CATESBY, William

On the death of his father in the summer of 1437, William Catesby was still a minor, albeit only just short of his majority. There was some confusion over whether his wardship pertained to the Crown. The Catesbys, despite their wealth, were not tenants-in-chief and thus not subject to prerogative wardship, but they were substantial tenants of the duchy of Lancaster. His father, very shortly before his death, had conveyed to feoffees at least part of the property he held of the duchy, namely his manor of Grandborough and his moiety of the manor of Lapworth in Warwickshire. Yet this did not prevent the Crown from acting as though entitled to the wardship: on 8 Nov. 1437 the King farmed to the courtier, Sir William Phelip†, the Catesby lands held of the duchy and sold him our MP’s marriage for the bargain price of 100 marks.5 E40/4377; DL42/18, f. 78v. Eight days later our MP’s mother was ordered, under the heavy penalty of £500, to produce her son in Chancery for delivery to his new guardian. Here the family hit back: his mother flatly denied that William was in her custody. The Crown, however, did not give up its claim. In the following February, Thomas Palmer* and others were commissioned to inquire into the Catesby lands in Northamptonshire, presumably in an effort to extend royal wardship to our MP’s inheritance there. The findings of this inquiry are not known; but they must have been favourable to the Crown for, on 19 May 1438, both the custody of the Catesbys’ duchy lands and William’s marriage were committed for 100 marks to the courtier John Norris*, the husband of our MP’s maternal first cousin, Alice Merbrook.6 C244/19/133; DL42/18, f. 79v.

Nothing else is known of the matter, although, given Catesby’s later connexion with Norris, it is safe to assume that he was, at least briefly, in his wardship.7 He may have reached his majority as early as 5 May 1439, when he and his mother took a duchy of Lancaster lease of land in Ashby St. Ledgers for an annual farm of 33s. 4d. p.a.: DL42/18, ff. 126v-127. He also followed the Catesby tradition of taking a legal training and spent time at the Inner Temple. Although he never followed the lawyer’s calling, in 1448 he pleaded his membership of that Inn in bar to an action of maintenance sued against him.8 KB27/750, rot. 105. Of more lasting significance than this education was the profitable marriage he contracted, perhaps through Norris’s patronage. By the spring of 1442, when the couple had a papal indult for a portable altar, he had espoused Philippa, daughter and coheiress-presumptive of an old soldier, Sir William Byshoppeston, and one of the several coheiresses-apparent of her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Wilcotes.9 Apostolic Penitentiary, i (Canterbury and York Soc. ciii), 358; CPL, ix. 312. The marriage has been attributed to the links of the Catesbys and Byshoppestons with Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick: C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 101. The earl was, however, dead before the marriage was made. In the subsidy returns of 1435-6 Byshoppeston had been assessed at an annual income of £50 on lands in Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire; on his death in 1444, these lands descended to Philippa and her sister, the wife of the rising young lawyer, Palmer, the commissioner of 1438.10 E179/192/59. A rental of Sir William’s lands, drawn up by Catesby and Palmer in 1446-7, values them at just over £53: SC11/819. They included a manor in Lapworth, where the Catesbys were the principal landholders, and were thus well placed to supplement the family’s land. It was, however, some years before a formal division was made between the coheiresses. As late as 1451-2 the Byshoppeston lands were jointly accounted – in that year Catesby received £29 from them – and he and Palmer appear to have co-operated amicably in their administration.11 SC6/1043/29, 30. By this date our MP had also acquired a share in the Oxfordshire lands of Elizabeth Wilcotes, who died in the autumn of 1445, but, since his share amounted to only a tenth of her property, this made little difference to his income.12 C139/122/33. In Mar. 1449 he joined with the other coheirs in leasing the manor of Woodperry, Oxon., to Edmund Hampden* and John Weston: E40/5397; VCH Oxon. v. 286. At least two of the lessors, namely Catesby and Palmer, together with Hampden were then sitting as MPs. None the less, his wife’s inheritance helped compensate him for the losses inherent in his mother’s survival until the mid 1450s.13 His mother died between Oct. 1454 and Oct. 1457: E40/4319, 4535.

Norris’s part in Catesby’s education and marriage is unproven; but there can be little doubt that he was responsible for finding his ward a place in the royal household at a time when it was expanding in the wake of Henry VI’s coming-of-age. It was as an esquire there that, on 24 July 1442, the King granted our MP an annuity of £10 assigned upon the manor of Fawsley, a few miles south of Ashby St. Ledgers.14 CPR, 1441-6, p. 91. Thereafter he embarked on his adult career with the energy of a man anxious to exploit fully his early advantages. In the following November he was pricked as sheriff, an office that generally came to men of greater experience, and at the end of his year in office he was added to the bench in the same county, Northamptonshire. His willingness to take an active part in local administration added to his recommendations as a royal servant, and the pace of his activity increased further in the last years of the decade. On 19 Jan. 1447 he attested his first recorded parliamentary election when two of his fellow esquires of the royal household, William Tresham* and Henry Green*, were returned to represent Northamptonshire. Later, on 21 May 1448, he sat with Tresham as a commissioner at Northampton to inquire into concealments of royal rights. At the next election, held at Northampton on 16 Jan. 1449, it was his turn to be elected in company with Tresham, who routinely took one of the county’s seats.15 C219/15/4, 6; C145/313/12.

It is a measure of Catesby’s political involvement that he was again returned when Parliament was summoned at the end of the same year. On this occasion, however, he was returned for neighbouring Warwickshire, where the competition for seats was less intense. This was probably a politic move on his part. On 23 Oct., three days after his election, he attested the return of two royal servants senior to himself, namely Tresham and Thomas Thorpe*, for Northamptonshire, and there is every reason to suppose that he had accepted election in the neighbouring county rather than oppose these influential men. His presence in the assembly proved advantageous: he secured the exemption of his annuity of £10 from the Act of Resumption.16 C219/15/7; PROME, xii. 139. It may also have helped pave the way for further administrative appointments: soon after he was appointed for his second shrievalty in his native county, and while in office he added to his local responsibilities a place on the Warwickshire bench.

One so active in local administration was bound to be in demand as an agent in the transactions of others. When he was barely of age his family connexions brought him the role of arbiter in an important dispute: he was nominated by Humphrey, earl of Stafford, to return an award in the conflict over the lands of Nicholas Metley* between his uncle, Robert Catesby, one of Metley’s executors, on the one hand, and Metley’s widow, Joan, and her husband, Richard Hotoft*, on the other.17 E163/29/11, m. 2. A few years later, in 1444-5, he and his wife were admitted to the guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford-upon-Avon, to which many of the Warwickshire gentry belonged, an indication that he was almost as important figure in that county as he was in Northamptonshire.18 Reg. Gild of Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon ed. Macdonald, 181. His 2nd wife was to be admitted in 1457-8: ibid. 239. A year later he was involved in the affairs of a Warwickshire knight, Sir William Peyto‡, then in French captivity, joining with Sir William Mountfort* and others in raising his ransom.19 CP25(1)/293/71/309; CCR, 1441-7, p. 356. In 1448 he acted as a feoffee for his former guardian, Norris, in the purchase of the manor of Hampstead Ferrers in Berkshire; and in 1449 he returned an award in a dispute involving his younger brother, John Catesby of Althorp.20 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 277-8; CP25(1)/13/85/20; J. Biancalana, Fee Tail and Common Recovery, 354; Northants. RO, Spencer of Althorpe mss, 832. His connexions as a courtier are evident from his nomination in March 1450, while sitting as an MP, among the feoffees for the settlement made on the marriage of the young John, Lord Strange of Knockin, to Jacquetta, daughter of Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers.21 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 311-12. A chance reference adds significantly to this picture. An account for the fishpond at Ashby St. Ledgers shows that, in 1447-8, Catesby gave gifts of fish to Stafford, then duke of Buckingham, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and his countess, and two of the leading figures in his native county, William, Lord Lovell, and Sir Thomas Green*, both of whom later employed him as a feoffee.22 SC6/949/16; Lincoln Diocese Docs. (EETS, cxlix), 81; C1/53/257.

Talbot’s appearance among the beneficiaries of Catesby’s largesse is particularly revealing, for while there is no later evidence to connect him with the duke of Buckingham, he was soon to become one of the earl of Shrewsbury’s most trusted adherents. The earl no doubt saw him as a valuable ally in support of his second wife Margaret Beauchamp’s claim to a share of the earldom of Warwick after the death in 1449 of her niece of the half blood, Anne. He also provided other services. On 15 May 1452 he received payment in the Exchequer on behalf of their son, John Talbot, Viscount Lisle, and on the following 1 Sept., as the earl prepared to sail to Aquitaine, he was sufficiently valued to be named as one of his executors.23 E403/786, m. 1; Lambeth Palace Lib. Reg. Stafford and Kemp, f. 312v. In the earl’s absence, on 10 May 1453, he witnessed the jointure settlement made upon his daughter, Eleanor, when she married Thomas, son and heir of Ralph Butler, Lord Sudley; and a month later he acted in common recoveries designed to protect the inheritance of Viscount Lisle’s wife, Joan Cheddar.24 Warws. RO, Holbech mss, LI/79; Biancalana, 398; E40/11094.

In return, Catesby had the aid of the Talbots in finding a suitable second wife. Their role can be inferred from her identity: she was one of the earl’s nieces, but there is also more direct evidence, in a letter written by Catesby ‘in haste’ at London, almost certainly on 15 Sept. 1452, to Master John Ashby, a kinsman of his tenant, George Ashby*. This reveals some of the tensions inherent in the making of second marriages, for which the financial arrangements could not generally be fitted into the long-established formula governing first matches. He wrote that he had heard that Sir John Barre ‘hath mevyd to my lady of Shrewsbury’ that a formal contract might be drawn up for his forthcoming marriage to Barre’s sister, Joan. He insisted that such a contract was unnecessary: his proposed bride had no need to mistrust him, and he would assure her not only of her jointure but also the further sum of at least 20 marks p.a. ‘for her own finding’, which she herself had requested. None the less, he added, that, if she should require him to enter written undertakings, he would do so ‘with ryght a good wyll’. He proposed that the countess of Shrewsbury should be a party to the agreement, and that Joan should write to her by the bearer of the letter, stating her terms. He also wrote of practical arrangements for the wedding itself: he suggested the following 10 June as a suitable date, to which both the countess and her ‘brother’ (presumably a reference to Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, husband of the countess’s sister, Eleanor) were agreed, and asked that Joan send him measurements of the garments he would have made against that day.25 SC1/51/147. When this letter was written Catesby was farming the manor of Braunston near Ashby St. Ledgers from Beaufort, but nothing else is known of their relationship: E40/1412. It is probable that the marriage took place as Catesby proposed. The couple were certainly married by 25 June, when the jointure settlement was duly made. His feoffees, headed by Viscount Lisle, Lord Lovell and two of the leading Northamptonshire gentry, Henry Green and Thomas Tresham, conveyed manors in Grandborough and Ladbroke to the couple.26 E40/4369. In exchange for this settlement, our MP gained in respect of both his new wife’s social connexions and the property she brought from her first husband, (Sir) Kynard de la Bere. Since Kynard did not outlive his father she had no dower interest in the de la Bere estate, but later evidence shows that she held in jointure the manor of Letton, near the de la Bere home at Kinnersley.27 In 1464 the couple leased out Letton for £14 p.a.: CAD, iv. A8451, A8454.

By the time Catesby had taken a second wife, he had become a figure of greater account in the royal household. He was an esquire of the royal body by 15 Sept. 1452, when the King gave him a reward of £40, and on the following 5 Jan. he was one of those singled out for knighthood at the ennoblement of the King’s half-brothers at Greenwich.28 E404/69/21; E403/793, m. 3; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 770. Soon after, he was elected to his third Parliament, an assembly that proved far more amenable to royal wishes than its immediate predecessors.29 The Northants. return does not survive. The evidence of his Membership is his appointment to the comm. for the tax voted by the Parliament: CFR, xix. 44. New responsibilities in the household did little to diminish his activities in local administration. On 15 Apr. 1455 he sat as a j.p. at Kettering and, four days later, he had moved to Warwick to sit in the same capacity.30 KB9/283, m. 90; 290, m. 7. This mounting prominence was, however, soon to be threatened by the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, although, given his strong household connexions, he did not suffer the political exclusion that he must have feared. This was probably a result of his connexions with some on the Yorkist side – Thomas Palmer was committed to the duke of York’s cause and Sir John Barre had long been retained by him – and it is clear that he was not distrusted by the duke’s administration. On 6 June 1455 he attested the Northamptonshire election, and in the following November he was again named as sheriff of the county despite the fact that he had surrendered the office only three years before.31 C219/16/3. None the less, further advances on his part depended on the restoration of Lancastrian control and he must have welcomed the end of York’s protectorate early in 1456. He then resumed his household career, suing out a general pardon to insure him against the potential financial penalties of his shrievalty and receiving a pardon of account in the sum of 40 marks for his ‘greet and excessiue charges’ in that office.32 C67/41, m. 7; E404/71/1/42; E403/810, m. 3.

Catesby now showed that, as national politics became increasingly polarized, he was prepared to commit himself wholeheartedly to the militant Lancastrian regime. This commitment found expression in the offices entrusted to him. On 21 Feb. 1458 he received a royal grant of the constableship of Northampton castle for life at a daily wage of 12d. A few months later his household career reached its apogee with appointment as one of the King’s carvers; and, on 17 Nov. 1458, he was granted an annuity of £40, payable from the previous Michaelmas, for as long as he held the post.33 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 417-18, 461; E159/234, brevia Trin. rot. 16d; 235, brevia Mich. rot. 15d. His pricking as sheriff in Herefordshire in the same month, an appointment only barely justified by his wife’s interests in that county, marked a clear attempt by the government to assert control in a county in which the duke of York was strong.34 His removal from the Warws. bench with as many as seven others on 22 Nov. 1458 has no obvious explanation, but it may have been connected with his appointment as sheriff in Herefs.

Further reward for Catesby’s loyal service came after the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge in October 1459, at which he was probably present, and their subsequent attainder in the Coventry Parliament, in which he may have sat. This released a fund of patronage from which committed Lancastrians could expect to benefit. Catesby did so to a considerable degree. On 15 Mar. 1460 he was awarded the stewardship of the duke of York’s lands in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Herefordshire, together with the constableship of Wigmore castle. Nine days later he had a life grant of the custody of the manor of Fownhope in Herefordshire, forfeited by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, with £40 p.a. from the issues.35 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 550, 581. These grants made him an influential figure in his wife’s native county. He had already been able to seduce her brother, Sir John, from his long-held Yorkist allegiance. On 20 Dec. 1459, at the end of the Coventry Parliament, the two men had been named together on a commission of Lancastrian loyalists who were to hold revenues from the duke’s estates to the use of his duchess and her infants; thereafter Barre benefited from Lancastrian patronage.36 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 542-3. Barre was an MP in this Parliament, and this raises the possibility that the other three gentry among the commrs. (Catesby, Sir William Lucy* and Sir Richard Tunstall), also sat. Many returns are lost, including those for Northants. It is thus possible that Catesby and Lucy (who succeeded our MP as sheriff of Herefs. while the Parliament was in session) represented that county, although at least as strong a case can be made for Thomas Thorpe and Thomas Tresham as the county’s MPs.

In this period of prosperity Catesby forwarded his private affairs. As a mark of the growing importance of his family, he established a park at Ashby St. Ledgers. On 3 Apr. 1458 a large number of tenants of the manor there, headed by the prior of Launde, quitclaimed all their rights in the lands that our MP had recently imparked.37 This is an impressive document, retaining many seals: E41/203; J. Nichols, Leics. iii (1), 316. For further individual quitclaims: ibid. iii (1), 306; Northants. RO, Ashley mss, ASL/58. Soon after, he made preparations to acquire another of the trappings of family eminence: on 20 Mar. 1460, in company with his son, William, he secured a royal licence to found and endow a chantry of a chaplain in the church there with lands worth as much as 12 marks p.a. At the same time he was licensed to impark both 300 acres there (a retrospective justification of an accomplished fact) and 1,000 acres in Lapworth. Three months later, perhaps in furtherance of his new park in the latter, he purchased from Thomas Palmer that part of ‘Bysshwode’ which had come to him in right of the other Byshoppeston coheiress.38 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 551-2; E40/4419. Catesby was now at the peak of his career. He had continued the family’s social progress, which had begun in the time of his great-grandfather, and elevated it to the ranks of the greater gentry.

This prosperity, however, was soon brought to a violent end by the defeat of the Lancastrians on 10 July 1460 at the battle of Northampton. Proof is lacking, but there is every reason to suppose he was present there. Barre’s defection had removed an important friend on the Yorkist side; and he had, in any event, committed himself too far to abandon his Lancastrian allegiance in advance of a decisive defeat. He was removed from the Northamptonshire bench and the further defeat of the Lancastrians at Towton on 29 Mar. 1461, another battle at which he was probably present, left him facing attainder. He duly fled into exile with Henry VI, and on 14 May Robert Ingleton*, escheator of Northamptonshire and Rutland, was ordered to seize his lands.39 CPR, 1461-7, p. 35. For what happened next we are dependent on the account drawn up in the reign of Henry VII of the dispute over the Metley lands, to which Catesby’s uncle and cousin were party. This claims that, after Sir William’s flight to Scotland, he secured a pardon from Edward IV through the ‘mesne and helpe’ of Thomas, Lord Stanley, and the ‘sucoure and fauour’ of the countess of Salisbury.40 E163/29/11, m. 5. His exile is confirmed by two other sources: Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 158 (testimony of a spy in the service of Sir John Russell); SC6/1042/10, m. 3 (an acct. for Mich. 1461-2 which refers to his return from Scotland). There is no reason to doubt this statement, but it is an indication of the general limitations of the sources that there is nothing else to illuminate the intervention of Stanley and the countess. The conventional sources do, however, provide us with evidence of his pardon. This was granted, on payment of an unspecified fine, on 22 Dec. 1461, and, for the security of the recipient, enrolled on the patent roll; and he quickly added to his security by suing out a further pardon in the following February.41 CPR, 1461-7, p. 120; C67/45, m. 39. The dating of the first pardon is significant: the previous day had seen the prorogation of the parliamentary session in which the Lancastrian loyalists were attainted; Catesby escaped this fate and it thus seems that he had returned to England before the Parliament began in early November.42 His attainder had been expected. His name appears among the largely-accurate list of the attainted in a contemporary chronicle: Letters and Pprs. ii (2), 778.

Catesby’s quick restoration was a remarkable piece of fortune for him and a misfortune for his local rivals who had taken advantage of his absence. According to later actions sued by our MP, on 18 May 1461 William Newenham, a leading retainer of Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, had broken his close at Stoneton, Northamptonshire, and a few weeks later the abbot of Combe had done the same in respect of closes at Radbourne and its neighbourhood.43 KB27/805, rot. 74; 807, rot. 59d; 810, rot. 86d; CP40/815, rot. 335d. Catesby’s restoration allowed him to move on the offensive. On 8 Jan. 1462 he allegedly entered the abbot’s manor at Hodnell near Radbourne; and, on 16 Apr. 1464, Newenham was condemned at his suit in damages of £12 10s.44 KB27/805, rot. 79d; 807, rot. 70; 808, rot. 24d. Almost all that is known of Catesby in these years concerns litigation arising out of his dispute with the abbot, but again the Metley dispute narrative provides more interesting evidence. It tells us that on his return from exile, he won the favour of the earl of Warwick. This is consistent with what the narrative tells us about the intervention in 1461 of the earl’s mother and Stanley, husband of one of the earl’s sisters, and it may be that Catesby’s understanding with the earl went far enough for him either to accompany Neville on a campaign in the north or at least to send some of his tenants. The evidence is slightly ambiguous: an account for his property at Welton (near Ashby St. Ledgers) for Michaelmas 1463-4 has an allowance for 6s. 2d. for a man riding north ‘domino Warr’. This may be a mistake for the standard formula for ‘by the lord’s warrant’, but the reference to the north makes it more likely that the man was going to join the earl.45 E163/29/11, m. 5; SC6/949/15, f. 41; Carpenter, 493.

If, however, Catesby had found favour with the earl of Warwick there is little other evidence of that favour. By Michaelmas term 1463 he had put the bulk of his lands into the hands of feoffees, who did not include the earl. Indeed, in his choice he looked back to his Lancastrian past, naming Henry VI’s former confessor, John Stanbury, bishop of Hereford, Robert Tanfeld*, former receiver-general of Queen Margaret, and his old guardian, John Norris.46 He also named Barre and Palmer: E40/4462, 6046. Further, if he did enjoy the active patronage of the earl, it is hard to explain his exclusion from ad hoc commissions of local government and the delay in his restoration to the commissions of the peace. He was not reappointed in Northamptonshire until May 1465 and had to wait a year longer for his return in Warwickshire.

Nor did Catesby find a comfortable place in local affairs. His conflict with the abbot of Combe persisted. At the assize session at Warwick on 17 July 1465, which Catesby attended in person, the abbot complained that he had disseised him of more than 1,500 acres, although pleading centred on a much smaller estate, the manor of Radbourne Grange, which the abbey had conveyed to the Catesbys in tail male in 1415 at an annual rent of 63s. 4d. The assize found that the abbot had legitimately re-entered for arrears of rent, seemingly occasioned by Catesby’s exile, but it was later agreed, probably in an award returned by the assize justices in 1466, that the lease be renewed.47 JUST1/1547, rot. 2; E40/8848; VCH Warws. vi. 115; CPR, 1494-1509, pp. 141-2. The lease was of particular importance to the Catesbys for our MP had transformed his manor at Radbourne into a large and profitable livestock farm with receipts of as much as £107 in 1475-6: F.C. Taylor, ‘Catesby Estate’, Midland Hist. xxxii. 36-9; C. Dyer, Warws. Farming (Dugdale Soc. occ. pprs. xxvii), 17-21. This seems to have ended the dispute, but by this time our MP had become involved in another. Here he appears to have been the aggressor, determined, in the interests of more effective estate exploitation, to acquire from John Brome II* the one estate in Lapworth that he did not yet hold.48 He had contemplated making a claim in 1454, but Brome, as an important Exchequer official, was probably then considered too powerful an opponent: E40/4500. Both disputants had questionable claims. As long before as 1408 John Brome of Lapworth (not to be confused with Brome II’s father, John Brome I*) 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, Brome II had purchased them from Brome of Lapworth’s grandson and heir, John Audley, in 1436. Catesby’s claim was worst: 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 our MP now claimed as his heir.49 During pleadings in Chancery in 1500, Nicholas, son and heir of John Brome II, identified the weakness of the Catesby claim, asserting that our MP was seised to the use of finding a chantry priest: C1/185/64-67. Early in 1465 he collected a series of releases from various descendants of Brome of Lapworth to his own nominees, who then, at the assizes of July 1466, claimed that Brome II had disseised them of ten messuages and nearly 1,000 acres in Lapworth.50 E40/4251, 4256, 4395, 4402; E163/29/4; KB27/829, rot. 83. In one of these releases the earl of Warwick was named among Catesby’s nominees, but his name is excluded from the other releases and he appears later to have sided with our MP’s opponent: Carpenter, 502-3. Litigation persisted as Brome secured a writ of error when the assize found against him, but Catesby had won the dispute (for his lifetime at least) by the summer of 1470, when he made a lease of his rival’s capital messuage at Lapworth for the term of 20 years.51 E40/4407.

Little else is known of Catesby’s career in the late 1460s. He certainly regained none of the importance he had enjoyed in the 1450s, although he was not without some friends. In 1466, for example, he was named as a feoffee for the performance of the will of William, Lord Lovell’s widow, Alice Deincourt, and in June 1467 his daughter Anne married Robert Wittlebury, stepson of Henry Green. In the meantime, he was confident enough of his place in local affairs to head the attestors to the election to Parliament for Northamptonshire of another former Lancastrian, Sir Thomas Tresham.52 CP25(1)/179/96/16; Northants. RO, Fitzwilliam mss, 1416; C219/17/1. Yet this was a meagre level of activity for one who had been one of the most important gentry of the region, and his experience of exile in 1461 had probably made him cautious of whole-hearted commitment.

Such an interpretation is certainly consistent with what is known of Catesby’s activities during the new crisis in national affairs between 1469 and 1471. His earlier service in the household of Henry VI and his new, albeit tenuous, attachment to the earl of Warwick might have been expected to turn him into an active supporter of the Readeption. The new regime certainly identified him as such: on 6 Nov. 1470 he was named as sheriff of Northamptonshire and 13 days later he was granted a pardon in his account in the sum of £100.53 E404/71/6/20. This, however, is the extent of his known commitment, and, on the available evidence, he seems to have been more concerned with private affairs than returning to the political prominence he had enjoyed in the late 1450s. On 6 Dec. 1470 he returned an award in a minor dispute involving Palmer, whose Yorkist affiliations made him politically vulnerable.54 Leics. RO, Peake mss, DE221/1/2/7. More interestingly, on the following 30 Jan. he made arrangements for the observation of an anniversary in the church of Ashby St. Ledgers on the Monday after the feast of St. Anne.55 E41/162. This was clearly intended to stand temporarily in the place of the chantry he had been licensed to found in 1460, a plan thwarted by the change of regime in 1461, for he provided that, should that plan ever be fulfilled, the observance of the anniversary was to be the responsibility of the chantry priest. In the meantime, however, the task was entrusted to the vicar of Ashby St. Ledgers and Catesby knew exactly what he wanted. Indeed, so minutely detailed were his instructions that they suggest he was a man of strong personal piety.56 There are other indications of his piety. In 1473 he was admitted to the confraternity of Christ Church, Canterbury, and he later concerned himself with an inquiry into a local miracle: BL Arundel, 68, f. 5v; Christ Church Letters (Cam. Soc. n.s. xix), 29, 96. In 1478 he had a new altar cloth made for Ashby St. Ledgers church: SC6/1039/4, mm. 5, 12. The bede roll is the most interesting of them, for it looked back to his service to the Talbots in the late 1440s and early 1450s: he named the earl of Shrewsbury who died in 1453 together with his second wife, Countess Margaret, and two of their children, John, Viscount Lisle, and Eleanor. Aside from members of his own family, the only others named were two long-serving family servants, William and John Overton, and, puzzlingly, Sir Robert Danby, c.j. CB. There is very little to connect him with the latter in the surviving evidence, but they clearly enjoyed a close friendship.57 In 1460 they were together feoffees of a royal auditor, Thomas Pygge: CCR, 1461-8, p. 89. More significantly Danby was one of the justices of assize for the Midland circuit in the 1460s, and, as such, he arbitrated Catesby’s dispute with the abbey of Combe: E40/8848.

It was also at about this time that Sir William made a good match for his son and heir, William, contracting him to a daughter of the Northamptonshire baron, William, Lord Zouche (d.1462), by his second wife, Elizabeth St. John.58 For her parentage: CPR, 1494-1509, p. 18. There was a political context to the match: Elizabeth was the maternal half-sister of Margaret Beaufort, mother of the future Henry VII. During the Readeption this Beaufort connexion would have appeared valuable to the Catesbys, and it may be that the marriage took place then. It had almost certainly been made by 10 Nov. 1471, when Elizabeth and her second husband, John, Lord Scrope of Bolton, granted to William her life interest in the Zouche lands in Houghton-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire.59 W. Dugdale, Warws. ii. 789; E40/6808. Whenever it took place, it was the occasion of a generous jointure settlement by our MP: he gave the couple almost all the property that had come to him from his first wife, some six manors in Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, together valued in the inquisitions taken on the bride’s death in 1494 at £30 6s. 8d.60 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1109, 1113, 1131.

Taken together this evidence from the Readeption – Catesby’s appointment as sheriff, his probable Beaufort connexion and his friendship with Danby, who was replaced as chief justice on Edward IV’s return – could be taken to imply that Sir William was an active supporter of the restored monarch. But such a conclusion is hard to reconcile with the ease with which he adapted to his old master’s second deposition, nor is there any evidence to suggest his presence at the battles of either Barnet or Tewkesbury. Although he lost the shrievalty before his term was over, so too did the other Readeption sheriffs, and the general pardon he sued out on 23 Feb. 1472 was probably no more than a routine precaution.61 CFR, xxi. no. 42. C67/48, m. 7. Harder to explain is his exclusion from the Northamptonshire bench until 1475 and the failure to name him again in Warwickshire; none the less, there is nothing else to suggest that he was marginalized in these years. Indeed, it is striking that, in marked contrast to the 1460s, he was routinely appointed to ad hoc commissions of local government. Further, the narrative of the dispute over the Metley lands tells that, in the early 1470s, he ‘grue well in the fauour’ of the King’s brother, George, duke of Clarence; and this is confirmed by his nomination among the duke’s feoffees in 1475 and by his son William’s appointment as steward of the duke’s Northamptonshire lands.62 E163/29/11, m. 10; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 529-30; DL29/640/10388, m. 3d. He also appears to have been more active in the affairs of his neighbours than at any time since the 1450s. He was named as a feoffee by several local gentry, including Richard Knightley, Thomas Furtho and Richard Boughton; in 1474 he was a trustee in the goods of one of his own feoffees, Robert Tanfeld; and a year later he alienated the manor of Duddington in Northamptonshire to Magdalen College, Oxford, in execution of the will of Alice Deincourt.63 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 23; ii. 291; CCR, 1468-76, no. 1267; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 531, 557-8; Magdalen Coll. Oxf. Misc. 42, 427.

In these years Catesby was also defendant in two important Chancery petitions. Marina, widow of his old friend Sir Thomas Green, claimed that, as the last-surviving feoffee in Green’s Yorkshire lands, he was denying her dower. It is not clear what was at issue here, but Catesby may have failed to convey at the behest of the royal esquire, Richard Middleton, husband of the widow of Green’s son and heir. A widow was also the claimant in the other petition. Agnes, widow of William Haldenby of Holdenby (Northamptonshire), alleged that Catesby, as one of her husband’s feoffees, had refused to allow her the revenues to which she was entitled under the terms of her late husband’s will. Here the issue seems to have been a dispute within the Haldenby family.64 C1/48/244-5; 53/257.

Further evidence of Sir William’s renewed prominence dates from the very end of his life. Although the Metley narrative identifies his connexion with Clarence in the 1470s, this was not the family’s most important baronial association in these years. His son, William, was already a lawyer of standing – he gave his first reading at the Inner Temple in about 1474 – and, as such, he had made himself indispensable to the King’s intimate, William, Lord Hastings. In 1476 our MP himself joined Hastings among the feoffees for the implementaion of the will of his old friend, Thomas Palmer.65 HMC Hastings, i. 101. This connexion explains why, in the aftermath of Clarence’s fall, the elderly Sir William was appointed to the shrievalty of Northamptonshire for a remarkable fifth term. He was allowed to serve on favourable terms: a week after his pricking he was granted a pardon of account in £100.66 E403/848, m. 4; E404/76/4/85. At least outwardly, he was now thoroughly adapted to the Yorkist regime, and his son, William, with unfortunate timing, was to show himself a Yorkist partisan. Fortunately our MP did not survive to witness his son’s execution and his family’s temporary ruination. He did not even survive his shrievalty. Writs of diem clausit extremum issued out of Chancery on 22 Oct. 1479, although these were not acted upon, presumably because he was still not a tenant-in-chief.67 CFR, xi. no. 514.

By the time of his death, Catesby had already commissioned an elaborate brass from the newly-established London ‘F’ workshop to be laid in the church of Ashby St. Ledgers. Unfortunately, this ambitious composition survives only fragmentally, but its form is clear from the antiquarian record. Strikingly, our MP and his two wives were represented as shrouded corpses (only the upper part of the male figure is now in situ). This choice may have had a political significance. Such cadaver representations, it has been argued, were a stylistic choice favoured by those associated with the Lancastrian court. In the political circumstances of Yorkist rule such memorials are thus, on this analysis, to be seen as unobtrusive assertions of an allegiance to Lancaster. In the case of the MP’s brass, however, that assertion took a more direct form. The inscription remembers him as ‘quondam unus trencheatorum regis Henrici sexti’.68 P.M. King, ‘Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb’ (York Univ. D. Phil. thesis, 1987), 105-6, 369-70; Catesby Fam. and Their Brasses ed. Bertram, pp. xvii-xviii, 9, 22, 46-59. Perhaps, even in the late 1470s, his reconciliation with the house of York was reluctant and still incomplete. His son would have been wise to maintain the same stance.