HALLEY, Bartholomew

Of obscure antecedents, Halley may have hailed from the east Midlands where a relative held lands in Derbyshire’s Hope valley in the early 1470s.13 Sheffield Archs., Bagshawe mss, C/1796. He owed his parliamentary career to his membership of Henry VI’s household and played next to no part in the administration of Hertfordshire, in spite of sitting at least twice as a knight of the shire for that county. He did however acquire lands and offices there and become a friend of its great Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. Having joined the Household at some stage before the 1430s, Halley accompanied the young King on his French coronation expedition of 1430-2.14 SC8/153/7626, 7629. As he himself acknowledged in a petition presented to the Parliament of 1455, it had ‘liked’ the King ‘to make him Squier’, suggesting that his Household career advanced him in social status. While nothing is known about his parents or early years, both he and his son Peter were known as ‘literati’, indicating that they were men of some education.15 SC8/117/5826; Reg. Whethamstede ed. Riley, ii. 29.

Like many other Household servants, Halley benefited from a steady stream of grants and rewards. The first known of these is the daily salary of 6d., drawn from the issues of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, bestowed on him in July 1433 for his office as a yeoman of the Crown. Initially he received it during pleasure but the King re-granted it to him for life in September 1437. By the latter date he was a parker and water-bailiff in Sussex and keeper and controller of the royal park at King’s Langley, Hertfordshire. In April 1438 Halley was confirmed in office at Kings Langley for life, with the additional post of under parker (back-dated to his initial appointment), and in the following August he received another grant, again for life, of the keeping of the rabbits in the park there, in return for an annual rent of 200 rabbits delivered in person to the Household.16 CPR, 1429-36, p. 249; 1436-41, pp. 136, 194. By April 1438 he was also a keeper in the Peak forest, Derbyshire. Elsewhere in that county, in late 1439 he acquired the position of keeper of the duchy of Lancaster park at Shottle in Duffield Frith at the expense of John Curson*, whom the Crown had appointed to the office just a few months earlier.17 DL42/18, ff. 115v, 142v. The Derbyshire offices stand out as Halley’s only appointments outside the south-east but possibly his putative family associations with that part of the country had prompted him to bid for them.

The later 1430s also saw Halley sit in his first Parliament, as a burgess for Chipping Wycombe. Still an independent borough at the end of the fourteenth century, it often returned royal servants or lawyers to the Commons by Henry VI’s reign.18 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 278-80; HP Reg. ed. Wedgwood, 619. Although an outsider at the time of his election, he retained a connexion with Wycombe in later years, being in possession of land there by the early 1450s.19 St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, recs., XV. 15/1, mm. 6, 7d. It was perhaps during the Parliament of 1437 that Richard, duke of York, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, and other participants in the coronation expedition to France, Halley among them, petitioned the Commons. Seeking their wages for a period of ten months beginning at March 1431, they suggested that they should receive them from the revenues of the late duke of Bedford’s estates, indicating that they drew up the petitions after Bedford’s death in September 1435.20 SC8/153/7626, 7629. But it is also possible that the petitions were submitted to the Parl. of 1435, which opened a few weeks after Bedford’s death.

During the 1440s Halley continued to benefit from the generosity of the King and to play a more prominent role in his service. In May 1441 he and Andrew Lowe, a fellow Household man, were awarded the goods and chattels that John Cosyn of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, had forfeited to the Crown. Shortly afterwards, in the following July, the King granted him ‘Le Hyde’ in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, a manor or messuage that Henry IV had confiscated from the rebel John Montagu, earl of Salisbury. Halley paid a rent of £3 2s. 6d. p.a. to the Crown for Le Hyde, which the King confirmed to him and his male heirs two years later.21 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 509, 555; 1441-6, p. 197. It was also in July 1441 that Halley was entrusted with the custody of the priest Roger Bolingbroke. A member of the household of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Bolingbroke stood accused of practising sorcery against the King at the behest of Gloucester’s duchess, Eleanor Cobham. Assisted by two attendants, Halley guarded the priest (who was executed at Tyburn in November 1441) for almost nine weeks, a period for which afterwards he received £20 for his expenses.22 R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 238-9, 246-7; E403/743, m. 11; 747, m. 3; Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 441-2. At the beginning of 1442 the King granted an annual tun of Gascon red wine from the port of London to Halley and Thomas Skargill*, another yeoman of the Crown, in survivorship,23 CPR, 1441-6, p. 42. and he appointed the MP parker of Pinner, Middlesex, in May 1443.

In early 1446 Halley received grants of the reversions of the offices of joiner at the Tower of London and parker of Kings Langley, where he was already under parker, to vest after the deaths of Robert Cony and Richard Hay respectively. He had succeeded to the first of these positions following Cony’s death by March the same year although he had considerably longer to wait to become parker.24 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 398, 414, 425; CFR, xviii. 262. As joiner he received wages of 1s. a day and enjoyed the use of premises at Tower Wharf. He was largely – but not exclusively – occupied with the manufacture and supply of lances and other items of military equipment for the Crown.25 SC8/117/5826; Hist. King’s Works, i. 222, 225. On one occasion the Exchequer was ordered to repay Halley the £3 10s. 2d. he had spent on chests (to carry bows and bowstrings), on a staff for a ‘pelet Gonne’, on the delivery of a stool to the King’s wardrobe and on the making of doors, windows and lattices for the queen’s closet at Eltham.26 E404/63/121.

In June 1446 Halley and a fellow yeoman of the Crown, William Elton, obtained the office of warrener of Flamstead, Hertfordshire, in the King’s gift by virtue of the minority of the young daughter and heir of the recently deceased Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick.27 CPR, 1441-6, p. 432. The grant coincided neatly with Halley’s purchase of a messuage and lands at Flamstead in the same summer.28 CP25(1)/91/115/132. In the following November the Crown assigned the reversion of the office of under parker at Kings Langley to Halley’s son Peter – to vest after his father’s death – and in the same month Halley, Andrew Lowe and two other Household men, John Trevelyan* and Thomas Dawtry, received £40 as a reward for continually attending the King.29 CPR, 1446-52, p. 26; E403/765, m. 8. Yet another reward came Halley’s way in May 1447 when the Crown granted him an annuity of £10 for life, drawn upon a rent it received from Osney abbey in Oxfordshire.30 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 64, 106. The annuity was perhaps in recognition of his services the previous February when he had travelled with the Court to Bury St. Edmunds, the venue for the Parliament of 1447. Following the arrest of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, at Bury, it was Halley, Thomas Pulford and Thomas Calbrose who held him in his quarters in the town. Gloucester had died in confinement a few days later, probably of natural causes, although rumour had it that he had been murdered.31 Griffiths, Hen. VI, 497; M. Keen, Eng. in the Later Middle Ages, 401.

Not long after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1447, Halley and three other ‘King’s esquires’, Thomas West*, George Heton* and Hugh Kyngston, took on the role of spokesmen for themselves and other minor royal servants. By then, they and their fellow Household men were collectively owed nearly £3,450 in wages for the period 1439-46 when Sir Roger Fiennes* was treasurer of the Household. In response to their representations, on 4 Oct. 1447 the Crown directed that Halley and his associates should receive payment of the wages from subsidies collected in the ports of south-west England; although not until after the executors of Sir John Radcliffe* had received satisfaction for debts the King still owed their testator’s estate.32 E159/224, recorda Hil. rot. 5. In the event, the officials responsible for the collection of customs and subsidies relinquished their responsibilities soon afterwards, so rendering invalid the assignments issued to the four men at the Exchequer. Such was the state of affairs when the next Parliament was called in early 1449, an assembly in which Halley sat as a knight of the shire for Hertfordshire. The desperate financial state of the Household, as highlighted by the unpaid wages of its lesser officers, was a pressing concern for the Parliament. Prompted by a petition from the serjeants, gentlemen and yeomen of the Household, it appointed Halley and the other three spokesmen to receive payment for themselves and their fellows from the Crown’s prerogative resources. This proved a slow process, hampered by the issuing of bad tallies by the Exchequer although, according to the accounting record, they did receive assignments for the money owing between April 1450 and July 1452.33 Griffiths, Hen. VI, 318-19, 321; RP, v. 157-8 (cf. PROME, xii. 69); E403/779, m. 1; 781, mm. 1, 5, 6; 785, mm. 1, 2, 5; 786, mm. 1, 2, 3, 9; 788, mm. 1, 3; 796, m. 1; E101/410/5.

The Parliament of 1449 also witnessed strong criticism of the King’s chief minister and leading courtier, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, for the government’s failings at home and abroad. In the following Parliament, that of 1449-50, de la Pole was impeached and other royal servants, even comparatively minor figures like Halley, were condemned for having taken advantage of the King’s misguided largesse. This latter assembly ended just as Cade’s rebellion was beginning. Identifying themselves with the opposition to the Court, the rebels accused Suffolk and others around the King of having had Gloucester done to death. As for the deed itself, they claimed that Halley and Pulford had ‘drownyd the duke of Glocestar’ at Bury.34 Griffiths, Hen. VI, 640. Such a claim cannot have gained much credence with those who had known the duke, given that the MP was afterwards on good terms with the abbey of St. Albans, a house Gloucester had patronised during his lifetime and where he was buried.35 VCH Herts. iv. 403.

The Household came under renewed attack in the Parliament of 1450-1. A Commons petition demanded the removal from Court of the duke of Somerset, the recently widowed duchess of Suffolk and other named individuals, including Halley.36 PROME, xii. 184-6. As it happened, the latter retained his place in the Household because the King insisted that those accustomed to wait on him should remain at his side. A greater threat was the Act of Resumption passed in the same Parliament. Halley was obliged to surrender several of the grants he had received over the years but a partial exemption permitted him and his son to keep the office of under parker at Kings Langley and him to remain in that of joiner.37 PROME, xii. 123; E163/8/14. He was also able to obtain a new grant of a third part of the manor of Le Hyde, although for ten years only. Shortly after the dissolution of the Parliament, he likewise regained the keeping of the warren at Kings Langley, but for 12 years rather than for life, and obtained the farm (again for 12 years) of properties at Amersham which two men from that town had forfeited for treason in Henry V’s reign.38 CFR, xviii. 188, 213, 214. He also recovered his daily salary of 6d., restored to him in March 1452 and further confirmed two months later when it was charged upon the issues of Norfolk and Suffolk instead of those of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.39 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 529, 546. During the same period Halley was active in pursuit of his interests in another respect. In late May 1451, either immediately before or after the dissolution of the Parliament, he began proceedings in the Exchequer against George Langham, a former sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire, for his wages of £21 6s. as one of the knights of the shire of 1449. It seems unlikely that he ever obtained full satisfaction of this sum, since by mid 1452 the then sheriff of those counties had levied a mere 40s. from Langham’s goods and chattels.40 CP40/778, rot. 422.

In contrast to that of 1450-1, the Parliament of 1453 was well disposed towards the Crown. The Court interest was well represented and included Halley, sitting for Hertfordshire for the second time. During the Parliament he helped to secure an amendment to a bill threatening the interests of the abbey of St. Albans, so earning the monks’ praise as ‘quidam vir probus, et dicto Abbati multum amicabilis’. The bill was the work of the King’s half-brothers, the earls of Richmond and Pembrokeshire, who had introduced it into the Commons. In it they petitioned the Crown for respective grants of the whole counties, honours and lordships of Richmond and Pembrokeshire, but the grant desired by Pembroke threatened the abbey’s ownership of a daughter house, the priory of St. Nicholas, Pembroke. Not wishing to object to the bill in person, perhaps because he was known as the abbot’s friend, Halley approached John Skelton II*, one of the knights of the shire for Cumberland and formerly a servant of the late duke of Gloucester. Gloucester had given the priory to St. Albans in return for the abbey’s perpetual prayers, so Skelton, learning of the bill and concerned for his late master’s soul, set about securing the desired amendment. It was said that Halley spoke to Skelton in secret because he feared Henry VI’s indignation, presumably on the grounds that the King would not have reacted kindly to anyone acting contrary to his half-brother’s interests. Apart from his friendship with the monks, Halley’s defence of the abbey’s interests was possibly partly motivated by a sense of grievance with regard to Le Hyde, of which he had recovered a share two years earlier. Three weeks after the opening of the Parliament of 1453, Richmond and Pembroke had obtained the keeping of the whole manor, a grant confirmed to them and their heirs before the assembly came to an end.41 A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 57-58; PROME, xii. 276-83; Reg. Whethamstede, i. 92-94; CPR, 1452-61, p. 116. Although the Parliament had begun in a favourable atmosphere for those around the King, Henry VI’s mental breakdown in August 1453 led to the appointment of the Court’s leading opponent, Richard, duke of York, as Protector of England. During the protectorate, the government drew up ordinances for the reform of the Household in November 1454, but Halley was included in a list of those who were to make up a reduced royal establishment.42 PPC, vi. 223.

Halley remained in the service of the Crown until the end of Henry VI’s reign, and it is possible that he accompanied the King to the battle of St. Albans in May 1455. The Parliament called in the wake of this Yorkist victory passed an Act of Resumption but Halley successfully petitioned it for an exemption with regard to his office of joiner, while agreeing to relinquish his daily salary of 6d.43 SC8/117/5826. On 12 Oct. 1456, presumably in response to the death of Richard Hay, the Crown issued letters appointing him parker of Kings Langley for life,44 CPR, 1452-61, p. 325. Hay was certainly dead by Feb. 1457: CFR, xix. 183. and just ten days later he received further letters confirming his keeping of the warren there.45 CFR, xix. 180. In September 1458 Halley became gauger of Kent for life, and he gained a significant addition to his interests at Kings Langley when the Crown committed the keeping of the royal manor there to him in July 1459, in return for an annual rent of just over 50 marks.46 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 468, 507. Between these latter two grants, he was caught up in a well known incident at Westminster Hall. While departing the hall in early November 1458, apparently after attending a Council meeting, the Yorkist Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, encountered a group of Household men and other supporters of the Court. There developed a fracas, apparently emanating from an exchange of words between one of his retinue and the other party, and matters got so out of hand that Warwick was compelled to make a hurried and dramatic escape by his barge on the Thames. Neville, who viewed the incident as an attempt on his life, afterwards named the treasurer of the Household, Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, Thomas Daniell* and others, including Halley, as his assailants.47 M. Hicks, Warwick, 152-3; CP40/799, rot. 490.

Early in 1460 Halley was involved in military preparations against the Yorkists in his capacity as joiner. In February that year he received an order to supply the royal armoury with eight banner shafts, along with six spear shafts for the King’s pennon and ‘Foxtaile’ and 100 spear shafts for his baggage train.48 E404/71/4/27. It is likely that he was at the battle of Northampton five months later, since he was present when the chancellor, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, surrendered his office to the King at the royal encampment south of the town three days before the battle.49 CCR, 1454-61, p. 454; PPC, vi. 361. Whether he also witnessed Warwick and other Yorkist lords discover the King in his tent as the battle drew to a close is impossible to tell. The Yorkists’ victory at Northampton gave them control of the government and put those associated with the Court on the back foot, and in the autumn of 1460 Warwick took the opportunity to seek redress at law over the incident at Westminster Hall two years earlier. He sued Halley and the other alleged assailants in the court of common pleas, claiming they had lain in wait to kill him and had wounded four of his servants. The matter was still pending when Henry VI was toppled a few months later.50 CP40/799, rot. 490; 800, rots. 87d, 94d.

A few weeks after Edward IV seized the throne, the new government issued a commission for the arrest of a small group of ‘rebels’, Halley and his son Peter among them.51 CPR, 1461-7, p. 28. In due course, however, the MP made his peace with the new government. His career as an office-holder was now over and it would seem that his later years were largely uneventful. In February 1465 he and Peter attended the election of William Albon as abbot of St. Albans in place of the recently deceased John Whethamstede.52 Reg. Whethamstede, ii. 29. At some point between that date and his death, he and John Barlowe were sued in the Chancery by John Balky and John Chapman of Aylesbury. The suit related to a grant of December 1449, by which Henry VI assigned to Halley a sum of 100 marks that Chapman and three mainpernors had forfeited to the Crown. Having gone to law to recover 40 marks, that part of the forfeited sum for which Chapman was liable, Halley had agreed to accept £10 in lieu and to secure Chapman a discharge at the Exchequer. According to the bill, Chapman and Balky (involved in his capacity as a surety for Chapman) gave a bond to Halley and Barlowe to guarantee that they would hand over the £10 when the MP obtained the promised discharge. The plaintiffs complained that he had never done so, meaning that for ten years they had faced constant demands from the Exchequer. Furthermore, he and Barlowe had taken legal action against them over the bond.53 C1/33/304; CPR, 1446-52, p. 331. The bill is the only extant evidence of this Chancery case, which was possibly still pending when Halley died.

The MP died in the summer or early autumn of 1468. In his will, dated 29 July and proved on the following 22 Sept.,54 Herts. Archs., 1 AR, f. 122v. he asked to be buried in the presbytery of the abbey church at St. Albans, beside his already dead wife Florence. For the good of his soul, he requested that each of the four main orders of friars should hold a ‘gret trentall’ for him in London and made two small bequests, both of 6s. 8d., to the Carthusians at Sheen and the Trinitarian friars at Hounslow. His choice of Sheen, a foundation of Henry V, may have arisen from its association with the Lancastrian dynasty. As for Hounslow, Halley is likely to have known the friars there because their house was conveniently situated about half-way between Westminster and Windsor, a journey regularly undertaken by the King and the royal household.55 VCH Mdx. i. 192. Halley also bequeathed sums of money to his sister, Isabel, his servant, William Halley, and the abbot of Sulby, Northamptonshire, each of whom was to have 20s., to Oliver Woderoffe, who was to receive 6s. 8d., and to Master Roger Tayllor, who was to have 40s. The will referred to Isabel, William and the abbot (one John Halley),56 VCH Northants. ii. 142. as his ‘cousins’, but the exact relationships between the testator and these beneficiaries are unknown. Halley’s will also shows that he had invested in other lands besides his holdings at Flamstead, since he directed that his son and heir Peter should succeed to all of his properties in Hertfordshire, including a tenement at St. Albans that Dyot Dransfeld occupied for life, and Buckinghamshire. It does not however indicate whether his interests in the latter county extended beyond his holdings at Chipping Wycombe. Halley also left to Peter all of his personal estate not otherwise bequeathed and named him and the previously mentioned William Halley and Roger Tayllor as his executors. As requested, the testator was buried alongside his wife at St. Albans. His brass depicted the figures of himself (in armour), Florence and several children.57 Page, 26-27; VCH Herts. ii. 497. Peter Halley, who settled at Harpenden a few miles to the north of St. Albans, did not long survive his father, for he died in the autumn of 1471. In his will, dated 14 Sept. that year, Peter likewise sought burial in St. Albans abbey.58 Herts. Archs., archdeaconry ct. St. Albans, reg. 1471-1536, 2 AR, f. 5.A few months before his death, he featured in a deed made by Walter Halley, son and heir of Oliver Halley. By means of this deed, Walter had a messuage and other holdings in Hope and Hathersage, Derbyshire, settled on himself and his children, with remainder to Peter in case of default of such issue. Evidently Walter and Peter were relatives, although the exact relationship is unknown.59 Bagshawe mss, C/1796.