ANDREW, John III

One of the villains of the famous Paston Letters, John Andrew has not received a good press, but, biased though the letters are, other evidence suggests that his reputation was far from wholly undeserved. A lawyer, he was probably the John Andrew who entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1433, although it is also possible that he was the ‘Andrew’ admitted to the same inn of court nine years earlier.5 L. Inn Adm. i. 5. The earliest definite reference to him is a deed of February 1430, by which he and his brother Thomas (then of Harwich) forswore any right to land in Sproughton which their father, James Andrew, had demised to others six days earlier.6 Add. Chs. 9702-3. At the end of the same year he joined James in attesting the Suffolk return to the Parliament of 1431 and he also took part in the county’s election to the assembly of 1433.7 It is unclear if it was he or another John Andrew who had witnessed the return of Ipswich’s MPs in 1425.

Just over a year later, John succeeded his father, for James Andrew was murdered in July 1434. Of Ipswich burgess stock, James had established himself among the gentry through practising as a lawyer and marrying Alice Weyland, heiress to a moiety of the manor of Baylham and other properties in east Suffolk. During his career he had served the de la Poles, and his second wife, Margery, was both a relative of Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, a retainer of William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, and the sister-in-law of Sir Walter de la Pole*, the earl’s cousin. By 1434, James had been quarrelling for some 20 years with Richard Sterysacre†, a retainer of the young John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, over land at Baylham. Finally, matters got out of hand. One night in July 1434 a band of Mowbray retainers attacked him near Bury St. Edmunds and he died of his wounds soon afterwards. Following the murder, John and his stepmother, Margery, helped by her brother, Sir John Heveningham, sought the protection and assistance of the earl of Suffolk. By early 1435 there was every prospect of serious disturbances between de la Pole and Mowbray and their respective sets of followers, so the King’s Council intervened to ensure that the peace was kept and proceedings against the assailants would take place. In the end, most of the defendants were able to secure royal pardons, but it is possible that Suffolk helped John Andrew and his stepmother to obtain some sort of monetary compensation.8 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 32-34; R. Virgoe, ‘Murder of James Andrew’, Procs. Suff. Inst. Archaeology, xxxiv. 263-6. Like his father, John became a de la Pole councillor. Still a young man when James was killed, another ten years passed before he became a member of the Suffolk bench, but in the meantime he attended to his father’s will, of which he was executor,9 C67/39, m. 37. and pursued his legal career. Evidently a successful lawyer, by 1443 he possessed the means to lend the Crown no less than £100.10 E401/781, m. 13.

In July 1436 Andrew received a formal release from his stepmother of all James Andrew’s lands in Ipswich, Stoke by Ipswich, Sproughton, Little Belstead, Great Belstead and elsewhere in Suffolk. Associated with him in this quitclaim was another lawyer, John Heydon*, who subsequently achieved great prominence and no little notoriety in East Anglia as a de la Pole follower.11 CCR, 1435-41, p. 66. In the following November, Andrew stood surety when John French* of Ipswich, a defendant in a lawsuit, was granted bail by the court of King’s bench,12 KB27/702, rot. 77d. and at the end of the same year he acquired the keeping of a tenement in Paglesham, Essex, from the Crown.13 CFR, xvi. 203, 315-16. In July 1437 he was among those to whom the King granted a seven-year lease of the duchy of Lancaster manors of Offton, Elmsett and Somersham in south-east Suffolk. Reynold Rous*, another lawyer in the service of the earl of Suffolk, was one of those associated with him in this grant, but they had secured it at the request of Sir William Phelip†, rather than the earl.14 DL42/18, f. 75. Rous had enjoyed the patronage of Sir William, soon to become Lord Bardolf, for some years, but there is no evidence that Andrew was another of the knight’s clients. Andrew and Rous were on friendly terms with each other, for when the latter was agreeing jointure terms for his prospective wife, Elizabeth Denston, he asked Andrew to act as one of his sureties.15 PCC 12 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 89-90). The two men were again associated in November 1440, when they stood surety for Robert Lyston, a de la Pole follower against whom Sir Robert Wingfield*, one of the duke of Norfolk’s men, had brought an action for assault.16 H. Castor, ‘Duchy of Lancaster’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1994), 125n. Andrew had every reason to dislike Wingfield, who had provided shelter to his father’s killers in 1434.

Just over a year later, the burgesses of Ipswich elected Andrew to represent them in the Parliament of 1442. Presumably his family connexions with the town, where he owned a house,17 KB27/770, rot. 117d. played a part in his election, and the burgesses may have seen a lawyer linked with the earl of Suffolk as a useful representative. Within a month of Parliament’s dissolution on the following 27 Mar., Andrew and Reynold Rous gave two bonds to Henry Gairstang. The reason for these obligations, which bore penalties of £33 6s. 8d. and £30 respectively, is unknown, but in them Andrew is described as ‘of Weston’. Presumably he had married by that date, for his father-in-law, John Stratton, a London mercer, held three manors in that Norfolk parish.18 CCR, 1441-7, p. 65. In mid 1446 Andrew and his wife Elizabeth joined her parents in a fine, whereby the Stratton lands in north-east Norfolk were conveyed to feoffees, including John Heydon and Reynold Rous.19 CP25(1)/170/190/212. Later that year, he was acting as a feoffee of Heydon’s manor at Oulton, a few miles to the north of the Stratton estate.20 CP25(1)/170/190/215; Blomefield, vi. 373-4.

In the meantime Andrew had begun his career as a member of the Suffolk bench. A major difficulty for local government in East Anglia during the 1440s and 1450s was the disputes among the region’s magnates and their followings, a problem exacerbated by the fact that many j.p.s and other administrators were themselves associated with one or other of those affinities. As a de la Pole follower Andrew earned particular notoriety for his partisanship, and he was not above breaking the law when it suited him. Yet his misdemeanours were not on the same scale as those committed by some of the duke of Norfolk’s men. Mowbray had attracted a particularly unruly group of followers and proved inept at controlling them. None was more out of control than Sir Robert Wingfield.21 Castor, 112-13; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 226-7. On 16 Sept. 1447 two of Wingfield’s servants participated in an armed attack at Ipswich on Thomas Andrew, almost certainly one of Andrew’s relatives and probably his younger brother. Thomas received a serious wound to the head and lost one of his thumbs at the hands of his assailants, whom the knight afterwards helped to shelter.22 KB27/746, rex. rot. 46. The MP’s brother, Thomas, had settled at Ryburgh, Norf.: Add. 19115, ff. 1v-4.

Later that decade, John Andrew sat in the second of his two Parliaments, again for Ipswich. The Parliament opened on 12 Feb. 1449 at Westminster, where six days later he and John Heydon took a bond from Sir Robert Wingfield, as a guarantee that he would pay them £20. Whether the transaction had any connexion with the assault on the unfortunate Thomas Andrew is unclear: whatever the case, Wingfield never paid that sum, prompting Heydon and John Andrew to sue the knight’s executors over the bond shortly after his death in 1454.23 CP40/766, rot. 430. During the same Parliament, Andrew also found time to assist (Sir) Philip Wentworth* in his attempts to wrest the manors of Beighton in Norfolk and Bradwell in Suffolk from Sir John Fastolf, who had bought them quite legitimately from his relative and comrade-in-arms, Sir Hugh Fastolf. In mid April 1449, while Parliament was in recess, Andrew and John Ulveston* broke into Sir John’s house and close at Beighton, and a few weeks later they forged two documents, purporting to be the findings of inquisitions held before the escheator in Norfolk and which declared that the manors were the rightful inheritance of Thomas Fastolf† of Cowhaugh, Sir Hugh’s young grandson. Sir John traversed the ‘inquisitions’ to keep the properties out of Wentworth’s hands, whereby they were taken into the custody of the Crown, from whom he was obliged to farm them (Beighton for three years and Bradwell for five), incurring heavy legal costs and loss of revenue in the process.24 A.R. Smith, ‘Litigation and Politics’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 64.

In the event, Andrew would not appear in the King’s bench to answer these charges of forgery until ten years later. When he did, he put himself on the country, but no trial appears to have occurred. Fastolf was, however, able to take advantage of the downfall of the MP’s patron, William de la Pole, by now duke of Suffolk and the King’s chief minister, in 1449-50, and he took action against his opponents while commissions of oyer and terminer were active in East Anglia in 1450-1. At his behest his chaplain, Thomas Howes, and John Porter made accusations about the activities of Andrew and others when some of the commissioners sat at Norwich in March 1451. The jury indicted Andrew for the break-in at Beighton, for the forgeries and for his part in extorting money from Sir John Fastolf in the late 1430s.25 Ibid. 68; Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 108; C1/26/622; KB9/267/20. In riposte, Andrew brought a lawsuit against Howes, Porter and William Kelle, a baker from Wighton in Norfolk, which came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1452. Declaring their charges false, he alleged that the defendants had maliciously accused him, Tuddenham and Heydon of having extracted £105 from Fastolf in September 1438 by threatening the lives of three of his servants. He added that he had already been cleared of any such extortion, at a subsequent oyer and terminer held by Thomas, Lord Scales, and (Sir) John Prysote*, c.j.c.p. at Walsingham in May 1451, and sought damages of £100.26 KB27/766, rot. 90. In the meantime, judging by some rather cryptic notes made by William Worcestre, he also brought a separate suit against John Porter alone.27 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 145-6.

By the time the case against Howes, Porter and Kelle reached pleadings, Andrew had recovered the place on the Suffolk bench that he had lost following the fall of his patron, William de la Pole. In spite of this catastrophe, the de la Pole affinity proved resilient, regrouping around the widowed duchess of Suffolk and remaining active in local affairs.28 H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 157. The duchess paid Andrew an annual retainer of £2 13s. 4d. as one of her feed men, and he was present at Eye with Sir Philip Wentworth, Sir Thomas Tuddenham and other de la Pole retainers in August 1454 to assist her in a dispute with Thomas Cornwallis*.29 Egerton Roll 8779.

During the same period, Andrew took Wentworth’s side in a struggle for the wardship of Thomas Fastolf of Cowhaugh, whom Wentworth claimed was the rightful heir to Sir John Fastolf’s manors of Beighton and Bradwell. Back in late 1447, Wentworth’s brother-in-law and ally, Robert Constable*, had acquired a grant of the wardship from the Crown, in the face of strong opposition from Sir John, who argued that Thomas’s father had committed it to him in his will and that the child’s mother had surrendered her son to Constable under duress.30 CFR, xviii. 79; Smith, 64; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 204. To make matters worse for Fastolf, the Crown reassigned the wardship to Wentworth in February 1453, on which occasion Andrew and Thomas Devyll of Nettlestead stood surety for his opponent in the Exchequer.31 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 46, 144. Fastolf was, however, able to discover technical irregularities in the grant, and on 6 June 1454 the Crown awarded custody of the child to his ally, John Paston* (who hoped to marry Thomas to one of his daughters), and Thomas Howes.32 C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 242; CFR, xix. 92-93; Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’, 216. Wentworth responded by sending Andrew and Thomas Deyvill to enter the ward’s properties at Nacton and elsewhere in Suffolk two days later. (Paston and Howes subsequently sued them for forcible entry in the court of the Exchequer, alleging that they had taken rents totalling £360 and underwood worth £40.)33 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 112. Within six weeks of the grant to Paston and Howes, Wentworth managed to obtain new letters patent awarding him the wardship, but by the following December Fastolf had purchased it from the Crown, which granted it to his servants, John Bocking and William Worcestre.34 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 158, 208. This was not the end of the matter, since Wentworth entered the ward’s lands in 1455, prompting Fastolf to seek support from the duke of Norfolk.35 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 83-84; Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 151-2. Wentworth appears to have used some of the income from the ward’s properties to reward his supporters, for there were reports in June 1456 that Andrew was receiving an annual fee of 20s. from the manor at Nacton.36 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 147.

By this date Fastolf had already taken a writ of ‘ravishment’ against his opponents, because Wentworth had attempted to abduct Thomas two years earlier.37 Ibid. 93-94, 118. Wentworth and his supporters made another attempt to do so in July 1456, but their opponents quickly recovered the child, whose wardship Fastolf sold to Sir Thomas Fulthorpe before the end of the year.38 Richmond, 243. The abduction led to litigation in King’s bench. Wentworth, Andrew, John Bernard of Akenham, Thomas Devyll, John Wymondham* and John Ferrour, yeoman, were accused of having seized Thomas Fastolf at Halesworth, Suffolk, on 20 July 1456, although they claimed to have rescued him from Paston and Howes.39 KB27/786, rots. 66, 82; 790, rots. 7, 80; 794, rot. 66d. The dispute remained unresolved during Sir John Fastolf’s lifetime, for shortly after his death Wentworth submitted a petition to the Parliament of 1459, claiming that the letters patent issued to Paston and Howes had been invalid.40 RP, v. 371 (cf. PROME, xii. 507).

In the meantime, Andrew pursued his own quarrel with Thomas Howes, whose accusations at the oyer and terminer hearings earlier in the decade he had not forgotten. An attempt to arbitrate between the two men in early 1454 failed,41 Castor, ‘Duchy of Lancaster’, 186n. and Andrew resumed legal action against his opponent. In the following summer, Howes foolishly told Andrew in the presence of witnesses at Ipswich that Sir John Fastolf would render him ‘harmlese’ from such lawsuits.42 Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 144. During mid 1457 Andrew pursued a suit against the priest for the accusations he had made before the oyer and terminer commissioners earlier in the decade. In the following autumn Fastolf wrote to William Yelverton*, j.KB, begging him to look kindly towards his chaplain, who was soon to appear before him and his fellow judges ‘by the crewell and hasty sewte of Androus and hys affinité’.43 Ibid. 167. The suit in question was probably an action Andrew brought against Howes in King’s bench in the late 1450s over the indictment for forcible entry at Beighton.44 KB27/790, rot. 58. In September 1458 Howes was able to obtain a writ against John Wymondham, and 20 other men for maintaining a plea that Andrew had begun against him at Westminster without the King’s writ. Among their co-defendants was Thomas Daniell*, formerly an ally of the duke of Norfolk, and Robert Lethum, previously a Mowbray retainer, indicating a partial disintegration of Norfolk’s affinity, rather than the beginning of better relations between Andrew and the duke.45 Add. 27444, f. 57. It was also in the late 1450s that Howes and John Porter sued Andrew in the Chancery. In their bill, to which are attached copies of the indictments against the MP for the extortion of 1438 and the forcible entry at Beighton, they denied that they had conspired to have him indicted by labouring the oyer and terminer juries, adding that he was making such charges out of ‘old malyce and evell will’.46 C1/26/621-2.

While quarrels with Sir John Fastolf and his supporters dominated Andrew’s career during the 1450s, the MP had time for other matters. In February 1452, for example, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, appointed him and William Tyrell I* to take custody of a ward on his behalf.47 Hants RO, Reg. Waynflete, pt. 1, f. 3**. A year later, he and Tyrell were members of a jury that indicted a band of Mowbray retainers before commissioners of oyer and terminer sitting at Ipswich, stating that Norfolk’s servants had planned to kill John Ulveston.48 KB9/118/1/36. Also at Ipswich, Andrew was on another jury panel which indicted Sir William Oldhall*, Sir William Ashton and others, including the Mowbray retainers Sir Edmund Fitzwilliam and Otwell and Charles Nowell*. The jury declared that Oldhall and his associates had conspired in March 1450 to put the duke of York on the throne and to bring about the death of the duke of Suffolk by promoting Cade’s rebellion.49 J.R. Lander, Wars of the Roses, 63-64. Although the charges were very far-fetched, the indictment indicates that the Court and its supporters among the de la Pole affinity in East Anglia were regaining the initiative after the political upheavals of the early 1450s.

Shortly after the Ipswich hearings, Andrew attested the Suffolk county election to the Parliament of 1453. Also in 1453, he sued Henry Cobbe, a ‘peyntour’ from Ipswich, for breaking into his house and close in the town,50 KB27/770, rot. 117d. and less than two years later he took legal action against (Sir) John Wingfield†. On 2 May 1455, he appeared in the Exchequer to accuse Wingfield, then sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, of having made an illegal demise of the Suffolk hundred of Samford.51 E13/145B, rot. 65d. It is unclear whether his action progressed any further, although on the following 8 Nov. he received a special reward of £10 for his efforts in prosecuting Wingfield to the advantage of the Crown (probably by use of the ‘qui tam’ formula) in another suit, this time in King’s bench.52 Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 480. He was fortunate to do so, since Wingfield was a retainer of the duke of York, who had won the battle of St. Albans the previous May and was to assume the position of Protector of England for the second time a few days afterwards. Although he took out a pardon in October 1455,53 C67/41, m. 31. Andrew was apparently unaffected by political events, for he retained his place on the Suffolk bench during both of York’s protectorates. His dismissal as a j.p. in January 1459 occurred under a Lancastrian government, which reappointed him in June and then failed to include him in the commission of the peace pricked the following August. These appointments and dismissals are difficult to explain. If anything, they suggest that confusion abounded during the latter stages of Henry VI’s reign.54 C. Richmond, John Hopton, 111n. They cannot have had any political connotations, for he was included on anti-Yorkist commissions of array in September 1458 and December 1459.

In the following April, Andrew and Roger Philpot, probably acting at Wentworth’s behest, held unauthorized inquiries into the lands of the recently deceased Sir John Fastolf in Norfolk and Suffolk. The ‘inquisitions’ were a direct challenge to John Paston, to whom Sir John had apparently left his estates, because they found that Thomas Fastolf (described as a ward of the Crown) was the knight’s rightful heir. Paston and Thomas Howes traversed the Suffolk inquiry at the end of the following month, and the true inquisitions post mortem for Sir John Fastolf took place in the autumn.55 C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 107, 113.

In the meantime, the Yorkists had seized control of the government, prompting Tuddenham, Heydon, Andrew and other de la Pole retainers to take the precaution of seeking protection from the new regime. On 23 July, within days of their victory at Northampton, the earls of March, Warwick and Salisbury wrote a letter commanding all the King’s officials in Norfolk to ensure that nobody should rob or dispoil them, since any misdeeds they had committed were a matter for the law.56 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 221-2. In the following autumn Paston’s correspondent, Friar Brackley, advised him to seek a commission to investigate the activities of Tuddenham, Heydon, Andrew and others, should he be in London when Parliament opened in October. In another letter, probably written in 1461, Brackley warned Paston that Heydon, Wentworth and Andrew were still scheming maliciously against them.57 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 212-13, 264.

Three years later, the Yorkists executed Wentworth for his adherence to the Lancastrian cause although Heydon and Andrew were able to adjust to the accession of Edward IV. The latter lost his place on the Suffolk bench a few months after Edward came to the throne, but the new government trusted him enough to appoint him a j.p. in Norfolk two years later. Andrew was also adept enough at the beginning of the new reign to form an alliance with William Yelverton, William Jenney* and Gilbert Debenham I*, all of whom had opposed the de la Pole affinity in the past, and even to reconcile himself with the duke of Norfolk.58 Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 114. In September 1461 John Pampyng wrote to John Paston, informing him that Yelverton and Jenney, co-executors with Paston of Sir John Fastolf’s will, had entered the knight’s manor at Cotton in Suffolk, a property that Paston claimed as Fastolf’s heir. Andrew, who had supported Sir Philip Wentworth’s claims to the manor in the 1450s, had accompanied them and they had left one of his servants in possession there.59 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 248. At the same time, the MP continued to maintain links with the de la Poles, as a letter that Margaret Paston wrote to her husband in October 1465, in the aftermath of the attempt by John, duke of Suffolk, to seize the former Fastolf manor at Hellesdon, makes clear. She had been told, Margaret reported, that the duke (the son of Andrew’s former patron) and his mother, the dowager, had been ‘set fervently ageyn us’ by ‘Andrewys’ and other ‘fals shrewys’ who were causing ‘an evyll noyse in this contre and other places’.60 Ibid. i. 323.

In the following year Andrew was included on a commission instructed to investigate the illegal shipment of merchandise through East Anglian ports. There is no other evidence of his activities in the later 1460s, although he must have retained his links with Ipswich during these years, since he became a ‘foreign’ burgess of the town in May 1470.61 Add. 30158, f. 29. He took out a royal pardon at the end of the succeeding year,62 C67/48, m. 26. but in Easter term 1472 the sheriff of Suffolk was ordered to distrain him for failing to appear in King’s bench to answer for various misdemeanours of which he had been indicted.63 KB27/842, rex rot. 38; 843, rex rot. 13; 844, rex rot. 27d. There is no evidence that he ever had to answer these charges; in any case, he was dead by 18 Oct. 1473, when his widow, Elizabeth, drew up her will. She requested burial in the chancel of St. Denis Backchurch, London, rather than alongside her husband, who probably lay at Baylham. Whether she remembered Andrew with much affection is open to question, for her bequest of a doublet ‘that was my housbandes’ to a servant or dependant is her only reference to him in this document. Elizabeth appointed her sons-in-law, John Sulyard* and Thomas Windsor† her executors and asked her sister, Alice, the widow of Hugh Wyche*, to be the supervisor of the will, which was proved two months later.64 PCC 11 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 87v-88). Sulyard and Windsor had respectively married Andrew’s daughters and coheirs, Anne and Elizabeth, who shared his lands between them.65 Blomefield, viii. 287.