Dr Simon Payling of our 1461-1504 section explores the life and remembrance of MP for Derbyshire Sir Henry Vernon, and his family’s enduring relationship with Tong (Shropshire).

In the funerary landscape of late-medieval England, parish churches provided gentry families a hallowed setting, at the heart of their communities, in which their lineage and status could be publicly and enduringly expressed. The church of St Bartholomew at Tong in Shropshire preserves one of the most eloquent of these statements in the monument and chantry chapel of Sir Henry Vernon and his wife, Anne Talbot. While their tomb effigies sit within the long tradition of commemoration (albeit in stone rather than alabaster), the adjoining ‘Golden Chapel’ stands apart in its architectural ambition. Its fine fan vault echoes, albeit on a small scale, one of the grandest contemporary projects, Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey.

Sir Henry, MP for Derbyshire in 1478 and 1491, had enjoyed a long and, in its middle part, successful career.  For nearly half a century, he headed one of the richest gentry families in England. Around 1500 the family estates – scattered over eight counties – had a gross annual value of over £600, enough to compare with some minor baronial families. That wealth facilitated and justified the grand marriage made for him in 1465 by his ill-fated father, Sir William, who died of the plague when sitting as an MP two years later.  The bride was a sister of John Talbot (b.1448), earl of Shrewsbury. The match had a local aspect in that the Talbots had important interests in north Derbyshire, the heartland of the Vernons’ landed interests, and also a broader political context in that both families were seeking rehabilitation for their Lancastrian past. The marriage marked a significant social advance for the Vernons. 

            Yet for all this distinguished pedigree and advantageous kinship, the early decades of Henry’s career were decidedly lacklustre. During the Readeption crisis he behaved in a way that contemporaries – and later historians – found distinctly unheroic. Having followed George, duke of Clarence, into supporting Henry VI’s restoration in 1470, he equivocated, in a seemingly cowardly way, when the King returned from the Low Countries to reclaim his throne in the following spring. In a famous series of letters, Clarence repeatedly and unsuccessfully summoned him, and, when Clarence abandoned the restored Henry VI, Vernon, a study in paralysed caution, ignored summonses from Edward IV and the earl of Warwick.

This reluctance to commit himself was also evident in the next great crisis.  On 11 August 1485, four days after Henry Tudor had landed at Milford Haven, Richard III, then at Bestwood Lodge, a few miles from Nottingham, wrote to Henry, instructing him, on pain of forfeiture, to bring ‘suche nombre as ye have promysed’.  Vernon, wisely as it transpired, stayed away.  Only at the battle of Stoke (near Newark) in June 1487 did he finally appear in arms, swept along with the rest of the Midlands gentry into Henry VII’s ranks. Even then, the King conspicuously withheld the knighthood he bestowed on others. Vernon’s omission looks like a quiet rebuke.

And then, relatively abruptly and for reasons that remain obscure, Vernon’s fortunes improved dramatically. On 29 November 1489 he received the knighthood denied him at Stoke, conferred during the creation of Prince Arthur as prince of Wales.  More importantly, in April 1492, he was appointed governor of the young prince’s household, newly-established at Ludlow. His manor of Tong lay conveniently nearby, but he probably owed his appointment to the influence of his wife’s nephew, George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, whose star at court was rising fast.

Between 1492 to 1502 Vernon became a powerful presence in the Welsh Marches. He cemented his authority by marrying three of his children into leading Shropshire families – the Corbet of Moreton Corbet and the Ludlow of Stokesay – and by rebuilding Tong Castle in the fashionable new medium of brick, the first major brick structure in Shropshire.  This marked a major reorientation of the family’s interest, away from their main ancestral home at Haddon in north Derbyshire, but that reorientation was not to be maintained.  The death of Prince Arthur in the following April, diminished Sir Henry’s standing and caused him to refocus his main geographical interests to Derbyshire. 

Against this background, there is additional significance in Sir Henry’s choice of Tong as his place of burial.  That choice is to be seen in the context of the apparent incongruity of the same choice made by his grandfather, Sir Richard Vernon, more than 60 years before. Sir Richard had inherited the manor of Tong from his great-uncle, Sir Fulk Pembridge, in 1409, but the manor remained in the hands of Pembridge’s widow, Isabel Lingen, until 1446.  He thus held the manor for only a few years before his burial there, in an elaborate tomb, in 1451. The probability is that this represented an assertion of the Vernon title to the manor, then contested by heirs under an entail of 1324. Sir Henry’s burial—and the architectural ambition of his memorial—should be read in the same light, as a renewed, emphatic claim to Tong as a Vernon possession.

Sir Henry’s will of 18 January 1515 confirms the scale of his ambition. He allocated £100 for the tomb and its chantry chapel—its splendour, he insisted, was to honour “the bloode that my wyff is comyn of”—and a further 300 marks to endow the chantry with lands worth ten marks a year. Such heavy investment shows his determination to establish Tong as a grand family mausoleum, complementing the elaborate monuments of his parents and grandparents already in the church. Seen in this light, the ‘Golden Chapel’ is far more than a provincial imitation of royal style. It is the final, carefully calculated gesture of a man anxious to mark for posterity his worldly success, proclaiming his service to the house of Tudor, his kinship with the great family of Talbot and, perhaps most importantly, his family’s enduring connexion with Tong.

Further reading

H. Gilderdale Scott, ‘’this little Westminster’: the Chantry-Chapel of Sir Henry Vernon at Tong, Shropshire’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, vol. 158 (1), pp. 46-81.

For Sir Henry’s will: Derbyshire Wills, 1393-1574, ed. D.G. Edwards (Derbyshire Record Society, vol. 26), pp. 44-50.

For Sir Richard and Sir William Vernon: The Commons, 1386-1421, ed. Roskell, Clark and Rawcliffe, iv. 712-17; 1422-61, ed. Clark, vii. 313-20.

 A biography of Sir Henry will appear in The Commons, 1461-1504, ed. H. Kleineke.

SJP