SHOTESBROOKE, Sir Robert

As a younger son, Robert could not expect to inherit the family estates in Berkshire and Wiltshire, or his mother’s property in Staffordshire, which for the most part passed at the end of the fourteenth century to his elder brother. Yet by his own efforts he forged a notable place in national affairs as a retainer to all three Lancastrian monarchs, and through marriage and by other means established himself as a landowner of some consequence. In a career spanning nearly six decades he won distinction as a soldier and diplomat, and gained suitable rewards from noble and royal patrons alike.

In his youth Robert joined the household of Amauri, 4th Lord St. Amand, and teamed up with his only son and heir-apparent Sir Amauri with whom he went hunting in the chase at Cheriton in Hampshire belonging to William of Wykeham, the bishop of Winchester. In June 1401 the bishop accused them of poaching and of an assault on his ranger. Accordingly, Sir Amauri was bound over in £1,000 not to do any harm to Wykeham’s men, led by Master John Campden, and Shotesbrooke and Campden entered mutual recognizances in £40 to keep the peace towards one another. CCR, 1399-1402, pp. 410, 413-14; C1/68/127. Despite his friend’s death shortly afterwards Shotesbrooke continued to occupy a special position of trust in Lord St. Amand’s retinue, for in November that year a royal licence was granted for him to be the sole feoffee of the baron’s principal manors in Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire so that they might be settled in jointure on St. Amand and his second wife, Lady Eleanor. Lord St. Amand died just a few months after the transaction had been completed. CPR, 1401-5, p. 24; CP, xi. 300-1; CIPM, xviii. 799, 801, 803; CP25(1)/290/59/38. Shotesbrooke’s loyal commitment to his widow endured for well over 20 years, as he energetically protected her interests in the face of serious challenges to her tenure of the St. Amand estates brought by Lord Amauri’s descendants from his first marriage. When commissions of oyer and terminer were set up to investigate an attack on Lady Eleanor’s property instigated by Reynold, Lord Grey of Ruthin, Robert was appointed to the one for Bedfordshire and his brother John to that in Berkshire. In March 1426 Eleanor enfeoffed him of her manors of Enborne in Berkshire and Sherfield English in Hampshire, with the intention that he should sell them in accordance with her will, and on the following 15 May she named him as an executor. C44/27/21; CPR, 1416-22, pp. 78-79; Hatton’s Bk. of Seals ed. Loyd and Stenton, no. 389; Reg. Chichele, ii. 338-9; CAD, vi. C6772, 6776.

It was through this intimate connexion with the St. Amands that Shotesbrooke came by certain of his own landed holdings, which, belonging to their estate, had been entrusted to him. Notable among these acquisitions were the Berkshire manors of Enborne and West Woodhay and property in East Ildsley, perhaps worth as much as £40 p.a., and in addition he held lands in Holt and Kintbury in the same county and at Swampton in Hampshire. His title met with a challenge from Lord St. Amand’s great-grand-daughter and heir, Elizabeth, wife of Sir William Beauchamp*, but in 1433 she formally relinquished her interest. Feudal Aids, i. 66, 67; VCH Berks. iv. 170, 243; CP25(1)/292/67/141. Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, the wid. of Sir Walter Beauchamp, gave up her interest too: CCR, 1429-35, p. 289. Yet whether he had acquired these properties through some financial arrangement or more likely by the gift of Lady Eleanor is not recorded. Lady Eleanor’s sale to John, Lord Fanhope, of the valuable manors and lordships of Ampthill, Milbrook and Houghton in Bedfordshire was the source of major controversy in the same decade when the Beauchamps asserted that these estates were subject to an entail, and that she had burnt the charters which would prove their title. In 1438 Shotesbrooke was called to the Chancery to provide testimony. He swore on his life and his knighthood that Lord St. Amand had refused to seal the deeds settling them on his issue by his first wife, and had himself cast them into the fire; accordingly, so Shotesbrooke declared, Lady Eleanor had held the estates in fee simple. C44/27/21; S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 886-7.

Shotesbrooke had been appointed to his first ad hoc commission of local administration in November 1406, to evaluate the possessions of a man hanged for clipping coins, and on 10 Dec. he himself was granted the felon’s confiscated goods which were worth as much as 100 marks. CPR, 1405-8, pp. 278, 306. Then styled ‘King’s esquire’, he must have done Henry IV some outstanding service to be rewarded so generously. Probably this had been in a military capacity combatting the rebels in Wales, for he also attracted the attention of Prince Henry of Monmouth, who on 12 Mar. 1408 granted him for life an annuity of 20 marks from the issues of his principality, and immediately after his accesssion as Henry V awarded him a second annuity, of 50 marks, this being the sum due every year to the Crown from St. Augustine’s abbey, Canterbury. CPR, 1413-16, p. 9; 1416-22, p. 46; CCR, 1413-19, pp. 45, 143. Notwithstanding his commitment to serve the new King, two days after the beginning of the reign Shotesbrooke was also retained for life by Thomas, Lord Berkeley (d.1417), with a fee of £11 p.a. from the issues of the manor of Ordston in Ashbury, Berkshire. This sum, paid as an annual farm by the Shotesbrooke family to the Berkeleys since the thirteenth century, was now the responsibility of Robert’s brother John, so it must have been easy for Berkeley’s esquire to secure regular payment. Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby, ii. 610, 612; Great Cart. Berkeley Castle, c.1425, ed. eadem (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), nos. 314, 315.

Naturally, Shotesbrooke enlisted for Henry V’s invasion of France in 1415, and was contracted on 29 Apr. to supply one other man-at-arms and six archers for the voyage. E101/69/3/367; E404/31/283. He and his men were mustered at Southampton on 8 July, and served throughout the campaign, including at the battle of Agincourt, but when the King sailed home from Calais to Dover in November, they were left behind for a further 56 days waiting for a ship. Shotesbrooke later claimed to be owed £14 as wages for this period and 48s. for the passage back across the Channel, but officials at the Exchequer disputed his claim, and demanded the return of silver plate pledged to him as security for payment for his second quarter’s service. The matter remained a bone of contention as late as November 1424. E101/46/28, 31. The matter was finally put to rest in 1443: E159/219, recorda Easter rot. 16. Despite this, Shotesbrooke stayed attached to Henry V. His annuity of 20 marks was confirmed in May 1416 as henceforth to be paid from the duchy of Cornwall, and in January 1417 he was granted two pipes of wine a year for the next five years from the prise at Bristol. CPR, 1416-22, pp. 46, 60. Having crossed over to France again with the royal army that summer, he received at Falaise in January 1418 a grant in tail-male of all the Norman estates confiscated from Bertrand Champyon, together with the manors of Urvyle and Founteneys which belonged to Champyon’s mother, to hold by homage and rendering a shield decorated with the arms of St. George every year on that saint’s day. Rot. Normanniae ed. Hardy, 244. He was knighted by the King at Caen when St. George’s day was next celebrated, and as he took out letters of general attorney on 22 June and again on 26 Sept. that year he evidently remained overseas until the King himself returned home in February 1421. DKR, xli. 699; xliv. 606.

Shotesbrooke wore Henry V’s livery at the coronation of his queen, Katherine de Valois, E101/407/4, f. 34v. and it was probably also while in England in the spring of 1421 that this ‘King’s knight’ married Edith Stourton, the widow of Sir John Beauchamp of Bletsoe. Just before they sailed back to France, on 7 June, the King, for a payment of 20 marks, pardoned the trespass whereby without royal licence Edith had acquired an interest for life in her late husband’s manor at Bloxham in Oxfordshire, and granted that he would take no action to recover arrears of the farm due for the manor. This farm, set in Edward I’s time at £35 p.a., had since been reduced to £20, but the Shotesbrookes had feared that they might be held liable for back-payments amounting to as much as £1,000. Besides Bloxham, Edith brought to the marriage her jointure in two manors in Keysoe and other holdings in Bedfordshire, the manor and advowson of Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire, and in Dorset the manor of Ashmore. These provided an income of over £53 p.a. CPR, 1416-22, p. 369; VCH Beds. iii. 136-7; Feudal Aids, i. 38, 40; Reg. Chichele, i. 334; VCH Wilts. ix. 79, 86. The estimated value of Edith’s jointure is taken from C138/46/47, the post mortem for her son John Beauchamp (d.1420). Together with his wife Shotesbrooke acquired other lands in Wiltshire in 1425, including an estate called ‘Strangbows’ in Badbury which he kept for most of his life. Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 405; VCH Wilts. ix. 13; Feudal Aids, v. 278; CAD, i. C1387. Although he could retain Edith’s Beauchamp properties only until her death in 1441, they offered him a place in the gentry community of Wiltshire, which was bolstered by his new kinship to the influential Stourtons. Indeed, he acted as a feoffee for Edith’s nephew, Sir John (afterwards Lord) Stourton for over 30 years, out-living his co-feoffees to be the sole survivor when Stourton died in 1462. CPR, 1429-36, p. 112; CCR, 1461-8, pp. 125-6. It might have been expected that Sir Robert’s marriage would also have led to a close connexion with John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, the second husband of his stepdaughter, Margaret, but no evidence of such a connexion has been discovered. CFR, xvii. 166; CPR, 1441-6, p. 102.

Shotesbrooke sailed back to France with Henry V in June 1421, taking with him his own contingent of three men-at-arms and 11 archers. Following the King’s death and the accession of the infant Henry VI in the autumn of 1422, he obtained confirmation of his annuities from the Crown, amounting to 70 marks, DKR, xliv. 627-8; E101/50/1; CPR, 1422-9, p. 41. and secured election for Berkshire to the second Parliament of the new reign, summoned to meet on 20 Oct. 1423. Unless he had already acquired from Eleanor, Lady St. Amand, her manors in the county, his landed holdings there were of little consequence, although his brother John’s standing in the locality as a landowner, former MP and current member of the bench, probably counted for much. A few weeks later, during the first session, Sir Robert was appointed sheriff of the adjacent county of Wiltshire. There he made the acquaintance of the veteran parliamentarian Sir William Sturmy* (who was to leave him a silver-gilt cup and a baselard called ‘Crikhowell’ in his will), and also established amicable relations with the royal councillor Sir Walter Hungerford†, for whom he witnessed deeds in 1425 and later. PCC 7 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 55); Hungerford Cart. (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xlix), 56, 58, 60; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 50-52. In view of these connexions and his links with the Stourtons it is not surprising that he was elected by the Wiltshire gentry to represent them in the Commons at Leicester in 1426. Sir Walter entered the Parliament as the newly-created Lord Hungerford. In addition, Shotesbrooke was known to a member of the higher peerage, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, who held him in sufficient esteem as to give him a life-annuity of £10. SC12/18/46. This can only have served to advance his career when Warwick became ‘governor’ to the young King. Sir Robert contracted in February 1430 to serve on the major expedition to France for Henry’s coronation, providing a body of three men-at-arms and 12 archers. He took out letters of protection in April, E404/46/261; DKR, xlviii. 269; E403/695, m. 4. and was commissioned to help array the army and hold musters before it embarked. The award of yet another life-annuity, of 50 marks, followed on 7 July 1431, bringing his total income from royal grants alone up to £80 a year. This last annuity was to be paid from the issues of the manor of Orston in Nottinghamshire during the minority of the son and heir of the late Lord Roos. CPR, 1429-36, p. 122.

Shotesbrooke’s days as a soldier had reached an end, but in July 1432, following his return home, he was appointed to the first of several diplomatic missions – this one being to accompany the jurist Dr. William Sprever on a visit to the king of Denmark and to the towns of the Hanseatic League. Their brief was to iron out the differences that had arisen between England and Denmark as a consequence of illicit trading by English merchants in Iceland. Although they set off on 9 Sept. it was not until Christmas Eve that the envoys concluded an agreement. By this the English promised to pay for the damages they had caused in Norweigan territory, to return the people they had abducted and to forbid all future trade with Iceland except through the staple at Bergen. It may have then been intended for Shotesbrooke to travel on to attend the Council of Basel, and although there is no evidence that he actually did so, he did not reach London again until 8 May 1433, by which date his salary, at the rate of £1 a day, amounted to £241, and above this there was the cost of passage with 14 men in his retinue from Orwell to Denmark, from thence to Rostock and finally home from Calais to Dover. DKR, xlviii. 288; E364/66, rot. Gd; E404/48/344; PPC, iv. 126; E101/322/23; J. Ferguson, Eng. Diplomacy, 93, 217.

Sir Robert’s election to the Parliament assembled on 8 July 1433 enabled him to brief fellow Members of the Commons about his embassy. He also had private business to deal with. On 23 May he had negotiated with the treasurer, Lord Scrope, a lease of the manor of Orston (from which his most recent annuity was paid) for £29 9s. p.a. during the Roos minority. However, ‘per necligence et innocencie et saunz counsell de ley’ he failed to appreciate that his annuity was not safeguarded, and the Exchequer refused to make him an allowance for it. He renegotiated the lease on 12 July to no effect, so there and then he presented a petition in Parliament which his colleagues in the Lower House promptly sponsored and sent to the King. The immediate response was a grant restoring his annuity (by the advice of the Lords and at the special instance of the Commons), although he had to surrender the lease of Orston. CFR, xvi. 149, 155, 199-200; CPR, 1429-36, pp. 122, 297; SC8/26/1297; RP, iv. 471 (cf. PROME, xi. 156); E159/210, brevia Easter rot. 19. While the first session of the Parliament was still in progress, on 17 July, Shotesbrooke appeared in Chancery to provide securities in £100 that William, Lord Lovell, would keep the peace. CCR, 1429-35, p. 228.

After the dissolution, Sir Robert attended meetings of the great council held in April and May 1434, when the main subject for debate was the conduct of the war in France. PPC, iv. 212. Employment in the diplomatic sphere continued in February 1435 with Shotesbrooke being empowered to treat with the duke of Burgundy and the four members of Flanders concerning the modification of the statutes of the staple of Calais, and that summer he was one of those sent to the Congress of Arras, to negotiate with the same for the redress of grievances. He was licenced on 28 June to take with him gold and silver to the value of £200. CPR, 1429-36, p. 463; DKR, xlviii. 305; Ferguson, 192. This appointment offered him the opportunity to bargain for payment of the £66 5s. 4d. still owing to him for the embassy of 1432-3. He secured a warrant to the Exchequer to make good the arrears, and also received an advance of £91 for his wages at Arras. He was absent from 15 July to 23 Sept. E404/51/335, 336; E364/69, rot. G; E159/212, brevia Hil. rot. 17. The failure of the negotiations at the Congress, swiftly followed by the death of the duke of Bedford and the disastrous breach with Burgundy, precipitated a crisis in the territory under English rule. In the following year Shotesbrooke was asked for a loan of £40 towards funding a new army destined for France under the leadership of the duke of York. PPC, iv. 329. In July 1438 he offered sureties at the Exchequer for Sir John Styward when he was granted keeping of manors in Norfolk and Buckinghamshire which the duke of Bedford had held for life. CFR, xvii. 49.

Sir Robert had been appointed to the Berkshire bench some six years earlier, and evidently took his duties seriously by attending sessions. Supplies of wine and Mediterranean produce which he had carted from Southampton to his house at West Woodhay indicate his usual place of residence, CPR, 1441-6, p. 392; Brokage Bk. 1443-4, i (Soton. Rec. Ser. iv), 120; ii (ibid. vi), 295. and his friends among the local gentry elected him to his fourth Parliament in 1439. The fact that he was nominated four times between 1445 and 1453 to the Order of the Garter (albeit unsuccessfully), indicates not only that his qualities as a soldier had been recognized, but that his political support was valued. Those who nominated him included Lord Willoughby, Viscount Beaumont and Humphrey, duke of Buckingham. Reg. Order of the Garter ed. Anstis, i. 127, 132, 141, 150. His knowledge about chivalric affairs was called upon in October 1446, when one John Davy appealed his master, William Catour the London armourer, of treason before the constable and marshal. After they were assigned a day of battle at Smithfield, Shotesbrooke was one of the two knights instructed to be of counsel to the defendant, but Catour’s friends plied him with too much wine so that, unable to defend himself, he was slain. PPC, vi. 55-56.

On 24 July 1448 Shotesbrooke received £160 in advance for his wages as an envoy to treat with the grand master of Prussia and representatives of the Hanseatic towns for redress of injuries suffered by their merchants. This embassy nearly duplicated that of 1432-3 in terms of duration, for it too lasted from September to May. The envoys made contact with the Prussians in October, assured them that the English wanted to make peace, and offered to allow the Hanseatic League to continue trading in England for a season, but even so no lasting agreement was reached. On 11 May, shortly before Sir Robert’s return, he was granted further letters of protection as travelling on an embassy to Denmark, so evidently his brief had been extended. Seven months after the completion of his task he was still ‘behinde unpaide’ for his wages, and claimed he was owed £103. The Exchequer was ordered to check his accounts and payment of £100 was authorized by writ dated 12 Dec. 1449, but even so Shotesbrooke had still not received his dues by May 1453. However, he was sufficiently influential to secure a writ instructing the Exchequer to cover the deficit by assignment. DKR, xlviii. 378, 380; E101/324/17; E364/83, rot. B; E404/66/89; 69/147; Ferguson, 99; E159/226, brevia Mich. rot. 20d. The Parliament then in session contained an unusually large number of men attached to the Court, and although Sir Robert was not an MP himself he had played a part in deciding the Membership of the Commons by attesting the return made in the shire court in Leicestershire on 1 Mar. C219/16/2. In attending the hustings in a county where, so far as is known, he was not a landowner, he was in breach of the statutes, and his presence there is something of a mystery.

Shotesbrooke was dismissed from the Berkshire bench in 1458 and received no further commissions from Henry VI’s government until after the Yorkists took control of the King at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. His annuity from St. Augustine’s Canterbury continued to be authorized until after August 1458 (when it was granted in reversion to the King’s physician), and that from the duchy of Cornwall was protected in the Parliament of 1459 at Coventry, when the duchy estates were confirmed to the prince of Wales, CCR, 1454-61, pp. 162-3; CPR, 1452-61, p. 398; PROME, xii. 490. so it may have been his advanced age rather than suspicions that he was no longer loyal to the house of Lancaster which prompted this exclusion. Yet seeds of doubt may well have been sown by the activities of John Roger I*, the husband of Sir Robert’s niece, Elizabeth, the heiress to the principal Shotesbrooke estates. Immediately after the death of his elder brother, relations between Sir Robert and John Roger had been strained, to the extent that in 1448 Sir Robert unsuccessfully challenged his niece’s title to certain manors in Wiltshire, claiming that they had been settled in tail-male. CP40/748, rot. 126d. But such differences were seemingly set aside in the winter of 1459-60 by his concern for his kinsfolk and the real threat of forfeiture posed to the family estates in response to Roger’s blatantly Yorkist sympathies. Roger himself apparently met a violent end early in 1460, and in June several of the duke of York’s supporters from his Berkshire lordships were seized at Newbury and imprisoned in Wallingford gaol. Chief among the prisoners was Roger’s son and heir Thomas Roger*, Shotesbrooke’s great-nephew. In September the victorious Yorkists appointed Shotesbrooke to deliver the gaol and set their friends free. By the Act of Resumption in Edward IV’s first Parliament, Shotesbrooke’s annuities from the three Lancastrian monarchs were taken from him, yet on 25 Sept. 1464 he was granted a fresh pension of £35 p.a., as a special reward for the services he had performed for King Edward’s father the duke of York. Significantly, £24 of this pension was to be paid from the King’s inherited lordships at Lambourn in Berkshire, where the Roger family resided. The annuity was exempted from resumption in the Act which came into force the following February. PROME, xiii. 157.

At some point in the 1440s Shotesbrooke had made good his losses following his first wife’s death by marrying for the second time. Once more he chose a wealthy widow, although this time she was an heiress too. As her two brothers had died childless, Isabel Barton was now one of the coheirs of her long-dead father William Wilcotes, and inherited part of the former Wilcotes and Trillow estates when her mother Elizabeth died in 1445. These were valued at nearly £107 p.a., C139/122/33; SC12/18/42. but Isabel had to share them with her three nephews and two nieces, and the full extent of her portion is uncertain. Together with the other coheirs in March 1449 she and Shotesbrooke authorized a lease of the manor of Woodperry and property in Stanton St. John, Oxfordshire. CAD, iii. A5397. More importantly, as the widow of the successful apprentice-at-law John Barton, Isabel held for life a number of other properties, including the manor of Bainton, and although Shotesbrooke was drawn into the litigation over the estate, which had been in progress since Barton’s death in 1434, he clearly profited from the alliance. Isabel had sold Barton’s manor of Stone in Buckinghamshire to Andrew Sperlyng* in return for 300 marks and an annuity of £20 for her lifetime, but Sperlyng in turn sold it to (Sir) Robert Whittingham I*, who professed ignorance of the arrangement. The Shotesbrookes sought redress from the chancellor, and in July 1448 they gave up their claim to the annuity in return for the payment of a further 200 marks. The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 140-2; C1/16/703-9; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 77-78; CP25(1)/22/123/13. Several of Barton’s manors had been donated to All Souls’ College, Oxford, provided that certain annuities would be paid to Isabel for her lifetime; accordingly, she and Sir Robert regularly received £4 13s. 4d. p.a. from the manor of Padbury. Sir Robert supported his wife in her dispute over the manor and advowson of Foxcote, which in 1449 was adjudged by arbitrators to be theirs against the claim of William Purefoy. Cat. Archs. All Souls Coll. ed. Martin, 46, 95. Nevertheless, the fruits of his efforts were lost when Isabel died in 1456. CFR, xix. 167; CPR, 1452-61, p. 344. Shotesbrooke is not mentioned in the fragment of a draft will of Isabel’s which survives: Westminster Abbey muns. 63976.

Over the years Shotesbrooke had often been placed in positions of trust by his fellow members of the Berkshire gentry, such as the widow of William Danvers*, John Stokes of Brimpton and Thomas Beke*. CP25(1)/13/84/19, 20; 85/3; Wilts. Feet of Fines, 545; CCR, 1454-61, p. 368; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Stainswyke deeds, 11; CPR, 1441-6, p. 229; 1446-52, p. 24. More unexpected was his appearance among the feoffees of the East Anglian estates of John Clifton (d.c.1447) of Buckenham Castle, and as a bailsman in 1448 for the notorious criminal William Tailboys*, for whom he offered mainprise in 200 marks that he would keep the peace and reappear in the King’s bench. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 111, 201; CCR, 1447-54, p. 120. With the interests of the Shotesbrooke family in mind, he had been enfeoffed of the estates settled on his niece Elizabeth in jointure following her marriage to John Roger I, assisted the latter to make settlements safeguarding the interests of his sons, Thomas and John II*, CAD, i. B362, 363, 365; CCR, 1454-61, p. 445; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 318. and helped guarantee the marriage contracts made with (Sir) John Lisle II*. CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 491. Even so, at the end of his life, in Trinity term 1467, following his niece’s death, he made a last-ditch and unsuccessful attempt to challenge his great-nephews’ title to the former Shotesbrooke lands in Wiltshire, once more claiming in the court of common pleas that these, forming a sizable estate in Purton, had been settled in tail-male and so rightly belonged to him. CP40/824, rot. 359.

The heir to Shotesbrooke’s own manors of Woodhay and Enborne was his only daughter Eleanor, who, probably in 1439, had been married to Sir John Cheyne II*, the son and heir of William Cheyne† (d.1441) of Sheppey in Kent. In 1453 Sir John enfeoffed his father-in-law Shotesbrooke, along with Eleanor’s kinsmen the duke of Somerset and Lord Stourton, of the manor of Bilsington, CP25(1)/115/313/499; CPR, 1452-61, p. 89; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 113; iii. 369; C67/49, m. 7. but died in June 1467 while Sir Robert yet lived. The latter was still alive at the end of that month, but is not recorded thereafter. Half of his annuity for 1466-7, charged on the Lambourn estates granted to the queen, was paid by warrant of 30 June: A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 313. In accordance with his will (now lost), in July 1474 his daughter and six of his grandsons purchased for £40 a royal licence to found a perpetual chantry in the chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity which Shotesbrooke had built in the graveyard of Faringdon parish church in Berkshire. There prayers were to be said for the wellbeing of the King and queen, the prince of Wales and the founders, and for the souls of Shotesbrooke and his two wives and Sir John Cheyne. The chantry was to be endowed with lands worth 12 marks a year. CPR, 1467-77, p. 449; VCH Berks. iv. 498. In HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 766-7 it was assumed that because the prince of Wales was named in the list of beneficiaries Sir Robert must have been still alive when the prince was born in Nov. 1470 and his father Edw. IV restored to the throne in the following spring, but their inclusion was most likely made at Eleanor’s behest rather than her father’s.

Another side of this soldier and diplomat is revealed in a surviving copy of a translation of Laurent de Premierfait’s Somme le Roi, dated 1451. The translator, who described himself as ‘a knyght of kyng henrye conqueroure of Normandye’, is revealed to be our MP by the illustration of his arms. In the colophon he states that he gave his translation the title ‘Aventure and Grace’ as he was not ‘perfecte of the langage of Frensch by symple undirstondyng of the langage’, so ‘methowght it was vertues I aventured to drawe it into Englisch. And in many places there I coude not Englisch it, grace of the Holy Goste yafe me English acordyng to the sentens, wich came of grace’. ‘Aventure and Grace’ was in fact Sir Robert’s motto. Bodl. e Mus. 23; Notes and Queries, ccxxvi. 303-5.