The younger son of an obscure Welshman, Skulle enjoyed an extremely successful career considering his limited prospects at birth. No doubt he owed his rise to a combination of his own ability, patronage and his marriages. In spite of his success, he comes across as a somewhat colourless figure, an impression that probably reflects the nature of the sources rather than the reality. Even if very obscure, Skulle’s father was not necessarily of lowly background. Originally from Brecon, David Skulle settled at Much Cowarne in Herefordshire but evidently he maintained strong links with his native Wales, with which both Walter and his elder brother Miles were always closely associated.
A lawyer, Miles Skulle served in the administrations of Herefordshire and the principality of South Wales and he found employment with several important magnates. One of his earliest patrons was John, Lord Tiptoft†. He was a feoffee and surety for Tiptoft, as well as a party to a series of recognizances on behalf of Joyce Charlton in 1421-2, shortly before she became Tiptoft’s second wife. Miles was also a legal counsellor of Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford and later duke of Buckingham, and a justice on Stafford’s lordships in Herefordshire and South Wales. Furthermore, he served Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, and perhaps Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and acted as a feoffee for Sir John Pauncefoot†. Pauncefoot’s estates included holdings at Much Cowarne where Miles’s own principal residence lay. Miles’s landed interests were scattered, although his most important property dealings were in Herefordshire where for nearly three decades he was a working j.p. He was appointed to his last commission of the peace in November 1458 and he probably died not long after that date. His heir was his son William.
Successful though it was, Miles’s career was certainly less distinguished than that of his younger brother. Walter is first heard of in the mid 1430s, as an esquire of the royal household. In the autumn of 1435 he was one of a small force of Household men whom the Crown assembled to help defend Calais, then seriously under threat from the French, and he undertook to serve there for two months with four archers. It is not clear how much time he actually spent in the royal establishment, for he features in only one of the extant Household accounts from the reign of Henry VI, that for 1443-4, as an ‘esquire of the hall and chamber’.
It is likely that the status he gained as a King’s esquire helped Skulle to make a good first marriage. His bride Margaret was a lady of higher social rank than he, for she was a member of a cadet branch of the Beauchamp family and a relative of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. Both Margaret’s father and paternal grandfather were briefly peers of the realm, a status also enjoyed by her maternal grandfather. Although her father lost his title of Baron of Kidderminster at the accession of Henry IV, he died in 1420 possessed of estates in Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire which were probably worth comfortably over £100 p.a. His heir was Margaret, by then about 20 years of age.
If it is not known exactly when Skulle married Margaret Beauchamp, it is probably safe to assume that she was already his wife when he was returned to his first Parliament in December 1436. As in the previous assembly, much of the business of the Parliament of 1437 was concerned with the conduct and financing of the war in France. Among the taxes the Commons granted to the Crown was a tenth and fifteenth, and several weeks after the Parliament was dissolved Skulle and his fellow MP, Thomas Rous*, were commissioned to assign reductions in contributions to that levy to impoverished communities in Worcestershire. The commission, the first known of Skulle’s local government offices, was followed soon afterwards by his appointment to the commission of the peace in Worcestershire, a body on which he served almost continuously over the next 40 years. Against what was later to become an established convention, he remained on the bench during his terms as sheriff, an office he held in several counties. The fact that it was for Herefordshire that he was initially pricked for the shrievalty suggests that he possessed an unknown landed interest there, whether inherited or otherwise acquired. During this first term as sheriff of that county, he informed the Chancery that one of the local coroners, Thomas Capull, was insufficiently qualified for that office, and in February 1439 he was ordered to hold an election for a replacement.
While serving as sheriff of Herefordshire, Skulle obtained the position of attorney in all the royal courts, both English and Welsh, in Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire. His grant was made to him as a ‘King’s esquire’, and his connexion with the Crown made it easier to bid for grants from a King all too liberal in the exercise of his patronage. The office of attorney was clearly a sinecure (he was permitted to exercise it through a deputy and three years later he gave it up in favour of a fellow Household man, John Perrot), and it is possible that he was a lawyer like his elder brother Miles, since he was also placed on several commissions of gaol delivery.
In all likelihood Skulle owed his knighthood, bestowed at some stage in the later 1440s, to his connexion with the Household. It is impossible to ascertain what part (if any) his status as a Household man played in his parliamentary career, even though his last two Parliaments were summoned in circumstances favourable to the Court-dominated government of the time. Similarly, it is not known whether he was helped to gain election to the Commons by his wife’s connexions, or by his own family’s links with the Beauchamps or other lords. While Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d.1439), was still alive, the Skulles are said to have looked to him for patronage, and Skulle’s elder brother Miles became an annuitant of Beauchamp’s son and successor Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, before 1444-5.
It is hard to ascertain exactly when Skulle became associated with Richard, duke of York, and his cause. There is no evidence of any connexion between him and York in the early 1450s, and his election to the Parliament of 1453, summoned early that year in favourable circumstances for the Court, suggests that he was still identified with the Household at that date. The calling of the Parliament was in large part prompted by the need for parliamentary taxation to repay the loans that the Crown had raised to meet the considerable costs of the defence of Calais, the keeping of the sea and the re-conquest of Gascony. Both Skulle and his fellow knight of the shire, Humphrey Stafford III*, had taken part in seeking such loans in Worcestershire, by virtue of a commission of 21 Dec. 1452. Once Parliament had opened, it was ordered that anyone who had loaned money to the King since Michaelmas 1452 was to have his loan repaid directly from the tax render under the supervision of the commissioners for the loans and the Members of the Commons. Skulle, Stafford and their receiver, William Broke, subsequently faced proceedings in the Exchequer for their failure to account fully for the loans they had raised. Broke spent time in the Fleet prison and in 1455 all three men were ordered to satisfy the Crown of a sum of just under £31 that was still outstanding.
During the first session of the Parliament of 1453 Skulle and Ralph, Lord Sudeley, then steward of the Household, were among those to whom the Crown, by means of letters of 21 Mar. 1453, entrusted the keeping of the Herefordshire abbey of Dore, in order to protect it from its oppressors.
One authority states that Skulle, pricked for his third term as sheriff of Herefordshire in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans in May 1455, was one of York’s followers by the mid 1450s.
During this troubled period Skulle also found time for private affairs. In the spring of 1460 he successfully sued William Grimhill in the court of common pleas for a manor in the Worcestershire parish of Hallow, although his lawsuit bears all the hallmarks of a collusive action. The history of the manor is incomplete but Grimhill’s family had held it in previous centuries and were to do so again in Henry VIII’s reign. One possibility is that Skulle was acting as a feoffee rather than for himself, whether for Grimhill or someone else altogether.
By the second half of 1460, when the government was again in the hands of York and his allies, Skulle was certainly identified with the duke’s cause, as was his former ward Richard Croft. From at least early September that year he was treasurer of the Household, an institution the Yorkists were then using to control the monarch. In the following November he surrendered the offices of porter of Bronyllys castle, forester of Cantref Selyf and steward of Cantref Selyf, Penkelly, Alexanderston and Llangoed, so that they might be re-granted to the Yorkist esquire Roger Vaughan.
Following Edward’s accession, Skulle remained a j.p., served on the occasional ad hoc commission and, late in his career, as sheriff of Worcestershire. The shrievalty of Worcestershire was part of the inheritance of the earls of Warwick, but he owed his appointment to the Crown since the then earl was the infant son and heir of the late George, duke of Clarence. After 1461 he no longer received royal grants of offices that were little more than sinecures, perhaps because the new King pursued a policy of favouring younger men in this way,
By the mid 1460s Skulle was already linked with one of the new King’s chief supporters, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick.
It was shortly after Edward first seized the throne that Skulle married his second wife, Frances. She was the widow of the Lancastrian Sir William Mille, son and heir of the Gloucestershire esquire Thomas Mille*. Sir William had died four days after fighting for Henry VI at Towton, probably of wounds suffered in the battle. Following his attainder in the Parliament of 1461,
Still an office-holder in the late 1470s, Skulle was active until his death. By the early 1480s he had renewed his claims against William Bracebridge in the court of the Exchequer. Bracebridge responded in May 1482, pleading that he was quit of the £80 demanded from him, by virtue of the release that Skulle had given him in July 1462. The matter was referred to a jury but Skulle died before it could sit.
Not mentioned in Frances’s will is Joyce, her daughter by Skulle. She was married, probably after 1480, to Edward Croft, the son and heir of the MP’s former ward Richard. In 1487-8 Edward’s younger brother John, who afterwards took up residence at Holt, was married to Joyce’s elder half-sister Joan, Skulle’s daughter by Margaret Beauchamp and one of the coheirs of the Beauchamp inheritance. The Crofts already possessed a stake in that inheritance before the marriage of John and Joan, for some years earlier Thomas Croft†, uncle of John and younger brother of Richard, had married Joan’s half-sister Elizabeth (Margaret’s daughter by either her first or second husband). Elizabeth did not bear Thomas, who died in 1488, any children, but her share of the Beauchamp inheritance was not completely lost to the Crofts. Her subsequent marriage to Nicholas Crowmer was likewise childless, meaning that when she died in 1500 her estates were divided between Joan and her other half-sister, Alice (Margaret Beauchamp’s daughter by John Wysham), then wife of the Bedfordshire knight Sir John Guise. Presumably the Crofts had secured Skulle’s assent to the match between Thomas Croft and Elizabeth and, assuming that he was then still alive, to that between Joyce and Edward. Evidently deliberate, this sequence of marriages, so advantageous for the Crofts, may have arisen out of an understanding reached between a by then apparently sonless Skulle and his former ward.