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 hearings at York that September, Robert had left Agnes and their son William, who was about seventeen, at home in Plumpton. Waiting for the court process to begin, with his retainers, the men of the forest and his cousinage around him, sixty-three men in all, he wrote to her:
To my entyrely and right hartily beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plumpton, be this Letter delivered.
My deare hart, in my most hartily wyse, I recommend mee unto you, hartily prayinge you, all things laid apart, that you see that the manor and the place of Plumpton bee surely and stedfastly kept;
and alsoe that I have this Tuesday at even 6 muttons slene, to bee ordained for the supper the said Tuesday at night: and alsoe that yee cause this said Tuesday a beast to be killed, that if neede bee, that I may have it right shortly.
And thus I betake you to the keepinge of the Holy Trinity, who preserve you evermore to his pleasure. From Yorke
By your owne lover Robert Plompton Kt.66
In court, Empson produced a document showing that old Sir William had left the manors of Plumpton and Idle to his granddaughters. Given the confusion of Sir William’s affairs, it is perfectly possible that the document was real but Robert refused to accept it as anything but a forgery. His advisers urged him to make a compromise – there were negotiations with Empson’s lawyers held in St William’s Chapel on the bridge over the Ouse67 – but Plumpton would not move ‘and said that he would not departe with noo party of his land’.68 The negotiations were broken off and the bought and frightened jury awarded everything Plumpton owned to his cousin-enemies. It was then that open war began.
Agnes and her son William had fortified the house and its yards ‘with guns, bowes, crossebowes, bills, speares and other weapons &c. as if it were in of warr’.69 The Plumpton men squeezed in there, taking in beasts and other supplies, bolting the gates, storing the water.
The attack on the hall occurred at some time that October, a ferocious fight in which at least one man of Plumpton’s, Geffrey Towneley, who was probably a cousin, was killed, but the assailants were beaten off and the Plumptons remained in physical possession of the place.70 The bravest of their cousins, Sir John Townley, offered to support them, assuring them that ‘if ther be any thinge that I may doe for you, yt shalbe redy to you, as ever was any of my ansistors to yours, which, I enderstand, they wold have bene glad to do any pleasure to’.71
Other cousins and sons-in-law, scattered across the northern counties, found themselves besieged by the Empson gangs, writing anxious letters to Robert Plumpton, asking for ‘knowledg by the bringer herof how that ye do in your great matters’,72 fending off threats and visits from men demanding money, their goods and lands.
Robert, as a last hope, rode to Westminster to implore protection from the King. Agnes and her son William were left anxiously at Plumpton: not exactly under siege but expecting at any moment a renewed attack. Money was short and, as they had all agreed before Robert rode south, William went out with his men, armed, to collect the rents from their tenants due at Martinmas, 11 November. Some paid up, some refused, ordered by the Rocliffes to do so as the Plumptons were no longer their legal landlords. Those who wouldn’t pay William evicted from their houses and lands, seizing their cattle and goods. The Empsons, Rocliffes and Sotehills hovered, waiting to pick up the pieces. Desperate letters from Agnes went south, looking for an answer to their predicament.73
In the middle of that winter, she went down to join him, perhaps to urge him on, perhaps to comfort him. The seventeen-year-old William was left alone in Plumpton. The forces of the establishment, including the Archbishop of York, currying favour with Empson, threatened William but he stood firm, upholding what was left of his family’s honour and summoning ‘divers other husbands, labourers, yeomen, shermen, a webster, and a smith’74 to court for trespass on land where they did not acknowledge him as landlord. If they attempted to plough the strips in Plumpton’s open fields to the east of the hall, he said he would attack them.
That winter, probably to raise some money when the sap was down, he had timber trees felled in the Plumpton woods, ashes and others, valuable property which Sir John Rocliffe claimed was his. The Archbishop wrote again, warning William of the consequences of this ‘senestor’ behaviour. The Archbishop was prepared to let him take boughs for fuel but not the whole tree. ‘Sir, I wold advise you to doo otherwise. If ye will not be reformed, I acertaine you that the said Sir John shall be for me at liberty to take his most avantage.’75
In these circumstances, threat and legality become indistinguishable. In March 1503, William finally wrote to his parents in London, from where for weeks they had not
