DEVEREUX, Walter I

Walter Devereux was a direct descendant of Sir William Devereux of Lyonshall (Herefordshire), who had received a writ of personal summons to the Parliament of 1299, and a near-kinsman of John, Lord Devereux, steward of the royal household from 1388 until his death in 1393.11 CP, iv. 296-306. Our MP and his descendants more than lived up to this distinguished lineage, being re-elevated first, through the successful careers of our MP and, more particularly, his son, to the English baronage, and then, in the reign of Elizabeth I, to the earldom of Essex. The marriage of our MP’s grandfather, Sir Walter Devereux†, to Agnes, grand-daughter and heiress of Sir John Crophill (d.1383), was an important initial stage in this advancement, marking a virtual re-endowment of the family after the gradual erosion of its ancient estate. Her inheritance was substantial, comprising the valuable Herefordshire manor of Weobley with other lesser properties in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Shropshire. Judging from inquisition post mortem valuations, these lands were worth about 100 marks p.a., and their true value was no doubt significantly greater.12 CIPM, xxiv. 474-9; xxv. 63-70. They were, however, to remain out of the hands of the family for some time. Sir Walter was killed by the Glendower rebels at the bloody battle of Pilleth on 22 June 1402, and Agnes long outlived him.13 She had status enough to be chosen as godmother to Humphrey, earl of Stafford, baptised in Hereford cathedral on 15 Aug. 1402: CIPM, xxii. 369.

Agnes’s survival ensured that her son, our MP’s father, was a far less important man than the victim of Pilleth. There are only a handful of references to him in contemporary sources. In November 1408, at about the time he came of age, he was one of several Herefordshire gentry who entered into indentures with Henry, prince of Wales, and he attested three of the county’s parliamentary elections between 1413 and 1419. He died shortly before 20 Nov. 1419, leaving our MP as a minor.14 Cam. Misc. xxxii. no. 110; CIPM, xviii. 701; C219/11/1, 4, 12/3; CFR, xiv. 275. Agnes herself remarried twice, first to John Parr (d.1408) of Kirkby Kendal in Westmorland, by whom she was the mother of Thomas Parr*, and then to John Merbury, the chamberlain of South Wales. This latter marriage proved to be greatly to our MP’s advantage. On 8 Dec. 1420 Merbury offered surety when the Crown entrusted the boy’s wardship and marriage to one of the chamberlains of the Exchequer, John Throckmorton I*.15 Keele Univ. Lib. Raymond Richards mss, DV 19. He then, to draw an inference from the MP’s marriage to his only legitimate child, acquired the marriage from Throckmorton.16 Merbury bequeathed 100 marks to the marriage of another daughter, Marion, but, since she did not share his inheritance with our MP’s wife, she must have been illegitimate: Reg. Spofford (Canterbury and York Soc. xxiii), 225.

The well-connected Merbury’s patronage is also the probable explanation for the young Devereux’s entry into the service of another young man, Richard, duke of York. On 7 Apr. 1435 the duke named the untried Walter as steward of all his extensive Welsh marcher lordships, rewarding him on this, or a later occasion, with an annuity of £20.17 Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/6. He was in receipt of the annuity by 1442-3: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 230-1. This was the beginning of an association that was to determine the course of the career of both Devereux and his son, Walter II. More immediately it helps to explain why, despite his lack of experience, the former was elected to Parliament on the following 17 Sept. at hustings conducted by his father-in-law as sheriff.18 C219/14/5.

The next important developments in Devereux’s career were the deaths of his grandmother in February 1436 and of Merbury, who had a life interest in her inheritance, two years later. While the latter deprived him of a benefactor, it also brought him the lands, most significantly the manor of Weobley, that had been out of the hands of the head of the family for more than 30 years.19 CFR, xvii. 31-33; CIPM, xxiv. 424; PSO1/63/4; E159/216, brevia Easter rot. 19d. Devereux and his wife were also the principal beneficiaries under the terms of Merbury’s will, of which he was an executor: they were bequeathed all of her father’s household and agricultural goods, and their daughter, Anne, was to have £100 to her marriage.20 Reg. Spofford, 225-6. With his grandmother’s inheritance, Devereux immediately cut a more important figure. In the subsidy return of 1450-1 he was assessed, as comfortably the richest of the Herefordshire gentry, on an income of £120 p.a., most of which must have been derived from that inheritance and the lands that came to him from Merbury himself. The latter are poorly documented but are known to have included the manor of Dymock in Gloucestershire and that of Lyonshall in Herefordshire, which, ironically, his ancestors had sold in the early fourteenth century and then expended much effort in trying to recover.21 E179/117/64; CPR, 1446-52, p. 131; CP25(1)/79/90/113. For the family’s contentious loss of Lyonshall and its subsequent descent: CP, iv. 303-5; C.J. Robinson, Mansions and Manors of Herefs. 102-5. The only evidence for our MP’s tenure of the manor is a pardon of Feb. 1458, describing him as ‘alias of Lyonshall’, but the manor was certainly held by his s. and h.: C67/42, m. 27; C237/44/90; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 945.

Soon after coming into these lands Devereux was involved in a dispute within his wider kinship group. His paternal aunt, Elizabeth, on the death of her first husband, John Milborne (d.1436) of Tillington near Weobley, had married Henry Oldcastle*. In Easter term 1438 Devereux sued the new couple for the wardship of her infant son, Simon Milborne, claiming damages in the large sum of £500 for their alleged abduction of the boy from his wardship. The claim was a speculative one: his aunt was joint-tenant, by the enfeoffment of our MP’s father-in-law, Merbury, of the property from which Devereux claimed his right of wardship arose, and she thus had the right to her son’s wardship causa nutriture. In contesting that right Devereux seems to have shown a marked lack of family feeling. Later, he and Oldcastle were to find themselves on different sides in the conflict of the late 1450s.22 CP40/709, rot. 308.

Devereux soon left such trivial matters behind. He was an MP for his native county again in the Parliament of 1439, and, soon after the conclusion of the assembly, the Crown granted him the wardship and marriages of the three daughters and coheiresses of John Walwyn, a kinsman of his brother-in-law, Richard Walwyn. More significantly, on 28 Jan. 1441, in the first commission issued for the county for nearly four years, he was added to the Herefordshire bench.23 CFR, xvii. 139, 154; CPR, 1436-41, p. 583. On 16 May 1441, just before departing for France, he undertook to pay £20 for the marriages, having already agreed the modest farm of £4 8s. 8d. p.a. for their lands: CPR, 1436-41, p. 508; CFR, xvii. 163. He had little time, however, to enjoy his new role for, soon after his appointment, he embarked, or re-embarked, upon a military career. Although he may well have served in France when his lord, the duke of York, was first there as lieutenant between June 1436 and November 1437, he is not known to have done so until the duke’s second term in the office. Mustering at Portsdown in the duke’s expeditionary army, with a personal retinue of six men-at-arms and 49 archers, he landed at Harfleur in June 1441 and was to remain in France, albeit not continuously, until 1446.24 E101/53/33, mm. 6-7; C76/123, mm. 8, 13. On 17 June 1441 he conveyed his property in Hereford to an impressive group of feoffees, headed by York and Humphrey, earl of Stafford, and including John Barre, Kynard de la Bere*, John Abrahall* and Thomas Bromwich: Raymond Richards mss, DV 20. He was knighted near the beginning of this service, perhaps at the relief of the siege of Pontoise in July 1441. In August 1442 he succeeded John Norbury* as captain of the castle of Arques near Dieppe and served under John, Lord Talbot, at the successful siege of Conches. A year later members of his retinue, headed by his wife’s kinsman, William Merbury, were among those ordered to shadow the Dauphin’s army as it marched to the relief of the siege of Dieppe.25 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25777/1647, 25778/1817, 1819.

Devereux probably returned to England soon after, for, in September 1443, Norbury was reappointed to the Arques captaincy. The interlude was, however, brief: in January 1445 he again replaced Norbury there and he seems also to have briefly served as captain of Vernon to the south of Rouen. He remained in France even after York had left for the last time in the following autumn. This sustained period of service is unlikely to have profited him financially. Although there is no evidence that he was himself captured, he found himself entering financial pledges for those who were. In 1445 he pledged 400 saluts d’or (100 marks) for the payment of the ransom of another of York’s servants, Gruffydd Dwnn, and it may have been to finance this or another similar undertaking that, in the same year, he borrowed 600 saluts (£100) at Rouen from the fellowship of the merchant, Felice Fagmen.26 Devereux pprs. DE/I/7; R.A. Griffiths, Principality of Wales, ii. 185; C1/22/172. The debt to Fagmen was still outstanding in June 1453, when the chancellor referred the matter to the arbitration of (Sir) John Wenlock: C253/34/322. The profit of his service probably lay in the more intangible form of closer relationship with the duke of York, many of whose most active supporters in the troubles of the 1450s, men like our MP, Sir William Oldhall* and Sir Edmund Mulsho*, had served under him in France.

It is not known when Devereux left France for the last time. He had almost certainly done so by 1 Jan. 1447, when a former captain of Arques, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, was reappointed to the captaincy; and he had probably returned to England by the previous autumn when arrangements were concluded for the marriage of his son, Walter, to Anne, the young daughter of Sir William Ferrers of Chartley in Staffordshire. This was a very important match. Not only was it socially desirable: the bride was a direct descendant of Robert Ferrers (d.1279), wrongly deprived of the earldom of Derby by Edward I. But there was a prospect that the bride would fall heir to her father’s tail-general lands. Although that prospect was a possibility rather than a probability – her father was only in his mid thirties – it was possibility enough to have had a bearing on the bargaining. It may explain why her father gave her a portion in land (either in addition to, or instead of, money): on 26 Nov. 1446 Ferrers secured royal licence to settle the manors of Keyston and Southoe in Huntingdonshire on the couple and their issue. Six weeks earlier, on 12 Oct., our MP had made his own settlement, giving them part of his grandmother’s Crophill inheritance, principally the manors of Market Rasen (Lincolnshire), Arnold (Nottinghamshire), Cottesbache (Leicestershire) and Hyde (Bedfordshire), the grant to be void if the bride, then only about seven years old, should repudiate the marriage when she came to the age of 14.27 CP, v. 320-1; K.B. McFarlane, Nobility of Med. Eng. 254-6; CPR, 1446-52, p. 19; Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/8.

Once back in England, Devereux lost little time in resuming a prominent part in public affairs. On 21 Jan. 1447 he was elected to Parliament in company with another of the duke of York’s knightly servants, Sir John Barre*. Not improbably the two men travelled in the ducal retinue to the assembly’s unusual venue of Bury St. Edmunds, and both were among the witnesses to a charter sealed by the duke there on 28 Feb., 18 days after the Parliament had begun. Their attitude and that of their master’s to the dangerously contentious business of that Parliament – the court’s attack on the duke of Gloucester – is uncertain, but it was clearly not one of open hostility.28 C219/15/4; CPR, 1446-52, p. 231; Johnson, 66. Devereux, for the time being at least, remained persona grata with the regime of William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, the dominant influence in royal government. In the following November he was pricked as sheriff of his native shire; and, in February 1448, he shared with the courtier, John Norris, a grant of the keeping of the estates of Reading abbey at Leominster, recently wasted ‘through the negligence and improvident governance of certain monks, late wardens of the same’.29 CFR, xviii. 82; Reg. Spofford, 289-91; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 142-3. This, however, was to be the last period of calm in Devereux’s busy career. Thereafter, the fluctuating political fortunes of the duke of York, increasingly-alienated from the court, had a profound, and largely negative, effect upon his own. In June 1449 York, belatedly, and perhaps reluctantly, departed to take up appointment as the King’s lieutenant in Ireland, to which he had been appointed soon after Gloucester’s fall. Devereux appears not to have accompanied him, at least if one assumes that he was in England on the following 10 Aug. when he entered into a contract for the marriage of his daughter Anne. This marriage, made within the ducal network, was to have far-reaching consequences. The groom was a Welsh esquire, William Herbert* of Raglan, then at the beginning of a career that culminated in his elevation to the earldom of Pembroke. Our MP’s willingness to pay as much as 500 marks for the marriage suggests that the groom had already been identified as a man of promise.30 The contract for this marriage survives only in an abbreviated 17th-century transcript: D.H. Thomas, Herberts of Raglan, 104. The two families were to become close political allies.

If, however, Devereux did not leave for Ireland with York in the summer of 1449, he had joined him there before the duke’s controversial return early in the autumn of 1450. Then the dangers of his choice of lord were first made manifest to him. York complained, in a petition to the King, that his enemies in the royal household had plotted to execute his chamberlain, Oldhall, and imprison himself, Devereux and Sir Edmund Mulsho in Conway castle, as they landed in north Wales.31 R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 299. This plot, if such it was, was surmounted. On 12 Sept., five days after the landing at Denbigh, our MP and other of the duke’s ‘ministres’ were with him at Shrewsbury, where the borough authorities, evincing a friendlier attitude than the King’s servants, entertained them with wine. Whether Devereux then went to London and thence to East Anglia does not appear, although, as one of the duke’s most important retainers, it is likely that he accompanied him for part of the time before returning home to secure election to the Parliament summoned to meet at Westminster on 6 Nov. In this he was successful. At the county court held at Hereford on 24 Oct. attestors, including two of his friends, Ralph Lingen and Thomas Bromwich*, witnessed his election and that of Thomas Fitzharry*, who, interestingly, was later to be prominent among the duke’s local opponents.32 Salop Archs., Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 8d; C219/16/1.

Devereux used his time at Westminster to forward the affairs of himself and others. On 28 Nov. he and Sir John Barre, then sitting for Gloucestershire, secured writs of supersedeas in respect of their failure to act on a royal commission issued to them in 1445, when our MP had been in France.33 E159/227, brevia Hil. rot. 4, Mich rot. 27d. On the following day he acted in a matter of more than personal importance. He joined three other MPs, two of whom, Sir Edmund Mulsho and Sir William Pecche*, were closely affiliated with York, in entering recognizances in £200 to guarantee the appearance of another MP, Robert Poynings*, then sitting for Sussex, before the King and Lords in the Parliament chamber on 7 Dec. Poynings had been implicated in Cade’s rising, and it is noteworthy that York’s servants should have been ready to act for him in this way.34 CCR, 1447-54, p. 238. Later, during the second prorogation, Devereux was one of several of the duke’s men who were commissioned by the Crown to inquire into the value of the earldom of Pembroke, in royal hands after the death of the duke of Gloucester. Perhaps a grant of the earldom to the duke of York was in prospect, although, if this was the case the prospect soon receded.35 Johnson, 97. He did not sit as a commr.: CCR, 1447-54, p. 223.

Devereux seemingly returned to Weobley during the second prorogation. If an indictment made in 1457 is to be accepted, he was there as late as 3 May 1451, only two days before Parliament re-assembled, when he assaulted one Richard Lilwalle and forced him to enter a bond in 100 marks to abide his award in a dispute with one of his servants.36 KB27/784, rex rot. 22; KB9/35/41. No doubt, however, he was back in the parliament chamber to witness the presentation by one of York’s legal counsel, Thomas Young II*, of a petition asking for the recognition of the duke as the King’s heir. Here the duke overstretched himself: the government responded angrily, imprisoning Young and dissolving Parliament.37 Johnson, 98. Nothing else is known of our MP in 1451 save that, on 29 July, he was with the duke at a session of the peace at Shrewsbury: Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 9. This marked a further stage in the duke’s alienation, pushing him, early in 1452, into an ill-advised armed demonstration against the royal government, headed by Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Devereux was, unsurprisingly, one of the principal architects of the Herefordshire part of this rising. Indictments later asserted that, on 28 Feb. at Hereford, he and many others, ‘as fals Traytours and Rebelles’, plotted the King’s deposition and death by war in that county and elsewhere.38 In view of this alleged offence, it is surprising to find that, a few weeks later, he was among those commissioned to distrain the collectors of the fifteenth and tenth in Herefs.: E159/228, commissiones Easter. Perhaps the government was slow to gather intelligence about the local risings that had underpinned the duke’s Dartford rising. These indictments also imply a link between his activities and serious disturbances in the county town. Among those tradesman indicted for illegally accepting his livery in January 1452 was John Weobley*, the leader of a group of disaffected townsmen who, since 1448, had acted in opposition to the town’s ruling elite. This has suggested to one modern commentator that Devereux, through Weobley, whose surname implies he hailed from our MP’s caput honoris, exploited ‘the unrest of the unfranchised tradesmen against the civic oligarchy’ to build support for the duke of York.39 KB9/34/1, m. 5; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 99, 229. Such a conclusion is consistent with the surviving evidence, although it is worth adding the caveat that the supposed factional strife in the city has left no trace in the records outside the indictments of 1452.

These indictments of treason and illegally livery-giving were laid against Devereux at Hereford on 9 Aug. 1452 before royal commissioners of oyer and terminer, headed by Somerset, whose dominance of government had been the principal factor in provoking York’s rising.40 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 580-1; KB9/34/1, mm. 5, 48. On the previous day, however, our MP had won protection from the worst consequences of these charges by securing a royal pardon. Since the King himself had accompanied his commissioners to Hereford, it is likely that this was granted through Devereux’s personal supplication to the monarch. Accordingly, on 11 Aug., the King sent signet letters to two of the justices to cease all process against him until commanded otherwise. As quid pro quo for this royal intervention, Devereux was required to find surety of the peace in heavy sums. On 22 Aug., six local esquires, headed by John Harley of Brampton Bryan in Shropshire and Humphrey Stafford of Halmond’s Frome (Herefordshire), bound themselves in £200 each for his good behaviour.41 KB9/34/2/33, 45, 46. The recognizances were delivered to the chancellor on 29 Aug., and, on the same day, Devereux was awarded a writ of non molestetis to the justices, instructing them to allow him the pardon granted to him on the day before the indictments had been laid.42 KB9/34/2/43. The pardon was not formally pleaded until the 1452 commissioners came to Hereford for a final session on 20 July 1453: RP, v. 342 (cf. PROME, xii. 445). Yet, although Devereux escaped severe punishment, there is some evidence that the process rankled with him. By pleading his pardon against the treason indictment, he had deprived himself of the opportunity of contesting the validity of the charge. No doubt he, like York, took the view that his actions in 1452 were those of a lawful subject acting in the best interests of the King and realm. He presented a petition to the Commons in the Parliament of 1455, asking that his indictment for treason be annulled, notwithstanding his plea of a pardon against it, and that he be declared the King’s true liegeman.43 RP, v. 342; SC8/105/5239.

None the less, beyond the humiliation of indictment and pardon, Devereux did not suffer further for his part in the events of 1452. Significantly, his son, Walter, recently come of age, had not been implicated in the duke’s rising; and, if one may judge from the royal licence of 17 Mar. 1453, allowing him and his wife to have livery of her inheritance on favourable terms, the young man retained a measure of royal favour despite his father’s activities.44 CPR, 1452-61, p. 49. This helps to explain the government’s leniency to Sir Walter and its apparent anxiety to do nothing to increase his estrangement. For example, although an inquisition held in Gloucestershire in November 1452 found in favour of a rival and spurious title to his manor of Dymock, the Crown granted Sir Walter the keeping of the manor pending the hearing of his traverse of the inquisition’s findings.45 KB27/771, rex rot. 7; CFR, xix. 22, 66. In 1449 the manor had been settled on our MP and his wife, with remainder to Merbury’s right heirs: CPR, 1446-52, p. 131; CP25(1)/79/90/113. In June 1453 our MP strengthened his hold there by acquiring the small part of the manor, outside his ownership, from the earl of Warwick’s brother, William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, and Joan Fauconberg, his wife: CP25(1)/79/91/122. Nor was he entirely excluded from local government: twice in 1453 he was nominated to ad hoc royal commissions of inquiry in his native shire, although royal indulgence stopped short of restoring him to the county bench. Further, in June 1453, his son and his servant, William Mayell of Weobley, were entrusted with the wardship of a royal ward, Thomas, son and heir of Edmund Cornwall, despite an earlier grant of the same to the ward’s kinsman, namesake and self-proclaimed feudal overlord, Thomas Cornwall of Burford (Shropshire), an esquire of the royal household. They were to hold pending another traverse sued by our MP, in which he claimed title as Edmund’s feoffee.46 CFR, xix. 30, 32, 33, 36-37; C139/150/38; E159/231, recorda Hil. rot. 5. Edmund had been the duke of York’s steward at Wigmore, and our MP was thus a natural choice as his feoffee: Herefs. RO, Hereford city recs. MT/IV/30, 31.

If, however, the Crown hoped its forgiving attitude would diminish Devereux’s loyalty to York, it was to be disappointed. He continued to act as one of York’s principal lieutenants, and others recognized him as such. At some date between 1 Sept. 1452 and 31 Aug. 1453, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, granted him an annuity of £20 assigned on his lordship of Berkswell (Warwickshire), a clear sign of the developing alliance between York and the Nevilles that was to have so dramatic an effect on English politics.47 This grant is known only from an acct. of Mich. 1456-7, in which year the annuity was not paid, perhaps due to our MP’s imprisonment: SC6/1038/2. On 20 Mar. 1453 Sir Walter was at Reading, where Parliament had assembled two weeks before, to enter into a series of bonds to the King’s former almoner, John de la Bere, bishop of St. David’s, pledging himself to pay the £300 necessary to redeem the lordship of Naberth (Pembrokeshire), which the duke had mortgaged to the bishop in 1449.48 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 422, 424; CPR, 1452-61, p. 71; Johnson, 62. He was still there six days later, when he joined his son-in-law, Herbert, and others, in a recognizance to the King in £40 for the good behaviour of Herbert’s younger brother, Thomas†.49 CCR, 1447-54, p. 426; CP, x. 401. His presence at Reading raises an interesting possibility in the context of the irregularities in the Herefordshire indenture for this Parliament. The indenture is dated 10 Mar., four days after Parliament had convened, and the names of the MPs, Henry Oldcastle and Makelin Walwyn*, have clearly been inserted in a blank left in the original draft. Since Devereux did not come to the session in the retinue of the duke of York, who absented himself, the possibility cannot be discounted that he was in Reading as a Herefordshire MP, elected at the county court previous to that of 10 Mar., which had been assembled on 10 Feb., three weeks after the issue of the writ of summons. This can be no more than speculation, but, if Devereux’s election was set aside, it would provide further vindication to the complaint of a contemporary chronicler that elections to this assembly were not free.50 C219/16/2; Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 139-40.

Just as the indictments did nothing to diminish Devereux’s devotion to York, neither did they deter him from further lawless acts. In Trinity term 1453 he and several of his servants were appealed by Maud, widow of a Herefordshire gentleman, Richard Hakluyt of Leominster, as accessories to the murder of her husband. Nothing more is known of this incident, although it is suggestive that the victim’s mother, Isabel, was one of the rival claimants to the manor of Dymock, and that Richard himself had been one of the jurors who had indicted our MP for illegal livery-giving in 1452.51 KB27/769, rot. 52d; 772, rot. 68d; KB9/34/1/3. Devereux was also involved in a quarrel with the King’s esquire, Humphrey Blount†, over the manor of Ashton in Herefordshire, in which he claimed an interest as a feoffee of Edmund Cornwall. According to an indictment in 1457, on 6 Aug. 1452, just three days before he was indicted for his part in York’s rising, Devereux gathered 400 men and forcibly expelled Blount from the manor. Thereafter he kept him out.52 KB27/784, rex rot. 22; KB9/35/20, 48.

The King’s mental collapse during the course of the Parliament of 1453-4 reversed the decline in York’s political fortunes, and, in March 1454, he was appointed Protector. During this first period of York’s rule, Devereux brought two matters pending in the courts to a successful conclusion. In May a jury sitting at Gloucester vindicated his wife’s title to the manor of Dymock against the false title cited in the inquisition of 1452; and in November another jury returned that he had lawful title to lands once of Edmund Cornwall as Edmund’s feoffee.53 KB27/771, rex rot. 7d; 774, rex rot. 22; E159/231, recorda Hil. rot. 6. What service he personally gave to the duke during this protectorate is unclear, but, rather surprisingly, when, at its outset, the duke marched north to suppress the rising of Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, he himself remained at Weobley. On 20 May 1454 he wrote from there to the duke, telling his lord that he wished he were with him but that he had not had sufficient warning to make preparations to depart the marches, advising him to summon Sir William Herbert, who was waiting his call, and wishing him victory over his enemies.54 Cott. Vespasian F XIII, art. 66. Later, however, he joined York at Westminster, being there as the duke’s hold on power failed in the following February. On 13 Feb. he was present in the vestry of the low chapel of St. Stephen’s to witness a notarial instrument by which his son Walter and Anne Ferrers covenanted to protect the interest of the feoffees of her mother, Elizabeth. Six days later, in one of the last manifestations of the duke’s power, he was restored to the Herefordshire bench in the first commission issued for the county since May 1453.55 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 49-50; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 666-7.

It is not known whether Devereux fought for York at the first battle of St. Albans, when the tension that had pervaded English politics since the duke’s return from Ireland finally expressed itself in a serious armed clash. If a later indictment is to be trusted, he was at Hereford on 10 May 1455, 12 days before the battle, when he illegally gave livery to a tailor of that city, but it is fair conjecture that he joined Duke Richard as the Yorkists came south from the duke’s northern estates. However this may be, eight days after the battle Devereux was back on the marches, when he and Humphrey Blount entered into bonds to abide arbitration in their dispute over the manor of Ashton. On 6 June he was himself named as an arbiter, alongside Herbert, his friend, Thomas Bromwich, and (Sir) Walter Skulle*, over matters arising from an alleged murder by another claimant to the manor of Ashton, Humphrey Stafford (one of our MP’s sureties in 1452), elder brother of Fulk Stafford*.56 KB9/35/69; Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/12, 13. Then he may have travelled to Westminster to attend the Parliament summoned to meet in the wake of the Yorkist victory; the Herefordshire indenture is lost, but Devereux is very likely to have been elected. Not only did he present a petition to the Parliament but he was nominated, during the first prorogation, to both the bench and the shrievalty of Gloucestershire. It was, therefore, perhaps as an MP that he sued out a general pardon on 19 Nov. 1455, the day on which York was reappointed Protector.57 C67/41, m. 17.

In the midst of these greater events, Devereux found time to attend to more private affairs. By 21 Jan. 1456 he had contracted his sister, Isabel, in marriage to an esquire of the royal household, Roland, son and heir of Sir Roland Lenthall of Hampton Court (Herefordshire). A few months later, on 16 June, James, Lord Berkeley, granted him an annual rent of 20 marks, to be taken from the manor of Hinton (Gloucestershire) for the term of Devereux’s life. Berkeley no doubt saw him as a useful ally in his great dispute with the formidable Margaret Beauchamp, dowager-countess of Shrewsbury, although that dispute was then in temporary abeyance. The timing of the grant probably owed something to our MP’s office as sheriff of Gloucestershire.58 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 445; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), i. 260; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 573, 803.

Even, however, as this grant was being made Devereux was approaching the crisis of his career. His master, in the wake of the brief second protectorate, was driven into the political wilderness by a resurgent court party, and Devereux joined Herbert in an orgy of violence in the marches. His presence in the Parliament of 1455-6, which was not dissolved until 12 Mar. 1456, may have been the reason why he did not take part, three days later, in a murderous raid, led by his son and Herbert; but he was prominent in the later disturbances. On 1 Apr. he distributed liveries of cloth at Weobley, Leominster, Bodenham and Eardisland to over 60 men, headed by a local esquire, John Lingen, who had participated in the Hereford raid.59 Among those who allegedly took his livery were three Leominster MPs: William Hood*, John Hood* and Thomas Bradford*: KB9/35/6. Four days later he seized the city’s mayor, Richard Green, imprisoning him until he paid him £40 and entered into a ruinous bond in 1,000 marks to Herbert.60 The indictments give more than one account of Green’s arrest: KB9/35/40, 65. Such open flouting of the processes of the law were serious enough from the government’s point of view, but the disturbances of the following August were very much more so. These appeared to betoken a new Yorkist rising. On 10 Aug. some 2,000 men, with our MP and Herbert at their head, took Carmarthen castle, imprisoning its keeper, the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, before marching to Aberystwyth, where they held sessions as if they were the lawfully constituted authority. These actions represented a violent reassertion of the duke of York’s weakening lordship. The duke had been appointed as constable of these two castles in the aftermath of his victory at St. Albans, but had failed to secure effective control due to the pretensions of Gruffydd ap Nicholas, deputy-justiciar of South Wales, who, with a disregard for the law that matched that of Devereux and Herbert, had exploited the lack of direct royal lordship there to win considerable influence. At the end of York’s second protectorate the Crown sought to bring Gruffydd to heel by dispatching the earl of Richmond to west Wales; it was this that provoked the Yorkist reaction in August 1456.61 Griffiths, Hen. VI, 779-80; Storey, 179-80; CPR, 1452-61, p. 245.

For Devereux and Herbert, whether or not they were acting on York’s orders, their open defiance of royal authority was, in its unfortunate timing, a highly dangerous undertaking. The duke’s influence at the centre of government had survived, albeit in diminished form, for a few months after his loss of the protectorship, but, by August, he faced political exile in face of the growing influence of the hostile queen. He was, in short, incapable of protecting his men from the consequences of their actions. Hence it was that, on 28 Sept. 1456, Devereux found himself at Coventry, to whence the royal court had withdrawn. He had presumably been summoned there to answer for his great offences, for, on that day, he was obliged to enter a bond in the ruinous sum of £1,000, undertaking to go to Windsor castle, where he was to remain in custody awaiting the King’s pleasure. In November he was removed from the Herefordshire bench, and, a month later, he was transferred from Windsor to prison in Milburne castle in Leicestershire. He was, seemingly, still there in the following April, when various indictments for treason and lesser offences were laid against him at Hereford before royal commissioners, headed by Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, and John, earl of Shrewsbury.62 CCR, 1454-61, p. 174; E207/17/3/102; SC6/755/20, f. 17v; KB27/784, rex rot. 22. Not armed, as he had been in 1452, with a pardon, his position was, seemingly, more perilous than it had been then, and yet he was, albeit after a significant period of detention, able to free himself. On 27 May 1457 he pleaded not guilty to the indictments, and was dismissed to bail of four important men, all supporters of York to one degree or another (Sir John Neville, the earl of Warwick’s younger brother, York’s nephew Henry Bourgchier, younger son of Viscount Bourgchier, (Sir) John Wenlock* and John Nanfan*) to reappear a little over a month later, on the octave of St. John the Baptist. Curiously, however, this did not result in his release: a few days later, on 2 June, he, his son, Walter, and their local allies, John Lingen, Ralph Bromwich and Thomas Monnington†, were required to post a recognizance in the massive sum of 5,000 marks to William Brandon†, marshal of the Marshalsea, and John Wingfield†, to be true prisoners in that prison.63 KB27/784, rex rot. 22d; CCR, 1454-61, p. 223. On the following day, our MP joined Clement Spice* and Humphrey Stafford in entering a further bond in 2,000 marks that the latter would also be a true prisoner: CCR, 1454-61, p. 190. Our MP’s release was probably delayed until his appearance in King’s bench a month later, for on 4 July he himself offered bail for Lingen. Two further bailments followed before, on 3 Feb. 1458, he was acquitted by jury of treason and allowed to plead his pardon of 19 Nov. 1455 against the charge of illegal livery-giving.64 KB27/784, rex rot. 22; 787, rex rot. 21d. There is an interesting contrast between the sureties on his first release and those on his second and third bailments. On the latter two occasions he relied on kinsmen and friends – his eldest son, Walter, John Clinton, first cousin of Walter’s wife, our MP’s son-in-law, James Baskerville†, Thomas Bromwich and John Lingen – together with Walter, eldest son of Sir Theobald Gorges*.65 For Baskerville as Devereux’s son in-law: KB27/833, rot. 24. The higher status of his first sureties and his less intimate connexion with them suggests that, while his later bailments were routine, the first was not. Perhaps, when sureties were first offered, there was still a doubt about his fate and those indicted with him.

It is odd that, after his release but before his acquittal, Devereux resumed a modest role in local government. He was appointed to a Herefordshire array commission on 26 Sept. 1457, and was restored to the county bench in the following November. Yet this restoration proved to be brief. Although appointed to another ad hoc commission in the county on 17 Dec., he was removed from the bench nine days later.66 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 403, 408, 666-7. This removal added to our MP’s causes for resentment. Indeed, these may have extended beyond his imprisonment and the loss of his rightful place in local government. If an action of conspiracy brought by him and others is to be credited, their indictment for the raid upon Hereford was false, the product of a conspiracy by Thomas Fitzharry and others who were later to prove themselves committed supporters of Lancaster. One of John Paston*’s correspondents certainly believed that at least some of the indicted had a case, writing on 1 May 1457, ‘Manye be endyted, som causelese’.67 KB27/791, rot. 19d; Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, iii. 118. It is going too far to believe that the story of the raid is all fiction, yet it is probable that, in the strife that divided Herefordshire in the late 1450s, provocative offences of the Lancastrians went unrecorded.

This is the probable context of an arbitration arranged early in 1458. On 8 Feb., only five days after Devereux’s acquittal, the leaders of the two rival factions in the county – our MP, his son, Walter, Sir William Herbert and Thomas Bromwich on the Yorkist side, James, Lord Audley (one of those before whom the indictments had been taken), Sir John Barre (who had deserted York), Fitzharry and Thomas Cornwall, on the Lancastrian – in mutual bonds in £1,000 to abide the arbitration of John Stanbury, bishop of Hereford, and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, then treasurer.68 Devereux pprs. DE/Box I/15. Our MP’s quarrel with Cornwall was both political and personal. They were still at odds over the wardship of the son and heir of Edmund Cornwall, for which Thomas sued our MP in 1457 and 1459: CP40/784, rot. 310d; 793, rot. 319. Significantly, the point at issue was said to be the indictments taken in April 1457, again suggesting that there was something suspicious about them. The choice of arbiters appears less than even-handed: both Talbot and the bishop, who had once been Henry VI’s confessor, were members of the prince of Wales’s council, and might have been expected to favour the Lancastrian faction. However, despite their different political affiliations, Devereux was on very good terms with Stanbury. Indeed, soon after these bonds, on 17 May, the bishop, ‘ob specialem affectionem’, granted him the wardenship of his chace of Malvern, and a year later Devereux nominated the bishop among the trustees of his goods.69 Reg. Beauchamp (Canterbury and York Soc. xxv), 46-47; Devereux pprs. DE/I/17. There is, in short, no reason to suppose that the arbiters were imposed on our MP and his friends or that the proposed award was anything other than a genuine attempt to bring peace to the county, perhaps paralleling the similar effort in national politics, which culminated in the love-day of 25 Mar. 1458. The general pardon granted to our MP on 12 Feb., four days after the arbitration bonds, may also have been designed to bring about reconciliation. As it transpired, however, both came to nothing.70 C67/42, m. 27; Devereux pprs. DE/I/15; C237/44/90. Nor, maddeningly for Devereux, did the proposed award insure him against the continuing ramifications of the 1457 indictments, for, on 22 and 23 Oct. 1458, he, together with his son and two of his local adherents, Lingen and Monnington, were obliged to enter three bonds, in a total of 130 marks, to the chief justice, (Sir) John Fortescue*.71 KB27/790, rot. 83.

Unsurprisingly, Devereux’s imprisonment did not lessen his commitment to the Yorkist cause. On 2 Feb. 1458, the day before his acquittal, he had joined William Hastings, Walter Blount* and other of the duke’s servants, in entering bonds to Alice, dowager-duchess of Suffolk, for the payment of the portion of York’s daughter on her marriage to the young duke of Suffolk.72 CAD, vi. A6337. Thereafter, death, at less than 50 years old, spared him the irrevocable commitment to the Yorkist cause that, if one may judge from his persistent and active loyalty to the duke, he would certainly have made. On 22 Apr. 1459, as he lay on his deathbed, he made a grant of all his goods to the duke himself, two lords favourable to the duke’s cause, Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, his son, Walter, and three of his long standing friends and servants, Thomas Bromwich, John ap Richard, clerk, and William Mayell.73 Devereux pprs. DE/1/17. He also included, despite their political differences, his local bishop, Stanbury. He died on either the following day or the day after.74 CFR, xix. 213; C139/176/22. A later action in the Exchequer of pleas shows that his executors were his son, Bromwich and John ap Richard, but his will is not known to survive.75 E13/157, rot. 52d.