Six days later it was agreed at another meeting of the [150] Council that the Duke of York should return into the North with the Duke of Exeter in his custody, whom he was to confine in the castle of Pomfret as a state prisoner.[150.1]
By these decisive steps the authority of the Duke of York was at length secured on something like a stable footing. During the remainder of his protectorate there could no longer be a doubt to whose hands power was committed; and England, at last, had the blessing of real government, able and vigorous, but at the same time moderate. The resolutions of the Council soon became known to the public. ‘As for tidings,’ wrote William Paston to his brother in Norfolk, ‘my lord of York hath taken my lord of Exeter into his award. The Duke of Somerset is still in prison, in worse case than he was.’ William Paston wrote in haste, but these were two matters of public importance to be mentioned before all private affairs whatever.[150.2] And yet the private affairs of which he wrote in the same letter will not be without interest to the readers of this Introduction. Sir J. Fastolf goes to reside in Norfolk. William Paston now reported to his brother that Sir John Fastolf was about to take his journey into Norfolk within a few days, and proposed to take up his residence at Caister. His going thither must have been regarded as an event not only in the neighbourhood of Yarmouth but even in the city of Norwich. At all events it was highly important to John Paston, whose advice the old knight valued in many matters. ‘He saith,’ wrote William Paston to his brother, ‘ye are the heartiest kinsman and friend that he knoweth. He would have you at Mauteby[150.3] dwelling.’ This must have been written in the latter part of July. Sir John did not actually go into Norfolk quite so soon as he intended; but he appears to have been there by the beginning of September.[150.4]
There in his completed castle of Caister he had at length taken up his abode, to spend the evening of his days in the place of his birth, and on the inheritance of his ancestors. There during the next five years he spent his time, counting [151] over the items of a number of unsettled claims he had against the crown,[151.1] and meditating also, it would seem, on another account he had with Heaven. For the latter the foundation of a college[151.2] or religious endowment, in which were to be maintained ‘seven priests and seven poor folk’ at Caister, might possibly liquidate his debts. But in his transactions with his fellowmen he was certainly for the most part a creditor, and by no means one of the most generous. Instances will be found in his letters in abundance showing with what vehemence (testy old soldier that he was!) he perpetually insisted on what was due to himself;—how he desired to know the names of those who would presume to resist his agent, Sir Thomas Howes—how they should be requited ‘by Blackbeard or Whitebeard, that is to say, by God or the Devil’;[151.3]—how he noted that Sir John Buck had fished his stanks and helped to break his dam;[151.4] how he had been informed that at a dinner at Norwich certain gentlemen had used scornful language about him, and desired to know who they were.[151.5] In this perpetual self-assertion he seems neither to have been over-indulgent towards adversaries nor even sufficiently considerate of friends and dependants. ‘Cruel and vengeable he hath been ever,’ says his own servant Henry Windsor, ‘and for the most part without pity and mercy.’[151.6] So also on the part of his faithful secretary, William Worcester, we find a complaint of shabby treatment, apparently at this very time when the household was removed to Caister. To a letter in which John Paston had addressed him as ‘Master Worcester,’ the latter replied with a request that he would ‘forget that name of mastership,’ for his position was by no means so greatly improved as to entitle him to such respect. His salary was not increased by one farthing in certainty—only ‘wages of household in common, entaunt come nows plaira’—which apparently means, assured to him only during his master’s pleasure. When he complained to his master of this, all the satisfaction he obtained was that Sir John expressed a [152] wish he had been a priest, when he could have rewarded him with a living.[152.1]
There are, indeed, in more than one of Worcester’s letters in this collection symptoms of ill-concealed chagrin and disappointment. Nor were such feelings unnatural in one who, probably out of regard for an ill-appreciated hero, had devoted the best energies of his life to the services of such a master as Fastolf. William Worcester. A native of Bristol, the son of one William Worcester, who lived in St. James’s Bec in that town, he was descended by the mother’s side from a wealthy family of Coventry, and often called himself, instead of Worcester, by his mother’s maiden name of Botoner. Born in the year 1415, he had entered the university of Oxford in 1432, and been four years a student at Hart Hall, now Balliol College; after which he had gone into Fastolf’s service. For many years he had been steward of Sir John’s manor of Castle Combe in Wiltshire, and MSS. still exist in his handwriting relating to the holding of manorial courts there.[152.2] He had also been Fastolf’s secretary in drawing up various statements regarding the wars in France in vindication of his master’s policy.[152.3] He was a man of literary tastes, who had already presented some compositions to his patron.[152.4] Later in life he wrote a book of annals, which is an important historical authority for the period. It seems to have been about a year before his master’s death that he set himself assiduously to learn French, under the tuition of a Lombard named Caroll Giles.[152.5] From this instructor he had purchased several books, and Henry Windsor suspected he had run himself into debt in consequence. He had fairly owned to Windsor ‘he would be as glad and as fain of a good book of French or of poetry, as my master Fastolf would be to purchase a fair manor.’[152.6] But [153] he had a special object in view in which a knowledge of this language was important; for he had begun translating, at Fastolf’s request, from a French version, Cicero’s treatise de Senectute. This work appears to have been left on his hands at Sir John Fastolf’s death, and on the 10th of August 1473 he presented it to his patron’s old friend, Bishop Waynflete, at Esher. ‘Sed nullum regardum recepi de episcopo’ (but I received no reward from the bishop), is his melancholy comment on the occasion.[153.1] The work was ultimately printed by Caxton in 1481. Worcester was an assiduous collector of information on topics of every description, and a number of his commonplace books remain at this day. But like many men of letters after him, he found that industry of this sort may look in vain for any reward beyond the satisfaction of gratified curiosity.[153.2]
Along with the announcement that Sir John Fastolf was about to go into Norfolk, William Paston informed his brother that the old knight’s stepson, Stephen Scrope, would reside at Caister along with him. Stephen Scrope. Of this Stephen Scrope our Letters make not unfrequent mention; but the leading facts of his history are obtained from other sources. He was the son of Sir Stephen Scrope, by his wife Lady Milicent, who married Fastolf after her husband’s death. At the time of this second marriage of his mother, young Scrope was about ten or twelve years of age, and being heir to a considerable property, his stepfather had the management of his affairs during his minority. Bitterly did he complain in after years of the [154] manner in which Sir John had discharged the trust. According to the unfeeling, mercenary fashion in which such matters were then managed, Fastolf sold his wardship to Chief-Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks; ‘through the which sale,’ wrote Scrope at a later date, ‘I took sickness that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years [en]suing; whereby I am disfigured in my person and shall be whilst I live.’ Gascoigne held this wardship for three years, and by right of it intended to marry Scrope to one of his own daughters; but as the young lad’s friends thought the match unequal to his fortune, Fastolf bought the wardship back again.[154.1] Stephen Scrope, however, when he grew up, was not more grateful for the redemption than for the original sale of his person. ‘He bought me and sold me as a beast’ (so he writes of Sir John Fastolf), ‘against all right and law, to mine hurt more than 1000 marks.’ In consequence of the stinginess of his stepfather he was obliged, on coming of age, to sell a manor which was part of his inheritance and take service with Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester in France; by whom, according to his own account, he had some hope of obtaining restitution of the lordship of the Isle of Man, which had belonged to his uncle the Earl of Wiltshire in the days of Richard II. But Sir John Fastolf got him to give up his engagement with the duke and serve with himself, which he did for several years, to the satisfaction of both parties. Afterwards, however, on some dispute arising, Scrope returned to England, when Sir John sent home word that he must pay for his meat and drink. To do this he was driven to contract a marriage which, by his own account, was not the most advantageous for himself; and his stepfather, instead of showing him any compassion, brought an action against him by which he was deprived of all the little property that his wife had brought him.[154.2]
Of this first wife of Stephen Scrope we know nothing,[154.3] [155] except that she died and left him a daughter some years before we find any mention of him in the Paston correspondence. His necessities now compelled him to resort to the same evil system of bargaining in flesh and blood of which he had complained in his own case. ‘For very need,’ he writes, ‘I was fain to sell a little daughter I have for much less than I should have done by possibility,’—a considerable point in his complaint being evidently the lowness of the price he got for his own child. It seems that he disposed of her wardship to a knight[155.1] whose name does not appear; but the terms of the contract became matter of interest some time afterwards to John Paston and his mother, when Scrope, who, besides being disfigured in person, was probably not far from fifty years of age, made an offer for the hand of Paston’s sister Elizabeth, a girl of about twenty. The proposed match did not take effect; but it was for some time seriously entertained. Agnes Paston writes that she found the young lady herself ‘never so willing to none as she is to him, if it be so that his land stand clear.’[155.2] The reader will perhaps think from this expression that the young lady had been pretty early taught the importance of considering worldly prospects; but there were other motives which not improbably helped to influence her judgment. ‘She was never in so great sorrow as she is now-a-days,’ wrote Elizabeth Clere to John Paston, as a reason for concluding the matter at once with Scrope, if no more desirable suitor presented himself. Her mother would not allow her to see any visitor, and was suspicious even of her intercourse with the servants of her own house. ‘And she hath since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places.’[155.3] Such was the rough domestic discipline to which even girls in those days were occasionally subjected!
Some years certainly elapsed after this before either Stephen Scrope found a wife or Elizabeth Paston a husband. The former ultimately married Joan, the daughter of Richard Bingham, judge of the King’s Bench; the latter was married to Robert Poynings, whom we have already had occasion to notice as an ally of Jack Cade in 1450, and a ringleader in other movements a few years later. This second marriage appears to have taken place about New Year’s Day 1459;[156.1] before which time we find various other proposals for her hand besides that of Scrope.[156.2] Among these it may be noted that Edmund, Lord Grey of Hastings, wrote to her brother to say that he knew a gentleman with property worth 300 marks (£200) a year to whom she might be disposed of. No doubt, as in similar cases, this gentleman was a feudal ward, whose own opinion was the very last that was consulted as to the lady to whom he should be united. But it is time that we return to the current of public affairs.[156.3]
[130.3] W. Worc. In an almanac of that time I find the following note, which dates the beginning of the king’s illness on the 10th of August:—‘In nocte S. Laurentii Rex infirmatur et continuavit usque ad Circumcisionem Anni 1455, in p. . . .’ (?) (a word unintelligible at the end). MS. Reg. 13, C. 1.
[131.1] W. Worc.
[131.2] Nicolas’s Privy Council Proceedings, vi. 140-2, 147-9, 154-5.