Kent

Late medieval Kent was a fertile and prosperous county of contrasts and diverse communities. Its cities of Canterbury and Rochester and its Cinque Ports of Sandwich, Dover, Hythe and New Romney were relatively cosmopolitan and influenced by a constant influx of visitors, among them foreign merchants, soldiers, royal officials and the pilgrims making their way to Canterbury, one of the leading pilgrimage centres in western Europe. Some of Kent’s rural areas, the High Weald, the Isles of Thanet and Sheppey and Romney Marsh, by contrast, were relatively isolated. The county’s most important products were timber – considerable swathes of Kent were heavily wooded – and cereals, with much of the wheat and barley grown in the west feeding the demands of the London metropolis. A majority of those who worked the land, however, combined arable farming with livestock husbandry, and the keeping of animals predominated in the east of the county, especially on the Isle of Thanet and in Romney Marsh. Sheep, however numerous, were raised primarily for mutton, since Kentish wool was rated among the poorest in the realm. P. Fleming, ‘The Character and Private Concerns of the Gentry of Kent’ (Univ. of Wales Ph.D. thesis, 1985), 5; I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 1-7. Kent’s location ensured for it a pivotal role in national affairs during the reign of Henry VI. Within easy range of the administrative and judicial centre of government at Westminster, its ports and position between the capital and the English Channel gave it economic and strategic importance, so ensuring the inextricable linking of events there with the wider political dramas played out on the national stage. A considerable volume of goods and commodities traded between England and the continent passed through Kent, as did the men and materials necessary for the prosecution of the Hundred Years’ War.

The geographical location of Kent was fundamental for Cade’s rebellion, the great uprising of 1450 that emanated from the county. The discontents expressed by the rebels were not merely local in nature, since they included complaints about the government at home and English failings in the by then all-but lost war in France. Kent’s proximity to London ensured for it a high degree of political awareness and news and rumours about the conduct or perceived misconduct of the King’s ministers were quick to reach the county. Its location had also attracted members of the unpopular government and royal household seeking to obtain land conveniently close to the capital, sometimes by underhand or illegal means – another cause of discontent. Similarly, proximity to France ensured that Kent was quick to hear about the latest military setbacks across the Channel during the closing years of the war, failures for which the government incurred the blame. The conflict had an immediate impact on the county in two important respects. First, the constant transit across Kent of troops en route to and from the Channel ports always had the potential to cause aggravation. The authorities were often slow to pay for the billeting and other goods and services these men required from the local populace, who also suffered from the lawlessness to which soldiery were prone. Such issues formed the subject of petitions submitted to at least three Parliaments of the reign, those of 1425, 1429 and 1442. Secondly, Kent suffered from French naval raids during the latter stages of the war, to the detriment of its overseas trade in general and ports in particular. It appears that the origins of the rebellion (which began in late May 1450), lay in south-west Kent. It was in that part of the county that prominent members of the King’s army, (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I* and his cousin William Stafford*, met their end a few weeks later, while rashly attacking the rebels with an inadequate force after their initial withdrawal from Blackheath. Following their return to Blackheath and entry into London in early July, Cade’s men put to death two of their most hated targets from Kent, the chamberlain of the Household, James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and his son-in-law, William Cromer. The subsequent crushing of the rebellion did not immediately end trouble in the county, where the jittery authorities had to contend with further unrest during the early 1450s. Although a significant number of the rebels came from Sussex and the authorities captured Cade in that county, the rebellion was very much a Kentish affair. Sixty-five per cent of the royal pardons issued in connexion with the rebellion were from Kent, albeit including those with no involvement in it who sought a safeguard in its aftermath. In one of the three surviving manifestos attributed to the rebels, a third of the 15 causes of complaint related specifically to oppressions in the county. The manifestos expressed the rebels’ opposition to the activities of members of the Household like Fiennes and local officials (whom they also accused of corrupt interference at parliamentary elections), and were a reaction to the government’s political failings at home and abroad, to changes in the politics of Kent and to the traumatic losses in the war in France. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 610-65; D. Grummitt, ‘Deconstructing Cade’s Rebellion’, in The Fifteenth Cent. VI ed. Clark, 109-18.

The geography of Kent, more particularly its proximity to France, also ensured that the county featured prominently in the political crisis of 1459-61, even if many of its elite were apparently reluctant to declare for either York or Lancaster. In the aftermath of the debacle at Ludford Bridge in October 1459, the earls of Warwick, Salisbury and March fled to Calais, and the Kentish port of Sandwich became the centre of an operation to expel them from that English outpost. In January 1460, however, the Yorkist earls raided Sandwich, destroying much shipping and capturing the Lancastrian commander, Lord Rivers. When they launched their successful invasion of England from Calais several months later, they again landed at Sandwich before marching on Canterbury and London. The decisions made by those of the Kentish elite who did become involved in these events cut across many existing and longstanding ties. Some remained loyal to the Lancastrian Crown and some declared for York; a significant number of others remained uncommitted in this crisis-ridden period and incurred exclusion from an active role in local administration thereafter.

In spite of Kent’s proximity to Westminster, the Crown lands in the county were far from extensive. The lordships of Middleton and Marden were the principal royal landholdings. When not granted to a member of the royal family, the King assigned their administration to certain of the county gentry. Those lands belonging to the duchy of Lancaster – of no great significance – were the responsibility of the duchy’s feodary for Kent. Other royal interests included the King’s palaces and parks at Greenwich, Eltham and Leeds and the castles of Dover, Rochester, Queenborough and Leeds. Dover was the most important royal castle; its constable was also warden of the Cinque Ports, making him the principal office-holder of the Crown in the region. Fleming, 5; M. Mercer, ‘Kent and National Politics’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1995), 13-14.

Notwithstanding the relative paucity of Crown lands in Kent, the King’s affinity often played a significant part in the county’s affairs. Members of the affinity were prominent in local politics under the first two Lancastrian monarchs, only for the number of Kentish men in receipt of royal annuities or enjoying Household office to decline during the minority of Henry VI. Instead, the extended royal family, most importantly Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and Cardinal Beaufort, were the principal sources of patronage and political leadership in Kent. Once the King had reached his majority, however, the Crown re-emerged as a focus of power in the locality. Mercer, 1-38. From 1437, the most important royal servant there was James Fiennes, the younger son of a Sussex landowning family with close connexions with Kent. During the early 1440s, he used his proximity to the King to assemble a landed estate centred on the manor of Hever in west Kent, a property he had purchased. Like his brother, Sir Roger Fiennes*, appointed treasurer of the Household in 1439, James had entered the King’s service, and shortly after Henry VI attained his majority became an esquire for the King’s body, with privileged access to the monarch. Subsequently a knight for the body, Fiennes became chamberlain of the Household and rose to the peerage as Lord Saye and Sele in the wake of the downfall and death of the duke of Gloucester in 1447.

His own death during Cade’s rebellion meant that Fiennes had little time to enjoy his elevation to the peerage of the county. Notwithstanding the prominence he achieved, in this period Kent lacked resident magnates who were both pre-eminent and from established local families. By Henry VI’s reign, many of its indigenous nobility had died out and poverty had reduced others like the Clintons into relative insignificance. According to his assessment for the subsidy of 1436, John, Lord Clinton, held estates worth a mere £112 p.a. and following his capture in France six years later he had to pay a crippling ransom of 6,000 marks. For the remainder of his life he was too poor to receive a summons to the Lords and he yielded his claim to the Saye title to Fiennes in 1448. CP, iii. 315; xi. 478-9. Another noble family, the Cobhams, once of national importance, suffered from extinctions and hard times. The branch seated at Cobham died out in the male line in 1407; the Cobhams of Rundale and Allington did not receive summonses to the Lords after 1332 and lost their last male representative in 1429; and the Cobhams of Sterborough ceased to sit in the Upper House after 1372. Even so, for much of Henry VI’s reign Sir Reynold Cobham of Sterborough (d.1446) was a figure of some importance within Kent. N. Saul, Death, Art and Memory in Med. Eng., 11-36, 123-46; CP, iii. 338-55.

Notwithstanding the lack of significant resident peers, there were important lay magnates with interests in Kent, and the dukes of Bedford, Gloucester and York, the earls of March and Warwick, and Lords Cromwell and Abergavenny all held lands there. Even where such holdings were insufficient to warrant anything more than the most basic estate administration, the sheriff had to be mindful of offending these nobles and, when necessary, to work through their officials when serving a writ or executing judicial process. Mercer 13. Yet by far the greatest landowner in Kent was a churchman, the archbishop of Canterbury. Fleming, 5. The most significant secular lordship in Kent, itself held by knight service of the archbishop, was that of the Lowy of Tonbridge. By this period it had passed to the Staffords, earls of Stafford and dukes of Buckingham, whose Kentish holdings the Crown augmented by granting to them the manor of Penshurst following the death of the duke of Gloucester in 1447. C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 191, 194; CP, xii (1), 174-7. The relative lack of great lay estates meant that the office of warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover castle provided one of the most important means of wielding political influence in Kent. For almost all of Henry VI’s reign, it was in the hands of the King’s uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and his two immediate successors, James Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, and Humphrey, duke of Buckingham.

Thanks to the relative paucity of resident magnates, the gentry of Kent played a more dominant role in the affairs of their county than many of their counterparts elsewhere. The surviving records of the subsidy of 1451 provide a useful, if incomplete, snapshot of the Kentish gentry in the latter part of the Henry VI’s reign. The extant returns cover 37 of the county’s 66 hundreds and name 88 individuals with landed incomes of £10 p.a. and above, of whom 64 were mere ‘gentlemen’ rather than knights and esquires. The 21 (four knights and 17 esquires) with estates worth in excess of £80 annually were effectively the leaders of local political society. Another 25 possessed lands valued at between £80 and £22 p.a. and the rest holdings at between £10 and £20. Fleming, 475-6; E179/124/218. Returns are extant for only 16 hundreds for the subsidy of 1431; those for that of 1436 are almost illegible, meaning only the assessments of the men who appeared personally in the Exchequer can be used: Feudal Aids, iii. 56-81; E159/212, recorda, Hil. rot. 14; E179/124/103. One authority has estimated that there were 272 gentry families in Kent between 1422 and 1509, of which 37 per cent had knights or esquires at their heads. Fleming, 95-99. At the other end of the scale were the many parish gentry. Mainly excluded from public office, they appear to have played little part in parliamentary elections. Gavelkind, the system of partible inheritance practised throughout Kent, especially in the east of the county, provides the readiest explanation for the large number of these minor landowners. Ibid. 109; Mercer, 6-7. According to a petition presented in the Parliament of 1439, a majority of Kentish landowners still held their property in gavelkind at that date. Its purpose was to secure the annulment of a statute of the previous Parliament that had exempted those who fell into that category from jury service, so unfairly burdening the minority who fell outside it with that duty. PROME, xi. 289-90.

The names of 27 of the knights of the shire for Kent in Henry VI’s reign survive; only its representatives in the Parliament of 1459 are unknown. Each of them had a residence in Kent when elected and nine were from particularly old and well-established local families. The nine included Sir John Cheyne, William Haute, Sir Thomas Kyriel, Reynold Peckham and Reynold Pympe, all members of the remarkably stable group constituting the county’s upper gentry. Digges, Dreylond, Isle and Manston were the others of old Kentish stock. At least nine others came to Kent from elsewhere or were from families that had acquired interests there much more recently, a group that included James Fiennes and his followers and allies, Gervase Clifton and William Cromer. The 27 included men from families with traditions of parliamentary service. The Cheynes, Hornes, Pecches and Rickhills had provided MPs in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, if not in every case knights of the shire for Kent, and Guildfords and Scotts featured among the county’s parliamentary representatives after the period under review. These traditions comprised just part of a myriad of family connexions between the 27 and Parliament, and a majority of the MPs possessed such ties – whether through blood or marriage – with other parliamentarians, living or dead. Such connexions included relationships among themselves: for example, Edward Guildford was the father-in-law of John Bamburgh and Robert Horne; Cromer and Clifton respectively married a daughter of Fiennes and the widow of William Scott; and Haute was Richard Wydeville’s son-in-law. Furthermore, six of the 27 (Thomas Brown, Cromer, Cheyne, Horne, Peckham and Scott) were the fathers of MPs, including three later fifteenth-century knights of the shire for Kent. The impressive and still extant stained glass windows commissioned for the parish church of Nettlestead, south-west of Maidstone (probably by Reynold Pympe in the late 1430s) are further evidence of the connexions among Kent’s parliamentarians. The heraldic shields displayed in them bear witness to the links between the families of Pympe, Cheyne, Dreylond, Fiennes, Isle, Peckham, Rickhill and Warner. Archaeologia Cantiana, xxviii. 164-241; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Kent: West and the Weald ed. Newman, 423-4.

The ratio of recent arrivals in Kent to more established residents of the county among the 27 largely mirrors that for their 32 known predecessors of the period 1386-1421. Nine of the 32 were from the first generation of their families to settle in the region, The Commons 1386-1421, i. 454. while seven of the 27 were similar newcomers. Two of these seven, Clifton (from the Midlands), and John Thornbury (perhaps related to the Thornburys of Hertfordshire), obtained lands in Kent through marriage, while John Darell (from Yorkshire) William Hextall (from Staffordshire) and Geoffrey Lowther (from Westmorland) followed earlier precedents by coming to the south-east in the service of magnates. Although it is possible that the Hextalls had already acquired property at East Peckham near Tonbridge in the lifetime of Hextall’s father. Brown was the son of a London grocer and used his family’s mercantile wealth to acquire property in the county, just as Sir William Pecche’s great-grandfather, John†, a prominent fishmonger from the City, had done in the fourteenth century. Finally, Wydeville was a younger son from a Northamptonshire gentry family.

In terms of social status, those elected for Kent in the period under review were generally – if not always – of a similar background to their predecessors of the years 1386-1421, although the proportion of knights among them continued to decline, in line with the general trend throughout the realm in the later Middle Ages. The belted knights of the earlier period constituted less than a third of Kent’s MPs, The Commons 1386-1421, i. 455. but only three of the 27, Cheyne, Kyriel and Pecche, were actual knights at the time of their first or only elections. Three others, Brown, Clifton and Fiennes, received knighthoods after sitting in their first Parliaments. Although the honour came to Brown after his parliamentary career was over, both Clifton and Fiennes did subsequently represent the county in the Commons as belted knights. Alone among the MPs, Fiennes later enjoyed the distinction of elevation to the peerage. Created Lord Saye and Sele while a Member of the Parliament of 1447, he received his formal summons to the Lords on the final day of that assembly, and it was as of the Upper House that he attended the following two Parliaments. On only seven occasions in Henry VI’s reign (none of them before 1445), did the Kent electors certainly return an actual knight, and the election of 1455 is the only known occasion on which both Members were of that status. Of course, none of these figures is definitive, owing to the anonymity of the county’s representatives in the Parl. of 1459. Many of those MPs who never became knights could well support the rank (at least 13 of them incurred distraints for the honour), although Dreylond and John Pirie came from the lower gentry.

While knighthood retained its military connotations, by no means was the pursuit of arms confined to the actual knights among the 27. At least 11 of the MPs saw military service in France, the great majority of them before representing Kent in Parliament. Bamburgh, Clifton, Fiennes, Haute, Horne, Kyriel, Lowther, Manston, Pecche, Thornbury and Wydeville. It is also possible that Rickhill campaigned there early in his career. Only Bamburgh and Pecche appear to have sat as MPs before going to France although the same may hold good for Clifton as well, since it is not definite that he was the individual of that name who served in Normandy in the 1420s. Several of the soldier MPs took part in the administration or defence of Calais, as did Cheyne, who took up the office of victualler of that English outpost in 1451, after the war was lost and just over a year after the dissolution of his only known Parliament. It is a moot point whether the election of soldiers arose from a conscious decision by the electors to return such men or simply reflected the county’s engagement in the war. Whatever the case, past or continuing involvement in France is likely to have ensured their active engagement – or at least interest – in parliamentary debates on the conflict. Of the soldiers among the MPs, Kyriel and Wydeville in particular stand out, since they were two of the leading English captains in France. Both may have participated in the celebrated Agincourt campaign, as certainly did Fiennes, Haute, Lowther, Manston and, perhaps, John Rickhill. Others of the 27 appear to have had strong family connexions with the English war effort, even if they did not actually cross the Channel themselves. While Darell, for example, apparently took no personal part in the fighting, he proved of great worth as a frequent supervisor of musters of men waiting to embark, both before and during the period under review. Three others, Digges (whose father had participated in the Agincourt campaign), Guildford and Pympe (whose eldest son, John, had served in the duke of Gloucester’s retinue in 1415 and 1421), feature in a list of 12 leading men of the shire in possession of arms and armour for the defence of the county. Also named in the same list are two of those who certainly saw active service, Haute and Manston, and it is probable that Manston’s military experience was a factor in his election to the Parliament of 1437, a body dominated by concerns over the campaigns across the Channel.

France was not the sole area of operations for those of the MPs who took up arms, several of whom also did so at home. Between his two Parliaments, for example, Kyriel was active in the defence of Kent. In the late summer of 1457, he organized a force from the Cinque Ports and the surrounding countryside to drive off a French raiding party that had attacked Sandwich and killed its mayor. He was also responsible for reordering coastal defences in the aftermath of this encounter. Three years later, he joined the Yorkist earls following their arrival in Kent from Calais. A fortnight after the prorogation of his second Parliament in early February 1461, he was in the Yorkist army defeated at the second battle of St. Albans, where the victorious Lancastrians took him prisoner and summarily executed him. Clifton, Kyriel’s associate knight of the shire in the Parliament of 1455, was also active in organizing coastal defences following the French raid of 1457. He, however, remained loyal to the Crown and was in the Lancastrian army at the battle of Towton. His luck ran out a decade later, when he was among the defeated Lancastrians executed after the battle of Tewkesbury. By contrast, Horne, Kyriel’s fellow in the Parliament of 1460, was another who declared for York, and he may have participated in the Yorkist victory at Northampton a few months prior to the convening of that assembly. Horne certainly took up arms after its dissolution, since he died fighting for the new King, Edward IV, at Towton. Brown also met a bloody end, for he was among the Lancastrian defenders of the Tower of London captured and executed in the summer of 1460.

One of the more unlikely soldiers among the 27 was Bamburgh, who served briefly across the Channel with the duke of Bedford in the mid 1430s, given that he was primarily a lawyer. By contrast, Lowther, who had a far more distinguished military career than Bamburgh, makes a somewhat unlikely man of law, even though he was almost certainly the ‘Lowther’ listed among those admitted to Lincoln’s Inn at some point in the early fifteenth century. Just two other MPs, William Isle and Pirie, were definitely lawyers, although Peckham had probably also been educated in the law. Indeed, the most prominent lawyers in the county included Walter Moyle*, Richard Bruyn*, William Gernet* and John Fortescue*, none of whom was a native of Kent and of whom Fortescue appears to have lacked personal interests there. The three and a half decades before 1422 present a similar picture. Only one of the 32 knights of the shire for Kent in those years was definitely a lawyer although possibly three others had received some training in the law. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 455. But that survey names as one of the three putative lawyers John Darell (who also sat in the period under review), even though his biography (ibid. ii. 752-5) does not raise the possibility that he received such a training.

There was a mercantile as well as a legal element among the MPs, four of whom, Brown, Cromer, Pecche and Warner, were of London stock. Brown in particular enjoyed close links with the City, and it was as ‘late of London, citizen and grocer’ that he received a royal pardon in the late 1450s. At a humbler level, Dreylond was a burgess of the Kentish town of Faversham, of which he was mayor when he sat for the county in 1425. Furthermore, involvement in commerce was not below the dignity of the more established members of the county elite. Cheyne, for example, had business dealings with merchants from both home and abroad. He entered the prestigious London Taylors’ fraternity of St. John the Baptist and his eldest surviving son married a daughter of Geoffrey Boleyn*, a prominent City mercer.

It was thanks to his mercantile background that Brown was a substantial landowner, since the profits his family derived from trade gave it the wherewithal to invest heavily in real property. While incomplete, the extant subsidy returns for Kent do provide a good indication of relative wealth among over half the MPs. At the head of the list is Brown, whose estates were valued at £200 p.a. for the purposes of the subsidy of 1451. Two other major landowners were Wydeville and Clifton, assessed at £168 and £134 p.a. respectively for that of 1436. The subsidy returns also suggest that Pecche and Scott possessed estates worth over £100 p.a. and that – whether through inheritance, purchase or marriage – Bamburgh, Cheyne, Cromer, Hextall, Horne, Kyriel, Peckham, Pympe, Thornbury and Warner received yearly landed incomes of under £100 (substantially less in the cases of Cromer and Bamburgh, assessed at £30 and £40 respectively for that of 1436). Of course, such assessments reveal nothing of estates that some of the 27 may have held in France; nor do they necessarily provide a complete picture of the MPs’ English lands. For the purposes of the subsidy of 1436, for example, Thornbury’s income from land was a mere £20 p.a. but he had come into possession of further holdings in the right of his third wife before the end of the 1430s. As for those for whom subsidy evidence is incomplete or entirely lacking, Fiennes and Haute were clearly among the leading gentry landowners in the county and Dreylond and Pirie were both of modest landed means. Another, Isle, must have possessed estates worth at least £40 p.a. when he was distrained for knighthood near the end of his life although his inquisition post mortem estimated his annual landed income at no more than £25 10s., evidently a considerable underestimate. Yet even the richest of the Kent gentry were not major landowners in national terms and none had the resources to dominate the county’s politics or administration by virtue of their wealth alone. Just two of the MPs, Brown and Pecche, appear already to have possessed substantial holdings beyond Kent and Sussex prior to entering Parliament. The shift of Clifton’s interests to the Midlands, where his second wife was the heir to extensive estates, did not occur until just after the period under review, while Wydeville inherited the Northants. estates of his half-brother Thomas Wydeville* some three years after the dissolution of his only known Parl. For the most part, their more far-flung properties lay elsewhere in southern England and in London, although Pecche did inherit holdings in East Anglia. While Hextall, a far lesser landowner than Brown and Pecche, had relatively widespread landed interests when returned to the Commons in 1453. Apart from his own holdings in Kent and native Staffordshire, his second wife enjoyed jointure and dower rights in lands and other properties in the latter county as well as in Shropshire, Surrey, Worcestershire and London.

Most of the MPs, whatever their landed wealth, were of sufficient rank to exercise the higher offices in the administration of Kent. As many as 19 of them served as sheriff of the county although, as in the years 1386-1421, The Commons 1386-1421, i. 455. the office was by no means a prerequisite for election. Indeed, extensive service in local government in general was not a sine qua non for prospective MPs. Haute, for example, had barely begun his career in the administration of Kent when elected to his first Parliament (evidently while still in his twenties) in 1419. Of the 19 sheriffs, he was among the 11 who did not exercise the office until after entering the Commons for the first or only time although two of the 19, Wydeville in 1433 and Clifton in 1439, received appointments to it while sitting in Parliament.

Given that most of the 27 hailed from the upper gentry, it is understandable that fewer of them served in the more lowly office of escheator, whose responsibilities covered Middlesex as well as Kent. Dreylond completed a term as such shortly before his election to the Parliament of 1425, and Scott also held the office prior to entering the Commons, in his case some five years before winning his seat. Thornbury and Guildford both served as escheator after first entering Parliament and Pympe took on the role while sitting for Kent in that of 1411. While Dreylond and Thornbury were never significant landowners, it might be thought that the office was a little beneath the dignity of some of the other MPs. As many as 20 of the MPs served as j.p.s in Kent. Again, there was no fixed pattern; eight received their first appointments to the bench after their first or only election to Parliament, and 12 before. Once appointed, most remained j.p.s on a continuous basis for the remainder of their careers although some, like Kyriel and Wydeville, had their membership of the bench interrupted by military service. While the office of j.p. was an important part of the cursus honorum, few of the MPs regularly attended the sessions of the peace. Predictably, those who did included the lawyers, Bamburgh, Isle and Pirie (all of whom were placed on the quorum), as well as the putative member of their profession, Lowther. All of the 27 except Cromer served on ad hoc commissions in Kent under Henry VI, most of them beginning to do so before they entered their first or only Parliaments.

Several of the MPs, most notably Fiennes, also held other offices under the Crown in Kent. In late March 1442, on the last day of his second Parliament, Fiennes was made constable of Rochester, although he treated the position as a sinecure, transferring it within a year to Sir Brian Stapleton* in exchange for a manor in Surrey. During the Parliament of 1447, however, he successfully petitioned for the principal royal office in Kent. On 24 Feb. that year, probably the same date as his creation as Lord Saye and Sele, the King made him warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover castle in succession to the disgraced duke of Gloucester, who had died just a day earlier. Three of Fiennes’s fellow MPs served as deputy wardens, although by appointment of the warden rather than the Crown. First, throughout his parliamentary career, Lowther was deputy under Gloucester. Secondly, during the 15 years between his two Parliaments, Clifton served as such initially under the duke and then under his three successors as warden (Fiennes, his son William, Lord Saye and Sele, and Humphrey, duke of Buckingham). Thirdly, Kyriel became deputy warden by appointment of Buckingham in about 1457 and remained in office after that warden’s death at the battle of Northampton in July 1460; he was still in post when elected to the Commons for the second time that autumn. By contrast, it was by direct appointment of the Crown that Cheyne became keeper of the strategically important royal castle of Queenborough in February 1458, a measure of his local standing a decade after he had sat for Kent in Parliament. He also held office in the county under Queen Margaret, who had appointed him steward of the lordships of Milton and Marden in 1452. His predecessor as steward was Brown, who took up that position immediately after the death of the duke of Gloucester, the previous lord of Milton and Marden, by virtue of a reversionary grant of the Crown. Cromer was another to benefit from Gloucester’s downfall, since the queen had appointed him bailiff of the same lordships by the spring of 1447.

The office of queen’s bailiff was not the only immediate connexion that Cromer had with the Crown, since he gained election to both of his known Parliaments while an esquire of the King’s hall or chamber. Several of his fellow MPs were likewise members of the royal establishment at the time of their elections and, less formally, others were members of the King’s affinity in Kent. Most notably, Fiennes was a Household servant throughout his time as a Member of the Commons; first as a groom of the chamber, afterwards as an esquire and then knight for the King’s body. Cheyne had attained the position of King’s serjeant-at-arms a few years before his election to the first Parliament of 1449, and Warner was an esquire of the chamber when elected to the following assembly. Wydeville, by contrast, did not become an esquire of the King’s hall and chamber until his final years, after he had sat in Parliament, although he had formed an attachment with the Lancastrian Crown early in his career, serving it as an ambassador abroad both before and after representing Kent in the Commons. Late in Henry VI’s reign, Clifton served briefly as treasurer of the Household although he was already a ‘King’s esquire’ by the early 1450s. CPR, 1446-52, p. 479. Two other MPs, Kyriel and Brown, came to feature with like sobriquets in the records. Kyriel, whose loyalty to the house of Lancaster would not last, was a ‘King’s knight’ nearly two decades before he entered the Commons, CPR, 1436-41, p. 62. and he represented the Crown as an ambassador in negotiations with Flanders, France and Burgundy on several occasions in 1440 and 1441. Brown was addressed as a ‘King’s esquire’ in a royal charter he acquired in late 1448, within three years of the dissolution of his only known Parliament as a knight of the shire for Kent. Thornbury was another member of the royal affinity in Kent, since he was a leading servant of the queen in the county when he stood for election to the ‘royalist’ Parliament of 1453.

Membership of the Household was just one of several possible links with the centre of power. At least five of the 27 held office in one of the great departments of state at Westminster or in the duchy of Lancaster. For the most part, they did so after sitting for Kent for the first or only time, but Lowther attended his final two Parliaments while receiver-general and attorney-general of the duchy of Lancaster, positions he held for nearly 15 years. Both Darell and Brown served as under treasurer of the Exchequer although they owed their appointments to the treasurer of England rather than directly to the Crown. Darell served two terms as under treasurer, initially in Henry IV’s reign, before his first election to the Commons in 1407, and later in the early 1430s, after the dissolution of his last Parliament in February 1430. Brown began his term as such eight months after sitting for Kent in the Parliament of 1445, and briefly served as a member of the King’s Council in the summer of 1453. Earlier, the Council had included Fiennes, who joined that body in 1447, just as his parliamentary career as a Member of the Commons was drawing to a close, and remained on it until his death. During the last year of his life Fiennes was also, for nine months, treasurer of England. Finally, Hextall began his career as an officer of the Exchequer within two years of sitting for Kent in the Parliament of 1453.

Those of the 27 who held office in the Household and central government were certainly fewer in number than those who had an association with one or more lords (whether lay or ecclesiastical) when they stood for Parliament. While it is impossible to prove a patron’s support definitely secured a seat for any of them, such links would in any case have enhanced their local status and, therefore, their prospects as candidate knights of the shire. As already noted, the office of warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover castle provided magnates with one of the main means of wielding political influence in Kent, influence that had at least some part to play at parliamentary elections. Owing to his position as the duke of Gloucester’s deputy warden, for example, Lowther gained local importance in his own right, meaning that he was well qualified to represent the county as a knight of the shire. It is also worth noting that his fellow MP in the Parliament of 1422, Reynold Pympe, may also have had a connexion with Gloucester, and that Haute, his fellow in that of 1432, had served under the duke during the Agincourt campaign. The influence of Gloucester also best explains the return of Pirie, whose modest landed estate excluded him from the ranks of the leading gentry of the shire, in 1433. Even if the effects or extent of the political patronage of a subsequent warden, Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, are generally extremely difficult to measure, Rawcliffe, 81. there is no doubt that it shaped the lengthy parliamentary career of Hextall, one of the very few MPs of this period known to have represented as many as four different constituencies. Prior to his election for Kent, he had sat for three boroughs, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Stafford and Bletchingley, all associated with his patron, in at least seven Parliaments. Having shifted the focus of his activities from his native Staffordshire to south-east England in the late 1430s, he became receiver of his patron’s lands in Surrey and Kent, an office he still occupied when returned for the latter county in 1453. Whether Kyriel, another of those associated with Buckingham, owed anything to that lord for his parliamentary career is more open to question. While the duke was warden of the Cinque Ports at the time of Sir Thomas’s first Parliament in 1455, he did not appoint him as his deputy until about 1457. As for Fiennes, his patronage was crucial for the rise to prominence in Kent and parliamentary career of his son-in-law, Cromer. Furthermore, the election of Cheyne, Cromer’s fellow MP in the Parliament of February 1449, may also have rested upon his connexion with that lord. Unlike Cromer, however, there is no evidence that Cheyne was a partisan of Fiennes in the county’s politics of the 1440s. The extent of ecclesiastical influence over elections is harder to gauge. It is nevertheless likely that the patronage of John Kemp, archbishop of York, was at least of indirect assistance when Scott and Clifton stood for election in 1431 and 1439 respectively, and that the influence of Archbishop Chichele of Canterbury helped Burys to secure his seat in 1423. Similarly, Darell’s bond of kinship with Chichele would have bolstered his status as a candidate knight of the shire in Henry VI’s reign, even if he had enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Neville family earlier in his career and had already sat for Kent in several Parliaments before he married Chichele’s niece. Bamburgh’s association with Bishop Langdon of Rochester cannot have disadvantaged his candidacy in 1427 and 1431, although his involvement in the affairs of Rochester bridge was also perhaps a factor in his return to both of those assemblies.

As a Member of more than one Parliament, Bamburgh was in a minority, for the electors appear to have set little store in continuity of representation. They returned two newcomers to the Commons on at least four occasions and no fewer than 16 of the 27 elected sat for the county just once, although Brown and Hextall had already represented other constituencies and Pirie subsequently gained election for Dover. Of the remainder, five men sat in two Parliaments and two in three. The most experienced were Darell, Fiennes and Hextall. Darell attended seven Parliaments, entering his first in 1407 and leaving his last in 1430. Fiennes sat in four consecutive Parliaments of the late 1430s and 1440s – so alone providing the most continuity of representation for Kent in Henry VI’s reign – and received summonses as a peer to the two that followed: those of 1449 and 1449-50. Hextall was a Member of at least eight and possessed a wealth of parliamentary experience when he took up his seat in 1453. Darell was not alone in beginning his parliamentary career before 1422. As already noted, Pympe sat for the county in 1411; and Guildford and Haute were Kent’s knights of the shire in 1419. As far as the evidence goes, Brown, Hextall and Pirie were the only men who also represented other constituencies and none of the 27 sat after the period under review, whether for Kent or elsewhere. The frequent lack of continuity in the parliamentary representation of Kent in Henry VI’s reign followed the pattern of the previous three and a half decades. In the years 1386-21, 15 of the 32 known knights of the shire represented the county only once, even if there were also several individuals with long careers of parliamentary service for Kent and other constituencies. By contrast, there was considerably more continuity in the early Tudor period and, despite the gaps in the evidence, probably under the Yorkists as well. The Commons 1386-1421, i. 454; 1509-58, i. 113-14.

The cities of Rochester and Canterbury were the usual venues for elections of the knights of the shire for Kent. There are surviving indentures of return for the county for 19 of Henry VI’s Parliaments. Rochester was the venue for elections to ten of these assemblies and Canterbury for six. The indenture for the Parliament of 1442 was sealed at ‘Chesteners’, an unidentified location but perhaps close to Penenden Heath near Maidstone, an ancient meeting place of the county court and the venue for both elections of 1449. Generally, the men who sat as knights of the shire were not prominent among those attesting the indentures. Bamburgh witnessed at least five elections in the quarter of a century 1422-47, while his fellow lawyer, Isle, was present at four between the mid 1430s and the mid 1450s, but this was not the norm. Of the other MPs, nine witnessed elections on one occasion, five on two and another, Digges, on three. Indeed, most attestors in general witnessed only one election, even if some, particularly those connected with the administration of Rochester bridge, did routinely attend the county court. The average number of attestors at elections held during Henry VI’s minority was just 23 but at elections of the final two decades of the reign for which there are surviving indentures it rose to 63: the increase perhaps reflects the more politically contentious nature of the later hustings.

Even if taken fully at face value, the allegations of corruption at parliamentary elections in Kent during the 1440s do not reflect the situation for the whole of Henry VI’s reign. There are few signs of outside interference in the parliamentary process during the 1420s: notwithstanding the influence of the duke of Gloucester, local men and local concerns dominated elections. In particular, those involved in the administration of Rochester bridge played a prominent role at the hustings, and even Lowther, Gloucester’s leading servant in Kent, had a part in the bridge’s affairs. Rochester played host to the elections held for the Parliaments of 1422, 1423, 1426, 1427 and 1431, all occasions when many of the attestors had a connexion with the bridge or were citizens of Rochester. At these hustings and those for the Parliaments of 1425 and 1429, both held at Canterbury, the attestors and the men elected represented the geographical breadth of the county, in spite of the low numbers of named participants. There were as few as nine attestors in 1423, as many as 20 in 1431 and a dozen at the five other elections.

During the 1430s, Rochester hosted three elections and Canterbury two and, although the average number of attestors rose to 22, there is no evidence of any disputed elections. While men associated with Gloucester were again prominent among those returned, they in no way dominated the county’s representation and nor were they mere ciphers of the duke. In the Parliament of 1432, for example, both MPs, Haute and Lowther, did have past or current associations with Gloucester. By contrast, neither of those elected in 1437, Manston and Digges, had a known connexion with the duke, even though it was probably in his interests to seek the return of his followers to an assembly in which his captaincy of Calais was a major item on the agenda. The war in Normandy and France in general was also an important concern for the Parliament, and military considerations appear to have loomed large in Kent’s election to it. Both MPs had military reputations and Manston had fought at Agincourt. Moreover, the presiding sheriff was Fiennes, himself a veteran of the Agincourt campaign, and men with personal experience of the French war were prominent among the electors. The election of Fiennes and Clifton to the following Parliament of 1439-40 did not mark a shift in the pattern or nature of Kent’s parliamentary politics. Not only had Fiennes recently served as sheriff of the county, at this stage of his career he also had close connexions with some of Cardinal Beaufort’s Kentish servants; and Clifton’s patron, John Kemp, archbishop of York, was a native of the county and a former bishop of Rochester. Kemp, who continued to wield influence in the county after his elevation to the see of York, had introduced Clifton to Kentish society by arranging a match for him with Scott’s widow. While Fiennes and Clifton were recent arrivals in the county, both had been among the most active members of its gentry in the years immediately prior to their election.

The parliamentary politics of Kent during the 1440s differed from those of the preceding two decades in at least three respects. First, Fiennes and Cromer dominated the county’s representation. Secondly, both elections of 1449 took place at Peneneden Heath near Fiennes’s residence at Knole. Thirdly, the use of Penenden reflected a westward shift in the political geography of Kent, towards London and the seat of royal government at Westminster: Cheyne was the only one of the six knights of the shire of the 1440s who came from the east of the county. There is no evidence of disputed elections in this decade, even though significantly more attestors attended them than in the previous two. The average was 40 although no fewer than 69 men witnessed the return of Cheyne and Cromer to the first Parliament of 1449. Those present on that occasion included followers of Fiennes like Isle and Robert East but also his erstwhile enemies like Humphrey Eveas.

As already noted, Cade’s followers identified corruption at parliamentary elections as an example of Fiennes’s misuse of power in the county. One of their complaints was that the people of Kent ‘may not haue their free election in the choosing knights of the shire, but letters been sent from diuers estates to the great rulers of all the countrie, the which imbraceth their tenants and other people by force to choose other persons than the common will is’. J. Stow, Annales of Eng. ed. Howes, 642. Yet, in spite of the dominance Fiennes had come to wield in Kent, the nature of the connexion between him and those who represented it and the county’s boroughs in the Parliaments of the 1440s has been over emphasized. While he had close ties with Cromer and Stephen Slegge*, who sat for Hythe in 1445 and Dover in 1449, his links with the other Kentish MPs hardly justifies their characterization as a ‘Household circle’. As posited by Griffiths, 633-4. For example, Cade’s rebels identified Isle as one of the four ‘great extorcioners’ in Kent but, in spite of his association with Fiennes, there is no evidence that he had a connexion with the Household. By contrast, a fellow target of the rebels, Brown, appears not to have had any links with Fiennes although he was one of the queen’s estate officers in the county and a ‘King’s esquire’, and had recently served in the unpopular government as under treasurer at the Exchequer. Another of the knights of the shire of the 1440s, Cheyne, was both a royal sergeant-at-arms and a kinsman of Fiennes, but he did not suffer any of the opprobrium that the rebels heaped upon the latter. Similarly, Warner was a Household man and related through marriage with Isle, but Cade’s followers did not identify him as a member of the group they alleged was corruptly subverting the proper government of the shire. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Fiennes and his followers secured the election of MPs for Canterbury and Rochester who were inimical to the interests of those cities. Only in the Cinque Ports of Dover (where Slegge obtained one of the seats while sheriff of Kent in 1449) and Hythe (where Fiennes and his lieutenant, Clifton, intervened in the choice of barons to sit in the same Parliament) is there evidence of open interference in the due process of parliamentary elections.

With the exception of Fiennes, whose rapid and unpopular advancement after 1447 overshadowed his previous military career, none of the other knights of the shire of the 1440s had personal experience of the war in France. Similarly, just one of the sheriffs for the county in that decade, Thornbury, had seen military service abroad. As a result, and unusually for Kent, lawyers and administrators – sometimes of lesser social status than their predecessors of the 1420s and 1430s – dominated both the county’s shrievalty and parliamentary representation. Such a shift gave further weight to the belief that Kent and its government (and by extension that of the realm) was being undermined by a nexus of corrupt Household men and other ‘persones of lower nature exaltyd’ beyond their station. Harvey, 187.

A reaction against such perceived wrongs is apparent in the first two parliamentary elections for Kent following Cade’s rebellion. Significantly, Rochester, not Penenden, was the venue for that of 1450, at which there were 48 attestors, the third largest in number listed in the extant indentures. Furthermore, the men returned, Haute and Pecche, were from established Kentish families with traditions of parliamentary service and local office-holding, and Haute, at least, had served in the French wars. While Hextall, a relative outsider, was one of the knights of the shire in the following Parliament of 1453-4, he was a servant of the duke of Buckingham, whose return to the King’s counsels the rebels had demanded. Rawcliffe, 24.

The 1450s also saw the only known disputed Kentish election of Henry VI’s reign, following the summoning of the Parliament of 1455. According to a suit that William Culpepper, an esquire from a well established Kentish family, subsequently brought before the barons of the Exchequer, the sheriff had erased the name of one of the duly-elected MPs, his brother, Richard Culpepper‡, and replaced it with that of Clifton. E13/146, rots. 11, 11d, 36, 36d, 43, 46d. Just prior to the election, the Council sent the sheriff, Sir John Cheyne, the former knight of the shire of 1449, a letter of admonition. The letter observed that the ‘besy labour made in sondry wises by certaine persones for þe chesyng of the said knightes’ threatened the peaceful holding of the hustings and ordered him to observe the statutes concerning parliamentary elections. PPC, vi. 246-7. According to one interpretation, its intention was to secure the return of men sympathetic to Richard, duke of York, the recent victor of the first battle of St. Albans. P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 161. In fact, none of those involved in the dispute was close to York. Assuming that Cheyne did fraudulently alter the indenture, he probably did so for personal reasons. He and Clifton were respectively victualler and treasurer of Calais and both had recently fallen foul of a parliamentary ordinance as far as their accounts for those offices were concerned. Securing Clifton’s presence at Westminster was therefore important for their financial well-being and for the settlement of the perennial problem of the garrison’s wages. It is worth noting that Kyriel, Clifton’s fellow knight of the shire in the Parliament of 1455, was also personally acquainted with the complexities of the financial problems at Calais, since he had served as lieutenant there in the late 1430s and early 1440s.

The indenture of return to the Parliament of 1459 is no longer extant and the names of the knights returned for county are now lost but the result of the election to the following assembly, the last of the reign, represented the ascendancy then enjoyed by the Yorkists in national affairs. The sheriff, John Scott†, son and heir of William, the MP of 1431, had recently gone over to the Yorkists, as had both of those he returned, Kyriel and Horne. There were 56 attestors in 1460, the second largest number recorded in the extant indentures of return from Henry VI’s reign, perhaps testifying to a desire to bestow as much legitimacy as possible on the election of such partisans.