SPEKE, Sir John

When Henry VI came to the throne the Speke family had been established in the south-west of England for more than two centuries, first providing a knight of the shire for Devon in 1332. In 1392 William Speke, Sir John’s grandfather, profited from an entail of some of the family lands: his eldest brother John and all John’s male descendants had died by 1372, while the second brother, Robert, a priest, had expired in the bishop of Exeter’s prison in 1382, leaving William as next male heir to the estate. CCR, 1389-92, p. 470. William Speke survived into the reign of Henry IV and was succeeded by his son, another John, who had died by early 1422. CFR, xiii. 216; CP40/644, rot. 310; 651, rot. 498; Genealogist, n.s. xvii. 21.

Even before his father’s death, John’s synonymous son, the subject of this biography, had married Joan, daughter and heir general of John Keynes the younger of Dowlish, and in 1420 the couple had seisin of her inheritance, which included the manors of Dowlish (Somerset), Lashbrook (Devon), Niton on the Isle of Wight, and half the manor of Tangley (Hampshire). CCR, 1419-22, pp. 78-79; CFR, xiv. 346. In 1412 the Keynes lands had been valued at £142 p.a., but in 1419, perhaps aware of his son and heir’s precarious state of health, John Keynes the elder had entailed a large part of them in the male line, and settled others on his younger sons Nicholas and Edmund for life. Consequently, when the younger John Keynes died only four months after his father, most of the family’s valuable estates descended to his brother Richard as the nearest male heir, leaving Speke to contest his wife’s title in the courts. C138/51/95; Feudal Aids, vi. 504; CFR, xiv. 345; Som. Feet of Fines (Som. Rec. Soc. xxii), 179; E207/18/4/33. The sums of money involved were substantial: in early 1425 Speke was claiming a payment of 2,000 marks, purportedly outstanding since Easter 1422, from Nicholas Keynes. Feudal Aids, vi. 504; E13/136, m. 24.

Moreover, the entail of Speke’s own lands, which should have descended to him on his father’s death, now also came under attack from a central-Devon landowner, John Holland, and Alice, his wife, a descendant of another John Speke, the MP’s great-uncle. CFR, xiii. 216; CP40/643, rot. 305; 644, rot. 310; 651, rot. 498; Genealogist, n.s. xvii. 21. For all of this litigation Speke turned out to be well prepared. Following a brief spell of military service in France under Sir Edward Courtenay in 1417, E101/51/2 – unless this was his father. he had undergone a period of legal training, and by 1420 had entered Lincoln’s Inn. It was not long before he found employment: by 1419 he was acting as mainpernor for the custodians of the alien priory of Cowick near Exeter, as well as for the prior himself. CFR, xiv. 298, 385. This role may have brought him to the attention of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and by the mid 1420s he was attached to the household of Bishop Stafford of Bath and Wells. E13/136, m. 24.

Once he had secured his and his wife’s inheritances, Speke settled down to pursue his career as a lawyer. He maintained his ties with Lincoln’s Inn, standing surety for John Bathe, the steward, in about 1422, and serving a three-year term as a governor, in 1428-9 with specific responsibility for the society’s finances. L. Inn Black Bks. i. 1, 3. Ostensibly, he had no need to make a living by professional practice, for his lands provided him with a substantial income: in 1412 the Somerset manors of East and West Dowlish were said to be worth £40 p.a., and when Speke’s son died in 1444 the family holdings in Devon alone were assessed at a similar amount. C139/119/31. He could thus afford to return to fight in France, and in the spring of 1428 joined the retinue of John Arundel, Lord Mautravers. It is possible that he did so with the express intention of avoiding administrative duties in his locality, towards which he displayed a distinct disinclination throughout his career. On 6 Apr. he had been named among the men who were to levy the special subsidy on parishes and knights’ fees granted by Parliament that year, but on 20 Apr. he was present at the muster of Arundel’s retinue. E101/51/29, m. 3. By late 1432 Speke had returned to England and attended the Devon county court at Exeter for the parliamentary elections held the following summer. CCR, 1429-35, p. 223; C219/14/4. He was a regular attender in the county court, and as a result was among a limited number of those selected in 1434 to take the general oath against maintenance to be actually sworn. C219/13/1, 3, 5; Reg. Lacy, i (Canterbury and York Soc. lx), 278

Speke’s inclusion among those to be sworn may not have been entirely unjustified: in May 1427 he had been bound over in £100 not to harm Alice, the wife of Robert Dyer, or any other people. His offences against Alice were connected with a long-running dispute over tenements in Bransgrove and Wembworthy which was being tried before the justices of assize in the same year. Speke responded by accusing his opponents of having violently assaulted him, and his tactics proved effective: he recovered seisin of his tenement and was awarded damages of £20. KB27/650, rot. 98; JUST1/1540, rot. 59; CCR, 1422-9, p. 335. Nor was this the only challenge to his tenure of his estates that Speke had to fend off at this time, for the same year also saw the settlement of an equally protracted quarrel with one Stephen Abrigge over the advowson of the church of Combe Martin. KB27/650, rots. 29d, 66d; Reg. Stafford, i (Som. Rec. Soc. xxxi), 54.

Speke’s failure to play more than a marginal part in public life did not leave him isolated. Both as a lawyer of repute and a landowner of substance, he commanded impressive connexions in his locality. He was regularly called upon to witness charters and act as feoffee, and his two returns to Parliament in 1437 and 1439 are in themselves a testament to the contacts among the gentry he had forged. CCR, 1419-22, p. 212; 1435-41, pp. 42, 48-49, 161, 282; CP25(1)/45/79/15; C1/70/47. Nor was his circle restricted to minor and middling landowners. He held a large part of his estates from the Courtenay earls of Devon, and among his other feudal overlords were John Holand, earl of Huntingdon and later duke of Exeter, and the bishop of Exeter. C139/119/31; CP40/703, rot. 333d; 706, rot. 340; 715, rot. 656. Ties of feudal tenure aside, before 1436 he was also acting as a feoffee in the transfer of property from Sir John Herle* to Sir William, later Lord Bonville*, and his other associates included Sir Thomas Brooke* and Thomas Carew. CCR, 1435-41, pp. 18-19; CP25(1)/292/66/61; 68/175; CP40/699, rot. 387; 714, rot. 543. The city of Exeter, where he owned a house and where his uncle William Wynard was recorder, included him among the panel of prominent lawyers it employed, and throughout the 1430s and 1440s he regularly received gifts of food and wine from the mayor and civic council. Devon RO, Exeter city recs., receivers’ accts. 7-10, 11-13, 16-18 Hen. VI.

It was in the period at the end of the 1430s, when Speke could be said to have reached the zenith of his career, that he was drawn into an acrimonious dispute with a leading member of his own profession, Nicholas Radford*, with whom he had been associated in his early work for Cowick priory. CFR, xiv. 385. The origins of the quarrel are unclear, but at least one of the matters in dispute was the title to some of Speke’s lands in Dulverton. He accused Radford of breaking into his close and houses there, taking his goods, and even of forging muniments in order to deprive him of possession. CP40/713, rots. 170d, 249; 714, rots. 135, 336, 363; 715, rot. 36. At the same time, the two men were retained as counsel by opposing sides in the quarrel of the Tremayne brothers, Thomas I* and William, over the ownership of the manor of North Huish, which their father Nicholas had supposedly settled on William, thereby depriving Thomas of part of his inheritance. Whereas the cause of the feeble William was championed by the influential esquire Roger Champernowne* (who had been Speke’s parliamentary colleague just a few months earlier in 1437), and who recruited Radford to fight their case, Speke took the side of the elder brother. Soon accusations and counter-accusations began to fly. Radford, so Thomas Tremayne and Speke claimed, had employed a goldsmith to make an exact copy of the seal of the elderly Nicholas Tremayne, and had used it to forge a deed that settled North Huish on his client. For his part, Radford asserted that Speke had no business to involve himself in the matter, since he lacked the qualifications needed to act as counsel in a law suit and was thus in breach of the statute of maintenance, being effectively a layman and hardly learned (minime eruditus) in land law. Moreover, he had offered a bribe of £10 to the earl of Devon for his assistance. CP40/714, rot. 320; 715, rot. 247d; Chancery Case between Radford and Tremayne (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. n.s. lv), pp. xvi-xix. The dispute was put to a jury, but Radford sought to gain an advantage by inducing the sheriff of Devon, James Chudleigh* (first cousin to Radford’s associate Champernowne) to send a list of 24 neutral jurors to Speke, but actually return into Chancery the names of 38 different men, the majority of whom were partial to himself. C1/45/236.

Even while proceedings in the Tremayne affair were ongoing, Speke became embroiled in a different and violent disagreement with one John Laurence. On 25 Aug. 1439 an inquest presided over by John Mules* and the hardly impartial Radford heard that on 31 July Speke had come to Laurence’s house at Ottery St. Mary, attacked and wounded him with a dagger, and held him captive in his own house for four hours. He forced Laurence to pay £50 for his release and nearly strangled his wife. On 12 Oct. the two j.p.s were ordered to certify their findings into Chancery, and by this time Laurence had also begun proceedings against Speke before the justices of the King’s bench. Nevertheless, on 30 Oct. a more powerful commission of oyer and terminer was appointed to investigate the events afresh. C244/25/46; CPR, 1436-41, p. 370; KB27/714, rots. 53d, 117d.

In the interim, writs for a new Parliament had been issued. The circumstances of the elections, which took place against the backdrop of these local conflicts, are uncertain. There is, however, no reason to suppose that they were, as Wedgwood and Griffiths supposed, themselves marked by turbulence: HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 785; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 425; CCR, 1435-41, p. 338. by the time the writs of summons were issued on 26 Sept. the Laurence affair had moved to the law courts, and the original assault, whatever its exact circumstances, had in any event taken place at Ottery St. Mary, several miles away from the meeting place of the county court at Exeter. What does seem probable is that the earl of Devon took the opportunity to influence the contest for the first time: while Speke, irrespective of his actions in the summer, was re-elected, his colleague of 1437, Roger Champernowne, was replaced by the earl’s steward, John Copplestone*. To add to the complexity of the situation, Champernowne’s cousin (and Speke’s earlier nemesis) James Chudleigh was still sheriff and thus presided over the elections. Whether or not the various inquiries concerned with Speke’s activities had given him a degree of notoriety, he had in some way attracted the government’s attention and in May 1440, not long after the dissolution of Parliament, he was appointed keeper of the seas. Perhaps to escape from his various domestic troubles, he had apparently planned to go to France with the duke of Somerset, but when he received the King’s new commission he embarked on his task with enthusiasm. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 390, 415; DKR, xlviii. 334, 337; Griffiths, 425. Originally contracted on 2 May to serve with 420 men, he assembled an additional 300, and only a week after his return on 1 Sept. he concluded a new indenture for a retinue of 800. He disembarked at the end of this second period of service on 12 Dec. 1440. E101/53/30; E404/57/323; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 413, 450. For his second voyage Speke’s orders had been redrafted and the protection of the strategically important port of Harfleur, which had come under siege from the French, was specifically included. E403/739, m. 17; E404/56/303. While initial payment for his services was, probably under the pressure of events, rapidly forthcoming, the ready supply of money soon dried up, and by the end of 1440 Speke had to petition the King for payment. The settlement of Speke’s and his men’s wages only progressed slowly, and as late as 1450 tallies issued in 1442 were being returned to the Exchequer for reassignment. E28/66/25; E403/744, mm. 6, 14; 777. These difficulties in securing payment forced Speke to finance his operations in other ways, and his capture of a Genoese carrack and its cargo of wine in 1441 was probably no isolated incident. CPR, 1436-41, p. 575; E404/57/19.

Speke did not live to receive full payment for his services. He drew up a will on 16 Oct. 1441. The dating of the will is problematic. The enrolment in Bp. Lacy’s reg. gives 16 Oct. A.D. 1441, but 19 Henry VI, i.e. 1440: Reg. Lacy, iv. 45. The record of a law suit drawn up in 1465, but subsequently tampered with, suggests that Speke made his will in extremis, and thus lends support to the later date: CP40/818, rot. 346. On the other hand, the testator’s stipulation that he be buried wherever he should die, and an implication that his executors might not be able to ascertain the exact date of his death seems to point to the expectation of dying away from home. His prime concern was for the welfare of his soul: he asked that 1,000 masses be said immediately after his death and a further 1,000 every year thereafter, while the two chantries to be established for himself, his wife and his ancestors in the churches of Brampford Speke and Wembworthy were to last for 100 years, and obits were to be celebrated in perpetuity in the parish churches of which he had been patron at Dowlish Wake, Brampford Speke, Wembworthy and Combe Martin. The nunnery at Polslo and the Dominican and Franciscan friaries at Exeter were each assigned £4 in return for prayers for four years after his death. The generosity of these provisions stands in striking contrast to the parsimony of Speke’s other bequests. The masses aside, the costs of his funeral were not to exceed five marks. All his household goods were to fall to his widow Joan, to dispose of as she found convenient for herself and beneficial for her deceased husband’s soul. Speke’s debts were to be settled from the revenues of his estates, which he had transferred to feoffees. Yet, he had spent much of his ready cash in his service at sea, so his bequests and debts more than twice exceeded the money in his executors’ hands. It thus took until 1448 for the testament to be proved. At the time, Speke’s widow presented an inventory which valued his possessions at just £89 1s. 4d. The other two executors, John Bury and Thomas Shepton had, so the bishop’s commissary recorded, refused to accept the executorship, but Shepton may have taken on the task after Joan’s death in 1462, and was still seeking to recover debts owing to Speke in the mid 1460s. Reg. Lacy, iv. 45-48; C1/70/47; CP40/808, rot. 363; 818, rot. 346. Meanwhile, Speke’s widow had gone on to marry Hugh Champernowne alias Rowe of Modbury, an illegitimate descendant of one of the lines of the Champernowne family, and servant to the earl of Devon. Before she died she settled the manor of Lashbrook, the hundred of Black Torrington and other lands from her paternal inheritance in Devon on her younger son William. CCR, 1461-8, p. 128. The couple’s elder son and heir, John, who had married Alice, grand-daughter and heiress of Sir Thomas Beauchamp*, died only three years after his father in 1444, leaving his son John† a minor. C139/119/31; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 296-7. This latter John was eventually to represent Somerset in the Parliament of 1478, and his grandson in his turn became MP for the shire in 1539 and 1545. The Commons 1509-58, iii. 359-60.