BURLEY, William I

More information can be added to the earlier biography.19 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 432-5.

Burley played a part in the dramatic events of the autumn of 1450, occasioned by the return from Ireland of the duke of York (from whom he received fees in excess of £73 p.a.). York landed at Denbigh, where Burley was (or had been) his steward, on 7 Sept.; and five days later our MP was in his company in Shrewsbury, where the duke and his ‘ministres’ were entertained with wine by the borough authorities. It seems likely that Burley then rode to London in the ducal retinue. This is implied by the now famous letter written from London on 6 Oct. in which William Wayte reported to John Paston*, ‘Borle Jonge and Josse labour sore for Heydon and Tuddenham to Sir Wilem Oldhall’. Burley’s willingness to intervene on behalf of this unpopular pair (John Heydon* and Sir Thomas Tuddenham*) may be an instance of the professional solidarity of lawyers. If, thereafter, he remained in York’s company as he travelled through East Anglia, to Fotheringhay and thence to Ludlow, where he arrived on 5 Nov., he was absent from his native county on 15 Oct. when once more elected to Parliament. The indenture has one curious feature. Those who stood surety for the attendance of Burley and his fellow MP, William Lacon I*, were the first four attestors to the return (Thomas Corbet I*, Roger Corbet II*, Richard Lacon and John Sondford), and named in the indenture and hence of a much higher status than such sureties generally were. Perhaps this betokens the absence of one or both of those elected.20 Salop Archs., Shrewsbury recs., bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 8d; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 175: C219/16/1.

Throughout his career Burley played an important part in the affairs of Shrewsbury, which he served as steward. It was through him that the town mediated its relationship with its powerful neighbour, the duke of York. This may have been particularly important early in 1452 when the duke called upon the town for its support in his dispute with Edmund, duke of Somerset. The borough accounts for 1451-2 record a present of wine ‘de regardo’ to Burley for his advice at a meeting at Ludlow between a deputation for the town and the duke himself, and there is every reason to suppose that this was in connexion with this call.21 Paston Letters, i. 97-98; Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/380, m. 1. Equally significant was the role played by Burley in representing the town’s interests to the Crown. It was no coincidence that Shrewsbury’s acquisition of a new constitution came in the Parliament of 1445-6, in which Burley was Speaker. The grateful borough made him a present of cloth worth £4 for his labour on this occasion, and often provided him with food and wine on his frequent visits. In 1446, for example, when he and his colleagues came there as royal loan commissioners, they were given two gallons of wine, perhaps to persuade them to look sympathetically on the borough’s plea of poverty.22 Shrewsbury bailiffs’ accts. 3365/377, m. 5.

The earlier biography tentatively identified Burley’s second wife as a daughter of William Parys of Ludlow on the basis of her inclusion in the bede roll of a chantry endowed by Parys in the church of St. Lawrence, Ludlow.23 Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 3, iv. 349. An inquisition taken in 1492, however, firmly identifies her as a woman of much higher status, namely the daughter of a Shropshire peer. The marriage probably took place in July 1441, when her father, Lord Grey of Wilton, undertook to pay our MP 1,000 marks, conveying property to his feoffees as security. The debt probably represented Margaret’s marriage portion. So great a sum could only be justified by a generous jointure, and this explains why, by a final concord levied in November 1453, Burley settled upon his wife a life interest in almost his entire estate. The tardiness in the making of this settlement was presumably occasioned by a delay in the payment of the portion.24 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 726: CPR, 1436-41, p. 553; CP25(1)/195/22/41.

Margaret had a remarkably disturbed widowhood. Her extensive jointure was unwelcome to Burley’s heirs, her stepdaughter, Joan, wife of the King’s serjeant-at-law, Thomas Lyttleton, and William Trussell†, the young son of her late stepdaughter, Elizabeth, and it was inevitable that some sort of dispute should follow Burley’s death. The matter was compromised in 1465: Margaret surrendered all her title to the manors of Cressage (Shropshire) and Arley (Staffordshire), purchased by Burley from the duke of York in 1448 and not settled in the fine of 1453, and the heirs left her undisturbed in her jointure. Much more serious for Margaret were the difficulties arising from her second marriage to Fulk Sprenghose of Plaish, a friend or servant of her late husband. He had stood as godfather to Burley’s daughter by Margaret, and when, early in 1459, our MP’s administrators complained that his servants had despoiled ‘riotose et cum fortitudine’ his goods at Broncroft in the wake of his death, they named Margaret and Sprenghose as the principal offenders.25 KB27/791, rot. 25d. Sprenghose had also been the beneficiary of a lease made by Burley, when, according to an action sued by the heirs, the lessor had been non compos mentis: CP40/797, rot. 385. Their marriage thus arose out of this prior association, but, unfortunately for them, it was illicit and questionable from the point of view of both the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. On 10 Nov. 1465 a royal commission was issued for the couple’s arrest, perhaps because they had married without royal licence.26 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 491-2. The marriage had taken place by 11 Apr. 1464, when the couple sued out a general pardon: C67/45, m. 8. Worse still was the archbishop of Canterbury’s readiness to rule in favour of the claim made by another Margaret, daughter and heiress of John Wynnesbury*, an old associate of our MP, that she had married Sprenghose per verba de presenti and that their marriage had been publicly solemnized in church. In response our MP’s widow and Sprenghose secured, on 4 Feb. 1466, a papal commission to the bishop of Lichfield to examine the matter, and, when the bishop proved unhelpful, a further commission to the bishop of Hereford on 20 Apr. 1468. No more is heard of the matter until 1476 when the widow presented another petition to the Pope. From this it appears that her marriage to Fulk had never been declared valid, both because of Fulk’s pre-contract with Margaret Wynnesbury and a spiritual impediment arising from Fulk’s position as godfather to Margaret Burley’s daughter. Burley’s widow now needed papal intervention to allow her to contract a lawful union with one Richard Walwyn. Here she was compromised by her relationship with Fulk, described in the petition as the ‘carnal brother’ of Walwyn’s mother, and by her own kinship, within the prohibited degrees, to her new proposed groom. Happily, on this occasion, she secured dispensation, and it was as Margaret Walwyn that she died, an old woman, in 1491.27 CPL, xii. 463-4, 600; xiii (2), 517. She appears in the common law records as Walwyn’s wife by Mich. term 1477: CP40/864, rot. 115d.

This, however, was far from being the sum of her difficulties. While her wealth attracted the apparently welcome attentions of Sprenghose and Walwyn, it also attracted the unwelcome ones of a Staffordshire esquire, Humphrey Cotes, in what appears to have been a local cause célèbre. On 31 May 1473 he was indicted at Shrewsbury before a remarkable panel of j.p.s: Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, Thomas Arundel, Lord Mautravers, John, Lord Strange, Richard Fiennes, Lord Dacre, Thomas Lyttleton, now j.c.p., and William Allington†, Speaker in the Parliament then in prorogation, were, in the collective status of a group of sitting j.p.s, probably without parallel in the history of the fifteenth-century local bench. They were present in Shrewsbury for a council summoned by the King to address the problem of disorder in the Welsh marches, and their decision to take indictments as j.p.s relegated other members of the Shropshire commission to the status of jurors: Sir Humphrey Blount†, Thomas Horde*, Thomas Acton*, John Leighton†, Thomas Corbet I and Robert Cresset were all j.p.s on a jury that included no one below the rank of esquire. The indictment they laid was serious enough to match the occasion. They claimed that, on the previous 22 Jan., Cotes had collected 20 malefactors and abducted Margaret from Little Wenlock, taking her to his house at Woodcote (just on the Shropshire side of that county’s boundary with Staffordshire). From thence he took her from place to place, presumably to thwart any attempt to rescue her, until, on 26 Jan., he ‘felonice rapuit’ her at Lyndon. One imagines that Cotes was a thwarted suitor, and it is interesting to observe that Sprenghose was one of the jurors. Curious too is the indictment of Humphrey Swynnerton as one of Cotes’s abbettors, for he had been one of the administrators of Burley’s will. It says little for the administration of justice that Cotes was quickly pardoned.28 KB9/334/87; D.E. Lowe, ‘Patronage and Politics’, Bull. Bd. Celtic Studies, xxix. 547-8; KB27/852, rex rot. 6.