TREVELYAN, John

There were Trevelyans living at Trevelyan in St. Veep by Henry III’s reign, but John was his family’s first prominent representative. (It is worth noting that he appears at the head of the Trevelyan pedigree drawn up by the visitation heralds in 1620.)10 Trevelyan Pprs., iii. p. v; Vis. Cornw. (Harl. Soc. ix), 242. Little is known about his patrimony, which was probably not very significant, but he seems to have inherited several of the properties he held in St. Veep and its vicinity. He is first recorded in March 1441, when in response to a petition he had submitted the King granted him the ownership of a bondsman who had absconded from the royal manor of Tybesta. He was by then a royal household servant, styled a ‘King’s serjeant’, and drawing livery as one of the grooms of the chamber.11 E101/409/6, f. 22v. In subsequent years, he gradually rose through the ranks of the King’s servants. By Michaelmas 1441 he had become a yeoman (or valet) of the chamber, and at Michaelmas 1447 was promoted to the position of an esquire of the household.12 CPR, 1436-41, p. 508; 1446-52, p. 513; E101/409/9, f. 37.

The 1440s were years of great profit for Trevelyan. Possibly a personal favourite of the King, his chamber office afforded him privileged access to the royal presence and many opportunities to importune for rewards. In October 1441 he became bailiff-itinerant for life in Cornwall, and the following April he and two other Hhousehold men were awarded certain forfeited goods and merchandise lying in the port of Margate. In October 1442 the King granted him a daily wage of 6d. from the issues of Cornwall,13 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 95, 126. New letters patent granting Trevelyan this wage were issued in Mar. 1452 after the ct. of the Exchequer had ruled the original ones invalid: CPR, 1446-52, p. 513. and appointed him to the office of steward of all the possessions of the duchy of Cornwall in Devon, two other grants for life. Just over a year later he obtained another life grant, this time of the reversion of the keeping of the castles and parks of Trematon and Restormel and the fishery of the river Fowey, to take effect after the death of John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, who had come to possess them by virtue of his marriage to Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth, dowager duchess of Exeter. These offices alone brought with them fees of over £16 p.a. and a daily allowance of 4d. The deaths of Fanhope in late 1443 and of John Holand, duke of Exeter, in the summer of 1447 made available to the King a substantial amount of duchy of Cornwall bounty in the form of estates and offices, much of which was granted to Trevelyan and Thomas Bodulgate, a Household man who had also served Holand. In February 1444 the two men were entrusted with the keeping of Restormel, Penlyn and other Cornish manors (all of which had escheated to the King upon Fanhope’s demise) for a seven year term, and nearly two years later the same properties were re-granted to them to hold for their lives in survivorship at a farm of £80 p.a. To this, the two men added in April 1447 the office of parker of Liskeard in survivorship. In October 1444, Trevelyan and John Arundell, the greatest landowner in Cornwall, and a protégé of the King’s leading minister, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, obtained a life tenancy of the manor and borough of Helston (worth 20 marks p.a. to Trevelyan);14 CFR, xvii. 281, 287; CPR, 1441-6, p. 322; 1446-52, p. 80; PROME, xii. 126. By 1455 Helston had been re-granted to the King’s esq., John Nanfan: J. Hatcher, Rural Economy Duchy of Cornw. 198n. less than two years later, Trevelyan benefited from a royal appointment to a corrody at Launceston priory; and in 1448 he secured custody of the lands of the young heir of John Champernowne, a wealthy Cornish landowner.15 CCR, 1441-7, p. 370; CFR, xviii. 112.

Trevelyan’s interests were not, however, restricted to the south-west. In any case, his Household duties meant that he was frequently away from the region, and his purchase between the second half of 1447 and March 1449 of three properties within easy range of London (the manors of West Wickham, Keston and Southcourt in north-west Kent), suggests that he was spending much of his time at Court.16 CCR, 1441-7, p. 495; 1447-54, p. 114; CP25(1)/116/320/668. It was also in the 1440s that he came into possession, by forcible disseisin as it later transpired, of the manor and castle of Stone near Dartford and participated (apparently as a feoffee of John, Lord Clinton) in a dispute with Roger Clitheroe over lands in Ash near Sandwich. Kent was not the only county in the south-east in which Trevelyan bought land, since he had acquired property at Cranford in Middlesex before 1450 and a few years later he purchased Thomas Ledered’s lands at Leatherhead, Effingham and Shere in Surrey.17 KB27/755, rots. 41-44; 762, rot. 89d; 763, rot. 55d; E13/145B, rot. 9d; KB9/265/56; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 122, 129. Nor were all of Trevelyan’s Crown appointments and rewards drawn upon the West Country, although his grants elsewhere were much more circumscribed than those from that region. The only outright ones were the life tenancy of some duchy of Lancaster lands, consisting of a warren at Hertingfordbury and a park at Hertford, obtained in October 1445, and a share of the keeping of certain properties at Dorking in Surrey which he and others received in February 1447,18 Trevelyan Pprs. i. 75-76; CFR, xviii. 67-68. while several other grants, which included the keepership of the armoury at the Tower of London, were reversions, not all of which ever came to his hands.19 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 60, 79; 1452-61, p. 67; 1461-7, p. 110.

It is nevertheless interesting that Trevelyan also began his parliamentary career in the east, as a Member for the borough of Huntingdon, which he represented in 1442 and 1447.20 The names of Huntingdon’s representatives in the Parliament of 1445 are known, and Trevelyan was not among them, but there are significant lacunae in the returns elsewhere, and it is thus possible that he found a seat in another constituency in that year. There is no evidence of any links between him and Huntingdon before his first election there, and it is probable that he owed his place on both occasions to his position in the Household, either because the King helped a valued servant to find a seat, or because the burgesses had deliberately sought an influential outsider. The Parliament of 1447, assembled at Bury St. Edmunds, witnessed the downfall of Suffolk’s political adversary, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who was arrested there on a charge of treason on 18 Feb., and died within a week while still in custody. On the very day of Gloucester’s arrest Trevelyan and another royal servant, Christopher Barton, were granted the reversion of the offices of constable and porter of the castle and park at Hadleigh in Essex, then held by the duke. The circumstances in which the Hadleigh reversion was acquired may well have raised suspicions among the government’s opponents. Although there is no evidence that Gloucester died of anything but natural causes, popular opinion held Suffolk and his clique, among whom Trevelyan had become prominent, responsible.21 I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 34.

Trevelyan’s pursuit of Crown offices and rewards is the dominant feature of his early career, but something is known about his other activities during the 1440s. In April 1445 he obtained a papal indult to keep a portable altar and two months later he secured a pardon from the King, although it is not known why he should have felt it necessary. He also acted on behalf of others, since he was a mainpernor for John St. Loe*, a long-serving esquire for the King’s body, and, in February 1448, he was pardoned in his capacity as one of the sureties of the duke of Norfolk’s riotous opponent, Sir Robert Wingfield*. Several weeks after receiving this pardon he was appointed to act as an arbitrator between his friend Bodulgate and a Calais merchant, and later in the same year he, Edmund Lacy, the bishop of Exeter, and John Copplestone* obtained a royal licence to found a guild in the collegiate church at Crediton, Devon.22 CPL, ix. 515; C67/39, m. 42; CFR, xvii. 271-2; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 130, 162-3; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 226-7; CAD, iii. D768. Other noble patrons also found it worth favouring a man so highly regarded by the King: by the mid 1440s he was receiving an annuity of £10 (a life grant) from Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, as well as an annuity of ten marks from John Holand, duke of Exeter, and in 1447 Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, also granted him ten marks a year.23 E152/10/544, m. 4; J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam. 88; Petworth House, Suss. mss, 7214, 7215, 7216; C. Rawcliffe, Staffords, 235. Nothing else is known about his links with these peers, but his annuity from Stafford may have established a long standing connexion, since his eldest son was to join the rebellion led by the duke of Buckingham’s grandson in Richard III’s reign.

By the beginning of 1448 William de la Pole, who that summer would be elevated to the dukedom of Suffolk, was at the height of his power. While he determined policy about the King, his allies and servants governed the regions. Thus, in the autumn of that year, Trevelyan was appointed to the Cornish shrievalty. Within two months of his taking office, Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster in the second week of February. The Commons were expected to be restive: the price the government had paid for the renewal of the truce with the French, the surrender of the county of Maine, was widely held to be excessive, and questions could be expected to be asked about the conduct of the war more generally. The Court needed its own supporters in the House, and there can be little doubt that as sheriff of Cornwall Trevelyan played his part in securing one of the county seats for Thomas Bodulgate, and borough seats for his associates Thomas Tregarthen* (his brother-in-law), Thomas Penarth* (his lieutenant at Trematon), Thomas Clemens*, Nicholas Hervy*and Thomas Lymbery*. Overall, the administration’s preparations proved effective. John Say II*, an established Crown servant, was elected Speaker, and under his stewardship the Commons agreed to several, albeit limited, grants of supply. At the end of the first session, they also agreed to send to sea a fleet under the overall command of the leading courtier Thomas Daniell*, with several sub-commanders (including the Dartmouth shipman Robert Wenyngton alias Cane*) taking charge of operations under him.

Already, however, storm clouds were gathering for Trevelyan. Early in the year he incurred the displeasure of Bishop Lacy of Exeter concerning his administration of the estate of another John Trevelyan, a relative who had been vicar of St. Piran and had named the MP as an executor. The bishop wrote to the King’s judges requesting them to bar Trevelyan, whom he had recently excommunicated for violating the deceased priest’s estate, from all actions in the royal courts. It would appear that Trevelyan was subsequently taken into custody, for in March Lacy asked the King to release him from prison because he had by then submitted to episcopal authority.24 PCC 13 Rous (PROB11/1, f. 96v); Reg. Lacy iii (Canterbury and York Soc. lxii), 17-18, 29. Within a couple of months, even more dramatic events began to unfold. Just before the second session of Parliament was prorogued on 30 May, news arrived that a week earlier Wenyngton’s flotilla had intercepted and seized the neutral Bay Fleet, consisting of some 110 vessels, about 50 of which belonged to Hanseatic merchants, and taken it to Southampton in triumph. Wenyngton was at pains to emphasize that his actions had been motivated by his desire to enforce the right to search all vessels in the Channel that had been claimed by the Kings of England since Edward III, but in truth his large-scale act of piracy was highly profitable not merely for him, but also for his friends and supporters at Court, prominent among whom was Trevelyan.25 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 212-13; Harvey, 57. It also, however, immediately sparked a major diplomatic crisis. The ships belonging to subjects of the duke of Burgundy and their cargoes were before long restored to their proper owners, but the Hanseatic vessels were not. Reprisals swiftly followed, and English merchants, their ships and goods were placed under arrest throughout the Hanseatic League, causing dismay across the merchant community at home.

Parliament was eventually dissolved on 16 July, just two weeks before the French declaration of renewed war and writs for a fresh Parliament were issued on 23 Sept. Once again the conduct of the Cornish elections fell to Trevelyan who still occupied the shrievalty. It may be a measure of the strength of popular feeling that Bodulgate failed to secure re-election and the county seats were taken by two independent landowners of substance. Yet in the urban constituencies Trevelyan’s efforts met with greater success: Clemens, Lanhergy, Lymbery and Penarth all retained their seats. The administration certainly needed all the friends it could find, for the Commons were in uproar as soon as they assembled. The reverberations of Wenyngton’s exploits apart, over the summer the military position in Normandy had turned from bad to worse. On 29 Oct., a week before the opening of Parliament, the Norman capital of Rouen was surrendered to the French by the duke of Somerset. The popular mood, both on the streets and in the Commons, now turned increasingly ugly, focusing blame for the military disasters on those seen to have benefited from royal patronage. Before long Trevelyan came under attack. As for many other Cornishmen, privateering was a routine part of his life, and following his complicity in Wenyngton’s exploits he was implicated in similar activities, albeit on a lesser scale. In late 1449 he was charged with having that November taken goods worth some £12,000 from a Spanish ship anchored off Plymouth. Accordingly, Trevelyan’s own vessel, the Edward of Polruan, was confiscated, and he was placed temporarily in the Tower – in itself a measure of the increasing inability of the Court to protect its own. The Crown sold the Edward the following February, but since the purchasers were none other than Trevelyan’s associates, Arundell and Bodulgate, it is more than likely that he was able to come to a financial arrangement with them.26 C.F. Richmond, ‘R. Admin. and Keeping the Seas’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1963), 200-1; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 312-13; Harvey, 47.

By this stage, however, Trevelyan had other things to worry about, for the impeachment of Suffolk in February 1450 left him dangerously exposed. The Act of Resumption passed by Parliament in the late spring of 1450 cost him his bailiffship in Cornwall and his duchy of Cornwall stewardship in Devon. Although he secured a partial exemption, a contemporary estimate reckoned that the Act still cost him £6 out of the £26 he was by then receiving annually in fees and wages.27 PROME, xii. 126; E163/8/14, m. 2. Moreover, Trevelyan was popularly reviled as one of the most grasping of the King’s advisors. In one of a number of hostile satirical poems written about that time he was lampooned as the ‘Cornish chough’ (a bird popularly associated with petty theft) who had blinded the King, perhaps meaning that he had prevented Henry from seeing how unwisely he was diminishing his patrimony. Another poem expressed the sentiments of many at the time more explicitly, blaming the likes of Trevelyan and Thomas Daniell for the loss of France, since they had monopolized access to the King, to the exclusion of the militarily experienced among his traditional councillors.28 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 101; PPC, vi. p. xxv; Harvey, 131. These views were current among the rebels who from the early weeks of 1450 began to gather in the southern counties. Following a further crushing defeat of an English army at Formigny on 15 Apr., and the murder of the duke of Suffolk on 2 May, the unrest gathered pace. An ill-judged ceremonial progress of the duke’s corpse through Kent provided a catalyst for the disorder: it was at this time that a further satirical ballad showing Suffolk’s friends and allies mourning him in a parody of the funeral mass was published. Among those named in an unveiled threat that they had not been forgotten, was Trevelyan. By early June, different localized groups of insurgents began to band together under a captain known as Jack Cade. Parliament, which had been in session at Leicester, was hastily disbanded, as first a group of specially appointed lords and then the King himself headed south-east to crush the rebellion. The rebels took up a position on Blackheath, where they demanded the dismissal from the King’s presence of Suffolk’s remaining supporters ‘whiche ben opynly knowyn traitours’, but when on 18 June Henry VI himself led an army to Blackheath to confront the insurgents, he found them gone. A small force dispatched under (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I* and William Stafford* was attacked at Sevenoaks and its leaders killed, and a day later news came that some of the fighting men in the royal army were in mutiny and threatening to join the rebels unless Trevelyan and others who provided the King with ‘Flateryng and Fals counsayll’ were immediately removed from his presence. Henry VI had other ideas: he took Trevelyan and Daniell with him to the safety of Windsor castle. This saved Trevelyan’s life. In his absence he was among those indicted for treason and summarily condemned at sessions of oyer and terminer held at the guildhall in London on 3 July, after Cade’s rebels had entered the city. Many Londoners sympathized with the rebels’ demand for the restoration of the Hanseatic trade – not without justification holding Trevelyan and others of Suffolk’s clique responsible for acts of piracy like the attack on the Bay Fleet. The Kentish men who followed Cade also had good reason to dislike him. After the rebellion had been put down, a commission of oyer and terminer was sent to Kent to investigate rebel complaints about oppressions which he and others had committed there, and when the justices sat at Rochester on 20 Aug., a jury indicted him and Thomas Bodulgate for forcibly evicting William Wangford and others from the manor and castle of Stone three years earlier. Nor was this the end of Trevelyan’s troubles, for on 9 Sept. a gang of some 25 men broke into his house at Cranford and took goods worth £40.29 Chrons. London ed. Kingsford, 159; Gt. Chron. London ed. Thomas and Thornley, 182; CPR, 1446-52, pp. 444-5; Harvey, 57-58; Hanserecesse ed. von der Ropp, iii. 475, 506; Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Soc. xviii), 221-2; KB9/265/56.

When Parliament assembled again, on 6 Nov., Trevelyan again came under attack. In early December he was one of those whom the Commons actively sought to have banished from the King’s presence; he retained his place in the Household only because of the King’s insistence that those who were accustomed to wait on him should be allowed to stay. At the same time demands were made that the goods of Trevelyan, Wenyngton and Daniell should be confiscated and handed over to the Hansards in compensation for the taking of the Bay Fleet. The fresh Act of Resumption passed in the same Parliament cost him his keepership of the castles and parks at Trematon and Restormel.30 CPR, 1446-52, p. 426; Hanserecesse, iii. 511; PROME, xii. 184-6; E101/410/3, 6. Further difficulties arose for Trevelyan in April 1451, when a commission was instructed to proceed with the earlier indictment at the Guildhall, but in the event he was acquitted before Parliament was dissolved. Nor did he suffer any serious consequences from the indictment passed at Rochester.

The eclipse of the duke of York and his supporters after his ill judged Dartford campaign in early 1452 put the Court back in the ascendant, and it did not take long for Trevelyan to recover much of what he had lost. In October, he was reappointed bailiff itinerant in Cornwall and duchy steward in Devon, and had control of the castles of Trematon and Restormel restored to him.31 CPR, 1452-61, p. 50. Already, he had been recompensed for what he had lost elsewhere by receiving an Exchequer lease for a term of seven years from October 1451 of various lands in Grampound and elsewhere in south-west Cornwall that had once belonged to Ralph Trenewith.32 CPR, 1446-52, p. 443; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Misc. xxiv), 205; CFR, xviii. 252-3.

It was during this same period of the early 1450s that Trevelyan established a connexion with the young and unstable duke of Exeter, Henry Holand. In November 1451, he shared with the duke an Exchequer lease for ten years of the manors in Restormel and elsewhere which he and Thomas Bodulgate had previously held, and when this grant was renewed for another ten years in September 1456 the fishery of the Fowey and the borough of Camelford were added. Almost certainly one of Exeter’s retainers, Trevelyan is known to have had access to the Coldharbour, the duke’s London mansion and received bonds on his behalf. Furthermore, he actively participated in Holand’s dispute with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, over the Bedfordshire manor of Ampthill. In Hilary term 1455 he was one of those against whom Cromwell brought a writ of trespass in the court of King’s Bench (the others were the duke’s friend Lord Richemount Grey, his two bastard brothers and 16 lesser men) for forcibly taking away 11 horses and £1,000-worth of goods from Ampthill some three years earlier.33 CFR, xviii. 241-2; C1/28/301; 75/23; S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 903. In the event, only Grey appeared to answer Cromwell’s suit: ibid. 903n.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1453 Trevelyan had once more been elected to Parliament, now taking his seat as a knight of the shire for Cornwall. His election should come as no surprise, for the Parliament of 1453, in contrast to the two preceding assemblies, was one of the most royalist and compliant of the reign and marked the zenith of Henry VI’s political recovery after the crises of 1450-2. Among its business was the attainder of the duke of York’s servant, Sir William Oldhall*, and the resumption of grants made to those who had accompanied the duke on his armed demonstration at Dartford the previous year. The Commons held two sessions, lasting for much of March and all of May and June, before rising for the summer on 2 July. During the recess, Trevelyan contracted a marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter of Thomas Whalesborough, a fellow Household esquire and Cornishman. The marriage was potentially valuable in terms of connexion, for Whalesborough was related to Alice de la Pole, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, and connected by marriage to both Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, and Thomas, Lord Scales. There were other reasons to recommend the match from Trevelyan’s point of view, because Elizabeth and her sister, Katherine, were Whalesborough’s immediate heirs.34 Whalesborough’s son, Edmund, who had married one of the daughters of Chief Justice Fortescue, had presumably died by this date, and it is even possible that it was his death and Elizabeth’s resultant expectations of inheritance that made her an attractive bride for Trevelyan: CP25(1)/293/73/411. The Whalesborough estates consisted of lands which Thomas had inherited from his mother, a daughter of the Somerset knight Sir John Raleigh† of Nettlecombe, as well as from his father, John Whalesborough†, and he also possessed the reversion of a substantial part of the estate of his uncle, Simon Raleigh. The marriage settlement concluded between Trevelyan and his prospective father-in-law in July 1453 stipulated that Whalesborough would give the couple Raleigh estates worth 50 marks, and promise not to grant away any properties which would in the ordinary course of events descend to his heirs, although he was permitted to settle lands worth £40 p.a. on his wife. Trevelyan, for his part, promised to provide Elizabeth with a jointure worth £40 p.a. in Cornwall and Surrey and to pay her father the sum of 260 marks. To ensure adherence to the terms of the agreement, the parties exchanged bonds, each bearing a penalty of £500. When Whalesborough died nearly 30 years later Elizabeth was the sole inheritor of her father’s estate, since her sister Katherine had predeceased him.35 Trevelyan Pprs. i. 18-19, 37-40, 94-95; ii (Cam. Soc. lxxxiv) 53; E101/410/9; R.M. Jeffs, ‘The Later Med. Sheriff’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1960), 337; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 822; C140/80/41; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 581.

Close to the date of Trevelyan’s marriage, in the summer of 1453, and between the second and third sessions of this Parliament, the King suffered a serious mental collapse. His resulting incapacity became a cause of grave concern for his courtiers and in January 1454, a few weeks before the last parliamentary session opened, Trevelyan and three other Household servants, conscious of their absolute dependence on the monarch, were rumoured to be drawing up a bill for the establishment of a garrison at Windsor to guard the King and his infant son.36 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 296. The bill, if it was indeed placed before Parliament, does not seem to have made any progress, and in the following month the duke of York was recognized as Protector by the Lords. It is interesting to find that York’s ascendancy seems to have had for Trevelyan no immediate consequences of the kind faced by other men with Court connexions, like the Speaker Thomas Thorpe*. Indeed, in May 1454 he was included in an ad hoc commission (ironically to investigate an act of piracy), and although he was admitted to the Cornish bench only after the duke’s first protectorate had come to an end, he was allowed to continue as a j.p. after the battle of St. Albans of May 1455 and for nearly four years longer. From the autumn of 1457 he was included in ad hoc commissions in the far south-west, many of them of a military nature, and the general pardon that he purchased in early 1458, while the King was vainly trying to reconcile the opposing political factions to each other, may have been little more than a pre-emptive measure to cover himself against any form of litigation.37 C67/42, m. 8.

The flight of the Yorkist lords in the aftermath of the stand-off at Ludford Bridge in October 1459 left the Court in undisputed control of the kingdom for the first time since Henry VI’s initial collapse. Fresh shrieval appointments were among the first measures taken, and Trevelyan now once more assumed office in his home county, nominally by appointment of the young prince of Wales and duke of Cornwall. This placed him at the forefront of the efforts to mount a defence against a potential invasion by the exiles, and in the first days of June 1460 he was among the commissioners instructed to investigate insurrection and to commit all adherents of the duke of York to prison. When the invasion came just weeks later, it targeted the south-east rather than Cornwall. It is not clear whether Trevelyan played any part in the decisive battle of Northampton that placed the King and with him control of the government in the hands of the Yorkist lords. What did, however, fall to him, was the duty of presiding over the elections to the Parliament summoned by the victors. Regrettably, no returns are known to survive for either Cornwall or any of its boroughs, but there can be little doubt that Trevelyan would have sought where possible to engineer the return of supporters of the old regime, as he had done in 1449. His subsequent moves are largely undocumented. The Parliament assembled in the autumn agreed to the disinheritance of the prince of Wales in favour of the duke of York and his descendants, and York was assigned an apanage from the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall. Whether Trevelyan was allowed to retain his duchy offices is not known, for no new appointments are recorded before the following summer. Nor is there any record of his participation in any of the important battles of 1460-1, although he may have been rallying forces for the house of Lancaster in the south-west in the spring of 1461, for at the end of March commissioners were appointed to arrest him and others who were in insurrection against Edward IV in Cornwall, and in July the escheator in Surrey was ordered to confiscate Trevelyan’s possessions in that county.38 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 28, 36. Although HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 874 claims that he was attainted, no such sentence is recorded on the Parl. rolls.

Despite this order, Trevelyan apparently escaped formal attainder in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, and was thought to have given up resistance to the new King by January 1462, when he obtained a general pardon for all treasons and other offences committed before the opening of that Parliament. But he was by no means reconciled to the change of dynasty. Among the surviving Trevelyan family papers is a bede-roll containing prayers and poems to Henry VI, including one from that year headed ‘Here ys a devoute prayer of Kyng Herre’, and Trevelyan was soon in trouble again, since another commission for his arrest was issued in May 1463.39 Trevelyan Pprs. i. 48-52, 53-60; CPR, 1461-7, p. 278; C67/45, mm. 43, 49. Official reprisals aside, the change of regime provided a couple of adversaries with an opportunity to settle outstanding scores. First, Trevelyan’s own son-in-law, Henry Ash, accused him, Thomas Bodulgate and others of breaching their trust as feoffees on his behalf by selling without his consent two messuages in Bishop’s Lynn which he had inherited from his grandfather, William Wythes. Following Wythes’ death, Ash had been committed to the care of Trevelyan, who had lost little time in marrying him to his daughter, Anne. Later, after the death of Ash’s mother, Trevelyan first summoned his fellow feoffee, John Spyne, into his presence, and when he refused, ‘caused’ the duke of Exeter to summon him in writing to his London residence, the Coldharbour. There, Trevelyan fiercely rebuked him and demanded that he release all his right in Ash’s property to specified nominees, on the pretext that he himself was best placed to guard his son-in-law’s interests (and had in any event already sold one of the messuages and was going to use the proceeds to buy lands in Kent on Ash’s behalf). Spyne complied, but was all too ready to tell his story once the deposition of Henry VI had rendered Trevelyan vulnerable. Secondly, the late 1460s saw Trevelyan charged with conspiring with Thomas Tregarthen to embezzle the revenues form lands once belonging to Robert Kayl†, which they had been meant to employ for charitable uses to the benefit of Kayl’s soul.40 C1/28/301-2; 31/119, 138.

More serious than these comparatively minor challenges in Chancery was the seizure by the dowager duchess of Suffolk of her relative Thomas Whalesborough’s manors at Michaelstow in Cornwall, Wrington in Somerset and Llancarfan and Llantwit in Glamorgan. Such an action was of immediate concern to Trevelyan, since it threatened his wife’s future inheritance, and he petitioned Alice’s son, John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, for redress. In the letter he wrote to Suffolk he said that the ‘sterynge’ of Sir William Herbert*, now Lord Herbert, had encouraged the duchess to enter the manors, and that her claim to hold them as the heir of her father, Thomas Chaucer*, was invalid because Chaucer had only ever held them as a feoffee. Trevelyan must also have petitioned the King, since at some stage before the duchess’s death in 1475 Edward IV ordered her son ‘to do what was right’ with regard to the properties, which were subsequently restored to Whalesborough.41 Trevelyan Pprs. i. 81-83, where Trevelyan’s letter is misdated to 1463.

The difficult circumstances in which Trevelyan found himself during the early 1460s probably explain why, in 1461 or 1462, he deposited certain evidences with his relative, Henry Trevelyan, formerly one of Queen Margaret’s chaplains and by then master of the hospital of St. Katherine beside the Tower of London, and with Dame Elizabeth Blount some five years later. (He later sued the executors of both for withholding these documents from him.) Equally, his reduced circumstances serve to explain his sale in May 1468 of West Wickham and the other Kentish manors which he had bought 20 years earlier to Richard Scrope for 300 marks. Two months later he felt it necessary to obtain another pardon from the King, perhaps having come under suspicion in the volatile political atmosphere of that summer and autumn.42 E101/409/13; C1/32/268-9; 36/111; CPR, 1461-7, p. 42; CCR, 1468-76, no. 44; C67/46, m. 32. Dame Elizabeth would appear to have been the wid. of Sir Thomas Blount† (d.1456), and thus the stepmother of Walter Blount*, Lord Mountjoy, but how Trevelyan had come to know her is a mystery. Trevelyan may have had good reason for concern, since it is possible that he had maintained contacts with the court of Margaret of Anjou at Koeur. Margaret’s companions at Koeur included the Lancastrian chancellor in exile, (Sir) John Fortescue*, the father-in-law of Elizabeth Trevelyan’s late brother Edmund Whalesborough. In normal circumstances this was a comparatively remote relationship but Fortescue may have sought to exploit the connexion while looking for support among Henry VI’s old servants. Whatever the case, Trevelyan was placed on the Somerset bench following the Readeption of Henry VI in 1470. Yet this may have been the extent of his service to the Lancastrians. Not long after Edward IV’s return, he secured a fresh pardon, and by November 1471 he was witnessing deeds for Alfred Corneburgh†, who unlike him, had transferred his allegiance to Edward IV early in the reign, and had become one of the King’s leading lieutenants in Cornwall. It was perhaps through contact with the likes of Corneburgh that Trevelyan was able to win a degree of trust from the King, for he was reappointed to the Somerset bench in 1474 and was put on an ad hoc commission in the same county the following year.

Trevelyan’s later years saw some of his earlier endeavours come to fruition. By the late 1470s he would appear to have achieved reconciliation with his son-in-law, Henry Ash, for in June 1478, shortly before Ash’s death, he was appointed to act as a feoffee to the use of the last will of Adrian, Henry’s son. In March 1481 Thomas Whalesborough died and his daughter Elizabeth’s substantial inheritance came to the Trevelyan family. Although the inquisitions post mortem taken in Cornwall and south Wales after Whalesborough’s death have not survived, his properties at Whalesborough, Michaelstow and elsewhere in Cornwall, along with the manors at Llancarfan and Llantwit in Glamorgan, are known to have come the Trevelyans’ way. Elsewhere Elizabeth inherited a manor at Wood next ‘Chikstone’ in Devon, lands in Wootton Fitzpaine, Dorset, and, in accordance with her marriage settlement, several former Raleigh properties, comprising four manors in Nettlecombe and Knole and other lands in Somerset. According to the inquisitions which have survived, Whalesborough’s lands outside Cornwall and Wales were worth nearly £40 p.a. but this was clearly a considerable underestimate, since the Raleigh properties alone were worth some 50 marks annually.43 C67/48 m. 27; CCR, 1468-76, no. 797; 1476-85, no. 389; CFR, xxi. no. 449; C140/80/41; Trevelyan Pprs. i. 37-40. For some reason Whalesborough’s manor at Wrington does not feature in the inq. taken in Som.

When Richard III seized the throne, Trevelyan was dismissed from the Somerset bench, even though – unlike his eldest son and namesake – he is not known to have participated in the political opposition to the usurper. The younger John was attainted for taking part in the duke of Buckingham’s rebellion, and, although pardoned in December 1484, had to wait until Henry VII’s accession for a full restitution.44 PROME, xv. 27, 102-5; CPR, 1476-85, p. 504. When Henry came to the throne, Trevelyan was reappointed to the commission of the peace for Somerset, but by this date he was an old man and his sons were beginning to play a greater part in public affairs. His heir, John, born in about 1462 and so several years into his majority,45 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 581. followed in his footsteps by joining the royal household, and accompanied Henry VII on his expedition to France in 1492. Like him, Trevelyan’s second and third sons, Thomas and Richard, also embarked on administrative careers in their father’s lifetime. In 1491 Richard succeeded his brother as escheator in Somerset and Dorset, having already held the same position in Devon and Cornwall in 1488-9.46 Trevelyan Pprs. ii. 53; N. and Q. Som. and Dorset, xix. 97; CFR, xxii. nos. 194, 341, 378.

Trevelyan’s will is now lost, but a draft paper dated 9 Mar. 1490 and in his own handwriting has survived. In it he outlined his intentions with regard to his lands, of which a year earlier he had enfeoffed the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Worcester and the King’s uncle, Jasper, duke of Bedford. The instructions he gave to these feoffees made generous provision for his younger sons out of his patrimony. To his heir, John, he left his properties in Trevelyan and other parishes in the vicinity of Lostwithiel and Bodmin, along with tin and coal mines and tolls pertaining to the same. To Thomas, he left his properties in several parishes situated further south, in the vicinity of Truro, and to Richard, his third son, the lands he had acquired in Surrey and Sussex. His fourth and fifth sons, Nicholas and another Richard, were each to have moieties of his Cornish manor of Trewennack, and he provided Humphrey, his youngest son, with lands in Trefrew and at Burrington in Devon along with an annual rent from his manor of Knole in Somerset. George, his sixth son, who would enter the Church and later became one of Henry VIII’s chaplains, was left £76 13s. 8d. to ‘fynde him to scole’. Presumably Trevelyan was as generous as he was to his younger sons because their brother, John, was already well provided for as the heir to their mother’s substantial estate. Trevelyan died on 20 June 1492, having apparently outlived his wife. Among the family papers there is a list of expenses incurred at his funeral on food, wine and other commodities, including ‘bokeram’ [buckram] for his hearse, totalling £9 11s. 9d. A further £13 4s. ½d. was expended during his month’s mind.47 Trevelyan Pprs. i. 90-94, 96-97, 121; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 581.