CLEMENS, Thomas

Clemens’s parentage is obscure, but he may have been a son or other kinsman of Richard Clemens who in 1450 was said to hold 40s. worth of property in Cornwall, and alongside whom he witnessed a Liskeard property transaction in December 1447.17 E179/87/92; Cornw. RO, Connock-Marshall mss, CM232. No details of Thomas’s education have been discovered, but it is clear that he trained in the law, and by the early 1440s was practicing as an attorney in the Westminster law courts.18 CP40/724, rot. 315; 727, rots. 306, 401; 730, rot. 301. Nevertheless, at the time of his first return to the Commons in 1442 he was still a relatively obscure man-of-law, and he clearly owed his election to his local credentials in his home town of Liskeard.

As Clemens grew in standing in his profession, and found increasingly frequent employment with a range of individuals and corporations, mostly in Cornwall,19 C1/25/79; KB27/735, rot. 49; 743, rot. 26; 746, rex rot. 45d; 750, rot. 43d; 752, rot. 48; Cornw. RO, Launceston bor. recs. B/Laus/143, m. 1d; Edgcombe mss, ME681. so his income also increased, enabling him to invest some of the profits of his legal practice in the acquisition of lands in his native county. By the end of his life, his holdings encompassed some 500 acres in Liskeard, nearby Menheniot, St. Mabyn and elsewhere in Cornwall, and probably produced revenue far in excess of the £5 p.a. at which they were valued at the time.20 E210/759; C140/41/42; C1/33/186, 54/276, 58/367-70; CP40/817, rot. 510; KB9/249/30. Rents aside, an important source of income from these holdings were the profits of the tin industry, in which Clemens had interests, as his occasional appearance as a plaintiff in the stannary courts suggests.21 SC2/157/9, rot. 2d.

It was during the 1440s that Clemens was drawn into the orbit of one of the leading Cornishmen of his day, the duke of Exeter’s retainer Thomas Bodulgate, an esquire of Henry VI’s household, a connexion that would shape the course of his career for much of the remainder of the reign. Clemens had perhaps first come to Bodulgate’s attention during the 1442 Parliament, when the older man had been one of the knights of the shire for Cornwall, and later that year he was employed by Bodulgate as his attorney in the court of common pleas. He would perform similar services for him on later occasions.22 CP40/727, rot. 401; KB27/742, rot. 136d; 755, rot. 5. Neither man is known to have sat in the Commons in either 1445 or 1447, but in early 1449 they were both returned once again by their respective constituencies. Unlike Bodulgate, who was not re-elected that autumn, Clemens returned to Westminster for the second Parliament of 1449, but no details of what part, if any, he played in that turbulent assembly have come to light. What is certain is that he maintained his ties with Bodulgate, alongside whom he was appointed constable of the royal castle of Tintagel in September 1452. Bodulgate was very much the senior partner in this appointment, and it seems likely that Clemens had been chosen as his colleague to take care of the actual duties of the office in the far south-west.

Occasional appointments to ad hoc commissions followed, but in the autumn of 1455 even these dried up, and Clemens’s career of office holding under the Crown remained unimpressive. It is possible that his relations with Bodulgate had cooled, for although the two men continued to share the constableship of Tintagel, by the summer of 1459 they were in open conflict. The background to their disagreement is uncertain, but it may in some way have been connected with the de Brune inheritance which was then in dispute between Bodulgate and, among other claimants, the Somerset gentleman Peter Shetford*, for Shetford headed the list of south-westerners (which also included Clemens) whose offences were submitted to the adjudication of a high-powered commission (headed by Bodulgate’s patron, the duke of Exeter) in June of that year.23 CPR, 1452-61, p. 518; KB27/793, rot. 3.

Clearly, Clemens’s disaffection with the Lancastrian administration was absolute, for following the victory of the Yorkist earls at the battle of Northampton in June 1460 he rapidly rose to considerable prominence in the administration they established in Henry VI’s name. In this, he may have been assisted by the family ties he had established in the Yorkist camp through the marriage of his eldest son to the heiress of the Beaucombs of Beaucomb, who had for several generations headed the household of the father and grandfather of the earl of March’s confidant, John Dynham of Nutwell.24 C1/27/74; CP25(1)/294/77/128; H. Kleineke, ‘Dinham Fam.’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1998), 115. In the summer and autumn of 1460 Clemens was repeatedly appointed to royal commissions in the south-west, and in November he was added to the quorum of the Cornish bench. Following Edward IV’s accession, further preferment followed. Clemens was now granted the constableship of Tintagel in his own right, and also inherited Bodulgate’s erstwhile post as parker of Liskeard. On 1 May 1461 he was placed at the head of the entire duchy administration in Cornwall as steward of the duchy in the county, and although in December he had to disgorge that appointment in favour of King Edward’s close friend Humphrey Stafford IV*, Lord Stafford of Southwick, he retained his other posts, to which he had added in July the controllership of the King’s works in Cornwall.

As an important Crown servant, as well as a prominent lawyer, Clemens’s professional services were widely sought after throughout the West Country. Apart from the towns of Liskeard, Saltash and Truro, which employed him as their steward in these years, he acted as legal counsel for the duke of Buckingham, the bishop and dean and chapter of Exeter, the priors of St. German’s and Tywardreath and the Pomeroys of Berry Pomeroy, and estate steward of Sir John Marney of Colquite.25 CP40/837, rots. 24d, 126; SC6/822/10; 1242/4-6; Liskeard bor. recs., B/Lis/265, mm. 1, 2; B/Lis/20/2/58; Cornw. RO, Arundell (Tywardreath) mss, ART1/34, 3/26. Clemens might thus have been content with his lot, but it seems that he harboured a grudge, perhaps on account of his dismissal from the duchy stewardship, and he thus seems to have been an early recruit to the rebellion fomented by the King’s brother, George, duke of Clarence, and their cousin, the earl of Warwick, in 1469-70. In April 1470 the lawyer was among the known rebels whose estates were ordered to be confiscated, and less than two months later he was accorded the dubious honour of having a commission of arrest appointed for him alone.26 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 218, 220. This commission was probably a direct result of a violent incident in the manor court of Liskeard, presided over by the deputy steward of the duchy, John Glyn, a filacer of the court of common pleas with whom Clemens had long been acquainted. On 8 Jan. 1470 two dozen of Clemens’s servants, armed to the teeth, had invaded the court, and soon began a brawl in the course of which one of them shot Glyn in the face with a broad arrow. Having torn up the court rolls and robbed the wounded man of his purse, they then dragged him away and locked him up for several hours, denying him either water or the attention of a physician or leech. In order to strengthen their victim’s conviction that he was to be done to death, unless he complied with their demand that he should release to Clemens all actions pending between them and never sue his captors for their actions, they summoned a priest to administer the last rites. The cleric, Clemens’s servant Robert Knoll, refused Glyn even the comfort of the sacrament, saying ‘malyssyously and with rigours wordys ... “If þou wilte not graunte to do make this obligacion, stande at thyn owene aventure and Juparte”’.27 C1/1/144, 43/58-64, 48/121; PROME, xiv. 78-83; SC8/29/1439.

In the event, Glyn regained his freedom and survived his ordeal. Once at liberty, he lost little time in striking back at his enemy. Throughout the late spring of 1470, so Clemens complained later that year, Glyn and his servants had lain in ambush for him, and had all but prevented him from going about his business. Yet, in October Edward IV’s exile and Henry VI’s restoration once more placed Clemens in the ascendant. On 20 Oct. his attorney, John Penlyn†, appeared in the court of common pleas, and charged Glyn, who was present attending to his duties as a filacer, with repeated threatening behaviour towards his employer, claiming the vast sum of 1,000 marks in damages.28 C1/43/60; CP40/837, rots. 24d, 126. Days earlier, Clemens’s men had ransacked Glyn’s house at Morvale, driven away the livestock there and from the filacer’s other manors, and had even emptied the larder and cellar of their provisions, taking cider, ale, beer and wine, as well as six ‘flikkes’ of bacon.

If Clemens had been stripped of his offices in early 1470, he was evidently restored to them by the Readeption government.29 SC6/1291/3/13. Edward IV’s restoration in the spring of 1471 thus heralded his final undoing. Although he sued out a general pardon from the victorious King in May 1472 to circumvent a writ for his arrest sued out by Glyn a month earlier, it was clearly only a matter of time before Glyn would succeed in taking his revenge.30 KB27/843, rots. 17, 21. This Clemens was not prepared to wait for. Learning that Glyn would be visiting the fair at Tavistock on 29 Aug. 1472, he sent a group of his servants to waylay him. They encountered their victim at four o’clock in the morning at Over Wringworthy, and cut him to pieces, splitting his head into four parts. To make doubly sure, they then severed an arm and a leg, before decapitating the mutilated corpse, and making off with the dead man’s cloak, purse, signet, sword and dagger.31 PROME, xiv. 78-83; SC8/29/1439; C67/49, m. 29.

Parliament assembled not long after the murder, and Glyn’s distraught widow successfully petitioned the Commons for an act of attainder against her husband’s murderer. The murdered filacer’s synonymous son, a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, proved even more resourceful, and with the support of the King’s brother, the duke of Clarence, secured Clemens’s arrest and imprisonment in London’s Newgate gaol on 16 Nov. There he languished for two months until, probably succumbing to the conditions of the notorious prison, he died on 17 Jan. 1473.32 KB27/846, rot. 31. Clemens was survived by his two sons, the elder of whom, Thomas, was said to be 22 and more, but was probably somewhat older as he had been made one of his father’s feoffees in 1461.33 C140/41/42. Thomas inherited his father’s quarrel with the Glyns along with his lands and a range of other unfinished business.34 C1/54/363. The younger John Glyn† continued to pursue those indicted in Parliament for his own father’s homicide. Within months of the MP’s death he petitioned the chancellor, asserting that the younger Thomas Clemens was unlawfully seeking financial gain by suing an action of debt over the bond extorted from Glyn senior in January 1470, which had been cancelled by Parliament. Clemens responded by raiding Glyn’s mansion at Morvale on 26 Oct. 1475 with a band of armed followers, taking goods worth £100, and imprisoning the filacer’s widow. Glyn for his part made full use of his influence at Westminster and secured the appointment of two royal commissions to have Clemens arrested. In addition, he took the precaution of bribing the sheriff of Cornwall, Sir John Fortescue†, to ensure that he would do his office properly. This latter ploy failed, as Fortescue simply took the bribe, but failed to keep his promise, and it is uncertain whether Clemens was ever brought to justice.35 C1/59/107; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 552, 573; KB9/341/44. When he died in June 1482 his brother John had to sue their father’s feoffees for access to his inheritance. By a curious twist of fate a kinsman of the family’s old adversaries, Thomas Glyn, stood surety for him in Chancery in this undertaking.36 C1/54/276; Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica ed. Nichols, v. 285.