William Hawte

Sir William Hawte (also Haute or Haut) (c. 1430 – 2 July 1497) was a prominent member of a Kentish gentry family of long standing in royal service, which, through its near connections to the Woodville family, became closely and dangerously embroiled in the last phases of the Wars of the Roses.

It is claimed that he is the same Sir William Hawte who was a composer of liturgical and devotional choral music (who flourished c. 1460–1470), represented in a number of manuscript choirbooks that survive to this day. Two settings of the Benedicamus Domino are found in the Pepys Manuscript, and another work attributed to him, a Stella coeli, extirpavit (a Latin prayer to the Virgin, for protection from plague) exists in the Ritson Manuscript.

Hawte the composer is identified as a son of William Haute of Bishopsbourne, Kent, M.P., by his second wife, Joan Wydeville, daughter of Richard Wydeville, M.P. (1385–1441), of Grafton, Northamptonshire and Maidstone, Kent, who married c. 1429. William the father did have a child by his first wife, and there is mention of a young William Haute seeking a novitiate at Christ Church priory in Canterbury around 1430. However the weight of evidence is that Sir William was Joan Wydeville's son. He was therefore, by affinity and probably by blood, nephew of the 1st Earl Rivers and first cousin to Elizabeth Woodville, Queen Consort of King Edward IV.

William therefore grew up, probably at Bishopsbourne, with an elder half-sibling and with three younger brothers and various sisters, one of whom, Alice, was by 1462 married to Sir John Fogge (as his second wife). William also was married before that date, and had a son of his own called William by his wife, Joan Horne (daughter of Henry Horne, M.P.), both of whom are mentioned in his father's will. Made in May 1462 and proved in October, this document is concerned mainly with the furnishings and chattels, the estates themselves having been disposed of by a testament now lost. Old William asked to be buried between his two wives before the image of St Katherine in the church of the Fraternity of St Augustine's, Canterbury. Among other things William inherited from his father the residue of his interesting collection of religious relics, after some of the choicer items had been allocated to selected recipients.

Both William and his father were included in commissions of array of December 1459 and 1460 to resist the rebellious adherents of Richard Earl of Warwick. William junior had already entered the service of Edward IV in 1461 when he was granted for life the office of Keeper of the King's Warren, near Sandwich, and soon afterwards received instructions to cause beacons to be set up along the Kentish coast to give warning of the approach of the king's enemies. He was created a knight at the queen's coronation on 26 May 1465, and rode before the queen's litter in the procession; in 1466–1467 he was for the first time High Sheriff of Kent (an office in which his father, his grandfather and his great-uncle had preceded him), and received the freedom of Canterbury in 1467.

In 1470 Hawte's cousin Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, appointed William his attorney for entry into his Kentish estates. William's sister Anne was in the later 1460s and earlier 1470s engaged to marry Sir John Paston, but was released from the arrangement. William's brother Richard inherited some estates jointly with his brother by grant from their father, and in 1463 and 1468 released tenements in Canterbury to William. The full estates were finally granted among the brothers by their father's trustees in 1480, in tail, with mutual remainders. In the meantime Richard married Dame Elizabeth Darcy, widow of Sir Richard Darcy of Maldon and Danbury, and daughter of Sir Thomas Tyrrell of Heron, Essex, restoring the familial bond formed by his grandfather Nicholas Haute's second marriage. Like William Haute, Darcy was knighted at Elizabeth Woodville's coronation, but died in 1469 leaving a son Thomas aged 10.

Elizabeth remarried almost immediately to Richard Haute who held commissions for the peace for Worcestershire in 1472 and 1473 and for Shropshire, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire in May 1474. Richard was, from 1472 to 1475, Member of Parliament for Essex and from 1472 to 1480 held commission for the peace in that county. He was further Sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire in 1474–1475. In the latter year Richard was granted the freedom of the city of Canterbury by birth, and represented it in parliament in 1478. He was appointed a justice in eyre of the queen's forests in 1477. By the partition indentures of 1480 Sir William received the old family manors of Bourne, Ford and Wadenhall, and the de Marinis lands of Otterpool, Blackmanstone and Elmsted, while Hastingleigh, Alderlose and Ightham Mote fell to Richard, their brother Edward taking the manor of Crofton, lands in Hougham near Dover and rents in Canterbury.

Through this period Sir William, the eldest brother, held a prominent position among the gentry of Kent. Although only two of his sons, William and Thomas, and a daughter Alice, reached maturity, there were besides four other sons and two daughters born in this time who appear to have died in their youth. He was a justice of the peace for Kent in 1461, 1462, 1464, 1465, 1467, 1469 and 1471–1475. With a commission of oyer and terminer to judge certain alleged traitors in 1463, in 1465 he was appointed to a commission against smugglers, and was reappointed in 1474 and 1475. Often in association with Sir John Fogge, Sir John Scott, Sir John Colepeper and Ralph St Leger the younger (who married Richard Haute's daughter Isabel), he took musters of soldiers in 1468, held commissions of array in 1469–1472, and mustered at Sandwich in the latter year.