WHITTINGTON, William

Considering that he was a great-nephew of the famous ‘Dick’ Whittington† and hailed from a family which had occasionally supplied Gloucestershire with knights of the shire since Edward II’s reign,5 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 849-50. Whittington is a relatively obscure figure. Perhaps in his infancy when his father died in France in 1437,6 Ibid. 846. Although an unidentified William Whittington was the tenant of the Whittington estate at Sollershope, Herefs. in 1428: Feudal Aids, ii. 415. he was not immediately recognized as the successor of his grandfather Guy Whittington, since the jury was unable to name the heir at the inquisition post mortem held in Gloucestershire following Guy’s death in 1440.7 CIPM, xxv. 529. In due course, however, he inherited his grandfather’s manors at Pauntley and Frampton Mansell in Gloucestershire and Upton Haselor in Warwickshire, and his estates in Herefordshire.8 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 845-6; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xl. 116; R. Bigland, Hist. Glos. ed. Frith (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), 1051; VCH Warws. iii. 112; C142/44/99. When he married in 1448, his widowed grandmother Cecily settled the reversion of her Gloucestershire manor of Notgrove upon him and he was also to succeed to her holdings at Rodborough, Naunton and Ebley in the same county.9 VCH Glos. ix. 148; x. 275; C142/44/156. Some of his grandparents’ estates did not come his way, for Cecily’s moiety of a manor at Leigh, Gloucestershire, passed to his uncle Richard Whittington, who appears also to have succeeded to Guy’s manor of Staunton, Worcestershire.10 CP25(1)/79/89/70; VCH Worcs. iv. 200. Whittington is not known to have inherited any lands from his mother Elizabeth, and it was his marriage to a younger daughter of a Cornish knight which would provide his family with its most significant dividend in lands at the end of the Middle Ages, although not in his lifetime.

As a landholder of some substance, Whittington easily qualified for knighthood, an honour for which he was distrained on at least two occasions, and it was as ‘notabilis armiger’ that he was returned to the Parliament of 1455.11 C219/16/3. While an MP, he took the opportunity to acquire a royal pardon, dated 12 Nov. that year.12 C67/41, m. 20. The Parliament, which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, appears to mark his earliest involvement in public affairs. It is possible he had come to identify with the Yorkist cause, in spite of his family’s apparent links in the 1440s with two peers associated with the Lancastrian Court, John, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, and Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley.13 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 332. The fact that his son and heir’s first wife was a daughter of the Yorkist (Sir) Richard Croft† lends weight to such an hypothesis,14 Vis. Glos. 267-8; Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xl. 116. but it is unlikely that he was ever an out and out partisan in political terms, not least because he was appointed to the last of his ad hoc commissions following the restoration of Henry VI.

Just weeks into Henry’s Readeption, Whittington died in London. He was buried in the city’s fashionable Greyfriars’ church, where a monumental inscription recorded that his death had occurred on 3 Nov. 1470.15 Collectanea Topographia et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 284. His will, made in August that year, is no longer extant, although it is recorded that he assigned at least one of his manors, Upton Haselor, to his widow to hold for life.16 C142/44/99. Elizabeth subsequently remarried, finding a new husband in the Warwickshire esquire Nicholas Brome of Baddesley Clinton, son of John Brome II*.17 Shakespeare Centre Archs., Ferrers mss, DR3/264. Whittington’s son and heir John survived until 1525. He died a far greater landowner than his father, having inherited a share of the extensive Cornish estates of his mother’s family following the deaths of his childless cousins, Sir Edmund Arundell and Anne Crocker, in the first decade of the sixteenth century.18 C142/44/99, 156; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 680; iii. 366.