Born into a family of no great distinction, Wenlock faced limited prospects at the beginning of his wide-ranging and prominent career as a soldier, servant of the Household, politician and diplomat.
The Wenlocks originated from Shropshire, although Wenlock’s father, William Wenlock, had settled in Bedfordshire.
By the time Sir Thomas died John had already begun to make his own way in the world. He had followed his brother’s example by serving in France, perhaps crossing the Channel for the first time in the early summer of 1421. On 15 June that year he and Sir Thomas mustered with Sir John Cornwall at Sandwich before taking ship, and in the following October they and other members of Cornwall’s retinue joined the siege of Meaux. Cornwall’s son and heir was killed at the siege, prompting him to return to England before the town fell in May 1422.
The royal expedition to France ended in February 1432, and Wenlock had also returned to England by the following month when he attested the election of Lord Grey’s retainers Sir Thomas Waweton* and John Fitzgeffrey as the knights of the shire for Bedfordshire to the Parliament of that year. His own parliamentary career began following his election to the succeeding assembly. The Bedfordshire indenture for the Parliament of 1433 names Sir Thomas Sackville* and William Whaplode* as the men who the county’s electors had returned to the Commons, but this is due to a scribal error. Sackville and Whaplode did indeed sit in that Parliament, but as the knights of the shire for Buckinghamshire, which shared the same sheriff as Bedfordshire. Although the indenture was never amended, a separate schedule listing the representatives of both counties correctly names Wenlock and James Gascoigne*, another associate of Sir John Cornwall, who now bore the title Lord Fanhope, as the men elected for the latter county.
It is not clear whether Wenlock was already married when he entered the Commons for the first time, although Elizabeth Drayton was certainly his wife by 1435. The widow of Christopher Preston, an obscure Northamptonshire landowner who had died earlier that decade,
Wenlock is likely to have added to his own estates before the end of the same decade since by mid 1438 he was known as ‘of Someries’, suggesting that he already held Greathampstead Someries at that date.
When Wenlock was returned to his second Parliament, the short assembly of 1437, it was alongside John Ragon*, a follower of Reynold, Lord Grey. By then the relationship between Grey and Wenlock’s own patron, Lord Fanhope, was breaking down, since the latter had begun to contest the elderly Grey’s pre-eminence in the county. He built a castle for himself at Ampthill, just a few miles away from the Grey residence at Silsoe, a dramatic symbol of his challenge to the more established peer. Unlike Ragon, who died shortly after the Parliament met, Wenlock was active in the quarrels between the two magnates. He was present when Fanhope and his retainers confronted Grey and his men at Silsoe in the spring of 1437. Before riding to Silsoe on this occasion, he and another of Fanhope’s retinue took the precaution of donning habergeons, although in the event there was no serious disorder. Wenlock was also present during the Bedford ‘riots’ of January 1439. On that occasion Fanhope and his servants clashed with Grey’s followers at the sessions of the peace in the town, a mêlée causing a panicky stampede in which several men were crushed to death. At the time Wenlock was escheator in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire but he cannot have made any pretence at neutrality, since he was included in the general pardon granted to Fanhope and 55 of his supporters two months later. It was a mark of the favour that Fanhope enjoyed at Court that it was secured weeks before a like pardon was issued to Grey’s men. Shortly after the disturbances, he and a number of his followers were appointed to a new commission of the peace from which Sir Thomas Waweton and other leading retainers of Grey were excluded.
In the following June Wenlock mustered as one of the retinue which the recently appointed lieutenant of Aquitaine, Fanhope’s stepson John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, had raised to accompany him to France. By then he had already conveyed all his goods and chattels to John Broun of London, and Joan Wenlock (presumably a relative), to hold in trust while he was overseas.
Within a couple of years of taking up his seat in the Commons of 1439, Wenlock had entered the King’s household. He was certainly one of its esquires by September 1441,
By the time Margaret landed at Portsmouth in April 1445, Wenlock may already have secured the position of an usher of her chamber, an office he certainly held at her coronation on the following 30 May. As an usher he was entitled to a daily salary of 1s. 6d., along with an allowance of 6d. for a yeoman, and the queen supplemented these wages with ad hoc gifts and allowances. No doubt he viewed such additional rewards as no more than his just desserts, since by the mid 1440s the Crown owed him some £430 for his work as an ambassador. By now, however, he was well placed to tap into royal patronage. In May 1446 he and another of the queen’s ushers, Edmund Hampden*, received a grant in survivorship of the offices and Crown lands which Giles Thorndon then held in Ireland, contingent upon Thorndon’s death or retirement. Potentially this grant was very significant, for Thorndon was then treasurer of Ireland and constable of Dublin and Wicklow castles, but it was opposed by the lieutenant governor of Ireland, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, as well as by Thorndon himself. Talbot objected to it on the grounds that it was his right as lieutenant to appoint or dismiss officers of the Crown in the King’s Irish lordship, and in the following July Thorndon was confirmed in all his offices there. In the meantime, however, Wenlock was able to obtain a grant of the offices of constable of Cardiff castle and steward and master forester of the lordships of Glamorgan and Morgannok, for all of which he received fees totalling 100 marks p.a. The castle and lordships had belonged to Henry Beauchamp, duke of Warwick, whose estates had escheated to the Crown following his death since his heir was a baby daughter, whose wardship was granted to the queen. Following the infant’s death in 1449 most of the Beauchamp estates passed to Richard Neville, the husband of Beauchamp’s only full sister and the lord with whom in later years Wenlock was to become most closely associated.
No doubt Wenlock’s membership of the Household facilitated his election to the Parliament of 1447. The government mobilized its resources to secure the return of royal servants to this assembly, summoned with the purpose of bringing down its principal critic, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. The other knight of the shire for Bedfordshire in 1447 was William Gedney*. Almost certainly he owed his seat to his position in the Household since, unlike Wenlock, he was not an established member of the county’s gentry. At the time of his election to this Parliament Wenlock was still an esquire, although he received a knighthood at some stage later in the same year. The following Parliament, which opened in early 1449, was a less overtly political assembly. Re-elected to it as a knight of the shire for Bedfordshire, Wenlock found time for private matters during its first session, for on 24 Mar. that year he, in association with Sir Willam Peyto* of Warwickshire and Edmund Brudenell of Buckinghamshire, obtained a reversionary grant of the wardship of John Barantyn†, son and heir of Drew Barantyn*. The reversion was intended to vest after the latter’s death but Drew, a landowner with substantial interests in the Thames Valley and Bedfordshire, lived for several more years. Wenlock was well placed to bid for such a grant since Drew’s late first wife Joan, the elder of Sir John Drayton’s daughters and coheirs, had been his sister-in-law, although it is more than possible that he and his two associates were acting on the Barantyns’ behalf.
By the time he took up his seat in the Parliament of February 1449 Wenlock had risen to the position of chamberlain of Queen Margaret’s household, an office for which he received an annual fee of £40 and which he held for about five years. It was as her chamberlain that in April 1448 he had laid the foundation stone of Queens’, her new college at Cambridge, an institution of which he himself became a benefactor. In the following July he received letters patent, addressed to him as Margaret’s chamberlain and the ‘King’s knight’, granting him the reversion of the office of constable of Bamburgh castle in Northumberland. This was to vest upon the death of the then constable, John Heron*, but in the end nothing ever came of the grant.
In spite of his association with the queen, Wenlock escaped the savage criticism levelled at some of his fellow courtiers in the late 1440s and early 1450s. He made sure of securing an exemption from the Act of Resumption passed by the Parliament of 1449-50,
By the beginning of the same year Wenlock had fallen into dispute with the widowed duchess of Suffolk, Alice, in spite of his previous links with her late husband and members of the de la Pole affinity. The quarrel concerned a dowry of 750 marks awarded by Henry VI to the wife of an usher of the chamber, Robert Whittingham II*. The King had prevailed upon the duchess to act as his pledge for the payment of this sum and, in turn, she had persuaded Wenlock and Edmund Hampden, now also a knight, to stand as sureties on her behalf. After his wife had not received any of the dowry within the time allotted for its payment, Whittingham had gone to law against Wenlock and Hampden, who had reacted by daily ‘labouring’ and ‘vexing’ the duchess for relief from their difficulties. To resolve the mess he had created, the King issued a writ in January 1451 ordering the Exchequer to content the Whittinghams of the 750 marks, either by direct payment or assignment.
Shortly afterwards Wenlock found himself at odds with Hampden, having become embroiled in another, more serious dispute with the duchess Alice, this time over the former Drayton manor at Nuneham Courtney in Oxfordshire. In 1425 Sir John Drayton’s widow Isabel and her then husband Stephen Haytfeld had sold the reversion of the manor, to vest after their deaths, to Alice’s father Thomas Chaucer*. In the event, Isabel outlived Chaucer but Alice inherited her father’s right to Nuneham, a claim which Wenlock and Drew Barantyn chose to challenge in the early 1450s. They entered the property in June 1451, prompting legal action by Alice and her followers. A suit brought by a group of de la Pole councillors headed by Hampden and Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, led to an assize of novel disseisin at Henley-on-Thames on the following 16 Sept. but this ended in disorder. In the wake of these disturbances, several of the j.p.s for Oxfordshire, acting in association with the county’s sheriff and under sheriff, informed the Crown that Wenlock, Barantyn and no fewer than 3,000 armed ‘malefactors’ had disrupted the proceedings and threatened their opponents and the presiding justices (who included none other than the two chief justices) with death. It would appear that Wenlock and Barantyn paid for their temerity with a brief period of imprisonment in the Marshalsea, since in February 1452 the King sent Sir John Fortescue, c.j.KB, an order for their release. On the following 15 Mar. Wenlock was among those who entered a recognizance for 500 marks to guarantee that Barantyn would appear in the Chancery on 9 May, and he and his fellow sureties also undertook to deliver him to the Fleet prison if he failed to make such an appearance. Five days after putting his name to this recognizance, Wenlock entered another for 2,000 marks, to guarantee his good behaviour while the assize that he and Barantyn had disrupted was still pending. Barantyn was also obliged to provide a like security, although this bore a greater penalty of £2,000. Wenlock turned to the queen for support soon afterwards, for it was at her bidding that he received a royal pardon, dated 21 Apr. 1452, for all the trespasses, riots and other offences he had committed. Two years later, he produced the pardon in the court of King’s bench, so as to forestall any further proceedings against him for his behaviour at Henley, although in the meantime the duchess of Suffolk pressed ahead with another suit in the same court against him, his wife and the Barantyns. In the end the de la Poles won the quarrel, for at the beginning of the following December Wenlock and Drew Barantyn formally quitclaimed Nuneham Courteney to Alice and her heirs.
Shortly after the quarrel over Nuneham had flared up, Wenlock was among those commissioned to arrest the vicar of Standon in Hertfordshire. The commission may have had political overtones since the lord of the manor of Standon was Richard, duke of York, who had granted it to his chamberlain and close adviser Sir William Oldhall* for life. By now York was the leading opponent of the government and the Court, but there is evidence to suggest that Wenlock, who knew the duke from their diplomatic work together nearly a decade earlier, was not necessarily hostile towards him and Oldhall. In about 1454, just after losing the position of queen’s chamberlain, Wenlock received a letter from Henry VI granting him permission to go on pilgrimage overseas. In the letter, the King informed him that his proposed absence abroad was not the only reason for discharging him from the office, since ‘oon of the gretteste causis wherfore we discharge you ys bicause that in the untrewe troubelous tyme ye favored the duc. of .Y. and suche as longed to hym as .O. and othre’. This tantalizing allusion appears to refer to contacts between Wenlock on the one hand and York and Oldhall on the other during the politically troubled years of 1450-2, perhaps the first example of the sort of double dealing for which Wenlock was to become notorious. The King nevertheless went on to assure him in the same letter that, ‘yif your demeanyng be in alwise from hensforthe as may and oughte tobe to the pleasir of us and of the quene aftre your said pilgrimage … we in som othre thing [presumably a grant to compensate him for his loss of office] wol shewe you our favorable lordship’.
In spite of his contacts with York, Wenlock was still far from ready to join him in rebellion, and in the spring of 1455 he turned out for the King at St. Albans. According to one contemporary account, he was carried home in a cart ‘sore hurt’ after the battle,
During the third and final session of the Parliament Wenlock took action to safeguard the repayment of an unpaid loan of £1,033 6s. 8d. he had made to the King before December 1449. This necessitated acquiring two exemptions; first from legislation in favour of those merchants of the Calais staple who likewise had advanced substantial sums to the Crown, and secondly from the Act of Resumption passed by the assembly. Startling in its size, Wenlock’s loan was just one of several that he provided the Lancastrian Crown. At some stage before mid 1451 he advanced it £200 for the defence of the realm, and he also lent the queen sums totalling well over £100.
It appears that Wenlock transferred his loyalties to the Yorkists during 1458. A royal pardon he received on 10 Mar. that year suggests that he was spending more time away from the capital and the Court, since it describes him as of Bedfordshire and ‘late of London’, although he did attend a meeting of the King’s Council at the London Blackfriars just six days earlier.
By the following autumn Wenlock had committed himself openly to York’s cause, for he was with the Yorkist forces scattered by a royal army at Ludford in his native Shropshire on 12 Oct. 1459. Following the rout, he fled with the earls of March, Salisbury and Warwick, first to Devon and then, via Guernsey, to Calais.
Later that month, Lord Fauconberg, Wenlock and John Dynham led another raid against Sandwich from Calais, seizing armaments and capturing Osbert Mountford, who was there raising troops for the Lancastrian garrison at Guînes. Mountford was also conveyed back across the Channel but, unlike Rivers and his son, his life was not spared and he was beheaded at Rysbank. This second raid preceded the return to England of the earls of March, Warwick and Salisbury, who landed at Sandwich on 26 June. Within a week of their return, the Yorkist earls entered London. Wenlock did not participate in the battle of Northampton on the following 10 July, since he had remained in the City with Salisbury to besiege the Tower of London where a Lancastrian garrison led by Lords Hungerford and Scales was holding out. On the night of 19 July the garrison, which had already begun to negotiate its surrender, staged a mass breakout. It appears that Wenlock was ready to allow some of the more high born defenders to make good their escape, although Scales was caught and killed by a group of Thames watermen.
At the time of Wakefield Wenlock was with the earl of March at Ludlow. It is likely that he accompanied March to the Yorkist victory at Mortimer’s Cross in early February 1461, for he was with him in Gloucestershire when the earl of Warwick was defeated at the second battle of St. Albans later that month. Prior to St. Albans, Wenlock was commissioned by the Yorkist-dominated government to arrest its opponents in southern England and the Midlands, and appointed steward of the duchy of Lancaster in Essex, Hertfordshire and Middlesex. It was at St. Albans that the hapless Henry VI was freed from Yorkist control and reunited with his queen, who now hoped to march to London. Following the battle, an anxious mayor of London made arrangements to send victuals and money to the victorious Lancastrians, but a band of Londoners, assisted by Wenlock’s cook John Bishop, intercepted the baggage train before it could leave the City.
Later that month Wenlock marched north with Edward IV to Yorkshire, where he commanded the Yorkist rearguard at Ferrybridge on 28 Mar. and took part in the bloody battle of Towton on the following day. On 1 Apr. Edward ordered him to besiege Thorpe Waterville, a castle in Northamptonshire belonging to the Lancastrian duke of Exeter. Three days later it was reported to have surrendered, as if the mere threat of a siege had sufficed to persuade the garrison to yield. In reality there probably was a short siege, since subsequent payments which Wenlock received from the Exchequer included his expenses ‘before Thorpewatervyle’.
Confirmed in office as chief butler of England by letters patent of 1 May, and one of those whom the new monarch placed on his Council, Wenlock was also involved in the preparations for Edward’s coronation on 28 June. It fell to him and the lawyer Thomas Young II* to discharge the duties of steward of England at the coronation, owing to the youth of the nominal steward, the King’s brother George, and it was in this capacity that he and Young received bills of claims to render services during the ceremonies. Among the successful petitioners were the mayor of Oxford and six of his fellow burgesses, whose claim that they should assist Wenlock at the coronation feast in his capacity as chief butler was upheld. Within days of the coronation the Crown appointed Robert Stowell, a yeoman in the King’s butlery, to purvey wines for the Household, because the increasingly busy Wenlock lacked the time to attend to his duties as butler. Another of the chief butler’s duties was to act as the King’s coroner in the City of London, an office which was likewise assigned to another deputy, Wenlock’s second cousin, John Lawley* of Shropshire.
Two days after the Parliament of 1461 opened, Wenlock was appointed governor of the person and estates of the new duke of Norfolk, then a minor of 17 years of age. On the following 11 Dec. he was made constable of Hertford castle, part of the duchy of Lancaster, for life, and five days later steward of the royal manors and lordships of Langley Marish, Wyrardisbury and Bledlow in Buckinghamshire. On the 21st he and the Irish knight Sir Roland Fitzeustace were jointly appointed treasurer of Ireland, the position which he had failed to secure in the mid 1440s. He and Fitzeustace, who were granted the office for their lives, shared an annual fee of £60 and the keeping of the royal manors of Newcastle Lyons and Saggart in Co. Dublin. Early in the New, Year Wenlock was appointed steward of the duchy of Lancaster in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, again for life, and reappointed steward of the Langley Marish group of lordships, to which was now added the manor of Ruislip in Middlesex. He also attracted the patronage of the dowager duchess of Buckingham. Anxious to win the favour of those at the centre of the new regime, she appointed him steward for life of her estates in Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, with a fee of 20 marks p.a.
The young duke of Norfolk was not the only important figure for whom Wenlock took responsibility in this period, for the King also appointed him governor of the persons and lands of three Lancastrian ladies, Eleanor, countess of Wiltshire, Eleanor, Lady Hungerford and Moleyns, and Lady Hungerford’s mother, Anne Hampden, in March 1462. The countess was a daughter of the late Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, killed at the first battle of St. Albans, and the widow of James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, executed shortly after Edward IV took the throne, and the other women were the wives of the rebels Lord Hungerford and Moleyns and Wenlock’s erstwhile associate Sir Edmund Hampden, who was then in exile with Henry VI in Scotland.
In the same month Wenlock benefited from a series of potentially lucrative grants from the new King. On 12 Mar. he obtained the custody of the lands which the late Katherine, the deceased wife of the judge Robert Danvers (and possibly a daughter of Drew Barantyn), had held at Abbeyfield in Berkshire, along with the wardship of her three daughters and coheirs. Two days later, he received the keeping during pleasure of the Norfolk estates of Sir Thomas Tuddenham, recently executed for treason. Wenlock was well placed to secure such a grant since Tuddenham, possibly acting under duress, had appointed him one of his executors while awaiting his fate as a prisoner in the Tower of London. The grant confirmed a fait accompli, for in a short will made just before his death, the doomed knight had already assigned to him four manors in Norfolk and a share of the barony of Bedford, to hold for life.
Such grants at home were in part Wenlock’s reward for his activities abroad, since his main service to the Yorkist regime was in foreign affairs. Edward IV exploited his considerable experience in this field and from 1461 to 1470 he spent part of every year abroad on diplomatic missions. He was placed on the first of these embassies in August 1461, when Edward appointed him, (Sir) John Clay* and Peter Taster, dean of St. Saviour’s, Bordeaux, to negotiate with the duke of Burgundy. He and his fellow ambassadors were given several objectives. First, they were to negotiate a truce and commercial treaty with Burgundy; secondly, they were to try with the duke’s help to obtain a truce with France; finally and secretly, they were to propose a match between Edward IV and the duke’s niece, the Mademoiselle de Bourbon. The ambassadors, who crossed to Calais within a month of their appointment, met the duke of Burgundy at Valenciennes. In the end, their only real achievement was to confirm and strengthen the existing friendship between the Yorkists and Burgundy, for the marriage proposals came to nothing and attempts to seek a truce with France proved abortive. At Valenciennes the bishop of Arras entreated the English ambassadors and the duke to support a crusade called by Pope Pius II but Wenlock and his associates refused to make any promises regarding a matter they had no authority to discuss. The duke lavishly entertained the ambassadors throughout their stay. He held a banquet in their honour before they left and sent them gifts of silver plate just as they were preparing to depart. They returned to England via Calais, reaching London on 21 Nov. Nine days before they arrived back in the City, Wenlock and Taster were among those commissioned to determine infractions of the Anglo-Burgundian truce. In spite of the limited success of their mission, they were well rewarded for their efforts. Clay and Taster each received £82 in wages (£1 for each day they were away) and Wenlock twice that amount, and they were also allowed an additional £20 for their travelling expenses.
In the following February the King sent Wenlock on an embassy to the Scottish earl of Ross. Scotland was an important concern for the Yorkists at the beginning of Edward IV’s reign, since it was the home of the Lancastrian Court in exile. Wenlock’s mission was linked to the diplomatic manoeuvring of the earl of Warwick. Warwick was working to turn the Scottish Queen-Mother, Mary of Gueldres, against the Lancastrian refugees north of the border. Wenlock, who may have attended the talks which Warwick held with her at Dumfries, returned to Scotland in the summer, as a member of an embassy headed by the earl. Later in the same year he was occupied elsewhere, for in the autumn of 1462 he and other ambassadors crossed to Flanders to meet representatives of the duke of Burgundy. He was paid £112 for his part in these negotiations,
The Scottish-Lancastrian incursions into England which necessitated the campaigning in the borders in the early years of Edward’s reign were a pressing priority for the Yorkists because they were partly sponsored by Louis XI of France. Even limited foreign support for an insurrection against his insecure throne was a serious concern for the new King, and in the latter half of 1463 Wenlock was involved in the diplomacy which removed the immediate threat of direct co-operation between the French and the Lancastrians. He did so as a member of an embassy which met representatives of France and Burgundy on Burgundian territory in the autumn of that year, first at St. Omer and then at Hesdin. Originally the English ambassadors, headed by the chancellor, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, and Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex, were to have arrived in Flanders in June 1463. According to one report, they were delayed by rumours of French plans to attack Calais, a somewhat unlikely scenario given that Louis had assented to a conference between the three sides. In fact, the main reason for the delay was Edward’s desire to settle the unstable situation on the Anglo-Scottish border before dispatching his embassy, which did not leave England until late August. In the meantime Wenlock attended a meeting of the Council on 4 July, at which plans for the forthcoming negotiations were discussed, and on the same day the ambassadors received an advance of 40 days’ wages, of which his share was £80. On 8 July he was among those commissioned to investigate complaints from members of the Calais garrison about their unpaid wages, although he had returned to England before 21 Aug., when he and the other English delegates finally set sail from Dover. Upon arriving at Calais, Wenlock rode ahead to Boulogne, where he met the duke of Burgundy and obtained assurances that it was safe for the main party to continue to St. Omer. The English ambassadors spent almost the whole of September at St. Omer, from where Wenlock corresponded directly with Edward IV to keep him informed of events, before travelling to Hesdin. Primarily intended to achieve an agreement between England and France, either directly or through the mediation of Burgundy, the conference almost foundered on the English ambassadors’ insistence that Louis XI should cease providing support to Henry VI and his queen. At length an Anglo-French truce, the first since 1449, was concluded at Hesdin, where Wenlock and his colleagues met Louis in person. Signed on 8 Oct., it suspended hostilities between the two sides on land for a year, while leaving a truce at sea to future negotiation. In addition, Louis promised neither to make war against England nor to provide succour to the Lancastrian King, queen and prince of Wales. While at Hesdin the English ambassadors also agreed a treaty with Burgundy. Dated 7 Oct., this extended the trading agreements already in place between the two sides.
In the following spring Wenlock and the earl of Warwick engaged in further discussions with the French. Another conference at St. Omer was planned for 21 Apr. but Warwick was kept at home by further disturbances in northern England and negotiations with the Scots. As a result, the meeting was postponed and all that was immediately achieved was a temporary truce at sea, agreed on the 24th of the same month. When the delayed conference finally opened on 1 July, Wenlock and Richard Whetehill were the only English representatives to attend, and it was adjourned until October. In the event, Edward IV’s secret marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville had already put paid to Warwick’s schemes for a match between the English King and Louis’s sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy. In due course the King’s marriage became public knowledge and the conference never reconvened. In spite of this setback, Warwick continued to press for a French alliance but Edward’s preference for closer ties with Burgundy and Brittany sounded the death knell for such a project. In March 1465 Warwick, Wenlock and others were appointed keepers of the truce with Brittany, and two months later both men were dispatched on a powerful embassy authorized to treat at will with Burgundy and France, meaning that they were abroad when Elizabeth Wydeville’s coronation took place. By now constantly associated with Warwick, Wenlock seems to have shared his dismay about the Wydeville match,
By the time of his match with Agnes, Wenlock had already taken steps to safeguard his well-being in the hereafter. In early 1466 he had obtained a papal indult requiring the congregation of St. Mary’s, Luton, to include him in their prayers, both during his lifetime and after his death. This was granted to him after he had submitted a petition seeking ‘spiritual remuneration’ in return for his efforts in helping the church’s parishioners to obtain an exemption from the dietary regime customarily expected of the faithful at Lent and on other fast days, for his devotion to the Holy See and for the assistance he had proffered papal nuncios in the past. Just over three years later, he obtained a second such indult, this time awarding him the right to receive a plenary remission of his sins in the hour of his death from a confessor of his choice, provided that he had truly and penitently admitted all his sins.
Remarkably, Wenlock was still in favour with the Crown at this date, in spite of his close association with Warwick, now increasingly estranged from Edward IV, and the uncovering of a treasonable conspiracy earlier in the same year. Among those arrested at Whitsuntide 1468 was one of his servants, John Hawkins, who was executed for receiving correspondence from the Lancastrian queen in exile, Margaret of Anjou. Before he was put to death Hawkins was said to have accused Wenlock and other prominent Yorkists of treasonable activity. The King chose to ignore the allegations, just as he decided not to act against the scheming Warwick, and it was in the immediate wake of the arrests that he granted Wenlock the Fortescue estates in fee simple. There is no evidence that Wenlock participated in Warwick’s unsustainable coup of 1469, probably because he was in Calais, attending to his duties as the earl’s lieutenant there.
According to the chronicler Philippe de Commines, the duke of Burgundy also tried to ensure that Wenlock would remain loyal to Edward by granting him a pension of 1,000 ėcus. If so, his efforts were to no avail, for when Henry VI was restored to the throne in the autumn of 1470 Wenlock came out in support of Warwick and the Readeption government. Still in Calais when he did so, Wenlock appears to have remained across the Channel for some time yet, for he was not summoned to the Readeption Parliament. He probably returned to England with his old mistress Queen Margaret, whom he accompanied to the battle of Tewkesbury. At the battle, fought on 4 May 1471, he and Sir John Langstrother, prior of the Hospitallers in England, had the responsibility of advising her young son Edward, prince of Wales, the nominal commander of the Lancastrian centre. The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall† (who sat for the borough of Much Wenlock in Henry VIII’s reign) records that he was killed by one of his own side, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who suspected him of treachery in the midst of the battle. Apocryphal or not, this story has probably done more than most to reinforce his reputation as a turncoat.
Before Tewkesbury Wenlock had deposited various pieces of plate, a locked casket containing jewels and other valuables and a breviary with the abbot of Glastonbury, John Salwood, for safekeeping, and 16 days after the battle Salwood formally agreed with his widow Agnes that he would return them whenever she requested. Presumably it was over these items that the abbot and Agnes quarrelled not long afterwards. In a letter which he wrote to Agnes at some stage after Tewkesbury, Salwood warned her that if she went to law against him he would ‘opyng such thyngges that shal turne yow to as much trobill as I shal haue by yow’ and confidently predicted that he would have the best lawyer in England on his side.