William was faced with the prospect of his Rocliffe enemies ploughing up the land they claimed they owned for spring wheat. ‘Sir, I marvell greatly that I haue no word from you vnder what condition I shalld behaue me & my servants. Sir, it is sayd that Sir John Roclife will ploue, but we are not certayne.’76
With help from his Gascoyne cousins, William was re-arming. Ten longbows were delivered to the hall. He was ready for the next stage of the battle and suspected that his father might be guilty of wishful thinking or a lack of resolution. Any talk of royal protection, he told his father, seemed like little more than ‘fayr words’.77 His mother had returned to Plumpton and just before Valentine’s day Robert for once wrote to her from London. Cash was short again:
To my right hartily and mine entyrely beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plompton, bee this delivered.
Best beloved, in my most harty wyse I recommend mee unto you. Soe it is, I mervaile greatly, that yee send mee not the money that yee promised mee to send with John Waukar within 8 dayes after you and I departed, for I am put to a great lacke for it. Therefore, I hartily pray you, as my especiall trust is in you, to send me the said money in all hast possible, and alsoe to send me money, for my cost is very sore and chargeable at this tyme: for I have spent of the money that I brought from you.
Therefore, deare hart, I pray you to remember mee. And as for my matter, there is noe mooveinge of it as yet. And for diverse consideracions and greate hurts might falle to you and mee and our children hereafter, I heartily pray you to remember to hast the money unto mee, as my especiall trust and love is in you,
From London in hast, the Tuesday next afore St. Valentines day, by your lovinge husband, Robert Plompton, kt.78
Hurried, repetitive and emotional as this was, less coherent than she was to him, Agnes can have been left in no doubt.
Through the spring of 1504, the sense of an impending disaster grew more insistent, as did Agnes’s realization that Robert was incapable of saving them. In mid-March she sent him the money he needed, which she had somehow scraped together, and asked him that he ‘be not miscontent that I sent it no sooner, for I have made the hast that I could that was possible for me to do’.79 She was managing the tricky situation with the tenants, evicting some, squeezing money out of others. In mid-April, her patience was breaking. He hadn’t written; he had let the whole business go on too long. Word had reached her of his hopelessness and their adversaries’ persistence and ingenuity: ‘Sir, I marvell greatly that ye let the matter rest so long, and labors no better for your selfe, and ye wold labor it deligently. But it is sayd that ye be lesse forward, and they underworketh falsly and it is sene and known by them.’80
The rent that was due at Whitsun in early May would be a valuable prize for whoever gained the right to the manor by then. There was talk all over the county that Robert was allowing his enemies to win. ‘Sir, I besech you to remember your great cost and charges, and myne, and labor the matter that it myght have anend.’81 The Rocliffes had taken to arresting select individuals. They had got the machinery of the law on their side. And what was he doing? ‘Ye dow none to them, but lett them haue there mynd fullfilled in every case.’82
The Rocliffes and Sotehills were tightening their grip on the county, by threat and persuasion excluding the Plumptons from the world they had once called their own. Plumpton loyalists were being charged and held. No one would buy the wood the family had felled over the winter, or anything else they were trying to sell. Robert needed to bring the whole question to an end, and soon.
For without ye get some comaundement, I wott not how your house shalbe kept, for I know not wherof to levy one peny worth. No more at this tyme, but the Trenietie keepe you. From Plompton in hast, the xij day of Aprill.
By your wyfe, Dame AGNES PLOMPTON83
Two weeks later she was writing again. She was holding the fort, telling him their news. They were all well, the children, their servants, herself. He had been anxious to know if the Rocliffes had received any of the rents (‘the farm’) from the Yorkshire manors, but as far as she knew all they had done was sell some of the timber trees, at way below the market price: ashes and oaks worth 40 pence had been sold for 12 pence, and some holly wood sold at Idle. But that was all, ‘Scrybled in hast, the fryday next after St. Marke day. By your wyffe, Dame AGNES PLOMPTON.’84
Then at last a piece of good news. Against all expectations, Henry VII made Robert a ‘Knight of the Body’, an honorary member of the royal bodyguard, and as such screened him and his servants from all arrest. It was the trump card in any court. The Plumptons could keep hold of the manors at Plumpton and Idle, where they had been for 300 years, with impunity. The Rocliffes, at least legally, could do nothing.
A success but no victory. That summer Agnes Plumpton died, perhaps exhausted by the strain of maintaining the dignity of this ragged and tattered family. And despite the legal protection conveyed by Robert’s new status, the facts on the ground, the fear cast into gentry and yeoman alike by the power nexus of Richard Empson and his lawyer friends the Rocliffes and Sotehills, were enough to keep the country almost entirely shut against them.
Symptomatic is an angry letter to Robert Plumpton, from a Yorkshire lawyer, delivered to Plumpton Hall by the lawyer’s man, in November 1506. It was the second time of asking and a promise had been broken:
I pray you that I may have my money now at this tyme, for I must occupy much money within thes iiij dayes, as this bearer can shew you.
If ye will not delyver it at this tyme, I will send no more to you for it, but the berer shall goe to the Shereff and have from him a warrant to leve the sayd money, or els to take your body, the which I wold be as sory for, as any man in Yorkshire, if I myght other wayes doe, as knowes Our Lord, who keepe you in worship. At Staynley, this St. Martyn even. Yours to his litle power,
ROBART CHALONER.85
Chaloner was in fact Rocliffe’s man, helping him to increase the pressure on Robert Plumpton. Friends who had stood surety for Plumpton on loans of up to £100 found bailiffs at their doors, seizing their lands and goods, with Plumpton unable to pay or do anything about this spreading disaster. Month after month, Plumpton can have been aware only of the closing of doors. He had married again, Isabel, the daughter of a peer, Lord Neville. She too was soon at her wits’ end. No one would pay him what they owed him. No one would buy what the Plumptons could offer in the way of either underwood or timber trees.
No one would buy any land from the Plumptons as their title to it was so insecure. The Rocliffe-Empson band had shut them out of any timber or wood market. Isabel was reduced to sending Plumpton a few shillings through the post. Her mother, Lady Nevill, sent her £4 13s. 4d. in a letter, saying it was all she could afford and advising her that ‘God is where he was, and his grace can and will pooruey euery thing for the best, & help his servant at their most needes, and so I trust his Hynes, he wil do you.’86
At the death of Henry VII in 1509, Robert ceased to be a Knight of the Body, as the office died with the King. Both Plumpton and Isabel his wife, still guilty of occupying Plumpton Hall illegally and owing money at all points, were thrown into the Counter, the debtors’ gaol in London. The Rocliffe and Sotehill cousins took possession of the manors of Idle and Plumpton itself. But the same turn of the wheel brought Plumpton release. Richard Empson and Edmund Dudey, the saw and razor of Henry VII’s oppression, were also arrested on the old king’s death and after conviction on false charges of treason were executed on Tower Hill to general delight, a sop to the masses from the new young King. Empson’s death released the Yorkshire gentry from a reign of terror and the way was opened for yet another attempt at arbitration between the Plumptons on the one side and the Rocliffes and Sotehills on the other.
The
