GOWER, Thomas I (d.1458), of Clapham, Surr.

This MP poses problems of identification. Indeed, there is also a doubt as to whether he sat in Parliament. His return came about in irregular circumstances. The joint return for Westmorland and Appleby, dated at the county court held at Appleby on 22 Sept. 1435, names those returned for the borough as two northern lawyers, John Cerf* and Robert Lambton*; but the writ is endorsed with the names of Lambton and Thomas Gower. C219/14/5. Since the endorsement almost certainly post-dates the drawing up of the indenture it is likely, but by no means certain, that Gower took the seat, perhaps because the busy Cerf refused to serve. But who was this Gower? There are two possibilities, the one was the son and heir of Walter Gower (d.1443) of Stittenham in Yorkshire, and the other, a notable soldier of unknown parentage, who spent most of his career in France. The former was the MP for Scarborough in 1460 and his biography follows, and since either of them, with almost equal probability, could have been returned in 1435, the biography of the latter is included here.

Although there can be no doubt that Gower is to be distinguished from his Stittenham namesake, the soldier too appears to have been from Yorkshire. One can only speculate on his family origins. It is possible that he was a yr. son of Nicholas Gower (d.1416) of Picton in the N. Riding: VCH Yorks. (N. Riding), ii. 261; CFR, xiv. 146. He is described as such when, on 14 Nov. 1433, he witnessed a deed at Dulwich on behalf of two fellow military men, the brothers-in-arms Nicholas Molyneux and John Winter. CCR, 1429-35, p. 291; CP40/691, cart. rot. 1d. For Molyneux and Winter: K.B. McFarlane, ‘A Business Partnership in War and Admin.’, EHR, lxxviii. 290-308. Gower’s relationship with Winter remained close, for in 1445 Winter named him as overseer of his will: ibid. 306. Thereafter, however, there is no evidence of his geographical affiliations in England until the fall of Lancastrian France. To the subsidy of 1436 a namesake was assessed on an income of £20 p.a. in Northants., Northumb. and London, but there is no evidence that this was the soldier: E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (xi). His military career, although much less well known than that of his associate, Matthew Gough, was long and distinguished. His experience of the war may have extended back to the reign of Henry V: he or a namesake serving in the retinue of John, Lord Roos, fell ill at the siege of Harfleur and so missed the battle of Agincourt, and it was probably the same man who fought in the retinue of Richard Beauchamp, Lord Abergavenny, during the 1417 campaign. E101/44/30(1), m. 14; 51/2, m. 5. Thomas Gower of Woodhall, Worcs., escheator of Worcs. in 1419-20 and a servant of Lord Abergavenney, is the more likely candidate in respect of 1417: VCH Worcs. iii. 454; CFR, xiv. 270, 281, 303, 308; SC11/25. If our MP was the son of Nicholas Gower, he was still under age in 1417: CFR, xiv. 187, 281. Only, however, from 1424, when he participated in the conquest of Anjou under Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, does Gower appear regularly in the military records. In December 1428 he was appointed as Lord Talbot’s lieutenant at Falaise. He left the garrison there a year later and went on to serve in the field under Thomas, Lord Scales, and briefly as captain of Evreux. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Fr. 25767/93; Curry, ii. pp. lxxiv, lxxviii; Letters and Pprs. ii (1), 118-19; ii (2), 412; A.J. Pollard, ‘The Talbots’ (Bristol Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1968), 421; Add. Ch. 7967. Throughout 1431 he was lieutenant of Alencon under its captain, the duke of Bedford, and from about 1433 he was bailli of Le Mans. Curry, ii. p. xli; Letters and Pprs. ii (2), 552; Jones, 119.

It is likely that Gower returned to England with Bedford in June 1433, for he had business of his own to oversee. At Alencon he had married a Frenchwoman, and in the Parliament which met a few weeks after Bedford’s return, he and his wife successfully petitioned for letters of denization in respect of her and their children, born and to be born. PROME, xi. 117. It was while this Parliament was in session that Gower witnessed the deed for Molyneux and Winter, but, like the duke of Bedford, he was back in France by the autumn of 1434, when he and Gough were acting as lieutenants of Le Mans under Sir John Fastolf. Paston Letters, ii. 40; Add. Ch. 17237. If he did sit in the Parliament that met on 10 Oct. 1435, he must have returned home again. It met at a time of crisis in English affairs in France. The duke of Bedford had died on the previous 14 Sept. and the duke of Burgundy formally defected from the English alliance a week later. Perhaps Gower, who had already shown some familiarity with parliamentary affairs by presenting a petition to the Commons in the previous assembly, had been prompted to return by this emergency and seek a seat in Parliament, finding Cerf ready to surrender his place.

Such speculation aside, no more is known of Gower until the summer of 1439, when he was appointed as lieutenant of Cherbourg under John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, and he remained there, later as captain, until the fall of Lancastrian Normandy. Curry, ii. p. lxiv; Jones, 119. Unlike many of the commanders of the English garrisons in the fateful campaign of 1449-50, he emerged with his reputation enhanced. His garrison at Cherbourg put up much stiffer resistance than many others in this series of capitulations, and Fastolf’s servant, William Worcestre, the contemporary English chronicler of these losses, paid tribute to him as ‘sage [et] vaillaunt, qui avoit continue la graunte partie de sa vie en service de roy, et exercise en faitz de guerre pour le conservation du bien publique dez royaumes de Fraunce et de Angleterre’. Letters and Pprs. ii (2), 634. Yet it has recently been suggested that his surrender of the castle and town in August 1450 was premature; that he had the resources for continued resistance; and that he accepted what amounted to a bribe from Charles VII’s financier, Jacques Coeur, to end his resistance. Suspicion is aroused because, aside from the formal capitulation, he entered into a separate agreement with Coeur. Under its terms, his son, Richard, one of the hostages surrendered to the French as part of the agreement concerning the surrender of Rouen in the previous autumn, was to be released without ransom and Coeur was to pay an undisclosed sum ‘en secret a plusieurs chevaliers et gentilz hommes du party des ditz Anglois’. Gower also gained under the provision in the formal surrender that the departing soldiers should be allowed to sell their property in the town. He himself gave the property he held just outside Cherbourg to the local abbey of Notre Dame du Voeu in return for prayers and he sold ‘un hostel neuf’ to a Frenchman. J. Barker, ‘The Foe Within’, in Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen ed. Coss and Tyerman, 306-8, 320; R.A. Massey, ‘Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy’ (Liverpool Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1987), 234. It must, however, be doubted that, in accepting these seemingly generous terms from the besiegers, he was doing anything more than bowing to the inevitable, while at the same time making the best possible terms for himself and the garrison.

Gower’s English property holdings are undocumented before his return home, but soon after he held the manor of Clapham, near the property of Molyneux and Winter at Camberwell, and it must be assumed that he purchased that manor, as also a tenement, called ‘Le Faucon’, at Southwark, with further property at Lambeth and at Chingford in Essex, that he held at his death. The manor of Clapham was valuable: in about 1438 it had been sold by Robert Weston to the London grocer, William Wetenhale, for 300 marks, although the seller, in a complaint to the chancellor, claimed that it was worth 500 marks. Gower presumably purchased it from Wetenhale. VCH Surr. iv. 39; C1/39/130. These acquisitions were enough to justify Gower’s distraint to take up knighthood in 1457. Clearly his long service in France had not been entirely unprofitable, and in the summer of 1453 he had resources enough to lend £40 to the Crown. E159/234, adhuc communia Trin. rot. 21; E403/793, m. 16. There is some evidence that he had benefited from ransoming French prisoners. In July 1451, for example, he appealed a judgement in the constable’s court which gave custody of two of his prisoners to one Hugh Alcock. CPR, 1446-52, p. 466. No doubt on other unrecorded occasions during his long service in France he met with better fortune, and he also benefited financially from shipping interests. He provided a ship, the Cokke John, to the fleet provided to bring Margaret of Anjou to England for her marriage to Henry VI in 1445. Later he put this vessel to another use: in the mid 1450s, in company with a carvel owned by Thomas, Lord Roos, it captured a Dutch ship ‘by weye of werre’. Unfortunately for Gower, however, the seizure was ruled illegal and he was obliged to compensate the Dutch owner. None the less, it is fair to assume that other more successful ventures have left no record. Add. 23938, f. 16d; C1/25/200. He possessed at least one other ship, a crayer sold by his agent in Yarmouth to two Dutchmen who defaulted on payment: C1/17/224.

The future prosperity that Gower’s investment in property promised his descendants was threatened by a more serious miscalculation than the illegal seizure of ships. Like some other veterans of the French war, notably Sir Thomas Kirkby and Sir Henry Norbury*, he entered the service of the young and unstable Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. With his sons, John and Richard, he was sued by Ralph, Lord Cromwell, for involvement in the duke’s seizure of the lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire in June 1452. Although he himself was acquitted, it was probably in connexion with this affair that, between November 1453 and February 1455, he was obliged to find heavy sureties for Richard’s repeated appearances in Chancery. CP40/769, rot. 328; KB27/775, rot. 46; CCR, 1447-54, pp. 510-11; 1454-61, pp. 43-44, 54. He was fortunate to escape financially unscathed from these obligations, for, while they were pending, Richard and another of his sons, yet another Thomas, were indicted for participating in the duke’s rising in Yorkshire of May 1454. KB9/149/1/ 39, 63d. The younger Thomas appears to have died in his father’s lifetime. As ‘junior’, he was pardoned together with Richard on 12 Oct. 1455: C67/41, mm. 29, 30. But he is not mentioned in his father’s will in 1458.

Gower soon found further trouble as a servant of the duke of Exeter. The duke had appointed him as his lieutenant in the constableship of the Tower of London. As such he was blamed by the Crown for the escape, during Trinity term 1456, of two sons of Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon, who had been imprisoned in the Tower for the brutal murder of the Devon lawyer, Nicholas Radford*. This cost him a fine of four marks, and again he was lucky to escape so lightly. KB29/86, rot. 35d; KB27/781, fines rot.d. Much more interestingly, at the same time he found another way to incur the indignation of the authorities, on this occasion by a striking display of temper in Westminster Hall. This arose from a purely routine matter. In 1453, at Westminster, he had stood surety in the sum of ten marks for Joan Kerdiston, the widow of his old comrade-in-arms, Matthew Gough, in respect of money she owed to one John Barnburgh. Barnburgh sued on the bond, and in the same term as he was fined for the escape of the earl of Devon’s sons, a Middlesex jury assembled in Westminster Hall. Both Gower and Barnburgh’s attorney, Robert Forster*,a filacer of the court, addressed the jurors, and after Forster had accused Gower of dishonourable conduct in telling the jurors untruths, he, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his temper. With ‘verbis contumeliosis et comminatoriis’, he told the attorney that he should not meddle with his honour and that, if he did, it would result in the death of one or other of them. The justices were unimpressed and committed Gower to the Fleet. Again, however, he was allowed to escape lightly, securing his release on the payment of a small fine of 6s. 8d., for the payment of which he called on the surety of two of the duke of Exeter’s servants, John Trevelyan* and John Archer II*. CP40/779, rot. 423; 782, rot. 323.

This episode shows, as might be expected of a man who had spent most of his life as a soldier, Gower was of a combative temperament. Other offences were laid at his door. In Hilary term 1455, for example, he was appealed as an accessory to the murder of John Smyth in London on 19 Dec. 1454. KB27/775, rot. 100. No doubt had he lived he would, as a servant of the militantly Lancastrian duke of Exeter, have put his military service to use in the civil war of 1459-61. Death, however, spared him the trouble.

Gower made his will, at his new home at Clapham, on 11 July 1458, requesting burial in the parish church of Holy Trinity there before the image of the Virgin. He divided his property between his two remaining sons, Richard, who was to have the manor of Clapham, and John, who was to have the property at Chingford. They were to share between them the property at Southwark and South Lambeth after the death of their mother. In the event of the two sons dying childless, all the property was to pass to the descendants of their late sister, Lowys, by her husband, John Passhele*. The testator died a few months later: his will was proved on the following 24 Dec. and soon after his executors, namely his widow and two sons, were suing in the common pleas against his creditors. Later, in November 1459 when the old soldier, Fastolf, under whom Gower had served long before, came to draft his known will, he included Gower among those whose souls were to be prayed for. Bibliothèque Nationale, Fr. 25767/93; PCC 14 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 104v-105); CP40/792, rot. 387d; 796, rot. 85; Paston Letters, iii. 157.

The sons proved active supporters of the house of Lancaster. Richard (d.1463) maintained his connexion with the duke of Exeter, succeeding his father as the duke’s lieutenant-constable of the Tower, and it was perhaps as a result of finding himself on the wrong side that, in February 1462, he sold his manor of Clapham, receiving 480 marks from the master of the Grocer’s Company, George Ireland†. KB27/794, rot. 31; CCR, 1454-61, p. 420; CAD, vi. C6506; C140/38/41. John fought for Lancaster at the battle of Towton, and, after briefly making his peace with Edward IV, defected to Queen Margaret. He was accordingly attainted in 1465 and his lands – described as a large messuage with some 300 acres of land in Chingford, ‘Le Faucon’ in Southwark and two messuages, a court and 100 acres in South Lambeth – were granted to Thomas Garnet, a household servant of the new King. He fell as standard-bearer to Prince Edward at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. John’s attainder was reversed in 1485 on the petition of his great-niece, Anne Pympe. PROME, xiii. 122-8, 293, 171-2; CPR, 1461-7, p. 546; J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 163.