The Frowyks were an old-established Middlesex family, who had been seised of their principal manor of Old Fold in South Mimms since the reign of Edward I. The family were of some standing in the county, and at the time of his first election Henry was the latest in a succession of Frowyks dating back to 1316 who represented Middlesex in the Commons. The family was a prolific one: Henry was the eldest survivor of no fewer than 19 children, and his paternal uncle and namesake Henry I also left numerous offspring. Throughout the later Middle Ages the family showed a predilection for the names Henry and Thomas, and some of the MP’s earlier activities are difficult to distinguish from those of his uncle, a prominent London mercer, who survived until 1460, and with whom he was periodically associated in property transactions. The uncle’s activities were mainly focused on the City, but it seems probable that it was he rather than his nephew (then most likely still in his teens) who attended the Middlesex parliamentary elections of 1435 and 1437 and set his seal to the sheriff’s indenture. The later Middlesex Member was first so recorded in 1447 (then already styled an esquire). He owed his independent status in the county to a share of the family holdings consisting of the manor of Willesden and a property known as ‘Gloucesters’ in the London parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate, which his father had settled on him at the time of his marriage. This settlement was beyond doubt part of the agreement that Thomas Frowyk had reached with the bride’s father, their neighbour Sir Thomas Lewknor, a Sussex landowner who also possessed property at South Mimms. While Joan Lewknor was unlikely ever to inherit any of her parents’ property, since several of her brothers survived into adulthood, the match was important on account of the connexions with which it provided the Frowyks: Joan’s mother, Elizabeth Etchingham, was by her first marriage to Sir Thomas Hoo the stepmother of the prominent soldier (Sir) Thomas Hoo I*, later Lord Hoo and Hastings, and mother of Thomas Hoo II*, a leading servant of the Mowbray dukes of Norfolk, and MP for Horsham in Frowyk’s final documented Parliament.
It was not, however, until after the death of Frowyk’s father in 1449, when he succeeded to his full inheritance, that he began to play a more prominent role in public life. He now gained control of the Middlesex manors of Old Fold and Durhams in South Mimms and Brockham in Surrey, as well as a number of additional properties in the city of London, and the death of his mother in 1455 added to this Weld (in Shenley), Sherlands (in Aldenham) and Windridge, all in Hertfordshire, holdings which in Thomas Frowyk’s day in 1436 had been estimated to be worth some £90 p.a.
In August 1450 Frowyk received his first official appointment as one of the assessors of a tax granted by the Commons in that year. Other commissions followed in 1453, and in the early months of that year he was elected for the first time to represent his county in Parliament. His fellow-Member was his first cousin of the half blood, the experienced parliamentarian (Sir) Thomas Charlton*, who during the second session was elected to the Speakership. The two men maintained close ties throughout their lives (Frowyk headed the feoffees of Charlton’s estates, and was bequeathed a covered silver-gilt cup under the terms of his will), and while nothing definite is known of Frowyk’s activities during his first Parliament, it is reasonable to assume that he was among his cousin’s more enthusiastic supporters among the Commons.
This, however, was the limit of authority that the new rulers were prepared to place in Frowyk, who attracted no senior offices after Edward IV’s accession. He continued to serve as a j.p. throughout the 1460s, and in the spring of 1463 was once again returned to the Commons as one of the knights for Middlesex, following two elections which saw the county electorates severely badgered on the King’s behalf. On account of the on-going fight against Lancastrian resistance in the far north , the Parliament was prorogued time and time again, and eventually dissolved only in March 1465. Both Frowyk and his colleague, the filacer Thomas Luyt*, experienced some difficulty in securing payment of their wages, but the comparatively prompt settlement of the matter after Henry had begun litigation against the sheriffs of London and Middlesex may point to mere administrative problems, rather than anything more sinister.
It is not clear whether Frowyk’s appointment as a commissioner to try felonies by the earl of Warwick’s government formed in Henry VI’s name in the autumn of 1470 owed anything to presumed Lancastrian loyalties (perhaps partly based on the distant kinship of the Frowyks’ cousins, the Charltons, to Warwick and his brothers). Yet the administration of the restored Edward IV thought so, and Frowyk was dropped from the Middlesex bench. By the end of 1477, he had perhaps achieved a degree of rehabilitation, which allowed him to secure election to the highly partisan Parliament summoned in the King’s interest for the trial of the duke of Clarence, but it may be significant that it was the Cornish borough of Truro rather than his native county of Middlesex that returned him. The borough seats of the far south-west were by this date increasingly being treated as in the personal gift of the prince of Wales’s tutor, Anthony Wydeville, Earl Rivers, and it had become unusual for a local man to be returned, the constituencies increasingly preferring to award their seats to the candidate prepared to accept the lowest wages. It is, however, not possible to tell to whose patronage, if any, Frowyk (whose name, like that of his colleague Robert Cinte† was inserted into the return over an erasure) owed his election, or indeed whether he had actively sought election as a means of protecting himself from litigation by his adversaries.
He had good cause to do so: it is uncertain what misfortune had struck Frowyk in about 1456, but by the end of that year he was evidently in serious financial difficulties that would continue to dog him for the remainder of his life. In late December 1456 he sealed bonds for a total of £720 to the Lincoln’s Inn lawyer Richard Illingworth* that he would not ‘alien, sell nor pledge any [of his] lands ... nor charge or encumber the same’ to anyone but Illingworth, who would pay whatever sum might be agreed between them. A further bond for £100 was sealed in February 1458, but in the event no sale seems to have been concluded, and Frowyk may have found other means of raising the necessary funds.
To raise money, Frowyk had to take recourse to a sale of his mother’s Hertfordshire inheritance and the mortgage of some of his other holdings. In December 1469 he mortgaged his Willesden property to Roger Frende, and before the end of 1473 he sold Weld and scattered lands in St. Albans, Shenley and Ridge to John Forster†. About the same time the manor of Durhams passed to his cousin, Thomas Frowyk II*, and two years later the manor of Windridge went to John Fortescue† for the sum of £200.
Little else is known of Frowyk’s career. Although he received no official appointments from Edward IV, he periodically served on local juries in his native county.
The exact date of Frowyk’s death has not been established, but it probably occurred not long before 13 Aug. 1484 when writs of diem clausit extremum were sent to the escheators of Middlesex and Hertfordshire.