JOHN, Lewis

The son and namesake of a self-made Welshman and servant of the Lancastrian Crown who settled in Essex, Lewis had reached his majority when he succeeded his father in October 1442. Without a wife when the elder Lewis made his will on 2 June 1440,8 PCC 14 Rous. he had married by 8 Feb. 1444 when he had the manor of ‘Porters’ at Stebbing in north-west Essex settled on himself and his wife Maud – a lady of unknown parentage – and their male issue.9 Capell mss, DE/M/139. On the same 8 Feb., Lewis gave the chancellor a recognizance for £200. The security was in earnest of his readiness to fulfil the obligations contained in the will of his father, should the goods and chattels in the hands of Sir Lewis’s executors prove insufficient for that purpose. He also undertook to abide by any ruling the chancellor might make between him and his father’s feoffees.10 CCR, 1441-7, p. 220.

Sir Lewis John had held lands in several counties but those in Essex made up the bulk of his estates, valued at £350 p.a. (a substantial sum but probably an underestimate) in 1436.11 H.L. Gray, ‘Incomes from Land in Eng. in 1436’, EHR, xlix. 633. He had left most of his property to his second wife, Anne, to hold for life, with remainder to the children of both his marriages, allowing his eldest son immediate possession of just ‘Porters’ at Stebbing.12 PCC 14 Rous; CIPM, xxvi. 120-3. While his stepmother, who afterwards married John Holand, duke of Exeter,13 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 498. was still alive, Lewis resided on that property.14 CFR, xiii. 28. Following his father’s death, he sued the surviving feoffees of Sir Lewis’s will, the clerk Nicholas Dixon (a servant of the abbot of Waltham Holy Cross),15 Petre mss, D/DP T1/843. and John Ash I*, in the Chancery. His purpose was to compel them to convey to him the reversion – to vest when his stepmother died – of West Thorndon, Ingrave and other manors and lands in Essex then in her possession.16 C1/14/35. While the exact date of this suit is unknown, it is likely that it was the matter pending before the chancellor referred to in the recognizance of February 1444. If it signified tensions between him and Anne, he and his stepmother were evidently on much better terms by 1452, when they jointly acquired the lease of holdings in East and West Horndon from the abbot of Waltham Holy Cross.17 Petre mss, D/DP T1/845.

It was only after Anne, by then the dowager duchess of Exeter, died in November 1457,18 C139/170/41. that Lewis came fully into his own. Late in life, she had begun building a new hall at West Horndon, presumably a project completed by her stepson.19 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 38; Petre mss, D/DP M1082. Having taken possession of West Horndon and other manors and properties in south-east Essex, including the Bell Inn in Brentwood and a vineyard at South Weald, Lewis vacated his former residence of ‘Porters’ in Stebbing, leasing it to a farmer in September the following year.20 Petre mss, D/DP T1/1506. In due course, Lewis augmented his inheritance. In 1461, for example, he obtained the lease of a manor at Great Warley from the guardians of a minor, John Godeston, for £22 p.a., and he appears to have gained possession of Cranham by 1464, perhaps following the death of his younger brother, Edmund, to whom Sir Lewis John had left that manor.21 VCH Essex, vii. 104, 168. He may also have augmented his landed income by engaging in commerce like his father, since in April 1465 a Lewis John received licence to trade in France and Spain for a year.22 C76/149, m. 21. Furthermore, when he obtained a royal pardon just over three years later he was described as ‘late of London’,23 C67/46, m. 33. where Sir Lewis was once a merchant. Yet Lewis was first and foremost a country gentleman. As such, he acted as a feoffee for his fellow gentry,24 e.g. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 24-25; Essex RO, deeds, 1460, 1467, D/DHf/T41/91, 100; C139/170/41; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 151-2, 344-5; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 67. and was often associated with the Tyrells, one of the most prominent families in Essex. (Sir) Thomas Tyrell* was an annuitant of Lewis’s stepmother, Anne, and afterwards an executor of her will.25 Petre mss, D/DP M1082; PCC 11 Stokton (PROB11/4, f. 86).

A week after his father’s death, Lewis obtained a grant for life of the stewardship of the royal lordship of Havering, an office which Sir Lewis John had held before him.26 It is possible that he temporarily lost possession of the office a few years later, since he was obliged to surrender his letters patent in the wake of the Act of Resumption passed in the Parl. of Nov. 1449. He received new letters, awarding him the wages of the stewardship for life, in Apr. 1452: CPR, 1446-52, p. 542. In all likelihood this was a sinecure, meaning that he did not properly begin his career as a local administrator until appointed sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire in 1457. While sheriff, he received a royal pardon although it is impossible to tell whether this was connected with any shortcomings in his exercise of the office.27 C67/42, m. 25 (20 Feb. 1458). He was returned to his only Parliament in the autumn of 1459, when he and Sir Thomas Tyrell were elected as knights of the shire for Essex. A partisan assembly, the Parliament attainted Richard, duke of York, and his leading allies, and on 21 Dec., the day after its dissolution, Lewis was appointed to an anti-Yorkist commission of array in Essex. There is no evidence of his having fought in any of the civil war battles of the late 1450s and early 1460s, although his younger brother, Henry Lewis, was a committed Lancastrian who appears to have received his knighthood from Henry VI in July 1460, just before the battle of Northampton.28 Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. vi. 37. It is also possible that Henry was at St. Albans five years earlier, since shortly after that battle it was mistakenly reported that he was one of the fatalities: Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 30. Henry, who had inherited Sir Lewis John’s manor at Nevendon, had continued the latter’s association with the Beauforts by marrying a daughter of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Attainted in the Parliament of 1461, he was pardoned in May 1463 and afterwards entered the service of the earl of Warwick (a nephew of his stepmother).29 Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 84; PROME, xiii. 42-51; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 139, 267; C76/151, m. 19. As a younger son, he had less to lose than his elder brother, who soon came to terms with the accession of Edward IV. In November 1461, shortly after the opening of the Parliament which attainted Sir Henry, the new King made Lewis keeper and parker of Fulbrook, a royal manor in Warwickshire. Four years later he was held in sufficient trust for the government to appoint him a j.p.30 It is even possible that Lewis entered the service of the Welsh Yorkist Sir William Herbert*. In June 1468 the latter, by then Lord Herbert, sent a servant of his named Lewis John to the Exchequer to collect 2,000 marks assigned towards his siege of Harlech, a Welsh castle still in Lancastrian hands: E403/840, m. 4. On the other hand, Lewis John was a common Welsh name.

In spite of the trust Edward IV had shown in him, but no doubt swayed by family sympathies for the Lancastrian cause, Lewis committed himself to Henry VI at the Readeption. Following the restoration of that King, Sir Henry Lewis was appointed sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire and his elder brother as an ad hoc commissioner in Essex. The MP died fighting for the Lancastrians at Barnet on 14 Apr. 1471, perhaps as a member of the retinue which his cousin, John de Vere, 13th earl of Oxford, had brought to the field.31 Paston Letters, v. 100. Presumably it was this letter, which refers to the MP as ‘Sir Lewes Johns’, which prompted HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 504, to speculate that he was knighted during the Readeption. But there is no evidence to show that he received that honour, or (as HP Biogs. also suggests) that he sat in the Parl. of 1470. Warwick was also killed but Sir Henry (assuming he was at the battle) survived and was pardoned just 17 days later.32 CPR, 1461-77, p. 258.

Lewis’s will – if he made one – no longer exists and there is no extant inquisition post mortem for his lands. These were confiscated by the Crown, even though it appears that (unlike the earl of Oxford and other supporters of the Readeption) he was never formally attainted. In the following December, the King granted them to the duke of Gloucester, to whom Richard Fitzlewis, Lewis’s son and heir, was obliged to make a formal conveyance of the manors of West Horndon, Field House (in West Horndon) and Ingrave and other lands in early 1474. This transaction was reinforced by an Act of Parliament, and Richard and his uncles, Sir Henry, Philip and John Fitzlewis, quitclaimed the properties to the duke on 7 Mar. 1475. Soon afterwards, Gloucester sold them to the queen, Elizabeth Wydeville, conveying them to her and her feoffees on the following 16 Mar.33 CPR, 1467-77, p. 297; PROME, xiv. 263; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 1428, 1432. Subsequently she sold the manors to Cardinal Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury, who retained them until Richard Fitzlewis (who by this date had recovered other parts of his father’s estate) negotiated their return in the early 1480s. Richard agreed to pay Bourgchier £1,000 for the properties, valued at 100 marks p.a., but to raise this huge sum he was obliged to sell ‘Porters’, along with other manors and lands in Stebbing, Great and Little Saling and Felsted to the wealthy Londoner, William Capell†. When an indenture of sale was drawn up in May 1482, Capell had already paid 700 marks of the purchase price, 500 marks of which he had delivered directly to the cardinal’s brother, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex.34 CCR, 1476-85, no. 995. But this calendared version of the indenture contains several errors. See Petre mss, D/DP T135/12 for another copy. In spite of having made his peace with the Yorkists, Richard’s future was only assured with the advent of the Tudors. Knighted at the battle of Stoke in 1487, he also fought for Henry VII at Blackheath ten years later.35 The Commons 1509-1558 ed. Bindoff, ii. 140.