Welford was the most prominent man to represent Hereford during Henry VI’s reign, although his prominence largely post-dates his recorded parliamentary career. From a family settled in Worcester, he was a lawyer who, by committing himself to the cause of York in the 1450s, rose to a place in local affairs that he would not otherwise have obtained. He first appears in the records in 1432 when he leased a messuage in Worcester from his stepfather, Richard Veyly, at 12d. p.a. for 12 years.
His wife’s lands prompted Welford to transfer his interests from Worcester to Hereford, where he quickly established himself among the leading citizens. On 24 Jan. 1447 the city electors returned him to the Parliament originally summoned to meet at Cambridge but then re-summoned to Bury St. Edmunds. The unusual venue, together with the divisive nature of the Parliament’s likely business as the royal court moved against Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, may have been a deterrent to candidature. Welford was perhaps elected in absentia: the Hilary law term had begun the day before the election, and he is known to have personally pursued at least one action during the term.
Welford’s readiness to accept election as mayor of Hereford in the following October implies that his concern for city affairs now took precedence over his practice as an attorney in the Westminster courts. His first term in the office, however, came at a very difficult time. The politics of the city was becoming factionalized as the dominance of the leading burgesses, of whom he was one, came to be actively resisted by lesser men, who found a leader in John Weobley*. This had already led to a disturbance at the mayoral election of the previous year, October 1448, when our MP had been among the electors threatened by Weobley, and tension heightened during Welford’s mayoralty. On 8 Mar. 1450 he arrested one of Weobley’s adherents, Philip Corveser, only to have the prisoner violently freed from his custody. This, according to an indictment before commissioners of oyer and terminer in August 1452, was the prelude to a major disturbance as Weobley called upon the marginalized Welsh in the city to rise up against the mayor and citizens. Further problems, according to the same indictment, arose on the following 19 Oct., when, as the citizens assembled in the Tolsey to elect Welford’s successor as mayor, a gang of 200 broke in and threatened them with death unless they filled the office with a man of their choosing. If this intervention did occur, it did not prevent the election of one of the leading citizens, John Fuster, to the mayoralty, but Weobley’s faction enjoyed better success at the parliamentary election held only four days later. The election indenture gives no hint of irregularity (the attestors were leading citizens, including Welford), and yet Weobley was one of those returned.
Much about this episode in Hereford’s politics is obscure, not least because knowledge of it depends exclusively upon indictments taken after the duke of York’s rising in 1452. These trace a link between the disaffected in the city and the strong Yorkist faction among the county gentry, headed by (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, by naming Weobley and other Hereford tradesmen as illegally receiving livery from Devereux in January 1452. What is known of Welford’s later career suggests that he too was a supporter of Devereux, and there is some evidence that, despite his clashes with Weobley during his mayoralty, the two men were not on bad terms. Other evidence shows that Weobley was not the outcast the indictments portray him, and in the same month as Devereux allegedly distributed livery he was named as an arbiter in a dispute between our MP and a local brasier.
Welford was once again elected to Parliament on 2 Mar. 1453. On 8 Apr. 1454, during the last session of this long Parliament, he joined Walter Hood* in offering surety for a lease by the Crown to two of the county’s gentry, Thomas Parker and John Dumbulton.
In the meantime Welford’s career as a local lawyer advanced, culminating in June 1458, when a new commission of the peace was issued for Herefordshire with the sole purpose of adding him to the quorum.
It is not known whether Welford played any active part in the campaigns of 1459-61, but the trust placed in him by the new government is exemplified by his striking pricking as sheriff of Herefordshire on 15 July 1461, an office to which his local standing hardly qualified him, and his nomination, three months later, to three important commissions in South Wales and Herefordshire.
Yet, although there can be no doubt that Welford was advanced by the change of monarch, he did not benefit directly from royal patronage, even though he continued to be appointed to commissions of gaol delivery and continued his service on the quorum of the Herefordshire bench, from which he was briefly removed during Henry VI’s restoration. Little is known of his career in the 1460s, although it is a reasonable speculation that he sat for Hereford in one or both of the Parliaments of 1461 or 1463, for which returns are lost. In the early 1470s, for reasons that are unclear, Welford was more prominent. Despite his advancing years – he must have been about 60 years old in 1470 – he continued to involve himself in Hereford affairs, serving a second term as mayor, was appointed to several ad hoc commissions, most notably the important oyer and terminer in South Wales in the wake of Edward IV’s restoration, and was briefly added to the quorum of the Gloucestershire bench. He also benefited from a lease from the Crown, albeit a very minor one – on 13 Mar. 1472 he rented a parcel of a ditch next to the wall of Hereford castle at an annual rent of 12d. – and it is a further measure of his status that he should have been named as high as third among the attestors to the Herefordshire parliamentary election held on 27 Dec. 1477.
Welford was too old for this Indian summer of his career to last very long. His removal from the Herefordshire bench in 1476 was the prelude to retirement, although he was named to two gaol commissions as late as 1489 when he must have been about 80 years of age. He did not long survive this last appointment, making his will on 7 Mar. 1490 and dying a few days later. Describing himself as of the parish of St. Owen, he wanted to be buried in Hereford cathedral in the aisle of the Blessed Virgin ‘de pitte’ next to his first wife, Isabel. The will reveals much about his family. He named, among those for whom a priest was to pray for two years, his parents, wives and brother, and, less predictably, his two stepfathers, Richard Veyly and Henry Comyn, and he made a bequest to his elderly sister, Alice, who was to have two crofts in Hereford should his son and heir, Richard, die without issue. Despite his great age, this son and heir appears to have been a minor. One can only suppose that his second wife, whom he had married by 1477, was much his junior, even though it is clear from the will that she did not survive him. He instructed his executors to provide for the young heir first ‘ad scolas’ at Oxford and then ‘ad London ad curiam’, presumably intending to provide him with a legal education like his own. The heir was to have nearly all his property in Worcestershire and Herefordshire (not specified in detail), provided that he married by ‘consilium amicorum suorum’. Welford’s plate, however, was to be divided between the heir and a family servant. The generosity to this servant is a curious feature: aside from a share of the plate, he was to have a messuage in St. Thomas’s Street and the bed in which Welford slept. It is a reasonable speculation that the servant was the MP’s bastard son, particularly as he too was named John. The executors charged with implementing these bequests included the heir, despite his youth, but, more significantly, also Sir John Lingen and Ralph Lingen. They were to be rewarded, rather ungenerously, with 20s. each for their labour.
One curious episode throws an unflattering light on Welford’s character. On 18 Nov. 1451 a brasier of Hereford, Henry Man, had complained before the barons of the Exchequer that he, as mayor of Hereford in 1449-50, had fabricated process and judgement against him in the city’s piepowder court. Man was one of Hereford’s more substantial men – he is almost certainly to be identified with Henry Brasier, assessed in the city with an income of £5 p.a. in 1451 – and his temerity in bringing this action provoked Welford’s tenacious hostility. After a failed attempt at arbitration early in 1452, he would not let the matter rest. In the same year he brought an action in King’s bench against Richard Green, mayor of Hereford in 1447-8, for maintaining Brasier’s plea, and much later in 1465 he accused John Gloucester II*, an Exchequer official at the time of Brasier’s action, of the same offence.