does not appear, but it may be that Portalyn intervened to protect her. On the following 14 Oct. he was required to find surety of the peace to Gargrave, and it was perhaps this that prompted him to seek a more lawful redress. The third session of the Parliament of February 1445 began six days later, and he and his new wife presented a petition to the Commons, successfully requesting expeditious common-law process against the offenders. The failure of Gargrave and all but three of his confederates to appear in the court of King’s bench in the following Trinity term led to their summary conviction for felony. In the same term the couple added to the pressure by bringing bills of robbery against her assailants and of rape carnaliter against Gargrave.
Although Gargrave was the most violent of the opponents to Portlayn’s marriage to Alice, he was not the only one. His motives were clear – he wanted to make Alice his own wife – but those of Nicholas Morley*, MP for Hertfordshire in the 1445 Parliament, are unknown. Like Gargrave, however, he was sued by the new couple. In Hilary term 1447 they brought bills against Morley, confusingly claiming that on 2, 6 and 13 Sept. 1445 he had imprisoned her at Harringay, Aspenden (where Morley lived) and in the ward of Farringdon Extra, extracting a ransom of £140 on each occasion. Perhaps this conflated three offences into one, but it may be significant that one of the dates given, 6 Sept., was the same as that on which Gargrave allegedly abducted her. Perhaps Morley was acting in Gargrave’s support, although there is no evidence to connect the two men.
Whatever lay behind this mysterious episode, the legal action against Morley made little progress. In Trinity term 1447 the defendant pleaded a protection against the bills. Gargrave’s summary conviction, however, promised better success. Although on 11 July 1447 Portalyn appeared personally in the court of King’s bench to again offer surety of the peace to Gargrave, the latter seems to have suffered severely for his crime. The details of the process against him have not been traced, but, at some unknown date, he was condemned to our MP in as much as £2,000 and, as late as 1455, he was a prisoner of the sheriffs of London to answer the Portalyns.
Alice’s hand was a prize worth fighting for. Her inheritance was a substantial one, consisting of numerous tenements in the London parishes of St. Michael Bassishaw, St. Mildred Poultry, All Hallows, Barking, and elsewhere in the city. Its value cannot be accurately assessed, but in the subsidy returns of 1435-6 her first husband, William Markeby, had been assessed on an income of £41 p.a., the greater part of which was derived from her property.
Marriage made Portalyn a man of independent means, but Duke Henry’s death on 11 June 1446 left him without a master. Not until the death of the duke’s infant daughter in the first days of 1449 did the Beauchamp lands pass, in the right of his sister, Anne, to her husband, Richard Neville. None the less, he retained a mistress, serving the duke’s widow as her receiver-general in the last few years of her life. He also retained enough influence in this intervening period to secure both appointment, in May 1447, as controller of the great customs in London (an office he held until late in 1449 when Thomas Pounde* replaced him), and, on 2 Dec. 1448, an inspeximus of the grants made to him by the duke for the duration of the minority.
If Portalyn suffered for his service to the earl of Warwick in the late 1450s, when militant Lancastrians were in control of government, or benefited from it in the wake of the Edward IV’s accession, neither the loss nor the profit has left an unmistakable mark on the surviving records. There is, however, one puzzling piece of evidence: on 8 Apr. 1460, when the estates of the leading Yorkists, including the earl of Warwick, were under attainder, Henry VI granted ‘Lionel Portalyn’ the office of porter of Cardiff castle. If this, as seems likely, was a mistake for our MP, it may that his loyalty to the earl was weakening. This would certainly explain his obscurity in the early 1460s. Had he still been the earl’s receiver-general he might have expected to gain more from the change of regime than another general pardon (in which he is styled as ‘of London, gentleman, alias of Isleworth’) and an unwelcome appointment to the Middlesex subsidy commission of 1463.
The crisis in Portalyn’s career came in the late 1460s when he was implicated in a major Lancastrian conspiracy against Edward IV. If later indictments are to be credited, on 20 Oct. 1466 Hugh Mille* approached Portalyn in the parish of St. Sepulchre in Farringdon Ward, telling him of Margaret of Anjou’s plans to depose the King; Portalyn responded by giving him £5 in support of the conspirators, and later, on 6 Dec. 1467, entered into further discussions with the traitors in the parish of St. Anne in the ward of Aldersgate. On 8 July 1468 a London jury acquitted him of treason and felony, and on the following day he was tried for the lesser offence of misprision of treason. The record notes no verdict, but later evidence implies that it was one of guilt. At the end of the month Sir Thomas Bourgchier†, one of the King’s carvers, was granted £100 from such fine as Portalyn should incur for ‘mesprisons and offenses’.
Given Portalyn’s apparent involvement in the Lancastrian conspiracies of the late 1460s, his appointment to the Middlesex bench during the Readeption was a natural one (even though he seems no longer to have been on close terms with Warwick). He also took the opportunity to secure protection against further proceedings on the indictments laid against him in 1468, no doubt recognizing Edward IV’s restoration a possibility if not a probability. On 7 Feb. 1471 he came into the court of King’s bench and both presented the pardon he had received in November 1468 and had it enrolled that he had been acquitted of treason at the sessions. It is possible that he had petitioned for this effective declaration of innocence during the Readeption Parliament. The most important of his alleged fellow conspirators, Thomas Cook II*, who sat for London, is said to have campaigned in this assembly for compensation for the false accusations against him; Portalyn, perhaps as an MP, may have done the same.
Portalyn’s widow made her will on 21 Aug. 1479, desiring burial in the choir of the hospital of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield beside ‘her welbelouid husbond’, a reference to her first spouse, who is known to have been buried there. Thomas, the younger of her two sons by our MP, was remembered with a bequest of a featherbed and ‘my boke of praiers with the matens of the trinite’, but her lands, subject to the payment of her debts were to pass to her eldest son, namely John Shipley.