FIENNES, James

Of ancient pedigree, being descended from the Norman counts of Boulogne, the Fiennes family had been established in England since the Conquest, when John de Fiennes was made constable of Dover castle. One of their number, Faramus de Fiennes, was a cousin of King Stephen’s wife, Maud. A series of advantageous marriages gave the family lands in six counties in southern England, and their most important estates lay in Sussex, where Sir William Fiennes purchased the manor of Herstmonceux in the 1370s.27 Archaeologia Cantiana, xxviii. 214-16; W. Dugdale, Baronage (1675-6 edn.), ii. 243-5. James, the younger son of Sir William, was a minor when his father died in 1402. Although his older brother, Roger, was a royal ward, he himself probably remained at Herstmonceux and grew up in a household run by his mother. It was not until 1407 that Roger made proof of age to take possession of his late father’s and grandmother’s estates. He was knighted five years later, probably while on military service overseas.

In 1415 the two brothers mustered in the company of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, for Henry V’s invasion of Normandy. James brought with him a small retinue of two men-at-arms and six archers, but there is no evidence that he matched Sir Roger’s achievements in the field.28 E101/45/13. Again with Sir Roger, he served in the conquest of Normandy between 1417 and 1419, by which time he had emerged as a capable war captain. In 1418 he was appointed captain of the newly-conquered fortress of Arques and in the following year he was granted the seigneurie of Court-le-Compte and other confiscated properties in the bailliages of Rouen and Caux, thereby joining the ranks of Englishmen with a territorial stake in the duchy. By February 1421 he was serving as the lieutenant of Sir Lewis Robessart, captain of Caudebec. His duties at this time included being appointed to take musters of various fortresses, including Harfleur in May 1421, and in the same month he was also instructed to take a force of men to secure the castle of Maulévrier.29 E101/51/2; DKR, xliii. 406, 426-7.

James did return not to England with his brother immediately after Henry V’s death in 1422. Instead, he remained in Normandy taking custody of the castles of Torcy and St. Valery, only resigning the latter in June 1424. By the time of his return to England, he was in possession of the Kentish manor of Kemsing and Sele, settled on him by the terms of his father’s will, and was tenant for life of the Oxfordshire manors of Lynham and Ascote, by gift of his brother.30 E. Hasted, Kent ed. Drake, iii. 35, 52; CCR, 1422-9, p. 345; 1429-35, p. 69. Two factors, however, combined to ensure that he emerged as a major landowner in Kent and Sussex during the next decade or so. The first of these were the profits that Sir Roger, and presumably James too, had made in the French wars. The most important of these acquisitions were at Hever. In December 1423 Sir Roger had purchased the manors of Hever Brocas and Hever Cobham, and four years later members of the Northwode family relinquished their claims to Hever Brocas to the Fiennes brothers. By 1430 James was in possession of both manors at Hever.31 CAD, i. C676, C787; ii. C2544; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 267-8. The second was his entry into Henry VI’s Household. This may well have been facilitated by Robessart, now the young’s King’s chamberlain. In February 1430 when he indented to join the King’s coronation expedition to France with three archers in his retinue, Fiennes was already one of the grooms of the King’s chamber.32 E403/693, m. 16; 695, m. 4; DKR, xlviii. 268. The King did not return to England until January 1432 and it seems likely that Fiennes remained one of his constant companions throughout the expedition.

Following his return from France Fiennes began to assume some local responsibility in Kent and Sussex, with appointment in November 1433 to the commission of the peace in Kent. In September 1435 he attested the parliamentary election in Rochester and on 8 Nov. 1436 he was pricked sheriff of the county. By this time both he and his brother stood high in the King’s favour. On 28 Aug. 1437 he was granted an annuity of £40 from the royal manor of Headington, Oxfordshire, as well as the duchy of Lancaster manor of Monkecourt in Kent, only, on the following day, to give up his grant of Monkecourt as its value had not been specified in the letters patent. Yet he still had designs on Monkecourt, and on 13 Oct. induced John Hardwick, to whom it had been granted five years earlier, to surrender his own letters patent, and on the same day at the royal palace of Sheen secured from the King a grant of the manor for life. Fiennes was beginning to use his close access to the monarch to further his interests.33 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 77-79, 93. See also Somerville, i. 221. By at least May 1438 he was one of the esquires for the body and thus in almost constant attendance upon the King in his chamber. This position was confirmed with an annuity for life of 50 marks.34 E159/214, brevia Easter rot. 20d; E403/734, m. 2. Fiennes’s influence at court was further increased the following year when, in April, Sir Roger was made treasurer of the Household. Having been pricked as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, James was to preside over the election of his brother as one of the knights of the shire for Sussex in the Parliament which met in November 1439. In the meantime, he continued his accumulation of land and offices. On 5 Feb. that year Adam Moleyns, the clerk of the council, had agreed to surrender a grant of the wardship and marriage of the infant son and heir of William Scott of Camberwell, Surrey, which were duly given to Fiennes. Yet the latter’s ability to monopolize the patronage he desired was not absolute. Three days later, the King issued new letters patent, this time granting the wardship to John Wakeryng, master of the hospital of St. Bartholomew, West Smithfield, and Richard Sturgeon. Fiennes took the matter up in both the courts of Exchequer and Chancery and, after his opponents had failed to answer writs commanding their attendance in the latter, he managed to get their grant cancelled in April 1440.35 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 248, 309, 402; CIPM, xxv. 416; CFR, xvii. 95; E159/216, brevia Easter rot. 15d.

Despite his growing importance at court, Fiennes continued to be employed on public business in Kent and elsewhere. He was present at Canterbury when the King met Cardinal Beaufort on 5 Oct. 1439, and even attended the meeting of the Council on that occasion. The same month, or early in November he was elected as one of the knights of the shire for Kent and travelled to Westminster to attend the Parliament which began only a week after the end of his shrievalty in Sussex and Surrey.36 G.L.Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 306; E28/64; C81/1545/75. There are no surviving election indentures for this Parliament, but it is tempting to suggest that Fiennes was elected at Canterbury in early October while the King was present. He thus joined in the Commons his brother Sir Roger, a veteran of at least two Parliaments. Before the dissolution in February the following year he had indented to serve in Normandy once more, this time under the newly-appointed lieutenant there, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset. Fiennes had some close connexions with servants of the Beauforts in Kent, and was to name Richard Waller, one of Cardinal Beaufort’s most important retainers in the county, as his executor.37 E159/216, brevia Easter rot. 1; Reg. Stafford, f. 190v. If indeed Thomas Walsingham was his father-in-law, then that relationship with a man who was a longstanding member of the Beaufort circle would also have strengthened our MP’s links with the cardinal. Somerset’s force left England in January 1440, but it looks as if Fiennes delayed sailing to join him in Normandy until after the close of the second session of the Parliament. He was probably still in England on the opening day of that session, at Reading on 14 Jan., when he was named as a surety for the lease to his brother of two Sussex manors, while later in the session, on 11 Feb., he himself secured the duchy manor of Monkecourt in fee simple, after submitting a petition.38 CFR, xvii. 132; CPR, 1436-41, p. 383. The petition does not survive, but the grant was made ‘by the authority of Parliament’. Although he may have been absent overseas for some of the time, the remainder of 1440 saw a steady flow of royal grants in his favour. In May he received an annuity of £5, which was paid at the Exchequer by the prior of Lewes; the same month the Kentish manor of Capell was farmed to him for 40 years at a rent of only 40s. p.a.; in July he was granted the reversion of one of the chamberlain-ships of the Exchequer; in September he was made steward of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Eagle and lordship of Pevensey; in the following month he secured the wardship and marriage of the heir of a Kentish landowner, William Clifford, and the manor of Huntingfield, rent-free; finally, in November the King granted him the manors of Shorne and Tracy, Kent, which had been forfeited to the Crown.39 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 414, 423, 428, 470-1, 488, 493, 500. In December 1441 Fiennes was elected for a second time as one of the knights of the shire for Kent, as it turned out for a parliamentary session which lasted only from 25 Jan. until 27 Mar. 1442. Perhaps the business of the session of most concern to him personally involved the King’s plans for the foundation of his college at Eton, and the ratification of the relevant royal charters in Parliament. More than a year earlier Fiennes had been made one of the King’s feoffees of the reversion of the manor of Horstead in Norfolk, held for life by the chamberlain of the Household, William Phelip†, Lord Bardolf, and this was among the properties set aside for Eton. On Parliament’s last day the King granted Fiennes the office of constable of Rochester castle for life with an annuity of £36 from the fee farm of the city, as well as a further annuity of £17 13s. 4d. from the issues of Kent. Four days earlier he had also secured a writ of ad quod damnum to enclose a road crossing his estate at Hever.40 PROME, xi. 315, 344-58, esp. 351; CPR, 1441-6, p. 83; E 159/219, brevia Hil. rot. 4d, recorda, Hil. rot. 3; CCR, 1441-7, p. 23; C143/449/2.

The new year in 1443 saw him engaged in negotiations with the Yorkshire knight, Sir Brian Stapleton*, over the manor of Witley, Surrey, which Stapleton had been granted two years earlier with John Feriby*, then controller of the Household. On 13 Jan. Fiennes had been granted the reversion of the manor, but, in the kind of negotiations made possible by his intimacy with the King, on 8 Feb. Stapleton surrendered it to him, and in return, on the following day Fiennes transferred the constableship of Rochester castle to Stapleton.41 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 83, 140, 161. Further grants followed in the same year. In April, after the death of Archbishop Chichele, Fiennes was made bailiff of the archiepiscopal manors of Otford and Uckfield, and in September the new archbishop, John Stafford, confirmed him in the offices at the King’s request, telling the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, that he had done so ‘havyng consideracion how the seid James stondyng aboute the Kyng as he dooth, may dayly proufyte our church and us’.42 CPR, 1441-6, p. 160; Literae Cantuarienses, iii. 182. A year later, on 27 Sept. 1444, he received a grant of the profitable manors of Sheldon and Solihull, Warwickshire, surrendered by Edmund Mountfort*, who had been given them for life only shortly before. The grant probably marks Fiennes’s promotion as knight for the King’s body, although the circumstances of his ceremonial knighting are not recorded.43 CPR, 1441-6, p. 296.

In January 1445 Fiennes again secured election as one of the knights of the shire for Kent, and on 25 Feb., the day of the Parliament’s opening, he secured a grant of the ‘little counting house under the Exchequer’ in the palace of Westminster.44 CPR, 1446-52, p. 76. The Parliament, which ran to four sessions, paid further attention to Henry VI’s endowment of his college at Eton, and also to that of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Cambridge, subsequently known as King’s College. The foundations were finalized, with formal ratification of the royal charters, in the last session, in April 1446. The endowment of King’s College included the reversion of the manor of Monkecourt, which Fiennes and his wife held for life.45 PROME, xi. 388, 391, 414-71, esp. 447-8; CPR, 1441-6, p. 279. The final session also saw the ratification of changes to the enfeoffment of that part of the duchy of Lancaster set aside for the performance of Henry VI’s will, exemplified in grants made under the duchy seal over the period November 1443 to June 1445, to which Fiennes, nominated among the distinguished group of feoffees, was party. 46 Somerville, i. 210; PROME, xi. 404-10.

It is likely too that by the beginning of 1445 Fiennes was clearly identified with William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, now the most powerful figure at court and in the council. While Fiennes’s position in the Household had been established independently of Suffolk’s influence, they had been associated formally over the previous five years as the King’s feoffees for his duchy of Lancaster estates and collegiate foundations, and within the confines of the King’s chamber their desire to assist the King to fulfill his wishes brought the two men together, albeit not so closely as to lead either to an alliance by marriage or participation in the other’s private affairs.47 Harriss, 349; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 454, 516; E28/65/49, 51, 54; J. Watts, Hen. VI and the Politics of Kingship, 142, 164, 169. Suffolk had been away for much of 1444 negotiating the truce of Tours and the King’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou, who was crowned at Westminster on 28 May 1445, during Parliament’s second session. Despite the fact that Sir James had not, unlike most members of her new household, accompanied her on her journey to England, he was soon appointed her chamberlain, an office he was still holding at Michaelmas 1446 (when he received a gift from her of a gold collar weighing 14 ounces). His wife and daughter, Elizabeth Cromer, were found positions within the queen’s establishment.48 E101/409/14. In 1447-8, on the marriage of another of his daughters, the queen presented her and her new husband two brooches: E101/409/17.

While Parliament was in progress Fiennes had also found favour with the King’s friend, Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, who in May 1445 appointed him steward of all his lands in Kent and Sussex. He continued to hold this office after Duke Henry’s death in June the following year and for the duration of the minority of his daughter and heir. Furthermore, the King granted him the hereditary shrievalty of Worcestershire, which pertained to the earldom of Warwick, to keep until the heiress came of age.49 CPR, 1436-41, p. 407; 1441-6, p. 445; 1446-52, p. 1. Fiennes’s influence about the King at this time can be inferred from a petition presented by one of the household servants of the recently deceased Queen Katherine, who named him alongside Suffolk, the bishop of Salisbury, Master John Somerset* and two esquires for the body, John St. Loe* and John Norris*, as essential intermediaries for securing royal preferment.50 E28/75/7.

On 14 Dec. 1446 writs were sent out for a Parliament to assemble at Cambridge on 10 Feb. 1447, only for new ones to be issued on 20 Jan. changing the meeting place to Bury St. Edmunds. Meanwhile, Fiennes’s own presence in the Commons had been decided on 2 Jan. when at Rochester he was once more elected, this time alongside his son-in-law, William Cromer*, as knight of the shire for Kent. Parliament met in a highly-charged atmosphere; if Henry VI was to leave the realm as planned, in order to meet Charles VII, then a regent would need to be appointed, and the natural choice, his uncle Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, was inimical to Suffolk and his allies at court and on the council. The Parliament proved a pivotal event in Fiennes’s career, transforming both his political importance and his reputation among contemporaries and later historians. Whether or not the Parliament had been called to facilitate the arrest and trial of Gloucester on charges of treason is unclear, but his arrest upon his arrival at Bury on 18 Feb. and death five days later doubtless dominated its proceedings and defined its purpose in the eyes of observers. Fiennes’s own role in the duke’s fall is ambiguous. A later Yorkist chronicle stated that he and Suffolk ‘hadde longe tyme ymagyned & conspired’ Gloucester’s death, and once the duke had been placed under arrest they ‘so excited and sturid the kynge agaynes hym that he myght neuer come to his answare, for they hade caste and ordeyned amonge thaym a prive conclusion the whiche as yette ys not comme to knowelage off the commyn peple’; while other, less partisan, authors also considered that Gloucester’s death allowed Suffolk and Fiennes to monopolize the King’s counsels.51 English Chron. 1377-1461 ed. Marx, 65-66; Incerti Scriptoris Chron. Angliae ed. Giles, 34. Yet no contemporaries explicitly pinned responsibility for Duke Humphrey’s death on Fiennes, even though the notion that it had been brought about by a clique of his enemies, led by Suffolk, soon gained wide credence. Furthermore, the favours that Fiennes received with immediate effect strongly suggest that planning on its eventuality was well advanced behind the scenes. On 24 Feb., the day after Gloucester died, Fiennes successfully petitioned for appointment as his successor as constable of Dover castle and warden of the Cinque Ports, with an annual fee of £200.52 C81/443/6, 7; CPR, 1446-52, p. 87. He was unsuccessful in his petition to be appointed steward of the duke’s Kentish manor of Penshurst and to have ‘the habitacion and dwellyng’ within Queenborough castle, then held by Gloucester’s servant, Sir Roger Chamberlain*, and four days later Penshurst was granted to the duke of Buckingham: C81/443/21. Significantly, too, probably on that very same day he was created Lord Saye and Sele; the letters patent refer to him by that title. His formal summons to sit in the Lords was issued on 3 Mar., the last day of the Parliament.53 CCR, 1441-7, p. 466; 1447-54, p. 225; CP, xi. 148-9. J.E. Powell and K. Wallis, House of Lords, 481-4. James’s claim to the old baronial title of Saye was through his grandmother, the sis. and coh. of Willam, Lord Saye. It was tenuous to say the least. His brother, Sir Roger, of course, had a better, if still not strong, claim, as did John, 5th Lord Clinton, and the compound title ‘Saye and Sele’ may reflect this. The latter half of the title was territorial, referring to his property at Seal. From 1 Nov., when he received a quitclaim from Clinton of his rights to bear the arms of de Saye, Fiennes used the baronial arms exclusively, in preference to his paternal cognizance: CP, xi. 480; Archaeologia Cantiana, xxviii. 215-17. Very likely also on Parliament’s last day, he succeeded Lord Sudeley as the chamberlain of the Household, with a fee of £102 15s. 6d. p.a. from the fee farm of Bristol.54 A writ to the mayor of Bristol in 1451 recalled that the grant had been made on 24 Feb. 1447 to ‘James Fenys, lord Saye knight his chamberlain’, but Sudeley was still forwarding petitions as chamberlain for the duration of the Bury Parliament: CCR, 1447-54, p. 223; C81/443/14. More grants quickly followed: on 24 Mar. he was given the custody of Gloucester’s goods, these first having been placed in the hands of Archbishop Stafford who, on the King’s express wishes, relinquished them to Fiennes; on 18 June he received a further 100 marks from the customs in London to maintain his office of chamberlain. That month he was among the justices of oyer and terminer who investigated the alleged treasons of Gloucester’s servants. Yet another important post came into his possession in August when he was appointed constable of the Tower of London during the minority of Henry Holand, duke of Exeter.55 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 45, 63, 84.

In the following months Fiennes became increasingly linked in the popular imagination with Suffolk and the worsening situation in France. Certainly, Fiennes was close to Suffolk at this time; and as a member of the Council in May 1447 he endorsed the marquess’s protestation that the surrender of Maine was neither treasonable nor against the Crown’s dignity.56 Watts, 232; CPR, 1446-52, p. 78. As chamberlain he played an important part in keeping the court increasingly remote from the rest of political society, allegedly by carefully vetting preachers coming before the King to ensure that no criticism of royal policy reached his ears.57 T. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Veritatum ed. Wright, 191. According to one near-contemporary source, in May 1448 bills were displayed on the gates of St. Paul’s expressing the hope that Suffolk, Fiennes and William Aiscough, bishop of Salisbury, would ‘Be don to deathe’.58 C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 370.

As the military and fiscal situation deteriorated throughout the following year, Fiennes was inextricably identified with the conduct of affairs at the centre. Little is known of his activities during the Parliament which assembled at Westminster in February 1449, although he was certainly summoned and attended its sessions.59 Virgoe, 244. In the summer, after the Parliament was dissolved, the Crown’s financial affairs reached a crisis with the resignation of Marmaduke Lumley, bishop of Carlisle, as treasurer of England., and on 16 Sept. Fiennes was appointed to replace him, perhaps because only someone from within the Household and close to Suffolk could be induced to take on such a difficult task at this time. His first imperative was to raise money in anticipation of future taxation and nine days later he headed a commission to raise loans in Kent. His efforts were not without success: between the beginning of his term as treasurer and his death Fiennes delivered loans totaling nearly £2,000 into the Exchequer.60 E401/810, m. 22; 813, mm. 1, 10, 13, 17; Watts, 244. In November, when Parliament assembled at Westminster, he was faced with having to address a hostile Commons, declaring the state of the royal finances and making the case for further grants of subsidies.

The Commons, however, were determined to achieve two things during this Parliament: first, the impeachment of the duke of Suffolk and, second, an Act of Resumption. Both of these were achieved: Suffolk escaped being convicted of treason but was sent into exile for five years on 17 Mar. 1450, during the Parliament’s second session, while in its final session at Leicester an Act of Resumption was passed. In the same session, according to one chronicler, the Commons also demanded justice on Fiennes, Thomas Daniel* and others who were responsible for the loss of Normandy and ‘were causes of the dethe of the Duke of Glowcester’. Accordingly, the King appears to have considered removing Fiennes from the treasurership and his other offices, although if this was announced to the Commons it was certainly not carried through.61 J. Stow, Annales, 388; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 66. Fiennes was still treasurer on 9 June 1450 when a loan of £365 from him was entered on the receipt roll: E401/815, m. 11. Fiennes was also able to use his position to escape the full strictures of the Act. Originally, the sum of £100 (nearly a third of the £302 15s. 6d. he declared in royal fees and annuities), was to be resumed to the Crown, but a special proviso issued to him together with six other members of the Lords (Viscount Beaumont, Lords Cromwell, Sudeley, Beauchamp of Powick, Stourton* and Sir William Beauchamp*, Lord St. Amand), and Sir Edmund Hungerford* and (Sir) Thomas Stanley II* exempted all grants made to them.62 E163/8/14; PROME, xii. 121. It seems likely that the nine of them were the King’s principal counsellors at the Leicester session of the Parliament: Watts, 283.

On 12 Apr., shortly before the new parliamentary session began at Leicester, Fiennes had made his will. It is unclear why he chose to do so at this point, but his concern for the disposal of his property, much of it coming from royal grant, may have been designed to counter the Commons’ demands for resumption. Two of his executors, John Fray†, the recently retired chief-baron of the Exchequer, and Richard Waller, were instructed to enfeoff their co-executor, his wife Emmeline, with his Kentish manors of Hever, Knole, Kemsing and Seal and Crowthorn. The manor of Mereworth was settled on his elder son, Sir William, as were all those lands he had by ‘the kynges lettres patentes’. If, however, the latter died without male heirs these properties were to revert to the Crown.63 Reg. Stafford, ff. 190v-1. The will also stipulated that he be buried in the Greyfriars, London, and made provision for masses to be said for his soul there, and at Kemsing, Sevenoaks and Mereworth.

Popular opinion at this time was certain that Normandy had been lost, the King’s revenues diminished and lords of the blood royal excluded from Henry’s counsels through the machinations of a clique of household servants led by Suffolk and Fiennes. This was reflected in popular poems. ‘A Warning to King Henry’ stated:

So pore a kyng was never seene,

Nor richere lordes alle bydene;

The communes may no more.

The lorde Say biddeth holde hem downe.

That worthy dastarde of renowne,

He techithe a fals lore.64 Political Poems and Songs ed. Wright, ii. 229-31.

On 14 Apr. a proclamation was read in London against the posting of seditious libels.65 Foedera ed. Rymer (orig. edn.), xi. 218. There is evidence also that some intended Fiennes to suffer the same fate as Bishop Moleyns, murdered by disillusioned soldiers at Portsmouth on 9 Jan. Followers of Thomas Cheyne, a labourer from Southwark who had fermented rebellion in east Kent that same month, were alleged to have plotted the murder of Fiennes, Suffolk and Abbot Boulers of Gloucester, while in London on 29 Jan. a group of men, including a servant of the duke of Buckingham, had planned to behead him and Boulers together with Bishop Aiscough of Salisbury and Lord Dudley.66 I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 63-67.

In late April or early May news reached the assembled Lords and Commons of the defeat of Sir Thomas Kyriel* at the battle of Formingny. On 2 May Suffolk was murdered on his way into exile and his body thrown onto the beach at Dover. As his corpse was taken through Kent, reaching Canterbury on the 22nd, the county appears to have risen in spontaneous and popular rebellion against the King’s ‘evil counsellors’. On 6 June the duke of Buckingham and the earls of Oxford, Devon and Arundel were commissioned to go ‘against the traitors and rebels in Kent and to punish and arrest the same’.67 CPR, 1446-52, p. 385. On the same day Parliament was dissolved, and a week later King Henry, accompanied by Fiennes and the other lords, returned to London and established himself at St. John’s Hospital, Clerkenwell, while the Kentish rebels camped at Blackheath. Although he was not named explicitly in any of the three manifestos issued by them and their leader, Jack Cade, it is clear that Fiennes was among their principal targets. According to a contemporary observer, when Archbishop Kemp and the duke of Buckingham met with Cade on 16 June, the rebels stated ‘they would have the aforementioned traitors or they would all die for it’ and singled out Fiennes as one of the chief culprits.68 Hanserecesse, 1431-76 ed. von der Ropp, 475. Three days later, when the King rode out to Blackheath to confront the rebels, he faced a near mutiny within the ranks of the royal army. As one chronicler related: ‘kings host made þan a sodeyn shoute and noys upon the seid heth seing distroye we thise traitours aboute the king which þat þe the capitaigne hat entended to doo or ever we will doo hit’. Accordingly, Fiennes was arrested in the King’s presence and sent to the Tower.69 Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 132; The Brut (EETS, cxxxvi), ii. 517-18. On 22 June he was replaced as treasurer by his old colleague in the Household, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, and two days later the King appointed a commission to seize his goods.70 CPR, 1446-52, p. 390.

It looks as if at this critical hour Fiennes was abandoned by the King and the rest of the council. Arrested alongside him on 19 June were Lord Dudley, Thomas Daniel and John Trevelyan*. Yet although, according to one contemporary report, Daniel and two others were free to join the King at Windsor on 1 or 2 July, Fiennes remained in custody. Another account states that on 20 June the King had given a secret order for Fiennes to be released from the Tower, but he was prevented from leaving by the young duke of Exeter.71 Hanserecesse, 475; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany, xxiv), 199; Stow, 396. Interestingly, Fiennes was still nominally constable at this time as the duke of Exeter was not granted livery of his lands until 23 July. The duke’s other major office, admiral of England, had been granted to Suffolk during his minority and Exeter may have used Suffolk’s murder and the rebellion to assert his position on the political stage: CPR, 1446-52, pp. 84, 85. On 4 July Fiennes was arraigned at the London Guildhall before the commissioners appointed to inquire into treasons in the city three days earlier. Having first heard indictments of several other household men, by this stage the proceedings were descending into chaos. Most of the commissioners ‘wolde nott be founde’, much to the indignation of the assembled commons, and Fiennes was indicted of treason before the mayor, aldermen and two justices. Denied his request to be tried by his peers, he was dragged from the Guildhall by ‘unknown malefactors’ to the Standard in Cheapside and there beheaded by the direct commandment of Cade, who had ridden into the city earlier that day.72 Six Town Chrons. 133-4, 155-6; Hist. Colls. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. n.s. xvii), 192-3; Chrons. London ed. Kingsford, 160-1; KB15/42, f. 87; KB9/265, mm. 120, 121, 144, 145. Having been stripped naked, his body was then tied to a horse and drawn through the city, ‘so þat the flesshe cleued to þe stones’, past the Old Bailey and Ludgate and along Watling Street and Candlewick Street to St. Thomas’s chapel on London Bridge, where it was hanged and quartered before being taken across the river into Southwark to Cade’s lodgings in The Hart. His head, meanwhile, had been placed on a pole, and, alongside that of his murdered son-in-law, William Cromer, was paraded through city by the rebels, ‘cawsyng that oon to kysse that other’, before being placed on the Bridge.73 John Benet’s Chron. 200-1; Chrons. London, 161; English Chron. 69.

On 5-6 July, following a fiercely-fought battle on the Bridge, the rebels were ejected from the city and on the next day a general pardon was offered causing most of their host to disperse. Having been proclaimed a traitor, Cade himself was captured at Heathfield, Sussex, on 12 July, dying of his wounds in the process. The next day the heads of Fiennes and Cromer were removed from the Bridge and the former was buried, as he had requested, in the chapel of All Saints in the Greyfriars, London. His reputation survived him: ten days later soldiers returning from Normandy entered the chapel ‘where as þe the said lord Say was worthely buried and his heed leyd by him and his armes set on pelours aboute drewe and pulled down the same armes and them reversed’.74 Six Town Chrons. 134; Hist. Colls. Citizen London, 193-4; J. Stow, Surv. London ed. Kingsford, i. 320.

The contemporary perception of Fiennes as one of Henry VI’s foremost ‘evil counsellors’ was followed by later writers of the fifteenth century, as well as by historians. While his importance within the Household during the 1440s, and especially after the death of Gloucester in 1447, cannot be disputed, the characterization presented by commentators need not be accepted uncritically. Two main charges were leveled against him with regards to his activity at the centre of the government: first, that he was responsible for the surrender of Maine and the loss of Normandy, and second that he shared responsibility for Gloucester’s death. While there is little evidence that he was personally involved in the execution of French policy from the mid 1440s, and he did not accompany Suffolk to the negotiations at Tours in 1444, he, like Suffolk, had served in Normandy under Henry V and doubtless saw the preservation of that King’s legacy, both in England and France, as his principal duty. He may well, therefore, have supported Suffolk in his belief that the truce of Tours was the best way to preserve the Lancastrian interest in France and actively advanced the policy in the council. As Suffolk claimed in the Parliament of 1449-50, ‘so grete thinges coude not be doon nor brought aboute by hym self alone, onlesse that other persones had doon her parte and be pryvy therto aswell as he’.75 PROME, xii. 105. Fiennes did not assist Suffolk principally through meetings of the formal council; even after his elevation to that body he still attended only about a sixth of its recorded meetings.76 Watts, 211; Virgoe, 277-8. Instead, he used his proximity to the King to offer informal counsel and it was in this that the problem lay. As chamberlain, Fiennes controlled access to the King and the fears this led to were articulated by Cade when he protested that ‘the lordys of his ryall blode [were] put from his dayly presence & other mene persones of lower nature [were] exaltyd & made cheff of privy counsell’.77 Harvey, 187.

Fiennes’s involvement in the death of the duke of Gloucester is more difficult to establish. His petitioning for and grant of Gloucester’s most important Kentish office, the wardenship of the Cinque Ports, the day after he died, as well his appointment as administrator of the duke’s goods and participation in the prosecution of his servants, point to him playing a central role in Duke Humphrey’s demise. By the beginning of 1450 he was commonly identified as one of those who had benefited directly from the duke’s death, even if he had not plotted it himself. Nevertheless, the assertion of ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’ that during his appearance at the London Guildhall on 4 July Fiennes ‘knowlachyd of the dethe of that notabylle and famos prynce the Duke of Glouceter’ must be dismissed as fantasy.78 Hist. Colls. Citizen London, 193.

Although Fiennes was not named directly in any of the extant petitions issued by Cade in 1450, modern historians have also characterized his local influence as malign and corrupt: he was ‘pre-eminent amongst the group of parvenus intruding themselves into Kentish society’.79 Harvey, 37. Three main accusations have been leveled against him. First, that he controlled the appointment of local officials during the 1440s and that these officials operated a system of institutionalized oppression. Second, that he used his dominance of local office-holding to control the parliamentary elections in Kent. Finally, that he pursued a policy of extortion and violence to increase his personal wealth and landed holdings in the county. In fact, with the exception of his son-in-law, William Cromer, and Stephen Slegge*, there is little evidence that those appointed to county office during the decade were part of ‘the household circle of Lord Saye’.80 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 633-4. Sheriffs like William Isle*, John Warner* and John Thornbury*, and under sheriffs like John Roger III* and Hamo Bele, were men with long-established connexions in Kent, independent of Fiennes. Similarly, the evidence of their ‘oppressions’ comes from indictments taken in the highly-charged context of the immediate aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, and related to isolated incidents some of which had occurred nearly ten years earlier.81 R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 220-43. Likewise with parliamentary elections, Warner, Isle, Thomas Brown II* and Sir John Cheyne II* were men whose local standing could easily have gained them election to the Commons without any intervention from Fiennes. Nor is there evidence of direct intervention in the affairs of the parliamentary boroughs, Canterbury and Rochester, and household men like William Say*, elected for Canterbury in 1447, had independent connexions with the city. Only in the Cinque Ports after 1447 did Fiennes, as warden, seek to influence the choice of parliamentary barons, notably in the case of Robert Berde*, but here too his influence may have been less strong than that exercised by Gloucester in the 1420s. What may have been important in the 1440s, and contributed to the grievances expressed by the rebels, was a shift in the political weight in Kent to the west of the county. This was reflected in the location of parliamentary elections for the shire: while these were conventionally held in Canterbury and Rochester, between 1439 and 1449 four of the five elections for which indentures survive took place at Penenden Heath or ‘Chesteners’ near Maidstone, closer to Fiennes’s seat at Knole.82 C219/15/2, 4, 6, 7. This concentration of influence in the west of the county may also account for the 1450 rebels’ demand for a sharing of sessions of the peace equally between east and west Kent: Harvey, 187-8.

The third charge against him, regarding the allegedly unlawful means he used to accumulate estates and wealth in Kent, is more problematic. The royal grants of the manors of Monkecourt, Capel, Huntingfield, Shorne and Tracy, and property in Chelsfield helped bolster his position as one of the leading landowners in west Kent around Sevenoaks, and he acquired further property in the same area: in 1445 the manor of Mereworth, from William Manston*, and a year later, with Isle, land belonging to Ralph Legh*. Most important, he also purchased from Legh the valuable manor of Knole near Sevenoaks, which had come to Legh through marriage.83 CP25(1)/115/318/623, 319/648; Archaeologia Cantiana, lxxxix. 6-7; Hasted, iii. 64. From 1447 his acquisitions became more widespread and began to attract accusations of malpractice. In May 1448 the long-lived widow of Thomas Basings (d.1400) conveyed the manor of Kenardington to Fiennes and Stephen Slegge. This may have been part of a deal in which Fiennes received the Basings lands in Kent in return for securing a pardon in King’s bench for Alice, widow of Thomas Makworth*, the common law heir to the Basings inheritance, as an accessory to the murder of a rival claimant.84 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 54, 56; S.J. Payling, ‘Murder, Motive and Punishment’, EHR, cxiii. 2-9. He also sought to extend his holdings around Knole and this may have brought him into conflict with another local landowner, Reynold Peckham*, who in June 1447 sold him a property called ‘Joces’.85 Cat. Lambeth Chs. ed. Owen, nos. 154, 170. This, adjacent to Knole and along with neighbouring Panthurst, acquired around the same time, would have increased the parkland on Fiennes’s estate. There is nothing to suggest any irregularity in this sale, but on 14 Sept. 1450, before the commissioners appointed to inquire into extortions and oppressions in the county in the wake of Cade’s rebellion, a jury presented that two years earlier Fiennes, his wife and Slegge had made ‘such threats of death and imprisonment, drawing and hanging’ that Peckham had been forced to exchange further land in the parish of Seal with him. While Peckham had carried out his side of the bargain, Fiennes had not. Both Slegge and Fiennes’s widow were found not guilty of this offence. Fiennes’s acquisition of property in east Kent similarly attracted accusations of malpractice. Before the same commissioners he was accused, again with Slegge, of forcibly expelling Humphrey Eveas from his property in Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey. Similarly, Slegge was acquitted on this charge.86 Virgoe, 225-6, 234. In 1448 the aged widow of Sir William Septvance (d.1407) surrendered her estate in east Kent and Thanet to him, though there were no allegations that he had exerted undue pressure on her.87 CCR, 1447-54, p. 68. The following year he also acquired the manor of Crowthorn in Romney Marsh from a Middlesex man, John Brown, but according to a later Chancery petition, he entered it by force, imprisoning Brown and making him seal a release of his title before one of the masters of Chancery. It was said that shortly before his death Fiennes instructed his confessor to tell his wife to deliver the manor again to Brown and ‘uttred and declared that of all thinges he euer dyde in his lif hit was the moost in his conscience that he had don’. The point of this story was to secure a writ of subpoena against Sir John Cheyne II, who then held the manor as feoffee of Fiennes’s son, and it is likely that the plaintiffs were using Fiennes’s reputation for corruption to advance their own interests.88 C1/27/419; CCR, 1447-54, p. 177.

Fiennes left a widow, Emmeline, two sons and two surviving daughters. Emmeline suffered by association from her late husband’s reputation. Almost immediately upon his death she found her title to certain of the Fiennes estates under threat. Gervase Clifton* and the other remaining feoffees of the Septvance estates succeeded in recovering them from her possession, and so soon after his death as 24 July 1450 Humphrey Eveas retook possession of the property in Elmley. In October arbiters made an award dismissing her title to Panthurst.89 Virgoe, 226; C1/19/46; C253/32/175, 176; Archaeologia Cantiana, lxxxix. 7; Cat. Lambeth Chs. no. 132. She died on 5 Jan. 1452 and was buried next to her husband.90 CP, xi. 481; Stow, Surv. London, i. 320. Fiennes’s elder son and heir, Sir William, fared better and appears to have escaped the opprobrium attached to his father, despite having been a member of the royal household since the early 1440s. On 18 Dec. 1450 he was allowed to enter into his late father’s lands without any inquisition or suing out livery upon the immediate payment of 50 marks, with another 100 marks due the following Easter. On 13 Apr. he was summoned to the Parliament then in session as Lord Saye and Sele. He did not succeed, however, to his father’s office as warden of the Cinque Ports, for just 12 days after James’s death that office had been granted to Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, notwithstanding it had been entailed upon Fiennes and his male heirs. On 12 June 1451 Lord William released his rights to the office to Buckingham.91 CP, xi. 482; E101/409/6, 16; 410/1, 3; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 416, 428, 473. For the remainder of the decade he proved himself a capable soldier and local administrator. Ironically, he supported York during the crisis of 1459-60 and served alongside the earl of Warwick at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. Remaining close to Warwick through the early 1460s, he served him as vice-admiral, but left his service to support Edward IV in 1469, and fled into exile with the King the following year. He was killed fighting for Edward at Barnet on 14 Apr. 1471. William much less wealthy than his father had been. The lands held by grant of Henry VI were resumed during the Parliament of 1450-1, and during the civil wars it seems he was taken prisoner and held for ransom, being forced to sell more of his estate in Kent. His son and heir, Henry, was apparently too poor to be summoned to Parliament.92 CP, xi. 483. Of James’s daughters the two eldest, Elizabeth and Emmeline, had been married respectively to William Cromer and Robert Rademylde*. Both matches probably took place in 1443. A possible third, unnamed daughter appears to have married a man named Sackville (probably a member of the Sussex family) in 1447-8, while a fourth married Thomas Danvers*, but seems to have predeceased her father. Another daughter, Jane, was still unmarried at the time of her father’s death; he provided 400 marks for her in his will.