BERGH, Walter

Bergh was descended from a family with extensive landholdings on both sides of the boundary between Hampshire and Wiltshire. At the time of his only known return to the Commons, his father, John, was still alive and serving as one of the county coroners, and alongside a fellow coroner, John Uffenham alias Laurence*, he found sureties for Walter’s parliamentary attendance.7 CFR, xix. 136; CPR, 1446-52, p. 306; CCR, 1447-54, p. 146; C219/16/1. Walter himself had by this date been connected to Henry VI’s household for some years. The exact nature of this connexion is uncertain, for he is not known to have received robes as one of the esquires of the hall and chamber until 1451,8 E101/410/9. but it probably predated his surrender of a manor which he held from the duke of York, and which – in a petition to the King of about 1452 – he claimed to have given up at the sovereign’s command some six years earlier.9 SC8/248/12365.

In the light of Bergh’s relative youth and inexperience it is likely that he owed his election for Bishop Waynflete’s borough of Downton to the patronage of the court, although he arguably fulfilled the requirement for residence at least in so far as he held some property in the borough from the bishop. It is possible that he had personal motives to seek election: by the early months of 1450 he was in dispute with the able and litigious lawyer John Newburgh II*, whom he accused of badgering his tenants at Wilton.10 CP40/756, rot. 89d. In truth, the matter was more complicated, for Newburgh had laid claim to the property of the deceased Wiltshire gentleman John Cuttyng, which Bergh stood to inherit (although the details of the descent are unclear). The affair was not settled until 1455, when Newburgh secured recognition as remainderman of the Berghs’ property in the event of their failure to produce surviving issue.11 CP25(1)/293/73/402; CP40/797, rot. 409.

On the wider political stage, Bergh’s election took place against a backdrop of military disaster in France and popular unrest in England. In the early months of 1450 the Commons had launched an open attack on the King’s principal minister, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, who – rightly or wrongly – was being blamed for the disastrous course of the French wars, and by the summer much of southern England was in open rebellion.12 PROME, xii. 159-60. Among the lords, Richard, duke of York, grew increasingly vocal in his criticism of the conduct of the war by the duke of Somerset (who had replaced Suffolk as Henry VI’s principal confidant). In late September 1450 York forced his way into the King’s presence and presented him with demands for reform. Such reforms would, it was thought, loom large in the business of the Parliament which had been summoned on 5 Sept. to assemble two months later, and all sides took steps to ensure the return of their supporters. Retainers and sympathizers of the dukes of York and Norfolk procured a number of East Anglian seats, while the earl of Devon secured the return of several of his own servants and clients in the south-west. Conversely, the court for its part also sought the return of pliable Members, and among the men so elected was Bergh, who found a seat in Downton. While it is possible that our MP’s credentials as a local landowner were sufficient to secure his return, it seems probable that external patronage played a part. The other Downton seat was taken by the insignificant yeoman John Wyng*, who clearly owed his election to his close connexions with the influential Hungerfords. Bergh, like Wyng, was later employed by Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, as a feoffee of his estates, and it is possible that he had come to Moleyns’s attention at Henry VI’s court during the later 1440s.

In spite of the best efforts of the men about the King, the balance of power in the Commons of 1450 nevertheless seems to have lain with York’s supporters, for it was the duke’s chamberlain, the parliamentary novice Sir William Oldhall*, who was elected Speaker before York himself had ever reached Westminster. During the first session Parliament initiated a number of bills directed against the dead duke of Suffolk and his widow, the duke of Somerset and a number of other courtiers. It is not known what part Bergh played in the deliberations of the Commons, but it is likely that he opposed these measures which in the event were blunted by the King himself.13 Ibid. 164-7. If Somerset thus escaped parliamentary impeachment, he did not get away entirely unscathed. In spite of measures taken by the London authorities to prevent a repetition of the disorder of the preceding summer, the end of 1450 saw fresh rioting in the city’s streets. In December a mob ransacked Somerset’s lodgings at Blackfriars, and the duke himself was apparently only saved from personal injury by the intervention of the earl of Devon who spirited him off to the Tower, ostensibly for his own protection.14 Ibid. 165-6; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 203.

This outburst of mob violence set in motion events that would have profound implications for Bergh. It seems that York’s supporters had deliberately sought to stage an incident which would allow for Somerset’s arrest, for York’s and Norfolk’s retainers were implicated in the looting. Prominent among those accused of involvement was no less a man than Speaker Oldhall, and it appears to have been Bergh who pointed the finger at him. Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1451 the allegations over Oldhall’s part in his master’s supposed attempted coup steadily escalated, eventually causing him to take sanctuary in the collegiate church of St. Martin le Grand, to escape the consequences of the ‘slanders’ of ‘his mortal enemies, and especially one Walter Burgh of the King’s household’, as the dean of St. Martin’s, Richard Caudray, recorded. Oldhall, however, also had his supporters. On the evening of 18 Jan. 1452 Bergh ‘was so atrociously wounded in the City of London, by three men altogether unknown to him, that his life was despaired of’. Although the identity of the assailants was not, apparently, established, the authorities were quick to conclude that the former Speaker had been behind the attack, and forcibly removed Oldhall from sanctuary.15 A.J. Kempe, Hist. Notices of St. Martin-Le-Grand, 141-2; SC8/248/12365. Although the dean’s indignant insistence on the privileges of his church resulted in Oldhall’s return to the safe haven, the disgrace of the duke of York in the aftermath of the failed coup at Dartford not long after put Bergh in a position to seek reward for his services. He petitioned the King, pointing to the ‘grete Woundes and sore beting of Body’ which he had suffered, and alluding to his withdrawal from tenancy of one of the duke of York’s manors, and at the end of 1453 he had the satisfaction of being granted some of Oldhall’s forfeited property, a grant which was explicitly exempted from the provisions of the Act of Resumption passed by Parliament in that year.16 SC8/248/12365; CPR, 1452-61, p. 34; PROME, xii. 307-9.

Not long after the violent assault on his life, Bergh had been granted the post of controller of customs in the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth, which he would continue to hold until the spring of 1455. The appointment demanded Bergh’s frequent personal attendance, and it is thus improbable that he ever embarked on the expedition to Gascony in the retinue of Lord Moleyns for which he sued out letters of protection in January 1453, or, indeed, that he joined the garrison of the castle of Guîsnes in the retinue of the lieutenant, Sir Thomas Fynderne*, a service for which he had procured similar letters. Rather, it seems, the letters of protection were designed to protect him from the lawsuits with which John Newburgh, now in association with John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, and his father’s old friend John Uffenham was still harassing him.17 CP40/768, rot. 117d; DKR, xlviii. 398.

Curiously, it was not Henry VI’s incapacity and the duke of York’s consequent appointment as Protector that spelled trouble for Bergh. It was apparently not until after York had resigned as Protector that the Exchequer began proceedings against him for the Oldhall property in his custody.18 E159/231, recorda Hil. rot. 4. Equally, his dismissal from his controllership on 28 Mar. 1455 was a direct result of the removal from the treasurership of England of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, by whom he had been appointed, and the latter’s replacement by the earl of Wiltshire, James Butler. Butler was undeniably a household man, and while Tiptoft had first assumed the treasurership in 1452 before the King had lost his wits, his ties of marriage to the duke of York and his Neville allies evidently rendered him and his clients suspect to the lords who sought to reassume the government in the aftermath of York’s two protectorates. In any case, Walter soon had reason to return to his native region. In the spring of 1456 his father died, and he inherited the family’s extensive holdings in Hampshire and Wiltshire which included the manors of North Charford and ‘Seccheford’ (or ‘Sechefeld’) in Hampshire, and Chilhampton, Fovant, Sutton Mandeville, ‘Newenham’, ‘Feldescourte’ and Winterslow in Wiltshire, as well as some 1,900 acres of land and over 2,000 acres of pasture in southern Wiltshire, holdings which even some decades earlier were believed to be worth over £60 p.a.19 C139/161/8; C140/56/40; CP40/797, rot. 409; Feudal Aids, v. 249; vi. 456, 532. It was in the context of this inheritance that he clashed with the Oxfordshire landowner Richard Quatermayns* who, so he claimed, had come into possession of the muniments relating to the lands and was refusing to return them, a charge which Quatermayns denied.20 CP40/797, rot. 409; 800, rot. 111d.

It was probably about this time that Bergh took up the office of verderer in the royal forest of Clarendon, but it is notable that in spite of his one-time membership of the household he was not otherwise part of the increasingly narrow pool of regional gentry on whom the regime dominated by Queen Margaret was prepared to rely for the governance of the provinces in the final troubled years of her husband’s reign. He was evidently still owed some of his household wages, and in October 1457 he was able to secure a grant of legal fines in compensation.21 CPR, 1452-61, p. 389. Bergh was apparently replaced as verderer in the early weeks of Edward IV’s reign. The writ for his replacement, describing him (then about 35 years old) somewhat disingenuously as ‘too sick and aged’ to carry out his official duties, was issued while the King and his chancellor were still in the north at Durham, and it is possible that Bergh was then also in that part of the realm, having perhaps played some part in the decisive battle of Towton.22 CCR, 1461-8, p. 45.

Bergh now withdrew into private life, and held no further Crown office, although in 1465 he headed the juries empanelled to take the inquisitions post mortem of Sir Maurice Berkeley I* and (Sir) John Seymour I*.23 C140/14/29, 32. By that year, when his son and heir was born, he had married a third time, but the parentage of all three of his spouses remains obscure. Throughout the 1460s, Bergh maintained links with the surviving members of the Hungerford family, who were feudal overlords of some of his scattered property in Wiltshire, and with others of their circle. Whatever the truth of his planned expedition to France in the retinue of Lord Moleyns, in 1459 our MP had been included among the feoffees of the estates of Moleyns’ father Robert, 2nd Lord Hungerford, and he continued as a trustee beyond the violent deaths of Moleyns and his son and heir in 1464 and 1469, as well as periodically attesting Hungerford property transactions.24 CIMisc. viii. 332; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 439-41; 1468-76, nos. 236-8, 247-8; Tropenell Cart. ed. Davies, ii. 123. Others with whom he was closely connected at this time included Edward Basyng*, a Hungerford client who had sat in the two Parliaments of 1449, and whose putative brother William* had represented the borough of Chippenham in 1450, when Bergh sat for Downton.25 CCR, 1461-8, p. 152.In January 1469, when the Hungerford heir, (Sir) Thomas Hungerford*, was tried at Salisbury for treason alongside the heir to the Courtenay earldom of Devon, Bergh was among the regional gentry pressed into jury service, but he was only called upon to give a verdict on Courtenay’s case.26 KB9/320/8.

Bergh’s attitude to Henry VI’s readeption cannot be established, although it may have been under the impression of the political uncertainty of the final years of the 1460s, which had not only claimed the life of Thomas Hungerford, but had also seen in the north in open rebellion and the King in the earl of Warwick’s captivity, that he and his wife in September 1469 settled their property on feoffees headed by (Sir) Maurice Berkeley* of Beverstone, and also including William Browning I* and Robert atte Fenne*.27 C140/56/40. The circumstances of Bergh’s death, which had occurred before 25 Aug. 1471, when a writ of diem clausit extremum was sent to the escheator of Hampshire and Wiltshire, are equally uncertain. It is possible that he fell victim to one of the battles of that spring, but no definite evidence to that effect has been discovered.28 CFR, xxi. 4. His widow married as her second husband the Cheshireman Charles Bulkeley and survived until 1476. Bergh’s son and heir, Maurice, who was little more than six years old at the time of his father’s death, was knighted by Henry VII on the battlefield of Stoke in 1487. His son John Aborough† went on to represent Salisbury in the Commons in the reign of Henry VIII.29 C140/56/40; M.J. Bennett, Lambert Simnel, 129; VCH Hants, iv. 560; The Commons 1509-58, i. 287.