NEWPORT, John II

Newport and John Truthall* were the only two men of uncertain origins to represent Lincolnshire in Parliament during the reign of Henry VI, and Newport’s election is the most puzzling of the two. Almost everything known of his career is curious. He followed an unusual path, emerging from obscurity to play, for a brief period, a prominent part in Lincolnshire affairs before establishing himself as one of the leading men of the borough of Grimsby. The probability is that he was of gentry rank by birth. Throughout his career, despite his apparent lack of acres, he is generally described as ‘esquire’, but his precise origins can only be a matter of speculation. It is possible that he was closely related to Sir William Newport† of Abnalls near Lichfield in Staffordshire: in 1443 he was a co-defendant with Sir William’s son, another William Newport, and in 1450 he himself sued two Lichfield tradesmen for taking his goods from Grimsby.3 CP40/730, rot. 327; 759, rot. 183. Alternatively, he may have been a representative of the Newports of Furneux Pelham in Hertfordshire. Cecily (d.1477), widow of William Newport* (d.1433), took as her second husband the Lincolnshire knight, Sir William Tirwhit*. It may be that our MP was a kinsman of her first husband and this marriage brought him to the county, although there is no evidence to connect him with Tirwhit.4 J.E. Cussans, Herts. (Edwinstree), 148-9; Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, ser. 5, iii. 67. Later Cecily’s gdda. married Sir Thomas Barnardiston (d.1503) of Kedington, Suff., and Great Coates, Lincs.: Lincs. Peds. ed. Maddison, 91. It may be significant that our MP held lands at neighbouring Little Coates.

Newport first appears in the records in October 1438, when he was granted by the Crown the keeping of six bovates of land in Burgh on Bain (Lindsey) during the minority of Agnes, daughter and heiress of John Hawley of Girsby, at an annual rent, agreed in May 1440, of two marks.5 CFR, xvii. 84, 152-3. Why he should have been the beneficiary of such a grant is unknown but there is one very strong possibility, namely that he had married Hawley’s widow. Such a marriage would explain much about his career that would otherwise be inexplicable. Hawley, assessed in the subsidy returns of 1436 on an annual income of 40 marks, had died seised of a respectable estate, centred on the manor of Girsby.6 E179/136/198. If our MP had held some of these lands, it would explain the part he played in the county’s affairs in the 1440s.7 The marriage would also explain why, in a lawsuit of 1443, he is described as ‘of Girsby’: CP40/730, rot. 327. On 8 Jan. 1442 he attested the Lincolnshire parliamentary election return, and on 3 Apr. 1445 he was appointed to the burdensome shrievalty of the county. Even if, as seems probable, he held lands in right of his wife, he was poorly qualified for the office, and his nomination probably reflects the difficulty the Crown was having in finding willing candidates. That difficulty continued when Newport followed the lead of men of greater substance and refused to serve.8 C219/15/2; CFR, xvii. 303; R.M. Jeffs, ‘Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1960), 65. More surprising than his failed shrieval nomination was his election, on 5 Oct. 1450, to represent the county in Parliament. Again, some special circumstance may be suspected, perhaps a reluctance on the part of those with a better claim, to sit in the troubled political climate of late 1450.9 C219/16/1.

Thereafter the pattern of Newport’s career changed and the explanation may partly lie in his wife’s death and the consequent loss of her lands. By a fine levied in Trinity term 1453 the Hawley inheritance was settled in its entirety, with no indication that it was burdened by any dower interest, on John Hawley’s daughter and heiress, Agnes, and her husband, Thomas Blount*. Soon after, in Easter term 1454, the couple sued Newport for taking three chests of charters from Girsby.10 CP25(1)/145/161/5; CP40/773, rot. 236. The death of the Hawley widow may therefore explain why Newport largely withdrew from his role as a county esquire. After his election he is only twice more recorded as playing a part in the county’s affairs: in March 1456 he sat as a commissioner to inquire into concealments there and in 1467 he attested the county parliamentary election.11 E159/232, recorda Easter rot. 20d; C219/17/1. Instead, he developed the role he had already adopted as a burgess of Grimsby. He may already have purchased property in the borough’s environs. From about 1454 he was sometimes described as resident at Riby, a few miles from Grimsby, and in Michaelmas term 1461 he had an action pending for close-breaking there and at nearby Little Coates and Keelby.12 CP40/773, rot. 236; 802, rot. 198; E159/232 recorda Easter rot. 20d; C1/27/435; 28/541. By 1454 he also had property further afield at Kingthorpe, not far from Lincoln: CP40/773, rot. 41. To add to these local landed interests, he also had commercial ones. As early as 1441, along with his putative kinsman William Newport and other men of Lichfield, he allegedly abducted from London an apprentice of the goldsmith Ralph Boteler; a suit pending in the Grimsby borough court in October 1446 shows that he owned a ship; and by 1448 he was trading from that port in salmon and herring.13 CP40/728, rot. 325d; 730, rot. 327; Grimsby ct. rolls 1/101, 25 Hen. VI; E. Gillett, Grimsby, 28-29. His motive in settling there may have been to develop these interests further.

However this may be, Newport quickly established himself among the borough elite. As early as 1446 he had been elected as one of the borough’s auditors and to the mayor’s council. From 1452 he enjoyed an annual pension of as much as ten marks, charged on the fee-farm of Grimsby, from Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, an indication than he was a man of greater account than the bulk of the surviving evidence implies.14 Grimsby ct. rolls 1/101, 25 Hen. VI; Gillett, 52, 60. Less happily, on 1 July 1455 he stood as a candidate in the borough election, coming sixth of the seven candidates and polling only two votes.15 Bull. IHR, xlii. 217. This was something of a humiliation for a man who only five years before had been able to secure election for the county, but it did not reflect his lack of standing in his adopted town. In the autumn of 1456 he was elected for the first of his many terms as the town’s mayor. No doubt he had acquired property in Grimsby: in 1460, as a landholder there, he contributed 16d. to the expenses of the borough’s representatives in the Coventry Parliament.16 Grimsby bor. mss, 1/612/2.

Newport’s interests seem to have extended from Grimsby to Beverley on the other side of the Humber. At some date he had acquired property in the immediate vicinity of the East Riding town at Pighill in Molescroft, and for a brief period in the early 1460s he exercised a disruptive influence on Beverley’s affairs.17 In a Chancery petition of 1465 he is described as of both of Riby and Pighill: C1/28/541. In the first year of Edward IV’s reign, John Redesham, a local mercer and one of the principal men of Beverley, complained to the chancellor of the dangerous duplicity of Newport’s activities. He told a remarkable story. He claimed that, in the military preparations for the campaign which culminated in the battle of Wakefield on 30 Dec. 1460, the Lancastrian lords, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and John, Lord Neville (brother of Newport’s own lord, the earl of Westmorland), had sent a commission of array to the men of Beverley. Newport had asked Redesham to obtain a copy of this commission for dispatch to the Yorkist Sir Thomas Neville. Seemingly, both men were intent on aiding the cause of the party then in government, in other words, the Yorkists. But after Redesham had done what was asked of him, the situation changed. The Yorkist defeat at Wakefield gave Newport the chance to ruin his rival in what appears to have been a private vendetta. Not only did he, on 2 Jan. 1461, seize Redesham’s goods, seal the doors of his house and evict his wife, but, deviously and with the most serious potential repercussions, he also delivered the copy of the commission to the Percy earl and Lord Neville in an attempt to portray the unfortunate mercer as a traitor. This led to Redesham’s imprisonment, and when his wife went to the Percy earl at York to plead his case she was ominously told by the earl that her husband deserved to die for copying the commission. He was only saved from this fate and restored to his goods by the Yorkist victory at Towton.18 C1/27/435. Redesham was frequently a governor of Beverley between 1439 and 1483: VCH Yorks. (E. Riding), vi. 199. Whether Redesham gained redress is unknown, but he may have taken comfort from the fact that his tormentor was soon in trouble from another source. Early in the 1460s the archbishop of York’s bailiff in Beverley, Brian Holme, complained in Chancery that Newport, described as resident at Pighill, had kept him from the office for two years and had added to this injury by assaulting him.19 C1/28/541. Again, however, Newport appears to have escaped the consequences of his actions, although it may be significant that no more is heard of his unhelpful interventions in Beverley politics.

Instead Newport turned his disruptive attentions back to Grimsby. It was probably in 1465 that the coroners of the borough, Hugh Edon* and John Cokke, complained in Chancery that whereas the burgesses had elected John Sheriff* as their mayor, Newport falsely claimed that it was he who had been chosen. As a result Sheriff, dreading the latter’s displeasure, refused to take on the office, despite the fact that Newport was disqualified from holding it by non-residence. Nevertheless our MP clearly had considerable support for his pretensions to the mayoralty, for besides Sheriff eight burgesses were summoned to appear with him in Chancery. No verdict is recorded, but the fact he held the office of mayor suggests he was the victor of both the case and a struggle for local power.20 C1/31/339; Gillett, 60. Even so, Newport did not remain entirely unscathed by his brushes with the law. The accounts rendered to the Exchequer by the Lincolnshire escheator of 1466-7 include 10s. levied from the goods of Newport as an outlaw.21 E357/80, rot. 36. This outlawry, the product of some untraced common-law action against him, was probably quickly reversed for he seems to have continued as major of Grimsby until 1468. Soon after surrendering the mayoralty, on 28 Nov. 1468 he pardoned the community of the borough the sum of 25 marks, owed to him as arrears of the pension he had been granted in 1452.22 Grimsby ct. bk. 1/102/1, f. 39d. This apparently sympathetic attitude to the town’s poverty may explain his re-election as mayor in 1469. After the conclusion of this his penultimate term of office, he was faced with a threat potentially much more threatening than his earlier outlawry. On 26 May 1471 the restored Edward IV issued an order for his arrest, along with that of John Truthall, Thomas Fitzwilliam II*, William Yerburgh*, John Saynton† and others, in the wake of the battle of Tewkesbury, presumably because he and the rest were suspected of complicity in the Lincolnshire rebellion of March 1470 and support for the Readeption government.23 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 285-6. Significant here may be an earlier association between Newport and the leader of the rebellion, Richard, Lord Welles: in 1456 he and Yerburgh had acted as feoffees for the settlement of lands in jointure on Richard and his wife, Joan Willoughby.24 C140/4/33. Once more, however, our MP survived his indiscretion to serve a final term as mayor of Grimsby in 1476-7. It is not known when he died.25 In July 1460 his son, another John, was a plaintiff in the Grimsby bor. ct.: Grimsby ct. rolls 1/101, 38 Hen. VI. No more is known of him, although it is possible that the son rather than the father was mayor in 1476-7.