Sir John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer

Sir John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer, born 17 Nov 1493, Snape Hall, Snape, Yorkshire, England, died 2 Mar 1543, London, Middlesex, England, buried St. Paul's Cathedral, London

English nobleman of the House of Neville. His third wife was Catherine Parr, later Queen consort of England and Ireland to Henry VIII. His family was one of the oldest and most powerful families of the North. They had a long standing tradition of military service and a reputation for seeking power at the cost of the loyalty to the crown as shown by the Earl of Warwick, John's cousin.

Married:

1. Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward Musgrave, by whom he had no issue, On 20 July 1518
2. Dorothy (d. 1526-7), daughter of Sir George de Vere, sister and coheiress of John de Vere, fourteenth earl of Oxford.
3. Catherine, daughter of Sir Thomas Parr and widow of Edward Borough, 2nd Baron Borough of Gainsborough; she afterwards became wife of Henry VIII, before 1533.

John Neville and Dorothy de Vere had 2 children:

1. John, who succeeded him as fourth Baron Latimer, died 1577, and was buried at St. Paul's, leaving by Lucy, daughter of Henry Somerset, 2nd Earl of Worcester, four daughters and coheiresses, of whom Dorothy married Thomas Cecil, 1st Earl of Exeter and Margaret, whose marriage with one of the Bigod family was arranged in 1534.
2. Margaret, betrothed in Oct of 1534 to Ralph, son of Sir Francis Bigod. The contract provided that 'Ralf or other son of Sir Francis should marry Margaret or other daughter of Lord Latimer'.

John Neville was eldest son of Richard Neville, 2nd Baron Latymer by Anne, daughter of Sir Humphrey Stafford.

Biography

John Neville came to court, where he was one of the gentlemen-pensioners. He was a descendant of Ralph, 1st Earl of Westmorland, by his second wife Joan Beaufort, the daughter of John of Gaunt: thus he was not only a distant kinsman of Henry VIII but he was also connected by blood and marriage with many noble families. His father died before the end of 1530, and he had livery of his lands on 17 March 1531. He lived chiefly at Snape Hall, Yorkshire, but sometimes at Wyke in Worcestershire.

His immediate forbears had been protagonists in the feuding which preceded the Wars of the Roses and in 1469 his grandfather had fallen in the cause of Henry VI at Edgecote. The fortunes of this branch of the Nevilles were rescued after that disaster by a sympathetic relative, Cardinal Bourchier, who procured the wardship of the 2nd Lord Latimer and preserved his inheritance. Latimer grew up to become a figure of importance in the north.

John Neville accompanied Henry VIII to northern France in 1513 and was knighted after the taking of Tournai.

He had taken part about 1517 in the investigation of the case of the Holy Maid of Leominster.

By 1522 he was recognized as a spokesman for his father by the northern magnates and the heads of monastic houses, but it was not until six years later that he was first named to the Yorkshire bench for his native Riding.

His return to the Parliament of 1529 as one of the knights for Yorkshire was a further step in his progress, even if he owed it to his father: the representation of the county was something of a family affair, Neville's fellow-knight being his cousin Sir Marmaduke Constable, over whom he took precedence probably by reason of his noble lineage.

He was not to be a Member of the Commons for long: his father died either a few days before the close of the first session or immediately after it and thenceforth he was to sit in the Lords. The resulting vacancy was not filled until three years later, when his kinsman and namesake of Chevet was chosen in his place.

In 1530 the new Lord Latimer was appointed to the council in the north and signed the letter sent to Clement VII in favour of the King's divorce. The opening of the second session of the Parliament saw him take his place in the Lords: the loss of the Journal of that House for all but one of the sessions obscures his attendance save at the sixth, when he was regularly present, but his two letters of 1534 and 1536 to Cromwell asking for leave of absence show that he journeyed to Westminster for the prorogations and in 1532 he used his attendance in Parliament to sue out livery of his inheritance.

Business in Worcestershire kept Latimer from the opening of the Parliament of 1536; he reappeared there soon afterwards but although this was a brief Parliament he evidently quitted it early as for the last week his name lacks the “p” which would have signified his presence.

He may have returned to Worcestershire to complete his business there, but by the time the Pilgrimage of Grace began in the autumn he was back in Yorkshire. As the leading figure in Mashamshire, one of the centres of the revolt, he was urged to spare no effort to prevent it from spreading, but his house at Snape was not strong enough to be held and he could not rely on the support of his neighbours.

By 16 Oct he was reported with his brother-in-law Sir Christopher Danby to have been taken captive, and his behaviour at the conference at York and later at Doncaster, where he put the Pilgrims’ case to Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, prompted the suspicion that he secretly sympathized with his ostensible captors. Norfolk did not share this view and recommended Latimer's retention on the council in the north, but others were not so sure and Latimer was to spend the following year enlisting the aid of friends to clear his name.

Cromwell still harboured doubts even after Sir Francis Bigod's insurrection of January 1537 in Yorkshire had given Latimer the chance to prove his loyalty by decisive action, and he cultivated the minister with an annuity of 20 nobles and perhaps by surrendering to him the Latimer house in London: he followed this up in 1538 by selling one Buckinghamshire manor to Cromwell's friend John Gostwick and another to Cromwell himself, although these sales were also designed to pay for lands at Nun Monkton and elsewhere in Yorkshire which he bought about the same time.

Latimer attended the Parliament of 1539 nearly every day, but he did absent himself on 19 May 1539, when the attainder of Thomas, Lord Darcy, for complicity in the Pilgrimage was made final, and during the final session a year later he missed the last week of May.

The deterioration of relations with Scotland and the troubled state of the borders soon demanded his presence in the north, but he was able to attend the first session of the Parliament of 1542. By the summer he was back in the north fighting the Scots and advising the Earl of Rutland on the conduct of the campaign.

He then returned home and took no part in the Bigod rising of the following year. He did have to give up his town house in the churchyard of the Charterhouse to a friend of Lord Russell.

He prepared for the hazards of war by making a will on 12 Sep 1542 in which he provided for his wife, family and servants, but he was not to die in the field. When the second session of the Parliament opened in the following January he did not make an appearance in the Lords, but he must have journeyed to London to attend the session for it was there that he died on 2 Mar 1543 and in St. Paul's that he was buried.

He was succeeded in the barony by his son John, then aged 23 years. His widow, Catherine Parr, was sought in marriage by Sir Thomas Seymour but in the following Jul she became the sixth wife of the King and only after his death did she marry Seymour.

See also

Neville, John (1490?-1543) in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900), a publication now in the public domain.

References

Alison Weir, Britain's Royal Family: A Complete Genealogy (London, U.K.: The Bodley Head, 1999), page 154. Hereinafter cited as Britain's Royal Family.

G.E. Cokayne; with Vicary Gibbs, H.A. Doubleday, Geoffrey H. White, Duncan Warrand and Lord Howard de Walden, editors, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, new ed., 13 volumes in 14 (1910-1959; reprint in 6 volumes, Gloucester, U.K.: Alan Sutton Publishing, 2000)

Links

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