ELTON, William

Elton served for over 20 years in the household of Henry VI. His social and geographical origins are unknown, but it is possible that he came from the city he represented in Parliament. In 1459 he was described as ‘of Coventry’, and, although this may only be because the Lancastrian court was then largely resident there, it is suggestive that one Richard Elton (the surname was not a common one in late-medieval England) was, on several occasions in the late 1370s, a juror before justices of the peace at Coventry. In any event there is no good reason to place our MP’s origins elsewhere, for there is nothing to identify him with the namesake who attested the Oxfordshire election of 1447.1 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 386-7; Rolls Warws. and Coventry Sessions (Dugdale Soc. xvi), 16, 19, 23; C219/15/4. Yet, although he may have hailed from Coventry, he played no part in its government. Rather he made his career in the royal household where he had found a place by Michaelmas 1438. In the great wardrobe account for 1438-9 he is listed as one of the 28 yeomen of the chamber, and he soon became one of the more favoured among them. Soon afterwards he was named as keeper of the royal park at Tooley at Peckleton in Leicestershire, a sinecure with the modest daily wages of 1½d.; and to this was added, on 8 Aug. 1440, the standard wage due to yeomen of the Crown, namely 6d. a day, in his case assigned upon the issues of Norfolk and Suffolk.2 E101/408/25, f. 7v; CPR, 1436-41, p. 442; E159/217, brevia Mich. rot. 14d.

In the mid 1440s Elton secured further advancement and reward. On 11 Jan. 1445 he shared with John Slifirst, another yeoman of the household, a grant of any forfeiture accruing to the Crown from a seizure of uncustomed cloth at Topsham (Devon). On the following 21 Oct. he won what should have been a much more important grant, that of the constableship of the castle of Kidwelly, to hold for life by himself or deputy. Unfortunately for him, this grant was quickly revoked, either because it was deemed desirable that the office be held in person or merely through confusion in the distribution of royal patronage.3 CCR, 1441-6, p. 317; DL37/13/5; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 641. He was, however, soon compensated: on 17 June 1446 he and his fellow yeoman of the Crown, Bartholomew Halley, were given the office of warrener of Flamstead, in the King’s gift because of the minority of the young daughter and heir of Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick. Since the duke had died only six days before, the grantees had clearly taken advantage of their place about the King to secure the office.4 CPR, 1441-6, p. 432.

In March 1447 Elton was with the King during the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, and in company with two other household servants, Richard Cooke and Thomas Chamberlain*, he successfully petitioned for £30 to be equally divided between them as reward for riding day and night on royal matters for more than five weeks.5 E404/63/29. He and his colleagues had difficulty securing payment. They had assignment on 10 July 1447 and reassignment six months later: E403/767, m. 9; 769, m. 10. Better still, on 10 July he was granted a life annuity of £12 assigned upon the fee farm of Malmesbury (Wiltshire) and payable by the town’s abbey. This made him one of the best rewarded of the yeomen of the Crown, who generally had no fee beyond their daily wages of 6d., and by the late 1440s he was one of the most senior of them.6 CPR, 1446-52, p. 77; CCR, 1447-54, p. 86. As such, he was entrusted with confidential tasks. In the spring of 1449 he was sent to Rouen to deliver royal letters to Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, the King’s lieutenant in Normandy, a mission for which he received the generous expenses of £10 with a reward of 20 marks; and on the following 15 Nov. the Exchequer was ordered to pay him five marks as he was about to return to Normandy as the King’s messenger. This latter mission came at a very dangerous time, with Harfleur under siege by the French, to whom it fell on New Years’ Day 1450. It was later said that, in going, he had ‘putte his liffe and body in grete Jupardy’.7 E403/773, m. 16; 775, m. 11; E404/66/77; SC8/29/1403. Soon after, he was exposed to further danger in royal service. According to one of the bills Richard, duke of York, presented to Henry VI in the aftermath of his return from Ireland in September 1450, Elton was among the household men who had unsuccessfully attempted to apprehend him as he made his way from North Wales, in Elton’s case at Worcester.8 R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 271-2, 299.

Nearly as unwelcome to Elton as the personal dangers to which royal service exposed him were the diminished rewards it brought as the Commons sought to reduce the cost of the King’s establishment and reform royal patronage. The Act of Resumption of May 1450 stripped him of his annuity of £12, and the more comprehensive resumption of the Parliament of 1450-1 may also have deprived him of his daily 6d. (although this is uncertain).9 PROME, xii. 127; E163/8/14. He may have received nothing of his annuity. On 7 Mar. 1449, nearly two years after the grant, the abbot was ordered to pay him arrears from the death of the last annuitant, Sir Gerard Huyn: CCR, 1447-54, p. 86. None the less, this loss was balanced by promotion within the household. By 12 May 1451, when he secured a pardon for a Leicestershire husbandman accused of felony, he was serjeant of the King’s hall.10 CPR, 1446-52, p. 423. He succeeded Thomas Hotoft, who had been in office at Christmas 1450: E101/410/6, f. 39v. With this advancing seniority about the King came social promotion. When, on 16 Mar. 1452, he was re-granted his daily wages of 6d. (with arrears from Michaelmas 1450), the reason given for the grant was a curious one; not that the earlier grant of 1440 had been resumed, but rather that it had been deemed void, ‘per considerationem’ of the Exchequer, because it had described him as a yeoman and he was now an esquire.11 CPR, 1446-52, p. 557; C66/475, m. 20; E159/228, recorda Easter rot. 1d. This rank is accorded to him in letters of privy seal dated six days later, ordering the Exchequer to pay him and Thomas Harper ten marks in ready money for keeping watch of the duke of York’s lieutenant, Sir William Oldhall*, who had confined himself in the sanctuary of the collegiate church of St. Martin le Grand in London.12 E404/68/100; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 116.

Elton was one of an exceptionally large number of Household men elected to the Parliament of 1453, an assembly that proved more amenable to the royal will than its two predecessors. His constituency, Coventry, had not returned Members since 1346 (and even before that date it had returned Members only intermittently), but in 1451 the city, particularly favoured by the Lancastrian regime, had been granted a charter of incorporation as a county with the right to return its own Members. Our MP was the first to be returned under this new dispensation (the name of his colleague is unknown, for only a fragment of the return survives).13 C219/16/2. As a courtier, he was well placed to benefit from his parliamentary service. On 17 May 1453, during the second session, he secured a new grant of the annuity assigned on the fee farm of Malmesbury.14 The patent for this grant was not enrolled, but it is cited in a petition our MP presented in the 1455 Parliament: SC8/29/1403. Earlier, on 8 Mar., two days after Parliament had assembled, he had witnessed, in company with two other MPs, Thomas Everingham* and Richard Hotoft*, a charter by which one of their fellows, John Chiselden*, alienated property in Rutland to yet another MP, John Truthall*, and other nominees of John, Viscount Beaumont, an interesting indication of the transaction of private business in Parliament.15 CCR, 1447-54, p. 441.

The King’s mental collapse in the late summer of 1453, soon after the end of the second session of this Parliament, transformed the political landscape. Early in 1454 the duke of York became Protector, and men such as Elton must have viewed with trepidation the duke’s plan to reduce the royal household in size and cost.

Our MP may have felt that he had particular cause for concern in view of the accusation the duke had levelled against him in 1450. As it transpired, under the household ordinances of 13 Nov. 1454, he kept his place as serjeant of the hall.16 PPC, vi. 361. What part he played in the dramatic events that followed the end of the duke’s protectorate is not known, but, given his intimate place about the King, it is likely that he was in the royal army defeated by the Yorkists at the first battle of St. Albans in May 1455.

That victory led to the summons of a Parliament of very different stamp from that in which Elton had sat: the Commons proved as hostile to the court as their immediate predecessors had been favourable and demanded a new resumption of royal grants. Elton petitioned for exemption. The petition and the answer endorsed upon it are of considerable interest. The petition itself is in the baldest of terms, simply asking that the Act of Resumption be not prejudicial to him in respect of his grants of 16 Mar. 1452 and 17 May 1453. The answer, however, provides two reasons why the petition should be granted: first, because the King, ‘of his grace hathe made Wylliam Elton Gentilman’; and second, because he had put his life at risk by going on royal business to Harfleur on the eve of its fall to the French in 1450. This implies that Elton had been able to make personal representations, presumably verbal, before the lords responsible for granting or denying exemptions, arguing that, should he lose his grants, he would no longer be able to maintain the gentle rank to which his household service had raised him. It may be that he was able to do so as Member of the Commons for it is possible that he was again returned for Coventry, for which the returns are lost. However this may be, his plea met with partial success. The endorsement of the petition said that the lords were agreed that he keep his annuity of £12 but lose his daily wages of 6d., and this exemption was recorded on the parliament roll. Elton’s exemption and others like it are also interesting from another point of view. They reflect the tensions between, on the one hand, the duke of York and a powerful faction in the Commons, anxious to push resumption further, and, on the other, a large part of the parliamentary peerage, determined to protect their own grants. This tension was a significant factor in bringing the duke’s protectorate to an end.17 SC8/29/1403; PROME, xii. 423; Johnson, 172-3.

The recovery of Lancastrian fortunes must have provided Elton with new opportunities, but he makes only a few appearances in the depleted records of government in the late 1450s. On 11 Apr. 1459 he stood surety for the King’s chamberlain, Sir Richard Tunstall†, on Tunstall’s appointment as master and maker of the King’s money. Here he is described as ‘of Coventry’, and it is very probable that he represented the city in the Parliament that met after the defeat of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge in the following October (unfortunately the relevant return is again lost). He himself had probably been in the royalist ranks on that occasion, and he was certainly so at the next major battle. On the afternoon of 7 July 1460 he was with the King in a tent pitched in ‘Hardingstone Field’, just to the south of Northampton, as the royal army awaited the arrival of a Yorkist army marching from London. There he witnessed the surrender by the chancellor, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, of a great seal of silver into the King’s hand, as a mark of the bishop’s surrender of his office.18 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 386-7, 454. No doubt he fought in the battle three days later. Thereafter he makes only one further appearance in the records. On 17 Feb. 1461 royal signet letters in the name of the young prince of Wales, dated at St. Albans where, on that day, the Lancastrians had won a victory, peremptorily ordered the mayor and aldermen of Coventry to be ‘assystent, helping and faverable in all that ye can and may’ to him, as the King’s ‘trusty and welle beloved Squyer’, and two more senior household men, the King’s carver, (Sir) Edmund Mountfort*, and (Sir) Henry Everingham*. Perhaps the loyalty of the men of Coventry to Lancaster was thought to be wavering.19 P. Fleming, Coventry and the Wars of the Roses (Dugdale Soc. occ. pprs. l), 34; Coventry Leet Bk. ed. Harris, 313. Elton disappears from the records thereafter. Either he fell into obscurity with the fall of Henry VI, or died fighting to escape that fate.