FIENNES, Robert

Robert was still young when his father became treasurer of Henry VI’s household in 1439, but nevertheless he soon enjoyed a share of royal patronage from the over-generous King. Together with his elder brother, Richard, and their cousin, William, he received the fees and robes assigned to esquires of the hall and chamber, and on 19 Mar. 1446 the King granted him in reversion the keeping of Portchester castle, to hold for life after the death of his father.6 CPR, 1441-6, p. 417; E101/409/16, f. 35. That same year, the latter, who had been on the lookout for suitable wives for his sons, arranged for them a double marriage to the two grand-daughters and heirs-general of Thomas, Lord Dacre. In a settlement made on 1 June he agreed with the girls’ father, Sir Thomas Dacre, that the elder of them, Joan, would wed Richard Fiennes, and the younger, Philippa, would be Robert’s wife, and undertook to pay 200 marks for the marriage of the former and 250 marks for that of Philippa, to ‘doo his parte to fecche the seyde dowghters to London atte his own costes’, and to pay for the nuptials. Dacre had earlier promised that Joan should marry the Dorset esquire John Filoll*, ‘yf upon sight and speche hadde bytwene them they can therto agree to’, for a payment of £200, but evidently now considered the double match a better bargain. He vowed not to alienate the lands his daughters stood to inherit.7 T. Barrett-Lennard, Acct. Fams. Lennard and Barrett, 58-62. Richard was later to allege that his fa. had paid as much as 1,800 marks for the marriages: C1/27/501. These were not inconsiderable, for through their mother, Elizabeth Bowet, the grand-daughter of Sir Robert Ufford, they were heirs to a number of manors in East Anglia and Sussex. By final concords made early in 1447, these estates were settled on Sir Thomas and his wife for term of their lives, with remainder to the two couples. Thus, Robert and Philippa and her issue were promised the Suffolk manors of Wrentham, Benacre, Henstead, Thorington and Burgh by Grundisburgh, and six more in Sussex (including Hurstpierpoint, Westmeston, Standen and Gold Bridge).8 CP25(1)/293/71/332. For Elizabeth Bowet’s inheritance, see C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 207, 211, 217-18, 222n.

For the time being, when he was not in attendance at Court, Robert and his young bride probably lived in east Sussex at Herstmonceux, in the castle newly-built at great expense by his father. It would appear that when elected to Parliament for Hampshire on 6 Feb. 1447 he possessed no lands in that county to qualify him as a knight of the shire, although his father, who had resigned from the treasurership of the Household three months previously, was a figure of substance in the region. Perhaps Robert was then acting as his father’s lieutenant at Portchester castle, but even if this were the case, there can be no doubt that he was young (perhaps even still a minor) and lacking any experience of public service. Clearly he owed his election to the standing of his father, and perhaps even more to the ambitions of his uncle (Sir) James Fiennes, now a highly favoured knight for the body, and second only to William de la Pole, marquess (and afterwards duke) of Suffolk, among the most influential of the King’s advisers. The Parliament assembled at Bury St. Edmunds just four days later, and when the duke of Gloucester died there in suspicious circumstances on 23 Feb. Sir James, then sitting in the Commons for Kent, immediately secured for himself Gloucester’s prestigious offices as constable of Dover and warden of the Cinque Ports. Robert was present when his uncle was created Lord Saye and Sele at the close of the parliamentary session, and as a member of the Household he no doubt benefited from Saye’s appointment as the King’s chamberlain on 1 Apr. Indeed, as an usher of the Chamber, on 18 Oct. that year he was granted for life in reversion the annuity of £20 which his father Sir Roger received from the customs collected in the port of Southampton, and in the following July (1448) the King made him a personal gift of £40. By the spring of 1449 Robert was ranked among the select group of esquires for the King’s body, and as such he received an additional annuity of 20 marks, this time from the issues of Portsmouth. Having been appointed sheriff of Hampshire in November 1448, he presided over the two parliamentary elections of the next year, and it may well be significant that to the second of these, the Parliament of November 1449, he returned Henry Trenchard*, a fellow esquire of the Household, who was himself closely attached to the duke of Suffolk.9 CPR, 1446-52, p. 111; E404/64/227; E159/226, brevia Hil. rot. 2; C219/15/6, 7.

Fiennes was still in office as sheriff when his father died, and together with his mother and elder brother he took on the executorship of his will. As a younger son he could not hope to inherit a large part of the family estates, and in fact all he did acquire was a manor in Wandsworth, Surrey, which his father and uncle had purchased together ten years earlier.10 Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Stafford, f. 178; VCH Surr. iv. 113. Fiennes probably lived in Wandsworth in the 1450s: CCR, 1461-8, p. 58; C67/41, m. 26. He also now formally succeeded Sir Roger as keeper of Portchester castle, a responsible position which immediately presented him with other concerns. On 6 May 1450 he wrote to the King about ‘the greet ruyne decay and delapidacion’ of the castle, informing him that ‘the gatez ben broken . . . the draghtbrugge fallen downe’, the towers and walls seriously damaged, and the roofs and floors of the houses in urgent need of attention. He asked that the clerk of the works be sent to survey the premises and instigate repairs.11 E28/80/46. But within a few weeks he must have had other, more pressing matters on his mind, when Cade’s rebels slew his uncle, Lord Saye, and the family’s manorial possessions in the south-east came under violent attack. Although he himself apparently escaped unscathed, thereafter he had to manage without Saye’s patronage, and his standing suffered accordingly. As an esquire for the body he was exempted from the workings of the Act of Resumption passed that summer in so far as it affected most of his royal grants, worth 50 marks a year, but an exception was made of the £20 annuity he had only just started to receive, and which must have provided a substantial part of his income. Command at Portchester castle was transferred to the battle-hardened earl of Shrewsbury towards the end of 1451, when the profits of the castle and manor were appropriated for naval defence, and even though Fiennes remained a member of the royal household at least until Michaelmas 1452, by then he had been demoted from his place as an esquire for the body and his prospects for advancement were dramatically reduced.12 E163/8/14; PROME, xii. 125; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 517, 568; E101/410/1, f. 31v; 410/3, f. 31; 410/6, f. 39v; 410/9, f. 42v; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 258. His whereabouts at the time of the first battle of St. Albans in May 1455 are not known, although it was while living in Wandsworth that he obtained a pardon in October that year.13 C67/41, m. 26.

Not long after the death of his first wife’s grandfather in January 1458, Fiennes’s brother Richard was recognized by letters patent as Lord Dacre. However, the new baron and his wife, Joan, showed no generosity to our MP, whose own wife, Philippa, had died without surviving issue at an unknown earlier date. In the closing months of Henry VI’s reign, so he later alleged, the couple dispossessed him of the five Suffolk manors and disputed his title to the six manors in Sussex which had all been promised to him and Phillipa at the time of their marriage. The quarrel between the siblings was not resolved until by the mediation of Chief Justice (Sir) John Fortescue*, John Prysote*, j.c.p., and other of their ‘friends’ it was agreed that Robert would formally surrender his title to all the premises in dispute to the Dacres and Joan’s issue, and receive in return the Fiennes castle and manor of Burgham, Kent, and the manor of Wandsworth (which he already held by inheritance), together with a no doubt welcome annual payment of £44 for life from the East Anglian estates.14 CP, iv. 7-9; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 189-90, 662.

That Robert was then regarded as a staunch supporter of the house of Lancaster is clear from his appointment as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex on 7 Nov. 1459, shortly before the opening of the Parliament at Coventry which attainted the leading Yorkists. Yet before he came to hold parliamentary elections at Guildford and Chichester in August and September the following year, the tables had been turned and the Yorkist earls were firmly in control of the government following their victory at Northampton in July 1460.15 C219/16/6. During the first reign of Edward IV, in the 1460s, Fiennes lived in relative obscurity, perhaps unable because of their estrangement to take advantage of his brother’s position ‘now greatest about the King’s person’. On the other hand the continuing unrest presented the opportunity to pursue his own interests, as is clear from reports of an alliance made between him and Eleanor, dowager countess of Northumberland, with the intention of dispossessing Elizabeth, the widow of the countess’s uncle Robert Poynings*, of very substantial manorial holdings in Kent. Elizabeth’s brother, John Paston*, received from another brother, Clement, a letter dated 26 June 1461 reporting that the countess and Fiennes had occupied all her land, which was a ‘gret myscheffe’. The countess, as Baroness Poynings, viewed the properties in question as her rightful inheritance, from which she had been ousted by her late uncle, but Fiennes’s motives can only be guessed. It is possible that he bore Poynings a longstanding grudge for the part he had played during Cade’s rebellion, when he was reputed to be Cade’s swordbearer, and it should be noted that his own political eclipse had coincided with Poynings’s acquittal on charges of treason when the Yorkists were in power in 1455. Fiennes took out a royal pardon in February 1462, but he continued to persecute Elizabeth, who some four years later informed her nephew, Sir John Paston†, that he had done ‘grete wast and hurte’ in the livelihood which pertained to her and her late husband, and had ‘of gret malice’ indicted one of her servants for felony. Her brother-in-law, Edward Poynings (the master of Arundel College) petitioned the King for a letter under the royal signet commanding Fiennes to cease levying their rents, whereupon he was ordered to ‘laye off [his] hondes’ at his peril.16 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 198, 207-9; CP, x. 665; C67/45, m. 47. For the background to this dispute, see Bull. IHR, xxxiv. 148-64, and for the difficulties in dating Elizabeth Poynings’s letter, ibid. 158, 161 n.2. In the summer of 1463 Elizabeth brought a suit against him in the common pleas for breaking into her closes at seven places in Kent, taking crops worth £40 and attacking her servants.17 CP40/809, rot. 403d.

By that date, Fiennes had been knighted, perhaps for unrecorded military service in the north of England. Furthermore, he was one of four ‘knights marshalles for the Hall’ at the banquet held at Elizabeth Wydeville’s coronation on 26 May 1465. However, save for an association with two yeomen of the King’s chamber, recorded in October 1468 (when one of them gave Fiennes and his colleague his goods and chattels), he does not appear to have had much to do with the royal court of Edward IV. Nor, significantly, was he given any part to play in local government until the Readeption of Henry VI, when he was placed on the bench in Suffolk, only to be promptly removed as soon as King Edward returned from exile. So it is surprising to find that when, on 3 July 1471 in the Parliament Chamber at Westminster, Cardinal Bourgchier and the other lords spiritual and temporal acknowledged Edward’s son Prince Edward as heir to the throne, Fiennes was among the ten knights also listed in attendance. Perhaps his brother Lord Dacre’s new position as a member of the prince’s council explains his presence. Even so, he does not appear to have established amicable relations with his brother, who failed to mention him in his will of September 1483. By that date the two men may well have found other reasons to quarrel, for while Dacre had grown close to Edward IV’s queen, Sir Robert had found favour in the 1470s with the King’s brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, and had been linked with members of the duke’s affinity in Suffolk. Gloucester’s usurpation of the throne further split the family that autumn, when Sir Robert’s nephew, Thomas, rose in rebellion against the new King, and was attainted in the Parliament of January 1484. Yet Sir Robert himself was not only restored once more to the Suffolk bench, but on the following 8 Apr. as a ‘King’s knight’ he received a grant for life of an annuity of £40, charged on sums due to the Exchequer from the abbot and convent of Bury St. Edmunds.18 Coronation Elizabeth Wydeville ed. G. Smith, 20; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 120, 858; Add. 5485, ff. 119-21; CPR, 1476-85, p. 391; BL Harl. MS. 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, i. 148; R. Horrox, Ric. III, 87, 264. It may have been at this stage that, secure in the knowledge of King Richard’s favour, he dispossessed his widowed sister-in-law, Joan, Lady Dacre, of the manors in Suffolk he had earlier disputed with her and his late brother. She died on 8 Mar. 1486, leaving her grandson, a minor, as her heir, and some 18 months later Fiennes secured at the Exchequer keeping of the property until Midsummer 1488, provided that he would answer for the issues if these were adjudged to the Crown as pertaining to the wardship. Roger Wentworth†, the former MP for Ipswich, was one of his mainpernors.19 CFR, xxii. no. 181; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 189-90, 662; CPR, 1485-94, pp. 165-6. Fiennes appears to have suffered no ill consequences for his allegiance to Richard III, although he was removed from the Suffolk bench for a few years.

If Fiennes’ second marriage, to Joan Massy, one of two daughters of a Buckinghamshire esquire, had brought him into close contact with her mother, the widow of Walter, 5th Lord Fitzwalter, and her brothers-in-law from the prominent Norfolk family of Radcliffe, there is no sign of it in the surviving records.20 CP, v. 483-4. Nor is there any indication about the material advantages of the match, which may not have amounted to much. In 1472 he made a quitclaim of lands in Surrey which had once belonged to his father-in-law.21 CCR, 1468-76, no. 896. By contrast, in his later years the annuity paid to him from the former Dacre estates rose to as much as £108 6s. 8d., as payable by his great-nephew Thomas, Lord Dacre (d.1533), in equal instalments at Easter and Michaelmas. This caused dissension even after Sir Robert’s death in 1509. Dacre petitioned the chancellor Archbishop Warham claiming that he died on the morning of Good Friday (6 Apr.), but by not allowing neighbours or servants to enter his chamber his widow concealed his death until the afternoon of Easter day, so that the Easter payment of the annuity would still be handed over.22 C1/310/22.

Even if he had been under age when he sat for Hampshire in 1447, Fiennes must have been over 80 when he died. He was a j.p. for the last 13 years of his life, which he spent living at Hitcham in Suffolk with his third wife, Eleanor, by whom he had seven children. The couple made their wills on 28 Mar. and 8 Oct. 1509, respectively, both of them naming as executors John Jenney, the master of Brundish, and John Hudson, parson of Brettenham. Sir Robert instructed them to divide his lands in Hitcham, Chelsworth and Kettlebaston between his five sons, so that each would receive a net income of £3 6s. 8d. p.a. Probate was granted in Sir Robert’s case on 12 May, and in that of his widow on 12 Nov.23 Suss. Arch. Collns. lviii. 199; PCC 17, 21 Bennett.