WATERTON, Sir Robert

Waterton’s father had a very distinguished career in the service of the house of Lancaster. In the 1390s he was steward, constable and master forester of the duchy honour of Pontefract, and he was among the first to rally to Henry of Bolingbroke in the campaign that resulted in Richard II’s deposition. On close personal terms with the new King, he was appointed as master of the King’s horse in 1399 and was later, albeit only briefly, chief steward of the north parts of the duchy.7 Oxf. DNB; Thoresby Soc. xv. 81-88; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxx. 368-83; S.J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian Eng. 135. His loyal service brought material reward. Through royal grant and purchase he extended his patrimony. In 1399 the new King granted him the valuable Lincolnshire manor of Doubledike in Gosberton and the advowson of the church of Gosberton, forfeited by Sir John Bussy†;8 CPR, 1399-1401, p. 143. in 1409 he had a grant in fee tail of the forfeited Percy lands at Fangfoss (East Riding); and, most significantly of all, in 1410 the King allowed him to exchange with the hospital of St. Nicholas, Pontefract, a foundation of the King’s progenitors, the advowsons of the churches of Gosberton and Wath for the manor of Methley, where he then made his home.9 CPR, 1408-13, pp. 77-78, 198, 200, 232, 371; CPL, vi. 288-9; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxx. 375-7. Waterton acquired the advowson of Wath from his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Fleming: Yorks. Deeds, iii (Yorks. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. lxiii), 145. His new wealth and standing enabled him to contract an excellent marriage for our MP’s sister. On 15 Aug. 1417, in the church at Methley, she married Lionel, grandson and heir apparent of John, Lord Welles (d.1421).10 CIPM, xxi. 859-63. Since her issue later inherited our MP’s lands she was his full sister. She is called both Joan and Cecily in the records, named either after her own mother or in honour of her father’s first wife, Joan Everingham.

Robert the father died on 17 Jan. 1425, when, according to the inquisitions taken soon after, our MP was still five years short of his majority. These inquisitions concerned themselves only with the lands the father had held in right of his first wife, to which his stepson, Robert Elys, was heir.11 CIPM, xxii. 391-6; CFR, xv. 102. This may explain why our MP escaped royal wardship and one can only speculate where and in whose custody he spent the last years of his minority. One possibility is Gawthorpe, not far from Methley and the home of one of the leading families of the West Riding, that of Gascoigne. In February 1426 his stepmother, Margaret, daughter of Thomas Clarell of Aldwark, had married the young (Sir) William Gascoigne*, and, given his later associations with Gascoigne, it is not improbable he went with her to Gawthorpe. A more significant question about his early years is the date of his knighthood. Strangely, for all his importance, his father had never taken that rank, but he himself was to achieve it while still a minor. He was certainly a knight by 10 Oct. 1428, when described as such in a subsidy inquisition, and it is therefore probable that he was one of the wealthy gentry knighted with the young King at Leicester on 19 May 1426. This supposition gains strength from the fact that his brother-in-law, the young Lord Welles, is known to have been among those so honoured.12 Feudal Aids, vi. 276; CP40/675, rot. 563; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 80-81; CP, xii (2), 443. His father’s long service to the house of Lancaster may have recommended him as a candidate.

Waterton’s early knighthood was justified by his wealth. Aside from the valuable manors at Gosberton and Methley and the less valuable manor at Fangfoss, he also inherited from his father the manors of Halton and Barlow (in Brayton) in the West Riding, Waterton in north Lincolnshire and some scattered properties centred around Clarborough in north Nottinghamshire.13 CP25(1)/280/153/16; 293/71/315; Thoresby Soc. xv. 92-93. To the subsidy of 1436 he was assessed on an annual income of £235. The general accuracy of this assessment is confirmed by a contemporary financial account: for the year Michaelmas 1427-8 his clear annual income from lands in Yorkshire had been given as £192 6s. 11d.14 E163/7/31/1; C.E. Arnold, ‘Political Study of the W. Riding 1437-1509’ (Manchester Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1984), i. 80. This high figure was achieved despite his stepmother’s survival: her precise date of death is unknown, but since she had many children by Gascoigne it is clear that their marriage was not a short one (the contemporary record gives no indication of the extent of her interest in the Waterton estate). With such considerable resources, the young Sir Robert was little inconvenienced by the considerable charitable bequests in his father’s will. The father left £200 for the building of a chapel at the church of Methley and 400 marks to the purchase of lands worth 24 marks p.a. to support three chaplains to serve there.15 Thoresby Soc. xv. 87-88. For the fine tomb of our MP’s parents in Methley church: P.E. Routh, Alabaster Tombs Yorks. 75-79.

The first part of Waterton’s career followed the predictable course of a man of such wealth. As if to justify his recent knighthood, he participated in the coronation expedition, probably crossing to France in May 1430, but this is the only evidence that he undertook military service.16 E403/691, m. 27; 693, m. 19; 695, m. 4. By 22 Sept. 1434, when the couple had papal indults to choose their own confessor and have a portable altar, he had made a good marriage to Beatrice, sister of the northern peer, Thomas, Lord Clifford, and niece of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland (d.1455). The match may have come through a mutual connexion with Lord Welles, whose mother Maud was the first cousin of the bride’s father, John, Lord Clifford.17 CPL, viii. 513, 515; CP, xii (2), 443.

Soon after, Waterton began the administrative career typical of one of the greater gentry. He was named to his first ad hoc commission of local government in July 1434; on 12 Sept. 1435 he was elected to represent his native county in Parliament in company with Gascoigne; and in the following year he was added to the West Riding bench.18 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 360, 628; C219/14/5. Further, although he did not take over the important offices his father had held in the honour of Pontefract he acquired some of the lesser ones. In the late 1430s he was appointed as parker of Rothwell, one of the most valuable of the honour’s eight parks, and armourer of Pontefract castle.19 DL42/18, ff. 92v-93; Somerville, i. 519. He also benefited from other grants, albeit fairly minor ones, of duchy and royal patronage. With the parkership of Rothwell went, by a grant of 1 Nov. 1437, the farm of the duchy manor there and the park’s herbage to hold for 40 years at £5 16s. 8d. p.a., and a fortnight later he shared with William Skargill a grant of the herbage of Roundhay, another of the honour’s parks, at a farm of £4 p.a. On 27 Oct. 1440 he was granted all the goods in Yorkshire of 20 yeomen and other lesser men outlawed in the county.20 DL42/18, f. 91v; DL37/53/52; CPR, 1436-41, p. 481. More significantly, on the following 4 Dec., when he was in office as the county’s sheriff, he undertook to farm the alnage of cloth for sale in Yorkshire and York from the following Christmas for seven years at 113 marks p.a.21 E159/217, recorda Hil. rot. 14; CFR, xvii. 182.

Waterton’s affairs continued to prosper in the first years of the new decade. On 2 Jan. 1442 he was appointed feodary of the honour of Pontefract for life, and six days later he had a pardon of account as sheriff in £150 in recognition of his expenses in supporting the duchy tenants at Knaresborough in their dispute with John Kemp, archbishop of York.22 DL37/9/18; Somerville, 518; E159/219, brevia Mich. rot. 29; Griffiths, 578-9. In the following April he sued out new letters patent in respect of the Yorkshire alnage to include Kingston-upon-Hull, which, by virtue of its newly-acquired county status, was excluded from the terms of his earlier grant.23 CFR, xvii. 201-2. By the mid 1440s, and probably for some years before, he was acting as deputy constable of Pontefract castle under Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, who had succeeded our MP’s father in the most important offices in the honour of Pontefract. Yet this prosperity was soon to be dramatically reversed. The first sign of a marked decline in his status dates from early in 1444. On 11 Jan. another of the West Riding gentry, John Langton of Farnley, an esquire of the royal household, joined him in the office of keeper of the park of Rothwell, and at the end of the same year the office was settled on Langton in tail-male expectant on Waterton’s death.24 DL37/11/24; 12/51. Langton seems to have become sole possessed of the office at Mich. 1446: DL29/525/8361-2. Later, on 5 Feb. 1446 he surrendered the keepership of the manor of Rothwell and the herbage of the park there in favour of his kinsman, Richard Waterton*, and William Bradford.25 DL37/53/52. It may have been at the same time that he stopped acting as the earl’s deputy.

It is impossible to say what brought about this reversal in Sir Robert’s fortunes. Debt may have been a contributory factor. He certainly owed money to the Crown, and in the mid 1440s several pleas of account were pending against him in the Exchequer. These difficulties seem to have been resolved in his favour. On 9 July 1446 he sued out a privy seal writ ordering the Exchequer to allow him to appear by attorney (notwithstanding the course of the Exchequer) to answer these pleas; and he immediately appeared to plead a pardon granted to him in the previous December against the Crown’s claim that he account for an alien subsidy collected during his shrievalty.26 E159/222, brevia Hil. rot. 24d, Trin. rot. 7d, recorda Trin. rot. 9; CPR, 1441-6, p. 394. None the less, the servicing of his obligations to the Crown may over the years have placed a strain upon his finances. On 23 June 1441, while sheriff, he had entered into a statute staple in as much as £1,000 to Sir Henry Brounflete (later Lord Vessy) of Londesborough, and in June 1443 Brounflete sued execution. It is no doubt more than coincidental that, in the spring of 1446, Waterton sold Brounflete his manor of Fangfoss.27 C241/230/13; Harl. Ch. 47 C 45; CP40/742, cart. rot.; CP25(1)/280/159/37, 38; VCH Yorks. (E. Riding), iii. 166. Vessy’s da. and eventual h. later married our MP’s nephew, John, Lord Clifford. To add to his difficulties, in Easter term 1443 the earl of Salisbury sued him for £200, perhaps in connexion with his position as deputy constable.28 CP40/729, rot. 327d.

Although, however, there is evidence that Waterton was in debt, this can serve as no more than a partial explanation for so complete a reversal of fortune. A more attractive, but admittedly speculative, explanation is some sort of mental or physical collapse. A feoffment made on 16 July 1446, a few days after he had pleaded his pardon in the Exchequer, is suggestive here. In the previous April, at the time of the sale of Fangfoss, he had placed the bulk of his lands in the hands of feoffees closely associated with himself, headed by his brother-in-law, Lord Welles, and including his kinsman, Richard Waterton.29 CP25(1)/293/71/315. These feoffees now made a new settlement on a very different group, defined not by personal ties to our MP but by kinship ties with his wife. They included her brother, Lord Clifford, her aunt, Maud, dowager-countess of Cambridge, her maternal uncle, the earl of Northumberland, and her first cousins, Sir Henry and Sir Thomas Percy, and it is clear that they were nominated as the protectors of her interest. They were to hold the lands (which excluded the manor of Methley) for her life, during which period they were to pay 50 marks p.a. for six years to Lord Welles and the other grantors.30 Lincs. AO, Earl of Ancaster mss, 2ANC3/A/17. It appears that Sir Robert was surrendering his lands for his wife’s benefit, retaining only his home at Methley and a short-term income of 50 marks p.a. paid to trustees on his behalf. It is possible that marital breakdown is the reason for this settlement, with his wife’s powerful family imposing an unfavourable settlement upon him. But, if this is the case, it is hard to understand why this separation should have coincided with his near-complete disappearance from public life. An alternative explanation is more attractive, namely that his ability to conduct his own affairs was compromised and that this prompted measures to ensure proper provision for a wife additionally threatened by his mounting debts.

From the late 1440s Waterton almost disappears from the records. His administrative career effectively ended. In 1447 he was replaced as feodary and armourer in the honour of Pontefract and as alnager in Yorkshire,31 DL37/15/14; 16/12, 38; CFR, xviii. 49. although he remained on the bench until 1458 and was named to two ad hoc commissions of local government in 1457 and 1459.32 He is recorded as sitting for three days as a j.p. in the immediate aftermath of his appointment in 1436, but not, in the admittedly incomplete record, thereafter, and he was almost certainly inactive: Arnold, i. 339; E101/598/42. His appointment to the latter commission, one of array in December 1459, is indicative of Lancastrian sympathies as are his family connexions. Even leaving aside the historic links between the Watertons and the house of Lancaster, these were militant Lancastrian: his brother-in-law, Thomas, Lord Clifford, died on the King’s side at the first battle of St. Albans in 1455, and his nephew, John, Lord Clifford, his brother-in-law Lord Welles and cousin Richard Waterton, all fell for Henry VI at Towton in 1461.33 Interestingly, Lord Welles was buried in the church of Methley, only about ten miles from the field of Towton: Routh, 79-82. There is, however, no evidence that Sir Robert himself played any part in the civil war of 1459-61. His subsequent exclusion from public affairs under Edward IV is much more probably to be explained by incapacity than political disfavour. Given his considerable landholdings, that exclusion, as it did for many others much more clearly identified as Lancastrians, would have ended long before his death in 1475 had he been considered as able.

Very little is known of the last years of Waterton’s life. On 12 Feb. 1465 he sued out a general pardon. More interestingly, on 1 Aug. 1466 he entered into an agreement with his nephew and coheir-presumptive, Richard, Lord Welles and Willoughby, charging his lands in Yorkshire with an annual payment of 100 marks to Welles in discharge of a debt contained in 27 obligations.34 C67/45, m. 7; Lincs. N. and Q. iii. 68-69. Neither the size of nor the reason for the debt is apparent, but the agreement adds to the impression of the elderly Waterton’s nullity and indebtedness. To the wider world he was simply the inactive tenant of a considerable estate that would eventually pass to others. In March 1470 his two next heirs, his nephew and great-nephew, Welles and Sir Robert Welles, together with his nieces’ husbands, the Lincolnshire knights Sir Thomas Dymmock of Scrivelsby and Sir Thomas de la Launde of Horbling, paid with their lives for their abortive rising against Edward IV. When they were attainted in 1474 our MP’s heirs – his four nieces and their husbands – acted to exclude the legal remainder from the general forfeiture of the Welles lands. They secured a proviso to the Act of Attainder. On 20 Mar. 1475 Robert, son of Sir John Radcliffe* and the husband of Dymmock’s widow, sued out an exemplification of this proviso.35 PROME, xiv. 300-1; CPR, 1467-77, p. 510. Waterton’s death in the following December justified these precautions, but the interest of his widow in the bulk of his estates meant that their inheritance was long delayed. She lived until March 1481.36 CFR, xxi. 283, 614; C140/54/51; 81/50. Thereafter, for reasons that are unclear, the formal division of the estate did not take place until 26 Apr. 1487. Then his niece Katherine, wife of Robert Tempest and de la Launde’s widow, and his three great-nephews, Sir Christopher Willoughby, Sir Robert Dymmock and Thomas Laurence, shared lands valued in the deed of partition at £175 14s. 5d. p.a.37 Arnold, i. 80; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 257, 532; Sheffield Archs. Bacon Frank mss, BFM/379; Thoresby Soc. xv. 92-93; CP, xii (2), 449-50n. A fraction of the estate seems to have been deflected away from them in favour of our MP’s illegitimate son, upon whom his feoffees settled the small manor in Stanley by Wakefield.38 Yorks. Arch. Jnl. xxx. 386; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 80.