STANLEY, John II

Stanley enjoyed a long and distinguished career of varying political allegiance. In the late 1420s, while he was under age, he was contracted in marriage to his mother’s kinswoman, Cecily Arderne, probably with the intention of protecting his mother’s Arderne inheritance against the claims of her male kinsmen. Ormerod, iii (2), 566. It was, however, another part of his maternal inheritance, which fell to his mother in about 1425 as heir of Stafford of Clifton Campville rather than of Arderne of Elford, that was to play an important part in his early career. In law, on his mother’s death in the early 1430s, these lands should have fallen to his father to hold for life by courtesy of England, but it is clear that they did not. Not only is John’s early prominence inexplicable if he were landless, but the description of him in the 1440s and 1450s as variously ‘lord of Clifton Campville’, as ‘of Pipe’ and ‘of Sibbertoft’, all manors of that inheritance, show that he held the Stafford lands, in all or part, before his father’s death. CCR, 1441-7, p. 377; Canterbury Cath. Archs., Dean and Chapter mss, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/L/218, 223; KB29/93, rot. 10. A pardon of 1446 refers to him as ‘tenant of Sibbertoft’: C67/39, m. 23. There are two possible explanations. The father may have freely surrendered to the son; or, more probably, the feoffees of the Stafford lands, headed by John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, retained the inheritance, perhaps to discharge burdens placed upon it by the last adult tenant, Thomas Stafford†, until after the death of our MP’s mother. If she never had seisin then the father had no right to the courtesy. CIPM, xxii. 571-2. The feoffees were seised until at least as late as 1429: CPR, 1422-9, pp. 388-9; CCR, 1422-9, pp. 378-9, 380-1; E159/205, brevia Easter rot. 14. By 1457 our MP also held, in part at least, the Stafford property at Chipping Campden, Glos.: CP40/788, rots. 336, 340. The inheritance was slow to pass to him in its entirety, for it was long burdened by Thomas Stafford’s wid., Katherine, daughter of Sir John Gresley* and sister of our MP’s friend and brother-in-law, John Gresley. After Stafford’s death she married Sir William Peyto‡ and was living as late as 1467: The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 446.

Whatever the case, because he held these lands John Stanley was an important figure in his own right from the 1440s. He is probably to be identified with the namesake, who, on 22 Jan. 1442, was named by the prior of Coventry as his proxy at the Parliament due to meet three days later. But the first certain reference to him dates from soon afterwards when he joined his father in suing John Verney, dean of Lichfield, and many others, mainly local tradesmen, for trespass. This action implies that he already had lands of his own to protect, and the next reference to him makes this certain. On 20 May 1444, described as ‘lord of Clifton Campville’ and cousin and heir of his maternal great-uncle, Edmund Stafford, bishop of Exeter, he quitclaimed a manor once owned by the bishop at Bridgeford, near Stafford, to Robert Whitgreve* in fee. SC10/50/2459; KB27/723, rot. 72; CCR, 1441-7, p. 377.

At this early stage in his career, Stanley was in the service of Sir Edward Grey, whose wife, in 1445, inherited the barony of Ferrers of Groby (Leicestershire). This, at least, is the most likely explanation of two references from the mid 1440s. In July 1444 he and Grey entered into a bond in 1,000 marks to Henry Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, as the earl sought to bring an end to a dispute involving Grey’s servant, William Burgeys. Two years later, on 11 May 1446, he was among many Leicestershire landowners, headed by Grey, gentry who witnessed a declaration, on behalf of Robert Sherard of Stapleford, that Sherard’s wife had given birth to a daughter who had lived only two hours. CP40/756, rot. 333; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 414-15; Leics. RO, Sherard mss, DG40/481; E. Acheson, Leics. in 15th Cent. 90-92. If, as this implies, Stanley numbered among Grey’s servants, it may be that he was introduced to that service by his distant kinsman, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, who himself retained Grey, and it was not long before Stanley was himself the direct recipient of the duke’s patronage. On 9 Dec. 1446 the duke appointed him as his lieutenant in the office of master of the chace of the Staffordshire forest of Needwood with a modest annual fee of £5. It is probably not coincidental that his entry to, or, at least, his promotion within, the ducal retinue corresponded with the beginning of his public career. On 20 Jan. 1447, although he was yet to inherit his father’s lands, he was elected to represent Staffordshire in Parliament with another of the ducal retinue, William Mytton*. NLW, Peniarth mss, 280, p. 42; C219/15/4. He was returned again on 22 Oct. 1450, on this occasion with his brother-in-law, John Gresley*, also one of the duke’s retainers. C219/16/1. His personal connexion with Gresley was clearly close. It was at about this time that he and his father unsuccessfully attempted to arbitrate a settlement in Gresley’s long-running dispute with the abbot of Burton-upon-Trent: S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 125. Interestingly, during the first session of this Parliament, he was pricked as sheriff of the county and Gresley as its escheator. Given that the Parliament was to have two further sessions and not conclude until May 1451 these appointments, as it transpired, were unfortunate for the efficient working of the county’s administration. None the less, two elections to Parliament and a pricking as sheriff in the space of little more than three years show how thoroughly Stanley had taken his father’s place in local affairs. The same could be said of his four successive elections as master of the guild of St. Mary in Lichfield. Admitted in 1449 to a guild popular among the local gentry, he was elected as master in 1451, as his father had been more than 20 years before, and served until 1455. His 2nd w. Elizabeth was admitted at the end of his term as master: Harwood, 403.

Stanley’s second marriage in about 1453 was of value to him both socially and materially. She was a Vernon, one of the wealthiest Midland gentry families. The context for the match may have been the Stafford retinue, for her late father, Sir Richard, had numbered among the duke’s retainers. Yet, towards the end of his life, that wealthy knight appears to have been on poor terms with his lord: in 1450 he had brought an action of maintenance against a group of his fellow retainers, among whom was our MP and the latter’s father. Perhaps, therefore, the marriage was in the nature of a reconciliation, and it may be significant that the bride’s brother, William Vernon*, was retained by the duke in 1454. KB27/757, rot. 31; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 240. Whatever the local political context of the match, Stanley is likely to have been more attracted by its material rather than social benefits. His new bride had been beneficiary of a generous jointure settlement by her first husband, John Vampage, Henry VI’s attorney-general. In 1448 the manors of Pebworth and Merston in Gloucestershire together with the manor of Wick in Worcestershire had been entailed to her and her male issue by Vampage. CP25(1)/293/71/333; C146/2084, 10007. The Stanleys were able to secure these manors, but they had great difficulty in establishing Elizabeth’s right to dower in her late husband’s lands in Worcestershire not settled in jointure. On 12 Feb. 1454 they sued her stepson, another John Vampage, for a third of nearly 2,000 acres in Pershore, Great Comberton and elsewhere in that county, and, after Vampage had entered a complex defence and countersued the couple for detinue of charters, the matter was put to the arbitration of two prominent Midland lawyers, Thomas Lyttleton and William Cumberford*, both of whom, perhaps significantly, were retained by the duke. CP40/775, rots. 549, 600; 776, rot. 94d; Year Bk. Mich. 33 Hen. VI (Reports del Cases en Ley, 1679), pl. 36. f. 51.

Even though the arbiters discharged their task thoroughly, returning a comprehensive award largely in Stanley’s favour in London on 30 June 1455, this did not bring the matter to a conclusion. In the following Michaelmas term Stanley sued Vampage on a bond in 1,000 marks for failure to abide the award and brought an action for dower before Master John Stokes, auditor-general in the court of Canterbury. KB27/828, rot. 93; KB27/795, rot. 38d; CP40/779, rot. 329; 780, rot. 125d. Nor did the award terminate the original dower action in the court of common pleas: on 28 Mar. 1457, before the justices of assize at Worcester, a jury found for the Stanleys on nearly every count of Vampage’s defence, valued Elizabeth’s dower entitlement in the county at £30 p.a. and awarded the couple costs and damages of £71 13s. 4d. Our MP’s attempts to enforce payment simply added a new cause of dispute between the parties, and his resort to the ecclesiastical court prompted his rival to bring an action of praemunire against him. CP40/775, rot. 549; 791, rot. 328; 795, rot. 201. The whole case illustrates the tendency of litigation to multiply itself when one or both parties resisted settlement, and the matter continued to rumble on into the late 1460s.

Stanley was summoned for Staffordshire to the great council called in April 1455 to meet at Leicester, the summons of which provoked the duke of York and the Nevilles into open rebellion. PPC, vi. 342. Our MP’s sympathies were undoubtedly with Lancaster, and it is possible that he was in the duke of Buckingham’s retinue among the Lancastrian army at the first battle of St. Albans on 22 May. His connexion with Buckingham was certainly closer than that simply of being his lieutenant in Needwood. He named his son by his second wife Humphrey, implying that the duke was the boy’s godfather, and in early September 1459 the duke appointed him to the high trust of one of the feoffees for the implementation of his will. Staffs. RO, Stafford fam. mss, D(W)1721/1/1, ff. 52v-53. Further, through Duke Humphrey he had a connexion with Queen Margaret. In the late 1440s or 1450s she wrote to order him to exclude Thomas Chaterley*, who had hunted illegally in her park of Agardsley, from all places ‘that ye have governance of under us in that countrey’. The park lay within the bounds of the forest of Needwood, appurtenant to the honour of Tutbury and thus part of the queen’s endowment, and Stanley was presumably the recipient of this letter as lieutenant of Needwood under the duke as steward of Tutbury. Letters of Margaret of Anjou (Cam. Soc. lxxxvi), 143. The letter cannot be dated accurately. Stanley was still in office as lt. of Needwood in 1456: CP40/782, rot. 19d. Chaterley was a yeoman of the Crown from c.1447 to c.1458.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that Stanley should have been in the Lancastrian ranks at the battle of Blore Heath. According to a well-informed chronicler, he was one of seven men knighted by the King before the battle, only two of whom survived the day. Although the story is wrong in detail – the King was not at the battle – Stanley was certainly knighted at about this date; and there is no reason to doubt his presence in a force commanded by his neighbour, James Tuchet, Lord Audley, at a battle fought not far distant from his estates.. Historical Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 204. Earlier, in Feb. 1455, he had witnessed an important family settlement made by Lord Audley: CCR, 1454-61, p. 53. His strong Lancastrian sympathies are also evident in his appointment as sheriff soon afterwards and, early in 1461, eathHto two powerful commissions of oyer and terminer designed to investigate treasons in the Welsh and marcher lordships of the Yorkist lords. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 562, 564-5.

Yet, like many other Lancastrians, Stanley was not so committed to that cause as to be unable to adapt to the change of regime. Indeed, his allegiance may have been weakened by the duke of Buckingham’s death at the battle of Northampton in July 1460. Whether he fought for Lancaster after Blore Heath is unknown, but by the winter of 1462 he appears to have been ready to turn out for the new King. According to one source (admittedly one of slightly doubtful accuracy) he was among the knights who accompanied Edward IV on his expedition to reduce the northern strongholds of the Lancastrians in the winter of 1462-3.. Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 157. None the less, he seems to have served a short period of probation, and it was not until 1464 that he resumed his role in local administration. What is known of him in the early 1460s relates only to his private interests. On 3 July 1462, for example, he appeared personally in the court of King’s bench to renew a surety of the peace he had found in 1451. At about the same time he joined his brother-in-law (Sir) William Vernon, another who was struggling to adapt to the new political dispensation, as an arbiter on behalf of John Bate, dean of the collegiate church of Tamworth, in the dean’s long-running dispute with Nicholas Fynderne over the Derbyshire manor of Stretton-en-le-Field. KB29/93, rot. 10; J. Nichols, Leics. iii (2), 1028.

The death of Stanley’s father in 1463 brought him the manor of Aldford and other property in Cheshire, perhaps worth as much as £100 p.a., and made him probably the wealthiest of the gentry residing in Staffordshire. Indeed, his income, if his second wife’s lands are included, was probably about £300 p.a. But this increase in his already substantial wealth can hardly serve as a complete explanation for his burst of administrative activity in the late 1460s. CHES2/135, m. 5d. He seems rather to have outlived any lingering doubts about his loyalty to the new regime. His pricking for a third term as sheriff in 1464 marked his return to his old prominence, and it was probably at about the same time that John Hals, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, another with a Lancastrian past to outlive, named him as steward of his local estates. In March 1467 he was appointed to his first local commission under the Yorkists, and, on the following 16 Apr. he was elected to Parliament after an absence of 17 years. Rowney, 245; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 28-29; C219/17/1. More significantly still, on 1 June 1468, during the assembly’s last session, the King granted him and his son, Humphrey, the office of ranger in the royal forest of Cannock. CPR, 1467-77, p. 82; CCR, 1468-76, no. 4. For their difficulty in securing their daily wages from the Staffs. sheriff: E13/158, rots. 29, 30d. It was thus as a trusted servant of the new King that in the following November he was reappointed to the shrievalty (despite the brief time that had elapsed since his last appointment), and belatedly added to the county bench. He had influence enough to secure the shrievalty on favourable financial terms: on 28 Nov. he sued out a writ of privy seal ordering the treasurer and barons of the Exchequer to give him an assignment of £80 on what he owed as sheriff. E404/74/1/133. £40 was the standard sum awarded to sheriffs of Staffs., the sum he himself had been allowed as sheriff in 1450-1: E159/229, brevia Mich. rot. 17. Stanley’s importance is also indirectly reflected in his half-brother George’s nomination as the county’s escheator in 1469.

In re-establishing his place in local government Stanley was no doubt aided by the increasing association of his powerful kinsmen the Staffords with the new regime. The young duke of Buckingham, Henry, was married to the queen’s sister Katherine Wydeville in early 1465. Evidence of his continued service to that great family is scarce, but in 1465 he was a plaintiff in an action of close-breaking as one of the late duke’s feoffees. CP40/858, rot. 327. It might also be speculatively suggested that he had won the new government’s trust through the King’s brother, George, duke of Clarence. In 1464 the King had granted Clarence the duchy of Lancaster honour of Tutbury, and, having been declared of age in 1466, he began to play a part in the politics of the north Midlands. Although there is no evidence to place Stanley in Clarence’s service until April 1472, when he held the woodmoot of Needwood forest as his steward, the possibility cannot be discounted that a connexion with the King’s brother explains, in part, his prominence in the late 1460s. DL30/111/1678, m. 3d.

During this period of prominence in the 1460s, Stanley was troubled with two disputes, the one purely personal and the other involving several of Staffordshire’s leading figures. His quarrel with Vampage continued, in desultory fashion, into the late 1460s, with Stanley appearing to have been the aggressor: on 12 Feb. 1468, as Vampage came into the court of King’s bench to secure the revocation of an outlawry secured against him earlier in the dispute, Stanley sued him anew with a bill of debt on the arbitration bond of 1455, claiming damages of as much as £500. The matter was pleaded but no more is heard of it after the failure of a London jury to appear in November 1469. KB27/827, rots. 77, 81; 828, rot. 93. The other dispute was more serious for it reflected a division within Staffordshire society. Stanley was one of several leading landowners in the county who found their interests compromised by a rising Yorkist official, Ralph Wolseley*. In the spring of 1465 Wolseley, in the desire to create a park as physical testament to his social advance, enclosed some 1,000 acres of ‘Wolseley Wood’ in the parish of Colwich, thus depriving Stanley, his brother-in-law, (Sir) John Gresley, Bishop Hals and other lesser men, of their rights of common pasture. According to an action of trespass brought by Wolseley, on 12 May 1466 a large gang of local men, headed by Gresley and George Stanley and including our MP’s sons, John and Thomas Stanley, threw down his enclosures. The dispute rumbled on, with Gresley as Wolseley’s principal opponent, but our MP, doubly involved both as a local landowner and the bishop’s steward, took his part. Indeed, if a later complaint by Wolseley is to be credited, he used his powers as sheriff in 1474-5 to prevent Wolseley’s acquittal on the indictment and disavowed a jury panel he himself had returned into King’s bench. KB27/822, rot. 61d; 853, rex rot. 52; Staffs. RO, Wolseley mss, D(W)1781/6/2/8.

If Stanley was associated with Clarence as early as the late 1460s, the connexion was not strong enough to draw him into the duke’s abortive rising in March 1470, at least if one may judge from his appointment to the commission of array in Staffordshire as the King set out in pursuit of the rebels. One can only speculate on his attitude to Henry VI’s Readeption. On the one hand, he retained his place on the commission of the peace; on the other, he lost his office in the forest of Cannock to his neighbour, John Swynnerton. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 219, 233, 630. What is certain is that, on Edward IV’s return, he rallied to him. He fought on the Yorkist side at the battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, and was rewarded with promotion to knight banneret. His presence at the battle is notable, and can be taken as indirect evidence of his connexion with Clarence. Nothing in his career before 1471 identifies him as a committed Yorkist and hence he is unlikely to have turned out at Tewkesbury save as the follower of another. That ‘other’, given the evidence of our MP’s subsequent service to him, is most likely to have been Clarence, who had abandoned the Readeption regime on his brother’s return. The other possibility is that Sir John was following the lead of his cousin, Sir William Stanley, who had been one of the first to rally to Edward IV on his return, and was, like our MP, created a knight banneret after Tewkesbury. W.A. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 16; D.J. Clayton, Admin. County Palatine of Chester, 109-10.

After the Readeption Stanley’s career resumed its former course. On 6 July 1471, as one of the surviving feoffees of Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, he made a dower settlement in favour of the duke’s widow, Anne Neville. Stafford fam. mss, D(W)1721/1/1, ff. 53v-54. He took the routine precaution of suing out a general pardon in February 1472, and in the following July he joined with the lawyer, Nicholas Fitzherbert*, in returning an award in the dispute between Isabel, widow of Nicholas Montgomery of Cubley in Derbyshire, and her son, another Nicholas. Since the latter was married to Wolseley’s daughter, it is likely that Stanley was the widow’s choice as arbiter. Derbys. Chs. ed. Jeayes, 2288; Wright, 91. Two months later, on 24 Sept., he was elected to Parliament for the fourth recorded occasion. C219/17/2.

During the course of this long assembly, Stanley was pricked as sheriff, just as he had been in his second Parliament. Interestingly, he was appointed in succession to his half-brother, George, as a measure of his family’s importance at this date. Indirect evidence of his continued association with the Staffords is provided by his third marriage, in about 1473, to a lady who appears to have been the widow of Sir William Harcourt, who had been steward of the Stafford lordship of Maxstoke (Warwickshire), initially under Duke Humphrey and then during the minority of his heir. Rawcliffe, 205. He also remained active in the affairs of his brother-in-law, Gresley: on 10 Aug. 1474 the two men entered into bonds in 500 marks to the wealthy Warwickshire knight, Sir Simon Mountfort†, and it is highly likely that these bonds relate to the payment of the marriage portion for the marriage of Gresley’s daughter, Elizabeth, to Sir Simon’s eldest son, Thomas. Wm. Salt. Arch. Soc. n.s. iv. 113.

Stanley died on 29 June 1476 and was buried in an impressive monument that survives in Elford church, where, as his memorial inscription notes, he founded a chantry in a newly-built chapel. CHES3/48, 16 Edw. IV, no. 7; F.H. Crossley, English Church Mons. 159, 222; S. Shaw, Staffs. i, facing p. 384. His death brought a dispute between his eldest son, John, and Humphrey, his son by Elizabeth Vernon. He had made substantial provision for the latter. In October 1458 he had his manor and advowson of Clifton Campville with a subsidiary property at neighbouring Haunton (Staffordshire), a manor at Quorndon (Leicestershire) and another at Sibbertoft (Northamptonshire) settled on himself and Elizabeth and their issue, and in January 1461 he added the manor of Pipe. C54/360, m. 28d; E150/1021/1; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. (1917-18), 277. Whether he made these settlements out of what he owed to his wife’s standing, or through an active preference for her children over his heir, can only be a matter of speculation. In any event, even though this provision was far more generous than that which was generally made for younger sons of even the greatest gentry families, John, as the eldest son, was still left with a considerable inheritance, consisting of all the former Arderne lands in Cheshire, valued in his father’s inquisition post mortem at nearly £100 p.a., together with the family caput honoris at Elford. CHES2/149, m. 1. The two half-brothers, for a period, appear to have coexisted peacefully. On successive days, within two weeks of Sir John’s death, both were retained by William, Lord Hastings, who, as steward of the honour of Tutbury, was the new power in Staffordshire. They also took turns as masters of the guild at Lichfield. Both were admitted in 1476, John was then master in 1477-8 and Humphrey in 1478-81. I. Rowney, ‘Hastings Affinity’, BIHR, lvii. 37, 39; Harwood, 406-7. John, however, probably resented the provision made for his half-brother. This, at least, is implied by the award made between them on 20 Dec. 1490 by their cousin, Sir William Stanley, then chamberlain of Henry VII’s household. This award both confirmed Humphrey’s title to Clifton Campville and the other Staffordshire lands and made provision for the suffering of a common recovery to provide security for him and his issue. The other two manors – Quorndon and Sibbertoft – returned to the male line. Topographer, x. 5; CP40/869, rots. 102, 120; 918, rot. 330; Quorndon Recs. ed. Farnham, 174-5, 177-8. By this date, Humphrey had become a much more important man than John. He had fought for Tudor at the battle of Bosworth, where he was knighted. He then found a place as a knight of the new King’s body and was appointed to the stewardship of Tutbury, posts of honour beyond the ambition of his father. HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 797; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 541. A man of vindictive temperament, famously having his neighbour, William Chetwynd*, another member of the royal household, murdered in 1494, The vivid account of the murder provided by the widow in a petition to the King and council is to be contrasted with the account in the indictment before the county coroner, which has the murderers acting in self-defence: Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xii. 333-5; KB9/402/7. The latter makes no reference to Sir Humphrey. he nevertheless survived such offences and received the honour of being buried in Westminster Abbey.

The division of our MP’s great estate between his two sons was soon followed by further division. John alienated the bulk of his Cheshire lands to Sir William Stanley, although he left Elford to descend to his eldest daughter and her husband, William Staunton (whose tomb remains in Elford church). Two further descents to females followed, first to Anne, wife of Sir William Smyth (both buried at Elford), and then to Anne’s daughter Margery, husband of Richard Huddleston. Ormerod, iii (2), 565; C1/1226/31-34. On the death of Humphrey’s son, another John, in 1514, the lands settled away from the main line were divided between John’s two young daughters. The elder, Elizabeth (b.c.1502) became the wife of Sir John Hercy† of Grove (Nottinghamshire) and the younger, Isabel (b.c.1504) married Walter Moyle of Kent. C142/30/68-69. The substantial inheritance united in the hands of our MP thus had only a brief existence, from his father’s death in 1463 to his own in 1476.