WHITGREVE, Humphrey

Whitgreve began his career in the royal household as a groom in the early 1440s, owing his place there to his influential father, a long-standing royal bureaucrat. Soon afterwards he was dispatched on the great embassy that travelled to Nancy late in 1444 to bring the King’s bride, Margaret of Anjou, to England. E101/409/12, f. 82v; Add. 23938, f. 15. This was to prove the beginning of a long relationship for he was later to move into her household and continued to serve her, albeit seemingly briefly, after her husband lost his throne. Soon after his return from France he received a series of modest royal grants. On 22 Mar. 1446, with his father acting surety, the herbage and pannage of six hays in the royal forest of Cannock (Staffordshire) was farmed to him for 20 years at an annual rent of 23s. 7d. p.a.; and a month later he was one of the ten yeomen of the Chamber who shared a reward of £100 for their service to the queen on her journey to England. CFR, xviii. 23; E404/62/141; E403/765, m. 3. On 15 May in the following year he was granted the reversion of his father’s office of steward of the duchy of Lancaster manor of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and on 2 Dec. 1448 he was joined with his father in a grant of exemption from office. R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 550; DL37/15/18; CPR, 1446-52, p. 205. His father’s patronage is at least part of the explanation for these gains, and to be seen in the same terms is his election to represent his home town in the successive Parliaments of 1449 (Nov.), in which his father represented Staffordshire, and 1450. C219/15/7; 16/1. These grants and elections came when he was very young, at least if one may infer from his survival into the reign of Henry VII.

In Whitgreve’s early career may be discerned a father’s efforts to pass on to a son his own prominence. The place Humphrey found in the queen’s household offered him the chance to make good these efforts. It is not clear when he entered her household, but it is likely that he had done so by the spring of 1446. Of the ten yeomen of the King’s chamber then rewarded for their service in bringing her to England, nine, including Whitgreve, later numbered among the yeomen of her chamber; and it looks as though they had been deputed by the King to serve her. E404/62/141; Myers, 186. This service brought some modest rewards. For each day he spent in her court he had daily wages of 3d. If one may judge from the surviving account book for her household for Michaelmas 1452-3, when Whitgreve was paid 75s. for 300 days, he was one of the most assiduous of her yeomen in his attendance. In November 1453 he added a further daily wage of 1d. when he was appointed as her parker at Agardsley in the honour of Tutbury, which the queen held in jointure. Myers, 186; DL29/403/6463. Yet Whitgreve’s career did not fulfil its early promise. As a result of the resumption of royal grants in 1450-1, he could not make good the grant of the reversion of the office of steward of Newcastle-under-Lyme when his father died in 1453, and he was never again in a position to secure such an office. In part, no doubt, this was because he did not share his father’s energy and abilities, but another reason lay in the effective termination of his public career with the change of regime in 1461.

Whitgreve was also disadvantaged in the late 1450s by a dispute with his elder brother, Thomas, over the family inheritance. Thomas is frequently described in the records as a cleric, and as early as 1435 he had been admitted to the prebend of Colwich near Stafford. Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, x. 26. He must have been significantly older than Humphrey, and was perhaps only his half-brother. In any event, it appears that their father preferred to pass all or most of his lands to his younger son. Thomas was not prepared to accept this disinheritance: in a petition to the chancellor in October 1456, in which, significantly, he did not describe himself as a clerk, he claimed that the feoffees in a manor purchased by his father, that of Longford (near Newport in Shropshire), had refused to make estate to him as they were bound in trust to do. There can be no doubt that they refused because they held themselves enfeoffed to the use of Humphrey. On the following 8 Nov. either as part of a settlement imposed by the chancellor or to protect himself against his elder brother’s claim, Humphrey and another yeoman of the queen’s chamber, Sampson Vikers, sued out both a pardon from having acquired the manor from the feoffees and a licence to re-convey it to new feoffees headed by two knights of the royal household, (Sir) Edmund Hampden* and Sir John Boteler*. C1/26/33; CPR, 1452-61, p. 326.

In view of his service to the queen, it is probable that Whitgreve took an active part in the civil war of 1459-61, and, to his credit but fatally for his career, he maintained his loyalty to Margaret after the fall of Lancaster. Much later he claimed that, ‘after Palme Sonday feld’ (in other words, after the battle of Towton on 29 Mar. 1461), he followed her into exile in Scotland. Precisely how long he stayed across the border does not appear, but he was home by Michaelmas term 1464 when he sued his elder brother for taking six coffers (‘pixides’) containing charters in the time of Henry VI. STAC1/2/64; CP40/813, rot. 77. Yet, even in the confined environment of Stafford, the end of Whitgreve’s exile did not bring him back to prominence. He attested the borough’s parliamentary election on 24 Sept. 1472, being named as high as third of the 12 attestors, and, in view of his earlier service to the queen, it is possible that he himself had represented the borough in the previous assembly, held during Henry VI’s brief restoration. C219/17/2. None the less, he is almost invisible in the surviving records. When he does appear it is to defend himself at law. His brother’s death in the late 1460s or early 1470s failed to heal the family divide. Thomas’s daughter, Joan, sued him in Chancery for detinue of charters; Humphrey replied, seemingly accurately, that since his brother had been a cleric she was illegitimate and it was he who was his brother’s heir. C1/52/179-80. Her father was alive as late as 1467: CP40/824, rot. 293.

More troublesome to Whitgreve was a dispute with a local cleric, Humphrey Yonge. In a Chancery petition of about 1470, Yonge claimed that he had enfeoffed Whitgreve of a tenement in Stafford in trust and that the feoffee now refused to re-convey. This was probably not the real substance of the dispute, but rather a stylized description with the elements necessary to bring the quarrel within the chancellor’s jurisdiction. Yonge did not confine himself to action at equity, also suing Whitgreve at common law for forcible entry and having him outlawed in Middlesex on 5 July 1473. This put Whitgreve to the inconvenience of several personal appearances in the court of King’s Bench to secure the outlawry’s revocation. C1/41/176; CP40/844, rots. 235, 341d; KB27/850, rot. 26.

Whitgreve was alive as late as 1494, more than 40 years after he sat in Parliament, when once more he found himself a defendant in an equity court, this time in Star Chamber. He was sued on the terms of a marriage contract allegedly entered into by his father in the reign of Henry VI. Roger Tonge, then one of the ‘alms knights’ of the college of Windsor, alleged that on his marriage long before to Humphrey’s long-dead sister, Anne, her father had promised the couple lands worth ten marks p.a., but that he and his wife had, after Robert’s death, accepted lands worth about half that sum. These lands had been lost to him after he ‘wente wythe your saide blyssyde vncle [Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke] in to Scotland and in many yerys after durste neuere returne into Englande but was dyspoylyde of all his goodys moveable’, and for the past 32 years and more, Humphrey had taken the profits. Whitgreve replied, evasively, by claiming his own period of exile in the Lancastrian cause, and, more pertinently, that the disputed lands were settled on his sister only for term of her life. No verdict is recorded, and Whitgreve, already about 70 years old, must have died soon afterwards. It is probable that Robert Whitgreve of Stafford, who sued out a general pardon in 1504, was his son and heir. STAC1/2/64; CPR, 1494-1509, p. 341.