Thomas’s father was one of the leading commanders of the English armies in France, serving with distinction from 1415 until his death during the Pontoise campaign of 1441.
This substantial inheritance did not come to Burdet directly upon his grandfather’s death on 15 Oct. 1442. He spent two years in the wardship of Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford (and from 1444 duke of Buckingham); and the survival of his mother until about 1450 diminished his immediate expectations.
These well-founded hopes were, however, not to be realized. Instead, Burdet spent a long career persistently engaged in local disorder with only an intermittent involvement in the proper concerns of the leading gentry. One reason for this was the particular tensions in Warwickshire politics during this period; another was the long dispute over the manor of Bramcote in the north-east of the county that had come to him with his maternal inheritance. Yet the serial nature of his disputes and the curious circumstances of his death suggest that the main reason, as in the case of his neighbour, Robert Arderne*, lay in an instability of character.
The dispute over Bramcote dominated the early years of Burdet’s adult career. It was a large property, valued at £26 p.a. in 1477, and his mother’s title was contested by the Leicestershire esquire, William Charnels of Snarestone, who claimed as heir in tail. Late in 1440 Charnels had allegedly entered on the possession of the earl of Stafford, who was holding the manor to the use of Burdet’s parents. Restored to possession, the earl conveyed the manor to a powerful group of local feoffees, headed by our MP’s kinsman Sir Maurice Bruyn and (Sir) Humphrey Stafford I*, to the use of his mother.
The long dispute over Bramcote seems to have been waged without violence; the same cannot be said of other disputes in which Burdet was involved. In the summer of 1445 he and his sureties forfeited £180 on his failure to keep the peace to John Boteler of Alspath, the husband of his wife’s sister, and he was one of the leaders of an armed band, said to number 300, involved in raiding the Gloucestershire property of Katherine, wife of Sir William Peyto‡.
At this stage of his career, this lawless record did not prevent Burdet from taking the part in local affairs due to his rank. In the summer of 1450 he was appointed to his first ad hoc commission of local government, and he quickly came to assume an important place in Warwickshire politics. In 1451 he was granted an annuity of ten marks by the county’s leading magnate, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick; on 23 Sept. 1452 he was at Cheltenham to witness an award made by another of the county’s peers, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, between the abbess and convent of Syon and their Cheltenham tenants; and a few weeks later he sued out a general pardon against his earlier indiscretions.
None the less, later events suggest that Burdet was a committed supporter of neither the earl of Warwick nor the duke of York. He had other associations that were likely to lead him in another direction. On 25 Nov. 1455, during the second session of the Parliament, he was one of those who stood mainprise for the future good conduct of the notorious felon, (Sir) William Tailboys*. Tailboys, together with another of his sureties, Robert, illegitimate brother of Henry Holand, duke of Exeter, were later to number among the Lancastrian military leaders, and even at this early date in the conflict between York and Lancaster it is curious to find a retainer of the earl of Warwick acting alongside such men. Further, although Burdet’s removal from the Warwickshire bench in November 1458, when the Lancastrians were in control of the government, implies they did not trust him, this impression is flatly contradicted by his nomination as sheriff of Worcestershire (an office held by the earl of Warwick in right of inheritance) in the wake of the rout of the Yorkist lords at Ludford Bridge.
Clearly Burdet’s political sympathies, in so far as they existed independently of his self-interest, were divided, perhaps because of his period as a ward of the duke of Buckingham, one of the principal supporters of the Lancastrian government of these years. The Yorkist victory in July 1460 at the battle of Northampton, where the duke was killed, thus found him in an equivocal position. His acceptance of the Worcestershire shrievalty can have done little to endear him to the earl of Warwick, and this explains why, despite his fee from the earl, he did not benefit from the change of regime. The new government indulged him no further than the grant of a general pardon on 4 Feb. 1462 as ‘late sheriff and under sheriff of Worcestershire’.
In the early 1460s Burdet’s career resumed the course it had followed in the 1440s, as he was once more drawn into a series of disputes. According to a Chancery petition, to be dated to this period, ‘of his grete malice’ he violently assaulted and threatened one of his former servants, Nicholas Bosbury of Alcester, forcing him to surrender evidences concerning property at Binton near Arrow.
These disturbances are one explanation for Burdet’s exclusion from local government during most of the 1460s. Another probably lies in the distrust in which he was held by the earl of Warwick, whose arbitration he seems to have rejected in his dispute with Rous. All this, however, is not to say that Burdet lacked friends, even among those close to the earl, nor that he was without influence. A modern historian of the county has argued that, in the mid 1460s, the earl’s affinity was ‘splitting apart’, and, on the assumption that Burdet was persona non grata with the earl, his place in the county certainly suggests that the affinity lacked cohesion. Early in 1463 John Hathwick named him as a feoffee in the disputed manor of Dodford in Northamptonshire alongside the earl’s servants, Thomas Hugford and Thomas Throckmorton*; and in the following May the earl’s intimate, Robert Clapham, was among those prepared to offer mainprise for our MP’s appearance in Chancery. Burdet was also able to call on some of the leading Warwickshire gentry to act in the same capacity: in February 1465 Sir Simon Mountfort†, Sir Edward Raleigh, Humphrey Stafford III and William Berkeley† offered surety on his behalf.
Such connexions, allied with a wealth that gave him a strong claim to a place in local administration, appear to have paved the way for a recovery in Burdet’s fortunes in the late 1460s. Part cause and part effect of this recovery was final victory in his long dispute over Bramcote: by a fine levied in 1466 William Charnels and Joyce, his wife, acknowledged his right in the manor. At about the same time his dispute with Rous came to an end: in November 1465 Rous released surety of the peace to him and no more is heard of their quarrel.
This recovery seems to have been ended by the Readeption, perhaps again because he had not regained the earl of Warwick’s favour. He was, in any event, removed from the county bench in December 1470, and nothing more is known of his activities during Henry VI’s short second reign. This setback, if such it was, proved to be brief. Edward IV’s restoration saw his return to the bench, and on 21 Sept. 1472 he appeared for the first and only recorded time as an attestor to a parliamentary election.
The subsequent course of Burdet’s career is very difficult to explain. His next omission from the bench in February 1474 was, unlike the last, a deliberate exclusion – he was the only gentry removal – and, although he was restored again, he was removed for the final time in November 1475.
A clue may be found in Burdet’s increasingly complicated family circumstances. His early marriage to Agnes Waldieve proved to have baneful consequences. They were divorced in the consistory court of the bishopric of Worcester in June 1446, on the grounds of consanguinity.
Later reliable evidence suggests that Burdet also resorted to less conventional methods. In 1528, when called upon to give evidence in the long dispute to which this attempted disinheritance gave rise, an old man, John, son of Henry Dyson who had been a servant of our MP for over 30 years, recalled that he had often heard his father relate an extraordinary narrative. Burdet caused a priest to lie in a bed with himself and his first wife, Agnes, every night; he would then rise early and go hunting, intending to slander his wife and obtain a divorce; but she would ‘lyke a good woman’ also leave the bed to avoid lying alone with the priest. More plausibly, the witness claimed that his father later learned that Burdet intended to murder his eldest son, and responded by secretly at night taking the child to the abbey of Alcester (very near Arrow), entrusting him to the care of Abbot Richard Tutbury, the boy’s godfather.
This testimony seems too improbable to be a complete invention, although its chronology is confused. The conspiracy to compromise Agnes must have taken place before the summer of 1446; and the plot to murder the heir to after 1454 when Tutbury became abbot.
Whatever reliance is to be placed on this narrative, there can be no doubt that Burdet was determined to disinherit, if not to murder, his eldest son, but it remains to ask how his plan to disinherit Richard was related to his own fall. One suggestion can be very tentatively put forward. In the indictment that prompted his execution, his servant, Alexander Rushton, is the only one mentioned by name among those to whom he supposedly made a treasonable declaration on 26 May 1475. This raises the possibility that it was Rushton who betrayed him, either revealing a real conspiracy or concocting one, and his motive may have lain in disgust at the scheme of disinheritance. There are two other speculative contexts to Burdet’s fall. His third wife’s claim, as a jointure from her first husband to part of the Hill inheritance in Somerset and Dorset, brought him into conflict with William Say†, the eldest son of the influential courtier, (Sir) John Say II*, who had married Margaret’s daughter, Genevieve. In 1475 the Burdets vindicated her title to two-thirds of this property, and it cannot be discounted that Sir John’s hostility was a factor, albeit no more than a minor one, in his fall.
This leads us to a final explanation, namely that Burdet was destroyed as a warning to the King’s disenchanted brother, George, duke of Clarence, whose servant he was. As the husband of one of the Neville earl of Warwick’s daughters and coheiresses, Clarence had played a significant, if fluctuating and disruptive, part in Warwickshire affairs, since 1471. It is not known when Burdet entered his service; indeed, the only evidence that he did post-dates his death. None the less, the connexion was a close one: the duke declared Burdet’s innocence at a meeting of the royal council held after our MP’s execution and later, allegedly at least, employed his servants to make public declarations to the same effect. This strongly implies that the duke viewed the attack on his servant as an attack upon himself, but it does not itself show either that Burdet’s treason, if such it was, was part of a conspiracy against the King led by Clarence, or that the charges against Burdet were a fabrication aimed at warning or discrediting the duke.
For whatever the reason, on 12 May 1477 a powerful commission of oyer and terminer was issued against Burdet. Five days later three separate Middlesex juries returned ‘billa vera’ against the catalogue of alleged treasons, dating back to 1474 and culminating in the dissemination of treasonable bills at Holborn as recently as 5 May. On 19 May our unfortunate MP was found guilty before the Lords and he was hanged, drawn and quatered at Tyburn on the following day. His final act was to declare his innocence ‘magno spiritu et verbis multis’.
Despite his death on the scaffold, Burdet had an honourable burial – he was interred in the chapel of All Saints in Greyfriars church, the monumental inscription describing him as Clarence’s ‘valens Armiger’ – and he also escaped forfeiture.
This ensured that a lengthy dispute would follow, one that would have been avoided or deferred if Burdet had suffered forfeiture. His eldest son made determined, and ultimately largely successful, efforts to regain what he regarded as his own. He committed a series of disseisins against his stepmother and half-brother, Nicholas, and although he was indicted for these entries before the county j.p.s his cause clearly had considerable sympathy among the county elite. His admission in 1479 to the guild of Stratford-upon-Avon, in which his family had long played a part, is a sign of his acceptance, as also was his marriage to a daughter of Sir Simon Mountfort.
From the point of view of the family’s future wealth, Richard’s victory was unfortunate, for his issue quickly failed in the male line. On the death of his son, Thomas, in about 1497, the family lands passed to Thomas’s sister, Anne, and her husband, Edward Conway.