WILLOUGHBY, Richard

In his father’s inquisition post mortem Richard Willoughby’s age was estimated at 30 years ‘and more’. This was a conservative estimate. Since he had a younger brother who was of age as early as 1428, he must have been in his early 40s when his father died. C139/135/37. For the career of his yr. bro. Nicholas: Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. vi. 78. He himself first appears in the records in December 1432, when he was named with his father in an award by which a family of villeins bought their freedom from the Willoughbys. Later evidence, principally his appointment to the quorum of the peace, shows that he received a legal training. Indeed it may be that he was at the Inns of Court as a young man in the early 1430s. This would explain why he appeared in person in the court of common pleas to pursue suits of debt against a draper of London and a gentleman of Worcestershire, debts which may have arisen from legal work he had undertaken on their behalf. Nottingham Univ. Lib., Middleton mss, Mi D 3306; CP40/691, rot. 501. His interest in the law is also reflected in his ownership of a 14th-century copy of Registrum Omnium Brevium, which may have descended to him from the most famous of his forebears, Sir Richard Willoughby (d.1362), c.j. KB. Add. Ch. 22162. His name appears in the volume as ‘of Notts.’, perhaps to distinguish him from his Northants. namesake, another lawyer. He also owned some important litugical books: Wollaton Med. MSS ed. Hanna and Turville-Petre, 7-9.

However this may be, as heir-apparent to a substantial inheritance, a career as a professional lawyer probably held few attractions for Willoughby. These attractions were diminished further by his acquisition of a landed estate through marriage in 1434 to the youngest of the four coheiresses of Simon Leek. On 5 Apr. 1434 his father, showing a concern for his eldest son’s welfare which was not to be matched later on, conveyed his manor of Wymeswold in Leicestershire to Nicholas Wymbissh, a Chancery clerk, John Pygot* and a lawyer Richard Bingham (who was later to marry our MP’s stepmother), feoffees acting on behalf of the bride. The condition of this feoffment was that, if the couple married by the following 1 Aug., then the feoffees were to convey the manor to them and the heirs of the groom’s body, if not, the feoffor was to re-enter. The marriage clearly took place by the prescribed date for the settlement was duly made on 22 Sept. Anne brought Willoughby three small manors at Kilvington, Shelton and East Stoke, all a few miles to the south of Newark. These lands explain why he was assessed on an income of as much as £33 in the subsidy returns of 1435-6. Middleton mss, Mi D 3372/2-4; E179/240/266. The formal division of the Leek inheritance appears to have been delayed until 1439: Wyggeston Hosp. Recs. ed. Thompson, 841; Notts. Archs., Portland mss, 157 DD/P/8/3. By a fine levied in 1440 the three manors near Newark were settled on our MP and his wife and their issue with remainder to his wife’s right heirs: R. Thoroton, Notts. ed. Throsby, i. 325. Even without his patrimony he was rich enough to be distrained to take up knighthood in 1439.

The inheritance of Willoughby’s wife helps to explain his election to Parliament, while still a relatively young man, on 12 Sept. 1435, and from then onwards he took an active part in local affairs. While an MP, he was named in an important fine by which Sir John Zouche* and his wife Margaret conveyed her inheritance to feoffees, preparatory to the marriage of their eldest grand-daughter to William, son and heir of Sir Thomas Chaworth*. With his brother, Nicholas, he attested the Nottinghamshire parliamentary election of 10 Dec. 1436. C219/14/5; 15/1; CP25(1)/292/68/177; Add. Ch. 20542. Less happily, on 16 July 1440 he was indicted before the j.p.s in Rutland for conspiracy with his father to have Robert Browe* and others falsely appealed of felony for the purposes of extortion. According to the jurors, Richard had been his father’s under sheriff in Lincolnshire at the time of the alleged offence, an office he appears to have shared with Nicholas. KB9/235/49; C67/39, m. 20. Unexecuted writs of outlawry against our MP continued to be issued on this indictment until at least 1453: KB27/769, rex rot. 26.

The crisis in Richard’s career came in the late 1440s. For what follows: S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 208-11. In January 1444 Sir Hugh gave instructions to his feoffees that drastically curtailed his heir’s expectations and, shortly before 1 Jan. 1448, obliged Richard to swear an oath before Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and others, to accept this curtailment passively. Richard immediately disregarded his oath and began a subtle campaign to secure what he justifiably regarded as his birthright. He had several factors in his favour. He was well established among the county gentry in his own right, and one of those before whom he swore his oath, Sir Thomas Chaworth, numbered among his closest friends. In July 1448 his independent standing had been further underlined by his appointment to the bench as a justice of the quorum. His nomination to the pricked list for the shrievalty on the following 9 Nov., just six days before his father’s death, promised him an even stronger position. C47/34/2/5. Unfortunately for him the choice fell on the Household esquire, Thomas Staunton*, but nonetheless he still had influence enough to secure false returns from the jurors in his father’s inquisition post mortem. The jurors asserted that all the family estates were held in fee tail and thus could not legally be settled as his father had laid down. This was true with respect to the bulk of the Willoughby lands, but not the manors of Sutton Passeys and ‘Nowers’ fee in Willoughby-on-the-Wolds and an estate in Wollaton permanently alienated from him by Sir Hugh. As a result of the returned inquisitions, he was able to sue out of the King’s hands all his father’s lands save those to be assigned to his stepmother Margaret in dower. In addition, he brought an assize of novel disseisin against Margaret for the manor of Cossington and Hamilton and sued her in the court of King’s bench for taking away 200 marks-worth of his goods from Wollaton.

This was the prelude to the referral of the matter to arbitration. On 11 Sept. 1449 the disputants entered into mutual bonds in the massive sum of 1,000 marks to abide the award of Cromwell, and it is likely that it was his intervention that persuaded them to accept the verdict of a third party. Cromwell called to his assistance the legal expertise of (Sir) John Fortescue*, c.j. KB, and John Portington, j.c.b. They returned their award in London on 15 Nov., a year to the day after Sir Hugh’s death. Under its terms Richard was to have immediate possession of a considerable part of the family’s lands, including the coal-rich manor of Wollaton. The price he had to pay for this considerable revision of his father’s intentions was the loss of the two outlying Lincolnshire manors of Dunsby and Wigtoft, which were settled on Margaret and her issue by Sir Hugh. One of the most unfortunate provisions of Sir Hugh’s intentions was that those lands permanently alienated from the common-law heir lay at the heart of the family inheritance, a provision to some extent forced on him by the fact that these were the only lands he held in fee simple. The arbiters noted the undesirability of this provision in their award when they stated that Richard was to have the main Nottinghamshire lands of the inheritance, either in possession or reversion, ‘for his great ease and quiet and to that end that no other person but he shall have interest in the said towns of Wollaton, Sutton and Willoughby’. Payling, 210. The award’s terms were given permanence by a series of recoveries suffered in Trin. term 1453: J. Biancalana, Fee Tail and Common Recovery, 392.

Willoughby’s appointment as sheriff in December 1449 served to vindicate his successful defence of his birthright. His enhanced landed wealth firmly established him among the gentry elite of his native shire, although it is surprising to find that this wealth is not reflected in the subsidy returns of 1450-1. His assessment at an annual income of £40 was a very considerable underestimate, and we can only assume that this was connected with continued complications in the settlement of his dispute with his stepmother. During the following decade his career followed the pattern characteristic of members of the gentry with incomes far in excess of £40. On 4 Mar. 1451, a few months after the end of his shrievalty, he secured a pardon of account in the sum of £70. This should not be interpreted as a mark of royal favour – £80 was the standard pardon to sheriffs of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire – although at this date he did have some minor direct and indirect connexions with the Crown. His younger brother Nicholas was receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster lands enfeoffed for the purposes of the King’s will, and he himself, according to a pardon he sued out in June 1452, held the poorly-documented office of keeper of the royal park in Nottinghamshire. E179/159/84; E159/227, brevia Hil. rot. 15d; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 211; C67/40, m. 26. He took an active role on the county bench, particularly so during the late 1450s when he attended 29 of the 41 days on which the j.p.s came together between October 1455 and July 1459. Only his fellow member of the quorum, Thomas Neville of Darlton, was more active: Payling, ‘Political Society in Notts.’ (Oxf. Univ. D. Phil. thesis, 1987), 313. He attested the parliamentary election held at Nottingham on 5 Mar. 1453 and headed the list of attestors to the following election of 30 June 1455. More interestingly, he had in the meantime been summoned, on 16 Apr. 1455, to represent Nottinghamshire at the great council which was the immediate pretext for the withdrawal of the Yorkist lords from the royal court. C219/16/2, 3; PPC, vi. 341.

Willoughby’s administrative activity was matched by continued involvement in the affairs of his gentry neighbours. In May 1449 he acted as one of the feoffees for the marriage settlement of Elizabeth, daughter and coheiress-presumptive of Sir Thomas Rempston†, to John Cheyne II*. At about this time he was further involved in the affairs of the Rempstons when chosen to arbitrate, in company with Sir Thomas Chaworth, the long-running dispute between Rempston and his mother, Margaret, over the valuable manor of Bingham. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 51, 84, 203; C1/21/9c. In July 1452 he again acted with Chaworth when they both appeared in Chancery to act as mainpernors for a pardon granted to the prominent Leicestershire lawyer Thomas Palmer*, and in 1454 and 1457 he acted in fines on Chaworth’s behalf. Indeed, his connexion with the latter was particularly close. In his will made on 16 Jan. 1459 Sir Thomas described him as his cousin, and, besides nominating him as one of his executors, bequeathed him ‘an Englisse boke called Grace de Dieu’. C237/43/98; CP25(1)/293/72/388; 73/419; Test. Ebor. ii (Surtees Soc. xxx), 227-9. Chaworth empowered the abp. of York to reward his executors, ‘everyche after the quantite of his labor’. As a result, in 1461 Willoughby was paid £40, more than was awarded to the other executors. Another close associate of our MP was his near neighbour William Babington, who had been summoned with him to the great council of 1455. In January 1459 he was involved in a conveyance preparatory to the settlement of property on Babington’s chantry in the church at Flawford. A month later he was commissioned, clearly as a nominee of Babington, to investigate some of the circumstances attendant on the foundation of this chantry, and the inquiry was held in his own manor at Wollaton. Further, on 6 Oct. 1460 he voted for Babington at a contested parliamentary election. Harl. 174, ff. 1-2, 13; C1/1/84, 85; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 104-5; C219/16/6.

Willoughby drew other associates from the second rank of the county gentry. In 1453 he was named as one of the executors of John Cockfield of Nuthall, husband of his maternal aunt, and in 1455 he acted in the same capacity for Hugh Hercy*, the husband of one of his wife’s sisters. He is also found acting in the conveyances of his lesser gentry neighbours. In 1457 he was a feoffee of John Brunnesley the elder, in the manor of Trowell, and in 1459 for his father’s old associate, David Preston, in the manor of Broxtowe Hall. Test. Ebor. ii. 4n, 201; Middleton mss, Mi 2/55/29; CAD, iii. C3745. Moreover, he also managed to maintain friendly relations with kin of the half-blood despite his acrimonious quarrel with their mother. In May 1458 he acted as a feoffee for his eldest half-brother Robert in the manor of Dunsby, and probably at about the same time he was one of the trustees for the implementation of the contract made on the marriage of his half-sister Margery to Godfrey, son and heir of Sir Godfrey Hilton† (d.1459) of Irnham in Lincolnshire. Middleton mss, Mi D 3492; Add. Ch. 47090.

Further evidence of Willoughby’s connexions is provided by the arrangements he made in 1457 for the future of his own estates. On 28 Feb., in a rather belated implementation of the award of 1449, he assigned his manors of Willoughby-on-the-Wolds and Cossington, together with the advowson of the family chantry in Willoughby church, to his stepmother in dower. On the following 2 Sept. he granted his manors of Wollaton, Sutton Passeys and Wymeswold to a large body of 17 feoffees, the usual combination of local notables, lawyers, friends and servants. Three magnates – John, Viscount Beaumont, Henry, Lord Grey of Codnor, and Humphrey Bourgchier* – headed the list, followed by three senior members of the legal profession, including his stepmother’s husband, Sir Richard Bingham, and his wife’s brother-in-law, Sir John Markham. The breadth of his connexions among the leading men of his native county is reflected in the inclusion of William Chaworth, eldest son of Sir Thomas, Robert Clifton* and William Babington. Two wealthy merchants of Nottingham, Thomas Thurland* and Thomas Alestre*, were also named, a reflection of Willoughby’s holdings in the borough. The only slightly surprising inclusion is the wealthy Warwickshire knight, Sir Thomas Erdington*, who had been one of his father’s feoffees in 1438. Middleton mss, Mi D 4767/1, 4770.

During the crisis of 1459-61 Willoughby appears to have been considered favourable to the Yorkist cause. Although he had been summoned to the council of 1455 and was appointed to the Lancastrian commission of December 1459, a far more reliable indicator of his sympathies is his reappointment as sheriff when the Yorkists were in control of government in the wake of the battle of Northampton in July 1460. An early indication of these sympathies is provided by his appearance as a mainpernor for the Yorkist Thomas Palmer in 1452. This is not to say he was a partisan of that cause: he received no particular marks of royal favour on Edward IV’s accession beyond a pardon of account in £100 at the end of his shrievalty. C237/43/98; E159/238, brevia Mich. rots. 33, 43d. He did, however, retain his prominent place in local affairs. A regular appointee to ad hoc commissions of local government, he continued to be active on the bench during a period in which the Nottinghamshire j.p.s heard several important indictments. On 24 Feb. 1462 he sat at Nottingham when the j.p.s took an indictment concerning a theft from Henry Pierrepont† and in the following month he heard a similar indictment concerning the property of Richard Illingworth*. Since both Pierrepont and Illingworth were committed supporters of the new regime, these indictments may have had a political dimension. Two years later, on 15 Nov. 1464, he was again at Nottingham when the j.p.s took an indictment concerning perhaps the most notorious murder committed in the county during the fifteenth century, that of John, younger son of the late Sir Thomas Chaworth. This murder had particular poignancy for Willoughby for he had been named as one of the executors of the victim’s will. KB27/810, rot. 5d; KB9/299/121; 310/23; Test. Ebor. ii. 156n.

In view of Willoughby’s childlessness it is at first sight surprising to find him purchasing property late in his life. In 1466 he acquired the legal remainder of eight messuages and 600 acres of arable land, meadow and pasture in Annesley, Annesley Woodhouse and Kirkeby Woodhouse expectant on the deaths of William Forde and Margaret, his wife, and purchased five bovates of land in Sutton Passeys from John Bingham of Hucknall Torkard, son of his stepmother’s husband. CP25(1)/186/40/5, 6; Middleton mss, Mi Dc 3, no. 198. These and other lesser acquisitions are to be explained by his plans for a chantry foundation at Wollaton. This had been in agitation as early as the 1450s. On 5 Nov. 1458 Margaret Woodhouse, shortly before she married William Forde as her third husband, instructed her feoffees, of whom our MP was one, to dispose of her lands (in the event of her death without issue) about the completion of his proposed chantry, and this no doubt explains Willoughby’s later acquisition of the remainder. Although it was not until 13 Dec. 1470 that he secured a royal licence for the foundation, plans for the chantry were already well advanced by that date, and he had already built two houses next to the rectory, one for the chaplain and the other for three paupers. By a fine levied in the previous year he had conveyed the legal remainder of Margaret’s lands to a group of men, headed by (Sir) Robert Clifton, associated with him in the foundation. Under the terms of the licence, purchased for the sum of £30, the foundation was to be supported by the alienation of lands worth £10 p.a., of which Margaret’s gift was intended to be part. Portland mss, 157 DD/P/CD/50; CP25(1)/186/40/10; CPR, 1467-77, p. 231. A medieval cottage survives to the west of the church of Wollaton: N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Notts. (2nd edn.), 274. It may have been connected with Willoughby’s chantry. It is informative to compare this licence, which names only the founder on the bede roll, with an undated draft petition of the late 1460s. The latter, a request for royal letters patent, proposed a much longer list: the chaplain was to pray for the good estate of Queen Elizabeth, Willoughby, and William and Margaret Forde, and for their souls after death together with the souls of Willoughby’s wife, parents, Richard, duke of York, Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, Sir Thomas Chaworth and his wife, Isabel, and John Bowes*. The inclusion of York and Salisbury is suggestive of earlier political connexions that have left no other trace in the surviving records, and their omission from the licence to be explained by the fact that it was purchased during the Readeption. Middleton mss, Mi 1/4/1-4.

There is little else of significance to relate of the last years of Willoughby’s career. In 1466 he paid a fine of £4 when distrained to take up the rank of knighthood for the third time. In the following year he acted for his late wife’s sister Elizabeth Hercy in the foundation of a chantry in the church of Saundby and was named on the bede roll. It would be intriguing to know why, on 12 Nov. 1467, Sir Robert Markham†, Gervase Clifton and Thomas Molyneux entered into a statute staple to him in the massive sum of 1,000 marks to be paid at the following Purification, but unfortunately the surviving evidence provides no clue. On 1 Sept. 1468 he returned an award with his friend William Babington in a minor dispute between Gervase’s father, (Sir) Robert Clifton, and Sir Robert Strelley*. In view of his friendship with the Clifton family it is likely that he was the arbiter nominated by the former. E159/243, communia Easter; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 543-4; Notts. Archs. Nottingham recs., ct. rolls, CA 1b/12; CAD, vi. C4665. His apparent Yorkist sympathies were not sufficient to cause his discomfiture during the Readeption: besides securing his chantry licence, he retained his position on the county bench and was appointed to a commission of inquiry in October 1470. Just as he had been a popular choice as an executor in the 1450s, so he was also in the last decade of his life. In addition to the ill-fated John Chaworth, he was also an executor for John’s elder brother, Sir William Chaworth (d.1467), for Margaret, widow of John Cockfield, who dated her will at his manor of Wollaton, and for Agnes Truthall. CP40/828, rot. 230; 837, rot. 87d; Test. Ebor. ii. 262-3.

Willoughby made his own will on 15 Sept. 1469. He left detailed instructions as to his place of burial: in the church at Wollaton at the north end of high altar before the image of St. Leonard, to whom the church was dedicated, and next to a new monument he had had made. The rest of the will was concerned with charitable bequests, the chief beneficiary of which was the church of Lenton, to which he left what appears to be many of the contents of his own domestic chapel, including a silver jewel set with a beryl for carrying and showing the sacrament on the feast of Corpus Christi. His stepmother’s husband, Justice Bingham, was named as the supervisor of the work of as many as seven executors, headed by (Sir) Robert Clifton and Master William Gull, rector of St. Peter’s, Nottingham. Borthwick Inst. Univ. of York, York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 173. Interestingly, an Exchequer official, John Fitzherbert, a younger son of a Derbyshire esquire, Nicholas Fitzherbert*, was also named an executor, and this gives some indirect support to a single later reference which identifies Willoughby’s widow as Nicholas’s sister. Nothing is known of the date or circumstances of this second match. CP40/925, cart. rot.

Willoughby’s precise date of death is uncertain. According to the inscription on his tomb he died on 7 Oct. 1471, but his inquisition post mortem gives the date as precisely a month later. Notts. IPM (Thoroton Soc. xvii), 66-67. No writ of diem clausit extremum was issued until the following 1 July: CFR, xxi. 98. In February 1462 he had made arrangements through his servant Geoffrey Staunton for the provision of his gravestone. For the sum of eight marks, a London marbler, James Reames, was commissioned to provide a stone decorated with brasses. Rather incongrously in view of his apparent lack of military experience, Willoughby wished to be represented ‘hoole armyd except the hed, of the best harnes and godelyest wyse his helme undre his hed the crest ther of havyng an owle and at his feete agrete welke shell in stede of a beest’. The image of his wife was to have, at the feet, ‘alitle dog with bellys aboute his nekke’. Middleton mss, Mi 5/168/34, printed in N. Saul, ‘Contract for the Brass of Richard Willoughby’, Nott. Med. Studies, l. 167-9. Reames did a good job. The surviving tomb displays brasses made in broad conformity to the contract’s instructions: the male figure is depicted in fashionable armour with the head resting on a tilting helmet (the whole effect rendered faintly absurd by the enormous coudiere on the left arm); the female with two pet dogs playing at the feet. It is likely that the workshop responsible for these brasses was also responsible for those of two of Richard’s contemporaries and neighbours, Sir Robert Strelley (d.1488) at Strelley church and Sir Gervase Clifton (d.1491) at Clifton church. There is no direct evidence to show who was responsible for the rest of the tomb, although the canopy, decorated with the arms of Willoughby, Leek, Foljambe and Annesley (the last three representing his wife, mother and paternal grandmother), appears to be by the same sculptor as that over the tomb in Strelley church of John Strelley (d.1501) and his wife, Sancha, our MP’s niece of the half-blood. York registry wills, prob. reg. 4, f. 173; Notts. and Derbys. N. and Q. iv. 26-28, 35-36. For detailed discussions of this important tomb: Saul, 169-93; J. Denton, ‘The East-Midland Gentleman’ (Keele Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2006), 72-4, 157-61.

Curiously, the death without issue of the head of Willoughbys served to strengthen rather than weaken the family, by paving the way for the reunification of the Willoughby lands with those of the Frevilles. By two deeds dated 27 Jan. 1472 Willoughby’s surviving feoffees of 1457 conveyed the manors of Wollaton and Sutton Passeys to his half-brother Robert and his wife Margaret. These conveyances later gave rise to litigation. In a Chancery petition of 1480 Robert’s son and heir Henry Willoughby claimed that the feoffees, of whom only Lord Grey of Codnor and Master William Gull then survived, were still seised and had refused to re-convey to him. This was disingenuous: it was simply a manoeuvre in his dispute with his mother over her jointure. In reply, Gull recalled events in the immediate aftermath of our MP’s death. Robert Willoughby had sent Richard Clerk, one of our MP’s executors, to Gull and the other feoffees to require them to make estate of the manors of Wollaton and Sutton Passeys to him and his wife Margaret. Clerk showed Gull deeds which Robert required the feoffees to seal. Gull responded by asking Clerk to secure the seals of the other feoffees, whom he described as more ‘worshipfull’ and better learned in the law than he, before he set his own seal to them. This process was duly carried through. Middleton mss, Mi Dc 3, no. 197; Mi D 1628; C1/51/233-4.