COTYS, Robert II

No evidence of the younger Cotys’ parentage has been discovered, but it seems highly likely that he was a son or other close kinsman of the man of the same name who had sat for Bridgwater in 1447, and from whom he was distinguished at least until the end of Henry VI’s reign by the suffix ‘junior’. This distinction aside, their activities are hard to tell apart. However, it was certainly the younger man who was present at the Somerset shire elections to the Parliament of 1449 (Feb.) and who sealed the sheriff’s indenture on that occasion. It is possible that he was at this date already serving as one of the county coroners, and if so, it may also have been he, rather than his older namesake, who set his seal to the election indenture of 1450. He had definitely taken up the coronership by the early summer of 1453, but it is not certain how long he remained in office. If he secured reappointment at Edward IV’s accession, he was certainly replaced at the time of Henry VI’s restoration in December 1470.3 C242/12/16.

Even more problematic is the evidence for Cotys’ sole election to the Commons. The Parliament of 1455 was summoned just days after the first battle of St. Albans in a highly charged political atmosphere, which cannot have failed to affect the elections in the shires. Whether as a result of a clerical oversight, or of deliberate tampering at some stage of the administrative process, the return made by the sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, John Cheyne of Pinhoe, was ambiguous. While the formal indenture attested by some 26 esquires and gentlemen of standing in the county (including William Daubeney*, William Dodesham*, Henry Hull*, John Jewe*, John Sydenham* and William Twyneho*) named a parliamentary novice, the Sussex esquire Thomas Lewknor*, as senior burgess for Bridgwater, the composite schedule which accompanied the indenture substituted for Lewknor’s name that of the equally inexperienced, if at least local, Robert Cotys.4 The schedule explicitly styled Cotys ‘junior’, presumably to distinguish him from his putative father Robert I: C219/16/3. In the absence of evidence of a wage claim by either man, it is impossible to tell which of them eventually took up the seat, but it may be suggestive that in the following summer Cheyne appointed Cotys one of his attorneys to appear for him in the Exchequer of pleas in a suit brought by the keeper of the privy seal, Master Thomas Lisieux.5 E13/146, rot. 31.

Throughout the 1460s, Cotys appears to have maintained a modest private legal practice, and found employment as feoffee to a range of south-western landowners, including the royal justice Richard Chokke, and – more importantly – the Devon esquire John Spencer of Spencercombe. As the last survivor of Spencer’s feoffees of his moiety of the Somerset manor of Brompton Ralph, in the mid 1480s Cotys later came into conflict with John’s son, Sir Robert (a man of considerable importance both in the south-west and beyond by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor Beaufort, widow of James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, and first cousin to Henry VII’s mother).6 Bridgwater Bor. Archs. 1445-68 (Som. Rec. Soc. lx), no. 814; 1468-85 (ibid. lxx), nos. 916, 920, 944, 1012, 1035; Reg. Stillington (Som. Rec. Soc. lii), no. 238; C1/160/2-4; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 652; ii. 524-5; Devon RO, Nutcombe and Bluett mss, 2912M/T/21.