Stillington, Robert (d. 1491), administrator and bishop of Bath and Wells, is first recorded as a senior Oxford academic in 1442, and was therefore probably born before 1410. He was the son of John Stillington of Nether Acaster near York. By November 1442, when he acted as proctor for Lincoln College, he was already principal of Deep Hall, and by June the next year he had graduated as doctor of civil law. Still at Deep Hall in September 1444, he seems thereafter to have embarked on an official career. His first living, as rector of Beverstone, Gloucestershire, in 1443, preceded his ordination as acolyte, subdeacon (1444), deacon (1445), and priest (1447), all in the diocese of Bath and Wells, where from at least 1445 to 1448 he was chancellor to Bishop Thomas Beckington (d. 1465). Beckington collated him to a series of livings, beginning with a prebend in Wells Cathedral in 1445 and culminating in the archdeaconry of Taunton in 1450. As early as 1446 Stillington was dispensed to hold a second, and in 1451 a third, incompatible benefice. A whole series was bestowed by other bishops active at court and in government, such as William Aiscough of Salisbury (d. 1450), John Kemp of York (d. 1454; who collated him to prebends in York, Ripon, Southwell, and the chapel of St Mary and the Holy Angels in York), and Thomas Kemp of London; in 1458 Henry VI appointed him dean of the royal free chapel of St Martin's-le-Grand in London. By fifteenth-century standards Stillington was a notable pluralist: in 1461 he was confirmed as dean of St Martin's and archdeacon of Colchester and Taunton; held three additional prebends at York, St David's, and St Stephen's, Westminster; and was rector of Ashbury in Berkshire. He was to become archdeacon of Berkshire in 1464 and in 1465 archdeacon of Wells. He gave little or no service in person to any of these preferments, and was licensed to visit his archdeaconry by deputy from 1451. Provided to succeed Beckington as bishop of Bath and Wells on 30 June 1465 and consecrated on 16 March 1466, he gave up all his benefices except St Martin's, which he retained until 1485. During his 25-year episcopate he is recorded in Somerset only once, in 1476, which is evidence for an exceptional lack of commitment to his pastoral duties. In 1448 Stillington was appointed a commissioner to negotiate with Burgundy over recent breaches of a truce, and in the next thirty years he took part in several foreign embassies. In 1449 he became a royal councillor, but although he continued to acquire benefices, his secular career during the 1450s remains obscure, until on 28 July 1460 the Yorkist-dominated government appointed him keeper of the privy seal, with a salary of £365 a year. Stillington remained keeper until his appointment as chancellor on 20 June 1467, after the dismissal of Archbishop George Neville (d. 1476). As chancellor he influenced the development of procedure along civil-law lines in the court of chancery. He remained in office until 25 July 1473 with the exception of the six months of Henry VI's readeption in 1470–71, when he was supplanted by his predecessor, Archbishop Neville. During the latter period he took sanctuary in St Martin's. Though a pardon on 25 February 1471 implies that he made his peace with the Lancastrians, he nevertheless helped persuade George, duke of Clarence, to return to his Yorkist allegiance. Following the restoration of Edward IV, Stillington is reported to have sought to protect the elderly countess of Oxford against attempts to disinherit her by Richard, duke of Gloucester. Illness prevented his attending the first session of the parliament of 1472, and thereafter, the Crowland continuator reports, he was less effective and ‘did nothing except through his pupil [John Alcock (d. 1500)]’ (Pronay and Cox, 133). Old age and failing health may therefore explain his replacement; he was not out of favour, sharing in a grant of the presentation to the deanery of St Stephen's in 1477 and acting as a royal ambassador as late as 1479. Right at the
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heart of the Yorkist regime, he acted as feoffee to the king, to the duke of Clarence, and to Edward's stepson, the marquess of Dorset, among others. At the coronation of Richard III and Queen Anne, on 6 July 1483, he took the prominent supporting role traditionally reserved for the bishop of Bath. Stillington's brushes with the crown are difficult to explain. Between 27 February and 5 March 1478 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was examined by the king and council, but having satisfied them that he had been faithful to the king, and had done nothing contrary to his oath of fealty, he was pardoned on 20 June 1478. This episode is sometimes explained by collusion in Clarence's treason, perhaps by telling the duke of Edward IV's precontract of marriage, but this interpretation seems unlikely, both because Stillington was only arrested after the dissolution of the parliament during which Clarence was tried and executed, and because no mention of the precontract is known at this stage; the allegation that Edward was a bastard, supposedly repeated by Clarence, can be backdated to 1469. Richard III's usurpation, on 26 June 1483, was justified in sermons and speeches, and especially in the manifesto Titulus regius, known only through its confirmation by the parliament of 1484, but circulated to members of the Calais garrison in June 1483. This strictly contemporary document disqualifies Edward V and his siblings from the crown, both because their father Edward IV had been illegitimate, and because his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalidated by a prior contract that he had made with Eleanor Butler. The Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commines attributes the precontract story to Stillington, ‘ce mauvais evesque’, whom he claimed had officiated. Such a precontract must have taken place before Edward IV's marriage on 1 May 1464, when Stillington was still keeper of the privy seal. However, there is no confirmatory evidence—historians have not even been able satisfactorily to identify Eleanor Butler—and Stillington was not noticeably favoured by Richard III. A year-book of 1488 does, however, contain the claim that it was Stillington who drew up the petition in which the Lords and Commons asked Gloucester to take the crown, suggesting that by then he had become popularly associated with Richard's usurpation. Henry VII was hostile to Stillington and on 22 August 1485, the very day of Bosworth, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Five days later he was already in prison at York, ‘sore crased by reason of his trouble and carying’ (Drake, 122). For his ‘horrible and haneous offences ymagined and done’ against Henry VII (RotP, 6.292), he was deprived of his deanery of St Martin's but not of his bishopric, and was pardoned on 22 November in view of his ‘grete age, long infirmite, and feeblenesse’ (Campbell, 1.172). Apparently implicated in treason, presumably that of Lambert Simnel, he took refuge at the University of Oxford, which, although embarrassed, initially refused six requests in March–April 1488 to surrender him on grounds of franchise. He was imprisoned at Windsor until 1489, and died in April or May 1491. Stillington was buried in the large chapel, demolished in 1552–3, that he had erected by 1488 off the cloister to the south of Wells Cathedral. Extremely large for a chantry, Stillington's chapel was cruciform, stone-vaulted, and high quality: the elaborate panelled west wall is still visible where it abutted on the cloister. Stillington also founded a chantry school of St Andrew at Nether Acaster, Yorkshire, on ground inherited from his father. There is no evidence to confirm Commines's story that Stillington had a bastard son, whom Richard III intended as
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husband for Elizabeth of York and who was captured off Normandy and died in Paris. Michael Hicks Sources Emden, Oxf. · W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: excavations and discoveries (1980) · M. A. Hicks, ‘False, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence’: George, duke of Clarence, 1449–78, rev. edn (1992) · P. de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. J. Calmette and G. Durville, 3 vols. (Paris, 1924–5) · M. Bennett, Lambert Simnel and the battle of Stoke (1987) · N. Pronay and J. Cox, eds., The Crowland chronicle continuations, 1459–1486 (1986) · The registers of Robert Stillington, bishop of Bath and Wells, 1466–1491, and Richard Fox, bishop of Bath and Wells, 1492–1494, ed. H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, Somerset RS, 52 (1937) · A. F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond, eds., The coronation of Richard III: the extant documents (1983) · RotP, vols. 5–6 · F. Drake, Eboracum, or, The history and antiquities of the city of York (1736) · W. Campbell, ed., Materials for a history of the reign of Henry VII, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 60 (1873–7) © Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved: see legal notice
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