ZOUCHE, William

The Zouches were a family of ancient distinction descended from the Fergant dukes of Brittany. The branch represented by our MP had been settled since the 1270s at Harringworth, acquired by the marriage of Eon Zouche to Millicent Cauntelo, and in 1308 the son and heir of this union, William, was summoned to Parliament. William’s descendants maintained the honour. CP, xii (2), 937-45. In 1423 the family’s landholdings were significantly augmented by the marriage of our MP’s father to his distant kinswoman, the heiress of the St. Maurs. Her paternal inheritance, valued at £300 p.a. in 1404 and centred on the great manor of Castle Cary in Somerset, gave the Zouches a very significant stake in the West Country, adding to the castle of Totnes and other property in Devon, Wiltshire and Somerset which they had long possessed. CCR, 1402-5, p. 322; CIPM, xix. 550-9. The valuation of £300 p.a. excludes the lands that passed to her uncle, Sir John St. Maur, and her valuable maternal inheritance which descended to her half-brother, John Broughton: J. Collinson, Hist. Som. ii. 199. This elevated the family to the ranks of the better-endowed parliamentary peers. Although our MP’s father was assessed on an income of only 800 marks in the subsidy returns of 1436, other evidence shows that his income was in excess of £800. EHR, xlix. 617. Unusually full inqs. taken after the death of William, Lord Zouche, in 1415 give the total clear value of the family patrimony (unencumbered by dowagers) as over £560, and to this is to be added the value of the St. Maur lands: CIPM, xx. 414-16, 419-20, 425, 427-39.

In his father’s inquisitions post mortem in 1463 William Zouche was said to be 30 years of age ‘and more’ and he was probably about 35. C140/8/29. He had been contracted in marriage as early as 1435 when his father granted the manor of Clipsham in Rutland to feoffees, headed by Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, Henry Bowet, archdeacon of Richmond, and Sir William Plumpton, on condition that they should settle the manor on Plumpton’s daughter, Katherine. The marriage was probably brokered by our MP’s great-uncle, Sir John Zouche*, who in the same month employed Plumpton among his feoffees and whose son-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bowet, was a kinsman of the archdeacon. C140/30/53; CP25(1)/292/68/177. A further settlement was made in favour of the couple on 20 Feb. 1449, perhaps on our MP’s coming of age, when they were granted the manor and lordship of Calne with other property in Wiltshire, and at a date unknown they were also granted two manors in Gloucestershire and land in Devon. This was a valuable jointure: in later inquisitions post mortem it was valued at over £55 p.a., which, in the tradition of such inquisitions, was probably an underestimate. C140/30/53; 38/40.

The younger Zouche first appears in the records in an active role in the mid 1440s when he came into conflict with a wealthy esquire, John Browe*. In Michaelmas term 1446 Browe sued him and several of his tenants at Clipsham for offences against his property at nearby Pickworth. KB27/742, rot. 41d; CP40/743, rot. 381d; 744, rot. 158. Thereafter he embarked on a military career in the dying days of the English occupation of Normandy. With Henry, Lord Gray of Powis, and Sir Robert de Vere*, he was one of the leaders of the expedition which departed from Portsmouth in September 1449, and by the time Harfleur fell to the French on 1 Jan. 1450 he was serving as lieutenant there of the earl of Shrewsbury. PPC, vi. 86; A. Marshall, ‘English War Captains in Eng. and Normandy’ (Univ. of Wales M.A. thesis, 1975), 147; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), [629]. No more is heard of his activities until 1454, when, on 28 Nov., he appeared personally in the court of King’s bench to register a deed, dated at London six days before, by which he relinquished his right in a Lincolnshire manor sold by his father to John, Viscount Beaumont. KB27/774, rot. 126d. He had probably been brought to the capital by the great council then in session, and it may be that he was sympathetic to Richard, duke of York, who was then Protector. This would, at least, explain his readiness to sit in the Parliament which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of St. Albans. On 6 June 1455 he was elected for Northamptonshire in company with John Dyve*, another who seems to have been sympathetic to the Yorkists. Given the duke’s previously demonstrated ability to influence elections in the county, those unfavourable to his cause would have been unlikely to be elected in the circumstances of 1455, and it may be significant that the return was attested by both Zouche’s paternal uncle, John, and Dyve’s father. On 23 Nov., early in the second parliamentary session and just after the duke had resumed the protectorship, Zouche received a minor grant of royal patronage: he and Henry Chaterton were entrusted with the keeping of the manors of Holywell in Castle Bytham (Lincolnshire) and Stretton (Rutland) for the term of seven years at an annual rent of £11 3s. 4d. C219/16/3; CFR, xix. 139-40.

None the less, although his political sympathies in 1455 seem clear, neither Zouche nor his father was later to number among the Yorkist partisans, perhaps restrained by their ties with the Lancastrian establishment. Zouche’s stepmother, Elizabeth St. John, was the maternal half-sister of Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond (the King’s sister-in-law); his father-in-law, Plumpton, was a Percy retainer and hence a committed Lancastrian; and his sister, Margaret, widow of Edmund Lenthall, was the wife of one of the leading courtiers, Thomas Tresham*. CIMisc. viii. 344, 457; Add. Ch. 62433. Lord Zouche is numbered among the neutral lords in a list compiled during the second session of the Parliament of 1460, and there is no evidence that either he or his son played any part in the conflicts of 1459-61. C. Richmond, ‘The Nobility and the Wars of the Roses’, Parlty. Hist. xviii. 266.

In the aftermath of Edward IV’s accession Lord Zouche acquired some important connexions among the leading Yorkists from the Midlands. In March 1462 he appointed William, Lord Hastings, as supervisor of all his lands in the West Country. This connexion may have stood our MP in good stead when his father died at the end of the year. On 29 Jan. 1463 he had licence to enter into his inheritance, a mark of royal favour, for his father’s inquisitions post mortem had yet to be taken. CPR, 1461-7, p. 208. Writs of diem clausit extremum were issued for only Notts., Derbys., Som. and Dorset: CFR, xx. 66. In May 1463 juries in all four counties returned that he died seised of no lands: C140/8/29. Unfortunately, however, it was a depleted inheritance. Two months before his death, Lord Zouche had conveyed a significant part of his lands in the Midlands to a powerful group of feoffees, headed by Lord Hastings, and John Wenlock* (now Lord Wenlock) for the execution of his will; and to be added to that charge on the estate was the widow’s entitlement to dower. C140/30/53.

In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the new Lord Zouche should have sought to diminish his losses. On 19 June 1463 he and his stepmother entered into mutual bonds in 1,000 marks to put their rival claims to the award of Hastings, Sir John Markham, c.j.KB, and Richard Choke, j.c.b. Whether this brought him much profit must be doubted. His father’s feoffees made his stepmother an allowance for her dower, and then remained seised of the rest to the uses of the feoffor’s will throughout our MP’s short career. Curiously, among the enfeoffed lands were the family’s caput honoris, the manor of Harringworth, and the rest of family’s properties in Northamptonshire were entrusted to the widow’s dower. What was left to Zouche was principally the family’s extensive estate in the West Country supplemented by some manors in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The value of this diminished inheritance he then proceeded to reduce further. His father had assigned annuities on the family patrimony with the abandon of a wealthier man, and Zouche added to them. For example, on 10 Oct. 1465 he appointed John Byconnell* as chief steward of his courts in Devon at an annuity of five marks; on 12 July 1467 he granted an annual rent of £10 to William Ashbourne for good service; and at an unknown date he settled the same sum upon Lord Hastings’s brother, Ralph*, ‘pro suo gratuito consilio, servicio et assistencia’ and for acting as his steward in Buckinghamshire. His inquisitions post mortem record at least 26 separate annuities totalling over £130 (in addition, his father had granted life estates in the manor of Claybrook in Leicestershire and lands in Yelvertoft in Northamptonshire to two local lawyers, Robert Isham and John Eltonhead†) and, since much of his Somerset inquisition is illegible, the actual charge was probably slightly greater. KB27/809, rot. 24; C140/30/53.

These considerable burdens offer a partial explanation for the new Lord Zouche’s obscurity. Although he took his father’s place on the benches of Northamptonshire and Rutland, despite his lack of lands in fee in the former county, he was appointed to only one ad hoc commission of local government in either the Midlands or the West Country in the 1460s. He was the recipient of only one appointment of any note: in May 1466 Queen Elizabeth nominated him and her father, Earl Rivers, as overseers of her lands in Northamptonshire. Hatton’s Bk. of Seals ed. Loyd and Stenton, 22. His lack of commissions in Somerset is surprising for he spent much time at Castle Cary both before and after his father’s death. When he sued out a general pardon on 12 Mar. 1462 ‘late of Castle Cary’ was given among his aliases, and his younger son William seems to have been born there. On 20 Jan. 1466 he granted to one Alice Raulys of Castle Cary an annuity of one mark as the infant’s nurse. Yet the feoffees’ tenure of Harringworth did not exclude him from the family’s ancient home. He dated two deeds there in the autumn of 1467, and when he drew up his will on the following 12 Jan., it was there that he wished to be buried. C67/45, m. 32; C140/30/53; W. Dugdale, Baronage, i. 692.

Zouche’s comparatively early death on 15 Jan. 1468 condemned the family to a lengthy minority since his son and heir, John, was only eight years old. Margaret, wife of Henry Green*, was John’s godmother: Northants. RO, Northampton Archdeaconry, Probate Reg. 1, f. 18v. However, the survival of his wife and stepmother, his father’s feoffment and the burden of annuities upon the estate ensured that the benefit to the Crown and its grantees was more limited than it might ordinarily have been. On 1 Sept. 1468 those lands that did come into royal wardship together with John’s marriage were granted to Earl Rivers, and, on his execution, they came to his widow, Jacquetta of Luxembourg. In the meantime, within a year of her husband’s death, our MP’s widow had married (Sir) Gilbert Debenham II*, and on her death in 1471 he and his son were entrusted with the keeping of the Zouche lands she had held in jointure and dower. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 97, 152, 327-8, 373; C140/38/40. This marriage had taken place by Christmas 1468: C1/34/59.