RUSSELL, Henry

Henry followed a family tradition of representing Dorset boroughs in the Commons. A kinsman, Thomas Russell†, had been elected for Melcombe Regis in Richard II’s reign, and Henry’s father Stephen sat for the neighbouring town of Weymouth in 1395. Stephen laid the foundations of the family fortunes through his successful trading activities and profitable marriage. He imported large quantities of wine from Gascony, a mercantile interest which may have given him and his son their alias of Gascoigne, although as he was once described as a ‘merchant of Bordeaux’ it may well be the case that he or his ancestors originally lived in that part of France. Stephen shipped his wine and iron into Weymouth, the staple port for Dorchester, and established close links with the inhabitants of both towns. Status as a landowner in the wider county came through his marriage, for his wife Alice could claim to be heir general to two Dorset families, the de la Tours and Blynchesfelds. Consequently, the Russells successfully asserted their title to property in Compton Abbas and land near Shaftesbury; and in addition they held an interest in remainder to the manor of Berwick in Swyre (which eventually passed to the family in the lifetime of Henry’s son John). This also led to the acquisition of other properties in Swyre and Nether Sturthill in the south of the county, at a distance of about five miles from Weymouth. Stephen owned houses in Dorchester, and in 1431 he was also recorded holding lands and tenements worth £10 13s. 4d. a year in the north of the shire. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 258, 260-1; Scott Thomson, 38-44, 50-51, 62-64. His standing in Dorset is indicated by his frequent attendance at the county court not only to report the outcome of the Weymouth elections to Parliament (which he did as many as 14 times), but more importantly to participate in shire elections to every one of the Parliaments summoned between 1417 and 1432. He was present to attest his son Henry’s first two returns to the Commons.

Henry emulated his father in becoming both a merchant and a ‘gentleman’, before eventually rising above him in status by attaining the rank of esquire. He had made his mark in Weymouth as early as 1425, when the burgesses elected him to Parliament for the first time. Through carrying on his father’s business in the wine trade he secured appointment by the Crown as deputy to the chief butler, Thomas Chaucer, in the port of Melcombe Regis, close to his home – an appointment verified on 8 Dec. 1427, the last day of the first session of the Parliament of 1427-8, in which he again figured as a representative for Weymouth and his patron Chaucer sat for Oxfordshire. CPR, 1422-9, p. 448. It is uncertain precisely how long he occupied the post, but he may have continued to do so until July 1433 when Melcombe ceased to be a head port and the focus for the collection of customs and subsidies along the Dorset coast was shifted to Poole. CPR, 1429-36, p. 298. At the time of this change Russell was attending his third Parliament. During the second session, in the autumn, it was agreed that leading members of the shire communities should all take oaths not to maintain law-breakers. Accordingly, Henry and his father were required to swear to keep the peace in Dorset in the following spring. CPR, 1429-36, p. 382. Henry attended the county court to attest the elections for Weymouth on four occasions in the 1430s. He was also among the witnesses to the parliamentary indentures for the knights of the shire, in 1432, and in a further mark of his acceptance among the gentry he was asked by Sir Thomas Brooke*, Lord Cobham, to witness a grant to John Stork† in 1437. CCR, 1435-41, p. 178. Russell occasionally did duty as a juror at inquisitions post mortem conducted in Dorset, doing so, for example, at Shaftesbury in October 1438 following the death of Humphrey, the son and heir of the late earl of Arundel. C139/85/12; 88/50.

Throughout the 1430s Russell took an active role in the affairs of Weymouth, where he witnessed local deeds, e.g. C146/6110. and officiated as bailiff for at least four annual terms. Of his own mercantile activities little is recorded in this decade, although in September 1433 he served on a jury in Dorchester which reported that two foreigners had been able to ship wool from Melcombe without paying customs duties owing to the unacceptable absence of the royal searcher, John Strensham. Scott Thomson, 71. Probably while on a voyage to the south, Russell took prisoner five Bretons, who in September 1439 were granted letters of safe conduct to sail from Brittany to England with goods to sell to raise money for their ransoms. DKR, xlviii. 330. His vigilance in helping to police the Channel found recognition in an important appointment in the following spring, whereby he was given sole authority to undertake a special investigation into smuggling. On 14 Apr. 1440 he was instructed to seize any wool, woolfells or other customable merchandise found being shipped abroad without due payment of subsidies, to arrest those responsible and to report at the Exchequer the value of the cargoes concerned. His brief seems to have been to roam the Channel in search of miscreants; a roving commission which placed him outside the regular system of customs’ administration, run by controllers, collectors and searchers in the ports. At least on one occasion he proved highly successful in tracking down his quarry. Having put to sea in a barge called the James of Weymouth, manned with 80 soldiers and mariners, on 22 June he captured off the Isle of Portland a pinnace containing cloth belonging to merchants of Guernsey, who had failed to pay any subsidies. The cargo was valued at £260 13s. 8d by approvers of Weymouth and Melcombe. In November the King, on the advice of the Council, ordered the treasurer to give Russell a reasonable reward for this war service at sea, and he was duly allotted £130 6s. 8d., which was also to cover the wages of his crew of 110 men for three months. In addition, in the following May he was assigned costs of £30 for the jury empanelled for the suit brought before the barons of the Exchequer by the men of Guernsey who challenged his action in seizing their vessel. Although there is no record that Russell’s initial success was repeated so dramatically, his commission of 1440 was not to be cancelled for three years. CPR, 1436-41, p. 411; E403/740, m. 5; 741, m. 3; E404/57/124; E122/161/16; E159/216, recorda, Trin. rot. 19; 222, brevia Hil. rot. 17d.

Meanwhile, in November 1440, shortly after his capture of the pinnace, Russell had been appointed with Hugh Yon* as collector of customs and subsidies in Exeter and Dartmouth. The two men received £40 as a reward for their endeavours at Michaelmas 1441, and Russell was reappointed, this time with John Clerk*, in January 1442 when both he and Clerk were about to attend Parliament (with Russell once more representing Weymouth and Clerk sitting for Barnstaple). CFR, xvii. 166, 200; E403/743, m. 5. Yon replaced him as customer in March, most likely because he had been allotted new responsibilities in naval defence. The Commons of 1442 had petitioned that for the safekeeping of the seas the King would ordain that certain vessels should be available for a fixed term, to provide protection against enemy action. The vessels, listed on a schedule presented in Parliament and including a barge and a pinnace belonging to Russell himself, were to assemble in the Camber that May and to remain in service until November; after the winter they were again to defend the Channel for eight months of the following year. PROME, xi. 373-4. At the same time that Russell relinquished his post as customer, and ten days before the Parliament closed on 17 Mar. 1442 he had obtained a comprehensive pardon of any offences he might have committed, and of any fines, forfeitures, debts or accounts due to the Crown. It was to prove useful later, in evading the stringent processes of the Exchequer. CPR, 1441-6, pp. 104-5; E159/219, brevia Easter rot. 18. He had need of such protection. During his first term as a collector of customs, two informers, Thomas and John Rowe of Dartmouth, who were hoping to secure half of any forfeitures in accordance with a recent proclamation, had appeared in the Exchequer on 28 Oct. 1441, to report that three weeks earlier they had discovered at Dartmouth two pipes of wool in a boat of which one John Stoke was master. Stoke denied any knowledge of the wool, but in April following at an inquiry held at Exeter a jury swore that Russell had not been resident there during his time as customer, and his failure to carry out his duties properly had had serious consequences for the royal revenue. Scott Thomson, 74-76; E159/218, recorda, Mich. rots. 6d, 13. Russell’s difficulties may have arisen through attempting to combine the role of bailiff of Weymouth with that of customer in a different county, for the customers were required by statute to keep their accounts in person. The sheriff of Devon was ordered to cause him to come to the Exchequer on 31 May 1443 to show why he ought not to satisfy the King of the sum of £100 as demanded. On arrival at Westminster Russell exhibited both his pardon of 1442 and a writ issued just a few days earlier, instructing the treasurer and barons not to trouble him further. E159/219, recorda Easter rot. 12, brevia rot. 18.

While at Westminster in 1442 Russell had established a useful contact. Shortly after the Parliament dissolved he had joined Master Adam Moleyns, then clerk of the Council and dean of Salisbury cathedral, in obtaining a royal licence to found a guild dedicated to St. George in the chapel of St. Nicholas in Weymouth, together with a perpetual chantry which was to be endowed with land worth ten marks a year. In the event, neither Moleyns (subsequently keeper of the privy seal and bishop of Chichester), nor their co-founder Henry Shelford, the parson of the church at Wyke Regis, lived to see the completion of the foundation. It fell to Russell alone to purchase in July 1455 a licence to grant to the chantry-chaplain and his successors 17 messuages, a toft, a dovecote, some 64 acres of land and common of pasture for eight oxen in Weymouth and elsewhere, in part satisfaction of the planned endowment. CPR, 1441-6, p. 70; 1452-61, p. 241; C143/451/27.

After 1442 Russell is not known to have sat in Parliament again, although he demonstrated his continuing interest in the representation of Dorset by attesting the returns to the Parliaments of February and November 1449. On the latter occasion he also provided sureties for the appearance in the Commons of the MPs for Weymouth, one of whom was his own son John, still a mere youth. C219/15/7. Russell may also have travelled to Westminster to bring suits in the court of common pleas against his debtors. He pursued the executors of John Walsh alias Gregory* of Dartmouth, one of whom was John Clerk, who had been his fellow customer, for the sum of 40 marks; and in 1453 he sued his other fellow customer, Hugh Yon, for defaulting on payment of £16 13s. 4d. under bonds sealed at Weymouth seven years earlier, although Yon was acquitted on a technicality. CP40/753, rot. 265; 758, rot. 280d; 768, rot. 77; 769, rots. 203d, 238. Since his time as customer Russell had held no further royal offices, but in April 1454 he was appointed with the mayors of Salisbury and Poole to collect £50 from those places and Weymouth, and pay it into the Exchequer before 20 June, pursuant to an ordinance in the current Parliament, which had provided that specified sums should be loaned by named cities and towns to pay for the force established to safeguard the seas. CPR, 1452-61, p. 164; E159/235, recorda Mich. rot. 74; PROME, xii. 267. Then, in the following year, Russell was once more appointed as a deputy butler, this time in the ports of Melcombe Regis and Poole. CPR, 1452-61, p. 273. The appointment may indicate that he was in favour with the regime which had come to power following the Yorkist victory at St. Albans; and in this context it should be noted that 15 of the messuages he granted to the chantry in Weymouth were held by him as a feudal tenant of the duke of York. C143/451/27. It may be of relevance, too, that he purchased another pardon, on 8 Feb. 1458, at a time when negotiations for peaceful relations between the Lancastrian government and its Yorkist opponents were under way. C67/41, m. 11.

Russell’s standing among the gentry of Dorset had been strengthened by his first marriage, for his wife Elizabeth was one of two daughters and coheirs of John Herring of Chaldon Herring, a landowner whose holdings in the county had risen in value from 20 marks a year in 1412, Feudal Aids, vi. 423. to at least £66 by the 1440s. In that decade Herring made a series of settlements of his estates, in which he largely favoured this daughter and her children over his other daughter, Iseult, wife of John de la Lynde. In March 1442 he arranged that after his death and that of his wife Alice, Henry and Elizabeth Russell should hold in tail his manor of Chaldon Herring and land nearby in Winfrith Newburgh; and two months later (seemingly after both Alice and Elizabeth had died) he settled other properties in Sutton Poyntz, Preston and elsewhere so that if he died without male issue the Russells’ elder son John would inherit them, with successive remainders in tail to John’s brother William and two sisters, Joan and Christine. Herring had not yet given up hope of having a son: he married again, and in 1447 gave his new wife Joan jointure in the manor and advowson of Winterbourne Clenston, and other valuable properties. Even so, Russell’s children were favoured in settlements made in 1449 with regard to other of the Herring estates, and John Russell’s wife Alice Froxmere was promised jointure in lands in Horiford and Sutton Poyntz. When Herring died in October 1455 his coheirs were his grandsons John Russell and John de la Lynde; while his son-in-law Henry Russell took possession of Chaldon Herring, which he was entitled to hold for life under the terms of the earlier settlement. C139/162/21.

The marriages arranged by Russell for two of his children had already had an effect on the parliamentary representation of Weymouth. As befitted her standing as the daughter of a gentleman, Russell’s daughter Christine had been married, probably in the spring of 1440, to Walter Cheverell*, the son and heir of a prominent Dorset lawyer; and Cheverell had joined his father-in-law as an MP for Weymouth in the Parliament of 1442. Dorchester Recs. ed. Mayo, 299-300 (wrongly dated 18 Edw. IV instead of 18 Hen. VI); The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 544-5. Russell settled on Christine and her husband one of his houses in Dorchester. The marriage of Russell’s own son and heir to Alice Froxmere probably owed much to the fact that the lands settled on the couple by Herring in 1449 were held of Sir James Butler, now earl of Wiltshire, for Alice, who came from Worcestershire, was a kinswoman of the earl’s trusted retainer Henry Filongley*. Both Filongley and his nephew Thomas Froxmere* were returned to Parliament for Weymouth in this period (in 1449 and 1453, respectively), even though they were evidently outsiders to the shire community and not resident in the town. That they owed their elections to the influence of Russell, the most prominent inhabitant of Weymouth, remains a distinct possibility. Significantly, when, in 1444, Butler’s followers had violently clashed at Toller Porcorum with those of William Stafford*, both Russell and his son-in-law Cheverell were among those including Filongley who were accused in King’s bench of causing the death of one of Stafford’s men. KB27/738, rots. 25-26. They obtained pardons two years later: C67/39, m. 33.

By 1455 Russell had in his possession the manor of Blynchesfield, lying to the south-west of Shaftesbury, which had once formed part of the endowment of Alcester abbey in Warwickshire, although how he had acquired the manor, said to be worth 20 marks a year, is unclear. He may have claimed it as part of his mother’s inheritance, but perhaps it is more likely that he purchased it as conveniently located near his property in Shaftesbury, Stour Provost and Compton Abbas. He was accused of wrongdoing in connexion with the acquisition, for at some point before 1457 the abbot of Alcester filed a bill in Chancery complaining that Russell wrongfully withheld possession of the manor from the abbey. The abbot had sued for a writ of sub poena two years earlier, requiring our MP to appear in court on penalty of £1,000, but he had disobeyed the writ and ‘wolde have slayn your said besecher’. C143/451/27; C1/16/503. Russell made a settlement of some family land in Compton Abbas on Edward and Alice Meech in 1456, reserving for himself a rental income: Dorset Feet of Fines (Dorset Recs. x), 382. Such was the extent of Russell’s landholdings in the later years of his life that he was usually styled ‘esquire’, most notably when he attested the shire elections of 1460. C219/16/6. Of his political affiliations in the civil war years of 1460-1 little may be deduced from the surviving evidence. Yet while his purchase of yet another pardon in August 1462, some 18 months after Edward IV came to the throne, may have been merely a formality, it could be that he needed to disassociate himself and his family from the now disgraced earl of Wiltshire. C67/45, m. 18.

Russell died at an unknown date between October 1463 and October 1464, and was buried in church of the Holy Trinity in Dorchester. Scott Thomson, 93, 95 (date of death derived from ct. rolls of Stour Provost). Little is known about his second wife, Isabel, to whom Russell had given jointure in his manor of Blynchesfeld and land in Stour Provost. After his death the widow was known as Isabel Hymerford, so it may be the case that she married John Hymerford*, the sometime MP for Wells and Bridgwater, or else a kinsman of his. She died in 1479. E149/240/16. Russell’s elder son John, who had been elected to represent the county in 1472, was the grandfather of a namesake who was created Lord Russell by Henry VIII and earl of Bedford by Edward VI. The family’s impressive rise in the sixteenth century owed much to the career of our MP in the fifteenth.