John was the son of a yeoman, William Baxter of
Heydon, Norfolk. Legal records from as late as 1450 refer to him as 'John Heydon of Baconsthorpe alias John Baxter of Heydon'. His mother's name was Jane, daughter and heiress of John Warren, of Lincolnshire, whose arms,
Chequey or and azure, on a canton gules, a lion rampant argent, is also quartered by the Heydons family; William was the first of his family that settled at Baconsthorpe, having purchased a moiety of the manor of Woodhall in this town, and was buried in the chapel in the north isle, with this epitaph, now lost:
O Jesu tolle a me quod feci Et remaneat mihi quod tu fecisti, Ne pereat quod sanguine tuo redemisti. John was educated at the
Inns of Court, and, by 1428, was acting on behalf of Edmund Winter of
Town Barningham, Norfolk, likely in connection with Winter's dispute with the Paston family over the manor of
East Beckham. In 1431, he was appointed
Recorder of
Norwich, but was unpopular with the townsmen, and was dismissed from the position before May 1437. Many years later, in 1450, it was alleged that during his tenure as Recorder he had informed
Norwich Cathedral priory of information concerning the City of Norwich's dispute with the priory. By the mid-1430s he was acting as legal counsel for the priory, and, by 1445, was the priory's chief steward. From 1438 onward, he served on numerous commissions in Norfolk, was a
Justice of the Peace from 1441 to 1450, and, in 1445, a
Knight of the Shire for Norfolk. By 1447, he was steward of the East Anglian estates of
Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Among his numerous legal clients were
Lord Bardolf,
Lord Cromwell,
Lord Willoughby and Sir John Clifton (d.1447). However Heydon chiefly owed his prominence in
East Anglia to his service with
William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk (d. 1450), with whom he had become associated by 1435. Through his influence with
Henry VI, Suffolk is said to have ousted
John Mowbray, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, from his rightful position as the dominant magnate in East Anglia. Two of his agents in particular, Heydon and
Sir Thomas Tuddenham, from 1443 jointly held the 'powerful and lucrative' stewardship of the
Duchy of Lancaster, and are said to have terrorised East Anglian gentry, including the Paston family. The conflict between the Pastons and Heydon over the years is recorded in the
Paston Letters. In 1448, it centred on the manor of
Gresham, which
William Paston had purchased from
Thomas Chaucer. In February of that year, 'almost certainly on Heydon's initiative',
Robert Hungerford, 3rd Baron Hungerford, asserted his wife's claim to Gresham, then in the hands of William Paston's son,
John. Paston attempted to recover the manor through negotiation and legal action; both proved fruitless, and, in October 1448, Paston asserted possession by sending his wife,
Margaret, to reside in a house in Gresham. In the following January Hungerford's servants assaulted and damaged the house, forcing Margaret Paston to leave; Hungerford remained in possession of Gresham for the next three years. In a letter in 1448 Margaret referred to Heydon as a 'false shrew'. Suffolk fell from power at the beginning of 1450, and Heydon and Tuddenham immediately found themselves under attack by their principal opponents in East Anglia.
Sir John Fastolf, a kinsman of John Paston's wife, Margaret, immediately requested a servant to provide him with a list of the wrongs which Heydon had done to him over the previous thirteen years, and in October 1450, a commission was empowered to inquire into complaints in East Anglia. Indictments were drawn up which provided details of Heydon's and Tuddenham's actions during the previous fifteen years; according to Richmond, these allegations were perhaps biased, since Fastolf,
John Paston, and the City of Norwich were among the principal informants, but it is 'likely that much of the shire was hostile to the pair of them'. During the years 1450–51 the Duke of Norfolk,
John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, and Fastolf also exerted efforts to remove Suffolk's former agents from positions of local power. These efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, however. By the spring of 1451, Suffolk's widow,
Alice (d.1475), and
Thomas Scales, 7th Baron Scales, had regained Suffolk's former dominance in East Anglia. After this setback, Heydon was never again as influential in East Anglia, although he retained his offices and stewardships, and was a member of various commissions from 1452 on. When the
Lancastrian regime was overthrown in 1460–61, the Pastons hoped that Heydon would be destroyed. However although Tuddenham was executed in 1462, Heydon was not. He continued to enjoy the patronage of Suffolk's widow,
Alice, and was able to obtain a pardon from the
Yorkists in April 1462 on payment of 500 marks. During the
Readeption of Henry VI he attempted to gain the favour of
John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, a Lancastrian, and was appointed to two commissions, but thereafter, for the remaining eighteen years of his life he was not prominent in public affairs, although he continued to practice law and to administer his clients' estates as well as his own. Heydon died in 1479, leaving more than sixteen manors to his son and heir
Sir Henry Heydon, purchased with the wealth acquired during his career. Among them was his seat at
Baconsthorpe, where he had rebuilt the manor house, a project perhaps begun about 1446 when the King granted him forty oak trees from the forest at
Gimingham. His will, which he made in March 1478, makes no reference to his wife or to any child other than his son, Henry. In addition to numerous charitable bequests, he left £200 towards the marriages of his granddaughters, and £20 towards his burial in the Heydon chapel in
Norwich Cathedral. ==Marriage and issue==