PALMER, Thomas

On 28 Dec. 1392 William Palmer entered into an agreement with Robert Digby at Digby’s manor of Tilton-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire. Palmer undertook to marry Digby’s daughter for a portion of 120 marks, contracting to settle his lands in Frolesworth and Leire in the same county as jointure.9 Leics. RO, Peake mss, DE 221/1/2/25. It is instructive to compare the 120 marks he received with his wife with the portion of 40 marks – to secure a jointure worth £5 p.a. – he gave his daughter Margaret on her marriage to John Blaby, one of the lesser Leics. gentry, in 1405: Peake mss, DE221/1/2/8. This was a very modest estate, described in a later inventory of the Palmer lands as no more than four messuages and virgates, six acres of meadow and 6s. rent, and valued at only 70s. in 1467, but, at this early stage of his career, it represented the bulk of Palmer’s landed property. If we may judge from this inventory William’s patrimony consisted of these lands and an equally small estate in Rockingham. The bargain was thus an unequal one, not only in the ratio between jointure and portion, which greatly favoured the groom, but also in the disparity of social rank between the groom and his father-in-law, the head of an ancient gentry family and MP for Leicestershire in 1373. Part of the reason for these variations from the norm lay in Digby’s indebtedness – the portion was to be paid not in cash but rather by a ten-year lease to the groom, at a nominal rent, of the manor of Digby in Kesteven – but William had other recommendations beyond his willingness to accept a long lease as payment of the portion. He was a lawyer of talent, who, before the end of his career 30 years later, had seen service on the quorum of the benches of four counties. Moreover, although Digby’s daughter did not live to enjoy the benefits, in the last years of his career he was wealthy enough significantly to extend his landed estate.

This Palmer did, like many careerists, by taking advantage of the acute financial difficulties of an established landed family. Sir John Trussell†, a substantial landowner in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, had been forced into debt through the expenses of litigation and the heavy securities demanded of him for his involvement in disorder. In 1416 he alienated to our MP’s father his manor in Holt with lands in neighbouring Prestgrave, Drayton and Bringhurst in south-east Leicestershire, and soon after similarly surrendered his manor of Westhall in nearby East Carlton, just over the river Welland in Northamptonshire. It is likely that these properties had been mortgaged, and that Palmer had taken over the mortgages which Trussell then proved unable to redeem.10 Peake mss, DE221/10/5/4; CP25(1)/126/73/9, 18; CCR, 1413-19, pp. 289, 348-9, 519. Since Palmer had already acquired the other manor in East Carlton through his second marriage to Anne, daughter and heiress of Nicholas Ward, his interest in Trussell’s property is understandable, and his son was later able further to exploit that knight’s difficulties. William’s success enabled him to establish two of his sons among the lesser gentry: our MP inherited the slender Palmer patrimony with the lands his father had purchased, and his younger half-brother the property of the Ward heiress.

But, if William was a successful man, his eldest son, the subject of this biography, was even more so. For over 50 years Thomas Palmer was one of the most important men of business in the east Midlands. His father died between 15 Feb., when appointed to a gaol delivery commission, and 14 May 1424, when his widowed stepmother farmed her manor of Easthall in East Carlton to her son, John Palmer, our MP and John Mulsho of Finedon in Northamptonshire.11 C66/413, m. 33d; CCR, 1435-41, pp. 449-50. There was once a brass to William and his two wives in the church of East Carlton: VCH Northants. Fams. 241; J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 293. Our MP had already begun to take a place in local affairs before his father’s death. In response to a royal writ dated 4 Dec. 1422, he was elected as one of the verderers in the forest of Rockingham.12 C242/10/7. This election, together with the proximity of East Carlton to the castle of Rockingham, suggests the possibility of an early association with Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre, who held the castle as part of her recently-restored dower, but there is no direct evidence to support this supposition. Nonetheless, the Crown’s grant to him on 4 Nov. 1423 of a 12-year lease of the duchy of Cornwall manor there implies that even at this early stage of his career he was not without influential friends.13 CFR, xv. 59. When a new commission of the peace was issued for Northamptonshire in July 1424 he took his lately-deceased father’s place on the bench although not on the quorum. Four years later he was appointed to the first of many ad hoc commissions of local government. It is possible that in the meantime he spent a brief period in France: his name appears in a list of those in the retinue of John, duke of Bedford, in the sixth year of Henry VI’s reign. Such military service sits rather uneasily with what else is known of his career, but, since his name appears alongside those of several Northamptonshire men, such as John Mulsho and Richard Knightley*, he is the most likely candidate.14 Harl. 782, f. 47v.

Palmer first became active in the land market in the late 1420s, probably investing the liquid profits of his father’s career for his own had hardly yet begun. On 24 June 1425 Sir John Trussell’s son, John, who had succeeded his father in the previous year, quitclaimed to him all his right in ‘Trussell’s manor’ in Holt and the manor of Westhall in East Carlton, the end of a process of acquisition begun by Palmer’s father. Far more significantly, by a fine levied in 1427, our MP acquired the other manor in Holt together with a manor in neighbouring Prestgrave and property at Ashley, a few miles away in Northamptonshire, from Joan, widow of Sir George Nowers, daughter and heir of John Olney of Holt.15 CP40/658, cart. rot. 1, 1d; Peake mss, DE221/4/1/57, 66; CP25(1)/126/74/10, 179/93/43. Joan disinherited John, her son by Sir George Nowers. It was probably at this time that he made Holt his home. At this date he was also advancing money on mortgage. By a further fine levied in 1427 the manor of Hothorpe in Northamptonshire was settled him in fee, and at first sight this looks like another purchase of a Trussell property. But, although a third of the manor was said to have been in the hands of Margaret, widow of Sir John Trussell, and among the deforciants was Alexander Boson, the husband of her daughter and heiress, it was the deforciants and the heirs of John Culpepper* who quitclaimed the manor to Palmer. The manor does not earlier appear among Culpepper’s properties nor later among those of our MP, and the most likely explanation of this transaction is that it was a mortgage subsequently redeemed by the heirs of Trussell.16 Peake mss, DE221/4/1/66; CP25(1)/126/74/10; 179/93/43, 44.

This considerable augmentation of Palmer’s estates was accompanied by the development of close links with several of the leading gentry in the immediate vicinity of Holt. He had a ready entree into local society through the head of his late mother’s family, Everard Digby*, who had a residence at Stoke Dry, a few miles away. The two men long maintained a close association for over 30 years, one that survived their divergent political sympathies in the 1450s. Their family relationship was recognized in a fine levied in 1425, probably on the occasion of Digby’s marriage to Elizabeth Hunt, by which our MP, his brother, William Palmer, and his sister, Margaret Blaby, were given remainder interests, albeit distant ones, in the Digby manor of Billesdon, not far from Holt.17 CP25(1)/126/74/6. It is also possible that Palmer’s first wife was a Boyville, a leading Leicestershire family established at Stockerston. This is implied by a conveyance of 1425 by which John Boyville* settled the Palmer estate in Rockingham on our MP and his first wife in joint tail general. Not improbably he was here acting as the agent for the settlement of his sister’s jointure, but even if the two men were not related by marriage they were bound together by friendship, for Boyville often acted for our MP in property transactions. Another leading member of the Leicestershire gentry with whom Palmer was closely associated from the late 1420s was John Bellers*. On 14 Mar. 1429 Bellers granted him a life annuity of a mark for his counsel, the first direct indication that Palmer was, like his father, a man of legal expertise. In the same year our MP was involved in a curious conveyance as one of the trustees of the goods and chattels of Sir John Basings of Empingham in Rutland: on Christmas day the trustees re-conveyed these moveables to Sir John for him to trade with to the benefit of the trustees.18 Assoc. Archit. Socs. Reps. and Pprs. xxxvi. 168; JUST1/1537, rot. 27; J. Nichols, Leics. ii (1), 243; Peake mss, DE221/4/1/42; Vis. Rutland (Harl. Soc. lxxiii), 14. Palmer’s connexions in Northamptonshire appear to have been less extensive, and this probably reflects his move from Rockingham, where he seems to have resided in the early years of his career, to Holt. In the late 1420s, however, he was numbered among the feoffees of William Tyndale of Deene in that county, and it was in these years that he began a lengthy connexion with the Northamptonshire lawyer, William Tresham*, and with Thomas Mulsho*.19 CIPM, xxii. 740; Peake mss, DE221/12/1/28; Add. Chs. 797, 803, 810, 811.

The expansion of Palmer’s estates came at an opportune moment for it corresponded with the death of his first wife, leaving him able to offer a substantial jointure in the search for a new bride. His lack of male issue by his first wife added urgency to his search and also left him readier to settle this jointure to the advantage of any issue he might have by his new wife. His choice fixed on Elizabeth, one of the two daughters and coheirs-presumptive of the soldier, Sir William Byshoppeston, and he made a handsome settlement upon her. On 17 Jan. 1429 two of his feoffees, his half-brother, John Palmer, and Richard Greystoke, parson of Cranoe, granted the manors of Holt, once of John Olney, and Keythorpe, a few miles to the south-west of Holt, to him and his new wife and their issue, thus giving any children the marriage might produce preference over the two daughters he had by his first wife.20 Peake mss, DE221/4/1/96. Greystoke was one of his father’s executors: CP40/658, rot. 157. The marriage explains Palmer’s admission, in 1439, to the prestigious guild of the Holy Cross in Stratford-upon-Avon, near his father-in-law’s home at Bishopton: Reg. Gild. of Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon ed. Macdonald (Dugdale Soc. xlii), 154. Much later, in 1469, the couple alienated to the guild a half burgage in the town: ibid. 284, 466. The inclusion of the manor of Keythorpe, valued at as much as £24 p.a. in a rental of 1467, as the main part of the jointure shows that the groom had already made a further major addition to his lands (although the feet of fines imply that this acquisition did not take place until 1435). And it is tempting to conclude that this settlement was prompted by the expectation of further gain through the new wife, particularly as she later inherited a share of her father’s lands. Yet, when the marriage was made a brother stood between her and inheritance, and it is likely that the motive for our MP’s generosity was social rather than material.

Palmer’s move to Holt and the continuing additions to his Leicestershire properties explain why, in the early 1430s, the main focus of his local interests switched to that county from Northamptonshire. After a term as escheator of the joint bailiwick of Northamptonshire and Rutland,21 His term of office led him into litigation in the Exchequer of pleas: in July 1432 the abbot of Westminster complained that on 8 Feb. 1429 Palmer, as escheator, had wrongfully taken £9 in money from his tenants in the vill of Deene. This is a curious action since the tenants were the feoffees of William Tyndale, one of whom was Palmer himself: E13/139, rot. 35d. he was, in 1430, appointed to the same office in Leicestershire and Warwickshire, which his father had held in 1406-7. This realignment of his administrative interests was confirmed shortly before the conclusion of his term with his addition to the Leicestershire bench and his removal, in July 1432, from the Northamptonshire one.22 The abandonment of his administrative interests in Northants. led to a royal order for his replacement as a verderer in July 1439: CCR, 1435-41, p. 220. Recognition by the electors of the former county was quick to follow for, on 18 June 1433, he was returned to Parliament. Curiously, at the next election, held on 8 Sept. 1435, he headed the list of attestors, and while it was natural that he should attend the county court it is surprising to find him noted as the most senior of the gentry present. If, however, this indicates some irregularity in the conduct of the election, it is the only such indication.23 C219/14/4, 5. In the meantime Palmer’s acquisition of Keythorpe was confirmed by a fine levied in 1435 by which Thomas Neville and Margaret, his wife, presumably the former tenants of the manor, surrendered their interest in it to him and Elizabeth Byshoppeston, and three years later he acquired lands in Tugby, Goadby and Billesdon, all in the immediate neighbourhood of Keythorpe, from the same source. In the tax returns of 1435-6 he is credited with an annual income of £46, which, in view of the fact that most of his major purchases of land had already taken place, is likely to be a significant underestimate.24 CP25(1)/126/75/34, 47; E179/192/59.

On 29 June 1437, described as ‘of Holt, gentleman, late of Rockingham’, Palmer sued out a general pardon for something more than mere insurance. A few days later he appeared personally in the court of King’s bench to plead it against the King’s suit, pending since as long before as 1426, for his failure to bring to court a Staffordshire yeoman, for whom he had stood bail. In the late 1430s and early 1440s he frequently acted as a mainpernor for those answering indictments in the same court.25 C67/38, m. 14; KB27/705, rex rot. 20; 708, rex rots. 7, 24; 726, rex rot. 27. His later absence from this role implies that he then abandoned legal practice at Westminster. Many lawyers of ability served a term as escheator or took a seat in the Commons early in their careers but went on to concentrate their energies on the professional advancement to be won in the central courts. Palmer’s younger neighbour, Richard Neel*, is an excellent example. Our MP, however, took the alternative route, maintaining a very active local presence in county administration to the exclusion of such advancement. In November 1439 he became one of the very few men to be appointed to the office of escheator for the third time, an appointment which must have come very soon after his second election to represent his adopted county in Parliament.26 It must be doubtful how faithfully he was able to exercise the office for he was absent in Westminster for the two sessions of what proved a lengthy assembly. Nor were his administrative activities confined to Leicestershire. He had been nominated to the Rutland bench in 1434, shortly after the conclusion of his first Parliament. At first sight this is surprising. The compact estate he had built up around Holt lay near the Rutland border, but there is no evidence that he had acquired property in that county. The justification for his appointment lay in the fact that Rutland was too small a county to produce lawyers of sufficient rank to staff the quorum. Indeed, with a quorum of only two, exclusive of the assize justices, our MP was obliged not only to sit regularly at the sessions but also to act as the county’s custos rotulorum.27 That he held this office in the 1440s is suggested by the appearance of his name on the dorse of writs of certiorari and terminari directed to the Rutland j.p.s.: e.g. KB9/235/48; 254/26.

Such office only added to standing, and it is not surprising that, as an active member of two county benches, Palmer was readily able to find places in the service of the local nobility.28 He was rarely absent from the Leics. sessions during the 1430s and was probably a regular attender for over 40 years: E101/509/34. He was most closely attached to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and it is unlikely to be coincidental that he is first found in that lord’s service when Cromwell was expanding his considerable estates into Rutland and Northamptonshire. From 1439, when he was involved in Cromwell’s questionable acquisition of the manors of Ketton and South Luffenham from the impoverished Rutland esquire, Thomas Greenham*, he acted as one of his agents in many land transactions in these counties and elsewhere – most notably in the purchase of the valuable manors of Collyweston in Northamptonshire and Ampthill in Bedfordshire – and their association remained a close one until the lord’s death in 1456.29 CP40/712, rot. 110d; CCR, 1435-41, p. 476; 1441-7, pp. 219, 222-3, 229, 289, 352; 1447-54, p. 238; 1454-61, pp. 112-13; CPR, 1441-6, p. 268; 1452-61, pp. 200, 341; CP25(1)/179/95/101, 103, 110, 143; Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Candlesby deeds 36b; F. Peck, Antiquarian Annals of Stamford; Lincs. AO, Holywell mss, H71/15, 16, 18, 22-27; Westminster Abbey muns. 14178; CP40/765, rot. 274. To Cromwell, treasurer of England from 1433 to 1443, Palmer probably owed both the renewal of his lease of the manor of Rockingham in November 1442 and the grant at the Exchequer in the following February of the custody of the neighbouring manor of Little Weldon, in the King’s hands through the death of the life tenant, Isabel, wife of John Cheyne I*, at an annual rent of £8 6s. 8d.30 CFR, xvii. 248, 250. To these benefits he added those of service to other of the Midland nobility. In her will of 1445 Elizabeth, widow of Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor, mentioned him among her annuitants. Three years later William, Lord Zouche, appointed him his steward of his Leicestershire lands and granted him a life annuity of £5 p.a. for holding this office and ‘pro bono consilio’.31 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 315, 468; Peake mss, DE221/10/5/26.

Such service did nothing to either lessen or intensify Palmer’s involvement in local government. On 21 Dec. 1441, he was again elected for Leicestershire, on this occasion with another leading lawyer, Richard Neel. While at Westminster he acted as a mainpernor in Chancery for Richard Pittes, who had formerly been one of his fellow verderers in the forest of Rockingham, and for other tenants of the manor of Brigstock.32 C219/15/2; CFR, xvii. 211. In November 1442 he completed the last of his important purchases: Thomas Baud* quitclaimed the manor of Lubenham, a few miles to south of Holt, to him, Elizabeth, William Tresham, Everard Digby, John Bellers, John Boyville and others.33 CP25(1)/126/76/56.

Two years later, on the death of Sir William Byshoppeston, Palmer secured a further augmentation of his lands. His second wife’s brother had met his death campaigning in France in the 1430s, and this had prompted her father to make a complicated settlement of the family inheritance. By a final concord levied in 1439, to which our MP was a party, Sir William settled his entire inheritance on himself for the life of one Thomas Chapman of Drayton, with remainders to three different sets of feoffees, who were to hold successively for the lives of three other named individuals. Only on the termination of these life interests were the lands to pass to the issue of his late wife Philippa. One can only speculate on the purposes of this conveyance, but it is significant that those for whose lives Sir William and the feoffees were successively to hold were all associates of Palmer.34 Warws. Feet of Fines (Dugdale Soc. xviii), 159-60. Chapman and John Whitside were his tenants in Holt, and William Bourdon was parson of Rockingham. For his connexion with the other ‘life’ Robert Wyville: CP40/679, rot. 307d; CP25(1)/126/75/27. An obvious possibility is that the settlement was intended to repay loans the latter had extended to his father-in-law, who had been ransomed by the French in the 1430s and is known, on other evidence, to be in poor financial health. Whatever its purpose, the conveyance had run its course by 1449, when Sir William’s inheritance was jointly in the hands of our MP and William Catesby*, the wife of the other coheiress.35 Between Mich. 1449 and 1451 Palmer drew about £50 from the issues: SC6/1043/29, 30. His wife was also coheiress to the inheritance of her mother, Philippa, da. of William Wilcotes† of North Leigh, Oxon., but since she was entitled to only a tenth share this made little difference to our MP’s income: CIPM, xxvi. 403; E40/5397. Thereafter, because this property was not ideally placed to supplement the compact estate he had built up, Palmer bargained away part of his interest in Catesby’s favour. For example, in June 1460 he sold him his part of the wood called ‘Bysshwode’ in Lapworth. He also seems to have been content to leave to Catesby the defence of the Byshoppeston title against John Brome II*. He did, however, retain the Warwickshire manors of Thornton in Nether Eatington and Lyndon End in Solihull.36 CAD, iii. A4419, 4500; iv. A9012, 9439; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 118; VCH Warws. iv. 223; v. 80; Add. Ch. 41651; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 734.

By the 1440s Palmer had built on the foundation laid by his father to make himself one of the richest of the Leicestershire gentry. His arrival among the county elite was reflected in the royal grant to him, on 1 May 1448, ‘of special grace’ and ‘without payment of any fine or great fee of the seal’, of licence to empark 300 acres of land in Holt or Keythorpe and of free warren in his demesne lands there and elsewhere.37 CChR, vi. 100. It was at this period, however, that he formed political affiliations which rendered unlikely further marks of Lancastrian favour. His alienation from Henry VI’s government was probably a reflection of that of Cromwell’s and to have been connected with one event in particular: the murder on 23 Sept. 1446 of John, bastard son of the same Sir John Basings for whom our MP had acted as a trustee in the late 1420s. A month later, Palmer, with Cromwell and others, as j.p.s for Rutland, took indictments of the murderers, but their efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice were to be frustrated by the corruption of James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele.38 Palmer, in his capacity as custos rotulorum, delivered the indictments into the ct. of KB: KB9/254/26. Saye used his considerable influence to secure a pardon for Sir John’s sister and common-law heiress, Alice Makworth, who had undoubtedly commissioned the crime, in return for a grant of the Basings lands in Kent. To make matters worse, on 6 May 1448, Palmer was obliged to enter into a bond of 300 marks to Saye that Agnes, the widow of Thomas Basings, Alice’s long-dead brother, would surrender her dower and jointure interest in these properties. What is not clear is why he was assumed to have influence over Agnes, although the survival among his family papers of a copy of Sir John’s will of 1445 attests to his close involvement in the dispute. On 22 Nov. 1448 Saye acknowledged that the terms of the recognizance had been fulfilled, but this can have done little to reconcile our MP to what had passed.39 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 56-57. For a full discussion of this dispute: S.J. Payling, ‘Murder, Motive and Punishment’, EHR, cxiii. 2-11. So direct an experience of the corruption of the court is likely to have weakened Palmer’s loyalty to the Lancastrian regime, although, for him as for many others, open commitment to the cause of the opposition was slow to develop.

On 6 Feb. 1449 Palmer was elected to represent Leicestershire in Parliament for the fourth time. The return was irregular in that no attestors are named, but even though the other successful candidate was Thomas Everingham*, a Household servant and retainer of John, Viscount Beaumont, it is difficult to discern an overt political dimension to the election.40 C219/15/6; E. Acheson, Leics. in 15th Cent. 127. Nevertheless, in the context of what had gone immediately before, it may be significant that Palmer had already established that association with the duke of York which assumed such importance in his later career. At an unknown date shortly before August 1448 and on the duke’s behalf, he had bound himself in the sum of £50 to Bartholomew Brokesby*, from whom York had purchased Le George in Grantham. Further, on 27 Feb. 1449, a few days after the Parliament assembled, he was one of those to whom the duke granted his manor of Hambleton in Rutland, and, though he was here acting for Cromwell as purchaser, it is not unlikely, given his association with both lords, that he had been involved as an intermediary in negotiating the sale.41 DL29/212/3276; KB27/752, rot. 32; CPR, 1446-52, p. 218; CP25(1)/192/9/14. A few months after the conclusion of this Parliament, Palmer addressed himself to a matter of more immediate personal concern: the future of his daughters in the absence of a male heir. He contracted Katherine, one of his two daughters by his second wife, in marriage to William Neville, son and heir-apparent of Thomas Neville (d.1482) of Rolleston in Nottinghamshire. On 16 Jan. 1450 he and his feoffees granted his recently-acquired manor of Lubenham to the couple and the heirs of their bodies, saving the remainder to himself and his second wife; in return, Thomas Neville and his feoffees settled on the couple the manor of Rigsby in Lincolnshire and the reversion, expectant on the death of himself and his wife, of the manor of Screveton in Nottinghamshire.42 Peake mss, DE220/MTD/54-56. The settlement of Lubenham in tail suggests that Palmer had abandoned hope of a male heir. Socially the marriage was a good one – the Nevilles were one of the most ancient and wealthiest gentry families in Nottinghamshire – but it is likely that the groom’s main recommendation was his father’s willingness to pay handsomely for the hand of a potentially substantial coheiress.

These arrangements had been made against the distant background of the turbulent Parliament of 1449-50, which saw the fall of the duke of Suffolk. Palmer had not sat in this assembly but he had attended the Leicestershire election of 16 Oct. 1449 to witness the return of two Members, Richard Hotoft* and William Feldyng*, who were supporters of the Court. He was, however, called back into the political fray at the next Parliament. There can be no doubt that his election, on 29 Oct. 1450, to represent Rutland, for the first and only time, is to be interpreted as an aspect of his service to the duke of York. The elections to this Parliament took place in the atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion attendant upon the duke’s sudden return from Ireland, and in several counties were successfully influenced by the electioneering of York and his supporters. Palmer’s return for a county in which his landholdings were negligible is one example of this success; Thomas Mulsho’s return for neighbouring Northamptonshire is another. The question arises as to why our MP was not elected for Leicestershire. The fact that the election for that county was delayed until 12 Nov., six days after Parliament had assembled, suggests a possible answer. The writs of summons were issued on 5 Sept. and hence the Leicestershire election could readily have been held at the county court if not of 17 Sept. then of 15 Oct. The delay implies that it was deliberately held over until after the Rutland election, even though this meant that it could not be held until after Parliament had assembled, and that the results of the two elections were linked. It is thus a fair surmise that Palmer was a candidate in Leicestershire, and that, to avoid a politically divisive contest, he agreed, perhaps after lengthy discussion, to withdraw if he could secure a seat in Rutland. Unusually in the return made by the Leicestershire sheriff four mainpernors were named for each MP. Strikingly, Palmer and his friend Everard Digby stood as mainpernors for John Bellers. The other MP was Robert Staunton*, a follower of Viscount Beaumont. Perhaps Palmer and Bellers had intended to stand as a ‘joint ticket’, but could not be returned because of the candidature of Staunton, who may have represented those who were hostile to the pretensions of the duke of York.43 C219/15/7, 16/1.

Two pieces of evidence suggest that once he arrived at Westminster Palmer took an active part in the proceedings of this important assembly. On 10 Feb. 1451, during the second session, he was appointed to a commission of inquiry into the complaints of soldiers retained to serve in France that Thomas, Lord Hoo, the chancellor of Normandy, and other former captains had detained the wages due to them. The appointment of this commission and Palmer’s nomination to it is likely to have been a concession to the King’s critics in the Commons. On 19 Apr., the last day of this session, York appointed Palmer as steward of all his forest courts in Rockingham, Brigstock and Cliffe, an appointment which can be interpreted either as reward for his support in this Parliament or an attempt to bind him more closely to his service.44 CPR, 1446-52, p. 444; SC6/1115/6.

The recovery of Lancastrian fortunes in the wake of the abortive Yorkist rising at Dartford confronted Palmer with the consequences of his identification with the duke’s cause. On 22 June 1452 he sued out a general pardon, and on the following 6 July he produced in Chancery the mainpernors necessary for its successfully pleading in bar to indictment.45 C67/40, m. 29; C237/43/96, 98. He was wise to take such precautions. On 28 Oct. commissioners of oyer and terminer, touring the east Midlands hearing indictments for treason, arrived at Peterborough. Here the jurors endorsed as ‘billa vera’ the following: Thomas Palmer and Richard Quatermayns*, both ‘of Fotheringhay’, had on 3 Nov. 1450 (three days before the assembly of Parliament) and on other days before and after come together at Fotheringhay and elsewhere in Northamptonshire to plot the ‘mortem et destructionem’ of the King ‘per guerram’ and had procured Thomas Mulsho and others to levy war against him.46 KB9/94/1/2. Other indictments before the same commrs. shows this to have been one of several alleged risings by supporters of York in Nov. 1450: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 88. It has been suggested that the alleged offences are dated 1450 in scribal error for 1451, but, since they fit equally well the known events of both years, the date in the indictments is to be preferred: R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 249; J.S. Roskell, ‘Sir Wm. Oldhall’, Nottingham Med. Studies, v. 104n. These allegations are not to be taken literally. There can be little doubt that they were intended falsely to portray the gathering of York’s retinue for the Parliament of 1450 as a series of risings against the Crown.47 J.W. Watts, Hen. VI, 296n. The naming of our MP does, however, show that in the eyes of the Lancastrian regime he had seriously compromised himself by his support for the duke. Fortunately for him, he was in a position to halt process by pleading his pardon.

Having survived this alarm, Palmer’s career resumed its established pattern. Within two weeks of his indictment he was standing as mainpernor for pardons granted to his son-in-law, William Neville, Everard Digby and the wealthy Nottingham merchant, Thomas Thurland*. On 1 Mar. 1453 he once more attested a Leicestershire parliamentary election; in December 1454 he was one of those nominated to arbitrate the dispute between Digby and Bartholomew Villers over the Clerk of Whissendine inheritance; and in 1455 his feoffees in the manor of Keythorpe – Lord Cromwell, Sir Leonard Hastings*, and his old friends, Digby and John Bellers – had a plea pending against various local clergy for hunting in his free warren there.48 C237/43/95; C219/16/2; CP40/777, rot. 183; 789, rot. 109. In view of his open identification with York in the crisis of 1450-1, it is curious how little effect this appears to have had during the later 1450s. Surprisingly he was summoned, as Rutland’s sole representative, to the controversial great council scheduled to meet in the Lancastrian interest at Leicester on 21 May 1455. Less surprising was his election to represent Leicestershire, along with York’s retainer Sir Leonard Hastings, in the Parliament which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans, but thereafter he continued to be appointed to important commissions when the Lancastrians had resumed control of government, most notably the commission of array of September 1457. This was despite the fact that he remained closely associated with the duke of York: in February 1458 he was numbered, along with such prominent servants of the duke as (Sir) Walter Devereux I* and John Milewater, among those who entered into bonds on his behalf on the marriage of his daughter to John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk.49 PPC, vi. 341; C219/16/3, CAD, iv. A6337. More remarkably, although later evidence demonstrates that he was present on the Yorkist side at the rout of Ludford Bridge on 12 Oct. 1459, he was appointed to the Lancastrian commission of array of the following December for both Leicestershire and Rutland.

One reason why Palmer managed to maintain his place in local affairs despite the increasing militancy of the court party may have been his close friendship with Everard Digby, who, by 1459, had emerged as one of the most important Lancastrian supporters. More significant for the future, however, was an association Palmer formed with William Hastings, son and heir of his former parliamentary colleague and feoffee, Sir Leonard. Their alliance was a natural one. The Hastings family had long been closely identified with the duke of York, but William, like our MP, was one of the Yorkists fortunate enough to escape the attainders of the Parliament which met in the aftermath of the rout. In May 1460 he named Palmer in a feoffment of his entire estate, a feoffment no doubt intended to protect his lands from the consequences of a possible forfeiture.50 HMC Hastings, i. 295-6.

The uncertainty that pervaded the politics of the late 1450s was hardly the ideal background for planning the future of an inheritance, but it was in this period that Palmer completed the settlement put in train by the marriage of his daughter Katherine to William Neville. He levied a very important fine in Easter term 1457, providing for the future division of his own lands, although not those he held in right of his wife, between his four daughters. Not improbably the occasion of this settlement was the marriage of Katherine’s sister Joan to Thomas Rokes†, son and heir-apparent of Thomas Rokes II* of Ascott in Wing, Buckinghamshire, for, by a fine of the same term, the manor of Ascott was settled on the couple and their issue. The division was a complex one. After the deaths of himself and his wife, his two manors in Holt together with land in Medbourne were to pass to Katherine Neville and the heirs of her body, and his manor of Drayton with property in Prestgrave and Bringhurst to Neville and Katherine and the heirs of her body. These manors, together with the manor of Lubenham settled in 1450, were to form the pourparty of the Nevilles. His other principal holdings, the manor of Keythorpe with property in Tugby, Goadby and Billesdon was settled, in remainder expectant on the deaths of himself and his wife, on Katherine’s full sister, Joan, and her husband, Rokes, and the heirs of her body. This left our MP’s two daughters by his first wife to divide between them the modest patrimony of their grandfather. After their father’s death, they were to have his entailed lands in Rockingham, long before settled as their mother’s jointure, Frolesworth and Leire to them and their issue. Unless and until the issue of their half-sisters failed they would inherit nothing more.51 CP25(1)/22/124/18; 293/73/416; VCH Bucks. iii. 453.

This settlement reflects two things, the one reinforcing the other. First, the generous jointure Palmer had settled on his second wife at the time of their marriage, and to which he had subsequently added, meant that, even had he wanted to, he could not legally divide his inheritance equally between his four daughters. He was bound to favour his two daughters by the Byshoppeston heiress at the expense of their half-sisters. Second, he himself appears to have been unenthusiastic about the division of an inheritance so painstakingly built up by his father and himself. For these reasons the unfortunate daughters of his first wife were largely disinherited, while one of their half-sisters was favoured over the other in the division of the main estates. In some ways his son-in-law, William Neville, became his surrogate heir.

Predictably, after the accession of Edward IV, Palmer came to take an even more central role in the administration of those counties in which he held property. On 11 May 1461 he was appointed to the important commission charged with the responsibility of taking into the new King’s hands the extensive estates of two of the leading Lancastrians in the Midlands, Viscount Beaumont and Lord Roos. In the following November he was pricked as sheriff of Rutland, and, while in office, was given the additional responsibility of acting as the King’s receiver in Leicestershire and neighbouring counties. One so active in the service of the new regime had the right to expect some reward, and Palmer was not to be disappointed. On 3 Dec. 1461 he was jointly granted, along with his nephew, William Palmer, and Ralph Hastings†, brother of Lord Hastings, the keeping and herbage of the lawn of Benefield and of the parks of Brigstock and Cliffe, part of royal forest of Rockingham, for the lengthy term of 20 years at an annual rent of 20 marks. More important was the grant to him on the following 2 Apr., for a period of ten years, of the Leicestershire manor of Freeby, near Melton Mowbray, in royal hands as a result of the attainder of Lord Roos. This grant was a recognition not only of his good service to the King and the late duke of York, but also as compensation for goods worth £340 forcibly taken from him by Roos, in his coming from Ludlow field. If this was an accurate measure of this loss, the grant was only partial recompense for, under its terms, he was to take only £16 p.a. to his own use. On 15 July 1463 the receivership of the honour of Leicester was added to Palmer’s offices and, as a further mark of royal favour, he was allowed to declare his account on oath.52 CPR, 1461-7, p. 111; CFR, xx. 46-47; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 182; PROME, xiii. 298; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 566; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 177n.

Given his close association with the new regime and with William, Lord Hastings, it is not surprising that, despite his advanced years, Palmer should have been elected to represent Leicestershire, with Robert Staunton, another servant of Hastings, in the Parliament of 1467. This may not be the first time he had sat in Parliament during the 1460s. No returns survive for Leicestershire for the Parliaments of 1461 and 1463, and, although he is unlikely to have sat in 1463 when he was serving as sheriff of Rutland, his Yorkist connexions make it a distinct possibility that he was returned in 1461.

Palmer’s grant of Freeby was extended for a further period of 18 months by a grant of November 1466 and then exempted from the Act of Resumption passed during the first session of the subsequent Parliament. Curiously, despite this exemption, on 23 Nov. 1467, the manor, which he was said to hold for life, was granted to the royal servant, Edward Hardgill†, to hold from the previous Easter, but this grant did not take effect until after our MP’s death for the manor was still in his hands in 1471. He gained a further small mark of royal patronage in February 1470, when the King gave him the sum of £53 as compensation for a forfeited bond he had long before entered into on behalf of the late duke of York.53 C219/17/1; PROME, xiii. 298; CPR, 1461-7, p. 532; 1467-77, p. 43; 1476-85, p. 57; Add. Ch. 41623; DL29/212/3276. No doubt these benefits of royal largesse, worthwhile rather than spectacular, were mediated through Hastings, who frequently employed him as a legal agent. In 1463, for example, he acted with two other senior local lawyers, Richard Neel and Henry Sotehill, in a property exchange by which Hastings acquired two manors from John, Lord Lovell, and in 1467 he was commissioned, with Neel and Staunton, to investigate a rival claim to the manor of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, which Hastings held by royal grant.54 HMC Hastings, i. 42, 296; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 549-50.

The 1460s marked both the height and the end of Palmer’s lengthy career. The brief restoration of Henry VI resulted in his exclusion from the Leicestershire bench, and he did not resume his active role in local affairs on Edward IV’s restoration. Advanced age is the likely reason, and very little is known of the last years of his life. Shortly before his death his grand-daughter, Margery Rokes, was contracted in marriage to Christopher Neel, son and heir apparent of Justice Neel. Given his long acquaintance with his fellow Leicestershire lawyer, there can be little doubt that Palmer was responsible for negotiating the terms of his grand-daughter’s settlement and he appears to have pressed a hard bargain. Even though he had favoured the Nevilles in the division of his estates, Margery’s expectations were still considerable enough for him successfully to ask that the judge settle upon her a jointure of as much as 40 marks p.a.55 C1/81/58-62; 151/2.

Palmer died on 5 Sept. 1475.56 Writs for inqs. into his property were not issued until May 1476: CFR, xxi. 327. Only the Leics. inq. survives and this mentions only the manor of Holt: C140/55/9; E149/232/10. His will does not survive, but later common law actions show that his widow and her nephew, William Catesby†, were his executors. An indication of the charitable bequests it contained is provided by the alienation of the advowson of Lubenhan church. On 16 Jan. 1476 his widow and his friend, John Bellers, granted the advowson to Lord Hastings, (Sir) William Catesby and others as the beginning of a process by which it was conveyed to the Premonstratensian abbey of Sulny in Northamptonshire. After Palmer’s widow and daughters had levied a fine of the advowson to a group of Hastings’s men, a royal licence was obtained to alienate the church to the abbey, presumably in return for prayers for the MP. His widow must have been a wealthy woman for not only did she have a life-interest in the bulk of the Palmer lands but she held in her own right her share of the Byshoppeston estate. She died shortly before 22 Jan. 1481, when writs were issued for the taking of inquisitions into her property in five counties.57 CP40/864, rot. 7d; HMC Hastings, i. 101; CP25(1)/126/79/36; VCH Leics. v. 226; CPR, 1476-85, p. 276; CFR, xxi. no. 565.

The survival of a new rental compiled for Palmer’s estates in January 1467 provides an opportunity to assess accurately the extent and value of the landed acquisitions a successful career had brought him. The total annual rental value of his father’s inheritance was a modest £9 10s. 8d., and even this may be an overestimate in that it includes property that our MP had purchased in Rockingham. His father’s purchases are more difficult to value since the rental makes no distinction between purchases of our MP and those of his father in the neighbouring vills of Holt, Prestgrave, Bringhurst and Drayton. William Palmer, however, is known to have demised his manor in Holt to farm for an annual rent of £3 13s. 4d., and, adding this to the 1467 rental value of the lands in the other three vills, we arrive at a maximum value of his purchases of about £15 (this excludes the manor he bought in East Carlton not included in the 1467 rental). Thus the total value of the property Thomas inherited was less than £25 and yet the rental value of the estates he held in his own right was £106 exclusive of the £16 he received from the manor of Freeby which he held by royal grant (this sum is also exclusive of the lands he held in his wife’s right for these do not appear in the rental).58 Add. Ch. 41613. An estimate of £80 p.a. as the rental value of his purchased lands is unlikely to be far wrong, and this, assuming 20 years’ purchase, amounts to a capital investment of £1,600.

This figure is all the more impressive when one considers that nearly all Palmer’s purchases took place in the first part of his career, and provides a striking illustration of the profitability of a legal career with an exclusively local focus. It is worth noting that he was far more active in the land market than Richard Neel, the only Leicestershire man appointed to the judicial bench in this period. Even more noteworthy is the fact that he was able to concentrate his purchases within such a small area. Generally the large-scale purchaser of lands had to take his opportunities to purchase where he found them. Palmer was fortunate, first, in the fact that his father found a knight both under financial pressure to sell and with little reason to resist that pressure, and, second, that in the neighbourhood of the estates the family thus acquired were other proprietors who, for various reasons, were open to offers for their lands in the area. The Bauds, for example, were an ancient Essex family. Their manor of Lubenham, although long in their hands, was peripheral to their main interests, and, despite the fact that it had been settled in tail-male in 1331, it is not surprising that they were willing to let it go.59 VCH Herts. iii. 52.

Palmer’s financial interest in property extended beyond its purchase. In February 1450, with his half-brother, John, he contracted to pay 100 marks to take, over a period of four years, the wood growing on 40 acres of land at Corby, the property of the lunatic George Neville, Lord Latimer, within the forest of Rockingham. Six years later he took the farm from Henry, Lord Scrope of Bolton, of a quarter of the manor of Medbourne near Holt for a nominal annual rent of a rose, probably in repayment of a loan. More importantly, a Chancery case shows that he was a wool-grower on a considerable scale: in the late 1440s a London draper Robert Bertyn† purchased from him wool worth as much as 400 marks, a sum that proved beyond Bertyn’s means to pay.60 Add. Ch. 41632; C139/173/31; C1/25/142b. Palmer’s estates lay in an upland area well adapted to pastoral farming, and a Star Chamber case of 1496 hints at the social dislocation occasioned by his energetic efforts fully to exploit this advantage. Sir William Skeffington†, the grandson of his daughter, Elizabeth, claimed that property in Keythorpe worth £2 p.a. was rightfully his under an entail made in the time of his great-grandfather, John Skeffington, but that he had been disseised by his cousin Christopher Neel. An elderly witness described the background to the case. The problem lay in the fact that the disputed property lay in the midst of land enclosed and laid to pasture by our MP in the 1450s. Palmer had wanted to purchase it from his grandson, Thomas Skeffington, but the potential vendor was deterred from sale by the entail and the property had subsequently become absorbed into the pasture land of Palmer’s heirs so that ‘none then on life’ could show where it lay. Nor did Keythorpe mark the full extent of our MP’s enclosing activities, for the village of Prestgrave in Bringhurst was also lost to the expansion of his flocks.61 Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc. xvi. 92-98; xxii. 253-4. Two lawsuits suggest that our MP was denying rights of common pasture in Keythorpe in the 1460s: CP40/831, rots. 421, 426.

As a recent arrival among the leading county gentry Palmer had an urgent need to establish a residence worthy of his new status. His acquisition of the manor in Holt brought with it a large manor-house built by the Trussells in the previous century. To this he made substantial additions, which still survive, most notably a magnificent bay-window at the south-west corner of the hall and a large two storey porch with an embattled roof at the south-east. It may be that these works were begun at about the same time as he purchased his licence to empark in 1448, but it is also likely that they were only completed shortly before his death. While his arms – azure, a fleur-de-lis or – both alone and impaling those of his Byshoppeston wife appear above the porch windows, a large space has been left clear over the entrance, presumably for a larger armorial decoration that was never completed. Palmer also seems to have been responsible for the addition of clerestory and other work at the parish church of Holt.62 A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, ii. 173, 282-4; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Leics. and Rutland (2nd edn.), 330-2; VCH Leics. v. 241-2, 247; Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc. xiii. 232-8.

Although Palmer died without male issue, his family long continued at East Carlton through the male descendants of his younger half-brother, John, who inherited the lands of his mother, Anne Ward, heiress of the manor of Easthall. Raised to the baronetcy, the family provided several MPs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most notably the first baronet, Sir Geoffrey Palmer†, appointed attorney-general at the Restoration.63 Bridges, ii. 292.