HULS, Hugh

Huls, who came from a large Cheshire family which was well established in the county by the mid fourteenth century, was related to Hugh Huls (d.1415), a justice of the King’s Bench from 1394, who played an important role in Henry V’s administration of North Wales.3 Talbot Deeds (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. ciii), 34-35, 44-45; Sel. Cases King’s Bench (Selden Soc. lxxxviii), pp. xii, lxii; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 168, 170. The judge’s sons included another Hugh (d.1430), a fellow of New College, Oxford, and Andrew Huls, a noted collector of humanist works, who rose in the Church to be archdeacon of York and chancellor of Salisbury cathedral and served Henry VI as keeper of the privy seal between 1450 and 1452.4 J.W. Bennett, ‘Andrew Holes’, Speculum, xix. 314-35. The Norbury branch of the family, by contrast, appears to have kept a much lower profile, confining its activities principally to the area surrounding the family home, and while the MP’s father was appointed as a tax collector for the hundred of Nantwich in 1403-4, little else is recorded of his career.5 G. Ormerod, Palatine and City of Chester ed. Helsby, 463-4; DKR, xxxvii. 370.

Hugh’s subsequent success may therefore have owed something to the prominence of his more illustrious relatives, and their connexions with the Crown. It was probably no coincidence that, like the former judge, he made a name for himself in North Wales: as early as 1429 he was one of three men authorized to adjudicate in a dispute concerning the inheritance in Caernarvon and Anglesey of the late Henry Parys, son of Robert Parys†, a former chamberlain of Chester and North Wales.6 Add. Ch. 44282. Clearly seen as a promising administrator, two years later he was appointed to the first of several commissions in the region, in this instance concerning the lands of Nicholas Parys, uncle of the deceased Henry.7 CPR, 1429-36, p.131; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 22. Huls’s abilities were further recognized when, in the autumn of 1436, he was appointed sheriff of Caernarvon, a post he seems to have held until late March 1437, despite his apparent replacement by John Hynde on 25 Jan. During this period there was an increasing tendency for the Crown to promote trusted servants, and especially Household men, to positions of authority in North Wales, a policy which became most marked following the end of Henry VI’s minority,8 Griffiths, ‘Patronage, Politics and the Principality of Wales’, British Government and Administration ed. Hearder and Loyn, 83-85. and this may account for the gap in Huls’s career in public office between the two similar commissions, in 1437 and 1453, set up to recover large sums of money owed by tenants and officials in those parts of the principality.9 CPR, 1436-41, p. 148; 1452-61, pp. 124, 173. Though a Cheshire man, Huls took his duties in Wales seriously enough to take up residence there: in a royal pardon he obtained in 1437 he was described as a burgess of the towns of Caer Beaumaris and Conway.10 C67/38, m. 14.

As Wales and the palatinate of Chester were not represented in Parliament in this period, Huls had to look elsewhere for a seat in the Commons. Strikingly, the three different boroughs he represented in three consecutive Parliaments were all very far from his home in the north-west of England. The reasons behind his election for East Grinstead, Gatton and Midhurst are unclear, as no direct connexion has been established between him and any of these places. Perhaps his satisfactory performance as a Crown servant played some part in his returns to the Commons, particularly at East Grinstead, which formed part of the duchy of Lancaster estates in Sussex.11 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 654-5. Nothing is recorded of any links between him and the lords of the boroughs of Gatton and Midhurst, the duke of Norfolk (and his retainer John Timperley I*) and the local landowner Humphrey Bohun, but it may well be significant that his second Parliament coincided with the term of his kinsman, Andrew Huls, as keeper of the privy seal.12 Bennett, 314-35. Hugh’s career took a new turn in July 1452 when he sued out letters of protection as going overseas in the retinue of Gervase Clifton*, until recently the deputy warden of the Cinque Ports, perhaps with the intention that he would assist Clifton in his role as treasurer of Calais, a position requiring considerable financial and administrative acumen. Probably in a similar capacity, early in 1455 he joined the company of Sir Thomas Fynderne*, the lieutenant of Guînes.13 DKR, xlviii. 392, 403.

The accession of Edward IV may briefly have threatened Huls’s employment by the Crown in Wales, but in the event any fears of redundancy were to prove unfounded. Far from being discarded, he was appointed in November 1461 as one of the auditors of the accounts of royal officials in Cheshire and Flint.14 CPR, 1461-7, p. 56; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 300. An association with John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, may have helped to prolong his administrative career: in March 1465 he stood as a mainpernor at the Exchequer when the earl as justice of North Wales was granted the farm of manors and lordships in the region in return for payment of £130 p.a. at Caernarvon.15 CFR, xx. 162. Huls was then described as a ‘gentleman of London’, but whether he regularly resided in the capital is not known. Nothing more is heard of him after this date. Thomas Huls of Norbury, a tax collector in Cheshire in 1487, may have been his son.16 DKR, xxxvii. 371.