BEARE, John

Although it is possible that the Barnstaple MP of 1437 was a wealthy local baker,3 For a mere baker, this man was apparently very well connected in the borough. In early 1431 he served as executor of the will of Joan Hayne and personally travelled to Westminster to pursue the debts owing to the testator in the law courts: CP40/680, rot. 158; 715, rot. 306; KB27/703, rot. 32. there is evidence to suggest that like his parliamentary colleague (the young and undistinguished Hugh Champernowne*, who appears to have owed his election to the Commons entirely to the influence of his kinsman, Sir William Bonville*), he was in fact an outsider. Like Champernowne, Beare came from an ancient family: the Beares of Huntsham traced their lineage back to a Baldwin de Bere who had been lord of the manor of Bere in the reign of King Stephen.4 J.S. Vivian, Vis. Devon, 59. Also like his colleague, Beare was a comparatively young man who had only recently come into his paternal inheritance.5 The exact date at which Beare succeeded his father has not been established with absolute certainty: Robert was still alive in Oct. 1429, when he presented a priest to the parish church of Huntsham, but was dead by the summer of 1439, when the patronage was exercised by his feoffees. In a later lawsuit in Chancery John Beare claimed that his father’s principal feoffee, Sir John Speke, had drawn the revenues of his lands for a period of seven years before his own death (which occurred in 1441), placing Robert’s death in about 1434: Reg. Lacy ed. Hingeston-Randolph, i. 121; Reg. Lacy, ii. 157; C1/70/47. Indeed, it appears that he experienced some difficulty in securing livery of the family lands. Robert Beare had settled his estates on feoffees, headed by his wife’s kinsmen Sir John* and William Speke,6 The exact relationship between Beare and Speke is unclear. According to Vivian, Robert Beare married Margaret, a daughter of William Speke; if so, she may have been his first wife, as John Beare’s mother, who survived her husband, was called Joan: Vivian, 59; Reg. Lacy, ii. 157. with instructions to use the revenues of the lands to pay his debts and to deliver any surplus to the heir once he attained his majority. After Robert’s death, Sir John had carried out these instructions in so far as to pay out £50 to Robert’s creditors, but had not paid any of the residue to his son by the time he himself died in 1441. Following Speke’s death, his widow, Joan, married Hugh Champernowne alias Rowe, the bastard brother of Beare’s parliamentary colleague in 1437, and – so John Beare claimed – refused to pay him any of the money he was owed.7 C1/70/47. This dispute aside, Beare was kept busy in the Westminster courts for much of the 1440s and 50s defending his title to various parcels of his father’s estates.8 CP40/730, rots. 119d, 122, 182; 736, rot. 452; 742, rot. 115; 779, rot. 106.

These holdings were centred on the family castle at Huntsham near Tiverton (the residence of the Courtenay earls of Devon) on the Devon border with Somerset, and also included property in Bere, Jacobstowe, Uplowman, Exeter and elsewhere in the county, as well as several burgages in the borough of Tiverton. In 1436 Beare had claimed to have an annual income of no more than £5, while in the early sixteenth century his family’s estates were said to be worth more than £11 annually, but both of these figures were probably significant underestimates, for not long after his father’s death John Beare himself admitted that his inheritance was worth in excess of £27 p.a.9 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (ii); C142/44/90; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 799; CP40/730, rot. 122; 768, rot. 314; 779, rot. 106; C1/70/47. Although the Beares owned no property in the borough that John represented in Parliament, they had connexions who wielded considerable influence there. They were feudal tenants not only of the Courtenay earls who held the ‘castle manor’ of Barnstaple, but also of the honour of Torrington, which in the 1430s was held by Sir John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, in the right of his wife, Elizabeth of Lancaster, widow of John Holand, duke of Exeter (exec.1400). Another part of the estates which Elizabeth had brought to Cornwall was the honour of Barnstaple, providing the absentee lord with a degree of local influence, should he choose to exercise it.

It nevertheless seems that it was Beare’s kinsman, Sir John Speke, who played the crucial part in securing his return in 1437. Speke, who himself rode to Westminster that year as one of the Devon knights of the shire, was at the time embroiled in a bitter dispute with the leading local lawyer Nicholas Radford*. Already the battle between the two men was being fought out in the Westminster law-courts, and it must have seemed probable that Radford, who had secured one of the county seats in the previous Parliament, would seek to best his opponent by bringing the matter before the Commons. In the event, Radford appears not to have been elected, while Speke succeeded in procuring a Barnstaple seat for his younger relative.

His sole return to the Commons aside, Beare played little part in public life. He was present at the Devon shire elections in the troubled year 1455, and occasionally served on local juries, but he did not otherwise hold office either under the Crown or any of the region’s magnates.10 C219/16/3/12; KB9/350/50, 51; C139/123/43, 143/30, 154/28; C140/19/12, 41/23, 69/21A, 74/22, 76/67, 77/75, 78/87. It is possible that it was this apparent reticence to involve himself in affairs other than his private ones which kept him from involvement in the troubles sweeping Devon in the mid and late 1450s. Certainly, there is no indication that he sided with either Thomas Courternay, earl of Devon, or his great local rival, William, Lord Bonville, in the violent dispute that threw the county into turmoil in the final decade of Henry VI’s reign.11 One John Beare, esquire alias gentleman, sued out a general pardon in March 1460, but cannot be identified with the MP with any degree of certainty. A likely alternative candidate would seem to be the lawyer who had served as attorney for Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, in the mid 1440s: CPR, 1452-61, p. 568; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 100, 256, 258-9. Nor did Beare rise to prominence after Edward IV’s accession. He continued, as before, to accept occasional nominations as a feoffee to his neighbours, or to attest their deeds, but would appear to have sued out the general pardon he procured in December 1471 in the aftermath of Henry VI’s readeption as a mere precaution.12 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1023; Harvard Law School Lib., English deeds BBN9416; N. Devon RO, Chichester of Arlington mss, 50/11/15/3; CP25(1)/46/89/271; C1/77/78, 143/32; C4/76/192; C67/48, m. 6.

Beare died on 5 Apr. 1492. He was succeeded by his son John, on whom he had entailed his lands in the previous autumn. Neither the younger John nor any of his immediate descendants followed him into the Commons, and it was not until the reign of William and Mary that a member of the family was once more returned to Westminster, on this occasion for the borough of Tiverton.13 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 799; The Commons 1715-54, i. 456.