WOOD, John III

The future Speaker came from a relatively modest family background. We know the names of his parents and maternal grandfather from the will his younger brother and namesake made in 1485, a year after he himself had died at the end of a long and ultimately distinguished career. PCC 15 Logge (PROB11/7, ff. 111v-112). From their maternal grandfather, Thomas Sarceller of Midhurst (either the MP of 1382 and 1397 or else his younger kinsman), The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 305. the brothers were to inherit property in that west Sussex town and its neighbourhood, to add to the landed holdings of their father John which lay to the south of Chichester, on the coast at West Wittering. Notes and Queries, 12th ser. xi. 408-10. The descent of both strands of inheritance may be roughly charted. John Wood the father was in possession of some of the Sarceller property in Midhurst (a burgage in North Street) by 1422, and recorded as tenant of land at Bracklesham in West Wittering six years later; while under the terms of a settlement made in 1428 his wife Joan’s inheritance (five messuages, 100 acres of arable land and seven acres of meadow in Midhurst and West Dean) was entailed on their issue. Feudal Aids, v. 164; Cat. Cowdray Archs. ed. Dibben, ii. 242 (no. 4455); CP25(1)/240/85/38. Little is known for certain about the father’s career, save that he was one of the eight leading townsmen of Midhurst who in 1432 reached an agreement with the lord of the borough, Sir John Bohun, with regard to market tolls and the court leet, thus bringing to an end many years of dissension. W. Suss. RO, Add. mss, 20801. It is a credible speculation, however, that he was the John Wood appointed by Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, to be clerk of the estreats at the Exchequer in 1413. This was at the start of the earl’s term as treasurer of England, when he extended patronage at Westminster to many of his followers from Sussex. If so, John senior, who remained in post until 1430, no doubt played a significant part in introducing his eldest son, the future MP, to the Exchequer, thus inaugurating the latter’s prolonged association with that government department. PRO List, ‘Exchequer Offices’, 89.

As John Wood ‘of Midhurst’ the future MP was recorded as a scholar at Winchester College in 1426, only to leave school the same year. Where he completed his education, which almost certainly included some training in the law, is not known. Similarly, it is uncertain when he inherited his parents’ property, although as he was called ‘junior’ on the returns to his first two Parliaments it may be presumed that his father was then still alive. Indeed, he was still being styled ‘of Midhurst, junior, gentleman’ as late as the summer of 1449: then, in a suit brought in the court of common pleas by the prominent Sussex lawyer William Sydney*, it was alleged that he and William Ernele* of Arundel owed the plaintiff the sum of £29. As the description ‘junior’ was dropped in the following year, we may deduce that by then the MP’s father was no longer alive. CP40/754, rot. 38d; 757, rot. 48. Meanwhile, Wood had been elected to Parliament for a third time, in 1442, and had served in his home county on the first of very many ad hoc commissions of local government.

Wood was to be connected with the Exchequer for the greater part of his working life. Having joined its staff in an unspecified capacity by 1444, it was doubtless as an Exchequer official that he received assignments on behalf of landowners from Sussex, including Sir Roger Fiennes*, the former treasurer of the Household, and members of the Hussey family of Harting. E403/755, m. 6; 757, m. 8; 771, m. 1. In 1445 he stood bail in the common pleas for Sir Henry Hussey*, and by the time he was elected as a knight of the shire to the Parliament summoned to assemble on 6 Nov. 1449 he was well acquainted with other members of the local gentry, such as the new feudal lord of Midhurst, Sir John Bohun’s son and heir, Humphrey, and the lawyers Edmund Mille* and Bartholomew Bolney*. Even so, Wood himself could not claim to be a landowner of much consequence in the locality, and this election as a shire knight is difficult to explain in terms of his current standing. CCR, 1429-35, p. 288; 1447-54, p. 24; CP40/738, rot. 331d; Bolney Bk. (Suss. Rec. Soc. lxiii), 74-75.

Before Wood stood for election for the neighbouring county of Surrey, 11 years later, his material circumstances and social status altered immeasurably. To a large extent this was due to his fortuitous marriage to the twice-widowed Elizabeth Mitchell, whose previous husband died while the final session of the Parliament of November 1449 was in progress in the spring of 1450. As widow and heiress Elizabeth brought him prosperity. From her first husband, an esquire named William Fitzharry, she had acquired a house in Cousin Lane, London, along with three-quarters of all his moveable goods (which, as Fitzharry left monetary bequests of over £205, were probably of considerable value), and an income of 20 marks a year from property in the parish of All Hallows the Great, where she retained lodgings. More important, her second husband, the distinguished surgeon Thomas Morstead, had risen to the height of his profession through service to each of the three Lancastrian kings, thereby becoming one of the richest men in the City. Corp. London RO, hr 160/26; R.T. Beck, The Cutting Edge, 57-58, 62-63, 79-101. Morstead’s success and financial acumen had gained him a number of properties in Essex (including the manors of Steeple and Rivers Hall in Boxsted), Surrey (that of Wotton), Middlesex (Preston and lands in Enfield), and the capital itself – most notably in the parish of St. Olave in Old Jewry. In a will of 1445, while guaranteeing Elizabeth a life-interest in their house in Old Jewry, Morstead had promised that she might keep the Middlesex holdings together with Rivers Hall and his land at Boxsted to pass on to her own heirs, and the provisions of his testament of 20 Apr. 1450 provide further illustration of his wealth, for he instructed his wife to distribute as much as £100 among the poor. By customary law a citizen of London could not devise to his wife real estate in the City for longer than the term of her life, but the surgeon overcame this restriction in two ways – by arranging for some of his property to be held by feoffees, who were directed to convey it to Elizabeth and her heirs, and by stipulating that she should be able to purchase the reversionary interest in other properties on preferential terms. Thus, she could buy the reversion of Steeple for £40 less than the sum offered by any other prospective purchaser. Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, p. 77; PCC 12 Rous (PROB11/1, ff. 88-90).

Nor was this all that Elizabeth brought to her third husband, Wood. Together with her sister Joan, wife of William Druell, she was coheiress to the estate of their father John Mitchell (d.1445), the former mayor of London. In his will Mitchell had left her 40 marks, a mere fraction of the 1,600 marks which, together with half his jewels and plate, he had bequeathed to her mother, Margaret, although on the latter’s death Elizabeth was to inherit his property in the parish of St. Nicholas Coldabbey, together with part of his estate in Hertfordshire, centred on the manor of Clothalle. PCC 29 Luffenham (PROB11/3, ff. 234v-7). Furthermore, in the testamentary arrangements she made in 1452, Margaret left her daughter Elizabeth the sum of £100, expensive wall-hangings and the contents of her manor-house at Molesey in Surrey. Besides Molesey (which Margaret had inherited from her father Hamelin Matham), at her death in 1455 she was also possessed of ‘Lyonnes manor’ in Great Oakley, Northamptonshire, and a moiety of that of Great Childerley in Cambridgeshire, which had come to her through her mother Cecily Lyons. Elizabeth was not Margaret’s only heir, for she had to share her maternal inheritance with her sister Joan and with their young nephew William Sydney (the eldest son of their half-sister Cecily), PCC 2 Stokton; C139/158/31; J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 325; CFR, xix. 152-3. Young William Sydney was the son of the namesake who had brushed with Wood in the law courts in 1449. but even so, she and Wood took possession of a substantial portion, comprised of the Hertfordshire estate and a moiety of Molesey. VCH Surr. iii. 453-4; CCR, 1454-61, p. 92; CFR, xxi. no. 875. The Woods produced no children – or if they did none survived their mother – yet Wood successfully contrived to keep the bulk of his wife’s property after her death in 1464. When it became apparent that Elizabeth was dying, legal transactions were completed enabling him to retain possession of the former Morstead holdings in Essex and Middlesex and her stake in Molesey for the rest of his life. CP25(1)/152/96/7; 232/75/5; Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 59; C140/13/25; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 968-9. Furthermore, in the will she made on 11 Feb. that year Elizabeth stipulated that he and his heirs should have her manor of Steeple in perpetuity. She also bequeathed to him a great standing-cup of silver gilt called Le Mighell which had belonged to her father, although stipulating that at his death this was to be passed on to the most distinguished of her blood-relations then alive. E326/12057. In a royal pardon of August 1452 Wood was called ‘of Midhurst alias of London’, but while his first wife lived they usually resided at her manor-house at Molesey, which, being not far up-river from Kingston-on-Thames, provided a convenient base for his business at Westminster. C67/40, m. 22; SC1/44/20.

In the same summer, in June 1452, Wood was appointed to the quorum of the Surrey commission of the peace, thereafter remaining on the bench of either Surrey or Sussex, or of both counties at once, until his death 32 years later, save for the year he officiated as sheriff of the joint bailiwick. The appointment as j.p. followed hard upon an important promotion at the Exchequer, for during the Easter term, probably soon after the elevation on 15 Apr. of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, as treasurer of England, he was made the earl’s under treasurer. The post entitled Wood to a daily wage of 8d. along with 5d. a day for his sustenance, to add to the ancient fee of 40 p.a., all of which he was to enjoy during his three-year term as Tiptoft’s deputy. This, a period of escalating military crisis abroad, culminating in 1453 with the final loss of English territory in France, constitutional and political crises as Henry VI succumbed to mental illness, and immense financial difficulties as the Crown’s debts spiralled out of control, must have tested Wood to the full. In the autumn of 1452 he personally delivered the sum of 200 marks to speed the embarkation to Guyenne of the force led by John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, and in August 1453, as yet unaware of the earl’s defeat and death at Castillon, he and William Baron*, one of the tellers of the Exchequer, personally took to Sandwich £1,516 to pay the army mustering under the command of Lord Saye to sail out to relieve him. E404/69/48; E403/793, m. 18; 798, m. 12. Shortly afterwards, Wood assisted the treasurer and Thomas Thorpe*, one of the barons of the Exchequer, in negotiations for the transfer to a city syndicate of a large quantity of rock alum and black foil worth £2,000 then in the Crown’s possession at Southampton and London. This raw material was part of a large consignment of alum belonging to Genoese merchants that had been requisitioned to the King’s use two years earlier, for the purpose of creating a monopoly from which the Exchequer was designed to profit. E403/796, 6 Nov.; CPR, 1452-61, p. 155.

While in office Wood was recorded making several loans to the Crown, totalling as much as £1,622, but it seems improbable that all this came from his own resources – more likely he took responsibility for handing in to the Exchequer sums contributed by others. E401/827, mm. 12, 13, 18; 830, mm. 20, 25; 831, mm. 33, 46; 839, mm. 11, 29. This had been the case in January 1453 when he had joined another Exchequer official, John Poutrell, in making a loan of 40 marks, and together with Poutrell, William Beaufitz* and the teller Thomas Pound* another of £600. That May he and the treasurer ‘lent’ £2,000, and five months later they formed another syndicate, with (Sir) Thomas Brown II* and Thorpe, to forward 2,000 marks. E401/830, mm. 25, 26; 831, m. 16; 834, m. 3. Much greater challenges for Wood and his Exchequer colleagues arose from the political and financial consequences of the King’s mental collapse in the summer of 1453 and his continuing illness through the following winter. When the Lords re-assembled at Westminster for a session of Parliament on 14 Feb. 1454 they were forced to take collective responsibility for government, and such were the demands made on Wood personally, as under treasurer, that on 8 Mar. he was paid separate amounts of 100 marks for his work in expediting business in the Parliament and £100 as a special reward for his attendances at Westminster to assist the Council in its deliberations. At the close of the Parliament, special keepers of the seas (including the earl of Worcester) were appointed for the defence of the realm, and in July they authorized Wood to act as their attorney with special responsibility for supervising the collection of tunnage and poundage to cover their costs. Finally, on 19 Feb. 1455 he received a further £100 to reimburse his expenses and for furthering special business undertaken for the lords of the Council. E403/796, m. 16; 800, m. 10; E159/232, commissiones, Hil.

While under treasurer, Wood became engaged in the lucrative wool-trade with the intention of helping to reverse the catastrophic decline in the Crown’s revenues. In association with two members of the royal household and John Worsop*, a London draper who was also controller of the customs in London, he entered into a scheme devised to make profits for the Crown through the export and sale of its stocks of wool. On 17 Apr. 1454 the Protector and Council authorized a pardon to the four men of any trespasses they had committed by shipping the wool contrary to statute, and waiving their accounts. The King’s recovery in the early weeks of 1455 and the resignation of the earl of Worcester as treasurer on 15 Mar. prompted Wood’s removal from office. On that same day he received a licence to ship 214 sacks of wool directly from Southampton to the Mediterranean free of customs, but only after agreeing to surrender tallies worth £572 – a sum he had himself spent on victuals for the Household. The change of regime brought about by the Yorkist victory at St. Albans in May led to an attack on the practices employed by the former treasurer and his deputy. In the Parliament assembled on 9 July Wood was the subject of a petition by the Commons. The main object of the bill was to protest against evasions of the staple at Calais, and it stated that more than 1,226 sacks of wool marked with a crown had been recently shipped at London in the King’s name, and sold to the owners’ great profit but of little advantage to the royal revenues, for Wood had allegedly embezzled the greater part of the customs due – as much as £3,000. This was evidently the business for which Wood and his associates had been pardoned in the previous year. The Commons requested that his appearance in the King’s bench early in the following Michaelmas term should be required by proclamation in the city of London, that his failure to answer to the charge be met with a penalty equivalent to the amount of his defalcation (£3,000), and that any attempt on his part to bar or delay process by pleading a royal pardon should involve him in a forfeiture of 10,000 marks. Fortunately for Wood, the petition was turned down and he escaped censure. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 157, 218; RP, v. 335-6 (cf. PROME, xii. 444).

Little is recorded about Wood during the treasurership of Henry, Viscount Bourgchier, which lasted until October 1456, when the resurgent royalist party, now led by the queen, made important changes in the ministries of state by excluding the viscount and his brother Archbishop Bourgchier, the chancellor. Following the appointment of the second earl of Shrewsbury as treasurer, a rumour circulated that Wood was poised to regain his former office: as one of the correspondents of John Paston* wrote to him from Southwark on 8 Oct., ‘John Wode shalbe Undertresorer. Thus thei say in the Chequer.’ Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 162. This intelligence proved unfounded, perhaps because although Wood had previously received gifts from Queen Margaret after he facilitated payments of her debts, he never attracted long-lasting favour. A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 169-70, 225. Wood took out a pardon as ‘of Molesey, Surrey, and of London, esquire, former under treasurer of England’ on 19 Jan. 1458. C67/42, m. 45. That autumn further changes in financial administration occurred, with the earl of Wiltshire replacing Shrewsbury as treasurer and Sir Thomas Tuddenham* becoming treasurer of the Household, and it was probably at the same time that Wood secured appointment as keeper of the great wardrobe. He accounted for this office from 13 Nov., thereafter remaining at the Lancastrian court until after the Yorkists took control of the King following the battle of Northampton in July 1460. Just before that event, in May, he secured in aid of the expenses of his department the wardship and marriage of the grand-daughter of John Michelgrove*, a tenant-in-chief of the Crown in his native Sussex; and at an unknown date that summer he was dispatched to Wales with certain letters ‘by the King’s command’ – a task which earned him a reward of ten marks, authorized by royal warrant dated 28 Aug. Three days later he was dismissed from his office as keeper of the great wardrobe. E361/6 rot. 51d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 596; E404/71/4/41.

As this dismissal implies, Wood may have been regarded with suspicion by the Yorkist regime, yet if so any doubts about him were quickly laid to rest. He was elected for Surrey to the Parliament summoned to meet on 7 Oct., and a month later, during the first session, his younger brother, John Wood junior, was appointed escheator of that county and Sussex. Furthermore, during the parliamentary recess in December the MP was reappointed to the Surrey bench. Then, a week before the decisive battle of Towton in March 1461, he was included in a commission appointed by the new King, Edward IV, to arrest servants of the Lancastrian Lord Roos. Thereafter, his continued service on the county benches reflects not only his pragmatic commitment to the house of York but also the untried rulers’ dependence on experienced administrators. The Sussex returns to Edward IV’s first Parliament, summoned to meet on 4 Nov. 1461, are no longer extant, but that Wood and Thomas Tauk* were elected is clear from their later suit against the county’s sheriff for failing to pay their parliamentary wages. E13/149, rots. 39d, 40-41,43-45; Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 381-2. It may have been during the first session of Parliament that Wood came to the personal attention of the King. On 23 Dec., two days after the prorogation, Edward directed the barons of the Exchequer to hear the accounts submitted by ‘notre chier et bien ame’ John Wood for his keepership of the great wardrobe under Henry VI, and make him full allowance for any and all costs and expenses he claimed under oath. E159/238, brevia Hil. rot. 31.

By then, the earl of Worcester, Wood’s former superior at the Exchequer, had returned home from Italy to take up his place as constable of England, and in April 1462 he resumed office as treasurer. Tiptoft promptly employed Wood, his one-time deputy, to travel from London to Leicester with messages for the King, and then ride to Fotheringhay bearing letters from the Council. He also entrusted him with £600 released by the Exchequer for payment into the King’s chamber for his private expenses. E403/824, m. 8; 825, mm. 4, 7, 8, 10. The treasurer was also responsible for a grant to Wood on 4 May 1462 of a lease of the manors of Banstead and Walton-on-Thames in Surr. for seven years at £40 13s. 4d. a year, although this was rescinded by Tiptoft’s successor, with effect from Easter 1464: E159/242, recorda Easter rot. 27; CFR, xx. 139. He had dealings regarding property at Walton, and a pardon he obtained on 24 Nov. 1471 described him inter alia as sometime farmer there: E326/7789-93; C67/48, m. 34. On 27 June Wood sued out a royal pardon which also protected his wife and her inheritance, and make sure it was enrolled in the Exchequer in October. The pardon proved useful in halting Exchequer processes against him and his mainpernors over his accounts for his brief term as alnager of Bristol in the previous reign. Wood took the opportunity to declare his loyalty to the new King and that he had satisfied any debts to the old. E159/238, recorda Mich. rots. 3, 30. There is no record of to show whether Wood was elected to the Parliament which assembled in April 1463, but during the first session on 26 May he joined the earl of Worcester and his under treasurer John Say II* in forwarding a loan of £200 to the Exchequer. E403/829, m. 6. It is very likely that our John Wood was the ‘King’s esquire’ who had been serving as victualler of Calais since early in 1462. This was a role eminently suited to a former under treasurer, for the huge extent of indebtedness of the Lancastrian government to the garrisons at Calais had resulted in a serious financial crisis. Now, in the summer of 1463, the merchants of the staple advanced a quarter’s wages (£3,436) for the garrisons in return for a grant out of the second half of the aid just approved by Parliament, while at the same time (Sir) Walter Blount* as treasurer of Calais and Wood as victualler were given sufficient assignments on the same portion of the aid to insure the payment of another quarter’s wages due on 2 June. The Council appointed Henry Bourgchier, now earl of Essex, Lord Wenlock*, Wood and others to ‘take reckoning’ with those to whom money had been owed on the last day of Henry VI’s reign. When these commissioners brought in their report (at the end of the following year) it showed the Crown’s indebtedness at the three fortresses at Calais to amount to £37,160. The Exchequer was then instructed to replace any tallies delivered to Wood as victualler as had proved insufficient, with fresh assignments to which he was agreeable, thus giving him priority in the choice of revenues from which he could obtain payment. Bull. IHR, xxxii. 141-3; E404/72/3/45; 4/72; C81/1547/5; C76/147, m. 3.

During the 1450s and 1460s, Wood had become increasingly in demand as a trustee of land in Surrey and Sussex. Sir Henry Hussey’s son and heir made use of his services to complete an entail, and in 1465 he was party to a collusive suit in the court of common pleas regarding the substantial Tregoz inheritance which had been held by the late Sir Thomas Lewknor*, his role evidently being to arbitrate an acceptable partition between Sir Thomas’s eldest son, Sir Roger, and the latter’s five half-brothers. Thomas Hoo II*, the Lewknors’ close kinsman, made Wood a feoffee of his manors in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire in 1468, and later on engaged both him and his brother John in transactions relating to holdings at Wartling in Sussex. Perhaps most important, in 1465 Wood joined a distinguished group of feoffees of estates in ten counties on behalf of William, earl of Arundel. Add. Chs. 18752, 23826; Add. 39376, ff. 130v, 131, 147; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 443-4; CCR, 1468-76, no. 1199.

Unlike the earl of Worcester, Wood emerged unscathed from the upheavals of the Readeption, and showed his whole-hearted support for Edward IV on his return from exile. On 22 Apr. 1471, as soon as Edward had won the battle of Barnet, he made a valid contribution to the King’s cause by helping Richard Fowler†, the chancellor of the Exchequer, and John Roger III*, the former under treasurer, to guarantee on Edward’s behalf that the Crown would repay a loan of £200 made by the city of London, and perhaps he also facilitated the extraction of further contributions from the citizens. The guarantee further illustrates Wood’s continued connexion with the Exchequer. E404/74/2/105; 75/1/2. During the King’s absence Wood had become embroiled in litigation with Sir Roger Lewknor over possession of the castle, manor and lordship of Bodiam in Sussex, a valuable estate which had been inherited several years earlier by Lewknor’s maternal uncle, Richard Dallingridge*. The latter had broken an entail by arranging for the reversion of the estate to pass after his death to his nominees, the Sussex lawyers Edmund Mille and William Sydney, but these two both pre-deceased the grantor, leaving Mille’s son Richard in possession of the reversionary interest. This, apparently with the full approval of the ailing Dallingridge, Mille sold to Wood for a substantial sum of money, confirming the sale on 10 Jan. 1471, just three days after Dallingridge died. Almost immediately Wood’s title was challenged by Lewknor, who entered Bodiam as Dallingridge’s closest relation and heir by blood. Even though the jurors at an assize of novel disseisin held in July and the judges of the common pleas at Easter 1472 all found in Wood’s favour, awarding him recovery of seisin, Sir Roger refused to give up his claim, and took his suit to the courts of Exchequer chamber, King’s bench and Chancery, until Wood finally gave up in June 1473. Sel. Cases in Exchequer Chamber, ii (Selden Soc. lxiv), 25-28; VCH Suss. ix. 263; C1/41/35-38. It is uncertain at what stage in the proceedings he sealed a contract to marry his adversary’s daughter, Margery, although the marriage was clearly intended to heal the breach between them, and perhaps to compensate Wood for his loss of Bodiam and the local prestige that ownership of the castle would have bestowed.

Meanwhile, Wood had been elected for Sussex to the Parliament summoned to meet in October 1472 which lasted through several sessions until March 1475. While it was in progress Bishop Waynflete of Winchester sought his assistance with regard to the appropriation of the estates of Sele priory for his endowment of Magdalen College, Oxford. In October 1474 Wood witnessed a commitment undertaken by Robert Langton* of Bramber to be faithful to the bishop, and then released to the college all actions for debts owed him by two former priors of Sele and of all leases of the parsonage of Shoreham, while undertaking in return for ‘the good lordship and convenyent reward’ he had received from Waynflete, to provide counsel to the college authorities as they completed the transfer of the property. E. Cartwright, Rape of Bramber, ii (2), 233; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Suss. deeds, Shoreham 2. In the autumn of 1475, after the dissolution of the Parliament, he accepted appointment as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex, after receiving assurance that £40 would be allowed on his account at the Exchequer as recompense for the substantial charges he would sustain. E404/76/1/54. In this period Wood established amicable relations with Henry Percy, the restored earl of Northumberland, who held substantial estates in Sussex. On 22 Nov. 1477 the earl granted him and John Morton, the keeper of the rolls of Chancery, the wardship and marriages of the three daughters and coheirs of the late John Pelham, who had held the manor of Treve alias Ryver as his tenant. Unfortunately, one of the girls was abducted from her two guardians on 1 Jan. following, and they had to bring an action for redress in the court of common pleas. Although the verdict was given in their favour, they received only £35 of the damages of £200 they had demanded. Peds. Plea Rolls ed. Wrottesley, 444.

The suit coincided with Wood’s service in the Parliament assembled on 16 Jan., once again as a knight of the shire for Surrey. In the course of the brief session a warrant was issued to the Exchequer to pay him a reward of 35 marks out of the revenues of his shrievalty. E404/76/3/32. Following the dissolution, in June 1478 Wood was again associated with John Morton, this time as a feoffee of property in Southwark belonging to the widow of (Sir) Thomas Cook II*, who ten years earlier had been accused of treason in a much-publicized trial. His links with Cook were personal rather than political, however, for they went back several years to the time the wealthy former mayor had been an executor of his first wife’s will. CCR, 1476-85, no. 475; E326/12057. That autumn Wood was appointed sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire, and as before he was given a ‘grant in aid’, this time in the very substantial sum of £198 due on his account. E404/76/4/84; E403/848, m. 3.

Five days after taking up this post Wood went to the court of the Exchequer accompanied by Thomas Combe* and their friend John Apsley† and entered recognizances in £100 to the treasurer, Henry Bourgchier, earl of Essex, and his under treasurer William Essex* to guarantee that he would render account for the issues of his bailiwick; while he and Apsley supported Combe in the same way as he took up the shrievalty of Surrey and Sussex. E159/255, recogniciones Mich. Wood’s move to Essex (where he lived at Rivers Hall) brought him into closer contact with Bourgchier, a leading landowner in that county, and when his deputy died in 1480 the earl reinstated Wood as under treasurer – a post he had last filled 25 years earlier. The elderly earl relied heavily on Wood to perform many tasks which properly fell within his own remit: thus it was Wood who, accompanying the duke of Gloucester and other lords to the convocation of the diocese of Canterbury held at St. Paul’s cathedral on 28 Mar. 1481, made a speech explaining that they had come on behalf of the King to ask the assembled clerics for a ‘notable subsidy’. Although the bishops declined to comply with the request until they had discussed the matter with the King in person, agreement was reached on 12 Apr. whereby a tenth was granted, half of it payable on 24 June and the rest on 11 Nov. Wood and one of the remembrancers of the Exchequer were put in charge of the collection, and perhaps as a reward the two of them were granted in July 1482 the right of presentation to the church at High Ongar. Wood alone received 40 marks for his assiduous labours. Reg. Bourgchier (Canterbury and York Soc. liv), 129, 134, 139-41; CFR, xxi. nos. 657-60; CPR, 1476-85, p. 315; E405/70, rots. 7-8d. The earl of Essex not only relied on Wood to carry out his duties as treasurer, for he also made him his deputy in the office of chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster in southern England for the rest of his, the earl’s life. Wood attended duchy council meetings more regularly than his superior, and his assumption of authority at the Exchequer led contemporaries to dub him ‘treasurer’ on occasion. DL5/1, ff. 50, 123, 128; Howard Household Bks. ed. Crawford, ii. 97, 285. In return he received a salary of 100 marks a year, the sum previously paid to the treasurer himself, as well as a payment of £20 for riding about the country on the Crown’s business. E404/78/3/63; E405/68, rot. 5, 5d; 70, rot. 4.

For the first time for nearly five years, Edward IV summoned Parliament to meet on 20 Jan. 1483, almost certainly to consider the prospect of reviving the war with France. Wood was re-elected, probably for Surrey (the returns are lost), and on the second day of the session this veteran of at least nine Parliaments was chosen by the Commons as its Speaker. PROME, xiv. 410-11. He did nothing to offend the King in the course of the Parliament, which, after sitting for just 30 days, was dissolved on 18 Feb. Far from it: he was knighted on that same day, and expressly as a reward for his labours exercised in Parliament for the benefit of King and kingdom he received a handsome present of £100 from the royal coffers. Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 505; E405/71, rot. 6d.

Just a few weeks later, on 9 Apr., the King died. If Wood did not already enjoy the confidence of the duke of Gloucester he soon won it, for on 17 May the duke, as Protector, called upon him to fill the office of treasurer as successor to the earl of Essex, whose death had occurred a matter of days before that of King Edward, and confirmed the appointment after his usurpation of the throne. Wood attended his coronation. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 349, 361. At the time of Buckingham’s rebellion in the autumn, Wood did not waver in his loyalty to Richard III, even though his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Lewknor was to be attainted for his part in the revolt. On 24 May 1484 Lewknor was bound over to be true to Richard in the future, and placed under house arrest in Wood’s custody during royal pleasure. CCR, 1476-85, no. 1242. Wood himself prudently obtained another pardon: C67/51, m. 16. In the previous month the King had made Wood one of two vice-admirals and one of five commissaries-general of the Admiralty, this at a time when invasion from across the Channel in Henry Tudor’s interest was continually awaited. CPR, 1476-85, p. 391.

With the exception of (Sir) Walter Blount (appointed treasurer in 1464, not long before his ennoblement as Lord Mountjoy), since 1422 no other person ranked below the peerage had been elevated to this high office. But Wood did not reap the rewards of his promotion for long. He died in the autumn of 1484, probably on 6 Sept. C141/6/19. The inq. post mortem held in Surr. on 27 Oct. gives 25 Oct. as the date of his death, but this is most unlikely as the writs de diem clausit extremum had been issued on 15 Sept.: CFR, xxi. no. 830. Later inquisitions, held in 1487 and 1503, give 6 Sept. and 20 Aug., respectively: CIPM Hen. VII, i. 278; ii. 629. As he left no surviving issue the Surrey property of his first wife now passed to her sister Joan Druell, and the entailed estates of his own family devolved on his younger brother John, who survived him by little more than a year. In October 1485 the latter too died childless, whereupon the bulk of the Wood properties passed to their three nieces, the daughters of their late brother Thomas. C141/6/19; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 278; ii. 629. In his will the Speaker’s brother John left money for an obit at St. Olave’s Old Jewry for the souls of Thomas Morstead and his wife Elizabeth, the testator’s former sister-in-law, and land near Chichester to Boxgrove priory for prayers for Sir John Wood and his two wives. He also left the friars preachers at Chichester a noble, so that they would not dishonour his late brother for allegedly being party to an incident in which some thieves had been dragged out of sanctuary in the priory church. PCC 15 Logge. John junior, who had sat for Midhurst in 1467, established a close relationship with the bp. of Chichester, John Arundell (d.1477), whom he served as receiver and executor and remembered with great affection, asking to be buried next to his tomb in Chichester cathedral: L. Inn Black Bk. i. 40; CP40/872, rot. 65. The Speaker’s widow, Margery, took as her second husband Thomas Garthe† and survived Wood by 18 years. Margery kept for her lifetime Wood’s manor of Rivers Hall, although his heirs contested her entitlement to an annuity of 20 marks from his manor of Pulborough in Sussex. The heirs also brought legal actions against Garthe, who was granted administration of Wood’s estate on 15 Nov. 1488. Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 87; Lambeth Palace Lib., Reg. Morton, f. 254v; W. Suss. RO, Add. mss, 12322-3, 12325; C1/138/34-35; Notebk. of Sir John Port (Selden Soc. cii), 97-99. Margery died in 1502. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 629.