HAMPTON, John II

Although coming from an old Staffordshire family, Hampton did not owe his elections as a knight of the shire to at least seven of the Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign to a prominent place among the county gentry. His patrimony was by no means extensive: his father John asserted in 1411 that he should not be distrained for failing to take up knighthood because he possessed lands worth no more than £11 p.a.18 E159/187, communia Trin. rot. 9d. These holdings included property at Dunstall in Wolverhampton, which the Hamptons had acquired in the twelfth century, and, more important, the manors of Kinver and Stourton and the hereditary keepership of Kinver forest, held in chief of the Crown in return for an annual fee farm of £9. Despite his illegitimate birth, John senior had inherited them from his father, Richard Hampton (d.1388), and they continued to be entailed on the male line of the family.19 S. Shaw, Staffs. ii. 173-4; CIPM, xvi. 703. Not without difficulty, the older John had also negotiated an agreement with the legitimate heir, his cousin Joan, wife of William Bysshebury, that after the deaths of her and her husband he and his descendants would be entitled to certain properties in Wolverhampton and the advowson of the chapel of Willenhall. Our MP’s entry into his patrimony was delayed by the survival of his stepmother Margaret, the widow of Robert Chetwynd,20 Wm. Salt. Arch. Soc. xi. 217-18; xvii. 58, 89, 95-96, 104, 106. who was assigned dower in the Hampton lands in December 1433, following the death of her second husband. John was then present as an observer, to make sure of inheriting besides Kinver and Stourton and the hereditary custody of Kinver forest, eight burgages and other properties in Lichfield.21 C139/62/8; CFR, xvi. 181.

By then Hampton, already aged over 42, was firmly established as a member of the King’s household, having embarked on a career in royal service at least 20 years earlier, most likely before the accession of Henry of Monmouth as Henry V. The new King had granted him for life the office of ranger in Kinver forest, with all the profits accruing to it, rendering nothing to the Exchequer. He had probably come to Henry’s attention through the auspices of the King’s cousin Anne, dowager countess of Stafford, whose second husband, Earl Edmund, had retained Hampton’s father. Not long after the earl’s death at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403,22 CPR, 1399-1401, p. 442; 1401-5, p. 347. the widowed countess had married Sir William Bourgchier†, one of Henry of Monmouth’s companions-in-arms. As a reward for our MP’s long service to them, the couple gave him an annuity of £10 from Anne’s lordship of Wheatenhurst in Gloucestershire, and he contracted to join Bourgchier’s military retinue not only for Henry V’s invasion of France in 1415 (where they fought at Agincourt), but also to cross the Channel again in 1417 to take part in the longer campaign for the reduction of Normandy. At home in England Bourgchier, now created count of Eu, also engaged Hampton for duties at the Tower of London, where he himself held the office of constable for five years until his death at Troyes in France in May 1420.23 CPR, 1413-16, pp. 99, 129; 1422-9, p. 456; N.H. Nicolas, Agincourt, 360; C1/5/42; SC8/117/5836; E101/51/2. Hampton may have been in France with his superior at the time of his death, but he returned to the Tower to serve under Sir Roger Aston*, Bourgchier’s lieutenant and successor as constable, and when he entered direct royal service a year later it was as serjeant of the armour kept there for the personal use of the King. This post entitled him to a wage of 1s. a day. To this he added a further daily wage of 8d. from the issues of Essex and Hertfordshire after his marriage to Agnes Huntley, to whom this had been granted in survivorship along with her former husband Thomas Huntley (as compensation for wounds received at the battle of Shrewsbury).24 CPR, 1413-16, p. 132; 1422-9, p. 22; E159/202, brevia Mich. rot. 33d. What further advantage the marriage brought him has not been discovered.

After Henry V’s death in 1422 Hampton became attached to the Household of the infant monarch, becoming one of just two ushers of the royal chamber within the next three years, and in the Household he was to remain, always in close proximity to his young master, at least until Henry VI’s mental collapse in the mid 1450s, and possibly right up to his deposition in 1461. The office of water-bailiff of Plymouth, which Hampton held either on his own or jointly with his brother Boyce from 1425 until the very end of the reign, may have been initially granted to him as a sinecure, although, as we shall see, he was by no means ignorant of its functions. His first appointment to an ad hoc commission of local government affected his private affairs by enabling him to hold official inquiries into the inheritance of the Chetwynds of Tur Langton in Leicestershire, for the heir was his own stepbrother John Chetwynd (b.c.1409). Hampton took the profits of the estate from May 1425, following the death of the heir’s grandmother, and in February 1427 he shared with Henry Bourgchier, count of Eu (the son and heir of his early patron) keeping at the Exchequer of the manor of Tur Langton, during Chetwynd’s minority.25 CPR, 1416-22, pp. 360, 387; 1422-9, pp. 71, 318; 1436-41, p. 285; CIPM, xxii. 707; xxiii. 152; CFR, xv. 159; E28/50/22. To compensate him for the loss of the annuity awarded him by the count’s parents (since at the partition of the former de Bohun estates between Countess Anne and Henry V, Wheatenhurst had been allocated to the latter), in December 1428 he successfully petitioned the Council to be given instead the £9 annual rent due to the Crown as the fee farm for Kinver and Stourton (then payable by his father and later by himself). This was the first of many grants and gifts made to him during Henry VI’s reign, initially as authorized by the Council, then by the young King himself. The Crown retained the right to nominate a nun to enter the Benedictine abbey at Barking at each accession to the throne, and it fell to Hampton’s daughter Goda to receive this nomination as a special honour to mark Henry’s coronation at Westminster abbey in November 1429.26 CPR, 1422-9, pp. 456, 544-5; 1429-36, p. 48.

Hampton, attired in royal livery, witnessed the crowning,27 E361/6, rot. 20. and in the following February he became engaged in the preparations for the King’s voyage to France for his coronation there. Although he was formally contracted to serve with a small force of just three mounted archers, required to muster at Dover on 1 May 1430, his appointment as master of the ordnance for this large-scale expedition, meant that his responsibilities were considerable. Besides being commissioned to provide carpenters, smiths and stone-cutters to construct a sufficient number of carts to convey the great cannon to the ports of England and supply oxen and horses for the carts, he had to conscript manned vessels to transport the guns across the Channel. As master he was to receive a handsome reward of 100 marks for one year’s service. At Canterbury on 16 Apr. the Council ordered the captain of Harfleur and the treasurer of Calais to deliver to him guns, ‘magnos bombardos’ and all other necessary items. For their purchase the sum of nearly £2,213 was assigned to him at the Exchequer in the first instance, although before the end of his term of office he was to receive and spend more than £3,266. The munitions were distributed among the garrisons in the occupied territories.28 E101/70/4/668; CPR, 1429-36, p. 44; PPC, iv. 31, 33; E364/69, rot. L. The royal party returned home from France in February 1432. Hampton and other household officials petitioned the Parliament which met in the following May for pardons for arrears in their accounts since the beginning of the reign, stating that the custom was for such pardons to be awarded annually. It is unlikely that to obtain a satisfactory response to petition Hampton needed the help of his distant kinsman, John Hampton I*, then sitting in the Commons for Hampshire; he was sufficiently influential on his own account. He was appointed sheriff of Merioneth in 1433, specifically until he should be provided with another office not requiring residence, and in the following year the Council granted him an annuity of 50 marks at the Exchequer. Furthermore, in 1436 he was made constable of Chester castle, while a few months later his brother, Boyce, obtained the constableship of Shrewsbury, in a strong indication of their positions of trust near the monarch.29 PROME, xi. 27; CPR, 1429-36, p.266; 1436-41, pp. 25, 135, 174; PPC, iv. 196; DKR, xxxvii (2), 343.

When elected to the Parliament which assembled in January 1437, therefore, Hampton was in receipt of annuities from the Crown totalling £54 10s., and occupying a number of royal offices. Although he had been listed to take the oath against law-breakers in Staffordshire in 1434,30 CPR, 1429-36, p. 400. as yet he had had little to do with the affairs of the county or its gentry; clearly he owed his election to this, and to six more Parliaments, to his position at Court. Of his participation in the official business of the sessions he attended there are occasional mentions in the parliament rolls. More intriguing is the revelation that it was ‘in tyme of parlemente’ that ‘Hampton esquyer’, otherwise called ‘a goode squyere’, brought to the attention of the author of ‘The Libelle of English Policy’ a scroll recording an ordinance of Edward III which gave three west-country ports, Dartmouth, Plymouth and Fowey, ‘governance’ over ‘Pety Bretayn’ (Brittany). His post as water-bailiff of Plymouth had no doubt excited his interest in the matter.31 Political Poems and Songs ed. Wright, ii. 165-6. For a suit brought by him and Boyce against the mayor and commonalty of Plymouth for a debt of £20 in 1449-50, see Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iii. 187. His status in the Household was enhanced in the summer of 1437, as Henry VI began to assert himself and to take on his kingly role. Having attained his majority the King could make his servants grants for their lifetimes. Now elevated to the position of an ‘esquire for the body’, Hampton relinquished the shrievalty of Merioneth in exchange for an annuity of five marks from the fee farm of Coventry, his Exchequer annuity was increased to £50 for life, also now payable from Coventry, his constableship of Chester was given up in return for an annuity of £20 from the exchequer at Chester (afterwards switched to the fee farm of Worcester), and his £9 p.a. from Kinver was awarded him for life. More grants, including the confiscated goods of certain outlaws, soon followed. He shared with Edward Hull*, a fellow esquire for the body, a ship called the Nicholas of Saltash, forfeited to the Crown, although they were required to report the full extent of their profit so that the King could take ‘as much thereof as he pleases’.32 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 45, 76, 221, 232, 234, 237. The wardship and marriage of John Botrell of Boterell Aston, Shropshire, son of the recently-deceased wife of Hampton’s stepbrother Chetwynd, were followed in April 1439 by a grant in survivorship to him and his wife of £10 p.a. from the farm of Pendlestone mills (by the hands of the burgesses of Bridgnorth) and £2 p.a. from the fee farm of Bridgnorth itself, in lieu of the 8d. a day she had received from Henry V.33 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 239-40, 285; CFR, xvii. 56-57, 72; Feudal Aids, iv. 266.

By this time Hampton was enjoying annuities amounting to £91, in addition to his official fees and wages. Three months later he shared with John Somerton a grant of the reversion of Kempton park and the royal manor of Kempton to fall to them after the death of Henry Somer*, and on 7 Nov., five days before his second Parliament was due to assemble, he was given two tuns of wine annually from the port of Bristol. In the course of the Parliament the Commons expressed strong criticism of the deplorable state of the finances of the Household, and in January 1440 important commissions were set up to make extensive inquiries throughout the country, though particularly in London, touching the secret export of wool in evasion of customs and subsidies. Hampton’s ‘diligent and laboriouse service’ assisting Sir Roger Fiennes*, the treasurer of the Household, in the work of these commissions earned him a reward of as much as £100 in ready money. Yet there is no hint that he was prepared to limit his own expectations for the sake of fiscal economy. Indeed, for many years he helped drain the royal coffers with greedy enthusiasm. Earlier on, he and a colleague John Keen had been authorized to sue and recover on a bond of £200 forfeited to the King and to split the bond and any recoverable damages between them; and in May 1440 he and his brother Boyce were granted £8 p.a. from the issues of Shropshire, while he alone had £40 p.a. from the issues of London. Nor was this all: in July Hampton’s office as ranger of Chasepool was awarded him in tail-male, with remainder to his right heirs, and that of water-bailiff of Plymouth was given to him and Boyce in survivorship. At the end of the year a general pardon was issued to him specifying any offences against the statute of liveries, although what in particular had prompted him to request this is not revealed.34 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 300, 349, 372-3, 395, 401, 404, 431, 432, 490; E404/56/207.

In the course of that same year, 1440, Hampton, a constant companion of Henry VI, became very much involved in the King’s plans for the foundation of a college at Eton, and was present at the lodge in Windsor park when arrangements for the initial endowment were made on 12 Sept. As a consequence of his nomination to the body of 12 trustees, headed by the archbishop of Canterbury, who were given keeping of all the alien priories in England and Wales ‘to fulfill the King’s intent and will’, he was party to a number of important transactions over the next few months, but he also acted as purveyor for the enterprise, and early in 1442 received £40 in consideration of his ‘great business, occupation and costs’ about the building works.35 CPR, 1436-41, p. 454; 1441-6, p. 29; B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 136; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 493-6; PROME, xi. 442; Hist. King’s Works ed. Brown, Colvin and Taylor, i. 279 n. 7; E404/58/126; E403/743, m. 14; 745 m. 7; 747 m. 2. From January that year he was also associated with a smaller group (including Bishop Aiscough of Salisbury, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, the King’s secretary Thomas Bekynton, and the provost of Eton) to whom were allotted all subsidies granted to the King by abbots, priors and the commonalty of Chester, which together with other revenues were all to be spent on the building of the college. Among the revenues assigned to them were the issues of the Cornish estates of the late Sir William Bodrugan*, which were granted to them by authority of the Parliament then in progress. Hampton, representing Staffordshire for the third time, had no doubt helped the passage of these measures, and he also had a role to play in the next Parliament (of 1445-6), when the Commons endorsed another series of patents embodying the endowment of the King’s colleges at Eton and Cambridge.36 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 32, 35, 50, 54; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 60, 88; PROME, xi. 351; CFR, xvii. 207.

Given these and his many other duties in furthering the King’s favourite projects, Hampton may rarely if ever have crossed over to Guînes to exercise his office as high bailiff (to which he had been appointed in 1441) in person; perhaps his joint bailiff John Somerton accepted responsibility for the task, which also involved victualling the castle. In January 1442 he and Somerton took possession of the manor of Kempton, as had been earlier granted to them in reversion. This was but one of a steady stream of grants and offices coming Hampton’s way. Shortly before, together with William Tresham*, the Speaker of the Parliaments of 1439 and 1442, he had obtained the wardship and marriage of John Woodhill, heir to the barony of Woodhill; in May 1443 a cash payment was authorized for the sum of £31 5s.7d. due to him as wages of war (probably for the coronation expedition); and among his other grants in this period was one of a crayer called Katerine of Fleshing, forfeited for being used for smuggling wool. He shared with the King’s physician Master John Somerset* and Thomas Thorpe* the Exchequer official, a royal grant of a minor wardship,37 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 2, 28, 30, 138, 181, 229; E404/59/220; CFR, xvii. 262-3. and along with his wife he received in survivorship an extra annuity of £4 3s. 8d. from the fee farm of Bridgnorth in January 1444. In May, with others, he was allotted premises in London, and from that summer he shared with William Essex the alnagership of Northamptonshire and Rutland, which entitled them to keep a moiety of all forfeitures for much of the rest of the reign. With a kinsman he obtained in December that year ten sacks of wool shipped uncustomed, and this was re-granted to them four months later, after Hampton secured the King’s assent by sign manual. In January 1445 he acquired a fresh annuity of £20 from Chester (although this was reduced to 20 marks a year or so later), to which was added in June sums amounting to £120 forfeited for a breach of the peace in Coventry.38 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 226, 258, 318, 344, 350, 356; 1446-52, p. 218; CFR, xvii. 281; xviii. 194; xix. 103, 142-3.

By then Hampton’s fourth Parliament (assembled on 25 Feb. 1445) was in progress. During the second session (on 30 May) the queen, Margaret of Anjou, was crowned. Hampton had played an important part in bringing her over to England, for Henry VI had entrusted him with some of the arrangements for her journey from France. As early as August 1444 he had been made master of her horses, and in the following month he completed a number of purchases at great expense, including a white ‘double trotting’ horse for the queen’s ‘chare’, bought for £20 from Viscount Beaumont by command of the marquess of Suffolk, who was in charge of the enterprise. Together with Suffolk and Master William Waynflete, the provost of Eton, he was given keeping of the wardship and marriage of the young John Speke† in December 1444, but by then the escort was already on its way to France. Perhaps Hampton did not actually go; if he did then he would have been elected to Parliament in his absence, and have missed the first session. The King had also asked him to supervise repairs to the bridge in Windsor park and build a ‘grete chymney’ in the chamber being prepared for the queen in Windsor castle, for which he paid in part from his own purse, although he was eventually reimbursed. On 5 July the Exchequer released 40 marks for him to deliver to the ambassadors of Margaret’s father as a gift from the King.39 E404/61/21, 22, 25, 240; 62/203; E101/409/12, f. 68; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, i. 447; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 314, 316.

While the Parliament was yet in being in February 1446, and together with Sir Edmund Hungerford*, the King’s carver, Hampton shared the keeping of certain lands in the King’s hands owing to the idiocy of John Grendon, the stepson of the late Sir Richard Lacon*. Hampton and Hungerford were happy to be paid £100 to relinquish their claim to his lands to William Lacon I*.40 CPR, 1441-6, p. 452; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 435-7. In May he was granted licence to enclose 300 acres of land in Stourton as a park (even though the land lay within the metes of the royal forest of Kinver). Although not a Member of the Parliament which met at Bury St. Edmunds early in 1447, a flurry of grants to Hampton at that time strongly suggest that he was present in attendance on the King: he and Robert Manfeld* received money forfeited by a Genoese merchant; with William Lynde, another esquire for the body, he gained property in Essex; with William Tresham the Speaker he acquired the wardship of William Harrowden’s heir; and along with his former colleague Henry Bourgchier, now Viscount Bourgchier, and a fellow esquire for the body, John Norris*, he pocketed forfeitures worth 300 marks.41 CChR, vi. 59; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 33, 34, 46; E159/229 brevia Hil. rot. 9d. At the same time, together with his third wife, Anne Hanham, he was granted the constableship of Colchester castle and £24 p.a. from the fee farm of Colchester itself. The previous constable, the King’s uncle Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, had just met his death at Bury. A few months later Hampton obtained the stewardship of the royal forest of Morfe and Shirlett (previously held by his stepbrother Chetwynd), to hold in tail, with £5 p.a. as his fee.42 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 33, 106. The Hamptons’ continued tenure of office at Colchester castle was apparently owed to Queen Margaret: VCH Essex, ix. 243.

There can be no doubt of Hampton’s standing. In 1441 he had obtained papal indults from Eugenius IV to choose a personal confessor, have his own portable altar, and receive plenary indulgence at death. The bounty heaped on him by Henry VI stemmed from his privileged position in the Household, where he also found places for his brother Boyce and for Thomas and Richard Hampton, his kinsmen, all four of them wearing the Lancastrian livery.43 CPL, ix. 230, 231, 241; E101/409/9, 11, 16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. John, especially favoured, was constantly present at Windsor castle or wherever the Court was residing to offer the King advice and to take advantage of his boundless generosity. Henry not infrequently gave him presents of money, sometimes as much as £20 for payment for ‘such occupaciones as we shall comaunde him’, and although he was on one occasion actually summoned to attend a great council, for the most part his counsel was readily available on an informal basis.44 E28/59/36; E404/57/208; PPC, vi. 342; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English, i. 470. Hampton was among those whose names appear frequently as witnesses to Henry VI’s acts of state. Furthermore, he had a role to play in the distribution of royal patronage. For instance, he wrote personally to the keeper of the privy seal in May 1445 in support of a petition from Thomas Burghill* for the office of collector of rents at Calais, for which he had just obtained King Henry’s assent under his sign manual. The ability of Hampton and other household men to obtain all manner of grants from the King clearly soon became well known to suitors and informers, who would share the proceeds with them in return for their sponsorship.45 E28/75/60, 61. Intimacy with the King had led to Hampton being nominated to the large and eminent body of feoffees of the duchy of Lancaster, for the purposes of carrying out Henry’s will. Charters relating to this were recited in Parliament on 6 Apr. 1446, with Hampton present as an MP for Staffordshire, and were again discussed in that of February 1449, Hampton’s fifth.46 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 210, 212; PROME, xi. 404-10; RP, v. 165 (cf. PROME, xii. 69.

Nor were there any signs of a decrease in the flow of patronage, even as the financial crises of the 1440s deepened. During the late 1440s the strain of the cost of the queen’s household threw the already parlous state of the royal finances into confusion and greater debt. But Hampton was well placed to secure any sums owing to him. He and William Lynde presented a petition showing that they had been unable to obtain payment of £178 13s. 4d. for which they had been given exchequer assignments on the customs, as the tallies had been made void because of changes in personnel among the collectors whose names were inscribed on them (this being one of the measures recently introduced by Bishop Lumley, the treasurer, to control the flow of revenue). New assignments were authorized as charged on the first dues collected for customs at Southampton on 25 Mar. 1447, and by letters patent of a year later each man was granted £50 from the customs in one year and £39 6s. 8d. in the next. Hampton was also given a warrant for fresh tallies on 15 Sept. 1447, for £100 in recompense for certain tasks he had undertaken, these being assigned on the half tenth and fifteenth granted in the Parliament of 1447, in whatever place Hampton named and desired and notwithstanding any statute or ordinance made by the King or Council to the contrary. He was also privileged to receive, on 10 Feb. 1449 (two days before the opening of his fifth Parliament) a pardon of all debts, accounts and arrears relating to his former office as master of the queen’s horses, and of all actions against him in the Exchequer or any other court.47 E404/63/36; 64/14, 250; CPR, 1446-52, p. 214.

In the desperate circumstances of the fall of Normandy that autumn, the King appointed men close to him to take charge of the beleagured garrisons: thus Hampton became captain of Hammes in Picardy, but whether he crossed the Channel before November 1449, when his sixth Parliament met, is not recorded.48 Hampton had received a bond in 100 marks from Fulk Vernon* in May 1447 at the time that Vernon had contracted for the reversion of the captaincy of Hammes, so it may be that he took over the office after Vernon’s death, earlier in 1449: C131/68/12, 13; E101/71/4/919. Letters of protection were issued for men to join the garrison under his command, but the fact that he spent £12 6s. 8d. on ‘plaies and disgisinges’ that Christmas for the King’s entertainment, and a further £13 to celebrate the feast of St. George at Windsor in the following April, suggests that he remained at Henry’s side for much of the time. There was little he could do, even as a Member of the Commons, to defend the King’s ministers from the outburst of popular feeling against them and in particular against the duke of Suffolk, who was impeached. Even so, he himself emerged virtually unscathed by the measures passed in the Parliament. Although by this stage in his career his annuities totalled more than £188 and were an obvious target for retrenchment, all but £40 of this income was exempted from the workings of the Act of Resumption passed during the third parliamentary session, meeting at Leicester from April to June 1450. Furthermore, just before the Act was passed he prudently surrendered his life-grant of the manor of Kempton, having it converted to a lease for 25 years. At the height of Cade’s rebellion, on 27 June he was probably with the King at Berkhampstead castle.49 DKR, xlviii. 381-2; CPR, 1446-52, p. 309; PROME, xii. 121; CFR, xviii. 154; E404/66/183.

There is no doubting where Hampton stood in the eyes of Jack Cade’s rebels – as one of those who had been in league with the hated duke of Suffolk – and the extent of his own unpopularity is clear from the murder on 5 July of Thomas Mayne*, his deputy constable at Colchester castle, especially as this execution was reported to have been ordered by Cade who ‘lette to be heddyd a man of Hampton’. Hampton and Mayne had shared a royal grant of a substantial building in London for the previous six years,50 Hist. Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 193; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 258, 350. and it may be assumed that our MP had been influential in securing Mayne’s election to the previous three Parliaments (for Bridgnorth and Newcastle-under- Lyme). Clearly, if he had been caught at Colchester instead of his deputy he could have expected no mercy. The feelings of a wide section of the population were further expressed in December, towards the end of the first session of the Parliament of 1450-1 (to which Hampton had not been returned), this time in a Commons’ petition which asked the King to ordain that certain persons, headed by Edmund, duke of Somerset, and including Hampton, be ‘voided and amoeved’ from his presence for the rest of their lives, staying outside a 12-mile radius of the Court on pain of forfeiture. They were said to have been ‘mysbehavyng aboute youre Roiall persone ... by whos undue meanes youre possessions have been gretely amenused, youre lawes not executed’ and the peace not observed; ‘universall noyse and clamour’ had run openly through all the realm against them. The Commons demanded that they should forfeit their offices, fees and wages with immediate effect. The King responded firmly that he would be surrounded by ‘vertues persones and of noon other’, and that he knew of no reason why those singled out in this way should be expelled from his presence. Nevertheless, he agreed that with the exception of anyone who continually waited on him those listed would be exiled from the court for a year pending an inquiry. Hampton was one of those thus excepted, and accordingly remained close to the King, yet several of his annuities were lost to the second Act of Resumption, and several months were to pass before he began to recover them.51 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 102; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Misc. xxiv), 201n; CPR, 1441-6, p. 30; 1446-52, p. 332; PROME, xii. 184-6.

The process of recovery was a slow one, but the political climate changed and in November 1451 Hampton obtained exemplifications of various letters patent on the (probably spurious) grounds that the originals had been lost, and a month later he was pardoned all debts, trespasses, impeachments and offences. In March 1452 he was granted again his £9 p.a. from Kinver and Stourton, and in May he received back his life annuity of 50 marks, payment of both annuities being backdated to Michaelmas 1450, before their resumption. He also obtained confirmation of the letters patent to him and William Tresham (who was now dead), and in January 1453 his brother Boyce was restored to the constableship of Shrewsbury castle. Hampton secured election to the strongly loyalist Parliament summoned to meet at Reading, and on 14 Mar., just a week after the beginning of the first session, he regained his two tuns of wine, and was confirmed as steward of Morfe and Shirlett. During the Parliament the King presented a schedule, on parchment and authorized with his sign manual, stating that the Act ‘of the King’s Household’ was not to prejudice certain concessions, including that to Hampton and William Lynde for payment of their £178 13s. 4d. from the customs. Later on, Hampton obtained yet another exemplification of letters patent after ‘losing’ the originals.52 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 512, 521, 547, 548, 559; 1452-61, pp. 37, 48, 67, 139; PROME, xii. 250.

But meanwhile, in the summer of 1453, Henry VI had gone out of his mind. What then happened to Hampton is unclear. There is no evidence that he was permitted to stay on at Court, and he was not one of the four esquires for the body named in the ordinances governing the Household as issued in November 1454.53 PPC, vi. 223. Nor indeed are his whereabouts known until after the King recovered his wits early in the following year. In May 1455 he was commissioned to raise royal loans in Staffordshire, and on the 20th he was pardoned his fines for the failing to prevent the escape of felons from Colchester castle, on the excuse that the roof of the ancient building had collapsed, allowing them to flee. The Yorkist victory at St. Albans, just two days later, once more placed Hampton in a precarious position. He petitioned the King in the Parliament of 1455-6 to be allowed to keep his annuities of £9 and 50 marks and his constableship, then again threatened with resumption, on the basis that he had been ‘squire for youre body before any other havyng that office that nowe is living’. Surprisingly, even in the changed political circumstances, exemption from the Act of Resumption was granted him with respect to the constableship and a reduced annuity of 40 marks, in view of his excellent and long service to Henry V and Henry VI and also because he was ‘gretly stryken wt age’.54 CPR, 1452-61, p. 242; SC8/117/5836; PROME, xii. 426-7. Naturally enough, when the queen’s party assumed control of the government, Hampton again recovered his £9 annuity, doing so at Coventry in February 1457, and he was evidently still close to the King’s person, if in an undefined role, for he continued to pay out ‘privy expenses’ on the monarch’s behalf. In June 1459 he obtained yet another pardon regarding all his debts, and when during the Parliament at Coventry on 20 Nov. a new body of feoffees of the duchy of Lancaster was appointed, he remained on the list. Towards the close of the Parliament he was granted in recognition of his long service certain stewardships in Worcestershire. Surprisingly, even when the Yorkists once more seized power following the battle of Northampton in July 1460 he was still able to secure another pardon regarding escapes of prisoners at Colchester and all consequent fines, doing so in December. Most surprising of all, in the course of the Parliament then in progress his position as a feoffee of the duchy of Lancaster estates was affirmed, even though the new members of the committee included the Yorkist earls and there were other marked and significant changes in its composition.55 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 350, 487, 532, 645; E404/71/2/37; PROME, xii. 468-77. Nevertheless, Hampton’s career ended with the accession of Edward IV: an old man, aged over 70, he did not follow his royal master Henry VI into exile.

Whatever local influence Hampton had previously enjoyed in Staffordshire was now eroded. There, his connexions with the Chetwynds had led to his feoffeeship of the manors of Sir Philip Chetwynd (d.1444),56 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 266-8; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xii. 263, 313-14, 316. who was a retainer of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, and the duke, perhaps also reminded of Hampton’s early links with his mother and long association with his half-brother, Viscount Bourgchier, had given him for life in 1441 an annuity of ten marks, which he increased to £10 four years later. Together with Buckingham and Bourgchier he became a feoffee of the manor of Newhall, Essex, to the use of Richard Alrede, the receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster.57 C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 234 (from Staffs. RO, D641/1/2/17, mm. 1d-2d, 20; Longleat House, Wilts. Bath mss, 6410, mm. 2d-3d); CAD, iv. A6996-7, 7909. But these links (even the ones with Duke Humphrey, the most powerful magnate in his home county), seem to have been always subordinated to ties formed at King Henry’s court. For instance, he twice acted as a mainpernor for Robert Manfeld* on his appointments as master of the Mint, and asked him to act as a feoffee of his estates, alongside William Tresham, the lawyer and four times Speaker.58 CCR, 1441-7, p. 408; 1447-54, p. 371. Now, at the advent of the new regime, these friends and patrons were dead or disinclined to assist him. Buckingham had been killed at the battle of Northampton, and Hampton’s potentially useful contacts with Bourgchier, now risen to be earl of Essex, had ceased, their paths diverging as Bourghier espoused the Yorkist cause. Several years earlier (in 1448) he had been permitted by royal licence to entail his manors of Kinver and Stourton and the offices of keeper of Kinver forest and ranger of Chasepool, so that in the likely event of the deaths of himself and his wife Anne without surviving descendants these should remain in his family, passing first to his brother Boyce and his issue, and then to his distant kinsman, John Hampton of Hampshire.59 CCR, 1447-54, p. 371. Despite this entail, in July 1461 the new King appointed John Acton† rider of the forest (a post probably synomynous with the lieutenantcy), and a few months later made him ranger of Chasepool too. Acton tried to evict Hampton from his property, whereupon the latter brought suits against him in the court of common pleas for breaking into his close and houses at Stourton, assaulting him and taking from his warrens 1,000 rabbits worth £20. Edward IV issued a licence in 1464 for Hampton to grant Kinver and Stourton to a fresh group of feoffees (including Humphrey Stafford III*, Thomas Burdet* and Thomas Throckmorton*), but these men were almost certainly not of our MP’s own choosing. Burdet and Throckmorton ‘recovered’ the manors from Hampton in the common pleas in 1469, and they were alienated from his heirs. In effect he had been dispossessed. The sheriff of Staffordshire was ordered to arrest him and his brother Boyce and bring them to the King’s bench in Hilary term 1469 to answer for a trespass and contempt.60 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 8, 56, 379, 481; 1467-77, pp. 346-7; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 121, 162; CP40/830, rot. 104. That year the brothers made settlements of some property in Wolverhampton, so that instead of being occupied by Boyce for life, this should be held by John and his wife and after their deaths should pass to Thomas Hampton of Stoke Charity, the son of John’s namesake from Hampshire. John was not recalled to Henry VI’s side during the Readeption, probably because of age and infirmity, but he did continue to pursue suits in the King’s bench.61 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xi. 239; n.s. iv. 172, 181.

Hampton’s final years saw him engaged in tidying up the affairs of the families of Beaumont and Clinton in which he had long been involved. Back in 1452 he had been enfeoffed of estates including the manor of Wednesbury by Joan, widow of (Sir) Henry Beaumont II*, and when Beaumont’s son and heir died in November 1471 he settled these on his widow.62 C140/41/32. Another matter concerned the Kentish property of John, Lord Clinton (d.1464), to whom Hampton had offered counsel several years earlier in 1441, when Clinton had been captured by the French and ‘sette to a great fynaunce’. Clinton’s two young sons had replaced him in captivity while he returned to England to raise his ransom, and he then settled property on Hampton, John Dyve* and others as the nominees of the boys’ mother, Joan. He then callously left the ransom unpaid, condeming his younger son to a captivity ended by death and his heir to one which continued for 26 years. In 1471 or 1472 Lord Clinton’s young widow (Margaret St. Leger) and her new husband Walter Hungerford† petitioned the chancellor to summon Dyve and Hampton to answer why they refused to hand over the property. On appearing Dyve reported that Hampton was ‘yt a lyve’, and although he failed to respond to the Hungerfords’ suit our MP did support the petition brought against them by Margaret’s stepson, the new Lord, by affirming that the enfeoffment had been made to the use of the late lord’s issue by his first wife.63 C1/39/4-9; 40/21, 22.

Now aged over 80, Hampton took out a pardon for himself and his wife on 8 Feb. 1472, referring to their former office at Colchester.64 C67/48, m. 9. He made a brief will on 12 May following, naming her and Thomas Frost as executors, and died before 16 July. He was buried in Kinver church. His hereditary post as lieutenant of Kinver forest was lost to the family, thanks to the forced settlement of 1464, and his manors of Kinver and Stourton were conveyed to the King’s brother, George, duke of Clarence, who later donated them to Tewkesbury abbey. The MP’s heir, Thomas Hampton, married one of his six daughters to William Frost (probably a kinsman of John’s executor) and settled the manor of Dunstall on the couple in reversion after the death of John’s widow.65 PCC 6 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 42v-43); CPR, 1476-85, p. 47; VCH Staffs. ii. 345; xx. 129, 131; Shaw, ii. 174. The executors brought various suits to recover the testator’s debts and one against Humphrey Whitgreve* for detinue of a book worth 20 marks. Hampton’s widow was still living in 1478.66 Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 185, 194; vi. 100.