BELLINGHAM, Richard

A younger son of a knightly Northumbrian family, Bellingham first appears in the records in 1443. On 19 Mar. he joined John, younger son of Sir Richard Vernon*, in offering surety in a royal grant made to William Kene, an esquire of the royal household. He himself may have had some household connexions, for it is hard otherwise to see why, in the same year, he should have been favoured with a royal grant of the keeping of a very small property in Merchingley (in the parish of Slaley, Northumberland), and with appointment, in succession to his elder brother, Henry, to the escheatorship of Cumberland and Westmorland, an office for which he was qualified by birth but not by land. Such a connexion would also explain why, on 10 Nov. 1443, six days after this appointment, he was described as ‘of London’ when he offered mainprise in the court of King’s bench for a servant of Sir William Gascoigne*.1 CFR, xvii. 269; Hist. Northumb. vi. 378; KB27/732, rot. 46d. Thereafter he took his part in the periodic episodes of disorder in which the Bellinghams were routinely involved: in 1444 he was fined 10s. for his failure, as a pledge, to have two of his brothers, Henry and Robert, in the court of King’s bench to answer an appeal of mayhem; and, more seriously, in 1447 he and several of his kin were attached to reply to a widow for the murder of her husband.2 KB27/732, fines rot. 2, rex rot. 14; 745, rot. 62d; 746, rot. 2.

Bellingham’s election for Cumberland, at hustings held on 28 Oct. 1449, is surprising. Not only was he a younger son, but his family estates lay, principally, if not exclusively, in Northumberland and Westmorland. Only one explanation can be tentatively advanced. His later career identifies him as a committed supporter of the Percys. The connexion may have been established as early as 1443 when he offered surety for a servant of Gascoigne, who was among the earl of Northumberland’s leading retainers, and it seems reasonable to conclude he was returned as their man by the sheriff, Thomas Crackenthorpe*, another follower of that great family. None the less, it is still curious that Bellingham, an outsider, should have been the Percy choice, for there were other better qualified members of that affinity. Perhaps he was chosen because he was eager to serve and other more senior members of the retinue were not. If so, his eagerness may have arisen from the continuing ramifications of his family’s assault (in which he was not directly implicated) on (Sir) Thomas Parr* in London during the last session of the Parliament of 1445-6. This had produced a petition in the assembly of February 1449, asking for the reversal of the act of Parliament of 1446, imposing attainder and forfeiture on the attackers. The petition had been only partially successful, for the reversal contained a saving to any chief lords or royal grantees who had benefited from the forfeiture. A desire to secure further leniency would serve to explain Richard Bellingham’s readiness to sit in the Parliament of November 1449, to which, significantly, his brother Thomas (one of the principals in the affair) was also returned.3 C219/15/7; R.L. Storey, End of the House of Lancaster, 120-1; RP, v. 168-70 (cf. PROME, xii. 69).

The rest of Bellingham’s documented career was concerned with the great quarrel between Neville and Percy, which disturbed the peace of both the north and the nation in the 1450s. In the early 1450s he was involved in another incident that came to parliamentary attention. On Christmas day 1452 a group of retainers of Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, headed by our MP, assaulted a Neville servant, Thomas Laton (probably the son and heir of the Cumberland MP of 1433), at Laton’s home at Dalemain, near Penrith, and allegedly imprisoned him until the following June. His imprisonment cannot have been particularly restrictive, for, while confined, he petitioned Parliament for redress. On 16 June 1453, during the second session of the Parliament which had begun in the previous March, the Crown responded to his complaint by ordering the sheriff of Cumberland, Thomas de la More*, a Neville servant, to make proclamation against Bellingham and his adherents, demanding that they appear in King’s bench. Thereafter, however, the matter was quickly resolved after a local jury awarded the victim damages of £278. On the following 1 Oct. Laton made releases to Lord Egremont, Bellingham and his other alleged assailants, and, six days later, acknowledged that he had been released from his captivity on the previous 7 June.4 KB27/769, rot. 106; KB145/6/32; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 467-8, 470.

By the time of the releases, however, Bellingham had been drawn into more serious violence. According to indictments taken at York in June 1454, he was among the Percy retinue that confronted the Nevilles at Heworth Moor on 24 Aug. 1453, the first serious clash in the escalating hostility between the two families. On 6 May 1454, on the evidence of the same indictments, our MP (described as ‘once of Helay in the county of the city of York’) broke into one of the earl of Salisbury’s houses in York and assaulted the tenant, and on 21 May he was one of a great gathering at Spofford pledged to the support of Lord Egremont and his ally, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. His failure to answer led to his outlawry, but on 16 Sept. 1455, with other members of his family, he secured a general pardon, part no doubt of attempts at reconciliation in the wake of the death of the earl of Northumberland at the first battle of St. Albans.5 KB9/148/1/7; 149/89; P. Booth, ‘Men Behaving Badly?’, The Fifteenth Cent. III ed. Clark, 115-16; Storey, 130, 142, 148; C67/41, m. 27.

Thereafter Bellingham continued to be involved in Percy affairs. On 14 May 1457, in company with the duke of Exeter, and Eleanor, widow of the earl killed at St. Albans, he (described as ‘of Leckonfield’, a Percy manor in Yorkshire), and others entered in a bond in the massive sum of £16,000, undertaking that the countess’s son, Richard Percy, would be a ‘true prisoner’ in the Marshalsea. He subsequently took up arms on their behalf, although his part in the civil war of 1459-61 is illuminated by only a single reference. In 1462 he was one of many appealed by Alice, widow of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, as an accessory to the death of her husband, proof that our MP had been present in the Percy retinue at the battle of Wakefield on 30 Dec. 1460, in the aftermath of which Salisbury met his violent death.6 CCR, 1454-61, p. 223; KB27/804, rex rot. 65. No doubt this was not the extent of Bellingham’s battle honours; it is not unlikely that he was with Lord Egremont at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 and with the earl of Northumberland at the decisive battle of Towton in the following March. These defeats brought the Bellinghams a major setback. Not only were their patrons deprived of land and influence, but the head of the family, Henry, who, like Richard, had been implicated in the death of the earl of Salisbury, was among those attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, as was their brother, Robert. The family estates were granted to their enemies, the Parrs; and Henry, knighted by Henry VI, compromised the rest of the family by remaining active in the Lancastrian cause despite pretended reconciliations with the new King.7 CPR, 1461-7, p. 224; 1467-77, p. 10; J.R. Lander, Crown and Nobility, 133-4.

Nevertheless, our MP escaped the worst of these consequences, reinventing himself, by a means for which the surviving records provide no satisfactory explanation, as a Lincolnshire gentleman. On 3 Feb. 1462, despite the charges of the countess of Salisbury against him, he successfully sued out another general pardon. Here he is described as ‘of Holme, Lincolnshire, gentleman, alias of Bottesford parish’. The evidence of a later visitation pedigree shows that he came to settle there by marriage to a local widow, but one can only speculate upon how he was able to make such a match.8 C67/45, m. 41; Lincs. Peds. ed. Maddison, 117. It may, however, be significant that there were Bellinghams in Lincs. earlier in the 15th cent. Shortly before 1436, another Richard Bellingham died seised of a small estate in Upton and Aisby, near Gainsborough, leaving sons Thomas and John: C1/185/54. It is, however, clear that he lived quietly in retirement. Although his kin remained active in the Lancastrian cause – in July 1471, after Edward IV had retaken the throne, a commission was issued for the arrest of Henry and four other Bellinghams – Richard and his brother Thomas were not pursued further.9 CPR, 1467-77, p. 288. The brothers appear to have kept on close terms, despite the fact that Thomas lived in distant Sussex. In a suit brought into Chancery at Easter 1481, Robert Langton*, the former constable of Bramber castle, alleged that Thomas had reneged on a promise to give him 40 marks for procuring the marriage of Langton’s nephew, Richard Waterton (b.1464), to our MP’s daughter, Elizabeth.10 C1/62/237. Aside from this Chancery petition, almost nothing is known of his last years. He may have attested the Lincolnshire parliamentary election of 1478, although only the initial letter of the Christian name is legible on the return. According to the visitation pedigree, he died on 12 Jan. 1491, when he must have been over 70 years of age, and was buried in the church of Bottesford. He left at least one son, Thomas, who, on the evidence of the same pedigree, married the heiress of the manor of Brumby (now part of Scunthorpe), a few miles from Holme. One of his direct descendants, another Richard Bellingham (d.1672), was governor of Massachusetts.11 C219/17/3; Lincs. Peds. 117-18. In Hist. Northumb. vii. 193, our MP’s brother, Robert (d.1476), is wrongly described as his son.