STANLEY, Thomas II

The marriage of our MP’s paternal grandfather, Sir John Stanley (d.1414), to Isabel Lathom, whose claim to the valuable Lancashire manors of Knowsley and Lathom he ruthlessly and successfully pursued, marked the beginning of the rise of the Stanleys to comital rank. S.K. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 161-2. To the advantage of a fortunate marriage, Sir John added those of energy and military ability. Employed by Richard II as both his justiciar in Ireland (from 1389 to 1391) and, in the last two years of his reign, as controller of his household, he prospered further under Henry IV, serving as steward of the household from 1404 to the end of the reign and twice as lieutenant of Ireland, where he died in 1414. Above the routine perquisites of royal office, this service to Henry IV brought one extravagant reward: in April 1406 he was granted the Isle of Man in fee to an annual value of £400. CPR, 1405-8, pp. 201-2; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 37. For Sir John’s career: M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 215-19; J.H. Wylie, Hen. IV, ii. 289-95.

So generous a grant to a mere knight perpetuated the great success of Sir John’s career in his descendants and elevated the family to the first rank of the English gentry. His son, another Sir John, built on these substantial foundations, establishing the reality of his family’s lordship on the Isle of Man, but it was his grandson, our MP, who was responsible for another significant advance in the family’s fortunes. His career was a remarkable one. He combined, as his grandfather had done, the roles of a senior courtier with that of the ruling figure in his locality, and he was rewarded, late in his life, with promotion to the peerage. He also had a striking record as an MP. His famous grandfather never sat in the Commons, and his father did so only twice, but Thomas, beginning his career in the Commons while his father lived, represented Lancashire on ten occasions, including in eight of the nine Parliaments that met between 1439 and his death 20 years later. Indeed, but for his absence in France when the 1445 Parliament met, he would no doubt have served in nine consecutive assemblies.

The first significant act in the young Thomas’s career was his marriage, when about the age of 16, to a daughter of Sir Robert Goushill, who had been killed fighting for Henry IV at the battle of Shrewsbury. She was her father’s coheiress, but her immediate expectations were very modest, and the explanation for the match is to be sought in social rather than material considerations. If there was a material consideration in respect of the marriage it did not lie in the Goushill inheritance (confined to the manor of Hoveringham), but rather in Elizabeth Fitzalan’s share of the tail general estates of the Fitzalan earldom of Arundel. She had inherited a third share of these lands on the death of her brother, Thomas, earl of Arundel, in 1415, and on her death in 1425 this share passed to her son, John, duke of Norfolk. If, however, he should die without issue these lands, which included the valuable barony of Lewes (Suss.), would fall into division between her four daughters, including her two by Goushill. In short, at the time of Stanley’s marriage, only one line of descent stood between his wife and a worthwhile landed inheritance. If this gamble did provide the Stanleys with a motive for making the match, it was a gamble that paid off in 1481, when the duke’s issue failed: VCH Suss. vii. 5; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle ed. Wells-Furby (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc.), ii. 678; Statutes, iii. 58. Her father, of relatively humble rank, had been a servant of one of the Appellants, Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and on the duke’s death in exile in 1399 he found the duke’s well-born widow, a daughter of another of the Appellants, Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, ready to disparage herself. During their brief marriage of only a few years they had two daughters, the younger of whom married our MP. This marriage marked another stage in the advance of the Stanleys in that it brought them new noble connexions. Joan’s half-brother was John Mowbray (1390-1432), earl (and from 1425 duke) of Norfolk, and her half-sister, Isabel Mowbray, married James, Lord Berkeley. On 1 Sept. 1422 Berkeley, in preparation for his marriage to Isabel, conveyed his castle of Berkeley and other lands to feoffees including both Stanley and (Sir) Robert Wingfield*, the husband of the other Goushill coheiress, and it must be assumed that Joan and our MP were then already married. CP, ix. 604; Cat. Med. Muns. Berkeley Castle, i. pp. xliv, 6; L.E. Moye, ‘Estates and Finances of the Mowbray Fam.’ (Duke Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 81.

Soon after his marriage, the young Stanley was involved in an episode of disorder that showed that, while his family were the pre-eminent dynasty in the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire, it did not enjoy uncontested dominance. In 1425 there was a major confrontation between our MP and his cousin, Sir Richard Molyneux of Sefton, at Liverpool, where the Stanleys had one of their principal residences. ‘The Tower’ had been built by Sir John Stanley (d.1414) as a base for journeys to the Isle of Man. It was destroyed in 1819: A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, i. 171-2, 173n. Molyneux had been appointed by the Crown as constable of Liverpool castle in February 1421, and it may be that the Stanleys resented his promotion. R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 498. It is, however, at least equally likely that Molyneux, who had been brought up in the wardship of the Stanleys, owed this appointment to their patronage. Certainly, after 1425, he was quickly reconciled to the family, and was able to maintain his position as constable. By 1432 Sir Richard’s son, another Richard, had been contracted to Sir Thomas’s young da., Elizabeth: VCH Lancs. iii. 69.

The confrontation is, in short, a surprising one, the expression of a sudden and short-lived animosity. It is described in a report made by two of the county j.p.s., Ralph Radcliffe*, and James Holt, to William Troutbeck, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. On 27 June 1425, in company with the sheriff, Sir Richard Radcliffe of Winmarleigh, and acting in response to a royal order to suppress rumoured disturbances in Liverpool, they had come there and found Stanley assembled with 2,000 men, waiting to confront Molyneux, who was approaching with 1,000 men of his own. Their report may exaggerate the danger. If it did not, it is curious that they were able, apparently so easily, to forestall the threatened confrontation, with Stanley submitting to detention in the duchy of Lancaster castle at Clitheroe. On the following 10 July the government summoned our MP to Kenilworth and Molyneux to Windsor to account for their actions, but this is the last that is heard of the matter. Lancs. and Cheshire Historical Soc. lxxxv. 82-87.

In any event, this supposed confrontation had no impact on Stanley’s standing. On 16 Sept. 1427, although yet to come into the family estates and only just arrived at his majority, he was elected to Parliament for Lancashire in company with one of the j.p.s. who had intervened in 1425, (Sir) Ralph Radcliffe. J.S. Roskell, Lancs. Knights of the Shire (Chetham Soc. xcvi), 215. This was the prelude to a short period of intense activity in local affairs. On the following 10 Feb., during the assembly’s second session, he joined his neighbour, John Orell, in entering a bond in 300 marks to Eleanor, widow of Sir Hugh Poynings, the recently-deceased son and heir of Thomas, Lord Poynings. Since Orell was the husband of Eleanor’s daughter, Alice, the bond was presumably designed to protect Eleanor’s rights as Sir Hugh’s widow: CCR, 1422-9, p. 389. Interestingly, two of those bound with Stanley – Hugh and William Orell – had attested his election. The Stanleys appear to have acted as patrons to the Orells. Nicholas Orell had served under Sir John Stanley in Ire. in 1389: Bennett, 168n., 218. Later in the same year he offered surety in another context. In December he and his father appeared in the Exchequer at Chester to guarantee that two Cheshire knights, Sir Laurence Fitton of Gawsworth and Sir John Savage of Clifton, would appear before the royal council at Westminster a month later. PPC, iii. 346. Father and son again acted together in June 1429 when they failed to bring to a peaceful end a dispute between Sir Henry Norris of Speke (Lancashire) and a lesser man, Robin ‘of the Bury’. The result was Bury’s murder at the hands of two of Norris’s sons, and a new award made by (Sir) Ralph Radcliffe, imposing heavy financial penalties on Sir Henry and his sons: Cal. Norris Deeds (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. xciii), 11-12. This, however, was to be the last period of our MP’s long career in which he was predominantly concerned with such parochial matters. Thereafter the main focus of his interests moved to France, then to Ireland, and then to the court of Henry VI.

Stanley’s long service to that King began on 18 Feb. 1430, when he indented to serve on the coronation expedition with the modest retinue of two men-at-arms, himself included, and six archers. He crossed to Calais in the last week of April, and soon after he was knighted. E101/70/5/681; E404/46/213. It has been suggested that he was knighted at the coronation of Henry VI in Nov. 1429: Oxf. DNB. If this was so, then it was Thomas Stanley I* who indented for service in France, but in view of what is known of the careers of the two Thomas Stanleys, our MP is the more likely soldier. He was, at all events, a knight when a major promotion came to him on 29 Jan. 1431 with appointment to an office his grandfather had held, the lieutenancy of Ireland. CPR, 1429-36, p. 105. His youth, lack of resources and inexperience made him a strange appointment, and it may be that his father had been the original choice but had been reluctant to act. The office was certainly an unenviable responsibility. The ‘pale’ was under constant pressure from the native Irish, and Irish revenues and the resources the English Exchequer were prepared to devote to the problem were hopelessly inadequate for its easy defence let alone its extension. After the death of Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, in January 1425, the office had proved difficult to fill adequately. The feud between John, Lord Talbot, and James Butler, earl of Ormond, not only complicated resistance to the depredations of the native Irish and Anglo-Norman rebels, but disqualified the two most natural candidates from the lieutenancy. The appointment of both John, Lord Grey of Codnor, and Sir John Sutton, our MP’s two immediate predecessors, had proved short term. A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 106-11; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 162-4.

The government thus turned to Stanley as the best of a number of poor options. No doubt anxious to prove himself, he agreed to serve on terms comparable to those of earlier lieutenants of the Lancastrian period. He indented to serve for six years from the following 12 Apr. with a retinue of 25 men-at-arms and 500 archers, taking 5,000 marks for the first year (4,000 marks from the Exchequer and the other 1,000 marks from Irish revenues), and then 4,000 p.a. for the next five years, to be drawn entirely from Irish revenues although with the ambitious proviso that any shortfall should be made good from England. Yet, almost immediately, his position was undermined. He was a victim of both of the general parsimony of the English government when it came to Irish affairs and the particular crisis in royal finances occasioned by the French war. Although on the day of his appointment he had a writ of privy seal ordering the treasurer to pay him 3,000 marks ‘prestement en main’, he had received nothing when, on 16 Mar., the royal council decided that disbursements for the war in France should take precedence of the payments promised for Stanley in Ireland. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 166; E404/47/161; PPC, iv. 79-80.

The consequent failure of the Exchequer to pay the initial sum due to Stanley led to the redrafting of his terms of service, deferring the beginning of his term to 8 Aug. The new indenture, in its surviving copy, is a curious document in that it is clearly simply a reworking of the terms conceded to an earlier lt., probably Sir John Sutton. In several places the new lt. is described as ‘John’ rather than Thomas: E404/71/3/873. The other possibility, less likely, is that indentures had been drawn up with the idea that his father would take the office. Only then were preparations made for his departure. On 28 June a commission was issued for the arrest of ships along the coast from Bristol to Lancaster for the transportation of Stanley with 700 horses to Ireland, and on the following day Sir Thomas had another writ of privy seal ordering the Exchequer to make urgent payment to him. This brought a much-needed response: he was paid, in cash, over £1,800 for his costs as lieutenant, including 250 marks to cover the transporting of his retinue. This retinue duly mustered at Liverpool in late July and he arrived in Ireland soon after. CPR, 1429-36, pp. 133, 153; E404/47/328; E403/698, m. 7. Stanley soon discovered that the cash he had received shortly before his departure would not, in the short term at least, be replenished. The Irish revenues were minimal, capable of sustaining only a very small fraction of the 4,000 marks p.a. assigned upon them for his support. Indeed, from Michaelmas 1432 to Easter 1437 he received only a paltry £518 from them. E. Matthew, ‘Financing of the Ldship. of Ire.’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 111n. In compensation, the English Exchequer offered him inadequate assignments that proved difficult to cash. In the first two years of his term from May 1431 he was assigned just £888, and it was probably because he was starved of money that he returned to England late in 1432 or early in 1433. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 121; A.J. Otway-Ruthen, Med. Ire. (2nd edn.), 369. He is likely to have been at home by 8 Feb. 1433, when he stood surety on the appointment of Thomas Lathom as escheator of Lancs.: Somerville, i. 466. His election to Parliament on the following 24 June, at hustings attended by his father and uncle, Sir William Haryngton, may have been connected with his efforts to secure payment of the moneys due to him. Roskell, 218. If so, he met with only very partial success. Two day after his election he personally appeared in the Exchequer to receive assignment of £810. Later, on 10 Feb. 1434, about two months after the end of the assembly, the royal council agreed that the treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, should make further assignment of all that was due to him, but even then scope was left for the exercise of the treasurer’s discretion. None the less, Stanley had made some progress, for on 24 Feb., after remitting to the King 500 marks, he had a further assignment of £3,000. PPC, iv. 198-9; E404/50/154, 170; E403/709, m. 8; 712, m. 10.

It is possible that Stanley was back in Ireland by this date, but it is equally likely that this large assignment was made to encourage him to resume his duties. Against this difficult background, he achieved one victory during his second residence in Ireland: in September 1434 he captured the native Irish chieftain, Niall Garbh O’Domhnaill, and despatched him to custody on the Isle of Man. This was, however, an isolated success as the financial pressures upon him were quickly resumed. For example, of the 1,000 marks due to him from Irish revenues for Easter 1434 nothing was collected, and when on the following 26 Oct. the Exchequer was ordered to make good this shortfall, it issued him assignments amounting to only about £220. Indeed, it may be that that was too little even to maintain the English position. He returned to England late in 1435 bearing a report of the Irish council giving a gloomy picture and a gloomier prognosis. ‘The pale’ was said to have shrunk to little more than 30 miles in length and 20 miles in breadth, and a lieutenant was required ‘suche as the peple woll drede and be aferd of … and to be here before the begynyng of this somyr, or else the saide lande is like to be fynaly destrued’. E404/51/114; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 166-7; Otway-Ruthven, 369-70. This could be taken as an implied criticism of Stanley as lieutenant, but it is better read as a plea to the English government to give Irish affairs a higher priority and recognition on Stanley’s part that he had neither the standing nor the resources to achieve more.

In April 1436 Stanley was still in England, receiving at Liverpool an emissary from John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and it is probable that he did not return to Ireland. He was, in any event, still in England on the following 6 June when he appeared in person in the Exchequer to receive to an assignment in 1,000 marks. Pollard, 73-74; E403/723, m. 6.

A few months later his attention was engaged by a major incident in the affairs of his native county. On 23 July 1436 his first cousin, Isabel, widow of (Sir) John Boteler I*, was ‘moste horribely rauysshed’ at her home at Bewsey and then, ‘naked except hir kirtyll and hir smokke’, carried ‘into the wild and desolate places of Wales’ by a gentleman of Wirrall, William Pulle. So grievous an offence against so important a widow brought a quick response. On 25 Oct. Stanley was named to a very powerful commission for the arrest of Pulle and his adherents and for the safekeeping of the wronged woman. E28/82, 26 Oct. 1436; CPR, 1436-41, p. 83. He duly found his cousin at Birkenhead and put her in safe custody at Chester. Yet, curiously, although he acted to protect her, it was he who posted surety for the appearance in Chancery of three of those allegedly involved in her abduction. On 27 Mar. 1437, the last day of the Parliament in which Isabel had presented a petition against her abductors, he joined Sir Thomas Rempston† in a recognizance of 500 marks that Thomas Pulle and two others would appear in Chancery in the following month. PROME, xi. 206; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 114-15, 121, 162.

By the time Stanley’s term as lieutenant of Ireland formally ended in April 1437, his career had already moved into new channels. Despite his difficulties in securing the payments due to him while lt., it appears that eventually he was able to secure nearly all that was owed. He received some 65% of his salary in office and a further 22% in arrears thereafter: Matthew, 103. The process, however, was a slow one, for he was still receiving assignments as late as Dec. 1446: E403/765, m. 9. His father not die until the end of that year, but, as his intervention in the Boteler affair implies, he had already assumed the headship of the family even while his father lived. He did so at the same time as Henry VI’s assumption of the reins of power led to a wholesale distribution of royal patronage, and, like his grandfather before him, he had the energy and ambition to make the most of favourable circumstances. A series of royal grants to Stanley began even before he had inherited the family patrimony. The first, made on on 28 Feb. 1437, was a very significant one, enhancing his family’s local pre-eminence and providing him with a considerable landed endowment as he waited to inherit his patrimony. The Crown leased to him, for the term of 12 years, the castles and lordships of Hawarden (Cheshire) and nearby Mold (Flint), once the principal lands of the Mohauts, hereditary stewards of Cheshire, together with the manor, lordship and hundred of Macclesfield, which had come back into the King’s hands on the death of Queen Katherine at the beginning of the year. The initial rent was agreed at a total of £150 p.a., and even though it almost immediately increased to over £180 p.a., the grant was a profitable one. CHES2/109, rots. 2, 10d; CFR, xvi. 322, 362-3. In 1376 Macclesfield alone had been valued at £170 p.a.: P.H.W. Booth, Financial Admin. Ldship. of Chester (Chetham Soc. ser. 3, xxviii), 160. But just as important as this favourable lease of valuable lordships were the grants of local office that came to him in quick succession. On 6 Dec. 1437, only a few days after his father’s death, he was appointed for life to the constableship of Chester castle on the surrender of John Hampton II*; in February 1439 he joined the treasurer, Lord Cromwell, in the offices, once held by his father, of steward, master forester, surveyor and equitator of the royal forests of Macclesfield, Delamere and Mondrem; and on the following 26 Apr. he was nominated to the chamberlainship of North Wales in succession to the King’s carver, Sir William Beauchamp*. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 128, 286; CHES2/110, rot. 3d; 111, m. 3.

This concentration of local office in Stanley’s hands was combined with advancement of another sort, for, like his grandfather, he also made a career at the royal court. To whose patronage he owed his advancement there is not known, but he was certainly on friendly terms with Cromwell and may already have established a connexion with William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, who had been steward of the Household since 1433. However this may be, by 26 Apr. 1439 he had replaced John Feriby* as controller of the royal household. His appointment was one of several changes contingent upon the King’s assumption of government, and it may be that this combination of promotion at both court and in his own locality was part of a wider royal policy of creating a series of local hegemonies for leading courtiers. Stanley was the obvious candidate to assume that role in the strategically significant north-west. CPR, 1436-41, p. 286; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 302.

Stanley was thus a figure of considerable standing when he resumed his career in the Commons in the Parliament of November 1439. There he was faced with a minor challenge to his family’s recent conduct. Otwell Worsley, a servant of Cardinal Beaufort, presented a petition to the King in Parliament claiming that he was heir in tail to a large Cheshire estate, centred on the manor of Stockport, but that he was being kept out by Sir Laurence Warren, formerly captain of Coutances. Warren, or so Worsley claimed, had made lavish gifts to powerful figures in the county for their maintenance of his title, and principal among them were the Stanleys. He had supposedly promised our MP’s father the marriage of his heir or £1,000 and given our MP the lordship of Etchells (Cheshire), extravagantly valued in the petition at 100 marks p.a. SC8/150/7495-6. This complaint, however, did nothing to arrest Stanley’s continued rise. On 12 Feb. 1440, a few days before the end of the Parliament, he was granted the keeping of the third of the manors of Hawarden and Mold that remained out of his hands. They had been held by Margaret, duchess of Clarence, until her death on the previous 30 Dec., and Stanley was now to hold them for ten years at a rent of about £30 p.a. On 23 Feb. the earl of Suffolk, who, four days before, had been named as the royal justice of Chester, named Sir Thomas as one of his deputies in the office. CFR, xvii. 131; CHES2/113, m. 6.

Other less significant grants followed as Stanley steadily engrossed into his own hands nearly every royal office, many of them minor, in the north-west. On 9 May he was appointed to a vacant post as gauger of all ports in North Wales and Cheshire, but more often his appointment diminished the interest of an existing grantee. Between December 1441 and August 1442 he joined John Parker and James Harbrowne in the parkerships of Ightenhill and Toxteth respectively and Thomas Lathom in the escheatorship of Lancashire. When the grantee was a more influential figure he took a grant in reversion: in December 1441 he was given a reversionary interest, expectant on the death of Thomas Urswyk I*, in the master forestership of Amounderness. CPR, 1436-41, p. 398; CHES2/113, m. 4; DL37/8/26, 27, 48. The rewards of office were supplemented by financial ones. In February 1441 the rent he paid for the lordships of Mold and Hawarden was diminished when the annuity of £40 that the elderly knight of the body, Sir Roland Lenthall, took from the issues of Risborough (Buckinghamshire) was charged upon Mold and Hawarden and jointly granted to our MP and Lenthall. CHES2/114, m. 4d; CPR, 1436-41, p. 513.

Stanley’s growing status at court is reflected in the important charge placed upon him in January 1442, namely that of the custody of Eleanor Cobham, the disgraced wife of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. On 22 Jan. he received her person at Westminster with instructions to convey her to Cheshire, and it may be more than coincidental that on the same day he was rewarded with the extension, from life to tail-male, of his interest in the valuable stewardship of Macclesfield. By 10 Feb. he had brought her to Chester, a journey that meant he missed the first part of the Parliament to which he had been elected on the previous 15 Jan. Eleanor was confined in the castle there, where Stanley was constable, until October 1443 when she was transferred to Kenilworth castle and the custody of its constable, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley. Griffiths, King and Country, 247-9; CHES2/115, rot. 4d. The loss of this responsibility, however, was not a judgement on Stanley’s performance, for it coincided with an advance in the family’s material fortunes almost as significant as the grant of the Isle of Man to his grandfather in 1406. On 15 Oct. his lease in the lordships of Hawarden and Mold was extended to an interest in tail-male to be held at no rent, a striking instance of the young King’s reckless generosity. CPR, 1446-52, p. 539; CHES2/117, rot. 5d. When these two lordships had been granted to Henry IV’s younger son, Thomas, duke of Clarence, in 1412, a limit of 400 marks p.a. had been placed on the value of the grant, and, while the 400 marks was an ambitious valuation, it is still noteworthy that the King was ready to alienate, potentially permanently, these valuable lordships (although the possibility cannot be ruled out that Stanley made some compensatory payment to the Crown). CPR, 1408-13, p. 407.

More offices soon followed. On 10 Nov. 1443 the elderly Thomas Urswyk surrendered in his favour the master forestership of Amounderness, of which Stanley already had the reversion, together with the receivership of the duchy of Lancashire lands in Lancashire and Cheshire and the office of baron of the exchequer at Lancaster. Somerville, i. 485, 494; DL37/11, nos. 6, 7, 11. More importantly, three weeks later, the earl of Suffolk took what has been described as ‘a unique step in fifteenth-century Wales’ in surrendering a sole interest in the justiceship of Cheshire, Flint and North Wales in return for a joint one, associating Stanley with him in the office. Griffiths, King and Country, 175; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 74, 226; CHES2/117, rot. 5d. This suggests that Sir Thomas was developing an increasingly close relationship with the King’s chief minister and gives added significance to the earlier evidence of his involvement in Suffolk’s private affairs. In 1441 he had acted as a feoffee for the earl in the purchase of a manor and in 1442 as a surety when the earl was granted a royal wardship. CAD, iii. D547; CPR, 1441-6, p. 66. If the two men were friends, it would explain why the earl was ready effectively to surrender to him so important an office. Soon after they acted together in a matter of central concern to the dynasty they both served. On 13 Nov. 1444 they departed for France in the great embassy that was to bring Henry VI’s bride, Margaret of Anjou, to England. B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 180-2; Add. 23938, f. 13. Stanley did not return until 9 Apr. 1445, and this explains why he was not elected to the Parliament which had been summoned in his absence. Yet his influence was indirectly felt on the hustings, for Lancashire’s two MPs – Peter Gerard* and Henry Keighley* – were both closely connected with him.

If, however, Stanley was on close terms with Suffolk, and also with the King’s friend, Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, who in about 1445 granted him an annuity of £20, CIPM, xxvi. 457 (p. 279). he was in dispute with another leading peer. The valuable manor of Bosley, a few miles from Macclesfield, had once, like the lordships of Hawarden and Mold, been part of the Mohaut estate, and it is understandable that he should have coveted the property. The manor had been valued at more than £40 p.a. in 1400: G. Ormerod, Palatine and City of Chester ed. Helsby, iii (2), 737. So too, however, did a yet more powerful man, Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford (and from 1444 duke of Buckingham), and the two men fell into a dispute that occupied much time at the Chester assizes in the mid 1440s. Stanley claimed as the grantee under a royal grant of 8 Feb. 1443 after the Crown had, contentiously, seized the manor for unlicensed alienations; Stafford’s title was as purchaser from one of the illegitimate sons of the clerk, John Macclesfield (d.1422), keeper of the great wardrobe in the late 1390s. On 13 Dec. 1443, perhaps taking advantage of his recent elevation to the justiceship, Stanley brought an assize of novel disseisin against the earl for the manor and then appeared to pursue the action in person a month later. Ormerod, iii (2), 737-8; CHES29/149, rot. 16. Thereafter the matter was delayed, in part because of Stanley’s absence abroad, and it was not resolved until the first days of June 1446 on terms that were by no means favourable to him. He acknowledged Stafford’s claim as purchaser from the Macclesfield family; in return, Stafford sold the manor to him and his issue for 1,000 marks saving the reversion to himself and his heirs. CHES2/119, rot. 3; CHES29/151, rot. 24; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 48, 157-8.

Stanley’s apparent defeat in his dispute over Bosley was a rare setback. He continued to add to his influence on his return from France. In the summer of 1446 the King reaffirmed his trust in him by returning Eleanor Cobham to his custody for confinement on the Isle of Man, and soon after Stanley took his part in the discreditable events that led to the death of her husband, Gloucester. Elected to the Parliament which met at Bury St. Edmunds on 10 Feb. 1447, he played a prominent part in the duke’s arrest. According to one account, it was he and the treasurer of the royal household, (Sir) John Stourton II*, who, riding to meet the duke as he approached Bury St. Edmunds on 18 Feb., persuaded him to go to his lodgings rather than directly to the King. Later that day other peers went to arrest the duke, and it must be presumed that Stanley and Stourton intercepted him to discourage the King’s personal intervention on his behalf. PPC, vi. 51; Griffiths, King and Country, 249; Roskell, 221-2; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 496-7; J. Watts, Hen. VI and the Politics of Kingship, 230. Stanley continued to be involved in Gloucester’s affairs after the duke’s death. On 24 Mar., three weeks after the end of the Parliament, he and (Sir) James Fiennes*, Lord Saye, were named by the Crown alongside two court clerics, Masters John Somerset* and Richard Chestre, to dispose of the late duke’s goods. On the following 8 July he was one of those royal commissioners, headed by Suffolk, before whom Gloucester’s servants were indicted at Deptford in Kent. CPR, 1446-52, p. 45; E159/223, brevia Easter rot. 1; KB9/255/2/21; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 498; Watts, 231n.

Stanley’s involvement in the duke’s fall brought him further reward. On 25 Feb. 1447 he had the modest grant of the advowson of the Lancashire church of Eccleston to hold in fee. Much more significantly, on 1 Mar., two days before the end of the Parliament, the reversion of the chief stewardship of the south parts of the duchy of Lancaster, expectant on the death of Sir Roger Fiennes*, was jointly committed to him and Suffolk. At the end of the year the two men were joined together in a related office, the chief stewardship of the duchy lands put in feoffment by the Crown. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 43, 123; DL37/15/11. Yet, interestingly, Stanley seems to have lost out in respect of another office, suggesting that the competition for what had once been the duke’s was intense in the months after his death. In 1456 he sued for exemption from the terms of an Act of Resumption in respect of an annuity of 100 marks, ‘which was graunted be cause of leuyng of the office of constable of Dovorre as parcel of his recompence of the same’. No other record of this grant has been traced, but there is every reason to suppose that it was made shortly after the duke’s death. On 24 Feb. Lord Saye was named as the duke’s successor in the constableship, an office to which our MP had presumably aspired and for which he was compensated when Fiennes, a more natural appointee, was preferred. C49/63/25.

A different sort of competition surrounded another lesser grant made to Stanley at this date. He and two of his servants were appointed to the office of bailiff of the Cheshire hundred of Eddisbury, but the appointment was not what it appeared. A later dispute shows that it was made, on the initiative of John Troutbeck* as chamberlain of Chester, not, as appears by the enrolment, on 12 Oct. 1445, but at some date soon after 1 June 1448, when the office was granted to Thomas Daniell*. This, according to a later complaint, was an expression of Troutbeck’s malice towards Daniell. CHES2/119, rot. 6; E404/69/97. Troutbeck and our MP were on close terms: Stanley’s daughter Margaret had married Troutbeck’s son and heir, William, probably in the autumn of 1445. Cheshire and Chester Archs., Troutbeck and Talbot mss, DDX 178/22. But there is no evidence that Stanley shared his friend’s hostility to Daniell, and it must be assumed that Troutbeck was acting on his own initiative.

By end of the 1440s Stanley numbered among the small governing circle with Suffolk at its head. He was one of the influential figures to whom Queen Margaret distributed New Year’s gifts in 1448 and was added to the royal council in the same year. On 22 Jan. 1449 he was given the privilege of hunting in royal forests taking eight deer each year; and in the following July, at the end of a Parliament in which he had again represented Lancashire, he was commissioned to negotiate with the Scots. A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 212; R. Virgoe, ‘Composition of the King’s Council’, Bull. IHR, xliii. 158n.; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 213, 220; Roskell, 223; Rot. Scot. ii. 334. All this, however, proved to be the calm before the storm. In 1450 and 1451 Stanley was profoundly affected by a series of crises in national affairs. The first began when Parliament met on 6 Nov. 1449 in an atmosphere of mounting crisis as the English position in northern France collapsed. During the second session, which convened on 22 Jan., Stanley, himself sitting in the Commons, must have viewed with dismay the determination of his fellow MPs to bring Suffolk down. This forced Henry VI to pronounce a sentence of banishment against Suffolk, who was then murdered on 2 May as he made his way into exile. A parody of a funeral mass, written soon after this, portrays Stanley among those participating in the duke’s exequies, and it is clear that, in the public mind, he was closely associated with the duke’s unpopular regime. Political Poems and Songs ed. Wright, ii. 234.

The attack on Suffolk was not the only threat the Commons posed to the court clique, for they were also determined to undo the effects of the King’s wanton generosity by resuming all the grants he had made since his accession. An Act of Resumption was eventually passed in Parliament’s final session, which met at Leicester from 29 Apr. to 7 June, and yet Stanley and other leading courtiers were able, in large part, to escape its operation. They secured from the King provisos of exemption in respect of the bulk of their grants. For Stanley it meant that he gave up grants worth £40 p.a. while retaining others assigned a notional annual value of £176 13s. 4d. PROME, xii. 121; E163/8/14. Further, in another way he and other coutiers seem to have turned the resumption to their advantage, by acquiring what others had lost. On 13 May the lawyer Thomas Denys noted in a letter to John Paston* that Stanley ‘hath a bille redy endossed’ in respect of the stewardship of the duchy lands north (the correspondent mistakenly implied ‘south’) of the Trent should that office, which Sir Thomas Tuddenham* held, be resumed. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 38. This office he did not secure, although from 20 May he benefited, albeit only for a year, from a lease, to be held jointly with Hugh atte Fenne*, of the lordship of Swaffham (Norfolk), which Tuddenham had farmed from the duke of Suffolk. CFR, xviii. 155, 174-5, 225-6; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 272. He was also given another important responsibility at about this time. On 31 Mar. 1450 the duke of Buckingham surrendered the captaincy of Calais, and two days later, as an interim measure, his responsibilities devolved on a committee of six, including our MP (although effective command devolved on only two of then, namely Stourton and Sudeley, as lieutenant of Calais and captain of Calais castle respectively). Harriss, 31.

The next crisis was the rebellion of Jack Cade which broke out in Kent just as the third and final session of Parliament was coming to an end. Stanley was one of the lords who accompanied the King to London on 13 June and then brutally pursued the retreating rebels. Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 131. At inqs. held in Kent between 21 Aug. and 20 Oct. 1450, he was, along with other senior Household men, indicted for offences committed in the course of this pursuit: R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Soc. xviii), 224-5, 232, 243. This had the opposite of the desired effect. The flames of rebellion were fanned and Cade returned, in greater strength, entering Southwark on 2 July. The King retreated to the safety of Kenilworth, and Stanley also went north. On 1 July he and his cousin, (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I*, were commissioned to raise the levies of Cheshire and Lancashire, and they were presumably engaged in that task when the rebels were defeated. PPC, vi. 95-96. Stanley had reason to be satisfied that he had surmounted a storm that had claimed the lives of Suffolk and Saye. Yet his difficulties were not over. As a leading household official and a regional magnate in the north-west, it naturally fell to him to respond to the duke of York’s landing there from Ireland in September 1450. If York’s complaint to the King is to be accepted literally, Stanley was at the head of a group of household men who put up a hostile resistance to that landing. How extensive that resistance was must remain questionable. It seems not, later on, to have compromised relations between him and York, and it may be that York’s interpretation of Stanley’s actions owed more to the mutual suspicions existing on both sides than any violent confrontation. Griffiths, King and Country, 265-76.

None the less, the new political climate in the wake of York’s return was distinctly unfavourable to Stanley. On 17 Oct. a rising Shropshire lawyer, William Lacon I*, was appointed ‘for this turn’ to act as justice in North Wales on the grounds that Stanley was too much busied elsewhere. This was clearly a pretext as Stanley would ordinarily have named his own deputy, and since Lacon had no earlier or later connexion with him there is no reason to suppose that he was Stanley’s choice. It looks, in short, that he was being temporarily replaced. CPR, 1446-52, p. 403; Griffiths, ‘Richard, duke of York, and the Crisis of Hen. VI’s Household, 1450-1’, Jnl. Med. Hist. xxxviii. 251. Further, it may also be that steps were taken, albeit unsuccessful ones, to prevent him taking his customary parliamentary seat. The Lancashire election was not held until 17 days after Parliament had convened, even though there was as long as two months between summons and meeting. Even on the six-week county court cycle that prevailed in Lancashire and often delayed elections there, there should have been time to hold a timely election. Roskell, 224. In any event, even though Stanley did take his customary seat, election did not protect him from further losses. In a bill presented during the first session, his fellow Commons included his name among the 29 they accused of ‘mysbehavyng’ about the King and by ‘undue meanes’ diminishing the King’s possessions. They asked that he and the others be removed from the royal presence. PROME, xii. 184-6; A. Curry, ‘Introduction to 1450 Parl.’, PROME, xii. 165. This demand the King eventually rejected but it may have been in the spirit of concession that, soon after Christmas, he removed Stanley from the controllership of his household. E101/410/6, f. 39. Later, on consecutive days in April 1451, Sir Thomas lost two more important offices. He was replaced as chamberlain of North Wales by the King’s carver, Sir William Beauchamp, now Lord St. Amand, whom he himself had replaced in 1439; and the chief stewardship of the south parts of the duchy of Lancaster, which had fallen to him and Suffolk in reversion on the death of Sir Roger Fiennes in November 1449, was now granted to Lord Cromwell for life. CPR, 1446-52, p. 419; Somerville, i. 428. No doubt his loss of both offices was related to the new more comprehensive Act of Resumption passed in March 1451, but there may be significance in his failure to secure new grants to himself.

Even, however, against this unpromising background, it would be wrong to see Stanley as now compromised beyond the hope of easy recovery. His opposition to York’s landing may have made him the duke’s enemy, but their relationship was later repaired. Further, although he had been removed as controller, his successor was his cousin and close associate, Sir Richard Haryngton*, and, more significantly, he seems to have so energetically resisted his replacement as chamberlain of North Wales that the office was soon his again. A ‘Remembrance’ from the Exchequer official, Thomas Brown II*, to Beauchamp relates to this resistance. It advocated that a writ under the privy seal be directed to Stanley, who ‘dredes no commaundement of the Kyng’, ordering him to deliver up the King’s seal and all records pertaining to the exchequer at Caernarvon. He urged Beauchamp to emphasize to the chancellor the damaging local consequence of Stanley’s open disobedience as it encouraged others to disregard royal writs. He also advised that, if a commission could be secured to inquire into the behaviour of Stanley’s servant, Henry Norris, it should be made out to a baron of the Exchequer, ‘that loves my lord’, presumably because any local inquiry would favour our MP. Surr. Hist. Centre, Loseley Park mss, 6729/7/143 (printed in Griffiths, ‘Richard, duke of York, and the Crisis of Hen. VI’s Household’, 255-6). Norris had been Beauchamp’s under chamberlain as early as in 1437, when Stanley had offered surety that he would discharge Beauchamp of any moneys he received in that office: CCR, 1435-41, p. 120. He had presumably continued to serve when Stanley took the office. No doubt this was good advice, but Beauchamp decided instead to relinquish the office, for Stanley was certainly again chamberlain in February 1452. E404/68/94.

Stanley also took other measures to strengthen his position. His difficulties in 1450-1 may have impressed upon him the desirability of acquiring new political allies, and this was probably the context for the ambitious marriage he contracted for his son and heir, Thomas, the future earl of Derby. On 3 July 1451 the abbot of Jervaulx and the rector of Middleham (Yorkshire) had archiepiscopal licence to solemnize the younger Thomas’s marriage to Eleanor, daughter of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, in the chapel of the Neville castle at Middleham. E135/24/74. The Nevilles might prove valuable allies for Stanley in struggles to come, and so it was to transpire, albeit at the price of straining his family’s established Lancastrian affiliations. Soon after this match was made Stanley recovered his political fortunes. His exile from the benefits of royal patronage proved to be only brief, and he was soon able to continue the process of engrossing into his own hands the Crown’s local patronage in the north-west. Not only did he recover the chamberlainship of North Wales, but local resistance and legal doubts about the validity of the Act of Resumption in a county unrepresented in Parliament meant that his existing Cheshire grants, with the important exception of that of Mold and Hawarden, went unresumed. He now added others, such as the farm of the fishery of the ‘King’s Pool’ in the water of the Dee near Chester and the keeping of the duchy of Lancaster manor in the park of Ightenhill. D.J. Clayton, Admin. County Palatine of Chester, 147; T. Thornton, ‘A Defence of the Liberties of Cheshire’, Historical Research, lxviii. 338-54; CHES2/124, rots. 2d, 4; DL37/21/13; 53/104. Much more importantly, in June 1452 he joined Cromwell in the chief stewardship of the south parts of the duchy, a compensation for the sole interest in that office he had lost by resumption. Somerville, i. 428; DL37/20/12. His eldest son also began to be drawn into the circle of the King’s servants. On 27 May 1453 the newly-married Thomas was granted the office of forester and keeper of the duchy chase of Hoddlesden (Lancashire) for life, and by November 1454 he had a place in the royal household. DL37/21/15; PPC, vi. 223. To be set against these gains is an apparent minor setback. On 20 May 1452 John Talbot, Viscount Lisle, had been granted the reversion of justiceship of Cheshire, an important office in which Stanley might have legitimately hoped that his son would succeed him, and it may be that our MP was given the chief stewardship as compensation. CHES2/124, rot. 1d.

Stanley took advantage of his return to prominence by instigating a very important private transaction with the support of the Nevilles. He turned the resumption of Mold and Hawarden into royal hands to his advantage. As royal grantee his title had been threatened not only by resumption but also by the existence of a rival title. In 1337 these lordships had been granted by Edward III to William Montagu, earl of Salisbury, in fee, and under that grant a claim descended to Alice Montagu, the mother of Stanley’s daughter-in-law. CChR, iv. 431-2. Now that the lordships were again in royal hands and his family were allied with the Nevilles, Stanley embarked on a complicated series of transactions that was designed to make the Montagu title his own. He may have concocted and abandoned a similar scheme in the mid 1440s. In 1445 Thomas Glegge of Gayton (Cheshire) had licence to sue Stanley for Hawarden and Mold as heir of Robert, Lord Mohaut (d.1329), who had sold the lordships to the Crown in 1327. The claim was an entirely spurious one, and it may be that Stanley’s plan was to allow Glegge to recover the lordships on this false title and take as his grantee, thereby defeating the Montagu title: CHES2/118, rot. 7; Ormerod, ii (2), 517. He resorted to a legal sleight of hand, claiming that on the forfeiture of John Montagu, earl of Salisbury (d.1400), the two lordships had been in the hands of feoffees who, although enfeoffed by John, were not seised to his use; and that therefore the lordships should not have been forfeit. Title under that feoffment had descended to John Hertcombe as the nephew and heir of the last surviving feoffee, and Stanley’s plan was for Hertcombe to sue the Crown for the lordships and then convey them to him. This process began with the issue of a royal commission on 16 May 1452 for an inquiry into Hertcombe’s title to Mold; and was completed by two final concords levied in the court of Cheshire in 1454. Significantly, however, the plan could not have been completed without the co-operation of the Nevilles. That co-operation is apparent in the identity of those to whom Hertcombe conveyed after establishing his title by a royal inquiry held on 10 Jan. 1453. They were Sir James Strangeways*, Robert Danby, j.c.p., John Needham*, serjeant-at-law, and Richard Carlisle*, the first two of whom were Neville representatives, and it was these four who completed the resettlement. They alienated the lordships to the earl of Salisbury and Alice; and then, by a final concord levied in December 1454, the Nevilles settled the lordships on our MP in tail-male saving the reversion to themselves and Alice’s heirs. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 538-9; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 494-5; CHES31/33, 32 Hen. VI, 4; 33 Hen. VI, 4. Although proof is lacking, it is highly probable that this co-operation was part of the price of the marriage made in 1451, perhaps standing in place of a portion. M. Hicks, Warwick, 25. It is possible that this arrangement between Stanley and Neville was mediated through Thomas Haryngton, friend and cousin of our MP and valued retainer of Neville.

The recovery of the court’s fortunes after the fall of Suffolk came to an end with the King’s descent into madness in August 1453, but Stanley found it easy to adapt to the new political dispensation. He had suffered in the crisis of 1450-1 perhaps because of his personal ties with Suffolk, but he had no such links with the duke of York’s enemy, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who had replaced Suffolk at the head of the court. Further, with his new connexion with the Nevilles and their recent alliance with the duke of York, he could hope for continued prosperity. Thus, when York assumed the protectorate on 3 Apr. 1454, Stanley and John Say II* were the only two commoners named to serve under York on the royal council. Griffiths, King and Country, 314, 319. He soon proved his worth to the new Protector. On 16 May the Council, realizing that a rebellion formented by Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, and Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, was spreading from Yorkshire into Lancashire, ordered him and his cousin (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I to suppress any attempted uprising ‘in the contree where as ye be’. His son, Salisbury’s son-in-law, then dispersed those who had gathered to support Exeter and made representations to Exeter himself that he should withdraw from Lancashire. When further rebels assembled at Wingates, near Bolton, to await Egremont’s assistance, the son and Haryngton defeated them. DL37/23/26; 24/29; PPC, vi. 130, 186. Somerville mistakenly says it was our MP rather than his son who dispersed the rebels: Somerville, i. 227.

Comfortably established under York as Protector, Stanley may have found his loyalties confused when a new crisis was provoked by the King’s recovery and the return of York’s enemy, the duke of Somerset, to power. This drove the Yorkist lords into a defiance that resulted in the first battle of St. Albans on 22 May 1455. Stanley, seemingly travelling in company with John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and Cromwell, arrived too late to fight at that battle. All three had their own reasons to view the confrontation ambiguously, and their tardiness may therefore have been considered rather than accidental. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 155; Pollard, 73-74. In Stanley’s case, he must have been torn between the loyalty he owed to Henry VI, under whom he had for the most part prospered, and his new family ties with the Yorkist Nevilles. In the event, the Yorkist victory brought him some immediate benefits as the new regime sought to win his unequivocal allegiance. He received two singular marks of favour. He succeeded his old associate, Cromwell, as chamberlain of the royal household, seemingly by 6 Aug. 1455, and, presumably in relation to the dignity of his new position, he was elevated at some date before 15 Jan. 1456 (the beginning of the third session of the Parliament of 1455-6), to the peerage. Pollard, 75n.; CCR, 1454-61, p. 130. It was as both peer and chamberlain that he petitioned for a limited exemption to the Act of Resumption passed during a Parl. in which he sat in both Commons and Lords. He had a proviso of exemption in respect of the master forestership and ridership of Macclesfield, Delamere and Mondrem: PROME, xii. 408; SC8/28/1365.

Given his antecedents, it is striking that the duke of York should have placed so much trust in Stanley. This has been explained in terms of his standing in the north-west, an influence that made it likely that any regime, to which he had shown himself not implacably opposed, would work to win his support. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 310. Yet this hardly explains why he gained so much in this period of apparent Yorkist domination. Either the duke’s control of government was less complete that it appeared and he had to accept certain promotions he would rather not have done, or else, much more probably, the duke believed that Stanley’s new connexions with the Nevilles would make him a Yorkist partisan. The end of York’s second protectorate, at about the time that Stanley took his place in the Lords, raised questions of loyalty for him more acute than those that had faced him at the time of the battle of St. Albans. He had reason to fear that his connexion with the Nevilles, his equivocal conduct at the battle and his promotion under York had compromised him in the eyes of his erstwhile political allies. And yet he again proved himself adaptable. He continued to benefit from royal patronage, and although none of the grants that came his way were particularly significant, cumulatively they imply that he remained in favour. On 24 Mar. 1456 his eldest son was named as joint chamberlain of Middlewich (Cheshire). On the following 1 July he himself was re-granted the keeping of Queen Margaret’s parks of Barton and Shireholt in the chase of Needwood (the date of the original grant is unknown); and two days later the town of Harrow (Middlesex) was assigned for his ‘livery’ as King’s chamberlain whenever the King should be at London, Westminster or Kennington (an increasingly rare eventuality with the court now generally at Kenilworth and elsewhere in the Midlands). CHES2/129, m. 1; DL37/24/6; CPR, 1452-61, p. 290. Further, on 3 Mar. 1457, the Exchequer was ordered to discharge him of all debts due from him as royal custodian of Hawarden and Mold (that is before he had established his own title to these valuable properties): E159/233, brevia Easter rot. 1. He also received two grants in association with other senior servants of the royal household. On 7 June 1457 he shared with Sir Richard Tunstall† a grant of the next but one collation of a canonry and prebend in the free chapel of St. Stephen within Westminster palace; and on 24 Aug. 1458 he was granted with Thomas Staunton*, one of the ushers of the Chamber, the next presentation to the church of Eccleston (Lancashire), presumably because his earlier grant of the advowson had been resumed. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 352, 435.

The impression created by this string of grants is strongly confirmed by Stanley’s nomination to the formal council appointed for the tutelage of the young prince of Wales on 27 Jan. 1457 and his installation to the Order of the Garter on the following 14 May. CPR, 1452-61, p. 359; H.E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou, 133-4; G.F. Beltz, Mems. Order of the Garter, p. clxi. Such honours are difficult to reconcile with doubts about his loyalty to Lancaster, as too is his appearance, on 2 Apr. 1457, among the five courtier magnates, headed by Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, who came to Hereford to take indictments in respect of the Yorkist insurrection led by (Sir) Walter Devereux I* and Sir William Herbert*. KB27/784, rex rot. 7. In these years another important matter, aside from the rising political tensions in England, engaged Stanley’s attention. The details are obscure but it seems that James II of Scotland, anxious to profit from these tensions, reasserted the Scottish claim to the Isle of Man by sending a raiding party there. In response, Stanley sent his son Thomas, at the head of some 500 men, on a mission of revenge, which resulted in the burning of Kirkcudbright, the port on the coast of Dumfries from which the Scottish raiders had embarked. When these events occurred is not precisely clear, but the Scottish raid may date from May 1456 (when James repudiated the truce), and Stanley’s retaliation to the following year. A.I. Dunlop, James Kennedy, Bp. of St. Andrews, 202. They provide a context for the petition presented to the Pope by Stanley shortly before 20 Jan. 1459. He successfully asked that, as a deterrent to further violence, a sentence of suspended excommunication should be promulgated against both those who would invade the island and those inhabitants of the island who would seek to invade neighbouring parts. CPL, xi. 379-82. This implies that hostility persisted between the Scots and the Manx, and that Stanley was anxious to end its active manifestations.

Stanley’s involvement in national affairs over a period of nearly 30 years is only one narrative of his career. He also maintained an important local role as much more than the passive recipient of the Crown’s patronage in Cheshire and Lancashire. Throughout his career he was very active in arbitrating disputes and maintaining local order. In 1446, for example, he returned an award in a dispute between Abbot Thomas Kirkham of Vale Royal and Ranulph Weaver, whose family had been implicated in the murder of the previous abbot in 1437, and in 1448 he intervened to bring peace between the abbot and Hugh Venables of Kinderton, imprisoning the latter for his intransigence. VCH Cheshire, iii. 161; Clayton, 149; Ledger Bk. of Vale Royal Abbey ed. Brownbill, 171-5. Later, in the early 1450s he acted with (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I to end the long-standing property dispute between the Houghtons of Leagram and the Talbots of Balsall. Add. 32108, ff. 60-61v; VCH Lancs. vi. 254. More unusually, he is also found on one important occasion acting in defence of local liberties against the Crown. In accordance with the subsidy voted by the Parliament of November 1449 (of which he was a Member), commissions had been issued in May 1450 for the levy of the subsidy in Cheshire, a contravention of the county’s ancient exemption from parliamentary taxation. Accordingly, Stanley and many others, as the ‘commonalty’ of the shire, drew up a successful petition for confirmation of this exemption. Archaeologia, lvii. 75-78; Thornton, 338.

There is nothing in the story of the last years of Stanley’s life to show that he had, in any way, been seduced from his Lancastrian allegiance by his son’s Neville marriage and his own promotion by the Yorkist government in wake of the first battle of St. Albans. It has been argued that he was replaced as chamberlain before his death, for a royal charter dated 26 July 1458 was witnessed by Tunstall as chamberlain. But, since in a charter of the following 22 Oct. Stanley is the witnessing chamberlain and he is again described as chamberlain on 18 Dec., the earlier charter must be misdated: C53/190, mm. 9, 10; C81/1471/32. In any event, death spared him the need to choose between York and Lancaster for he died on 11 Feb. 1459, just before the descent into civil war. CHES3/45, 37 Hen. VI, no. 7. He was bur. at the house of Austin canons at Burscough, which had been founded by his ancestors, the Lathoms. The 2nd Lord Stanley later commissioned a series of memorials for his ancestors to be placed in the arches in the chancel of the priory church: PCC Holgrave (PROB11/14, f. 148); N. Saul, English Church Mons. 130. Yet if he remained a Lancastrian, his heir did not. The exclusion of the new Lord Stanley from all his father’s offices, even those local to the north-west that he had the right to consider as almost the family’s own, shows plainly that he was positively distrusted by the increasingly militant Lancastrian regime. Tunstall succeeded our MP not only as chamberlain of the household but also as baron of the exchequer at Lancaster and receiver of the palatinate; Stanley’s offices of chamberlain of North Wales and justice of Cheshire passed to John Sutton, Lord Dudley, and John, earl of Shrewsbury, respectively; James, earl of Wiltshire, became chief steward of the duchy in its south parts; and our MP’s son-in-law, Sir Richard Molyneux, replaced him as escheator of Lancashire. Somerville, i. 429, 485; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 783; Clayton, 77-78; DL37/27/10.

Thus, even if there was no rift between the Stanleys and Lancaster in our MP’s lifetime, his son found no favour, and this explains the new Lord Stanley’s conduct in the autumn after his father’s death. He failed, when summoned, to join the Lancastrian army which was defeated by his father-in-law’s forces at Blore Heath on 23 Sept. 1459, and to his passive support for Salisbury was added the active support of his brother, William, who was in the ranks of the Yorkist army at the head of the family’s servants and tenants. As a result, William was attainted in the subsequent Parliament at Coventry and he himself was saved from the same fate only by the King’s mercy. PROME, xii. 503-5; Clayton, 79-81. By contrast, one and possibly two of our MP’s sons-in-law, Sir William Troutbeck and Sir Richard Molyneux, were killed on the Lancastrian side at Blore Heath: J.L. Gillespie, ‘Cheshiremen at Blore Heath’, in People, Politics and Community ed. Rosenthal and Richmond, 79.

The apparent resentment of our MP’s son against the Lancastrians may have been informed by something more than his exclusion from his father’s offices. The Crown appears to have challenged the Stanley title to the castle and lordship of Hawarden, which his family’s lawyers had taken so much trouble to construct. In his father’s inquisition post mortem, held at Chester on 13 Mar. 1459, it was found that our MP had died seised of this valuable property in tail-male, but instead of awarding livery to his son, the Crown ordered another inquiry. This, held at an unknown date, found that title to Hawarden lay in the Crown’s hands (this inquisition does not survive, but it probably found that the Crown had title under the Montagu forfeiture). It was presumably in response to these hostile findings that, on 5 Apr., the new Lord Stanley sued out a lengthy exemplification of all the documents on which his family’s title depended. Even so, the castle remained in the hands of the Crown until 24 June 1460, when its keeping was entrusted to him pending a verdict on the contrary findings of the two inquisitions. CHES2/132, rot. 10; 133, rot. 11.

It is hard not to see this belated concession as an attempt, by an increasingly desperate Lancastrian regime, to regain the loyalty of the new Lord Stanley. In this it failed. There is strong evidence that he offered the Yorkists his active support. On 13 July 1460, three days after the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton, Sir John Mainwaring, a supporter of Lancaster, was instructed by royal warrant to hand over various Yorkists imprisoned in Chester castle to him, an unlikely order if Stanley was not a trusted Yorkist himself. Clayton, 92. More interestingly, according to the Annales wrongly attributed to William Worcestre, after that victory, Queen Margaret, in fleeing from Eccleshall (Staffordshire) towards Chester, was nearly captured by a servant of Lord Stanley called John ‘Cleger’, ‘ac spoliata est de omnibus bonis suis et jocalibus a propriis servientibus’. This episode must relate to the commission issued on 15 July, headed by William Stanley, to arrest John Glegge, Thomas Glegge and others for stealing from the King at Gayton money and jewels worth as much as 20,000 marks. Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 773; CHES2/133, m. 6.

This support for York explains why Lord Stanley was favoured with one of the few provisos added to the Act of Accord in the subsequent Parliament. His hereditary title to the lordships of Mold and Hawarden and the stewardship and master forestership of Macclesfield was to be protected against any adverse consequences following from York’s recognition as the King’s heir apparent. C49/63/4; PROME, xii. 531. Further he gained other modest marks of favour: on 6 Aug. 1460 he was named as steward of the duchy of Lancaster lordship of Halton (Cheshire) and constable of the castle there, and on 30 Oct. he was granted the reversion, expectant on the death or surrender of the Lancastrian Tunstall, of his father’s old office of receiver of the palaltinate of Lancaster. DL37/28/20; 29/23. It is, unfortunately, unknown whether these rewards prompted Stanley to commit himself openly on the Yorkist side at the decisive battle of Towton. A contemporary poem mentions ‘the Hertes Hede’ among the badges of those drawn up in the Yorkist ranks, a possible reference to the three bucks’ heads on the Stanley arms, but open to more than one interpretation. Archaeologia, xxix. 346. The evidence of the patronage bestowed on the Stanleys in the early years of the new reign is similarly difficult to interpret. Both Lord Stanley and his brother William were rewarded but not to the extent that would mark them out as men who had played a significant part in making Edward IV King. Their local pre-eminence was recognized in a way that the Lancastrian government had failed to do after our MP’s death. On 1 May 1461 William was appointed as chamberlain of Chester; and early in the following year Lord Stanley was appointed to his father’s old offices of justice of Cheshire and Flint, master forester and steward of Macclesfield and, in succession to the exiled Tunstall, receiver in Lancashire. Clayton, 93, 95; DL37/30, m. 5d. But their rewards went no further.