PAYN, Hugh

Payn’s origins are obscure, and while it has been suggested that he may have hailed from Wales or its marches, no conclusive evidence to substantiate this hypothesis has been discovered.4 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 669. Wedgwood’s assertion appears to be based on a lawsuit for the farm of Boughrood church brought by a Hugh Payn in Chancery against one Jevan ap Philip at some point between 1432 and 1443: C1/10/53. Nevertheless, there is no suggestion that he had any connexion with the south-west of England, and it seems that he came to play a part in the region’s politics solely through his link with the Holand dukes of Exeter.5 There seems to be no reason to connect Hugh Payn with Thomas Payn, who served as alderman outside the east gate of Exeter in 1430-2: Devon RO, Exeter city recs., mayor’s ct. rolls, 9-11 Hen. VI. Uniquely among the MPs of Henry VI’s reign, he held a bachelor’s degree in both laws, but no details of where he was educated have come to light: he has left no trace in the surviving records of either English university. By the mid 1440s he had come to the attention of John, duke of Exeter, the admiral of England, who employed him as his lieutenant and commissary general, with the specific responsibility of presiding over the court of admiralty. The court normally sat at London, and at Exeter’s special request Payn was admitted to the freedom of the city not long after taking office.6 CPR, 1446-52, p. 63; Corp. London RO, jnl. 4, f. 199.

At John Holand’s death in the summer of 1447 Payn transferred apparently seamlessly into the service of his young heir, Henry.7 CCR, 1447-54, p. 411; E159/235, recorda Mich. rot. 82. It is not clear whether he retained his admiralty post under William de la Pole, successively marquess and duke of Suffolk, who held the office of admiral during Duke Henry’s minority, and he may for a time have pursued other affairs. In October 1448 the citizens of Exeter made him a gift of wine on his visit to their city, and rewarded him with 40s. for his services in treating with Bishop Edmund Lacy, but there is no explicit mention of his involvement in a suit which the city fathers had begun in the court of admiralty at this time.8 Exeter receiver’s acct. 27-28 Hen. VI, mm. 1d, 2. In Jan. 1448 commrs. were appointed to hear an appeal against a judgement passed by Payn while still in office, but the date of this judgement is unclear, and it may have been made before John Holand’s death: CPR, 1446-52, p. 142. Payn remained a trusted member of the Holand circle. In July 1448 he was said to have been among a group of armed retainers in the company of William Holand, one of the late duke’s bastard sons, who laid an ambush for Nicholas Kirkham along the road from Newton Bushel to Teignmouth, seized Kirkham’s servant John Burgh, dragged him to Teignmouth and hanged him from a beech tree, letting it be known that if they could only lay hands on his master, he should suffer the same fate.9 E28/88/32.

Payn’s judgements in the court of admiralty were frequently subject to challenges and appeals, but these probably owed more to the conflicting jurisdictions of admiralty and common law than to any incompetence or corruption on his part.10 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 63, 142, 417, 564; 1452-61, pp. 246, 346, 369; M.M.N. Stansfield, ‘Holland Fam.’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1987), 234. Nevertheless, his impartiality was occasionally called into question by his all too close ties with his noble master. Thus, on the night of 14 July 1449 a ‘galyet’ belonging to the duke of Exeter attacked and seized a Flemish carvel, the Kateryn of Vlissingen, on its voyage to London, and diverted it to the Isle of Wight, where it was spoiled of its cargo of wheat. The owners of the grain, two London merchants, proved remarkably resourceful, and unleashed a barrage of petitions to the duke, the chancellor, and even the King himself. Holand ordered his servants Payn and John Chancy to make restitution, but although Payn professed to be willing to carry out his master’s instructions, and in his capacity as presiding officer of the admiralty court had several members of the crew of the pirate vessel arrested, he found himself faced with unexpected difficulties in the Isle of Wight, where the stolen ship had been seized by the officials of Richard, duke of York. In the interim, the London merchants and the Flemish shipmaster, one Cornelius Everbolt, had made further complaints, claiming that Payn had shown himself unwilling to restore their property (of which he had in any case accepted a share), unless they would pay a contribution towards the victualling of the duke of Exeter’s ‘galyet’ (presumably for its next privateering expedition), and had initially demanded 20 marks, then ‘styfly’ £10, and eventually 20 nobles.11 SC8/63/3141; 132/6576; C49/50/6, 7; C4/4/20; Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van den Handel Met Engeland, Schotland en Ierland ed. Smit, ii. 1370-1.

Although Payn was unquestionably known to the citizens of Exeter, it is clear that his return to Parliament for the city in 1450 was the result of a deal between his master and Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon. That year, the city receiver recorded a payment to one John Lange for carrying a letter from the duke to the earl, concerning the election of Exeter’s representatives. The two magnates evidently agreed that each of them should nominate one of the two MPs, for Payn’s colleague was the earl’s retainer Thomas Holland* of Cowick.12 Exeter receiver’s acct. 29-30 Hen. VI, mm. 1d, 2. Moreover, Payn’s candidacy probably suited the parsimonious civic authorities, for it came cheap: he drew just 26s. 8d. for a Parliament that lasted for more than five months spread over three sessions, and in the event did not collect this money for more than six years.13 Ibid. 36-37 Hen. VI. Payn’s own reasons for wishing to sit in the Commons of 1450 are unclear, unless he did so at Henry Holand’s bidding: at least one modern scholar has suggested that the duke secured Payn’s return as a personal favour, rather than out of any particular political consideration.14 Stansfield, 244.

As in the case of the Kateryn of Vlissingen, Payn’s service to the duke of Exeter was not strictly limited to the business of the admiralty. Thus, in the spring of 1449 he took charge of two French merchants, variously said to hail from Limousin or Armagnac, as the duke’s prisoners, and committed them to gaol at Southampton, from where they were forcibly removed by the sheriff of the town, John Payn I*, and the latter’s kinsman Thomas Payn.15 SC8/46/2278; C1/19/483; CP40/795, rot. 108. That November he was associated with the Holand servants Thomas Calwodelegh I* and John Chancy in receiving a grant of custody of the deceased duke of Exeter’s estates during Henry Holand’s minority,16 CFR, xviii. 147. and in 1453 he was at his master’s side at the armed gathering at the Yorkshire manor of Spofforth, where Holand and Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, appeared to be planning to rise in open revolt.17 KB9/149/1/4, no. 27; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 343-4; P. Booth, ‘Men Behaving Badly?’, The Fifteenth Cent. III ed. Clark, 107. Throughout the 1450s he was regularly associated with other members of the Holand household and affinity in their personal affairs,18 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 411, 497; E159/235, recorda Mich. rot. 82. and there may well have been some truth in the claim of the London mercer John Aleyn that Payn, having lent him various sums of money and received an enfeoffment of two houses as security for repayment, had arranged for Aleyn’s dwelling house to be ransacked by Exeter’s servants, who had not even stopped short of searching the clothes worn by the mercer’s wife and servants.19 C1/16/176-8.

In the event, the duke of Exeter’s sabre-rattling at Spofforth was to pale into comparative insignificance as the wider kingdom was tipped into open civil war by the rivalries of the lords. Following the disintegration of the army of the duke of York and his Neville allies, the earls of Salisbury and Warwick, at Ludlow in October 1459, the Nevilles, accompanied by York’s heir, the earl of March, fled to Calais, while York himself sought refuge in Ireland. In November the adherents of the court party around Queen Margaret summoned a Parliament which attainted them and declared their estates forfeit. The duke of Exeter had taken the queen’s side, and he and his servants consequently stood to gain. In February 1460 Payn thus found himself rewarded with the stewardship of the Yorkist lords’ forfeited estates in Wales, and two months later he was included in a commission to seize all the lands in question into the King’s hands.20 CPR, 1452-61, p. 545. He was not to enjoy these new offices for long. About the time of his appointment to the stewardship, the duke of Exeter himself went to sea with a force of 3,500 men to dislodge the Yorkists from their stronghold at Calais. Yet, the loyalty of these men proved dubious, and at the first sight of the Yorkist fleet under the command of the earl of Warwick Exeter turned back into Dartmouth harbour.

It is not known with how much zeal Payn set about his commission. Certainly, by the early summer he was back in London, where he joined the duke of Exeter’s household in the Tower, which the duke ruled as constable. Suspicious of the Londoners’ loyalties in the event of a Yorkist invasion, the queen’s government dispatched Lords Scales and Hungerford to lead the defence of the fortress. When the Yorkist lords landed in Kent at the end of June they met with little resistance until they reached the gates of London, and even these were opened to them after a short delay, leaving the garrison of the Tower cut off from the other Lancastrian lords. While the main Yorkist force set out for the battlefield of Northampton on 5 July, the earl of Salisbury remained behind and laid siege to the Tower, whose defenders in their turn began a bombardment of the city which was to last for some time. The return of the victorious Yorkists from Northampton with King Henry in their custody proved a blow to the morale of the starving garrison, which eventually capitulated on 19 July. A number of the defenders, including Payn, were brought for trial before the earls of Warwick and Salisbury at the guildhall on 23 July, and several of them were sentenced to execution. With the sole exception of (Sir) Thomas Brown II* the condemned were the duke of Exeter’s servants, and it is curious that Payn, among the more prominent of them, escaped the penalty.21 KB9/75/1-6; E163/8/10; English Chron. (Cam. Soc. lxiv), 95-96; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 227; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xviii), 169; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 857-60, 862-3; C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 90, 92-93. Whatever lay behind his reprieve, he apparently did not hesitate to rejoin his erratic master who had thrown in his lot with Queen Margaret. The whereabouts of neither duke nor deputy during the winter of 1460-1 is known, but by the time of Edward IV’s accession Payn had been identified as a die-hard supporter of the old dynasty, and on 6 Mar. 1461 he, along with the two bastards of the duke of Exeter, was included in the list of men explicitly exempted from the offer of a pardon to all remaining supporters of Henry VI who would submit to the new King.22 CCR, 1461-8, p. 55.

Excluded from King Edward’s good grace, Payn was perhaps reduced to following Henry Holand into exile in France, and for a time disappears from view. He may have returned to England with the duke in 1471, or have quietly sought out the protection of Duchess Anne, Edward IV’s elder sister, at some point during the 1460s. He does not appear to have become implicated in the events of 1470-1, and in the summer of 1471 was able to appear openly during the divorce proceedings between the duke and his duchess.23 Stansfield, 251. Little else is known of Payn’s final years. Possibly the ‘gentleman of London’ who in July 1475 headed the mainpernors for one John Burton in the exchequer of pleas, he is not heard of thereafter.24 E13/161, rot. 11.