Patrick Comerford
I have been in Oxford three times in the space of six or seven weeks for medical tests, surgical procedures and hospital visits, with one overnight stay, and time too for walks by the river, Choral Evensong in Pusey House and browsing in the bookshops.
During some of those visits, I began thinking about the potential for resources in the Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts that might be important sources for my continuing research in genealogy and family history when I came across the will of William Stanley (1474-1552) of Comberford, Staffordshire, made in 1552.
William Stanley’s kinship with King Henry VII, although there was a 20-year age gap, is analagous to that of a third cousin: his father, Sir Humphrey Stanley of Pipe, near Lichfield, was a second cousin of Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, who married the king’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. William Stanley’s will is held the Bodleian Libraries as part of the Weld Family Papers, including deeds relating to the manors in Staffordshire held by the Stanley, Heveningham, Simeon, Weld and Eyre families, dating from 1293 to 1809.
This collection of papers in Oxford includes deeds, family papers, court rolls, list of charges and even an indulgence granted to Sir John Stanley by Michael Laskeis (?Laskaris), in return for a florin given to Laskeis to help him liberate his family at Constantinople in 1468. Among the wills in this collection in the Bodleian are two wills of Dame Ellen Stanley, widow of Sir Humphrey Stanley of Pipe, near Lichfield, dated 1516 and 1518, and the will of her son William Stanley of Comberford, between Lichfield and Tamworth, made in 1552.
I wondered why William Stanley was living at Comberford Hall, and how he was related to one of the most powerful political families in Staffordshire, who were among the kingmakers during the wars of succession now known as the ‘Wars of the Roses’.
The Stanley family rose to political prominence first in Lancashire and Cheshire through Sir John Stanley (I) (ca 1350-1414), a younger son of Sir William de Stanley of Stourton.
John Stanley married Isabel Lathom, despite the opposition of John of Gaunt, and as heiress she brought him great wealth. He was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland on three occasions (1386-1388, 1399-1401, 1413-1414), and was granted the Lordship of Mann or the Isle of Man by Henry IV in 1406, becoming titular King of Mann. He died on 6 June 1414 at Ardee, Co Louth, and was brought back to England and buried in Burscough Priory, Lancashire.
John Stanley and Isabel Lathom were the parents of both Sir John Stanley II (1386-1437), ancestor of the Earls of Derby, and Thomas Stanley (1392-1463), ancestor of the Stanleys of Elford and of William Stanley of Comberford Hall.
The eldest son, Sir John Stanley II (1386-1437), was also titular King of Mann. He died on 27 November 1437 in Anglesey, Wales, and was buried in Saint Oswald Churchyard, Winwick, Cheshire. He married Elizabeth Harrington and they were the parents of three sons and two daughters, including: Thomas Stanley (ca 1405-1459), 1st Baron Stanley; Richard Stanley, Archdeacon of Chester (1425–1433); and Edward Stanley, Archdeacon of Chester (1454-1462) – at the time, Chester was part of the Diocese of Lichfield or Coventry and Lichfield.
The eldest son of Sir John Stanley II, Sir Thomas Stanley (1405-1459), was the titular King of Mann, 1st Baron Stanley (1456) and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1431-1436). He died at Knowsley, Lancashire, on 20 February 1459 . John Stanley and Joan Goushill were the parents of three daughters and four sons, including: Thomas Stanley (1435-1504), 1st Earl of Derby; and James Stanley (1478-1485), who was also Archdeacon of Chester when it was still part of the Diocese of Lichfield.
The eldest surviving son, Thomas Stanley (1435-1504), was the 1st Earl of Derby and became the stepfather of King Henry VII. He was the last of the Stanleys to style himself King of Mann. His first wife Lady Eleanor Neville, was a daughter of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, a descendant of Edward III and a sister of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (‘Warwick the Kingmaker’), creating a powerful alliance with the House of York. In 1472, when the House of York was back on the throne, he married his second wife, the widowed Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), whose son, Henry Tudor, later became Henry VII.
After the death of her second husband Sir Henry Stafford, Lady Margaret Beaufort married Thomas Stanley in 1472. She founded both Christ’s College and Saint John’s College in Cambridge, and gives her name to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She was a daughter of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, and had previously married Edmund Tudor (1430-1456), 1st Earl of Richmond and half-brother of Henry VI, and then Sir Henry Stafford (1433-1471), son of the Duke of Buckingham.
Haselour Hall, one of the homes of the Stanley family in Staffordshire, became one of her homes too, and the house played a role in the War of the Roses. The house is within the boundaries of Lichfield District Council, 4.6 km from Comberford and from Comberford Hall, 12 km east of Lichfield and 8.3 km north of Tamworth. Haselour Hall is the house where Thomas Stanley’s son, the future Henry VII, is said to have spent the night before his decisive victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
Henry Tudor, then Earl of Richmond, is said to have spent a night at Haselour Hall, after slipping away from his march from Lichfield to the Battle of Bosworth Field with a small band of his guards before his decisive victory in 1485. While he was visiting his mother, Henry entreated Stanley, his step-father, to join him in battle against Richard III. Stanley, however, refused to choose sides, opting instead to remain neutral for a while longer before making clear his allegiance. This neutrality was so important to the Stanleys, that when Richard kidnapped one of Stanley’s sons to force him to join his ranks, Stanley replied laconically: ‘I have other sons.’
The Battle of Bosworth Field was the last significant battle in the War of the Roses. On the day of the battle, it is said that Stanley watched it unfold from afar, and when Henry defeated Richard III, Stanley rode down the hill from which he was watching, took the defeated king’s crown from his head and used it to crown Henry VII, only then pledging his allegiance to the new king. It was a decisive intervention that brought an end to the War of Roses and put the first of the Tudors on the throne of England.
Thomas Stanley died on 29 July 1504, and was buried in the family chapel in Burscough Priory. His descendants included the subsequent Earls of Derby. When Lady Margaret died on 29 June 1509, she was buried in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey.
Meanwhile, the second surviving son of Sir John Stanley who died in 1414, was Thomas Stanley (1392-1463) of Elford. He was Sheriff of Worcestershire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire, and MP for Staffordshire, and he was the ancestor of the Elford branch of the Stanley family, which continued until 1508.
Thomas Stanley acquired the Elford estates through his marriage to Matilda Arderne (1396-1423) of Elford. The most famous member of her family was Sir Thomas Arderne, who fought with the Black Prince at Crecy and Poitiers. Matilda and Thomas Stanley were the parents of a daughter and two sons: Anne Gresley, Sir John Stanley and George Stanley.
The younger son, George Stanley (ca 1440-1509) of Hammerwich, near Lichfield, High Sheriff of Staffordshire (1473), has been identified recently with the Stanley effigy in the South Choir Aisle in Lichfield Cathedral, despite its Victorian inscription.
The elder son, Sir John Stanley (1423-1474) of Elford, was married three times. He was first married in 1428 at the age of five and with a special church dispensation, to Cecile de Arderne of Harden, and eventually were the parents a son, Sir John Stanley (1447-1508).
His second wife Isabel Vernon (1427-1471), daughter of Sir Richard Vernon of Haddon, Speaker of the House of Commons, and they were the parents of three daughters and a son, Sir Humphrey Stanley (1452-1505) of Pipe. His third wife was Dulcia Leigh, and they were parents of a further son, Roger Stanley. When this Sir Thomas Stanley died in 1474, he was buried in Saint Peter’s Church, Elford, and his eldest son, also Sir John Stanley, succeeded to the Elford estates.
This eldest son, John Stanley (1447-1508) of Elford, is said to have joined his first cousin’s son Thomas Stanley (Lord Stanley) and Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, at Haselour Hall on 21 August 1484 ahead of the Battle of Bosworth Field. Lord Stanley’s decisive intervention in the Battle of Bosworth the next day brought the first of the Tudor monarchs to the throne.
Local legend says John Stanley was the father of John Stanley, the last male heir of the Elford Stanleys, who was fatally injured ca 1460 by a tennis ball that severed his jugular vein. He is depicted in a monument in Saint Peter’s Church, Elford, that was completely restored in the Victorian period. The ‘Stanley boy’ has short hair and a simple robe, his left hand holds a round object, and his right touches the side of the face, while a Latin inscription on the plinth reads Ubi dolor ibi digitus (‘Where the pain is, there is the finger’).
The legend is retold by many local historians, including Sampson Erdeswicke (1603), William Wyrley and Thomas Pennant (1781). However, Sophie Oosterwijk has examined all the historical evidence and concludes the effigy is a post-mediaeval forgery and the unusual hand gestures may have been introduced by a 17th or 18th century forger to illustrate the legend even more convincingly.
Putting legends aside, John Stanley was the father of three daughters who eventually became co-heiresses to the Elford estates: Maud married Sir John Ferrers (1438-1484) of Tamworth Castle; Anne married Christopher Savage of Worcestershire; and Margery married William Staunton. Elford passed through the female line to William Staunton then to Richard Huddlestone, then to William Smythe and finally to Sir John Bowes.
This line of descent then continued in the Bowes, Howard and Paget families until the end of the 1930s. Henry Bowes Howard (1687-1757), 11th Earl of Suffolk and 4th Earl of Berkshire, built a new hall on the site of the old Elford Hall, ca 1720-1730. Elford Hall was finally demolished in 1964.
Sir John Stanley (1423-1474) of Elford and his second wife Isabel Vernon (1427-1471) were also the parents of Sir Humphrey Stanley (ca 1452-1504), of Pipe Hall near Lichfield.
Sir Humphrey Stanley of Pipe Hall married Dame Ellen Lee, daughter of Sir James Lee of Stone, and they were the parents of four sons, John, William, Humphrey and George, and two daughters, Maud (Wolverston) and Alice (Swinnerton).
Sir Humphrey Stanley died on 12 March 1504 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. But antiquarians in the 18th century mistakenly identified him with the Stanley effigy in the south choir aisle in Lichfield Cathedral. His widow, as Dame Ellen Stanley, widow of made two wills, dated 1516 and 1518, that are in the collection of papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, that includes the will of her son William Stanley (1474-1552), who lived at Comberford Hall.
Their eldest son, Sir John Stanley of the Pipe Hall near Lichfield, married Margaret Gerard, daughter of Sir Thomas Gerard, and they were the parents of father of two daughter and co-heiresses: Isabel, who married Walter Moyle of Kent, and was the mother of an only daughter Mary, who married Erasmus Heveningham; and Elizabeth, who married Sir John Hercy of Grove, Nottinghamshire.
A brass plate in the niche above the Stanley effigy in the South Choir Aisle in Lichfield Cathedral has long identified it as the tomb of John Stanley, son of Sir Humphrey Stanley of Pipe. But this appears to be a Victorian addition and so is not conclusive evidence of the effigy’s subject.
William Stanley (1474-1552), who lived at Comberford Hall, was the second son of Sir Humphrey Stanley of Pipe Hall and Dame Ellen Lee. He was born in Morpeth, Northumberland, in 1474, and he married the much younger Margaret Comberford (1494-1568), daughter of Thomas Comberford of Comberford and Dorothy FitzHerbert. She was a sister of Humphrey Comberford, of Comberford Hall and Master of the Guild of Saint Mary and Saint John the Baptist in 1530; Richard Comberford, putative ancestor of the Comerfords of Kilkenny and Wexford; Henry Comberford, Precentor of Lichfield Cathedral; and John Comberford of Wednesbury.
How did William Stanley come to live at Comberford Hall in the 1550s? He was then in his mid-70s and I can only speculate that this is because his eldest brother-in-law was living at on the Northamptonshire estates at Watford, Stoke Bruerne and Shutlanger inherited from the Parles family; the next brother, Canon Henry Comberford, was heavily involved in Church life; Richard may have died by then; and John was living on the family’s estates in Wednesbury.
William Stanley and Margaret Comberford had probably married late in life, when he was in his late 50s and she was in her 30s. They were the parents of an only daughter Dorothy.
Dorothy Stanley (1530-1587), who married her cousin Christopher Heveningham (1540-1574), daughter of Mary Moyle and Erasmus Heveningham. Dorothy and Christopher were the parents of Dorothy Heveningham and Sir Walter Heveningham, of Aston and Pipe, and the descendants of these lines of the Stanley and Comberford families continued to live in the Lichfield area for many generations.
But this is a story that involves continuous litigation, lost fortunes, and economic decline. And that is, indeed, a story for another day.
As an aside that brings me back to those recent visits to Oxford, the crest in the Stanley coat of arms gave rise to the popularity of the Eagle and Child as the name for public houses in England, often in former manors once held by the Stanley family. They include the Eagle and Child on St Giles in Oxford, currently undergoing extensive refurbishment. It is known for its literary associations and is affectionately dubbed ‘the Bird and Baby’.
