Following the battle of Bosworth and Henry Tudor’s accession to the English throne, the country’s gentry who had sided with Henry seemed destined to be elected to Parliament uncontested. However, as Dr Simon Payling of our Commons 1461-1504 project explores, this was not always the case…
Election disputes were rare in late-medieval England. Indeed, it was not until the early fifteenth-century that any legal framework was established to define what constituted a dispute. Early parliamentary elections were regulated by custom not statute, and the understanding of what defined a valid and proper election was slow to develop. This unsatisfactory situation was remedied by a series of statutes passed between 1406 and 1445. These defined, amongst other things, the franchise (the famous 40s. freehold) and the proper form of a parliamentary return, and laid down penalties for sheriffs who acted against their terms. Much of what is known of disputed elections comes from litigation on these statutes. Such litigation was rare – very few elections were contested at the hustings, let alone disputed – but, when disputes did occur, they are often profoundly revealing of tensions within the county society. Since elections were rarely contested, contests reflected a failure of the compromises on which the smooth running of county society depended and represented, as Gerald Harriss has put it, ‘an opening for the serpent of division’ (G.L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation (Oxford, 2005), p. 172).
That metaphorical ‘serpent’ was active in Shropshire when electors assembled at Shrewsbury castle on 27 October 1485, two months after Henry Tudor’s victory at the battle of Bosworth, to elect two members to the first Parliament of the new reign. On the face of it, a contest appeared unlikely. Several of the county’s leading gentry had played a significant part in Tudor’s victory, and, with such apparent unity on the great question of national politics, it might have been expected that the two MPs would emerge without contention. This, however, did not prove to be the case, and the election pitted against each other the two Shropshire gentry who had most distinguished themselves for Tudor in the Bosworth campaign. Sir Gibert Talbot, uncle of the young George, earl of Shrewsbury, was one of the commanders of Tudor’s army, and Sir Richard Corbet of Moreton Corbet, at least on his own later claim, brought to the battle a contingent of as many as 800 men. Two months later, they had different roles to play: Talbot was the sheriff who conducted the election, and Corbet was a candidate for election. Now they found themselves on different sides. Corbet later sued Talbot for his supposed misconduct at the hustings. He alleged that, although he and another veteran of the Tudor side of Bosworth, Sir Thomas Leighton of Church Stretton, had been the choice of the electors, Talbot had made a false return, replacing his name with that of a lesser local figure, Sir Richard Ludlow of Stokesey.
The election illustrates how allegiances in national politics could be starkly contradicted at the local level. The common cause of Talbot and Corbet at Bosworth did not lessen their opposition in the tangled politics of the Welsh marches. In the days before Tudor landed at Milford Haven on 7 August, a conflict between Talbot’s friend, Sir Richard Croft of Croft (Herefordshire), and Corbet had broken into fatal violence. Three of Corbet’s Welsh servants were murdered by Croft’s men at Hopton castle, the property of Corbet’s mother. It is not unreasonable to suppose, given the insecurity of the times, that the three unlucky Welshmen were among a retinue recruited by Corbet in anticipation of Tudor’s landing. Since Croft was then treasurer of Richard III’s household as well as sheriff of Herefordshire, it might be assumed that his objection to this gathering was as a Ricardian partisan anxious to prevent recruitment for the Tudor’s cause. Yet this was very much not the case, for Croft, like many others, soon showed himself ready to abandon Richard III. There can, in short, be little doubt that the deaths at Hopton Castle had nothing to do with national politics but were an early manifestation of the personal hostility between Croft and Corbet.
It is thus not surprising that these local divisions complicated the election of 1485. The most likely scenario is that Croft, was determined to prevent his enemy’s election and called upon Talbot’s aid. Talbot responded by setting aside the poll and replacing Corbet with Ludlow, an inoffensive candidate from Croft’s point of view. By this act, he contributed to the growing rift between Croft and Corbet which again broke out in fatal violence as the two knights raised men to fight for the King when his throne was threatened by the rising of Lambert Simnel in 1487. Not until Corbet’s death in 1492 was the ‘serpent of division’ laid to rest.
SJP
Further reading
S.J. Payling and S. Cunningham, ‘From the Welsh Marches to the Royal Household: the Leominster Riots of 1487 and Uncertain Allegiances at the Heart of Henry VII’s Régime’, in The Fifteenth Century XX: Essays Presented to Rowena E. Archer, ed. L. Clark and J. Ross (Woodbridge, 2024)
