CHEYNE, Sir John II

The Cheyne family had been established in Kent since the end of the thirteenth century, but acquired what would become their principal residence, Shurland on the Isle of Sheppey, by marriage in the early fourteenth century.6 E. Hasted, Kent ed. Drake, vi. 248-9. John was the son and heir of William, one of the leading men of the county who had served as j.p. and twice as sheriff and sat in Parliament as knight of the shire in March 1416. William continued to be involved in the public affairs of Kent throughout the 1420s and the first reference to John is his admittance, along with his parents, to the fraternity of Christ Church, Canterbury, in July 1428.7 BL Arundel 68, f. 60. This may have marked his coming of age and the following year he was present, alongside his father, at the parliamentary election at Canterbury.8 C219/14/1. In February 1433 he appears to have been in trouble and was bound over to keep the peace towards a neighbour John Hamond.9 E159/209, recorda Hil. rot. 1.

In 1441 John’s father died and, along with his mother, he served as executor of his will. By this stage he had already married Eleanor, the daughter and heiress of Sir Robert Shotesbrooke, the noted soldier and diplomat. The match had probably been made in 1439, as in November of that year property in Harbledown near Canterbury was settled on a group of feoffees, including Shotesbrooke and William Cheyne, to the use of John.10 CP25(1)/115/313/499. The marriage was to have important consequences for Cheyne’s later career. In 1442 Eleanor’s uterine sister Margaret Beauchamp married John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and Cheyne appears to have formed an important connexion with the Beauforts, who were themselves already figures of note in Kent.11 CP, xii (1), 47; M. Mercer, ‘Kent and National Politics’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1995), 4-5. This was also to have consequences for Cheyne’s relations with his neighbours in east Kent. In November 1446 he was among a group of feoffees named by Nicholas St. Nicholas who quitclaimed the manor of St. Nicholas on the Isle of Thanet to Edmund Beaufort, marquess of Dorset, and a group of his servants, including Sir Thomas Kyriel*.12 CCR, 1441-6, p. 441. This quitclaim settled the title to the St. Nicholas estate, which Cheyne and the other feoffees had defended at common law three years earlier. Cheyne and the marquess each represented rival groups of feoffees acting for a different one of St. Nicholas’s two daughters. No decision was made at common law between the competing interests, but Cheyne’s connexion with the Beauforts may have helped to resolve the dispute amicably.13 CP40/731, rot. 523.

Cheyne’s other important connexion was with the Fiennes family, to whom he was related through his paternal grandmother, Margery Cralle.14 Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. xlii), 103-4; Archaeologia Cantiana, xviii. 228. Although John’s father William had not received any part of the Cralle estates, the relationship between him and the Fiennes family appears to have been a close one. He had acted as a trustee for Sir Roger Fiennes* from 1411, and had sat with him in the Commons of March 1416. John’s own relationship with Sir Roger’s brother James* is, however, less well defined. On one occasion he appears to have been implicated in Fiennes’s alleged extortions in Kent during the 1440s. In a petition presented long after the event, Fiennes, accused of having used threats to obtain the manor of Crowthorn in Romney Marsh, was said to have enfeoffed Cheyne with the manor. The petitioners claimed they would have little prospect of recovery at the common law as Cheyne was ‘a man of grete power and myght’.15 C1/27/419. Whatever the truth of this allegation, Cheyne established a lasting friendship with James’s son, William. At some point after 1453 William, then Lord Saye and Sele, granted him the nomination of the chantry chaplain at Crowthorn, and he died in possession of both manor and advowson.16 Kent Chantries (Kent Rec. Ser. xii), 156. Cheyne appointed Sir Richard Fiennes (son of Sir Roger) as one of the feoffees of his lands on the Isle of Sheppey, and in 1456 acted with both cousins as recipients of a gift of goods and chattels made by a Sussex man, John Chitecroft*. It also seems that marriage negotiations took place between Lord William and Cheyne to match their offspring, but the outcome of these is unclear.17 C140/26/45; CCR, 1454-61, p. 172; J.R. Scott, Mems. Fam. of Scott, p. lvii.

His connexion with James Fiennes may explain Cheyne’s election to the Parliament of February 1449. The parliamentary representation of Kent during the 1440s was dominated by Fiennes, his kinsmen and friends, and on this occasion Cheyne was elected alongside Fiennes’s son-in-law, William Cromer*. Despite this, however, there is no evidence that Cheyne had been a partisan of Fiennes in the politics of the 1440s. He had not been present at any of the other Kentish elections during the 1440s, nor had he close links with any of the other men in Fiennes’s circle (with the exception of the Household man John Warner*).18 CP40/745, rot. 365. By the time of his election Cheyne was an established member of the Kentish elite, apparently taking a more active role in the administration of the county than his father had done. In April 1445, described as a King’s serjeant-at-arms, he had been appointed to his first ad-hoc commission and shortly afterwards he was knighted, although the exact date and occasion for the honour are unknown. It was possibly at the coronation of Queen Margaret which took place at Westminster on 30 May that year. In December 1447 he was appointed to the bench. Neither his membership of the royal affinity in Kent nor his nomination to the bench can be positively connected with the influence of Fiennes, and Cheyne certainly escaped any implication in the alleged misgovernment of the county made by Cade’s rebels. In fact, he was the only man of knightly rank to purchase the general pardon offered to people of the region in the early days of July 1450, after Fiennes had been put to death. That the pardon extended to the men of the Isle of Sheppey in general is probably evidence that Cheyne was not personally involved in the rebellion, but reflects the widespread appeal of the pardon throughout Kentish society.19 CPR, 1446-52, p. 339.

An alternative explanation for Cheyne’s election to Parliament was his business and legal entanglements in London and Westminster. Around the time of his election he was a defendant in a debt case brought by a London goldsmith, John Wynne, in the court of common pleas. His election may have been motivated by the prospect of enjoying the parliamentary privilege of freedom from common law process. This suit eventually resulted in Cheyne being outlawed for his failure to appear and it was not until Michaelmas term 1449 that his outlawry was reversed.20 CP40/751, rot. 611. Cheyne’s links with London were mercantile. A few years earlier, described as ‘squier de Kent’, he had entered the prestigious Taylors’ fraternity of St. John the Baptist.21 Guildhall Lib. London, Merchant Taylors’ Co. accts. 34048/1, f. 358. Like his father, he traded in grain and wool produced on his land in Sheppey. In September 1448 William Nicoll, a London draper, made a grant of 18 sacks of wool due to him from Cheyne to another Londoner and a yeoman of the crown and in June 1449 Cheyne was licensed to ship wool from Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey to London.22 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 231-2; CPR, 1446-52, p. 278. He also had links with foreign merchants. A year later Francesco Micheli, the Lucchese, alleged in the common pleas that Cheyne had failed to pay a deceased kinsman of his £4 3s. 4d. for three ells of blue velvet upon satin and a red and white ‘baudekin’ decorated with gold of Lucca.23 CP40/758, rot. 126d. His connexions reached the pinnacle of London mercantile society, later enabling his son and eventual heir, William, to marry one of the daughters of the London mayor and mercer, Geoffrey Boleyn*.24 Genealogist, new ser. xxii. 185.

It was undoubtedly Cheyne’s kinship by marriage with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and his links with London that led to his appointment as victualler of Calais in 1451. He appears to have remained close to Somerset from then until the latter’s death at St. Albans in 1455, and in June 1453 he stood as surety when the duke received custody of the Warwick lands following the death of Anne, daughter and heir of Duke Henry.25 CFR, xix. 34. Sir John’s association with Somerset probably also explains the patronage he received from Queen Margaret. In 1452 he replaced Thomas Brown II* as her steward of the lordships of Milton and Marden and was also given the keeping of the manor of Capel.26 DL29/75/1495, m. 1; CFR, xix. 21. Even so, throughout the 1450s he was preoccupied with matters across the Channel. Somerset indented as captain of the major fortresses in the pale of Calais in September 1451 and on 27 Oct. Cheyne replaced Robert Manfeld* as victualler. The following day he received authority to purvey victuals and supply everything necessary for the provisioning and garrisoning of the pale.27 DKR, xlviii. 389. With the loss of Normandy the traditional areas that had supplied the garrison were no longer available and increasing amounts of the necessary supplies had to be obtained from England, especially Kent, amidst fears of a French attack.28 CPR, 1446-52, p. 244. The arrears of the garrison’s wages was also one of the most pressing problems facing Somerset and on the following 26 Jan. Cheyne and the recently-appointed treasurer of Calais, Gervase Clifton*, were licensed to sell a certain quantity of wool to be applied to these wages and to works on the fortifications. A similar mandate was issued to Cheyne alone the following month.29 DKR, xlviii. 391, 393.

The job of victualling Calais clearly accounted for most of Sir John’s time and energy during the 1450s. Although he continued to be appointed to ad-hoc commissions in Kent throughout the decade and remained on the bench, he does not appear to have attended the sessions of the peace after July 1452.30 E101/567/3. Victualling Calais also involved him negotiating loans, presumably using his London contacts, and in litigation. In December 1453 he himself made a loan of £400 to the Crown to this end and the following year he and Clifton advanced a further £466 13s. 4d.31 E403/798, m. 4; 800, m. 8; E404/70/1/40. At times the parlous state of the finances of Calais had an impact upon him personally. In the summer of 1454 he submitted a petition to the King’s Council explaining how he had been instructed to gather a loan of £600 for the payment of wages and purchase of victuals. Yet once in Calais, some of the stuff purchased with this money had been seized by the soldiers, while the rest had been sold below its market price. Cheyne asked that John Wodehouse, Somerset’s treasurer-at-war in Calais, be instructed to deduct the price of the goods stolen from the soldiers’ wages.32 E28/85/83. Cheyne was required to account at the Exchequer for everything delivered to victual Calais and he was forced to defend himself at law to prevent lost foodstuffs being charged against him in his account. In October 1456 he appeared before the barons of the Exchequer to explain that eight bales of timber destined for Calais had been stolen at Rochester by a group of men led by Robert Doget*.33 E159/233, recorda Mich. rot. 18. Around the same time the mayor and fellowship of the staple brought an action in Chancery against him, his deputy and attorneys, claiming that pounds had been mistaken for marks in an obligation which had resulted in litigation in the Exchequer.34 C1/32/246. A measure of the trouble that his office caused him can be gauged by the grant on 6 July 1453 of letters of protection to him and his tenants on the Isle of Sheppey for as long as he remained victualler. Already, in November 1452, he had received a general pardon almost certainly related to his office.35 CPR, 1452-61, p. 90; C67/40, m. 5.

It was against this background of the difficult task of supplying Calais that Sir John was pricked sheriff of Kent on 4 Nov. 1454. Indeed, his shrievalty would see Calais matters come to the forefront at the parliamentary election over which he presided at Rochester in July 1455. On the 5th of that month the King’s council wrote to Cheyne warning him that ‘we be enfourmed there is besy labour made in sondry wises by certaine persones for þe chesyng of the said knightes’ and that the peaceful proceeding of the election was threatened. He was ordered to observe the statutes concerning parliamentary elections and report any malefactors to the council.36 PPC, v. 246-7. On the 7th, just two days before the Parliament was due to assemble at Westminster, he duly made proclamation in the county court at Rochester. According to a later bill presented in the Exchequer of pleas, Sir Thomas Kyriel and Richard Culpepper‡ were duly elected; however, Cheyne then altered the return, erasing Culpepper’s name and replacing it with that of his colleague (Sir) Gervase Clifton.37 E13/146, rots. 11-11d, 36-36d, 43, 46d. It seems unlikely, however, that there was a political dimension to Cheyne’s return of Kyriel and Clifton. Although the duke of York had recently taken control of the government of the kingdom in the aftermath of the battle of St. Albans and was eager, as the council’s letter of 5 July makes clear, to have MPs returned who were well disposed to his regime, the Kent elections of 1455 seem to have been more influenced by concerns about Calais. Both Cheyne and Clifton were motivated by their own financial difficulties resulting from their offices there. They had fallen foul of the act of the Reading Parliament of 1453 which required the treasurer and victualler of Calais to render account every two years, under pain of a fine of £500, and were doubtless keen to see the financial administration of Calais settled in the forthcoming Parliament.38 PROME, xii. 232-5; E159/231, recorda Trin. rot. 6. To that end they must have welcomed their appointment to the committee, named at the beginning of the Parliament, to review the finances of the garrison. Both were able to forward their affairs during the assembly. On 4 Oct. 1455, while Parliament was still in session, both men sued out royal pardons, and on 19 Dec. Cheyne secured a discharge in respect of obligations in 2,000 marks that he had delivered to the staplers in response to their loans.39 C67/41, m. 29; PROME, xii. 337-8, 370-7. Moreover, the mayor and merchants of the Calais staple presented a petition concerning a loan they had made of 23,000 marks towards the garrison’s wages. Two thousand marks worth of obligations on the wool customs had been delivered for repayment of the loan to certain merchants by Cheyne, as appeared by an indenture between him and Robert White*, mayor of the staple, on 19 Dec. that year. The staplers requested, and the King agreed, that Cheyne be discharged of the obligations.40 PROME, xii. 370-7.

Like Clifton, by the mid 1450s Cheyne had proved himself an indispensable figure in the administration of Calais and Kent. Thus, he was not replaced when the earl of Warwick took custody of Calais and its fortresses in the summer of 1456. Nevertheless, he appears to have spent much of that year and the remainder of the 1450s in Kent, being appointed to numerous commissions and, in August 1457, being among those who led the mobilization of the county following the French raid on Sandwich. The following December he was among the commissioners appointed to assemble the archers granted as part of an innovative subsidy in the Parliament of 1453.41 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 815-16; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 371, 401, 405, 408, 490; E. Kent Archs., New Romney recs. assmt. bk. 1448-1526, NR/FAc 3, f. 33. A measure of Cheyne’s standing in the region came in February 1458 when he was placed in charge of the strategically important castle of Queenborough.42 CPR, 1452-61, p. 415.

The following year saw the outbreak of open hostilities between the Crown and the Yorkist lords. On 12 Oct. 1459 the latter fled England in disarray after the desertion of Andrew Trollope’s contingent of soldiers from Calais at Ludford Bridge. The earls of Warwick, Salisbury and March retired to Calais, while York himself fled to Ireland. Cheyne remained in Kent and appears to have allied himself alongside his friends, Clifton, Kyriel and (Sir) Thomas Brown, with the Lancastrians. On 3 Dec. he was replaced as victualler of Calais by Nicholas Hussey, another man associated with the Lancastrian court, but no reasons for his replacement are apparent. A week later he was commissioned to muster the force that Lord Rivers was putting to sea at Sandwich to defend the Channel. On 15 Jan. 1460 a Yorkist force led by John Dynham and John Wenlock* raided Sandwich, reclaiming Warwick’s ships and capturing Rivers and his son. Cheyne, like Clifton, appears not to have been at Sandwich at this time (perhaps forewarned by news from his contacts in the Calais garrison), and the following day he was appointed to a commission of array in Canterbury, presumably a belated attempt to resist the invaders. Two months later he was named on a commission of oyer and terminer to hear indictments relating to the raid on Sandwich.43 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 564, 611; EHR xxxviii. 253-5. At this stage Sir John would seem to have been firmly attached to the Lancastrian party. On 22 June he was named on a commission, led by the earls of Wiltshire and Arundel, to arrest the adherents of the duke of York in the south-east. This failed to prevent Lord Fauconberg’s successful raid on Sandwich which paved the way for the landing of the Yorkist earls there just four days later. Cheyne does not seem to have been present at the Lancastrian debacle at Northampton on 10 July, but he was probably stripped of his offices by the Yorkist regime in aftermath of the battle and was not named on the new commission of the peace issued in December. Indeed, his subsequent activities during the winter of 1460-1 are obscure. He appears, however, to have avoided taking the field for either side, thus escaping the fate of his erstwhile friends, Kyriel and Brown, or the political disgrace suffered by Clifton.

A possible explanation for Cheyne’s hesitation to commit fully to the Lancastrian cause may have been his links with the Scott family. By November 1457 he was mortgaging property to John Scott†, a kinsman of his, probably in order to meet debts incurred through the victualling of Calais, and around 1460 he and the other feoffees of the London draper, Thomas Winslow II*, settled property in Romney Marsh on Scott, John Fogg† and others.44 Scott, pp. lvii, lix. Scott and Cheyne were both great-grandsons of Robert Cralle: Vis. Kent (Harl. Soc. lxxiv), 67, 127; Vis. Berks. (Harl. Soc. xlii), 103. After Edward IV’s accession to the throne Scott and Fogg emerged as the leading figures in Kent and Cheyne’s connexion with them may explain his ability to survive the fall of the Lancastrian regime unscathed. Certainly, he retained close links with Scott throughout the early 1460s, appointing him as a feoffee of several of his Kentish properties. The two men also acted together in recovering a debt owed to them by the Sandwich merchant, Richard Cheldesworth.45 C140/26/45; CP40/813, rot. 430d; 818, rot. 435; Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Scott mss, U1115, T35/2. In February 1462 Cheyne received a general pardon of all offences, finally drawing a line under his service to the Lancastrian Crown during the previous decade.46 C67/45, m. 36. Nevertheless, his past record meant that he was not appointed to any public office in Kent for the rest of his life.

Little evidence remains of Cheyne’s activities during the 1460s. It is possible that he divided his time between Kent and Berkshire, for it appears that his father-in-law had by then settled the Berkshire manors of Woodhay, Enborne and Compton on him and his wife. In the pardon of 1462 he was styled as ‘of Woodhay’ as well as of Eastchurch. Before he died he settled these Berkshire manors on one of his younger sons, John, who still held them at the time of his own death in 1499, and entails ensured that they continued in this junior line of the family.47 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 113; iii. 369; Vis. Berks.105. Cheyne remained, however, an individual of some local importance in east Kent. Shortly before his death the jurats of New Romney rode to Birchington to seek his counsel on some undisclosed matter.48 New Romney assmt. bk. NR/FAc 3, f. 58v.

Cheyne died on 20 June 1467. An inquisition post mortem held at Ospringe on the following 30 Oct. is now badly faded and the value of his lands in Kent, concentrated on the Isle of Sheppey and Romney Marsh but also including the manor of Bilsington near Ashford, is not known. The latter had been acquired by the grant of Joan, widow of Sir William Brenchelse, j.c.p., and her feoffees in 1453. Sir John’s heir was named as his second and eldest surviving son, William, then aged 27 (the eldest son, Roger, had predeceased him).49 C140/26/45; CPR, 1452-61, p. 89. In February 1470 William joined the earl of Warwick’s retinue at Calais.50 C76/153, m. 4. He died in 1487, leaving by his second wife a son, Sir Thomas† (d.1558), who distinguished himself by sitting as knight of the shire for Kent ten times, serving as constable of the castles of Dover, Queenborough, Rochester and Saltwood, and rising to be warden of the Cinque Ports.51 The Commons 1509-58, i. 634-7. Sir John’s widow outlived him by several years. In accordance with her late father’s will, in July 1474 she and six of her sons purchased a licence to found a perpetual chantry at Faringdon, Berkshire, to provide prayers for their souls and those of Shotesbrooke and Cheyne.52 CPR, 1467-77, p. 449. Sir John’s third son, John, at that time an esquire for the body of Edward IV, was to be summoned to Parliament in 1487, under Henry VII, as Lord Cheyne. A fourth son, Edward, became dean of Salisbury cathedral in 1486.53 Vis. Berks. 105.