FITZWILLIAM, Thomas II (d.1497), of Mablethorpe and Louth, Lincs.

Fitzwilliam greatly advanced his family’s fortunes in a lengthy and notably successful legal career. He was probably studying at Gray’s Inn by Easter term 1449 when he appeared in person in the court of common pleas to sue a husbandman of Mablethorpe on a plea of detinue of chattels. J.H. Baker, Men of Ct. (Selden Soc. supp. ser. xviii), i. 683; CP40/753, rot. 146. By 1458, when he briefly served on an expanded Lindsey quorum of the peace, he seems already to have established a more important place in local affairs than that enjoyed by his father. His legal credentials are apparent in the demand for his services as an arbiter: in March 1459 he acted to settle a dispute involving Sir Thomas Holand of Swineshead in the parts of Holland, and in the following February he was nominated with Thomas Moigne* to arbitrate a dispute over lands in Bratoft. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 434, 476-7. He was also prominent enough to attract the attention of the electors of the city of Lincoln, who on 12 Nov. 1459 returned him to represent them in the notorious Coventry Parliament. C219/16/5. During the course of this Parl. our MP’s father had royal licence to crenellate the family manor-house at Mablethorpe, and it is probable our MP used his Membership of the assembly to advance his father’s petition for this grant: CChR, vi. 131-2. At this date he was probably already in office as the city’s recorder, perhaps owing his place in its affairs to a close association with the wealthy family of Sutton. In April 1458 he had been nominated as one of the feoffees for the implementation of the will of Hamon Sutton I* and his fellow MP in 1459 was Sutton’s son, Hamon II*. Notts. IPM (Thoroton Soc. xvii), 65.

Fitzwilliam’s service in the Parliament which attainted the Yorkist lords and his appointment to the Lancastrian commission of array of December 1459 implies that his political sympathies lay with Lancaster. Yet his nomination to the Yorkist commission of arrest of the following November suggests that he was not considered a partisan of that cause. Indeed, unlike his father, he appears to have had no difficulty adapting to the new regime. He took the precaution of suing out a pardon in February 1462 and was reappointed to the Lindsey bench a year later. C67/45, m. 45. His legal career continued its established path. At Lent 1466 he read at his Inn on the Statute of Merton. Judging from his age, this was probably his second reading, suggesting that he had first read in the autumn of 1460. Readings and Moots, i (Selden Soc. lxxi), pp. xxxiv-vii. In the following year he was elected to Parliament to represent the Devon borough of Plympton Erle. This is hard to explain. He was returned in company with William Allington† , another lawyer without apparent west-country connexions. In the electoral indenture both names have been added in a blank left in its first drafting, and it is tempting to conclude that this addition occurred after the indenture had been returned into Chancery. However, in the schedule of the county’s MPs returned with the indenture, there is no sign of addition or amendment (although our MP is wrongly called ‘William Fitzwilliam’). C219/17/1. It is of incidental interest to note that both the MPs were future Speakers. The most likely explanation for these anomalies is that both men were elected through the influence of the Crown exerted through the royal servant, Humphrey Stafford IV*, Lord Stafford of Southwick, who had been granted the borough as part of the forfeited estates of the Courtenay earls of Devon. If so, Fitzwilliam must already have begun to develop those links with the Yorkist hierarchy that he was later to exploit so successfully. In this context, it is probably significant that on 4 May, shortly before this election, he had secured a ten-year lease of the duchy of Lancaster manor of Saltfleetby, near the family home at Mablethorpe, at an annual rent of £20 6s. 8d. DL37/54/112, 118.

Nevertheless, despite this evidence that Fitzwilliam was finding favour under the Yorkists, his family’s association with their baronial neighbours, the Lords Welles, who had suffered attainder in 1461 and who retained their Lancastrian loyalties despite their full restoration in 1467, were soon to pose him a serious problem of loyalties. In February 1468, with his father, his first cousin, Sir Thomas Dymmok (who was also the brother-in-law of Richard, Lord Welles), and William Yerburgh*, he acted with Lord Welles to make a settlement in favour of Margaret, duchess of Somerset, the widow of Lionel, Lord Welles. He and his father were also Welles feoffees in manors in Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, and there can be little doubt that they were trusted servants of the family. CCR, 1461-8, pp. 464-5; PROME, xiv. 300, 307. It is also clear that Richard, Lord Welles, had a considerable following among the gentry of the eastern part of Lindsey, where the Fitzwilliams held their lands. Thus, when, probably in the autumn of 1469, Lord Welles raided the Gainsborough manor-house of the courtier Sir Thomas Burgh†, it is not surprising that our MP and his father either actively supported him or were suspected by the Crown of having done so. They both sued out pardons with Welles and others of his affinity in the first few days of March, but this was far from being the end of the matter. Although direct evidence is lacking, it is more than probable that they participated in the open rebellion which resulted in the executions of Lord Welles, his son, Sir Robert Welles, and Sir Thomas Dymmok. In May 1470 our MP paid the more limited price of being removed from the Lindsey bench. Restoration followed during Henry VI’s brief Readeption but, on Edward IV’s return, he was removed once more. Far worse, on 26 May 1471 he was one of the many Lincolnshire men, among them Yerburgh, John Newport II* and John Truthall*, whose arrest was ordered, presumably for their complicity in Welles’s rebellion. C67/47, m. 8; C237/46/68, 70; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 286, 508-9.

Like most others, however, Fitzwilliam quickly reconciled himself to the restored Yorkists. On 10 Dec. 1471 he sued out a general pardon which, for additional security, he had enrolled on the patent roll; in the following July he reappeared on the ad hoc commissions of Lincolnshire government; and in November 1475 his restoration was completed by reappointment to the Lindsey bench. His re-establishment may have owed something to a connexion formed with the Hastings family. Joan, daughter and eventual heiress of the ill-fated Richard, Lord Welles, had married Richard, younger brother of the King’s intimate, William, Lord Hastings, and when, in February 1476, our MP secured a royal licence to found a chantry in the parish church of Alford, near Mablethorpe, the Hastings brothers were named among those for whom prayers were to be endowed. Fitzwilliam’s election on 12 Jan. 1478 to the Parliament which oversaw the downfall of George, duke of Clarence, is another indirect indication that he had now found favour with the Crown. CPR, 1467-77, pp. 294, 563; C219/17/3. This favour found material expression on 26 Feb., the last day of the Parliament, when he was granted a life annuity of five marks p.a. ‘for his counsel’ charged on the Lincolnshire lands of Clarence’s forfeited honour of Richmond. His new-found influence may have been significant in obtaining for the dean and chapter of Lincoln cathedral the licence to acquire lands worth £20 p.a. in mortmain granted by the King at Newark on the following 1 Oct.: our MP was nominated as one of those through whom the acquisition was to be made. CPR, 1476-85, pp. 70, 123, 176. On 12 Nov. his place in royal service was confirmed by his appointment as one of the duchy of Lancaster’s apprentices-at-law, and thereafter he regularly sat on the duchy council until at least May 1485. DL5/1, f. 7; 2, ff. 7, 13, 15.

Further promotion within the legal profession followed. On 19 June 1483 the common council of London elected Fitzwilliam as recorder of the City in succession to Sir Humphrey Starky, who had been appointed chief baron of the Exchequer four days earlier. It was unfortunate for him that this promotion came at a time of such acute dislocation in national politics, but it may not have been coincidence. It has been suggested that his appointment was a reflection of an earlier association with Richard, duke of Gloucester. Certainly, his service as a duchy of Lancaster apprentice must have led him into contact with Gloucester, who was chief steward of the north parts of the duchy, and, if the traditional Fitzwilliam pedigree is to be credited, Thomas’s wife was the daughter of one of the duke’s leading northern followers, Sir James Haryngton†. W.O. Massingberd, Ormsby-cum-Ketsby, 260. Such evidence is, however, very far from conclusive, particularly as, on chronological grounds, his wife’s identification as a daughter of Sir James is more than a little doubtful. There can, however, be no doubt that she was a Haryngton. This is d demonstrated by the armorial decorations in a book of statutes seemingly prepared for our MP in c.1461: Archaeologia, lvii (1), 4. Moreover, even if Gloucester’s patronage was in some way responsible for his appointment, Thomas was not, according to the accounts of Tudor chroniclers, a supporter of the duke’s claim to the throne. When, on 24 June, Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, made a speech on Gloucester’s behalf in the Guildhall to an unenthusiastic London audience, which Thomas, as recorder, was called upon to second, he was careful to conceal his own views. According to a later account written by Sir Thomas More†, the recorder, in recounting what Buckingham had said, ‘so tempered his tale, that he shewed every thing as the dukes wordes and no part his owne’. Ricardian, no. 85, pp. 324-5; CPR, 1476-85, p. 351; T. More, Hist. Ric. III ed. Sylvester, 75.

None the less, whatever Fitzwilliam’s private views about the validity of Richard III’s right to the throne, they did not prevent him playing an active role in the affairs of the reign. On 5 July 1483, as the coronation procession moved through Cheapside, he, as recorder, made a brief speech and presented a purse of 1,000 marks to the King and later one of 500 marks to the queen as the City’s contribution towards the costs of the coronation. In the following October he was elected as MP for London in a continuation of the recently-established practice by which the City returned its recorder (although the Parliament never assembled because of Buckingham’s rebellion). Coronation of Ric. III ed. Sutton and Hammond, 34. He was also appointed to all the important London commissions of the King’s troubled reign: in March 1484 he was one of those commissioned to deliver Sir John Guildford†, leader of the Kentish rebellion, from Newgate gaol, and in the following November he was named to the powerful commission of oyer and terminer charged with trying the treasons of William Collingbourne and John Turberville. Such activities must have kept him fully occupied in the capital with little time left for his responsibilities in his native Midlands. Although in September 1484 the men of the towns of Nottingham and Retford agreed to refer to him their dispute over tolls, he told them he could not visit the area to attend to the matter until the following summer. Nottingham Recs. ed. Stevenson, ii. 396, 398, 421.

Fitzwilliam’s importance as a man of affairs had been recognized by the Crown on 21 Feb. 1484 with the grant of an annuity of 20 marks from the Lincolnshire honour of Bolingbroke; and on the following 1 Apr. he was granted a ten-year lease of the manor of Saltfleetby at an annual rent of £20 11s. 8d., either a renewal or re-grant of a lease he had held as early as 1467. DL42/20, ff. 15, 81. But these rewards did not betoken a commitment on the recorder’s part to Richard III’s government. Just as his career seems to have been advanced by that King’s usurpation it was more rapidly advanced by his deposition. Fitzwilliam was among those present at Shoreditch to welcome Henry Tudor to London after the battle of Bosworth, and he soon came to take, albeit only briefly, a more important role than he had ever previously done. Elected on 25 Oct. 1485 to the first Parliament of the new reign, as recorder, he was responsible for informing his fellow Members of the Commons how notice of the Speaker’s election was customarily given to the chancellor. During the course of the Parliament he received the honour of knighthood, being first styled a knight in a Lindsey commission of sewers of 8 Feb. 1486. At the close of the assembly he was rewarded not only with appointment on 9 Mar. as a justice of eyre in South Wales but, more significantly, by grants, on 10 and 11 Mar., which restored, at a slightly reduced level, the gains he had made under Richard III: he was given a seven-year lease of Saltfleetby at an annual rent of £20 13s. 4d. and a £10 annuity charged on the honour of Bolingbroke ‘for his advice to the King’. On 1 Oct. 1488 he exchanged these grants for a life interest in Saltfleetby at a nominal rent of 10s. p.a. J.S. Roskell, Speakers, 301; Red Ppr. Book Colchester ed. Benham, 62; Materials for Hist. Hen. VII ed. Campbell, i. 378, 382-3; ii. 352; DL42/21, f. 124d. Clearly the recorder of London had found favour with Henry VII and this explains why the Commons elected him as their Speaker on 14 Jan. 1489. He had probably been singled out for the office well before his formal nomination. Although he had been elected to represent London on 2 Dec. 1488, he went on to secure election for Lincolnshire, perhaps because he had had advance warning that he was likely to be Speaker and so required a county rather than a borough seat. On becoming Speaker he was voted ten marks by the chamber of London and at the close of what was a lengthy Parliament of three sessions he was granted the customary £100 reward by the Crown. Roskell, 74, 96, 114; E404/80/260.

Fitzwilliam’s Speakership marked the high point of a successful career. By 1489 he must already have been in his early 60s and, although he continued to be appointed to local commissions as late as July 1496, he last occurs as recorder in October 1494 and had been replaced in the office by another Lincolnshire man, Robert Sheffeld†, by the following September. Cal. Letter Bk. London L, 304, 308. He drew up a lengthy will on 25 June 1494, directing burial in the Premonstratensian abbey of Hagnaby, a few miles from Mablethorpe, if he should die in Lincolnshire or within 40 miles of the county. His religious bequests were many and detailed. He was careful to remember a large number of local Lindsey churches as well as the London church of St. Alban in Wood Street, to which he bequeathed 20s. for forgotten tithes. He also provided for the repair of the church of Maidenwell near Louth in discharge of his father’s soul. Similarly, he left small bequests to several Lincolnshire religious houses, of as many as four of which, including the abbey of Crowland, he was a lay brother, and 20s. to the London Charterhouse to pray for him as they would for a member of the fraternity. In common with many lawyers he showed a very open concern for the health of his immortal soul: 1,500 memorial masses were to be said for him within eight weeks of his death, particularly in the London and Lincoln houses of the mendicant friars, the university of Cambridge, the towns of Boston, Stamford and Grimsby, and the house of the observant friars at Greenwich. He was also concerned to make good what may have been a deliberate oversight on his part. His father had intended to found a perpetual chantry in the cathedral church of Lincoln, endowed with lands worth eight marks p.a., and to establish an obit in the same church with an annual income of four marks. However, according to Sir Thomas’s will, the difficulty of obtaining a royal licence and other unspecified problems meant that this project could not be carried through. As an alternative our MP, having taken the advice of John Russell, bishop of London (d.1494), and other learned men, proposed to endow prayers for the souls of his parents in the abbey of Hagnaby, to which his father had been particularly devoted, or some other suitable religious house, and to provide a 60s. annuity to the dean and chapter of Lincoln cathedral for an obit there. Another matter which weighed on his mind was his purchase from Sir Marmaduke Constable† of a croft in Theddlethorpe ‘tailed to heirs of Gyrdike’. He provided that if the heir-in-tail would pay his executors the sum of £6 then his feoffees were to make estate according to the entail; otherwise the croft was to be sold and the money raised spent in deeds of charity.

Fitzwilliam’s will was also concerned with ensuring an adequate endowment for his widow and two younger sons. At his death he was seised of a landed estate in Lincolnshire conservatively valued, in his inquisition post mortem, at £79 p.a. The bulk of this estate appears to have come to him by way of inheritance for, despite the wealth that a successful career must have brought him, his purchases appear to have been confined to small parcels of land in the immediate neighbourhood of his inherited properties. The exception was the ‘place’ he bought at Stepney in Middlesex, no doubt to serve as his London residence while he was recorder. This he did not intend to form a long-term addition to his family’s lands for he provided for its sale in his will. Other purchases made up the endowment of his youngest son William, who was to have, in tail-general, lands in Mablethorpe and Trusthorpe, valued at eight marks p.a. His other surviving son, George, was to be endowed out of the Fitzwilliam patrimony, holding, again in tail-general, the family lands in Louth with the exception of the capital messuage there which was to be the residence of our MP’s widow. Sir Thomas was careful to ensure that she received her full common-law entitlement: his executors were instructed to allow her a third of his purchased lands as well as a third of all the lands of which he or his feoffees were seised at his death, regardless of any assignment contained in his will save only the alienation of land in Little Carlton worth 26s. 8d. to the chantry he had founded at Alford. PCC 9 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 72); CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 2.

Fitzwilliam’s importance in the later part of his career is reflected in the quality of his connexions. At his death his feoffees were headed by John Blithe, bishop of Salisbury, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, and John, Lord Dynham, while among those for whom he acted as a feoffee in the later years of his career were numbered Edward Grey, Viscount Lisle, Sir Robert Tailboys†, Sir Henry Vavasour†, Sir John Markham, former c.j.KB, Sir Humphrey Starky, whom he had succeeded as recorder, and John Stanhope*. CIPM Hen. VII, i. 195, 764, 962, 1037, 1043-4, 1165; ii. 2, 420, 526; iii. 956, 958; C140/72/60; CCR, 1485-1500, 529, 647. Further, on 1 Feb. 1486 Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, had granted him, as one of his councillors, an annual rent of five marks charged on the fee farm of Grimsby. N.E. Lincs. Archs., Grimsby bor. recs., ct. bk. 1/102/1, f. 53d. This annuity was discontinued in Mich. 1487, apparently at the earl’s order, but payment was resumed in Feb. 1489: HMC 14th Rep. VIII, 268. He was also closely associated with the other great northern earl, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland (d.1489), for whom he acted as both feoffee and executor. This association probably arose out of the tenure of the manor of Mablethorpe which was held of the nearby Percy manor of Calceby and it explains why, in 1479, he arranged the marriage of his eldest son, John, to a daughter of Sir John Pickering of Oswaldkirk (North Riding), one of the earl’s most important retainers. Test. Ebor. iii (Surtees Soc. xlv), 309; Materials, ii. 554; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 477; ii. 2. Pickering was one of his fellow executors. Equally close was his relationship with the Hastings family: in March 1486 he was one of those who acted to assure the title of Katherine, widow of William, Lord Hastings, and her son Edward, to various manors in Leicestershire and elsewhere, and in 1488-9 he served as the Lincolnshire steward of Richard Hastings, Lord Willoughby. CCR, 1485-1500, no. 63; Hastings mss, HAM 74(5). His professional activities brought him into more fleeting contact with many other important men and institutions. For example, in November 1462 he was paid 3s. 4d. for his counsel by the burgesses of Grimsby; in the accounting year 1478-9 he was paid the same sum by the executors of Ralph, Lord Cromwell; and, while recorder, he was paid a retainer of 6s. 8d. by the mayor and aldermen of Canterbury. Grimsby bor. recs., chamberlains’ accts. 1/600, 2 Edw. IV; De l’Isle and Dudley mss, U1475/Q17/3; E. Foss, Judges, v. 21. The high level of demand for his counsel occasionally led him into a conflict of interests. In 1482 he found himself acting for both William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, as the principal of Cromwell’s executors, and Maud, Lady Willoughby, as one of Cromwell’s heirs. His conduct did not impress the bishop who believed that, as counsel to both parties, ‘he schuld study to take sum indifferent wey and not to study to the uttmust mischeff coude be thougth; for a mong men of sad disposicion ther must be sum credens gevene and not to constrewe al to the warst’. Bull. IHR, lxv. 115.

Sir Thomas died on 4 Mar. 1497, and it seems he was buried in the church of Mablethorpe rather than, as his will had directed, in the nearby abbey of Hagnaby. Lincs. Church Notes (Lincoln Rec. Soc. xxxi), 259; W.E. Hampton, Mems. Wars of the Roses, 109-10. He left as his heir his ten-year-old grandson, also called Thomas. Neither his widow nor his heir, however, long survived him: his widow was dead by 22 Nov. 1498 and his grandson died on 14 Sept. 1502. This left Sir Thomas’s second son, George, to inherit the Fitzwilliam estates and assume his father’s position in local affairs. Knighted late in his career, he served on as many as three occasions as the Lincolnshire sheriff. His death without surviving issue in 1536 brought the family lands to the descendants of our MP’s younger brother and eventually to another Sir George who sold the manor of Mablethorpe in 1613. CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 2, 585; CFR, xxii. 619; Lincs. Peds. 357-9.