CORNWALLIS, Thomas (c.1415-85), of Brome and Oakley, Suff. and Basildon, Essex.

An ancestor of Marquess Cornwallis, the British commander who surrendered to the American rebels at Yorktown in 1781, Corresp. Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis ed. Ross, i. 1. Thomas was born of mercantile stock. Both his grandfather and namesake (said to have come from Ireland) and his father, John, were vintners in the city of London, although the latter invested in property in Essex and acquired lands in Suffolk through his marriage. KB27/721, rot. 91; Add. 19124, f. 421; Vis. Suff. ii. 149; CPR, 1377-81, p. 594; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 409; Feudal Aids, vi. 440, 490; CIPM, xxiv. 592-5. Following his death in 1436, John was buried in the church of St. Martin Vintry where his own father already lay. Vis. Suff. i. 149. In April the following year the Crown ordered the escheator in Essex to grant seisin of his manor of ‘Botelers’ in Basildon and a tenement at Ramsden Crays to Thomas, who also succeeded to John’s holdings in the parishes of St. Dunstan in the East and St. Martin in the Vintry in London and Stepney, Middlesex. CFR, xvi. 329-30; Feudal Aids, vi. 490; CP40/791, cart. rot. 2; KB27/816, rot. 85. Thomas may have entered his maternal inheritance in Suffolk, which included manors at Brome and Oakley, at about the same time since his mother, who had inherited the properties in question from her brother, Robert Bukton, was probably already dead by this date. For a time at least, he also came into possession of the former Bukton manor of ‘Hemnales’ in Pulham, Norfolk. W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, iii. 239, 286; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 409; KB27/768, rot. 35. Philippa Cornwallis does not feature in her husband’s will.

Cornwallis may have spent some of the next few years in London receiving a legal education, since he later practised as a lawyer. KB27/773, rot. 47d. The ‘Cornwallis’ admitted to L. Inn in 1467 is unidentified: while he may have been the MP, it is also possible that he was one of Cornwallis’s sons: L. Inn Adm. i. 16. He was certainly at Westminster in mid 1441, when he and several of his servants appeared in person in the court of King’s bench to answer a suit brought by John Jenney*. Jenney claimed that the defendants had trespassed on his lands at Brome and neighbouring parishes the previous March, but they asserted that the properties rightfully belonged to Cornwallis, by inheritance from his father. KB27/721, rot. 91. Aspects of the pleadings in this suit are of some interest. Jenney referred to the marriage of Cornwallis’s parents at Brome, although Thomas asserted that the ceremony had taken place at Whitechapel. Cornwallis also claimed that his father had died on 7 Sept. 1436 and that he himself was still a minor two months later, although the inquisitions post mortem held after John Cornwallis’s death found that John had died on the previous 13 Aug., and that his son was already of age at that date: CIPM, xxiv. 592-5. Presumably Thomas was correct in his assertions: such inquisitions were far from infallible and he should have known better than Jenney the facts relating to his parents’ marriage. Over a decade later, he again clashed with Jenney, who sued him and a husbandman associate at Westminster, alleging that they had broken into his close at Pulham and Hardwick in the summer of 1452. Appearing in person in King’s bench in Easter term 1453, they pleaded that the property in question was part of Cornwallis’s inheritance. KB27/768, rot. 35.

It is also likely that Cornwallis lived for some of his early years in Essex, since he attested the return of its knights of the shire to the Commons of 1442, before settling in Suffolk, where he attended three subsequent parliamentary elections. He probably owed his own return to the Commons of 1449-50 to a combination of political circumstances and his own connexions. The East Anglian elections to this Parliament witnessed something of a reaction against the Court interest and the King’s chief minister, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, whom the Commons impeached the following February. Cornwallis’s fellow knight of the shire was John Howard*, the cousin of one of the duke of York’s allies, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. There is however no evidence of a link between the duke of Norfolk and Cornwallis, who was to be a member of a Suffolk jury that indicted the Mowbray retainer, Arthur Nowell, for trespass in February 1453. KB9/118/2 (1), no. 132. There is also no evidence that Thomas was linked with the out of favour de la Pole, notwithstanding his maternal grandfather’s past association with the duke’s family. Indeed, a later lawsuit suggests that he was in dispute with the duchess of Suffolk at the time of his election. KB27/783, rot. 64. If Cornwallis did have a patron in this period, it was most likely York, from whom he was farming the Essex hundred of Barstable by 1447-8, Westminster Abbey muns. 12165. and whom (Sir) John Tyrell*, his wife’s influential uncle, had served in the past.

Cornwallis won his seat in the Commons in controversial circumstances, for there was a contested election. Tellingly, the return lists no fewer than 159 attestors, an unusually high number, and a subsequent lawsuit shows that Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe* of Framsden had opposed his candidature. When the suit, heard in the court of common pleas, came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1450, Radcliffe alleged that the defendant, Giles St Loe, sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1448-9, ought to have returned him, not Cornwallis, alongside Howard. He accused St. Loe of having breached the statutes of 1429 and 1445 regulating sheriffs’ conduct of parliamentary elections, by making a return that ignored the true wishes of the electorate. He therefore demanded that St. Loe should pay him £100, the sum awarded by the statutes against sheriffs who made false returns, and sought damages of £200. St. Loe contradicted these claims, declaring that a majority of the forty-shilling freeholders attending the shire court had in fact elected Cornwallis. The parties agreed to refer the matter to a jury but further legal process ensured the postponement of the intended trial. It had still not taken place in the autumn of 1452, when the court discharged the defendant because, for reasons now unknown, Radcliffe had decided not to prosecute his suit. CP40/759, rot. 433. In spite of this outcome, Sir Geoffrey did not lose hope of gaining redress for the wrong he believed he had suffered. Just as the common pleas dismissed St. Loe sine die, he was in the process of initiating another action, this time in King’s bench, against Cornwallis. He accused the latter of having breached statute by maintaining the cause of St. Loe in the common pleas suit, to the damage of the King as well as himself. When the case came to pleadings in Trinity term 1454, Radcliffe alleged that Cornwallis had illegally assisted St. Loe at Wickham Market, Suffolk, where the trial of the commons pleas suit was to have taken place, on 20 Aug. 1452. Cornwallis, represented by his attorney, Robert Bukton, evidently a relative, pleaded that there was no case to answer because St. Loe had retained him for his legal counsel, and that he had quite legitimately shown members of the jury panel certain evidences in support of his client. In response, Radcliffe alleged that Cornwallis lacked the qualifications to act on St. Loe’s behalf, perhaps justifiably, given that his opponent was never a j.p. and, so far as is known, served on only two ad hoc commissions. As a result, the outcome of the suit came to hinge on whether the MP was, as he claimed, ‘homo in lege temporali Anglie eruditus’. Following pleadings, the parties agreed to refer the matter to a jury but it appears that the intended trial never took place. KB27/766, rot. 47d; 770, rot. 38d; 771, rot. 63; 773, rot. 47d; 775, rot. 17d; 786, rot. 82. The trial had yet to occur nearly six years later, by which stage it is possible that Radcliffe was no longer alive.

During this period, Cornwallis was also at odds with Alice de la Pole, duchess of Suffolk, despite the links which his grandfather, Robert Bukton, had enjoyed with her late husband’s family. An account of the widowed duchess’s receiver-general shows that she summoned (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, (Sir) Miles Stapleton*, Sir Thomas Tuddenham* and other prominent retainers to Eye, Suffolk, in August 1454, to discuss various trespasses he and his servants were supposed to have committed against her. Egerton Roll 8779. By then Cornwallis’s poor relationship with Alice was of several years’ standing. In a King’s bench suit of the later 1450s, she accused Cornwallis and two local gentlemen, Robert Bukton of Brome (probably the MP’s attorney in Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe’s lawsuit) and Peter Herfrey, of having poached on her warren at Eye, which lay close to the Cornwallis manor of Brome. She alleged that this trespass had occurred on 12 Nov. 1449, a claim open to question, given that the Parliament of 1449-50 had opened six days earlier: either she was misleading the court or he had delayed his departure for Westminster. Alice continued doggedly to pursue Cornwallis and Bukton over this matter into the early 1460s. In Michaelmas term 1462, they obtained several licences to treat with her out of court and the case, perhaps never concluded, was still pending at the beginning of 1464. KB27/782, rot. 67d; 783, rot. 64; 806, rot. 47. Probably related to the quarrel between Cornwallis and the duchess were a couple of suits that the MP himself pursued at Westminster. He initiated one of these actions in King’s bench at the beginning of 1456. In pleadings of Easter term that year, Cornwallis alleged that the defendant, a husbandman from Eye named John Mason, had been involved in assaulting and imprisoning him at Eye in mid 1454. He claimed that Mason and seven accomplices from Eye, including Robert Anyell, ‘gentleman’, had held him there for two days after attacking and wounding him there on 2 June that year. He further alleged that he had lost, through injury, the services of two of his men caught up in the same incident. Mason responded to the plea by seeking licence to negotiate with Cornwallis out of court but failed to reappear at Westminster in Trinity term 1456 as directed, meaning that the MP won the case by default. On the following 9 Sept. a jury sitting at Ipswich assessed Cornwallis’s damages against Mason and his sureties at £60. KB27/780, rot. 92d. Cornwallis brought the second suit in the common pleas. In pleadings of the same Easter term, he alleged that the defendant, Mason’s accomplice Robert Anyell, was detaining a charter he had delivered to him for safe-keeping in the spring of 1449. In response, Anyell claimed that Cornwallis had entrusted the charter (recording a demise of lands in Langton Green near Eye from Robert Bukton – which of his relatives of that name is unclear – to Richard Mason) to him so that he might examine it alongside the evidences and court rolls of the duchess of Suffolk’s honour of Eye. He added that had always been willing to return the charter, which he had recently brought to Eye with the intention of returning it to Cornwallis. CP40/781, rot. 338. It is not known whether Cornwallis and the duchess ever resolved their differences; although by October 1476, within 18 months of her death, his eldest son and heir, John, was acting as a feoffee for her son, John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk. CCR, 1476-85, no. 283.

During his quarrel with Alice de la Pole, Cornwallis appears to have associated with Sir John Fastolf, an opponent of the de la Pole interest in East Anglia, since he witnessed a conveyance of property in Suffolk on the knight’s behalf in May 1457. Magdalen Coll. Oxf., Spitlings deeds 3. By 1464 he was a feoffee for the Pastons of Norfolk, self-proclaimed heirs to Fastolf’s estates, Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iv. 105; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 190n. although his ties with the Tyrells of Essex, a wealthy and well connected family with whom his father had associated in the early fifteenth century, G.A. Moriarty, ‘Early Tyrells’, New Eng. Hist. and Gen. Reg. cix. 19-20; CCR, 1422-9, p. 48; CP25(1)/169/185/15; 187/96. were of greater significance, not least because he was bound to them by marriage. Philippa Tyrell had become his wife by July 1441, the date of a settlement of the Cornwallis manor at Basildon on the couple. Essex RO, deed, 1441, D/DHf/T41/86, 88. By the latter part of 1448, Philippa and her sister, Margaret, had succeeded their brother (named Edward Tyrell like their father), Corp. London RO, hr 178/2. but Philippa had not come permanently into land as a result. In accordance with their father’s will, she had and Margaret had come into joint possession of the manors of Shepreth, Maldon and Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, but for the term of their lives only, after which these estates were to pass to their cousin, (Sir) Thomas Tyrell*. Philippa had succeeded also to lands at South Hanningfield and Downham in Essex, but again as a tenant for life only. Reg. Chichele, ii. 630, 631. Cornwallis enjoyed a good relationship with Sir Thomas, for he and the knight served each other as feoffees. CP25(1)/72/287/58; CPR, 1476-85, p. 77.

During the mid and later 1460s, Cornwallis was associated with Margaret, widow of another of his wife’s cousins, William Tyrell I*, who had been executed for treason in 1462, and with Margaret’s brother, (Sir) Robert Darcy II*, in two lawsuits at Westminster. Both suits concerned the manor of ‘Fitzjohns’ in Rickinghall, Suffolk, at one time the property of the Fitzjohn family and afterwards acquired by John Rickinghall, bishop of Chichester (d.1429). In one of these actions, heard in the common pleas, the plaintiffs were Sir Thomas Bourgchier (a younger son of the earl of Essex) and Robert Wimbill†. When their suit came to pleadings in Michaelmas term 1466, they accused the defendants, Cornwallis and Margaret, of having wrongfully entered the manor in May 1464. Bourgchier and Wimbill claimed to hold it by virtue of a conveyance from the bishop’s nephew and heir John Manning; Cornwallis and his co-defendant asserted that following the bishop’s death it had passed by means of several conveyances to Margaret’s late husband, William Tyrell, who subsequently had conveyed to Cornwallis and Sir Robert Darcy. CP40/821, rot. 529. Cornwallis and Darcy were the plaintiffs in the second lawsuit, which came to pleadings in King’s bench in Easter term 1467. According to them, the defendant, John Fitzjohn, (styled a ‘yeoman’ but presumably descended from the former owners), along with a chaplain named William Stanfeld and John Fitzjohn junior, had trespassed on lands belonging to the manor in May 1462. As in the common pleas suit, they claimed to hold Fitzjohns by virtue of a conveyance from William Tyrell. Fitzjohn responded by referring to the bishop’s acquisition of the manor and its descent to John Manning, adding that Manning had conveyed it to him and that, in turn, he had conveyed it away to Bourgchier and Wimbill, on whose behalf and as their ‘servant’ he had entered upon the lands in question. After the parties had agreed that the matter should go before a jury, Fitzjohn sought the support of Bourgchier and Wimbill, whom the court agreed to summon to Westminster, but the pair had yet to appear or a jury to sit at the end of 1467. KB27/824 rots. 72, 79; 825.

Apart from the likes of Darcy and the Tyrells, Cornwallis had other prominent Essex associates, including Sir John Marney, (Sir) Lewis John* and his son, Lewis John alias Fitzlewis* and Sir Thomas Montgomery†. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 151-2; CCR, 1468-76, no. 63; CP25(1)/72/287/58; Essex RO, deed, 1477, D/DHf/T41/104. Of this circle, Cornwallis stood surety for Marney in the late 1460s, after the knight had been implicated in a Lancastrian plot, CPR, 1467-77, pp. 344-5; 1476-85, p. 13; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 122-3. It is impossible to say whether his association with Marney played any part in the MP’s decision to obtain a royal pardon in Sept. 1473: C67/49, m. 6. and Montgomery was a trustee for some of the properties that the MP owned in London. Consisting of ten messuages, a crane, wharf, cellars and land in the parish of St. Martin in the Vintry, these holdings featured in a Chancery suit that Cornwallis brought against John Geest, a ‘bargeman’ to whom he had leased them, in 1479. In his bill, Cornwallis stated that he had settled them on Montgomery and others in their capacity as feoffees to the use of his last will, but that Geest had refused to attorn to them as their tenant, or to pay them any rent. C1/56/34-36. The properties in question included a stretch of ground known as ‘Cornewalesse grounde’, the scene of the assault on (Sir) Thomas Parr* while he was on his way to the last session of the Parl. of 1445: RP, v. 168 (cf. PROME, xii. 69).

As this case indicates, Cornwallis made (or at least had intended to make) a will, but neither this nor any subsequent will has survived. He died on 26 May 1485, leaving as his heir his son, John, then some 30 years of age. Later that year the Crown instructed the escheators in Essex and Suffolk to enquire into his lands in those counties, CFR, xxi. no. 833; xxii. no. 5. Curiously, the authorities had likewise issued a writ of diem clausit extremum relating to Thomas Cornwallis and addressed to the escheator of Essex and Herts. back in May 1474: CFR, xxi. no. 226. Either they had received false information of the MP’s demise or the Thomas in question was a namesake from a cadet branch of the Cornwallis family. It is worth noting that the MP had a younger brother, John, perhaps the John Cornwallis of Essex who died in 1446: PCC 20 Luffenham; C139/136/45. but only the records of the Essex inquisition post mortem, which refer to the manor at Basildon he had inherited from his father, have survived. Nevertheless, a similar inquisition held in Suffolk after the death in 1506 of his son and successor, John, mentions three manors in Brome and its environs and a third part of the manor of ‘Braham Hall’ in Brantham, which the MP had held in that county. Cornwallis is also known to have possessed at least two other manors in Suffolk, ‘Woodhall’ in Thrandeston and ‘Bayton Hall’ in Capel St. Mary, the second of which he is said to have inherited from one of the Fastolfs of Ipswich. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 104; iii. 205; Copinger, iii. 319; vi. 28; Harl. 7356, f. 9. The Essex inquisition post mortem for the MP valued his lands in that county at 20 marks p.a.; that held in Suffolk after the death of his son estimated that the manors at Brome and Brantham alone were then worth about £48 annually. Since inquisitions post mortem almost invariably underestimated land values, and, given that he had owned property in Middlesex and London as well as in Essex and Suffolk , Comprising a manor known as ‘Berneys’ (C1/9/349) as well as the holdings in Stepney he had inherited. Cornwallis must have enjoyed a substantial income from real property. It is scarcely surprising that he was distrained for knighthood on at least two occasions during his lifetime.