Sir Humphrey was one of the very numerous children of James Tuchet, Lord Audley, by his second wife Alianore Holland (daughter of Constance of York by Edmund Holland, Earl of Kent.) Their family is so large that it confuses creators of family trees and it is hard to be absolutely certain just how many siblings there were. Humphrey was, however, the eldest of the sons.
He was born about 1434 and is often known as Humphrey Audley of Swaffham, although I am not clear as to how he acquired that manor.
In 1464, having acquired a dispensation, he married Elizabeth Courtenay, widow of Sir James Luttrell, who was Audley’s cousin. (One might ask who wasn’t given his extensive family connections.)
Elizabeth was the daughter of Sir Philip Courtenay of Powderham, Devon. With Humphrey she had a son, John, later Sir John, and two daughters, Philippa and Elizabeth. All these children eventually had children of their own.
Humphrey’s half-brother, John, Lord Audley, became a trusted member of Edward IV’s government, having defected to the Yorkists after his father’s death at Blore Heath. Indeed, Lord Audley was one of the clique around Edward to whom Warwick took exception. Humphrey though appears to have retained Lancastrian sympathies. It may be that his Courtenay connections were key.
In any event, he joined Margaret of Anjou following her arrival in England and fought for Lancaster at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Captured by the Yorkists, he was one of those sentenced to death by the court headed by Richard Duke of Gloucester and John Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, and executed in Tewkesbury Market Place on 6 May 1471. He was subsequently buried in the Abbey and lies under the book shop, near the Duke of Somerset.
His widow married someone called Thomas Mallet in 1478 and lived until 1493. She was buried in Dunster Church.
Sir John Audley certainly inherited Swaffham and married Muriel Brews, sister of Margery Brews. He was thus a brother-in-law of John Paston III. It’s a small world!
murreyandblue 
I used to think Richard was related to everyone, that he had kin with every landed family and to that end I decided to start a few file cards on the families I read about the most often. Silly me. It isn’t that Richard was related to everyone, no, they were all related to each other, gentry thru peerage, and increasingly, from the merchant class into the peerage… and some families seem to ONLY marry each other! And then, the names, what wouldn’t I give for a Hawisa, a Fouques, a few Benedicts or Dionysia’s, but no, a flood of Anne, Katherine, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Richard, Roger, William, Joan, John… I now work on 8.5″ x 14″ sheets to scrawl cross-outs and scribbled changes.
I have found it easier to just link up families, the Pastons who intermarried with the Brownes and the Poynings – very tidy (and all connect importantly with Richard); and then there is the Devereux /Ferrers – Herbert – Corbet family linkage (also important for Richard) as are the FitzAlans/ Browne / Scales / Vaughans (and don’t even start me on the issue of which Thomas Vaughan we are talking about!),; and yes the Tuchets (Lords Audley) figure greatly in the Yorkist era and Richard’s life, and continuously along the Border areas with Wales – not to mention yet more confusion with Roger Vaughans amid the Thomas Vaughans.
Currently I am trying to disentangle the Tyrrell family lines, omg, what a chore. More interesting has been the merchant families who advanced into the gentry and then found the opportunity to become ennobled within a generation (by design under H7, preferred to hobble established nobility under bonds and recognizances and create a ‘new’ aristocracy beholden entirely unto himself and later his son. The Stonors, who clearly felt they WERE the elite gentility even before throwing in with Richmond), must have wondered how the Cely’s who were mere aldermen and wardens in London became Viscounts, married duchesses, and find themselves barons within a mere lifetime. When the genealogy sites leave me with little more than a name (as has happened with the Cely/Sely and Rawson connections I have Thrupp to fall back on… it is worth it though, quite a few surprises have popped up and I can see now why both Edward and Richard made it their business to recall faces and names of virtually everyone around them, they needed to know who was ‘family’ and who had been on the other side of any number of feuds, protracted squabbles (and there were alot of those, far more than the Percy-Neville one everyone knows about), and the furious animosity over dowers, wardships, minutiae within inheritance consumed families that they dealt with and very often had to placate – forget the darn French, ever try to reason with a Stanley?
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