PENROSE, John II

The Penroses were a gentry family established in Cornish society by the reign of Edward II. The family’s pedigree in the fifteenth century is convoluted, but it appears that by the latter years of Richard II’s reign two important cadet branches had been established in the south-west. The Penroses of Escalls in Sennen rose to a high degree of prominence in John Penrose j.KB, one of the most unscrupulous men ever to serve as an English judge, but under the Lancastrian kings the line’s fortunes declined sharply following the judge’s dismissal from the bench, his son and heir’s idiocy, and the grant of the family estates to the grasping courtier John Trevelyan*.5 CFR, xviii. 67; C139/127/28; E149/183/16; C1/7/80; CIMisc. viii. 204; Trevelyan Pprs. (Cam. Soc. lxvii), i. 28-29; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 50.

The man who represented Helston in Parliament in 1442 came from a different branch of the family, living not far from that borough at Methleigh in Sithney. A John Penrose of Methleigh, the son of Bernard Penrose and his wife, Joan, and the father of the later Helston Member, had represented Liskeard in 1411.6 CP40/681, rot. 360d; 683, rot. 337d. At that time, the family estates in western Cornwall, which centered on the manor of Penrose Methleigh and extended across some 500 acres, were said to be worth less than £2, but in 1451 they were assessed at more than twice that sum and in the early sixteenth century Methleigh alone was thought to return its owner an annual income of £4.7 C131/59/23; C142/83/197; E179/92/87. The agrarian profits of their lands aside, the family also had interests in the Cornish tin industry, as Penrose’s occasional appearances in the court of the stannary of Penwith and Kirrier attest.8 SC2/162/4, rot. 1d.

Although the Penroses of Methleigh did not mix with the very greatest of the Cornish gentry, they were evidently well connected among their immediate neighbours, both within the town of Helston and in the surrounding countryside. Throughout his life, John frequently witnessed the property transactions of the minor gentry families of the far south-west, the Trewoofes, Lannarghs and Bevilles.9 CCR, 1435-41, p. 428; Harvard Law School Lib., English deeds, APV6094; CAD, iv. A9911, 9920, 9931; C1/54/48; Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR1/195. Particularly close was his bond with the Reskymers of Treloweth, a family connexion which dated back several generations. Then, it had been the lawless judge John Penrose who had been associated with the equally unruly Trevarthians,10 Vivian believed the Helston MP’s paternal grandmother to have been a Trevarthian: Vivian, 366. while 50 years later it was the Helston MP who as a young man entered the service of the descendants of Sir John Reskymer† to whom part of the Trevarthian estates had passed by inheritance: at Michaelmas 1435 the reeve of Treloweth accounted for 5d. for the expenses of John Penrose and others on Ralph Reskymer’s business, in 1461 Penrose served William Reskymer as an arbiter, and in the intervening years he frequently attested the Reskymers’ conveyances.11 SC6/823/36; CAD, iv. A9946, 10048, 10176; v. A12012.

Not always, however, were Penrose’s relations with his neighbours unequivocally cordial. In October 1431 commissioners of oyer and terminer were appointed to investigate claims by William Antron that John together with his wife’s kinsmen Peter and Geoffrey St. Aubyn had waylaid him at Helston and wounded and maltreated him in an attempt to murder him.12 CPR, 1429-36, p. 197. It was perhaps in view of such activities that Penrose never held office under the Crown or the duchy of Cornwall, except for a solitary commission of inquiry to which he was appointed in 1440, even though he did occasionally serve on local juries.13 E143/22/5, m. 2. Nor did his single return to the Commons appear to give him a wider interest in the government of the realm. He is twice recorded attending the Cornish shire elections, but these two instances lay nearly 20 years apart.14 C219/14/2, 15/6.

Penrose lived on into Edward IV’s second reign, and it was probably he who in November 1473 attested a deed for James Lannargh alongside a John Penrose ‘junior’, and who around the same time quarreled with the lawyer Henry Gilliot over a house in Tresprison (in Mullan or Wendron). Six years later, a related transaction was witnessed by just one John Penrose and it is likely that this was the younger man, and that the MP had died in the intervening years.15 C1/54/48; CAD, iv. A9900, 9911. Penrose had at least two children. In about 1449 his daughter Elizabeth had married Laurence, son and heir of Thomas Tremayne I* of Collacombe,16 CAD, iv. A6555, 8840; LR14/1006. and it is possible that her brother Geoffrey, Penrose’s son and heir, in turn married a Tremayne daughter.17 Vivian, 366. Richard Penrose† of Methleigh who sat for Helston in 1491 was probably Geoffrey’s son or grandson.