TEMPEST, Sir William

Sir William was the representative of a junior branch of one of the principal gentry families of the West Riding, the Tempests of Bracewell. By his time, this branch had enough property by marriage to rival the senior branch in wealth. Our MP’s father, Richard, the younger brother of Sir John Tempest of Bracewell, married two important heiresses. The first inherited the manor of Hartforth (in Gilling) and other property in the North Riding. The second, as heiress of the family of le Gras, brought a more scattered inheritance, comprising the manor of Studley near Ripon and other lands in the West Riding with the manor of Trafford Hill (in the parish of Egglescliffe) in county Durham.4 Add. 40670, f. 2; F.S. Colman, Barwick-in-Elmet (Thoresby Soc. xvii), 163-71. As far as the later history of the family was concerned the first of these marriages was made on particularly generous terms. By final concords levied in 1342 the bride’s father, Sir Thomas Hartforth, had his manors of Hartforth, Appleton and Stainton settled on the couple and their issue with remainder over not, as was usual in such conveyances, to his own right heirs but to those of his son-in-law. As a result when his daughter died without issue these manors passed to our MP’s father in fee.5 Yorks. Feet of Fines, 1-20 Edw. III (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. xlii), 159-60. Sir Richard then further added to his lands by his marriage to our MP’s mother. This marriage took place in the mid 1350s. By fines levied in 1354 and 1355 the manors of Studley, Linton-in-Craven and Sawley were settled on Sir Richard subject to the payment of £40 p.a. to his mother-in-law, Isabel, widow of Sir Thomas Bourne and then wife of Sir Hugh Clitheroe†.6 Ibid. 21-51 Edw. III (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lii), 49, 52. Our MP’s maternal inheritance would have been more extensive but for alienations made by her grandmother, Pauline, wid. of Sir John le Gras. In 1348 Pauline sold Stanford Rivers to Ralph, Lord Stafford: VCH Essex, iv. 211. The Cambs. lands passed from the Tempests by a more complex route. Pauline settled them on Mary, da. of Isabel’s second husband, Sir Hugh Clitheroe, by an earlier wife. Mary married our MP’s er. bro. John, and had that couple had issue these lands would have been reunited with the Yorks. ones, but, as it transpired, they decended to Mary’s issue by her second husband, Nicholas, yr. bro. of Sir William Gascoigne, c.j.KB: VCH Cambs. v. 266; Colman, 135.

Sir Richard’s success on the marriage market was matched by his success as a soldier. After service in France in the 1340s, he held a series of important military commands in the north, culminating in his appointment in 1367 as warden of the east march. He was also closely connected with the Percys. In April 1351 Henry (d.1368), son of Henry, Lord Percy (d.1352), rewarded him with a grant of the reversion of the manor of Hetton (in Chatton), Northumberland, expectant on the termination of his brother’s life estate.7 Add. 40670, f. 2; Hist. Northumb. xiv. 231; CPR, 1358-61, p. 20. On Sir Richard’s death in the late 1370s the lands he had acquired by his first wife descended to his eldest son, John.8 There is some doubt about his precise date of death. One Exchequer record dates it to 28 Oct. 1376, but he appears to have been alive as late as Oct. 1378, when the manor of Trafford Hill was entailed on him and Isabel: Add. 40670, f. 2; DURH3/2, f. 208. John’s career was to be brief. After serving on Bishop Despenser’s crusade in 1383, he died between July 1388, when he conveyed the manors of Studley and Sawley to Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland (d.1408), and others, and February 1390, when his widow Mary made a release to his cousin Sir Richard Tempest† of Bracewell. A month later she released her right in Studley to our MP’s mother in return for a life-annuity of 20 marks.9 C76/67, m. 7; W. Yorks. Archive Service, Leeds, Vyner of Studley Royal mss, WYL150/4397, 4399; Colman, 164n.

John was succeeded by our MP as his younger brother. Nothing is known of William before June 1396 when he was named, along with his cousin Sir Richard, to a commission to make arrests in Yorkshire. There is no direct evidence of his involvement in the usurpation of 1399, but he probably sided with Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, in support of Henry of Bolingbroke. It is suggestive that, on 1 Dec., he joined with one of the earl’s servants, Sir Thomas Colville† of Coxwold, in offering surety when the new King granted to the earl the keeping of the Yorkshire lands forfeited by Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. His knighting during this period similarly implies involvement. He was a knight by 8 Apr. 1401, when, again with Colville, he appeared in the chancery of the bishop of Durham to find surety not to impeach a pardon granted by the bishop. The most likely occasion for his knighthood is the new King’s expedition to Scotland in August 1400.10 CPR, 1391-6, p. 729; CFR, xii. 29; DURH3/33, m. 25.

It was about this date that Tempest extended his estates by marriage. His wife was the only daughter of Sir William Wessington and thus heiress to the valuable manor of Washington held in chief of the bishop of Durham. Wessington was dead by 15 Oct. 1399 and it is probable that the marriage had taken place by then.11 The manor was valued at as much as 40 marks p.a. in the inq. taken after Sir William’s death: DURH3/2, f. 136. It was, however, to be some years before Tempest was able to secure his wife’s inheritance against the claims of her stepmother, Eleanor, who had taken Percival Lindley of Lindley (West Riding) as her second husband. She claimed that the manor had been settled upon her in jointure, and Bishop Skirlaw duly accepted her claim in October 1400. Tempest and his wife, however, entered on her possession, and the Lindleys responded by suing an assize of novel disseisin against them. The bishop then sponsored an arbitration. In July 1402 both parties bound themselves in 600 marks to abide the award of as many as 12 arbiters, headed by Sir Marmaduke Lumley and Sir Thomas Surtees. What they awarded is unknown. The evidence is indirect and contradictory. From 1406 to 1415 Lindley, an insignificant figure in his own right, held office as sheriff of the palatinate, and even though the shrievalty was a less significant office there than in other shires it is hard to imagine that he would have been appointed had he not held the manor of Washington in his wife’s right. On the other hand, according to a later proof of age, Tempest was living at Washington in 1410.12 DURH3/33, mm. 24, 26, 27d; C.D. Liddy, Bishopric of Durham in Later Middle Ages, 135, 150-1; DURH3/2, f. 259.

Tempest and his wife also had difficulty in making good her title to the Wessington lands in Westmorland at Helton Flecket and Brampton Patrick. In 1412 they sued formedon against William Lancaster and Elizabeth, his wife, and their title remained in doubt until the late 1420s. At the assizes at Appleby on 15 Sept. 1427 they won damages of £40 against George Warwick and his wife, Elizabeth, who was presumably Lancaster’s widow, for disseising them non vi et armis of their Westmorland property.13 Add. 40670, f. 2; CP40/614, rot. 220; JUST1/1530, rot. 23. Tempest’s marriage, at least in the short term, did not bring him the augmentation of his property that he might have hoped. Nor was this the only problem it brought, for there was also the more fundamental problem of establishing the validity of the marriage itself. It had been knowingly contracted within the prohibited degree of consanguinity and without the papal licence necessary to overcome that disability, an offence for which the couple were excommunicated. It was some years before the attendant difficulties were overcome. Although, as early as 21 Apr. 1403 Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, had a papal mandate to absolve the couple from excommunication and, after a period of separation, to grant them the dispensation required to make a lawful marriage and legitimise their children, for some unknown reason that dispensation was not granted until as late as October 1409.14 CPL, v. 531; Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 320. These troubles may have given Sir William an acute sensibility on the question of the ecclesiastical rules governing marriage. According to his own later testimony at a proof of age, when, on 9 June 1408, he had been asked by his neighbour Thomas Ingilby to stand godfather to his son, his natural inclination to agree was overcome by the fear that ‘such a spiritual relationship could, in future, be an impediment to marriage’.15 CIPM, xxiii. 309.

Tempest, in these early years of his career, was also faced with a dispute with his late brother’s widow, Mary, now the wife of Nicholas Gascoigne. By a fine levied in Easter term 1405 he and his mother, in confirmation of the agreement made in 1390, settled an annuity of 20 marks on the couple for Mary’s life in return for the surrender of their interest in the manor of Studley Roger. Later, in Michaelmas term 1408 the Gascoignes had an action for dower pending against Tempest, but this may have been a collusive action designed to secure a formal allocation of dower.16 CP25(1)/279/150/29; CP40/591, rot. 465d. Mary was alive at least as late as 1427: W. Yorks. Archive Service, Leeds, Gascoigne mss, WYL115/F/5/1/16a. Fortunately for him, however, the loss occasioned to our MP by the rights of his sister-in-law were negated by his mother’s willingness to concede her hereditary interest in at least part of her property. On 30 June 1406, by a deed dated at Ripon, the two surviving feoffees of his late brother, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and William Ledes, conveyed to him her manors of Studley and Salway.17 Vyner of Studley Royal mss, WYL150/4404.

These myriad complexities in his circumstances may explain why Tempest played so little recorded part in public affairs during the reign of Henry IV. He may also have found himself embarrassed by the divisions between the two great northen families of Percy and Neville that dominated the first half of the reign. His own connexions, as far as they are reflected in the surviving records, appear to have continued to be with the Neville earl of Westmorland, but his family’s historic association had been strongly with the Percys. Further, his brother Nicholas was among those who rebelled with the Percys in 1405 and 1408, for which he was fortunate to be pardoned.18 CPR, 1405-8, pp. 42, 463. Sir William’s response to this potential conflict of loyalties appears to have been one of studied neutrality.

Under Henry V, however, Tempest became more active. Although there is no evidence that he participated in the Agincourt campaign, he indented to serve under Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, in the expedition which culminated in the duke of Bedford’s naval victory at the mouth of the Siene on 15 Aug. 1416. Again, however, as with so much else in his career, even this proved not to be straightforward. With other of the earl’s men, he was accused of ending his service prematurely and a commission was issued for his arrest. He and the others protested that they left with the duke’s permission and on the following 13 Oct. they were released from the threat of arrest on their mainprise to appear before the King in person. No doubt the matter was satisfactorily resolved and in July 1417 he once more indented to serve under Mortimer.19 CCR, 1413-19, p. 321; E101/51/2, m. 7.

With a period of military service in France behind him, Tempest’s standing was no doubt augmented, as, by the death of his elderly mother on 13 Aug. 1421, was his wealth. New property, however, brought him a new problem, one that may have prompted him to seek election to Parliament. The bishop of Durham granted him full seisin of his mother’s manor of Trafford Hill on 3 Nov. 1421, but on 29 Mar. 1423 he was obliged to appear before the bishop’s justices to defend his possession against a rival title on an ancient entail. Obstructive pleading allowed him to delay the action, but it is interesting to observe the coincidence in timing between this action and his only election. On 23 Sept. he again appeared before the bishop’s justices, pending the adjournment of the case to Westminster, and four days later he secured election to represent Yorkshire in Parliament.20 DURH3/38, m. 7d; CP40/651, rot. 103; Year Bk. 1 Hen. VI (Selden Soc. l), 53-58; C219/13/2. Whether he did anything to further his case as an MP does not appear, but the matter was concluded in his favour. Even, however, with a private interest to pursue, his attendance at the Parliament might not have included the beginning of the assembly. He was named among the witnesses to a deed of 20 Oct., the day Parliament began, and if he was present in person he must have missed the opening. Perhaps a failure to attend for the duration of the two parliamentary sessions explains his difficulty in securing the payment of his wages. According to an action he brought in the Exchequer of pleas in February 1425, on the previous 27 Mar. (a month after the dissolution) he delivered the writ for payment to the county sheriff, Sir Robert Hilton*, at York castle, but none of the sum of £26 due to him had been forthcoming.21 Yorks. Deeds, ix (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. cxi), 57; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 365.

Tempest was soon faced with a new legal difficulty of his own. On 3 Sept. 1426, at the assizes at York, damages and costs of 30 marks were awarded against him for a disseisin at Sawley. More significantly, on 12 July 1427 the Exchequer ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to distrain him, as the tenant of his father’s lands, to render account from his father’s service as the sheriff of Berwick and Roxburgh in the late 1360s and early 1370s. It is not known why this claim should have been made against him after so long a passage of time, but Sir William had a ready, if rather contrived, defence. In the following Michaelmas term he appeared personally in the Exchequer to plead that since his father had made his will at Hetton in Northumberland his debts to the Crown were extinguished by the pardon granted to the men of that county in answer to a petition presented in the Parliament of 1402.22 JUST1/1530, m. 6d; E368/200, recorda Mich. rot. 10d.

In the late 1420s and early 1430s Tempest was involved in two of the major events in northern politics, namely the famous causa de Heron, which began with the murder of his friend, William Heron of Ford, in 1428, and the challenge to the liberties of the bishopric of Durham in 1433. On 22 Jan. 1428 Heron met his death either, depending on which of two accounts is to be credited, in leading an assault on the castle of his neighbour John Manners† at Etal or in an ambush laid by Manners. A year earlier the murdered man had named Tempest among his feoffees in the manor of Ford, and it was this connexion that explains why our MP should have been named by the Crown to the commission named on 8 Feb. to investigate the circumstances of the death. On the following 19 Mar. he was among the commissioners, headed by Sir Robert Umfraville, a patron of both Tempest and Heron, who took indictments at Newcastle-upon-Tyne placing the blame for the death on Manners. Thereafter a settlement was mediated with our MP acting as one of the negotiators on the part of the Herons.23 J.W. Armstrong, ‘Violence and Peacemaking in the English Marches towards Scotland’, in The Fifteenth Cent. VI ed. Clark, 56-63; CPR, 1422-9, p. 467; 1436-41, pp. 258-9. Tempest was peripherally involved in the more important matter of Bishop Langley’s liberties. On 12 Feb. 1433 he was appointed to a royal commission to investigate concealments in royal rights in the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. When he joined the other commissioners at Hartlepool on 1 Apr., they heard from a high-ranking jury drawn largely from county Durham a series of indictments that portrayed Bishop Langley’s exercise of his palatinate rights as a usurpation of those of the Crown. What is not known is whether the commissioners were acting as agents of the bishop’s opponents, led by Sir William Euer*, or were simply conduits through which that opposition found expression. It may be significant that one of the indictments named Tempest and one of his tenants as the victims, albeit seemingly in a very minor way, of the unlawful assertion of the bishop’s feudal rights. Presumably it was our MP himself who provided the jurors with the relevant information, and so it must be supposed that he sympathized with the jury’s complaints. There is, however, no other evidence to identify him with what turned out to be a failed ‘constitutional rebellion’.24 CPR, 1429-36, p. 276; PROME, xi. 92-102; R.L. Storey, Thomas Langley, 116-34, 249-50.

The last ten years of Tempest’s life were less eventful. In October 1438 he acted as a juror in the inquisition taken at Boroughbridge on the death of Sir William Ingleby, for whom he had reluctantly declined to act as godfather some 30 years before. In November 1439 he and other feoffees of William Heron succeeded in traversing an inquisition that had falsely found that, at Heron’s death, seisin lay in Heron’s hands rather than in those of feoffees.25 CIPM, xxv. 158; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 258-9, 350; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 300-2. More significantly he began to make arrangements for the future of his family after his own death. In Michaelmas term 1439 he was sued by Robert Neville, who had succeeded Langley as bishop of Durham, for abducting his own grandson, John Norton (the son of his late daughter) from the bishop’s wardship. His intention was no doubt to contract a marriage for his grandson that was profitable to them both, but he may have been prevented from doing so by the bishop’s claim.26 CP40/715, rot. 671d.

No such difficulty attached to the marriage of Tempest’s own son, William. By 3 Mar. 1440, when Sir William settled his manors of Hartforth and Stainton on the couple, William was married to the well-connected Elizabeth, daughter of the famous soldier, Sir John Montgomery*, by a sister of Sir Ralph Butler, who was to be raised to the peerage in the autumn of 1441.27 CIPM, xxvi. 214. This marriage presents some unusual features. If it was William’s first it appears to have been rather delayed, for both his sisters had been long married by 1440.28 Our MP’s da. Denise had married, or been promised in marriage, to his neighbour, William Mallory, by 9 Nov. 1422: Add. 40670, m. 2; P.J.C. Field, Sir Thomas Malory, 12. Tempest’s other da. Isabel married another neighbour, Richard Norton of Norton Conyers, and had a son, John, who was said to be as old as 26 in 1452: DURH3/164/101. More interestingly, since Montgomery lived at Faulkbourne in distant Essex, the match cannot have come about through local connexions. The explanation may lie in mutual connexions through the Herons: the bride’s mother was the widow of William Heron†, Lord Say, representative of a junior branch of the Herons of Ford. Another possibility is that the marriage came about through associations of the groom’s own. Direct evidence is lacking, but William may already have fought in France as he was later to do. It is certainly suggestive of wider connexions that in July 1439 he had been one of those who stood surety for Queen Katherine’s widower, Owen Tudor, on his release from imprisonment.29 CCR, 1435-41, pp. 284-5. However this may be, the settlement on the couple of two manors in present possession was a generous one, a reflection of the desirability of the match from Sir William’s point of view and perhaps also of his awareness that his own life was coming to an end. That feeling may also have prompted him to make a provison for his bastard son, Roland: on 12 May 1440 he granted Roland all his lands in Northallerton and nearby Thornton-le-Street. He then survived for little more than a year, dying on 8 June 1441 at probably not short of 70 years of age.30 DURH3/2, f. 311.

Tempest’s successor, the newly-married William, was to have a much briefer career. By that date he had been deputed to act as deputy to his wife’s uncle, Lord Sudeley, as chief butler of England in the port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.31 CPR, 1436-41, p. 547. In the early summer of 1443 he entered into arrangements preparatory to what was probably not his first military service in France. On 17 May he entered into an indenture with his mother, settling the manor of Trafford Hill on her in dower; on 20 May he both confirmed the settlement his father had made on Roland and added further property in the same vicinity at Thirsk and Otterington; and on the following day he conveyed the rest of his lands to feoffees. Their composition reflected both family and tenurial connexions. His father-in-law and Lord Sudeley were among them, and they were headed by Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, from whom Tempest held his manor of Linton. On 17 July he mustered in the expeditionary army of John Beaufort, earl of Somerset.32 DURH3/46, m. 18; 164/101; Add. 40670, f. 2; CIPM, xxvi. 213-14; E101/54/2. He returned back from this failed expedition but he did not long survive. He died either on 20 Dec. 1443 or 4 Jan. 1444, leaving an infant son and heir, John, aged only two.33 DURH3/164/61; CIPM, xxvi. 213-14.

This succession of an infant raised a threat to the survival of the Tempests of Studley in the male line, for, unlike many northern families, their lands were not settled in tail-male. That threat was soon to be realized. John was dead by 9 Apr. 1450 when an indenture of partition was drawn up between our MP’s grandson, John Norton, on the one part, and his surviving daughter, Denise, and her husband, William Mallory of Hutton Conyers. Subject to the dower interest of our MP’s widow, the Mallorys were to have the Yorkshire manors of Studley and Linton-in-Craven and the Durham manor of Trafford Hill, and all the rest of the lands that descended to our MP from his parents were to pass to the Nortons.34 DURH3/47, m. 16d; CP25(1)/293/72/369. These lands were supplemented by the death of Sir William’s widow early in 1452 when her inheritance – the manors of Washington and Helton Flecket – was divided between them by moieties.35 DURH3/164/102; CP40/795, rot. 26d; 797, rot. 144.

The male line of our MP’s branch of the family was perpetuated in an illegitimate line through his son Roland. Illegitimacy did not prevent Roland enjoying a successful career. A collector of customs in Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1433, he married Isabel, daughter of Sir William Elmden* by one of the four coheiresses of Elizabeth, niece of Sir Robert Umfraville (d.1436). Our MP was a close associate of the wealthy Umfraville and had placed his bastard son in Sir Robert’s service. The match was thus a natural one, and from the Tempests’ point of view profitable. Sir Robert adopted Isabel as his heir in respect of the manors of Holmside and Whitley in county Durham, and a new branch of the Tempest family was thus establisned at Holmside. Roland’s grandson, Sir Thomas Tempest†, represented Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the Parliament of 1529-36.36 Add. 40670, f. 19; CFR, xvi. 168; Surtees, ii. 324-5; The Commons 1509-58, iii. 431-3.