SHIRLEY, Hugh

Even though both Hugh Shirley and his putative brother, Thomas, bore Christian names employed by the Shirleys of Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, they were not closely related to that great gentry dynasty. Rather their origins were more modest: Hugh was the son of an obscure Radnorshire family. Within a few years of his father’s death in 1442 he had established himself in the Herefordshire market town of Leominster, some 14 miles from his home at Presteigne. In February 1449 he attested a parliamentary election there, and he was himself returned by his fellow townsmen in the following year. C219/15/6; 16/1. This seemingly sudden rise to prominence may have been the result of a connexion with the lord of Presteigne, Richard, duke of York. His later career shows that he was a strong adherent of the Yorkists, and the particular circumstances of the Parliament to which he was returned lent themselves to the election of such a sympathiser. Recently returned from Ireland in controversial circumstances, in 1450 the duke intervened in several constituencies to secure the return of his supporters, and it is not improbable that Leominster was one.

Further indirect evidence of this early entry into York’s service is the general pardon Shirley sued out, modestly described as ‘of Leominster, yeoman’, on 14 Aug. 1452, an indication that he had been involved in the disturbances in Herefordshire that accompanied the duke’s abortive Dartford rising. By 1454 he was certainly closely associated with the powerful Yorkist faction in the county, led by the duke’s steward, (Sir) Walter Devereux I*. He was, according to an appeal sued by the victim’s widow, one of a gang, with Devereux at their head, involved in the death of another Leominster townsman, Richard Hakluyt. C66/40, m. 22; KB27/772, rot. 68d. Against this background it is not surprising to find that, when royal commissioners of inquiry came to Hereford on 2 Apr. 1457, Shirley was indicted for taking part in the two great outrages laid at the door of the county’s Yorkists. He was named among those who, under the command of Devereux and Sir William Herbert*, raided Hereford on 15 Mar. 1456 and hanged six of the citizens, who they blamed for the death of one of Herbert’s kinsmen, and on the following 10 Aug. seized Carmarthen castle and imprisoned the King’s half-brother, Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond. Shirley was quick to purchase a general pardon and to take the additional precaution, and no doubt to incur the additional cost, of having it enrolled on the patent roll. The pardon, enrolled on 14 May 1457, was for all offences before the previous Good Friday, and granted, ‘to the honour of God who suffered on Good Friday the pain of death for human race’. Two days later, on 16 May, he found sureties (all minor men) and came into the court of King’s bench to plead it successfully against the indictments. CPR, 1452-61, p. 353; C237/44/148; KB27/784, rex rot. 18.

This dangerous episode did not persuade Shirley to live a quieter life. In Easter term 1458 he was sued, in company with Thomas Shirley, by one John Yaython for an assault at Leominster, and, much more significantly, he himself was, soon afterwards, the victim of an alleged assault. Its significance is twofold: first, it illustrates the growing divisions among the local gentry, for the supposed assailant was a committed Lancastrian, Thomas Cornwall of Burford (Shropshire); and, second, it provides the first direct evidence of Shirley’s personal service to Richard, duke of York, for it was the duke who, in Trinity term 1459, sued Cornwall for the assault on Shirley as his servant. CP40/789, rots. 36, 265; 794, rot. 457. In 1460 Cornwall had a plea of debt of £20 pending against Shirley: CP40/797, rot. 194. Against this background, there is every reason to suppose that our MP was in the duke’s retinue when the Yorkists were routed at Ludford Bridge on the following 12 Oct. He certainly appears to have suffered during that campaign, for, on 11 Oct. six Wiltshire men, headed by Sir Roger Tocotes† and John Dauntsey*, took his goods to the value of £40 from nearby Leominster, an offence presumably committed when the Lancastrian army were there before the battle. It was probably at the same time that a gentleman of Chester, David Ferrour, took 500 of his sheep from the same place, both offences probably related to the provisioning of that army. KB27/803, rots. 37d, 49d.

Shirley was soon faced with a new difficulty. When Parliament met at Coventry on 20 Nov. to proscribe the Yorkist lords, he was named by the Commons among the 25 men ‘notariely and universally thorough oute all this your Realme famed and noysed, knowen and reputed severally, for open Robbers’. Although the list is purportedly one of felons, and included William Tailboys*, a committed Lancastrian, most, if not all, of the others named were Yorkists, known followers of either the duke of York or the Nevilles. Shirley and the four other Herefordshire men named, whatever their propensity for disorder, were no doubt singled out as the duke’s men and probably also for their presence at Ludford Bridge. RP, v. 367-8.

The Commons requested that the 25 be summoned to appear before the chancellor to be imprisoned pending an inquiry into their offences, but Shirley again escaped penalty. On 16 Dec. 1459, four days before the end of the Parliament, he was one of several Herefordshire men who secured pardons for treasons and other offences, able perhaps to purge himself in this way because he had not fled into exile with the duke. None the less, his second escape from the consequences of treasonable activity did nothing to reconcile him to Lancaster. After the return of the Yorkists in triumph in the following summer, he secured election for Leominster to the Parliament summoned to meet on 6 Oct. 1460 to undo the acts of its predecessor. CPR, 1452-61, p. 539; C219/16/6.

The Yorkist victory brought him a place in the royal household after Edward IV’s accession. On 25 July 1461, as one of the yeomen of the Crown, he had a life grant of 6d. a day from the fee farm of Hereford to be taken from the first day of the new reign. According to the ‘Black Book’, the yeomen of the Crown, generally 24 in number, were, ‘bold men, chosen and tryed out of euery lordes house in Ynglond for theyre cunyng and vertew’, and it may be that Shirley had qualified himself for appointment through service in the household of the King’s father. The office was an onerous one, in that it demanded lengthy periods of attendance on the King’s person, but it brought rewards beyond its wages. On 19 Aug. 1461 Shirley was granted £10 p.a. from a meadow in the King’s lordship of Kingsland in Herefordshire until he should be provided with an office of equivalent value. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 26, 71; Household Edw. IV ed. Myers, 116.

In the following November Shirley was appointed to an office of a different sort; it was not one of profit nor did it sit comfortably with his duties about the King. Between 1461 and 1464 he served as escheator of Herefordshire, despite the statutory restriction of service to one year, and it must be assumed that he did not return to the royal household until the end of his extended term. Soon afterwards he received a royal grant that not only advanced him but raised the prospect that his descendants would inherit a place among the county gentry. In May 1465 he received a grant to him and his male issue of three manors in Herefordshire and Northamptonshire, forfeited, fittingly in view of the earlier alleged assault, by Thomas Cornwall. He was to have the issues, to the annual value of £20 6s. 8d., collected since March 1461, the date from which Cornwall’s attainder was effective. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 26, 71, 441; CFR, xx. 49.

Shirley’s place about the King allowed him to protect his grants against the resumptions of Edward IV’s first reign. In respect of the Act of 1468 he had the precious grant of 1465 specifically cited in his exemption, presumably not trusting to the general exemption granted to the yeomen of the Crown as a group. RP, v. 474, 536, 592, 594. Such precautions were, however, of no value against a change of monarch, and he must, temporarily at least, have lost his grants and his position during the Readeption. Edward IV’s restoration saved him from a ruin, and he was quick to resume his career. On 26 Oct. 1472, at hustings conducted by his kinsman, Thomas Shirley, as bailiff of the abbot of Reading’s liberty of Leominster, he was elected to Parliament for the third time, by, if the words of the indenture are to be taken literally, a group of five burgesses, described as ‘elisores’, acting as the representatives of the burgesses as a body. As an MP he was well placed to secure a further exemption from yet another Act of Resumption, and he duly did so, presumably because his earlier grants were once more effective. RP, vi. 87; C219/17/2.

Shirley maintained his prominence into the 1470s. On 14 Mar. 1473 he sat on a high-ranking jury, headed by five knights, before the Herefordshire j.p.s. at Hereford; and on 26 Feb. 1477 he sued out a general pardon, again having it enrolled on the patent roll. KB9/334/86; CPR, 1476-85, p. 14. Soon afterwards his long service among the yeomen gained him promotion to that special category of yeomen, the four ushers of the royal chamber. Here his attendance about the King must have been even more frequent. Two of the ushers had, for example, to be present at every meal in the King’s chamber, ‘to see euerything done in dew order and to kepe silence’. E403/845 m. 9; Household Edw. IV, 114. He also appears to have had provisioning responsibilities outside the Household. On 18 Sept. 1478, for example, the King ordered the Exchequer to pay him as much as £100, in ready money and without delay, for wool he had purchased for the royal use. He does not certainly appear in the records after May 1479, when he had payment for another wool purchase made on the King’s behalf. E404/76/4/48; E403/848, mm. 3, 7; 850, m. 1.

What happened to Shirley next is unclear, but it is probable that he is to be identified with the namesake who represented Leominster in the Parliament of 1491. If so, he died, as an old man, shortly before 6 Nov. 1499 when letters of probate were granted to his widow Anne. She lived until the autumn of 1510 leaving two grand-daughters as the couple’s heirs. Cal. Probate Acts. Consistory Ct. of Bps. of Hereford, 148; C142/78/80; C1/356/35.