SAY, John II

One of the foremost Members of the Commons in the fifteenth century, and unique in that he served under both Henry VI and Edward IV as Speaker,16 Unless otherwise indicated, this biography is based on J.S. Roskell, ‘Sir John Say of Broxbourne’, Trans. E. Herts. Arch. Soc. xiv (1), 20-41. Say was of obscure background, despite attempts to link him with the Herons of Northumberland and James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele. According to one family tree, he was the son and namesake of a Bedfordshire man. This pedigree would also have it that his mother was one Matilda although a lawsuit of the later 1440s shows that his putative father was married to an Alice (conceivably the MP’s stepmother) when he died. The suit, which had reached pleadings in early 1447, related to a bond that the defendant, a husbandman from Bedfordshire, had entered into with John Say of Podington at London in 1439. It was brought by Alice, acting in her capacity as John’s widow and executrix, and her then husband, John Robberdes. According to the plaintiffs, the defendant had failed to pay the testator a sum of £10 for which the bond was security.17 Genealogist, n.s. vii. 57; CP40/744, rot. 336d. A letter from the well-known correspondence of the Paston family provides the basis for the supposed connexion with Lord Saye and Sele. Writing to her husband, John Paston*, in May 1463, after Say had become Speaker for the second time, Margaret Paston confusedly referred to ‘Fynys, that is now Speker of the Parlment’.18 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 236.

It is impossible to prove that Say went to Oxford university like his brother, William, who had attended Winchester College before studying as a theologian at New College. He first comes into view in 1442. On 16 June that year he and William dined with the latter’s friend and fellow Wykehamist, the King’s secretary Thomas Bekynton, and Edward Hull* at Hull’s house at Enmore in Somerset. Shortly afterwards, Bekynton and Hull departed on an embassy to Gascony to discuss a marriage between Henry VI and a daughter of the count of Armagnac.19 A. Judd, Life of Thomas Bekynton, 61; Corresp. Bekynton ed. Williams, ii. pp. xxxiii-vi, 178. By 1442 Say had probably already joined the royal household, of which he was certainly a yeoman of the King’s chamber by 1443-4. As such, he received an annual fee of 13s. 4d. and robes and hose worth a further 3s. 8d. p.a.

Despite his relatively lowly Household rank, Say was appointed to an important embassy, with wages of 5s. per day, in February 1444.20 J. Ferguson, English Diplomacy, 184. Led by William de la Pole, then earl of Suffolk, its task was to discuss peace terms and to negotiate a marriage between the King and Margaret of Anjou. The ambassadors landed at Harfleur on 13 Mar. and were back in London on 27 June, having successfully concluded a marriage treaty (although they had failed to achieve a permanent peace). Say’s part in this embassy indicates that he had already found favour with both the King and Suffolk at this early stage in his Household career. As far as his contemporaries were concerned, he owed his advance to de la Pole. A hostile satirical poem and parody of a funeral mass, written after Suffolk’s downfall in 1450, portrays the duke’s political allies and henchmen participating in his exequies, during which Say acknowledges that he was Suffolk’s creature by uttering the words ‘manus tue fecerunt me’.21 Political Poems and Songs ed. Wright, ii. 234. Following his return from France, Say quickly accumulated offices and fees, to an extent soon resented by those not within the privileged circle of the Court. In August 1444 the King gave him and Thomas Chamberlain*, also assigned to the chamber, part of the petty custom collected at Bordeaux,22 C61/132, m. 2; CPR, 1441-6, p. 347. and in the following October he received a grant of the reversion of the office of coroner of the marshalsea of the Household, to hold for life after the death of its then holder, Robert Fayreford.23 In the event, this latter grant was cancelled just over a year later although the King would reassign the coronership to him and his brother Thomas in 1457. In the same October Say was awarded an annuity of £10 (again for life) from the farm of the subsidy and alnage of cloth in Norfolk and Norwich, a grant renewed just over a year later. In January 1445 the King awarded him a fee of 6d. per day from the issues of Staffordshire, as a yeoman of the Crown, and in the following March he became keeper of the privy palace of Westminster, two further grants for life.24 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 310, 330, 347; 1446-52, p. 23.

It is possible that Say initially came into contact with his first wife, the young widow Elizabeth Tilney, through his appointment to the office of escheator in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in November 1445, since she was the daughter of a prominent Cambridgeshire esquire. Just before their marriage, which took place a year later, the King granted the couple an annuity of £32 10s. from the subsidy and alnage of cloth in Norfolk and Norwich (in lieu of the earlier grants from the same source to Say alone). At the beginning of December 1446 several men acting on Say’s behalf, including his brother William, John Langton, chancellor of Cambridge university, William Waynflete, the future bishop of Winchester, and John Wenlock, bound themselves in 1,000 marks to Say’s father-in-law Laurence Cheyne and others. This was to guarantee that Say would settle lands worth 50 marks clear p.a. on himself and Elizabeth within the six years following 2 Feb. 1447,25 CCR, 1441-7, p. 441. an arrangement suggesting that he was unable immediately to provide a jointure for his wife because he had few (if any) lands of his own at this early stage in his career. Through his marriage, he gained a connexion with Cambridgeshire more lasting than that afforded by his term of office as escheator, but contrary to past assumptions, he almost certainly did not represent the borough of Cambridge in the Parliament of 1447.26 Both Oxf. DNB and Roskell, ‘Sir John Say’, assume (without evidence) that Say sat for the borough, despite the fact that it guarded its independence against outsiders in this period. The Cambridge MP of 1447 was almost certainly a local butcher who happened to share the same name: CP40/722, rot. 445d.

In early 1447 the King assigned Say £20 from the Exchequer as a special reward, granted him the wardship and marriage of Elizabeth Tilney, his wife’s daughter by her first marriage, and made him a grant for life of the Essex manor of Lawford. In the following September he and two other Household men, Henry Vavasour and William Holthorp, gained the right to present an incumbent to the parish church of Cottingham in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Their choice was a future bishop of Bath and Wells and chancellor of England, Robert Stillington, although he was obliged to appeal to Rome after the official and receiver-general of the diocese of York had refused to accept his nomination. By contrast, Say’s path to further advancement was free of obstacles. Perhaps already an esquire of the Household when he received a gift of a silver gilt cup out of the stock in the royal jewel house in February 1448, he had certainly attained that rank by the following Michaelmas.27 Roskell, Speakers, 232; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 43, 105. In the same February he joined the Cambridgeshire bench and was appointed to his first commission covering that county. He did not become a j.p. in Hertfordshire – where he had begun to buy lands – until six years later. Among his feoffees for these new acquisitions were his father-in-law, Laurence Cheyne, his brother-in-law, John Cheyne II*, Sir Andrew Ogard*, Philip Butler* and his brother William, a chaplain to the King since 1446. It was undoubtedly through William that Say enjoyed good relations with Winchester College. When the two brothers attended the installation of William Waynflete as bishop of Winchester on 19 Jan. 1449 John was one of those to whom the college offered hospitality. At some point previously he received a grant of an annuity of £20 by Henry Percy, Lord Poynings, for his ‘good and faithful counsel’. No doubt he was intended to represent Poynings’s interests at Court against his wife’s uncle, Robert Poynings* in their dispute about her inheritance.28 CPR, 1446-52, p. 253; CAD, i. B241, B555; VCH Herts. iii. 433-4, 436, 452; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, iii. 1650; T.F. Kirby, Annals of Winchester, 205; R.M. Jeffs, ‘Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D. Phil. thesis, 1960), 319.

It was for his wife’s county of Cambridgeshire that Say was returned to his first Parliament in 1449. Although Suffolk’s regime lacked firm support in the Commons during this assembly, it was probably an initial solidarity among the Household element that ensured the election of Say, a parliamentary novice, as Speaker. There is no doubt where his primary loyalties lay, since he was in attendance on the King just three days after his formal presentation to the office, and he received further rewards from Henry VI while Speaker. The day before the end of the first session he was granted an annuity of 50 marks from the farms and issues of Hampshire and Devon, and less than a week before the third session began he was given the reversion of the combined offices of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and chancellor of the county palatine of Lancaster, with annual fees of 100 marks, upon the decease or resignation of William Tresham*. In the event, this reversion vested sooner rather than later because Tresham was murdered in September 1450. He also received rewards from others besides the King, since after he had become Speaker Jacquetta, dowager duchess of Bedford, and her second husband, Richard Wydeville, ordered their receiver in Cambridgeshire to pay him an annual rent of ten marks. The failure of the Parliament to achieve anything much before its dissolution on 16 July did not affect Say’s credit at Court. During the Parliament, he joined the reconstituted committee of feoffees of the duchy of Lancaster estates set aside for the performance of Henry VI’s will. Among the other feoffees was his brother, William, now dean of the royal chapel. While still an MP he was also involved as a feoffee in a conveyance of the Cambridgeshire manor of Madingley, until the previous year the property of Sir Nicholas Styuecle*, but now held in trust to provide wages for those who represented Cambridgeshire as parliamentary knights of the shire.29 Roskell, Speakers, 231, 232, 234, 279; Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. iii. 1649; CP25(1)/30/99/78; VCH Cambs. ix. 167.

The following Parliament, of 1449-50, was not so favourable for Say. Soon after it opened he became sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, almost certainly through the influence of William de la Pole, by then duke of Suffolk. Yet by now the connexion with de la Pole was dangerous, for the duke’s impeachment by the Commons in February 1450 and his murder while on his way to exile three months later, left Say in an exposed position. A target of contemporary lampoonists, he was one of those threatened during Cade’s rebellion the following June by mutinous retainers of the King and magnates at Blackheath, who said they would join the rebels unless these royal servants, whom they regarded as traitors, were arrested. In early July, after Cade had entered London, sessions of oyer and terminer were held at the Guildhall and Say was indicted of treason and extortion. The seriousness of these charges, afterwards overturned, is testimony to the resentment at the way that he and others close to the King had enriched themselves despite the Crown’s poverty. Say incurred some loss as a result of the Act of Resumption passed in the final session of the Parliament, held at Leicester, since he was obliged to surrender his fee of £9 2s. 6d. as a yeoman of the Crown, as well as the office of keeper of the privy palace at Westminster. On the other hand, he managed to retain fees and annuities worth £65 8s. 4d. a year and he recovered the same keepership in the autumn of 1452, when the Crown re-granted it to him and John Rede, a yeoman of the pantry, for their lives in survivorship.30 E163/8/14; CPR, 1452-61, p. 15. Say also came under attack in the Parliament of 1450, since the Commons drew up a bill demanding the removal of him and other prominent figures, among them the duke of Somerset and the dowager duchess of Suffolk, from Court for ‘misbehaving about your [the King’s] royal person’. Say escaped any serious consequences because the King exempted those who were accustomed to wait on him, and he and others who had been indicted of treason were acquitted. He was certainly in attendance on Henry VI in early 1452, for it was one of his servants who carried a message to Winchester to warn the college to expect a visit from the King on Palm Sunday. He did however take the precaution of securing a pardon in August 1452.31 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 101; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 205; Kirby, 195; C67/40, m. 24; PROME, xii. 216.

The King had recovered from the political crises of 1450-2 when the next Parliament opened at Reading in March 1453, although he was to suffer his first mental collapse while it sat. Say was returned to the Commons as one of the knights of the shire for Hertfordshire, where he had established himself as a landowner and where he became a j.p. in the following year. His fellow Member, Bartholomew Halley*, was another Household man who had suffered denouncement in 1450. After the King’s collapse in August 1453, it was no longer possible to exclude the duke of York and his allies from the government, but Say’s position as a courtier and office holder remained secure. He continued to benefit as a grantee, since he, his brother-in-law, John Cheyne, and the Hertfordshire lawyer, Ralph Gray I*, acquired the wardship of John Butler, son of Cheyne’s half-brother, Philip, and stepbrother of Elizabeth Say, in the autumn of 1453.32 CPR, 1452-61, p. 155; C139/149/27. By the end of the same year, moreover, he had adroitly secured a stewardship on the duke of York’s estates in Hertfordshire. A further safeguard of his position was his association with the powerful Bourgchier family. His connexion with the Bourgchiers was already of several years’ standing, since Thomas Bourgchier, then bishop of Ely, had been a party to the settlement made when Say married Elizabeth Tilney in 1446.33 CCR, 1441-7, p. 441. Later, in July 1451 the bishop’s brother Sir John Bourgchier (afterwards Lord Berners) had promised to pay the MP and his father-in-law, Laurence Cheyne, 100 marks a year over a period of five years, an undertaking perhaps connected with the marriage of Say’s stepdaughter and ward, Elizabeth Tilney the younger, to Humphrey, Bourgchier’s son and heir. In a settlement of the previous April for the latter match, Cheyne and Say had undertaken to pay Sir John £500, while for his part the knight agreed to settle lands worth £40 p.a. on the couple and their male heirs.34 Notts. Archs., Portland (of Welbeck) mss, DD/4P/48/5. Say subsequently formed a friendship with the eldest brother, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier (later earl of Essex).

In November 1453 Say participated in a meeting of the King’s Council, perhaps the first indication of a gradual change in his career, whereby he became more of a royal bureaucrat and less of a Household man. On the following 3 Apr., the day the duke of York was appointed Protector of the realm for the first time, Say was among the councillors who assembled in the Star Chamber. As officially ordained a councillor on 15 Apr. he received £40 p.a.,35 E403/807, m. 9. but the significance of his membership of the Council should not be overstated, for he and (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*, the other commoner on it at this date, were little more than messengers. Yet he was still very much a Household man at this date, and the Council confirmed his position in the royal establishment by listing him as one of the four esquires for the body in the ordinances it drew up for the regulation of the Household in November 1454.36 PPC, vi. 223. In the same month Ralph, Lord Cromwell, chamberlain of the Household, appointed him to act as a feoffee for the performance of his will, of which both he and his brother William were subsequently executors.37 R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 316, 319; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 200, 341; 1476-85, pp. 107-8.

After the King recovered his sanity at the end of 1454 and York relinquished his protectorate in the following February, Say probably spent much of the spring of 1455 at Court. In April that year he was summoned to a great council called for the following 21 May,38 PPC, vi. 341. an assembly superseded by events. With the King at Kilburn on the 21st, he presumably accompanied Henry VI to the first battle of St. Albans, fought the next day. While at Kilburn he presented to Henry a letter which York and his Neville allies had sent from Royston via the chancellor, Thomas Bourgchier, now archbishop of Canterbury. His links with the Bourgchier family stood him in good stead during the upheavals of 1455. In the wake of the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, he became the deputy of the new treasurer of England, Viscount Bourgchier, and was again elected to the Commons as one of the knights of the shire for Hertfordshire. Within weeks of his appointment as under treasurer, he lent the substantial sum of £200 to the Crown, striking evidence of the wealth he had already accrued by this stage in his career.39 Portland (of Welbeck) mss, DD/4P/48/5. The Parliament, chiefly distinguished by a high rate of absenteeism in the Upper House, achieved little although during the recess following its first session Say and other feoffees of Lord Cromwell took the trouble to acquire a royal pardon.40 C67/41, m. 30. With regard to the political situation, Say may well have agreed with the standpoint of the Bourgchiers, who appear to have tried to hold a balance between the opposing factions. Six months after the dissolution of the Parliament, by which stage the queen was providing strong opposition to York, Say lost his office of under treasurer and shortly afterwards his patron, Viscount Bourgchier, stood down as treasurer.

There is little evidence for Say’s official duties in the later 1450s, although he did attend meetings of the Council in March and October 1458. In February the same year he was associated with Thomas Wytham and (Sir) Thomas Charlton* in conveying lands and manors in Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset to John Neville, brother of the earl of Warwick, and his wife, Isabel.41 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 220, 213, 241. As far as his own affairs were concerned, he continued to prosper. By now a reasonably substantial landowner, he was distrained for knighthood in 1457. In each of the following two years, he took out a pardon; on the second occasion it related to his purchases of lands held in chief.42 C67/42, m. 32 (10 Jan. 1458); CPR, 1452-61, p. 509 (11 July 1459). Say was not elected to the Coventry Parliament, the notorious assembly of late 1459 that attainted York and his leading allies, but he probably attended the King while it was in progress. On 21 Dec., the day after its dissolution, he was appointed to the precautionary anti-Yorkist commission of array for Hertfordshire. Eight days later, he received a grant for life of York’s forfeited lordships of Hitchin and Anstey, of which he was steward, along with six others, Ware, Bushey and Shenley (also in Hertfordshire), and Weald Bassett, Clavering and Ham (all in Essex), which had belonged to the earl of Salisbury. In May 1460 he witnessed a conveyance of the reversion of the Hertfordshire manor of More to the abbot and convent of St. Albans after the monks had purchased it from Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley.43 Reg. Whethamstede ed. Riley, i. 357-62, 367.

Puzzlingly, the Coventry Parliament excluded Say and his brother William when it reshaped the committee of feoffees of the duchy of Lancaster estates earmarked for the fulfilment of the King’s will. They were both, however, re-established as feoffees in a new settlement arranged in the Parliament of 1460, which met after the Yorkists won the battle of Northampton and regained control of the government in July that year. Notwithstanding his recent anti-Yorkist activities and grants, the pliant Say attended meetings of the Council in the following month,44 PPC, vi. 306. and advanced the now Yorkist-dominated Crown a huge loan of £2,000 in October the same year.45 E401/873, m. 1. No doubt he took his cue from his patron, Viscount Bourgchier, who had welcomed back the Yorkist magnates from Calais in June 1460 and fought for them at Northampton. Bourgchier, restored as treasurer, once more appointed Say as his deputy. Having taken the precaution of securing a royal pardon during the tumultuous winter of 1460-1,46 CPR, 1452-61, p. 646 (14 Jan. 1461). Say continued to flourish after Edward IV seized the throne, a coup supported by his patron Bourgchier, in March 1461. Three months later, he was confirmed (for life) in his offices of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and the county palatine of Lancaster, and in the late summer of the same year the new King’s mother, Cecily, duchess of York, appointed him steward of her demesnes at Standon, Anstey and Hitchin. According to the terms of her grant, he was to receive a fee of ten marks p.a. for the office, which he was to hold during good behaviour and which probably equated to the stewardship he had held under her late husband.47 SC6/870/5, rot. 5.

More significantly, at the beginning of Edward IV’s reign Say was admitted to the Yorkist Council, of which he was still a member in 1468. After Edward’s accession Say’s career was primarily that of an important administrator. While he did become keeper of the great wardrobe near the end of his life, he does not feature in the surviving Household accounts of the 1460s.48 E101/411/13, 15; 412/2. A good indication of the high esteem in which the new regime held him is a letter written on 9 Sept. 1461 (possibly by the treasurer Henry Bourgchier, by then earl of Essex) in which he was informed that ‘the King maketh grete bostes of you for the truest and the faithfullest man that any christen Prince may have, of the whiche I am right glad and joyeux that ye have soo borne you’.49 Orig. Letters ed. Ellis, ser. 1, i. 15. In the same month the Exchequer paid Say 100 marks for helping, in his capacity as under treasurer, with the collection of a clerical tenth during vacation time. He continued to show diligence in his duties, for he received further substantial rewards later in the decade, including £200 in June 1463, in recognition of his ‘great labours and good service’ as under treasurer from the beginning of Edward’s reign and as Speaker in the Parliament then sitting. Exchequer rolls also record that he received payments for attending the Council. In return, the Crown benefited from the large sums he advanced to it in Edward’s first reign, including loans of £100 and £45 in December 1461, of 100 marks in April 1462, of the same sum in the following August, of £150 in March 1463, of 200 marks in May the same year and of 100 marks and £200 late in the same decade. Some of these loans went towards the King’s costs in his campaigns against the Lancastrian rebels in northern England.50 E403/824, m. 4; 825, mm. 2, 5, 6, 7; 827A, mm. 4, 8, 11, 12, 18, 16; 829, mm. 4, 6, 8; E405/40, rots. 1, 2, 3d, 5d, 6; 43, rot. 1; 48, rot. 3; 50, rot. 2; 51, rot. 2; E404/72/3/54.

Ironically, Say had dealings with the family of one of the leading rebels, Robert, Lord Hungerford and Moleyns, an implacable opponent of the new dynasty who was attainted in Edward IV’s first Parliament and executed after the battle of Hexham in May 1464.51 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. 79-80, 179; Historical Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 224-5. He was both one of the creditors and mortgagees of that peer’s father (who had died in 1459) and a feoffee of a considerable number of Hungerford estates.52 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 439, 440; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 363-5. In December 1464 Say and other Hungerford feoffees joined Lady Margaret (mother of the executed Lord Robert and grandmother of Thomas*) in petitioning the King for the return of certain other confiscated Hungerford estates.53 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 365, 368. By then Say had already relinquished an interest in the lands of another prominent Lancastrian, the late John de Vere, 12th earl of Oxford. Following the earl’s execution for treason in February 1462, he joined John, Lord Wenlock, and two prominent members of the Household, Sir John Fogg† and Sir John Scott†, in obtaining the keeping of the substantial Vere estates during pleasure.54 The bp. of Exeter was able to secure a grant of some of the de Vere holdings in July 1463. It is assumed that Say and his co-grantees relinquished their interests in early 1464, since it was then that the new 13th earl of Oxford, de Vere’s second son, received licence to enter his estates: CPR, 1461-7, pp. 287, 298; J. Ross, John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, 50-52.

After his election to the Parliament that opened at Westminster on 29 Apr. 1463, Say became Speaker for the second time in his career. During the initial session he was granted 200 marks as a special reward for his work as under treasurer, and as already mentioned five days after the session had ended, he received a further £200 for his service in the same office since the beginning of Edward IV’s reign, although this grant also expressly took into account all the labour and costs which he so far borne in the Parliament. On the same day (22 June) he, the treasurer (Bourgchier’s successor, the earl of Worcester), and John Wood III*, a former under treasurer, were repaid a loan of £200 which they had made four weeks earlier.55 E403/829, mm. 5, 6. The remuneration Say received during the Parliament was well deserved, for the Commons had granted the King an aid of £37,000 for defence. It may also have served as a final settlement between him and the Crown for his duties at the Exchequer. While the earl of Worcester had retained him as under treasurer, he was dismissed from the office when Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, replaced the earl as treasurer on 24 June. In the following autumn Speaker Say attended a feast given by the serjeants-at-law in London and helped to resolve a contretemps which arose when the seat of honour was allotted to the treasurer instead of the mayor of London, Matthew Philip. Philip abruptly departed rather than countenance this breach of his right of precedence, but afterwards Say, (Sir) John Clay*, a knight for the body, John Dynham and Hugh atte Fenne* (who had succeeded Say as under treasurer) went to the Guildhall to assure the mayor that they did not approve of the affront to his dignity and to ask him to dine the next day.56 Roskell dates this episode to Oct. 1464, which is not possible since Clay died in the previous month. Confusingly, Cal. Letter Bk. London, L, 7, states that the feast occurred on 7 Oct. 1463 but the mayor in question, Matthew Philip, was not elected to that office until 13 Oct. When the final session of the Parliament of 1463 opened in 1465, the Commons granted the King the wool subsidy and tunnage and poundage for life, although they also requested a reduction in the aid they had earlier made him.

Five weeks after the Parliament was dissolved, Say was knighted at the coronation of Elizabeth Wydeville. He assisted at the coronation banquet, during which he brought in one of the spice plates and passed it to another newly made knight, Sir William Bourgchier (the son of his patron, the earl of Essex), who then served the queen.57 Coronation Elizabeth Wydevile ed. G. Smith, 23-24. In the following August Say was confirmed in office as chancellor of the duchy and county palatine of Lancaster with increased fees, probably to reflect his new rank. In January 1466 Edward granted him, William Hatteclyf, the King’s secretary, and Thomas Prout, an esquire for the body and steward of the duchy of Lancaster lands in Hampshire and Berkshire, the right to collate to the next vacant prebend at the royal chapel at Windsor. A year later Say was a member of an embassy appointed to discuss a truce and trade with the duke of Burgundy’s commissaries. Say’s enhanced status ensured that he was in demand as a feoffee during the later 1460s. Two months before he was knighted, he had acted on behalf of John Donne, an esquire for the body, in a grant involving certain estates forfeited by (Sir) Thomas Tresham*. In September 1466, the King’s sister, the duchess of Exeter, obtained licence to grant estates in Essex, Berkshire and Northamptonshire to a panel of important feoffees, including Say. By the following March John Dynham, now Lord Dynham, had chosen Say to act in the same capacity with regard to 13 manors in East Anglia. Among others for whom Say acted as a trustee in this period was a former mayor of London, John Young*, who had recently become one of his neighbours in Hertfordshire.

Say was again returned as a knight of the shire for Hertfordshire to the Parliament of 1467. When the Commons elected him its Speaker he became only the sixth man to serve in that office three times. Exempted from the Act of Resumption passed by that assembly,58 PROME, xiii. 320-1. Say afterwards received a reward of £200, ‘in consideration of the great costes, charges, and expenses born and had’ by him in pursuit of the King’s profit and his duties as its Speaker.59 Roskell, Speakers, 112; E405/50, rot. 2. In the second session two whole tenths and fifteenths were granted to the King, but the Speaker’s work did not end with the dissolution of Parliament. The Commons had laid an information against the keeper of the royal exchange and one of the governors of the mint at the Tower and after they had complained that they had not had enough time to discuss this matter a commission of oyer and terminer was set up to continue the investigation. It consisted of a group of lords, officials and judges, along with Say and nine others nominated by the Commons.

In the meantime Say also found time to attend to other matters. In March 1467 he conveyed his estates in Hertfordshire and Essex to several feoffees to hold for 60 years at the nominal annual rent of a rose. As this grant contained a proviso to the effect that this term should come to an end upon the death of his wife Elizabeth, it was perhaps intended for her benefit.60 E326/9788, 10874. In the following summer he purchased from the Crown for 100 marks the wardship of the grand-daughter and heir of Walter Ralegh*, a middling Devon landowner,61 CFR, xx. 204. and was nominated, in association with Thomas Urswyk II*, to arbitrate in a dispute involving John Quedhampton, a Hampshire gentleman.62 CCR, 1468-76, no. 127. It is possible that he never enjoyed possession of the Ralegh lands, since shortly before his own death he took action in the Chancery against Ralegh’s younger son (another Walter) for occupying them.63 C1/66/208. Elsewhere, he certainly augmented his holdings in Hertfordshire. He purchased manors in Essendon and Little Berkhampstead from Sir John Norbury† in 1466,64 VCH Herts. iii. 460; CP40/818, rot. 278d; E41/526; CPR, 1467-77, p. 114. by which date he farmed from the queen another manor in Essendon, one of the duchy of Lancaster properties the King had granted her,65 DL37/54/111, 128. and in July 1468 he acquired the reversion of that of Sawbridgeworth from the feoffees of the recently deceased and childless Sir John Heron.66 E326/6006, 6065; CAD, iii. A5148; VCH Herts. iii. 335.

During the political crisis of 1469 the King’s brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, wrote to Say for a loan of £100 to cover the costs of accompanying the King on his march against the rebels in northern England.67 R. Horrox, Ric. III, 32. While remaining aloof from the disaffection of 1469, and in spite of his good service to Edward IV, Say did not oppose the Readeption of Henry VI the following year. He remained a j.p. and retained his duchy of Lancaster chancellorships, although he did take the precaution of purchasing a royal pardon (which referred to his former status as an esquire for the body of the restored Lancastrian King) in early 1471.68 C67/44, m. 7 (25 Jan.). Upon recovering the throne in 1471 Edward must have felt that Say had too readily accepted the return of the Lancastrian dynasty. The MP lost the same chancellorships and felt obliged to obtain pardons in June and November that year.69 CPR, 1467-77, p. 262; C67/48, m. 29 (29 Nov.). Edward’s suspicions are understandable, not least because Say’s son, John, a follower of the duke of Clarence and earl of Warwick, was regarded as a rebel.70 CPR, 1467-77, p. 218.

Yet Say remained a j.p. and the restored Yorkist King made another of his sons, Leonard, a grant for life of the free chapel of Tickhill, a duchy of Lancaster castle in Yorkshire in August 1471. No doubt it was to Say’s advantage that he had continued to enjoy important connexions. He had remained a feoffee of the King’s sister, the duchess of Exeter, and at this date he was serving the earl of Essex in the same capacity.71 C141/3/31. Say was also the foremost feoffee of his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Tilney, and one of the executors of her husband, Humphrey Bourgchier, who had died fighting for Edward IV at Barnet.72 CP, ix. 614. She subsequently, in April 1472, married Thomas Howard†, the son of John Howard*, Lord Howard, an administrator-politician high in the King’s favour. In turn, John Howard was a relative and servant of the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, of whom the then duke was the nephew of Say’s own patron, the earl of Essex. Bourgchier’s connexion with the duke of Norfolk must have helped Say to gain the stewardship of Mowbray’s estates in Hertfordshire, an office in his hands by 1472. Another significant connexion was the influential William, Lord Hastings, to whom Say had lent £100 as far back as 1463,73 E315/477/3. and whom he would later appoint supervisor of his will.74 PCC 35 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 278v-279).

Following the summoning of the Parliament of 1472 Say was able to win a seat, although this time he represented a borough like his eldest son, William, one of the burgesses for Plympton Erle in Devon. The fact that he was obliged to look to the burgesses of Tavistock (another Devon borough which had become a target for gentry ‘carpet-baggers’ by the second half of the fifteenth century), is an indication of his fallen political stock. There is no evidence that Say played a significant role in this Parliament. He acquired an exemption from the Act of Resumption it passed in October 1473, but only with regard to any grant or assignment he had received under the seal of the duchy of Lancaster, or to any payment made to him by a grantee of forfeited estates up to an annual value of 20s. He was, nevertheless, involved as a feoffee in a land transaction on behalf of Thomas Grey, earl of Huntingdon, the queen’s son by her first marriage, and Anne, Edward IV’s niece (the daughter of the duchess of Exeter) a few months after becoming an MP.75 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 373-4. While the Parliament of 1472 was sitting, Say clashed with the King’s attorney, William Hussey*, over the wardship of Ralph, son and heir of the Devon esquire, Philip Copplestone. He was initially able to obtain custody of Ralph, but Hussey, acting for the Crown, filed a bill in Chancery seeking a court ruling about the wardship (although with what result is unknown).76 C1/48/523.

In September 1473, between Parliament’s second and third sessions, Say’s wife, Elizabeth, died. He may well have married Agnes, his second wife, in the following year, since he was a feoffee of several Buckinghamshire manors belonging to Sir John Leynham alias Plomer and his wife Margaret, one of Agnes’s daughters, by November 1474.77 CCR, 1468-76, no. 1358; VCH Bucks. iii. 93-95. The marriage had certainly taken place when the abbot and convent of St. Albans granted letters of confraternity to him, Agnes, his children and, posthumously, his first wife in April 1476. Say was Agnes’s fourth husband, her third, Lord Wenlock, having died at the battle of Tewkesbury. She was a member of a prominent legal family. One of her brothers, (Sir) Robert Danvers*, had sat on the bench of the common pleas, and another, William†, became a judge of the same court in 1488. A third brother, Thomas, was a retainer of William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester. It was perhaps through Thomas Danvers that Say came to act in a conveyance of lands in Lincolnshire to Waynflete’s foundation, Magdalen College, Oxford, in July 1477.78 CPR, 1476-85, p. 48.

By the mid 1470s Say was enjoying a marked change in his fortunes, not least because he was too useful a creditor for the Crown to spurn. Exchequer records suggest that in this period he and two other wealthy bureaucrats, Hugh atte Fenne and Richard Fowler†, jointly advanced Edward IV a total of £1,290, and that he lent the King well over another £1,000 on his own account.79 E405/57, rot. 3; 58, rots. 1d, 2; 59, rots. 1, 2, 3; 63, rot. 3d; 64, rots. 1, 2. By 1474-5 Say enjoyed a fee of £40 p.a. for life from the issues of the duchy of Lancaster estates in Lincolnshire held by the queen,80 DL29/736/12059. and he became under treasurer for the third time in April 1475, replacing Richard Fowler who had succeeded to his duchy of Lancaster offices in 1471. As with his previous appointments as under treasurer, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex, was then treasurer of England. In June 1475 Bourgchier and Say obtained a licence to ship wool, tin, hides and other commodities to the Mediterranean and to import, free of customs and subsidies, other merchandise worth up to £4,000. Their trade venture was a success, for in October no fewer than 15 ships, full of furs, buckram, linen, oil, wine, almonds and other luxuries worth a total of £1,097, docked at Sandwich. Some of these goods were probably for the consumption of the families and households of the two business partners – a man as wealthy as Say probably lived in some style – but doubtless they intended to sell the rest, since they included items like 2,000 ostrich feathers, 200 tennis balls and incense.81 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 532-3; E122/128/15; L.S. Woodger, ‘Hen. Bourgchier’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 239-40.

In the meantime, Say was appointed to the great council which remained in England when the King led his expedition to France in 1475.82 C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, ii. 125. In the autumn of 1476 he became keeper of the great wardrobe, an office of no little responsibility, and in November 1477, on the very day of Richard Fowler’s death, the Crown made him a new grant for life of the duchy of Lancaster offices he had lost over six years earlier. Say was also involved in negotiations on behalf of the King after the fourth Mowbray duke of Norfolk had died leaving a young daughter as his sole heiress in January 1476. Edward IV decided to marry his second son to the girl, and almost before the duke was buried he delegated Say and others of his Council to open discussions with the widowed duchess, with whom the MP may already have come into contact through his stewardship under her late husband.83 Ibid. 203; E405/63, rot. 1d.

In 1478 Say sat in his last Parliament, this time once again as a knight of the shire rather than a mere burgess. He was returned alongside John Sturgeon†, with whom he had secured several stewardships in Hertfordshire and Essex during the minority of Henry, Lord Morley, at the end of 1476. The King’s chief reason for summoning this short assembly was to have the duke of Clarence arraigned on charges of high treason. While Parliament was still in session Say, along with three prominent Household men, (Sir) Thomas Vaughan*, Sir John Elrington† and (Sir) Robert Wingfield*, and the recorder of Coventry, Henry Boteler II*, were instructed to examine the accounts relating to Clarence’s lands and possessions. A month later, in March 1478, Say was appointed to the commission set up to inquire into the duke’s lands in Essex and Hertfordshire.

The commission was Say’s final such appointment. He died on the following 12 Apr., having made his last will only two days previously.84 PCC 26 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 259v-260v). He asked for burial in Broxbourne parish church and for a priest to sing there for the souls of himself and his first wife for a term of 20 years. The church was already an object of his generosity, since he had already undertaken to rebuild its south aisle, a project for which he agreed to pay a mason £24.85 E210/2638. Among his other directions were instructions to his executors to ensure that a perpetual chantry in St. Paul’s cathedral requested by his brother William, who had died ten years earlier and whose executor he himself was, should finally be established.86 CPR, 1467-77, p. 603; 1476-85, p. 64. Say also ordered his own executors to dispose of the residue of his moveable possessions for the good of the souls of William, himself, his first wife Elizabeth, ‘and for the gode and prosperous astate of Kynge Edward the iiijth and for the soule of Kynge Henry the vjte in whos service I was brought up and prefereed’. His executors included John Russell, bishop of Rochester, John Morton, master of the rolls (a former protégé of Archbishop Bourgchier), his son William and brother Thomas Say, and he appointed Lord Hastings to oversee their work. The executors took on an a particularly important responsibility, since they had to account for substantial sums that Say had received for the Crown (including monies owed to the King by various foreign merchants) in his capacity as under treasurer and were still in his hands when he died.87 E405/80, rot. 50d; 66, rots. 1d, 4d, 5d. Say bequeathed plate to three of his sons, a substantial 100 marks’ worth each to William and Thomas and another £40 worth to Leonard, who had taken priest’s orders. During his father’s lifetime William had married his first wife, Genevieve, the heir of both her father, John Hill III*, and her grandmother, Cecily, widow of Sir Thomas Kyriel*. Say was also still alive when the couple quarrelled with Genevieve’s mother, Margaret, and her second husband, Thomas Burdet*, over the Hill estates.88 C1/48/268; 57/245-9. William’s second wife was Elizabeth Fray, a daughter of his stepmother, Agnes, and the widow of Sir Thomas Waldegrave of Smallbridge, Suffolk. Of the five daughters the MP named in his will, four of them were married when he died. Anne was the wife of Sir Henry Wentworth† son and heir of (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, one of Say’s colleagues in Henry VI’s household. Elizabeth married Thomas Sampson (perhaps the MP for Ipswich in the Parliament of 1485) and Katherine’s husband was Thomas Bassingbourne of Hatfield Woodhall, who had been a near neighbour of her father in Hertfordshire. Mary married Philip Calthorpe† and she and her husband joined the household of Princess Mary in Henry VIII’s reign, he as the princess’s chamberlain and she as her governess.89 CPR, 1467-77, p. 594; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 66; LP Hen. VIII, iii (2), nos 1439, 1533, 1673. Whether Say’s will was ever put into effect is open to question (there is a blank after probatum in the copy of it in the prerogative court of Canterbury),90 PCC 35 Wattys. but Say’s request to be buried beside his first wife at Broxbourne was respected. The brass effigies placed on top of his tomb bore the Yorkist collar of suns and roses, an acknowledgement of loyalty to the King whose favour he had managed to regain after the hiatus of the Readeption.

Say died seised of estates in four counties although most of them were in Hertfordshire.91 C140/67/43. He had made his first manorial purchases there, six small manors in Broxbourne (including ‘Baas’ which became his home manor) and one in nearby Cheshunt, in 1448. The vendor, from whom he also acquired another manor, ‘Hokes’ in Essex, at the same date, was the Gloucestershire lawyer, John Edwards*. It is likely that Say exploited his Household connexions to make the purchase, since Edwards had inherited these estates from his recently deceased brother, Thomas Gloucester, a royal servant whose offices had included that of cofferer of the Household.92 VCH Herts. iii. 433-4, 436, 451-2; Gloucester Corporation Recs. ed. Stevenson, 398; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 30-1; CAD, i. B241, 555. Say afterwards added to his interests at Broxbourne, since he was farming the lands of the rectory at Broxbourne from Thomas Kemp, bishop of London, by 1464. While the terms of the farm are unknown, it was not restricted to his own lifetime since it passed to his son and heir William Say after his death. Furthermore, the accounts of Kemp’s receiver-general show that he was in receipt of a fee of 40s. p.a. from the bishop at the end of his life, although for what is not indicated.93 SC6/1140/25-27. Elsewhere in Hertfordshire, Say acquired four other manors, at Bishop’s Hatfield, ‘Bedwell’ in Essendon (where he had a tile kiln), Little Berkhampstead and Sawbridgeworth in the late 1460s.94 VCH Herts. iii. 102, 104, 335, 460, 461. Outside that county, he held two manors in Frenge, Norfolk, once the property of Sir Edmund Ingoldisthorpe*,95 F. Blomefield, Norf. x. 305; CCR, 1454-61, p. 156; C139/165/20. and six at Liston and elsewhere in Essex, including ‘Hokes’ and his grant for life of Lawford. He settled his manors at Liston on his younger son, Thomas, who died seised of them in 1497.96 C140/67/43; CPR, 1461-7, p. 228; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 1157. His one more far flung property was the manor of Market Overton in Rutland, formerly the property of the childless Richard de Vere (d.c.1467). Richard was the childless uncle of John de Vere, 13th earl of Oxford, who acquiesced in Say’s purchase through a series of transactions culminating in a collusive lawsuit at Westminster in 1469.97 Ross, 55-56. Say’s Cheyne in-laws and their connexions were prominent among his feoffees, many of whom were drawn from the leading landowners of Hertfordshire and Essex, including John, Lord Dynham. For a few years before his death Say also enjoyed, in the right of his second wife, an interest in manors at Great Munden (Hertfordshire) and Wenden, Essex, formerly the property of her former husband, Sir John Fray. Agnes survived him by just two months and was buried beside Fray in the church of St. Bartholomew the Little in London.98 C140/67/45; The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 126.