SEYMOUR, John II

John, who sat in all four of the Parliaments summoned in the 1450s, was the eldest of the five sons of John Seymour I, whose inherited wealth had elevated him to the first rank of the gentry of Wiltshire. His parents married in July 1424, so even if he was their first child he cannot have been born before the spring of 1425. He perhaps attained his majority before his marriage to Elizabeth Coker which took place before 1 December 1447, the date that his father obtained a royal licence to settle on them and their male issue his moiety of the manor of Stapleford, which was held of the Crown in chief.3 CPR, 1446-52, p. 121. Little is known about Elizabeth, save that she inherited the Somerset manor of Lydeard St. Lawrence, and was less well-endowed than her cousin Margaret, who was married successively to the lawyer Alexander Hody* and a younger son of John Stourton II*, Lord Stourton.4 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 652; C1/166/77. In the tax assessments returned by Seymour’s father and other commissioners in Wiltshire in February 1451, our MP was listed as receiving a comparatively modest income from land of £30 p.a.5 E179/196/118.

At the date this tax was levied Seymour’s first Parliament was in session at Westminster. Still in his mid twenties he had been returned by the Wiltshire borough of Hindon. Lordship of the borough pertained to William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, whom his father was currently serving as constable of Farnham castle. John too entered Waynflete’s service. Thus, he was joined with the bishop in transactions concerning the manor of Stainswick in Berkshire, which had belonged to the late William Danvers*, when Danvers’s widow Joan conveyed it to Waynflete and his nominees in July 1453, as a preliminary to its donation to Magdalen College, Oxford.6 Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Stainswyke deeds, 1, 2, 4. This was during the prorogation of Seymour’s second Parliament, which he attended as a shire knight for Wiltshire. Given that he was possessed of comparatively little in the way of land and that his father still lived, it must have been to the latter and their links with Waynflete that he owed his return. Seymour’s election to his third consecutive Parliament, in 1455, was again for Hindon.

Bishop Waynflete was made chancellor of England in October 1456, and a year later Seymour was appointed sheriff of his home county. Save for the commission to distribute tax allowances in 1453 (to which all the representatives of shires were named), this was his only recorded promotion to Crown office. His appointment on 7 Nov. 1457 fell on the same day that his father began his own seventh shrievalty, in his case in Herefordshire, where the Seymours held estates but had hitherto played no part in local affairs.7 CFR, xix. 196. In the event John, clearly expected to fill his father’s shoes at home, did little to inspire confidence in his ability to do so, for two felons escaped from his custody and he was fined the enormous sum of £100 for failing to bring one of them to the King’s bench. According to his petition, after the prisoner Wybert Charleton had been handed over to him by the justices of assize in Wiltshire, his under sheriff had imprudently released him on bail, from which he absconded. Nevertheless, Seymour’s access to the chancellor served him well: on 20 July 1458 he was pardoned the escapes and all fines incurred as a consequence, as well as for any trespasses, negligence and failures in the returns of writs.8 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 433-4. After the end of his shrievalty he petitioned to be discharged from certain sums of money for which he was held accountable at the Exchequer.9 Wilts. Hist. Centre, Court Rolls, 192/55. Perhaps in connexion with debts owing to him as sheriff, in the following May three Wiltshire men, including his former under sheriff Thomas Mason of Salisbury, were bound over to pay him £21 in instalments before Christmas.10 CCR, 1454-61, p. 379. Meanwhile, in November 1458, when he left office, Seymour had further assisted Bishop Waynflete in the acquisition of Stainswick for his college, by formally receiving a quitclaim of the manor from Sir Robert Shotesbrooke*.11 CCR, 1454-61, p. 368; Magdalen Coll. Stainswyke deeds, 11. Shotesbrooke had earlier held the manor of Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire, in right of his first wife, and in the same week a royal licence was granted for Seymour and a different group of feoffees to take possession of it, presumably on behalf of her daughter Margaret Beauchamp, dowager duchess of Somerset.12 CPR, 1452-61, p. 461; CCR, 1461-8, p. 240; VCH Wilts. ix. 79.

There is little information about Seymour’s whereabouts during the civil war years of 1459-61, save for his election, once again as a knight of the shire, to the Parliament at Coventry which was opened by Waynflete as chancellor on 20 Nov. 1459 and passed an Act of Attainder against the duke of York and his allies. Curiously, however, Seymour was not appointed to any of the commissions set up to array the country in defence of the Lancastrian government, and nothing is heard of him until after Edward IV had seized the throne. Even then the record relates to a private dispute rather than involvement in national politics. Seymour had quarrelled with the rector of Lydeard St. Lawrence regarding land and tithes in the parish. By an award made by Bishop Bekynton in his palace at Wells in August 1461, it was decided that Seymour should pay the rector 6s. 8d. for tithes, and the rector and his successors were to keep specified acres of arable land while allowing Seymour and his issue by his wife Elizabeth to have untroubled possession of the rest of the disputed property.13 Reg. Bekynton, i (Som. Rec. Soc. xlix), 1398. Seymour and his father both sued out pardons from Edward IV in the spring of 1462, the younger man doing so on 28 June.14 C67/45, mm. 21, 26. He died 15 months later, on 29 Sept. 1463.15 C140/70/38. Thus, at the death of his father Sir John in December 1464 the heir to the bulk of the Seymour estates was our John’s son and namesake, then aged 14.16 C140/14/32.

The MP’s widow married Richard Whitley†, a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer from Devon, but outlived him too. She had retained the Seymour moiety of Stapleford, which passed on her death in 1472 to her son John Seymour of Wolf Hall, by then aged 21.17 C140/40/16. As young John was heir to substantial estates, the Crown took an interest in him, in 1477 going so far as to institute inquiries about the holdings of his great-great-grandfather Sir William Sturmy*, who had died 50 years before.18 E149/232/9. He succeeded to the wardenship of Savernake forest (after a period during his minority in which it was kept by his grandfather’s feoffees), although expected his younger brother Alexander to perform the warden’s functions as his deputy.19 VCH Wilts. iv. 439-40. John reached an agreement with his kinsman Robert Ringbourne with regard to a further partition of the former Sturmy estates, which in his case were augmented in 1485 by the death of his elderly grandmother Isabel.20 Wilts. Hist. Centre, Marquis of Ailesbury mss, 1300/143, 144; CPR, 1485-94, p. 61. He died in 1491 and was succeeded by yet another John (the fourth in succession), a minor who as Sir John Seymour was to father Henry VIII’s queen Jane and become grandfather to Edward VI.21 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 766-72; CCR, 1485-1500, nos. 622, 1159; CPR, 1485-94, p. 452.