FITZWILLIAM, Nicholas

Fitzwilliam is an example of a common phenomenon: a younger son of a substantial gentry family who, through a combination of an endowment of part of the family estates and a highly lucrative marriage, attained to a level of landed wealth that enabled him to take a more prominent part in local affairs than the heads of lesser families. In his case, his prominence may also have owed something to the death of his elder brother, John, at the siege of Rouen in 1421, leaving a young son as heir to Sprotborough. Nicholas himself may have spent some years at Wadworth, the residence of his uncle, Edmund Fitzwilliam (d.1430), another who had benefited from a generous settlement of the family patrimony, for it was as ‘of Wadworth’ that, on 8 July 1427, he was granted letters of protection as about to depart for France in the retinue of John, duke of Bedford. Unlike other members of his family, however, his military career was a brief one.3 DKR, xlviii. 251. His yr. bro. Ralph was a noted soldier who rose, in 1441, to the office of capt. of Salva Terra in Gascony: W.P. Baildon, Baildon and the Baildons, i. 368. J. Hunter, S. Yorks. i. 339-40. It is possible that he was the ‘Fitzwilliam’ admitted to Lincoln’s Inn for his second Christmas in 1428. There is certainly some evidence, albeit indirect, that he received a legal training. When the famous dispute between the hospital of St. Leonard and the men of the West Riding over the hospital’s claim to thrave of corn from each ploughland threatened disorder in the summer of 1430, he was one of the 12 nominated by the former to compromise the dispute before an arbiter. On 2 Sept. he appeared in the chapter house of York cathedral to hear Chief Justice Babington pronounce an award in favour of the hospital.4 L. Inn Adm. i. 5; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 165-7. Thereafter, he came to take a part in the administrative affairs of Yorkshire, serving a term as escheator and, on 12 Sept. 1435, attesting the return to Parliament of Sir Robert Waterton*, the stepson of his elder brother’s widow, and Sir William Gascoigne*, her third husband.5 Parlty. Repn. Yorks. (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. xci), 236.

In the following year Nicholas added substantially to the estates he held as a scion of the Fitzwilliams by marriage to the thrice-widowed Margery Mackerell. Very shortly before their marriage she had been assessed, for the purposes of taxation, on an annual income of as much as £80. A small part of this was probably derived from her dower interest in the property of her first two husbands, but the bulk of it came from the remarkably generous settlement her third husband had made in her favour. Mackerell gave her a jointure interest in his entire estate in three counties: this, as specified in detail in a fine of 1444, consisted of eight small manors, namely Stanton, Breaston and Wilsthorp in Derbyshire, Hayton, Misterton, Sturton le Steeple and Carlton in Lindrick in north Nottinghamshire, and Middle Carlton ‘called Carleton Makerell’ in Lincolnshire. While none of these were valuable, when their issues were added to those of Fitzwilliam’s larger manor of Adwick le Street in south Yorkshire, held of the duchy of Lancaster, he had an income to compare with that of all but the wealthiest gentry.6 It is not known when Adwick was granted to him, only that, between June 1446 and July 1449, his brothers, William and Robert, and Robert Melton, son of one of his father’s feoffees, quitclaimed to him their rights in the manor: CP40/771, cart. rot.; CCR, 1447-54, p. 95.

Fitzwilliam would have been yet richer if he had been able to benefit from another manifestation of the uxoriousness of Margery’s third husband. As the widower of a substantial heiress, Mackerell enjoyed a courtesy interest in an estate more valuable than his own, namely the large north Nottinghamshire manor of Hodsock and other lands. By an agreement of November 1435, his stepson, Sir Gervase Clifton*, who was heir to this estate, traded concessions on Mackerell’s part for an undertaking of his own to pay Margery for her life an annual rent of 40 marks. Mackerell died within two months of the agreement, and, on her remarriage, Margery was immediately faced by Clifton’s refusal to pay the annuity. In Hilary term 1437 she and Fitzwilliam sued him on the £1,000 bond into which he had bound himself to adhere to the agreement. The defendant appeared in person to enter the powerful defence that Mackerell, a fortnight before his death, had released to him all actions real and personal. The result of the case has not been traced, but it is highly unlikely that Fitzwilliam gained any redress. Indeed, he and Margery soon found themselves facing a counter-suit from Clifton for detinue of charters.7 CP40/704, rot. 257; 705, rots. 118, 304; 721, rot. 154; 722, rot. 178d. The couple were also to be disappointed if they hoped to gain any significant part of Margery’s paternal inheritance. In his will of 1414 her father had assigned to her the legal remainder of certain tenements in Nottingham expectant on the death of her mother, but the latter, in her will of 1439, ignored her claims, instead settling property on Margery’s son, John Mackerell.8 Borthwick Inst. Univ. of York, Abps. Reg. 18 (Bowet), f. 368; York registry wills, prob. reg. 3, ff. 576-8. Margery was assessed at a meagre 7s. 6¼d. for the tenth part of her freehold in Nottingham in the subsidy roll of 1473: Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, iii. 290. It is clear that the bulk of the Tansley inheritance passed to her sister, Cecily Wentworth.

If, however, one of Margery’s sons by her third husband thus gained a small advantage at the expense of Fitzwilliam, the Mackerells as a family were ruined by her third marriage, for her new husband chose to secure the future prosperity of his issue by Margery through a blatant act of disinheritance. In Michaelmas term 1444, by a final concord in which he and Margery appeared as joint deforciants, he conveyed the entire Mackerell inheritance to a powerful group of five feoffees, headed by Maud, countess of Cambridge, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and completed by his first cousin, Edmund Fitzwilliam (d.1465) of Wadworth, William Babington* and a north Nottinghamshire esquire, Hugh Cressy. Soon after the countess’s death in August 1446, the four surviving feoffees reconveyed the property to the couple and the heirs of their bodies; only on the failure of their issue were the lands to come to Margery’s issue by Ralph Mackerell.9 CP25(1)/293/70/293; C142/51/33.

Such a settlement was clearly tortious for Margery had only a life interest in the property, and it reflects little credit on the feoffees that they were prepared to disregard the interests of the Mackerells. That Cromwell was ready to support our MP in a disinheritance so important to the future of the Fitzwilliams of Adwick le Street is to be explained by the longstanding connexion between the two men. Although Nicholas was not of the inner circle of the lord’s affinity, their association was a close one. Its origins did not lie in a territorial relationship – for Cromwell held no lands in Yorkshire – but in a family one. Nicholas’s grandmother, Maud, widow of Sir William Fitzwilliam of Sprotborough, was Cromwell’s paternal aunt.10 Maud was alive as late as 1418 and thus must have been well known to Cromwell: Notts IPM (Thoroton Soc. xii), 162-3. The first evidence that their kinship was manifest in mutual co-operation dates from 1427 when they, with others, were enfeoffed of the Yorkshire manor of Baildon by Nicholas’s younger brother, Ralph, who himself was to attend the lord at the King’s coronation in Paris.11 Yorks. Deeds, iii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxiii), 4; Hunter, i. 339. On 2 Sept. 1447 Cromwell quitclaimed all his right in the manor to our MP: Baildon, 369-70. Thereafter, this co-operation became closer. In 1429 our MP acted as a mainpernor in Chancery when an inheritance, of which Cromwell was planning to defraud the right heir, was committed to the temporary keeping of the lord’s nominees. In 1441, when Cromwell found himself the victim of the depredations of Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, Nicholas sat as a petty juror before justices of oyer and terminer, commissioned to investigate Grey’s offences in Derbyshire. More mundanely, in 1443 he acted with Cromwell in a fine by which the latter acquired the Yorkshire manor of South Cave. His election to Parliament is to be seen as another aspect of this service, and it is also significant that his three terms as Yorkshire escheator in the space of only ten years all came during the period when Cromwell, as treasurer, was in a position to influence appointments. In return for these services, and others unrecorded, Cromwell, as treasurer, secured for him the potentially profitable office of controller of customs in Kingston-upon-Hull, and acted for him in the dubious resettlement of the Mackerell lands.12 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 21, 206. While customer, he sued a merchant of Hull for seizing one of his ships: Baildon, 369. He may also have loaned him money. According to the accounts of his executors, at their testator’s death Nicholas was bound to him in a £200 bond.13 This sum was still unpaid in 1466: Magdalen Coll. Oxf. Cromwell pprs., Misc. 355, m. 2.

Fitzwilliam’s associations with lesser men are more difficult to reconstruct. He was intimately associated with Richard Wentworth of Everton (Nottinghamshire), with whom he had much in common. Both were younger sons of wealthy south Yorkshire families and both acquired estates in north Nottinghamshire through their marriages to two sisters. The fact that Wentworth’s wife, Cecily, inherited the bulk of the Tansley property to the disadvantage of Nicholas’s wife was clearly not a bone of contention betweem them. In the early 1440s Wentworth used Nicholas as a feoffee and in his will of 20 Dec. 1447 appointed him as one of his executors. It is worth noting in this context that, like Nicholas’s cousin Edmund, Richard was of the affinity of Maud Clifford (d.1446), dowager-countess of Cambridge, resident at Conisbrough castle in south Yorkshire.14 Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 123, 137-8; Yorks. Deeds, vi (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxxvi), 17-19; Bodl. Dodsworth mss, 90, f. 59; CP25(1)/281/160/15; Hunter, ii. 244-5. Our MP’s close association with these two men, together with Maud’s appearance as one of his feoffees in the fine of 1444, suggest the possibility that he was also of her affinity. Another close connexion of his was Sir John Zouche*, to whom he was related through his mother, Eleanor Green, the niece of Sir John’s mother. Although Sir John was principally resident at Kirklington in Nottinghamshire, he also held the manor of Bolton upon Dearne, only a few miles from Adwick le Street. In final concords of 1422 and 1435 Nicholas appears as one of Zouche’s feoffees, and in October 1449 he was named as one of the supervisors of the will of Zouche’s widow, Margaret.15 CP25(1)/280/154/43; 292/68/177; Add. Ch. 20542. For a spouse for his son and heir, John, Fitzwilliam looked to the family of one of his lesser neighbours. On 23 Mar. 1453 he conveyed to John and Amicia, daughter of Robert Passelew of Barnby Dun and Elizabeth, daughter and coheiress of Thomas de la Haye, a fee tail interest in small parcels of land in Bentley, Arksey and elsewhere, in what was no doubt part of a marriage settlement.16 These lands were probably part of Nicholas’s share of his family’s patrimony for the conveyance reserved remainders, in successive tail-male, to his brother, Ralph, his nephew, William of Sprotborough, and his cousin, Edmund: Notts. Archs. Foljambe of Osberton mss, 157 DD FJ 4/37/1. He himself is sometimes described as resident at Bentley (near Adwick): CP40/720, rot. 125; 765, rot. 76. The inscription on the couple’s tomb in the church of Adwick le Street describes her as one of her father’s coheiresses, but it is not clear what, if anything, she inherited.17 Hunter, i. 212.

Little evidence survives for the latter part of Fitzwilliam’s career. In July 1459 the archbishop of York granted him licence to make an oratory in his house at Adwick le Street. Although he was appointed to the Lancastrian commission of array of the following December, it is likely that he was a passive if not an active supporter of the Yorkist cause. To be added to his own probable membership of the affinity of the duke of York’s stepmother, Maud, countess of Cambridge, is the fact that other members of his family – a family which had been long associated with the house of York – were committed Yorkists. His cousin, Edmund Fitzwilliam, was constable of the duke of York’s castle at Conisbrough and later an esquire of Edward IV’s household, while his own son and heir was to be granted, on 14 Nov. 1460, a life annuity of ten marks by the duke.18 Ibid. 353; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 223, 231-2; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 121, 479. John’s annuity was confirmed, at the instance of Edw. IV, by Richard, duke of York’s feoffees on 19 Feb. 1470: Foljambe of Osberton mss, DD FJ 4/37/2. For the close association of earlier generations of the Fitzwilliam family with the house of York: Hunter, i. 250; CPR, 1413-16, p. 377. By then Nicholas was dead. It is not impossible that he fell at the battle of Northampton, for he died between 21 Dec. 1459 and 29 Aug. 1460, when licence was granted to veil his widow. She survived until shortly before 3 Nov. 1474, when her will of the previous 2 July was proved. She wished to be buried in the chapel of St. Lawrence in the church of Adwick le Street, where no doubt our MP was interred. Their son John was also buried there. According to a monumental inscription the son died in 1470, but this would seem to be an error for a later will and inquisition show that he died on 4 Jan. 1498. The family failed in the male line on the death of our MP’s great-grandson, another John, in 1512.19 Test. Ebor. ii. 154n; iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 335; York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 218d; Hunter, i. 353; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 235-6; Notts. IPM (Thoroton Soc. iii), 71-72, 190-3; C142/28/91, 48/74, 51/33.