STAUNTON, Thomas

Thomas Staunton was descended from a Leicestershire knightly family long resident at Staunton Harold. The family’s main estates had passed by marriage to the Shirleys on the failure of the senior male line in 1423. By then, however, a junior branch had been established at Sutton Bonington, just over the county border in Nottinghamshire, through the marriage of our MP’s father to the heiress of a manor there. Leics. Med. Peds. ed. Farnham, 101. The father made a career in royal service, long holding both duchy of Lancaster and Exchequer office, and he was no doubt responsible for finding the younger Thomas a place in the royal household. Once established, his promotion was rapid. He was already one of the marshals of the Hall, the lesser of the two departments of the Household when, in July 1433, his elderly father was allowed to resign in his favour the office of master forester of Dartmoor with its fee of ten marks p.a. assigned on the duchy of Cornwall. CPR, 1429-36, p. 272. Further grants of office followed and for the last 20 years of Henry VI’s reign he was one of the ushers of the Chamber. The fees from these offices greatly augmented the modest landed income that came to him on his father’s death in 1436. His father had been assessed at only £10 p.a. in 1412: S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 223. The constableship of Melbourne, another post in which he succeeded his father, brought with it £10 p.a.; the keepership of the crossbows was worth 12d. a day assigned on the issues of Warwickshire and Leicestershire; and the receivership of the honour of Leicester had an annual fee of £5 p.a. CPR, 1436-41, p. 130; CCR, 1435-41, p. 394; DL29/212/3263. His 12d. a day sometimes proved difficult to collect. In Easter term 1455 he sued Sir William Birmingham, former sheriff of Warws. and Leics., for a year’s arrears of £18 5s., of which he appears to have recovered only half: E13/145B, rots. 60-61, 74. These fees were supplemented by direct grants of royal patronage. In June 1439 he received a joint grant in survivorship with the King’s surgeon, William Stalworth (d.1446), of forfeited lands at Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire worth 20 marks p.a.; in April 1442 he joined the elderly King’s esquire, Robert Twyford, in a grant of £18 p.a. from the issues of the Derbyshire manor of Bolsover; and in November 1446 he was awarded the wardship and marriage of Alice, daughter and heir of John Saltby of Grantham (Lincolnshire). CPR, 1436-41, p. 280; 1441-6, p. 63; 1446-52, p. 7. The Saltby wardship was granted to him only three weeks after the tenant’s death and nearly three months before the issue of the writ of diem clausit extremum: CIPM, xxvi. 507. More modestly, in January 1441 he was granted for life a tun of wine yearly to be taken at Kingston-upon-Hull; and in August 1458 he was associated with the King’s chamberlain, Thomas Stanley II* (now Lord Stanley), in a grant of the advowson of the parish church of Eccleston in Lancashire. CPR, 1436-41, p. 489; 1452-61, p. 435.

Staunton earned these rewards, which were considerable for a man of his relatively modest rank, not only by his service about the King’s person but also by twice holding, albeit on favourable terms, the shrievalty of his native shire. On the first occasion he had a pardon of account of £50 which, since it exceeded the pardons then customary, the Exchequer was reluctant to allow. On 8 Dec. 1441 a royal writ of privy seal rebuked the barons for their reluctance, ordering them to speed the former sheriff in his accounts so he no longer had reason to be absent from the royal service. At the end of his second term he was still more generously treated. The normal pardon of account for the shrievalty of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire had risen to £80, and the King granted Thomas an additional £20 in consideration both of the costs he had incurred and the ‘longe service [he] hath doon unto us’. E199/135/13; E159/226, brevia Hil. rot. 4.

Staunton held no local offices besides the shrievalty, and was only a very occasional ad hoc commissioner of government in the shires. His intimate service to the King left him little time for affairs nearer home. He did, however, find time to engineer what appears to have been a serious disturbance in Nottingham. According to an indictment laid before the town’s j.p.s on 26 Sept. 1446 he, along with various yeomen and tradesmen from Sutton Bonington, Normanton on Soar, Castle Donington and Kegworth, undoubtedly acting at his bidding, had raised a riot nine days earlier, seriously assaulting a local yeoman, Richard Leverton, who lost two fingers of his left hand. The rioters also assaulted three others, one of whom was Henry Etwell of Kingston, gentleman. KB9/313/4-8; KB27/743, rex rot. 4d. It is difficult to determine what lay behind this fracas but the fact that both Leverton and Etwell were soon after, on 20 Nov., involved in the murder at Kegworth of John Chedell, suggests the strong possibility that the two events were linked. KB27/744, rots. 76-77; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 423, 453. Perhaps Staunton intervened in a dispute among his lesser neighbours and succeeded only in provoking its escalation. Whatever the truth of this, he and those indicted with him suffered no seriously adverse legal consequences. Although they put themselves on the county they were spared a jury trial when the court, acting on a royal writ of privy seal, admitted them each to make a modest fine of 4d. Thomas’s half-brother, Robert, and the yeoman of the Chamber, Thomas Barton II*, acted as their pledges. KB27/743, fines rot.; KB145/6/25. The rioters were also appealed of mayhem by Leverton, but the outcome of this suit has not been traced: KB27/743, rot. 39d.

Among the incidental benefits Staunton derived from his Household service was a close connexion with the powerful Lancastrian magnate, John, Viscount Beaumont. As early as 1437 he was one of his feoffees in two Lincolnshire manors, and it is surely more than coincidence that his appointment as steward of Melbourne came on the same day as Beaumont became steward of the honour of Leicester. Later, in 1444, he acted for his superior in the duchy administration in the purchase of the Leicestershire manor of Barrow upon Soar from Sir Thomas Erdington*; in February 1456 the viscount named him as one of his executors (although in a will that was subsequently superceded); and two days after the viscount’s death on 10 July 1460 he was one of the feoffees who made a settlement in favour of his widow, Katherine, dowager-duchess of Norfolk. CPR, 1436-41, p. 35; 1441-6, pp. 279-80; 1467-77, p. 200; E211/281; HMC Hastings, i. 73; E153/1155/7. For other evidence of this association: CCR, 1441-7, p. 135; 1447-54, p. 441. This close connexion was an important factor in explaining his single election to Parliament. On 12 Jan. 1447, shortly before his second term as sheriff, he was returned to represent Leicestershire in the Parliament that was to witness the downfall of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in a coup engineered by the duke’s opponents at court. He was no doubt elected as one liable to favour that coup, but he could not have relied on his own resources to secure election. His landholdings in that county were minimal, and there can be little doubt it was Beaumont’s influence that supplied the deficit between these resources and those required to secure a county seat. Two considerations turn this speculation into a near certainty: the election was conducted by Thomas Everingham*, who was not only one of Staunton’s colleagues in the Household but also a fellow servant of Beaumont; and second there are strong grounds for the belief that Beaumont directly intervened in Grimsby to ensure the election of our MP’s half-brother, Robert. C219/15/4. The viscount’s patronage also appears to have been exerted in favour of the half-brothers after the Parliament. It is the obvious explanation both for our Thomas’s appointment in 1449 as receiver of the honour of Leicester, of which Beaumont was steward, and for Robert’s return for Leicestershire to the Parliament of 1450.

The connexions that went with office in the Household assisted Staunton in finding suitable spouses for his children. The marriage he contracted for his son and heir, John, demonstrate how ties of neighbourhood and service tended to become fused. John was married to Joan, daughter and eventual heiress of Richard Hotoft*, who had been Thomas’s fellow Leicestershire Member in 1447 and was feodary of the honour of Leicester while Thomas was its receiver. By fines levied in Michaelmas term 1455 Hotoft made a generous settlement in the couple’s favour: they were to have immediate seisin of a few hundred acres of land in Thurmaston and elsewhere in Leicestershire together with the reversion, expectant on the death of Joan’s parents, of the main Hotoft manor of Humberstone. CP25(1)/126/77/81, 83. It was probably only the profits of Household office that enabled Thomas to contract such a marriage for his heir. His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, also found a spouse among the Leicestershire gentry: in 1458 she married William (d.1474), son and heir apparent of Thomas Hasilrigge (d.1467) of Noseley: and his father settled on them the Hasilrigge manor in Humberstone, valued at ten marks p.a. in an inquisition of 1474. Hist. Northumb. xiv. 521; E. Acheson, Leics. in 15th Cent, 233; C140/49/25.

While Staunton’s impressive record of service to the house of Lancaster aided him in arranging the marriages of his eldest children, it brought his career to an abrupt end on Henry VI’s deposition. Although little is known of his career in the 1450s, it is clear he remained a trusted servant of the Household throughout that decade. In March 1450, for example, he was one of the three Household servants to whom the King committed the custody of the engineeer of Gloucester’s downfall, William, duke of Suffolk, when Suffolk was impeached. He escaped largely unscathed from the Acts of Resumption passed in the early 1450s, and he remained as usher until at least as late as January 1460. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 361; PROME, xii. 104, 123, 409; CPR, 1446-52, p. 311; 1452-61, p. 17; E163/8/14; SC8/141/7014A and B. He also gained, albeit modestly, from the forfeiture of the Yorkist lords after the rout of Ludford Bridge. On 18 Jan. 1460 he was granted for life the office of tronager and pesager in the port of Southampton, an office appurtenant to two messuages there forfeited by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick. CPR, 1452-61, p. 580; CFR, xix. 268. Thereafter, however, he almost disappears from view, even though he lived almost long enough to see the fall of the house of York. The Notts. j.p. of 1479-82 was almost certainly his yr. namesake of Staunton-in-the-Vale.

The rest of the Staunton family did not share the obscurity of its head. Our MP’s two sons adapted to the new regime through the agency of their uncle, Robert. Robert successfully transferred his allegiance from Beaumont to William, Lord Hastings, and by the early 1470s both the younger Stauntons, John and Thomas, were members of the Hastings retinue. This affiliation probably explains their sister Katherine’s marriage to John Turville of Aston Flamville and their sister Elizabeth’s second marriage to Thomas Entwysell of Darby-on-the-Wolds; both husbands were Leicestershire members of the Hastings affinity. W.H. Dunham jnr., Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 118; CPL, xiii (2), 693; Acheson, 227, 255. It may also explain the insignia on a mutilated tomb in the church of St. Anne in Sutton Bonington. Aside from the Staunton arms with a crescent for a difference, the effigy bears the Yorkist livery collar of suns and roses with a ‘lion of March’ pendant, and probably represents the younger Thomas, who died in 1486. Trans. Thoroton Soc. xxix. 137-8, 140; CFR, xxii. 7; CP40/898, rot. 287 (he died intestate and his Turville brother-in-law was appointed his administrator).

The last reference to the elder Thomas in an active role relates to the second marriage of his heir John to Joan, daughter and heiress of the Lancastrian Exchequer official John Gloucester II*. The childless death of the heir’s first wife had disappointed the Stauntons’ expectations of acquiring the Hotoft estates by marriage, but Joan Gloucester, heiress to lands worth in excess of £20 p.a., provided the family with partial compensation. On their marriage in about 1468, his father, according to a later Chancery petition, promised to settle on them all his lands in Stanford-upon-Soar and Normanton-on-Soar (Nottinghamshire) and nearby Hathern (Leicestershire), together with the reversion of his manor of Sutton Bonington. This must have represented the bulk of the Staunton inheritance and is an indication of the handsome jointures heiresses could command. But soon after the marriage things began to go wrong. John persuaded his wife not only to sell her place in London to Thomas, Lord Stanley, and her lands in Hertfordshire to others for a total of 450 marks, but also, by a final concord levied in 1471, to settle what appears to have been the rest of her property with ultimate remainder to his right heirs. In compensation he promised to purchase the Leicestershire lands of his first wife’s uncle, Thomas Hotoft (d.1473), valued at 40 marks p.a., and add them to her jointure. In part fulfilment of this promise, before he died in 1476 he left instructions that all his lands in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, worth £20 p.a., should go to his widow for her life. But such an arrangement proved unacceptable to his aged father and his younger brother. The latter refused to allow Joan the £20 p.a. of land, and took possession of the Hotoft properties his brother had purchased, selling them to Thomas Kebell† for 400 marks. Not surprisingly, the disappointed widow appealed to the chancellor, probably in the late 1470s, asking that subpoena writs be directed to the two Thomas Stauntons. The outcome of her suit is unknown, although Kebell kept the lands he had purchased. CAD, v. A12183; CP25(1)/294/76/77; CFR, xxi. 283; C1/58/322; E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, 336. The defendants both died shortly afterwards: writs of diem clausit extremum were issued in respect of the elder Thomas on 27 Apr. 1483. CFR, xxi. 717.

Staunton’s career is a good illustration of the demands as well as the rewards of a prolonged period of Household service. In the 1440s and 1450s he drew an income from office which may have exceeded that produced by his own estates, and direct grants of patronage added more: the Saltby wardship, for example, which he held from 1446 to about 1456 was worth in excess of £10 p.a. CIPM, xxvi. 507. These handsome rewards were, however, earned at the cost of near-constant attendance on the King’s person and a consequent distancing from the affairs of his neighbours. Although his wife came from one of the leading families of the north of his native Nottinghamshire, even this link may have owed something to an association formed outside the county, since her father was a ‘King’s knight’. This marriage had taken place by Mar. 1441 when the couple had an indult for a portable altar: CPL, ix. 239. Millicent was born between the death of her mother’s 2nd husband in Dec. 1409 and of her mother in Sept. 1419: The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 725. When, in 1444, our MP settled upon her a messuage in Breedon-on-the-Hill near Melbourne he employed as his feoffees men drawn from the Beaumont retinue, including John Truthall*, rather than his own neighbours. Wyggeston Hosp. Recs. ed. Thompson, 265. Aside from the Hasilrigge marriage his nomination as one of the executors of Sir Thomas Chaworth* in January 1459 is the only evidence of a firm association formed exclusively within his own locality. Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 221. Perhaps this lack of local friends explains why what appears to have been his intervention in a dispute between his lesser neighbours ended in the embarrassment of indictment before the j.p.s of Nottingham in 1446.