SACKVILLE, Sir Thomas

Of distinguished lineage, Thomas was a member of a family which had held the manor of Fawley since the eleventh century. His paternal grandfather and namesake, who sat for Buckinghamshire in no fewer than 14 Parliaments, enjoyed a particularly active career, serving in Edward III’s later campaigns in France, helping to suppress the Peasants’ Revolt, joining the English invasion of Scotland in 1385 and playing a prominent part in local administration. He died aged about 70 in 1406, having outlived Thomas’s father. In October that year Thomas appeared in the Chancery in the capacity of his grandfather’s executor, to swear that the dead man had never received royal letters appointing him to an ad hoc commission in Buckinghamshire.5 CCR, 1405-9, p. 237.

Thomas was the heir to sizeable estates. Apart from Fawley, these included two manors in Wing, Buckinghamshire, and three others at Upper Clatford, Hampshire, and Helmingham and Marlesford in Suffolk. He also possessed an interest in land at Haddenham in the Isle of Ely.6 CP40/656, rot. 372d. Shortly after he succeeded his grandfather, an inquisition found that he was the ‘right heir’ of the manor of Debenham, Suffolk, formerly held by a distant relative, Sir Andrew Sackville† (d.1369), but in spite of this finding it passed to Sir Andrew’s illegitimate son, Sir Thomas Sackville† of Buckhurst, Sussex.7 CCR, 1405-9, pp. 56, 66; 1409-13, pp. 33-34; CIPM, xix. 98; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 273. It is unlikely that Thomas came completely into his own immediately after succeeding his grandfather, since the latter’s widow, who survived until 1428, probably retained a dower interest in his inheritance.8 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 271. It is also likely that his mother, Elizabeth, was still alive and possessed a similar interest in the Sackville estates. Whatever any encumbrances laid upon it, his inheritance was a valuable one, and in the mid 1430s he was wealthy enough for the King’s Council to approach him for a loan of 100 marks, to help towards the costs of sending an army to France.9 PPC, iv. 317.

It is not known if Sackville himself ever campaigned across the Channel, although it is likely that he earned his knighthood by serving the Crown in a military capacity. In any event, such evidence for his career as exists relates to activities at home rather than overseas. Early in his career he acted as a feoffee for William Clerk† of Chipping Wycombe,10 Worcs. Archs., Hampton (Packington) mss, 705: 349/12946/494144, 494402. and he maintained his family’s long established friendship with the Stonors of Oxfordshire by acting as a witness on behalf of Thomas Stonor I* in the spring of 1423.11 CAD, iii. C3536. On 10 June of the same year he and his wife Anne received a royal pardon for marrying without the licence they were required to seek because she was the widow of a tenant-in-chief, Sir Thomas de la Pole, a younger son of Michael de la Pole, first earl of Suffolk.12 CPR, 1422-9, p. 103. By virtue of her previous marriage, Anne had retained dower rights in manors at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire, Ramridge in Hampshire, Norton sub Hamden in Somerset and Chirton in Wiltshire, and she also held the entire manor of Grafton Regis, Northamptonshire, a property which de la Pole had settled on her and her male heirs by him. As it happened, the son she bore de la Pole died, still a minor, in July 1430. The boy’s nearest male heir was his cousin, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, although while she lived Anne retained Grafton Regis and her dower interests in the other manors. Anne also possessed an interest in her own right in estates in East Anglia, comprising the manor of Riddlesworth near Thetford in south Norfolk and lands in various parishes in east Suffolk. In mid 1436 she and Sackville were parties to a conveyance by which these properties were settled on Christopher Le Strange and Cecily his wife (apparently Anne’s sister) for their lives, with remainder to herself and the MP and her heirs by him. She is not heard of after this date, so she may well have predeceased Sackville.13 CIPM, xxi. 372, 484-8, 682-4; xxiii. 521; CCR, 1413-19, pp. 301-2; 1419-22, p. 98; F. Blomefield, Norf. i. 276-7; CP25(1)/292/68/189. Anne’s parentage is uncertain. According to R. Horrox, De la Poles of Hull (E. Yorks. Local Hist. ser. xxxviii), 23, she was the da. of ‘Cheyne’; according to Blomefield, she was a da. and coh. of John Roos, who had acquired Riddlesworth through his marriage to Beatrice Archer.

By the time of his marriage, Sackville had already begun to play a part in the public affairs of Buckinghamshire, in so far as he had attested the return of its knights of the shire to the Parliaments of 1419 and 1422. He attended at least four other elections in that capacity, including the controversial one of 1429. On 31 Aug. that year he was among those who returned John Hampden II* and Andrew Sperlyng*, a result overturned by the sheriff, Sir Thomas Waweton*, who sent into Chancery a false indenture naming Sir John Cheyne I* and Walter Strickland I* as the men elected. A judicial commission subsequently established that the election of Hampden and Sperlyng should have held good, although by then the Parliament was over. Cheyne was a man with a record of lawlessness and associations with lollardy, and in 1431 he was suspected of involvement in an abortive lollard rising in neighbouring Berkshire. In June that year Sackville was among those commissioned to arrest and bring him before the King and Council, to seize his manors of Drayton Beauchamp and Grove, to confiscate all books, documents and suspicious memoranda they found there and to certify to the Council the details of his armoury and library. The commissioners duly apprehended Cheyne and his brother Thomas, both of whom were briefly imprisoned in the Tower.14 The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 552-3; CPR, 1429-36, p. 153.

Two years later, Sackville himself was returned to Parliament. He was never the most active figure in county administration but his social rank and wealth made him eminently qualified to represent Buckinghamshire as a knight of the shire.15 In 1445 he acquired an exemption for life from being appointed to any office under the Crown, presumably against his will since this did not in fact mark the end of his career as an office-holder: CPR, 1441-6, p. 361. Through scribal error, the election indenture for Bedfordshire, which shared a sheriff with Buckinghamshire, recorded that he and William Whaplode* had been returned for that county as well. The mistake was never amended, although a separate schedule listing the representatives of both counties correctly named James Gascoigne* and John Wenlock* as the men elected for Bedfordshire. So far as the available evidence goes, Sackville was a newcomer to the Commons, but he was returned alongside Whaplode, a man with previous parliamentary experience. A pressing concern for the Parliament of 1433 was the problem of lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and during the assembly both the Lords and the Commons swore an oath to uphold the peace. A month after the Parliament was dissolved, Sackville, Whaplode and their fellow knights of the shire were ordered to draw up a list of the names of all those in their respective counties whom they thought should likewise swear the oath,16 CCR, 1429-35, p. 271. which they were afterwards instructed to administer by commissions of May 1434.

Official duties were not Sackville’s only concern during the mid 1430s, since in this period much of his attention was occupied with important personal affairs. In the summer of 1435 he and his wife conveyed the Sackville manor of Ascot in Wing to his daughter Margery and her husband Thomas Rokes II* and their children, and a year later they took part in the settlement of Riddlesworth and conveyed Marlesford and Upper Clatford to John Hampden II and other feoffees.17 CP25(1)/22/120/19; 292/68/189. The lack of a reliable ped. for the Sackvilles of Bucks. sometimes makes it difficult to establish generational relationships, but later lawsuits over the family’s estates indicate that Margery was the MP’s da. An inq. of Oct. 1487 poses a problem since it suggests that she was in fact his gda., but (assuming that Anne Sackville was his first and only wife) it is very unlikely that any gda. of his could have been married as early as 1435. However, it is possible that the MP’s fa. is omitted from the family tree provided by this inquisition: CP40/842, rot. 575; 857, rot. 344; 863, rot. 343; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 317. By this period he had also renewed his grandfather and namesake’s claim to the manor of Emmington in Oxfordshire. Emmington belonged to the distantly related Sackvilles of Sussex and had descended to Sir Thomas Sackville of Buckhurst. In spite of the latter’s illegitimacy, there was no foundation to the claim and in the end the Sussex family succeeded in retaining the manor, although not without considerable trouble. During 1436-7 Emmington was the subject of several suits in the court of common pleas between the MP and Sir Thomas of Buckhurst’s son Edward, and in the early 1470s Edward’s own son and heir, Humphrey Sackville, sued Margery Sackville’s son Thomas Rokes† for the manor, suggesting that Rokes had managed to take possession. In the middle of the same decade the two men and Rokes were disputing the patronage of Emmington parish church, and it was not until 1482 that the Rokes family formally acknowledged that the manor rightfully belonged to Humphrey Sackville, who died seised of it in 1488.18 VCH Oxon. viii. 92-93; CP40/701, rots. 102d, 407; 703, rots. 319, 453; 842, rot. 575; 857, rot. 344; C139/141/10; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 416. It was perhaps in connexion with the Emmington dispute that the MP obtained a royal pardon in mid 1437: C67/38, m. 11.

Still alive in December 1457, when he was appointed to his last known ad hoc commission, Sackville is likely to have died soon after that date since nothing more is heard of him. He was succeeded by his son or grandson, another Thomas, who died without issue in 1466 and was in turn succeeded by Margery Sackville’s son Thomas Rokes. It may have taken Rokes some years to make good his right to the manor of Fawley, and he did not succeed to another Sackville manor, ‘Crafton’ in Wing, until the late 1480s. Brought to the Kentwood family when another of the MP’s daughters, Maud, married Nicholas Kentwood, it reverted to Rokes after her grandson John Kentwood died without issue in 1487.19 CFR, xx. 195, 196; xxii. 186; CP40/863, rot. 343; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 317.