PLUMPTON, Sir William

Sir William Plumpton’s career is unusually well documented because of the fortuitous survival of transcripts of letters written to him in the 1460s and 1470s and of a series of deeds relating to his affairs.9 J. Taylor, ‘Plumpton Letters’, Northern Hist. x. 72-87; Wilcock, ‘Sir Wm. Plumpton’, 27-30. His family, established since the twelfth century at Plumpton near Knaresborough in the West Riding of Yorkshire, were substantial tenants of the Percys and had a distinguished record of service to that great family. Long one of the leading gentry families of the West Riding, they were significantly advanced by the marriage of William’s parents. His mother’s Foljambe inheritance eventually doubled the family’s income. Judging from a valor drawn up towards the end of our MP’s life the family’s ancient estate (principally the manors of Plumpton, Grassington, Steeton and Idle, all in the West Riding) had a clear annual value of about £150 p.a.; and the Foljambe property, mainly located in Nottinghamshire and north Derbyshire, of about the same sum.10 Plumpton Letters, 234-6; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 282. Further, the marriage created another focus for the family’s interests, providing them with a secondary residence at Kinoulton in south Nottinghamshire and drawing them into an important kinship network. Our MP’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Leek, was closely related to many of the leading gentry of that county, and was the mother of the noted soldier, Sir Thomas Rempston† of Bingham, with whom Plumpton was to develop a close friendship.

Nonetheless, the West Riding was to remain the area of the family’s main concern, and it was into another of the prominent families there that the young William was married. On 20 Jan. 1416 his father contracted him to Elizabeth Stapleton, the ties of neighbourhood between the two families being reinforced by a mutual connexion with John, duke of Bedford. The bargain was a favourable one for the Plumptons and indicates the enhanced status the Foljambe lands had brought them: Elizabeth came with a large portion of 370 marks, for which Sir Robert undertook to settle lands in Kinoulton worth 40 marks p.a. on the couple and their issue. It was also agreed that the Stapletons should have the custody of the young couple, but this arrangement was soon overtaken by demands of feudal law.11 Leeds District AO, Plumpton Coucher Bk. 374 (printed with errors in Plumpton Corresp. pp. xliii-iv). She was probably very young. Her brother, Brian, was born in Nov. 1412. On his father’s death, almost certainly at the siege of Meaux, William came, albeit only briefly, into the wardship of Henry, earl of Northumberland, whom he was to serve until the earl’s death in 1455.

In 1425 William entered into an almost unencumbered inheritance. His paternal grandmother’s death two years before had removed the last dowager with a charge upon the Plumpton lands, and although Margaret Rempston lived on until 1454 her interest in the Foljambe lands seems to have been confined to the Derbyshire manors of Ockbrook and Edensor. Nor, under the terms of his father’s will, did the demands of wider family provision place a serious drain on our MP’s resources. His two younger brothers were reasonably provided for with life annuities of 20 marks each, but the four unmarried women of the family, William’s sisters and aunts, were to have the ungenerous portions of only 40 marks each.12 C139/152/7; Plumpton Letters, 248.

The deaths of both his father and father-in-law in the French wars did not deter William from a period of military service shortly after coming of age. On 27 Jan. 1427 he sued out letters of general attorney as about to depart for France and he is later found, as his father had been, in the retinue of the duke of Bedford. He probably owed his place there to Rempston, who was one of the duke’s chamberlains before his capture at the battle of Patay in 1429, where perhaps Plumpton also fought.13 Cat. des Rolles Gascons, Normans et Francois ed. Carte, ii. 259; Letters and Pprs Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 436. There is no evidence that he fought in France beyond about 1430. His military service brought him the knighthood to which his wealth entitled him – he had taken up that rank by May 1430 – and also led him into a potentially expensive undertaking on the part of the captive Rempston. On 20 Nov. 1432 he joined Margaret Rempston and others in a massive bond in 1,750 marks to the executors of Thomas, duke of Exeter, with the aim of securing the release of a French esquire in the executors’ custody so he might be part exchanged for Rempston. Three years later this arrangement had still not been carried through, and the captive’s friends sought parliamentary assistance. In a petition of 1435 the Commons asked that the esquire be delivered to Margaret, Plumpton and two other knights. Rempston’s release soon afterwards implies that the petition was successful.14 CIPM, xxv. 158; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 228-9; PROME, xi. 179-80.

In November 1435 Plumpton entered into the first of a long series of marriage agreements for his expanding family. His infant daughter, Katherine, was contracted to William Zouche*, eldest son and heir of William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth, with his patron, the earl of Northumberland, acting as one of the guarantors for Katherine’s jointure.15 C140/30/53. Such a groom was not to be acquired cheaply and the match is an indication of Plumpton’s wealth and standing. With wealth went local office. Plumpton’s first recorded involvement in local administration dates from 1 Apr. 1434 when he sat on one of two grand juries before commissioners of oyer and terminer at Derby. The commissioners’ principal area of inquiry was the violent dispute between Thomas Foljambe and Sir Henry Pierrepont*, and in view of the favour shown to the former by our MP’s jury, there can be little doubt that Sir William was acting here for his kinsman.16 KB9/11/11; S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 130. In January 1436 he was appointed in Yorkshire to his first ad hoc commission of local government. Yorkshire, however, was a county well supplied with many wealthy gentry and competition for office there was correspondingly intense. This may explain why it was for Nottinghamshire that he was elected to Parliament on 10 Dec. 1436 in an assembly in which his brother-in-law, Sir Brian Stapleton*, sat for Yorkshire. More interestingly, it is clear why the two men together with the other Nottinghamshire MP, Sir Thomas Chaworth*, were keen to attend this Parliament. They wanted to support the petition to be presented to the Commons by Sir Thomas Rempston, recently released from captivity in France, complaining of the failure of Exchequer officials to pay him the 1,000 marks the Crown had granted him towards the payment of his great ransom.17 SC8/137/6844. This explanation is consistent with the presence at the Notts. hustings of four of the Leek kinsmen of Margaret Rempston: C219/15/1.

Plumpton’s administrative career gathered pace at the end of the 1430s. His place in the service of the earl of Northumberland, a royal councillor, explains why, probably in the autumn of 1438, he was appointed to an office his father had held before him, the stewardship of Knaresborough (initially in company with the controller of the royal household, John Feriby*, who died in 1441). Later in the same year his local authority was further enhanced by nomination to the bench of the West Riding.18 Wilcock, ‘Honour of Knaresborough’, 43. These promotions were, however, soon to prove ill-advised for Plumpton was drawn into a dangerous dispute with a powerful adversary, John Kemp, archbishop of York. The avowed point at issue was the exemption claimed by the tenants of Knaresborough from the tolls levied at the archbishop’s fairs at Otley and Ripon. Initially, it may be that Kemp and his tenants were the aggressors. According to the court roll of the honour of Knaresborough, on 3 Dec. 1439 a group of Ripon men numbering some 200 assaulted the tenants of Knaresborough ‘quemadmodum fuissent Scoti vel Gallici’; and on the following 30 Apr. an even larger band of the archbishop’s men was raised to deter the same tenants from coming to the fair at Ripon on the following day. The men of the honour, led by Plumpton, then responded in kind. In July 1440, if Kemp’s account is to be credited, the Otley fair was disturbed by about 700 Knaresborough tenants acting ‘be the covyne and assent’ of Sir William. On the following 5 May there was a much more serious clash as the archbishop’s men made their way from the larger fair at Ripon. Kemp claimed that they were set upon at Thornton Bridge and nearby Helperby by an armed band headed by Plumpton, leaving two of his men dead and others severely wounded or put to ransom. When called upon to answer by the Crown, Plumpton excused himself on the grounds of defence against the mercenaries Kemp allegedly employed to garrison Ripon ‘like a towne of warr’.19 Ibid. 48-54; Plumpton Corresp. pp. liv-lxii; R. A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 578-9; J.A. Nigota, ‘John Kempe’ (Emery Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1973), 503-17.

It is unlikely that Plumpton would have acted in this way without powerful backing, and it is clear that the dispute over tolls had already been drawn into a wider one between his master, the earl of Northumberland, and the archbishop over rival spheres of influence in Yorkshire. As the dispute continued he and the earl grew closer together. On 20 Feb. 1442 the earl named him as the steward of all his Yorkshire estates, perhaps to facilitate the raising of the Percy tenants against Kemp. Plumpton’s appointment was certainly followed by an escalation of the dispute. On 10 May 1443 Kemp complained to the King that large assemblies of rioters had attacked his manors and were now threatening his palace at Southwell in Nottinghamshire, and on the following day Plumpton and other Percy men were peremptorily summoned on pain of £1,000 to appear before the royal council on 31 May. This conciliar intervention diminished the tensions, but the dispute was only terminated when Kemp was translated to Canterbury in 1452.20 Plumpton Corresp. p. lxvi; PPC, v. 268-71; CCR, 1441-7, pp. 98-99, 145; Wilcock. ‘Honour of Knaresborough’, 56-57.

Plumpton’s violent conduct may explain his removal from the West Riding commission of the peace in November 1443, but this was a minor setback which had little impact on his local standing.21 He and the recently-murdered Sir Christopher Talbot* were the only two men removed from the comm. in Nov. 1443: CPR, 1441-6, p. 482. Despite the dispute he kept office in Knaresborough and benefited from some minor grants of duchy patronage. In March 1444 he was granted 20 oak trees; in June 1445 he joined two others in taking a 14-year lease of all coal mined in the honour; and on 28 Feb. 1446 he took the farm of the herbage and agistment in the park of Bilton.22 DL37/11/126; 53/48; Coucher Bk. 530. Further, his exile from the local bench was only brief. Although according to the enrolled commissions he was not restored until May 1448, he sat as a j.p. for at least two days between July 1445 and April 1447.23 CPR, 1446-52, p. 598; C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), i. 339.

Plumpton’s high standing at this date is also evidenced by the marriage he made for his eldest son, Robert (b.1431) in the summer of 1446: the bride was Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of Thomas, Lord Clifford.24 Settlements contingent on this marriage were made by Plumpton in Aug. 1446 and 1449: Plumpton Letters, 251-2. Further, on 1 Nov. 1447, the Percy earl granted him a second annuity of £10 (the first was his fee as steward), and it is probably more than coincidental that eight days later he was pricked as sheriff of his native county. This came at a time of continued disturbance in local affairs. In the previous July there had been a serious clash between the earl’s sons, Thomas and Richard Percy, and Kemp’s tenants at Beverley, and it may be that his pricking was engineered by the earl in furtherance of the long-running dispute. On 3 Nov. 1449 he rendered further service to the earl as one of his several retainers present at the parliamentary election held at York, no doubt to give their support to their fellow retainer, Sir William Normanvile*, who was returned in company with a Neville man.25 Plumpton Corresp. p. lxvi; Griffiths, 579; C219/15/7.

In the early 1450s Plumpton either demonstrated a certain carelessness in his private affairs or else, for reasons that are unclear, had real financial difficulties. In 1450 writs were pending in Middlesex for his arrest to answer a Londoner, John Wigmore, for a debt of as much as £100, and on 29 Mar. 1451 he was outlawed in the London hustings for failure to answer three wealthy citizens, Thomas Morstead, William Horn and John Bedford, for debt and damages of £110. Although personally humiliating, however, his outlawry occasioned him little difficulty. Indeed, he was still labouring under its disability when pricked as sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the following year. Not until towards the end of his term of office did he take the trouble to put himself back on the right side of the law. In October 1453 he obtained a writ of error, and in the following month Bedford appeared in the court of common pleas to acknowledge himself satisfied of the debt and damages.26 CP40/754, rot. 284d; 755, rots. 215, 391; KB27/770, rot. 67.

If this delay was caused by financial troubles on Plumpton’s part, these were relieved by two events. The death of Margaret Rempston in April 1454 brought him the Foljambe manors of Ockbrook and Edensor, which she had held in dower.27 C139/152/7; CFR, xix. 90. More important in the short term was the marriage of his new heir-apparent, William (b.1436), to Elizabeth Clifford. The death of his eldest son in July 1450, when Elizabeth was still infra annos nubiles, had frustrated the implementation of the 1446 contract, but its terms were resurrected by the substitution of the new Plumpton heir in about 1453. The original contract has not been found, but its main terms are given in a later declaration and Chancery case: the couple were to have a jointure worth £50 p.a. in return for a portion of 380 marks.28 Plumpton Letters, 229-30; Plumpton Corresp. pp. ciii-v; C1/31/330; 40/144; 66/77. After William’s death Elizabeth married John Hammerton. The petitions complained of Sir William’s failure to settle the promised jointure.

It was also at about this time that Sir William either entered into a marriage of his own or subsequently claimed to have done so. In July 1472 the parish clerk of Knaresborough remembered that this match had taken place in the parish church there on a Friday between Easter and Pentecost about 21 years before, in the presence of a handful of witnesses, who were urged to secrecy by the groom. It is difficult to explain this perceived need for secrecy. There may have been an element of social derogation in the match from Plumpton’s point of view, but hardly in sufficient degree to occasion scandal. Nor is it likely that the secrecy was designed to deprive the bride of her potential dower rights: in the late 1450s he is said to have enjoined his domestic chaplain to avow the match publicly should he be killed on the military campaign he was about to undertake. The difficulty in finding an explanation for this apparent secrecy suggests that the depositions of 1472 were a fabrication. Joan Wintringham was probably simply Plumpton’s long-term mistress, only acknowledged as his wife when he had determined to settle his estates on his son by her.29 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxiii-iv, lxxvi-vii.

Matters of more public and immediate concern were to call Plumpton’s attention in the mid 1450s. Although there is no record of his involvement in the clashes between the Percys and the Nevilles in 1453-4, his service to the Percy earl explains why, on 16 Apr. 1455, he was one of those summoned for the West Riding to the controversial great council, the call of which provoked the Yorkist lords into rebellion. It is probable that he was in the earl’s retinue at the first battle of St. Albans and that he witnessed there his master’s death and that of Thomas, Lord Clifford. He may have paid a price, albeit a small one, for his participation: on 18 June, with the duke of York in control of government, he was granted a pardon of account from his shrievalty of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire of only £30, a sum significantly lower than was generally granted for that office. In the following year he accompanied the new earl of Northumberland on a raid into Scotland.30 PPC, vi. 340; E159/232, brevia Mich. 7d; Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxvi, lxxiv-v.

Violence of a more private kind dominated Plumpton’s career in the late 1450s. He became involved in a murderous quarrel with the Pierreponts, former rivals of the Foljambes and one of the leading Nottinghamshire families, over property in Mansfield Woodhouse.31 For most of what follows: S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 200-1. While litigation was pending, what had seemed a commonplace dispute over a relatively insignificant property took a murderous turn. On 21 July 1457 a double murder occurred: at Papplewick in Sherwood forest Henry, son of Sir Henry Pierrepont, met his death (or at least received injuries from which he subsequently died) at the hands of John Green, our MP’s steward and brother-in-law; and Green himself was then killed at Pannal near Wetherby by Henry’s brother, John. The dating of one or both of these events is open to question for Pannal lies some 65 miles from Papplewick, but there is no reason to doubt the fact of the murders. These disturbances and others associated with them attracted royal attention: on the following 13 Aug. the sheriff and j.p.s of Nottinghamshire were ordered to arrest and imprison Plumpton’s brother George and son William until they gave security of the peace, and to bring the two men before the King and council.32 CPR, 1452-61, p. 370. Two weeks later Green and his accomplices were duly indicted before that county’s coroners on view of Pierrepont’s body, implying that his injuries had taken some time to prove fatal. The jury also indicted Sir William as an abettor present on the fateful day. Our MP responded by exploiting his power as a j.p. He presided over sessions of the peace held at Selby on 4 Oct. and at Wetherby on 17 Nov. when indictments were laid against the Pierrepont servants implicated in Green’s murder. The second of these sought to blame the Nottinghamshire family for the first resort to murder by naming Henry Pierrepoint as an accessory. These indictments were called into the court of King’s bench by writ of certiorari on the following 20 Jan. and on the same day Plumpton sued out a general pardon as insurance against the indictment laid against him.33 C67/42, m. 16.

With neither side holding the initiative, on 10 Feb. 1459 the disputants put their quarrel to a panel of arbiters indicative of their different political allegiances. Plumpton chose his neighbour in north Derbyshire, (Sir) William Vernon*, William Babington* and the lawyer Richard Neel*, all of whom were Lancastrian in sympathy or by connexion; and his rival, Henry Pierrepont†, son of the murdered man, turned to three supporters of the house of York, Sir John Melton* (brother of the murdered man’s widow), John Stanhope* and the lawyer, Richard Illingworth*. The nomination as umpire of one of the leading partisans of the Lancastrian regime, John, Viscount Beaumont, was no doubt welcome to our MP, but, more interestingly, it suggests that the award had powerful sponsors and was perhaps part of a wider effort on the part of the government to resolve local disputes. These efforts, if such they were, were soon overtaken by the outbreak of civil war, and Plumpton took an active role, rendering loyal support to the Percy earl and the house of Lancaster. Subsequent litigation provides some details of his activities. In a Chancery petition presented in about 1466, Robert Percy of Scotton near Knaresborough, who had fought for Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, at the battle of Blore Heath on 23 Sept. 1459, claimed that Plumpton had despatched his men to raid his property in the immediate aftermath of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge three weeks later. Worse, after Percy was taken at the battle of Wakefield on the following 30 Dec., our MP, in arms on the victorious side, laboured to have ‘his hede stryken of’ and plundered his lands of livestock and goods worth in excess of 100 marks.34 A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern Eng. 271, 293-4; C1/31/485. These alleged oppressions probably arose out of a private enmity between two neighbours on different sides in the conflict.

The other charges laid against Plumpton concern his acts as one of the leading knights of the Lancastrian army. Later he was one of the many retainers of the earl of Northumberland appealed by the countess of Salisbury as accessories to the murder of her husband at Wakefield, and sued by his executors for taking livestock worth a massive £560 from Middleham and elsewhere.35 KB27/804, rot. 65; CP40/802, rot. 441; 804, rot. 237. This probably refers to the plundering of the Neville estates before the battle to provision the Lancastrian army. After their victory there Plumpton joined Queen Margaret on her march south and took part in the harrowing of the dead duke of York’s property. According to a later indictment, on 8 Feb. 1461 at Stamford he plundered the property of two local merchants. No doubt he was also at the second battle of St. Albans nine days later and returned north with the Lancastrian army after their failure to gain entry into London. He seems to have again passed through Stamford for he was later indicted for another offence against a townsman there on 5 Mar.36 His victim on that occasion was George Chapman from whom he allegedly took goods worth £40: KB27/809, rot. 50. The two are said to have come to terms in 1464 but Chapman was still suing for damages in 1466: Plumpton Letters, 34; KB27/820, rot. 36d. Seven days later the Lancastrian leadership, established at York, ordered him to join Sir Richard Tunstall† and (Sir) Thomas Tresham* in summoning the men of the lordship of Knaresborough to resist the Yorkist advance, and on the next day to come himself with ‘all such people as ye may make defensible arraied’. There can be little doubt that he then took part in the fateful battle of Towton where his master, the Percy earl, met his death, as perhaps also did his own eldest son, William.37 Plumpton Corresp. p. lxvii; Plumpton Letters, 26.

It is not clear what exactly befell Sir William in the immediate aftermath of that battle, but it is probable that he was captured with other prominent Lancastrians at Cockermouth as he attempted to reach Scotland, and that he was brought before the new King at Newcastle on 1 May.38 C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 175. What is certain is that on 13 May at York before another Yorkshireman, Robert Danby, the newly-appointed c.j.c.p., he entered into a bond in the massive sum of £2,000 payable at Pentecost; in return he and his tenants were taken into the new King’s protection. On 12 July the financial restraint was supplemented by a physical one: Plumpton was confined to the Tower of London. Yet he was back in Yorkshire early in August when he witnessed the will of his friend and brother-in-law, Sir Brian Stapleton, and his fortunes briefly recovered when first, on 5 Feb. 1462, he secured the respite of a general pardon and then, in the following autumn, he was released from his punitive bond.39 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxvii-viii; Yorks. Deeds, iii (York Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxiii), 90, 155.

Plumpton’s private enemies were less generous. On 8 Oct. 1461, before the Kesteven j.p.s at Stamford, he was indicted for his actions there in the previous February, and in Easter term 1462 he was appealed by the countess of Salisbury as an accessory to her husband’s murder. On 31 May he and another of those appealed, his son-in-law, Sir George Darell, entered into two bonds in £1,000 and 1,000 marks to the appellor to abide her arbitration. No evidence survives of her decision and it is curious that there is no reference to the matter of the appeal in the surviving Plumpton letters.40 KB27/804, rot. 65; R.L. Storey, End of the House of Lancaster, 194; CCR, 1461-8, p. 135. Indeed, they give little indication of the drama of our MP’s affairs in these months. The most interesting of them was written to him on 8 Jan. 1462 by the Nottinghamshire justice of King’s bench, Richard Bingham, concerning two other appeals, those still pending from the murderous events of July 1457. The justice informed him of arrangements made with Henry Pierrepont for the arbitration of the dispute at Nottingham on the following 27 Apr., when he and John Markham, c.j.KB, ‘shal so behave us betwix you, that yf ye both wil bee rueled by reason, ye shal both bee wel eased’.41 Plumpton Letters, 27-28. Nothing seems to have come of this proposal. Bingham alone returned an award on 28 May 1462. It said no more than that both parties should abandon their appeals: ibid. 257; Payling, 257.

Although Plumpton was able to ride the worst of the storm in the immediate aftermath of Edward IV’s accession, he continued to face difficulties into the mid 1460s. There appears to have been a major raid on his property in August 1463: he later complained before the barons of the Exchequer that the then sheriff of Yorkshire, (Sir) Robert Constable*, had taken livestock and goods worth as much as £300 from Plumpton.42 E13/151, rot. 103. Far worse was soon to follow. Late in the same year his life was put at hazard by his denunciation as a traitor by one David Routh of Westminster, who accused him of having received the King’s enemies from the Lancastrian strongholds in Scotland at Hounslow in Middlesex between March 1462 and the present. Perhaps his wearisome problems in the wake of Towton had led Plumpton into active conspiracy against the new regime, but it is equally likely that he was troubled by the groundless accusations of a personal enemy. Whatever the truth, he was able to clear himself of these unspecific charges shortly before Christmas in his trial before the constable, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. Useful to him in this emergency may have been the constable’s kinship with the Beckwiths of Clint (Yorkshire), into which family our MP had recently married his daughter Elizabeth: a year earlier Worcester had intervened to conclude a dispute over the payment of the portion for this marriage, reportedly remarking that he ‘loved’ Plumpton ‘right wele’. Such connexions explain why, on 20 Jan. 1464, Sir William was able to secure a royal signet letter exonerating him of treason.43 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxix-xx; Plumpton Letters, 28.

The insecurity of these years prompted Plumpton to take more active measures to adapt to the new political dispensation. An earlier narrative of his career claimed that these efforts were remarkably successful. It was said that, in the mid 1460s, he regained his office as steward of the lordship of Spofforth, then in the hands of the young George, duke of Clarence, as royal grantee, and was appointed as deputy to the earl of Warwick in the stewardship of Knaresborough.44 Plumpton Corresp. p. lxx; Pollard, 293. The first, however, is doubtful, and it has recently been demonstrated that he was never the earl’s deputy.45 Wilcock, ‘Sir Wm. Plumpton’, 42. In truth, he did not re-establish his position in local affairs in the 1460s: his only certain appointment was to a commission of arrest in 1467.46 CPR, 1467-77, p. 55. None the less, he did take measures to establish close connexions with two lawyers in the local service of the earl of Warwick, namely Brian Roucliffe, a baron of the Exchequer, and, more importantly, Henry Sotehill, the King’s attorney-general. In November 1463 he contracted Margaret, one of his infant grand-daughters to Roucliffe’s son and heir, John, for a payment in excess of 400 marks; and in the following February Margaret’s sister, Elizabeth, was contracted to Sotehill’s son and heir, John, for 500 marks.47 Coucher Bk. 558, 562 (printed with several errors in Plumpton Letters, 230-4, 258).

In the short term these marriages were very much to Plumpton’s political and financial advantage. In the long term, however, they led to grave difficulties for his heirs-male. Whatever may have been his intentions when he entered into these arrangements, they later took on the appearance of a deliberate fraud. There can be no doubt that the two lawyers were not made aware of the existence (or, at least, the prospect of the future legitimacy) of Plumpton’s son by his then unacknowledged second wife, and it may be that Sir William was guilty of serious subterfuge in marrying his daughters as though they would inherit. Yet this judgement may rest too heavily on a knowledge of later events. Long after our MP’s death a deed, entailing the Plumpton lands in tail-male and dated to 1453, was produced to support the claim of the heir male, but this was probably a forgery.48 By that deed Sir Thomas Rempston, a feoffee under settlements of 1420 and 1439, entailed all the Plumpton and Foljambe lands in tail-male successively on Sir William and his surviving brother, Godfrey: Plumpton Letters, 252-3. Suspicion about the authenticity of this deed of entail is aroused by its false statement that the other feoffees of 1439 were dead. It is also significant that it was not used by the heir male in the later dispute until his cause had become desperate: Plumpton Corresp. p. cviii. If no such settlement had been made, the existence of the son in itself had no impact on the brides’ prospects of inheritance. In any event, Sotehill, who entered into a far more detailed agreement than Roucliffe, ensured that the contract gave him protection against future disappointment, for it offered our MP little reward should the Sotehill bride be disinherited. Plumpton entered a bond in £600 that he would make no alienations from his patrimony save to provide life estates for the girls’ mother and any widow he might leave, and he also agreed that, should he have a legitimate son, then that son would be married to a daughter of Sotehill on payment of a portion of 200 marks. This latter arrangement implies that Sotehill recognized that any future legitimate son would inherit a part of the Plumpton patrimony, and that he sought to compensate himself by securing his marriage for a modest portion.

Plumpton’s actions here were probably more hastily opportunistic rather than simply dishonest, political and financial troubles forcing him to realize the asset represented by his grand-daughters’s marriages without thought for the future consequences. However this may be, matters were soon to be complicated when, while he was still receiving instalments of the payment due from this sale, the fact of his second marriage was publicly acknowledged. His hand may have been forced by the ecclesiastical authorities, but it is much more likely that he himself instigated the proceedings to secure the acknowledgement of his son’s legitimacy. On 26 Jan. 1468 he appeared in the cathedral church of York to explain his cohabitation with Joan Wintringham, and on the following 13 Feb. he produced witnesses as to the fact of his marriage to her.49 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxiii-iv.

The restoration of the Percy earl of Northumberland in March 1470 offered Plumpton new opportunities. When the earl was appointed to our MP’s former office of stewardship of Knaresborough in June 1471, he named him as his deputy.50 It was once supposed that the earl chose another of his leading retainers, Sir William Gascoigne, in preference to Plumpton, and that bonds of 27 Oct. 1471, by which the two men undertook to abide the earl’s arbitration, arose out of Plumpton’s resentment that he had been passed over: Pollard, 140. The evidence is contradictory, but it has recently been persuasively argued that it was Plumpton’s appointment that was resented by Gascoigne: Wilcock, ‘Sir Wm. Plumpton’, 44-45. With this came restoration to the West Riding bench and the chance to benefit from some of the perquisites of the lordship: on 28 Sept. 1472 Richard, duke of Gloucester, as chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster, leased to Plumpton the corn mills at Knaresborough, the new mill at Bilton and the office of bailiff of the borough for a period of 12 years.51 Plumpton Letters, 263. These leases appear to have taken only partial effect: ibid. 47. In the intervening summer he received welcome news of another sort: the ecclesiastical authorities accepted the validity of his second marriage.52 Plumpton Letters, 263; Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxvi-vii. Later he received a mark of royal trust and favour: on 17 Feb. 1474 he was granted licence to construct crenellated walls and towers at Plumpton, to enclose lands there as a park, and to enjoy rights of free warren even though the lands in question lay within bounds of the forest of Knaresborough. In the summer of 1475 his renewed standing in northern affairs was further evidenced by his appointment to an embassy to treat with James III of Scotland concerning fishing in the river Esk.53 CPR, 1467-77, p. 421; Rot. Scot. ii. 452.

For reasons that are unclear this good fortune did not last. In another of the reverses which typified his long career, Plumpton was one of several removed from the West Riding bench in November 1475, and it is probable that this was the result of a more serious reverse, his displacement by another Percy man, William Gascoigne, in the deputy stewardship of Knaresborough. His political stock certainly seems to have been declining at this date: in the same month he was peremptorily ordered by the duchy council to desist from his enclosures at Plumpton as against forest law, and in the following March he was summoned before the council to account for his actions.54 C. Arnold, ‘Commn. of the Peace’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 125; DL39/2/6; VCH Yorks. i. 509; Wilcock, ‘Sir Wm. Plumpton’, 49.

Plumpton responded to these setbacks by urging upon his long-suffering Westminster agent, Godfrey Green, a campaign of furious political lobbying. In return Green found it necessary gently to remind him of the ways of the political world. His well-known letter, probably to be dated to November 1477, can be read as an excuse for inaction on the part of a servant who lacked commitment to his master’s cause, but it is better understood as the exasperated explanation of one whose perception was superior to that of his hasty master. With reference to the stewardship of Knaresborough he wrote that, as the Percy earl will ‘haue no deputie but such as shall please him’, to attempt to move him otherwise, even through the King, would ‘turne to none effect but hurt’; accusations of misgovernance against Gascoigne before the royal council were similarly useless for the general consideration that ‘in euery law the saying of a mans enemies is chalengeable, and rather taken a saying of malice then of treuthe’ and the particular one that they would be seen as ‘a disworship to my lo[rd] of Northumberland, that hath the cheif rule there vnder the king’.55 Plumpton Letters, 51-52. Green’s exasperation may also have been the result of the rebukes he took on his master’s behalf. Not only had he been famously reproached by the King’s chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, when seeking to secure Plumpton’s restoration to the commission of the peace, but in Michaelmas term 1476 his efforts on his master’s part had incurred the displeasure of the royal justices. He reported that they gave ‘no favour’ to an appeal of murder sued by the widow of one of Plumpton’s servants, ‘for they say they vnderstand by credible informaciones that [the appellees] be not guiltie, and it is but onely your mainetenance. And so one of them said to me out of court’. Their view must have been reinforced by the intervention of another Yorkshireman, the King’s serjeant Guy Fairfax, who ‘said openly att the barre, that he knew so verily they were not guilty, that he wold labor their deliuerance for almes, not takeing a penny’.56 Ibid. 53-54. The appeal rose out of the alleged murder of William Aylmer in 1473: KB27/858, rot. 30d.

While Green’s valiant efforts proved sufficient to win his master’s restoration to the commission of the peace, Plumpton played little recorded part in local affairs during the last years of his life. His main concern was rather a private one, the undoing of the arrangements he had entered into on his grand-daughters’ marriages and the deflection of his entire inheritance to his son. To this end, in the autumn of 1475 he conveyed all his lands to a group of his intimates headed by his friend Richard Andrewes, dean of York, and they duly made re-conveyance to him for life with remainder to Robert in tail-general, saving the life interests of Joan Wintringham in the manor of Grassington and other property and of his bastard sons, William and Robert, in part of the manor of Ockbrook.57 Plumpton Letters, 264-5; Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxviii-ix, cv-vi; Towneley of Towneley mss, O/3/45; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 601-2.

At this point Plumpton sought to further his son’s cause by marrying him to Agnes, sister of his rival, William Gascoigne. Despite their quarrel the two men, as servants of the earl of Northumberland, were natural allies, and our MP was probably moved by the consideration that Gascoigne, as the husband of the earl’s sister, would have the power to call on the support of that great lord in the likely event of a dispute with the heirs general. For Gascoigne the match offered the chance to marry his sister cheaply. Had there been no doubt that the Plumpton lands would pass to the groom in their entirety his marriage would have commanded a large portion; Gascoigne was able to obtain it for a modest £100. This figure, together with the £20 jointure eventually agreed on, were the subject of sustained negotiation. As early as April 1476 Plumpton’s illegitimate son, Robert, reported to his father ‘the matter betwixt my brother Robart and Mr Gascoines sister me think is to long in makeing up, for in long tarrying comes mekell letting’. Not until 13 July 1477 was the contract drawn up.58 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxix-xxx, 38. This match marked Sir William’s final breach with Sotehill, and in Easter term 1478 Sotehill sued him for infringing the 1464 contract.59 CP40/866, rot. 117.

Plumpton’s last years saw further efforts on his son’s behalf. On 1 May 1478 he granted Robert all his goods; and in the following Hilary term he brought his own action against Sotehill for an alleged failure to find surety for payment of the portion.60 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxxvi; CP40/869, rot. 403. In the months before his death efforts were made to avert the serious dispute which now threatened. On 29 May 1480 the Roucliffes entered into a bond in 1,000 marks to abide the award of a panel of ten arbiters, headed by Sir Thomas Burgh†, Sir William Gascoigne (by then a knight and no doubt a nominee of our MP), Sir Robert Constable (with whom our MP was not on friendly terms) and Sir Hugh Hastings. The process was terminated by Plumpton’s death on the following 15 Oct. and the disputing parties turned their attention to securing favourable returns to the writs of diem clausit extremum issued eight days later. On 30 Nov. Gascoigne, intent on promoting his brother-in-law’s claim, entered into an indenture with the escheator of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, Edmund Pierrepont: the escheator was to ‘write to the ... Sherife to have such men impannelled’ as he would name and to make returns according to ‘such evidence as shal be shewed’ by his counsel; in return the escheator was to have £4 for his office and 20s. for his reward. No doubt a similar arrangement was made in Yorkshire where the inquisition had been held nearly three weeks earlier.61 Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxxi-xxxi, lxxxvii-viii; CFR, xxi. 564. The juries in all three counties made returns in support of the heir male’s cause, reciting the settlements made in 1475 (re-dating them to the day before our MP’s death) with the exception of the reservation in favour of the bastard sons.62 Plumpton Letters, 267-71; C140/78/88. Sir Robert added the manor of Idle to his mother’s jointure, but proved less generous to his bastard brother William who was forced to sue in Chancery for his settlement: Plumpton Corresp. p. lxxxix; C1/155/31-33.

This, however, marked only an early exchange of what, for the Plumptons, was to be a long and damaging dispute. An award returned in September 1483 by Richard III himself proposed a more equitable division which took into account both the undertakings our MP had entered into on the marriages of his grand-daughters and the ancient entails in tail-general which bound the Foljambe inheritance. The award gave the heirs general the bulk of the Foljambe lands in Derbyshire and the manors of Grassington and Steeton, together valued at 224 marks p.a. This would have left the Plumptons with an estate of comparable size to that which they had possessed before the marriage of our MP’s parents, the valuable manor of Kinoulton compensating them for the loss of two of their Yorkshire properties. That this was not the end of the dispute was largely due to the corrupt intervention of a royal minister, Richard Empson†, without the lands to support his rank, in 1497.63 Plumpton Corresp. pp. xc-xcv, cii-cxxv; BL Harl. MS. 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, iii. 133-6; J.W. Kirby, ‘Plumptons, 1461-1515’, Northern Hist. xxv. 113-19.

Although Sir William’s machinations proved seriously damaging to the family’s interests, it may be that a combination of political and financial insecurity left him little choice but to act as he did. Aside from the other pressures upon him, his finances were strained by the great cost of marrying his seven daughters by his first wife. It is significant that his eldest daughter – contracted as early as 1435 to the heir of the barony of Zouche – made a far better match than her sisters, who were all married within narrow local confines and some of whom had a long wait for husbands. Contracts survive in transcript for most of these matches, although unfortunately not for the first, and it is a fair estimate that between 1435 and 1468, when his daughter Joan married his neighbour, Thomas Middleton of Stockeld, they cost him in excess of £1,000.64 For these marriages: Plumpton Corresp. pp. lxxxi-iv; Plumpton Letters, 28, 30, 254; Coucher Bk. 555; Yorks. Deeds, iii. 71; iv (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxv), 3. This would have placed a strain on the finances of any gentry family, but for Plumpton his political difficulties in the early 1460s may have made it unsupportable. This may explain his ill-judged decision to marry his grand-daughters as though they were destined to inherit. The fact that he died intestate suggests that even that was not sufficient to repair his finances.65 Plumpton Corresp. p. lxxxvi.