HENDE, [John]

The identity of this MP is uncertain, since his Christian name is lost from the return attesting his election to Parliament.6 C219/16/3/84. In this period, however, Westbury usually returned lawyers or Crown servants to the Commons, and what follows rests on the assumption that he was John Hende, a long-standing member of Henry VI’s household.7 On the other hand, it is worth noting that Westbury did occasionally return much more local men. It is therefore conceivable that the MP was not the royal servant, but came from Marlborough in Wilts. In Mar. 1442 and July 1446 the Crown appointed John Hynde of Marlborough (identified as a ‘yeoman’ on the second occasion) a tax collector in that county. Mayor of his home town in the mid 1460s, this John survived into the 1470s: CFR, xvii. 217; xviii. 35; CCR, 1468-76, no. 1089; C1/1/139; E326/2529, 2559; C139/171/12; C140/30/53; KB9/135/27A; Wilts. Hist. Centre, Savernake Estate mss., 9/19/272, 710. This John was the younger of the two sons of that name of the wealthy London draper John Hende by his second wife, Elizabeth.8 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 152. The date of Hende’s birth is uncertain, but both he and his synonymous er. bro. were apparently still under age on 28 July 1418, when their father added a codicil to his will: PCC 42 Marche (PROB11/2B, ff. 105-6). Following the draper’s death in 1419, she married the young future treasurer of England, Ralph Butler, later Lord Sudeley, to whose influence the Hende brothers probably owed their earliest advancement.9 C140/7/14; CP, xii (1), 421. While it is unclear which of the two Johns Sir Henry Norbury*, Butler’s nephew, retained for war service in Normandy and at Calais in late 1435,10 E404/52/25; DKR, xlviii. 308. it was certainly the younger brother who had become a King’s esquire by February 1436, rose to be a marshal of the hall by the summer of 1444, and continued to serve in the Household until the late 1450s.11 CPR, 1429-36, p. 510; E101/408/25, f. 7.

The brothers’ father had provided for the younger John with a grant of the Essex manors of Ramsey, Wrabness and Stondon (in South Massey), as well as the reversion of a tenement with a quay in Colchester. These were substantial holdings, valued at some £40 p.a. after the latter’s death in 1464. In addition, John inherited the vast sum of £1,500 in money and a quantity of plate and jewels, and such resources no doubt funded his purchase of a tenement in ‘Le Shete’ Street in Windsor in 1445.12 P. Morant, Essex, ii. 155; VCH Essex, iv. 243; PCC 42 Marche; C140/12/6; CCR, 1429-35, p. 307; St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, recs., XV.45.148-51. To add to his income were the rewards he gained in the service to the Crown, although the direct monetary grants among these were clearly precarious in view of the permanent financial crisis of Henry VI’s administration. Alongside other members of the King’s entourage, he repeatedly saw his claims set aside and his tallies cancelled. To take just one example: a grant of 100 marks for good service that he was to share with Hamon Sutton II* and 11 other Household servants in July 1452 was not honoured by assignment until more than a year later and still remained unpaid in the summer of 1459.13 E404/69/184; E403/796, m. 8; 807, m. 4; 819, m. 6. Rather more valuable were the offices that periodically came Hende’s way. In February 1436 the young King’s Council awarded him the post of forester of ‘Bateles Bailly’ in Windsor forest and keeper of the chase of Cranborne in Wiltshire, a position he kept for ten years before it was granted instead to John Lewknor*.14 CPR, 1429-36, p. 510; 1441-6, p. 399. A year later, he acquired the shrievalty of Caernarvonshire, a sinecure exercised by a deputy, which he retained to nearly the end of Henry VI’s reign.15 CFR, xvi. 314; CPR, 1436-41, p. 151. Much later in his career, Hende and another Household esquire and marshal of the King’s hall, Thomas Montgomery†, received a grant of the office of warden of the Tower mint and exchange in survivorship.16 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 87-88, 481.

Thanks to his landholdings and Court connexions, Hende was an obvious choice for the shrievalty of Essex and Hertfordshire, which he held twice during the political ascendancy of the leading courtier magnate, William de la Pole, earl (subsequently marquess and then duke) of Suffolk. By the mid 1440s, however, he had formed a connexion with a local magnate, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, possibly through the good offices of another member of that peer’s circle, Walter Writtle*, the son-in-law of his brother, John Hende the elder. In the autumn of 1446 the viscount agreed to surrender custody, during the minority of the heir, of the former lands of John Warner in Essex to Hende, who remained associated with Bourgchier for the rest of his life.17 CFR, xviii. 58-59; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 273, 317; 1461-7, p. 255.

It is likely that Hende owed his return to the Parliament of 1455 to the viscount’s influence. This assembly was summoned in the aftermath of the first battle of St. Albans by the victorious adherents of Richard, duke of York, and Bourgchier, who replaced the earl of Wiltshire as treasurer of England a week after the battle, was both York’s brother-in-law and ally. Hende’s family connexion, Walter Writtle, secured a seat closer to home at Maldon, while the duke’s influence in Wiltshire may have allowed for Hende’s return at Westbury. In spite of the killing in the streets of St. Albans, the divisions between the ‘Yorkists’ and the ‘Court party’ had yet to reach the point of no return. Notwithstanding their association with York, Bourgchier and his brother Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, who had become chancellor in March 1455, occupied the middle ground to some extent. Their close ties of kinship with leading magnates from both sides meant that their appointments to the two great offices of state were probably perfectly acceptable to the likes of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, an opponent of York, as well as to York and his Neville allies.18 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 164-5. Similarly, the appointment of Hende, both a member of the Bourgchier affinity and a Household servant, to a third term as sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire in the autumn of 1456 (after York’s protectorate had ended and the Bourgchiers had left office) must have commanded broad acceptance.

After becoming drawn into the orbit of Viscount Bourgchier, Hende continued to maintain ties with his stepfather, Lord Sudeley, with whom he made a grant of a tenement in the London parish of All Hallows the Great to St. Albans abbey in May 1456.19 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 286, 291; 1467-77, p. 512; C143/452/1. Otherwise, his circle owed much to his membership of the royal household, where his associates included the likes of Thomas Queny, one of the keepers of the King’s cellar in London.20 CCR, 1441-7, p. 396. Little else is known of his affairs, and the debt of £10 for which he had begun a suit against a husbandman from Wrabness at some point before 1456 probably arose from the petty squabbles common everywhere between landlords and tenants.21 CPR, 1452-61, p. 314.

It is not certain whether Hende’s Household career ended with the Yorkist victory at Northampton in the summer of 1460 or the deposition of Henry VI in the following March. Having survived the accession of Edward IV, he died on 6 Sept. 1464. He had both outlived his elder brother and left no offspring, and his heirs were the descendants of his niece Joan, the wife of Walter Writtle.22 CFR, xix. 195; xx. 126, 132; C140/12/6; VCH Essex, iv. 242-3; Morant, ii. 156.