GLOVER, John

Glover was a townsman of Warwick and a very close associate of the town’s most prominent inhabitant, John Brome II*. On 8 Jan. 1444 Brome named him as his attorney to receive seisin of property at Baddesley Clinton, and thereafter our MP acted for him as feoffee and witness to deeds.1 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Ferrers mss, DR3/241; Warws. RO, Walter of Woodcote mss, CR26/W25, XXVII; Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 2635. There is no evidence to identify him with the namesake who, as a follower of Sir Edmund Ferrers (d.1435) of Chartley, Staffs., was involved in a violent confrontation with the servants of Joan, Lady Beauchamp of Abergavenny, at Birmingham on 17 Mar. 1431: E159/210, brevia Trin. rot. 4d; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 389-90. This friendship explains why, in Michaelmas term 1443, Glover headed a list of 14 men facing an action of trespass sued by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. Several of his co-defendants were from Brome’s manor of Baddesley Clinton; and there can thus be little doubt that the action was an episode in a continuing dispute between Brome, on the one hand, and, if not the earl himself, then the earl’s servants, on the other. The result of the suit is not known, but it distinguishes Glover as a man of some standing: he is described as ‘of Warwick, gentleman’ and he is the only one of the defendants to face process by distraint rather than arrest.2 KB27/770, rot. 108d.

Brome’s influence may also explain Glover’s election to Parliament. The indenture witnessing this return, dated 10 Feb. 1449, is irregular in two respects: no attestors are named and Glover’s name has been added over an erasure, one that took place before the writ was endorsed for there his name appears without amendment.3 C219/15/6. No obvious explanation suggests itself, but it may be that he was Brome’s choice rather than that of the burgesses of Warwick. However this may be, there is better evidence that his patron advanced him in another way. Brome enjoyed a long and successful career in the Exchequer, rising to the office of under treasurer in 1455, and this suggests that Glover is to be identified with the royal auditor active in the late 1450s. It is surely more than coincidence that this auditor was first employed while Brome, as under treasurer, was in a position to influence such appointments. On 21 Feb. 1458 he was appointed joint auditor of the lands of the earldom of Richmond and of the bishopric of Durham; and on the following 11 Aug. he was named jointly to audit the accounts of royal officials in North Wales and Cheshire from the previous Michaelmas, significantly a nomination occasioned by the refusal to act of the previous auditors, one of whom was Brome himself.4 CPR, 1452-61, p. 416; CHES2/131, m. 4; 132, m. 17. On 15 July 1458 he was paid, at 5s. a day, for working 28 days in auditing the accts. of the Richmond lands: E403/816, m. 3. If, as seems almost certain, this auditor was our MP, his career, like that of his patron, floundered on the change of regime. On 17 June 1460 Glover was commissioned to audit the accounts as joint-auditor of the lordship of Denbigh, forfeited by the duke of York after the attainder of the Yorkists in the Coventry Parliament. The swift recovery of the duke’s fortunes can have given him no time to discharge this function, and he is not known to have acted as an auditor again. There are no further references to Glover.5 CPR, 1452-61, p. 597. In 1468 a namesake received assignments in the Exchequer, but this was a servant of the Wydevilles not our MP: E403/840, m. 6; CPR, 1467-77, p. 339.