THORPE, Roger

Thorpe first appears in the records on 20 Feb. 1447, when he acted with his father in the purchase of a tenement called ‘Le Belle super le Hoop’ in Great Ilford (Essex), one of a series of acquisitions the family made in that county. Two years later, on 29 Jan. 1449, father and son were joined in another context, the Crown appointing them, in survivorship, as porters of the castle of Newcastle-upon-Tyne at a daily fee of 2s.2 E210/4346; CPR, 1446-52, p. 226; E159/225, brevia Easter rot. 19. The father, a rising star in the Exchequer, was well placed to channel royal patronage in his son’s favour, and in April 1451 the young Roger benefited again: the custody of the honours of Peverel, Boulogne and Hagenet in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, together with the castle and honour of Huntingdon, were committed to him and two of his father’s associates, Sir John Burcester and Thomas Cross*, at the modest annual rent of £5 for the long term of 24 years.3 This grant was made during the second prorogation of the Parl. of 1450-1, of which our MP’s father and the two men who offered surety for the grantees, Thomas Mallory* and Thomas Umfray*, were Members: CFR, xviii. 197-8. On 7 Feb. 1456 his father superseded the son in the grant: CFR, xix. 147. His father’s influence also explains his election to represent Truro in the Parliament of 1453, in which the father was to act as Speaker. His return, to be seen in the wider context of the government’s successful attempt to secure a favourable assembly, was irregular. Although Truro was not generally represented by residents, its representation, up to this date, was dominated by Cornishmen: the Parliament of 1453 was the first occasion on which it returned two men, our MP and John Norris*, an esquire for the King’s body, who had no local interests. Further, they were not the choice of the electors: the return shows unmistakable signs of amendment, the names of those originally elected have been erased and replaced with those of Thorpe and Norris.4 The names of the Cornish MPs appear in a schedule to the return, only the Truro MPs appear over an amendment: C219/16/2.

Roger had some small reward for his service in Parliament. On 29 Apr. 1453, four days into the second session, he was formally reappointed to the portership of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to hold office as though it had not been resumed by the Act of Resumption of three years earlier. This enabled him and his father, who was joined with his son in this grant on the following 17 May, to sue the sheriffs of Northumberland for wages during the period of suspension.5 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 64, 81. In Trin. term 1455 the Thorpes had an action pending in the Exchequer of pleas against (Sir) John Heron* for £54 14s. 6½ d. as their wages for the period Mar. 1451-Sept. 1452: E13/145B, rot. 74. Later, however, the political climate changed against them: Roger’s father was removed from the Speakership after Richard, duke of York, had him arrested (in our MP’s later contention through the plotting of the duke’s councillor, Thomas Colt*), and, worse still, the unfortunate Speaker was singled out by the Yorkists as responsible for precipitating the first battle of St. Albans in May 1455.

For the remainder of the decade Roger’s career followed the ups and downs of that of his father. No more is known of him until the autumn of 1456 when the duke’s fortunes were in decline and his father’s consequently in the ascendant. By that date he numbered among the four henchmen of the Crown, and on 27 Oct. 1456 he was granted during pleasure the office of tronager and pesager in the port of Berwick-on-Tweed, a sinecure his father had held in the early 1440s.6 E101/410/4, f. 6v; CPR, 1452-61, p. 329. The henchmen, of whom there were four in the late 1450s, rode besides the King in processions and progresses, and were generally very young men receiving education at the hands of a master: Household Edw. IV ed. Myers, 126-7, 246. Thorpe appears to have been too old to have been inducted into the role in the late 1450s and may thus have held the post for some time, perhaps from before he sat in Parl. On 7 Apr. 1457 he was restored to the portership of Newcastle-upon-Tyne castle (to hold from 9 July 1456), an office he had lost when the pro-Yorkist Parliament of 1455 passed an Act of Resumption against his father. Another sinecure came to him in February 1459, when he was granted for life the keepership of a stretch of the river Fosse near York with wages of 6d. a day.7 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 365-6, 479; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 165, 325-6.

To these years of prosperity is, perhaps, to be assigned Roger’s marriage to Constance, the daughter of an Essex knight. This marriage cannot be accurately dated – indeed, there is no certain evidence of it until as late as 1488 – yet it is very unlikely to have taken place while Roger was out of favour under Yorkist rule nor, if his son Ralph (of age by 1497 at the latest) was also Constance’s, can it have been made after 1485. The other possibility, and perhaps the stronger one, is that the match was contracted during the Readeption. What can be inferred about the bride’s age is consistent with a match either in the late 1450s or about 1470. She had a brother born in about 1449, but, since her father had been born in about 1401, this brother may have been only her half-brother and she many years his senior.8 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 90; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 981; C140/12/4; CIPM, xxii. 670.

Given his father’s place in the increasingly militant Lancastrian regime of the late 1440s, it was natural that Roger should have taken an active role in the civil war of 1459-61. Towards the end of 1459 he sailed in the expedition, commanded by Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, sent to take Calais out of the hands of the earl of Warwick, and he was thus probably present when the duke was defeated at Newnham Bridge in the following April. Returning with Beaufort in October 1460, he went on to fight at the battle of Wakefield on 30 Dec. 1460, a Lancastrian victory that briefly promised to mark a decisive defeat for the cause of the house of York. Unusually an account survives, albeit a highly ex parte one, of the part he took in the battle. According to later complaints made by Thomas Colt, he took advantage of the carnage for an act of personal revenge. The two men were at odds over the imprisonment of our MP’s father during the second prorogation of the Parliament of 1453-4 (in which Colt, like the Thorpes, was an MP), and, in revenge, Roger is alleged to have sought out Colt and assaulted him. The complaint, when it was made in the court of King’s bench early in the new reign, was couched in the conventional legal language of such petitions, only the numbers it cites were a departure from the norm: Colt presented a bill, asserting that, on the day before the battle, his adversary had vi et armis collected 20,000 malefactors arrayed in warlike manner and lay in wait to murder him at Wakefield, where he beat and wounded him. Clearly this was not a literal description of events, although there is no reason to doubt a personal clash. Colt added to our MP’s legal discomfiture by adding another charge in his guise as the administrator of the duke of York, who had died in the battle. He claimed that, again in the day before the battle, Thorpe and another Lancastrian, Nicholas Rigby, had plundered from the duke goods worth £5,000, cash to the value of £1,000, and horses worth £200.9 PROME, xv. 146-9; KB27/803, rot. 16d. Interestingly, Thorpe’s presence at the battle is attested in another source: in Easter term 1462, described as ‘of London, esquire’, he was among those appealed by Alice, dowager countess of Salisbury, as accessories to her husband’s death there.10 KB27/804, rot. 65; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 194.

In view of his undoubted presence at the battle, and his apparently prominent role there, it is surprising that Roger escaped attainder in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign. Yet the change of regime still proved ruinous for him. His father’s murder at the hands of the London mob in February 1461 had left him heir to the family estates, but in the following July a commission was issued for the seizure of his manor of Barnwell. Nor did he escape the unfavourable notice of the Commons who assembled in November: they presented a petition naming him, described as ‘late of London, esquire’, as one of seven men (among whom was Rigby), ‘who, as it is said and alleged, have offended against the royal majesty, crown and dignity’ of the new King and ‘not yet submitted to his good grace’. They asked that proclamation be made for the appearance of the seven in the court of King’s bench on the octaves of Purification ‘to submit themselves’ to the King’s grace and ‘become his liegemen and subjects’, non-appearance to result in attainder and forfeiture.11 CPR, 1461-7, p. 134; PROME, xiii. 56. One explanation for these proceedings is the intervention of Colt, high in the favour of the new monarch. Intent on pursuing his own action against Thorpe, the latter’s attainder and consequent forfeiture did not suit his purpose. He hoped instead to win Thorpe’s estates for himself by having his enemy condemned at common law in damages beyond his capacity to pay. Accordingly, on 6 Feb. 1462, a few days before the date set for Thorpe’s submission to the King’s grace, he brought bills in King’s bench, laying the charges cited above. His plan, if such it was, worked perfectly. At the assize session at York on the following 30 July a jury awarded him, on our MP’s default, the impossible sum of £10,000 – £2,000 for the supposed assault and £8,000 for the plunder of the duke’s goods. According to Thorpe’s later testimony, Colt employed this award to extort from him a significant part of his Essex estates, principally the manor of Clayhall in Ilford, well placed to supplement Colt’s existing properties. The omission of Thorpe’s Essex estates from the confiscation order of July 1461 supports the idea that this was the culmination of a well-laid plan.12 KB27/803, rot. 16d: PROME, xv. 146-9.

Thorpe was in prison in the Marshalsea when Colt brought the bills against him, and, on his own later testimony, he remained in that prison or another until he had made this surrender to Colt. The date of the surrender is unknown, although it must have been before August 1467, when Colt died.13 PROME, xv. 146-9. Once that surrender had been made, however, his fortunes appear to have improved, albeit modestly. Unpalatable though the loss of much of his Essex estates must have been, that loss was better than attainder, a fate he escaped, as it were for the second time, when, on his apparent failure to appear to submit to the King as prescribed in the Commons’ petition, that penalty was not imposed, or, if it was, the attainder was quickly reversed. Although, grouped with the other six men named in that petition, he was exempted from a comprehensive general pardon in July 1463, at some later date in the first reign of Edward IV he established his title to the manor of Barnwell. This is clear from an action he brought in the court of common pleas in Hilary term 1471, during the brief Readeption of Henry VI: he sued a yeoman of Oundle for close-breaking there against the peace of King Edward.14 CPR, 1461-7, p. 292; CP40/838, rot. 277d.

The Readeption should have brought a further improvement in Thorpe’s situation, and it is thus surprising that the only reference to him during this brief period is his suit concerning Barnwell (although, as remarked earlier, it may have witnessed his marriage). In any event, if Henry VI’s restoration had held out any new hopes to him, these were quickly dashed. During Edward IV’s second reign, he played no part in local affairs, and what little can be discovered about him suggests that he was in straightened financial circumstances. On 9 Dec. 1478, described as ‘of Barnwell, esquire’, he entered into a statute staple at Westminster in the sum of £12 to Thomas Luyt*, a long-standing filacer of King’s bench; and in the following March he entered into another of the same in the sum of £9 8s. to John Beauchamp, a London draper. Neither statute was discharged.15 C241/258/23, 67. Luyt had been his attorney in the actions sued against him by Colt in 1462: PROME, xv. 146-9; KB27/803, rot. 16d. A Chancery petition, dateable to the last years of the reign, provides further evidence of debt. The parson of Barnwell, Thomas Lawe, complained that Thorpe owed him 43s. 4d. and that, on his failure to pay, the matter had been referred to the award of four of their friends. Under the terms of the award, the disputed sum was paid to one Thomas Haldenby to the parson’s use, but Haldenby then refused to pay the parson.16 C1/60/103.

Thorpe probably saw in the end of Yorkist rule the means of escape from his life as an impoverished and marginalized gentleman. To this end, he presented a petition to the Commons of the first Parliament of Henry VII’s reign detailing his own and his father’s tribulations at the hands of their nemesis, Thomas Colt, and asking for the reversal of the judgement Colt had obtained against him in 1462 and for the revocation of the conveyances he had been forced into making thereafter. The petition was successful, but the days of his prosperity were too far behind him to admit of any real restoration of fortune. Indeed, he did not even succeed in regaining the lands he had alienated to Colt. On 22 Nov. 1493 he released and quitclaimed the manor of Clayhall to Colt’s son, John Colt, presumably in return for some undocumented financial consideration.17 PROME, xv. 146-9; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 767; P. Morant, Essex, i. 6. Nor, seemingly, did he find much advantage in his wife having becoming a coheiress, with her two sisters, on the death of her brother, John Fleming. John had died in 1479, but most of the family’s lands appear to have remained in the hands of his mother until her death in 1483.18 CFR, xxi. nos. 513, 738. Unfortunately, neither of their inqs. post mortem survive. The unexpected windfall, when and if it came, was not retained. In Michaelmas term 1488 he and his wife surrendered their right in one third of the manor of ‘Flemmynges’ and other land to John Fleming’s widow, Elizabeth, and her new husband, Henry Dilcok. Although this may have been no more than a concession of dower, there is no later record of the Thorpes holding any part of the Fleming inheritance.19 Essex Feet of Fines, iv. 90; J. Biancalana, Fee Tail and Common Recovery, 434; Morant, i. 291. Harder to explain is a further, more important alienation. His desire to liquidate most of his troublesome assets in Essex is, perhaps, understandable, but towards the end of his life he went further, selling his most important property, the manor of Barnwell. By a fine levied in early 1496 he and his wife surrendered the manor to David Phelp†, a Welsh servant of the new King and an import into Northamptonshire as our MP’s father had been.20 CP25(1)/179/97/39. Clearly, despite the success of his petition in 1485 and his wife’s unexpected inheritance, he never recovered from the disaster represented by Henry VI’s deposition in 1461.

Thorpe did not long survive the sale of Barnwell and the effective liquidation of the estate his ill-fated father had built up. He was probably dead by 1 Feb. 1497 when his son, Ralph, avowing before witnesses that he was of full age, made a release to the purchaser. All that remained to the family of Thomas’s purchases for Ralph to inherit was the Essex manor of Cranbrook in Ilford. The family did not survive in the male line long into the sixteenth century, by the middle of which the common-law heir to Cranbrook was Richard Page, great-grandson of our MP’s sister, Beatrice (the widow of Richard Strickland*).21 CCR, 1485-1500, no. 981; C1/558/47-49; VCH Essex, v. 197.