The family of Bromwich had a distinguished recent history. Our MP’s great-uncle, Sir John Bromwich† (d.1388), had a remarkable career, successively holding prominent places in the employ of three of the greatest magnates of his day. He moved from the service of Lionel, duke of Clarence, whom he accompanied to Milan in 1368, to that of Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, for whom he acted as justiciar in Ireland during Mortimer’s lieutenancy there, and finally to that of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, serving, during the last years of his life, as surveyor of the lands of Gaunt’s son, the future Henry IV.
Sir John’s career marked the highpoint of the family’s fortunes. Two circumstances ensured its decline, at least relative to Sir John: first, he settled a life interest in his principal properties – the manors of Credenhill and Eaton Tregoes in Herefordshire, and Nailsworth and Bromsberrow in Gloucestershire, all of which he acquired rather than inherited – on his young second wife; and, second, when these manors descended on her death in 1420 to his nephew and heir, our MP’s father, Thomas, defects of title meant that he was only to hold on to the manor of Bromsberrow.
On this evidence of the family’s landholdings, although far more attenuated than in the time of Sir John, were ample, yet the subsidy returns of 1450-1 give a different impression. Our MP was assessed at a meagre £10 p.a., his mother £6, his son and heir, another Thomas, also at £6, and his brother, Robert, at £2.
The difficulty of coming to an unambiguous picture of the family’s status is matched by that of accurately demarcating the overlapping careers of the three Thomases, who headed the family in the fifteenth century. Between about 1410 and 1470 the records are careful to differentiate between two Thomas Bromwiches, senior and junior, but, regrettably, the eldest Thomas’s date of death is not certainly known. The best hypothesis is that he died in the late 1430s, when there is a break in the designation of ‘senior’ and ‘junior’, and that the re-emergence of the designation ‘junior’ about ten years later marks the start of the career of our MP’s son.
Our MP first occurs in the records in 1416, when he and his father numbered among many defendants in an assize of novel disseisin successfully brought by Margery Massy in respect of land in Mansell Lacy and Brinsop (near Sarnesfield). He was probably quite young at this date, perhaps even under age, for he makes only sporadic appearances in the records over the next 20 or so years. Early in 1420 both he and his father appear in a list of Herefordshire esquires fit to undertake military service. In the following year, he presented to the church of Credenhill, in a failed attempt to resurrect Sir John’s hereditary claim to the manor. John, Lord Talbot, quickly asserted his own right to the patronage.
From this point Bromwich, despite his father’s continued survival, began to play an independent part in local affairs. In 1430 he sued a husbandman of Brinsop for close-breaking there, perhaps on property settled upon him by his father at the time of his marriage; and on 21 Apr. 1431 he joined his brother-in-law, Ralph Lingen, at Hereford to sit as a juror in the inquisition taken on the death of (Sir) Richard Hankford*.
Not until the late 1430s did Bromwich succeed to the family estates. The eldest Thomas last appears in the records in December 1437, when, as a feoffee under a settlement made as long before as 1404, the Crown licensed him to make an enfeoffment of the Herefordshire manor of Brimfield, and he probably died soon afterwards.
At the end of that year Bromwich attested the election to Parliament of his putative kinsman, Henry Oldcastle*, and John Abrahall, and very soon afterwards he was to be drawn into a curious affair involving both these men and one in which he might have been expected to have a personal interest.
Bromwich also had difficulties with others at this date. In Trinity term 1444 he again troubled to attend the court of King’s bench to pursue two actions: the one brought against a large group of minor individuals from the neighbourhood of Abbey Dore, in the far south-west of the county, for assaulting and wounding him there; and the other, against a husbandman for close-breaking at ‘Wydmersshmore’.
The dramatic events Bromwich witnessed in this Parliament – the Commons’ attack on the government, culminating in the impeachment of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk – provided him with a foretaste of the troubles that overtook his native county in the 1450s. In view of his longstanding connexion with his powerful kinsman, Sir Walter Devereux, one of Richard, duke of York’s principal local lieutenants, he could hardly escape involvement in this turmoil. Although, beyond pledging £200 for his friend’s good behaviour, he played no recorded part in the disturbances organized by Devereux early in 1452 in support of the duke’s failed Dartford rising, other evidence shows that he and his kinsman, Ralph Bromwich, numbered among Devereux’s closest associates. In Trinity term 1453 Ralph was appealed alongside Devereux as accessory to the murder of Ralph Hakeluyt of Leominster, and later in the same year our MP was nominated as an arbiter in a dispute between two of Devereux’s tenants.
Soon thereafter, however, the politics of the county entered a period of crisis, provoked by the end of the duke of York’s protectorate and, more specifically, by the murder of a kinsman of another Yorkist, Sir William Herbert*, at Hereford. Bromwich was one of the many who took up arms in the cause of revenge: on 15 Mar. 1456 he numbered among a Yorkist gang, led by Herbert and Devereux’s son, Walter II*, who came to Hereford, intimidated the j.p.s (among whom was Fitzharry) into taking an indictment of murder against six citizens, and then promptly hanged the indicted. Perhaps chastened by this explosion of violence he did not, at least on the evidence of the indictments taken before royal commissioners at Hereford in April 1457, participate in the Yorkist raid on Carmarthen and Aberwystwyth castles in the following August. None the less, his alleged involvement in the earlier events was enough to ensure that these commissioners heard several indictments (all of which concerned the illegal hangings), and there followed an anxious period for him. On 9 May 1457 he appeared personally in the court of King’s bench and pleaded not guilty on the indictments, producing sureties for his appearance in the following term. These were headed by Devereux’s son-in-law, James Baskerville†, an obvious choice given Bromwich’s own affiliation with Devereux, but it is more surprising to find two junior members of the Lancastrian Skydemores, Philip and Richard, alongside Baskerville.
Bromwich, like the others, was made to wait for the alleviation of the financial and physical danger in which they stood, a danger increased by an appeal sued against them by Agnes Glover, a widow of one of the murdered townsmen. Over the next two terms he produced new sureties, including the two Devereuxs, father and son, and another Yorkist, John Clinton, for further appearances in King’s bench, and it was not until 3 Feb. 1458 that a jury came to Westminster to acquit him and the other principals of the charges against them.
Bromwich had had dealings of his own with one of the arbiters, the earl of Shrewsbury, in 1457. Politically weakened by his involvement with Devereux, he had been unable to resist a final surrender of his longstanding, but spurious, claim to the earl’s manor and advowson of Credenhill. By a final concord levied in Easter 1457, only a few days after his first appearance in King’s bench, he and his wife warranted the earl’s title.
In the months that followed Bromwich laid low in the hope, and (in view of the escape of the Yorkist lords abroad) perhaps the expectation, of better times ahead. He escaped attainder in the subsequent Parliament, probably because his personal connexion with York was slight, his principal allegiance being to the Devereux family rather than the duke (significantly, Walter Devereux II also escaped attainder, although not without entering heavy securities). Bromwich’s son, John, however, appears to have had more to fear than his father: on 17 Dec., three days before the end of the Parliament, he took the expensive precaution of having a pardon for treason and other offences enrolled on the patent roll. It was perhaps in further defence of the family’s interests that our MP travelled to Westminster: in Easter term 1460 he appeared personally in the court of common pleas to secure writs of outlawry against three Hereford tradesmen on pleas of debt and to defend a debt action sued against him by Catesby.
With the further Yorkist victory at Towton in March 1461, Bromwich’s decision to support the Devereux family was finally vindicated, but, perhaps because of a combination of his own advancing age and the death of his friend, Sir Walter Devereux, he benefited less from the change of regime than might have been expected. Although he was added to the Herefordshire bench in July 1461, and in the following month was nominated to a politically-sensitive commission of array, he did not cut much of figure in local politics. Some of his activities were, not surprisingly, informed by the rivalries of the previous decade: he continued to pursue his conspiracy action in the court of King’s bench, albeit without securing a verdict, and in July 1462 he and his son, Thomas, were members of a jury which acquitted John Kene, a local lawyer connected with the Devereux family, on a charge of theft from Fitzharry.
Bromwich was alive as late as 8 Mar. 1470, when, as feoffee of Thomas Walwyn of Much Marcle, he was party to the settlement of an annual rent of £5 on John, younger son of Sir Walter Devereux. His adherence to the Devereux family is enough to explain his omission from the Readeption commission of the peace issued during the following December, but death is another explanation. He was, in any event, certainly dead by October 1471, when he was noted as such in an action concerning Sir Walter’s executors.