Fitzharry’s career, as lawyer and Lancastrian loyalist, was a remarkable one. His family, whose origins lay in Wales, owed their entry into the Herefordshire gentry to the house of Lancaster. Our MP’s father was a servant of Henry of Bolingbroke: by 1396 he was in office as deputy steward of Bolingbroke’s lordship of Brecon, and when his patron became King he was entrusted with the constableship of Aberystwyth and rewarded with the considerable royal annuity of £40. That service also brought him advancement of another kind for it recommended him as a suitable husband for a daughter of as exalted a Lancastrian servant as Sir Hugh Waterton, chamberlain of the duchy of Lancaster. Thereafter, however, the family suffered a setback: John’s younger brothers, Thomas and Gruffydd, were implicated in Glendower’s rebellion, and later John himself formed a compromising friendship with the lollard traitor, Sir John Oldcastle†.
As a third son Thomas Fitzharry’s expectations at birth were poor, and they were only contingently improved by the childless death of his eldest brother, Hugh, late in Henry V’s reign. Little is known of his early life, although it is a reasonable surmise that he was brought up in the wardship of another prominent Lancastrian, John Leventhorpe I*. In 1421 Leventhorpe, perhaps in his capacity as one of Waterton’s executors, had been entrusted by the Crown with the wardship and marriage of our MP’s elder brother, and it was natural that the two boys should be kept together.
Fitzharry had an aptitude for legal learning. Since he is described, in the early 1450s, as an apprentice-at-law, he must have progressed as far as reading. Success of this sort was compensation for the disadvantages of a younger son; and he appears to have enjoyed another in the form of a land settlement, perhaps under the terms of his father’s will. As early as 1441 he brought a plea of trespass against a lesser man of Dorstone, near Vowchurch, implying he had property there; and by 1448 he certainly had land at Vowchurch, for he then sued two local gentlemen for killing six of his young oxen there and depasturing his grass to the value of £5.
During his term as escheator a threat emerged to part of the lands of his brother, Richard, nominally the head of the family but already eclipsed by our MP. On 14 Sept. 1443 two royal commissioners, Henry Oldcastle* and Thomas Bromwich*, charged with inquiring into the lands of John Abrahall*, found that he had died seised, among other things, of a moiety of the manor of Eaton Tregoze in the south-east of the county. This gave the Fitzharry brothers cause for concern. The moiety had been the property of their mother, Elizabeth Waterton, and, although in 1439 Richard had agreed to exchange his moiety for Abrahall’s manor of Ocle Pychard, that exchange, in the contention of the brothers, had not been completed. This doubt explains why, on Abrahall’s death, the Crown issued a special commission rather than directing the routine writ of diem clausit extremum to our MP as escheator.
The Fitzharrys had won the argument, but it was to be a little longer before they were clear of difficulties. Their resort to violence proved to be an error, for Oldcastle was a difficult man to intimidate. At a session of the peace at Hereford on 13 Jan. 1444 they were indicted for their unlawful but understandable assault upon him. The latter also presented a litany of the wrongs allegedly committed against him to the chancellor, adding the colourful detail that the Fitzharrys had threatened to cut up, ‘as smalle as haukes mete’, all the jurors they blamed for wronging them. As a result our MP and his brother were summoned to appear before the King and council under heavy financial penalties. No doubt there was an element of truth in these accusations, yet they cannot be taken at face value, not least because of the strong coincidence in wording between the indictment and petition. In any event, our MP was only momentarily inconvenienced. In the following Easter term he came in person into King’s bench to plead successfully the insufficiency of the indictment, and no traceable action was taken against him as a result of his appearance in the same term before the royal council.
These problems aside, in the mid 1440s Fitzharry began to attract important patrons. In May 1444 Humphrey Stafford, earl of Stafford, appointed him to hold sessions in his Welsh lordship of Huntington, and, more importantly, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, as royal justice of south Wales, chose him as one of his deputies. He was soon busy in the latter of these roles, sitting as one of four justices at the great sessions at Carmarthen on 21 Sept.
While an MP in this second Parliament, Fitzharry was drawn into the controversy surrounding the lands of the Beauchamp dukedom of Warwick. Early in 1450, during the second session, he was among those commissioned to inquire into the late duke’s lands. Since earlier inquisitions had entirely vindicated the title of the late duke’s sister of the whole blood, Anne, wife of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, this new inquiry cannot but have been unwelcome to the powerful earl. Even worse from his point of view was the grant made on 14 Mar. to our MP and another Herefordshire gentleman, Henry ap Griffith, of the keeping of all the duke’s lands in Herefordshire to hold during the minority of a rival claimant to the Despenser part of the great Beauchamp inheritance, George Neville, son and heir of Anne’s maternal half-sister and Warwick’s first cousin. Both commissioners and keepers are likely to have been the nominees of George’s father and the earl’s uncle, Edward Neville, Lord Abergavenny, and it may be significant here that, in 1447, Fitzharry had been named to act as a feoffee in part of the Fitzalan earldom of Arundel, to which Abergavenny’s wife was coheir.
On 24 Oct. 1450 Fitzharry was again elected to Parliament, on this occasion with (Sir) Walter Devereux I*, another against whom he was to find himself at odds at the end of the decade. A third successive election for a county was a surprising achievement for a man who had few lands of his own, for his elder brother still lived. As such, patronage was vital to him, and he received two royal grants during the course of this assembly. On 27 Nov., during the first session, he was entrusted with the temporary keeping of the temporalities of the bishopric of Hereford, vacated by the translation of Richard Beauchamp to Salisbury in the previous August; and on 9 June 1451, a few days after the end of the assembly, he shared the less important grant of the keeping of a hall in the city of London.
With new resources Fitzharry flourished further. He had retained his position as one of the deputy justices in South Wales after the fall of the duke of Gloucester in 1447, or, if he had not, he was back in office by June 1450, when, as deputy to Gloucester’s successor, John, Lord Beauchamp of Powick, he sat at the great sessions. Later, in November 1451, Humphrey Stafford, now duke of Buckingham, formalized an earlier connexion by granting him an annuity of 40s., and soon after the duchy of Lancaster added him to the apprentices-at-law it retained. Another who employed his services was John, abbot of Dore, who, finding himself ‘oppressed by sons of iniquity’ in the spring of 1453, asked the Crown that his abbey be committed to the keeping of Fitzharry and four others, headed by Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley.
This middle period of Fitzharry’s career also saw a further addition to his newly-acquired land. Nothing is known of the identity of his first wife, but, in September 1453, he married the twice-widowed niece of John Merbury*, who had played a pivotal part in Herefordshire affairs until his death in 1439.
Thereafter the dispute continued against the background of increasing divisions in national politics which were replicated and amplified in Herefordshire. Few, if any, other counties were to be so riven by faction in the struggle between York and Lancaster, and Fitzharry wholeheartedly identified himself with the Lancastrians. His loyalties were clear by the middle of the decade when, in April 1455, he was summoned with another Herefordshire Lancastrian, (Sir) John Skydemore* to the great council that provoked the duke of York into armed demonstration that ended in the first battle of St. Albans.
Against this background it is not surprising that Fitzharry should have played a prominent part in resisting the powerful Yorkist faction in Herefordshire, his resolve no doubt strengthened by his stepson’s identification with that faction. In March 1456 he witnessed the ruthless violence of the local Yorkists at first hand, or, at least, he is said to have done so. A gang of armed men, headed by Walter Devereux II* and John Lingen, allegedly came to the sessions of the peace at Hereford to take vengeance on those they held responsible for the death of a kinsman of (Sir) William Herbert*. To give their revenge the cloak of legality, they forced the j.p.s., one of whom was our MP, to take indictments against six citizens, whom they then hanged. This was one of several serious crimes attributed to the Yorkists when royal commissions, headed by the duke of Buckingham, came to the county in April 1457. But all is perhaps not as it appears. If an action of conspiracy brought by Devereux and others is to be credited, their indictment for the raid upon Hereford was false, the product of a conspiracy by Fitzharry and others who were later to prove supporters of Lancaster. One of the correspondents of John Paston* certainly believed that at least some of the Yorkists had a case, writing on 1 May, ‘Manye be endyted, som causelese’.
This is the context of an arbitration arranged early in 1458. On 8 Feb. Fitzharry joined three Lancastrians, James Tuchet, Lord Audley, Sir John Barre* and Thomas Cornwall, in a bond in £1,000 to abide the arbitration of John Stanbury, bishop of Hereford, and John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, in their dispute with Sir Walter Devereux I, Sir William Herbert, Walter Devereux II and Thomas Bromwich. Significantly, the point at issue was said to be the indictments taken in April 1457, again suggesting that there was something suspicious about them. This attempt to bring peace to the county ran parallel with the similar effort in national politics, but both were to be overtaken by events.
As the temperature was rising in Herefordshire politics Fitzharry stepped up his campaign against his troublesome stepson, John Lingen. In Easter term 1457 he brought bills against him in King’s bench, claiming damages of 650 marks; and on 23 July the vicar of Madley and Sir John Barre made depositions in respect of a suit pending in Chancery supporting the claim of our MP and his wife to jointure in the manor of Sutton Overcourt.
These victories, however, were to stand for nothing in the battles of the civil war of 1459-61. Here Fitzharry fought for the King. There is every reason to suppose that he was with the Lancastrian army that intimidated the Yorkist lords into ignominious withdrawal at Ludford Bridge on the night of 12 Oct. On the following day he travelled to Hereford to take part in the parliamentary election convened there by the Herefordshire sheriff, the courtier, (Sir) William Catesby*, acting on writs of summons issued only four days before. In view of the events at Ludford Bridge, the gathering at the county court was a remarkable one. As one would expect, prominent local Lancastrians, most notably Fitzharry, Barre and Skydemore, were present, no doubt making their way directly from the Lancastrian encampment. But, strikingly, so too were several, like the two Thomas Bromwiches, father and son, and John Walwyn, who had sided with Devereux and Herbert in recent divisions within the shire, and, most remarkably of all, John Milewater, the duke of York’s receiver-general, in what was either an act of abandonment or a display of defiant loyalty to a defeated lord. If, as seems probable, their purpose was to oppose the election of Lancastrian partisans, they failed: Fitzharry was elected in company with Barre.
Fitzharry was rewarded by the Crown for his support. He was appointed to act (probably pending the nomination of a more substantial figure) in the important office of chamberlain of South Wales, vacated by the death of Lord Audley, killed at the battle of Blore Heath on 23 Sept. 1459; and on 29 May 1460, after the attainder of the Yorkist lords, he was granted the keeping of the duke of York’s manor of Marden (near his own holding at Sutton) at a farm to be agreed.
Too far committed to avoid continued involvement in the escalating conflict, Fitzharry was with the army commanded by Jasper Tudor, earl of Pembroke, and defeated by the earl of March at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross on 2 or 3 Feb. 1461. According to the antiquary, William Worcestre, who visited Herefordshire in 1479, he was one of several Lancastrians taken at the battle and beheaded at Hereford. This cannot be true. A month later, on 6 Mar., he was exempted by name from an offer of pardon by the new King, as he was again on 12 Aug. when pardon was extended to rebels in Wales.