GRESLEY, John

With the Blounts and the Vernons, the Gresleys were among the principal gentry families of fifteenth-century Derbyshire. They had a record of service to the house of Lancaster that was notable even by the staunchly Lancastrian standards of that county. Our MP’s grandfather, Sir Thomas Gresley†, had rallied to the cause of Henry of Bolingbroke in 1399; both he and his son, Sir John, held duchy of Lancaster office in the county; and the latter also enjoyed a notable military career, culminating in appointment as lieutenant-general of Rouen. Moreover, our MP’s aunt, Joan, served as nurse to the infant Henry VI (although this appointment owed more to the connexions of her husband, Thomas Astley of Nailstone in Leicestershire than it did to those of her own family).7 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 236-9; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 51-52. Given this background, it is not surprising that our MP, like his first cousin, Walter Blount*, should have assumed a place in local affairs before he had inherited the family estates. Nor that he should have married well. The date of his marriage to the daughter of a knightly family settled at Elford, only a few miles from Drakelow, is unknown, but as early as 1452 his eldest son was a page in a great household.8 Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc. i. 20-21; H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 298.

During his father’s brief tenure of the Gresley estates, John had already become embroiled in a dispute with the Vernons. In 1446 he and his brothers, Thomas and Nicholas, are alleged to have led a large group in an assault on a Vernon servant, John Gelden, at Netherseal near Drakelow. The manor of Netherseal had been settled by Sir Richard Vernon* on his eldest son, William*, and there can be no doubt that this assault was an episode in a dispute which appears to have involved the heirs rather than the heads of the two families. In Michaelmas term 1447 Gresley made a fine of as much as ten marks in the court of King’s bench to end the process against him on the indictment to which this allegation had given rise.9 KB9/254/1; KB27/746, fines rot. 1d. In the meantime measures had been taken locally to reconcile the disputants. On 21 Sept. 1447 Sir William Ferrers of Chartley returned an award in settlement of the ‘greete debate and variaunce’ between Gresley and his father, on the one part, and William Vernon, on the other. The point at issue appears to have been the admission of beasts to a pasture, but the failure of the award suggests that pasture rights were only a symptom of wider disagreement and Ferrers’s intervention seems only to have intensified the conflict. In Michaelmas term 1450 Agnes, widow of Gresley’s servant, John Hert, appealed William Vernon and Gelden as accessories to her husband’s murder, and this produced a further resort to arbitration. The Vernons were ordered to pay the widow 20 marks in compensation for her loss and in return for the abandonment of the appeal.10 HMC Rutland, iv. 29; KB27/758, rot. 33d; 761, rex. rot. 12d; Gresley Chs. ed. Jeayes, 437. The dispute, however, was not over and later had a bearing on the far more serious violence which overtook Derbyshire in the mid 1450s.

The death of Gresley’s father on 17 Jan. 1449 brought John an inheritance considerable enough to support a career in local government in two counties. Although it was encumbered by the dower interest of his stepmother, she showed herself ready to compromise his interests with her own: six weeks after her husband’s death, on 1 Mar., her feoffees leased to John the manors of Colton and Kingstone (Staffordshire) for 30 years at an annual rent £40, payable in the minster of St. Mary, Coventry.11 Derbys. RO, Gresley mss, D77/3/425 (printed in Gresley Chs. 425). The rent had fallen into arrears by Mich. 1456: CP40/783, rot. 88d. This may not have conferred any financial advantage upon him, but it did give him control of what had become the family’s secondary residence at Colton and the basis for what was quickly to become a very active part in Staffordshire politics.

Less happily, Gresley’s entry into the family estates corresponded with the re-opening of the family’s longstanding dispute with the abbey of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire. This can be traced back to the 1390s and was to continue into the late 1460s. In March 1449 and May 1450 royal commissions were issued for the arrest of Gresley and his brothers for offences against the abbot, who alleged that Gresley had secured false indictments against him, his monks and tenants. John, for his part, complained of malicious charges made against him before his ‘full dowtfull lorde’, Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, John, Viscount Beaumont, and Sir William Ferrers. These mutual recriminations, in which both parties looked to Buckingham for support, were not the prelude to an immediate settlement, and the dispute continued, albeit at a lesser intensity.12 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 285-6, 385; Wright, 125. They were, however, the context of the establishment of a formal relationship between Gresley and the duke. Between 1 Sept. 1450 and 31 Aug. 1451 Buckingham retained him for life at an annual fee of £10 to serve in England with three yeomen, two pages and five horses, and abroad ‘with as many as shall please the duke to call’; and by 1452 his son Thomas was a page in the duke’s household.13 Nottingham Med. Studies, xvi. 91; Castor, 298. In 1456-7 Thomas Gresley was in receipt of an annuity of £4 as one of the duke’s household servants: Staffs. RO, Stafford fam. mss, D641/1/2/23.

By this date Gresley had already begun his administrative career. Notwithstanding the commissions issued for his arrest, he was appointed to the Derbyshire bench in November 1449, and on the following 22 Oct. he was elected to represent Staffordshire in Parliament. Significantly, his fellow Member was his brother-in-law, John Stanley, and the indenture was attested by two other of his kinsmen by marriage, Sir Thomas Blount† and Hugh Wrottesley.14 C219/16/1. During the prorogation of this Parl. from 29 Mar. to 5 May 1451 he appears not to have returned to his native county for he was in London on 20 Apr. and hence unable to appear before the Derbys. subsidy commissioners: E179/91/73. His gdfa.’s income had been assessed at £200 p.a. in the previous subsidy of 1435-6 and this is a fair guide to our MP’s own: E179/240/266. While this Parliament was in session he was pricked as escheator for the county he was representing, an office he may have hoped to exploit in the furtherance of his disputes with the abbot of Burton-upon-Trent and the Vernons. He was again elected as MP for the same county on 8 Mar. 1453, on this occasion with the prominent Household man, John Hampton II*.15 C219/16/2. According to an action he brought in the Exchequer of pleas in Feb. 1456, he was paid only £26 14s. 8d. of the £33 8s. due to him for service in this long Parl.: Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 379-80. Although he was wealthy enough to command such a place in local affairs on his own account, it is likely that so intensive a beginning to his career in local government owed something to the patronage of Buckingham. The same patronage probably also explains his knighthood, probably on the occasion of the ennoblement of the King’s half-brothers on 5 Jan. 1453 and along with his rival, William Vernon.16 The first reference to him as a knight is the Staffs. election return of 8 Mar. 1453: C219/16/2. He appears as an esq. in the plea roll of the previous Hil. when sued by Queen Margaret for hunting without licence in her park of Stockley in Needwood, Staffs.: CP40/768, rot. 100.

In view of the very serious disturbances which overtook Derbyshire in the spring of 1454, Sir John’s appointment to the shrievalty in November 1453 (during the lengthy prorogation of a Parliament of which he was a Member) was a particularly unfortunate one, both for him personally and for the maintenance of the peace in the county. Indeed, according to his own later petition, he had not taken up office until 8 Jan. 1454 and it may be that this delay was occasioned by local opposition.17 E159/232, brevia Easter rot. 4. In any event, his close connexion with the Blounts and his manifest hostility to the Vernons meant that he was singularly poorly qualified to maintain the peace when the county was divided by a struggle which pitted the one against the other. Although he himself was not actively involved on the side of the Blounts, at least one of his kinsmen did not share his restraint. On 30 Apr. 1454 his brother, Nicholas, was among those who accompanied Walter Blount in the raid on the manor of Longford which was shortly to provoke violent retaliation. Such partisanship weakened his authority as sheriff: on the following 28 May, when an armed band of 1,000 men under the leadership of Sir Nicholas Longford and William Vernon passed through Derby on their way to sack Blount’s manor at Elvaston, his proclamation urging them to keep the peace was treated with contempt. A sheriff perceived as neutral may have fared no better (particularly because, in the eyes of the rioters, royal authority was itself compromised by the protectorship of Richard, duke of York), but Gresley was certainly not the man to intervene effectively.18 KB9/12/1/9, 13; Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. xxxiv. 39-49; xxxv. 244; Castor, 305-7.

A year later it was Gresley’s own dispute with the Vernons that occasioned the most serious breaches of the peace in Derbyshire. No details survive, but on 12 July 1455 he and (Sir) William Vernon’s brother, Roger, were summoned to appear before the royal council to answer for recent riotous assemblies.19 PPC, vi. 250-1. This in turn led to the referral of the matter to the arbitration of Buckingham, who had influence with both families, as part of York’s more general efforts to restore peace to the county. Buckingham lost little time, returning his award on the following 12 Sept. at Stafford. He decreed that the parties ‘shalbe full frendes and of frendely delyng’, laying aside ‘Rancre of herte’, and that any future cause of quarrel between them should immediately be referred to his judgement or, in his absence, that of his son and heir. The terms of the award itself are unrevealing, concerned only with settling compensation for the servants of the disputants who had suffered injury. Anne Hert was to be paid the 20 marks awarded to her under the terms of the previous award for the killing of her husband by Vernon’s adherents; and Thomas Webbe, a tenant of (Sir) William at Netherseal, was to have £8 6s. 8d. for the serious injuries he had suffered at the hands of Gresley’s servants. This seems to have marked the end of the quarrel.20 Gresley mss, D77/3/437 (printed, in part, in Gresley Chs. 437).

According to the pardon of account of £100 awarded to him on 3 Mar. 1456, Gresley had incurred some exceptional costs during his troubled period as sheriff, ‘in assemblyng oure people’ of the counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to assist the duke of York during his judicial visitation of the region in the aftermath of the Elvaston raid, in labouring for seven days with 200 men, and in sending messengers to make proclamations and deliver letters of privy seal.21 E159/232, brevia Easter rot. 4. These additional burdens may explain his apparent inability to meet some of the payments charged on the issues of his bailiwick. As a result he found himself defending several actions in the Exchequer of pleas. In Michaelmas term 1455 he was sued by Robert Clifton* for unpaid parliamentary wages amounting to nearly £23 and by John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton, for 50 marks due to him as treasurer of the royal household.22 Parliamentarians at Law, 378-9; E13/146, rot. 12. His pardon of account is likely to have been only partial compensation for these and other charges arising out of his term of office, and although the royal pardon he successfully sued out two days before his pardon of account gave him protection from debts due to the Crown, he remained vulnerable to private actions.23 C67/41, m. 4. Clifton’s demands in particular occasioned him much inconvenience. In a separate but no doubt related action Clifton sued him for a debt of £15 in the court of common pleas and won a writ of exigent against him. On 8 July 1457 he was exacted in the Nottinghamshire county court, and, according to the return made by the sheriff, was committed to Nottingham gaol where he languished too infirm to be moved. This return was false, designed merely to save Sir John the inconvenience of outlawry, and the court saw it for what it was, ordering the sheriff, John Wastnes, to produce the defendant on pain of £40.24 CP40/787, rot. 12. In Easter term 1458 Wastnes brought an action against Gresley for a debt in that sum: CP40/789, rot. 7d.

It is unlikely that Gresley’s removal from the commission of the peace in November 1458 was the result of suspect political sympathies. His erstwhile rival, (Sir) William Vernon, was removed at the same time, and their dismissal is more likely to be a government reaction to the dying embers of their quarrel. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Sir John maintained his family’s Lancastrian allegiance until 1460, for he was named to the commission of array in December 1459 and restored to the Derbyshire bench in the following March.25 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 558, 663. Further, there is no evidence at this date to associate him with any of the Yorkist lords.26 It has been suggested that the pardon he sued out on 29 June 1452, in the wake of the duke of York’s abortive rising at Dartford, provides an early indication of Yorkist sympathies: C67/40, m. 1; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. i. 58. There can, however, be little doubt that the pardon had nothing to do with Dartford and everything to do with potential legal difficulties arising out of his disputes with Burton abbey and the Vernons. In fact, as far as the evidence goes, his connexions were on the other side. Not only was he a retainer of the duke of Buckingham, but he seems also to have had links with John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, who was coming to play an increasingly important part in both national and Derbyshire affairs. On 10 Jan. 1458 he was one of the Derbyshire j.p.s who took an indictment of Humphrey Bourgchier* for forcible entry into the earl’s manor of South Wingfield. Later, in April 1459, he was named as a feoffee, alongside Buckingham and James, Lord Audley, in the disputed Derbyshire lands of the Twyfords, a dispute in which the earl of Shrewsbury was acting as arbiter.27 KB9/288/22; Add. 6672, ff. 158-61. His connexions with these Lancastrian lords adds some credibility to the statement in Gregory’s chronicle that Gresley was one of seven men knighted by the King before the battle of Blore Heath on 23 Sept. 1459, only two of whom survived the battle. Although the story may be wrong in detail, there is a strong possibility that he was present at a battle fought not far distant from his estates, particularly as the chronicler appears to have been well informed about the conflict.28 Historical Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 204.

Nevertheless, if Gresley was committed enough to take up arms for Lancaster in 1459, he soon adapted himself to changing political realities. The deaths of Buckingham and Shrewsbury at the battle of Northampton in July 1460 severed the links that bound him to the family’s old Lancastrian allegiance. The first indication of his new sympathies is his election to the Yorkist Parliament of the following October, and there can be little doubt that his friendship with his fellow Derbyshire MP in that assembly, Walter Blount, simplified this apparent change of allegiance.29 C219/16/6. Some historians have doubted the sincerity of this change, but this rests on a misunderstanding. In April 1468, before royal commissioners of oyer and terminer, he was indicted for distributing liveries of cloth at Drakelow on 20 Mar. 1461, nine days before the decisive battle of Towton, ‘erga guerram in partibus borialibus’. This has been interpreted as implying continued Lancastrian sympathies, but this is to misunderstand the purpose of the indictments. Several of the leading men of the county, including the unimpeachably Yorkist Blount, were also indicted for contravening the statutes concerning the giving of livery. In soliciting these indictments the Crown’s aim was to lessen the level of disorder in Derbyshire by restricting the distribution of livery rather than to reveal misdemeanours in the Lancastrian cause. Indeed, if the charge against Gresley is to be taken literally, it is likely that those to whom he gave livery fought on Edward IV’s side at Towton.30 KB9/13/19; KB27/844, rex rot. 36d. For the misinterpretation: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. i. 59; Wright, 101-2. The indictment against Gresley is also to be seen in the context of the action brought against him by John Shawe in 1465 for distributing livery of cloth at Lichfield, Colton and elsewhere in Staffs.: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 139-40.

There can, in short, be no doubt that Gresley had the trust of the new King. His election on 10 Sept. 1461 to represent Staffordshire in the first Parliament of the reign and his appointment in 1462 to two royal commissions of arrest are unlikely nominations for someone whose sympathies were suspect.31 E13/150, rot. 7; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 102, 135. Further, according to one source (admittedly one of slightly doubtful accuracy) he was among the knights who accompanied Edward IV on his expedition to reduce the northern strongholds of the Lancastrians in the winter of 1462-3.32 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 157. He was also the beneficiary of a grant, albeit a minor one, of royal patronage: in the early 1460s he farmed the duchy of Lancaster hundred of Gresley.33 DL37/54/53; DL29/371/6199.

Gresley’s good standing with the new regime is further evidenced by his association with some its leading local gentry supporters. In a fine levied in Easter term 1461 he is named as a remainderman in lands in Staffordshire together with William Harcourt† and Thomas Ferrers of Tamworth, retainers of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.34 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xi. 239. A further indirect connexion with the powerful Warwick was his kinship with the earl’s councillor, Sir Walter Wrottesley, son of his sister Thomasina (d.1480). The two men are found acting together: Sir Walter was the Staffordshire sheriff who presided over Gresley’s election in 1461; in 1464 they were named as feoffees of Edward Langford*, the husband of their kinswoman, Sancha Blount; and, at a date before November 1468, they were also feoffees in property in Clipsham in Rutland, possibly for the earl himself.35 E13/150, rot. 7; C140/50/38; KB27/832, rot. 65.

It is not therefore surprising that, in 1464, Gresley should have added appointment to the bench in Staffordshire to that in Derbyshire, and that soon after his family should have been quick to benefit from an important change in the local political landscape. The grant of the honour of Tutbury to the young George, duke of Clarence, introduced a new power into the north Midlands or, seen from the perspective of the leading local families, a new patron to be exploited. The Gresleys, with their large landholdings in the heartlands of the honour, were natural beneficiaries, and our MP’s son, Thomas, was duly appointed as deputy lieutenant of Duffield Frith and Needwood Chace.36 CPR, 1461-7, p. 572; DL30/34/346, rot. 4. Their association with Clarence did not prevent Gresley and his son persistently poaching duchy game in the late 1460s: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 146, 164; DL30/111/1676, rot. 1d; KB27/831, rot. 25; 832, rot. 43. Soon afterwards Clarence provided the family with another service, successfully intervening to bring to a conclusion their long-running dispute with the abbey of Burton. On 24 Feb. 1467 Gresley and the abbot entered into mutual bonds in 200 marks to abide by Clarence’s arbitration. A detailed award was made on the following 9 May. Its most striking aspect is the comparative triviality of the points at issue: rents of no more than a couple of marks, rights of common pasture in Drakelow and Caldwell and of fishing in the river Trent, and the ownership of a ferry over the same river. It also makes clear that Gresley, at least in this particular phase of a long dispute, was the aggressor, withholding rents and usurping the rights of the abbey, but the award’s intention was not to punish past transgressions but to prevent future ones by defining the respective rights of the two parties. It concludes by deciding that both Sir John and the abbot should host a dinner for the other in symbolic satisfaction of their past trespasses one to the other.37 Derbys. Chs. 1027; Gresley mss, D77/3/440; Staffs. RO, Paget mss, D603/L260.

It was unfortunate for Gresley that the benefits of the end of his family’s long dissension with his religious neighbours was more than outweighed by the opening of a quarrel with his former friends and neighbours, the Wolseleys. This is an object lesson in the problems caused to his neighbours by an ambitious gentleman anxious to create a residence matching his rising status. The origin of the quarrel lay in the enclosure by Ralph Wolseley* in the spring of 1465 of 1,000 acres in the lordship of Haywood near Colton to provide himself with a park. This, if later complaints are to be believed, deprived Gresley, his brother-in-law, (Sir) John Stanley, and John Hales, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, of rights of common pasture. A petition presented by Gresley, seemingly to the royal council, provides a vivid ex parte account of the dispute’s early stages. He claimed that ‘the first begynnyng’ of the quarrel was an assault ‘on good Fryday’ on his servant, William Sydall; and that this was the prelude to a campaign of intimidation against his servants and tenants sponsored by Wolseley’s father, Thomas, who, as a j.p., was able to thwart the execution of a warrant of the peace against the miscreants. No year is given for the assault on Sydall (although all else that is known of the dispute suggests it happened on 4 Apr. 1466), but the petition adds the significant detail that when it occurred both our MP and Wolseley were at Calais in the service of the town’s captain, the earl of Warwick. In their absence, or so it was claimed, Richard Bagot, one of the leading Staffordshire gentry, prevailed upon Thomas Wolseley and Gresley’s wife Anne to put the dispute to the arbitration of Ralph and Gresley on their return home. All this is said to have taken place without Gresley’s knowledge, and thus, when he did return to London from Calais, he still viewed his colleague as a friend. He was thus unprepared when the latter ‘of malice and evyll disposicion’ laboured to have him arrested and slandered his wife, alleging that she had led an assault on Thomas and other ‘suche behavynges not goodly nouther accordyng to be affermed on eny Gentilwoman’. Shortly thereafter, in the petition’s account, the disputants entered bonds to abide the arbitration of Walter Blount, now Lord Mountjoy, who as a friend of both parties was well qualified for such a role; yet, while this award was pending, Ralph had ‘vexed and sued’ more than 50 of Gresley’s men, ‘aswele by writes supplicacions as by prevy sealx’.38 Staffs. RO, Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/4/25 (printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. ser. 3, ii. 82-86). One of these allegedly vexatious suits can be dated: on 23 June 1466 Ralph Wolseley brought a writ of trespass in the ct. of KB, claiming that Gresley, Anne and many others, including Sydall, had broken his close at Wolseley and assaulted his servants: KB27/822, rot. 61d (partially printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 146).

This petition, probably to be dated to the summer of 1466, prompted Ralph Wolseley to present the chancellor with a tale of woe of his own. He alleged that those who complained to have lost common pasture rights by his enclosure had agreed to take pasture in the equivalent acreage in another place; none the less, Gresley had broken down his fences. Further, he alleged that, when he had countered by suing Gresley at common law for trespass, his rival had conspired to have him, then absent in the King’s service in Calais, and his aged father indicted of felony.39 C1/32/300 (printed in Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. vii. 258-9). This refers to an indictment taken against the Wolseleys on 31 July 1466, at a session of the peace before the royal justice, Richard Bingham, for forcibly enclosing 1,000 acres at Wolseley.40 KB9/317/129. This account cannot be reconciled with the chronology implied in Gresley’s petition. It has our MP acting against the Wolseleys while Ralph was still absent in Calais, whereas Gresley claimed that, in their mutual absence in Calais, he knew nothing of the cause of enmity between them at home. In short, if Gresley was telling the truth here, then Wolseley was lying in implicating him in the allegedly false indictment of July 1466. Such contradictions are beyond resolution on the surviving evidence, but in any event they soon lost their meaning for Gresley. Although his dispute with Wolseley rumbled on in a minor key into the late 1470s, it lost its early intensity and he gave place to the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield as the principal opponent of Wolseley’s pretensions.41 For the later manifestations of our MP’s dispute with Wolseley: CP40/871, rots. 322, 323d; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. vi (1), 105, 117, 123-4, 126.

Gresley’s claim to have been absent in Calais when he first became a victim of Wolseley’s enmity suggests that he had a closer relationship with the earl of Warwick than implied elsewhere in the sources. None the less, his connexions with neither Warwick nor Clarence were strong enough to draw him into their abortive rising in March 1470, at least if one may judge from his appointment to the commission of array in Staffordshire as the King set out in pursuit of the rebels. They were, however, sufficient to preserve his position in local affairs during the Readeption. Despite his removal from the Derbyshire commission of the peace, he was named to an important commission of inquiry in that county and he remained on the bench in Staffordshire.42 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 219, 247-8, 611, 630. Indeed, Edward IV’s restoration appears to have posed a more serious threat to him. The early 1470s were a very quiet period in his career. On 8 July 1471 he was displaced from the Staffordshire bench, and, at least equally significantly, he was not reappointed to the peace commission in Derbyshire.43 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 611, 630. For a man of his local standing and active political involvement these were significant exclusions. In the following December he sought the security of a general pardon, which, in July 1472, he pleaded in bar to the livery indictment laid against him in 1468.44 C67/48, m. 33; KB27/844, rex rot. 36d.

Later, the growing influence in the east Midlands of William, Lord Hastings, provided Gresley with a new patron and thus with the opportunity to re-establish his place in local affairs. Their relationship quickly became a close one, far closer than he had ever enjoyed with Clarence. Before 1 June 1475 Gresley’s son and heir Thomas married Hastings’s niece, Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Ferrers of Tamworth, and the Gresleys soon reaped the benefits. Sir John was restored to the Staffordshire bench in 1475 (although, curiously, not to that in Derbyshire), and on 8 Dec. 1477 he entered a formal indenture of retainer with Hastings.45 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 611, 630; Wright, 225; W.H. Dunham jnr., Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 129. His importance to his new lord was soon graphically illustrated. On 8 Jan. 1478 he was elected to represent Derbyshire in the Parliament which was to oversee the fall of Clarence. The election, for the borough of Stafford, to the same assembly of his son Thomas adds weight to the supposition that they were there to give active support to Hastings. A few months after the end of this short assembly he was again called upon to act on Hastings’s behalf: in August 1478 he appeared before papal commissioners in the church of Ashby-de-la-Zouch to give evidence in favour of the granting of a dispensation for the marriage of Hastings’s heir to the Hungerford heiress. On the following 26 Apr. his own son and heir Thomas formally indented with Hastings.46 C219/17/3; CPL, xiii (2), 689-90; Dunham, 131. Soon after, the relationship may have become an even closer one. According to one source our MP took as his second wife Emma, one of the several daughters of Lord Hastings’s brother, Sir Ralph. If such a marriage did take place it must have done so after 5 June 1481, when the manor of Colton was settled in jointure on Gresley and his first wife, and there must have been a considerable discrepancy in age between him and Emma.47 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. i. 61; J. Nichols, Leics. iii (2), 608n.; F.P. Parker, Colton, 367-8; Gresley mss, D77/3/449.

One can only speculate about Gresley’s attitude to Richard, duke of Gloucester’s ruthless disposal of Lord Hastings on 13 June 1483. Whatever it was, it did not prevent him attending Richard’s coronation on the following 6 July. Indeed, demonstrating the political adaptability which characterised his entire career, he soon found a place in the new King’s service. By 26 Apr. 1484 he numbered among the knights for the royal body: on that date he is described as such when the King, during one of his several periods of residence at Nottingham castle, granted him for life an annual rent of £40 from the issues of the honour of Tutbury.48 Excerpta Historica ed. Bentley, 384; DL42/20, f. 27. Significantly, however, this grant is the only surviving evidence of his Household service and it is clear that he was only on the outskirts of the royal affinity. Further, since there were at least 50 ‘knights of the body’ during the short reign, the term does not denote the same level of intimacy with the King than it had once done.49 R. Horrox, Ric. III, 227-8. Gresley took the precaution of suing out a general pardon on the following 20 June, and six months later he was an unsurprising appointment to the Staffordshire commission of array.50 C67/51, m. 28; CPR, 1476-85, p. 491. None the less, he was probably not sorry to hear of Richard III’s defeat and death at the battle of Bosworth. In any event, he quickly made himself useful to the victor: although now about 70 years old, he accompanied Henry VII in his progress of the north in the spring of 1486. He did not long survive his exertions. He died on the following 30 Jan.51 Cott. Julius BXII, f. 7v; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 359, 455.

In the course of so long and varied career, it is not surprising that Sir John established an extensive network of connexions among the gentry of the Midlands. Revealing here are the arrangements he himself entered into for the marriage of his heir to Anne Ferrers. On 1 June 1475 he conveyed his Leicestershire estates to nine feoffees, who were, in effect, trustees for the implementation of the marriage settlement. Three of them – Sir John Ferrers and Ferrers’s kinsmen, Henry Willoughby and John Aston – were clearly nominees of the bride’s family and a fourth, Sir Richard Bingham, was no doubt named in his professional capacity. For his own part Gresley turned to three leading Derbyshire gentry – Sir Nicholas Longford, Nicholas Montgomery and Ralph Shirley – together with Edward Hastings, a younger son of his lord, William, Lord Hastings, and a Staffordshire esquire, William Basset of Blore.52 C142/38/36. Three years after he had married his heir into the Ferrers family, he contracted his daughter Alice to John Egerton†, the heir of another prominent Staffordshire family and fellow member for Stafford with our MP’s heir in the Parliament of 1478. By a contract dated late in that year Gresley agreed to pay a portion of as much as 260 marks and to farm lands worth £10 p.a. in Colton to the couple for ten years at no rent; in return, the groom’s father guaranteed the groom an inheritance with a clear annual value of 280 marks and the bride a jointure worth 20 marks p.a.53 C147/117; Nottingham Univ. Lib. Middleton mss, Mi 5/168/58; CAD, i. C735. Such large portions could be afforded by only the greatest gentry families and its provision is a measure of Gresley’s wealth, especially as Alice was not the only daughter for whom he needed to provide a husband. He had at least two others. Contracts for their marriages do not survive, but the identity of the groom is certainly known in the case of one of them: Elizabeth took as her husband Thomas, son and heir of Sir Simon Mountfort† of Coleshill in Warwickshire. This match is likely to have taken place in the late 1470s when Sir Simon was, like our MP, one of the retainers of Lord Hastings.54 The Commons 1509-58, ii. 641.

A later dispute in the family seems, at first sight, to throw an interesting light on the arrangements made by our MP for the future of the Gresley patrimony. The only children of Sir John’s grandson, Sir William Gresley, were four illegitimate sons. On his death in 1521 they, with the support of their mother and her husband, Sir John Savage the elder, contested the right of his brother and heir, George Gresley. The latter defended his position by citing the enfeoffment our MP had made in June 1475: he claimed that the feoffees were seised of the Gresley estates not simply to the use of our MP but to his use for life with successive remainders to the uses of Thomas Gresley, Anne Ferrers, and their male issue, and then of William, Lord Hastings, and his heirs. As a result no head of the family had had seisin of the lands since 1475 and that the fee simple, on the death of the feoffor’s grandson in 1521, resided in the hands of Sir Henry Willoughby as the last surviving feoffee. An entailed use, such as this settlement, would have been an unusually advanced conveyance for the 1470s, but, whether or not it was fraudulently cited by George against Sir William’s desire to provide generously for bastard children, it saved an ancient gentry estate from dismemberment. In 1525 Chancellor Wolsey’s award gave the mother an annual rent of 100 marks for her life and her four sons life annuities of £5 each.55 Wright, 37-38; Add. 6671, ff. 17v-18; Derbys. Chs. 1028; Reliquary, vi. 146-7.