HORNE, Robert

The Horne family had been resident in Appledore for several generations. Having served as knight of the shire for Kent in the Parliament of October 1404 Robert’s father had been pricked sheriff of the county two years later. Thereafter he was named on several Kentish commissions, but was not appointed to the county bench and his prominence in local affairs early in Henry IV’s reign was probably due to his friendship with a close supporter of the Lancastrian usurpation, John Freningham†. There are no references to him alive after 1434, when he took the oath not to maintain law-breakers.5 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 423.

Robert’s early years are obscure.6 It was almost certainly a namesake who, in 1425, quitclaimed his interest in land in Woodchurch, Kent, and witnessed a deed in Canterbury in June 1426: Harvard Univ. Law School Lib., English deeds, 378; Canterbury Cath. Archs., Canterbury city recs., burghmote reg. 1298-1503, CCA-CC-O/A/1, ff. 42v-43. Like many members of the Kentish gentry in this period, as a young man he served in the wars in France. In November 1435 he was a mounted man-at-arms in a troop of soldiers sent to reinforce the garrison at Evreux, and after entering the regular garrison there he continued to serve at Evreux under its successive captains, Sir Nicholas Burdet and William, Lord Fauconberg, until at least March 1439. By August of that year he had joined the company of John, Lord Talbot, and received wages in the garrison at Criel. Staying in France in the early 1440s, by June 1443 he was a member of the retinue of (Sir) Thomas Hoo I*, then captain of Mantes.7 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr 25772/1014; 25775/1397; 25776/1636; nouv. acq. fr. 8606/60; Evreux, Archives Départementales, II F 4069.

Despite his long absence overseas, Horne proved able to establish useful connexions within the Kentish gentry, and his association with Gervase Clifton* and the latter’s stepson John Scott† can be traced back to the early 1440s. At some point before 1444 he married one of the daughters of Edward Guildford and in that year he acted alongside Guildford, Clifton and another of Guildford’s sons-in-law, John Bamburgh*, as a feoffee in property in Newchurch near Hythe for a local man, Thomas Chapman. This resulted in litigation in the court of common pleas in Trinity term 1447 when certain men of Hythe and Newchurch forcibly entered the property. It was still in progress in Michaelmas term the following year and early in 1448 Horne and the other feoffees demised their interest in the property to Thomas Penylond of Tenterden.8 CP25(1)/116/320/673; CP40/746, rot. 480; 751, rot. 368d. Chapman had been executor of the will of William Scott I*, whose widow had subsequently married Clifton. Meanwhile, in Hilary term 1446 Horne had been one of the jurors who were distrained for their non-appearance in the suit for debt between Thomas, Lord Scales and Sir Thomas Kyriel*,9 CP40/740, rot. 451. and had been present at Rochester on 2 Jan. 1447 to witness the parliamentary election of the knights of the shire for Kent. This marked his first participation in the public affairs of the county.10 C219/15/4. He returned across the Channel in the following year: the final reference to Horne’s military career in the Norman garrisons is a record of his service under the Kentish captain, Sir Richard Frogenhall, at Harcourt in December 1448.11 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr 25778/1827.

Back home in Kent in September 1449, Horne was appointed to his first ad-hoc commission, an appeal for loans for the defence of Normandy. Further local responsibilities soon followed: in the next February he was appointed to a commission of sewers (perhaps taking up his father’s interest in Kent’s waterways), and in April his military experience was put to use when he was commissioned to array the men of the county. That eventful summer he was called upon to resist Cade’s rebels. Having initially remained aloof from the rising, in early June along with John Scott† and John Fogg† he was commissioned by the King’s Council to borrow 500 marks to raise forces to confront the rebels gathering around Ashford, and in August the three men, along with Gervase Clifton, were rewarded with £100 for their efforts. Six years later the associates, Horne, Scott and Fogg, joined together to obtain a royal licence to ship 400 sacks of wool, retaining 16s. 8d. of the customs due on every sack, to repay the loan they had levied.12 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 329-30; E404/66/210; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 154-5, 173; E159/233, recorda, Hil. rot. 25.

Horne’s reward for his services against Cade was his appointment in December 1450 to the commission of the peace. Although he was well connected within Kentish political society, his appointment may reflect the turmoil which still affected the county in the aftermath of the rebellion. Another young man recently returned from the French wars, Sir William Pecche*, had been returned as one of the knights of the shire in September, alongside another older soldier, William Haute*, and the concentration of county office in the hands of men of military reputation may not have been mere coincidence in the troubled times of the autumn and winter of that year. In February 1451 Horne was also appointed to a commission to inquire into acts of piracy in the Sussex port of Winchelsea alongside Clifton, who was serving in his capacity as lieutenant of Dover castle, and in the following November he was pricked sheriff. As sheriff he was named to a commission of array, led by Clifton, to call the king’s lieges in Kent together to resist the show of force staged at Dartford by Richard, duke of York, in February 1452. Although it has been suggested that, given his later support for York, Horne may also have supported the duke on this occasion, it seems very unlikely that he did so.13 P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 113. Certainly, the group of conspirators which gathered a few months later at Harrietsham, seeking the fulfilment of the petitions of the commons of Kent and proposing to send letters written in invisible ink requesting help from the duke of York, planned to murder those royal officials, including Horne, John Roger III* and Alexander Iden, who, they alleged, had oppressed the local people.14 KB9/279/99. The record says Thomas Horne, but this must be a scribal error. At the end of his shrievalty Horne continued to be appointed to ad-hoc commissions in Kent and to sit on the justices’ bench, although his attendance in the latter capacity appears to have sporadic: in the extant writs for payment of expenses from 1454 and 1457 he received payment for only two days’ service on each occasion.15 E101/567/3. Meanwhile, on 24 Nov. 1455 he sued out a general pardon as ‘of Appledore, esquire alias gentleman’.16 C67/41, m. 13.

It was in military matters that Horne made his biggest impact on county affairs. In 1454 and 1456 he was appointed to array the men of Kent and in May 1457, amidst renewed fears of a French descent, he was among those appointed to oversee the placement of beacons along the coastline. The crisis came on 26 Aug. when an enemy fleet, led by Pierre de Brézé, seneschal of Normandy, attacked Sandwich. Sir Thomas Kyriel, lieutenant of Dover castle, quickly organized a force from the Cinque Ports and the surrounding countryside, which on the following day, joined by Horne, Clifton and William Culpepper, drove the French back to their ships, killing 120 of Brézé’s men in the ensuing fight.17 English Chron. 1377-1461 ed. Marx, 75; Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 110-11; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 170-1; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 815-16; E. Kent Archs. New Romney recs., assmt. bk. 1448-1526, NR/FAc 3, f. 33. On 8 Jan. 1458 Horne secured a general pardon, almost certainly in connexion with possible litigation arising from his shrievalty,18 C67/42, m. 35. but in May he was removed from the commission of the peace. It has been suggested that this removal was politically motivated: Fogg was also dismissed from the bench at this time, as was Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenny, the earl of Warwick’s uncle, and John, Lord Clinton, a known supporter of the duke of York.19 M. Mercer, ‘Kent and National Politics’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1995), 56. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of Horne’s connexion with either Warwick or York at this time.

Indeed, when the Yorkist lords fled to Calais in October 1459 in the aftermath of the débacle at Ludford Bridge, Horne’s loyalty to the Crown was not questioned. In December and three times in early 1460 he was named on commissions of array in Kent and in May he was appointed to muster the retinues of the duke of Exeter and other Lancastrian reinforcements being assembled at Sandwich to assist the embattled Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, at Guînes. On 26 June, however, the Yorkist earls of Warwick, Salisbury and March landed at Sandwich and began their march through Kent to London. Horne, along with his old friends, John Fogg and John Scott, had been ordered to resist the rebels, but at Canterbury they joined forces with the earls and accompanied them to the capital.20 Chron. John Stone ed. Searle (Cambridge Antiq. Soc. octavo ser. xxxiv), 79. It is entirely possible that Horne was present at the Yorkist victory at Northampton the following month. On 20 Sept. that year at Canterbury he was elected as knight of the shire to the Parliament summoned to meet at Westminster on 7 Oct., along with another old colleague, Sir Thomas Kyriel.21 C219/16/6. His activities at the Parliament, which witnessed the duke of York’s claim to the throne made explicit, are not known, but during the first session he was appointed to a commission of arrest and restored to the bench in Kent. On 12 Dec., a few days after the prorogation, he was appointed deputy butler in the port of Chichester, by bill of the Yorkist (Sir) John Wenlock, who, as soon as his attainder had been reversed in the Parliament, had been made chief butler for life. York was killed at Wakefield on 30 Dec., and it was a diminished Parliament which met for a second session on 28 Jan. 1461. As the northern army under the banner of Margaret of Anjou marched south to threaten London, Horne, in common with many of the other Kentish supporters of York, accompanied the earl of Warwick to do battle. He was present at the earl’s defeat at St. Albans on 17 Feb., but escaped to join the force led by York’s heir, Edward, hastily declared King just two weeks later. On 29 Mar. the Yorkist army met Queen Margaret’s Lancastrians in the fog at Towton, but although his side proved victorious Horne was among those killed in the battle.22 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 165.

What evidence survives of Horne’s private affairs suggests that the decision to support the Yorkist cause in 1460 had its foundations in personal connexions, notably in his friendship with John Scott, who was to rise to prominence under Edward IV as controller of his household. During the late 1450s he had joined Scott in dealings regarding the estates of the late Sir John Passhele, from whose heir, John*, Scott acquired in the autumn of 1460 the Sussex manor of La Mote. Other Passhele properties in Appledore and Kenardington came to Horne’s possession as a feoffee or purchaser. On 14 Nov. while the Parliament was in progress, he and Scott witnessed a deed together.23 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 44, 447, 449, 486.

Recognition of Horne’s commitment to the Yorkist cause came in February 1462 when Sir John Fogg, treasurer of the Household, founded a chantry at Ashford where prayers were to be said for the souls of those killed at Wakefield, St. Albans and Towton, specifically naming on the bede roll Horne in association with the duke of York and the earls of Salisbury and Rutland. The same men were remembered in the perpetual chantry established at Headcorn four years later by the clerk of the King’s Council, Master Thomas Kent. The MP left a widow, his second wife Isabel, who on 30 Aug. 1461 had been granted for life an annuity of 40 marks from the royal manor of Milton and hundreds of Milton and Marden to provide for her and her three daughters.24 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 7, 76, 516. Horne’s elder son, Gervase (who was to represent New Romney in the Parliament of 1484), was not mentioned in these provisions, but may have been taken into wardship as a minor, for when Isabel died in 1484 he was said to be aged just ‘30 and more’. In the meantime Isabel had secured a good marriage to (Sir) John Lisle II* of Thruxton, Hampshire, and after Lisle’s death in 1471 had married Thomas Beauchamp esquire.25 C141/6/17.