[ Sir John Paston and Caister]
William Paston.
When Sir John Paston returned to England, the first thing that he had to consider was how to meet a debt to his uncle William which was due at Michaelmas.[291.4] William Paston is a member of the family of whom we totally lose sight for many years after the very beginning of Edward’s reign; but his pecuniary relations with his nephew about this time cause him again to be spoken of and to take part in the correspondence.[291.5] He was, doubtless, a rich man, although we find him pledging some of his plate to Elizabeth Clere of Ormesby.[291.6] He was one of the trustees of Elizabeth, Countess of Oxford, the mother of the banished earl.[291.7] He had married, probably since the decease of his brother the eldest John Paston, the Lady Anne Beaufort, third daughter of Edmund, Duke of Somerset, [292] a lady of a wealthy family; and he occupied the great mansion called Warwick’s Inn, near Newgate, which had been the town-house of the mighty Kingmaker. His mother, Agnes Paston, lived there along with him.[292.1] Of his family we may mention here that the first child he had by the Lady Anne was a daughter named Mary, born, as we know from an old register, on St. Wolstan’s Day, the 19th January 1470. The second, more than four years later, was also a daughter, and having been born on Tuesday the 19th July 1474, the eve of St. Margaret’s Day,[292.2] was christened Margaret next day at St. Sepulchre’s Church, having for her godfather the Duke of Buckingham, and for her godmothers, Margaret, Duchess of Somerset,[292.3] and Anne, Countess of Beaumont.[292.4] Neither of these two daughters, however, survived him. The second, Margaret, died four months after her birth, at a time when her father was absent from London, and was buried before he came home.[292.5] In the end, the lands of William Paston descended to two other daughters, for he had no sons.
Money matters.
At this time Sir John had only borrowed of his uncle £4, a sum not quite so inconsiderable in those days as it is now, but still a mere trifle for a man of landed property, being perhaps equivalent to £50 or £60 at the present day. He repaid the money about November 1474, and his uncle, being perhaps agreeably surprised, inquired how he was going to redeem a mortgage of 400 marks held by one Townsend on the manor of Sporle. William Paston was already aware that Sir John had received a windfall of £100 from the executors [293] of Walter Lyhart, Bishop of Norwich, who died two years before, and that some one else had offered to advance another £100, which left only 100 marks still to be raised. He was afraid his nephew had been compelled to offer an exorbitant rate of interest for the loan. Sir John, however, being pressed with his questions, told him that his mother had agreed to stand surety for the sum he had borrowed; on which William Paston, to save him from the usurers, offered to advance the remaining 100 marks himself, and with this view placed, apparently unsolicited, 500 marks’ worth of his own plate in pawn. Sir John thought the plate was in safer custody than it would have been at Warwick’s Inn, where, in his uncle’s absence, it remained in the keeping of his aged grandmother; but he was anxious, if possible, not to lay himself under this kind of obligation to his uncle.[293.1]
The manor of Sporle was redeemed, but apparently not without his uncle William’s assistance. Some other land was mortgaged to his uncle instead; but the transaction was no sooner completed than Sir John declared he felt as much anxiety about the land in his uncle’s hand as he had before about that which was in Townsend’s. His mother, too, was not a little afraid, both for the land and for her own securities. She suspected William Paston was only too anxious to gain some advantage over them. She was jealous also of the influence he exercised over his aged mother, who had recently recovered from an illness, and she wished the old lady were again in Norfolk instead of living with her son in London.[293.2]
Sir John remained in debt to his uncle for at least a year,[293.3] and whether he repaid him at the end of that time I cannot tell; but certainly, if out of debt to his uncle, he was two or three years later in debt to other men. In 1477 he was unable to meet promptly the claims of one named Cocket, and was labouring once more to redeem the manor of Sporle, which he had been obliged to mortgage to Townsend a second time. His mother, annoyed by his importunity for assistance, told him flatly she did not mean to pay his debts, and said she [294] grieved to think what he was likely to do with her lands after her decease, seeing that he had wasted so shamefully what had been left him by his father.[294.1]
Sir John Paston’s claim to Caister.
But, however careless about his other property, Sir John, as we have already remarked, always showed himself particularly anxious for the recovery of Caister. During the whole of the year 1475, when he was abroad at Calais and with the army, he makes frequent reference to the matter in his letters. His brother John and his uncle William had undertaken to urge his suit in his absence to my lord and lady of Norfolk; but he would have come home and brought it before the king in Parliament, had not the French king at that time come to the confines of Picardy, and made the Council of Calais anxious to retain the services of every available soldier on that side of the sea.[294.2] He was impatient at the non-fulfilment of a promise by Bishop Waynflete—‘the slow Bishop of Winchester,’ as he called him—to entreat the duke and duchess in his favour.[294.3] But he was consoled by news which reached him before he came home, that the king himself had spoken to the Duke of Norfolk on the subject, and that, though the matter was delayed till next term, the king had commanded the duke to take good advice on the subject and be sure of the validity of his title, for justice would certainly be done without favour to either party.[294.4] This report, however, was rather too highly coloured. The Duchess of Norfolk denied its accuracy to John Paston. The king, she said, had only asked the duke at his departure from Calais how he would deal with Caister, and my lord made him no answer. The king then asked Sir William Brandon, one of the duke’s principal councillors, what my lord meant to do about it. Brandon had already received the king’s commands to speak to the duke on the subject, and he said that he had done so; but that my lord’s answer was ‘that the king should as soon have his life as that place.’ The king then inquired of the duke if he had actually said so, and the duke said yes. On this the king simply turned his back without another word, although, as my lady informed [295] John Paston, if he had spoken one word more, the duke would have made no refusal. John Paston, however, informed her ladyship that he would no longer be retained in the duke’s service.[295.1]
His petition to the king.