When assessed for tax purposes in 1451, Somerset ranked among the wealthiest of English counties, being estimated at £5,033 – more than Wiltshire to the east and comparing favourably with its southern neighbour of Dorset, which was assessed at less than half that sum. Nevertheless it fell far below Devon to the west, which was rated at more than £8,000.
In the reign of Henry VI Somerset society was chiefly remarkable for the high concentration of magnates residing either within or close to its boundaries, and who held substantial estates in the county. At Henry IV’s death, these had included the Beaufort earl of Somerset, the Montagu earl of Salisbury, the Courtenay earl of Devon and the Lords Audley, Botreaux, Poynings and Zouche.
The presence of so many potentially conflicting political interests within Somerset’s boundaries might be thought to have made it a hotbed for unrest in a reign notorious for factions among the aristocracy, and it is thus indicative of the relatively harmonious relations between the greater landowners in the county that comparative peace prevailed for most of Henry VI’s first three decades on the throne. When conflict came, it was concerned with the balance of power in the wider West Country, rather than with Somerset in particular. The re-emergence on to the political scene of Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, head of a family traditionally dominant in Devon but also possessing substantial territorial power in Cornwall and Somerset, acted as the catalyst for the disorder that broke out openly after 1450. During the earl’s minority in the 1420s and 30s, the vacuum of power left by the absence of an adult earl had been filled by an alliance dominated by nobility and gentry, principally the Hungerfords and Stourtons, whose power base lay in Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, and represented in the Devon heartland of Courtenay power by Sir William Bonville. Relations between Bonville and Courtenay had been further strained by the royal administration’s mishandling of the appointment of a new steward of the duchy of Cornwall, a post coveted by both rivals. In the late summer of 1451 Courtenay (in association with Sir Edward Brooke, now Lord Cobham, whose family’s relations with Bonville had long been troubled), resolved to strike at his enemy and the latter’s principal ally at court, the new earl of Wiltshire, and rallied his retainers. On 15 Sept. the Courtenay army reached Taunton, from whence it marched over the course of the following week by way of Bridgwater, Glastonbury, Wells and Bath to Wiltshire’s manor house at Lackham, causing general alarm in its wake. At Wells, Bishop Bekynton made an abortive attempt to dissuade Courtenay from breaking the peace, only to be abruptly brushed off. Nevertheless, when Earl Thomas’s force reached Lackham on 17 Sept., Wiltshire had already fled for the safety of the royal court, and the Courtenay army was reduced to plundering the houses of his tenants and retainers in eastern Somerset and elsewhere. In the interim, however, Bonville had come up behind Courtenay with a force of his own, and entered Taunton castle. The earl hastily marched his army back to Bathpool, where he took its muster before laying siege to the castle, only withdrawing when persuaded to do so by Richard, duke of York, to whom Bonville surrendered. For a few months, peace seemed restored, but in February 1452 York himself joined with the earl of Devon in gathering a new army and marching east to confront the leaders of the court party about the King. In Somerset there were armed rallies of Courtenay retainers at Yeovil and Ilminster on 19 Feb., before Devon’s army joined that of York in its march to the ill-fated encounter with the royal forces at Dartford. In the aftermath of the humiliation of earl and duke, Somerset witnessed a royal progress, as Henry VI himself made his way through the county into the Welsh marches to pacify the kingdom.
Within the county there were just four parliamentary boroughs: the dual cathedral cities of Bath and Wells, the bishop of Winchester’s borough of Taunton, and the port of Bridgwater, where overlordship was shared by the Lords Zouche of Haringworth and the Mortimer earl of March (whose title passed to the duke of York on his coming of age in 1432). While Bath and Wells proved largely resistant to outside intervention, there is a suggestion that after his elevation to the episcopate in 1447 William Waynflete made his influence felt in Taunton and from 1449 he secured at least some of the borough’s seats for his clients and members of the royal household, while several of the men returned at Bridgwater in the later 1440s may have been nominees of the duke of York.
The names of Somerset’s MPs are known for all but one of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign, and it is a reasonable surmise that the presence of the lawyer Alexander Hody at the Parliament of 1459 (referred to in a letter sent to John Paston*) was a result of his election by the county which he had regularly represented in the preceding two decades. Of the 21 men who shared the available 43 seats between them, 12 represented the county just once, while three (Daubeney and the two Brookes) were each returned twice, two (Carent and John Hody ) sat three times, and a further three (Beauchamp, Stourton and Sydenham) secured four seats each. Somerset’s representation in the period was dominated by the lawyer Alexander Hody, who was returned for the county to perhaps as many as eight Parliaments. Nevertheless, alongside Hody, who had sat in the Commons for Bridgwater and Shaftesbury on three occasions before first being elected a knight of his shire, several other Somerset MPs also established impressive records of parliamentary service. In addition to his three returns for Somerset, Hody’s elder brother John sat in the Commons on six occasions between 1421 and 1431 as burgess for Shaftesbury and knight for Dorset, and in 1439 he was summoned to attend the Lords as chief justice. (His death at the close of 1441 prevented him from obeying a similar summons issued to him for the Parliament of 1442.) John Stourton I represented Somerset seven times between 1419 and 1435, and his niece’s husband William Carent sat six times between 1420 and 1450, alternating between the county seats of Somerset and Dorset. Beauchamp, Sir Thomas Brooke, Cheddar and Sydenham each served in Parliament on five occasions. Although Sir Edward Brooke sat in the Commons only twice, and Humphrey Stafford just once, both of them received several summonses to the Lords following their elevation to the peerage: in Brooke’s case from 1445 to 1463, and in Stafford’s from 1461 to 1467.
Evidently, the Somerset electorate set great store by prior parliamentary experience. No fewer than 33 of the 43 seats for which the Members’ names are known were filled by men who had previously sat in the Commons, and in nine cases an MP was directly re-elected. Consequently, all but one of Henry VI’s Parliaments saw Somerset represented by at least one man with prior experience of the Commons, and in no fewer than 12 of the 21 Parliaments for which both MPs are known neither of them were newcomers. The sole Parliament to see two complete novices returned for Somerset was that of 1447, when Sir Edward Hull and Sir Walter Rodney, both members of the King’s household, took the county seats. This assembly (which in the event would see the arrest and death of the King’s last surviving uncle, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester) had originally been summoned to meet at Cambridge, but (by a second writ, issued on 20 Jan., three days before the Somerset county court met at Ilchester and thus too late to be taken into account by the sheriff) was ordered to assemble instead at Bury St. Edmunds.
In addition to their personal achievements, a number of the county’s MPs came from families which either already possessed or were about to develop long traditions of parliamentary service. Thus, Sir Thomas Brooke had followed his father to Parliament, where the latter had sat on no fewer than 13 occasions between 1386 and 1413, and his son, Sir Edward, who sat in the Commons just twice, was the first of a succession of Brookes to sit in the Lords. Daubeney’s grandfather and father had seen parliamentary service, as did his son and grandson after him. William Courtenay belonged to a sprawling dynasty with numerous representatives in the Commons, including his great-grandfather, father, and three of his brothers, while a paternal great-uncle had been summoned to the Lords as bishop of Norwich. Stafford had been preceded in the Commons by his father, an uncle, and at least three previous generations of his paternal family, as well as ancestors on his mother’s side. Hill followed his father and grandfather into the Commons, where he was later succeeded by his son. Gorges alias Russell was Beauchamp’s nephew, and could also point to a string of Russell relatives who had preceded him as MPs. Cheddar and Wake were the sons of MPs, while Newton’s father had been summoned to the Lords as chief justice of common pleas. Carent (whose son also sat in Parliament), Palton and Sydenham could point to fathers-in-law among the ranks of the Lower House, as could Wake and Rodney (the latter being son-in-law to no less a parliamentarian than the former Speaker Sir Walter Hungerford, as well as having a grandfather and father who had sat in Parliament). The Hody brothers, although of humbler origins than many of their fellows, nevertheless established themselves in Parliament through their service to the Crown as professional lawyers. Their multiple returns to the Commons were not matched by John’s son William†, who only sat twice, but the latter nevertheless made for himself a long parliamentary career, being summoned first as attorney-general and later as chief baron of the Exchequer to every Parliament between 1485 and 1515.
Although the period under review witnessed a general increase in the number of professional lawyers returned to the Commons, the representation of Somerset continued to be dominated by its landed gentry, many of them of knightly rank, rather than men of law. Thus, just three (Carent and the Hody brothers) of the 21 MPs were practising lawyers, while the remaining 18 were members of the landowning classes, and no fewer than eight of the latter were belted knights. If in terms of the distribution of the available seats the picture appears less unbalanced (of the 43 seats for which names are known as many as 14 went to the three lawyers), this owed more to the exceptional career of Alexander Hody than to any preference for men of law on the part of the electorate: as many seats as were claimed by the lawyers were taken by belted knights, leaving a further 15 for the gentry below knightly rank.
Nevertheless, over the course of Henry VI’s reign there was a marked decline in the number of belted knights returned. Between 1386 and 1399 all but one of the county’s seats had been taken by knights; and in the first decade of Henry IV’s reign ten seats were taken by knights, while four went to esquires. Under Henry V esquires outnumbered knights for the first time, at a ratio of 3:2, and this trend continued in subsequent decades. During the period of Henry VI’s minority ten of the county’s 22 seats were filled by knights as opposed to 12 by esquires and lawyers, while from 1439 the four seats taken by knights were vastly outnumbered by the 17 filled by those of lesser rank.
This decline in the proportion of MPs who were belted knights was indicative of a broader decline in the political calibre of the men chosen to represent the county. Four of those who sat for Somerset in the reigns of Richard II and the first two Lancastrian Kings were former or future Speakers of the Commons, and they and many of their fellows played an important part in national affairs.
Like Brooke, nearly all of the MPs had, or stood to inherit, landed interests in other counties, and even the two men (Austell and John Hody) who cannot be shown to have done so received the profits of office-holding from far beyond the boundaries of Somerset. Yet they all either resided in the county or at least owned very substantial estates there. Not even Wake, who hailed from the Midlands, failed to meet this qualification, as he had arrived in Somerset some time prior to his election by virtue of the inheritance of his wife, one of the coheiresses of the Lovells of Clevedon.
In a period when the deteriorating military situation in France occupied an important place on the agenda of the Commons, it was not surprising that county communities should have sought to return men with personal experience of military campaigns, be they knights or substantial esquires. Sir Thomas Brooke, Carent, Daubeney and Palton had fought in France under Henry V; while Wake and Sir Edward Brooke had joined Henry VI’s coronation expedition of 1430-2, and the latter had returned to France six years later in the duke of Gloucester’s retinue to raise the siege of Calais. Paulet had sailed for France in 1432 in the retinue of Lord Hungerford. Yet the most impressive military careers were those of Sir Theobald Gorges alias Russell and Sir Edward Hull, whose potential as commanders was not realized until after their parliamentary service (in 1432 and 1447, respectively) was over.
In administrative terms, Somerset shared a sheriff and an escheator with the smaller and less wealthy county of Dorset, where many Somerset landowners (including a number of its MPs) also held estates. There is no suggestion that prior service in the shrievalty carried much weight with the electorate of Somerset. Just three of the county’s Members (Hull, Paulet and Rodney) had served as sheriff of Somerset and Dorset before being returned, and all three of them only sat in the Commons on a single occasion. A further three MPs (Austell, Palton and Sydenham) went on to become sheriffs of Somerset and Dorset at a later point in their careers, while Austell, Sir Thomas Brooke, Courtenay, Hull, Newton, Paulet and Wake all served as sheriffs in other bailiwicks. Interestingly, the government on more than one occasion pricked a sitting Somerset or Dorset MP, exploiting a constitutional loophole which merely precluded the election of a serving sheriff, but not a sheriff’s service in the Commons. This occurred in 1450 when Carent represented Somerset (he had also been pricked on a previous occasion while an MP, in 1427 when he sat for Dorset), and again in 1460, when Stafford was pricked.
Nor was the Somerset MPs’ record of prior service in other offices impressive. Fifteen of them had been appointed to royal commissions prior to their first return in the period,
Nevertheless, as far as the limited and uncertain evidence allows us to tell, many of Somerset’s MPs were comparatively young men when they were first returned to Parliament: the Brookes, Cheddar and Courtenay were all in their mid to late 20s, and Daubeney, Hill, Gorges alias Russell and Rodney in their early 30s. Exceptional circumstances governed the returns of Palton and Stafford: the former, aged about 43 when he was elected for the only time, in 1422, was perhaps deliberately chosen as a veteran of Henry V’s wars, while the extreme youth of the latter, who was barely of age when he was elected in 1460, serves to emphasize the partisan nature of his return. The long parliamentary careers of several Somerset MPs of the period ensured, however, that men of more mature years were regularly dispatched to Westminster. At the time of his final return in 1427 Cheddar was about 48 years old, Alexander Hody was about 56 when last elected in 1459, while Wake’s age of about 47 at the time of his sole election for the county is explained by his relatively late arrival in the south-west.
In the light of the large number of aristocratic landowners with interests in Somerset, the extent to which established patterns of patronage remained intact is striking. As in the preceding reigns, the single most dominant force in the county’s representation remained the Brooke family. Four MPs (Beauchamp, Cheddar, Newton and Palton) were all closely associated with Sir Thomas and Sir Edward Brooke, while two others (Daubeney and Gorges alias Russell) were connected with them through their ties with Beauchamp. Yet, the dominance of the Brookes was no longer as unchallenged as it had once been. The county’s two MPs of 1447 (Hull and Rodney) were both members of the King’s household, as was Thomas Wake (February 1449), and it was the same source of power that allowed the future Lord Stourton to become the focus of a separate affinity, among whom should be counted not only his uncle John Stourton I and brother-in-law William Carent, but also John Hill and John Sydenham. Less important for the choice of the county Members was the patronage of the bishop of Bath and Wells (with whom Austell was connected) and of the duke of York, who could number Hull and Stafford among his circle, and the return of the latter in 1460 was beyond doubt a result of his support of the winning side at the battle of Northampton.
Somerset’s parliamentary elections in the period under review were invariably held in the county court at Ilchester, a state of affairs which had apparently prevailed since 1407, when a shire election had last been held at Wells. (Only in the 1550s was there an – unsuccessful – attempt to make Glastonbury the county town.) Election returns survive for 18 of the 22 Parliaments of Henry VI’s reign. Until 1437, the sheriff normally made out separate indentures with those attesting the elections of the knights of the shire, and with representatives of the four parliamentary cities and boroughs. These indentures were then returned to Westminster together with the indentures from neighbouring Dorset (which formed part of the same shrievalty) and accompanied by a schedule setting out the names of the knights, citizens and burgesses from both counties along with their sureties. After 1437, no indentures for the urban constituencies in the two shires are to be found, and the names of the urban representatives were certified only by the schedule until 1455, when they were included in the shire indenture. By 1467, the sheriffs of Somerset and Dorset sealed separate indentures with each borough, although it is uncertain at what date this practice had first been adopted. As required by statute, each indenture was counter-sealed by a number of named attestors, but it is clear that the list of men so recorded provides only a rough guide to the real size and composition of the county electorate. Indeed, the frequency with which the attestors numbered 24 or other multiples of 12, usually including one or more of the county coroners, combined with the established practice of having four representatives of each parliamentary borough attest their joint indenture, suggests strongly that the list of men named on the sheriff’s return bore little more significance than that it provided the formally required authority for this document.
It seems that successive sheriffs of Somerset conducted the elections at the last possible meeting of the county court before Parliament was due to assemble. The only exceptions to this rule, as far as can be told, were the elections to the Parliaments of 1425 and 1432.
If the surviving returns otherwise provide no clear evidence of open interference in the electoral process, it is nevertheless tempting to speculate to what extent Thomas Wake, a relative newcomer to the county, had his wife’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Hull, then sheriff, to thank for his return in 1449, while there can be little doubt that the election in 1460 of Humphrey Stafford IV, the youthful heir of a family which had not supplied a Somerset MP since the reign of Richard II, owed everything to the young man’s association with the victors of the battle of Northampton, and the disgrace of Alexander Hody by virtue of his association with Queen Margaret’s partisans.