LOVELL, William II

It is impossible to identify Lovell for certain, although he was a close relative of his namesake William Lovell, 7th Lord Lovell and Holand, a prominent soldier and servant of the Lancastrian Crown. The usual assumption is that he was Lord Lovell’s second son, a relatively obscure figure who played little part in public affairs. Although a younger son, this William Lovell was well provided for, since his father left him a dozen or so more manors in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Hertfordshire, Kent and Surrey, as well as other estates in Oxfordshire and elsewhere.7 VCH Wilts. ix. 177; CP, ix. 219-20; VCH Warws. iii. 53; Lincoln Diocese Docs. (EETS, cxlix), 82. He also came into possession of estates in eastern England and East Anglia in the right of his wife Eleanor, sole daughter and heir of Robert, Lord Morley (d.1442), whom he had married by 1465.8 Norf. Archaeology, xxx. 252, provides no references to support its claim that they married in 1460. He assumed the title Lord Morley in her right, and it was as such that he received a summons to the abortive Parliament of 1469. Late in life, he also succeeded to a manor at Shabbingdon, Buckinghamshire, from his mother Alice, one of daughters and eventual heirs of John, Lord Deincourt (d.1406).9 VCH Bucks. iv. 102. At some stage during the 1450s, Alice entered the service of the infant prince of Wales, presumably as a governess. Owing to ‘bodily infirmities’, she left the prince’s service in March 1460; yet she was to marry a second husband, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, in 1463 and survived until 1474.10 CPR, 1452-61, p. 567; 1461-7, p. 222; C140/52/31. According to Wedgwood and Holt’s History of Parliament, her Lancastrian connexions were what won a seat for her son in the controversial Parliament of 1459,11 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 557. to which his elder brother John received a summons as the new Lord Lovell. William Lovell, Lord Morley, died in the summer of 1476, a few weeks before his wife Eleanor.12 C140/59/73. According to most of his inqs. post mortem, he died in July 1476, although some say his death occurred in Sept. that year. Their son and heir Henry was then about 11 years of age, and he became a ward of the Crown. The King assigned several stewardships and other offices on the Morley estates to various of his Household men to hold during the boy’s minority, and in March 1477 he granted Henry’s wardship to Richard Beauchamp, bishop of Salisbury, and Peter Courtenay, dean of St. Stephen’s, Westminster.13 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 603; 1476-85, pp. 5, 15, 16, 48.

By virtue of his family connexions and lands in Oxfordshire, Henry’s father was well qualified to represent that county in Parliament but, if the MP, he would have entered the Commons at a particularly early age.14 He was still a minor or had only just attained his majority at his father’s death in 1455. His eldest bro. John had only recently come of age when their fa. died: CP, viii. 223. On that basis, it would seem more likely that the MP of 1459 was the younger brother of the Lord Lovell who died in 1455. An obscure figure, in 1446 this William Lovell was residing at Rotherfield Greys in south Oxfordshire, where one of the manors which his sister-in-law, Alice Deincourt, had brought to the Lovell family was situated.15 E. Suss. RO, Gage of Firle mss, SAS/G5/2; CIPM, xxii. 30. By then he had already greatly enhanced his prospects by marrying Elizabeth, the eldest of Thomas St. Cler’s three daughter and coheirs, but the controversies over the St. Cler inheritance mean that he may not have secured any part of it before the mid 1440s. A younger son of Sir Philip St. Cler (d.1408), a landowner with extensive estates in southern England and the Midlands, Thomas had succeeded his brother John, while still a minor, in 1418.16 VCH Surr. iii. 177; CIPM, xxii. 359. Lawsuits over his unexpected inheritance occupied much of his short adult life, difficulties that may have lain behind his decision to convey away his lands to feoffees.17 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 272; iv. 277-8. Whatever his motives for such a transfer, a series of inquisitions held after his death overseas in 1435 found that he made it in order to defraud the King of the wardship of his daughters.18 CIPM, xxiv. 415-18; CPR, 1436-41, p. 443; CIMisc. viii. 114-17; CFR, xvii. 79-80. These investigations were still taking place in late 1438 when the Crown sold the wardship and marriages of the three girls to (Sir) Thomas Stanley II* and Thomas Pycot for 200 marks.19 CPR, 1436-41, p. 241. The grant to Stanley and Pycot proved short-lived, for in the following February they were recommitted to the keeping of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester.20 CFR, xvii. 69

Exactly when Lovell married Elizabeth – about 13 years old at her father’s death – is unknown, although she was certainly his wife at the beginning of 1443. Together with her sisters Eleanor and Edith and their respective husbands John Gage and Richard Harcourt*, Elizabeth and Lovell brought collusive actions in the court of common pleas against Thomas St. Cler’s surviving feoffees to secure their title to the manor of Chalgrove in Oxfordshire and eight other manors in Sussex.21 CP40/728, rots. 117, 118. It was not, however, until December 1445 that the Crown formally licensed the St. Cler sisters and their husbands to enter their patrimony.22 CPR, 1436-41, p. 443. Poorly documented, Elizabeth’s share included manors at East Grinstead, West Dean and Westbourne in Sussex,23 VCH Suss. iv. 129; CPR, 1441-6, p. 443; CIMisc. viii. 117; Suss. Arch. Collns. lxii. 2; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 1141; Gage of Firle mss, SAS/G5/2. and the manor and advowson of Wethersfield in Suffolk,24 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 645. but it is not clear whether she ever gained possession of any of her late father’s lands in Oxfordshire. She and Lovell became embroiled in a long and complicated dispute over the manor of Stanton St. John in that county, a property their father seems to have lost to a rival claimant, Thomas St. John, in the late 1420s. It had subsequently passed by marriage to the Lydyard family but the St. Cler coheirs and their husbands appear to have revived their father’s claim, for in 1451 Lovell, Gage, Harcourt and their respective wives conveyed it to a group of feoffees acting on their behalf. It was recovered by Thomas Lydyard later in the same decade, probably so that he could ratify a title which he had already transferred to the Chamberleyns (descendants of Elizabeth’s paternal grandmother, Margaret Lovein), who were certainly in possession in the mid 1470s.25 VCH Oxon. v. 285; Add. 5937, f. 40; CP25(1)/191/29/20. The St. Cler coheirs and their husbands were also engaged in litigation over the manor of Hardwick in the same county in 1450, although with what result is unknown. Seven years later, the King jointly pardoned them all debts and accounts due to him from the issues of Stanton St. John and the manor of Barton St. John, another Oxfordshire manor to which it appears they were unable to make good their claim.26 CP40/758, rot. 213; CPR, 1452-61, p. 350.

Even if the pardon of 1457 is the last definite reference to this William Lovell, it is possible that he was still alive at the summoning of the Parliament of 1459 and that he, rather than his nephew, the future Lord Morley, sat for Oxfordshire in that assembly. As with his nephew, there is no record of his having ever played any part in local government in the county, but he might have looked to his family connexions to help him to gain election to the Commons. Evidently considerably older than his wife, he was certainly dead by June 1461, when as a single woman Elizabeth made a bond to a London fishmonger, and by Michaelmas term 1462 she was married to Richard Lewknor*.27 KB27/806, rot. 301. In spite of her second marriage, it was as ‘Elizabeth St. Cler’ that she became involved in yet another quarrel over the St. Cler inheritance, this time over two of her father’s manors in Kent: Lullingstone castle and Queencourt in Ospringe. In February 1471 she and the heirs of her by then dead sisters, her nephews William Gage and Christopher Harcourt, made entries on to the properties. They were swiftly ejected from both; in the case of Lullingstone by John Newburgh II*, a descendant of the last Lord Poyntz, one of its previous owners. Newburgh obtained custody of Lullingstone from the Exchequer in December 1472, and he won possession of the castle against Elizabeth and her coheirs in the court of King’s bench in the following Easter term. In the meantime, Lewknor and Elizabeth’s cousin Thomas Hoo II* had managed to secure a lease of Queencourt from the Crown, but they relinquished it at the end of October 1473 when the Exchequer increased their annual farm from £15 to £53.28 C140/42/46; Peds. Plea Rolls ed. Wrottesley, 434-5; CFR, xxi. nos. 143, 152, 215. One of Hoo’s heirs at his death in October 1486, Elizabeth herself survived until 1492. Her successor was her son who, like Lord Morley’s son, bore the name Henry Lovell.29 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 205; ii. 645; iii. 1141; Suss. Arch. Collns. lxii. 2.