MONTGOMERY, John

It was as a member of Henry VI’s household that Montgomery, who was to suffer the ultimate penalty for his association with the Lancastrian Crown, sat in his only known Parliament. As luck would have it, he took his seat in an assembly especially critical of the government and Court. He had inherited his attachment to the Lancastrian dynasty from his father, Sir John Montgomery. A distinguished veteran of the war in France, Sir John had served as an esquire of Henry IV’s household and was still a ‘King’s knight’ in the mid 1440s. He died just a few months before his son’s election to the Commons.

Owing to the longevity of his mother, Elizabeth, who survived him by three years, Montgomery never came fully into his own. The sister of Sir Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, she was of far more distinguished lineage than Sir John Montgomery, who had awarded her a jointure interest in all of his English estates, consisting of at least four manors and other lands in Essex, Hertfordshire and Hampshire, for life.5 E329/13; C139/135/36. Sir John had also held lands in France, but it is likely that he had lost most, if not all, of these estates by his death. In acknowledgement of her son’s predicament, Elizabeth appears to have permitted him a tenancy in the Montgomery manor at Great Tey in Essex.6 E326/7732.

While waiting for an inheritance to which he would never fully succeed, Montgomery occupied himself with gainful employment in the Household. He was certainly a ‘King’s serjeant’ when he and his father received a grant in survivorship of the office of bailiff of Calais in February 1446, and he features as an esquire of the King’s hall and chamber in the Household accounts for the years 1446-52.7 E101/409/16; 410/1, 3, 6, 9. On the grounds of age, he was not the John Montgomery whom the Crown sent to Normandy with the King’s secretary, John Rynell, and the bp. of Lisieux in 1439. Likewise, he cannot have been the soldier of that name who was serving in France in the following year: CPR, 1436-41, p. 340; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Fr. mss, 25775/1540. The Calais sinecure was not Montgomery’s only reward from the King, from whom he received no less than £100 for his good service before the end of 1446,8 E403/765, m. 10. Although Montgomery had yet to secure this sum, which was assigned to him rather than paid directly, in Nov. 1447: E403/769, m. 4. as well as the marriage of Margaret, widow of a fellow member of the Household, Edmund Lenthall, in May 1447.9 CPR, 1446-52, p. 37. The daughter of William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth, Margaret held a life interest in several manors and other properties in Sussex in jointure from her late husband.10 CIPM, xxvi. 577-8; C139/136/42; C141/4/43. Following the grant of 1447, Montgomery had the option of taking her hand himself but, in the event, she married another Household man, Thomas Tresham*. No doubt Tresham’s father, (Sir) William Tresham*, one of the Crown’s leading legal counsellors, had used his influence to secure Margaret for his son, in spite of the grant to Montgomery. In the end, the latter married Anne, a daughter of Robert Darcy, another prominent and well-connected lawyer who had settled at Maldon in Essex, just a few miles south-east of the Montgomerys’ manor at Faulkbourne in the same county. Following the marriage, Anne received a jointure interest in the reversion of the Montgomery manor at Chalton, Hampshire, upon the death of her mother-in-law.11 E326/7732.

Montgomery must have owed his election to the Parliament of 1449-50 to his membership of the Household, for he had no prior connexion with Lyme Regis, the Dorset borough for which he sat. By then in decline, Lyme was increasingly ready to return complete outsiders to the Commons as the fifteenth century progressed, probably because they were prepared to pay their own way.12 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 371-2. On 9 Mar. 1450, during the second session of the Parliament, the Exchequer paid Montgomery for the expenses he had incurred in going to Portsmouth on the King’s business.13 E403/777, m. 13. The port was a major embarkation point for Normandy and it is possible that he had accompanied Adam Moleyns, bishop of Chichester and keeper of the privy seal, there in the previous January. The government had sent Moleyns to settle the unpaid wages of the mutinous soldiers and sailors at Portsmouth, but they had murdered him for his role in ‘selling’ Normandy to the French after he had tried to satisfy them with less than their due.

In spite of losing Normandy, the English still retained Calais, although Montgomery was obliged to surrender his office there by virtue of the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1450-1. His loss proved temporary, for the office was restored to him in February 1453,14 CPR, 1452-61, p. 38 just as the Court was enjoying a short-lived political recovery. Montgomery disappears from view for the remainder of the 1450s, only to re-emerge at the beginning of Edward IV’s reign, having lost the status and offices he had enjoyed under the deposed Henry VI. What part (if any) he had played in the civil strife that had preceded the toppling of the last Lancastrian monarch is unknown, but he was soon implicated in the opposition to the new King.

The winter of 1461-2 was awash with rumours of Lancastrian conspiracies and it was said that Margaret of Anjou had assumed the leadership of a great pan-national league dedicated to restoring her husband to the throne. This was certainly a wild exaggeration, but the government suspected a serious plot by early 1462, prompting it to institute commissions of oyer and terminer to investigate trespasses and treasons throughout the country. On 12 Feb. John de Vere, earl of Oxford, his eldest son Aubrey de Vere, and four associates (the earl’s ‘ffeed men’ according to one chronicler), Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, Montgomery and two other sons-in-law of the late Robert Darcy, John Clopton and William Tyrell I*, were arrested in Essex and brought to the Tower of London. According to one account, the apprehended men had sent a message to Henry VI and his queen saying that they would pretend to join Edward IV on his campaign against the Lancastrian rebels in northern England, in order to get near enough to kill him when the opportunity arose, but their conscience-stricken messenger had betrayed them. Another, perhaps more reliable, version states that Oxford had arranged with Margaret of Anjou for the duke of Somerset to land with a Lancastrian army on the Essex coast. Whatever the case, all of those arrested, save Clopton, were summarily charged and convicted of high treason before John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, the constable of England, rather than in a common law court. On 20 Feb. Aubrey de Vere was beheaded on Tower Hill, and his execution was followed by those of Tuddenham, Montgomery and Tyrell on the 23rd and Oxford three days later. Their bodies were buried in the church of the Austin friars in London, but it is likely that their heads were publicly displayed on London Bridge.15 C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 231-2; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 78, 162-3; Gt. Chron. London ed. Thomas and Thornley, 198-9, 428. Like Scofield, i. 232, this account relies on Three 15th Cent. Chrons. 78 for the dates of the executions, about which the chroniclers are not agreed. For example, John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 203-4, states that Tuddenham, Montgomery and Tyrell met their deaths on 24 Feb. and John Vale’s Bk. ed. Kekewich et al. 179 that they were executed in the previous month. Afterwards, the chronicler John Warkworth condemned the use of summary process (‘the law of Padua’) against the executed men.16 C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 397. None of them was attainted, suggesting that the executions were not justifiable under the common law, although there is little doubt that, at the very least, all of them were strongly sympathetic to the Lancastrian cause.

The non-attainder of Montgomery meant that his heir, his younger brother Thomas, was able to succeed to the Montgomery estates after the death of their mother in 1465. Thomas had also served in Henry VI’s household, but he had thrown in his lot with the Yorkists and earned a knighthood fighting at Towton for Edward IV, for whom he became a trusted personal servant. Just over a year after her husband’s beheading, the MP’s widow Anne surrendered her reversionary interest in Chalton to her brother-in-law. According to an indenture drawn up between them, the surrender was in recognition of Sir Thomas’s ‘great labour’ and costs in defending the tenancy she held in the manor of Great Tey, and for helping her in her ‘many great troubles and vexations’, although it is always possible that he was simply taking advantage of his sister-in-law.17 E326/7732.

The time-serving Sir Thomas Montgomery, who proved equally adept at adjusting to the accessions of Richard III and Henry VII, survived until 1495. In his will of July 1492, he conveyed Bower Hall, his ‘place’ at West Mersea, Essex, to the Cistercian abbey of St. Mary Graces, London (where he was buried), in return for prayers for himself and other members of his family, including his long dead elder brother.18 PCC 22 Vox (PROB11/10, ff. 175-8). In 1496 Anne Montgomery, who appears never to have remarried, again renounced any claim to Chalton, this time to Sir Thomas’s niece and heir Alice Langley.19 Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. xv, ped. between pp. 50 and 51. Anne was still alive in mid 1498 when her cousin, Thomas Froxmere*, appointed her an executor of his will, and she was one of those who witnessed that document, dated 21 July that year.20 PCC 23 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 190v). She was no longer alive when the widow of the last Mowbray duke of Norfolk made her will of 6 Nov. 1506, since the dowager duchess asked to be buried near her tomb in the church of the Minoresses without Aldgate, London.21 Trans. Essex Arch. Soc. n.s. xv, ped. between pp. 50 and 51.