A family of only moderate regional importance and limited landholdings, the Strangeways first rose to prominence in the early years of the reign of Henry IV, when Henry Strangeways, grandfather of the later MP, was appointed chief chamberlain of the Irish exchequer. Several of Henry’s sons made for themselves careers in the law and royal administration. Nicholas Strangeways succeeded his father at the Exchequer of Ireland in 1430, while his brother Roger rose to be appointed King’s attorney in North Wales in 1439. It was, however, their brother James who achieved the greatest prominence, being called to take the serjeant’s coif in 1411. Four years later he was appointed a King’s serjeant and (following judicial appointments as a j.p. in the North Riding of Yorkshire and justice of assize on the Midland circuit) sat on the common bench as one of the puisne justices from 1426 until his death in 1443.
The family’s geographical focus in this period lay in the palatinates of Lancashire and Chester. In common with many of the gentry families of the region the Strangeways were highly prolific and as a result able to forge ties of marital kinship with many of their neighbours. The judge himself married Joan, daughter of Nicholas Orell; their daughter Isabel became the wife of (Sir) Peter Gerard*; and her sister Elizabeth married Sir Thomas Mountfort*.
Little is known of the later Speaker’s early years, although – like his father and son – he may have received some training in the law, perhaps at one of the inns of court on London’s western outskirts.
Strangeways’s landed wealth allowed him to make his first forays into public life. On two occasions in the mid 1430s he was appointed to the commission of array in Yorkshire’s North Riding. In 1439 he and William Orell, a kinsman on his mother’s side, found sureties to secure the release from imprisonment in Beaumaris castle of James’s uncle, Roger Strangeways, the former receiver of the recently deceased dowager queen, Katharine of Valois.
It was, however, the Strangeways’s connexion with the Nevilles that now became of overriding importance. In the 1420s (and even before his brother’s marriage to the dowager duchess of Norfolk) Justice Strangeways had forged a link with her mother, Joan Beaufort, dowager countess of Westmorland, and her son, Sir Richard Neville (who within a few years married the heiress of the last Montagu earl of Salisbury and was raised to comital rank in her right).
In the light of his local position, Strangeways hardly needed to rely on the influence of a noble patron to gain election to Parliament, but the Yorkshire county court was heavily dominated by magnate interests and the political situation of early 1449 makes it likely that his Neville connexions played a part in securing his return to the assembly initially held at Westminster in February 1449. The sheriff presiding over the county court was his wife’s brother-in-law, Sir John Conyers, while his parliamentary colleague, the experienced Sir William Euer, a fellow Neville client, was by marriage uncle to the two Darcy sisters, making the whole occasion something of a family affair. The Nevilles had good reasons to wish to have their own men returned, for their ranks were depleted. In the north, the early weeks of 1449 were marked by renewed fears of a Scottish attack, and on 3 Feb., a week before Parliament was to open, the earl of Salisbury’s brother Robert Neville, bishop of Durham, the earl of Westmorland and ten other men (including the bishop’s steward Sir Thomas Neville and Westmorland’s brother Sir John Neville) were instructed to remain in the north rather than travel to Westminster for the assembly, while another Neville brother, William, Lord Fauconberg, was serving in France. The attention of the Lords and Commons, on the other hand, was absorbed by the rapidly deteriorating military situation in France, and it may have been to the credit of the northern Members of the Lower House that the grant of the wool subsidy in the third session explicitly confirmed previous concessions made to Fauconberg for the expenses of Roxburgh castle.
Certainly, the protection of the northern border by both military and diplomatic means was to preoccupy Strangeways for much of his life. That same summer he was charged with the first of a series of diplomatic negotiations with the Scottish King’s representatives that would stretch over a quarter of a century, and when in October an indefinite truce was agreed, he was appointed one of its conservators.
At the same time, Strangeways was shoring up his own holdings. In January 1451 he procured a grant to himself and Bishop Neville’s servant Robert Kelsy* of the manor of Laverton in the West Riding, which had been resumed into the King’s hands during the Parliament of November 1449, for a term of ten years.
In November 1452 Strangeways was entrusted with the Yorkshire shrievalty for a second time. The early months of this second term of office passed quietly enough. On 20 Jan. 1453 writs for a Parliament to be held at Reading on 6 Mar. were issued, and these evidently did not reach the sheriff in time to conduct the elections at the next month’s shire court, for only on 5 Mar. (and thus evidently too late for the elected Members to make the journey to Berkshire in time for the opening) did Strangeways preside over the choice of Sir Brian Stapleton* and Sir William Gascoigne*. Yet, while Parliament debated desperate last-ditch attempts to shore up the military situation in what remained of English Gascony, the north of England descended into open disorder. In June the earl of Salisbury’s younger son, Sir John Neville, gathered his armed retainers and went in pursuit of his local rival, Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, while other Percy and Neville retainers clashed elsewhere. It is uncertain whether Strangeways’s official duties permitted him to join Salisbury and his sons at Lord Cromwell’s seat of Tattershall for the marriage of Sir Thomas Neville to Cromwell’s niece, and whether he was subsequently caught up in the Nevilles’ confrontation with Egremont and his retainers at Heworth near York. What is clear is that the sheriff was unable to put a stop to the violent bickering of the two great noble families, and over the course of the summer repeated judicial commissions were dispatched to pacify the region. Their efforts were wasted. At the end of October the armies assembled by the Nevilles and Percys faced each other in northern Yorkshire, but at the last moment avoided a direct confrontation.
The end of Stangeways’s shrievalty came at a time of crisis not only in the affairs of Yorkshire, but also in those of the realm. In the late summer of 1453, Henry VI had suffered a mental collapse that rendered him unable to rule. For some months the lords of the council dithered, hoping that the monarch would make a full and speedy recovery. Not until 27 Mar. 1454 did they agree to the duke of York’s appointment as Protector. Six days later, the council further agreed to the appointment of Strangeways’s patron, the earl of Salisbury, as chancellor. By now, the former sheriff had joined the earl at Westminster where Parliament was in session, and along with the bishop of Durham’s chancellor, Robert Beaumont, he was given the task of discussing with the mercantile community financial provision for the keeping of the seas.
If York and the Nevilles now controlled the government, their grip on their own northern region was rather less secure. Here, a new player had entered the fray in the person of the unstable young duke of Exeter, Henry Holand. The duke, whose principal landed interests lay in Bedfordshire and the south-west, rather than the north, had quarrelled with Lord Cromwell (uncle of Sir Thomas Neville’s new wife) over the possession of the manor of Ampthill, and as a result had conceived a dislike of Cromwell’s new Neville associates. In the early weeks of 1454, Exeter allied himself with the Nevilles’ principal opponent, Lord Egremont. During May and June the two lords rallied their armed retainers in the northern counties. The duke of York’s arrival in the north caused Exeter to flee to sanctuary at Westminster, while Egremont evaded the commissioners appointed to pacify the region locally. In mid September he moved once more. By now, the chancellor, the earl of Salisbury, had himself returned to the north and issued orders for the arrest of all those participating in unlawful gatherings in Yorkshire. Prominent among the commissioners that the earl appointed at the end of September to lead a local levy into Lancashire and to suppress any risings there, was his retainer Strangeways.
It seems that during the troubled years that followed Strangeways remained in his region. While it is just possible that in accordance with the terms of his indenture of retainder he was with the earl of Salisbury at the battle of St. Albans on 22 May 1455, he had returned north within a month, and on 23 June attended the elections to the Parliament summoned by the victorious lords.
It is difficult to gauge Strangeways’s position in the severely polarized politics of the crisis years from 1457 to 1459. While there can be no doubt of his continued loyalty to the earl of Salisbury, the official appointments with which he was entrusted do not seem to bear out a narrowly partisan interpretation. In April 1457 he was serving as a justice of gaol delivery at York, while in June he was once more appointed one of the conservators of the renewed truce with Scotland. In the following month, Robert Neville, bishop of Durham, died, and was replaced by the queen’s confidant Laurence Booth. The Strangeways held their seat of West Harlsey from the palatine see, Neville’s predecessor, Thomas Langley, had been a patron of the later Speaker’s father, and Neville himself was explicitly named in Strangeways’s indenture with the earl of Salisbury as one of the lords against whom he was not obliged to take up arms. Now, he was faced with a feudal overlord (and, at that, one with considerable political powers in the light of the Durham see’s palatine status) who was likely to be unsympathetic, if not outright hostile, towards any supporters of the Nevilles, and by inference, to the duke of York’s cause.
There were, however, last-ditch efforts, for once driven by the King himself, to bring about reconciliation between the squabbling factions. In the early weeks of 1458 a great council met at Westminster, culminating in a love-day of 25 Mar., which saw the hostile lords process into St. Paul’s cathedral arm in arm. It is uncertain whether Strangeways was present, but if he did not represent his shire at the council, he may nevertheless have been part of the earl of Salisbury’s substantial retinue. In January he had been commissioned once again to deliver the gaol of York castle, but it may be suggestive that when fresh commissions of the peace were issued in May while the celebrations that followed the love-day were still in progress he was appointed to the bench of the East, as well as the North Riding of Yorkshire.
Within months, however, Strangeways was drawn to the heart of parliamentary politics. On 26 June 1460 Salisbury, Warwick and March landed at Sandwich, and made their way to London, which they reached on 2 July. Two days later, the first of their troops left the capital and marched northwards, towards Northampton, where six days later they routed a royal army and took control of the King. On 16 July they returned to London and a further fortnight later writs were issued for a Parliament to meet at Westminster on 7 Oct. On 25 Aug. the Yorkshire county court returned Strangeways, along with another one of his brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Mountfort. The business that was placed before the Lords and Commons was highly political. In the first place, the proceedings of the Coventry Parliament, including the attainders of the Yorkists, had to be annulled. Then, after the duke of York’s return from Ireland, came the resettlement of the Crown on the Yorkist line. Private business, in the mean time, was largely ignored.
What could not be ignored were the movements of Queen Margaret, who, along with some of her principal supporters, foremost among them the dukes of Somerset and Exeter, was at large at the head of a substantial armed force. When Parliament was prorogued for Christmas, the earl of Warwick remained in London to direct the government and watch over the King, while the young earl of March was dispatched west to raise armed men in the old Mortimer lands. York, Rutland and Salisbury rode north, accompanied by many of their leading retainers, among them Strangeways. On 30 Dec. the approach of the queen’s army tempted York and his allies into an incautious sortie from Sandal castle. The outcome was nothing short of a disaster. Rutland and many other leading Yorkists were killed in the fighting, while York and Salisbury themselves were taken and summarily executed after the battle. Strangeways’s fate is uncertain. Three weeks after the engagement, Clement Paston reported to his brother John* a popular rumour that the Yorkshire knight (along with Thomas Colt* and Sir Thomas Pickering) was ‘takyn or ellys dede’, but thought the latter more likely.
In London, the Yorkist lords now took matters into their own hands: following their defeat at the second battle of St. Albans which reunited Henry VI with his queen, the earl of March was proclaimed King as Edward IV in Westminster Hall on 4 Mar. By inference, King Henry was simultaneously deposed. Clearly, this momentous step required parliamentary sanction, but it was not until after the decisive victory at Towton that fresh writs in Edward IV’s name were issued. It was originally intended that Parliament would meet at Westminster in July, shortly after the new King’s coronation, but continuing Lancastrian resistance in the north required the young monarch’s presence and it was in the event not until 4 Nov. that the two Houses came together. There was no doubt whose interest was dominant in this first Parliament of a Neville-born King: in the Lords alone there were three Neville earls (Warwick, Westmorland and Kent) and a Neville baron (Montagu), while the chancellor, the bishop of Exeter, was also of their close kin. For the Commons, too few MPs’ names are known to provide meaningful statistics, but there were probably many, like Strangeways, who owed their returns to their connexion with one or other of the Nevilles. In view of the contentious business in hand – the settlement of the Crown aside, the Commons were likely to be restive over the lengthy list of attainders that was to be put before them – it was imperative that the Speakership of this Parliament of Nevilles should be vested in a reliable man, and Strangeways must have been an obvious choice.
Among the Speaker’s first set-piece duties was the presentation on 12 Nov. of a formal commendation to the new King in flattering terms, praising him for his ‘pryncely and knyghtly prowesse and corage’ and expressing the hope that God might ‘contynue and prosper [his] noble reigne longe ... in honoure, joy and felicite’.
Strangeways may not have regretted the cancellation of the second session of the Parliament very much, for other affairs kept him fully occupied. A year earlier he had been returned to the North Riding bench, while being for the first time added to that of the West Riding.
William Neville, earl of Kent (whose second daughter had married Strangeways’s son and heir Richard), died in January 1463. Within two months of his death, his widow, the 56-year-old heiress of the last Lord Fauconberg, married an obscure commoner called John Berwick. Although on 14 Mar. the King granted her a pardon for remarrying without licence, two days earlier a commission, which included Strangeways, had been appointed to inquire into her sanity, which reported within two weeks that she had been an idiot from birth.
Throughout the 1460s Strangeways continued to serve as one of the feoffees of the Neville estates and his relations with the earl of Salisbury’s sons continued to be close.
In the light of the extensive family network of which Strangeways formed a part, it might be prudent to speculate how much any of his blood ties really mattered when it came to high politics. It is clear that he maintained cordial relations with at least an inner circle of relatives. Thus, in 1463 he arbitrated a dispute between Richard Clairvaux (whose son had married the former Speaker’s daughter) and Thomas Fitton of Cawarden in Cheshire over title to a rent at East Cowton, and in 1469 he witnessed the conveyance of some of the estates of the recently deceased Lord Vessy (his first wife’s stepfather) to Vessy’s sole daughter Margaret, the widow of John, Lord Clifford, and now wife of Sir Laurence Threlkeld.
If Warwick’s ostensible treason was rendered somewhat more palatable to Strangeways by his longstanding Neville loyalties, he soon found himself at the sharp end of the problems that Warwick had inherited from his royal master. Having been incited to open rebellion, the commons of the north had no intention of going home quietly, and there were those who were all too ready to exploit the situation. In August two members of the cadet branch of the Nevilles seated at Brancepeth, Sir Humphrey and Charles Neville, rose in the name of the long-imprisoned Henry VI, and Warwick found himself unable to raise the armed levies necessary to crush this fresh rebellion. In the interim, King Edward had been moved to Yorkshire, to Warwick’s castle at Middleham, from where he regained his freedom in early September. For the time being at least, he sought a reconciliation with Warwick and his noble allies, who, after all, included not merely the earl’s brother, the archbishop of York, but also the King’s own brother, the duke of Clarence. ‘The Kyng hym-selffe hathe good langage of the lordys of Claraunce, of Warwyk, and of my lordys of York, of Oxenfford, seyng they be hys best frendys’, wrote Sir John Paston†.
The King’s household men, Paston had gone on to report, did not share their master’s confidence in the professed loyalty of Warwick and his noble kinsmen, and in the spring of 1470 they were proven right. In February a fresh rising broke out in Lincolnshire. Once again, the rebel leader was closely related to Strangeways: Sir Robert Welles was the son by an earlier marriage of Richard, Lord Welles and Willoughby, who had married Sir James’s daughter Margery in the late summer of 1468.
Nothing is known of Strangeways’s movements in the seven months that followed, but it is likely that his displeasure at the restoration on 25 Mar. of the Percy earl of Northumberland and the consequent removal of John Neville from the wardenship of the east march and from his coveted earldom to the marquessate of Montagu, was not far behind that of Neville himself. He may thus have done nothing when Lord Fitzhugh’s rebellion broke out in July, although he may have rallied to the King when Edward himself came to Yorkshire in the following month. Thereafter events began to move rapidly: in mid September Warwick and Clarence, who had taken shelter at the French court after the disaster at Empingham, landed in the West Country and marched for their midland strongholds. Within days, they were joined by the disaffected Montagu. On 29 Sept. Edward IV was driven into exile, and Henry VI was brought out of the Tower of London and restored to the throne. Warwick now went about the establishment of a new government in Henry’s name. Clearly, he harboured doubts over the reliability of Strangeways, who over the previous year and a half had taken King Edward’s side against members of the Neville circle, many of them his own close kin. When fresh commissions of the peace were issued in November, Sir James was unceremoniously dropped from the benches of both the North and West Ridings, and he held no office during the months of the Readeption.
There is thus reason to suppose that Edward IV’s landing at Ravenspur in Yorkshire on 14 Mar. 1471 was welcome news to Strangeways. Although there is no evidence to suggest that he was among the few who immediately rallied to the former King, or fought for him either at Barnet, where the Nevilles met their end, or Tewkesbury, it is clear that the restored Edward IV retained confidence and trust in him. Sir James saw no need to avail himself of the general pardon offered by the restored monarch, and by the late summer of 1471 he was once again acting as one of the King’s plenipotentiaries in negotiations with the Scots over the renewal of the truce on the northern border. He continued this diplomatic activity in the early months of 1472, when the range of discussions was expanded to explore the possibility of a perpetual peace secured by a marriage alliance between the houses of York and Stewart, and throughout the early 1470s played a regular part in settling minor border disputes that arose. The renewed commissions of peace issued in February 1472 saw Strangeways restored to the North Riding bench, on which he continued to sit until his death. By way of a reward for his continued services, Edward IV exempted the lands Strangeways held in the duchy of Lancaster honour of Pickering from the Act of Resumption passed by Parliament in 1473 (as he had also done in those of 1463 and 1467).
It seems that in these later years Strangeways increasingly set his sights on the afterlife. In 1470-1 he and his second wife, his son James and the latter’s wife, and the widowed Lady Welles had been admitted to the Corpus Christi guild at York, and in October 1476 he and his son and heir, Sir Richard, and the latter’s eldest son, also James, agreed to undertake the running and funding of the chantry and hospital founded at North Allerton under the terms of the will of the draper Richard Moore.
Both of Strangeways’s marriages had been prolific, and those of his children extended still further the network of his blood ties among the northern nobility and gentry. As we have seen, his heir cemented the family’s ties with the Nevilles by his marriage to one of the heiresses of the earl of Kent, while his son James (d.1507/8) married one of his Conyers cousins. Another son, George, entered the Church and was presented to the family benefice at Bulmer and the chaplaincy at Whorlton castle, before taking up residence at Oxford as rector of Lincoln College, and rising to become archdeacon of Coventry.
Sir James Strangeways died shortly before 20 Aug. 1480, when writs of diem clausit extremum in his name were issued to the escheators of six counties.