A younger son who unexpectedly succeeded to the family estates after both his elder brothers died, Quatermayns enjoyed a long and varied career as a London merchant, country gentleman and servant of the Crown. In the mid fifteenth century he entered the service of Richard, duke of York, and as a result he continued to prosper after York’s son seized the throne in 1461. Evidently a man of considerable ability, he was still publicly active when a very old man, and was returned to his last Parliament when about 80 years of age. Blessed though he was with impressive longevity, he failed to father any surviving children, meaning that his branch of a long established Oxfordshire family came to an end at his death.
When his father Thomas Quatermayns died in 1398, Richard was a child of about six years of age. John, the eldest of Thomas’s three sons, lived only until December 1403, either shortly before or just after attaining his majority. John’s brother and heir, Guy, came of age in the autumn of 1409 but died in May 1414 and in the following August Richard was granted livery of the Quatermayns estate.
When acquiring Shirburn, Quatermayns had yet to come fully into his own, for part of his inheritance was held in dower by his mother Joan, still alive in 1434. Following Thomas Quatermayns’s death, she had married John Creedy, a Devonian who had pursued a career in London and died in 1426.
Elsewhere in Wiltshire, Quatermayns acquired interests in the right of his wife, and during the 1440s he and Sibyl, together with her sister Cecily and Cecily’s husband, William Fowler*, pursued a claim to lands in Market Lavington against John Dewall* and his wife, Joan.
After gaining Shirburn, Quatermayns purchased at least three other manors. In the second half of the 1440s he acquired Weston in Welford, Berkshire, from Abingdon abbey; early in the following decade he obtained the manor of Long Crendon in Buckinghamshire (previously the property of Andrew Sperlyng*) which he endowed on a chantry he had founded at Thame; and in 1461 he paid Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre of the South, 300 marks or more for ‘Fynes’ at Ascot in Great Milton.
Of course, not every land transaction to which Quatermayns was a party was of direct personal concern, for he frequently acted as a trustee for other landowners. In the great majority of cases he did so on behalf of his fellow gentry in Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties, although he was also a feoffee for John Timperley I* of Suffolk and the Leventhorpes of Hertfordshire.
In all likelihood, Quatermayns had already embarked on his mercantile career when he unexpectedly succeeded to the family estates, since it seems unlikely that he would have chosen such a path after Guy’s death.
Quatermayns appears to have derived some of his London property through inheritance rather than purchase. In the early 1420s he went to law against Richard Edmond to establish his title to premises in St. Nicholas Olave which he claimed as the heir of his great, great-aunt Cecily Quatermayns, who had married Henry Arderne of London. The property in question was probably a holding known as ‘Le Pecock’, which was certainly in the hands of him and his feoffees in the mid 1440s.
During his early career Quatermayns must have spent most of his time in London, and it was in the City and its vicinity that he first held office under the Crown. In the spring of 1421 he was placed on a commission of inquiry charged with investigating the theft of wines and gear from a Breton ship which had foundered at the mouth of the Thames. Early in the following year, he was appointed during pleasure as controller of tunnage and poundage in the port of London, an office with a fee of 20 marks p.a. He was required to exercise this position in person, and when his appointment was renewed in the following year it was stipulated that he was to write his rolls in his own hand. It is more than likely that Quatermayns owed his appointment as controller to the hugely influential Thomas Chaucer, since the office was in the latter’s gift as chief butler of England. He was still controller at Michaelmas 1424, but in March 1426 Walter Green* was appointed to the office, presumably in his stead.
In the following decade, Quatermayns became a customs collector in London, an office for which he received a substantial fee of 50 marks p.a. As a customer he was long associated with Chaucer’s friend Thomas Walsingham†, a vintner from the City who had held that position since 1421. In August 1433 he and Walsingham were ordered to collect London’s contribution to the subsidy of tunnage and poundage granted by the Parliament of 1431, a commission they were required to exercise in person. Three months later, they were appointed to collect the City’s contribution to a like grant made by the following Parliament, along with various other taxes authorized by the same assembly.
The records of the Exchequer contain various interesting details relating to Quatermayns’s time as a collector. In the late 1430s, for example, he and Walsingham informed the Crown that Henry Frowyk I* and other prominent mercers had illegally shipped merchandise to Flanders and Brabant, and in 1443 he seized the goods which an alien merchant was attempting to ship overseas without paying customs. He intercepted these goods, including seven gold rings decorated with precious stones, at the Steelyard, the Hanse headquarters in London. Some of the customs revenues he and Walsingham paid into the Exchequer were particularly substantial. In February 1434 they deposited a total of £600 there, of which £400 was assigned to (Sir) John Tyrell*, treasurer of the Household. In the spring and summer of 1438 they brought in over £638, of which more than £200 was assigned to Edmund Beaufort, the future duke of Somerset, to buy saltpetre for the war in France.
By now Quatermayns was a trusted servant of the Lancastrian Crown. In the previous December he himself had bought saltpetre on behalf of Gilbert Parr, keeper of the King’s artillery, and in the same month he and John Goulde had received an assignment of money at the Exchequer for repairs to the royal manor of Woodstock. He received another such assignment in February 1441, this time on behalf of the keeper of the wardrobe, Sir Roger Fiennes*, for Household expenses.
The acquisition of saltpetre was far from Quatermayns’s only contribution to the English war effort. Earlier, in 1435, the treasurer of England, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, had commissioned him, Richard Buckland*, John Throckmorton I* and William Venour to fit out a couple of ships, Le Peter and Le Julyan of Newcastle, to guard the seas between 25 July and Michaelmas that year.
Perhaps because he spent so much of his time in London in the earlier part of his career, Quatermayns was not to hold office under the Crown in his native Oxfordshire until the 1430s. First appointed a j.p. in 1432 (after serving in the Parliament of that year), he was escheator in Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1434-5 and sheriff of the same counties in 1436-7. While sheriff, he returned a family connexion, Robert Danvers* (stepson of his niece, Joan Bruley), as one of the knights of the shire for Oxfordshire to the Parliament of 1437. It was in relation to the same term as former sheriff that William Danvers* began legal proceedings against him in the Exchequer in mid 1439. One of the knights of the shire for Berkshire in the Parliament of 1437, Danvers alleged that Quatermayns had failed to pay him £9 of the £14 due to him in wages for his attendance at that assembly.
For the same reason, it is unlikely that Quatermayns had much time to exercise his duties as an officer on the estates of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. His attachment to Beauchamp must greatly have facilitated his acquisition of Shirburn, although it is not known exactly when he entered the earl’s service. He had certainly already done so by Michaelmas 1429 when he relinquished the stewardship of that lord’s household. Perhaps he was unable to devote sufficient attention to this office, although by the same date he had become steward of the Beauchamp manors of Quarrendon, Flamstead and Cosgrove with a fee of 40s. p.a. Even if this latter responsibility was far less time consuming, it was left to those who owed homage to the earl at Quarrendon to inform their lord about the illegal activities of some of the farmers and tenants on that manor. Quatermayns was nevertheless present at Quarrendon for the making of a new manorial survey in December 1430. Warwick evidently valued his services, since Beauchamp had also appointed him steward of his manor of Spelsbury, Oxfordshire, again with an annual fee of 40s., by 1438. He continued to serve the Beauchamp family after the earl’s death in April the following year, and in October 1440 he received £10 from the issues of Spelsbury, in part payment of expenses he had incurred while helping in some way to expedite the holding of the earl’s inquisition post mortem in Oxfordshire.
It is impossible to tell whether Beauchamp (or, indeed, any other patron) helped Quatermayns gain election to the successive Parliaments of 1432 and 1433. In any case, by the early 1430s he was of sufficient standing in Oxfordshire to seek election as a knight of the shire in his own right, and a few months after the Parliament of 1432 was dissolved he was appointed a j.p. for the county. No doubt the following Parliament was particularly memorable for him, if for the wrong reasons. The Parliament rolls record that he was assaulted while it was in session, although without revealing any details of the incident. The Commons reacted to this affront to their dignity by referring the Crown to a statute which the Parliament of January 1404 had passed in the wake of a near-lethal attack against Richard Cheddar*, a ‘servant’ of one of the knights of the shire in that assembly. Intended to secure future protection from criminal assault for Members of both Houses and their servants, the statute had laid out the procedure for dealing with any perpetrators of such assaults. In their appeal, the Commons of 1433 asked the King to confirm that the same procedure (whereupon the assailant was ordered by public proclamation to surrender himself to the court of King’s bench or else face instant conviction and financial penalties) might apply in the present instance. Their request was granted, although with what result is not known.
During the first session of the Parliament of 1433, Quatermayns was among those who acted as a mainpernor in Chancery for William, 7th Lord Lovell and Holand, to guarantee his good behaviour towards one William Penteney. This is the first known evidence of Quatermayns’s connexion with that peer, with whom he appears to have enjoyed a good relationship. He and Lovell served each other as feoffees, and a decade later Quatermayns appeared in the Exchequer to collect a sum of money on Lovell’s behalf.
In spite of his connexion with Cromwell and apparent links with Cardinal Beaufort, Quatermayns was also associated with Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, a political opponent of both men, in the later 1430s. In December 1437 he and Thomas Parsons went to the Exchequer on Gloucester’s behalf, to receive an assignment of an annuity of 500 marks which Henry V had granted to the duke. Quatermayns was again one of the duke’s sureties two months later, when the Crown awarded Gloucester the wardship of the daughters and heirs of the late Sussex esquire, Thomas St. Cler.
Notwithstanding his links with Sudeley and other prominent members of the Lancastrian establishment, Quatermayns entered the service of Richard, duke of York, who was to assume the leadership of the opposition to Suffolk’s government. He had begun his association with the duke, his most important patron during the later years of Henry VI’s reign, by July 1448 when he appeared in the Exchequer on York’s behalf. By 1448-9 he was a member of the duke’s council, and at some stage during that accounting period the receiver of the duke’s estates in East Anglia and south-east England rode to meet him and other councillors at Rayleigh in Essex. In December 1451 he was among the councillors to whom York referred his quarrel with the former under treasurer of England, Thomas Brown II*.
It was probably no coincidence that Quatermayns served a second term as sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire during York’s first protectorate, since at least a quarter of the new sheriffs appointed in the autumn of 1454 were connected with the duke. Exchequer records reveal that he took office at the ‘special entreaty’ of the Council after all the other potential candidates had refused it, for fear of the financial losses they might incur.
Amidst all the political upheavals of the early and mid 1450s, Quatermayns was also kept busy by his own affairs. In 1454 he was party to a settlement which provided for his wife’s nephew Richard Fowler to succeed to the manor of Rycote, should he and Sibyl die without surviving issue, indicating that their son William was already dead at this date.
Nothing daunted, Collingridge repeated his claims of forgery in a Chancery bill he brought against Quatermayns in the summer of 1457. At the same time, he also complained about the exchange of 1432 in general, alleging that Quatermayns had sought by ‘diuerse fayned menys’ to gain his part of Shirburn ‘for lytill or naught’, so forcing him to agree that John Cottesmore and Thomas Chaucer should arbitrate between them. In response, Quatermayns stated that Collingridge had committed many trespasses against him and his tenants at Shirburn and denied acquiring Collingridge’s estate there by unfair means. Furthermore, he claimed that Chaucer had played no part in the arbitration process and alleged that Collingridge had ‘laboured’ Cottesmore for the very award about which he was now complaining. In fact, Collingridge had done very well out of the exchange, since the properties he had received at Great Milton and Towersey were respectively worth some £7 10s. p.a. (after the deduction of the rent of 30s.) and ten marks. What was more, he had breached the arbitration award by deserting the tenancy granted to him at Shirburn after just two years, having struggled to pay the rent for it, a situation for which he had only himself to blame. According to Quatermayns, Collingridge and his friends had sworn to Cottesmore that the Collingridge estate at Shirburn was worth £10 p.a. rather than its true value of £8, but when making his award Cottesmore had called their bluff by setting the farm at this supposed value. The bill, the resulting writ of sub poena and Quatermayns’s answer are the only records from this Chancery suit to survive, but Collingridge must have lost his case since Quatermayns remained lord of the whole manor of Shirburn. Although the full intricacies of the complicated quarrel between the two men are now impossible to discern, resentment on Collingridge’s part must have lain at the heart of it. Evidently he had parted with his share of Shirburn reluctantly, perhaps after coming under pressure from the likes of Cottesmore and Chaucer to co-operate with Quatermayns.
In the meantime the Lancastrian regime continued to appoint Quatermayns to public office, in spite of his connexion with Edward’s father, the duke of York. By 1458-9 he was steward of the queen’s manor of East Greenwich, where he spent £63 on works for the tower that Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, a previous holder of the manor, had begun building there,
By the autumn of 1461 the new government had already made Quatermayns a member of the quorum as a j.p., a position he was to hold continuously for the rest of his life, save for a brief hiatus at the Readeption of Henry VI. Given his identification with the Yorkist regime, the letters of pardon he acquired in February 1462 were probably no more than a pro forma grant.
In July 1467 Quatermayns surrendered the former Mortimer manor of Great Hambleton to the Crown at the ‘full speciall and laborious desire’ of Edward IV, who soon afterwards alienated it to the royal servant Henry Ferrers.
Whatever the circumstances of the recognizance, Quatermayns remained associated with the Lovells after this date, since during the later 1460s and early 1470s he had dealings with Lovell’s younger brother William Lovell, Lord Morley, for whom he acted as a feoffee. In the same period he was also involved in the affairs of the Illingworth and Babington families, as a feoffee of the settlement made in 1465 when a marriage was contracted between the daughter of (Sir) Richard Illingworth*, chief baron of the Exchequer, and William Babington. Babington was the nephew of William Babington*, in turn the second son and eventual heir of the late Sir William Babington, c.j.c.p. The match arose from the legal and Nottinghamshire connexions the respective families shared, but the branch of the Babingtons into which the bride was married was settled in Oxfordshire and the jointure provided for her comprised lands in Quatermayns’s native county.
During Edward IV’s first reign Quatermayns was also involved in several disputes, both as an arbitrator and as one of the parties concerned. In 1466 he arbitrated in a quarrel concerning one ‘Fowler’, presumably William or Richard, and began a series of actions in the common pleas against Elizabeth, the widow and administratrix of (Sir) John Heron*. He sought debts of no less than £240 from her, although the circumstances in which these debts had arisen are unknown.
It is possible that differing political views added piquancy to the quarrels between the two men. During the Readeption of Henry VI Barantyn continued to serve as a commissioner in Oxfordshire but the Yorkist Quatermayns lost his position as a j.p. for the county. Also excluded from all ad hoc commissions, both in Oxfordshire and elsewhere, in late 1470 Quatermayns took the precaution of securing a royal pardon from the restored Lancastrian King.
By now some 80 years of age, Quatermayns remained active as an office-holder for the rest of his life and in the autumn of 1472 he was returned to his third Parliament, 40 years after first entering the Commons. Over the course of this prolonged assembly he devoted at least some of his time to advancing and protecting his own interests. In late July 1473, during the recess between the second and third sessions, he obtained letters patent confirming his grant of the manors of Wilbraham, Halton and Wickmere. The new letters also licensed him and his feoffees to convey Wilbraham to a chantry chapel dedicated to St. Michael which he and his wife had founded at Great Rycote in 1449, and in the following autumn he secured an exemption for this alienation in mortmain from the Act of Resumption passed in the third session.
The elderly Quatermayns was as busy as ever after the Parliament finally closed in mid March 1475. Within a month of its dissolution he was placed on the commission of the peace for Oxford University, and in the following summer he and a couple of associates successfully applied for a grant of the temporalities of Godstow abbey, to farm from the Crown until a new abbess was appointed.
It would appear that the second of these commissions was Quatermayns’s last appointment to public office. At the end of 1476, no doubt because he sensed that he had not long to live, he made a settlement to ensure that his wife would remain in possession of various London properties of his after his death.
According to the Tudor antiquary John Leland, Quatermayns was buried at Rycote,
O certeyne dethe that now hast ouer throw
Richard Quatremayns Squyer and Sibil his wife that lie here now full [lowe]
That with rial princes of Counsel was true and wise famed.
To Richard Duke of york and aftur with his Sone kyng Edward the iiii named.
That foundid in the Churche of Thame a Chauntrie vi pore men and a fraternite:
In the worshipp of Seynt Cristofere to be relevid in perpetuyte.
[They] that of her almys for ther Soulis a paternoster and [Ave] devoutly wul Sey
of holy ffadurs is grauntid they pardone of dayes forty alwey.
wiche Richard and Sibil oute of this worlde passid in the yere of oure lord A MCCCClx-Uppone their Soules Jhesu haue mercy Amen.
Driver, 101. F.G. Lee, Hist. Thame Church, 330n, states that Quatermayns and his wife were also commemorated in a now gone stained-glass window in their chapel at Rycote. According to Lee, the window depicted him wearing the Lancastrian collar of ‘SS’, but this seems more than a little unlikely.
In spite of the incomplete date on the monument at Thame, Sibyl is known to have survived until 22 May 1483. During her widowhood she was sued in the Chancery by Richard Burton and John Ernest, the executors of Sir Matthew Philip of London. These plaintiffs claimed that the executors of the late Stephen Forster, Quatermayns’s onetime business associate, had taken legal action against them over a bond of £40 which Philip had given Forster on the MP’s behalf. They called upon Sibyl, in her capacity as Quatermayns’s executrix, to settle the debt to Forster’s estate, although with what result is not known. Following Sibyl’s death, the manor of North Weston passed (by virtue of a settlement made in Quatermayns’s lifetime) to Richard Fowler’s widow Joan, a grand-daughter of Maud Bruley, and afterwards to Joan’s son Richard Fowler† (d.1502).