GREEN, Henry

In the mid fourteenth century, Sir Henry Green (d.1369), c.j.KB, had built a remarkable fortune: large enough to endow two great gentry families. Both were wealthy, but the junior, settled at Drayton, was certainly the more politically active and probably the richer.9 CIPM, xii. 355. Sir Henry’s younger son, another Sir Henry† and the grandfather of our MP, considerably augmented the endowment of the younger branch by his marriage (during the judge’s lifetime) to the heiress of the Mauduits of Warminster. His execution as one of the most notorious supporters of the misrule of Richard II’s later years was a setback from which the family quickly recovered. Our MP’s uncle, Ralph Green, secured the restoration of the family estates and enjoyed a busy career in local administration in Northamptonshire and Wiltshire, serving no fewer than four terms as sheriff and twice sitting for the former county in Parliament. Curiously, however, he seems to have neglected to marry until in his late thirties and our MP’s father stood heir-presumptive to the Green inheritance throughout Ralph’s tenure of the estates.10 John was not landless in these years, for in 1397 his father had purchased the legal remainder of the manors of Hardwick and Grafton Underwood (Northants.) as provision for his younger sons: CP25(1)/178/89/175. John was in possession of these manors by 1406: R. Halstead, Succinct Gens. 190. It may have been in recognition of this fact that John named his first son after his elder brother, although the young Ralph was not destined to live long enough to inherit the family estates. The elder Ralph died childless, despite a marriage late in his life, in 1417, perhaps while serving in France, and our MP’s father entered the inheritance.

This inheritance was, however, a much depleted one. Although his elder brother’s marriage did not produce the heir to deprive John Green of the lands to which he had long stood heir, it did produce a widow with an interest in the Green lands far in excess of her common-law entitlement. When Ralph had married Katherine, daughter of the Norfolk baron, John, Lord Clifton (d.1388), he had settled on her a jointure which, even measured in the context of the social disparity between bride and groom, was very generous and one which showed little regard for the interests of his younger brother and nephews. It comprised the manors of Comberton (Cambridgeshire), Buckworth (Huntingdonshire), Chalton and Colworth (Bedfordshire), Wavendon, Great Woolstone and Emberton (Buckinghamshire), and, most significantly, those of Drayton, Lowick, Great Houghton, Cotes and Raunds (Northamptonshire) at the very heart of the family inheritance. Ralph’s brother could, however, take some comfort from the fact that those lands not settled in jointure remained in the hands of feoffees throughout the short marriage and hence Katherine could have no claim to dower. None the less, even for a family as wealthy as the Greens her jointure was a heavy burden.11 This jointure was settled by fine on the couple and the heirs of Ralph’s body by subinfeudation saving the reversion to the settling feoffees in the event of Ralph’s death without issue: CP25(1)/291/63/42; CIPM, xx. 765-8, 773-8. Although not included in the fine, the family’s manor of White Roding in Essex also passed into her hands: Halstead, 193-4; P. Morant, Essex, ii. 469. Our MP’s father had unsuccessfully challenged the settlement in Chancery: C1/4/45.

Katherine’s large jointure may explain why John Green had such an obscure career, although it was not to prove the same deterrent to our MP. When John died on 9 Feb. 1433 our MP, born at the house at Stepney belonging to Walter Green (probably his maternal uncle), was still short of his majority. Indeed, at this date he may not yet have been his father’s heir. When John had drawn up his will on the previous 28 Jan. his eldest son had still been alive, but the young Ralph must have died very soon after.12 CIPM, xxiv. 561; Halstead, 192-3. In any event our MP was recognized as John’s heir by 21 Apr. when he was named as such in his father’s Hampshire inquisition post mortem. On 1 May his marriage was granted to another Northamptonshire man, Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, and some six weeks later, on 19 June, the keeping of his lands was entrusted to Walter Green and to a rising local lawyer, William Tresham*. This no doubt was a favour to the young heir as the trustees were clearly friends of the family, but the arrangement was very quickly changed. A further royal grant made on the following 5 July gave both the marriage and the keeping to the archbishop on very favourable terms: a mere 20 marks p.a. for the lands and £200 for the marriage.13 CIPM, xxiv. 49; CPR, 1429-36, p. 265; CFR, xvi. 150, 154. The value of the grant was, however, diminished by the immediacy of Henry’s majority and the archbishop’s failure to contract him in marriage (although Henry may have financially compensated him for this failure). On 12 Dec. 1435 a writ for the proof of the heir’s age issued out of Chancery and process upon it was extraordinarily expeditious. Only eight days later an inquisition was held, and on the following day the escheator of Wiltshire was ordered to give him seisin.14 CIPM, xxiv. 561; CCR, 1435-41, p. 16.

To the burden of his brief minority and the very much more serious one of Katherine’s jointure was added that of the provision made for Henry’s mother. Under the terms of his father’s will she was to have for life all his properties in Northamptonshire (that is, the manors of Hardwick and Grafton Underwood, the advowson of the church of Grafton Underwood, and land in Irthlingborough), the manor of Grateley in Hampshire and the advowson of the church there, and the manor of Mathern near Chepstow in Wales, together with her common-law dower in his Wiltshire estates.15 CCR, 1429-35, p. 207; C139/58/32; Halstead, 192-3. Our MP’s two sisters were to be provided with £100 each for their marriages from the sale of wood in Hardwick and Grafton Underwood, or, in the event of Katherine’s death, from her jointure. Between them these two widows left our MP with only about a third of the entire Green inheritance, largely confined to the Mauduit inheritance of his grandmother in Wiltshire, which formed the secondary focus of the Green patrimony.16 In 1412 Ralph Green’s lands in Wilts. had been valued at 95 marks and this accords closely with the valuations given in his inquisition post mortem and that of his father: Feudal Aids, vi. 540; C138/27/41; CIPM, xviii. 327. Even this, however, is probably an underestimate, for in 1439 they formed the lion’s share of an estate said to be worth £200. In Ralph’s inquisition the lands settled on Katherine in jointure were valued at £95 13s. 4d. Further, Henry was destined to bear this burden, in part at least, for a considerable time. Katherine, the greatest drain on his patrimony, lived to a very great age: on her death on 23 Mar. 1460 she may have been as old as 90 (her brother, Constantine, had been born in 1372, and her father died in 1388).17 CPR, 1429-36, p. 511; CP, iii. 307-8; C139/175/21. His mother also had a long life but, early in her widowhood, she seems to have surrendered her interest to our MP, who was seised of the lands settled on her in his father’s will by the time of his first marriage in 1439. Katherine, although not until many years later and not to the same extent, also proved accommodating. By 10 July 1453, when our MP sued out a royal licence to settle the manor of Drayton, she had surrendered some at least of her Northamptonshire lands, and by October 1454 our MP also had the manor of Lowick in his own hands. This licence, especially when considered in the context of our MP’s confirmation in May 1453 of Katherine’s interest in other of her jointure estates, implies Drayton had only recently come to him. On the other hand, he had already been playing a significant part in Northamptonshire affairs since the mid 1440s. Either this prominence was sustained by the lands he had from his mother (supplemented by those he held in right of his second wife) or else the death of Katherine’s second husband, Sir Simon Felbrigg, in 1443 had removed a restraint upon her generosity.18 CPR, 1452-61, p. 85; Halstead, 194.

One thing, however, is clear. It was Katherine’s interest in the main Green estates that forced Henry to focus his interests on the west-country estates of the Mauduits and prompted him to seek a wealthy wife from that part of the country. On 6 Mar. 1439 he entered into a bond in the huge sum of 2,000 marks to Walter, Lord Hungerford†, supervisor of the will of his intended bride’s first husband and a feoffee in the Paulet lands. The conditional defeasance shows how high a price he was both obliged and prepared to pay to secure the hand of a wife who was both a widow and an heiress. The burdensome interest of Katherine Felbrigg threatened to reduce any dower to which his own bride might become entitled and thus obliged him to settle a larger jointure than might otherwise have been the case. He thus undertook to settle upon her jointure lands (in tail-male) with an annual value of as much as £200, including his important manor of Warminster, together with lands worth a further 100 marks in reversion expectant on Katherine’s death. Such a jointure would not have disappointed the bride of a baron, but it easy to see how Henry could justify following the precedent set by his uncle. Not only did Constance have her own very considerable recommendations and a strong claim to insurance against Katherine’s continued survival, but his own circumstances meant that a large jointure (settled, as this one was, in tail-male) was unlikely to damage the interests of the male line of his family. His heirs-presumptive were his two sisters, and, should he have male issue by Constance, it was unlikely that she (already aged about 30) would long survive their coming of age. Further, should Constance predecease him having produced only female issue, then any legitimate male issue he might later have would not be disadvantaged by the entail to his issue by her. Accordingly, on 16 May 1439, for the sum of 20 marks, he purchased a royal licence to settle the manors of Warminster, Westbury and Ditteridge, held in chief, on himself and Constance and the heirs male of their bodies, and to these were added all the other manors of which Henry was then seised with the exception of his two Northamptonshire manors of Hardwick and Grafton Underwood surrendered to him by his mother.19 CCR, 1435-41, p. 250; CPR, 1436-41, p. 264; PCC 23 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 181).

Constance’s own lands significantly strengthened his landed position in the West Country. When she had been contracted in marriage to John Paulet in 1427, her father had agreed to settle lands worth £40 p.a. on the couple in return for a jointure to the same value to be settled by the groom.20 Paulet’s lands were in the hands of feoffees headed by Walter, Lord Hungerford, and part of the marriage agreement of 1427 stated that the groom should take estate to himself so Constance could claim dower, but his premature death may have prevented his retaking seisin: Harl Ch. 54 I 37. She thus had lands worth £80 p.a. as a result of her first marriage to add to her claim to one third of the lands of her grandfather, Lord St. John.21 Her inq. post mortem shows that she died seised of the manors of Nunney in Somerset and Basing in Hampshire, together with a third of the manor of Abbotteston in the latter county: C139/108/22. The new weight that this advantageous marriage gave Henry Green was quickly acknowledged both by the Crown and the local community. In January 1441 he was appointed to the bench in Wiltshire on which his uncle had briefly served, and at the end of the same year he was elected to represent the same county in Parliament. Indeed, had his first marriage not proved so short, he might have made his career there, but in the event his wife was dead by the end of the following year, and this led to a change. First he embarked on a brief military career. On 26 May 1443 he sued out royal letters of attorney before, on the following 17 July, mustering in the retinue of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset.22 E101/54/5, m. 1. On his return from this ill-fated expedition he resumed his public career in Northamptonshire rather than Wiltshire. In November 1444 he was pricked as sheriff there and in May 1446 he added appointment to the county bench. Constance’s death may have been one reason for this change; another may have been Katherine’s willingness to surrender or lease to him part at least of her jointure in that county.

Another implication of the death of Green’s first wife may have been the loss not only of her Paulet jointure but also of her hereditary estates. The jurors in her Hampshire inquisition post mortem, held on 19 Jan. 1443, had been careful to make reference to a daughter, named Anne, she had had by Henry as the justification for his continued tenancy (by law of England) of the property she held by right of inheritance, namely her share of the Poynings lands. The immediate loser here was the Crown, who had wardship of the heir to these lands, and it may be that the jurors were guilty of colluding with Henry in an attempted fraud. Their finding is the only evidence that the marriage was not barren and it seems that the Crown succeeded in asserting its own claim against that of our MP.23 C139/108/22. He was, however, able to salvage something. On the previous 16 Nov. 1442, two days before the relevant writs of diem clausit extremum had been issued in respect of his wife’s death, he and the chancellor, John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, were granted the keeping, at an annual rent of 20 marks, of the Paulets’ principal property, the Somerset manor of Nunney, during the minority of his stepson, John Paulet.24 DL37/10/2.

This grant aside, however, the probable loss of land occasioned by Constance’s death gave Green an additional incentive to refocus his career on Northamptonshire. This change of emphasis was soon cemented by his second marriage. Just as his first had strengthened our MP’s position in Wiltshire, his second did the same in Northamptonshire. His new wife was, like his old, both an heiress and a widow. She had significant interests in south Lincolnshire (as coheiress of her father she had a share of the manor of Gedney and as the widow of Pinchbeck, who seems to have been a younger son, a life interest in other lesser properties), but, more important from the perspective of her new husband, was the generous settlement her second husband had made in her favour. In his will, drawn up on 5 July 1445, John Wittlebury had bequeathed her the manors of Milton and Marholm for the term of her life. This represented almost the entire Wittlebury estate and he was no doubt prompted to such generosity by the fact that their son and heir was still a boy. Thus, although any issue our MP might produce by his new wife would not be heir-apparent to the Roos estates, in the short term her lands were a valuable augmentation to his resources, the more valuable because of Katherine Felbrigg’s continued survival. Margaret also brought further assets: on 6 Aug. 1445 the abbot of Peterborough, of whom the Wittleburys were tenants, granted her the marriage of her young son together with the wardship of those Wittlebury lands that had come into the abbot’s hands on John’s death.25 Northants. RO, Fitzwilliam (Milton) Chs. 1411, 1413, 2154. Green’s 2nd marriage later led to that of his stepson, John Paulet, to Margaret’s half-sister, Eleanor (1432-1509), the other coheir to the Roos of Gedney estates.

Green’s enhanced landed status in Northamptonshire may be one explanation for his election on 19 Jan. 1447 to represent the county in Parliament. But there is a more important one. In this year he appears in the first surviving list of those in receipt of robes as esquires of the royal household, and it is reasonable to infer that this was not his first year of household service (it may explain his participation in Beaufort’s expedition).26 C219/15/4; E101/409/16. He continues to appear in the household lists until they fail in 1452: E101/410/9. If this is so, he was returned to Parliament as a supporter of the Court at a time when the duke of Suffolk was mobilizing the household in Parliament for his attack on the duke of Gloucester. He soon had his reward: on the following 25 Apr., seven weeks after the conclusion of this fateful assembly, he was granted a yearly fair at his manor of Warminster. Two years later, on 1 Apr. 1449, he had a further mark of royal favour with a licence to establish a park and chace at his manor of Grafton Underwood (even though part of the proposed park and chace lay in the King’s forest of Rockingham), and this latter grant was exempted from the Act of Resumption which followed soon after.27 CChR, vi. 85, 113; PROME, xii. 135. Green’s high standing at this date is reflected in the feoffees to whom he had licence, in February 1448, to grant his manor of Warminster. They were headed by Chancellor Kemp and William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, and included two leading household men, Sir Robert Roos and (Sir) John Stourton II*. None the less, although apparently quite close to the ruling household circle, he was not without his connexions outside it, for he also included Richard, duke of York, among his feoffees.28 CPR, 1446-52, p. 124. He was also closely associated with the duke’s councillor, Sir Andrew Ogard*, the widower of Katherine Felbrigg’s great-niece, Margaret Clifton. Ogard employed him as a feoffee in important conveyances made in Dec. 1447 and Aug. 1448: CPR, 1446-52, p. 112; DKR, xxxvii. 569. Whatever Green’s choice of feoffees reveals about his political affiliations, it certainly demonstrates how far the balance of his local interests had moved from Wiltshire to Northamptonshire. Only Stourton lived locally to the property conveyed; the bulk of the feoffees were from the latter county.

The presence of York among Green’s feoffees is to be seen in the context of a well-known reference from the duke’s accounts. At about Michaelmas 1450 Thomas Willoughby, the duke’s auditor, rode from his place at Wardington in Oxfordshire to secure the support of various influential Northamptonshire men for York’s candidates at the forthcoming election. Green was visited by Willoughby at Milton.29 Egerton Roll 8783, m. 3 (quoted in K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 233n); C219/16/1. The duke himself was at Fotheringhay from 17 Oct. for at least four days: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 85. The election was held on 22 Oct. 1450, and one of the duke’s retainers, Thomas Mulsho*, was returned. What part, if any, Green played in this election is unknown. He does not appear among the attestors, but three of his associates do: his stepfather, Richard Grey, headed the list of electors, and also named were Henry Huddleston, his brother-in-law, and William Aldewyncle*, a long-standing servant of the Greens. Perhaps our MP brought his influence to bear on election-day through these men. Whether or not he did so, it is significant that the duke both rated his influence highly and expected, despite Green’s close household affiliations, a positive response.

The early 1450s were a period of comparative obscurity in Green’s career. On 20 Jan. 1452 he received a further small mark of royal favour with confirmation of letters patent concerning the ancient weekly market and yearly fair appurtenant to his wife’s manor of Gedney. By this date he was probably already acting as steward of the liberty of the abbey of Peterborough, from which his wife held the manors of Milton and Marholm.30 CPR, 1446-52, p. 531; CP40/769, rot. 37. However, his main concern in these years appears to have been his own estates. On 7 May 1453 he joined with the family lawyer, Aldewyncle, in confirming the life estate of Katherine Felbrigg and her feoffees in her jointure, with the exception of the manor of Drayton and her other Northamptonshire holdings, which, either at this date or earlier, she had surrendered to him. Two months later, on 10 July, he sued out a royal licence to convey Drayton to an influential body of local feoffees, headed by Sir William Lucy*, (Sir) William Catesby*, William Vaux*, Thomas Wake* and Robert Tanfeld*.31 Halstead, 193-4; CPR, 1452-61, p. 85. The general pardon he sued out on 14 Oct. 1455 was probably also part of this reordering of his affairs, particularly perhaps as indemnity against debts owing to the Crown from his term as sheriff.32 C67/41, m. 8.

These transactions, however, fade into insignificance compared with the one he entered into in 1458. His two marriages had produced only one surviving daughter and his second wife was, by this date, beyond child-bearing age. It was thus probable that this daughter, Constance (born in about 1447), would fall heiress to a very substantial inheritance.33 It is odd that she should have been named after his 1st wife, but there is no doubt that she was the da. of his 2nd marriage. In his inq. post mortem she was said to be aged 22 and more. Indeed, her expectations were considerable enough to attract the attention of one of the greatest men of the realm as a convenient means of providing a competence for a younger son. Accordingly, on 19 Jan. 1458 a contract was drawn up for her marriage to John, third son of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham. Such a marriage had obvious social advantages from the point of view of our MP. Further, to obtain so valuable an heiress the duke was prepared to make a very generous settlement: he undertook to settle lands worth as much as 400 marks on the couple (albeit saving his own life estate). Green, for his part, insured that the duke’s investment was protected by entering into a bond in the massive sum of 2,000 marks that he would not alienate any of his property away from his right heir without the duke’s consent. Additionally he agreed that, in the remote contingency of his fathering a legitimate son, Constance was to inherit lands with an annual value of £100, and in the equally unlikely eventuality of his having further daughters she was to inherit lands worth the same sum over and above her common-law share.34 Halstead, 196-9. The marriage agreement was soon implemented. By a fine levied in Trinity term 1458 the duke and his wife conveyed manors in Northamptonshire, Essex, Surrey, Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire and Buckinghamshire to Green and his nominees, Sir William Catesby, Thomas Lyttleton, Thomas Billing*, serjeants-at-law, Thomas Wake, Robert Tanfeld and William Cumberford*.35 CP25(1)/293/73/431.

This marriage was, however, something more than a business transaction. In the troubled conditions of the late 1450s it also had a political dimension. On 7 July 1458 Reynold Boulers, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, licensed the prior of his cathedral church to solemnise two marriages in the chapel of the duke’s castle of Maxstoke: that of the duke’s son to Constance Green and that of the duke’s daughter, Katherine, to the son and heir of John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury.36 Lichfield Joint RO, Reg. Boulers, B/A/1/11, f. 93v. Since Buckingham and Shrewsbury were among the leading supporters of the court party, one effect of Constance’s marriage was to draw our MP more closely into the orbit of a court he had served since the 1440s. His local support, as the duke of York had recognized in 1450, was certainly worth having and was soon to become the more so: the death of Katherine Felbrigg in March 1460 finally reunited the Green of Drayton inheritance and made him one of the richest gentry in England.37 For Katherine’s will: F. Blomefield, Norf. viii. 110.

None the less, there is no evidence (beyond his appointment to the Lancastrian commission of array in December 1459) to indicate what part, if any, Green played in the crisis of 1459-61, and he certainly did not follow the political lead of the duke of Buckingham. Indeed, his general obscurity during the contentious 1450s suggests that he was a man of circumspection, and he may have been careful to balance the commitment represented by his daughter’s marriage into the Stafford family by developing connexions among Henry VI’s opponents. On 2 Nov. 1460, when the Yorkists were in power, John, Lord Lovell, granted the manor of Ashby de la Zouch to a group of feoffees including, alongside our MP, Edward, earl of March, and William Hastings. There can be little doubt that this was an involuntary conveyance on Lovell’s part for he was politically compromised by his role in defending the Tower of London in the Lancastrian cause in the previous summer. Green’s inclusion among the feoffees implies that he had the trust of the new regime, although it is also possible that he was named as a friend of Lovell alongside men hostile to Lovell’s interest.38 HMC Hastings, i. 2. He had a close connexion with the Lovells. In 1448 John’s father, William, Lord Lovell, numbered among his feoffees, and in 1450 he acted in a fine contingent on John’s marriage to Joan, da. of John, Viscount Beaumont: CP25(1)/293/72/357. His exclusion from the commission of the peace in September 1460 hardly suggests that he was a partisan of the Yorkist cause, but neither, despite his family relationship with the now deceased duke of Buckingham, was he identified as a partisan of the other.

One can only speculate as to whether there was a political dimension to a major raid on Green’s property at Gedney on 21 Feb. 1461, a month before the decisive battle of Towton. Led by Sir John Colville of Newton in Cambridgeshire, the raiders, according to an action later sued by our MP, plundered goods worth as much as £200. Most of these were ordinary household goods, but some were items of much greater value, none more so than a small chest containing 23 gold rings, three of which were set with precious stones.39 CP40/817, rot. 122. This was probably an episode in a private quarrel, but, whatever the case, it was the prelude to a short period of almost complete obscurity for Green. Careful to take advantage of the general pardon in February 1462, he was slow to re-establish himself in local affairs after Edward IV’s accession and was a notable absentee from the first four Northamptonshire commissions of the peace of the new reign.40 C67/45, m. 43.

Nevertheless, when it came, Green’s assimilation into the new political climate was complete and brought him considerable advantage. Restored to his local bench in the spring of 1463, he was soon a beneficiary of royal patronage to an even greater extent than he had been in the late 1440s. When John de Vere, earl of Oxford, petitioned in the Parliament of 1463 for the repeal of the act of Henry IV’s first Parliament confirming the duke of Ireland’s attainder, the King added exemptions in favour of Green, his wife and stepson, Robert Wittlebury, for any manors of which they were seised. It may even be that Green was one of the Northamptonshire Members in this assembly for which the returns are lost. More significantly, on 31 Jan. 1464, as a royal esquire, he was granted a very large annuity of 100 marks assigned on the issues of his native county. So large a grant was a recognition of his great wealth (and perhaps of his relatively advanced age), and he was soon required to earn it. On 3 Feb. 1465 Edward IV personally chose him to fill the vacant shrievalty of Northamptonshire, an office he had last held 20 years before, and there is little reason to doubt that the exemption from future office granted to him in May 1466 was a quid pro quo for this service. His close connexion with the new regime is reflected in his appearance in March 1465 among the feoffees of the esquire of the King’s body, John Donne, in certain forfeited lands Donne held by royal grant. No doubt it was this new standing that prompted him belatedly to bring an action in the court of common pleas against Colville and his adherents for the raid on Gedney. In Michaelmas term 1465 he claimed damages of £400 and, on the following 20 Jan. 1466, before the justices of assize sitting at Bourn, he was awarded costs and damages amounting to £250 against one of the lesser defendants.41 PROME, xiii. 207; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 379, 430-1, 518; CP40/817, rot. 122.

These, however, were Green’s twilight years. He did not live long enough to obtain a verdict against Colville himself or to offer further service to Edward IV. He last appears in a public capacity on 9 Apr. 1467, when he attested the return of (Sir) Thomas Tresham* and Richard Middleton† as MPs for his home county.42 C219/17/1. Soon after, he completed arrangements for the marriage of his stepson, Robert Wittlebury, to Anne, daughter of his old friend, Sir William Catesby. Accordingly, on 16 June his feoffees, of whom Catesby himself was one, leased the manor of Milton to him and his wife to hold for term of their lives with remainder to the new couple and their issue.43 Fitzwilliam (Milton) Ch. 1416.

Green made his will on the following 3 Sept. The arrangements he had entered into on the marriage of his surviving daughter left him with few instructions still to be given regarding the disposition of his patrimony, but he had consolidated his holdings through several forays on the land market and it was with the disposal of these acquisitions that the will was largely concerned. His purchased lands in Thorpe near Peterborough were to augment the dower of his widow before passing to his daughter and her issue; those in nearby Whittlesey, Southorpe and Marholm were to provide first for his widow and then her son, Robert Wittlebury, and his issue; and those in Lowick were to be jointly settled on his daughter and her husband and their issue on condition that they did not hinder the performance of his will (otherwise the lands were to be sold). Green’s main concern, however, was the generous endowment of a chantry of two priests in the church of Lowick. They were to have as much as 24 marks p.a., charged either on lands of his future purchase, or, if such lands should prove insufficient, on his manor of Sudborough.44 Halstead, 199-200. He was left with little time to make these additional purchases or to carry through the necessary arrangements for the foundation. He died on 22 Feb. 1468 and was buried in the south chapel of Lowick church, where his marble table tomb with its monumental brass to him and his second wife still survives.45 VCH Northants. iii. 242; Mon. Brasses: Portfolio Plates of the Mon. Brass Soc. no. 194. Green’s executors may have been negligent in carrying through his chantry foundation or else were impeded in this task by his daughter and son-in-law. In any event, when, 30 years later, his grandson, Edward Stafford, earl of Wiltshire, sued out a royal licence to found two perpetual chantries in the churches of Lowick and Pleshey (Essex), our MP and his second wife were among those included on the bede-roll.46 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 158-9.

At his death Green’s estates were divided among several groups of feoffees, and jurors at inquisitions post mortem held in seven counties accordingly returned that he died seised of no lands. His manor of Drayton remained in the hands of his surviving feoffees of 1453, headed by Sir William Catesby, and that of Warminster in those of Bishop Waynflete, and Richard Wydeville, Earl Rivers, then treasurer of England. It is not known when Green had made this latter feoffment but it is likely to have been soon after the marriage of his heiress in the late 1450s when Waynflete was chancellor and Wydeville a prominent Lancastrian. If this is so, they were probably nominees of Buckingham as the groom’s father rather than of our MP. Thomas Lenton and Katherine, daughter of Robert Long, kinsfolk and heirs of William Aldewyncle, had his manors of White Roding in Essex and Comberton in Cambridgeshire. On 18 May 1469 these separate groups of feoffees had royal licence to make settlements, the bulk of the estates passing to Green’s heiress and her husband, but his widow was granted a life interest in the manors of Comberton near Cambridge, Buckworth near Huntingdon, and Hardwick in Northamptonshire.47 C140/23/1; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 158-9; Halstead, 200, 203.

On the death of Henry Green’s grandson, the second earl of Wiltshire, the heirs to the Green inheritance were the representatives of our MP’s two sisters, Margaret, wife of Sir Henry Huddleston of Irthlingborough, and Isabel, wife of Sir Richard Vere of Thrapston and Addington: these were Margaret’s daughter, Elizabeth, widow of Sir Thomas Cheyne of Fen Ditton (Cambridgeshire), and Isabel’s four grand-daughters (the issue of her son, Sir Henry Vere). In 1499 the wardship of the three surviving heirs was purchased by Sir John Mordaunt†, a royal councillor and Speaker in the Parliament of 1487, and he contracted the eldest, Elizabeth, in marriage to his son and heir, John, created Lord Mordaunt in 1532. Although the claims of the coheirs were famously contested by George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, the bulk of the inheritance passed to the Mordaunts, raised to the earldom of Peterborough in 1628, and they made our MP’s manor house at Drayton their chief residence.48 Bridges, ii. 252; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 757; J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 124; VCH Northants. iii. 238; CP, x. 496.

Henry Green himself had been responsible for significant additions to this great house, which had been the home of his ancestors, the Draytons, and had subsequently been remodelled by his grandfather in the later years of the fourteenth century. He added a large entrance porch on the north side of the hall, and from this porch he built a range of buildings extending westward down the north side of the hall and then southwards almost as far as the wall defining the boundary of the fourteenth-century house. Much of this work remains among the later additions and rebuilding, and the northern aspect of the present grand house, with its crenelated turrets, is largely defined by Green’s scheme. He also continued the rebuilding of the church of Lowick, begun by his grandfather and uncle.49 N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Northants. 189-94; VCH Northants. iii. 231-5.