BLOUNT, Thomas

Thomas Blount hailed from one of the wealthiest gentry families of the north midlands. His career paralleled, in many ways, that of his elder brother Walter, who was elevated to the peerage after the accession of Edward IV. Both began their careers as esquires of Henry VI’s household; Thomas in 1451 and Walter a decade earlier. This is not to say that there was a significant gap in age between the two brothers. Walter was of age by 1440, when appointed to a minor duchy of Lancaster office, and so too was our MP. In Michaelmas term of that year he appeared in person in the court of King’s bench to sue a London cobbler for an assault upon him at Foston near Barton Blount, winning costs and damages of £11.5 E101/410/6; KB27/719, rot. 3d. None the less, in contrast to his elder brother, it was some years before he began to play a part in local affairs, perhaps because he spent his early years in the acquisition of a legal training in London.

The most significant event in Blount’s early life was his marriage to a childless widow and heiress. She was the grand-daughter of the Lincolnshire knight, Sir Thomas Hawley†, and, despite the generous provision Hawley had made in favour of his younger sons for their lives, her inheritance, centred on the Lindsey manor of Girsby in Burgh on Bain, was a valuable one, comprising over 2,000 acres.6 Reg. Chichele, ii. 191-5. Even though his brothers held parts of his paternal estates for their lives, her father, John Hawley, was still assessed at as much as 40 marks p.a. in 1436: E179/136/198. By a fine levied in Trinity term 1453 this eatate was settled on our MP and his wife in tail-general, thus ensuring him a life interest should his wife predecease him childless.7 CP25(1)/145/161/5. The marriage, a profitable one for a younger son even of so substantial a family as the Blounts, probably came about through connexions made in the royal household. Our MP and Hamon Sutton II*, the brother of the bride’s first husband, had places there in the early 1450s.

Blount’s public career began with election for the borough of Derby to the Parliament of March 1453 in which Walter sat for the county. As an MP he must have heard read the petition presented to the Commons by Henry, son and heir of (Sir) Henry Beaumont II*, seeking summary judicial process against those who had abducted his mother. The surviving petition also asked for a general remedy against ‘dyvers people of might, movyd of insaciable covetyse’ who detained single women and extorted bonds from them as a condition of their release.8 PROME, xii. 316-20. The two parts of the petition sit rather uncomfortably together, and it is not improbable that an earlier petition submitted by Beaumont was amended by debate in the Commons to include the request for a more general remedy. In this regard, it is interesting to note that our MP later availed himself of the resulting statute (31 Hen. VI, c. 9). In February 1455 he and his wife secured a writ under this statute on their complaint that her father-in-law, Hamon Sutton I*, had detained her in his house in Lincoln until, in April 1452, she entered into two bonds to him totalling £128.9 CP40/776, rot. 419. Perhaps this grievance had led our MP to contribute in the chamber of the Commons to the debate on Beaumont’s petition.

By the time Blount brought this complaint, he had become embroiled in affairs of much greater import. When he and his brother sat together in the 1453 Parliament, they maintained their family’s long-established service to the house of Lancaster, but they were shortly to break sharply with this tradition. A violent dislocation in Derbyshire politics in the mid 1450s found Thomas and Walter, who had taken over the headship of the family from their aged father, at odds with their county neighbours.10 For accts. of these disturbances: R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 150-8; S.M. Wright, Derbys. Gentry (Derbys. Rec. Soc. viii), 134-8; H. Castor, ‘Sack of Elvaston’, Midland Hist. xix. 21-39. Whether this was because they had already attached themselves to the cause of Richard, duke of York, in a county in which loyalty to Lancaster ran deep, or whether they became adherents of York because of their difficulties, remains to be resolved. The first sign of trouble came on 31 July 1453, while the Parliament in which both brothers were sitting was in recess. When visiting the nunnery of King’s Mead in Derby, Thomas was violently assaulted by a local esquire, Ralph Twyford, said to have been acting on the orders of two leading members of the Derbyshire gentry, Sir Nicholas Longford of Longford and John Curson* (in a later bill our MP claimed that Longford was one of his attackers, but in the indictment for the offence the names of Longford and Curson as abettors have been struck out).11 KB9/12/1/15, 2/254. It is not known what motivated this assault, although it may have been related to the Blounts’ support for Ralph Shirley in a dispute with Longford. What is certain is that it was the prelude to far more serious and widespread disorder. On the following 30 Apr., shortly after the Parliament’s conclusion, Walter and Thomas retaliated by leading 100 men in an attack on Longford’s house. Far more alarmingly, on 28 May Longford, in company with many of the leading gentry of Derbyshire and Cheshire, assembled 1,000 men to sack Walter Blount’s manor of Elvaston. A commission of oyer and terminer, headed by the duke of York as Protector, which first sat at Derby in July, failed to put an end to the violence. In April 1455 Roland Blount was murdered on the orders of John Curson, and, on the following 2 July our MP led an assault on John Cockayne, Roger Vernon and Nicholas Montgomery.12 KB9/280/27.

This extensive involvement, both as victim and perpetrator, in violent conflict with many of the leading families of his native county proved no bar to Thomas enjoying a highly successful career. By suing out a general pardon in February 1456 he was able to free himself from the inconvenience of the indictments pending against him, and in the following July he was appointed to the quorum of the bench in Lindsey, where his wife’s estates lay.13 C67/41, m. 7. The main consequence of his early experiences seems to have been either to cement an already existing relationship with the duke of York or else to establish one. By 20 Mar. 1456 Thomas was close enough to the duke to be constituted his attorney-general in all courts at a generous annual fee of £8. No doubt it was in this capacity that, on three occasions between July 1457 and May 1459, he received assignments on the duke’s behalf in the Exchequer.14 E159/232, commissiones rot. 5d; E403/810, m. 10; 816, m. 3; 819, m. 2. This connexion and his master’s increasing alienation from the royal court explains the course of our MP’s career in the late 1450s. In November 1458 he was removed from the bench of Lindsey, and at the same time he lost his post as collector of customs at Ipswich. The grant to him of a pardon, enrolled on the patent roll in March 1460, may have been an attempt by the Lancastrian regime to regain his loyalty.15 CFR, xix. 197, 214; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 598-9. If so, it failed. The change of regime in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton on the following 10 July restored his fortunes. On 31 July he was appointed customs’ controller at Hull, and on 25 Aug. the electors of his adopted county returned him to Parliament in company with the committed Yorkist, Humphrey Bourgchier*.16 CPR, 1452-61, p. 590; Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. i. 76.

After Edward IV’s accession the Blount brothers found their support generously rewarded and, initially at least, our MP made more considerable gains than his elder brother. In July 1461 he was appointed to the receivership of the duchy of Lancaster honour of Bolingbroke with a £20 annuity assigned upon the honour until he should be rewarded with an office of that value. In the following month he added the receivership of lands forfeited by Edmund, earl of Richmond, Thomas, Lord Roos, and Sir Richard Tunstall, and, in February 1462, that of the King’s lands in Lincolnshire.17 R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 579; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 26, 39, 111. These grants put him in charge of a very substantial estate in that county, which must in turn have eased his task as sheriff for the two successive terms from November 1461. Further, his grants of office were soon supplemented by more valuable grants of land. In May 1462, ‘for his good service to the King and his father’, he was rewarded with the grant in tail-male of the manor of Melton Ross and other lands in Lindsey to the annual value of 40 marks, an estate that was re-granted to him in February 1465 after the Act of Resumption of the previous month.18 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 195, 227, 344-5. He had exemption from this Act in respect of grants made to him under the seal of the duchy of Lancaster: PROME, xiii. 202. By this date he had already replaced his brother as treasurer of Calais and, although this office was taken from him in December 1466, when the ‘Act of Retainer’ committed it to the mayor of the Calais staple, his standing was unaffected. Indeed, he was compensated with a life annuity of £80 assigned on two royal manors in Lincolnshire.19 CPR, 1461-7, p.356; PROME, xiii. 347-9; DL37/35/15. At an election held on 26 Apr. 1467 he was once more returned to represent his adopted county in Parliament, this time with another royal servant, Sir Thomas Burgh†. Not surprisingly, he was exempted from the Act of Resumption that this Parliament passed in its first session.20 Lincs. Archit. and Arch. Soc. i. 76.; PROME, xiii. 297-9. His death, on 8 Feb. 1468, came while the Parliament was in recess and cut short a promising career.21 CFR, xx. 197; C140/29/49. The Derbys. inquisition taken on his death wrongly gives the date as 8 Feb. 1467.

The benefits of royal patronage insured that Thomas, judged by the standards of younger sons of even the greatest gentry families, died a wealthy man. His first wife had brought him land, and, on her death in 1462, he had made a further addition to his estates by marriage to the widow of Thomas Browe. Thomas, who met his death in the Yorkist cause during the campaign of 1460-1, had not lived to inherit the family patrimony, but, although his widow did not have dower, she did have a life interest in the manor of Woodhead in Rutland under the terms of the contract for her first marriage. Blount entered into negotiations with her father-in-law, John Browe, to turn this into something more. On 6 July 1467, a few days after the end of the first session of a Parliament in which both men sat, Browe had enrolled on the close roll a release he had formerly made to his feoffees in the manor with the intention that, on Isabel’s death, they should hold the manor to the use of our MP and his heirs. There seems little reason to doubt that this sale was negotiated between the two men when they were at Westminster.22 C1/42/100-1; CCR, 1461-8, p. 439.

On Blount’s death the lands of his first wife and the manor of Woodhead descended to their son Robert, born in the London parish of St. Sepulchre by Newgate on 11 Nov. 1458 at a time when our MP was engaged in representing the duke of York in the central courts.23 C140/73/85. The boy’s uncle, Lord Mountjoy, acted quickly to acquire his wardship and marriage. On payment of 400 marks the Crown granted them to him on 13 Feb. 1468, that is, even before Thomas’s inquisitions post mortem had been held. This probably represented a bargain, especially after Mountjoy was able to secure for his ward an exemption from the 1473 Act of Resumption with respect to the grant of Melton Ross and other lands.24 CPR, 1467-77, p. 61; PROME, xiv. 172. Nevertheless, the ward’s estate was encumbered by the dower of his stepmother, although this was not assigned until 15 Mar. 1475. The delay may be explained by her marriage without licence to Thomas Bryan, chief justice of the common pleas from May 1471.25 The couple were pardoned for marrying without licence on 24 Nov. 1474 and had a writ for the assignment of dower four days later: CPR, 1467-77, p. 477; C140/73/62.

Although our MP settled at Girsby in the early 1450s little evidence survives of his connexions with other Lincolnshire men. His first wife’s lands appear to have brought him into conflict with another of the shire’s MPs, John Newport II*, who was probably her stepfather and had had the keeping by royal grant of some of her lands during her minority. In Easter term 1454, he and Agnes sued Newport for close-breaking at Girsby and taking away three chests containing charters.26 CP40/773, rot. 236. The fact that Blount’s son and heir was born in London suggests the possibility that he spent little time in the county. The frequency with which his lands seem to have fallen prey to the depredations of his lesser neighbours is certainly consistent with lengthy periods of non-residence.27 e.g. CP40/780, rot. 416; 798, rot.37d; KB27/771, rots. 19, 56d.