The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson
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of Sir William Plumpton’s deceit: he had been secretly nurturing his own son in the idea that everything the name of Plumpton stood for was to be his. After 1452, every minute of his negotiations with the Cliffords, the Rocliffes and the Sotehills had been a lie. His wife he had forced to live in what the orthodoxy would have viewed as whoredom, their son a bastard. And worse than any of that he left as a legacy to the next generation the prospect of rage and destruction. Everything he had was now to be left, in its entirety, to two separate, competing families.
He seems to have entered his last decade preparing bullishly for death. With legal instruments, he disinherited his granddaughters, leaving the way clear, as he intended, for young Robert to inherit everything. Against the law and without permission, he crenellated Plumpton Hall, perhaps to make it more defensible in the battles to come, perhaps as an assertion of a status that seemed under threat.52 He stole timbers from the royal forest with which to beautify and strengthen the family house and the great barn that stood outside its gates. Illegally he made a private park around the house from the forest grounds. Rich textiles were bought in London to adorn the family chapel and tens of law cases were pursued against his enemies. When William Plumpton finally died in October 1480, it was at the end of a rampaging, brutal and desperate career. A man who had begun his life in the afterglow of Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt ended it with his inheritance mired in the prospect of a long and bitter legal dispute entirely of his own making. His two sets of heirs each felt obliged to defend their name and lands against their own family. Their cousins were their enemies.
Sir William might have hoped that his gamble would pay off. From his own archive he stripped out any evidence that he had once left his patrimony to his two granddaughters. He had lined up a string of gentry connections across the county on which his son and heir could rely. He had strengthened and fortified Plumpton Hall itself. He had loyal retainers supervising his tenants and business arrangements in Nottingham, Staffordshire and Derbyshire. And he had given enough to the church to consider that Providence might be on his side.
But his son Robert, now about twenty-seven, was a softer, gentler man, a recipient of his fate not a maker of it, and perhaps not up to the challenge his father had left him. Gradually over the next thirty-five years, for the whole of his adult life, the effects of Sir William’s machinations slowly and inexorably destroyed the fortunes of that son and his family.
On Sir William’s death, the legal wheels were already turning but Robert’s tenure began well enough. His mother, Joan, had been maltreated by his father, kept as a secret wife for sixteen years while the old man pursued his schemes. Robert did better, immediately giving her the proceeds of the manor of Idle in Airedale, on top of those from Grassington and Steeton, which his father had left her in his will.53 But this sense of ownership was not to last. In 1483, after a dogged pursuit by the two granddaughters and their lawyers, a decision and a division were made. Margaret and Elizabeth were to get Nesfield, Grassington and Steeton and everything in Derbyshire. Robert was to get only Plumpton, Idle and the Nottinghamshire manors. They were the best lands but out of them he was to pay £40 a year to old Elizabeth Clifford, the granddaughter’s mother. His own mother was deprived of those very lands which Robert had designated for her maintenance.54
This might have been the final arrangement. Even as the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and Henry Tudor claimed the throne as Henry VII, this distribution of lands amongst the Plumptons lasted for the next fourteen years, relatively untroubled. Robert, half the man his father was, both in property and resolution, nevertheless pursued the ideal of the knightly squire. He was short of money but he did his best to look after his people. He took on the local government of Knaresborough and its forest. He was a little dilatory, but he kept his correspondence carefully (which is how we know any of this), he served the new Percy Earls of Northumberland in battle against the Scots and was knighted. Tenants and land agents wrote to him, thanking him for the ‘tender mastership shewed me in all causes’.55 He did his best to address his declining financial position, claiming the fees due from the release of bondmen – there were still bound serfs in late fifteenth-century England and their release provided a steady income for landlords feeling short.56 Like his father, Robert was embroiled in long, expensive cases in Chancery, but going to the courts was not cheap and the threat of impoverishment was never far away.
Then, in February 1497, a letter arrived at Plumpton Hall which must have hollowed out a cavity in Robert Plumpton’s heart. It was from his lawyer and cousin Edward Plumpton, writing from the Inns of Court in London.
To my singuler good master, Sir Robart Plompton, kt.
In my right humble wyse I recomend me unto your good mastership, acertaynyng you that ther is in thes partes a great talking of those that belong & medle with Mr Hemson, that he intendeth to attempte matters agaynst you …57
By ‘Mr Hemson’, the lawyer meant Sir Richard Empson, ‘the great man E.’,58 as others referred to him, the most dangerous predator in the tangled wood of late fifteenth-century England. Empson, a lawyer, sophisticated, as slick as a slug, and his colleague Edmund Dudley were employed as debt-collectors-in-chief for the new Tudor crown. As Francis Bacon wrote a century later, they were Henry VII’s ‘horse-leeches and shearers: bold men and careless of fame’. Money was all, for them or their master, and to gain their ends, as Bacon went on, ‘they would also ruffle with jurors and inforce them to find as they would direct, and (if they did not) convent them, imprison them, and fine them … [Empson and Dudley] preyed upon the people; both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves; insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance’.59 This was the enemy to whom Sir William Plumpton had exposed his son.
Empson, whose method was the detailed acquisition, by any means he could manage, of one property after another, however slight, sniffed an opportunity. He allied himself with the interests of the two granddaughters, Margaret Rocliffe and Elizabeth Sotehill, eventually marrying his own daughter to Elizabeth’s son Henry. The ways of the law moved slowly and it wasn’t until May 1501 that Empson began to close in on Robert. The predatory minister began first in Nottinghamshire, where he bought, packed and threatened the juries, and then went on to Derbyshire to do the same. Efficient, connected and businesslike, he took all the best rooms in Derby to house the jury members. Plumpton failed and probably could not afford to match this smooth manipulation of justice, despite the urgings of his lawyers. The result was inevitable. On behalf of his party, Empson got hold of Kinoulton and Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire and the Staffordshire manors. Robert was now left with nothing but Plumpton and Idle in Airedale. ‘Thus’, as a Plumpton lawyer wrote of Empson’s methods, ‘he under myneth you.’60
The Plumptons’ world was dissolving; a queasy dread begins to fill the letters they preserved. The following year, in September 1502, Empson moved on to their heartland:
The procuringe & stirrings of Sir Richard Empson, Kt, by corrupt & vnlawful meanes obteyned the fauour & goodwills of the Sheriffe of the said county of York by giuinge of fes & rewards vnto him, & soe caused the panels to bee made after his owne mynd.61
After ‘diverse great gentlemen of the country’ had letters from the King himself, asking them to look kindly on his minister’s plans, Empson came to York. He brought a cavalcade with him of knights and squires, with two hundred of the King’s Yeomen ‘arayed in the most honnorable liverie of his said garde’.62 Empson himself rode through the streets of York with ‘his footemen wayteing on his stir-reps, more liker the degree of a duke then a batchelor knight’.63 This was justice entirely subservient to the facts and display of power. He was accompanied among all the others by Sir William Pierpoint, Plumpton’s old Nottinghamshire enemy, relishing ‘the vtter confusion & destruction’64 of his family’s ancient rivals. The Plumptons were trapped in a web not of kinship but of loathing.
Robert was lucky in the woman he married. Agnes Gascoigne was an educated and powerful Yorkshire gentrywoman. There can be no doubt he loved her, addressing her in his letters as ‘my entirely and most hartily beloued wife Agnes Plumpton’ and signing them ‘By your owne louer Rob:’.65 He was to need her in the years to come.
For the