GASCOIGNE, Sir William

The Gascoigne family, anciently established at Gawthorpe (in the parish of Harewood), near Leeds, had been significantly advanced by a combination of the successful legal career of our MP’s grandfather, another Sir William, who was chief justice of King’s bench from 1400 to 1413, and their service to the house of Lancaster. The future chief justice began his career in John of Gaunt’s service, and the judge’s brother, Richard (d.1423) was chief steward of the north parts of the duchy of Lancaster.3 S.K. Walker, Political Culture in Late Med. Eng. ed. Braddick and Harriss, 91, 102-3; A. James, ‘Men and Gentry Culture in Fifteenth-Cent. Yorks.’ (York Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 2012), 230-40. Our MP’s father maintained this tradition of service, although in doing so he ensured that his tenure of the family estates would be only brief. The former chief justice survived in retirement until 1419, by which time his son had embarked on a military career. In Henry V’s 1417 campaign the son served in the retinue of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and he continued to serve in France after his father’s death. He died on 28 Mar. 1422, probably as a casualty of the gruelling siege of Meaux, leaving our MP, a youth of 18, as a minor.4 E101/50/1, m. 3; 51/2, m. 37; CIPM, xxii. 193. Before departing on his last campaign, however, the soldier had made provision for the eventuality of death. On 19 May 1421, four days before the end of the Parliament in which he was representing Yorkshire, he granted all his lands to four feoffees, headed by two of those he had named as executors, Henry Chamber and John Mauleverer. On the following 6 Aug., by which time he had returned to France, the feoffees settled the manors of Thorp Arch, Shipley and Cottingley as a jointure for his wife. The feoffees were also instructed (at least according to the ex parte statement of two of his younger children) that, in the event of the Gascoigne heir inheriting as a minor, they were to receive the issues of the lands that remained in their hands and dispose of them, with the widow’s advice, to the profit of his unmarried children for the period of the minority.5 CIPM, xxii. 193; Test. Ebor. i (Surtees Soc. iv), 402-3; C1/9/256.

As a result of these arrangements, our MP as the heir avoided a wardship outside the family, but on coming of age in about 1425 he came into an inheritance burdened by the over-generous jointure for his mother. Further, his paternal step-grandmother, Joan Pickering, held as her dower the family’s manor of Wheldale (a few miles east of Gawthorpe), and his mother’s dower entitlement represented an additional deduction from his immediate expectations. In Easter term 1423 his mother had successfully sued the feoffees for her dower in the family’s manors of Gawthorpe, Askwith and Burghwallis (although, curiously, she was still awaiting execution of judgement as late as 1427).6 Test. Ebor. i. 394; CP40/658, rot. 133. None the less, the Gascoigne estate, although almost entirely confined to the West Riding, was sufficient to bear these charges without reducing our MP to poverty. According to the petition mentioned above, in the three years of his minority the feoffees had collected issues worth 500 marks from the lands that were not in the hands of the widows. Even allowing for some exaggeration, this was a handsome sum. In any event, even if the widows did represent a compromising financial burden for the young William, it was a short-lived one. The elder Joan died in 1426 and his mother in the early 1430s. Further, the death of the latter brought him property in York.7 The will of the chief justice’s wid., made on 1 May 1426, was proved on the following 12 June: Test. Ebor. i. 410. Our MP’s mother does not appear in the records after Oct. 1431: W. Yorks. Archive Service, Leeds, Gascoigne mss, WYL115/F/5/1/101.

Shortly before their deaths Gascoigne made a contentious marriage, taking as his wife a daughter of the wealthy North Riding esquire, Thomas Clarell of Aldwark. The marriage had an obvious benefit from his point of view. Widows could represent financial gain as well as loss to a landholder, and as his bride was twice-widowed she augmented his income, particularly in respect of the property she held from her first marriage to John Fitzwilliam.8 On 22 Feb. 1426 he and his wife presented to the Fitzwilliam church of Sprotborough: York Sede Vacante Reg. 1423-6 ed. Kirby, 90. Yet for some unknown reason the marriage, although seemingly a routine one between social equals, was made clandestinely, without the reading of banns and in an un-consecrated place. As a result the priest who conducted the ceremony, Thomas Clarell, the bride’s kinsman (perhaps her brother), who was later to be vicar of Leeds, incurred the penalty of excommunication, as did four of those present, including the bride’s father and John Mauleverer, one of the Gascoigne feoffees. They suffered only briefly: on 7 Feb. 1426 William Bramley, a former rector of Sprotborough and then rector of All Saints Pavement, York, and John Attlane, rector of the Clarells’ home parish of Rawmarsh, were commissioned to absolve them after they had made submission in the chapter house of York cathedral.9 Ibid. 88-89; Test. Ebor. iii. (Surtees Soc. xlv), 325. With the validity of the marriage assured, Gascoigne made a settlement in his wife’s favour. By a fine levied in Michaelmas term 1427 he had the manor of Burghwallis settled on her in jointure.10 CP25(1)/280/155/42.

Gascoigne was now a wealthy man whose family links to the house of Lancaster made him an obvious candidate for knighthood, and it is probable that he was one of those knighted on the eve of the coronation of Henry VI on 6 Nov. 1429. He was certainly a knight ten days later when he and his close associate, John Thwaites, a prominent West Riding lawyer, entered into three statutes staple at Westminster in as much as 700 marks to William Brocas*, hereditary master of the King’s buckhounds; and on the following day in another bond in 400 marks.11 C241/235/24, 26, 30; CCR, 1429-35, p. 37. Precisely what underlay these onerous undertakings is unknown, but there can be no doubt that they were related to the Yorkshire lands of Brocas’s late mother, Joan Middleton. She had died seised in the previous March of the manors of Denton in Wharfedale and Ouston in Tadcaster with lands at Askwith (where the Gascoignes already held a manor) near Denton. These lands lay not far from our MP’s home but a long way from Brocas’s in Hampshire, and it is likely that our MP had agreed to purchase them from him.12 In Joan’s inq. these lands were valued, no doubt very conservatively, at only about £13 p.a.: CIPM, xxiii. 251.

If, however, Gascoigne was the purchaser, the purchase was not a straightforward one. The lands had come to the Brocas family through the marriage of William’s grandfather, Sir Bernard Brocas†, to Agnes, daughter and heiress of Mauger Vavasour of Denton, but that marriage had ended in a divorce and it is clear that a residual claim to the property remained in the Vavasour family.13 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 361. In February and July 1430 Gascoigne, in company with his father-in-law, Thwaites, Sir William Ryther* and others, sought to protect his apparent purchase by bringing no fewer than three assizes of novel disseisin against John Vavasour of Weston (near Askwith). The result is not known, but later evidence shows that our MP successfully established his title.14 JUST1/1542, rot. 8d; JUST4/8/3, nos. 139, 141; C66/427, m. 32d; CP40/771, cart. rot.

While these matters were pending Gascoigne, as befitting a new knight, made plans to take part in the expedition for Henry VI’s coronation as king of France. He sued out letters of protection on 8 Mar. 1430, but if he did cross the Channel with the King at the end of April, his stay overseas was relatively brief. He was, it appears, back in England by the following Christmas Day when, in another expression of his new wealth and standing, he was elected to represent his native county in Parliament.15 DKR, xlviii. 268; C219/14/2. On 26 Mar. 1431, six days after the end of this Parliament, he began his career in local government when appointed to his first ad hoc commission. Two years later, in November 1433, he was named to a commission that may have had a personal interest for him: along with his father-in-law and Thwaites, he was charged with delivering from the King’s gaol at York his stepfather, Sir Ralph Greystoke, then seemingly resident at his manor of Thorpe Arch.16 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 126, 349, 350. More significantly, he was among the select group of leading gentry summoned by John, duke of Bedford, to the great council held at Westminster between 24 Apr. and 8 May 1434. The subject of discussion was the future conduct of the French war and most of those summoned had significant military experience. Why Gascoigne, who, on the available evidence, did not, should have been chosen is unclear.17 PPC, iv. 212; G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 236.

Soon thereafter Gascoigne was involved in a revealing, if minor, episode of disorder. In Michaelmas term 1434 he refused to pay the levy called ‘insyluer’, an annual payment of 6s. 8d. due to the duchy of Lancaster from the holder of every whole knight’s fee within the honour of Pontefract. When the bailiff of the honour, Thomas Strother, made distraint for payment in Gascoigne’s manor of Wheldale, Sir William led a campaign of generalised resistance to the levy, suing the bailiff for trespass in the common pleas.18 C1/73/115. Perhaps what appears to have been a championing of local rights served to recommend him again to the Yorkshire electors, for on 12 Sept. 1435 he was returned in company with Sir Robert Waterton*, the stepson of his wife.19 C219/14/5. Thereafter his importance in his native county quickly mounted. On the following 17 Dec., six days before the end of this assembly, he was named to an important commission charged with investigating the claims of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, to the four manors in Yorkshire and Northumberland lost to the Percys on the attainder of his grandfather in 1406. On 22 Dec. 1440 he was at York castle to act, with several other of the county’s knights, as a juror at the inquisition post mortem of Joan, widow of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d.1425).20 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 531-2; CIPM, xxv. 519.

He was named as sheriff of Yorkshire in the following November, and received at the end of his term the standard pardon of account in £140 with a further allowance for his expenses in the safeguarding of the King’s fish in the water of the Foss at York.21 E159/219, brevia Mich. rot. 25d, Hil. rot. 15d.The pardons of acct. awarded to the Yorks. sheriffs showed a marked increase over time. The sheriffs of 1438-45 were allowed either £140 or £150, but those of 1448-56 had between 360 and 450 marks: C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), ii. 104. A further year later, on 30 Nov. 1443, he was the beneficiary of a Crown lease of the lands of his neighbour, William Ingleby of Colton, to hold at an annual rent of 20 marks during a minority.22 CFR, xvii. 283; xviii. 65.

In view of his standing as one of the leading men of the West Riding, it is curious to find that soon after Gascoigne was indicted for homicide. According to a jury sitting before Thomas Davell, one of the Yorkshire coroners, on 19 Apr. 1444, he was one of the six principals in the early-morning murder of a collier, Thomas Dawson, at Tadcaster, a Percy manor near Gascoigne’s manor at Thorp Arch. Gascoigne was clearly the main instigator: those indicted with him were his servants or kinsmen, most notably his brother, Henry, his brothers-in-law, Richard Redmayne* and William Ryther, and Thomas Clarell, vicar of Leeds.23 KB9/246/52. In Trin. term 1444 Davell was fined a hefty £10 for the holding of an insufficient inq.: KB27/733, fines rot. 1. Later evidence shows that this murder had a surprising context. On the following 7 June the sheriff of Yorkshire, Sir Edmund Talbot, was ordered to make proclamation for the appearance of Gascoigne and his adherents before the King to answer for their oppressive conduct against the tenants and servants of the earl of Northumberland.24 C255/3/9/17A. Such behaviour stands in contradiction to other indications that Sir William was on good terms with the Percy earl. His appointment to the 1435 commission is likely to have been as the earl’s nominee, and it is not known why the relationship should subsequently have broken down. The story of the last years of Gascoigne’s career shows that relations were subsequently repaired, at least in part. In the short term the legal proceedings arising from the murder of the unfortunate collier occasioned Gascoigne some difficulty. The indictment was called into King’s bench on a writ of certiorari on the following 28 Aug., presumably at his suit, and on 26 Sept. he obtained a pardon. The enrolment of this pardon, specific to the offence, on the patent roll shows, however, that the matter was not a routine one. He then had to face an appeal of murder brought in Trinity term 1445 by the dead man’s brother, John Dawson. He was put to the inconvenience of appearing in King’s bench in several succeeding terms before he and the other principals were acquitted before the justices of assize at Selby on 1 June 1447.25 KB9/246/51; CPR, 1441-6, p. 297; KB27/737, rot. 99d.

Gascoigne soon recovered from these drawn out legal proceedings, which must, if nothing else, have been a blow to his local prestige. He may have made a virtue out of the necessity of defending himself against the appeal by spending a sustained period at Westminster late in 1445. At the end of October he answered the appeal and then conducted some other business. On 3 Nov., as former sheriff of Yorkshire, he had enrolled in the Exchequer a bond in 100s. to one of the barons, William Fallon; and he was again there on the following day to receive the reassignment of a bad tally on behalf of his fellow Yorkshireman, Robert Rolleston, former clerk of the great wardrobe.26 E159/222, commissiones Mich.; E403/759, m. 3. He may have still been at Westminster a month later when he sued out from the Crown an exemplification of the quo warranto of 1293 in respect of a grant of free warren for his property at Burton Leonard in the honour of Knaresborough. The connexions established by this and other visits to Westminster help explain how he was able, by Michaelmas 1449, to find a place for his eldest son, another William, in the royal household.27 CPR, 1441-6, p, 397; E101/410/3.

Gascoigne’s standing was further validated by his third election to Parliament on 5 Mar. 1453, only the day before the MPs were due to assemble at Reading (the Parliament had been summoned at unusually short notice). His return came at a difficult time in Yorkshire politics as the uneasy co-operation that had characterized recent relations between the great northern houses of Percy and Neville was beginning to give way to open hostility. It is therefore tempting to interpret the result of this election in the context of the development of two rival affinities, but this would be a mistake. The sheriff who conducted it, Sir James Strangeways*, was a senior adherent of the Nevilles, yet neither of those elected – Gascoigne and Sir Brian Stapleton* – could be similarly described. More significant in explaining their election was probably their connexion with the royal household – Stapleton directly and Gascoigne through his son – for the subsequent assembly was notable for the number of Household men elected.28 C219/16/2. Any temptation to interpret the election in terms of northern rivalries is further diminished by evidence that, at least at this stage of his career, Gascoigne’s connexion with the Percys, itself somewhat equivocal, was balanced by one with the Nevilles. At an unknown date between June and December 1453 he joined the two Neville earls and such Neville adherents as (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I* and Thomas Colt* in entering a series of bonds to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, no doubt in connexion with the marriage of Cromwell’s niece, Maud Willoughby, to the earl of Salisbury’s younger son, Sir Thomas Neville.29 Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Misc. 303.

While an MP, Gascoigne furthered a long-standing matter of personal concern. On 6 May 1453, during the second session, he and his feoffees secured a quitclaim from William Brocas’s son, another William, in respect of the manors of Ouston and the lands at Askwith that our MP had acquired, seemingly by purchase, nearly 25 years before.30 CCR, 1447-54, p. 434. Interestingly, Cromwell was among his feoffees, which, given that lord’s reluctant alliance with the Nevilles, may be taken as a further sign of Gascoigne’s own association with that family. The same could also be said in respect of his appointment on 29 Sept. 1454, during the duke of York’s first protectorate, to a commission to resist a rising in Lancashire that represented the last embers of the failed rising of Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and his Percy ally, Thomas, Lord Egremont.31 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 219-20; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 353.

The division of Gascoigne’s political loyalties between Neville and Percy was reflected in the contrasting allegiances of at least two of his sons-in-law. His daughter Alice had, by 1438, married Sir John Saville* of Thornhill, a few miles to the south of Harewood; in the 1450s Saville was an adherent of York and the Nevilles.32 Notts. Archs., Savile of Rufford mss, DD/SR/36/44-5; P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 238. By contrast his daughter Joan was, by the spring of 1449, the wife of a nearer neighbour, Henry Vavasour of Hazelwood, one of those indicted for the Percy attack on the Nevilles at Heworth on 24 Aug. 1453.33 Arnold, i. 133, app. 87; KB9/149/1/87. The marriage had been made by 20 Mar. 1449 when our MP and his son granted the couple the manor of Kelfield (in Stillingfleet), one of the few Gascoigne properties outside the W. Riding: VCH Yorks. (E. Riding), iii. 105; Harley 245, f. 127. The groom was head of the senior branch of the Vavasours, not of the branch that had a claim to the Brocas property. These conflicting connexions must have made it difficult for Sir William to commit himself when open war broke out in 1459. For his eldest son the problem of commitment was eased by his service in the royal household and he actively supported Percy and Lancaster. On 8 Dec. 1459, when the Lancastrians were in control of government, he was appointed to the bench in the West Riding, a distinction never attained by our MP; and 13 days later he was named to the Lancastrian commission of array there. He went on to fight in the Lancastrian ranks at the battle of Wakefield on 30 Dec. 1460, when he was knighted by the earl of Northumberland.34 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 560, 684; Arnold, 149. His father’s loyalties are less easy to discern. Sir William’s appearances in the records in these crucial years are confined to contradictory nominations to two oyer and terminer commissions. The first was issued on 30 May 1460 under the Lancastrian regime and headed by the earl of Northumberland, but the second, dated on the following 8 Dec., was issued under the Yorkist government. The latter was of very curious composition: it covered ten counties of the north and Midlands and was headed by the duke of York and the two Neville earls. Yet it also included a few, among them William, Viscount Beaumont, and Lionel, Lord Welles, who were to prove militant Lancastrians. Their inclusion makes it difficult to argue that Gascoigne’s nomination indicates that he retained the trust of the Nevilles, but, in view of his earlier connexion with that great family, it suggests that he might. The safest conclusion is that the son’s active involvement in the civil war of 1459-61 was not shared by the father.35 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 609, 652-3.

However this may be, both father and son survived the change of regime. Our MP, described as ‘the elder’, was able to sue out a general pardon, enrolled on the patent roll on 15 July 1461, and although a ‘Sir William Gascoigne’ appears in a chronicler’s list of those attainted in the 1461 Parliament, neither father or son suffered punishment.36 CPR, 1461-7, p. 24; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 778. Neither, however, had much longer to live. The younger Sir William may have been dead by as early as March 1462, when his father sued out another pardon without the designation of ‘the elder’, and was certainly so by 13 Jan. 1464 when his widow was given licence to marry Sir James Haryngton† of Hornby.37 C67/45, mm. 21, 31; Test. Ebor. iii. 337. This match was a contradiction of her late husband’s loyalties in that the Haryngtons were closely associated with the Nevilles (indeed her past and future husbands were probably in opposing ranks at the battle of Wakefield, where Sir James’s father, (Sir) Thomas, and elder brother were killed), and it may be that our MP considered the match as a means of rebuilding his own connexion with the Nevilles. If so, he did not live to benefit. He has not been traced in the records after 5 Sept. 1462, when he made a conveyance as one of the feoffees of his kinsman, Richard Aske of Aughton; but, as it was not until Michaelmas term 1466 that his widow brought an action against his feoffees for dower, he probably survived until about 1465. This action was probably collusive in that several of the feoffees – (Sir) John Gresley*, her nephew, Sir Henry Vavasour, her son-in-law, and William Fitzwilliam, her son by her first husband – were her kin. At about the same time (in any event between March 1465 and June 1467) she petitioned the chancellor against two other feoffees to comply with her late husband’s instructions and convey to her for life the manor of Thorp Arch.38 Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xvii. 109; CP40/821, rot. 288d; C1/32/118.

A surviving tomb in the church of Harewood is almost certainly the memorial of Gascoigne and his wife, and, in a further indication of our MP’s successful adaption to the new political dispensation of the 1460s, the male effigy is represented wearing the Yorkist collar of suns and roses.39 This tomb has traditionally and erroneously been attributed to his son. For its re-attribution to our MP and suggestion that the son’s tomb survives in Wentworth church, having been moved there from the priory of nearby Monk Bretton, see Routh and Knowles, 27-29, 36-40, 92-93. The family had a distinguished later history. At least two of Sir William’s sons were educated at Lincoln’s Inn, and one of them, Robert (d.1473), served as governor there and a j.p. of the quorum in the West Riding.40 J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 731-3. His grandson, yet another Sir William, strengthened the family’s association with the Percys by marrying Margaret, daughter of Henry, earl of Northumberland (d.1461). His long-lived great-grandson, another Sir William† (d.1551), a knight of the body under Henry VII, represented Yorkshire in 1495.41 For brief descriptions of their careers: Plumpton Letters (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, viii), 316-18; James, 242-7.