OLNEY, Robert

A member of the royal household by the time he came to sit in the Commons, Olney was not of a particularly exalted family background. Among his probable forebears was John Olney, a servant of the queen’s chamberlain in the reign of Edward III, while his paternal grandfather was a merchant, John Olney alias Barker of Weston Underwood. According to one authority, the Olneys of Weston were a cadet branch of those of Haversham, also in Buckinghamshire, although they were certainly related to the Olneys of London and it appears that Olney’s merchant grandfather had a career in the City.7 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/box 54/bundle 3; J1/574, 591, 601, 606, 609; H. Hornyold, Strickland of Sizergh, 45; VCH Bucks. iv. 498; CPL, iv. 204, 216, 224; CCR, 1396-9, pp. 50-51; P. Nightingale, A Med. Mercantile Community, 296, 300, 351; Cal. P. and M. London, 1381-1412, pp. 263-5; Cal. Wills ct. Husting London ed. Sharpe, ii. 373-4, 479-80; A.C. Chibnall, Sherington, 135. There was also an Olney (or Onley) family of Coventry, of which Robert Olney† was a member. A.F. Sutton, A Merchant Fam. of Coventry, London and Calais, 3-4, 19, seems to confuse the Olneys of Coventry with those of Bucks. It is not known how, if at all, the two families were related. By the early 1360s, the latter had become a creditor of Sir John Nowers†, from whom he acquired the manor of Weston Underwood. John the merchant died before 1396 and was succeeded by his son and namesake, Robert’s father.8 VCH Bucks. iv. 498; CCR, 1396-9, pp. 50-51. A minor gentleman, the younger John played little part in the administration of Buckinghamshire,9 CFR, xii. 319; xiv. 317; CPR, 1408-13, p. 378. although he advanced his family’s fortunes as an estate officer of William Beauchamp, Lord Abergavenny.10 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 684. In 1392 Abergavenny awarded him the manor of Birdingbury in east Warwickshire, to hold for life at a rent of 40s. p.a. At a later date, however, John managed to acquire the fee simple of this property, allowing him to pass it on to his descendants.11 VCH Warws. vi. 37. The feudal overlord of Birdingbury was Abergavenny’s nephew Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick,12 W. Dugdale, Warws. 226. but it not clear whether the John Olney who served Warwick as an auditor in the early 1420s was John of Weston or his father-in-law and namesake, John Olney of Bishops Tachbrook (the MP’s maternal grandfather).13 R. Jeffs, ‘Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1960), 313, assumes that the auditor was John of Weston. If John of Tachbrook was a blood relative as well as an in-law of the Weston John, he must, in view of the church’s marriage laws and the lack of evidence of any dispensation, have been a fairly distant kinsman. Still alive in February 1422, John of Weston died before the accession of Henry VI and was buried at Weston Underwood.14 CPR, 1416-22, p. 423; PCC 55 Marche. At his death he held lands at Banbury in Oxfordshire as well as his manors in Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire.15 VCH Oxon. x. 56.

At his father’s death Olney had yet to attain his majority, and in December 1423 his mother Margery and Walter Fitzrichard, an Olney trustee, bought his wardship and marriage from the feoffees of the late Henry V.16 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/box 54/bundle 4. Margery, who was still alive in July 1439, retained a dower interest in her late husband’s estates, although in April 1426 she demised Weston Underwood to her son, to hold at farm for a term of 15 years. Nearly two years later, she released to him other lands in Buckinghamshire which she held in dower, in return for annuity of 42s. for the rest of her life.17 Ibid. CR1998/J1/565, 568. By the later 1420s, Olney was also farming the manor at Weston of which Thomas Pever† was lord, for seven marks p.a.,18 Ibid. 571. but he most significantly augmented his landed interests through his marriage to Goditha Bosom.

The younger of the two daughters of the Bedfordshire esquire, William Bosom, Goditha was coheir to her father’s estates. Still unmarried on 29 Aug. 1424, the date of her father’s inquisition post mortem,19 CIPM, xxii. 322. she became Olney’s wife some time in the following autumn. On 10 Nov. that year, the escheator in Bedfordshire was ordered to make a partition of William Bosom’s lands between her and Olney on the one hand and her elder sister Margaret and Margaret’s husband, William Burgoyne, on the other.20 CFR, xv. 95. In due course the manor of Roxton passed to the Olneys and the lands in Wotton to the Burgoynes,21 VCH Beds. iii. 219, 329. but it was some time before either couple came into complete possession of these estates, since Bosom’s widow Margaret survived until late 1447. While she lived, many of the Bosom lands remained in her hands, although it would appear that she allowed the Olneys actual possession of Roxton during her lifetime.22 CCR, 1422-9, p. 165; CFR, xviii. 102; C139/131/19. In the early 1460s the manor was the subject of a lawsuit which Olney and his wife brought against another Robert Olney in the court of common pleas. Unless the couple’s son, it is hard to see what conceivable claim this other Robert could have had to the property. If their son, he must have predeceased his father, since Roxton subsequently passed to the MP’s daughter and heir.23 CP40/800, rot. 3d; VCH Beds. iii. 219. It is possible that the defendant was Robert Olney, a ‘gentleman’ and draper of London in 1482: CCR, 1476-85, nos. 277, 891. Goditha Olney, who predeceased her husband, is unlikely to have lived much beyond late 1463 since nothing is heard of her after this date.24 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/J1/631. She was certainly dead by Apr. 1478: ibid. EB/26.

Always primarily a member of the Buckinghamshire gentry, Olney is not known to have held any office outside that county or Bedfordshire. It was as of Weston Underwood that he swore the oath to keep the peace administered throughout the country in 1434,25 CPR, 1429-36, p. 397. although Birdingbury, his other inherited manor, gave him an interest in Warwickshire. It was as lord of Birdingbury that he clashed with nine of the manor’s tenants in the first half of the 1440s. In a couple of lawsuits brought in the common pleas, they accused him of seizing various household goods from them in early 1442, but when the suits came to pleading two years later Olney’s attorney asserted that they were his bondsmen and had no right to sue him at Westminster. A jury sitting at Warwick in the following summer thought otherwise, for it found for the plaintiffs, to whom Olney was obliged to pay damages totalling £10.26 KB27/732, rots. 42d, 71. Birdingbury would descend to Olney’s only surviving child, Margaret, who was married to the Warwickshire lawyer Thomas Throckmorton* in late 1445.27 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/J2/165. The match probably came about through the Beauchamp nexus, for Throckmorton’s recently deceased father John I* was a counsellor of the earl of Warwick. In a marriage settlement of 3 Oct. that year, an agreement to which his relative and feoffee, the prominent London mercer John Olney was a party, Olney undertook to settle land worth £20 p.a. on the couple before the following Christmas. He also agreed to convey the greater part of his estates to feoffees, to hold to the use of himself and Goditha for his life and then, should he die without any legitimate male issue, on behalf of the Throckmortons and their children. If Goditha bore him other children, they were to have a share of these lands although Weston Underwood was reserved for the Throckmortons.28 Ibid. J1/609; J2/165.

Even after his own marriage, Olney was never a landowner of the first rank but he advanced himself in the service of the Crown and at least two lay magnates. Certainly an esquire of the King’s hall and chamber in 1441, he was probably already a Household man by the autumn of 1435. On 1 Oct. that year he indented to serve in Calais with three archers for a period of two months, as part of a small expedition whose members were recruited from within the Household.29 E101/71/3/890; 409/9; E404/52/28; H.L. Ratcliffe, ‘Military Expenditure of English Crown 1422-35’ (Oxf. Univ. M.Litt. thesis, 1979), 103-5. It is possible that his family’s links with the Beauchamps had smoothed his entry into the royal establishment, in which he served until at least 1452,30 E101/410/9. Although ‘John Olney’ (possibly a scribal error for Robert) was one of 12 ‘esquires of attendance’ named in an ordinance for the reform of the Household in 1454: PPC, vi. 223. although he was connected with other lords as well. Among them was William, Lord Zouche, who had succeeded to the former Pever manor at Weston Underwood in the right of his wife. In May 1439 Zouche asked Olney, his ‘right Welebeloued frende’, to distrain a farmer at Weston, and at the end of 1456 he granted the MP and his son-in-law Thomas Throckmorton an annuity of seven marks for their lives in survivorship.31 CP, xii (2), 945; Carpenter, 526; VCH Bucks. iv. 500; Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/box 54/bundle 4. By 1456, Olney was also an annuitant and estate officer of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, and it was as a member of Buckingham’s affinity that he associated with other Stafford retainers, among them the duke’s receiver-general, John Heton*. Olney and Heton were feoffees for each other, and in early 1468 Olney conveyed away various lands in Weston Underwood to Heton’s brother Richard, as a mark of gratitude for the ‘great kindness’ which Richard had shown him.32 CPR, 1446-52, p. 163; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 64, 80, 110; 1476-85, no. 611; Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/J1/635-7.

Another of Olney’s friends and mutual feoffees was Thomas Charlton* of Middlesex, a fellow esquire of the Household. Following the birth of his son and heir in June 1449, Charlton hoped that Olney would become one of the child’s godparents. In the event this proved impossible because Olney was then away in the ‘far northern’ parts of England (presumably on the King’s business) and unable to make the long journey back south for the baptism at Hillingdon.33 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/J1/605, 609, 623; CCR, 1461-8, p. 132; Corp. London RO, hr 192/3; C140/17/31; 35/64. Assuming Olney enjoyed external support when he stood for election to either of his Parliaments, it is likely his membership of the King’s household counted for more than his connexions with Zouche and Stafford. In both assemblies his fellow knight of the shire (Robert Manfeld* in 1442 and Sir William Lucy* in November 1449) was a Household man, so it is possible that he was returned in the Crown’s interest. The second of these Parliaments marked a low point for the King’s servants, since the Commons impeached Henry VI’s chief minister William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. De la Pole had a significant following in the Thames valley but there is no evidence that Olney was ever one of his retainers. In November 1452, by which time the Court had regained the political initiative against its main opponent, Richard, duke of York, Olney was pricked as sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Upon relinquishing office, he faced demands from those claiming non-payment of sums which the King had awarded to them from the issues of the shrievalty.34 E13/145B, rot. 4d; 146, rot. 80d. Their lawsuits were the least of his troubles since his time as sheriff had proved particularly difficult; so much so that the government could find no one to replace him when it expired. In November 1454, therefore, it resorted to the expedient of assigning to Edmund Rede* and John Pulter the ad hoc task of collecting what they could of the revenues of those counties.35 PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 2.

According to a petition he submitted to the Crown, Olney had sustained great losses and expenses as sheriff because of the quarrels of various unnamed lords and other notable men. These dissensions had prevented him from properly fulfilling his duties and forced him to employ an inordinately large and expensive armed escort for his own protection. They had also made it extremely difficult for him to find men willing to serve as under sheriff, clerk and bailiff, obliging him to pay extraordinary wages to those who would do so, even though such officers were entitled to no more than the customary profits of those positions. He added that the King’s granting away of many of the liberties and franchises in the two counties had only compounded his difficulties in collecting the revenues of his bailiwick.36 E159/231, brevia rot. 10. The fact that no one would take up the shrievalty after Olney had completed his term suggests that he was far from exaggerating the problems he had faced. His petition does not identify the discords which did so much to contribute to these problems, but it is likely that the quarrels to which he referred concerned the Ampthill estate in Bedfordshire. A few months before he assumed the shrievalty, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, had seized these lands from Ralph, Lord Cromwell, so triggering a major dispute between the two lords and their respective followings.37 S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 881-907. The King responded to the petition from Olney, his ‘trusty and welbeloued Menyall seruant’ in the spring of 1455. In consideration of the MP’s troubles as sheriff, and in recognition of his past service at home and ‘beyonde the see’, the Exchequer was commanded to forgive him £65 10s. of his account, and the royal pardon he received in the following August covered his term in the shrievalty.38 E159/231, brevia rot. 10; C67/41, m. 32. His troublesome first term as sheriff was also covered by another such pardon granted to him in Jan. 1458: C67/42, m. 36.

A few weeks before his petition was granted, Olney and other knights and esquires linked with the Lancastrian government and Household received summonses to a great council at Leicester.39 PPC, vi. 340. The council never met because it was overtaken by the battle of St. Albans in May 1455, a skirmish at which the earl of Stafford, the son of Olney’s patron, was killed. There is no evidence that Olney himself took part in this or any of the other civil war battles of the later years of Henry VI’s reign, unlike his daughter’s brother-in-law, John Throckmorton II*, whom the Yorkists beheaded immediately after the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in February 1461, but he remained identified with the Lancastrian regime. In the autumn of 1458 it appointed him sheriff of Northamptonshire, a county in which he had no identifiable interests, and in March 1460 he witnessed a charter on behalf of Thomas Grey, Lord Richemount Grey, a committed supporter of Henry VI.40 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 482-3. Two months later he was appointed to an anti-Yorkist commission of array. Even if he did not actually take up arms for the Lancastrians, Olney was sufficiently mistrusted by the Yorkists to be excluded from all public office following the accession of Edward IV. Their suspicions appear well founded, given that he was appointed to a second term as sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire during the short-lived Readeption of Henry VI. In anticipation of the expenses he would incur as sheriff, the new government agreed to excuse him £70 on his account,41 E404/71/6/16. but he was removed from office as soon as Edward recovered the throne and never accounted. He subsequently took the precaution of obtaining a pardon from the restored Yorkist King.42 C67/48, m. 26.

In the pardon, dated 29 Nov. 1471, Olney was referred to as ‘lately of London’ as well as ‘of Weston Underwood’. By now he had begun to withdraw from active involvement in his interests in Buckinghamshire, having already surrendered his estates to his daughter Margaret Throckmorton. Including a manor at Ravenstone, Buckinghamshire, as well as those of Weston Underwood, Roxton and Birdingbury and his holdings at Banbury, he had given them up to her in return for an annuity of £50 for the rest of his life. He received this sum in half-yearly instalments of £25, issuing Margaret a receipt for each instalment paid. A number of these receipts have survived, and in most he is styled ‘of London’, where he spent his retirement, rather than of Weston Underwood.43 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/J1/599, 654, 656, 669, 673, 677, 681; J2/179. No doubt through his family connexions, he acquired interests in the City and its environs in his later years. Among his relatives there were the drapers John Norman* and his brother Richard – the exact connexion is not known – and he was a beneficiary of Richard Norman’s will of 1472. In the main body of the will, dated 16 Sept. that year, Richard bequeathed his ‘cousin’ Olney £40 and a gold cross and chain. On the following 21 Oct., just before he died, the testator added a codicil, made in the presence of the MP and others. In this he left his kinsman a couple of gowns and bequeathed £10 to the Drapers’ Company, upon condition that Olney, through the ‘meanes and labor’ of the Company, should succeed him as keeper of Blackwell Hall. Shortly afterwards, Olney assumed that role, with its issues and profits, for life. Again benefitting from his connexion with the Normans, he was able also to acquire Le Gote on the Hoop, a tavern in Cheapside previously held by John Norman who had died in 1468.44 PCC 6 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 50-51v); Historical Gazetteer Cheapside ed. Keene and Harding, no. 11/10. Apart from these interests in the City, Olney held various messuages, lands and tenements at Isleworth, Middlesex, at the end of his life, although whether likewise through the Norman connexion is unknown.45 Guildhall Lib. London, commissary ct. wills, 9171/7, ff. 100-1.

Wittingly or not, in relinquishing control of his Buckinghamshire estates to his daughter Olney freed himself from future problems, since Robert Neville† challenged the by now widowed Margaret Throckmorton (whose husband had died in July 1472) in her possession of Weston Underwood in the later 1470s. The grandson of Sir John Nowers,46 VCH Bucks. iv. 345. and a trusted servant of the Yorkist Household, Neville had made a formal release of the manor to Olney’s widowed mother Margery shortly after succeeding his elder brother, John Neville, in the late 1430s,47 CCR, 1435-41, p. 277. but now he chose to resurrect his claim. At some stage during the resulting dispute Olney wrote to his widowed daughter to acknowledge the ‘gret trowbyll’ that she was having over her ‘lyvelood’. He lamented that he was unable to help her as much as he would like because he himself ‘had late both trowbyll and losse’, although his letter fails to specify these problems of his own.48 Carpenter, 261. Among those drawn into the quarrel was Richard, duke of Gloucester. Initially he was probably acting on Neville’s behalf, but by mid 1476 the latter and his son and namesake had granted their alleged title to him and he was seeking to take the manor for himself. The duke’s intervention represented a formidable challenge, but Margaret stood her ground, writing to him in humble but firm terms in defence of her title.49 Throckmorton mss, CR 1998/box 4/bundle 4; J1/1132. It is not known how Gloucester reacted to her appeal, although in due course she succeeded in making good her claims and Weston, along with the rest of the estates which she had inherited from her parents, passed to her son and heir Robert Throckmorton.50 Ibid. box 55/31; CP40/866, rot. 360d; VCH Beds. iii. 219; VCH Bucks. iv. 499; VCH Warws. vi. 37.

Olney lived long enough to see his daughter win her battle for Weston, surviving until 1487. Early that year, he made his last will, registered and proved in the commissary court of the bishop of London. This is in two parts, one dated 20 Jan. and the other 22 Feb., the second of which immediately follows the first in the register in question.51 Commissary ct. wills, 9171/7, ff. 100-1. The latter part is perhaps best described as a codicil, given that it supplemented rather replaced the first. In the January section, Olney sought burial before the altar of Our Lady in the church of the Charterhouse just beyond the City wall, following a funeral conducted ‘honestly’ and without ‘pompe’. He directed that every monk there who was a priest should receive 6s. 8d., and each of the brethren not in orders 20d., while the poor were to receive 66s. 8d. on the day he died. For his further spiritual welfare, he set aside another £9 6s. 8d., of which the four orders of friars in London were to share £8 6s. 8d. between them and the City’s brotherhood or hospital of St. Augustine Papey were to receive the remaining 20s. In return, the friars were to say 1,000 masses as soon as possible after his death and the brethren another 100. Olney also donated vestments to the churches of Olney, the parish from which his family derived its name, and Ravenstone in Buckinghamshire, and vestments and a chalice to that of Roxton, Bedfordshire. Finally, he ordered that the residue of his estate, following the payment of any outstanding debts, should be disposed of in deeds of ‘pyte’ and ‘charite’ for the good of the souls of himself and his late wife, Goditha.

Olney opened the February section of his will by revoking all previous wills – although apparently not the document of the previous month – including a no longer extant will of 1482. Although the will of 1482 is now lost, one of its provisions is preserved in the records of the Drapers’ Company. These show that he had assigned control of Le Gote on the Hoop to a group of drapers headed by Sir Thomas Stalbroke, while reserving a rent of £2 p.a. for life that he had granted to a priest, Robert Rasy, at an earlier date. (At the end of the century, Le Gote would pass to the Drapers’ Company, presumably in accordance with Olney’s intent.) In the February section, Olney awarded Rasy a further annuity, of £4 from the issues of his holdings at Isleworth, asking the priest to pray for the souls of himself and Goditha and of Richard Norman and others. He also made bequests to John Totenhale, a priest of Merton College, Oxford, upon whom he bestowed 20s. p.a. for five years towards his ‘exhibicion’, to one Anne Beauchamp, to whom he left his best primer and a featherbed of down, and to Elizabeth, ‘lately called Elizabeth Punsunby’. He assigned to Elizabeth, presumably a relative or well-born dependant, nearly 27s., apparently an instalment of a sum of 100 marks (of which she had already received £40) he had previously undertaken to pay her. Furthermore, he directed his executors to allow her a reasonable share of bedding, utensils and other ‘necessaries’ from his household, as well as 20s. p.a. for her ‘houservant’ for as long as she was unmarried. As for religious institutions, in February 1487 Olney made bequests to the Charterhouse at Sheen, from whose monks he sought 1,000 masses for his soul, to the minoresses without Aldgate and to the Dominicans at Northampton. He also left a mass book, chalice and vestments to the parish church at Weston Underwood and made a donation of 6s. 8d. towards repairing a causeway that ran between the church and the Olney manor at Weston. In the January section of his will, Olney had appointed three executors, Master Thomas Aleyn, his previously mentioned annuitant, Robert Rasy, and Henry Assheborne, perhaps the writer of writs of that name, a Londoner who died in 1496,52 PCC 30-31 Vox (PROB11/10, ff. 248v-249) for this scribe’s will. While it does not mention Olney, it is worth noting that it features three of the institutions favoured by him, the Carthusian houses at London and Sheen and the abbey of Syon. and two overseers, his daughter Margaret and her son Robert Throckmorton. In the following February, however, he chose three of his servants, Thomas Atherton, William Hewet the elder and Thomas Blofeld, to assist the same appointees, awarding each of them £2 and a black gown for his trouble. As for his other servants, he directed the executors to reward them at their discretion, and to keep his household intact for a month after his death out of the proceeds of his estate. Perhaps hinting at family tensions, Olney concluded the February section with a warning, ‘upon peyne of cursyng’, to any of those of his ‘blode’ or ‘alye’ who might try to obstruct his will or trouble his executors. He died before 5 Nov. 1487, the date of probate recorded in the register of the commissary court.