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THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 



More fortunate than the Duke of Buckingham 

 and the notorious William Colyngbourne were 

 several of the other principal figures concerned in 

 this rebellion. Men like Richard Beauchamp Lord 

 St. Amand, Thomas West Lord de la Warre, Sir 

 Robert Willoughby and John Cheyney and his two 

 brothers are known to have escaped to Brittany to 

 take refuge with Henry Tudor, the last hope of the 

 Lancastrian cause. Roger Tocotes was probably also 

 of their party, although he is not specifically 

 mentioned in the group of such refugees from 

 Richard III. There were also many other important 

 escapees from the West Country, including Thomas 

 Grey marquis of Dorset, Peter Courtenay bishop 

 of Exeter, and Giles Daubeney, later said to have 

 fought with exceptional valour at Bosworth. The 

 absence of such figures denuded the area of those 

 who would normally have filled positions of power 

 and influence in the southern counties, and the king 

 was consequently forced to import men from his 

 northern affinity to fill the vacancies in order to 

 reassert royal power and control. These, of course, 

 were unpopular measures creating a vicious circle, 

 and exacerbating the hostility and suspicion with 

 which he was regarded by southerners; it also 

 provided further ammunition for those who wished 

 to destabilize his regime. 



Richard III, now critically short of able men, 

 had to reimpose control almost from scratch after 

 the rebellion. Five outsiders were given places on 

 the commission of peace as a direct result of royal 

 initiative in Hampshire, which had been linked with 

 Wiltshire as the county where Richard III was least 

 confident of the local gentry. Henry Braythwaite, 

 for example, a northern yeoman of the crown, was 

 made customer of Southampton; he was a 

 predecessor of Thomas Woodshawe in this post - a 

 man about whom more will follow later in this 

 paper. As for Roger Tocotes - relieved of his 

 positions after the rebellion, his place was taken by 

 Thomas Stafford, younger brother of Humphrey 

 Stafford of Grafton. Stafford also received a lion's 

 share of Tocotes' lands in Wiltshire within a month 

 of the rebellion, being then described as 'of 

 Bromham', Tocotes' home. Stafford followed this 

 with an impressive collection of local offices, largely 

 those forfeited by Tocotes, but with one or two extras 

 from elsewhere, including Colyngbourne's 

 parkership of Ludger shall. 14 



From Wiltshire, of course, came the most 

 notorious of the rebels, William Colyngbourne of 

 Lydiard, who was responsible for the seditious 

 rhymes which, with other traitorous symbols, were 



prevalent at the time. In July 1484 he pinned his 

 scurrilous verse to the door of St Paul's, which read: 



The crock-back'd boar the way hath found 

 To root out our roses from the ground; 

 But flower and bud will he confound, 

 Till King of Beasts the swine be crown 'd, 

 And then the dog, the cat, the rat, 

 Shall in his trough feed, and be fat, 

 The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog 

 Rule all England under an Hog. 15 



Apart from the king and the assumed fate of the 

 princes, this mocking doggerel alluded to William 

 Catesby, Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, viscount 

 Lovell, Richard's closest councillors, while the 

 epithet applied to Lovell referred to his heraldic 

 crest which featured a silver hound. It seems likely 

 that Colyngbourne had experienced some 

 unpleasant evidence of Lovell's growing power as 

 the king's friend, for the Lovells held the manor of 

 Elcombe and Uffcott, which bordered some of 

 Colyngbourne's own lands at Quidhampton and 

 Shawe. It was not only, or even principally for his 

 rhyme, that Colyngbourne suffered his painful 

 death, for he had been more seriously involved with 

 John Turbyvyle, a Dorset shipowner, in a plot to 

 encourage Henry Tudor, the Lancastrian claimant 

 to the throne, to invade England. 16 



A noteworthy example of a member of the 

 Wiltshire gentry who lost status and possessions, if 

 not his life, under Richard III exists in the case of 

 the Thomas Woodshawe mentioned above. He had 

 acquired the manor of Standlynch, near Downton, 

 in right of his wife, who before her marriage was 

 Grace Hugyns, a member of a well known Somerset 

 family. 17 The small manor was held under Richard 

 Beauchamp Lord St Amand, and when he was 

 forced to flee after the rebellion, the king 

 appropriated Standlynch and gave it to Nicholas 

 Rigby a supporter, then of Bruton. 18 This situation, 

 which was replicated in many parts ofWiltshire and 

 the West, seems the primary and more telling reason 

 for the strong support of Henry Tudor at the ensuing 

 battle of Bosworth. There, a measure of Henry 

 Tudor's backing would be drawn not only from 

 disaffected Yorkists, but also from Lancastrian 

 supporters in Wiltshire and the surrounding 

 counties - a remnant of those who had borne the 

 brunt of the devastating defeat at Tewkesbury 

 fourteen years before. 1Q At Bosworth revenge would 

 be very much in the air. Tudor support was probably 

 due less to any moral indignation regarding the 

 supposed fate of the princes, than to the more 



