CORNWALL, Otto

Cornwall enjoyed a brief but active career.1 His parents were married by Mar. 1429, but probably only shortly before, and it is thus almost certain that our MP was under 40 at his death: C.G.S. Foljambe and C. Reade, House of Cornewall, 191. He first appears in the records on 2 Apr. 1457, when he served on the grand jury which laid indictments before a powerful royal commission at Hereford, against the Yorkist faction in the county, headed by (Sir) Walter Devereux I* and Sir William Herbert*. That he should have been nominated to sit on such an important jury is an indication that he shared the strong Lancastrian sympathies of another of the jurors, his eldest brother, Thomas, an esquire of Henry VI’s household. Otto’s nomination as escheator in the following November, in succession to either his uncle or brother, Richard, is also to be seen in terms of the family’s local importance as Lancastrian loyalists.2 KB9/35/61d; CFR, xix. 197.

It was probably during his term as escheator that Otto made a respectable marriage. His wife was the daughter of one of the leading families of Hereford and widow of a Gloucestershire esquire, Robert Mattesdon, who, through his mother, was coheir of the Herefordshire knight, Sir John Chandos† (d.1428), and of Thomas Berkeley† (d.1405) of Coberley (Gloucestershire). Mattesdon had not been as wealthy as such kinship might be taken to imply, for Chandos had alienated most of his lands from his heirs. None the less, the widow enjoyed dower in the manors of Stoke Orchard, Coberley and Kingsholm (Gloucestershire), together with a jointure interest in the Chandos moiety of the manor of Lugwardine (Herefordshire).3 C139/168/23; CFR, xix. 224-6; CP, iii.150; CIPM, xxiii. 253; CCR, 1429-35, p. 1; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 753. The match put our MP to the inconvenience of suing out a royal pardon for an unlicensed marriage to the widow of a tenant-in-chief: this was granted on 9 Feb. 1459 in return for a modest fine of two marks, and on the same day the escheator of Gloucestershire was ordered to assign Katherine’s dower.4 CPR, 1452-61, p. 483; CCR, 1454-61, p. 322. That Cornwall was able to make so reasonable a match was due to a settlement made upon him by his father, at whose death he had been only a boy. Before departing on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, from which only his heart returned to be buried at Burford, Edmund had willed that his manor of Brimfield in north Herefordshire be divided between his two younger sons, our MP and Richard, and their issue.5 Foljambe and Reade, 195-6.

On 13 Oct. 1459 Cornwall accompanied his brother Thomas to the election held at Hereford on the day after the Yorkists had ignominiously fled from nearby Ludford Bridge when outfaced by a superior Lancastrian force. It is likely that the brothers had been with the latter, and they now did further service for Henry VI’s cause by helping to ensure the return of two local royalists, their uncle, Sir John Barre, and Thomas Fitzharry*. A few weeks later, on 5 Nov., Otto Cornwall was himself returned for Hereford. It is not known whether he had property in the city, but he had obvious recommendations for election: his wife was a Chippenham, a family with a distinguished recent record of parliamentary service for Hereford, and both this family and his own were supporters of Lancaster. If the electors needed any further encouragement, it might have lain in the consideration that the mayor who conducted the hustings was his wife’s first cousin, John Chippenham.6 C219/16/5.

Cornwall’s commitment to Lancaster certainly went beyond a mere willingness to serve in a controversial Parliament. Since he was exempted from the pardon of 6 Mar. 1461, issued at the beginning of Edward IV’s reign, he was almost certainly in arms against the Yorkists at one or more engagements of the civil war of 1459-61, almost certainly Ludford Bridge and probably also at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, not far from Hereford, early in February 1461. In contrast with his eldest brother, Thomas, however, he was not considered irreconcilable, and he quickly won a pardon. Indeed, on 11 Dec. 1461 he was not only pardoned but restored to his manor of Brimfield and the lands he held in his wife’s right. A few months later, on 29 Apr. 1462, he sued out a further pardon under the designation ‘gentleman, alias of Hereford, esquire, alias late escheator of Herefordshire’.7 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 55-56; CPR, 1461-7, p. 83; C67/45, m. 21. He had a connexion, albeit a very indirect one, with the Yorkists. Thomas Brydges*, an annuitant of Richard, duke of York, and MP in the Yorkist Parliament of 1460, was a first cousin once-removed of the first husband of our MP’s wife. In 1459 the two men were joint plaintiffs in an action of trespass: CP40/794, rot. 460d. Weighed against this quick rehabilitation, it was to be counted as a minor inconvenience that he faced the renewal of an action of conspiracy, first sued before the change of regime: several of those indicted in 1457 claimed that our MP and other Lancastrians, including his eldest brother, his uncle Barre, and three of his wife’s Chippenham kinsmen, had illegally conspired to secure these indictments.8 KB27/798, rot. 40d; 804, rot. 42; 808, rot. 77; 810, rot. 50d. This action seems to have come to nothing, and Cornwall was soon able to regain his place in a local society that was far more peaceful than it had been in the previous decade. In at least one context he acted in concert with one of his former foes: on 24 Sept. 1467, at Coventry, he joined Thomas Monnington*, one of those who had previously sued him for conspiracy, in entering a statute merchant to his late mother’s sister, Joan, widow of (Sir) Kynard de la Bere*, probably in connexion with her dispute with her son, Richard, also a party to the statute. His restoration to political health was complete, soon after this, with his election as mayor of Hereford, but unfortunately a failure in his physical health prevented further appointments. He died childless shortly before 26 Feb. 1469, when writs of diem clausit extremum were issued to the sheriff of Herefordshire.9 C241/260/3; C66/521, m. 24d; CFR, xx. 191. According to a much later case in Star Chamber, shortly before his death he had conveyed his part of the manor of Brimfield to feoffees headed by his uncle, Barre. His wife then took the issues until her death. She survived to a great age, marrying again into the gentry family of Bromwich and finally dying on 23 Mar. 1504.10 Foljambe and Reade, 195-6; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 753. The fact that her father had first sat in Parliament nearly a century before serves as testimony to her longevity.