As appears from the deed of settlement, the success of the negotiations had owed something to the mediation of ‘good lovers and frends’. Such affectionate, but anonymous, assistance might well have cloaked an intervention by the King himself. If so, it would not have been to Poynings’ disadvantage that he was one of Henry Tudor’s most ardent supporters, had landed with him at Milford Haven and had fought with great gallantry at Bosworth.
   Edward Poynings was the son of Robert Poynings, who had been one of the principal Kentishmen implicated in Jack Cade’s revolt, and of Elizabeth Paston, of the Paston Letters. He later received the Garter and was for some time Warden of the Cinque Ports. He was also, while Lord Deputy of Ireland, the author of "Poynings’ law", which subjected Irish law-making to the approval of the English council and held sway for three centuries.

   Poynings’ only legitimate child died during his father’s lifetime. Poynings’ fighting proclivities passed to one of his natural children, his estates to a distant relative, Harry Algernon Percy, fifth Earl of Northumberland. Percy died in 1527, leaving a legacy of debt to his son, the sixth earl, who nevertheless established his claim to the manor of Ash. This Henry Percy, having been so ill-advised as to cast eyes upon Anne Boleyn, had been forced by his father into marriage with a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The stratagem may have saved his head, but failed to provide an heir to the earldom. A year before his death in 1537, Percy granted all his estates to the ‘most dread, invincible and most excellent Prince, Henry VIII’. That was perhaps making a virtue of necessity; the invincible Prince had already taken care to ensure that if Percy died childless, his estates should pass to the Crown.²⁴