BURDET, Thomas

Thomas’s father was one of the leading commanders of the English armies in France, serving with distinction from 1415 until his death during the Pontoise campaign of 1441.7 His martial career is celebrated in a 16th-century poem, which drew upon family tradition through the chronicler, Raphael Holinshed (d.1580), who spent much of his life in the service of the Burdets: The Mirror of Magistrates ed. Campbell, ii (1), 418-40; Notes and Queries, ccxx. 296-300. For Holinshed’s service to the fam.: The Commons 1509-58, i. 547; Derbys. RO, Burdet of Foremark mss, D156M/E2/2. He also married well. Probably through his family’s connexion with Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, he won the hand of one of the earl’s wards, heiress to the manor of Abbots Lench, not far from Arrow, and other property in Worcestershire.8 VCH Worcs. iii. 355; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 685. When combined with the family’s ancestral lands in Warwickshire, this inheritance made the Burdets one of the wealthiest gentry families in the two counties: the inquisitions taken on our MP’s death valued his paternal inheritance in Warwickshire alone at over £154 p.a.9 CIMisc. viii. 459.

This substantial inheritance did not come to Burdet directly upon his grandfather’s death on 15 Oct. 1442. He spent two years in the wardship of Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford (and from 1444 duke of Buckingham); and the survival of his mother until about 1450 diminished his immediate expectations.10 Staffs. RO, Stafford fam. mss, D641/1/2/70, m. 7d; NLW, Peniarth mss, 280, p. 34. The last reference to his mother dates from 1449: KB27/754, rex rot. 26d. On the other hand, his own marriage, contracted in his father’s lifetime and like his father’s made within the great Beauchamp affinity, promised a further augmentation of his resources. At the time of their marriage in about 1437 Agnes Waldieve stood as coheiress-presumptive to manors in Meriden, Alspath and Forshaw, some miles to the north of Arrow and, judging from the subsidy returns of 1435-6, valued at £25 p.a.11 W. Dugdale, Warws. ii. 948; E179/192/59. His father-in-law, a servant of the Beauchamp earl, was alive in 1441: Carpenter, 690; KB9/240/105. For the Waldieve lands: CCR, 1485-1500, 967. Thus all seemed set fair for the well-connected Burdet to enjoy a prominent career in local politics as one of the richest gentry in the Midlands.

These well-founded hopes were, however, not to be realized. Instead, Burdet spent a long career persistently engaged in local disorder with only an intermittent involvement in the proper concerns of the leading gentry. One reason for this was the particular tensions in Warwickshire politics during this period; another was the long dispute over the manor of Bramcote in the north-east of the county that had come to him with his maternal inheritance. Yet the serial nature of his disputes and the curious circumstances of his death suggest that the main reason, as in the case of his neighbour, Robert Arderne*, lay in an instability of character.

The dispute over Bramcote dominated the early years of Burdet’s adult career. It was a large property, valued at £26 p.a. in 1477, and his mother’s title was contested by the Leicestershire esquire, William Charnels of Snarestone, who claimed as heir in tail. Late in 1440 Charnels had allegedly entered on the possession of the earl of Stafford, who was holding the manor to the use of Burdet’s parents. Restored to possession, the earl conveyed the manor to a powerful group of local feoffees, headed by our MP’s kinsman Sir Maurice Bruyn and (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I*, to the use of his mother.12 C145/328/6; Dugdale, ii. 1122; KB9/240/104-5; C1/31/149. The Burdets seemingly enjoyed strong local support, and it is surprising that Charnels managed to resist for so long. One reason was his ability to fight his cause in his native county: in 1445 he claimed £600 damages against Burdet and his mother for their fabrication of a false deed at Newton Boteler in that county, and when, at the assize session held at Leicester on 30 Apr. 1446, the Burdets defaulted, a jury awarded costs and damages of as much as 500 marks against them. Burdet responded in kind, alleging that the deed of entail upon which Charnels based his title was itself a forgery, and claiming error in the action which had gone against him. The result of this and related actions was that both he and Charnels were outlawed.13 CP40/736, rot. 129; 738, rot. 125; KB27/749, fines rot. 2d; 754, rex rot. 26d; C88/147/36. In the late 1440s, however, Burdet began to gain the upper hand. On 11 Jan. 1449 he secured a royal pardon for the heavy sum won against him at the Leicestershire assizes on the grounds that Charnels’s action had been conceived ‘ex magna subtilitate et malicia’ and sued by maintenance and embracery. Thereafter, although Charnels maintained his claim, the manor remained in the hands of the feoffees to Burdet’s use until the mid 1460s.14 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 207-8; KB27/754, rex rot. 26d; CP40/768, rot. 27d.

The long dispute over Bramcote seems to have been waged without violence; the same cannot be said of other disputes in which Burdet was involved. In the summer of 1445 he and his sureties forfeited £180 on his failure to keep the peace to John Boteler of Alspath, the husband of his wife’s sister, and he was one of the leaders of an armed band, said to number 300, involved in raiding the Gloucestershire property of Katherine, wife of Sir William Peyto‡.15 KB27/737, rex rot. 1; KB29/77, rot. 38; CPR, 1441-6, p. 346; C1/15/77; Carpenter, 416. More significantly, shortly afterwards (probably in the summer of 1447), Richard Mountfort, parson of Ilmington, complained to the royal council that Burdet had assaulted him at Stratford-upon-Avon, when he was with the bishop of Worcester making a visitation there, and that some of his servants and parishioners had died when attacked by Burdet’s men at Ilmington as all the ‘contrey’ knew. Unfortunately there is no evidence to support these serious (and probably exaggerated) allegations.16 E28/76/31; KB27/745, rot. 40; CP40/753, rot. 428d. Later, on 1 May 1450, Burdet joined his neighbour, Humphrey Stafford III* (the son of his Bramcote feoffee), in the notorious attack on the church of Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, seeking vengeance upon Sir Robert Harcourt* for the murder of Humphrey’s elder brother, Richard, two years earlier. He suffered little from his involvement: although a commission of oyer and terminer was issued to investigate the matter on 23 May, the indicted were all pardoned by royal letters patent issued six months later.17 Carpenter, 454-5; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 386-7, 461-2.

At this stage of his career, this lawless record did not prevent Burdet from taking the part in local affairs due to his rank. In the summer of 1450 he was appointed to his first ad hoc commission of local government, and he quickly came to assume an important place in Warwickshire politics. In 1451 he was granted an annuity of ten marks by the county’s leading magnate, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick; on 23 Sept. 1452 he was at Cheltenham to witness an award made by another of the county’s peers, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, between the abbess and convent of Syon and their Cheltenham tenants; and a few weeks later he sued out a general pardon against his earlier indiscretions.18 Carpenter, 696; SC11/219; C67/40, m. 11. This was the prelude to further promotion. Late in the following year he was added to the county bench; and on 7 Feb. 1454 he was the beneficiary of a minor grant of royal patronage, receiving with his servant, Henry Dyson, the custody of property in Worcestershire with a meagre annual rental value of 9s. This successful period of his career culminated in the summer of 1455, when, on 23 June, with the Yorkists firmly in control of government after their victory at the first battle of St. Albans, he was elected to represent his native county in Parliament. There can be no doubt that, like the other MP for the county, Thomas Hugford*, he was returned as a retainer of the earl of Warwick, whose support had been crucial to the Yorkist victory.19 CFR, xix. 80-81; C219/16/3.

None the less, later events suggest that Burdet was a committed supporter of neither the earl of Warwick nor the duke of York. He had other associations that were likely to lead him in another direction. On 25 Nov. 1455, during the second session of the Parliament, he was one of those who stood mainprise for the future good conduct of the notorious felon, (Sir) William Tailboys*. Tailboys, together with another of his sureties, Robert, illegitimate brother of Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, were later to number among the Lancastrian military leaders, and even at this early date in the conflict between York and Lancaster it is curious to find a retainer of the earl of Warwick acting alongside such men. Further, although Burdet’s removal from the Warwickshire bench in November 1458, when the Lancastrians were in control of the government, implies they did not trust him, this impression is flatly contradicted by his nomination as sheriff of Worcestershire (an office held by the earl of Warwick in right of inheritance) in the wake of the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge.20 KB27/778, rex rot. 36; CPR, 1452-61, p. 680; CFR, xix. 252.

Clearly Burdet’s political sympathies, in so far as they existed independently of his self-interest, were divided, perhaps because of his period as a ward of the duke of Buckingham, one of the principal supporters of the Lancastrian government of these years. The Yorkist victory in July 1460 at the battle of Northampton, where the duke was killed, thus found him in an equivocal position. His acceptance of the Worcestershire shrievalty can have done little to endear him to the earl of Warwick, and this explains why, despite his fee from the earl, he did not benefit from the change of regime. The new government indulged him no further than the grant of a general pardon on 4 Feb. 1462 as ‘late sheriff and under sheriff of Worcestershire’.21 C67/45, m. 33.

In the early 1460s Burdet’s career resumed the course it had followed in the 1440s, as he was once more drawn into a series of disputes. According to a Chancery petition, to be dated to this period, ‘of his grete malice’ he violently assaulted and threatened one of his former servants, Nicholas Bosbury of Alcester, forcing him to surrender evidences concerning property at Binton near Arrow.22 C1/27/390. For Bosbury’s earlier service to Burdet: KB27/745, rot. 40. More significantly, he found a new adversary in his neighbour, John Rous of Ragley, another who had played an equivocal role in the events of 1459-61. It is not clear why they should have come into conflict – they had previously been on friendly terms – but the dispute was a serious one. Beyond the usual fare of mutual close-breaking, there was also death. On 18 Feb. 1463 the Rouses were indicted before the Warwickshire j.p.s. for the murder of John Dusbert, one of Burdet’s tenants.23 Carpenter, 495; KB9/302/20. Burdet appears to have given as good as he got. Rous claimed, in a colourful Chancery petition, that Burdet had continued to commit offences against him even though they had mutually agreed to abide the arbitration of the earl of Warwick. He asked for heavy sureties of the peace on the exaggerated grounds that our MP was worth 500 marks p.a. and in his ‘fereous malice settyth nott by the los of a lytyll somme to a venge unlawfully his crewell malice’.24 C1/27/349. Burdet also asked for surety of the peace from Rous in Chancery, employing an almost identical phrase, suggesting that the petitions were drafted by the same hand: C1/27/407. As a result, in May 1463 Burdet was required to find mainpernors to appear in Chancery and to keep the peace, himself on pain of 500 marks and each of his four sureties on pain of 100 marks. Rous added to the pressure by suing him at common law for maintaining the appeal brought by Dusbert’s widow.25 C244/97/24, 192, 197; KB27/809, rot. 79; 810, rot. 33; 814, rot. 12.

These disturbances are one explanation for Burdet’s exclusion from local government during most of the 1460s. Another probably lies in the distrust in which he was held by the earl of Warwick, whose arbitration he seems to have rejected in his dispute with Rous. All this, however, is not to say that Burdet lacked friends, even among those close to the earl, nor that he was without influence. A modern historian of the county has argued that, in the mid 1460s, the earl’s affinity was ‘splitting apart’, and, on the assumption that Burdet was persona non grata with the earl, his place in the county certainly suggests that the affinity lacked cohesion. Early in 1463 John Hathwick named him as a feoffee in the disputed manor of Dodford in Northamptonshire alongside the earl’s servants, Thomas Hugford and Thomas Throckmorton*; and in the following May the earl’s intimate, Robert Clapham, was among those prepared to offer mainprise for our MP’s appearance in Chancery. Burdet was also able to call on some of the leading Warwickshire gentry to act in the same capacity: in February 1465 Sir Simon Mountfort†, Sir Edward Raleigh, Humphrey Stafford III and William Berkeley† offered surety on his behalf.26 Carpenter, 501; CCR, 1461-8, p. 188; C244/97/197; 99/39.

Such connexions, allied with a wealth that gave him a strong claim to a place in local administration, appear to have paved the way for a recovery in Burdet’s fortunes in the late 1460s. Part cause and part effect of this recovery was final victory in his long dispute over Bramcote: by a fine levied in 1466 William Charnels and Joyce, his wife, acknowledged his right in the manor. At about the same time his dispute with Rous came to an end: in November 1465 Rous released surety of the peace to him and no more is heard of their quarrel.27 Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2680; C244/97/192. On 3 Jan. 1468 Burdet was duly restored to the commission of the peace from which he had been excluded for ten years, and celebrated the fact by sitting as a j.p. at Warwick only eight days later. In March 1470 he was appointed to an ad hoc commission of local government for the first time since 1454. It was also at this time that he purchased property at Luddington for 160 marks.28 Carpenter, 508; KB9/334/122; C1/67/202.

This recovery seems to have been ended by the Readeption, perhaps again because he had not regained the earl of Warwick’s favour. He was, in any event, removed from the county bench in December 1470, and nothing more is known of his activities during Henry VI’s short second reign. This setback, if such it was, proved to be brief. Edward IV’s restoration saw his return to the bench, and on 21 Sept. 1472 he appeared for the first and only recorded time as an attestor to a parliamentary election.29 Carpenter, 515; C219/17/2. His brief removal from the bench in the following year reflected no personal disfavour: on 18 June 1473, while at Coventry, Edward IV removed all the local gentry, save Henry Boteler II* and John Beaufitz, from the Warwickshire bench. At Kenilworth three days later Burdet and other of the county’s leading gentry sat as jurors before the new commission; our MP took the opportunity to pursue a quarrel of his own, returning an indictment of forcible entry against two gentleman of Coventry, John and Thomas Shirwode. In the following August he was named to a commission of inquiry.30 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 405, 634; KB27/861, rex rot. 9d; KB9/334/113.

The subsequent course of Burdet’s career is very difficult to explain. His next omission from the bench in February 1474 was, unlike the last, a deliberate exclusion – he was the only gentry removal – and, although he was restored again, he was removed for the final time in November 1475.31 CPR, 1467-77, p. 634. This may suggest that the King had taken against him. Yet it hardly serves as a motive for the actions later ascribed to him. Jurors in 1477 were prepared to believe that on 20 Apr. 1474 Burdet, ‘falsely endeavouring to exalt himself in riches’, imagined and compassed Edward IV’s death at Westminster; and that on the following 12 Nov. at the same place he laboured with two clerics, John Stacy and Thomas Blake, both of Merton College, Oxford, to calculate the nativities of the King and the prince of Wales and to discover the dates of their deaths. If the story endorsed by the jurors is to be taken at face value, this latter part of the task proved a complex one for it was not complete until 6 Feb. 1475 when Stacy and Blake had their answer ‘by art magic, necromancy, and astronomy’. Burdet then allegedly made use of this sensitive information, declaring to his servant, Alexander Rushton of Arrow, and others unnamed that the King and prince would shortly die; his alleged aim was to deprive the King of ‘the cordial love of the people’ and to ensure that the prophecy would become self-fulfilling in that, when the King discovered the prophecy, his life would be shortened by sadness.32 KB8/1/9, printed in DKR, iii. 213-14; M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 133-5. All this is, to modern eyes, vaguely absurd, but, in a far more superstitious age not only the credulous might be convinced of its truth. The only questions the modern investigator can hope to answer is why was Burdet later suspected of such treason, and, if he was not so suspected, why were such indictments brought against him.

A clue may be found in Burdet’s increasingly complicated family circumstances. His early marriage to Agnes Waldieve proved to have baneful consequences. They were divorced in the consistory court of the bishopric of Worcester in June 1446, on the grounds of consanguinity.33 CP40/830, rot. 389d. The divorce is misdated to June 1464 in Year Bk. Hil. 18 Edw. IV (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679), pl. 28, ff. 29-30. Agnes was alive at least as late as 1469, having taken as a 2nd husband Robert Honford: CP40/830, rot. 389; Salop Archs., Brooke pprs., 5735/2/33/16. These marital difficulties were probably the context for his quarrel with John Boteler, the husband of his wife’s sister. Indeed, eight days before the divorce, he surrendered to the Botelers his claim in the Waldieve property, probably as the settlement, to his disadvantage, of the differences between them.34 Brooke pprs., 5735/2/33/15. In the short term, despite this loss, the divorce brought Burdet both social and material benefits, for it enabled him to contract two more marriages, the first socially prestigious, the second financially profitable. Shortly before November 1448, when the early promise of his career had not yet been dissipated, he married a daughter of the Gloucestershire peer, James, Lord Berkeley, in return for a portion of £200;35 Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle, i, p. xlvi. and on her death he took as his third wife, in the mid 1450s, a wealthy widow from the West Country.36 The couple had royal licence to marry on 28 Oct. 1456: CPR, 1452-61, p. 327. The jointure and dower lands she held from her first marriage to John Hill III, lying in Berks., Devon and Som., were worth at least £40 p.a.: CP40/818, rot. 279; C140/42/51; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 64-66. There was, however, a price to be paid in the creation of dangerous family tensions, and these were exacerbated by Burdet’s determination that his son by his first marriage should inherit nothing, and that all should pass to his sons by his third. The strictly contemporary record reveals only the conveyances necessary to make this disinheritance effective at law. On 23 Jan. 1477 his whole estate was resettled: the Warwickshire manors of Compton Scorpion and Bruton, most of his lands in Worcestershire and all those in Gloucestershire were settled on him and his third wife for their lives, with successive remainders to their five sons, headed by the eldest, Nicholas; the Warwickshire manors of Arrow, Seckington, and Luddington were settled in the same way except Margaret was not given a life interest.37 Burdet of Foremark mss, D156M/50; CP40/829, rot. 329d; CIMisc. viii. 459. These grants were enrolled on the close roll on 3 Feb. 1477: CCR, 1476-85, 122.

Later reliable evidence suggests that Burdet also resorted to less conventional methods. In 1528, when called upon to give evidence in the long dispute to which this attempted disinheritance gave rise, an old man, John, son of Henry Dyson who had been a servant of our MP for over 30 years, recalled that he had often heard his father relate an extraordinary narrative. Burdet caused a priest to lie in a bed with himself and his first wife, Agnes, every night; he would then rise early and go hunting, intending to slander his wife and obtain a divorce; but she would ‘lyke a good woman’ also leave the bed to avoid lying alone with the priest. More plausibly, the witness claimed that his father later learned that Burdet intended to murder his eldest son, and responded by secretly at night taking the child to the abbey of Alcester (very near Arrow), entrusting him to the care of Abbot Richard Tutbury, the boy’s godfather.38 Carpenter, 535-6; Burdet of Foremark mss, D156M/84. For Henry Dyson as a Burdet servant: CFR, xix. 80-81; CCR, 1461-8, p. 455.

This testimony seems too improbable to be a complete invention, although its chronology is confused. The conspiracy to compromise Agnes must have taken place before the summer of 1446; and the plot to murder the heir to after 1454 when Tutbury became abbot.39 VCH Warws. ii. 61.

Whatever reliance is to be placed on this narrative, there can be no doubt that Burdet was determined to disinherit, if not to murder, his eldest son, but it remains to ask how his plan to disinherit Richard was related to his own fall. One suggestion can be very tentatively put forward. In the indictment that prompted his execution, his servant, Alexander Rushton, is the only one mentioned by name among those to whom he supposedly made a treasonable declaration on 26 May 1475. This raises the possibility that it was Rushton who betrayed him, either revealing a real conspiracy or concocting one, and his motive may have lain in disgust at the scheme of disinheritance. There are two other speculative contexts to Burdet’s fall. His third wife’s claim, as a jointure from her first husband to part of the Hill inheritance in Somerset and Dorset, brought him into conflict with William Say†, the eldest son of the influential courtier, (Sir) John Say II*, who had married Margaret’s daughter, Genevieve. In 1475 the Burdets vindicated her title to two-thirds of this property, and it cannot be discounted that Sir John’s hostility was a factor, albeit no more than a minor one, in his fall.40 C1/48/268; 57/245-9. More interesting, but more speculative still, is the possibility of an enmity arising from a very different cause. According to the Croyland chronicler, one of the many charges against Stacy (and, by implication, also Burdet), was that he had made lead figures to destroy the Warwickshire peer, Sir Richard Beauchamp†, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, ‘at the request of his adulterous wife’, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Humphrey Stafford I.41 Croyland Chron. ed. Pronay and Cox, 145. It is an obvious possibility that Burdet was having an affair with Elizabeth. Interestingly, in 1476, despite the previous friendly relations between Burdet and the Staffords, her brothers, Humphrey and Thomas, had been required to find surety of the peace to him, perhaps because of the opposition to an affair: C244/122/83, 144. This suggests that Burdet was on poor terms with Beauchamp, and this supposition gains some slight support from the contemporary legal record. On 20 Mar. 1477, according to an indictment taken before the county j.p.s at Warwick 11 days later, a weaver of Alcester with some 30 armed men swore together to attack Burdet and his servants if they opposed them, and went on violently to assault Rushton and another of Burdet’s servants. Since Beauchamp had a residence at Alcester, it is possible that he was behind this act.42 KB9/344/18; KB27/863, rot. 4d; C. Carpenter, ‘Duke of Clarence and the Midlands’, Midland Hist. xi. 38-39. Again, however, such enmities are hardly an adequate explanation for Burdet’s fall, although they may have provided a motive for denouncing him to the King.

This leads us to a final explanation, namely that Burdet was destroyed as a warning to the King’s disenchanted brother, George, duke of Clarence, whose servant he was. As the husband of one of the Neville earl of Warwick’s daughters and coheiresses, Clarence had played a significant, if fluctuating and disruptive, part in Warwickshire affairs, since 1471. It is not known when Burdet entered his service; indeed, the only evidence that he did post-dates his death. None the less, the connexion was a close one: the duke declared Burdet’s innocence at a meeting of the royal council held after our MP’s execution and later, allegedly at least, employed his servants to make public declarations to the same effect. This strongly implies that the duke viewed the attack on his servant as an attack upon himself, but it does not itself show either that Burdet’s treason, if such it was, was part of a conspiracy against the King led by Clarence, or that the charges against Burdet were a fabrication aimed at warning or discrediting the duke.43 Croyland Chron. 145; RP, vi. 193 (cf. PROME, xiv. 402). In short, there is no convincing explanation for our MP’s fall. This confusion is reflected in a curious family tradition, recorded by Holinshed: Burdet’s treason lay in the making of an ambiguous remark, which could be interpreted as wishing the King dead, after the King had killed his favourite white buck while hunting in his park at Arrow.44 R. Holinshed, Chrons. (1807-8 edn.), iii. 45.

For whatever the reason, on 12 May 1477 a powerful commission of oyer and terminer was issued against Burdet. Five days later three separate Middlesex juries returned ‘billa vera’ against the catalogue of alleged treasons, dating back to 1474 and culminating in the dissemination of treasonable bills at Holborn as recently as 5 May. On 19 May our unfortunate MP was found guilty before the Lords and he was hanged, drawn and quatered at Tyburn on the following day. His final act was to declare his innocence ‘magno spiritu et verbis multis’.45 CPR, 1476-85, p. 50; DKR, iii. 213-14; Croyland Chron. 145. Another tradition current in the family in the sixteenth century attributes a penultimate one to him: as he was being drawn from the Tower of London to his execution, he saw his eldest son in West Cheap, begged his forgiveness and identified the wrong he had perpetrated against him as the cause of the divine vengeance he was about to suffer.46 J. Stow, Annales of Eng. ed. Howes, 430.

Despite his death on the scaffold, Burdet had an honourable burial – he was interred in the chapel of All Saints in Greyfriars church, the monumental inscription describing him as Clarence’s ‘valens Armiger’ – and he also escaped forfeiture.47 Collectanea Topographia et Geneaologica ed. Nichols, v. 281. In 1471 that church had seen the interrment of Sir Thomas Mallory*, another Warws. landholder whose career was compromised by criminal involvement. On 13 July 1477 a commission was issued to inquire into the lands he held, not at his death, but on 20 Apr. 1474, the date of his first alleged treason. The commissioners, headed by Sir Simon Mountfort, made returns detailing the settlements by which Richard Burdet had been disinherited.48 CPR, 1476-85, p. 50; C145/328/6.

This ensured that a lengthy dispute would follow, one that would have been avoided or deferred if Burdet had suffered forfeiture. His eldest son made determined, and ultimately largely successful, efforts to regain what he regarded as his own. He committed a series of disseisins against his stepmother and half-brother, Nicholas, and although he was indicted for these entries before the county j.p.s his cause clearly had considerable sympathy among the county elite. His admission in 1479 to the guild of Stratford-upon-Avon, in which his family had long played a part, is a sign of his acceptance, as also was his marriage to a daughter of Sir Simon Mountfort.49 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 537-8; Reg. Gild of Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon ed. Macdonald (Dugdale Soc. xlii), 320, 466. The marriage was a controversial one, for it came after Richard had reneged on a contract to marry the da. of a Coventry merchant: C1/54/378; Carpenter, 114-15. The latter had a particular significance for in June 1478 the Crown had granted Mountfort the custody of the Burdet lands during Nicholas’s minority. Richard’s cause further strengthened when, in January 1482, the bishop of Worcester testified to his legitimacy in an action in the court of common pleas. A fine levied in 1485 settled the manors of Arrow and Luddington and nearly all the rest of the Burdet lands in Warwickshire on Richard, effectively in fee, and in 1487 a similar settlement was made of the Worcestershire property.50 Carpenter, 538-9, 556-7; CPR, 1476-85, p. 102; CP40/874, rot. 121; C263/1/1/22; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2727; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 802. For the subsequent hist. of the dispute: Carpenter, 570-1.

From the point of view of the family’s future wealth, Richard’s victory was unfortunate, for his issue quickly failed in the male line. On the death of his son, Thomas, in about 1497, the family lands passed to Thomas’s sister, Anne, and her husband, Edward Conway.51 Carpenter, 574. It was the male descendants of our MP’s third wife that flourished. They settled at Bramcote, and developed a distinguished parliamentary tradition culminating in the career of the radical political reformer, Sir Francis Burdet†.52 C1/58/60; The Commons 1509-58, i. 547; 1558-1603, i. 517-18; 1660-90, i. 750-1; 1754-90, ii. 140; 1790-1820, iii. 302-14.