Westmorland, dominated by high ground and with a consequent dearth of cultiviable land, was among the poorest counties in England, and, at about half a million acres, one of the smallest. A petition presented to the Commons by the ‘poor commons’ of the county and those of neighbouring Cumberland, and Northumberland in the Parliament of May 1421 presented a picture of local desolation as plague and Scottish incursions further damaged a fragile economy.
Administratively the county had another peculiarity. Its sheriff was not subject to annual appointment by the Crown but the office was instead hereditary in the baronial family of Clifford, and the deputies who discharged the functions of the office were their appointees. Since, as lords of the barony of Appleby which dominated the northern half of the county, they were also Westmorland’s leading landholders, with castles at Appleby, Brough, Broughton and Pendragon (in Mallerstang), they were well placed to exercise a pre-eminent influence over its affairs. Indeed, this they did in the time of Roger, Lord Clifford (d.1389), and were to do again in that of Henry (d.1542), created earl of Cumberland in 1525, yet for much of the fifteenth century their own affairs did not prosper. They suffered lengthy minorities from 1391 to about 1410 and from 1414 to 1435, and were under attainder between 1461 and 1485. Further, even when free of these disadvantages, they were not, as they had once been, consistent residents of Westmorland, preferring instead to reside at their Yorkshire castle at Skipton in Craven.
The Cliffords’ partial eclipse was both cause and effect of the rising influence in the county of the junior branch of the Nevilles, in the person of Sir Richard Neville, created earl of Salisbury in 1428. As lord of the castle of Penrith, lying just over the county’s northern border in Cumberland in sight of the Clifford castle of Brougham, and, for most of the period under review here, warden of the west march, it was natural that he should be an important figure in Westmorland, but he was also able to benefit from changes in the political geography of the south of the county. Just as the north of the county was dominated by the barony of Appleby, the south was dominated by that of Kendal, a moiety of which, the so-called ‘Richmond fee’, was the property of the Crown. Under Henry VI, this was held by a series of absentee royal grantees – John, duke of Bedford, John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond – and, as a result, effective authority lay in Neville’s hands for he had been appointed as steward there by Bedford in 1426. He held the office until his forfeiture in 1459.
There are more omissions in the list of Westmorland’s MPs than for any other county. Returns are missing for as many as six of the 22 Parliaments that met during the reign of Henry VI.
In total the 25 MPs were, as far as the records go, elected 40 times for Westmorland, seven for Cumberland and four for Appleby, giving an average of only about two Parliaments per MP. The level of representative continuity was accordingly low, and only the lawyer Robert Warcop represented Westmorland in as many as five Parliaments. Of the 32 known seats, only 16 were taken by experienced MPs, and in five of these instances that experience was gained as a representative for a different constituency. On only four occasions was the county represented by two men with previous experience of the Commons (1431, 1432, 1435 and 1455) and to four Parliaments (1433, 1442, 1447 and 1453) two novices were elected. There were only two instances of immediate re-election, that is, Sir Thomas Strickland in 1431 and Warcop in 1432.
This represents a decline in representative continuity from the earlier period, when 30 of 56 known seats were taken by experienced MPs, and in as many as ten Parliaments both MPs had been returned before. The break in the pattern, however, occurred not in 1422 but in the late 1430s. Twelve of 20 seats from 1422 to 1437 were taken by experienced MPs compared with only four of 12 from 1442 to 1455. Furthermore, even at 50 per cent the percentage of seats taken by experienced men was lower than in nearly all other counties.
The social composition of the MPs also provides some noteworthy features. Since few in Westmorland were qualified by wealth to sit in Parliament, one might anticipate that the leading families would assume a very large share of the county’s representation. The 1436 subsidy returns show that six families were distinguished by their wealth, namely those of Leybourne, Moresby, Musgrave, Parr, Strickland and Threlkeld. The heads of five of these families provided the county with MPs in Henry VI’s reign, and the head of the sixth, Sir Christopher Moresby† (d.1443), had represented it in 1411. Yet between them they only filled 10 of the 32 known seats between 1422 and 1460, with a further seat being taken by a Musgrave younger son. Thus, while the wealthiest gentry in Westmorland considered that their honour was served by representing their county in Parliament, they did not consider that either their honour or advantage was served by accepting multiple elections. They therefore did not take their full representative burden.
Many of the vacancies this created were filled by families of the second rank of local society, most notably the Crackenthorpes. Yet the second tier of Westmorland society was not much broader than the first and the electoral net had to be cast wider. Given the stronger competition for seats in Cumberland, it might have been expected that some Westmorland seats would fall into the hands of leading men of that county who qualified for election by virtue of their Westmorland lands, but in this period only the election of (Sir) Thomas Curwen to the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.) falls into this category.
Although the MPs were often drawn from outside the leading families, there was no significant decline, as there was in most counties, in the percentage of seats taken by belted knights when comparing Henry VI’s reign with the period 1386-1421. Thus, while 16 of 56 seats in the earlier period had been filled by knights, roughly the same percentage pertained in the later one. This does not, however, tell the whole story. The percentage in the earlier period would have been much higher but for the obscure MPs elected under Henry V, when only one of the county’s 18 known seats was taken by a knight.
This, however, gives a misleading impression of the social quality of the MPs as a group. As many as five of them were of a social rank below that generally expected of a county MP, and it is in their returns that the dynamics of election in Westmorland are most clearly revealed. The first of the five, elected in 1435, was John Burgh, the filacer responsible for the county’s cases in the court of common pleas. Although filacers were often returned for boroughs, they were rarely elected for shires. Burgh himself had represented the county’s borough, Appleby, in 1431, but he would not have been elected for the county had other better-qualified candidates been ready to serve. In 1447 Westmorland again had particular difficulty in securing willing candidates, perhaps because the Parliament had been summoned away from Westminster, first to Cambridge then to Bury St. Edmunds. The two men elected were Nicholas Girlington, a successful lawyer from north Yorkshire with no apparent interest in Westmorland affairs, and George Dacre, a kinsman, and perhaps a younger son of Thomas, Lord Dacre (whose main territorial interests lay in Cumberland). Neither were qualified by known landholdings in the county. The same could not be said of John Strete, elected in 1450, but his property was not his but his wife’s. She was Robert Crackenthorpe’s widow and one of the coheiresses of Sir John Lancaster†, and in taking a third husband she had disparaged herself, for Strete was the most obscure man to represent Westmorland in Henry VI’s reign. More overtly political factors may explain the election of the two other poorly-qualified MPs. William Malett, elected to the Parliament of November 1449, was a Yorkshireman whose only possible qualification to represent Westmorland was an ill-documented connexion with the Cliffords. John Tunstall, the younger son of a prominent Lancashire family, was elected in 1453 because of his place in the service of the earl of Salisbury and his kinship with Parr’s wife.
It is worth noting that, aside from Burgh, all these poorly or curiously qualified MPs were elected between 1447 and 1453, and it could be argued that this was, for an unknown reason, a period of atypical difficulty in finding suitable MPs. Yet it parallels a similar period in the county’s representative history some 30 years before. Under Henry V four obscure individuals – William Beauchamp†, John Hutton†, Thomas Green† and Robert Mauchell† – were elected, with two of them serving together in 1420. This is, in part, to be explained by the absence of some of the county’s leading gentry in France, but it emphasizes the point that, in finding well-qualified MPs, the Westmorland electors had a very narrow seam to mine.
As well as periodically producing the election of men who would have been widely regarded as ill-qualified candidates, this narrow seam had another effect. It resulted in the frequent election of the heirs and younger sons, rather than the heads, of the shire’s leading families. Sir Thomas Strickland sat in his first Parliament – in 1404 (Oct.) – while his father lived, just as his own son and heir, Walter, was returned in his lifetime. Nicholas Leybourne sat in his only Parliament before inheriting the family estates; Blenkinsop was elected twice while his father had more than 20 years to live; and Thomas Curwen sat for the county just before his father died. Five other of the MPs had the disadvantages of younger sons – Robert Crackenthorpe, Dacre, Lancaster, John Musgrave and Warcop (although the last did eventually inherit the family estates). This reliance on heirs and younger sons resulted in the election of several young MPs. Blenkinsop, the two Leybournes, Parr, Redmayne and the two Stricklands were all in their twenties when they first sat in the Commons.
Another consequence of this unwillingness of the leading gentry to assume the parliamentary burden thrust upon them by the county’s poverty is the prominence of lawyers among its MPs. Seven of the 25 can be counted as men of law, either by education or function, although only Girlington, who late in his truncated career was second justice in the palatinate of Durham, could claim any distinction in the profession.
One reason for the inter-relatedness of the 25 MPs by blood and marriage was the geographical restrictedness of their landholdings. Of the 20 who are known to have had lands in the county, seven also had lands in Cumberland, four in Yorkshire, and one (Bethom) in Lancashire (at some point in their careers although not necessarily at the time they represented the county in Parliament). Only Threlkeld is known to have had lands in more than two counties, and only the Stricklands had land outside the north of England.
Despite the need on occasion to cast the net wide in the search for a willing candidate, as a group the MPs were closely-related. In the earlier period (1386-1421) the county had been represented by seven sets of fathers and sons and two sets of brothers. This pattern was continued in Henry VI’s reign, when Westmorland returned four sets of fathers and sons (the Leybournes, Stricklands, Robert and John Crackenthorpe and William and Thomas Crackenthorpe), and two sets of brothers (the Musgraves and William and Robert Crackenthorpe). Further, no fewer than nine of the MPs – Bethom, Blenkinsop, William and Robert Crackenthorpe, the Musgraves, Threlkeld, Sir Thomas Strickland and Warcop – were the sons of MPs who had sat for the county only in the earlier period, and another, Sir Thomas Curwen, was the grandson of such a man. So high a degree of interrelatedness by blood among a group of county MPs was unusual, and provides an indication of Westmorland’s remoteness, confined, as it was, by national and natural boundaries.
A study of the MPs’ marriages serves to reinforce this impression. Unfortunately, of the wives of the 25 MPs, only ten can be identified in terms of their paternal family, yet, significantly, half of these marriages involved the daughters of other Westmorland MPs. Robert Crackenthorpe and John Strete married a daughter of Sir John Lancaster, MP for the county in 1406 and 1421 (Dec.); Sir Thomas Curwen was the husband of Sir Robert Leybourne’s daughter; shortly before sitting for the county in 1406, Sir John Bethom† contracted a daughter to Sir Thomas Strickland; and Sir Henry Threlkeld married a daughter of Sir Roland Thornburgh†, MP on three occasions between 1404 and 1419.
The overlap between the personnel of local office-holding and of representation was lower in Westmorland than in most other shires. This was, in part, because of certain distinctive features of the county’s government. The deputy sheriffs tended to serve long rather than annual terms. Indeed, one of the MPs, Parr, was deputy sheriff for more than ten years. In these circumstances it is not surprising to find that only three other of the county’s MPs – Bethom, Sir Richard Musgrave and Robert Crackenthorpe – held the deputyship. None were in office when elected to Parliament, although Parr was appointed while sitting as MP in 1435. Bethom had not yet held the office when an MP, and only four of the county’s seats were filled by men who had already held the office.
Since tenurially Westmorland was split between a southern and northern barony, divided by the obstruction of Lake Fells, the notion might have developed, as it did in other counties with so clear a division, that the two MPs should be drawn from different parts of the county. Certainly, on occasion, such a notion appears to have informed Westmorland’s representation. In 1425 Bethom, with his home at Beetham in the extreme south of the county, was elected with William Crackenthorpe, who lived at Newbiggin on the northern border, and the MPs were again drawn from the far south and the far north in 1429 and 1450. A reluctance to serve in Parliament on the part of the established local gentry, however, would have made such returns difficult to achieve consistently, even if they were considered desirable. On at least two occasions – in 1433 and 1442 – the county was represented by very near neighbours, and overall it is impossible to discern any clear pattern, either in this period or that of 1386-1421.
Turning from administrative to military service, the Westmorland MPs were, as far as the available evidence goes, less involved in border warfare than the representatives of Cumberland. Indeed, the only two MPs who may have fought in the English defeat on the river Sark in 1448 – Curwen and Parr – sat for both counties. Of the other Westmorland MPs only Robert Crackenthorpe, one of the keepers of the west march in 1436, and Sir Richard Musgrave, a conservator of the truce with Scotland in 1458, had any known involvement in border affairs. With respect to service in France, however, the Westmorland MPs had a record to match that of their Cumberland neighbours. Two of them – Blenkinsop and Sir Thomas Strickland – had significant military careers there. Strickland began by fighting for Lancaster at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, had the honour of carrying the royal banner of St. George during the Agincourt campaign and saw further action in Henry V’s later campaigns and in the coronation expedition of 1430-2. Blenkinsop, long kept out of his patrimony by his father, had a less distinguished but longer career. When still a very young man he fought in the Normandy campaign of 1417, and remained in arms, albeit not continuously, until the fall of Lancastrian France more than 30 years later, spending most of his time in service in the garrison at Verneuil under a succession of captains, most notably William Neville, Lord Fauconberg. Several other MPs also went to France but restricted themselves to one or two campaigns. In 1417 Nicholas Leybourne and the two Musgraves served alongside Blenkinsop in the retinue of Sir John Neville, son and heir-apparent of Ralph, earl of Westmorland. Threlkeld was knighted during Henry V’s last campaign and, together with Sir Thomas Strickland and possibly also Parr, he went on to serve on the coronation expedition. Later, Tunstall fought in France in 1428 under Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, and in 1443 Dacre was one of the captains who mustered at Portsdown on the ill-starred expedition of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset. Since Dacre brought a substantial retinue of 116 archers, it is unlikely that this was his first campaign.
It might be expected that this military engagement would have been carried over into the civil war of 1459-61, particularly because of the local interests of, on the one side the Percys and the Cliffords, strong supporters of the Lancastrians, and on the other the Nevilles, strong supporters of York. In Cumberland most of the county’s MPs fell into one of these camps, but the division is very much less clear-cut in Westmorland. Ten of the MPs survived through at least part of the civil war of 1459-61. Of these, two – both of whom also represented Cumberland – were active partisans. Thomas Crackenthorpe fell in the Percy retinue at the battle of Towton; and Parr was attainted in the Coventry Parliament for fighting in the Neville retinue at Blore Heath and Ludford Bridge and probably went on to serve at Wakefield and Towton too. The third MP who sat for both counties, Curwen, was an important member of the Percy affinity, although it is not known if he played an active part in the civil war. He was, in any event, able to adapt to the new regime, and in December 1462 he and his eldest son took part in the campaign to reduce the northern strongholds of the Lancastrians.
In respect of the other seven MPs it is possible to discern factors that may have inclined them to one side or another, but only in the lawyer Girlington, imprisoned by the Lancastrians after the battle of Wakefield, is it possible certainly to identify an active partisan. It may be that this apparent lack of commitment reflects a failure of evidence. Redmayne, for example, is not known to have fought, yet, in 1462, he was retained by the earl of Warwick, implying that he was identified as a Yorkist partisan. With respect to the other six the most that can be said is that they had greater reason to side with York than Lancaster. Walter Strickland had been retained by the earl of Salisbury in 1448; and Sir Richard Musgrave’s younger son, John, and grandson, Richard, were both servants of the earl; as also was Tunstall. For the latter, however, there was a strong conflict of loyalties, for his nephew, Sir Richard Tunstall†, the head of the family, was a prominent Lancastrian. Of the remaining two, nothing can be said of Nicholas Leybourne’s allegiances save to note his appearance on the Yorkist commissions, and if John Crackenthorpe shared the Percy allegiance of his cousin, Thomas, no evidence survives of the fact.
It is clear from this survey that, even though not all the MPs connected with the Nevilles can be shown to have taken an active part in the civil war, that great family possessed the strongest faction in the county’s politics. In one sense, this is unsurprising – territorially they outweighed the Percys in a way they did not in Cumberland – yet it is curious that the Cliffords, not only hereditary sheriffs but also lords of the barony of Appleby, did not provide an alternative focus for the loyalties of the local gentry. Although they were as strongly committed to Lancaster as were the Percys, they appear not to have created a strong Lancastrian faction in their native shire.
The general reluctance of Westmorland’s potential MPs to make the journey to Westminster could be overcome by considerations of personal advantage, and it is instructive how often, even with the very imperfect surviving evidence, it is possible to identify such considerations.
More interesting are those occasions when the MPs promoted not a cause of their own but one of a lordly patron. In the Parliament of 1427 the young Ralph Neville, who had recently succeeded to the earldom of Westmorland, petitioned for permission to settle his property in trust during the rest of his minority and named Robert Crackenthorpe, then sitting for Westmorland, as one of the two potential trustees. No doubt the MP promoted the petition. The timing of Blenkinsop’s two returns was probably determined by the family’s long connexion with their feudal overlords, the Cliffords. His election to the Parliament of November 1422 may reflect the interest of the Clifford retinue in the arrangements the Crown intended to make for the minority occasioned by the death of John, Lord Clifford, in the previous spring. Interestingly, two of Lord Clifford’s feoffees, Sir Christopher Moresby and John Crackenthorpe†, were among the attestors to his election. Better evidence survives in respect of his election in 1426 when negotiations for the marriage of Lord Clifford’s widow to the young earl of Westmorland, half-brother of Sir Richard Neville, must have been well advanced. During the assembly a petition was presented by the executors of the earl’s grandfather, Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d.1425), for financial redress from the Crown. Its principal promoters were probably the two Cumberland MPs – Sir Peter Tilliol*, as one of the executors, and Hugh Lowther*, the son of another – but Blenkinsop and his fellow Westmorland Member, Nicholas Leybourne, who was also connected with the Cliffords, must also have lent their support.
External factors of a different sort appeared to have determined Westmorland’s representation in 1433. Sir Richard Musgrave and his near-neighbour, Threlkeld, were returned for the county, and Musgrave’s son-in-law, William Thornburgh*, and putative nephew, Roland Wharton*, were the MPs for Appleby. The return of this closely-related group, at hustings conducted by Roland’s father, Henry, is hardly likely to have been coincidental. Significantly, Threlkeld, Thornburgh and Musgrave’s eldest son, Thomas Musgrave, had taken a leading hand in recent troubles in the county, supporting Sir John Lancaster (d.1434) in his attempts to disinherit his daughters in favour of his male kin. To prevent indictment for their offences, Threlkeld and Thornburgh had intimidated a jury assembled before the j.p.s at Appleby on 23 Mar. 1433, and it may be that their desire to secure election at the hustings on the following 2 July was to thwart any petitions that might be presented against them in Parliament.
In respect of the national political considerations that might have been expected to inform the county’s elections in the strife-torn years 1450-60, the loss of the MPs’ names for the most controversial Parliaments of these years, those of 1459 and 1460, hampers discussion. In their absence, the only election that can be placed in the context of national politics is the return of Parr and Thomas Crackenthorpe in 1455. At first sight this looks like a compromise between the interests of the two great northern families, with Parr connected with Neville and Crackenthorpe with Percy. Yet the Percys were poorly placed to influence the election held in the wake of the triumph of York and the Nevilles at the first battle of St. Albans and the death of the earl of Northumberland there. They had certainly been unable to influence those held for Cumberland and Carlisle two days before, and Crackenthorpe’s successful candidature is puzzling, particularly as he had little property in the county (and what he did hold was his wife’s). The probability is that his return can be cited as another example of the importance of the personal private interest in Westmorland elections. Although there is no direct evidence, it may be that he sought election as part of his efforts to defend his wife’s lands against a rival claimant, William Tilliol.
In contrast to those for neighbouring Cumberland, the electoral indentures extant for Westmorland have few features of interest. None is singled out by the naming of an unusually large number of attestors, such as, for example, the Cumberland indenture of 1453 which names 154 attestors. Indeed, the number named is remarkably consistent. Of the 29 extant indentures of the fifteenth century, the lowest number of attestors named is 11 in the indenture of 6 Nov. 1421 and the highest 28 in those of 22 Sept. 1435 and 29 Oct. 1450. As many as 16 named between 21 and 28, suggesting that the clerks of successive deputy sheriffs followed a consistent pattern, and it might be speculatively suggested that this owed something to the comparatively lengthy terms these sheriffs served and thus a stability of personnel within their offices that did not prevail where sheriffs were changed annually. More significantly, this pattern can be taken as further evidence of the low level of competition for seats.
The emendations in the indentures can also be interpreted in the context of this lack of competition. In the indenture for the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.), Malett’s name has been added over an erasure both in the indenture and on the dorse of the electoral writ, implying perhaps that the man whose name was erased had refused to take the seat and Malett had stepped in to fill the vacancy.
Even so, the shire court on election day did serve as a meeting place for the shire’s leading gentry to a higher degree than in most other counties, although well short of the level attained in Cumberland. As remarked in the survey for 1386-1421, it was common for the elections to be witnessed by several past and future MPs. In the period under review here the best attended election was that of 1435, when the attestors were headed by four knights, all of whom had already sat for the county in Parliament, and five other former MPs.
Nearly all those with any reasonable landed stake in the county appear as attestors on at least one occasion. Of the 48 lay male landowners named in the county’s lay subsidy return of 1436 as many as 45 appeared at least once in the surviving indentures.
There was frequently a family relationship between at least one of the attestors and one or both of the MPs. In 1426, for example, the election of Thomas Blenkinsop and Nicholas Leybourne was attested by Thomas’s father, William (who had also attested his son’s return in 1422), and uncle, Richard Blenkinsop, and by Nicholas’s kinsman, John Leybourne; in 1453 Parr, at what, significantly, was the only election he is known to have attested, witnessed the return of his brother-in-law, Tunstall; and, in 1455, the electors who returned Parr and Thomas Crackenthorpe included Parr’s son, William†, and two of Crackenthorpe’s kinsmen.
It is also striking upon how many occasions there was a kinship between the deputy sheriff and MPs he returned. One instance has already been cited, namely the probable part played in this last election by the deputy sheriff, Christopher Moresby, Thomas Crackenthorpe’s stepson, but there are several others. In 1427 Sir Richard Musgrave presided over the return of his younger brother, John; in both 1429 and 1430 Thomas Bethom conducted the election of his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Strickland; and in 1447 George Dacre was returned when his putative brother, John, was deputy sheriff.
The earlier survey suggested that ‘in many respects’ the gentry of Cumberland and Westmorland ‘formed a single community’.
In the Lancastrian period there was a significant degree of overlap between the representation of Westmorland and its borough. Eight men are recorded as representing both. Seven of them were drawn from the county families of Crackenthorpe, Musgrave, Thornburgh, Warcop and Wharton, and it is curious that five of the seven represented the county first. In other words, service for a county’s borough did not serve, as it did elsewhere, as an apprenticeship for election for the county. These statistics, however, hide a contrast between the periods 1399-1421 and 1422-61. Of those elected for Appleby after 1422, only two also sat for the county, namely John Musgrave, a younger son of a leading Westmorland family, and the lawyer, John Burgh. This implies that the interest of gentry families in taking a seat for Appleby, so noticeable a feature of its representation under Henry IV and Henry V, significantly diminished in the period under review here.