BAILEY, John II

Bailey’s name was a common one, and the identity of the man who represented Downton in 1447 thus cannot be established with absolute certainty. Among others, men of this name attested the parliamentary elections in Berkshire in 1421 (Dec.), in Somerset in 1426, in Buckinghamshire in 1429, in Gloucestershire in 1449 (Nov.), and in Kent in 1472, while in 1434 there were namesakes of sufficient standing to be included among those required to take the general oath against maintenance in Kent, Oxfordshire and Norfolk.1 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 390, 395, 406.

The borough of Downton (of which the bishops of Winchester were lords) had been re-enfranchised in 1442, and throughout the remainder of Henry VI’s reign it regularly provided parliamentary seats for external placemen. While it is possible that the MP of 1447 was either the John Bailey of Winchester who served as a Hampshire tax collector in 1416 or a younger kinsman and namesake who had established a connexion with Cardinal Beaufort, no evidence of such a link has come to light.2 CFR, xiv. 151. Moreover, Bailey’s colleague in 1447 was John Breknock*, an official of the King’s household, and it is probable that like him our MP also owed his return to connexions at court other than to the cardinal whose influence was waning in the weeks before his death. One possible candidate was the former secretary to Thomas, duke of Clarence, and another was a former yeoman of the chamber to Henry IV, who was still in receipt of a royal annuity in 1440, but no definite identification is possible.3 E361/6, rot. 7d; CCR, 1429-35, p. 294; 1435-41, p. 310; 1441-7, p. 35.

If Bailey was indeed connected with the royal household, it is tempting to speculate whether he was (as Wedgwood surmised) the man who fell victim to Jack Cade’s rebels at Whitechapel on 4 July 1450. On that day the rebels seized and beheaded both the unpopular treasurer of England, James Fiennes*, Lord Saye, and his son-in-law, the purportedly corrupt sheriff of Kent, William Cromer*, and, so several London chroniclers reported, a man called Bailey was also summarily beheaded, and his head was placed on London Bridge along with those of Fiennes and Cromer. If the treatment meted out to Bailey ostensibly seems to point to at least a popularly perceived connexion with Lord Saye, Robert Fabyan’s later account offers a different explanation. Fabyan, a young boy at the time of the events that he was describing, recorded that he had heard it said that the executed man had been ‘of the famylyer and old acquayntance of Iak Cade’, who had arranged for his judicial murder so that he might not disclose the rebel leader’s true origins to anyone.4 R. Fabyan, New Chrons. ed. Ellis, 624; Chrons. London ed. Kingsford, 161, 315; Hist. Colls. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. n.s. xvii), 192; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Misc. xxiv), 200n; Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 155. Robert Bale’s chronicle is alone in calling the victim William Bailey (Six Town Chrons. 133), probably an error resulting from the name’s juxtaposition with that of Cromer.