He belonged to the leading Anglo-Irish Bathe family, who were prominent landowners in County Meath, and whose principal seat was at Athcarne, near Duleek.
He was in London in 1439, probably studying law, when he was charged with "ill conversation and behaviour", and committed to Ludgate Prison, from which his brother obtained his release.
[1] Far more serious charges (the most serious of which were demonstrably false) were levelled against Bathe in 1449, and these formed the main grounds for the indictment against him in the Irish Parliament of 1460.
[2] It seems that Stackpole had been installed as the parish priest of Kilberry, County Kildare, a living which Bathe claimed was his to dispose of under the traditional right of advowson.
[4] In the late 1450s the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic conflict between the rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, spread to Ireland, where Richard of York, the Yorkist claimant to the Crown of England, found his strongest support.
[7] Despite the triumph of the Yorkist cause in 1461, Bathe's disgrace was not permanent: York's son, the new King Edward IV, where possible followed a policy of reconciliation with his former enemies.