WENTWORTH, Philip

A man of impressive pedigree on his mother’s side of the family, Wentworth both flourished and met his end in the service of Henry VI. His maternal grandparents were a prominent knight and a peer’s daughter, and his mother, Margery, the widow of John, Lord Roos. Margery’s match with Roos, who was killed in France at the battle of Baugé, was childless, and she brought to her second marriage with Roger Wentworth the Despenser and Tiptoft lands she had inherited from her parents. CP, iv. 291. Philip’s father was of far less illustrious stock than Margery, a remarkable catch for a humble esquire. Originally from Yorkshire, he was a younger son of John Wentworth, himself from a cadet branch of a family of Wentworth in the West Riding, and early in his career he entered the service of Henry Scrope, Lord Scrope of Masham. Add. 5524, f. 55; Foedera, iv (2), 133. Following her first husband’s death, Margery had been assigned lands in dower from his estates in Yorkshire and five other counties in central and south-east England. Valued at over £241 p.a., they included the castle and manor of Helmsley, where she was probably residing when she met Roger Wentworth. CCR, 1419-22, pp. 186-7. The couple married in secret before April 1423 when the Crown, disapproving of the match, punished Margery by confiscating her dower lands. CFR, xv. 32. She and Roger obtained a pardon for marrying without licence on the following 25 June, but they were obliged to pay the King the extremely substantial fine of £1,000. CPR, 1422-9, p. 136; PPC, iii. 130. Although the match, upheld by the Church as valid in 1436, was considered degrading for Margery, she never forgot her social rank and retained the title ‘Lady Roos’ after becoming Roger Wentworth’s wife. CPL, viii. 601; Feudal Aids, iii. 343; Norf. RO, Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Betyns, f. 96. Roger remained a relatively obscure figure for the rest of his life, although he was distrained for knighthood on at least two occasions (in 1430 and 1439). Margery’s father, Sir Philip Despenser, died not long after her second marriage, by which date her mother, Elizabeth, was already dead. This meant that she succeeded to the lands of both parents at once. She inherited a considerable estate, comprising six manors and other lands in Lincolnshire, Essex and Yorkshire, along with various holdings in London, from her father, and 12 manors or parts of manors in Lincolnshire, Essex, Kent and Suffolk from her mother. Margery’s lands in Suffolk included the manor of Nettlestead, which became one of the principal residences of Philip, her eldest son by Roger. CP, iv. 291; CFR, xv. 95; CPR, 1422-9, pp. 156, 159, 160-1, 261-2; CIPM, xxii. 307-12. Philip never came fully into his own because she outlived him, but she is likely to have allowed him possession of at least part of his prospective inheritance. If his wife, Mary Clifford, brought him any lands in marriage, no evidence for them has survived.

By the late 1430s, perhaps before he had attained his majority, Wentworth was a member of the royal household. Soon held in high favour, in the mid 1440s he was one of the Household men given a jewelled brooch by the queen, E404/65/90; E101/409/17, m. 2. In later years Wentworth was one of a select few who regularly received gifts of jewelry from the queen: A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 213. and at the end of 1446 he received the first of many grants from the King, a sum of £12 10s. arising from a cargo confiscated at Bishop’s Lynn. CPR, 1446-52, p. 31. Described as a ‘King’s serjeant’ when awarded this sum, he was an usher of the chamber by the following 26 Feb. when he was granted a tenement in Ashingdon, Essex, formerly belonging to the late Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. CPR, 1446-52, p. 43.

The Ashingdon grant was made during the Parliament of 1447, which Wentworth attended as one of the knights of the shire for Suffolk. Gloucester, a leading critic of the government, had died three days earlier at Bury St. Edmunds, where the assembly was held, shortly after his arrest on trumped up charges of treason. The government, headed by William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, had called the Parliament in order to take action against Gloucester, and it had chosen Bury as the venue because it was well away from London where the duke had enjoyed popular support. During the elections to the Commons, it had mobilized its resources to secure the return of its supporters in East Anglia: Wentworth’s fellow knight of the shire for Suffolk was another courtier, William Tyrell I*, and the MPs for the county of Norfolk, Edmund Clere* and John Blakeney*, were also Household men. It is likely that Wentworth, in receipt of a fee of 20 marks p.a. from Suffolk’s widow a few years later, Egerton Roll 8779. was already a de la Pole retainer when he was returned to the Commons.

In the months immediately following the dissolution of the Parliament, Wentworth obtained several grants in conjunction with other members of the Household. In April 1447 the Crown assigned to him and Sir Edward Hull* certain lands in Devon which had belonged to Robert Cappes, one of Gloucester’s servants; in June he and Nicholas Ellis were jointly appointed to the office of surveyor of the customs at Hull; and in August he and John Blakeney were granted the right to take two tuns of wine from the port of Ipswich at every Christmas. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 45, 82. The last two of these grants were for life in survivorship, but Wentworth appears to have surrendered his share of the office of surveyor a few years later. It was also in 1447 that Wentworth was appointed sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, a significant office for one of his relative youth to hold. At the end of the decade he, like several of his predecessors in the office, was pardoned £160 from his account for this first term as sheriff: E28/79/16. In the meantime, his Household duties must have taken up an appreciable amount of his time, for in mid January 1449 the Exchequer was ordered to pay him £46 13s. 4d. for the expenses he had incurred while riding to deliver the King’s messages over the last six years. E404/65/90.

In the same January, Wentworth was re-elected to the Commons. On 10 Feb. 1449, two days before the Parliament opened, the Crown granted him a 60-year lease of the castle and manor of Offton and the manors of Elmsett and Somersham, all duchy of Lancaster properties in Suffolk. At the same time, or shortly afterwards, he was constable of Offton, an office he exercised jointly with an usher of the chamber, William Cotton, with whom he likewise shared the post of constable of the duchy castle at Clitheroe, Lancashire. Six days after Parliament opened, Wentworth attended a meeting of the royal council, PPC, vi. 67. and during the recess between its second and last sessions he was appointed steward and parker of the manor and forest of Feckenham, Worcestershire, for life. Circumstances had changed when the Parliament of 1449-50 was called. The government and Court came under strong attack from Richard, duke of York, and his supporters during this assembly, which impeached William de la Pole. By then duke of Suffolk, de la Pole was murdered on 2 May 1450, while on his way into exile overseas. The Parliament also passed an Act of Resumption, but Wentworth was hardly touched by this legislation. Although he lost his position as constable of Offton, only 12 marks’ worth of his grants and annuities (which brought in nearly £60 p.a. in all) was resumed. E163/8/14. In any case, he was rewarded with several offices in Wales while Parliament was still sitting. These included the receivership of Cilgerran, ironically a lordship which the late duke of Suffolk had lost as a result of the very same Act. B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 129, 259.

Largely unaffected by the crisis of 1449-50, Wentworth was knighted in the early 1450s. By 1452, he was one of the King’s carvers, an elite group within the Household, and in April that year he and a fellow carver, Richard Tunstall†, were jointly awarded £100 for attending and serving the King. E404/68/104. In the same month he took part in the installation of John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, as a Knight of the Garter. F.W. Beltz, Mems. Order of the Garter, p. xviii. He was present as a proctor for the duke, who was unable to attend the ceremony in person, but his links with Mowbray were far from close. By this date the Court had regained control of the government from the duke of York, who in the previous February had tried and failed to dictate terms to the King with a show of armed force, and in the autumn of 1452 Wentworth served on several commissions of oyer and terminer investigating those who had risen in the duke’s favour.

The Parliament of the following year was the most compliant of Henry VI’s reign. Wentworth was among the courtiers returned, although not without some controversy. The sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, Thomas Sharneburne*, subsequently alleged that Sir William Ashton, John Howard* and many other servants of the duke of Norfolk had threatened his under sheriff, Thomas Grys, and his clerk, William Peyntor, prior to the county election in Suffolk. He claimed that they had forcibly brought Peyntor before the duke who, it was implied, had pressured him to return his nominees to the Commons. Sharneburne further alleged that on election day itself, 12 Feb. 1453, a large number of Mowbray men had come in armed force to the county court at Ipswich, where they had returned Thomas Daniell* (who held no lands in the county) and John Wingfield† (a non-resident). The election, which neither Sharneburne nor his deputy had attended, was afterwards declared invalid, and Wentworth and Gilbert Debenham I*, a Mowbray man but then temporarily estranged from the duke of Norfolk, were returned at a new election held on the following 12 Mar. There is little doubt that Mowbray had attempted to influence the election, although it is equally clear that Sharneburne, a member of the queen’s household, had been determined to return candidates who enjoyed the support of the Court. R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 54-57; KB27/775, rot. 20d; PPC, vi. 183. After the Parliament, there was a further controversy between Wentworth and Sharneburne’s successor as sheriff, John Denston, with Wentworth suing Denston in the Exchequer for failing to pay him his parliamentary wages of £33. E13/145B, rot. 47.

Just as he had done during his previous Parliament, Wentworth attended at least one meeting of the King’s Council while a Member of that of 1453. PPC, vi. 136. A few months before the latter assembly opened, he obtained a grant for life from the duchy of Lancaster of the office of parker of Cridling Stubbs, Yorkshire, along with custody of the manor there, a sinecure he was allowed to exercise through a deputy. DL37/21/5. During the Parliament of 1453, moreover, he was awarded another grant for life of £40 p.a from the issues of the duchy lordships of Offton, Elmsett and Somersham in Suffolk that he already leased from the Crown, and of that of Fulmodeston in Norfolk. DL37/21/25. Although the summoning of the Parliament coincided with a political recovery for the Court, it was soon followed by further crises and civil war. Wentworth was in the royal army defeated by the duke of York at St. Albans in May 1455, a battle at which his brother-in-law, Thomas, Lord Clifford, was among those killed. CP, ii. 293. Shortly after the battle William Worcestre was informed that he had ignominiously fled the field: ‘Ser Phillyp Wentworth was in the feld, and bare the Kynges standard, and kest hit down and fled. Myn lord Norffolk seyth he shalbe hanged ther fore, and so is he worthy. He is in Suffolk now. He dar not come a-bought the Kynge.’ Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 156. It is not certain whether this report was true. Worcestre was a servant of Sir John Fastolf, who would have welcomed any story which showed Wentworth in such a bad light. There is no agreement as to the identity of the banner-bearer who had failed in his duties. One chronicle names the steward of the Household, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, although it does not charge him of cowardice; another says that the earl of Wiltshire abandoned it before fleeing the battle. But the letter addressed to Worcestre was closest in time to this episode: C.A.J. Armstrong, ‘Politics and the Battle of St. Albans’, Bull. IHR, xxxiii. 43.

The enmity between Fastolf, a leading opponent of the de la Pole affinity in East Anglia, and Wentworth dated back several years. Wentworth was a particular thorn in the flesh for Fastolf, competing with him for the wardship of his relative, Thomas Fastolf†, and challenging his title to certain lands. His claims to these estates were opportunistic and unjust, but in making them he was perhaps partly motivated by the frustration of having to wait to come into his own inheritance. During the late 1440s he attempted to wrest the manors of Beighton in Norfolk and Bradwell in Suffolk from Sir John, who had bought them quite legitimately from Sir Hugh Fastolf, the young Thomas’s grandfather. He was assisted by two de la Pole followers, John Andrew III*, a man whom Sir John and his supporters viewed with particular opprobrium, and John Ulveston*. Having broken into Fastolf’s house and close at Beighton in April 1449, Andrew and Ulveston forged two inquisitions which declared that the manors were the rightful inheritance of Thomas. KB9/267/20. Fastolf traversed these findings to keep the properties out of Wentworth’s hands but this meant that they were taken into the custody of the Crown, from which he was able to recover them only at farm, Beighton for three years and Bradwell for five. Unfortunately for him, in 1453 the government, then dominated by the Court of which his foe was part, set aside this arrangement. As a result, Wentworth recovered Bradwell and Fastolf was unable to secure Beighton until 1455, incurring heavy legal costs and loss of revenue in the process. C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 242; A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 209. In 1456, moreover, Wentworth took legal action against two of the knight’s servants and advisers, William Jenney* and Thomas Howes, over undertakings they had made in 1453, secured by bonds, that Fastolf and his feoffees would release their claim to Bradwell by a certain date and abide by arbitration concerning its revenues since the death of Thomas Fastolf’s father, another John Fastolf. CP40/782, rots. 37, 40.

During the quarrel, Wentworth’s claim that Beighton and Bradwell belonged to Thomas Fastolf made physical custody of the ward crucially important. Wentworth’s brother-in-law, Robert Constable*, had acquired the boy’s wardship from the King in November 1447, in spite of protests from Sir John Fastolf, who had argued that Thomas’s father had committed it to him in his will and that the ward’s mother had surrendered her son to Constable under duress. CPR, 1446-52, p. 144; A.R. Smith, ‘Litigation and Politics’, in Property and Politics ed. Pollard, 64. In reality, Constable was acting as an agent for Wentworth, to whom it was formally reassigned in February 1453 although Fastolf was able to discover technical irregularities in that grant. CPR, 1452-61, p. 46; Richmond, 242. On 6 June the following year, the Crown awarded the wardship to his allies, John Paston* (who hoped to marry Thomas to one of his daughters), and Thomas Howes. CFR, xix. 92-93; Paston Letters ed. Davies, ii. 103-4. Wentworth responded by sending John Andrew and Thomas Devyll to enter the ward’s manor of Nacton and other properties in Suffolk two days later. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 112. He also managed to obtain fresh letters patent awarding the wardship to him, CPR, 1452-61, pp. 46, 158. but Fastolf won it back by purchasing it from the Crown. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’, 207. The quarrel continued, however, and in the spring of 1455 Sir John sought the help of the duke of Norfolk. Paston Letters ed. Davies, i. 83-84; Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 151-2.

By now, Mowbray had good reason heartily to dislike Wentworth, who had remained in the service of the dowager duchess of Suffolk following the downfall of William de la Pole and helped her to resist his claims to her manor of Stockton in south-east Norfolk. Richmond, 148n. The animosity of the duke notwithstanding, Wentworth was on friendly terms with Gilbert Debenham I. Debenham shared an antipathy towards Sir John Fastolf, who in June 1455 claimed that Gilbert and other Mowbray men were supporting his opponent against him. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 118.

A year later, John Paston was informed that John Andrew had an annual fee of 20s. from the manor at Nacton, indicating that Wentworth was using some of the income from the young Thomas Fastolf’s properties to reward his supporters. Ibid. 147. By then Fastolf had already obtained a couple of writs of ‘ravishment’, in response to an attempt by Wentworth to abduct the ward. Ibid. 118, 141-2, 161-2. In mid 1454 the MP had ridden with a substantial armed force to Colchester, where he and his men had taken a boy they had mistaken for Thomas. Ibid. 93-94. Later, in July 1456, he and his supporters succeeded in seizing the right child, but Thomas was soon recovered by Fastolf who sold his wardship to Sir Thomas Fulthorpe. Richmond, 242. The abduction led to litigation in the court of King’s bench, where Wentworth and his co-defendants claimed to have rescued the ward from Paston and Howes. KB27/783, rot. 71d; 784, rot. 82; 786, rots. 66, 82; 790, rot. 119d; 794, rot. 66d; 798, rot. 80. As other litigation of this period in the same court illustrates, Wentworth broadened the quarrel with Fastolf by challenging his title to Cotton, another Suffolk manor which was not part of Thomas Fastolf’s inheritance, prompting Sir John to sue him and others for forcibly entering and taking livestock from that property. Paston Letters ed. Davies, ii. 166-8; KB27/791, rot. 53.

The dispute over the wardship continued after Fastolf died in early November 1459. During the Parliament of that year (which opened a fortnight after Sir John’s death) Wentworth successfully petitioned to have the letters patent issued to Paston and Howes over five years earlier declared invalid. RP, v. 371 (cf. PROME, xii. 507). It was probably at his behest that John Andrew and Roger Philpot held unauthorized inquiries into Sir John Fastolf’s lands in April 1460, since these took place during his second shrievalty. The ‘inquisitions’ were a direct challenge to Paston, who claimed that Sir John had bequeathed to him these estates, because they found that Thomas (described as a ward of the Crown) was the knight’s rightful heir. Paston and Howes responded by appealing to higher authority, and the true inquisitions post mortem for Sir John were held in the following autumn. C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: Fastolf’s Will, 107, 113. It is unlikely that Wentworth was ever reconciled with the Pastons: it was probably in early 1461 that Friar John Brackley of Norwich warned John Paston that the MP was one of those who bore him ill will. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 263-4. But a letter Margaret Paston wrote to her husband in Oct. 1460 might be read as indicating that Wentworth and Paston were trying to come to terms with each other by that date: ibid. i. 259.

In the meantime, whatever had happened at the first battle of St. Albans, Wentworth retained the trust of the Lancastrian Crown. He had, however, felt it politic to purchase a royal pardon in October 1455: C67/41, m. 22. In June 1457 he had been at Coventry, where he and other representatives of Henry VI concluded a truce with the ambassadors of the king of Scotland. Foedera, v (2), 71-75. He was also among those commissioned in the following August to travel to Rome, to offer the King’s obedience to Pope Calixtus III. Three months later he took out letters of protection prior to going abroad, but it is not clear whether he actually fulfilled his commission. CPR, 1452-61, p. 362; DKR, xlviii. 423. In Feb. 1458 he was granted another royal pardon (C67/42, m. 35), although it does not necessarily follow that he was in Eng. at this date. He was chosen for another embassy in April 1459, when a great council at Westminster agreed to a papal request to send representatives to a general diet at Mantua, to discuss the Turkish threat to Christendom. Later that year, Wentworth was assigned daily wages of 20s. for six months, but political crises at home prevented the ambassadors from ever setting off for Italy. PPC, vi. pp. lxxxiii-lxxxiv, 302; E404/71/3/84; J.T. Ferguson, English Diplomacy, 142-3; Reg. Whethamstede ed. Riley, i. 336.

Following the renewal of civil war in the autumn of 1459, Wentworth remained loyal to the Lancastrian Crown. On 14 Nov. that year he was appointed to a second term as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, just two days after his election to his last Parliament, held at Coventry. The Parliament of 1459 attainted Richard, duke of York, and his supporters and Wentworth served on several anti-Yorkist commissions established in late 1459 and early 1460. On 20 Dec. 1459 (the day Parliament dissolved) the King made him chief steward for life of the East Anglian honour of Clare, a lordship confiscated from York himself. He received one of his last grants from the Lancastrian Crown in the following March when he was awarded the wardship of Richard Mekylffyld, heir to an estate in Suffolk. CFR, xix. 260-1. The grant of the Mekylffyld ldship. was renewed three months later: CPR, 1452-61, p. 592.

A few months later, the Yorkists regained control of the government, and by the end of 1460 the queen had raised an army in the north of England to resist them. Along with other loyal Household men, Wentworth joined her forces. He fought for the Lancastrians at the battle of Towton in March 1461 and was attainted in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign. PROME, xiii. 42-46. Having survived Towton, in late 1462 he was one of the captains holding Dunstanburgh castle in Northumberland against Edward IV, Excerpta Historica ed. Bentley, 365. and he remained at large, still loyal to Henry VI, after that fortress surrendered at the end of December. His mother, younger brother and son all obtained pardons in the following spring, C67/45, rots. 11, 13. but he never reconciled himself to the Yorkist King. His whereabouts over the next 18 months are unknown, but he was in the Lancastrian force overwhelmed at Hexham on 15 May 1464. Captured the next day, he was brought south to Middleham in Yorkshire, where he, Oliver Wentworth, and other prisoners were beheaded on 18 May. J. Stow, Annales of Eng. ed. Howes, 418; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 79, 178-9. The MP and Oliver, described as ‘of Nettlestead, gentleman’ in Mar. 1460 (CFR, xix. 260-1), were evidently kinsmen but the exact relationship is not known.

In spite of Wentworth’s execution, his son and heir, Henry, was conspicuously loyal to the new dynasty and in due course joined Edward IV’s household. C67/46, m. 36. During the Parliament of 1463, he successfully petitioned for the right to inherit his ancestral estates, notwithstanding his father’s attainder, SC8/29/1418; PROME, xiii. 202-3. and after the death of his grandmother, Margery, Lady Roos, in April 1478 he also succeeded to the extensive estates she had brought to the Wentworth family. C140/66/35; CFR, xxi. no. 502. Margery was buried in the chapel of Queens’, the Cambridge college of which she was a benefactress. In her will she asked Henry to re-inter the MP under a marble tombstone at Newsam abbey in Lincolnshire, a religious house associated with her father’s family, the Despensers. PCC 33 Wattys (PROB11/6, f. 235). Margery’s will mistakenly refers to the MP as her ‘father’.