world that had been running in Plumpton’s favour was now a bed of shards set against him and he had to wriggle for his life. He managed to get himself released from the Tower but was confined to London and prevented from returning to the north. Large pockets of Lancastrian resistance were still holding out against the Yorkists, even then being suppressed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘proud setter-up and puller-down of kings’,35 as Shakespeare called him. Warwick was at the height of his powers, in his mid-thirties, arrogant, ruthless, by far the richest member of the nobility England has ever seen, personally responsible for killing the old Lord Clifford in 1455 and so tied by blood-hatred to destruction of the Lancastrian cause. He mopped up all the rewards: Great Chamberlain of England, Master of the King’s Horse, Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Government of the whole of the north of the country was given to him and his brother. Those great estates which had belonged to his enemies were now handed over, including most of the Percy lands in Yorkshire and the Clifford lordship of Skipton. Yorkshire became Warwick’s fiefdom. A Frenchman joked about the country under Edward IV: ‘They have but two rulers: M de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.’36 Plumpton could have found no refuge in that unforgiving, Warwick-dominated world.
Deprived of his offices and their income, kept away from his own lands in the north, Plumpton found himself exposed to his enemies. Arms were stolen from his house at Plumpton, precious household goods and even a surplice from his chapel was taken. The monks of a monastery sieved his fishponds for bream, tench, roach, perch and ‘dentrices’. His timber trees and underwoods were cut down and taken away. Oxen were stolen from his lands at Spofforth and stones already cut for houses were carted off. In his manors up in the limestone dales of the Pennines, his hay was mown and stolen in the early summer, and rabbits and hares were taken from his warren at Grassington.
From his lodgings near Hounslow outside London, he was conducting secret negotiations with his co-Lancastrians in the north but was caught by Yorkist informers and denounced to the authorities. They had been watching him, the way he ‘had receyved, red, and understaud false, damnable, diffamatory, and slaunderous writing, traiterously by pen and other forged and ymagined against the honor and welfare of our said soveraigne, and the same sent to other suspicious persons to corage and comfort them by the same’.37 There had been comings and goings, agents had arrived at his house and Plumpton had ‘secretly cherished them, succored, forbored, and their secrets concealed’.38 Foolishly, he had not concealed his true feelings. ‘When any turble or enterprise was leke to fall hurt or scaythe to the Kings people, the said Sir William Plumpton, with oder suspected, rejoyced, and were glad in chere and countenance.’39
The pressure did not let up. In a world where legal standing was so dependent on personal strength and status, everything in William Plumpton’s life in the early 1460s was vulnerable. His property was being continually raided. Money to fight for legal redress was desperately short. The letters preserved by the Plumptons describe a world in dissolution, full of the difficulties of dealing with people who were ‘right hard and strange’ and shot through with murderous arguments. His men were being ‘dayly threatened’40 with beatings or worse. All involved had to navigate the tangled and expensive jungle of late medieval law. Those with something to get out of Plumpton addressed him with imploring and self-abasing humility. Others wanted only ‘a remedy as shall accord with reason’.41 His lawyers prayed that God would give him ‘good speed against all your enemies’.42 He seems to have been surrounded by them. His tenants asked him to show ‘good lordshipp and mastership’,43 their only hope in a world where their own newly increased vulnerability was exposed to the competitiveness and thieving of those in power.
On top of all this, with his status crumbling, Plumpton was faced with the most intractable of gentry problems: daughters. He had seven of them, most of them coming into marriageable age in the 1460s. To maintain the dignity of the family, daughters had to be provided with dowries. The class average was something near £100 per girl and the deal was usually quite straightforward. The girl’s father would provide the lump of cash (usually payable in instalments over five years or so) and the boy’s father would settle lands on the young couple that would provide an annual income of about 10 per cent of that sum, called a jointure. If the husband died first, his widow enjoyed the jointure for the rest of her life. After her death, the lands would descend to her and her husband’s heirs. It was a civilized and humane arrangement, the equivalent signal in law to the co-presence in every parish church of the knight and his lady laid out side by side in equal honour and with equal dignity. Women were important: they ran estates, they mothered the all-important heirs, they stood as trustees in legal agreements and as widows they became powers in the land. Their arms were quartered equally with their husband’s. It was a given that every father would provide every daughter with an old age that fitted her ‘worship’, her honour. A proper dowry would get a proper husband. The Plumpton coat of arms would continue to be associated with others of equal or better standing. The family corporation would be allied in blood with those who could support it.
But seven daughters! Figures for the dowries provided by Plumpton have survived for three of his girls: £123 for Elizabeth at some time before 1460, £146 for Agnes in 1463 and £100 for Jane in 1468.44 Catherine, Alice, Isabel and Margaret Plumpton were all married in the 1460s, and all to equally distinguished members of the gentry, most of them knights, who would certainly not have accepted girls with less to offer. Somewhere or other William had to find some £900 to give away with his daughters. It was a necessary investment in new plant. The poor man was caught between his catastrophic political circumstances and the demands which the family business required.
He was no lamb. Beneath the surface, he had plans. Among the many lawyers he was using to fight his legal battles, he employed two from Yorkshire: Brian Rocliffe and Henry Sotehill. Both were rising and brilliant men, making their names and fortunes in the Westminster courts. Both, significantly, were supporters of the great Earl of Warwick. They were Yorkists, Plumpton’s natural enemies, and to each of them, plotting carefully, he sold a granddaughter.
Lying in bed in Plumpton Hall in 1463, William considers the situation. Daughters need dowries, a drain on resources. Both sons are dead, but William, the younger, slaughtered at Towton, has left Margaret (born in 1459) and Elizabeth (born in 1460). Two tiny girls, the joint co-heirs of the entire Plumpton inheritance. On them would descend all the beautiful manors in the Vale of York and up in the Pennine dales, in the Vale of Belvoir and the limestone uplands of the Derbyshire Peak District. Their hands in marriage are worth money. The two Yorkist lawyers Rocliffe and Sotehill would glow at the prospect of their heirs acquiring the Plumpton riches. And more than that, their connections to the great Earl of Warwick might surely ease some of William’s other pressures. And so in November 1463, Margaret, aged four, was sold to Rocliffe for his son John to marry. The tiny bride went to live with the Rocliffes, where she embarked on her education. ‘Your daughter & myn’, Brian Rocliffe wrote about her to Plumpton that December, ‘desireth your blessing and speaketh prattely and French, and hath near hand learned her sawter.’45 Her sister Elizabeth, aged three, was consigned to Sotehill’s son John the following February and went to live with them in Leicestershire. Elizabeth, the poor young widowed mother of these tiny girls, can have had no say in their fate. Too much hinged on it.
Brian Rocliffe was to pay for Margaret’s wedding and the young Rocliffes were, to start with, to get the poor little hillside manor of Nesfield in Wharfedale, a beautiful place but scarcely of any value. Rocliffe was to give Plumpton £313, more than the annual income from all of his lands. It was agreed ‘that all these couenants are to be performed without fraud or bad faith’.46 At the same time Plumpton made a deal for almost £350 with Henry Sotehill for the other granddaughter ‘the which Elizabeth the said Sir William hath deliuered to the said Henry’.47 The price for Elizabeth was a little higher because Plumpton also agreed with Sotehill that if, by any chance, Plumpton should have another son by another wife, he would also deliver this son to Sotehill so that he could be married to one of Sotehill’s daughters.
Hanging
