A royal pardon granted in 1458 referring to this MP as ‘alias late of London citizen and grocer’,
This link with Dixon, at that time one of the barons of the Exchequer, adds weight to the supposition that Thomas Brown the grocer’s son and Thomas Brown the Exchequer clerk and future shire-knight were one and the same person. Indeed, Dixon may well have played an important role in promoting the young man’s career at the Exchequer. By 1434 Brown had been employed there for at least eight years, and although he took no official salary it is clear that he regularly assisted the treasurer in the business of the Receipt. For instance, when a cash payment had been made to the duke of Norfolk in October 1426, it had been Brown who had completed the transfer. This was during the treasurership of Walter, Lord Hungerford, with whom Brown was to be frequently recorded until long after Hungerford ceased to hold his office. The association between the two men flourished not exclusively within the Exchequer (where, to take just one example, in May 1427 Brown received on Hungerford’s behalf the sum of £100), but in mutual support in their private transactions. That same year Hungerford and his under treasurer, William Darell*, together with the rising lawyer John Fortescue*, assisted Brown to complete the legal formalities when he took possession of the manor of Eythorne and other holdings in Kent, this being Brown’s first step towards becoming one of the most substantial landowners in the county.
During Hungerford’s treasurership Brown was kept busy at the Exchequer, engaged in tasks of considerable responsibility. He was the man employed in July 1427 to transfer an assignment of 100 marks to the executors of Ralph, earl of Westmorland, for the support of the earl’s ward the duke of York, and a year later to receive tallies on behalf of the duke of Bedford. In August 1429 he joined Hungerford in making arrangements for £1,000 to be sent to Bedford in France, with the help of the agent of a merchant from Lucca.
It is indeed curious that in all this time Brown held no official, salaried position at the Exchequer. Rewards came indirectly and intermittently. During Hungerford’s treasurership he profited from royal patronage in the form of leases granted by the treasurer’s bill. Thus, in 1428 he shared with Sir William Phelip the keeping of certain manors in Suffolk and Norfolk; a year later he took custody of property in Hampshire and briefly obtained the wardship and marriage of the heir of Walter Romsey; and in 1431, with others, he leased portions of the Wiltshire manors of Amesbury and Winterbourne for 12 years.
In April 1437 Brown was associated with the treasurer Cromwell and others including his fellow grocer, Thomas Canynges*, when one Baldwin Sanheuy made a formal release of all legal actions against them. Yet commercial rivalry between certain Londoners and Canynges and his kinsmen, who came from Bristol, may have prompted Brown to show excessive zeal when he was appointed to a commission sent into Kent the following year to make inquiries about evasion of customs duties. A number of the findings of the commissioners were eventually proved unfounded, most notably the accusation that Canynges and his half-brother John Young* had exported 200 woollen cloths and tin worth 400 marks from Queenborough to Zeeland without paying customs. Canynges asserted that he had paid his dues in London, and Young vehemently denied the charge saying that the inquiries had been heard before their ‘enemies and ill-wishers’, implying that Brown had used his official position to further his personal interests .
Brown continued to obtain Exchequer leases of property temporarily in the Crown’s possession, but now concentrated on those which would add to his steadily-expanding landed interests in Kent. For instance, for two years from July 1437 he had the keeping of a stretch of water called ‘Gestnyng’ near Sandwich. Seeking to obtain 100 acres of land known as Archer’s Court in the parish of River near Dover, he ran into difficulties over title and in 1438 had to purchase a pardon for acquiring it with others without licence, only, in August 1439, to gain custody of the same property, then said to be in the King’s hands owing to the death of John Baker of Caldham.
These purchases were quite apart from the manorial estates, mainly situated in Sussex and Surrey, which came to our MP through his fortuitous marriage. In November 1436 he and Eleanor, daughter and heiress of Sir Thomas Arundel, received from her father’s widow, Joan, all the latter’s life-interest in the manor of West Betchworth in Dorking, and at the same time he and his associates entered an agreement with Eleanor regarding her inheritance of Chancton in Sussex. The marriage, which by linking Brown to the earls of Arundel considerably improved his social standing, probably took place very soon afterwards.
Thus, by the time Brown was returned to Parliament by Dover in the autumn of 1439 he was an esquire of consequence in the locality. He had been a j.p. in Kent for three years, but of greater significance with regard to his relationship with the Portsmen of Dover is the fact that he had recently played a prominent part in ending the longstanding disputes between them and the men of Faversham arising over the exactions which Dover claimed from its member-Port. These disputes had been concluded on 1 Aug. 1438 by the mediation of Geoffrey Lowther*, lieutenant-warden of the Cinque Ports, John Darell*, steward of the archbishop of Canterbury and brother of Brown’s colleague William, and Brown himself. By this agreement the barons of Dover promised to accept a burgess chosen at Faversham as one of their parliamentary representatives, or else forfeit half of the customary annual contributions of 40s. Faversham was required to pay.
We might conclude from Brown’s purchases of land and other of his financial dealings, such as his involvement in the lucrative business of ransoming French prisoners of war, that he was accruing substantial sums of money as a consequence of his place in the Exchequer. But, curiously, it was ‘in consideration of his recent misfortunes and impoverishment in Kent’, that the King on 24 July 1440 granted him for life a licence to ship 100 sacks of wool every year from London, Southampton or Sandwich directly to the Mediterranean (avoiding the staple at Calais).
At this stage in Brown’s career the Exchequer faced a deep crisis, which it was hoped the new treasurer, Marmaduke Lumley, bishop of Carlisle, appointed on 17 Dec. 1446, would resolve. In his attempts to do so Lumley made considerable calls on the energies and experience of the clerks (‘approved and sadde men brought up of youth and of long tyme contynued in our Eschequier’), and on none more than Brown, whom he named as his deputy. Lumley’s first moves were to appoint new collectors of customs and subsidies, thus invalidating all tallies issued in the names of their predecessors, and then to suspend altogether payments of tallies from the customs. This all-embracing moratorium was bound to be short-lived, and was primarily designed to enable the Exchequer officials to prepare a report on the financial situation, so beginning a period of intense activity under the direction of Brown as under treasurer. A long and detailed financial summary was prepared for the Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds (10 Feb.-3 Mar. 1447), and Brown was paid at the rate of 10s. per day for the duration of the session, having gone to the Parliament armed with rolls and other memoranda for the purpose of making known the state of the realm to the King and Lords. At other times his regular wages were 8d. a day, and he also received 5d. a day for compiling certain of the records; while, in addition, there was a handsome annual ‘reward’ of £40.
Nevertheless, Brown does not fit easily into the mould of other courtiers to Henry VI, for contrasting oddly with these grants and their grandiose consequences is the impression given by the records that he was a hard-working Exchequer official endeavouring to put into effect Lumley’s stringent measures. On 7 Dec. 1447 he was paid £26 13s. 4d. for his labours in producing several views of the state of the realm, which he had drawn up to show to the King and Council, and for his attendance during vacations to deal with matters of concern.
Meanwhile, Brown’s personal affairs had continued to flourish, thanks partly to the trading concessions granted him by Henry VI. During the Parliaments of February and November 1449 an undertaking was given to the staplers of Calais that licences to bypass the staple would be restricted, yet when the King agreed to annul them he excluded from the annulment those licences he had granted to his queen, his chief minister the duke of Suffolk and four others, one of whom was our MP. Furthermore, the Act of Resumption passed in the latter Parliament (in the spring of 1450) was not to extend to Brown with regard to any grant or lease made to him; any letters patent issued to him were ‘to stande in theire strength and pleyn effect’.
Brown had probably left the Exchequer after the end of his under treasurership, for there is no sign of any personal friendship between him and the unpopular new treasurer, James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele (with whom he had represented Kent in the Commons of 1445). Unlike Fiennes he was not especially singled out for attack by Cade’s rebels, even though on 7 July 1450 (the day after the agreement which preceded their dispersal), a party of them broke into his property at Kingsnorth and stole livestock and goods worth £40.
From 1450 onwards Brown’s fortunes rested to a large extent on his relations with Richard, duke of York. Indeed, his increasingly fraught dealings with York were eventually to cost him his life. York had turned to Brown during his under treasurership for help in securing fresh assignments for payment of the Crown’s debts and to smooth the path for the redemption of Exchequer tallies. As an inducement, in the spring of 1449 he and his duchess conveyed to Brown a group of manors in south-east England, as well as a number of knights’ fees in Essex. These were worth between £130 and £140 p.a. and the conveyance of such a portion of York’s inheritance evidently involved the expectation that payment of his dues would be made promptly at the Exchequer. At some stage, however, the duke became impatient with the process and seized a collection of tallies in Brown’s possession that included a substantial number belonging to other royal creditors. Also, most probably at the time of his ascendancy in the winter of 1450-1, he harassed Brown in his enjoyment of income from two of the manors, Erith and Swanscombe. It is possible that the earlier transaction involved some mortgages as well as alienations in fee, but it is also possible that York simply recovered some of his lands by force. The settlement of their dispute, made a year later when the political climate was in the process of changing once more (and to York’s disadvantage), laid down that the tallies should all be returned to Brown, with the exception of those worth 6,500 marks which belonged to York. Brown was also to be given tallies to the value of 300 marks to compensate him for losses he had incurred in ‘costes, harmes and scathes’ through the suit and through the duke’s ‘hevy lordshipp’, but since these losses had allegedly totaled 2,000 marks he may have been unfairly treated in this respect. York was to be permitted to buy back the manors of Erith and Swanscombe within the next five or six years for the sum of 2,400 marks (that is, roughly 20 years’ purchase by value of the property).
Not surprisingly, Brown remained firmly committed to the Lancastrian government. He was knighted before April 1453 (perhaps in January that year on the occasion of the ennoblement of the King’s half-brothers), and in July he attended meetings of the Council, notably those concerned with the problem of threats to continued English rule in Guyenne. He agreed personally to purvey 2,000 quarters of wheat to be shipped out to Bordeaux, and was licensed to be absent from the council while he arranged shipment. However, it proved necessary to issue a strongly-worded reminder to him on 1 Aug. to have the consignment ready on the 20th.
The 1450s were also a period when Brown consolidated his landed estate, for in this decade he bought two more manors and the hundred of Foxhunt in Sussex and additional holdings in Kent, most notably the aldermanry of Westgate, Canterbury (acquired by exchanging it for three parts of the manor of ‘Sellyng’).
It was perhaps inevitable, given Brown’s earlier confrontation with York, his long and amicable association with Chief Justice Fortescue and the considerable benefits he had received from service to Henry VI, that he would remain loyal to the King to the very end. On 14 Oct. 1459, just two days after the Yorkists’ defeat at Ludford Bridge he was commissioned to confiscate the possessions of York and his allies in Kent, a task made easier by his appointment as sheriff of the county for the second time. On 6 Dec. he was instructed with the duke of Buckingham to cause all of the earl of Warwick’s ships anchored in the harbour at Sandwich to be safeguarded and prevented from slipping out at high tide to join the earl at Calais, and four days later he was ordered to take the muster of men-at-arms and archers enlisted to put to sea in the company of Lord Rivers and (Sir) Gervase Clifton*. But the plan to winkle Warwick out of Calais and destroy his base of operations signally failed just a month later, when Sandwich was attacked by the Yorkists and Rivers and several ships were taken captive.
There can be little doubt that Sir Thomas’s earlier clash with York was a decisive factor in determining his fate. His son George, who like most of the other defenders in the Tower escaped penalty, later alleged that the indictment and attainder, leading to the forfeiture of his father’s substantial estates, had been accomplished ‘by grete and inordynat labours and of grete malice of dyvers his ennemyes and evell willers’ so that these enemies might have his lands and possessions.