LAMBTON, Robert

This MP poses a slight problem of identification. There were two contemporary Robert Lambtons, probably distant cousins. Both were lawyers and both held lands in county Durham. The elder had his main residence at Nunthorpe in north Yorkshire, and from 1418 until his death in the autumn of 1435 enjoyed an annual fee of 20s. from the cathedral priory of Durham as legal counsel. He was extremely well connected: at the baptism of his son and eventual heir in 1425, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, the earl’s mother Joan, countess of Westmorland, and Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, stood as godparents.3 B. Dobson, Durham Priory, 132; R. Surtees, Durham, iii. 62. He would thus have been a natural choice as MP for Appleby, but there are good reasons for preferring the claims of his younger namesake. The latter was a representative of the principal branch of the Lambtons, long established at Lambton as tenants of the bishopric of Durham, and in the 1430s he had a minor position in the Exchequer. These circumstances alone make him the most likely candidate as the MP, but other considerations harden this likelihood into near certainty. In 1432, when a Robert Lambton first sat for Appleby, his father was MP for Northumberland, and in 1435 the other MP for Appleby was John Cerf*, another Exchequer man. Further, the elder Robert is an unlikely candidate for this second assembly. He made his will on 12 Sept. 1435, ten days before the drawing up of the Westmorland indenture, and died either before Parliament assembled or very shortly afterwards.4 C219/14/5. His will was proved on 27 Oct. 1435: Surtees, iii. 62. It is thus the younger Robert’s career that is outlined below.

The Lambtons of Lambton, at least in Robert Lambton’s generation, were a talented family. His younger brother, William, enjoyed a successful clerical career, serving as master of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1458 until his death about ten years later; and another brother, John, combined the religious with the military as one of several northern gentry who made a career among the Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes.5 Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, 1087-8. As a young man, Robert himself had material prospects that were scarcely better than those of his younger siblings: their father was a younger son, who did not fall heir apparent to the family lands until the death of our MP’s uncle and namesake at an unknown date in the 1420s.6 This Robert died between Apr. 1420 and Jan. 1430: HMC Var. ii. 18; DURH3/2, f. 259v. Perhaps this was a factor in determining the young Robert on a legal education. His will shows that he attended Furnival’s Inn, one of the inns of chancery; and he may then have found a place in the Exchequer, perhaps through his father, who had been attorney there for Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, since 1423. Indeed, his own first appearance in the records was as the recipient at the Exchequer, on 4 Dec. 1427, of a reward of £15 due to his father and two other esquires sent on embassy to Scotland. Less than a year later, on 3 Nov., he assumed a role generally undertaken by his father in receiving assignment on behalf of the earl as keeper of Berwick and warden of the east march.7 Cal. Scots. Docs. iv. 1013; E403/688, m. 4. Such evidence is insufficient to show that the young Robert was an Exchequer servant, particularly as he is not later recorded as holding formal office there, but there are other indications. In his will he refers to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, treasurer from 1433 to 1443, as ‘domino meo specialissimo’, and, since there is no evidence of his involvement in Cromwell’s well-documented private affairs, their relationship was in all probability a professional one.8 PCC 15 Rous (PROB11/1, f. 116).

The death in July 1430 of Lambton’s paternal grandfather, William, brought him closer to the family inheritance. On 13 Feb. 1431, as ‘of Lambton, gentleman’, he offered mainprise in Chancery for Peter Swift of Lambeth, again probably acting as an Exchequer servant, and in the following year he was elected to represent Appleby in Parliament. As far as the burgesses were concerned he was an obvious candidate: from a family connected with the Percys and with professional interests at Westminster, he promised to be an effective representative and perhaps one ready to serve without wages. If they needed any external prompting it may have come from the Percy earl, who was probably responsible for the election of Robert’s father for Northumberland.9 CFR, xvi. 31; C219/14/3. In June 1433, nearly a year after the conclusion of this Parliament, Lambton secured a royal grant of the keeping of several scattered parcels of forfeited land in south Northumberland at the modest annual farm of 10s. 2d.10 CFR, xvi. 154-5. Much more importantly the deaths of his aged grandmother at the end of the same year (she had had a life interest in the manor of Lambton by a deed of as long before as 1381) and his father in the following March brought him greater standing.11 DURH3/2, ff. 273v-274v. His father’s will does not survive, but later litigation shows that our MP and his brother, Thomas, were the executors: CP40/703, rot. 411; 707, rots. 286d, 407d. In recognition of his new status, he was named in July 1434 to a commission of array in Northumberland as both his father and grandfather had been before him. Two months later the bishop of Durham awarded him formal seisin of the family estates and pardoned him for an unlicensed entry into the manor of Tribley, near Lambton, which his father appears to have purchased.12 CPR, 1429-36, p. 361; DURH3/36/38; 37, m. 12d.

An MP for Appleby again in the Parliament which ended on 23 Dec. 1435, Lambton may have remained in London. He was, in any event, there in the following Easter term, when he appeared in person in the court of common pleas to sue a fisher of Chester-le-Street for breaking his close at Haydon Bridge and killing a greyhound. More interestingly, on 1 Oct. 1436 he secured licence from the bishop to grant his land in Penshaw near Lambton to a distinguished group of feoffees, headed by the earl of Northumberland, William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich, and Walter, Lord Hungerford†. The purpose of this feoffment does not appear, but it suggests that our MP could call upon some powerful figures to support him in his private affairs.13 C219/14/5; CP40/701, rot. 217d; DURH3/36/57.

Three years later Lambton’s landholdings were further increased by his mother’s death. In her will of 27 Aug. 1439 she remembered all her children, bequeathing our MP ‘principalem meam peciam coopertam stantem cum pedibus longioribus’ together with £10 in cash, and naming him, alongside his brother Thomas, as supervisor.14 Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 72. In July 1441 what might be described as another part of his parental inheritance fell into his hands: he was appointed customs collector in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, an office his father had held before him.15 CFR, xvii. 166. All seemed set fair for his career to make further progress. In the Parliament of January 1442 he acted with another local lawyer, Robert Rodes*, as proxy for the prior of the chapter of Durham, but soon after his career was cut short, like his father’s had before him, by premature death. He made his will on 11 Mar. 1443, and was dead 15 days later when writs of diem clausit extremum were issued by the episcopal chancery.16 DURH3/46, m. 8.

Lambton’s will shows him to have been a man of considerable means. As befitting a man of affairs, he wished to be buried in the church of the Friars Carmelite in London alongside the tomb of his father, bequeathing ten marks to a friar of that house to pray for their souls. Prayers were also to be said for his soul in the churches of St. Dunstan in Fleet Street and St. Andrew in Holborn, and he remembered his societas of Furnival’s Inn with the modest bequest of 20s. All his large bequests were, however, reserved for his immediate family. He left his wife, Joan, and his sister, Alice, £100 each, and his brother, Sir John, the knight of Rhodes, 100 marks. He named as the supervisors of his will his feoffee, William Alnwick, then bishop of Lincoln, and the treasurer, Lord Cromwell.17 PCC 15 Rous, abstracted in North Country Wills (Surtees Soc. cxvi), 44-45. Lambton died childless and was succeeded by his brother, Thomas, who did homage for the family estates on 2 Apr. 1443, a week before our MP’s will was proved.18 DURH3/46, m. 8. Thomas’s direct descendants had a distinguished record of parliamentary service from the late seventeenth century. John Lambton† was created earl of Durham in 1833.19 CP, iv. 559; The Commons 1820-32, vi. 28-37.