WATERTON, Richard

Waterton hailed from a family with very strong Lancastrian connexions. Following a family tradition of service to the house of Lancaster, his father John had risen high in the service of Henry of Monmouth, prince of Wales, and when the prince became King had become master of the King’s horse and undertaken a variety of important diplomatic missions. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 784-7. The Waterton pedigree is one of unresolved difficulties, but it is clear that Richard was the son and heir of John, the MP for Surr. (a county in which he had property through his second wife) in 1402 and master of the King’s horse, rather than John, the sheriff of Lincs. in 1410: CCR, 1435-41, pp. 62-63; PPC, ii. 279-80. Walker must be wrong in his assertion that the former John died leaving only two daughters: Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxx. 362. Richard was to have an an altogether more modest career, although, in its last 20 years, he played a significant part in Lincolnshire affairs. He first appears in the records in May 1421 when he successfully petitioned the King to be discharged from the obligation of accounting at the Exchequer for plate committed to John in lieu of payment of wages for the Agincourt campaign. CPR, 1416-22, p. 341; PPC, ii. 279-80; E159/204, recorda Hil. rots. 3d, 12d. Later, in July 1423, he was the beneficiary of royal patronage of a more direct kind when he was granted the keeping, for the very long term of 40 years, of a small estate in his native Corringham at an annual rent of 10s. CFR, xv. 46 (this keeping was extended by another grant of 12 Feb. 1454: CFR, xix. 81). No doubt he owed this grant, albeit a very modest one, to his family connexions, but it did not mark the beginning of another Waterton career in royal service.

For the next two decades, Waterton’s career was of surprising obscurity for one of his family background, and it was not until a relatively late stage that he began taking an active role in local politics. Even then he made only a halting start. Added to the Lindsey bench in 1437, he was removed in 1442, and on 27 June 1443 he followed the example of other of the county’s gentry by suing out of Chancery an exemption from office. In the following year, when despite this exemption the Crown attempted to appoint him to the admittedly burdensome shrievalty of Lincolnshire, he caused grave difficulties by simply refusing to act. CPR, 1441-6, p. 175; R.M. Jeffs, ‘The Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1960), 65. This record of seeming reluctance makes his subsequent career all the more striking. From the mid 1440s his attitude to office-holding was transformed. Restored to the Lindsey bench in June 1444 he was extremely active in local administration thereafter. He represented the county in the Parliament of February 1449; was a frequent appointee to the ad hoc commissions of local government throughout the 1450s; and, most surprisingly of all, served two terms as sheriff. His first term of sheriff drew him, or at least so it was later claimed, into the dispute between Robert Gayton*, a Lincs. man by birth who had made his career as a London grocer, and a lesser man, Thomas Benet, a servant of Gilbert Haltoft, a baron of the Exchequer. In a petition presented to the King and council in the early 1460s, Gayton complained that Waterton, as sheriff in 1453-4 and ‘dredyng more the displesance of the seid Gylbert than god’, had corruptly used the power of his office to win a favourable verdict for Benet in an assize of novel disseisin: SC8/85/4219.

It is tempting to explain this transformation in terms of the greatly increased wealth Waterton enjoyed during the second half of his career. On the death of his father-in-law, Sir William Asenhill, shortly before 22 Apr. 1443, his wife inherited a valuable estate centred on the West Riding manor of Walton. This significantly increased his income: in 1436 he was assessed at 40 marks p.a., while Asenhill’s landed income was put at as much as £95 p.a. (although this included Cambridgeshire lands to which Constance Waterton was not inheritable). E179/136/198; E163/7/31/1. It is not known when this Asenhill marriage took place, but it was probably long before the summer of 1436 when Asenhill’s Yorks. lands – the West Riding manors of Burn (in Brayton), Walton, Cawthorne and Minsthorpe (in South Kirkby) – were settled in reversion on the couple, a settlement designed to insure the inheritance to Waterton in the event of his wife predeceasing her father: CP25(1)/280/157/37. Indeed, it is likely that Waterton was, like his two sisters, married in his father’s lifetime and that the marriage was the product of mutual Lancastrian connexions of his father and father-in-law. This new-found prosperity both made the Crown more liable to appoint him to office and enabled him more readily to bear its potential burdens. Yet it came to him before he sued out an exemption from office – indeed, it may have been the greater liability to appointment that went with enhanced wealth that led him to do so – and before his refusal to serve as the county sheriff.

The explanation for Waterton’s new apparent willingness to assume office must, therefore, be sought elsewhere. It may lie in newly-forged baronial connexions. Just as his new wealth made the Crown more likely to appoint him to office so it made his services more attractive to the local baronage. From the mid 1440s he was very closely associated with Lionel, Lord Welles. As long before as 1417, Welles had married Waterton’s goddaughter and distant cousin, Cecily, sister and heiress in her issue of Sir Robert Waterton*, but it was not until after her death that Richard was drawn into Welles’s service. His entry into that service was, in all probability, through Sir Robert. Although there is little evidence to show that the two Watertons had the active connexion of friendship to add to the passive one of kinship, in February 1446 Sir Robert surrendered to Richard his grant of the the keepership of the duchy of Lancaster manor of Rothwell (near Constance’s manor of Walton) and the herbage of the park there. DL37/53/52. Significantly, the first indication that Richard numbered among Welles’s servants dates from soon after this act of apparent generosity. In the following summer he acted alongside Welles in a fine that was probably partly designed to secure part of the Waterton of Methley inheritance to Welles’s issue by the deceased Cecily; and in the following year, when Welles made a settlement in favour of his second wife, Margaret, widow of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, our MP was one of those assigned ‘ex magna fiducia’ to be feoffees for the implementation of his will. CP25(1)/293/71/315; C140/3/32; CPR, 1461-7, p. 468.

This close connexion with Welles continued right to the end of Waterton’s life. He sat alongside Welles on the Lindsey bench at Horncastle on 9 Aug. 1448, when the important indictments against William Tailboys* were taken. In December 1456, he was involved in arrangements to secure payment of Welles’s annuity from the alnage collected in Yorkshire, and when, in the following June, Thomas Dymmock of Scrivelsby (Lincolnshire) married Welles’s daughter, Margaret, he was one of the feoffees for the settlement of the jointure. KB9/260/93; Add. Ch. 16947; C140/34/50; Bodl. Dodsworth mss, 49, f. 91d. In this context, his energetic office-holding in the 1450s is probably to be seen as an aspect of his service to Welles. But, if Welles was his closest connexion among the Lincolnshire baronage, he was not the only one. In January 1453 he was a joint-grantee with another Lincolnshire lord, John, Viscount Beaumont, in the keeping of the impoverished Lincolnshire priory of Newstead-on-Ancholme; in 1456 he was acting as a feoffee in association with Beaumont; and in 1459 he was co-plaintiff with the viscount in two actions for debt. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 45-46, 540; CP40/795, rots. 190, 191; 797, rot. 42d. In the meantime, in November 1454 he was one of those nominated by Ralph, Lord Cromwell, as feoffees for the implementation of his will. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 199-200, 341. According to a Chancery case of 1458 Cromwell had made him promise ‘by the faith of his bodye as he was trewe gentilman’ to make no feoffment contrary to his wishes: C1/26/81.

Waterton’s several appointments to office in the late 1450s may have had a political dimension beyond the merely local. The increasing polarization of politics in the 1450s put reliable office-holders at a premium, and as an associate of Welles and Beaumont, both of whom were staunchly Lancastrian, the Crown could put Waterton in this category. With such an impeccable Lancastrian background, it is not surprising that he was one of those summoned from Lindsey to the anti-Yorkist great council of 21 May 1455; that he took the trouble to sue out a pardon in the following October when the Yorkists were in control of government; and that he was appointed sheriff in 1457 and to the Lancastrian commission of array of December 1459. PPC, vi. 341; C67/41, m. 25; CPR, 1452-61, p. 560. What is surprising, however, is that he headed the list of attestors to the Lincolnshire election of 25 Aug. 1460, when the Yorkists Humphrey Bourgchier* and Thomas Blount* were returned to a fiercely Yorkist Parliament, and that he was then appointed to the Yorkist commission of arrest of the following November. C219/16/6; CPR, 1452-61, p. 652. But Welles’s presence on the same commission shows that the Yorkists still hoped to win that lord’s loyalty, while Waterton himself, like many others, was probably seeking to keep his options open.

In the event, Welles’s loyalty was not to be won. He fought for the Lancastrians at St. Albans on 17 Feb. 1461, and was killed at Towton on the following 29 Mar. What happened to Waterton is less clear. A writ de diem clausit extremum for his Yorkshire lands was issued on the following 11 May, suggesting that he may have fallen with Welles at Towton, a surmise supported by one chronicler’s mistaken inclusion of him among those attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign. CFR, xx. 2 (the corresponding Lincs. writ was not issued until 22 July 1461); R.L. Storey, ‘Lincs. and the Wars of the Roses’, Nottingham Med. Studies, xiv. 79 n. 56; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), [778].

He was succeeded by a son, another Richard (d.1480), who married, probably in our MP’s lifetime, Margaret, a daughter of Sir John Langton (d.1459) of Mowthorpe and Farnley in Yorkshire. C1/62/237-9. The family had a long and distinguished later history settled at Walton, which our MP had acquired by marriage. The Commons 1509-58, iii. 556-7; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxx. 394-417.