BROME, John II

The story of the family of Brome, long-established as burgesses of Warwick, exemplifies the profits available to the capable and energetic in fifteenth-century England. John was one of two talented brothers. His younger sibling, William, made a career in the court of King’s bench, rising to the chief clerkship in the late 1450s, and establishing a gentry family in Oxfordshire.10 KB27/692, rot. 2; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Ferrers mss, DR3/805; E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 61; J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 374. For the Bromes of Oxon.: Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, vi. 289. John’s career was even more successful, although, because its continued success came to depend on the mutable fortunes of central politics, its end was troubled and finally tragic. Indeed, in the 1450s it provides an object lesson in the impact of political instability upon the prosperity of a comparatively minor official, who in troubled times yielded to the temptation to commit himself too far. His career can be divided into three distinct phases. From the late 1420s to about 1450 it was one of untroubled advancement: he became an Exchequer officer and made property purchases sufficient to establish himself among the higher ranks of the Warwickshire gentry. Between 1450 and 1461 related developments in Warwickshire and national politics meant his fortunes were subject to rapid fluctuation: he incurred the enmity of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, and reacted, unwisely as it transpired, by strongly supporting the militant Lancastrian regime of the 1450s. As a result he lost position and influence after the accession of Edward IV in 1461 and eventually fell victim to the resentments engendered by one of his many property acquisitions.

Brome owed his initial advancement to a legal education and a family connexion with the Beauchamps, lords of his native borough. By 1456, and probably much earlier, he was a member of Inner Temple: either he was educated there as a young man in the early 1420s or he earned a later admission through his place in the Exchequer.11 His membership is known only from a chance surviving reference. On 16 Oct. 1456 James Gresham wrote to an Inner Templar, John Paston, that Brome ‘of your Inn’ had been named as under treasurer: Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, iii. 108. His early advancement in that great department of state came through Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who was one of the hereditary chamberlains of the Exchequer. His grandfather, Robert†, had been the Warwickshire steward of the earl’s father, and as early as 1417 our MP was one of the many attorneys employed by Beauchamp. In December 1417 and May 1418, for example, he spent many days in Bristol with more senior lawyers, including John Throckmorton I*, protecting the earl’s interests in respect of a royal inquisition and an assize of fresh force.12 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 124; Egerton Ch. 8773, m. 9d. By 1424 he was plying his legal trade in the wider arena of the Exchequer, representing the bailiffs of Warwick and Worcester as they came to account for forfeitures of Scottish coin. His practice quickly expanded, and he became the attorney routinely employed by accountants from Warwickshire and surrounding shires.13 e.g. E159/200, recorda Hil. rot. 1; 201, recorda Mich. rot. 3; 209, recorda Trin. rot. 5; E13/138, rot. 21. His talents also attracted the attention of important patrons, other than Beauchamp, with matters to pursue outside the Exchequer. In December 1428, for example, he was at Coventry with several other lawyers to offer advice to John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, in a matter pending before the borough court there.14 E101/514/17, m. 5. In view of this employment it is tempting to identify him with the John Brown who was auditor to Mowbray’s son and successor as duke of Norfolk in the 1440s: R.A. Griffiths, ‘Public and Private Bureaucracies’, TRHS, ser. 5, xxx. 114. This identification is, however, contradicted by the same man’s service as Mowbray auditor in the 1470s: L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finanaces of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph. D. thesis, 1985), 421.

Brome’s connexions made him an obvious candidate to represent his native borough in Parliament, even though he was yet to inherit the significant family holdings there. His father had been elected for Warwick in 1426 and 1427, and he was himself returned to three of the next four Parliaments (his father taking the seat in the intervening one of 1431).15 Our MP is distinguished from his father by the addition of ‘junior’: C219/13/4, 5; 14/1-4. His affairs prospered strongly in this short period. On 18 Oct. 1429, while sitting in his first Parliament, he secured a royal lease of the lands of a minor Leicestershire landholder, Robert Neville, during a minority. From early 1430 he appears frequently as a receiver of assignments in the Exchequer, and by the autumn of 1431 he was acting as one of the deputies to the alnager in the port of London. More importantly, on 13 Feb. 1432, shortly before the start of his second Parliament, he was appointed clerk of the estreats at the Exchequer, an office worth a handsome £15 p.a. with perquisites of an unquantifiable sum.16 CFR, xv. 278; E403/693, mm. 12, 16; 695, mm. 11-12, 16-18; E159/208, recorda Mich. rot. 8; PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs’, 86, 89. In the following December he was granted the keeping, during a minority, of the manor of Nuthurst, a few miles from Warwick, and four months later he was joined with Robert Charyngworth, whom he had previously served as deputy, as alnager of London.17 CFR, xvi. 111, 134-5, 223, 251. His parliamentary service may have assisted him in gaining this advancement; but Brome appears to have seen no value in prolonging his career in the Commons. In this he was conforming to a pattern common among careerists, whose enthusiasm for sitting there diminished once they had established themselves.

Brome’s father survived until the late 1440s, and he was thus long kept out of the family patrimony.18 His fa. was alive in 1444, and as late as 1447 our MP is described as ‘the younger’: Warws. RO, Walter of Woodcote mss, CR26/XXV; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2628. The elder John may, however, have surrendered property to his son in his lifetime. In 1434 our MP was tenant of Le Crowne on the Hope on Warwick High Street, and in the same year he was indicted for allowing the flooding of a common high road at ‘Le Fordehall’ in the parish of St. Nicholas: KB27/721, rex rot. 9: Ferrers mss, DR3/220. Later, in 1437, father and son exchanged property, our MP taking land in Warwick and giving land in Lapworth: Shakespeare Centre Archs., Saunders colln., ER1/62, no. 220. This is one reason why he turned to the property market; another lay in the fact that he had already outgrown his family’s earlier achievements and needed a larger estate to support the status he had won for himself. His first documented purchase came in 1430 when he joined his father in acquiring Berford Hall alias Charlton’s Inn with tenements in Catte Street and St. Mary Street in Oxford. Their tenure was, however, brief: in 1437 they conveyed the property to Thomas Chicheley, archdeacon of Canterbury, and others as the site on which All Souls’ College was to be built.19 Cat. Archs. All Souls Coll. ed. Martin, 151; Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait ed. Edwards et al., 121. By that date he had made a series of acquisitions closer to home. In May 1434 he purchased from his maternal kinsman, William Rody, a messuage and wood at Baddesley Clinton, a few miles to the north-west of Warwick; a year later he bought a small estate in Warwick and neighbouring Myton; and in 1436, through a dubious transaction that was later to lead to difficulties, he purchased a manor at Lapworth, once the property of his kinsman, John Brome of Lapworth.20 Ferrers mss, DR3/219, 220; Warws. Feet of Fines, 2583, 2624; E40/4268, 8371, 10642. The treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, acted for him in the purchase of Lapworth: E40/4248, 4478. Other acquisitions he made in this period are known only from an enfeoffment made on 20 Dec. 1436: among the properties he then conveyed to John Sperman, dean of the collegiate church of Warwick, John Throckmorton I and Nicholas Rody*, were small parcels of land in Stoneton (Northamptonshire), in Hinkley and Wykin (Leicestershire), and in several vills in the neighbourhood of Warwick.21 Ferrers mss, DR3/455. Soon after, he made what was his most important acquisition: in 1438 he bought the principal estate at Baddesley – a much-traded manor – from the executors of another Warwickshire lawyer, Nicholas Metley*. There he made his main residence, completing his control by leasing the duchy of Lancaster holding, known as ‘Waleys’, for an annual rent of eight marks.22 Ibid. DR3/226, 228; VCH Warws. iv. 16-17; E40/4478; Carpenter, 104, 188; DL29/463/7547. He took care to extinguish other titles. In 1441 John, Lord Clinton, whose family had once held the manor, quitclaimed to him and his feoffees, presumably for a financial consideration: Ferrers mss, DR3/237. In 1442 he undertook to pay eight marks p.a. to Joan Burdet, the elderly widow of a previous tenant, under the terms on which the manor had been sold in 1434: Walter mss, CR26/24.

For a fairly minor Exchequer official this was a striking series of purchases, enough to provide Brome and his descendants with a place among the gentry of substance. In the subsidy returns of 1435-6 he was assessed on an annual income of £33; and the acquisition of Baddesley Clinton must have almost doubled this already respectable income.23 E179/192/59. A further expression of his arrival among the county gentry was the extension of the manor-house at Baddesley. How far he was responsible for the surviving building is not clear – a large part has been attributed to his son, Nicholas – but the accounts from his tenure there show that, from the moment of acquisition, he spent money on the renovation and extension of the existing house.24 Carpenter, 164, 189, 202; A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 359-61; Antiquaries Jnl. lxxxvii. 302-3, 307; T. Garner and A. Stratton, Domestic Architecture (2nd edn. 1929), 37-38. Another, and even clearer, indication of his arrival was his marriage. His wife was a Shirley, a family temporarily compromised by their great dispute with Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and later duke of Buckingham, over the Basset of Drayton estate, and yet still one of the greatest gentry families of the Midlands. Unfortunately the date of their marriage can only be inferred: at Brome’s death in 1468 the couple had several children of full age and so their marriage is likely to have taken place at about the time Brome began to acquire his landed stake in gentry society.25 J. Nichols, Leics. iii (2), 716*. It may have been even earlier. In 1448 he named Nicholas Brome as usher of the Exchequer, an office then in his gift as chamberlain: PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs.’, 254. If this Nicholas is to be identified as his second son and eventual heir, the marriage must have taken place in the mid 1420s. Since, however, his son lived until as late as 1517, there must be a doubt about this identification, and it may be that the usher was a brother of our MP.

Brome’s importance, both in the Exchequer and in his native shire, grew yet more strongly in the 1440s. On 25 Dec. 1441, for example, he attested the Warwickshire parliamentary election indenture, and early in the following year he was dispatched by the Crown on a mission to Calais headed by John, Lord Dudley.26 C219/15/2. He was absent in Calais from 1 Feb. to 28 June 1442, receiving in wages and reward a total of 134 marks: E404/58/202; E403/743, mm. 10, 15; 747, m. 13; 749, m. 10. He also developed a close relationship with the young Henry Beauchamp, who had succeeded his father, Earl Richard, as a minor in 1439 and was promoted a duke six years later. Brome acted for him in the Exchequer, and, in 1443, was named as his deputy as sheriff of Worcestershire. While in that office, he acted in support of Warwick’s attempt to end an important local dispute involving Edward Grey (later Lord Ferrers of Groby), taking charge of the bonds the competing parties gave to abide his master’s award. His services secured significant reward: in 1445 he was retained as of the duke’s counsel, and, more importantly, on 3 June 1446 the duke appointed him to act as chamberlain of the Exchequer for life (with wages of 8d. a day and an additional fee of £40 p.a.) in succession to John Nanfan*.27 E403/762, m. 4; E159/220, recogniciones Hil.; CP40/756, rot. 333; Carpenter, 414-15; Bodl. Dugdale mss, 13, p. 434; CIPM, xxvi. 443. This appointment, which Brome may have viewed as the culmination of a successful career, was to have a profound effect on his future. Without it, or at least without the desire to retain it, his later career would have taken an easier course.

The duke’s death eight days later, leaving an infant daughter as an heiress, changed the face of Warwickshire politics. For Brome, his death proved to be, in the long term, a major setback; in the short term, however, he continued to prosper. His chamberlainship was confirmed by royal letters patent on 4 July.28 E159/222, recorda Trin. rot. 28. On 26 June 1447 he was granted for life the liveries appurtenant to the office: CPR, 1446-52, p. 60; CCR, 1441-7, p. 425; E159/224, brevia Mich. rot. 21. Later that year, probably acting as a councillor of the late duke, he joined the King’s attorney-general, John Vampage*, in arbitrating a quarrel between the Verneys and the executors of the duke’s father. In September 1447 he acted in the interest of his wife’s stepmother, Alice, to end her dispute with his wife’s brother, Ralph Shirley, over dower. He also found time to travel to Wales to raise a gift to the Crown from the communities of Caerleon, Merioneth and Flint in lieu of taxation, an onerous task for which he received £40 from the King.29 Carpenter, 126, 429n; Shakespeare Centre Archs., Willoughby de Broke mss, DR98/497A; Nichols, ii (2), 717*; Shirley, 397-8; E403/771, m. 9. His legal skills were recognized in another way with his addition to the quorum of the Warwickshire bench. He is not named to a commission enrolled on the patent roll until the spring of 1449, but he is recorded as sitting as a j.p. at Warwick in the previous January. Clearly he had been added at some date after the previous enrolled commission early in 1446.30 KB9/261/2.

In the late 1440s Brome added further to his landed estate, acquiring some 50 acres in Kenilworth and adding a few hundred acres to his property at Hinkley and at Baddesley.31 Warws. Feet of Fines, 2628, 2635, 2637. More important was his purchase of the manor of Woodloes on the outskirts of Warwick, which, like his appointment as chamberlain, was to prove a poisoned chalice. On 2 Dec. 1448 he agreed to pay 250 marks to Alice, widow of a Warwick townsman, John Mayell, and her son, another John Mayell, and to give the widow an annuity of ten marks for the term of her life (with an annual allowance of 30 cartloads of wood from Baddesley). So great and quick an expansion of an estate was difficult to achieve without making enemies, and Brome, as is most clearly illustated in the purchase of Woodloes, did not surmount this difficulty. The purchase was to the disinheritance of the wife of Thomas Herthill, daughter and heiress of John Woodloes, and the Herthills showed themselves unwilling to accept their loss.32 Walter mss, CR26/24, 25; W. Dugdale, Warws. ii. 469; Carpenter, 127. In 1451 Brome paid 20 marks for Thomas Hopton’s interest in the manor: Walter mss, CR26/27, 31.

Brome’s unpopularity may, however, have had wider causes. There is evidence to suggest that from the late 1440s he was deeply disliked by some in his native town. He later complained, in a lengthy petition to the King, that while William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, had charge of the Beauchamp inheritance (in other words, during the brief tenure of Henry Beauchamp’s infant daughter and heir, Anne, who died in June 1449), Henry Somerlane, a local lawyer, and other men of Warwick, ‘of right grete malice and evell will’ had made a bill of complaint against him ‘without eny grounde of trouthe forgyd and fayned’. This, on Brome’s testimony, had prompted the duke to come to the town, where, in the guildhall and in the presence of ‘the Substance of all the towne, and grete part of the gentilmen of the same shire’, he had attempted to make an end between the rival parties, but his efforts had done nothing to reduce the enmity against our MP.33 Ferrers mss, DR3/628.

This unpopularity was soon to become a yet more acute problem. In June 1449 Richard Neville succeeded to the earldom of Warwick in right of his wife, Anne, the late Beauchamp duke’s only sister of the whole blood, introducing an element of rivalry in Warwickshire politics that had previously been absent.34 CFR, xviii. 131; M.A. Hicks, Warwick, 30. Anne’s rights were contested by powerful opponents, namely her three half-sisters and their husbands, notably Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury. Brome was to be drawn into this great quarrel with serious consequences for his career both in his native county and in the Exchequer. In what was to prove a major error of judgement, he came to identify himself with the interests of Somerset and Shrewsbury. One can only speculate as to why he did so. It may be that he felt himself left with no choice: in 1452 he accused Somerlane of ‘saing and noysing’ that he was against the new earl, implying that his enemies had poisoned the earl’s mind against him. Another possibility is that his own existing unpopularity led the new earl to consider it advantageous to exclude him from the patronage he extended to other former Beauchamp servants in the county.

In the immediate aftermath of Neville’s succession to the earldom, Brome’s local enemies accelerated their campaign against him. He was subject, upon his own complaint, to a series of attacks upon his property and servants by the two bailiffs of Warwick, Somerlane and Robert Commander, John Poers* and other lesser men of the town. He alleged that on 11 July 1450, ‘in tyme of grete rebellion and riote … withynne this lande’ and while the King was only four miles away at Kenilworth and the earl and countess of Warwick at Warwick castle, his enemies raided and plundered ‘Bromes Place’ in Warwick, taking goods worth 100 marks and charters; and, early the following morning, they went to Baddesley Clinton, some six miles away, putting his wife and children ‘in right grete fere and drede’. Having been deterred when Brome’s men ‘shot at hem with suche shot as they had’, they contented themselves with a serious assault on one of his tenants. On 13 Aug. there was a further attack on the Warwick property: the rioters, ‘in the most cruell and vengeable wise’, damaged timber and stone so that it might not be used in rebuilding. In his petition he attributed to his enemies the worst disorders ‘that euer was seene in that towne in eny man’s dayes that nowe lyueth, and lyke to distroy the same towne, without gode and due remedy’. He accused them of seeking to avoid the consequences of their actions by a series of devious strategies; first, blaming the commons of the town for the riots against him; second, attempting to get the townsmen to join them as a measure of defence against any action that he might sue against them. For good measure, they also laboured to put him, ‘out of the conceite of all the Comyns of all the said towne and Shire’, slandering him in every market town, so that he should not ‘be of myght and power’ to sue them.35 Ferrers mss, DR3/628. All this looks like special pleading in an effort to disguise his unpopularity among many as the product of the conspiracy of a few. It may also be significant that Poers, as one of the leaders of these riots, was able to secure election to Parliament on 19 Oct., two months after the second attack, in an indenture witnessed by Somerlane and Commander. There can, in short, be little doubt that Brome’s local stock was very low.36 C219/16/1.

All of this was unfortunate enough from Brome’s point of view. It was, however, a greater misfortune for him that his personal quarrel in Warwick soon became entangled with his relationship with Neville. The reason was his office as chamberlain, part of the Beauchamp inheritance. With the death of the late duke of Warwick’s widow, Cecily, in July 1450, the dispute between Warwick and the rival claimants came to centre upon this office. On the following 5 Dec. Brome, the appointee of the late duke, was confirmed in the office by Warwick’s rivals; two days later, he was forcibly removed by the servants of the earl, and the earl’s servant, Thomas Colt*, appointed in his place. The Crown intervened, naming the other chamberlain, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and the treasurer, John, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, to hold the Beauchamp chamberlainship pending a settlement. That settlement went against Warwick: it was adjudged that he had acted improperly by not obtaining Exchequer consent for his actions in ‘grete derogacion’ of the King’s right. Brome was accordingly restored on petition of Somerset and the rival claimants, a restoration that effectively ended his chances of reconciling himself to Neville.37 E159/227, brevia Hil. rot. 33; E404/67/226.

Throughout the early 1450s Brome struggled to maintain his position in Warwickshire and in the Exchequer in the face of the now united hostility of the men of Warwick and the Neville earl. In Trinity term 1452 he sued Somerlane, Commander, Poers and others for the attack on his property in July 1450, claiming damages of £100. On 1 July, four days before the end of the term, Somerlane was obliged to find heavy sureties of the peace in King’s bench, and it cannot have surprised Brome that two of earl’s men, Colt and Thomas Throckmorton*, provided the necessary guarantees. His enemies responded with a further attack on one of his servants on 11 Aug. 1452, part of a sustained campaign of violence and intimidation if his petition is to be accepted literally. They also secured indictments against him before the steward of the earl’s court, Nicholas Rody, once one of his feoffees.38 KB27/765, rots. 53d, 64, rex rot. 4d; 766, rot. 59. Our MP must have felt himself yet more beleaguered when his active enemies were joined by Richard Herthill, not only the rival claimant to Woodloes but also a servant of the earl. On the following 13 Nov. Herthill and others allegedly broke his closes at Warwick and Woodcote (parcel of the disputed manor), plundering property worth as much as £60.39 KB27/767, rots. 46d, 74d; 768, rot. 19; 769, rots. 11d, 19, 95d; 771, rot. 61; CP40/769, rot.272

Brome responded to this hostility by drawing closer to the Neville earl’s enemies in local and national politics. In the autumn of 1452 the earl of Shrewsbury named him as one of his executors. Soon after the Crown appointed him to the commission largely composed of Warwick’s local opponents to inquire into the disputed estates of Sir William Mountfort; and early in 1453 he was associated with the duke of Somerset as keeper of the ruined Welsh abbey of Kymmer. On the following 10 May he witnessed the jointure settlement made upon the earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter, Eleanor, on her marriage to Thomas, son and heir apparent of Ralph Butler, Lord Sudley.40 E13/146, rot. 23; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 58, 65; Warws. RO, Holbeche mss, L1/79; Carpenter, 463. Initially this position in the political spectrum served him well. At this date the earl of Warwick’s affairs were not prospering, and Brome took advantage. The long petition against Somerlane and other townsmen (unaddressed and undated in its surviving form) was probably presented to the King and council either late in 1452 or early in 1453.41 Carpenter, 467. The last offence mentioned is dated 11 Aug. ‘30th year of the present King’ rather than ‘this present regnal year’, hence the petition must date from after 1 Sept. 1452: Ferrers mss, DR3/628. On 23 May 1453 Brome secured letters of privy seal ordering the Exchequer to pay him all arrears since Michaelmas 1449 of his fees and wages as chamberlain and to disregard any writs of liberate in respect of the same issued in favour of any other claimant.42 E404/69/151. Further (if a later action of conspiracy is to be credited), at a session of the peace at Colshill on 22 Apr. 1453, he had used his influence as one of the justices to secure false felony indictments against Herthill and several lesser men of Warwick. These labours soon bore fruit: on the following 16 July the Crown issued a commission for the arrest of Herthill, Commander and another of the earl of Warwick’s servants, Richard Clapham, who were to be brought before the royal council.43 CP40/775, rots. 506, 508, 518; CPR, 1452-61, p. 122.

Only a month later, however, the King’s mental collapse changed the climate of national politics. The duke of Somerset found himself friendless, and the earl of Warwick, now allied with Somerset’s opponent, Richard, duke of York, came to exercise growing power. On 15 Feb. 1454 Warwick secured a judgement in his favour in respect of the Beauchamp chamberlainship, and Brome was supplanted again by Colt.44 E404/70/1/47; E159/230, recorda Hil. rot. 4. Colt was back in office by the following 12 Apr.: PPC, vi. 171-2; E28/84/12. Locally, Brome’s interests also suffered: in January 1454 Herthill and his adherents had been acquitted on the felony indictments against them before justices of gaol delivery (three of whom, Thomas Bate*, Thomas Hugford* and John Rous, were annuitants of the earl), and in the following Michaelmas term one of those indicted filed a claim for damages of £500 against him.45 CP40/775, rots. 506, 508d, 518. Further, it was probably at this date that Brome lost the shrievalty of Worcestershire, an office hereditary to the Beauchamps and to which the Crown had appointed him on the death of Cecily, duchess of Warwick. He retained it as late as Easter 1453, but by October 1454 his nemesis Colt was acting as the earl of Warwick’s deputy sheriff.46 CFR, xviii. 144; CP40/769, rot. 158; PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 158.

Thereafter, Brome’s fortunes fluctuated at a bewildering pace with changes in national politics. He could hope for no recovery during York’s protectorate, but its termination offered him a new opportunity. Early in 1455 the new treasurer, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, appointed him as his under treasurer. This was an influential position in that it gave its holder some influence over appointments to local office. James Gresham certainly believed that Brome had the power to secure the pricking of John Paston*’s candidate as escheator of Norfolk.47 E403/801, 15 July; Paston Letters, iii. 108. Again, however, Brome was to be quickly disappointed. The Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans (and Somerset’s death there) left him in an even more parlous position than before. Viscount Bourgchier replaced Wiltshire as treasurer and Brome lost his position not only as under treasurer but also as auditor in north Wales. For the first time in more than 20 years he was without a function in the Exchequer. Yet little over a year later he found himself as under treasurer once more, on this occasion to the new earl of Shrewsbury, son of his former patron.48 CPR, 1452-61, p. 237; E403/809, 4 Dec.

During the late 1450s Brome offered steadfast financial support to the increasingly-uncompromising Lancastrian regime. At a time when the government’s credit was poor, he was a source of loans. Between 28 Mar. 1455, while he was in office as under treasurer for the first time, and 3 Mar. 1460, he is credited in the Exchequer records with making advances to the Crown totaling nearly £600, exclusive of the £300 he lent in combination with another Exchequer man, John Poutrell, and the £370 he loaned with Henry Filongley*.49 E401/843, m. 41; 844, m. 1; 856, mm. 19, 23; 858, mm. 20, 42, 47; 868, m. 21. There must also have been other sums for, in December 1457, he and Poutrell were granted £700 from the proceeds of the distraint of knighthood in repayment of a loan, and when this failed to serve they were given licence to export wool free of customs.50 CPR, 1452-61, p. 397; E159/235, brevia Trin. rot. 15. Brome was also personally energetic in support of the Lancastrian government. For example, on 14 May 1457 he was paid £32 9s. 4d. as his costs in riding between London, Coventry, Chester and Kenilworth, carrying money for the royal household and in the labouring of other unspecified matters; two days later he had a further payment of 40 marks as reward and costs for declaring the status regni to the King and council. On 25 May he received £4 for the cost of boat hire in travelling from London to Westminster, and in the autumn of the following year he found himself pursuing royal business in Berkhampstead and Woodstock.51 E403/810, mm. 2, 3, 5; 817, m. 1.

Such loyal service was worthy of a reward beyond routine payments, yet Brome’s gains from royal patronage were unexceptional. Most potentially valuable was the reward of £200 made to him on 7 Nov. 1458 in recognition of his service as under treasurer. It must, however, be doubtful whether he ever received payment as he did not secure assignment until March 1460, only four months before the Yorkists retook the control of government. The only other grant to him in these years was merely in the nature of a confirmation: on 24 Feb. 1459 he was named as surveyor of the lordship of Fulbrook in Warwickshire in company with the earl of Wiltshire, a post he had held (from an unknown date) with the recently-deceased Thomas Stanley II*, Lord Stanley.52 E404/71/3/34; CPR, 1452-61, p. 478. John Talbot, Lord Lisle, had been appointed to the surveyorship in 1450; the grant to Brome and Stanley presumably came shortly after his death in July 1453: CPR, 1446-52, p. 376. He also had to wait longer than might have been expected to regain his valuable office as chamberlain. On 20 June 1458 his rival, Colt, was reaffirmed in the office, perhaps as part of the short-lived settlement between York and Lancaster, the so-called ‘loveday’ of the previous March. Not until 20 Oct. 1459, when all hope of reconciliation was gone, did Brome secure royal letters ordering the treasurer and barons to restore him.53 E368/230, recorda Trin. rot. 18; E159/236, brevia Mich. rot. 9d. These letters are not noted in PRO List ‘Exchequer Offs’, 16. He did predictably better after the fund of Lancastrian patronage had been greatly increased by the attainder of the Yorkists, although his gains were not spectacular. On 6 Mar. 1460 he secured letters of privy seal for the payment of an arrears of fees appurtenant to the chamberlainship dating back to as long before as November 1452. Since the office had been in Colt’s hands for much of the intervening period, this amounted to an act of royal largesse. So too did the statement in the letters that, on 11 Dec. 1449, Brome had been granted the office for life and for a term of 40 years after his death. No such grant is recorded, nor, given the hereditary Beauchamp interest, was it in the Crown’s power to make. Clearly this was a potentially great reward, but, in a time of bewildering political changes, both grantee and grantor must have known what such future interests were really worth. He had only one further grant. On the following 22 Apr. he shared with Henry Filongley the keepership of the Warwickshire manor of Berkswell, confiscated from the earl of Warwick; but at a rent of £24 10s., which can have left little margin for potential profit.54 E404/71/4/32; CFR, xix. 266.

Nothing is known of the part Brome played in the dramatic events of 1460-1, only that the accession of Edward IV marked the end of his public career. He lost his offices, including his place on the Warwickshire bench, never to hold one again, whether in the Exchequer or in his native shire, and he even lost the farm of the duchy of Lancaster lands in Baddesley Clinton.55 DL29/463/7549. His loss may have gone even further. The surviving accounts for the manor of Baddesley Clinton suggests a connexion between his economic activites and his political fortunes. Typically of largely self-made men, he was capable of innovation and energy in his estate-management. Between 1442 and 1452 he employed his lands at Baddesley as cattle pastures, supplying beef chiefly to the royal household. Thereafter, however, the scale of his entrepreneurial activities diminished due perhaps to his political and personal difficulties in the 1450s, and by 1465 all his lands at Baddesley had been rented out.56 C. Dyer, ‘Small Landowner’, Midland Hist. i. 5; Carpenter, 189-91.

None the less, Brome did not lose all. That he escaped attainder may be taken to imply that he was not identified with the Lancastrian inner circle, a conclusion consistent with his unspectacular rewards from royal patronage in the late 1450s. Indeed, on 5 July 1462, he was able to secure a general pardon, and he continued to play a part in the affairs of his neighbours. On the following 21 Sept., for example, he joined the abbot of Kenilworth in returning an award in the dispute between Sir Simon Mountfort† and his own old adversary, Richard Clapham.57 C67/45, m. 29; C1/27/174. He also remained a very active litigant in debt actions in the court of common pleas, both on his own account and as an executor of his brother, William. And he even had the credit to enter certain financial speculations: on 15 Mar. 1463 (Sir) Gervase Clifton*, a Lancastrian more prominent than himself, appeared before the mayor of the Westminster staple to acknowledge a debt of £200 to our MP and a London mercer, Hugh Wyche*.58 CP40/805, rot. 382; 809, rot. 7d; C131/73/6 (i).

This period of calm in Brome’s career was not destined to last. Warwickshire was a disturbed county in the 1460s. On 31 July 1465 he was involved, despite his advanced age, in what appears to have been a major instance of local disorder, resulting in a serious escalation in the quarrel between Mountfort and Clapham. If later indictments are to be credited, a large band, commanded by Mountfort, Sir Richard Verney and Brome, raided Clapham’s property at Alspath. During the course of this raid one John Walker, presumably a servant of Clapham, was killed. It has been plausibly suggested that the wealthy Mountfort was here acting in opposition to Warwick’s rule in the shire, and, in view of our MP’s earlier relationship with Neville, it is not surprising that he should have supported him. Whether he was sensible to have done so is another matter. Only four days later Walker’s widow appealed Brome as one of the accessories to her husband’s death. Even worse, a commission was issued on 28 Aug., headed by the earl himself, to inquire into treasons of Mountfort, Brome and their adherents. The commissioners acted with speed. Only two days later the earl joined Thomas Billing*, Thomas Hugford and Thomas Throckmorton at Warwick to hear a jury indict the offenders. Brome was put to the considerable inconvenience of making a series of appearances in the court of King’s bench to answer both appeal and indictments. Not until 27 May 1467, before the justices of assize at Tamworth, was he cleared of the indictments against him, the widow abandoning her appeal shortly before, presumably after being paid off.59 Carpenter, 503-4; KB27/818, rot. 35; 821, rot. 88, rex rots. 6d, 8, 9; 824, rex rot. 23; 826, rex rot. 14d. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 489-90.

These legal difficulties probably reduced his ability to resist the threat posed to his tenure of the manor of ‘Brome’ in Lapworth by his neighbour, (Sir) William Catesby*. Both claims were open to question. As long before as 1408 John Brome of Lapworth had willed that, after his widow’s death, these lands were to be used to found a chantry in the parish church. Notwithstanding this arrangement, our MP had purchased them from Brome of Lapworth’s grandson and heir, John Audley, in 1436. Catesby’s claim was inferior: it lay through his first wife’s father, who had been enfeoffed to the use of founding the chantry. This he had failed to do and Catesby now claimed as his heir, no doubt taking the view that Brome was poorly placed to withstand the challenge. Early in 1465 Catesby collected a series of releases from descendants of Brome of Lapworth, and our MP duly sued the releasees for contempt against the statute of false deeds. Soon after the dispute was put to the arbitration of two of the justices before whom it was pending, William Lacon I* and Richard Bingham, but although Brome troubled to submit his evidences to them in the cloister of the church of St. Paul’s no award was returned.60 C1/185/64-67; KB27/818, rots. 1d, 97; CAD, iv. A9012; E40/6055.

Thereafter, Brome found himself increasingly on the defensive and sought security through new enfeoffments. On 2 June 1466 William Godley, one of his feoffees from as long before as 1436, granted the disputed manor of Lapworth and the manor of Baddesley Clinton to two influential men, Sir Walter Wrottesley, and (Sir) Hugh Wyche; and on the same day he caused other property in Lapworth, Kingswood and Henley, also once the property of the Lapworth Bromes, to be settled upon himself and his wife, with successive remainders to their children, and a final remainder to the King in fee. The aim of this latter conveyance was probably to invoke the royal interest as a means of delaying litigation; the purpose of the former may have been to engage the sympathy of his former adversary, the earl of Warwick, who had no cause to love Catesby and for whom Wrottesley served as a councillor.61 Ferrers mss, DR3/260; E40/4493; Carpenter, 504. Whatever, however, their purpose, these conveyances were the prelude to another failed attempt at arbitration, on this occasion by three local lawyers, Thomas Throckmorton, Henry Boteler II* and John Beaufitz.62 CAD, iv. A8420, 9613; KB27/829, rot. 83. Unfortunately for our MP, Catesby was determined to pursue what was a political rather than a legal advantage: on 15 July 1467 he secured a favourable verdict in an assize of novel disseisin and was put in possession of the disputed lands. Brome responded with a writ of attaint against the jurors, one of whom was his old adversary, Henry Somerlane, and one of error against the assize proceedings, but he was fighting a losing battle.63 JUST1/1547, rot. 10; KB27/826, rot. 71d; 827, rot. 35; 829, rot. 83. His death brought these actions to an end. What is not clear is whether he maintained possession of the manor through these years. Catesby was certainly in possession in the summer following our MP’s death.64 E40/4407.

In the spring of 1468 the aging Brome turned his attention to the disposal after his death of the estate he had created. By a deed dated at Baddesley Clinton, he gave all his lands in Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire to one of the leading local gentry, Thomas Burdet*, William Harewell, an annuitant of the earl of Warwick (a further indication that his relations with the earl had improved), his wife’s kinsman, Thomas Shirley, and other lesser men for the implementation of his will.65 Ferrers mss, DR3/530; Walter mss, CR26/33. These feoffees did not have to wait long to act, for Brome soon met his death in circumstances noteworthy enough to merit a brief notice in a contemporary chronicle. The Annales records that he was killed by John Herthill as he heard mass in the church of the Carmelites in London. Other details were provided in documents extant until comparatively recently, but now lost. One of these was Brome’s will in which he forgave his eldest son, Thomas, ‘who, when he saw me run through in the Whitefriars church porch, laughed and smiled at it’.66 Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 792; Dugdale, ii. 972; Norris, 22. If this document was genuine then clearly the attack did not result in his immediate death. Another lost document (or at least the interpretation placed upon it by Dugdale) implies that the murder was provoked by Brome’s unreasonable behaviour. Herthill’s motive was not simply his rival claim to the manor of Woodloes; rather it was Brome’s denial of his right to redeem property there that Herthill had mortgaged to him. It would not be surprising if our MP had made a practice of taking mortgages, and there is an indirect piece of evidence to suggest that he did so. In his petition concerning the raid on ‘Brome’s Place’ in 1450, he complained that his enemies had evidences relating not only to his own lands but also to the lands of others, ‘that he had keping of ... to what grete losse, hurt, iupardie it may prove’ to him in the future, ‘yet no man can tell us’.67 Dugdale, ii. 971-2; Ferrers mss, DR3/628.

Brome was buried in the church in which he was murdered. His lost monumental inscription recorded his skills as a lawyer, ‘Nobilis et docti sic regni jure periti’ and the circumstances of his death, ‘Hujus in Ecclesia facta qui corruit ense, Pravorum manibus sub Missae tempore caesue’. His widow quickly lodged an appeal, and in the following Hilary term writs of outlawry were issued against Herthill.68 Dugdale, ii. 972; KB27/835, rot. 52. Her son, Nicholas, however, viewing his father’s murder very differently from his elder brother, Thomas, preferred to pursue much more direct methods. Thomas had not long survived their father, dying soon after 2 Nov. 1469, and Nicholas inherited, along with the family estates, what he saw as a duty of vengeance.69 Ferrers mss, DR3/530; Walter mss, CR26/W27. He was a man of violent temperament – his long-lost monumental inscription apparently recorded that he murdered a parish priest for over-familiarity with his wife – and he had no difficulty in discharging that duty. Tradition has it that he killed Herthill as his victim made his way to keep the earl of Warwick’s court at Barford, a few miles to the south of Warwick. Although the murder’s circumstances depend on this tradition, the fact of it does not. On 18 Mar. 1472, by an award made at Coventry, Elizabeth Herthill agreed not to sue appeals for the death of her husband; in return, Brome agreed to provide priests to say mass daily for souls of both murdered men in the churches of St. Mary, Warwick, and Baddesley Clinton for periods of one and two years respectively. He was also to pay Elizabeth the very modest compensation of 33s. 4d. Thus was honour served and the matter concluded.70 Dugdale, ii. 972; Norris, 22, 25. The original of the award does not survive, but a copy is preserved in Dugdale’s transcripts: Bodl. Dugdale 13, pp. 33-34. There can be no doubt about its authenticity. Not only do the arbiters named ring true (they included Nicholas’s brother-in-law, John Denton, and one of our MP’s feoffees, Richard Hall) but there survives the release of actions made by Elizabeth to Nicholas contingent upon the award: Walter mss, CR26/34. Nicholas was also implicated in a murder allegedly committed at Lichfield (Staffs.) in 1478: KB27/876, rot. 92.

Soon after this satisfactory resolution, Nicholas Brome married. The delay in the making of his first marriage is partially to be attributed to his status, until about 1470, as a younger son, but his father was certainly wealthy enough to have found a satisfactory match for even such a son. That our MP did not do so may reflect his loss of standing after 1460, in other words, at about the time as he began to seek spouses for his children. This loss probably explains why his eldest son, Thomas, made what looks a poor match: his wife, Joan Middlemore, hailed from a minor gentry family settled at Edgbaston.71 Norris, 24. Nicholas found himself better placed: his wife was from a Cornish knightly family with interests in Worcestershire. The contract he entered into in 1473 shows how wealthy his father had made the Bromes. Nicholas undertook to settle land worth as much 40 marks p.a. in jointure, and valued his inheritance at £96 p.a., part of which was then in the hands of his mother and his elder brother’s widow.72 Ferrers mss, DR3/265. In 1474 his mother agreed to confine her claim upon the estate to the manor of Baddesley Clinton: ibid. DR3/530. Given that, when our MP was born, the family’s lands had been confined to the borough of Warwick and can have been worth no more than about £10 p.a., there can be no clearer testimony to the success of John Brome’s career.

Later generations of the family’s main line did not build upon John’s success. Indeed, even though Nicholas left male issue by his second and third wives, the generous jointure settlement he had made on his first insured that, on his death in 1517, the bulk of the family lands, including the manor of Baddesley Clinton, descended to his two daughters by her, namely Constance, wife of Sir Edward Ferrers, and Isabel, wife of Thomas Marowe. The male line was reduced to their former status as townsmen of Warwick. One of our MP’s grandsons, Ralph Brome†, sat for Warwick in the Parliament of November 1554.73 C142/32/42; Dugdale, ii. 971; The Commons 1509-58, i. 513.