TILNEY, Robert

In his remarks on the ancient family of Tilney, Leland refers to this MP: as second son of Philip Tilney (who ‘or he died was prist and prebendari of Lincolne’), Robert ‘had gyven hym by his father a hunderith poundes by yere of lande in Cambridgeshire, and their Robertes heir yet duellith’.3 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 96-97. The Tudor antiquary may have exaggerated the endowment, but there can be no doubt that Robert benefited from an unusually generous family settlement. Philip’s marriage to a wealthy East Anglian heiress had given him the resources to indulge such generosity. In the subsidy returns of 1435-6 he was assessed on an annual income of as much as £198, despite the fact that lands assessed at £56 were still in the hands of his mother and the feoffees of his grandmother.4 E179/136/198. Further, the inheritance of his wife had led to a realignment of the family’s interests – a move from Boston to Ashwellthorpe in Norfolk – and this freed the ancient lands of the Tilneys in south Lincolnshire to endow younger sons. Philip settled land in Holbeach, Whaplode and Moulton together with his chief messuage in Boston and tenements there in ‘Tylney Lane’ and ‘Herwod Lane’ upon Robert, and he made a similar settlement in favour of Robert’s younger brother, Hugh.5 C66/324, m. 27d. An affection for his younger sons was no doubt one reason for this largesse, but there was another: his eldest son, Frederick, had died in 1446 leaving a young daughter as common law heir to the Tilney and Thorpe lands. The canon’s liberal endowment of his younger sons thus arose from a desire to keep the ancient family estates in the name of Tilney.6 Frederick was dead by 11 Nov. 1446 when his wid., Elizabeth, sis. of John Cheyne II*, was about to marry John Say II*. Say was granted the heiresses’s wardship and marriage in the following Feb.: CPR, 1446-52, pp. 23, 43.

Robert’s endowment also included a property that was not part of the Tilney patrimony, namely the valuable Cambridgeshire manor of Whittlesford.7 It was valued at £40 p.a. in 1501: CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 450. This had been acquired by hiss maternal grandmother, Joan, widow of Roger, Lord Scales (d.1388), who granted her second husband, Sir Edmund Thorpe, a life interest with successive remainders in tail to her grandson, Robert, Lord Scales, and her two daughters by Thorpe – Joan, wife of Sir John Clifton of Buckenham (Norfolk), and our MP’s mother. Both Robert, Lord Scales, and Joan died without issue, and by a fine levied in 1451 the manor was settled on a group of feoffees, headed by William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, and including our MP. They were to hold it for the life of Thomas, brother and heir of Robert, Lord Scales, with remainders in successive tail-male to our MP and his brother, Hugh, and finally to Thomas’s right heirs.8 VCH Cambs. vi. 266; CP25(1)/30/99/6. This looks like the settlement of a dispute or, at least, the laying to rest of a potential cause of dispute. Significantly, from the point of view of Robert’s career, it gave him as his principal property one to which his title was easily challenged. Had the settlement made by Lady Scales been better drafted the manor would have remained in the hands of the Scales family, a fact partially acknowledged by the life estate granted to Thomas, Lord Scales, in 1451. The weakness of his title was to cause Tilney grave problems in the 1460s.

The gravity of these difficulties cannot have been anticipated during the brief parliamentary career Robert enjoyed while a young man. His father’s withdrawal into the religious life in the 1440s and his elder brother’s death probably meant that he came into his Lincolnshire lands several years before Philip’s death in the autumn of 1453.9 Philip probably entered religion shortly after the end of his term as sheriff of Lincs. in 1438. In 1444 he was collated to the prebendary of Boston in the cathedral church of Lincoln: Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, Lincoln, 39. He was bur. in the cathedral: B. Willis, Survey of Cathedrals, iii. 149-50. He may thus have been a landowner of some substance when returned to represent the Wiltshire borough of Downton in the Parliament of November 1449. There can be no doubt that his election was engineered by another native of Holland, William Waynflete, who as bishop of Winchester was lord of that borough, and that Waynflete was also responsible for his election to represent another of his Wiltshire boroughs, Hindon, in the Parliaments of 1453 and 1455.10 C219/15/7; 16/2, 3. In 1453 his name and that of his fellow MP, Richard Waller*, were added over an erasure. The fact that the bishop was party to the fine of 1451 is further evidence of his connexion with the family, as is the later career of Hugh Tilney in his service.11 Hugh was the bp.’s receiver in Lincs. in the late 1470s: C1/62/153.

Robert had a strong personal motive to seek election to his third and last Parliament, for he was then facing a challenge to his title to his Lincolnshire lands from Sir John Bourgchier, whose son and heir, Humphrey, had married our MP’s niece, Elizabeth, the heir general of the Tilneys. On 5 Feb. 1455 the two parties had agreed, under mutual bonds in 500 marks, to abide the arbitration of Sir John’s elder brother, Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury, and John Prysote*, c.j.c.p., provided they returned their award before the following Christmas. Negotiations must thus have been pending during the first session of the 1455 Parliament, and on 3 Nov., nine days before Parliament was due to reassemble for its second session, the arbiters returned a detailed award. Its terms must have met with Tilney’s entire satisfaction for they concerned themselves solely with clarifying and giving expression to the terms of his father’s will. He and his brother Hugh were left in possession of what they had been given, albeit with the proviso that any property later shown to be entailed to their niece should be restored to her. Further our MP, as his father’s executor, was to have 175 marks from the issues of the lands in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire assigned to his niece, together with the rents due from her other properties at Purification 1454 and before.12 C66/324, m. 27d.

The settlement of the dispute was the prelude to the most successful period of Tilney’s career. In October 1456 his master Waynflete became chancellor, and there can be no doubt that the new chancellor was responsible for his addition soon after to benches in Holland and Cambridgeshire and his appointment as escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in November 1457. At the end of his term in the latter office he sued out a general pardon as ‘of Boston, esquire, late of London, late of Whittlesford’.13 C67/42, m. 4. Soon thereafter, however, he was removed from both benches as part of a general reduction in the number of commissioned j.p.s., and his public career came to a very abrupt end despite the increase in his landholdings occasioned by the murder of Thomas, Lord Scales, in July 1460.14 An inq. held on 15 Oct. 1460 cited the fine of 1451 and returned that Tilney had remained seised under its terms after Scales’s death. The jurors underestimated his age as 24 and more: C139/178/55.

The explanation lies in a crisis in Tilney’s affairs severe enough to consign him to obscurity for more than a decade. It is detailed in a later Chancery petition, the sole source for his career in these years, and the story related there is an arresting one. He complained that ‘thorowe the tiranny of a grete lord’ he had, without ‘deserte mater or cause’, been put in fear of his life and lands and compelled to make ransom of 300 marks payable within the short space of 14 days. To raise this money he negotiated the sale of a marsh and other lands in Holbeach, worth £9 p.a., to a Calais stapler, John Rede of Boston, for the sum of £120. These events, undated in the petition, can be dated from a final concord: in Hilary term 1463 Tilney and his wife, Mary, conveyed nearly 400 acres in Whaplode and Holbeach, mostly composed of marshland, to Rede in fee.15 CP25(1)/145/162/3.

One can only speculate as to the identity of the ‘grete lord’ but an obvious candidate is Anthony Wydeville, Lord Scales, the husband of Elizabeth, daughter and sole heiress of Lord Thomas. Despite the fine of 1451, Elizabeth had a strong claim to the manor of Whittlesford, and it is a fair speculation that Tilney’s refusal to surrender it led to his exclusion from administrative office during the 1460s. His stubbornness also left him with a burden of debt which the sale to Rede only partially lifted. On the same date as he levied the fine completing this sale, he levied another by which nearly 300 acres in Whaplode, Holbeach and Moulton were conveyed to the wealthy Lincoln merchant, Hamon Sutton II*, and there is every reason to suppose that this too was a sale to raise the 300 marks extorted from him.16 CP25(1)/145/162/4. He also had recourse to borrowing in London, and one of these loans gave rise to litigation in Chancery during the Readeption. A London grocer had advanced him £5 on the security of two Bibles and an ordinal (worth 19 marks) together with a bond in £6, and Tilney had difficulty in securing the return of these items from the intestate lender’s administrator.17 C1/46/324; 61/438

Not until the 1470s was Tilney able to recover his position and then but gradually. The Readeption proved too brief to offer respite, and the decade did not begin promisingly. In Trinity term 1471 he faced an action of trespass and contempt against the statute of entries sued by Wydeville, now Earl Rivers, and his Scales wife.18 KB27/840, rot. 7. Further, in the following April his widowed niece, Elizabeth, married Thomas†, son and heir-apparent of John Howard*, Lord Howard, and this may have led him to fear the resurrection of the dispute resolved in 1455. These fears were not, however, realized. On 13 June 1472 he gained the protection of the enrolment of the 1455 award on the close roll, and a few months later he resumed his public career in a modest way with nomination to a commission of sewers. Even better from his point of view was the childless death of the Scales heiress in September 1473, which ended the immediate danger to his disputed manor. Nothing further is known of him until 1479 when he was restored to the Cambridgeshire bench.19 Although, in the four years he then served on the bench, he was twice named to the quorum, there is no reason to suppose that he is to be identified with the member of Inner Temple in the 1490s: J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), ii. 1573. It is, however, possible that our MP had some form of legal education. Aside from these two appointments to the quorum, in Feb. 1457 he acted as an attorney for the livery of seisin in a grant of the estates of Lionel, Lord Welles: Lincs. AO, Earl of Ancaster mss, 2ANC3/A/22. In 1481 his position was further strengthened by his pricking as sheriff, for which he was rewarded with a pardon of account in 100 marks.20 E404/77/2/30.

Unfortunately for Tilney, this rehabilitation seems not to have been sustained, for he was removed from the bench at the outset of Richard III’s reign. By this date he must have been in his middle fifties, and his removal perhaps marks a voluntary retirement. On the other hand, there is some evidence that he was facing renewed difficulties. Late in the following year he presented the Chancery petition cited above, complaining against Rede’s widow Elizabeth, with reference to the sale he had made to her husband in 1463. He alleged that Rede, realizing the vendor’s desperation, had demanded extravagant sureties from him and his brother, Hugh, and that these (a statute of the staple in £200 and grants of two rent charges of 20 marks p.a. each) had not been surrendered despite the fact that the couple had enjoyed peaceful possession. The situation had now become critical from Tilney’s point of view. A local lawyer, Thomas Welby, had entered part of the property, and the widow had refused Tilney’s offer to repurchase the property (and so defend it against Welby) or else to take an action in her name but at his own cost against the entrant. Instead she had married her son to Welby’s cousin and sued our MP on the statute staple. Elizabeth’s reply suggests that this was a highly-coloured interpretation of the facts. She claimed, in an examination before Richard Spert* at Boston 10 Jan. 1485, that one Hubert Felde had entered on her possession of the lands as heir in tail, and that it was Felde who conveyed the property to Welby. The lawyer had then demonstrated to her that Tilney had had nothing in the land save by disseisin committed upon Hubert’s father, and she, with Tilney’s consent, had then paid £40 for the surrender of the Felde title.21 C1/65/181-2. No verdict survives, but even if Tilney did profit from his complaint, his career was not to be resurrected.

Tilney’s last years are as obscure as those of the 1460s. On 30 Mar. 1485, as ‘of Whittlesford, late sheriff’, he secured a pardon of all escapes and those other offences for which sheriffs’ were routinely fined, but very little else is known of him.22 CPR, 1476-85, p. 530; BL Harl. MS. 433 ed. Horrox and Hammond, i. 270. The only document that throws any light upon his last years is an inquiry held in Cambridgeshire on 22 Sept. 1501 in response to a royal commission of concealments. This shows that, early in Henry VII’s reign, Tilney had conveyed his manor of Whittlesford to a group of feoffees, headed by two prominent lawyers, John Fyneux† and John Fisher. It may be that this enfeoffment was made on the occasion of his second marriage to Joan (whose family has not been identified), for he instructed the feoffees to grant her a life annuity of 20 marks. A late second marriage explains why, when Tilney died on 2 Aug. 1500, he left a son and heir, another Robert, who was only nine years old.23 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 450.

Tilney’s will, drawn up on 28 July 1500, only a few days before his death, is largely unrevealing. He wanted to be buried in the chapel of St. John the Baptist in the church of Whittlesford. He confirmed the earlier settlement of an annuity of 20 marks upon Joan, adding that the settlement had been made by the ‘concilium’ of the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, Sir Robert Drury†. If, however, the apparent arbitration of a third party implies that all had not been well between Tilney and his wife, any disagreement was over when he made his will, for he named Joan as one of his two executors.24 PPC 13 Moone (PROB11/12, ff. 104v-105). The family survived at Whittlesford until 1552 when debt forced our MP’s grandson, John, to sell the manor.25 VCH Cambs. vi. 266.